Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (12 page)

They are in no way chronological, and patently I am not in control of them. They seem to appear of their own volition, and a concerted search for something specific is difficult and often unproductive. Let’s try this: a search through my eight decades.

*

Childhood is at once a challenge, because most memories are among the highly polished, having been summoned up for the memoir I once wrote. But – rooting around – here’s a neglected one: I am waiting for Lucy in our favorite garden space where we have a table and chairs. Abdul, the
sufragi
, brings our elevenses on a tray – orange juice and biscuits. I reach for a biscuit. Abdul says, sternly – or seems to say: “Sit!” Puzzled, I sit. Only later does it occur to me that what he was saying was: “Wait for the
sitt
!” – Arabic word for “lady” – I should not start on the biscuits until Lucy arrived.

This memory has its own coda – my realization of a misunderstanding – which is unusual, but rings true: there would have been that childhood fascination with language and its ambiguities. Let’s move on to adolescence.

I am staying with my aunt Diana and her family in Kent. Winter 1947, and bitterly – famously – cold. I remember going to bed with all my clothes on. I am fourteen, only recently exiled from Egypt, shunted between my two grandmothers during school holidays because my father is mainly abroad, with a new job. Di has kindly taken me on for Christmas, a somewhat taxing guest, I don’t doubt. There is a Boxing Day lunch party to which come friends of theirs, with a son my own age. And he is everything that I am not; he is charmingly forthcoming with adults, charmingly playful with my three young cousins, entirely comfortable with himself –
bien dans son peau
. I am lumpen, too tall, tongue-tied, unable to relate to the children, hideously self-conscious. I observe his performance, and swelter. He ignores me, except for some token charming remarks.

That memory has left me with a lifelong sympathy for adolescence, except that I think they have things rather better now that it is an accepted status. And I was an only child, who had been at a single-sex boarding school. That period was a Calvary; few adults penetrated the miasma of gloom, except for my uncle Oliver, who noticed a reading habit, and talked books to me, and my Somerset grandmother, who simply absorbed me into her routine.

But what about something more upbeat? Something joyous, celebratory, properly young? Trivia float up here: a lipstick called Paint the Town Pink; I am sixteen now and my father does not like me to wear lipstick. He had become a single parent after the divorce, my mother not having applied for custody. He is out at his office all day, so I have put on the lipstick anyway, and sail out feeling glamorous, sophisticated. And, later, at seventeen I think, I have been allowed a pair of wedge-heeled shoes, cutting-edge fashion of the day, and am obsessed with them. The most precious acquisition ever.

Also, around now, my father marries again and I have stepmother number one, Barbara, who has a son of her own, aged twelve, and is perfectly nice to me. We go to Italy for a summer holiday
en famille
, and Barbara has persuaded my father to buy me a sumptuous traveling vanity case for my birthday equipped with little pots of this and that, manicure set, lotions and potions. The sights of Rome I remember not; the vanity case is in my mind’s eye to this day. I see now that Barbara was ahead of her time, attuned to the yearnings of a teenage girl. But the marriage lasted only a couple of years, and I never saw her thereafter.

The twenties? Oh, there’s plenty here. Marriage, childbirth, becoming a rather young mother. We are in Kensington Registry Office, Jack and I, with our respective witnesses, a friend each, waiting in a somber brown room, occasionally murmuring to one another. An official puts his head round the door and says: “Would you mind making less noise, please?”

I am in the Radcliffe hospital, in Oxford, an emergency admission, having just given birth after a prolonged home labor that went wrong. I am aware that all is not well, because everything is going gray and I cannot speak. A nurse is doing something at a sink, at the far end of the room, but I cannot attract her attention. The baby is in a crib beside me; she has a little thatch of dark hair. At last, the nurse comes over, inspects me, and at once goes to ring a bell. I hear feet running.

