Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  When at last I went back, in 1988, I was incredulous. It was not that the place had changed. Quite simply, it had gone. Vanished. Obliterated. It was as though the whole thing had been a mirage – the airy, elegant villas brilliant with bougainvillaea that rose from the gardens of palms and tamarisk and oleander, the golden curves of the beaches, the long, leisurely parade of the Corniche following the great curve of the shoreline. In its place there was a wasteland of concrete stumps, stretching in all directions. The entire place had been built yesterday, it seemed – a lunar landscape of stark apartment blocks, mile upon mile. It made me think of the outskirts of Moscow. I was driven from end to end of the city, staring out of the car window in a state of shock. This was a transformation far beyond that of Cairo, where the old bones of the place still showed through. Here there was nothing, nothing. It seemed beyond belief that an entire landscape could be expunged in forty years. The highway that roared the length of the coastline must be following the line of the Corniche. But where were the beaches? An empty, unidentifiable expanse. The sea was so polluted, I was told, that no one in their right mind would venture into it. At one point a circular bite seemed perhaps to reflect the site of Stanley Bay. I searched in vain for the island off Sidi Bishr No. 2. Could they have wiped out that too? Ranks of concrete block-houses dumped on the sand were perhaps a mockery of the beach huts. There was not a tree to be seen. The place was drowned in concrete. The sky was sulphur-coloured, and there was a curious metallic smell. I spent a disconsolate night in the Montazah Sheraton, with incipient bronchitis, and iron in the soul, feeling as though my own past had been sliced away.

  The Alexandria of the 1930s and 1940s survives now only in my mind, and in the minds of others. Most of whom knew it a great deal better than I did. For I did not know it at all, I realize, any more than I knew Cairo in any real sense. Much of it I never even saw – the densely populated slum quarters to the west of the city, the labyrinthine streets of downtown Alexandria, tucked behind the boulevards and shops. It was not one city but half a dozen, in which people moved on different planes, segregated by class and culture. And for me there was the further segregation of childhood. My Alexandria was a sybaritic dream. Peanuts in a paper cone, eaten on the Corniche. The suck and whoosh of the sea at the Spouting Rock. The milky-green curve of a surfing wave. The cool grip of a chameleon. Pistachio ice-cream. Macaroons. A medley of allusions, which add up now to a place which no longer exists in any sense at all.

  It is not quite true to say that everything has gone. Shreds survive, here and there. Before the bronchitic night at the Montazah Sheraton I had walked out along the promontory to the Mameluke fort which is on the site of the Pharos, visited the Graeco-Roman Museum and spent the evening at a party in a lavishly ornate villa whose interior achieved that same curious combination of Moorish–Edwardian as Mena House. But this was to step into other Alexandrias which I sensed as a child but could in no way identify. Alexandria was then, and had always been, a Mediterranean city. It looked out, to the sea, not inwards, to Africa. It was not so much Islamic as a glorious hybrid, owing most of all to its Greek heritage. Its population was strongly Greek. And Jewish and Lebanese and Coptic and Maltese and French. The streets were called Rue Rouchdi, Rue Rowlatt, instead of Sharia this and that. To travel that brief distance up the Delta was to have moved into another culture as well as another climate. Several cultures, and above all one that was sui generis, unlike anywhere else before or since and extinguished now along with that ephemeral and transient landscape. I brushed against it, busy with my surfboard and my chameleons, and got a whiff of something pungent and unique.

  Every city is in one sense a construct of the imagination. It is seen differently by each pair of eyes, reinterpreted through the lens of knowledge, of beliefs, of affiliations. And Alexandria, above all others, seems a city fated to be seen as a concept rather than a reality. The site of the vanished library of antiquity, the haunt of Cleopatra, a literary vision. Contemporary Alexandrians would quarrel – understandably enough – with the notion that their city does not exist, but it is an uneasy truth. Reading Lawrence Durrell today I cannot find anything much to evoke the Alexandria I knew – just the occasional emotive name – Ras el Tin, Mareotis, Aboukir, Glymenopoulos – and here and there a clutch of words through which gleams a reflection of the place: trams shuddering in their thin metal veins, white drifts of sand along the slats of Venetian shutters.

