Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  My Somerset grandmother lived with my aunt Rachel in a place of red earth, steep lanes, flower-filled hedge banks, the long slack skylines of Exmoor and the slate-grey gleam of the Bristol Channel. She also was a widow, and at Golsoncott too life had been pared down, whittled away to a shadow of pre-war indulgence. But certain proprieties were observed. Dinner at eight, for which my grandmother changed from her day-time tweeds into a floor-length housecoat and her pearls. The time-honoured routine of church attendance, chairmanship of the village-hall committee and the Women’s Institute, household shopping in Minehead on Tuesdays, a rigorous daily stint in the garden. To go there from Harley Street was to move from one cultural zone to another – even I could see that, with my fragile grasp of social niceties. The staccato scatter-shot of Cockney was replaced by the ruminative buzz of Somerset speech. In each place the other was looked upon with mistrust and contempt. In Somerset, everyone said I’d soon have some roses in my cheeks once I’d shaken off that smoky London air. In London they wondered what a child could possibly find to do down there. My Somerset grandmother visited London once a year. She called it ‘going up to Town’, and had special clothes which she wore on no other occasion. She would go to a theatre or concert, take lunch or tea with relatives, and retreat thankfully after three days to her rose garden and her embroidery. My Harley Street grandmother, for whom the wilderness began at Croydon, made a ritual trip to Kew Gardens in the spring and a quarterly day-return outing to see her sister in Staines, from which she would return complaining of the distance.

  The journey to Somerset was itself a sort of acclimatization, from the moment you reached Paddington and the Great Western Railway train with its sternly regional black-and-white photographs of Glastonbury Tor and St Michael’s Mount and Clovelly. At Taunton you crossed the frontier for real, changing into the branch line to Minehead. Norton Fitzwarren, Bishop’s Lydeard, Crow-combe, Stogumber… The line is still there, but mockingly reborn as a ‘scenic railway’. Back then, it wasn’t scenery – it was a serious progress from A to B. People got on and off at every stop – schoolchildren, women returning from a day’s shopping in Taunton, visiting relatives. Myself, alighting at Washford to be met by my grandmother in the old Rover with the running-board and medallion of St Christopher alongside the speedometer.

  My Somerset grandmother was a strong personality also, but differently so. She too took me in hand, and was soon to do so alone after my Harley Street grandmother died. Her method was a kind of benign and tactful digestion of me within the calm parameters of her own concerns. She swept me up into a routine of brisk walks, local commitments, gardening chores and fireside evenings. She was the voice of authority, but she was also affectionate and companionable. She teased me when I began to strike adolescent attitudes, and punctured my burgeoning vanity. She came to say goodnight to me in bed every night, humming her way along the corridor. She could be both stern and indulgent. She had a youthful sense of the ridiculous. Once, the elastic in my knickers broke when we were out shopping in Minehead and they fell to the ground: we fled to the car and laughed ourselves into incoherence. And as I grew up, and became myself more opinionated, we frequently disagreed – energetically but without rancour. I came out as an agnostic, and went through the Ten Commandments with her to demonstrate that agnosticism was not synonymous with amorality – that I still held much the same views as she did on what was right and what was wrong. I queried her Conservatism – though I was not the first to do that. My aunt Rachel had always held somewhat socialist views which had been reinforced by her wartime experience working with an evacuee organization in East London.

  In the fullness of time, Golsoncott became the approximation of a home, and my grandmother and aunt central to my life. But in those early months and years of exile I was still an alien, walking that landscape always with a faint sense of incredulity. Sooner or later, surely, I would wake up and find myself at Bulaq Dakhrur. This was all a mistake, and eventually it would be proven so and normality would be restored. Sometimes I felt as though I were in suspension, dumped here in this alien other world while somewhere else real life was still going on, golden and unreachable; at others I was swept by the grim apprehension that all this was true. It was really happening, and would continue to do so.

  An enforced metamorphosis took place, during that spring and summer of 1945. I moved slowly from disbelief to resigned acceptance, and aged it seemed by about ten years. The war ended, and I hardly noticed, immersed in becoming someone else. At the most practical level, I had to be kitted out with a new wardrobe. Friends and relatives were called upon to sacrifice their clothing coupons. I must apparently have a tweed coat, and flannel skirts and thick jerseys. Knee-length socks, serge knickers, Chilprufe vests and a fearful woollen corset called a Liberty bodice. Lisle stockings and suspender belt, for heaven’s sake. I… who had never in all my life worn anything other than a cotton frock. I protested. You’re in England now, said Lucy grimly. She didn’t need to remind me.

  At some point during that first summer Lucy went away. I cannot now identify a moment of departure. She was there, for a while, and then she was not. And in the autumn I went to boarding school, to embark on the slow Calvary that was to last until I was sixteen.

  Lucy moved on to spend many years with another family, where she received more consideration than I think she had from mine. I remained in contact with her until the end of her life. On one occasion when I was visiting her, not long before her death, she remarked suddenly that she had been having a clear-out and had come across some old letters of mine. Would I like to have them? I said I would. She couldn’t remember right now where she’d put them, she said. She would send them.

