Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir

  My artist aunt, Rachel Reckitt, was in London throughout the blitz of 1941 and 1942, working at Toynbee Hall in Stepney, where she was one of those helping to organize the evacuation of women and children. Whenever she could, she made sketches of the bomb-blasted city, sketches that she would later – much later, in some cases – use as the basis for oil paintings and for the wood engravings for which she is distinguished. These hang on my walls today, and I look at them constantly. London of today is reminded of London then: House in Fulham, in which the shattered building serves as backdrop to a great pile of rubble from which, at the base, peers a Union Jack; House in Berkeley Square, three tiers of exposed doors, fireplaces, patches of wallpaper. And Demolition, where men with sacking hoods shift basket-loads of rubble; jagged walls, a fallen ladder, a flight of steps that go nowhere. The subject matter has become a display of the engraver’s craft: the minuscule hatching and crosshatching, the intensity of detail that becomes a kind of patterning, the subtle shadings to darkest black, the flares of white light. These are masterpieces of engraving; you study them for the intricacy, the effect. But they are also works of art about something once observed; she had sat sketching, back then, in front of a scene like this – that smashed house, those striving demolition workers. The engravings remember.

  As do I. Such sights were commonplace, you did not much stop and stare. The demolition men were gone, but the scarred landscape was there. I did not wonder at it, particularly; it was just another strange feature of this foreign world in which I found myself. The war had been here too, as in Egypt, if differently. I took note, but my immediate concerns were offensive underwear, and how to conform with new requirements. London had an etiquette, it seemed; I was no longer a child, they told me, I must wear gloves and lisle stockings, learn the procedures of the day. This was the class-ridden society of the midcentury; people were defined by speech and dress. I too must be defined, and understand the definitions. For one who had grown up amid the cosmopolitan exuberance of Cairo these were indistinct and baffling. Londoners all looked and sounded the same to me.

  I can sympathize with that, inspecting photos of street scenes of back then: the housewives, uniformed in coat to just below the knee, felt hat on head. All women seem to wear hats – they indicate neither age nor class; most men wear raincoats. But all, now, are lodged in an unfamiliar past; I don’t recognize them as people who must once have furnished the world I knew. Along with wartime idioms, and the clipped speech of the day.

  Does anyone identify with the age in which they were young? I don’t. It seems to me more that we slide accommodatingly along with the decades, adjusting plumage as we go – dressing accordingly, thinking accordingly, or up to a point. I don’t feel out of sympathy with today, by no means, though it has aspects that I deplore; I can play the grumpy old woman at moments. But there is far more that is alien and unappealing about 1945. And if I were again to feel nostalgic for polyglot and cosmopolitan Cairo – well, I have only to get out into London of today. A stroll round my own area this morning, and I hear Russian, Chinese, French, an eastern European language I cannot identify, ditto African. As for neutrality of dress, or being able to tell what sort of a person you are looking at – forget it. There are dress codes, yes – the urban hoodie, young fashionistas – but by and large I can have very little idea of a person from their dress or how they speak.

  I am a Londoner now, of many years standing. I am not sure that I love London – countryside feels more like home – but I am acclimatized. I can appreciate organic London, the metamorphosis of a city, the shape-changing city, the way in which it moves with time. That is what I most like about London – its eloquence, long story, the sense in which it is of the moment, this year, these mores, but is also a permanence, a solidity that outlives the racy window-dressing of new bars, new restaurants, new shops, new talk, new ways of living, a different layer of people.