  But this is hardly surprising. I did not move in such circles. And indeed The Alexandria Quartet seems to me a fiction that is not so much an evocation of a city as the statement of a concept of sexual behaviour. The place is an emanation of the characters, and as such a fiction in a further sense. But it remains for most of its readers the inescapable definition of the city of Alexandria. No city has been more subsumed into literature – a city of the mind in every sense. In the end, it seems grimly appropriate that the mirage city should have been entirely superseded by a concrete wilderness.

  Chapter Seven

  When I was nine I saw Charles de Gaulle in his dressing-gown. I see him still, quite clear and precise, dressing-gown and all. I know where, too, and why.

  Lucy and I are staying at Government House in Jerusalem. My mother is not. She is staying at the American Colony pension. Lucy and I are thus privileged because before Lucy came to look after me, long ago, she looked after the daughters of the High Commissioner and his wife. We have a room which opens off a long corridor, and further along the corridor is the bathroom which we use. We have to share this bathroom with General de Gaulle, who is also staying at Government House. We must not loiter in the bathroom, lest we impede the General, and we must keep out of his way. Also, his presence here is a secret. It is hush-hush. We must not mention the matter to anyone. But we peer round our door and hence I see General de Gaulle lope along the corridor on his way to the bathroom, an immensely tall figure, stately, with very long white legs beneath the dressing-gown, which is patterned in a design of swirls and curves. He carries a sponge.

  Paisley, the dressing-gown, it now seems to me. I didn’t know that at the time – I wouldn’t have known what paisley was – but memory obligingly records that swirling pattern which the wisdoms of today interpret as paisley. The colour is more elusive. There is an impression of darkness and richness, but there it stops. That is as far as I can go on Charles de Gaulle’s dressing-gown.

  And now I am confronted with an interesting collision between the firm statement in my head and the equally firm statements of recorded history. The Free French leader was indeed in the Middle East in 1942. Both his own memoirs and the accounts of his various biographers affirm that he arrived in Cairo on 21 July, whence he proceeded in August to Damascus and Beirut, where he was based until his return to London at the end of September. There is no mention of any visit to Jerusalem. However, the year before, in June 1941, he was most certainly in Jerusalem, according to the memoirs.

  So far as my own movements are concerned, common sense would suggest that we were in Palestine in the late summer and autumn of 1942, in the wake of ‘The Flap’ and the run-up to the battle of Alamein which took place at the beginning of November. We did indeed visit Palestine at other times, both before and after, but it does not seem likely that we would have gone there in the early summer of 1941, when the situation in Syria was precarious. Syria was under French mandate and was the Middle Eastern base of the pro-Vichy French army. The Germans had made landings there in the spring of 1941, and General Wavell, in Cairo, was under pressure from both London and from the Free French leader to open a Syrian campaign. In June a combined British, Australian and Free French force moved into Syria, which is why General de Gaulle then arrived in Jerusalem. He had personally taken command of the Middle Eastern Free French forces and was anxious to follow up a successful attack on the German force with a patriotic summons to his own fellow-countrymen. In the event, the Germans pulled out before any engagement took place, and de Gaulle and his associates faced a hos
tile and humiliating reception from the Vichy forces. In July Syria came under Allied control. Given all this, I cannot think that my mother would have decided on Palestine as an inviting venue for a summer holiday in early 1941.

  But we were certainly there in 1942. General de Gaulle was in the area, in August – that is clear enough. He was in Damascus and Beirut – no great distance from Jerusalem. And there is that telling little detail in my mental picture: secrecy, the injunctions about discretion.

