Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively
It had always been thus, of course. Greek, Roman, Mameluke. A brief and nasty experience of Napoleon. And then a period of tottering bankruptcy under the khedives before the British and French intervened in the late nineteenth century to sort out the economic crisis and, of course, keep a stranglehold over the crucial building and administration of the Suez canal. Egyptians had had two thousand years of foreign occupation, reflected now as then in the emotive wealth of the landscape, in which everything happens at once – Greek temples and Roman forts and the mosques of the Mamelukes and eventually the great cosmopolitan jumble of Cairo. With the unimaginable enigmatic reach of the pharaonic centuries beyond.
We were a part of the tail-end of that occupation. My father had gone out to Cairo as a very young man to work in the National Bank of Egypt. In the final years of the war he was made manager of the bank’s Sudan branch, where my mother, Lucy and I joined him briefly in Khartoum for the winter period when it was considered that we could endure the climate. He spent his youth in Egypt, effectively. When I asked him once, in his old age, what his feelings were about the place he replied, quite simply: ‘I loved it.’
In my head, my father is hugely tall and pink-faced and forever genial – roaring with laughter in the midst of a party of people on the veranda at Bulaq Dakhrur, or sticking his head round the nursery door to pass the time of day and tease me for a few minutes. In the photos in which I sit on his knee or am carried on his back, he is touchingly young, peering out at me now behind small owlish glasses with his distinctive look, some genetic quirk which preserves him still in my own face, and those of my two half brothers – the sons he achieved years later in another marriage – and which surprised me recently in a sudden glance from my own baby grandson. He bequeathed me the short sight and the long limbs, too, though not perhaps the inextinguishable good humour. In my adolescence, I got to know him, but during my Egyptian childhood he existed only on the perimeters of my vision – getting into the Ford V8 to drive to Cairo and his office, or at the hub of the downstairs adult life with which I was not much concerned, hived off with Lucy in our upstairs domain. And now I realize that he lived partly in another world, of which I knew – and know – little. He spoke good French and some Arabic, and was in the course of his job in daily contact with many people beyond the cloistered circles of Gezira Sporting Club and Shepheard’s Hotel. He was a part of the whole convoluted and precarious system of the foreign administration of the country.
And I knew little or nothing of all this, back then. Nothing of why we were there and the implications of our presence, except that some curious process of absorption without comprehension must have gone on, because when I read now of that time, the pages are littered with significance. Hands wave from the text. I know these names: Khedive Ismail, Mohammed Ali, Sa’ad Zaghloul, Nahas Pasha, Sir Miles Lampson. It is as though I have discovered the key to some baffling code. Some of the names, of course, were part of the topography of Cairo: Khedive Ismail Bridge over the Nile, flanked by imperious lions for which I felt wild nostalgia when in my grieving adolescence I first saw the lions in Trafalgar Square. Sharia Mohammed Ali. But the names of Sa’ad Zaghloul, the powerful and popular leader of the Wafd party, and of Nahas Pasha, the subsequent prime minister, must have been constantly mentioned. I heard, and noted. I remember a great fuss about tanks and Abdin Palace and the King and the Ambassador which would have been the notorious occasion in 1942 when Sir Miles Lampson, accompanied by the GOC of troops in Egypt, drove to Abdin Palace with an escort of armoured cars (the tanks seem now to have been apocryphal) to insist that Farouk invite Nahas Pasha to form a government. Something of the drama must have penetrated my tranquil existence, but from my point of view the main interest of the King was his girth, held up to me as a dire warning by Lucy: ‘If you eat too many sweets you’ll get fat like King Farouk.’
