Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (17 page)

But rocks and fossils never seem like putative material, at the time – they are just something that has made the mind sit up and pay attention. I wish I had paid attention more systematically – done some rock-watching in the way that I have bird-watched, and checked what I was looking at. The blue lias is all that I can recognize, and Devon’s red sandstone, and Oxfordshire’s oolitic limestone, which built two of the houses in which I have lived. The regrets of old age are polarized: you wish you had not done certain things – behaved thus, responded like that – and you wish you had seized more of the day, been greedier, packed more in. I wish I had packed in more rocks – on foot, legging it, learning what it was I walked over, looked at. Walking was a central pleasure, time was – Offa’s Dyke, when the going was good, Wenlock Edge, a bit of the Pennine Way. I looked up, and around – birds, wildflowers – but didn’t focus on down, on the deep time over which one was walking.

The naming of things. I have always needed that, where the physical world is concerned; much poring over bird books and my forty-year-old copy of Keble Martin’s
The Concise British Flora in Colour
. It annoys me that I can’t identify my blue lias ammonites; just “some kind of asteroceras or promicroceras” won’t do. The world and its life are the abiding delight and fascination, and to savor them to the full you want to have things labeled, named, classified; a tree is not just a tree, it is a particular tree, or you are only enjoying it as an agreeable sight. I can understand exactly what drove Linnaeus, despite being myself quite unscientific. Taxonomy is crucial, essential – the majestic discipline that marshals the natural world, so that everyone can know what is what and what it is not. Perhaps this urge for identification began for me in the nursery in Egypt (it never did get known as the schoolroom) when Lucy and I did Natural History on Wednesday mornings out of Arabella Buckley’s
Eyes and No Eyes
, that late-nineteenth-century guide to the flora and fauna of the English pond and stream: caddis fly larva, water boatman, dragonfly. And, indeed, out of Bentham and Hooker, the standard wildflower manual; we searched the fringes of the sugar-cane fields for scarlet pimpernel, shepherd’s purse, vetch.

The Jerusalem Bible

It is New Testament only, quite small – about nine inches by five – and it is bound with exquisitely inlaid mother-of-pearl, making it feel heavy, chunky. This must be real mother-of-pearl. If it were a tourist offering of today, I would propose plastic imitation, but plastic was not around in 1942, so it must be the real thing, ripped probably from the floor of the Red Sea, and this is therefore an environmentally reprehensible Bible. But environmental concern was not much around either in 1942.

Lucy bought it for me at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and has written in it: Penelope Low from Nanny. It was late summer 1942, when Rommel’s army in Libya had advanced to within a hundred miles of the Egyptian border, and British families were advised to leave the country. My mother had opted for Palestine, as opposed to Cape Town, the alternative; my father stayed at his job with an Egyptian bank. This would be only a temporary interruption to the status quo, seems to have been the assumption, we would soon be going home – as was indeed the case, but the bland optimism now seems strange: it looks today as though Egypt could very well have fallen to the German advance, and must have done so at the time to anyone facing the facts.

The title page of the Jerusalem Bible says, at the foot: “The American Colony Stores, Jerusalem, Palestine.” I am sure that this means simply that it was produced for this outlet, which presumably then supplied some bookstall at the Holy Sepulchre, because I am certain that Lucy’s purchase took place there. More on the American colony in a moment; for now, we are in the crowded, incense-reeking interior of the church, and somewhere in a crevice of memory that day lingers, this carefully considered purchase – which would have been quite expensive, and I was grateful, and proud of this new treasure – and Lucy’s prickly response to this place: its clamor, its rituals, the smells and bells, the mass of people. She had good reason; Lucy was paid-up Church of England, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was everything but that. This was a long way from the measured sobriety of Cairo’s Anglican Cathedral. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is – was – the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and control of the building is shared between several churches – Roman Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxies. Anglican and Protestant Christians have no permanent presence. Lucy was feeling herself to be on alien territory, and was probably bothered about this because she was quite devout, and this after all was the site of Golgotha, where the Crucifixion took place, and where Christ was buried. Perhaps the purchase of the Bible was a small defiant statement: we too are Christians.

And it must have caught the eye. It is handsome – on the front a Greek cross, set in a circle within a diamond of mother-of-pearl inlay, further small inlay slabs all around, forming a nest of rectangles, the whole thing iridescent – a shimmer of blues, pinks, greens, pearly whites. Mother-of-pearl; nacre.

Nacre is the inner shell layer of some mollusks, long valued as a decorative material – all those billions of pearl buttons, for starters. I have a butter knife with a mother-of-pearl handle; many such were manufactured during the last two and three centuries, no doubt. But nowadays the species supplying this industry are endangered, and plundering the oceans in the service of buttons and knives is frowned on. That shop in Covent Garden that used to have baskets stacked high with giant shells and nacre mollusks has long since closed down.

So, thus, that morning in 1942, and the Bible that remembers the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (and, at one remove, the vibrant life at the bottom of the Red Sea). We were there as tourists, and must have seen its sights, but of those I remember nothing. I was nine.

Hadrian built a temple on the site, originally – the temple of Aphrodite – which was demolished by the Emperor Constantine in around 325 when he had required his mother, Helena, to build churches on all the sites associated with the life of Christ. Helena is said to have discovered the True Cross during her excavations, though it is not clear whether it was under her auspices that it eventually got broken up into relics that would provide churches everywhere with enough fragments to marshal a whole army of crosses. The medieval relics marketing industry is fascinating: ideally, a splinter of the True Cross, or a Holy Thorn, failing that, hair or toenail of a saint, even a more substantial chunk of bone. Christ is of course the problem, there never having been an available corpse; but never mind, that can be got round, with a bit of ingenuity: a phial containing the breath of Christ. A religious tourist trade that has diminished today to Bibles and postcards.

