This book is to be about the context of a lifetime. Some of this context lies within my own head – the shape-shifting backdrop of memory. There is a rich population here, all those people in the mind, my own previous selves, and alongside them so many others – transient encounters and, most vividly, family and friends.
My old-age friends go back a long way. Twenty years, thirty, sixty – Susan and I were twenty together – and even seventy-five years, two were known in my Egyptian childhood. And now here we are sharing this new incarnation. Or is it new? Because they all seem to me much as they ever were. We behave toward each other much the same, except that we inquire after health in a way that we never used to – really wanting to know, not that casual perfunctory “How are you?” But, I suppose because we have kept up with one another all along the way, we are not taken aback by the metamorphosis, the way we look now. When I was on the other side of the Atlantic a few years ago staying with my best friend in America, she produced a photo she had found of the two of us taken in the early 1980s. We gazed at it with surprised respect; “Weren’t we young!” said Betty. Actually, verging on middle age, but never mind – our reaction was in perfect accord: an acknowledgment of those other selves. Steve, next-door neighbor of my childhood, seems remote today from the six-year-old in my head, with whom I am still playing a messy game by the garden pond involving ships made of pieces of plank, but there is a resonance. He became a sculptor, and back then he was in charge of plank construction: talent will out. I go back thirty years and more with Ann and Anthony; they are layered in my head, saying and doing over time, a collective with a concertina effect that compresses to the known people of today. Several decades again with Joy, and it is sometimes a familiar younger self of hers who surfaces – a turn of phrase, a mannerism.
And others . . . The point of all this is a tribute to the way in which we are each of us the accretion of all that we have been. You see this in yourself; you see it in those you have long known. Nothing new here, no fresh perception, but something you appreciate to the full in old age. I am aware of invisible ballast, on all sides, the hidden body of the iceberg.
I cherish the company of my contemporaries, but I want – need – also to touch base elsewhere. Two of my closest friends today are considerably younger than I am, and I value that; the great stimulus over the last twenty years has been watching, and knowing, my grandchildren, four of them now grown up. To be corralled with one’s own age group must seem like some kind of malign exile, a banishment from the rich every-age confection of society. To walk along the street and see a toddler in a stroller, a bunch of teenagers, businesspeople on their cell phones, middle-aged women with their shopping, someone else elderly like me, is to feel a part of the natural progression of things, to be aware of continuity, replenishment. And it is, quite simply, of consuming interest; a novelist is anyway a people-watcher – an old novelist is still in the business but in less forensic style. There is a kind of benign observation now; the street scene mutates from season to season, year to year. New adornment; different style. How on earth does she get into those skin-tight jeans? Tattoos all over both arms – you may get tired of that, you know. Three matching pugs with matching collars and leashes?
We old are on the edge of things. Or are we? Yesterday was budget day, and the airwaves are full of outrage at the so-called “granny tax” – the phasing out of tax concessions for those over sixty-five. Unfair to penalize those who have worked and saved, is the cry, but there is also threatening mention of the “gray vote.” We might bite back. No doubt all this has been taken into consideration by those whose job it is to crunch the numbers, but the fact remains that there is an uneasy tension today between proper concern for the old, and a nervous apprehension about this exponential growth of a new demographic. We are many, and will be more; on the edge, perhaps, but unignorable.
The day belongs to the young, the younger. I feel overtaken, and that is fine. I don’t like finding myself usually the oldest person in the room, and I am afraid of being boring. The old carry around the potential to bore like a red warning light; I know, I have shied away from it myself. But I wouldn’t in the least want to reoccupy the center stage, which is I suppose that midlife period around forty, with youth still apparent and middle age at arm’s length. I don’t remember being any more appreciative of life then than I am now. More energy, yes, of course – vigor, capacity – but plenty of doubts and anxieties. Well, there still are those, but tempered somehow by experience; you don’t fret or waver less, but you have learned that time will sort it out, for better or for worse.
