Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir

  This is a fancy; for me, a possible prompt for a story, even a novel. A new way of exploring the significance of memory in fictional terms. But it is a meaningful fancy, too, because it points up the power – the defining power – of the memories that we have. We are who we are because we have that particular range of memories, which form our past as we know it.

  When I pinch the leaves of the rosemary plant in my garden, and sniff, I am back on a hillside above Jerusalem, aged nine. I suppose there must have been wild rosemary there. This is an instance of what psychologists call the “Proust phenomenon,” in reference to the novelist and that now overworked madeleine. Smells, tastes, are famous memory prompts. Psychologists find olfactory memory interesting because there is an argument about whether the Proust phenomenon – smell and taste as memory triggers – exists at all, and if so whether it is always laid down in early life, and accessed best in later life. In old age the ability to distinguish smells is apparently much diminished, which may have something to do with it; back once more to the heightened response to the physical world when you are young. But in that case the distinctions are preserved: rosemary takes me back to the Jerusalem hillside, thyme and marjoram do not.

  There is a sensuality about memory, then. And the heritage industry seems to have latched on to this idea. A London pub-cum-restaurant cultivating a nineteenth-century atmosphere used to smell authentically of coal fires, despite being centrally heated throughout and free of such things; an aerosol spray was available, apparently – canned nostalgia. And at Jorvik, York’s re-creation of the Viking town, to which you can return in a trolleycar that trundles back through the centuries and past scenes of Viking domestic and commercial life, the sights and sounds are augmented by pungent whiffs of livestock, cooking, and inadequate sanitation. The past can be conjured up by the appropriate aroma, much as supermarkets seek to induce a spending appetite with the smell of newly baked bread, and house agents urge us to woo prospective buyers with a waft of fresh coffee.

  But it is not that memory is scented, rather – if the Proust phenomenon exists – that smells evoke a time, a place. That moment has not gone, can be recovered, because an experience in the present brings it back; my London garden is tenuously linked to what was in 1942 a Palestinian hillside. This is the sense in which memory is the mind’s triumph over time. The same has been said of history, and I relish both concepts: it is as though individually and collectively, we succeed in seizing hold of what is no longer there, that which should be unavailable, and making it miraculously permanent and accessible because it matters so much, because we need it.

  We are robust about time, linguistically, we are positively cavalier about it – we make it, we spend it, we have it, we find it, we serve it, we mark it. Last time, next time, in time, half-time – one of the most flexible words going, one of the most reached for, a concept for all purposes. Time is of the essence, or it is quality, or time will tell. We talk about it . . . all the time, I find myself writing. There. But when I think about time, I am awed. I am more afraid of time than of death – its inexorability, its infinitude. It is as unthinkable as space – another word we tame by making every use of it. And in old age I am time made manifest; sitting here, writing this on a summer afternoon, twelve minutes past three, the watch hand moving relentlessly round, my weathered body is the physical demonstration of passing time, of the fact that eighty years have had their way with it, that I ain’t what I used to be. I have lived with time, in time, in this particular stretch of time, but before too long time will dump me; it has far to go, and we don’t keep up with it. None of us, ever.

  Fifteen minutes past three.

  Impersonal, indifferent; it neither knows nor cares. It sweeps us along, the ever-rolling stream and all that, nothing to be done about it, but we do have this one majestic, sustaining weapon, this small triumph over time – memory. We know where we have been in time, and not only do we know, but we can go back, revisit. When I was nine, I was on a Palestinian hillside, smelling rosemary (and collecting a wild tortoise, but that is another story). Time itself may be inexorable, indifferent, but we can personalize our own little segment: this is where I was, this is what I did.

  Reading and Writing

  My house is full of books. I suppose that I have read all of them, bar reference books and poetry collections in which I will not have read every poem. I have forgotten many, indeed most. At some point, I have emptied each of these into that insatiable vessel, the mind, and they are now lost somewhere within. If I reopen a book, there is recognition – oh yes, I’ve been here – but to have the contents again, familiar, new-minted, I would have to read right through. What happens to all this information, this inferno of language? Where does it go? Much, apparently, becomes irretrievable sediment; a fair amount, the significant amount, becomes that essential part of us – what we know and understand and think about above and beyond our own immediate concerns. It has become the life of the mind. What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

  I can measure out my life in books. They stand along the way like signposts: the moments of absorption and empathy and direction and enlightenment and sheer pleasure. Back in the mists of very early reading there is Beatrix Potter, who does not just tell an enthralling story but challenges the ear. Her cadences, her linguistic flights that I repeated to myself over and over: “The dignity and repose of the tea party,” “too much lettuce is soporific,” “roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce,” “The dinner was of eight courses, not much of anything, but truly elegant.” When eventually I came to write for children myself, an occasional pursy-lipped teacher would tell me that I sometimes used words that a seven/eight/ten-year-old would not know and I should stop it. Such letters were thrown out – beneath contempt; go and read Miss Potter, lady.

