Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (3 page)

The Soviet threat was an evil. But, like everything in that hopeful time, it was also a good. As well as defending British
prosperity against the great Red menace, we were supposed to share in it, creating a haven of high education, a science park,
even an Essex garden community in which the clay cut to make the foundations of 51 Dorset Avenue might one day grow cabbages,
fruit trees and flowers. By 1960 Mr Churchill’s England had become Mr Macmillan’s – with only the barest distraction from
Mr Eden’s debacle in Colonel Nasser’s Egypt. Life was going to be fine.

There were many advantages for us on these company streets. Almost every family had a TV set, assembled during our fathers’
lunch-breaks rather than bought in a shop. We had miniature radios when most of the country still kept the BBC in big wooden
boxes: Professor Rame’s career began with the bedroom sound of science fiction, bluff Englishmen bringing their voices to
Mars and the Moon.

Books, by contrast, were rare. There were just five of them in 51 Dorset Avenue, the brightest coloured being a sky-blue edition
of S.T. Coleridge, the title printed in such a way that for years I thought that the poet was a saint. Next to this sat a
collected Tennyson, in a spongy leather cover. On the shelf below was a cricket scorebook in which someone had copied improving
philosophical precepts; and beside that,
The First Test Match
, a slim, slate-green hardback. This was the one of them that looked read and reread.

The fifth book is the only one that is with me in Alexandria fifty years on, my Nottinghamshire grandfather’s copy of the
second half of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, Books 7–12, with the name B. Stothard, in a firm, faded script, inside the flyleaf. The first owner of this red Loeb edition,
English and Latin on opposite pages, was a family mystery. My father refused ever to offer anything beyond a set of not quite
consistent facts: that Bert Stothard had been a farmer who had lost a fortune thinking there was oil beneath his farm, that
he had been a miner, a mining engineer, a Methodist preacher, a manager of the parts department at a maker of stone-crushing
machines. Every description was of some other existence. In 1956 he died, leaving behind a secretive son and the second half
of a Latin epic poem.

In the two thousand years since the time of Cleopatra this
Aeneid
has been the most famed of all writings in Latin. It has been the book of empire-builders, the story of how a young Trojan
prince escaped
the fires of conquered Troy and sailed away to found the far greater city of Rome. Its first half tells how Aeneas put imperial
duty before his love for a foreign queen (there is more than a touch of Cleopatra in Dido), and how he visited his dead father
in the underworld to get divine instruction for the task ahead and endured various adventures of varyingly entertaining sorts.
Its second half is more gruelling, for Aeneas, his men and for readers, a story of military struggle through Italy, the defeat
of hostile tribes and some vengeful killings that even Virgil’s greatest admirers wished he had omitted.

There must be many other two-volume sets of the poem where Part One is borrowed (and never returned) and Part Two is never
borrowed at all. Those who begin with the seventh book of the
Aeneid
, the first book of the
Aeneid
in the library of Dorset Avenue, take an unusual route into the story. They know nothing of Troy or Dido, nothing of sex
and cannibalism in caves. They begin with the military struggle, the shrugging-away of the Trojan past so that the Italian
future can begin.

There is also, at the very start of Book Seven, the question of ending, of memorial, of what part of us is remembered and
how and whether any memorial is worthwhile. In the first sentence of Latin I ever saw, Aeneas has just buried the woman who
nursed him as a child in Troy. Her name is Caieta. His father is dead; his lover, Dido, is dead. His mother, the goddess Venus,
while as alive as she ever was, has shown divine inattention to childcare. So Caieta is an important part of the hero’s past
and one of his last connections to it. He buries her on a coastal hill near Naples and builds a monument.
Tu quoque litoribus nostris, Aeneia nutrix:
You too to our shores, nurse of Aeneas.

Caieta may seem an odd character to appear at the beginning of a
book about Cleopatra. She is almost unknown. Most students have read the Aeneid without registering her at all. Her name begins
with C and ends in A but that is not the reason she will play her part in this story. She will be there because she was the
first Latin name I knew when it began. This final version of my Cleopatra, whatever it becomes, will be most of all a book
of chances.

Professor Rame’s adventure, my own first Cleopatra, owed a little to Bert Stothard’s
Aeneid
, but more as an opening to an ancient world than a guide to what was in it, more as an object than a text. I could not make
sense of Latin yet. My professor owed much more to radio and its infant child, TV. Electronics were about to banish the printing
press even then. On our estate of clay we were proudly in the forefront of that change. Our tiny transistor radios may have
lacked the smartest cases; our televisions had often no cabinets at all, their twinkling glass valves strung out along the
picture rails and around the back of settees. But we were surrounded by science. When we wanted a better picture, the contrast
of our blacks and whites was improved from the first principles of the cathode ray. To make the most of the Coronation, the
Billy Cotton Band Show
or even
Mrs Dale’s Diary
, a massed expertise could be deployed, from as far afield as Noakes Avenue, the outer limit where Marconi-land ended and
Essex farming returned.

The houses were so alike, and the food in their cupboards so absolutely alike, that it hardly mattered where on the estate
we fed our pet pond creatures or ate our tea. Most boys and girls had the same-shaped box room for their den, the same cube
within a cube. A sawn-off end of a radar tube was so perfect for newt-keeping that every boy who braved the ‘bomb-hole’ pond
in the ‘rec’ had one of his
own. Break the glass screen and there was always a replacement the next night. We all had field glasses, relics of our fathers’
wars or second-hand from the army surplus stores; we knew the names of every swooping, hovering or merely hopping bird. All
groceries came from the same dirty-green, single-decker coach of ‘Mr Rogers’, a silent ex-soldier who piled his fruit and
vegetables on either side of the aisle where the seats had been and twice a week toured the avenues from Dorset to Noakes
to sell cereals, sugar, flour and everything that the gardens might one day produce but did not yet.

