Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  I am in the very grand car of the High Commissioner. We are going to Bethlehem. The High Commissioner and his wife have to go there on some official duty and Lucy and I have been allowed to come too, for the experience. Lucy has told me that this is a very special privilege, and I must behave impeccably. I behave impeccably. I sit in silence beside Lucy in the back of the big car. There is a chauffeur in uniform driving and someone else in uniform alongside. There are outriders on motor bikes fore and aft and an armoured car bringing up the rear. We are a cavalcade, which sweeps slowly along a road that winds through the hills.

  It comes to me that I need to go to the lavatory. I convey my need to Lucy. Lucy whispers to the High Commissioner’s wife, requesting that the car be called to a halt, briefly, so that Penelope may go behind a bush. The High Commissioner’s wife replies crisply that this is not possible.

  Grimly, I clench my knees together and hope for the best. I sit bolt upright, staring ahead in order to concentrate the mind, feeling martyred and heroic. Lucy shoots reproachful glances at the High Commissioner’s wife. Bethlehem, I do not notice.

  *

  The High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, would have been at the time a prime target of the extreme Zionist terrorist groups. Two years later the Minister of State in Cairo, Lord Moyne, was assassinated by members of the Stern group. The craggy landscape through which we drove had rocky outcrops at either side of the road – excellent terrorist country. Lady MacMichael’s reaction seems entirely reasonable. And knowing what I now know I can account for other phenomena which neither interested nor concerned me at the time – the rash of Military Police in the streets of Jerusalem, the sentries with rifles who popped up all over the hillsides around Government House and, on occasion, advised about promising locations for tortoise hunts.

  Jerusalem is also reduced to a smell – incense. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre: milling crowds and men chanting, invisible, and that richly exotic smell, doctrinal and mysterious. Once more, this had nothing to do with the familiar and controllable landscape of the King James Bible and the Authorized Version of the Prayer Book. Lucy, a paid-up Christian, was stirred and uplifted by the Holy Sepulchre, though probably dismayed by the incense, as a good Protestant. I trailed around beside her, obscurely offended. Cairo Cathedral was one thing, this suggested impenetrable mysteries, and I was alienated.

  My mother stayed in a hotel-pension called the American Colony. It was a modest establishment with a long low building around a courtyard with orange trees, lavender and rosemary bushes, and was much favoured on account of its cheapness and excellent service. The chic place to stay was the King David Hotel, later the target of a massive terrorist attack. Connoisseurs stayed at the American Colony. It had been founded by members of a religious sect from the American Midwest. They had come to Jerusalem in the 1920s to be on the spot in good time for the Second Coming, which according to their beliefs was scheduled I think for 1932. The Second Coming did not materialize, or at least not in any identifiable form, and these people had abandoned their homes and employment in the United States, and had no money for the return passage. Resourcefully, one group set up in the hotel business – hence the American Colony, which by the 1940s was the mecca of the discerning visitor to Jerusalem.

  I have no idea how long we spent in Jerusalem, in that summer of 1942. We were also in Haifa, at Mount Carmel and at a small resort on the coast in the north called Nahariya. Here, perhaps, I glimpsed but in no way understood something of the ominous climate of the country and also of its loaded connection with Europe of the past and present. The pension at which we stayed – an unpretentious but attractive cluster of whitewashed buildings around a green lawn, with a vine-covered courtyard in which meals were served – was owned by Germans. I was instantly baffled and confused. German, to me, meant enemy. ‘Please God, make the war end soon and may we win and not the Germans’: my nightly prayer. But clearly there was nothing whatsoever that was hostile about these beaming people, who provided airy, spotless bedrooms, puddings drowning in cream, and who were evidently a part and parcel of the place. They had their own cows (furnishing all that cream, no doubt) and relatives just down the road who grew oranges and grapefruit. German? If anyone explained to me, the explanations washed over my head. I shrugged the problem aside, and concentrated on the important business of the beach facilities.

