Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  We have been driving for hours, days. I keep asking when we will get to the Half Way House, where there are cold drinks and lavatories. I am in need of both.

  The journey along the desert route to Alexandria probably did take many hours. It is about 140 miles, and nowadays the road is dual carriageway, but back then it was a narrow track of tarmac which dissolved here and there into a sandy waste, depending on how recent the last high winds had been. Hence the desert tyres. We could have gone by train. The railway between Cairo and Alexandria was built by Robert Stephenson and opened in 1856, vastly contributing to the influx of European visitors to Cairo and Upper Egypt. It was a side-shoot of the European and American railway boom and must have been one of the earliest railways on the African continent. I certainly remember it – the bedlam of the station, and then the trains which always started late and reproduced all gradations of social and cultural life – the first class with separate compartments and upholstered seats and a dining-car, and then the second and third with slatted wooden benches and people carrying bunches of live chickens, and finally the roof and the couplings to which clung the free-loaders, a tattered swarm of men and boys clutching on to each other if they couldn’t achieve a handhold on the train. We must then have used the railway on occasion, but it is the drive along the Desert Road that retains its mystique. The sand, the wind, the Half Way House, the beginning of the Alexandrian summer.

  We went in May, when the temperature in Cairo began to soar, and came back in September. It was a serious annual migration. It took place before the war, in the years when we did not go to England, because I have photographs which show me sitting in the Mediterranean as a plump infant, and leaping boldly from a houseboat into Alexandria harbour, wearing water wings made out of gourds. I don’t remember those times, but the early years of the war are quite clear. We were certainly there in 1940 and 1941. The annual exodus to Alexandria was far too important a feature of expatriate Cairo life to be affected by a passing inconvenience like the Libyan campaign. We moved to Alexandria nicely in time for the bombing of the city. Cairo, of course, was never bombed.

  In fact the bombing of Alexandria was concentrated on the harbour region, some distance from the residential area in which my mother would rent a villa for the summer. Indeed, for me the air raids simply added to the festive atmosphere of the place and gave it a further esoteric dimension. The sky was suffused with fireworks. If the raid was bad you were got out of bed and tucked up in a rug under the dining-room table, and there was always the possibility of picking up shrapnel in the garden next morning.

  I loved Alex. To go there was to be translated into another world – a faster, brighter, shinier world of sun and wind and sea. There was the Corniche, that ran the length of the seafront, with rusty railings that stained the hands orange and below the tumbled concrete cubes of breakwaters and beyond that the sea, rushing up in columns of foam. There were the leisurely streets of villas set in leafy gardens. And the city centre, a tram-ride away, with expensive shops and Baudrot’s, which was the Alexandria equivalent to Groppi’s, with cakes and ices that were if possible even superior. And, above all, there were the beaches.

  Stanley Bay. The Military Beach. Sidi Bishr No. 1 and Sidi Bishr No. 2 and Sidi Bishr No. 3. Significantly different one from another. Stanley Bay was distinctly down-market – a huge semi-circle of beach huts giving on to concrete promenades – crowded, cosmopolitan and lively, with itinerant peanut sellers and gully-gully men, who did conjuring tricks with live baby chickens. Lucy and I were sometimes reduced to Stanley Bay because it was within walking distance of our home base. The Military Beach was also within easy reach and held in somewhat low esteem because there was not much sand, just shingle and pebbles. I was partial to the Military Beach: the fishing was excellent. There was a rich system of shallow reefs and rock pools stretching away to sea for a hundred yards or more, and a long breakwater fingering right out into deep water. The breakwater was on the whole for serious, adult anglers, but one could lurk behind them, gawping at their majestic catch. I fished in the rock pools, scooping my net under the overhangs to bring it up jumping with shrimps. Tiny ones, for the most part, but there was always the possibility of a whopper – translucent, with those black blobs of eyes, throbbing in the palm of my hand. Sometimes it was rod-and-line stuff, squatting for hours on a rock watching my float, until the heady moment when it began to dip and circle. There was a kind of silvery triangular fish with black bands on the tail, that lived in shoals, and among the rocks and seaweed there were rockfish, with sucker-like mouths. I did not care for these, and there was always a problem about getting them off the hook. Lucy washed her hands of this, so I would tramp the beach in search of assistance. It was a place much frequented by courting couples – soldiers and sailors with their girls – Greek girls, French girls, Lebanese girls, ATS and WAAFS and WRNS. I would select a likely pair and stand over them, an insistent figure in sagging navy-blue woollen bathing costume and white cotton sun-hat, proffering a slimy creature on the end of a nylon line. I must have blighted many an afternoon of dalliance.

