Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  I know now that Arabella Buckley was a real person, as it were. Not just a resonant name on the cover of a book. She was secretary to Charles Lyell, the great nineteenth-century geologist who was Darwin’s patron and friend. She knew Darwin, and must have been a part of that contentious, combative and stimulating world of nineteenth-century scientific studies. I have conjured up Eyes and No Eyes in the British Library. It arrived in a dozen little booklets – not what I remembered at all – half of them written by someone called R. Cadwallader-Smith, a resolutely Edwardian name. Published in 1901, so the PNEU was not exactly up-to-date in its textbook recommendations. And there indeed were the colour plates with the identifying letters which had so impressed me: ‘a. dragonfly feeding, b. dragonfly creeping out of grub skin.’ But the text no longer had the command and authority I recalled. What I read now was something entirely different – the cosily instructive tone of the late nineteenth-century children’s writer. ‘Croak, croak, croak, we hear the frogs in the month of March… The mother frogs are laying their tiny dark eggs in the water. Each egg is not bigger than a grain of sand. But it has a coat of jelly…’ And presently the author introduces that familiar participatory child character, as though she doubted the reader’s ability to stomach instruction for much longer without the reassurance of a crony with whom to identify. There is Tom the game-keeper’s son – ‘a Devonshire lad’ – who watches young otters, and a sanctimonious little girl called Peggy who instructs her friend Peter: ‘And look, Peter, the yellow lines on the white flowers point straight to the narrow end of the flower-heart, where the insects find the honey.’ Can this have been the prose which so fired me with scientific enthusiasm, and sent me off on my own researches?

  It must have been, and I suspect that Arabella Buckley inspired my own first written work. I have it still. It was written in 1940, when I was seven, on the squared pages of an exercise book in much better handwriting than I have today. It is called, succinctly, Egypt, and on the back page it has a grandiose list of contents with chapter titles. I had run out of steam at Chapter Five: Egyptian Reptiles. The beginning of Chapter One is an excursion into rudimentary sociology:

  The Fellahs children are usually of a great many, a boy is treasured much more by the parents than a girl and if a boy and a girl are sent out together the boy will always ride a donkey while the girl walks along behind. While they are still children the girls will go into black veils over their heads but undernearth [sic] they wear a gay dress, the women do too, but if they are married it is entirely covered by black.

  The style is ponderous to a degree, but I warm to the hint of feminist outrage. At one point I got carried away with a description of the Egyptian sunset (’the clouds are transformed into a rich pink hue by the glow of the setting sun…’) but then evidently decided this was frivolous and crossed it out, embarking on a stern paragraph about the export of cotton. Or was this an acknowledgement of stylistic catastrophe? If so, the perception did not stretch far. The weighty language persists, with what now seems to me a distinct note of nineteenth-century didacticism – pages and pages about the Egyptian crow and the date palm and the horned viper. The shadow of Arabella Buckley, for sure.

  Or possibly Bentham and Hooker, the treatise which was Lucy’s prized possession and with which we did Botany and tried to identify the few wild flowers which grew on the fringes of the fields. Scarlet pimpernel, shepherd’s purse, vetch. Matching up quite nicely with the text and illustrations in Bentham and Hooker. We made lists of what we had found, and I tried to reflect the professionalism of Arabella Buckley and Messrs Bentham and Hooker by making my own line-drawings in pen and India ink. Not a success. I had no artistic talent. There in my head was the aspiration, and there on the page the ugly botched reality, irrevocably separated by frustration and despair. Why could I not produce those precise, allusive lines? Even Lucy, who had no artistic training, could manage a passable sketch of a plant. I can recover still that exasperated sense of being in some way crippled, and I think it was not to do with being unable to draw, but a temporary rage with the condition of childhood. Every now and then, children identify themselves. They see what they are – people at an early stage of development, with all that that implies. And the perception is appalling.

