Extravagant Strangers, page 21
After the warm, rubbery smell of the ship, the smell of the air conditioning in enclosed cabins and corridors, there were new smells in the morning. A cloying smell of milk – fresh milk was rare to me: we used Klim powdered milk and condensed milk. That thick, sweet smell of milk was mixed with the smell of soot; and that smell was overlaid with the airless cockroachy smell of old dirt. Those were the morning smells.
The garden or yard or plot of ground at the back of the house ran to a high wall. Behind that high wall was the underground railway station. Romance! The sound of trains there all the time, and from very early in the morning! Speaking directly to me now of what the Negro in the New York hotel had spoken: the city that never slept.
The bathrooms and lavatories were at the end of the landing on each floor. Or perhaps on every other floor – because, as I was going down, there came up a young man of Asia, small and small-boned, with a pale-yellow complexion, with glasses, and an elaborate Asiatic dressing gown that was too big for him in the arms; the wide embroidered cuffs hid his hands. He gave out a tinkling ‘Goo-ood morning!’ and hurried past me. Was he Siamese, Burmese, Chinese? He looked forlorn, far from home – as yet, still full of my London wonder, my own success in having arrived in the city, I did not make the same judgement about myself.
I was going down to the dining room, in the basement. The boardinghouse offered bed and breakfast, and I was going down to the breakfast. The dining room, at the front of the house, sheltered from the noise of the underground trains, subject only to the vibration, had two or three people. It had many straight-backed brown chairs; the walls were as blank as the walls of my room. The milk-and-soot smell was strong here. It was morning, light outside, but a weak electric bulb was on; the wall was yellowish, shiny. Wall, light, smell – they were all parts of the wonderful London morning. As was my sight of the steep narrow steps going up to the street, the rails, the pavement. I had never been in a basement before. It was not a style of building we had at home; but I had read of basements in books; and this room with an electric light burning on a bright sunny day seemed to me romantic. I was like a man entering the world of a novel, a book; entering the real world.
I went and looked around the upper floor afterwards, or that part of it that was open to guests. The front room was full of chairs, straight-backed chairs and fat low upholstered chairs, and the walls were as bare as the walls everywhere else. This was the lounge (I had been told that downstairs); but the air was so still, such a sooty old smell came off the dark carpet and the tall old curtains, that I felt the room wasn’t used. I felt the house was no longer being used as the builder or first owner had intended. I felt that at one time, perhaps before the war, it had been a private house; and (though knowing nothing about London houses) I felt it had come down in the world. Such was my tenderness towards London, or my idea of London. And I felt, as I saw more and more of my fellow lodgers – Europeans from the Continent and North Africa, Asiatics, some English people from the provinces, simple people in cheap lodgings – that we were all in a way campers in the big house.
And coming back night after night – after my tourist excursions through London – to this bare house, I was infected by its mood. I took this mood to what I saw. I had no eye for architecture; there had been nothing at home to train my eye. In London I saw pavements, shops, shop blinds (almost every other one stencilled at the bottom J. Dean, Maker, Putney), shop signs, undifferentiated buildings. On my tourist excursions I went looking for size. It was one of the things I had travelled to find, coming from my small island. I found size, power, in the area around Holborn Viaduct, the Embankment, Trafalgar Square. And after this grandeur there was the boarding-house in Earls Court. So I grew to feel that the grandeur belonged to the past; that I had come to England at the wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which (like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy.
Such a big judgement about a city I had just arrived in! But that way of feeling was something I carried within myself. The older people in our Asian-Indian community in Trinidad – especially the poor ones, who could never manage English or get used to the strange races – looked back to an India that became more and more golden in their memory. They were living in Trinidad and were going to die there; but for them it was the wrong place. Something of that feeling was passed down to me. I didn’t look back to India, couldn’t do so; my ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a similar feeling of wrongness. In Trinidad, feeling myself far away, I had held myself back, as it were, for life at the centre of things. And there were aspects of the physical setting of my childhood which positively encouraged that mood of waiting and withdrawal.
We lived, in Trinidad, among advertisements for things that were no longer made or, because of the war and the difficulties of transport, had ceased to be available. (The advertisements in American magazines, for Chris Craft and Statler Hotels and things like that, belonged to another, impossibly remote world.) Many of the advertisements in Trinidad were for old-fashioned remedies and ‘tonics’. They were on tin, these advertisements, and enamelled. They were used as decorations in shops and, having no relation to the goods offered for sale, they grew to be regarded as emblems of the shopkeeper’s trade. Later, during the war, when the shanty settlement began to grow in the swampland to the east of Port of Spain, these enamelled tin advertisements were used sometimes as building material.
So I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers. It was of a piece with the abstract, arbitrary nature of my education, like my ability to ‘study’ French or Russian cinema without seeing a film, an ability which was, as I have said, like a man trying to get to know a city from its street map alone.