  Actually, my approach to marine life was ambivalent. When it was on a small scale I was fascinated. The delicate pink and green sea-anemones whose tentacles had a tacky feel if you stuck your finger in them: I fed them shrimps, sadistically. And the tiny skittering sand-crabs, light as feathers, that blew in shoals across the sand in front of the advancing waves. The cowrie shells you could find along the tide-line and the little leathery dead starfish. The clouds of tiny fish that would skim across a pool, flashing silver in the sun. It was the lurking menace of monstrosity that I feared – overtones of that Nile catfish. Once, fishing on my own far out on the reef, I disturbed something two or three feet long which whipped away from pool to pool in a great dark powerful rush. Swimming in deep water, there was always the thought that some sinister mass might come wheeling up from far below.

  *

  The water is just below waist level, which is precisely right. Any higher, and I would not be able to push off with my feet at the crucial moment. I have to be able to lean forward and launch myself with a kick at the exact moment that the wave is breaking.

  I stand facing the shore with my head turned, assessing each approaching wave, clutching the surfboard. If they have already broken they are no good to me. Those that are still swelling must be allowed to go, lifting me temporarily off my feet as they do so. What I am after is the one that is ripening to a peak which frills with white as it begins to turn in on itself. Then I can fling myself forward with it and if the timing is right I will swoop down the slope of water and hurtle in with the wave – a glorious involuntary rush which will leave me washed up on the beach.

  Out of the corner of my eye I can see Lucy. She is waving. Not in greeting but in summons. I am to come out. I pretend I have not seen her. I go on waiting my moment. Great white broken waves charge through me. I bob up and down with the swells. And then the right one comes, and I have timed it right, the wave has me in its grip, and I am racing for the beach.

  The wave dies, and deposits me on the sand. Lucy is looking thunder, and I brace myself for an earful.

  This was not, I hasten to say, surfing on a Hawaiian scale. There were adults who were doing ostentatious things with proper surfboards, way out in the deep water. My surfboard was a child’s version of the kind most surfing camp-followers used – an oblong board with a rounded end over which you placed your hands, shaped to the waist at the other. Mine was made to measure, and had my initials on it in green paint – P.M.L. It was my most treasured possession. I was a good swimmer, and fancied myself as a surfer. I was passionate about it. I saw waves in my dreams, flaunting those alluring glassy flanks. When we went to the surfing beach I was in a state of tension, awaiting the colour of the flag. No flag meant no danger, and therefore possibly no waves either. Red meant hazardous, and therefore good waves, but an argument with Lucy about the degree of hazard. Black meant swimming forbidden.

&n
bsp; Lucy never bathed. She would set up an encampment on the sand – sun umbrella, rug and stool, Thermos flask, knitting – and from there she would supervise my activities. If we had access to a beach cabin, as tenants or guests, she would base herself in the greater comfort of the cabin, with its benches and shade, and make forays to check up on me. The surfing beach was Sidi Bishr No. 3, where we never had a cabin, so Lucy must have been condemned to many an afternoon’s edgy patrolling of the shore while I plunged off into the Mediterranean. Occasionally, when my flouting of her shouts and waves became entirely blatant, she would despatch some total stranger to admonish me. And once, the gaffir – the beach watchman – who came racing out with a life-belt and hauled me back: an appalling humiliation.

  I have every sympathy with Lucy, now. I’d do the same myself. A few people drowned off that beach every summer. According to Lucy it was because they’d gone into the water too soon after eating their lunch or their tea, which gave you cramp. I had to sit fretting on the sand for an hour after ingestion. I remember once seeing a tarpaulin stretched out on the sand with an oblong shape beneath, and a muttering crowd standing about. There were lifebelts tethered to posts every hundred yards or so, and those gaffirs in navy shorts and sweaters, who howled imprecations at anyone breaking the black-flag rule. In fact, I knew about the treachery of the inviting water, but I never let on to anyone. Once I had been caught in a current in the trough of deep water fifty yards from the shore, and found myself pulled terrifyingly out to sea. And on several occasions I had misjudged the size of a wave or positioned myself wrongly and turned head over heels, banging against the surfboard, caught up helplessly, hideously, in a roaring cauldron of water. I kept an expedient silence about such things. Surfing was essential; surfing was the whole point of existence. I have never surfed since, but I have always felt a sneaking empathy with those obsessives who traipse the globe in search of waves. I knew how they feel, once.