  In due course she did so. There were dozens of them, beginning that summer of 1945 and running on for the next few years. The later ones, when I was fifteen or sixteen, were unexceptional – long chatty accounts of what I had been doing. Grumbles about school. Adolescent posturing. Family gossip. It was the early ones that brought me up short, as I sat reading in my study through a long morning more than forty years later. They too were garrulous screeds about school, about the grandmothers, about what I had seen and done, but every now and then they broke down and became something else. They became love letters, and out of them there burst a raw anguish, a howl of abandonment and despair. I read them close to tears, incredulous, realizing that I remembered neither the writing of them nor the distress. It was possible to feel an acute and entirely detached pity. And when I had finished reading the letters I destroyed them all, because I knew that I could never bear to read them again, and because I knew also that I would not wish anyone else ever to do so. That sad child was gone, at rest, subsumed within the woman that I now am. And I think now of what it must have been like to be on the receiving end of those pathetic cries. Did she re-read them before she pushed them into that large manila envelope and posted them off to me? I think not. I suspect that she also, in her own way, had long since buried that traumatic separation.

  The events and the impressions of those early months and years in what was allegedly my own country are compressed now into a medley of sensation, much of it physical. There was the cold, which was beyond anything I would have thought possible. In the famously hard winter of 1947 the snow came in through the blitzed windows at Harley Street and lay in unmelting drifts on the stairs. Staying with relatives somewhere in the country, I used to creep into bed with all my clothes on. At my boarding school on the south coast you had to break the ice on the dormitory water-jugs in the mornings before you could wash. I thought I would die of the cold: it would have been a merciful release.

  This was England, then. But it bore no resemblance whatsoever to that hazy, glowing nirvana conjured up in the nostalgic chatter to which I had half listened back in Egypt. Back in the real world. Nobody had mentioned the cold. Or the rain. Or the London dirt which was not the aromatic organic dirt of Egypt but a sullen pervasive grime which left your hands forever grey and every surface
smeared with soot. In my mind I had created a place which seems like those now out-dated advertisements for environmentally destructive products like petrol or cigarettes – all soft-focus landscape, immutable good weather, gambolling animals and happy laughing folk. I had never seen such advertisements and I suspect the image was based on Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrations spiced with Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter. Certainly I would not have been surprised to find toadstool houses and the odd gnome, or people wearing poke bonnets and pinnies. I might well have felt on home ground then – I had grown up with that kind of thing, in a sense.

  What I was confronted with was something that was in no way soft-focus but disconcertingly precise. The weather was precise and inescapable, the topography was precise and daunting, what was expected of me was precise but coded. The gambolling animals had been turned into offal, and the happy laughing folk were transformed into the po-faced raincoated ranks at bus stops or on railway platforms. Moreover, everyone else knew their way around. They had the maps and the passwords. They did not so much exude happiness or laughter as an implacable confidence. This was their place. They had wrapped it round them and pulled up the drawbridge.

  I believe I have some idea of how the refugee feels, or the immigrant. Once, I was thus, or nearly so. I had concerned relatives, of course, and I spoke the language but I know what it is like to be on the outside, to be the one who cannot quite interpret what is going on, who is forever tripping over their own ignorance or misinterpretation. And all the while I carried around inside me an elsewhere, a place of which I could not speak because no one would know what I was talking about. I was a displaced person, of a kind, in the jargon of the day. And displaced persons are displaced not just in space but in time; they have been cut off from their own pasts. My ordeal was a pale shadow of the grimmer manifestations of this experience, but I have heard and read of these ever since with a heightened sense of what is implied. If you cannot revisit your own origins – reach out and touch them from time to time – you are for ever in some crucial sense untethered.

  I was used to a society in which people were instantly recognizable, defined by dress and appearance. An Egyptian could easily enough be distinguished from a European; someone who was English was unlike someone who was Greek. And the same was true here in England, it seemed, except that I could not see it. They all looked much the same to me, the raincoated London throngs. I could hear differences of speech, but these were confusing rather than illuminating. And the subtle code of appearance was quite beyond me. There were sartorial requirements which applied to me also, it seemed. You must never go out without gloves and an umbrella. Well, the umbrella made sense – but the gloves were purely symbolic, so far as I could see. They indicated what sort of person you were. They indicated what sort of a home you came from and quite possibly vouched for your character as well, for all I knew. ‘Where are your gloves?’ my grandmother would inquire on the Harley Street doorstep, kindly but sternly. And back inside I would have to go, to equip myself with my credentials before we could set forth.

  And then there was the matter of the divorce. My parents had not split up, in the brisk and neutral phraseology of today – they were divorced, a word that reeked of taboo. I soon learned that the situation should not be mentioned, or at least only by adult relatives in an awkward undertone. At my boarding school there was a small handful only of other girls with divorced parents. The headmistress summoned me to a private interview and made it clear that my position was unfortunate but distinctly reprehensible, and the most expedient behaviour was to lie low about it.

