Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  The train rocked across desert for what appeared to be days on end. About two, I now suspect, with a night in between. We had sleepers, an experience new to me and which I found entrancing. You woke in the cool dawn and there was the desert sliding past at the bottom of the bed, with the telegraph wires dipping up and down, up and down. There was nothing to see except an occasional camel train with Bedouin attendants, the animals festooned with equipment, the people shrouded so that they all seemed like moving parcels. The sand glittered with mirages, sometimes we moved through a great network of shining lakes and ribbed sand. This was Nubia, but I don’t think I knew that at the time though it would have had a personal resonance. Daoud and Hassan, at Bulaq Dakhrur, came from Nubia, as did many domestic servants in Cairo, and I was well aware of their physical distinction from Abdul or Mansour – glistening night-black skin as against rich brown.

  We reached Khartoum, and my father. I saw that this was indeed another country. Apart from anything else, it was hot. I was used to heat, but this was of another order. The heat imposed a curfew. You could not go out of doors between early morning and mid-afternoon. You rose early and walked by the river or in the zoo gardens for the bearable hours before the descent of that stifling pall. Then you languished all day in the muted heat of the stone-floored house, or on the shaded veranda, and sallied forth again as dusk fell. My father went to his office very early, and came home in the middle of the morning, going back to the office in late afternoon. We slept on the verandas of the house, on string beds without mattresses called angareebs. These were relished by the adults, for their relative coolness and – I suspect – the overtones of frontier life. I thought them primitive.

  I remember those nights. The warm black velvet air, and then the raucous dawns, as the birds awoke. And before that there was the visit of the night-soil men who collected the latrine buckets – the pad of bare feet, the tiny metallic clanks. I was much put out by this arrangement. In Cairo we had flush lavatories, for heaven’s sake.

  We have been taken out sailing on the Nile by a friend of my father’s. This has been held up to me as a great treat, but I am not enjoying myself at all. The sailing boat is very small and I do not trust it an inch. One false move and I shall be in there, helpless in the great swollen green-brown flow of the water, with the crocodiles whipping up from below, jaws at the ready. My parents know someone who is a close friend of a man whose yacht capsized only last week and he swam for the shore pursued by a crocodile and his strength gave out only yards from safety. And he could do the crawl, no doubt, I reflect grimly. I can only do breast-stroke.

  I do not believe in these crocodiles. My impression today is that even then there had not been crocodiles so far down the Nile for many a year. It was a long time since those Victorian and Edwardian drawings and photographs of dahabiyas cruising up-river with a line of dead crocs slung from the bowsprit. I think they had long since been shot out in that area and that my apprehension was entirely atavistic. Fuelled no doubt by folklore and anecdote. But there would be a certain satisfaction in finding out that I am wrong, and that there was some basis for that still potent anxiety.

  We spent one winter only in Khartoum – two or three months, perhaps – and what survives of it in my head is tenuous and oddly split into two opposing kinds of experience – one entirely sensuous and the other social and vaguely unnerving.

  Khartoum was a sensuous place. That enveloping heat, as though you moved about swathed in warm cotton-wool. The lush and lurid gardens, in which all the plants were bigger and greener and more succulent than those at Bulaq Dakhrur. Trees and bushes with thick juicy leaves and flaming flowers in red and orange. The zoo, to which Lucy and I inevitably gravitated, was also a park in which many of the birds and animals roamed free. There were stately grey secretary birds which stalked up and down the paths; one once came up behind Lucy’s back and tweaked her knitting needles out of her hand. Droves of little pig-like creatures rooted in the shrubberies. A baby elephant pottered about with its attendant keeper.

  And then there were the Sudanese themselves, qualitatively different from Egyptians – plum-dark, smiling faces. Slower, jollier. I remember the heaped form of the watchman outside our gate, peaceably sleeping in the dust under a tree and leaping to attention at the sound of the front door opening. And the uniformed officials at my father’s bank, with huge smiles and spanking white gloves and brass buttons. There is an impression of flowing voluminous white robes and those gleaming dark skins, an aspect of the sensuality of the place. Even the people seemed more vivid and intense.

  All that was clear and precise, a question of observation and absorption. The other thing was on a different plane. It was perturbing, and somehow treacherous.

  I joined the Khartoum Brownie pack. I had been a Brownie in Cairo, so this was not a new experience. Khartoum Brownies wore white uniforms instead of brown, with yellow ties, and Brownie gatherings took place in the grounds of the bishop’s residence, implying in some way the blessing of the church. We did sing the occasional hymn, I think. Otherwise, we did the usual Brownie things. You could get badges for the acquisition of various skills – laying a table, doing up a parcel, sewing on a button, tying a reef knot. I aspired to badges and laboured assiduously at table-laying and so forth. I think I got some, in the end. But, far more importantly, I made a friend.

  She had red hair. I cannot now remember her name, only the red hair, which impressed me. Something sparked between us. We were inseparable. We stood next to each other for inspection and when team-picking arose we picked each other. I looked forward avidly to the next Brownie afternoon. I recognize now an eerie affinity with the process of falling in love – that inescapable, inexorable obsession with another person.

