Life with Lucy
John Bowen
OLEANDER, JACARANDA by Penelope Lively Viking, £14, pp. 180 Penelope Lively was born in Cairo. When she was two, the family moved to Bulaq el Dakhrur, which was then cultivat- ed ground with three European houses and a village and is now a slum in the enor- mously expanded city. Her father worked for the National Bank of Egypt, her mother lived the hospitable, well-servanted life of a colonial administrator's wife — Egypt was not a colony, but counted as one for purposes of lifestyle. Such women did not expect to have to look after their own children. When Penelope was stx months old a nanny was engaged. Her name was Lucy.
Penelope grew. She was an only child. A war began in Europe, and spread to North Africa, but was never close enough to be uncomfortable. Penelope joined the Brownies, but met few other British children; she made only one close friend and after a while his parents moved. Lucy was her friend, her mother her mentor. Penelope was not sent to school. Instead Lucy, though she had little formal educa- tion, turned from nanny into governess, using a do-it-yourself education kit of booklets sent from Britain by the Parents' National Education Union (PNEU). Together Lucy and Penelope tackled the principles of Elementary Geometry, Citizenship, Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, The Natural History of Devonshire by Arabella Buckley, and when the PNEU material ran out or the ships which brought it were sunk by U-boats, they learned the plays of Noel Coward by heart.
In 1945, when she was 12, her parents were divorced. They did not 'break-up': they were divorced because of her mother's adultery. Since her mother did not want her, her father had custody, but by then he was working in Khartoum and the climate was unsuitable. Penelope and Lucy were sent back to England on a troop-ship. The child, who knew nothing about the English climate and class system, nothing of the difference in mores between town and country, was shuttled between one grand- mother in Harley Street and the other in Somerset. She had no experience of communal life in which one must hide one's differences, but was sent anyway to boarding school. Quite soon — Penelope Lively is not sure when — Lucy disappeared: she went to work for another family. As long as Lucy lived, Penelope wrote to her. Lucy kept the letters, and much later Mrs Lively was able to read them. Between every line of those early letters from London, from Somerset, particularly from boarding school, there was desolation. They were love-letters to a lover who will never return.
How could she not have become a novel- ist? For the rest of her life, she would con- struct imaginary worlds which she could control. There would be pain, of course, there would be death and loss as well as happiness, but it would never be too great, never too personal: she could arrange it into a pattern. After a while, when she was far enough away from it, she would be able to use some of that childhood. War-time Egypt and the young officers who were frequent visitors to the house at Bulaq el Dakhrur, where the kit-bags of the dead were still stored in the cellar, appear in Moon Tiger. There is a short story, 'A Clean Death', in which the protagonist is an adolescent girl sent away from parents abroad to live with relations in the West Country. In Cleopatra's Sister Lucy herself emerges as the dead English mother of an immensely fat North African dictator, who remembers her aphorisms — 'Don't care was made to care, Don't care was hung, Don't care was put in a pot and boiled till he was done.' Interestingly, Lucy is also the name of the heroine of that novel.
Wherever it deals with Penelope and Lucy — which is for most of its length Oleander, Jacaranda is vivid and moving. But merely to be that is not the whole of Mrs Lively's aim. She wishes also to say something about the nature of a child's perception, about different kinds of reality. She draws parallels, aligns perspectives; like the BBC she feels obliged to inform and educate as well as to entertain. In a work of literature, every element should be a literary creation. In an autobiography, the author herself must become such a `Of course he still has his hobby - he collects dust.' creation. The child Penelope is most successfully achieved, but for the adult the act of creation has to be more artful. Lucy did not hold with pleasure for its own sake. Mrs Lively presents the adult Penelope as recognisably Lucy's surrogate daughter.
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