  Some windows of my house in an Islington square have early glass – that beguiling, irregular glass beyond which trees ripple and change shape, a passing aircraft quivers and dissolves. These windows must have survived the blitz; indeed, the square appears to be unscathed, but the London Bomb Damage map for the area makes a silent comment: one house, a few doors from mine, is colored dark red – Seriously Damaged, Doubtful if Repairable. A direct hit, presumably, but the building seems to have been put together again. These fascinating and eloquent maps show the city, street by street and house by house, with the color coding that plots the extent of damage, from Total Destruction to Blast Damage, Minor in Nature. Large and small circles pinpoint the strike of a V1 or a V2. Islington is liberally picked out in every color – black, purple, dark red, light red, orange, yellow – each neat coloring-in of a house or street remembering some night of carnage, the maps becoming a strange and rather beautiful testimony. Much of Islington is early Victorian, houses that are a thin skin of brick. They always seem to me, now, to be holding each other up. Beneath the bombs, an entire street could go down like ninepins. My own house must have shuddered under the blast of that bomb a few doors away; the bricks remember. A few hundred yards away a land mine fell on the corner of Ritchie Street, obliterating a large site, now rebuilt. The whole borough is pockmarked like this, the post war new builds inserted into the Victorian infrastructure, replacing the rubble and the willow-herb. Islington knew the V2s; a pub on the corner of Mackenzie Road and Holloway Road was flattened on Boxing Day 1944, along with twenty houses and shop premises: seventy-one dead and fifty-six seriously injured. Another Islington rocket on January 13, 1945, killed twenty-nine and seriously injured thirty-six.

  So the blitz has a legacy; it is still here, its manipulation of the city is visible, as though a giant hand swept through the place, knocking this down, plucking that out. And then other hands rebuilt, steadily, doggedly, just as they always have done, century by century, the place reinventing itself, expanding, responding to new requirements, new populations. And the real blitz, the actual thing, the Sturm und Drang, has slipped off into history, into the books, into the documentaries and the fictional reconstructions. It has spun its own legends of chirpy Cockney courage, of the King and Queen picking their way through the ruins of the East End, of heroism and stoicism. And the darker stories of those who seized the day: the black-marketeers, the looters who kept people camping out in their bomb-damaged homes in case they lost everything, the opportunists who snatched rings and watches from the bodies of those killed in the Piccadilly Café de Paris bombing.

  My aunt Rachel, on the front line as it were, recorded her own vision in letters to her mother – brisk, factual letters that reflect her own vigor and energy (she was thirty-two at the time). She was giving an account of what she saw and did, of the behavior of those with whom she was dealing (September 1940): “It was exciting starting out this morning to view the damage. The first I saw was the Science Museum, all the large towers still standing, but the centre all gone. Up in Central London there was a big fire in Holborn, and various small craters to see, and then a big crater bang in the middle of the roadway between the Bank, Royal Exchange and a public shelter. It couldn’t have missed more important targets if it had tried! . . . The people . . . really are wonderful. Lots were wandering, homeless, towards the City this morning, with suitcases, all they had saved, but they seemed quite resigned and unmoved . . . None of the homeless people I had in were grumbling; they were all determined we must stick it out . . . There seems to be only one billeting officer for refugees, so, naturally, he can never be got hold of by anyone; no canteens seem to function and of course all the gas, etc., is off, so people can’t get hot food. They are still sticking it wonderfully well . . . I can have up to £30 to use for travelling expenses of intending evacuees who have an address to go to and don’t come under any scheme. So I have got one or two off today in this way. Generally when they ask to be evacuated I ask, ‘Has your house been demolished yet?’ and if it hasn’t I have to tell them to wait until it ha
s, as then we can do something. So later they come in with broad grins to announce that now it has been blown up and they can get away . . . There was an exciting air battle today – a big lot of Germans ran into a barrage of AA fire, one could see them scatter and rock in it, all very high up. Then they met our fighters, but came right over us so we had to stop watching. The sky seemed full of them for a few minutes. They came in the evening to drop incendiaries to start fires to guide them later . . . there is no evacuation scheme for old people, the blind, cripples, etc., who are too infirm to get to the shelters and have to lie and wait to be bombed. They don’t matter so much as the children, of course, but something might be done . . . The Evening Standard carried a front page article on how the old and infirm are able to be evacuated, but are not availing themselves of the opportunity. It is cruel as of course it is entirely untrue and merely raises their hopes. The poor old things are dying to go in hundreds of cases.”