  I asked Lucy if this child could be invited to tea, at our house. Lucy’s expression became strained. She did not reply. Later, she conferred with my mother. And later still it was conveyed to me – not explicitly but in some veiled way – that this would not do. Her parents were not, it seemed, the right sort of people. Yes, she was a nice little girl. But.

  I digested this non-information. I felt rebuked and embarrassed, as though myself caught out in a solecism.

  Why not rebellious? Affronted? I know now what it was all about. The child was from the other side of the tracks, socially speaking, in accordance with the complex but rigid structure of expatriate British life. Her parents ranked differently from mine, and the chasm was sufficient as to be unbridgeable except presumably on such neutral ground as the Brownie pack. An invitation to tea would have been a transgression of the rules. At the time, I did not understand at all, except to perceive that my own perception was lacking in some mysterious way. I even wondered if possibly my friend had some infectious illness. But I neither queried the dictum nor objected.

  The experience was to be mirrored a few years later, in England, when in my adolescence I struck up a friendship with a boy my own age while staying with relatives, and again had it tacitly conveyed to me that I was short on social sensibility. Once more, I felt a sort of puzzled guilt, but touched this time with doubt, and years later was able to write a short story about the episode which has always served me as a neat illustration of the way in which reality furnishes fiction. But in Khartoum I accepted this denial of a relationship with regret but without resentment. Was I peculiarly docile? Lumpenly unquestioning? Or, as I would rather think, is this not an instance of the way in which a child simply assumes that adult codes must be correct? The task at that stage is not to query the codes, but to identify them. I had been caught out in a failure to identify, and felt accordingly humiliated. Later, at fourteen, I remember the interesting and disturbing tingle of query.

  I have always been sceptical of the claim that travel broadens the mind. It depends how well equipped that particular mind was in the first place. Plenty of well-travelled minds are also nicely atrophied. Children are in any case of a different order. My own childhood exposure to the varying cultures of Egypt and
– briefly – of Palestine and the Sudan left me with an awareness of differences, but not of differences that I could absorb in any meaningful way. I saw simply that there is no uniformity of persons nor of places. At nine, and ten, I was starting to look beyond the prison of my own concerns, but was still focused mainly on the physical world, as younger children are. And I was still, also, fettered by the abiding task of childhood – the penetration of adult assumptions. There is not much room for reflection about cultural differences when you are still doggedly trying to identify the requirements of your own immediate circumstances. When I try to recover those months in Khartoum, it is for the most part like trying to peer into a mist. There are dim shapes and impressions, and then here and there the sun pours down and something leaps into clarity. The sheen of those plum-dark skins, the brilliance of a flower. The sound of bare feet on a tiled floor. The strut of a secretary bird. Those atavistic lurking crocodiles. And the baffling system whereby one child could be invited to tea but another could not. And I think I understand now why it should be this curious miscellany that survives. It mirrors my own ten-year-old concerns – the dazzling appearance of the world, and the perversity of its ways.

  Chapter Nine

  Lucy and I left for England in a troopship. It was early spring – 1945. The troopship – the Ranchi – was en route from the Far East and India with a cargo of the armed forces bound for home and demobilization. She stopped off at Suez to pick up some more, and along with them a small consignment of women and children; 7,000 troops – 100 women and children. Can it really have been 7,000? That is the legendary figure that has lain in my head ever since. We never saw them. We boarded the ship and were immediately segregated in a civilian ghetto well out of the way of the licentious soldiery, presumably in the interests of our own well-being. I remember only crowded dormitories with bunk beds, and queuing for the bathroom with the two saltwater showers, and the sense of those hordes elsewhere. There was the stamp of boots overhead, and sometimes distant sounds of revelry. It was a far cry from the P. & O. and the Bibby Line. No deck chairs and solicitous stewards.

  My mother was staying in Cairo with the man she was going to marry. My father would tie up his affairs in the Sudan and follow us to London in a few months. The war was not yet over, but the end was in sight. On the Ranchi everyone was elated – the invisible troops, the other expatriate women. Lucy was exuberant. Everyone was heading home, except for me, who was going into exile.

  I was twelve, poised for adolescence, though a lot more child-like probably than any adolescent of today. I had little idea what lay ahead, but I knew that something had come to an end. I remember a feeling of sobriety, rather than of grief. I remember gazing theatrically at the spit of land at the mouth of the canal, as the ship headed for the open sea, and thinking that I was seeing the last of Egypt. I decided to keep a diary of this momentous journey, and began it by listing all the other ships we had seen berthed at Suez, along with further observations about military activities in the area. Lucy, a patriot to the core, became anxious about the implications of this, and mentioned the matter to the NCO supervising our ghetto, who said gravely that there might indeed be a security risk. Lucy told me to start again and stick to descriptions of our daily routine. This was not the sort of thing I had in mind at all, and I threw the diary away.