Lucy was one of that army of semi-professional women to whom, in those days, middle-class English mothers entrusted their children. It now seems to me extraordinary to hand over your child to someone else to be brought up but I cannot, in retrospect, blame my mother. She was merely behaving as everyone she knew did; to have done otherwise would have been an act of defiant unconventionality. As it was, she looked after me on Wednesday afternoons, and in theory she ‘had’ me for an hour after tea, though this custom was abandoned if inconvenient. My main recollection of my mother is of someone exhaustively involved in ‘seeing people’ – Cairo’s social life was frenetic. In the mind’s eye, she is for ever part of a group on a lawn in the glowing light of early evening, everyone tricked out with white cotton mosquito protection tubes on arms and legs so that they looked like Michelin men, ice-clinking glasses of whisky and soda in their hands. Of no interest at all to me; upstairs was Lucy, and my own world. The arrangement was entirely satisfactory, so far as I was concerned.
Now, I see everything that was wrong with it, not least for Lucy herself – a maternal woman condemned like all her kind to be for ever a surrogate mother to other people’s children. She was a Londoner, and had started off as nursery maid to aristocratic families, which had instilled in her a reverence for titles which I found hard to handle when I saw her in adult life. Back then, Lucy’s particular form of elitism washed over me – a Lord or a Lady had as little resonance for me as a Pasha or a General or a Bishop. Words – no more and no less. Lucy was indeed the fountain of all knowledge, so far as I was concerned. I was in no doubt that what she spoke was the gospel, but those aspects of it which meant nothing to me I passed over.
I see and hear her now, quite clearly. A small woman – by the time I was eleven I was as tall as she was. Dark hair, long, but worn always in a bun secured with hairpins. To glimpse her in the mornings with her hair loose was to see her oddly – and a touch dismayingly – exposed. The hairpins were endlessly fascinating: I used to steal them. Round, steel-framed spectacles. She always wore grey or navy: grey cotton dresses for daily use, a grey suit or a navy coat for afternoons off or special outings. Stockings, always. A grey or navy felt hat, frequently. Her London speech had been gentrified entirely – when I met her sisters in England after the war I was startled because they spoke differently. She had stern moral values – a general code of truthfulness and honesty and kindness spiced with fervent patriotism. All this rubbed off on to me except the patriotism which was always elusive because of my confusion about my own identity. I could never manage to feel English with quite the confidence that Lucy did.
She was my entire emotional world. I lived alone with her, locked into a reassuring arrangement of solicitude and dependence. My parents were satellite figures – occasionally stimulating or provocative, but of a different order. Peering backwards, I cannot really see them. Lucy is vivid. She seems in retrospect to have been ageless; I know now that she was in her thirties.
We were together all of the time, as a parent and child would be. Except for Wednesdays, when she had her afternoon off and I was left with my mother, an arrangement which I disliked but endured because I recognized that Lucy was entitled to a spree and I could look forward to the blow-by-blow account she would give me of the film she had been to at one of the Cairo cinemas – a Bob Hope or a Hedy Lamarr or a Deanna Durbin. I was uncomfortable with my mother and played her up, I’m sure, sensing her own unease with me. She was not good with children. Lucy, when at odds with her, was fond of recounting caustically to her cronies my mother’s pronouncement that it took a particular mentality to be able to look after children – an inferior one, by implication.
I am in bed, on the brink of sleep. I can hear the voices of Lucy and my mother, across the passage, pitched low, in dispute. Lucy’s voice is tight and contemptuous; my mother’s is shrill and defensive. And it comes to me that it is Lucy who has the whip-hand, which is confusing. Why is there that note in my mother’s voice? Why can Lucy say what she does?
My mother needed Lucy very much more than Lucy needed her. Lucy could have found another job a dozen times over within twenty
Chapter Two
I am lying on a sofa, knees hugged to my chest, staring at the sofa back, which is a blurry chintz patterned with flowers, large blue and green pansies. I have a pain in my stomach. I trace the petals of the pansies with my finger. The pain comes in great waves, ebbing and flowing, washing through me as though I were in the grip of some tide. Lucy is somewhere in the room, knitting. I can hear the clack of needles. There is just the blurred pansies, and the clicking noise, and the pain.
