Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda evokes the author's unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and planets of the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, Oleander, Jacaranda follows the young Penelope from a visit to a fellaheen village to an afternoon at the elegant Gezira Sporting Club, one milieu as exotic to her as the other. Lively's memoir offers us the rare opportunity to accompany a gifted writer on a journey of exploration into the mysterious world of her own childhood.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Egypt, Biography, Africa, British Literature, Autobiography

133 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.

Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began.

She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012.

Penelope Lively lives in London. She was married to Jack Lively, who died in 1998.

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

The air has been freshened…
….with this gorgeous book.

In “Oleander, Jacaranda….A Childhood Perceive”, (a classic-historical-memoir- (133 pages) was first published in 1994.

From the beginning we learn that Penelope went back to visit Cairo in 1980…..to see the house she grew up in and contemplate the child she was. To try to piece together the past and present.
It’s as though she was pulling weeds and planting flowers in childhood memories and adult understandings at the same time — bridging the perception (as a discovery) from being ‘the’ child … and being ‘the’ adult.
She said:
“I look back in dismay. There has been a lot of unlearning to do”.
Growing up, Penelope had been caught between two cultures. Her parents were divorced (a huge taboo for the day).
Lucy, a governess, was Penelope‘s prime caretaker from the age of two months.
The impact of that relationship was primal.
Penelope stayed in touch with Lucy throughout her entire life

“When you do not know what to expect of the world—when everything is astonishing— then anything is possible and acceptable. Children are aliens in a landscape that is entirely unpredictable; they are required to conform to the dictation of a mysterious code while finding their way around a world which is both dazzling and perverse. I wanted to see if it was possible to uncover something of this experience”.

Growing up in Cairo during WWII had its challenges. Penelope was growing up in accordance with the teaching of one culture and surrounded by all the signals of another. Egypt was her home, and all that she knew, but she realized in some perverse way that she was not truly a part of it. Her family was English. And it was clear that she was never allowed to forget it.
“To be English was to be among the chosen and saved; to be the other was simply to be the other”.

…..The writing is stunning — with many descriptive thought provoking- reflective sentences to savior:
“It was possible to feel acute and entirely detached pity”.

“There was cold, which was beyond anything I would have thought possible. In the famously hard winter of 1947 the snow came in through the blitzed windows at Harley Street and May in unmelting drifts on the stairs. Staying with relatives somewhere in the country, I used to creep into bed with all my clothes on. At my boarding school on the south coast you had to break the ice on the dormitory water jugs in the mornings before you could wash. I thought I would die of the cold: it would have been a merciful release”.

“I am walking with Lucy beside the canal. This is one of our regular afternoon walks, a favorite with me because halfway along the canal there is a mimosa tree, from which Lucy allows me to pick a sprig. I bury my nose in the powdery yellow balls, guzzling that strange fragile smell. Further along there is a place where children from the village bathe in the canal, stark naked, hurtling themselves from an overhanging branch, throwing up great plumes of foaming brown water. And there I am in my cotton dress, my sun hat, my lace-up shoes, and my socks; I stare with fascination and with envy”.
Her stare of envy was also one of great ignorance. The canals were open sewers, used for washing clothes and cooking utensils, for watering animals, for urinating and defecating, for drinking. They were the habitat of the snails which harbored bilharzia, the deadly debilitating disease of the Egyptian fellaheen. Many of those children would have had trachoma, the eye complaint which causes blindness. Only a small portion of them received primary education”.

…..The themes of displacement and privileged were eye-opening —as the daughter of British expats.

…..There are more than a dozen black-and-white illustrations included:
…..The Bulaq Dakhrur house photos —wedding photos —a tea party for repatriated prisoners of war in 1943— The adorable little Penelope playing on the beach with your dad in Sufi Bishr— the swimming pool at Bulaq Dakhrur— etc.

…..The overall joyful Intriguing reading experience should knock any dubious doubtful memoir reader off their feet.