  The journey is a blank, now – perhaps in consequence of that affront. I remember only incessant lifeboat drills on the deck, when everyone stood about and grumbled, and nights when we lay in our bunks hearing distant muffled thuds which were apparently depth charges. There were not supposed to be any German U-boats around in the Mediterranean but there was always the possibility, and when we turned into the Bay of Biscay and eventually up the Irish Channel the thuds became more frequent.

  We were to dock at Glasgow. The ship entered the mouth of the Clyde, and the shoreline became visible. The 7,000 caught their first glimpse for several years of their native land and headed as one man for the port decks. There were frantic loudspeaker exhortations and after a few minutes the ship rode level once more. It was getting dark, anyway, a dank spring evening. By the time we tied up I was in my bunk, asleep.

  I woke to an unnatural stillness, and monstrosity. Framed in the porthole was an immense hairy foot. A hairy hoof. I stared in disbelief, and rose to see my first Clydesdale horse, carrying out haulage duties on the quayside. It was pouring with rain, and bitterly cold. I knew that I had arrived in another world.

  We took an overnight train to London, sitting up in a crammed compartment reeking of people in damp clothes, with Lucy on a high, pouring out our life histories to anyone who would listen, revelling in the camaraderie of her own language, her own country. I was acutely embarrassed, and pole-axed by the cold and what I could see out of the train windows, as it crept south in the grey dawn. The whole place was green, bright green. Grass, from end to end. How could this be?

  I was dimly aware of the arrangements. I was to be consigned to the care of my grandmothers – my paternal Harley Street grandmother in London and my maternal Somerset grandmother. My father would come to England as soon as he was able to. My mother would stay on at Bulaq Dakhrur with her new husband. I was going to boarding school. I knew all this, vaguely, and fended it off. For the moment, I had to come to terms with this stupefying environment: the inconceivable cold, the perpetually leaking sky, that grass.

  My London grandmother met us off the train. I was almost as tall as she was now and did not remember her at all. Today, I can feel a wholehearted admiration for my grandmothers. They were both over seventy and had valiantly agreed to take on a twelve-year-old whom neither had set eyes on for six years. In their heads there must have been an engaging small child. What they now received was an anguished adolescent, for whom the world had fallen apart. For the next two years they shunted me from one to the other, with anxious instructions about clothing requirements and dental appointments.

  They represented a classic English polarization – the town and country cultural divide. My Harley Street grandmother was the widow of a surgeon. She was still living in what had been both the family home and his consulting rooms – a five-floor house in that long sombre street. Today, there is an array of brass plates at the entrance of number 76. Back then, it was far from unusual for a single successful medical practitioner to occupy the entire house. My grandfather had died during the war, and my grandmother was now living like a squatter in her own home, entrenched within the old consulting room on the ground floor, which was the only room that could be kept warm. The rest of the building towered around her, the rooms shuttered and the furniture under dust-covers. Some of the windows had been blown out in the Blitz and never replaced – there were makeshift arrangements with boarding, and the occasional gaping hole.

  Living there with my grandmother was a relative called Cousin Dorothy. She was elderly, in delicate health, stone deaf and distinctly unpleasant. She seemed to be the quintessential poor relation but also to have my grandmother dancing attendance on her. She spent her days in the most comfortable armchair, hogging the fire, swathed in shawls, and she used an ear trumpet. She took an instant dislike to me, correctly identifying a rival for my grandmother’s attentions, and never referred to me except as ‘the girl’. In the basement was Nellie the cook, governing her own subterranean territory which seemed to stretch away into infinity. The house was a classic example of the optimum-size early-nineteenth-century terrace mansion. It had all the accessories – an immense coal-hole under the pavement, a satellite cottage in the mews behind, sculleries and larders and a wine cellar and lowering kitchen ranges and a food-lift on a pulley that could be wound from top to bottom of the house. From my grandmother I learned the correct terminology for various sections, which is why I am one of the few people left to call the well between the basement of a London house and the pavement the area, and to know what the leads are (the open rooftop of a jutting extension at the back of the house – the sort of thing that would be made int
o a roof-garden these days).

  There my grandmother had brought up six children, and there she now held out in a sort of gallant defiance of circumstances. She was a strong personality, a forceful woman with a robust sense of humour and artistic leanings. She was not a cosy grandmother, but a down-to-earth one, who set about what she no doubt saw as the rehabilitation of this waif washed up on her doorstep. No point in weeping and gnashing of teeth. The child must learn to adapt. I was plunged at once into the day-by-day negotiation with shortages and bureaucratic regulations which was the hallmark of the times. Each morning my grandmother sallied forth with a string bag in search of provisions. Offal was the supreme trophy. When she achieved this Holy Grail, she would plunge down into the basement calling for Nellie, and the two of them would pore in rapture over the bloody puddle of liver or kidneys. Lucy and I were officially non-persons, of course. The first task of all was to establish our existence and equip us with identity cards and ration books. Long hours in Marylebone Town Hall, waiting our turn to be quizzed by a hard-faced functionary. At last we achieved recognition. I had a blue ration book, as a person under sixteen. The functionary, thawing for an instant, pointed out portentously that I’d be entitled to bananas on that. My sense of disorientation was intensified. Why should people get excited about bananas?