  They must have been refugees of the 1930s. This must have been an area of German settlement – an early land purchase, in all probability. There they were, tending their cows and plying us with apfelstrudel and cream-topped milk-shakes. I can see still rooms with crisp gingham curtains, spanking white tablecloths and a pink-cheeked teenage girl who let me play with her kitten. In Nahariya I forgot my occasional nagging disquiet about what might be going on at Bulaq Dakhrur – were they remembering to feed the guinea-pigs? And would the Germans – those other Germans – treat our dog properly if they came? I settled down in Nahariya, and established my own emergency settlement, with its own absorbing daily concerns and occupations. There was a great sweep of sandy unpopulated beach beyond a belt of sand dunes. Lucy and my mother set up camp in the sand dunes, respectively knitting and sunbathing, and I patrolled the shore, searching for cowrie shells, of which I now had a seriously important collection. The high-water mark lay along the beach in a long curving frill and there, in the delicate surf of shell fragments, pebbles and fronds of seaweed, you could find, every now and then, tiny nacreous cowrie shells, pink and brown and white, perfect ovals, humped on one side and with neat serrated infolded edges on the other. It was like gathering pearls, and had all the appeal of the treasure-hunt: not too easy, but not so sparsely rewarded as to be frustrating. Obsession, once more. The absolute obsession of acquisitive greed. The other visitors said what a nice quiet industrious child I was.

  And one night I was allowed to stay up after dark, for a treat and a surprise. We walked along the quiet roads of the settlement in the velvet warm night, and the place was on fire. Green fire. Every bush and tree shone with little emerald balls of light. Glow-worms.

  I would have been happy to stay in Nahariya indefinitely. We moved on. My mother had got bored with lying among the sand dunes, and there was no social life. We went to Mount Carmel, where so far as I was concerned there was nothing of significance except that tree. And thence to Haifa, where I think we met other elements of the Cairo diaspora. There must surely have been perturbed discussion of the news from the Libyan front? If so, I was never aware of any undue anxiety. My father was still in Cairo, going daily to his office. Wondering, I would suppose, about us. What contingency arrangements had he made for his own departure, if things looked worse yet? I have no idea. The assumption was that all would be well, and in due course we would return to Egypt and life would go back to normal. As indeed was the case, but their optimism – or their unconcern – astonishes me, today.

  In 1947 the British mandate came to an end and Palestine effectively ceased to exist. There would now be Israel, and the Palestinian problem. Foraging among those shards in my head, I try to find some signal that I knew the word Israel, and again all the connotations are biblical. Israelites – yes, indeed. I knew the term Jewish – we knew Jewish people in Cairo. I think I had a vague grasp of the concept of Judaism. I would have known that Christ was a Jew – the Bible said so. And the disturbing effect of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had been perhaps the hazy perception that Christianity speaks in tongues. I would have known that expression, too, from the Bible, but it was the first time I had seen it in action, as it were. But I do not think that I had any understanding of anti-Semitism at the time, even in its most superficial social forms. Three years later, in London, my innocence came to an abrupt end. The first photographs from Belsen reached the English newspapers. My Harley Street grandmother, in whose care I then was, tried to keep them from me. Wrongly, I now think – twelve is old enough to be confronted with the nature of evil. But I can understand how she would have flinched. I came acros
s the pictures, turning a page and glimpsing what appeared to be a grainy grey representation of piled dead people with matchstick limbs and skeletal faces. But this could not be so. I looked again, and saw that it was.

  I grew up in a geographical area in which for a few years history had gone into overdrive. So much was happening so fast that even to read of it now is to be constantly checking dates and events, in disbelief at the fluidity of it all. Within a few years, the Germans had been poised to overrun Egypt and the rest of the Levant, but were halted. Allied and Axis forces ebbed and flowed across the desert, and then vanished entirely. In Egypt, the nationalist movement was quietly consolidating its position – there would not be much longer either for British rule or for King Farouk. And Palestine would soon cease to exist, translated into the distress and dissension of today. It is hardly surprising, I suppose, that a nine-year-old child should not take much of this on board. All the same, I look back with a certain wonder at that alter ego, collecting cowrie shells while the Middle East roared around her.