This was the ‘perfect’ redemption book from the recently downward spiral of disappointing novels.
It was also the perfect slim paperback to read during my rest-week in Capitola-by-the-sea. (both from bed and sitting on the beach)

Many thanks to Diane Barnes. I loved her review—commented so—and she was kind enough to send me her copy.
Sooooo….
we’re doing it again—
…..TRAVELING a wonderful book with the Goodreads community. Whose next?
To whom shall I mail this copy? Happy to mail this book to the next person who desires to read it — then pass it on again …. 🤗

Just Beautiful…..a first rate memoir!

[Georgia Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The photographs say it all. She loves water and could be brave leaping in. She dresses neatly and stands straight. She looks happy around her father, sad on her own, and clings to her governess like a life preserver that her mother would snatch given half a chance.

This for me was less a memoir about becoming a writer or life for British expats in Egypt before the Second World War as it is a portrait of neglect. I can't use any other word for it. The author herself calls it "the trauma." She doesn't mean the separation from her mother who wanted no custody of her only child. She doesn't mean her parents' divorce. She means the trauma of losing her governess upon returning to England and being sent to school - for the first time - a boarding school.

I wanted to hug her. Hard and long. Another writer who found safety in books away from life.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I have always been skeptical of the claim that travel broadens the mind. It depends how well equipped the particular mind was in the first place."

Those two sentences are an example of why I like Penelope Lively's books so much. Clear thinking, no nonsense and honest, especially in this book. Not so much a memoir of her early years in Egypt as a young child, as an explanation of why children see and experience things so much differently from adults. Everything is fresh because there's no experience to dull the senses.

She was the only child of inattentive parents, who left her to the care of a beloved nanny/governess. They divorced when she was 12, and just after WWII they sent her back to England to be raised by both paternal and maternal grandmothers, and the inevitable boarding schools of upper class children. It was a complete culture shock for her. She describes all this dispassionately, but you still get the sense of the emotions she felt. An enjoyable slow read at bedtime for me.

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Lively's memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, was a beautiful book that has an interesting provenance. This lovely paperback book was inscribed "LWL from Dodo and Catie, 5 Oct 96." Because this book is now out of print, Diane Barnes found this beautiful paperback copy and passed it on to Elyse Walters who then sent it to me. Wow, this is our Goodreads community at its best. So in the interest of passing it on, this beautiful paperback is available to anyone who would like to read it. Penelope Lively is the author of numerous fictional novels such Moon Tiger, Judgment Day and Pack of Cards. British writer Lively has written many children's books as well.

This was a glimpse into the early childhood years of a young English girl growing up in Egypt. It is monumental in that it is the perception of her childhood as it pertains to her interest in books as well as her awareness of the drumbeats of war. It is such an innocent time that Penelope Lively describes that are not only documented in the narrative of this book but in the beautiful black and white photos that tell their own story. Of course my favorite is a young Penolope Lively reading a book at a very young age having taught herself to read.

"Every child has to cope with the confusing codes of its own society--beginning with the family and working outwards. Every child is confronted with the puzzle of class distinctions. My particular challenge was that I was growing up in the accordance of the teachings of one culture but surrounded by all the signals of another. Egypt was my home. . . but I realized that in some perverse way I was not truly a part of it."

"My Cairo of then is a landscape that is highly selective, entirely personal, and only tenuously connected to either the reality of the time or the city that has overtaken both today. Indeed there is almost nothing left of it now."

But what I found most interesting was all of the narrative regarding Penelope Lively's views on childhood education and her views on literature, specifically children's literature. And these quotes will illustrate this point:

"I believe that the experience of childhood reading is as irretrievable as any other area of childhood experience. It is extinguished by the subsequent experience of reading with detachment and objectivity, with critical judgment. That ability to fuse with the narrative and the characters is gone. It is an ability that seems now both miraculous and enviable."

"Children do indeed start out as literary innocents, but the innocence is fragile. Corruption--so to speak--sets in with exposure to structured language of any kind. Prose, poetry, Fairy stories, mythology. Fiction, comics, Arabella Buckley."