  Later, much later, I met up with Arthur Ransome and was transported to an alien world in which unimaginably liberated children larked around in boats in some exotic landscape of hills and greenery and water. I was growing up in Egypt, and had known nowhere else; I would surface from Swallows and Amazons to my own mundane backdrop of palm trees, a string of camels beyond the garden hedge, the postman’s donkey titupping up our drive.

  That Egyptian childhood was book-heavy. I did not go to school, but books made me. I have written elsewhere, in a memoir of those Egypt years – Oleander, Jacaranda – of my home instruction, the Parents’ National Educational Union system devised for expatriate families and administered, in my case, by someone who had herself left school at sixteen. That was education, and I am concerned here with books in a rather different sense. But there is an overlap, inevitably. The Do-It-Yourself education method was focused entirely upon reading: the child was read to, required to “tell back,” and in due course to read and “write back” – a sustained exercise in the absorption of language. I am grateful to it. The Bible – the King James Version, of course – featured strongly. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse. And, above all, for me, Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece, that late Victorian retelling of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey spilled out of lesson time into the rest of the day; I reenacted the siege, the wanderings, as I drifted around our garden, because of course I was in there anyway – Penelope – so this must be something to do with me personally. The solipsism of the nine-year-old mind. Except that I was in there with the wrong part; Penelope is not as beautiful as Helen, she is described as wise and good, qualities that did not appeal. And Ulysses – red-haired and crafty – is clearly not a patch on brave Hector or glamorous Achilles. So I juggled with the narrative – true to the tradition of reworking Homer, had I known it – airbrushed the tiresome Helen, and set myself up with Achilles. And, to bring things more up to date, equipped him with an infantry tank and a machine gun, instead of all that stuff with chariots and spears – the Libyan campaign was raging a hundred miles or so away,
remember, in 1941.

  Many of the books sent out from England by the PNEU failed to reach us. We fell back on our own resources, for reading matter. Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield – immersed in the drama and tragedy of mysterious lives, reading as literary innocents, barely aware that the setting was the nineteenth century. Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, with me learning great chunks by heart: “Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore . . .” I did much learning by heart, and some of it lingers, surfacing at unexpected moments, a shred of Tennyson, a whisper of Shelley: “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O sea.” “Swiftly walk over the western wave, spirit of night.” Deeply out of educational fashion now, learning by rote, but it was hanging on still when I did eventually go to school, aged twelve, and I accumulated more: Shakespeare speeches, Wordsworth, Keats – bits and pieces of which I still have and I wish there were more still. You can only learn by heart when young, unless, I suppose, you are an actor.

  I think I was probably starved of fact – of non-fiction. The educational system’s offerings were not enticing: Plutarch’s Lives, and a turgid book on the history of Parliament which serviced the weekly period known as Citizenship Studies. I did relish our Natural History text, Arabella Buckley’s Eyes and No Eyes, published in 1901, so not exactly up to date, and dealing with the flora and fauna of Devon – entirely inappropriate to our Nile-fed garden, but with its own exotic and vaguely scholarly charm. This paucity of fact may account for my passion for Hendrik Van Loon’s The Home of Mankind – a treasured possession that still has a place on my shelves. When I open it now there is a whiff of that long-ago appeal; it is a nicely eccentric geography book with chatty text and the author’s own pungent views to the fore: “Poland suffers from two great natural disadvantages. Its geographic position is most unfortunate, and its nearest neighbours are its fellow-Slavs of Russia.” And the illustrations are a delight: the author’s own quirky drawings, accentuating geographical features. He demonstrates watery Europe, fringed by its elaborate coastline, invaded by chunky rivers; if the Pacific ocean should run dry – with the land-masses perched on top of peaks; the Atlantic – a section of blue underwater mountains with a curved surface on which perch tiny ships.

  By the time I arrived in England I was thoroughly book-addicted; socially inept, after that isolated upbringing, a floundering outcast at the fearful boarding school to which I was dispatched, but an ace reader. Books became my retreat – anything, everything. My school holidays were spent going from one grandmother to the other. My London grandmother’s Harley Street home was well equipped with books – short on creature comforts, in the late 1940s, but plenty to read, though reading that required a degree of perseverance.

  I plowed my way through Charlotte M. Yonge – The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, The Chaplet of Pearls, The Daisy Chain – and Harrison Ainsworth – Old Saint Paul’s, The Tower of London, Windsor Castle. I cite these not as signposts along the way – I was reading what was available, not what I would have chosen – but as indicators of what a desperate adolescent reader will undertake if necessary. Charlotte M. Yonge seems to me now an extraordinary challenge for a mid-twentieth-century thirteen/fourteen-year-old – those long, dense, mannered historical novels. In her own day, she had published many of them in serial form in her Monthly Packet, which one commentator has called the first teenage magazine. Victorian adolescents must have been made of stern stuff. Commentary on Charlotte Yonge is something of an industry. There is a Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship, which holds regular meetings and publishes a twice-yearly Review, and indeed the writer herself was an industry, with about one hundred and eighty works to her name, mostly novels. And she was highly regarded by her peers – George Eliot, Gladstone, Tennyson, Trollope. But not much read today, except by the stalwarts of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship. I have several of her novels, 1880s editions but evidently not filched from my grandmother’s shelves because they bear penciled secondhand bookshop prices – 35p, 25p. So I must have acquired them in adult life, out of nostalgia, maybe.