  Chapter Eight

  I had a more accurate perception of distance as a child than I have today. Now, like any other late-twentieth-century traveller, I believe that the Atlantic is as wide as it takes to read the newspaper and a few chapters of a book, eat a meal and have a snooze. I think that Australia is tiresomely inaccessible because it takes a whole twenty-four hours to get there, and if I were invited to lunch in Paris I might well accept. When last I went to Cairo, I was slightly put out because the journey did not quite give me time to finish a current reading chore and make some notes. The globe is diminished, reduced to time zones and unsettling climatic changes.

  Once, I saw the world differently, and correctly. I knew that England was a very long way from Egypt, and that the two places were separated by tracts of sea across which you ploughed day after day, week after week, in a great ship that was itself a way of life. In fact, the voyage from Alexandria to Southampton by way of Gibraltar would have taken about a week, I think, but it was a week expanded by the excitement and exoticism of the process: in my recollection it was interminable. By the end, you knew that you had covered a great distance. Travel was a serious matter. We had trunks, labelled Not Wanted on Voyage, and special equipment by way of rugs and collapsible stools. My mother had hat boxes and something called a dressing case. My possessions, and Lucy’s, went into a brown trunk with dark yellow ribs. It had to be searched for on docksides and station platforms: a symbol of security and normality. Later, it accompanied me for a few more years yet, to boarding school and even to university, with shreds of Bibby Line and P. & O. labels still clinging to it, hinting of another time and another world.

  I knew that Palestine also was distant, though not nearly so distant as England, and understood that distance in terms of the Sinai desert, hour upon hour of it, and the obstacle of the Suez canal. Alexandria too was far off, but manageably far, a matter of hours, not days. Again, the distance was an actuality – that long road forging through the wastes of sand. I don’t know when I learned to relate these known journeys to the map, and to see them in terms of global space, but when I did so I must have noted the great weight of Africa, hanging down there beneath the Mediterranean fringe of Egypt and Palestine.

  In 1943, when my father was transferred to Khartoum, we did not move with him. My mother was reluctant to leave Cairo and it was considered that the Sudan climate was the ruin of European women and children. Men were thought to be made of sterner stuff, I suppose. The idea was that we would join him there for the winter months, when the heat lets up a bit, and that he would take his leaves with us in Cairo or Alexandria. Thus, I plunged downwards into Africa for the first time.

  The Sudan also was pink, of course, on the map. Or it may have been ambiguously pink, like Egypt – striped or dotted. The country was administered jointly by Britain and Egypt under the Condominion Agreement of 1899. There was a British Governor General and a Government House, as in Palestine. There was a Church of England cathedral and a bishop. My father, as an employee of an Egyptian bank, albeit a bank with strongly British connections, must have had a foot in both worlds. To me, Khartoum had plenty of superficial resemblances to Cairo, in the cultural sense, but was stiflingly hot, and unquestionably distant.

  It was a distance that was again defiantly physical. The journey was a re-creation in tangible and vivid form of that dominant and significant winding black line on the map. We moved slowly down the Nile, from Cairo to Aswan and there we got on to a train which crawled on and down to Wadi Halfa and then across the neck of the Nile’s great bulge to the left and then moved parallel with it again until at last we arrived at Khartoum. It took a long time. Ten days? About that, I should think, but, like those Mediterranean journeys, it became a separate unit of time, distinct from ordinary life, a capsule in which one was suspended in slow motion, trundling for ever down and down, into another place. It was travel, as travel should be, and since I have never been back to Khartoum, I am left with one surviving correct impression of the relation between time and space.

  It would have been possible to fly. There was a flying-boat service which plied between Cairo and Khartoum, and indeed further still down into the continent, but it was expensive and was used mainly by those on official business or in a hurry. We had time enough to spare. We negotiated the Nile as people had always done, and probably not a great deal faster. We boarded a Nile steamer and chugged slowly down through Upper Egypt, until we got to Aswan and the limits of the Nile’s navigability in this type of craft. Ahead lay the cataracts, and the narrowing of the river.