"Children must learn to read and to write. The exciting thing about the writing of younger children is the way in which so many manage to incorporate influences while retaining a freshness and idiosyncrasy. That individual vision survives for a while."

This book is a teasure as it gives us a glimpse into a time in Egypt just before World War II. The images of Cairo and its environs were just so lovely. And we saw a small child growing up, and because of her command of the language, Penelope Lively was able to draw us into her unique perspective of this beautiful part of the world and the march of history.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This slim volume, containing so much, is an eloquent memoir and meditation on childhood perception and memory. Born of English parents and raised in Egypt (until she was 12), Lively recounts experiences of perceiving the world differently from adults and how those differences are eventually negotiated. While dreaming is not a focus of the book, one related dream is a vivid insight into how these childhood perceptions stay with us.

An incident noted near the end, of reading letters she'd written to her nanny (after their separation in England), hit me hard, in light of what the author does and does not remember. This is the first book I’ve read by Lively and now I’d like to read her Moon Tiger.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

My book club is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year by only selecting titles published in 1994. I read Lively’s wonderful ‘Moon Tiger’ (due for a reread) when it was first published, so her 1994 memoir was much anticipated.

A stifling, neglected expatriate childhood redeemed by her surrogate mother/governess Janet makes sobering reading, yet Lively makes few excuses or apologies for such a painful experience.

And there are some magical descriptions of Egypt throughout.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived captures memories of Penelope Lively's childhood in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s in snapshots so vivid that they alone would make this a fascinating book. But what shoots it into a league of its own is her simultaneous exploration of the nature and development of childhood perception.
Lively refers to the ‘anarchic vision of childhood’- anarchic because without preconceptions, unpredicatable, where adult societal and cultural codes are unknown. The experience of childhood itself is irretrievable, all that remains ‘is a headful of brilliant frozen moments’. She sets out to turn these frozen images into words, aiming ‘both to look at the way in which a child sees and at how it matches up with what was seen’.
She succeeds brilliantly, constantly thought provoking and challenging. Because she grew up in the English community in Egypt, her images are set in Egypt, Palestine and the Sudan, placed she lived or visited with parents and her nanny/governess, Lucy.
She captures moments when she realizes now that she first became aware of the passing of time – then and now, the dislocation of becoming aware of different viewpoints from your own customary egocentric viewpoint and that there is more than one way of looking at the world.
Lucy was the prime conditioner of Penelope's world view: ‘I was the product of one society but was learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture. I grew up English, in Egypt’.
The question the adult author wants most to pursue is how do ‘children arrive at an alternative interpretation of things and what happens to them on the way?’
She follows the different textures of memory at different stages, such as the simple observations of a very young child - a praying mantis in the garden, in bed with a stomach ache with the clack of Lucy's knitting needles in the background', and the slightly older surreal view of the black hole in Lucy’s chest (she now imagines inspired by the shadow between Lucy's breasts) and the seaweed she glimpsed growing at the base of her father’s torso when his bath towel slipped once. At some point, she says, rationality kicks in and the black hole and the seaweed ‘gave way to an awareness of and curiosity about sexuality', and speculates that some of the surreal nature of such images may continue into adulthood through dreams.
As she gets older, she becomes aware of things outside the house and garden and the texture of her daily life. The second World War is being fought in Libya, battles very close. The house is full of officers, her mother leads an active social life, entertains freely. They holiday at beaches. Which ones? Why? The snapshots she has chosen to write about take us through her growing awareness of social codes in Egypt, cultural differences, and the changing relationships between her parents as they divorce.
Then there is the devastating shock of being sent to England to boarding school, to a world in which she was severed from Lucy, where she knew none of the codes of acceptability, 'on the outside...the one who cannot quite interpret what is going on, who is forever tripping over their own ignorance or misinterpretation....I was a displaced person, of a kind, in the jargon of the day. And displaced persons are displaced not just in space but in time; they have been cut off from their own past...If you cannot revisit your own origins - reach out and touch them from time to time - you are forever in some crucial sense untethered'.
I read Oleander, Jacaranda in between two readings of W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. I hadn't expected to find such a reflection of Sebald's haunting theme here. But here it is.