  The beaches, like the trains, reflected the complexities of class and culture. Stanley Bay was raffish and multicultural. The Military Beach was domestic, despite the courting couples. Sidi Bishr No. 1 was plebeian. Sidi Bishr No. 3 was dashing and classy. Sidi Bishr No. 2 was classier yet, and it was there that my mother tried to achieve a beach cabin, each summer. Whether this was done by lottery, by order of application or by corruption I have no idea. The last, I should guess. Whatever – it was a matter of anxious anticipation. One year, Lucy and I concocted an April Fool trick whereby we announced that while she was out a man had phoned to say that she had a cabin allocated in the prime position in the centre of the beach, front row. My mother was ecstatic. ‘April Fool!’ I shouted, triumphant. Her reaction was explosive. Beach cabins were serious matters – definitions of status, and the focus of the summer’s social life.

  They were little detached villas on wooden stilts, painted cream and green, with a covered veranda in the front and a flight of wooden steps leading down to the sand. I seem to remember about three ranks of them, at both Sidi Bishr Nos. 2 and 3; front row was the most desirable – from there you could observe the comings and goings of the beach and accost your friends. Drinks, lunch and tea parties were held on the veranda. Towels and bathing costumes were hung out to dry on the surrounding railings. Inside, you changed, and kept all the summer equipment – the surfboards and the sun umbrellas and the buckets and spades.

  It was the area underneath the cabins that interested me – cool wastelands in which accumulated an enticing detritus of garbage. I was not allowed to go there, for fear of broken glass, but did so, repeatedly. I can summon up that landscape now, with no difficulty at all. There was a clearance of a couple of feet or so only, so you had to crawl, or shuffle forward on your stomach. Sand that was chill instead of burning like the beach sand. Strips of light between the planks of the cabin floor above. If you lay on your back under the veranda part you could see the pink slices of people’s feet and listen to conversations. And there was a treasure-trove of rubbish. Bottle tops, which I collected, and chunks of milky-green glass washed smooth by the sea. Crisp ribbons of brown seaweed. Cigarette ends. White cuttlefish. Gobs of blackish tar. Little wooden ice-cream spoons. Matchboxes. Sea-urchin shells. Buttons. And occasionally some mystifying object which might require identification. Once I interrupted one of my mother’s cabin At Homes brandishing a curiously structured burst balloon. There was an outbreak of feverishly inconsequential chatter and I was sent packing, condom and all.

  The attraction of Sidi Bishr No. 2 was that the beach was sheltered by a long low rocky island two or three hundred yards offshore. The channel between thus offered calm, safe swimming. Furthermore, you could swim out to the island and explore. It had a shallow lagoon in the middle, full of wonders – tiny jewel-like green crabs and the biggest shrimps in creation and a kind of red starfish that I never saw anywhere else. I thought of it as a miraculous otherworld, and had a long-running fantasy narrative in which I lived there, alone, a sort of female Robinson Crusoe with the romantic overtones of Nausicaa or Andromeda. The seaward side of the island sloped up to a low cliff, an awkward climb in bare feet over sharp rocks and pools of slippery weed but essential, because from the cliff you looked out to the open sea – crashing against the island and reaching away in a great blue quilt to the horizon, on which perched the grey cut-out of a cruiser or an aircraft carrier. The island was a nirvana. When I was very small I was towed out to it clinging to my father’s back. Later I could struggle there myself, doing a splashy breast-stroke and wearing gourds. And eventually I could swim all the way, easily, gourdless and mature.