  I couldn’t draw, but Lucy had done a good job on my handwriting. That would have been the hours of pothooks which by the time I achieved Form III (A) had become Dictation and Writing. Much copying out of chosen passages took place. In the period called English Grammar we dismantled sentences and put the spare parts into columns labelled Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and so forth. This was good fun. But there was also a period called Analysis and Parsing, which still gives Thursdays an ominous ring. Again, dissection was involved – that much we understood. But here Lucy was out of her depth, and together we thrashed about amid subjects and objects and subordinate clauses and prepositions. I would unravel a piece of prose and try to find the appropriate category for each component part – and always there were rogue elements, words and phrases that jeeringly refused to be corralled. Lucy read and reread the manual, and I would watch anxiously with an odd and uncomfortable emotion which I now recognize as compunction. It was because of me that she was being put through this. I hope and think that eventually we decided I could get through life quite satisfactorily without Analysis and Parsing, as indeed I have.

  Geography meant Bartholomew’s Atlas, of course, and the global rash of pink. Latin we played about with, insincerely. Mensa. Puella. Amo, amas, amat. Lucy did not take Latin seriously, and her contempt spilled over to me. I was still having trouble with Latin at eighteen, confronted with Oxford Prelims. For French we enjoyed ourselves with the Père Castor story books, and another series about a splendid bourgeois rodent called Madame Souris, who went shopping and nagged her husband and batted her children around. There was also Perlette: l’histoire d’une goutte d’eau, a wonderfully surreal tale about a drop of rain which falls into a stream and ends up in the ocean. The amorphous areas of Literature and Composition we simply included in the great untrammelled indulgence of Reading.

  For Reading was what we were best at, and we knew it. We were happy to read till the cows came home, and did so. Lucy read; I read. I told back; I wrote back. We read everything the PNEU suggested – Greek and Roman mythology, Norse mythology, stories from Chaucer and Piers Plowman, the Arabian Nights. And then we read it all again and when we were saturated in it we turned to whatever else we could find. Nicholas Nickleby. The Talisman. The Rose and the Ring. Mary Webb, who was responsible for a concept of rural English society that was to cause me much perplexity when eventually I arrived at my grandmother’s home in Somerset after the war. Some of this reading would have been shared with Lucy, much of it I did on my own – the compulsive retreat of a solitary child.

  I had children’s books too, as such, though not a wealth of them. Alice, The Wind in the Willows, The Just So Stories, The Jungle Books. All of them read and reread because there was no library available from which to ring the changes. And when the Arthur Ransome books found their way to the Express Bookshop in Cairo I became infatuated, addicted. I saved up my pocket money to buy them as they arrived – objects so covetable as to be awesome, those green bindings with the gold lettering, and the distinctive dust-jackets. I read them like some awestruck peasant, gawping at the goings-on of these incredible children: their airy confidence, their sophistication, their independence. The narratives patently bore no relation to real life, but were enthralling as pure fantasy. And then there was the matter of the ambience, this exotic landscape of hills and lakes and greenery and rain and boats and peculiar birds and animals. From time to time I would lift my eyes from the page to look out at my own humdrum environment of palms and donkeys and camels and the hoopoe stabbing the lawn.

  Greek mythology was another matter – altogether more accessible. Here, I was without inhibitions. I could march in and make it mine, manipulate the resources to my own convenience. Of course, I was right in
there anyway – Penelope – but saddled with a thoroughly unsatisfying role. All that daft weaving, and it was not even clear that she was particularly beautiful. So I would usurp other parts, wallowing in vicarious experience, hidden away in the hammock of creepers behind the swimming-pool. I would re-enact it all, amending the script, starring in every episode. I was Helen, languishing in the arms of Paris. I was Achilles, nobly dying. I was Nausicaa, nude and distinctly sexy on a beach. The erotic overtones had not escaped me – or rather, they had reached mysterious levels of my own nature. I perceived that there was something going on that I found distinctly exciting, and reacted accordingly. I ceased to be a podgy child daydreaming in a hedge, and shot up and away into a more vivid place where I controlled everything, where I was the heroine and the creator all at once, where I set the scene and furnished the dialogue and called the shots. I dressed myself in wonderful clothes, and felt the drapery slide across my adult limbs. I fled, as Daphne, sensing the wind in my hair and my own speed and then the strange insidious shiver as I began to turn into a tree. I walked the ramparts of Troy, I was rescued from the Minotaur, I listened for Orpheus. I became adept. I could slide off into this other world at will, trudging along the canal path behind Lucy, so busy in the head that I saw and heard nothing.