[Chavelli Sulikowska · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't have spent so long living in Egypt and not read Livey's childhood biography from her years growing up there. While there is more than fifty years between Lively's Eegyptian experience and my own, it's astounding how little many things have changed. It is in many ways, a sad reflection of a nation still very much restricted by its past.

Importantly however, Lively's account is both a child's and also an expat's. While she was born and raised outside of England, she was very much raised a middle to upper class 'little white girl' in a foreign, exotic land. This perspective, a very sheltered western one, is clearly delivered in this early memoir. Lively is aware of it, but neither upologises nor excuses it. She was of coursee a child, and, as is revealed in her somewhat sad and lonely account, the events of her early life were dictated by a largely adult dominated world over which she had no say.

Reflective, touching and insightful.

[Melora · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 ½ stars, rounded up.

An intriguing combination of memoir and reflection on memory. Growing up English in Egypt in the late 1930's and early 1940's (she returned to live in England in 1945), Lively's memories offer something out of the ordinary (in my reading, anyway) thanks to their historical and social aspects, but I'm sure she could make even an ordinary suburban childhood interesting. The questions of how clearly we remember things from our childhoods, why we remember certain things, how those memories get jumbled and mixed, how later knowledge and events may affect memories, and so on are intertwined with her stories, which are placed in context with modest amounts of historical background. The book offers an engaging invitation to readers to sift through the fragments of their own childhood memories and ponder how pieces fit together, how “factual” various memories might be, and how their adult selves see places, people, and events differently (or not) from the way they remember perceiving those things in childhood. An enjoyable, thought provoking little book.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir of Penelope Lively's early life in pre-war and wartime Egypt is subtitled 'a childhood perceived', and is much more interesting than most such records of childhood. She describes how she has 'tried to recover something of the anarchic vision of childhood - in so far as any of us can do such a thing - and use this as a vehicle for a reflection on the way in which children perceive'. This approach is unique in my reading experience and is absolutely fascinating, both in itself and for the light it shines on the author's approach to one of the main themes of her novels: memory and forgetting. A really rewarding and enlightening read.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a gift to me many years ago by Bernadette. For some reason it has languished on my shelves, been picked out from time to time and then returned unfinished. Not this time. This time I stuck with this relatively short memoir. It repays the effort as do all of PL's books. She is a master wordsmith and yet agin touches so accurately on a great range of emotions.
It is a fragmented read at times, a bit like What Maisie Knew as we are viewing happenings through both a child's eye and an adult reinterpretation; this may account for my initial difficulty or staying power.

Thank you again Bernadette.

[Sylvia Tedesco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of those unadulterated joys. Penelope Lively shares her emotions, feelings, confusions and sensations on being a young child in a warm climate (Egypt) with free rein to explore and think and absorb impressions. This is a memoire, of course, I had only read her exquisite fiction before, but this is a treasure to read.

[Mahika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir of childhood by a brilliant writer; essentially, her study of the phenomenology of the child, and her attempt to create a new language to describe the seeing of childhood. Such a venture into the life of childhood is, the author finds, consequently a venture into the "strange offerings into the subconscious." In PL's recollection of her expatriate childhood between Egypt, England, Palestine, and Sudan-- is also a recollection of family trauma. Her parents are palpably absent from her upbringing. She goes to live with her grandmothers and is then separated from her one true maternal figure, Lucy, in what the author herself refers to as a "traumatic separation."

Childhood is "irretrievable": "All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity..." The vantage of the child is "anarchic... without preconceptions"; "no narrative...just the compelling immediacy of life..." Everything is astonishing to her, because she doesn't know what to expect of the world; anything could happen.

For the grown woman, the inner child is "a self which is unreachable except by means of such miraculously surviving moments of being: the alien within..." How does the grown adult retrieve the child's vantage, the immediacy of her seeing, "no thought at all here, just observation... the ability to focus entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon the here and now, without the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation.... the Wordsworthian vision of the physical world..."? How to see, as an adult, "without the accompanying internal din of mediation?"