Experience. What is it? The employer’s question: “What is your experience?” Mere existence is experience; being here, exposed, involved, no choice in the matter, get on and make what you can of it. At eighty, you have a war chest of experience – euphoric, appalling, good, bad, indifferent. You may have learned from it: The stark truth is that you know rather more than you did at twenty. Or at thirty, or forty. But don’t go on about that; they will find out for themselves.
We old talk too much about the past; this should take place only between consenting contemporaries. Boredom hovers, for others – unless by special request for purposes of information or instruction. We must beware that glassy smile of polite attention: they are searching for an exit strategy. Fold up the past and put it away – available for private study. This is now, and while still present and a part of it, we do best to remember that that is where we are. This may sound a touch brutal; it is simply that I have become conscious of the need – for me, at least – to stay tuned in. Memory is crucial, memory is everything, but to retreat there would be a fatal detachment.
Memory is the subject for another section – the crutch, the albatross, the defining story, all the things that it is for any of us. I remember (see?) getting interested first in the operation of memory when in my forties – midlife, or thereabouts. Today, old, I am conscious of it as definition (shadow of the dreaded dementia) and, above all, as that essential setting. What has happened to me, but also what has happened while I have been around, which is where I go next – an examination of my own historical context both as it seemed at the time and how it seems now, with the wisdoms of analysis by others.
Life and Times
I was a wartime child. There were millions of us, and for many the experience was hideous. I was growing up in Egypt, where I was born. For me, the Libyan desert campaign of the early 1940s was simply the state of the world, the way things were; it sent us for a while to Palestine, then it receded, vanished. War continued, of course, but more distantly; it rumbled on, it was a condition, no more and no less.
Children do not question their circumstances. You are you, in this place, at this time, with these people – how could it be otherwise? I was required to say my prayers, every night: “Please God, help me to be a good girl, and make the war end soon.” A mantra repeated without interest or conviction. War was a word; it was language, first and foremost, language that swirled around me, above my head, language that did indeed create the times, the place, that has lodged, that can still – just – turn then into now.
Tobruk. Benghazi. Mersa Matruh. Alamein. Monty. The Auk. Churchill.
Before the war. After the war. For the duration. Peacetime. Shrapnel. Destroyers. Depth charges. Searchlights. Battledress. Armored cars. Jeeps. Tanks.
Spitfires. Hurricanes.
War was The War – this single commanding inescapable fact that so occupied grown-ups. It was constant, like the Egyptian sun. It was there, as far as I was concerned – as abiding as sunshine, as unremarkable.
“I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany”: I know those words because I have heard and read them many times. But I heard them first when I was six – a thin, dry voice coming from the wireless in my grandmother’s drawing room in Somerset, 3 September 1939. They were language that I did not unde
rstand, and to which I did not listen; I had been told that I must sit still and keep quiet, this required all my attention. But The War had stalked into the room, and into my life. It would shortly send me on a helter-skelter journey down through Europe, clutching a gas mask which I must not lose (why? what is it, anyway?), back across the Mediterranean to Cairo, home, and the garden that was the haven of my childhood, with its eucalyptus and casuarina trees, its poinsettias and lantana, zinnias and plumbago, the banyan, the bamboo, the bougainvillea, the arum lilies. More language, defining language, language that provides a child with that other crucial dimension – what you see is expanded into what you hear.
I am trying to see then against the wisdoms of now, to look at the climactic points of the last century, to fish out what it felt like to be around at that point, if possible, and set that against the long view, the story now told, the arguments and the verdicts.
The experience of childhood presents the greatest challenge. It is in one sense crystal clear, in another sense irretrievable. It is the smell of crushed eucalyptus leaves, the crash of waves against the stone rampart of the Corniche in Alexandria, the shrapnel trophy gathered at an air raid there, the cool grip on my finger of the chameleon I have found in the garden. But it is also gone, it cannot be recovered. It is swamped, drowned out by adult knowledge. That child self is an alien; I have still some glimmer of what she saw, but her mind is unreachable: I know too much, seventy years on.