The mosquito net over my bed is suspended from the ceiling by a metal hoop, and tucked in under the mattress all around. I am inside a filmy white tent. The tent is filled with the metallic smell of Flit. I can see the outline of the Flit-gun on the table beside the bed, a chunky barrel with a pump handle. I can see also the grey smudges of squashed mosquitoes on the net and a long wavering white line where Lucy has mended a tear.
I have found a praying mantis in the hedge. A shaft of sunlight makes it translucent. I can see its insides, and the dark veining of its wings, and the globes of its eyes. It sits in a frozen posture, and then moves an arm, stiffly, like an automaton.
No thought at all here, just observation – the young child’s ability to focus entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon the here and now, without the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation. It is also the Words-worthian vision of the physical world: the splendour in the grass. And, especially, Virginia Woolf ‘s creation of the child’s eye view. A way of seeing that is almost lost in adult life. You can stare, you can observe – but within the head there is now the unstoppable obscuring onward rush of things. It is no longer possible simply to see, without the accompanying internal din of meditation.
And is that perhaps why we remember with such clarity? Could it be that it is the lost capacity for unadulterated vision that furnishes those suspended moments, because we saw then with an immediacy that we have since lost?
My suspended moments are almost all focused on the house, or the garden. The stomach ache would have been no unusual occurrence – most Europeans in Egypt were mildly ill a good deal of the time, and at risk of typhoid, dysentery, sand-fly fever, malaria and a few other plagues. Any cut, bite or scratch became infected. All such abrasions were treated with iodine, which stung and left yellowish-brown stains, or mercurochrome, which was a gaudy red. I carried this war-paint all the time, especially around the knees, charting the injuries of the previous days.
My bed, and the mosquito net, were in the night nursery. Lucy slept there too. Across the passage was the day nursery, in which we lived. The passage reached from one end of the house to the other, and rooms opened off it to either side, like a hotel corridor – a peculiar arrangement for domestic architecture, but then it was an unusual house, or at least unlike anything I have known since. Externally, it was cream stucco with green shutters, flat-roofed and with a wide covered veranda running round most of two sides. The front door was rather grandly porticoed, with a flight of steps leading up. Now, it seems to me like a small version of one of those plantation mansions of the American deep south. It had been built in the early years of the century, along with its two neighbours, each of them lavishly surrounded by gardens and sharing an access driveway screened by a high hedge.
At the far end of that long corridor upstairs was our bathroom, which was also the visitors’ bathroom, and outside its window was a palm tree in which lived an owl, which would bob up and down in a strange private gymnastic performance. This was the Egyptian Little Owl, I had been told, and I always thought of it thus, with precision (heralding maybe an adult enthusiasm for extremely amateur ornithology). Next to the bathroom was Lucy’s pantry, in which she had a primus stove and did small-scale cooking operations in areas over which she did not trust the kitchen servants, such as boiling the milk. On one legendary occasion one of the bottles of milk delivered daily had been found to contain a small live fish – indicating that whoever bottled or delivered it was in the habit of topping it up from the canal.
Next to the pantry was our bedroom, and then the spare bedroom, and opposite was the big nursery, with the flowered chintz sofa on which I languished when ailing. The nursery opened on to a veranda – the roof of the covered veranda around the ground floor. In very hot weather my parents slept on this veranda in a sort of large fruit cage. I never got to do this, and it was a focal point of dissatisfaction. Why not? Why them and not me? Strictly speaking, it was not even their territory, which was the big suite of bedroom, dressing-room and bathroom at the far end of the corridor into which I seldom penetrated. Occasionally I was allowed in to explore the contents of my mother’s jewellery box or to watch her apply her make-up. I perceived their quarters as qualitatively different from ours, more richly furnished and full of lavish smells (my mother’s scent, my father’s leather shoes) but I always felt a touch displaced there and was quite happy to retreat again. Next to the nursery was a further guest bedroom, a sliver of a room reserved for bachelors, of which there was a plentiful supply, an unending stream of Eighth Army buccaneers on leave from the Western Desert. My parents were extremely gregarious; there was always someone staying, lunch parties and tea parties and ‘people for drinks’ were the norm.