Impressionistic, intuitive, and lucid, this was an inspiring work in memoir: "If you cannot revisit your own origins--reach out and touch them from time to time--you are for ever in some crucial sense untethered..."

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memories of the English novelist’s childhood in Egypt. What Lively offers is interesting, but I wanted more psychological insights.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been wanting to read Penelope Lively's childhood memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda, for such a long time, and it was thus one of my first choices on my Around the World in 80 Books challenge list. I have read and enjoyed several of Lively's novels in the past, and was keen to learn about the woman herself. Where better to start than with her own memories of her childhood, lived in comfort in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s?

Almost every review on the Penguin paperback edition which I purchased spoke of how 'emotive' Lively's memoir is. The Washington Times writes: 'She sees herself with clarity as both child and adult, a rare accomplishment indeed'. The Times believes her autobiography to be: 'Unsentimental yet so vividly evocative that you can smell the dung, the jacaranda and the oleander. It offers potent glimpses of British colonial life... The result is a wise, colourful and touching tale.'

In her modest preface, Lively writes: 'My childhood is no more - or less - interesting than anyone else's. It has two particularities. One is that I was a product of one society but was learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture. I grew up English, in Egypt. The other is that I was cared for by someone who was not my mother, and that it was a childhood which came to an abrupt and traumatic end.' Indeed, after living all of her early life in Egypt, and most of it just outside Cairo, Lively had to move to England after the Second World War, following the divorce of her parents; to the young Penelope, they are 'peripheral figures... for whom I felt an interested regard but no intense commitment'. Of course, her nurse, Lucy, who is variously described as 'the centre of my universe', is not part of her new life.

Lively's aim in Oleander, Jacaranda was to 'recover something of the anarchic vision of childhood - in so far as any of us can do such a thing - and use this as the vehicle for a reflection on the way in which children perceive.' Whilst she recognises that her child and adult selves are linked in many ways, she is able to separate them for the purposes of her memoir. She writes: 'As, writing this, I think with equal wonder of that irretrievable child, and of the eerie relationship between her mind and mine. She is myself, but a self which is unreachable except by means of such miraculously surviving moments of being: the action within.'

At the forefront of her exploration into childhood is the untrustworthy element of memory: 'One of the problems with this assemblage of slides in the head is that they cannot be sorted chronologically. All habits are geared towards the linear, the sequential, but memory refuses such orderliness.' With this constantly in her mind, Lively presents both her recollections, and the historical facts, of spending her formative years in such a turbulent and fascinating period, and a place so different from the England that she would later call home.

The descriptions in Oleander, Jacaranda are sumptuous. When talking of her daily routine, for example, she writes: 'The daily walks with Lucy are merged now into one single acute recollection, in which the whole thing hangs suspended in vibrant detail - the mimosa and the naked leaping children and the grey mud-caked threatening spectres of the gamooses. The pink and blue and lime green of children's clothes, the white of galabiyas, the black humps of squatting women.' Lively's observations of her young self feel both thorough and beautifully handled: 'No thought at all here, just observation - the young child's ability to focus entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon the here and now, without the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation. It is also the Wordsworthian version of the physical world: the splendour in the grass. And, especially, Virginia Woolf's creation of the child's eye view. A way of seeing that is almost lost in adult life.'