That war – The War – is packed away into books, and I read with fascination. It is history now, and not packed tidily, laid to rest, because there is nothing tidy or restful about history. The battle of Alamein has been differently fought, decade by decade. Did Montgomery simply take over plans originated by Auchinleck? Had Auchinleck intended a withdrawal of the Eighth Army to Khartoum and Palestine, if need be? The subsequent analyses chew over reputations, strategies, who said what to whom, why this happened, why that did not. Language illuminates, once more: “I am fighting a terrific battle with Rommel,” writes Montgomery, sidelining a few hundred thousand others, “. . . a terrific party and a complete slogging match.” And, for me, I hear again the Cairo chatter of 1942: so-and-so is in the bag, someone else bought it when his tank brewed up.
The battle – or battles, depending on the analysis – of Alamein turned the tide of the desert war and stopped Rommel’s advance into Egypt; that much is generally agreed. If it had not – well, at the most extreme estimate, the entire course of the war might have run differently, and possibly disastrously for the Allies. The Axis forces could have swept up through Palestine into Syria, Iran, Iraq, the oilfields there that must have been Hitler’s target. If it had not – at a purely personal level, we would have lost our home, and my father, who stayed in Cairo when my mother and I went to Palestine along with other British women and children as Rommel advanced, would have been interned. It was said that our house a few miles outside Cairo had been earmarked for Rommel’s retreat. So it would have been the German commander and his staff officers sipping gin and tonic on the veranda of an evening, instead of my parents and their friends, and diving into the large, raised concrete tank that was grandly called our swimming pool, and fraternizing with our dog, which was, conveniently, a dachshund.
I have written elsewhere of those years, of how it seemed to a nine/ten-year-old. I can still see it thus – eyes screwed up, peering backward – but the effect is refracted now by time and discussion. The language that was once normal seems archaic; the clipped upper-class diction of the day startles me – the voices of news bulletins, of old films – can that really once have been familiar? The background clamor of the Libyan campaign – the army convoys on the desert road to Alexandria, the searchlight battery in the fields near our house, the soldiers on the streets of Cairo, the talk of the next big push – is reduced now to the cold print of the books on my shelves. I can read about what happened; about what they say happened.
Keith Douglas, soldier poet who fought at Alamein and was killed in Normandy, aged twenty-four, wrote his memoir Alamein to Zem Zem soon after the campaign, probably in 1943: “I observed these battles partly as an exhibition – that is to say that I went through them like a visitor from the country, going to a great show, or like a child in a factory – a child sees the brightness and efficiency of steel machines and endless belts slapping round and round, without caring what it is all for . . . The dates have slipped away, the tactical lessons have been learnt by someone else . . . Against a backcloth of indeterminate landscapes, of moods and smells, dance the black and bright incidents.” And he makes them dance in that brief and vivid memoir, which is furnished with his own arresting, dashed-off sketches: the contorted corpse of a Libyan soldier, a tank crew cooking on a sand-filled petrol can. He gives the view from a tank (he was a tank commander, at twenty-one, fresh out from England, after a few months’ training in the Delta), like that in a silent film, since the noise of the engine drowns out all other sounds, he gives the camaraderie and irritation of the officers’ mess, he gives fear and exhilaration and the abiding, impervious presence of the western desert. It is a masterly piece of writing; when I reread it, I think with wonder that this life, his life, all those lives, were running thus just a hundred miles or so from where my child self was in animistic communion with the eucalyptus tree in our garden, or reading Tales from Greece and Rome under the banyan, or surfing the glorious waves of Sidi Bishr, in Alexandria. Seventy years on, that young man seems locked into that time, smiling out from the photo in the memoir, khaki-clad, moustached, looking rather older than he actually was. I read his poetry as a message from another world. There should have been more of it.