  Three possibilities. I never saw the General at all, but have concocted this strange image in response to some bizarre prompting of the psyche. It happened, but in 1941. It happened in 1942, in which case I offer the episode to de Gaulle scholars as a provocative footnote: that in August 1942 the Free French leader made a brief and probably clandestine visit to Jerusalem, lodged at Government House, and that his presence was recorded by a pair of beady nine-year-old eyes. Along with his choice of dressing-gown.

  I favour the third possibility, and indeed it is tempting now to furnish the General with some thoughts as he headed for the bathroom, sponge in hand. He would have been in a state of elation in the wake of the events of early June, when the Free French force based in Egypt had been in action for the first time with the Eighth Army and had held a key position on the southern flank of the retreating British in the face of Rommel’s onslaught. The French had hung on for fourteen days at Bir Hacheim, a stand which was seen at the time as a strategic success and which was hailed as a valiant feat of arms on the part of the Free French. De Gaulle would still have been glowing about that, but his head would also have been filled with baleful thoughts about perfidious Albion. He was at loggerheads with Churchill, and the Middle East had already been the scene of at least one of his more spirited exchanges with British representatives. He had had a notorious row in 1941 in Cairo with Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State for the Middle East, over the position of the Free French in Syria, convinced that the British were intent upon manoeuvring the French out of the Levant and with his eye already upon the post-war role of France. He would have been worrying about the strength of Rommel’s position, poised on the borders of Libya and Egypt, but also jealously protective of French interests. Whatever business he was about in Jerusalem, he cannot have been an easy guest at Government House.

  Palestine. Government House. It sounds like another age, as indeed it was. In Jerusalem, these were the last years of the British mandate, an uneasy time. The whole Arab–Jewish question was on the boil, and Britain was mistrusted by both sides. The Palestinians bitterly resented the Balfour Declaration with its approval of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and saw the British mandate as legitimizing and fostering Zionist settlement. The Zionists considered Britain to be equivocal in its policy and were enraged by the restrictions placed on Jewish land purchases in 1939. By 1942 the more extreme Zionists were openly opposed to Britain, and guerrilla warfare was being carried out against the British by the terrorist Irgun and Stern groups. Government House bristled with security arrangements, quite unconnected with the visit of General de Gaulle.

  All our visits to Palestine are now conflated, in the mind’s eye. There is a sequence of slides – places, events – but none of them can be tethered to a year or a month except General de Gaulle and his dressing-gown, by the fortuitous intervention of history. And there must be a whisper of doubt, even there. Like Alexandria, Jerusalem is now a busy, kaleidoscopic impression, along with everywhere else in the Palestine to which we went – somehow and at some point.

  In 1942 we travelled there by train, I think. We must have been a part of that exodus from Cairo in June and July and August, when the German advance had begun to look distinctly threatening. I have always thought that we did not leave until almost the eve of Alamein, perhaps in mid-October, but if we coincided with the General in Jerusalem in August, then it must have been earlier. Again, history lends a hand. So it would have been in the swelter of midsummer that we packed into the crowded train that ran to Ismailiya, where you crossed the Suez canal by ferry and took a further train to Jerusalem. And I remember nothing of it at all.

  It is the drives across Sinai that I remember. Several, probably, fused into one. The long straight road. The rolling sand dunes that go on for ever, with every now and then, miles from anywhere, the solitary figure of an Arab. Walking. Doing what? Going where? Clumps of some dry spiny shrub. Spinning balls of tumbleweed. Rusty petrol cans by the roadside. Stopping to have a pee – the mandatory retreat from the road lest another car should pass and see you, the trek off into the desert in search of a concealing contour.

  There was always the interesting possibility of a puncture. A great lark, to my mind, because that meant an unscheduled stop of indeterminate length, awaiting rescue. A patch of shade was contrived by making a lean-to against the car with the piled luggage from the boot and the picnic rug, and there we would huddle until after half an hour or so (half a day, two days…) a puff of dust on the horizon indicated an approaching vehicle. Usually an army jeep or lorry which would furnish an amiable soldier who set to and changed the tyre while Lucy supplied sandwiches and tea and my mother proffered cigarettes. Once we brought an entire convoy to a halt in this way. Everyone disembarked and brewed up at the side of the road and I struck up an intense relationship with a sergeant who let me sit at the wheel of a tank-carrier.