  “Exciting . . .” she says, more than once. And I imagine that in an eerie way it was, to a young woman whose life hitherto had been led in the rural tranquility of west Somerset. The experience affected her deeply; not only did it provoke an artistic response, but the revelation of urban poverty turned her into a lifelong socialist. She voted Labour thereafter, to the bewilderment of my grandmother, an entrenched conservative.

  The blitz – the war in general – has taken on a sepia quality today, and, indeed, a sense of romance has taken hold. You don’t get any fictional slant on the 1940s – on the page or onscreen – in which young love does not take center stage. For many, those years probably did have that flavor; certainly, hasty wartime marriages were a feature. I was the wrong age for the war, I realize; a child is a bystander. Ten years older, and you stood a good chance of getting killed, or you might have the time of your life.

  By 1945 I was no longer a child, perched now on that perilous interface between childhood and adult life. There weren’t teenagers back then; the status had not been invented. We were apprentice adults, very much on sufferance; our clothes were bought to last, we must not smoke or drink or go to restrictedfilms, we must behave ourselves and mark time until admitted to the real world. Most of us left school at fifteen, and were pitched into adult work; relatively few made their way into the privileged holding-pen of student life.

  My university years seem to me now to have been lived in a sort of mindless trance. Not in an academic sense – I was reading history, and I know that those reading years have colored my thinking ever since – but in absence of response to what was going on in the world. This was the early 1950s; plenty was going on, but it was not a time of student activism. Membership of the Oxford Union – the student debating society – was open to men only; those with political ambitions spoke there, and jockeyed for office. I have a vague memory of Michael Heseltine, a youth with floppy golden hair, and impeccably cut suits at a period when most male students wore gray flannels and duffel coats. I must have voted for the first time, but I don’t remember the event.

  The autumn of 1956 woke me up. The Suez crisis. I was in Oxford still, working as research assistant by then to a Fellow of St. Antony’s College. St. Antony’s was – is – a graduate college, specializing then in Middle Eastern and Soviet studies. It was international, a hotbed of young intellectuals. The group with which I became friendly included Americans, a Frenchman, an Israeli, a German, and Jack Lively, from Newcastle, my soon-to-be husband, who had come over from Cambridge to a research fellowship at the college. The unfolding drama of Suez, and the growing possibility of British/French intervention after Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal, polarized opinion throughout the country; Oxford was in a ferment of discussion, with those opposed to Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s increasingly belligerent stance in a majority. Jack, along with a colleague at St. Antony’s, set about a campaign to coordinate a response by senior members of the university, immediately after the first bombing raids on Cairo. I remember cycling round from college to college delivering personal letters summoning sympathizers to a meeting at which a statement was drafted, signed by three hundred and fifty-five members of Senior Common Rooms and ten heads of colleges, led by Alan Bullock of St. Catherine’s. The statement read: “We consider that this action is morally wrong, that it endangers the solidarity of the Commonwealth, that it constitutes a grave strain on the Atlantic Alliance and that it is a flagrant violation of the UN charter.” I couldn’t be at the meeting, not being a senior member of the university, but I remember vividly the heightened atmosphere of that time, the urgency of the newspapers, the climate of discussion, of argument, and eventually, for many of us, of outrage. For me, what was happening had a personal dimension – here was my own country dropping bombs on the country I still thought of as a kind of home. The Suez crisis was a baptism of fire, a political awakening, the recognition that you could and should quarrel with government, that you could disagree and disapprove.

  Over half a century ago now, Suez, and nicely consigned to history: my granddaughter Izzy “did” it for her A level. I too can read about it, and set what I read against what is in my head still – those autumn days in Oxford, when the talk was all of the names now packed away into the books: Eisenhower, Dulles, Ben-Gurion, Hammarskjöld, Gaitskell, Bevan. And, dominating all, Eden and Nasser. There was a sequence of events – dismaying, startling, often inexplicable events – and plenty of judgments, applause, condemnations, warnings. History has tidied it all up, to some extent – what happened when, and why, the inexplicable is explained. The judgments of history are of course equally various, but one thing does seem clear: there are not many today who defend Britain’s – Eden’s – handling of the Suez crisis. Peter Hennessy has written: “It is rare to be able to claim, historically, that but for one person, the course of history would almost entirely have been different. In the case of Suez, one can.”