What was true of Trinidad seemed to be true of other places as well. In the book sections of some of the colonial emporia of Port of Spain there would be a shelf or two of the cheap wartime Penguin paperbacks (narrow margins, crudely stapled, with the staples rusting quickly in our damp climate, but with a wonderful colour, texture, and smell to the paper). It never struck me as odd that at the back of those wartime Penguins there should sometimes be advertisements for certain British things – chocolates, shoes, shaving cream – that had never been available in Trinidad and were now (because of the war, as the advertisements said) no longer being made; such advertisements being put in by the former manufacturers only to keep their brand names alive during the war, and in the hope that the war would turn out well. These advertisements – for things doubly and trebly removed from possibility – never struck me as odd; they came to me as an aspect of the romance of the world I was working towards, a promise within the promise, and intensely romantic.
So I was ready to imagine that the world in which I found myself in London was something less than the perfect world I had striven towards. As a child in Trinidad I had put this world at a far distance, in London perhaps. In London now I was able to put this perfect world at another time, an earlier time. The mental or emotional processes were the same.
In the underground stations there were still old-fashioned, heavy vending machines with raised metal letters. No sweets, no chocolates came from them now. But for ten years or so no one had bothered to take them away; they were like things in a house that had broken down or been superseded, but remained unthrown away. Two doors away from my boardinghouse in Earls Court there was a bomb site, a gap in the road, with neat rubble where the basement should have been, the dining room of a house like the one in which I lived. Such sites were all over the city. I saw them in the beginning; then I stopped seeing them. Paternoster Row, at the side of St Paul’s Cathedral, hardly existed; but the name still appeared on the title page of books as the London address of many publishers.
My tramps about London were ignorant and joyless. I had expected the great city to leap out at me and possess me; I had longed so much to be in it. And soon, within a week or less, I was very lonely. If I had been less lonely, if I had had the equivalent of my shipboard life, I might have felt differently about London and the boardinghouse. But I was solitary, and didn’t have the means of finding the kind of society I had had for the five days of the Atlantic crossing.
There was the British Council. They ran a meeting place for foreign students like me. But there one evening, the first time I went, I found myself, in conversation with a bored girl, turning to the subject of physical pain, a fearful obsession of mine, made more fearful with the war (and one further explanation of the austerities I practised at various times). I began to talk of torture, and persevered, though knowing it to be wrong to do so; and was so alarmed by this further distortion of myself (more distorted than my behaviour during the flight to New York, first with the Negro in Puerto Rico, then with the Englishwoman in the seat beside me) that I never went to that British Council place again, for shame.
I had only the boardinghouse and that curious, mixed, silent company of English people, Europeans in limbo, and a few Asiatic students to whom English was difficult. And perhaps that boarding-house life might have meant more to me if I were better read in contemporary English books, if, for example, I had read Hangover Square, which was set in the very area just eleven years or so before. A book like that would have peopled the area and made it romantic and given me, always needing these proofs from books, some sharper sense of myself.
But in spite of my education, I was under-read. What did I know of London? There was an essay by Charles Lamb – in a schoolbook – about going to the theatre. There were two or three lovely sentences – in another schoolbook – about the Embankment, from ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’. But Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street was just its name; and the London references in Somerset Maugham and Waugh and others didn’t create pictures in the mind, because they assumed too much knowledge in the reader. The London I knew or imaginatively possessed was the London I had got from Dickens. It was Dickens – and his illustrators – who gave me the illusion of knowing the city. I was therefore, without knowing it, like the Russians I was to hear about (and marvel at) who still believed in the reality of Dickens’s London.
Years later, looking at Dickens during a time when I was writing hard myself, I felt I understood a little more about Dickens’s unique power as a describer of London, and his difference from all other writers about London. I felt that when as a child far away I read the early Dickens and was able with him to enter the dark city of London, it was partly because I was taking my own simplicity to his, fitting my own fantasies to his. The city of one hundred and thirty years before must have been almost as strange to him as it was to me; and it was his genius to describe it, when he was an adult, as a child might have described it. Not displaying architectural knowledge or taste; not using technical words; using only simple words like ‘olld-fashioned’ to describe whole streets; using no words that might disturb or unsettle an unskilled or unknowledgeable reader. Using no word to unsettle a child far away, in the tropics, where the roofs were of corrugated iron and the gables were done in fretwork, and there were jalousied windows hinged at the top to keep out the rain while letting in light and air. Using, Dickens, only simple words, simple concepts, to create simple volumes and surfaces and lights and shadows: creating thereby a city or fantasy which everyone could reconstruct out of his own materials, using the things he knew to recreate the described things he didn’t know.
To Dickens, this enriching of one’s own surroundings by fantasy was one of the good things about fiction. And it was apt that Dickens’s childlike vision should have given me, with my own child’s ideas, my abstract education and my very simple idea of my vocation, an illusion of complete knowledge of the city where I expected this vocation to flower. (Leaving room at the same time, fantasies being what they are, for other, late-nineteenth-century ideas of size and imperial grandeur, which neither Buckingham Palace nor Westminster nor Whitehall gave me, but which I got from Paddington and Waterloo stations and from Holborn Viaduct and the Embankment, great Victorian engineering works.)