  I have done that journey since, in a tourist cruise boat. The steamer we took in 1943 was a passenger craft with three or four decks, as firmly hierarchical as the trains to Alexandria. There was the upper deck, which was first class and on which we rode. Individual cabins, dining and sitting saloons, a deck with awnings. Below was the second class, with sparser versions of these amenities, and below that yet was a pullulating free-for-all where people swarmed unconfined over open decks, cooking, sleeping, arguing. The boat hugged one bank, so that the other seemed so far away that you could barely see it. This was a wider, untamed Nile, not like the constrained and confined river which flowed through Cairo. And it went on, and on, and on. The steamer stopped frequently, for long periods. It would tie up for half a day at some riverside halt where people would pour on and off the lower deck and others proffered goods from the quayside: baskets of eggs, live chickens, oranges. Up in the higher regions, there was a certain amount of fretfulness. My mother muttered about the flying-boat. Lucy remarked that we might as well have walked, the time it was taking. And then at last we would be on the move again, after a great production over hoisting of gangways and casting off. I would settle down with my eyes glued to the muddy bank and the slopping shallows, waiting for crocodiles. So far as I was concerned, we were leaving the civilized world and heading into jungle country.

  What I saw then – or did not see – is overlaid now by that subsequent visit, when I sat on the deck of a cruise boat and saw that incomparable Nile landscape with all the intrusions of adult understanding and experience. I saw how beautiful it is. Brilliantly coloured – emerald-green, ochre, feathered all over with the silver-blue of palms, splashed with the jewelled dots of figures in galabiyas of vermilion, salmon-pink, midnight-blue, eau-de-Nil (actually the eau of the Nile is a sort of greyish-buff). The soft light of the afternoon, with the desert hills beyond the cultivation pale buff and lilac, the palms throwing long quivering reflections on the water. Evening, the hills now pink and shedding a glow on to the river. The violent descent of night, when the sky turns a heavy peach colour and the river is suddenly blue, and within ten minutes it is quite dark. The birds: flocks of egrets like shredded white paper flying low over the water as the sun goes down, flights of brightly coloured ducks exactly like those in tomb wall paintings. A black ibis in silhouette on a spit of sand; a pelican patrolling the shore; a fish-eagle with golden head and
shoulders perched on an overhanging branch. And the abiding interest of the river bank – clusters of mud huts like models of a prehistoric village, a man working a shaduf, women carrying water jars, children swinging from the huge leaves of a palm, and waving to the boat.

  Back then, I must have seen all this, but differently. In the first place, I did not know that it was beautiful. It was profoundly familiar, and beauty to me would have implied something special and exotic. More significantly, I could not see it in terms of anything else. A perception of landscape is something learned – it depends upon individual knowledge and experience. At the age of ten, a mud hut to me was a mud hut, and could not be seen in the light of prehistory. A shaduf was a shaduf, and not a remarkable and ancient piece of engineering whereby water is raised from one level to another. Women carrying water jars were just that, without implications about health or economic circumstance. I probably noted the birds, but was far more interested in those potential crocodiles.

  At Aswan we left the steamer and got on to a train to Wadi Halfa. There, it seems to me that we switched to a different train for the long haul across the loop of the Nile and on down to Khartoum. Certainly, there is an impression of a great deal of waiting about on station platforms with all that that implied by way of crowds, commotion and aggravation. But I was used to this. I was a veteran of Egyptian trains and stations – Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailiya, Qantara, Suez – and knew what was normal. My mother and Lucy would have been in a fever about luggage and reservations and porters; I found the whole business distinctly stimulating. There was always a frenzied concourse of travellers of every gradation, insistent porters, obtuse officials, people begging and selling, droves of importunate children, stray dogs. The train would always be late, obstruction was rife, there would always be some drama about reservations not reserved or facilities not available. Each arrival or departure was a triumph over adversity. When in my adolescence I first saw the placid herds at English railway stations I was both perplexed and uneasy. Didn’t these people understand that travel is a battle?