  It cannot be done, now. Perhaps the next best thing is writing fiction but that, alas, has not the transforming element of identification. You may create, but you do not become. Reading Greek mythology today, I get an occasional emotive whiff of lost capacity.

  I believe that the experience of childhood reading is as irretrievable as any other area of childhood experience. It is extinguished by the subsequent experience of reading with detachment, with objectivity, with critical judgement. That ability to fuse with the narrative and the characters is gone. It is an ability that seems now both miraculous and enviable. And anyone who has had the temerity to write for children must be for ever reminded of it.

  But children are distinctly selective in their acts of identification and their abandoned fusion with a text. Some sort of judgement is indeed exercised. Norse mythology never engaged me in the same way. All that fire and ice was off-putting, somehow. And who would want to be Brynhilde, who gave an impression of being overweight and had plaits, which were not glamorous at all, in my view. Involvement could take other forms, too. Lucy and I read Nicholas Nickleby together, on the pansy-strewn sofa in the nursery, taking a paragraph each, Lucy resuming sewing when it was my turn to read, both of us openly weeping at the sad bits. We exercised our objectivity and our critical capacities all right, but in the immediate sense of outrage at this display of inhumanity. We discussed exactly what we would do to the Squeers family if we got the chance. If we could take Smike in we would feed him up with Lucy’s porridge and he would have the small spare room. We responded as though to an account of things happening to people we knew, with the intensity of personal involvement. The context of the book, its nineteenth-century setting, was neither here nor there. We read as literary innocents, and I realize now that there is an eerie advantage to be had in this.

  I never acquired a comic, but at some point I came across cartoon strips in newspapers or magazines and was hooked but also baffled by the evident sophistication. Popeye was an especial challenge: I couldn’t understand the running joke about spinach, which we did not have. And then there was Jane, the peroxide blonde with gargantuan bust and cleavage; I thought her immensely appealing but could not work out exactly why. The New Yorker sometimes found its way into the house and I pored over it, trying to decode the advertisements. Nylon stockings? Waffle-makers? Coca-Cola? Again, something was awry with my own language. This was English, but not an English I recognized. I saw that this rich, glib prose and these jaunty pictures reflected some complex and confident other world of which I knew nothing whatsoever, more unreachable even than the England I could barely remember but whose icons and mythologies were all around me. Pondering the teasing terminology of the New Yorker advertisements, I came up once more against the opaque screen of culture, and identified a difficulty over and beyond the familiar difficulties of words you did not understand. Here was a world far more inaccessible than those of Greek mythology or of Nicholas Nickleby.

  I lived in a condition of frenzied internal narrative, all of it entirely derivative. Neither the PNEU nor Lucy had arrived at the concept of creative writing for children, so it was never suggested that I try my hand at stories. I told them to myself, instead, lifting the themes and the characters from what I had read and making personal adjustments. In time, the adjustments became bolder and more elaborate, in the manner of a stage director’s wilder interpretation of a time-worn play. The siege of Troy in the garden at Bulaq Dakhrur, with the gardeners as the opposing forces – except of course that they didn’t know about the casting. And later still I acquired the hubris to supply my own sequels and parallel developments. Penelope did not in fact sit meekly awaiting Ulysses – she took up with one of the suitors, who was far better-looking anyway, and sailed away with him to found a rival establishment from whence Ulysses would in turn attempt to haul her back. And so on. Until at last I learned to break away from the models and spin private fantasies with some claim to originality.