  I tried to hitch myself to this place in the most basic way. I tried to find my way around it. In Somerset I pottered in the lanes and fields, contentedly enough. In London I roamed about, alone for the most part. Sometimes my grandmother took me on excursions, and succeeded in transmitting to me something of her own partisan enthusiasm for the city she had lived in all her life. But she encouraged me also to take off on my own – sensibly enough, though this now seems a surprising indulgence. Perhaps London was a safer place for a loose teenager in those days than it is now. I rode buses hither and thither, collecting those differently coloured tickets – rose, lilac, buff, sixpence, ninepence, one and six – and learning how the place fitted together.

  It was a landscape still scarred and pock-marked by the Blitz. Houses leered from boarded windows, or simply yawned with cavernous black rectangles. They dripped plaster and sprouted greenery. Paving stones would give way to a sudden wasteland of dirt and rubble. Railings were replaced by planks and lengths of rope. There were sudden eloquent gaps. A space in a terrace of houses where you would see ghostly staircases running up exposed walls, or a spine of cast-iron fireplaces with mantelpieces, and the unexpected intimacy of floral wallpaper. Or a sudden plunging hole filled with rubble and the jungle growth of bramble and buddleia that had swarmed into the vacuum.

  It seems now a long way from the London of today – a slow, scruffy dirty place in which the traffic crept along sedately and you woke in the mornings to the sound of hoofs, the leisurely clop of the United Dairies pony, delivering the milk. Coal was shot down under the pavements – a sackful at a time – black treasure measured out into the grate lump by lump. At Harley Street there was the one fire in the consulting room, monopolized by Cousin Dorothy, and elsewhere frigid expanses, as cold as out of doors. Little hissing gas fires in the bedrooms, those brittle grey columns in front of which you could get your legs nicely scorched if you sat close enough. I would retreat to mine and find solace in a bar of Fry’s chocolate and a book from the dust-covered glass-fronted bookcases in the drawing-room. My grandmother was a devotee of Charlotte M. Yonge. I read The Daisy Chain and The Heir of Redclyffe from end to end, to oblige, with my knees scarlet and the back of me shivering. And Harrison Ainsworth and G. F. Henty and John Buchan, more fodder from the shelves in this new world where even the fiction was otherwise. No Arthur Ransome at Harley Street, and if there was any Greek mythology I never found it.

  Friends and relations rallied round. There were theatre visits, lunches and teas. I was posted off for weekend visits, clutching my railway ticket, correctly gloved, with my umbrella strapped to my suitcase. I must have been a dismaying guest – incongruously tall, like a bolted lettuce, socially inept, crippled by homesickness.

  I no longer know which of these family friends it was who hit on the idea of taking me to see the heart of the City, the bomb-flattened area around St Paul’s. He was someone who had developed an intense interest in the topographical history of the area and had discovered the way in which the bombs had stripped away the layers of time. He had taken to going down there, map in hand, to trace what was revealed. He suggested I come with him on one of these weekend excursions.

  The place was deserted. St Paul’s rose from a wasteland of rubble, cropped walls and sunken lakes of willowherb. The effect was not one of destruction but of tranquil decay, like some ruined site of antiquity. Street signs tacked to surviving shreds of wall plotted the layout of the place: Cheapside, Bread Street, Watling Street. We wandered around, peering down into the pink flowered lakes (DANGER! KEEP OUT!), inspecting the untidy little cliffs of walling, matching what we saw against my companion’s street plan of the pre-war City. He also had a plan of the medieval boundary wall. He showed me how this was reflected in the street pattern. He gave me a genial history lesson, most of which I could not follow because what I knew of English history was confined to the patriotic rantings of Our Island Story, but I paid attention. I became distinctly interested. I floated free of the prison of my own discontents and enjoyed the fresh air of an abstract interest. I caught a glimpse of what it is like to have adult concerns. Look, said my companion, here is a stretch of the actual medieval wall, which must have been embedded within and beneath this blitzed building – look at the flint and ragstone. And then he led me to his pièce de résistance. Here, he said with triumph, here is a Roman bastion. This was one of the corners of the oldest wall o
f all, the original Roman wall.

  Roman? Roman, had he said? But what did this mean? We had Romans down in Egypt. Had had Romans, time was. I knew about Romans. They came from Rome and Italy and surged all over Egypt and Palestine, building forts and temples and things which had fallen down but bits of which you could still see. They dropped their money everywhere: most of it was in Alexandria Museum. They built the Alexandria catacombs. They were responsible for Pontius Pilate. So how then could there be Romans right up here, in England?

  I pondered this, staring at that unexceptional bit of wall. Evidently Our Island Story, in its potted hagiography of Boadicea, had not made it clear who it was she was up against. Perhaps I asked my companion to explain matters. If so, I don’t remember. What I do remember, with a clarity that is still exhilarating, is the sudden sense of relevances and connections which were mysterious, intriguing and could perhaps be exposed. That word Roman chimed a note that was personal but was also, I realized, quite detached. Romans were to do with me because I had heard of them, but they were also to do with the significant and hitherto impenetrable mystique of grown-up preoccupations. It was as though the exposure of that chunk of wall had also shown up concealed possibilities. I sniffed the liberations of maturity, and grew up a little more, there amid the wreckage of London and the seething spires of willowherb.