  In good years we had a cabin at Sidi Bishr No. 2, whence you could walk along the beach and thence on to the concrete promenade to Sidi Bishr No. 3, with its own townscape of beach cabins, ranging from an outer suburbia at the extreme edges to the prime positions in the centre front. In bad years we had no cabin and had to establish an enclave of sun umbrellas, or cadge invitations. Lucy and I were occasionally bidden to join the children of a wealthy Anglo-French family, acquaintances of my parents, who had a permanent cabin on Sidi Bishr No. 3 – the equivalent of membership of the Athenaeum. The children and their attendants were brought to the beach in a chauffeur-driven car, from which the chauffeur then carried to the cabin the beribboned boxes of cakes from Baudrot’s which were the substance of the picnic tea. Their cabin had a table, on which the tea was set out, and a set of folding chairs. There were paper plates, and patterned paper serviettes, and iced lemonade. There would be one of those big chocolate cakes topped with sugar-dusted chocolate logs, macaroons, cream-filled pastry boats, éclairs. And I would sit there slavering, a shameless hanger-on, a serf at the baronial feast, anxious only to get my paws on anything going. When we had a beach picnic it was Marmite sandwiches and a banana.

  There was beach life, and there was villa life – the long, leisurely mornings playing in our garden or in someone else’s. The gardens were richer and lusher than the gardens of Cairo, of Zamalek, even Bulaq Dakhrur itself. And there were chameleons in them. They stalked the branches of trees and shrubs, mysterious aliens with swivelling eyes and three-fingered hands like cool gloves. They seemed like manifestations of some fantasy world, leading their slow-motion lives in there among the leaves, hanging in frozen postures, or inching forward, out of kilter with everything else – the birds and the flickering lizards and the black trickle of ants on a tree trunk. A whole mythology attached to them: they could change colour according to background, if you put them on something multicoloured they would explode. I would scour the bushes for them, the little brown ones and the large bright green ones. I liked to hold them and then stare intently at them – the slack bellies that fluttered as they breathed, the perfect spiral of the coiled tail. They clung to my finger and hissed with open mouths. Lucy was repelled by them and admonished: they would bite, they were probably poisonous. I ignored her, and tried to test the mythologies. I put the brown ones on the lawn, but they stayed resolutely brown. I put a green one in the p
ocket of my pink dress, but when I took it out it was as green as ever. I considered a definitive experiment involving Lucy’s knitting bag, a rainbow affair of yellow shading through to red, but could never bring myself to carry it out. Suppose the creature really did explode?

  It was in Alex that I first had to wear glasses, realized that I had freckles, and was mistaken for a boy. The three things are fused into one dismaying event. My father – affectionately, teasingly, meaning no harm at all – called me ‘freckle-face’. I rushed to a mirror, and saw that he was quite right. For the rest of the summer (or the week, or the day) I was ablaze with self-consciousness. If anyone’s gaze fell on me they were looking, I knew, at my freckles. I was blighted. And then (next day, next week, next month) I was taken to an oculist who diagnosed short sight and astigmatism. I was furnished with spectacles, for lessons and for reading. I knew no other child who had to wear spectacles. Now I was disabled as well as blighted. And Lucy had knitted me a bathing costume which was only a pair of trunks without the customary additional rectangle that vaguely covered the chest and tied round the neck with a tape. I was bared from the waist up, like a boy. Furthermore, my hair had been cut very short. The inevitable happened. Someone at a beach gathering took me for a boy: ‘Would he like another sandwich?’ The surge of embarrassment and affront was greater than any I had ever known – or indeed, it now seems, than any since. Bespectacled, freckled and hermaphrodite, I soldiered through that summer.

  The freckles and the spectacles are still with me; I have long since come to terms with both. But those Alexandrian summers still bubble to the surface in another way – small skin eruptions called solar keratosis which periodically appear and have to be spirited away by a dermatologist. Sunshine decades old is locked into my body, with unstoppable effects.

  Our last summer in Alexandria was 1944. By then my father had been transferred to the Sudan branch of his bank and my mother was mostly absent also, preoccupied with the man who would become her second husband. There was no rented villa. Lucy and I lodged with an elderly bachelor banking acquaintance of my father’s, whom we never saw. His Lebanese housekeeper Josephine, a huge, cushion-like lady with gold teeth, spoiled me rotten and cooked us wonderful meals. I discovered that the rest of the world did not eat rice pudding and macaroni cheese and stewed prunes. I was eleven now, as tall as Lucy, and sobering up. I no longer flirted with naval officers. Lucy and I went for long walks along the Corniche, and read Tom Sawyer to each other in the evenings. There was something unspoken–a sense that we were on the edge of things. I thought that probably I would never be in Alexandria again, and I was right, almost.