Throughout Oleander, Jacaranda, Lively explores our capacities for recollection. Her memoir is one which feels balanced and measured from its opening page. There are few moments of drama, or melodrama; things happen which make a great impression on Lively as a child, but the importance of the everyday shines through. Lively's voice is charming and beguiling. It is fascinating to see those moments where her childhood memories and adult eyes meet, particularly when Lively discusses her return to Egypt in the 1980s. Oleander, Jacaranda is honest, warm, and intelligent. Lively somehow manages to make a very specific period of her life feel timeless in her depictions, and in consequence, her memoir of childhood is a joy to read.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not what I expected, although the subtitle should have tipped me off. (A Childhood Perceived) Not as much about Egypt as I had hoped, but fascinating in other ways. It is a exploration of her personal past - clearly she has spent time, a lot of it, trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle. How did those events shape her into the person she is today. She slips into philosophical commentary, esp. on the nature of childhood memories, quite frequently. There is quite a lot of pain uncovered, but pleasures also. It was not a page turner, but a quiet reflective read. I might have had trouble hanging in there, except that I was reading it for a book group. Others also found it a slow read, with interesting moments. (Description of countryside, the fact that she was raised by and attached to Lucy, but not really her parents, description of homeschooling, the loneliness of her childhood and the time and space it afforded for imaginatively acting out all the classic mythological stories, old Alexandria, trip to Khartoum. But most of all, we found her re-entry into England at age 12 fascinating. She didn't understand the cultural cues at all and really struggled. Also with the cold, wet weather. It was not the nirvana she had been led to believe throughout her upbringing in Egypt.)

[Tom Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Oleander, jacaranda, oleander, jacaranda, oleander…”, a young Penelope murmuring to herself, peering out the window from the back seat of the car as the alternating trees whip past like so many telephone poles. Reminds me of my young self, back seat riding, being ever on the lookout for Burma Shave signs. Only I wasn’t living in Egypt of the 1930s and ‘40s. “Oleander, Jacaranda” is a pleasantly paced book, introspective, at times bewilderingly so, which is, most likely, just a difference of opinion.
Early on, (the book is only 133 pages – enough of a taste of Penelope for me to order an old copy of “Moon Tiger”) - I encounter the best new word – “gamoose”. Otherwise known as the water buffalo. A huge beast that terrified a very young Penelope. Beware the gamoose!
We get a few pages of Penelope questioning, how exactly is childhood recalled? Why do certain jpgs or brief gifs from our early years float to the top of our consciousness? A difficult question and PL offers no answer, only her ruminations. That bit I found it a tad tedious. PL is an author for children's literature which makes her troubled mind about memory understandable. For me, her actual memories give the book its interest. Not that I haven’t wondered myself why it is that certain odd bits of my life as a very small person are the ones that I remember. It’s all beyond my ken so I leave it at that and just enjoy the memories.
Most mirthful moment – I shared Penelope’s love for playing, “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic”, over and over. Unlike PL, I didn’t play my 78 on a gramophone. I gave it a rest when I played, “The Chocolate Cowboy” (“my hideout’s a chocolate bar”, by Roy Rogers. Until this moment, I did not know that my favorite cowboy was the singer). That record was a little yellow 45. Got to love YouTube for letting me hear those two records for the first time in over sixty-five years. That is the only “downside” to “Oleander, Jacacranda”; getting lost in one’s own childhood memories.