The front door opened on to a large hall dominated at one end by a fireplace in which a fire was lit at Christmas, for ceremonial purposes. There was a Knole settee from which I was banned because I might bounce on it or dirty the cover: I cannot set eyes on a Knole settee, to this day, without a feeling of truculence, the submerged resentment of the hoi polloi. There was also an early nineteenth-century tallboy with brass handles in which were kept objects of importance: my father’s papers, photograph albums. I was forbidden, equally, to open these drawers. The tallboy had a definite aura: it signified official, adult concerns. Today, that tallboy stands in my bedroom in London. It houses some of my clothes, and a fair amount of detritus like surplus Christmas wrapping paper and discarded spectacles. This seems to me a nice instance of the way in which a portentous inanimate object eventually gets its come-uppance, though in another sense I still have a respect for the tallboy – it has twice navigated the Mediterranean, it has an impenetrable past going back at least a hundred years before I first knew it, and it is all set to outlast me, for sure.
My parents evidently shipped furniture out to Egypt. The drawing-room and the dining-room, large formal rooms opening off the hall, were furnished in similar style. The only Middle Eastern touches I remember were the khelim and Turkish rugs on the floors and the Crusader sword that hung over the mantelpiece in the hall. Was it really a Crusader sword? It was a sword all right, and on a further occasion of family legend one of the resident Western Desert buccaneers was supposed to have snatched it up and cut off the head of a cobra found sunning itself on the front doorstep.
Just inside the front door was a little suite of rooms – bedroom, bathroom and pantry – inhabited by Nunn. Nunn was an elderly British expatriate who had come with the house, in some curious way. He was vaguely employed as a caretaker, and ministered to the generator which supplied our electricity. He was a small irascible man with a bristly white moustache who always wore a khaki bush jacket and a solar topi (this last was a touch outdated by then in Egypt) and passed his time haranguing the servants and the gardeners in a mixture of kitchen Arabic and army invective. He was taciturn and irritable and a stern misogynist. He ignored Lucy and me as well as, for the most part, my mother. I only remember him talking at any length to my fat
Nunn now seems to me a strange and tragic figure. Who on earth was he? Tradition had it that he had fought in the Boer War and then somehow got washed up in Egypt on the way home. Certainly he had some sort of army background. There he is, in my head, always carrying a fly-whisk, standing in the front drive bawling out Ali, one of the gardeners, inhabiting a limbo of his own in which he was not one of us but neither was he exactly an employee. Now I see his irascibility as stemming from frustration and loneliness, his xenophobia as an expression of his own social insecurity. And there is a further Nunn-related moment which comes swimming up. Late in the war, he is no longer at Bulaq Dakhrur. He has gone, though I seem not to have noticed the moment of his going. Lucy and I go to visit him in Cairo. He is lying in a chair in a stuffy, over-furnished room, suddenly old and ill, tended by two young women who, it comes across to me, are his daughters. And they are not English. Lucy, wearing a pinched look, says that they are Lebanese. The misogyny cannot have been so total after all.
Behind a screen in the far corner of the hall was the entrance to the pantry and the kitchen, of intense interest to me because largely out of bounds. There was the pantry, in which Nunn ate his solitary meals and my mother gave daily orders to Hassan, the cook. Beyond that was the kitchen proper, which was absolutely forbidden territory. I doubt if my mother had ever been there. It was a mysterious, noisy, smelly place from which came sounds of raucous laughter, quarrels, commotion. Its activities spilled out on to the back door steps and the area around, which was discreetly fenced off from the drive by bushes. Here the servants sat to talk, to prepare vegetables, wash things in enamel basins, pluck chickens. I was not allowed to go there either but I did, on occasion. I would creep through the bushes and sit in fascination, watching and listening. Hassan, Abdul, Daoud and whoever else there was would kindly turn a blind eye. They knew I was out of order, but were prepared to collude. They weren’t much interested probably. I was only a child, and a girl at that.