  William Harrison Ainsworth is an equally unlikely choice – but of course this was not really choice, it was a question of what was available in that high, chill, Harley Street house, where the main rooms had all been dust-sheeted for the duration of the war, and the books stared darkly out from within glass cases. Harrison Ainsworth was another prolific Victorian – thirty-nine novels, master of the popular historical romance, friend of Dickens in their early writing lives. I think I enjoyed him rather more than Charlotte Yonge; there is a memory of being fascinated by the atmosphere and action of Old Saint Paul’s and The Tower of London, which probably chimed with a nascent interest in the presence of the past, its visible evidence – I would have been taken to both sites by my grandmother.

  Where choice operated, I discovered Mazo de la Roche, Canadian author of the Jalna novels, and wallowed in this family saga – rich with romance and spiced with lurking sex. And there was a brief, alarming engagement with the London Library. The uncle who had observed my bookish tendency gave me temporary membership for a sixteenth birthday present – my first experience of a great library. You could order books there, back then; for some obscure reason I ordered Hakluyt’s Voyages Round the World. It arrived on a cart, in several volumes, and I sat stolidly reading for a week, unable to admit to a mistake.

  At my Somerset grandmother’s house there were fewer books, but there was a complete run of bound volumes of Punch from about 1890; many a long, bored afternoon was spent poring over one of these, mainly in pursuit of the cartoons, but sometimes tackling the text, and picking up something along the way about the social attitudes of the early twentieth century and what seemed the heavy-handed humor of the day. There was little fiction; I moved on from Charlotte Yonge to Charles Morgan (boring), A. J. Cronin (ditto), and other popular novelists of the twenties and thirties.

  At last, a few years later, I plunged into the public library system and unfettered reading. Oxford Public Library, where the poet Elizabeth Jennings worked, and stamped your chosen books, and I observed her with awe – a few years older than me and a writer, a poet at that. And then the small branch library in Swansea, where Jack had his first permanent academic post at the university. I was coping first with a toddler, and then a three-year-old and a baby, and would trundle both in the pram to the library once a week, packing Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh around them for the return journey. It was not the best time at which to be servicing a reading addiction; I remember reading in snatches while feeding the baby, shoveling food into an infant mouth, minding them in the park or on the beach.

  Early reading is serendipitous, and rightly so. Gloriously so. Libraries favor serendipity, invite it; the roaming along a shelf, eyeing an unfamiliar name, taking this down, then that – oh, who’s this? Never heard of her – give her a go? That is where, and how, you learn affinity and rejection. You find out what you like by exploring what you do not. In the late 1940s, when I was first putting a toe into the waters of real grown-up books, the favored authors of the day were the Sitwells – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell (just to recite their names brings back the mocking refrain of a disrespectful number in some late-night revue less doting than the reading public) – Norman Douglas, Lesley Blanch, the kind of writing that did not use one word where ten would do – florid, self-conscious, portentous. I read dutifully and thought that either the times were out of joint or I was. And then later, much later, I found Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and realized that what I was after was economy and accuracy, the use of that just right, but startling language. Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen taught me that writing can be expansive and complex but still be accurate and exciting. I had no thoughts then of writing myself – I was reading purely as a gourmet reader, refining taste, exploring the possibilities. And now I think that a writer’s reading experience does not so much determine how they will write, as what they feel about writing; you do
not want to write like the person you admire, even if you were capable of it – you want to do justice to the very activity, you want to give it your own best, whatever that may be. A standard has been set.

  The signposts sent me toward particular kinds of writing; these were what I wanted to read and, when eventually I came to write myself, these would be – not how I wanted to write but the majestic exemplars always in the back of my mind. But no one – writer or otherwise – reads in search of stylistic satisfaction alone; what is said matters just as much as how it is said. Where fiction was concerned, I had the basic needs of any fiction reader – I wanted to escape the prison of my own mind, my own experience, and discover how it may be for others, to see other people’s lives distilled through an author’s imagination. The variety, the disparity, of fiction, is a constant astonishment. How can it be that there is such abundant fertility – that so many people turn to and create character, and narrative – both extraordinarily difficult feats, as anyone knows who has tried to do it. Well, only a very few do it with real power and effect, of course. But many, many have a shot at it – even more so today, with universities up and down the land offering their Creative Writing MA courses, so that it begins to seem as though you need formal qualifications to become a novelist. My generation beavered away in solitude – whether for better or for worse, I wouldn’t care to say.