From page 66, a choice excerpt, “Every Christmas there was a carol service at the cathedral which was known as the Toy Service. The point of it was that all attending children should donate a toy, which would be given to the families of poor Copts…You could not give any old toy; it had to be something you were especially fond of…It was the element of sacrifice that mattered. And so, every year, I stumped sullenly up the aisle clutching some beloved hairless teddy or wall-eyed doll. I like to think that my present agnosticism is the product of informed and intelligent reflection, but I suspect that the seeds may have been sown back then, when I was coerced annually into irrational sacrifice to the strains of, “Away in a Manger.”
Around page seventy, I became enamored of “Oleander, Jacaranda”. The book is very much in tune with my own perception of being a kid. Here, I feel I must type out a paragraph from page seventy-two, “We (Penelope and her nanny, governess and de facto mother, Lucy) read the Bible from end to end. Well, not quite. Lucy had her own ideas about what was appropriate, so we skipped Leviticus and Numbers and Chronicles and indeed much of the Old Testament. Formally, at any rate – but I certainly dipped into it on my own, partly in search of that stuff about issues of blood and nakedness that had Lucy running for cover but also because I liked all those catalogues of names, those sonorous injunctions, that language. When I look at the King James Version now, it is resonantly familiar. Those rhythms and cadences are ingrained somewhere deep within me. By the time I was in my early twenties, I knew that I was an agnostic, which presumably – and ironically – stemmed at least in part from that early emphasis in training for responsibility in the acceptance or rejection of ideas. Intensive exposure to the King James Version did not make me a Christian, but it gave me a grounding in the English language for which I am profoundly grateful. And when I see the pallid replacements favoured by the Church of England today – the New International Bible and the deplorable Good News Bible – I am amazed and saddened.” Well said, Penelope, well said. I was steeped in the teachings of the Lutheran Church but after being graduated from Sunday School, at age eighteen, I never went back. The kicker was when my namesake Thomas was chewed out for doubting that Jesus was indeed the real Jesus, and this after his being warned about the need to beware of false prophets! Good grief. That and as a young lad listening to the, “be fruitful and multiply” only to be admonished for having lust in my heart! Say what? Now there’s a neat trick if you can pull it off. And that’s just for starters. Occam’s razor has it right, “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” All the Abrahamic religions have assumptions piled on top of assumptions. However, I always did like the King James Bible and was quite offended when the new, teeth grinding version found its way into the American Lutheran Church service. A facepalm moment for all-time.
Oleander, Jacaranda - It was all great stuff and left me wanting more – Curious to see how PL’s fiction turns out. Finding a good book is a happy event – finding a good author is even better.
COMIC CODA: from page 81 “…at some point (I) came across cartoon strips in newspapers or magazines and was hooked though also baffled by the evident sophistication. Popeye was an especial challenge: I couldn’t understand the running joke about spinach, which we did not have. And then there was Jane, the peroxide blonde with gargantuan bust and cleavage; I thought her immensely appealing but could not work out why.” Who was “Jane”? It took a bit of googling but I finally found her http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2009/... (this is but one reference). Ah, the girly comics, how well I remember them. How old was I? I’m not sure. Seven? Eight? Ten? Whatever age I was, I suffered no such confusion. I loved them. With the Sunday comics spread out on the floor I carefully read all the funnies. The Sunday comics were the apogee of the week. I especially loved the girly drawings. Alas, they have not been seen in the popular comics for many years. The drawings were of a type like LI’L ABNER, the Daisy Maes and Moonbeams, buxom and curvaceous, appeared in three or four strips. I’ve searched but cannot find them. Even then I was amazed at how powerfully such images could capture my young mind. Funny now, when I think of it. Later, during my teens, girls would frighten the daylights out of me. Then, I was sadly baffled and confounded.