Wartime Cairo steamed with poets. Bernard Spencer, Robin Fedden, Terence Tiller, John Gawsworth, John Cromer, Gwyn Williams, Robert Liddell – none of these names would be familiar today to anyone outside the arcane world of mid-twentieth-century poetry studies. G. S. Fraser, a leading light, did have a postwar role as a prominent figure in London literary life; Tiller worked for the BBC and produced a radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings. Lawrence Durrell is known now as a novelist, for The Alexandria Quartet, but was working mainly as a poet in the early 1940s, and was one of the Alexandria gang of poets, with Robert Liddell and Gwyn Williams, exchanging insults and jokes with the Cairo crowd – Fedden, Spencer, Tiller. Keith Douglas was published in Personal Landscape, the literary magazine launched by Spencer and Tiller, and can fairly be said to be the only one of those wartime Cairo poets regarded today as a significant voice of the Second World War.
All were young – very young – as was most of the febrile, hectic Cairo society of those years, marvelously described in Artemis Cooper’s Cairo in the War. Parties, drinks on the terrace at Shepheard’s, drinks by the pool at the Gezira Sporting Club, more parties, expeditions to Luxor, to the Fayoum, yet another party. The Eighth Army officer buccaneers were at the heart of it; they came and went, and some went entirely – in the bag, or bought it. There were various planes of society – the Embassy circle, the bankers, the cotton magnates, the British Council, the universities – coteries and groupings but plenty of overlap in an overcrowded, centralized city. Lawrence Durrell was foreign press attaché at the British Embassy, so with a foot in that camp as well as the more informal world of the Anglo-Egyptian Union and the Victory Club. Robin Fedden was a lecturer at Fuad al Awad University; I remember him at my mother’s lunch parties, and that he taught our cook to make a dish I hated involving highly spiced lamb, apricots, nuts and garlic. Our cuisine was sternly English (rice pudding, cottage pie) and this injection of what sounds like pure Claudia Roden, and very good too, affronted me – the only brush with the esoteric world of the Cairo poets of which I am aware.
*
I came to England in a troopship in early April 1945; seven thousand demobilized soldiers and a hundred expatriate women and children, going home. Except for me, who was leaving home. It was a transition from the Middle Eastern world of warmth
and color to the chill gray of England, and wartime England at that, with its own hectoring vocabulary of coupons and points and identity cards and shortages. The war was not yet over; the V2 rocket offensive in London had reached a new intensity in February, the last weapon did not fall until the end of March. It was not until May 7 that the war officially ended, and the VE Day crowds surged through central London, dancing, singing, a sea of faces in front of Buckingham Palace, Churchill up there on the balcony with the royal family, flourishing V sign and cigar.
No, I did not see that. Reaching back for that summer, all I can find is an array of personal concerns, the problems of a traumatized teenager uprooted from what had seemed a homeland, whose parents had just divorced, and who had now ended up in an alien society where the social codes were mysterious and the climate defied belief. I was so cold. Well, so were most, back then, with coal the equivalent of black gold and central heating a concept of the future. Forget dancing in the streets; I was being outfitted for my first school, a dire establishment on the south coast. I met Chilprufe vests for the first time, and liberty bodices, and navy wool knickers. The war might have ended, but another had begun, for me.
But there is a landscape, in my mind – the eloquent landscape of London in 1945: the city fingered by the blitz, then again by the V1s and the V2s. I did surface enough from my own distresses to notice that: the houses with gaping façades, the floors gone, the ghost of a staircase snaking up, a fireplace clinging to a wall, the shape of a picture or mirror. The sudden absence in a street, like a tooth socket, a space filled with rubble and weeds. Someone took me to see the annihilation at the heart of the City; whenever now I come across that iconic photo of St Paul’s rising above the wasteland I have my own clear, complementary vision – the acreage of low walls fringing lakes of purple willow-herb, the cathedral enormous, startling, restored to its original dominance, everything else shorn to the ground. The willow-herb rampaged, birds sang.