I had thought of the cinema pleasure as a foretaste of my adult life. Now, with all kinds of shame in many recesses of my mind, I felt it to be fantasy. I hadn’t read Hangover Square, didn’t even known of it as a book; but I had seen the film. Its Hollywood London had merged in my mind (perhaps because of the associations of the titles) into the London of The Lodger. Now I knew that London to be fantasy, worthless to me. And the cinema pleasure, that had gone so deep into me and had in the barren years of abstract study given me such support, that cinema pleasure was now cut away as with a knife. And when, ten or twelve years later, I did return to the cinema, the Hollywood I had known was dead, the extraordinary circumstances in which it had flourished no longer existing; American films had become as self-regardingly local as the French or English; and there was as much distance between a film and me as between a book or a painting and me. Fantasy was no longer possible. I went to the cinema not as a dreamer or a fantasist but as a critic.
I had little to record. My trampings about London didn’t produce adventures, didn’t sharpen my eye for buildings or people. My life was restricted to the Earls Court boardinghouse. There was a special kind of life there. But I failed to see it. Because, ironically, though feeling myself already drying up, I continued to think of myself as a writer and, as a writer, was still looking for suitable metropolitan material.
Metropolitan – what did I mean by that? I had only a vague idea. I meant material which would enable me to compete with or match certain writers. And I also meant material that would enable me to display a particular kind of writing personality: J. R. Ackerley of Hindoo Holiday, perhaps, making notes under a dinner table in India; Somerset Maugham, aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing; Aldous Huxley, so full of all kinds of knowledge and also so sexually knowing; Evelyn Waugh, so elegant so naturally. Wishing to be that kind of writer, I didn’t see material in the campers in the big Earls Court house.
Penelope Lively
[1933-]
Penelope Lively (née Gréer) was born in Cairo, Egypt. She and her family moved to England in 1945. Lively attended boarding school in Sussex and received a BA in history from St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1957 she married Jack Lively, with whom she has two children.
Lively has been a BBC presenter for a radio programme on children’s literature and a reviewer for several magazines and newspapers, but it is for her fiction that she is best known. She began her writing career as a children’s author. Her first book, Astercote, was published in 1970 and was followed by, among others, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, winner of the 1973 Carnegie Medal. She won the Whitbread Award for A Stitch in Time (1976), the tale of a young girl who becomes obsessed with an ancient embroidery sampler.
In 1977 Lively wrote her first ‘adult’ novel, The Road to Lichfield, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Five more novels followed in the next ten years, and in 1987 Lively won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger, her most structurally ambitious and complex novel to date. The heroine in Moon Tiger is a historian who, as she is dying of cancer, constructs a new history for herself and the world. In this novel, as in virtually all of her work, Lively reveals a preoccupation with the elusive nature of time, the processes of death and renewal, and the connection between past and present. As she writes in Going Back (1975, later reprinted as an ‘adult’ book in 1990), events become ‘islands in a confused and layered landscape’ where ‘the things that should matter… get forgotten’.
Lively’s prose is precise, intelligent and eminently readable. Her more recent novels, including City of the Mind (1991), have explored the materialism and oppressiveness of Margaret Thatcher’s London in the 1980s. She has recently published the novels, Cleopatra’s Sister (1993) and Heatwave (1996), and a memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994). She currently lives in Oxfordshire and London.
The young woman in the extract from Lively’s exquisite memoir Oleander, Jacaranda exhibits a painful desire to attach herself to an unknown world. The nature of her colonial upbringing in Egypt suggests that arriving in Britain will simply form a continuum with her old life, but the society that she confronts is alien in many surprising and difficult ways.
From Oleandery, Jacaranda
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; seven thousand troops, one hundred women and children. Can it really have been seven thousand? 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 childlike, 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 seven thousand 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 poleaxed by the cold and what I could see out of the windows, as the train 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 Dakhur 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 house, 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 into a roof garden these days).
In that house 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 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 day my grandmother sallied forth with a string bag in search of provisions. Offal was the supreme trophy. On days 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 nonpersons, 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?
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 daytime 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 scattershot 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 Saint 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 the medallion of Saint Christopher alongside the speedometer.
My Somerset grandmother was a strong personality also, but differently so. She too took me in hand, and was eventually to do so alone when my Harley Street grandmother died within a couple of years. 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 good night ta 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 amor-ality – that I still held much the same views as she did on what is right and what is 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 Dakhur. 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 other times 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 skirt and thick jerseys. Knee-length socks, serge knickers, Chilprufe vests, and a fearful woollen corset called a Liberty bodice. Lisle stockings and garter 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 reread them before she pushed them into the 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 outdated 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, all the others 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 her 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 forever 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 home you came from and quite possibly vouched for your character as well, for all I knew. Where are your gloves? my grandmother would enquire 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 mentioned only by adult relatives in an awkward undertone. At my boarding school there were very few 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 pockmarked 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 buddleia and willow herb 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.