  But never, of course, an absolute claim. Children do indeed start out as literary innocents but the innocence is fragile. Corruption – so to speak – sets in with exposure to structured language of any kind. Prose, poetry. Fairy stories, mythology. Fiction, comics, Arabella Buckley. When I set my own seven-year-old effort beside the hundreds of pieces of unfettered writing by primary-school children in this country that I read in the course of judging that children’s writing competition, I see it as a dire instance of what happens when a child arrives early at a concept of what writing ought to be. But influence is inescapable. Numbers of those primary-school children were writing poetry that had a strong flavour of Ted Hughes. No bad thing, I hasten to say – but a demonstration of the way in which the pristine approach to language is contaminated as soon as the child hears or sees a story, a poem, contrived language of any kind at all. It cannot be otherwise, and one would not wish it otherwise. Children must learn to read, and to write. The exciting thing about the writing of younger children is the way in which so many manage to incorporate influences while retaining a freshness and idiosyncrasy. That individual vision survives, for a while.

  So that was early education, for me. It seems now to have been in one way ideal and in another way crippling. There is no knowing if I would have turned out a bookish child anyway or was shunted in that direction by solitude and the requirements of the PNEU. Whatever – I ended up at twelve as a fervent reader, with a capacity for application and an assumption that learning was on the whole enjoyable. When eventually I went to my first school, in England, I was well up to standard in all areas except Maths and Latin, both of which needed some urgent repair work. But I was woefully short on social skills. The disadvantages of all that indulgent one-to-one attention are obvious. I had never learned alongside another child, indeed had had very little to do with other children. I was introspective and good at being alone – not qualities that come in handy at an English girls’ boarding school. Flung into that fetid jungle I was lost. I knew none of the strategies of survival. Alternatively exhilarated and alarmed by the sudden exposure to this horde, I flailed around like an untrained puppy, and invited dislike. Children sense an outsider, and I was that all right. Eventually, I learned a stoical endurance but, where learning was concerned, the sun had now gone in.

  Hitherto, I had been growing up in the belief that books were enjoyable. I was quite prepared to have a go at anything. But now I found myself amid other adolescents most of whom held reading in contempt, an attitude that was subtly connived at by the teachers. The charismatic figures in the school were the good games players. Those who prospered academically were accorded a form of cool token approval along with which went the unspoken comment that they were on the whole dull fish. One of the p
unishments was to be sent to read for an hour in the library. You had to select a book, read, and then report on what you had read to the duty teacher. A sinister distortion of the PNEU system. The library contained little anyway except a few battered encyclopedias.

  I was by then too deeply steeped in heresy to recant. I accepted, grimly, that I was cherishing a perversion and went underground. I read under the bedclothes at night, and on the rare occasions when I could find a secluded corner and thought that no one was looking. I got found out, of course. Pious dormitory prefects reported me. My copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse was confiscated from my locker by an assiduous matron and returned to me in a reproving private interview with the headmistress. She pushed the book across her desk towards me – assertive red-tipped talons lay on the dark blue binding – ‘There is no need for you to read this sort of thing in your spare time, Penelope. You will be taught all that.’ She went on to point out that my lacrosse skills were abysmally below par.

  I grew up, after what seemed like several centuries, and found my way at last into the sunlight of a university where I discovered to my surprise that lots of other eighteen-year-olds had been reading quite openly for years.

  Chapter Six

  We are driving from Cairo to Alexandria along the Desert Road. The car has been fitted out with its thick squashy desert tyres for the occasion. The road reaches away ahead and behind like a black ribbon, narrowing where sand has drifted almost across it. We pass an army convoy, a long slow-moving chain of lorries and tank-carriers and the occasional jeep or armoured car. We edge past them one by one and I count them as we go, with the window open and the hot sandy wind rushing through the car. I wave to the soldiers and some of them wave back. They sit crammed in the backs of lorries – smoking, waving.