  On July 26, 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, declared Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, seizing control of the Suez Canal Company and proclaiming military law in the Canal Zone. Since the conception of the Canal by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, its construction under his aegis, and its opening in 1869, it had been administered under largely French management but with Britain owning forty-four percent of the Company’s shares. The Company never owned the Canal; it owned the concession to operate this crucial waterway that was on Egyptian territory, a waterway that united the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, vital to international shipping – the passage to India, to southern Africa, to the Far East.

  There was a background to Nasser’s action. He was angered by the withdrawal of the Anglo-American aid offer for his Aswan Dam project; Eden had initially favored this, anxious to preempt Soviet influence with Nasser, and in the Middle East generally, but his attitude toward Nasser had hardened, as he came to see him as an enemy of the West. Eden acceded to U.S. withdrawal from patronage of the Aswan Dam. Nasser reacted immediately and conclusively in the one way that he could, by taking over the Canal. Egypt’s Canal would be managed by Egyptians – a step that vastly increased his popularity at home but challenged the West.

  Over the Suez crisis lay the shadow of the Cold War. There was always the fear that Russia would make a move – exploit the situation to exert control over Middle Eastern oil supplies; it is always about oil, then as now – Suez, Iraq – the bulk of European oil supplies came through the Canal in the midcentury. And, more local and immediate, the simmering hostility between Israel and her Arab neighbors. The complexities of the situation have fattened the history books; to distill the international commotion of 1956 into a simple narrative is to leave out most of the surrounding clamor, but I am not writing history – I am trying to sort out what I now know happened and think of it against what seemed at the time to be happening. Now, I have all the advantages of hindsight, and the wisdoms of Peter Hennessy, Keith Kyle and others who have considered 1956 and drawn conclusions. Then, I was a twenty-three-year-old who,
thanks to higher education but what now seems a deficient interest in current affairs, knew perhaps more about certain historic periods than what was going on in her own world. The Cold War was a term, merely; I would become more alert to that, grimly alert. The United Nations was a concept, and a good thing, but I was barely aware of it. I had never much listened to the battle cries of politicians, the cut and thrust of the House of Commons. That October, I paid attention, and about time too.

  So, what happened then, shorn of surrounding clamor? Immediately after Nasser’s seizing of the Canal on October 26 Eden set up a cabinet committee – the Egypt Committee – to oversee the crisis. Its aims were uncompromising: to get rid of Nasser and see the Canal entrusted to international management. The expression “regime change” was not yet around, but Iraq must spring to mind. With a colossal difference: Nasser was – in Eden’s eyes at least – a threat to the West, but he was no Saddam Hussein. He was not a vicious tyrant; Egypt’s skirmishes with Israel did not compare with the invasion of Kuwait. Nasser had laid hands on what was seen as a Franco-British asset; his action might jeopardize the West’s oil supplies. And Eden had become paranoid about him.

  The next weeks and months saw the clandestine maneuvring that has become, in retrospect, the most significant feature of the Suez crisis: the Sèvres Protocol. This, in a nutshell, was a secret agreement between Britain, France, and Israel by which Israel would invade the Sinai peninsula – Egyptian territory – whereupon British and French troops would intervene under the guise of peacekeeping, and thus occupy the Canal Zone. The details, and the agreement, were hammered out at a meeting hosted by the French in a Parisian suburban villa that had once been a safe house for the Resistance; the leading participants were Guy Mollet, the French prime minister, Israel’s leader Ben-Gurion, and British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who seemed both at the time and subsequently to have wished he wasn’t there. The Israelis were persuaded of their role as the pretext for intervention; the Franco-British objectives were clear – destroy the Egyptian army, bring down Nasser, and occupy the Canal.