  The canal was like a sea, so wide you could hardly see across, or so it now seems. There was a tumultuous ferry, and the babel of the dock at Ismailiya, with clamouring porters and men selling carpets and slippers and fly-whisks and boys who dived into the canal after piastres thrown by people on the waiting ships. I remember above all the customs-shed, always the scene of vivid altercations between my mother and Egyptian customs officials. On one occasion the matter at issue was tortoises. I had – in a shoe box with holes carefully drilled in the lid – two treasured Palestinian tortoises gathered on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. With these, I intended to embark on some selective breeding. My own tortoises at Bulaq Dakhrur were the Algerian variety – agreeable but supine creatures. The Palestinian variety were small, dark-shelled, manic animals that could move at the rate of knots, raising themselves on all four scaly points and surging across the hillsides like little tanks. It had struck me that if I mixed these tortoises up with my own the results might be interesting. Besides, my own were not good breeders – they laid eggs, but the eggs never hatched, however assiduously I supplied them with sandy undisturbed nurseries. Clearly, what was needed was an introduction of fresh new stock. With this in mind, I had clambered with Lucy over the hillsides around Jerusalem until at last we found and captured this precious pair.

  My mother duly declared the tortoises on the customs form. The customs official pounced: ‘It is forbidden to import insects into Egypt.’ My mother retaliated in triumph that these were not insects, these were reptiles. The customs official dived into an office and returned with a grubby handbook. Now it was his turn to crow: reptiles also are forbidden. There was an excited argument. I burst into tears.

  And then suddenly the problem was resolved. The official shrugged and waved us through. My tears? Or did my mother slip him fifty piastres? Whatever happened, the tortoises made it into Egypt and eventually to Bulaq Dakhrur, where they beat up the resident tortoises and eventually escaped into the cultivation. Presumably tortoise species do not interbreed.

  That summer of 1942 we were forever on the move, in Palestine. Tel Aviv. Jaffa. Haifa. Nahariya. Mount Carmel. The names are strung out still in my head, with hazy images attached. Tel Aviv is an overcrowded beach and some fuss about hotel rooms – Lucy perturbed and my mother locked in conflict with someone at a reception desk. Jaffa is a car breakdown: a long wait at a garage where a mechanic lies under the car with his legs protruding, and I sit under a tree eating pistachio nuts out of a paper bag, which is not normally permitted. Mount Carmel is a tree, a tree which I climbed, daily for what seems weeks on end, a great city of a tree w
ith a labyrinth of trunks and branches, fat dependable limbs up which I could swarm, up and up.

  Thus is it reduced, that complex and explosive country. Subsumed into the fragments of my own concerns. There is a landscape, also, but a landscape which is remarkable mainly because it is not the landscape of Egypt. Hills. Grey-green hills with olive trees and rocky outcrops. Miles of orange groves, apparently growing in sand. Wild flowers on those hillsides – little irises, and thyme and bushes of rosemary. To this day, the smell of the rosemary in my Oxfordshire garden says Palestine.

  Did I understand anything of what was going on there? I suspect not. There were resonances, for sure, but they were not the resonances of the Arab–Jewish conflict or of the controversial nature of the British mandate. They were once again the resonances of personal reference. I was a child reared on the Bible, and here we were on the identifiable territory of the biblical narrative. This seemed to be some sort of confirmation of the veracity of the whole thing, but at the same time it was vaguely unsatisfactory. It was not what I had expected. I had furnished the Bible stories with a mental backcloth of my own, just as I had constructed scenarios for Greek mythology, and now here we were in the middle of the real thing and it was cluttered with extraneous detail. Jerusalem was full of cars and lorries. Nazareth had a café that sold Kia Ora fruit juice. The Sea of Galilee had a beach with sun umbrellas and children with buckets and spades. Bethlehem… Ah, Bethlehem.