I had come to London as to a place I knew very well. I found a city that was strange and unknown – in its style of houses, and even in the names of its districts; as strange as my boardinghouse, which was quite unexpected; a city as strange and unread-about as the Englishness of South Wind, which I had bought in New York for the sake of its culture. The disturbance in me, faced with this strangeness, was very great, many times more diminishing than the disturbance I had felt in New York when I had entered, as though entering something that was mine by right, the bookshop which had turned out to have very little for me after all.
And something else occurred in those very early days, the first days of arrival. I lost a faculty that had been part of me and precious to me for years. I lost the gift of fantasy, the dream of the future, the far-off place where I was going. At home I had lived most intensely in the cinema, where, before the fixed-hour shows, the cinema boys, to shut out daylight or electric street light, closed the double doors all around and untied the long cords that kept the high wooden windows open. In those dark halls I had dreamt of a life elsewhere. Now, in the place that for all those years had been the ‘elsewhere’, no further dream was possible. And while on my very first night in London I had wanted to go to the cinema for the sake of those continuous shows I had heard about, to me the very essence of metropolitan busyness, very soon now the idea of the cinema, the idea of entering a dark hall to watch a moving film, became oppressive to me.
I had thought of the cinema pleasure as a foretaste of my adult life. Now, with all kinds of shame in many recesses of my mind, I felt it to be fantasy. I hadn’t read Hangover Square, didn’t even known of it as a book; but I had seen the film. Its Hollywood London had merged in my mind (perhaps because of the associations of the titles) into the London of The Lodger. Now I knew that London to be fantasy, worthless to me. And the cinema pleasure, that had gone so deep into me and had in the barren years of abstract study given me such support, that cinema pleasure was now cut away as with a knife. And when, ten or twelve years later, I did return to the cinema, the Hollywood I had known was dead, the extraordinary circumstances in which it had flourished no longer existing; American films had become as self-regardingly local as the French or English; and there was as much distance between a film and me as between a book or a painting and me. Fantasy was no longer possible. I went to the cinema not as a dreamer or a fantasist but as a critic.
I had little to record. My trampings about London didn’t produce adventures, didn’t sharpen my eye for buildings or people. My life was restricted to the Earls Court boardinghouse. There was a special kind of life there. But I failed to see it. Because, ironically, though feeling myself already drying up, I continued to think of myself as a writer and, as a writer, was still looking for suitable metropolitan material.
Metropolitan – what did I mean by that? I had only a vague idea. I meant material which would enable me to compete with or match certain writers. And I also meant material that would enable me to display a particular kind of writing personality: J. R. Ackerley of Hindoo Holiday, perhaps, making notes under a dinner table in India; Somerset Maugham, aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing; Aldous Huxley, so full of all kinds of knowledge and also so sexually knowing; Evelyn Waugh, so elegant so naturally. Wishing to be that kind of writer, I didn’t see material in the campers in the big Earls Court house.
Penelope Lively
[1933-]
Penelope Lively (née Gréer) was born in Cairo, Egypt. She and her family moved to England in 1945. Lively attended boarding school in Sussex and received a BA in history from St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1957 she married Jack Lively, with whom she has two children.
Lively has been a BBC presenter for a radio programme on children’s literature and a reviewer for several magazines and newspapers, but it is for her fiction that she is best known. She began her writing career as a children’s author. Her first book, Astercote, was published in 1970 and was followed by, among others, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, winner of the 1973 Carnegie Medal. She won the Whitbread Award for A Stitch in Time (1976), the tale of a young girl who becomes obsessed with an ancient embroidery sampler.
In 1977 Lively wrote her first ‘adult’ novel, The Road to Lichfield, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Five more novels followed in the next ten years, and in 1987 Lively won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger, her most structurally ambitious and complex novel to date. The heroine in Moon Tiger is a historian who, as she is dying of cancer, constructs a new history for herself and the world. In this novel, as in virtually all of her work, Lively reveals a preoccupation with the elusive nature of time, the processes of death and renewal, and the connection between past and present. As she writes in Going Back (1975, later reprinted as an ‘adult’ book in 1990), events become ‘islands in a confused and layered landscape’ where ‘the things that should matter… get forgotten’.
Lively’s prose is precise, intelligent and eminently readable. Her more recent novels, including City of the Mind (1991), have explored the materialism and oppressiveness of Margaret Thatcher’s London in the 1980s. She has recently published the novels, Cleopatra’s Sister (1993) and Heatwave (1996), and a memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived (1994). She currently lives in Oxfordshire and London.
The young woman in the extract from Lively’s exquisite memoir Oleander, Jacaranda exhibits a painful desire to attach herself to an unknown world. The nature of her colonial upbringing in Egypt suggests that arriving in Britain will simply form a continuum with her old life, but the society that she confronts is alien in many surprising and difficult ways.