We are off for a weekend excursion in our first car, a Ford Popular. The children are in the back, Adam in a portable bassinet, Josephine alongside (no child seats in those days, or seat belts). We round a bend in a Welsh country lane (somewhere north of Swansea, where Jack has his first academic job), and at the same moment a cow dashes in front of us; we go slap into it. Amazingly, the cow is unhurt; equally, mercifully, all of us. But the car is immovable. The farmer in pursuit of the escaped cow calls for help; the local policeman discovers that Jack’s driver’s license is out of date but – benignly – decides to take no action: “You people have had enough for one day.”

Ordnance survey map in hand, I am making my way across Oxfordshire fields in search of the site of a deserted medieval village. Both children are at school now, and I am free to do this kind of thing, in my thirties – a heady liberation after the child-intensive years. Lapwings lift up ahead of me, and, yes, there are the grassy lumps and bumps of what was once a village called Hampton Gay.

We are driving somewhere in France; a town looms, announced by the road signs – “Sa cathédrale . . .” – and – “Piscine!” shout the children. The deal is that if we take them to the swimming pool they will then without complaint do time in the cathedral. My next book is going to be a guide to the municipal swimming pools of central and southern France.

Josephine rushes into the house – breathless, distressed: “They’re going to drown little black puppies in a bucket!” She has been down at the farm, playing with the three boys there, as on most days. I consider, I take a deep breath, I say: “All right, you can have one.” Dogs live for around ten years, I am thinking, Josephine will be eighteen or so and leaving home by then. The puppy was a
mésalliance
between a Jack Russell terrier and a poodle, and lived to be seventeen.

My forties – midlife – and we are into the 1970s now, the age of long cheesecloth skirts (which I wore) and flares (which I did not). These are the Warwick years, when Jack has moved from Oxford to that university. We have come to a poetry reading by Dennis Enright – D. J. Enright – who is Writer in Residence, and we have got to know, and enjoy, him. He starts to read, and after a few moments a young man in the front row of the small audience rises and leaves the room. Dennis breaks off for a moment, sighs: “You win some, you lose some.” And continues with the poem.

But there seems to be something awry with this midlife period – the roaring forties, but mine do not roar, they have sunk largely into an oblivion from which Dennis Enright sneaks out. And, yes, here now is a pond in Massachusetts (in England we would call it a small lake) in which I am swimming with my best, my oldest friend, Betty, but a new friend back then, and we are swimming through stripes of hot and cold in this dark green water, and Betty calls: “Look! Look!” and there all around us are large blue dragonflies.

Massachusetts, where I would now go often. The travel years are just beginning, and will fling me hither and thither before long. But for the most part memory is tethered to Oxfordshire, where we live (though in a different elderly farmhouse) – a dim continuous present which sends up occasional images. I am digging over a disused section of the vegetable garden, and am seized with sudden botanical fervor: I decide to take a specific square yard and list every species of plant growing there – hairy bittercress, groundsel, couch grass . . . I am at my desk, working; Jack comes past the window carrying an armful of logs; I hear him open the kitchen door, stamp his wet boots on the mat – thump-thump – drop the logs into the basket . . . Jackdaws have tried to nest in our high seventeenth-century chimney; failing to get their dropped sticks to lodge, they have come down to investigate, and are unable to find their way back, flying around the room and desecrating the furniture . . . There is another mouse in the kitchen trap; I remove it, my pre-breakfast chore. We share this place with much wildlife.

Why do I remember so little about work? These are the work years, also, the early work years. Writing. But that is part of that vague continuous present, until the 1980s – my fifties – when books come to direct my life, determine what I do, where I go.

I am in Docklands, where the skeletal framework of the Canary Wharf buildings are rearing out of a vast and muddy building site. This visit is in the service of the London novel that I am planning, and I have wangled an introduction to an architect working there, who has given me a guided tour, and now points me over to the Marketing Suite. In this sleek reception area, I suspect that my novelist role is not going to cut much ice, and I make some profoundly unconvincing enquiries about office space.

Bicycling in upper Egypt, somewhere outside Luxor, with Jack, and Ann and Anthony. We are on a Nile cruise, disembarked; Anthony has made a sortie into town, and hired the bikes, and now we are spinning on dirt roads through fields of sugarcane and clover, pursued by stray dogs and children. For me, this landscape is at once alien, and entirely familiar. Later, in Cairo, we will discover my childhood home, now part of a teeming suburban slum, but surrounded by such fields, back then.