Ours was a community of algebra and graph-paper. Mathematics was the language of choice. Contract bridge was the nightly recreation.
Prizes for success in this sport of the mind fell tumbling from our sideboard doors whenever they were opened too roughly,
uniformed knaves on ashtrays, unsmiling queens on decanters, aces on miniatures of port and brandy whose liquids had long
dried away but whose evidence for victorious rubbers remained. My curly-haired, smiling father had a brain for numbers that
his fellow engineers described as Rolls-Royce. Notoriously, he did not like to test it beyond a purr. In particular – and
this was unusual in a place of intense educational self-help – he did not care to inculcate maths into his son. This was a
task that he had recognised early as wholly without reward. Max Stothard would occasionally attack the mountain of clay in
his garden but never knock his head against a brick wall. He much preferred to be relaxed.

Like most of our neighbours, he had learned about radar by chance, in his case after lying about his age, volunteering for
the navy and spending most of the war becalmed off West Africa. He had wanted to fight but did not. On a ship called HMS
Aberdeen
, he had stayed three thousand miles from the desert-rat fights of Libya and Egypt. He
sent home red-leather-bound knives to his mates back in the Nottinghamshire mining lands. He sent postcards of Dakar’s six-domed
cathedral to his strictly Methodist mother. But he never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark.

In his infinite leisure hours he studied the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea. That was how he
spent most of the rest of his life, in the south of England instead of the north because that was where the radars were made,
quietly reasoning through his problems on his high chair in the Marconi Laboratory and in an armchair at home, spreading files
marked Secret like a fisherman’s nets.

Life on our estate was based on a bracing sense of equality and a grateful appreciation of peace. Although most of our fathers
felt they had a part in this great military project of the future, rarely can so massive a martial endeavour, the creation
of air defences along the length of Britain’s eastern coast, have been conducted in so calm a spirit. My mild mother competed
gently for influence against other mothers – in studied unconcern for what the Marconi estate was for. The fighting war was
absolutely over. The Marconi tower was a lightening conductor as well as a controller of missiles. The new business was civil,
work that would keep us safe and increase our prosperity as the politicians promised. And because everyone was in it, everyone
was in it together.

That was the determined message of Miss Leake (her name seemed perilously amusing from the first time I heard it), our headmistress
at Rothmans School, whose doctrine of excellence-and-equality, delivered in her severest voice, was adapted only slowly to
the advancing evidence of differences around her. My younger sister and I were peculiarly different. Jill was sharper, wilder,
a primal force. I was quiet and accepting.

There were girls with superior proficiency at maths to any boy. There were boys who could barely count but who designed the
most beautiful fighter planes to crash the female enemy down to earth, exchanging sketches that would today attract close
attention from the police. For our first two years our teachers reassured us repeatedly that we were all much the same. But
eventually, inexorably and certainly by the time that we had reached the age of nine, those of us who multiplied well were
divided from those who did not.

Streaming was the name for the separation. Maths was just the start. Those, like Maurice and I, who could not sing were called
‘groaners’ and kept outside the classroom door during music lessons. That was when I first properly noted his pale face and
wit. Those who preferred Aeneas to algebra were allowed to write fiction for our homework, as long as it was science fiction.

Miss Leake was the high mistress of these rules. We rarely saw her and wondered sometimes how she could exert such power when
the polished brass nameplate on her door was her only regular presence. My father came to see her only once. He was not at
all worried about my being a ‘groaner’ (he listened to little music himself bar the songs of the American mathematician, Tom
Lehrer) but he was faintly sad about my absent number skills.

Jill would sometimes join Max and the gramophone in singing Lehrer’s version of ‘We’ll All Go Together When We Go’, ‘The Periodic
Table’ and ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’. I could not and did not sing. My mother could sing well but did not. None of that
mattered. Numbers on the Marconi estate were the key to advancement. Euclid, the Alexandrian ‘Father of Geometry’, was the
best and only Greek. Physics was the first step to a working future, a future in paid employment in a world which itself worked
well.

Many Rothmans pupils with no aptitude at all for figures – who could draw a dive-bomber but never do equations – were pummelled
onto numerical paths. Jill resisted. To my mother’s frustration she was a brilliant resistor, an early lesson to me of female
will. But how possibly, asked our neighbour on the other side of the clay mountain, could anyone pull themselves up by any
other route than mathematics? My father agreed, but he did not force me and he could not force my sister. He did not argue
the superiority of science or anything much else, except bidding conventions in hearts and spades and the best way to see
threats low in the sky.

My mother had bigger worries than innumeracy. She had heard from rival mothers that I had damp eyes when stories were read
in class, not necessarily even the saddest stories. I was much too open to the world around me, absorbent almost: she put
this failing in different words at different times. Professor Rame and his Egyptian queen were among many bad influences.
It was better that I spent more time outside. In the real world everything would always be fine.

My mother was a shy connoisseur of small improvements and distinctions. She was born in the city of Nottingham, not ‘the sticks’,
the phrase with which she dismissed Bert Stothard’s fields and stone-crusher factories. When she met my father after the war,
she had been a secretary at John Player’s, a clean job in tobacco, and she had her eyes on a place in a silk shop or Raleigh
Bicycles. She was always alert to social distinction. Were the engineers’ families of Rothmans Avenue, Dorset Avenue and Noakes
Avenue truly quite the same? Did the more brilliant scientists live in Rothmans, the more managerial in Dorset, the more clerical
in Noakes? Were they richer in Rothmans and rather poorer in Noakes? Who took a daily newspaper? Who took the
Daily Telegraph
?