Constantine’s edifice was built as two connected churches, most of which were destroyed in 1009 by the Fatimid caliph, though in a later deal between the Fatimids and the Byzantine Empire some rebuilding was allowed and a mosque reopened in Constantinople. Then came the Crusades; the objective of every Crusader was to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem was taken, and throughout the Crusader period there was much rebuilding and excavation of the church and its site, until the city fell to Saladin in 1184, though a treaty allowed Christian pilgrims to enter the church. Effectively, the site was a battleground for centuries, the building itself rising and falling, knocked down, restored, revived, neglected, fought over. And, it appears, this tradition survives with occasional brawls between the contemporary occupants; in 2002 the Ethiopian contingent objected to a Coptic monk having moved his chair from an agreed spot – eleven people were hospitalized after the resulting commotion.

Representatives of all these sects would have been there on that morning in 1942 – Greek Orthodox in full fig, monks and priests and a herd of tourists that would have included plenty of those displaced by the war, like ourselves. Soldiers everywhere, and RAF and ATS and WAAF; we were connoisseurs of categories and uniforms – some Aussies over there, and those are New Zealanders, and he’s Free French. Jerusalem would have been a favorite leave destination.

Lucy and I were living in some style. We were at Government House, by invitation of the British High Commissioner’s wife, because before Lucy took me on she had looked after their children. And thus it was, there, that I saw General de Gaulle in his dressing-gown, but that too is another story. My mother had not been invited to Government House, and was staying more modestly at the American Colony Hotel, which I remember as having a lovely courtyard with orange trees, resident tortoises, and amazing ice cream. It was the hotel of choice for the discriminating: charming, cheap, more select than the cosmopolitan and pricey King David, and with an interesting background.

The hotel was run by descendants of an American religious group. I gave an inaccurate description of these in
Oleander, Jacaranda
, drawing on remembered hearsay. I am now better informed. They had left Chicago for Jerusalem in 1881, so as to be there well in time for the Second Coming at the millennium. They were joined by others from America and from Sweden, and eventually formed a community of a hundred or so, who engaged in good works, diversified into farming, and, after the Second Coming failed to take place, the surviving family of the original group founded the hotel, sited partly in the historic “Big House” just east of the Damascus Gate which the first arrivals had made their home. There my mother stayed, modestly, and there could I, today, though rather less modestly.

The American Colony Hotel is five star, now, and when I Google it I can indeed see a garden courtyard, and very inviting it looks. “Privately owned boutique hotel . . . an oasis of timeless elegance.” Swimming pool, complimentary Internet access, TV with in-house video. And there is obliging availability: I can have a standard double room tomorrow night for £175, or – if I want to push out the boat – the Deluxe Pasha King Room for £345. Are there still tortoises, I wonder? And do they still produce Bibles bound in mother-of-pearl?

I have four more Bibles, as well as the Jerusalem Bible. So I am an agnostic who owns five Bibles. One is the battered old King James Version with which I grew up, from which Lucy and I read every morning at the start of the day’s lessons: Bible Study. Then there is something called the Bible Designed to be Read as Literature, which seems to bestow literary status on the original text simply by knocking out the traditional verse numbers. Given to me by my grandmother. And then there is a dreadful thing called the Good News Bible, which has little cartoony illustrations and has debased the language of the King James Version to such an extent that I shall not even give a quote, to spare those of you who have not come across it. And there is a further offering called the New International Version, which is somewhat less debased but why bother at all, when you have the King James? These last two were acquired by myself, when I noticed them in churches I was visiting – Pevsner in hand, usually – and thought: what on earth is going on?

The language of the King James Version was laid down in my mind, as a child, like some kind of rich sediment: those cadences, the rhythm of the phrases. The fact that we met unfamiliar words and that meaning was occasionally obscure bothered neither Lucy nor me. Lucy was there for reasons of piety and the requirements of the National Parents Educational Union’s daily timetable; I rather enjoyed the stories. Intensive exposure to that beautiful text, to the liturgy, to the narrative, has not made me a Christian, evidently, but I am profoundly grateful for it. If you don’t know something of the biblical narrative you are going to be bewildered by most early art and by innumerable references in English prose and poetry. And if you have not known the King James Version you will not have experienced the English language at its most elegant, its most eloquent.

I am an agnostic who relishes the equipment of Christianity: its mythologies, its buildings, its ceremonies, its music, the whole edifice without which ours would be a diminished world. I like to attend a service. I am a church-visiting addict, with cathedrals the ultimate indulgence. An ambiguous position; some may say, hypocritical. I want it all to go on, I want it all to be there, but I can’t subscribe to the beliefs. I am accredited – baptized, confirmed; but nobody asked me if I wanted to be, at some point skepticism struck, and I stepped aside. But not very far; there remains a confusing, or confused, relationship with this physical and mythological presence, which is in some way sustaining. Perhaps this is because I grew up with the Bible and the rituals of the Church of England; perhaps it is because, however secular-minded, you can recognize the effect, the allure of religion (which is why I call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist). Jack shared my unbelief. A friend and colleague of his, Father Conor Martin, was a Jesuit priest, a fellow political theorist and an academic in Dublin; Conor perfectly accepted Jack’s position, but had also his own subversive comment: “Ah, but Jack, you’re a spiritual man.” I think I know what he meant.