New Haven, Connecticut. Yale, where Adam is doing postgraduate work. Josephine and I are visiting, and find ourselves taking part alongside him in a civil- rights demonstration. Many of the faculty are on strike in protest against the university’s treatment of women and blacks. Adam, who has teaching responsibilities, is on strike, which means he teaches, but not on university premises. We stand in the rain, demonstrating, and Josephine says, rather irritably, that she is not sure this is what she has crossed the Atlantic for.

University College Hospital. Josephine is holding Rachel, who is a day old; she has pink cheeks and a thatch of dark hair. My father appears, in high spirits; he is visiting at the same time this great-granddaughter, and a grandson, Oliver. Nicky, wife of my half-brother Marcus, has also just given birth here. Marcus and his brother Valentine are the sons of my stepmother number two, Daphne. My father – our father – is a wow with the nurses on the ward, who are much entertained by this jovial elderly gent and his complex genetic arrangements.

I wake up, and know at once that I am somewhere else. The birdsong. Outside the window there is birdsong, much birdsong, and it is wonderfully wrong. It is song such as I have never heard before. In fact, I am in Australia, at an idyllic country motel to which the long-haul participants in the Adelaide Literary Festival have been brought to detox after their flights, before the festival begins. I open the window, listen some more, see birds I cannot begin to identify, and realize that I am seeing and hearing that Darwin was right. This is another continent, where things are done differently.

We are into the 1990s here, and I have hit sixty. I don’t remember feeling especially bothered about this – full of energy still, writing, living. The view from eighty says: huh! a mere slip of a girl – just you wait.

Slovenia. I have been sent by the British Council to British Book Week at Ljubljana. I am being briefed on the day’s activities over breakfast by the British Council representative when one of the Slovenian officials rushes up to cry excitedly: “Your Mrs.Thatcher is fallen! She is no longer the government, she is gone!” We say: “Oh! Great!” It seems to me now that the Council representative was a touch out of order here, with such openly expressed political commitment. “You will need to go home,” continues the Slovenian. “You will need to be with your families. There will be . . . disorder.” We say that no, we don’t need to, and there won’t be, and recognize the gulf between those who have lived always in a politically stable society and those who have not.

And I have to note here the curious conflict between what is remembered and what was taken down at the time, for a diarist. Wanting to check this exchange, I looked in the diary: nothing about it at all, nothing. But several pages on other aspects of that week that only returned, vaguely, as I read. The conference on contemporary British fiction, for example, at which, apparently, papers were delivered on such subjects as “The Macedonian response to the Movement poets,” and ‘The Serbo-Croat reception of the Sirens episode in
Ulysses
.” Really? However can I have forgotten that?

In fact, a short story eventually surfaced from that time – “The Slovenian Giantess” – and the diary entries had come in useful here, along with that other, unrecorded, memory. That, essentially, is what it has been for, the diary. And, at the time of writing the story, in 1994, I was apparently bothered about “the inexplicable shift between significance at the time and significance in recollection – the way in which memory evidently transmutes events . . . Now if you could lay a finger on why one moment is immortalized and another obliterated you would presumably have made a seminal discovery about the workings of the human mind . . . All a fiction writer can do is take note.” I quite agree, eighteen years on.

Recent memory – the last ten or fifteen years – seems reasonably well furnished. More grounded – less travel now – and much that is distressing: death, illness. The hospital years, Gore Vidal has called this period of life, and yes, indeed, there is plenty of hospital experience – Jack’s, my own. Verdicts delivered by kindly, deliberate, consultants: “We have a problem;” waiting rooms; procedures; trolley rides to operating theaters, contemplating the building’s internal pipework overhead; the unrelenting hospital pillow; “How is your pain today – on a scale of ten?”

But much else, too. Isaac says: “When you’re four,
Horrible Histories
is good, but you don’t really understand it. When you’re five, you understand it but it isn’t so funny.” He is five – Adam’s fourth child, and my sixth grandchild. We have gone forth and multiplied.