[Wendy Greenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have long known about Lively's childhood in Egypt from reading Making It Up many years ago. This novel takes real episodes from her upbringing and traces an alternative path from the one actually taken. Amidst this is a version of what happened to her whilst living in Egypt during World War Two. This memoir puts the real perspective to those imaginings.

The attempt is to write from a child's eye view, observing herself and, whilst this is largely achieved, inevitably later understandings are crafted between the memories which helps contextualise a life being lived up close to the North African Desert War. She questions her recollections as she writes and as she re-visits the places on a return visit in the 1980s.

I enjoyed this ex-pat story which added a heavy dose of understanding to the friends I met at boarding school (in a different era) and what they had been pulled from to become rooted back in the motherland. Lively had little connection with her own mother, her companion/nanny/governess was Lucy who, despite the presence of her parents, acted as in loco parentis and it was her views that led Lively's learning.

I found the everyday of a child the most engaging parts. I understood why Lively chose to balance the telling with how unreliable memory can be, but I preferred the sections which weren't overlaid with her more measured, reflective voice.

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book several years ago and then I recently listened to it on CD. Don't expect a standard, chronological autobiography. This is a memoir of the author's first 12 years, living in pre-WWII Alexandria, Egypt, before she was sent to England to live with a relative. Memories of early childhood are often fragmentary and sometimes unreliable and Lively acknowledges and even enjoys that fact. Actually, a number of her books riff on the unreliability of memory and whether the accuracy of memories is all that important. The first time I read the book, I wasn't a parent. Now that I am and I'm homeschooling my son, I really enjoyed Lively's retelling of her own homeschool experience, being taught by her nanny (Lively's mother was, to say the least, an uninterested parent) using the British education materials that were sent to most "colonial" families living ex-pat lives at that time. It isn't a history of pre-war Egypt or a blow-by-blow account of Lively's life, but it is an intelligent and self-aware memoir of an interesting childhood, by an author who was a curious and observant little girl.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda evokes the author's unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and plants of the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, Oleander, Jacaranda follows the young Penelope from a visit to a fellaheen village to an afternoon at the elegant Gezira Sporting Club, one milieu as exotic to her as the other. Lively's memoir offers us the rare opportunity to accompany a gifted writer on a journey of exploration into the mysterious world of her own childhood."
~~back cover

I had a difficult time "getting into" this book, and in retrospect I think that was because the description of her life, and the Cairo she knew, was presented at the level of childish understanding. As they should have been, of course. I loved her descriptions of the Nile and the people who lived on its banks -- written froman adult perspective (Chapter 8.) So much more evocative. Perhaps this is my failure to be able to return myself to the condition of childhood.

It also struck me that the author would have done much better navigating & surviving the differences between cultures had she been able to assess them with an anthropologist's eye -- which she couldn't have had, since to be British was the acme and everything else terribly lacking. Was she lucky to have had Lucy, who wasn't capable of completely submerging her in British socialmores? Or unlucky?

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

This prize-winning novelist looks back on her childhood in Egypt in the 1930s through WWII, focusing on vignettes of childhood memory that she then puts in context from her adult perspective. On one level it concerns the life of colonizers among (and well separated from) the colonized. On another it’s about the difference between a child’s and an adult’s perceptions. She was an only child raised by a beloved nanny until she was 12 — her mother had no interest in children and very little to do with her at all, her father was busy and distant though he seems to have had more affection for her. After her parents divorce she is cared for by her grandmothers in England and the nanny moves on to another family which was extremely traumatic for the girl-she-was though the author doesn’t say too much about it. She truly lost the emotional center of her life. I think the rather strange distance between the author and her child self, an almost clinical or third-person approach, may be because that emotional break was so traumatic that she distanced herself from the pre-England child and almost became a new person that incorporated that experience and memories but finds it too painful to identify too closely with her child self emotionally.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Encountering a narrative from Penelope Lively is like coming home to an old friend. Lively's passion for history and its implications on the present is a constant driving force behind her writing, and I was as intrigued as ever by this spellbinding idea. Oleander, Jacaranda is interesting in that it is a personal account of Lively's early childhood in Egypt, and as a Lively-admirer I've been looking forward to reading this for quite some time. I loved the evocative Egypt that she portrayed in Moon Tiger and though Oleander, Jacaranda brings us a very different incarnation of the country, her ability to manifest its dust and salt in the pages of her book is just as powerful.

Another wonderful element of this book was the effusive, living-breathing Lucy. Her character was so well-drawn, and so respectfully rendered that I feel as if I know her.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Booker prize-winning author Penelope Lively lived in Egypt as a child during the 1930s and 1940s until the age of twelve. In this memoir, Lively reflects on her time in Egypt during the Second World War, with her devoted English governess Lucy, and tries to “recover something of the anarchic vision of childhood”.

This is not a chronological memoir, but rather like flicking through an old photo album with a friend describing snippets of tales of past experiences. I loved Lively’s conversational style and her ability to describe the child’s view of the world from adulthood. Whether she is talking about a settee she was not allowed to sit on, or children she could attend Brownies with but not invite over for tea, Lively reflects with great clarity through two lenses: the past child and the present adult. An interesting memoir of an exciting time and place.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Penelope Lively would make a great dinner guest. She grew up in Egypt although she is English by nationality and moved back to England after WWII. I really liked her novel, Moon Tiger and this is the second book I have read about her life and family. She has seen parts of the world that really do not exist any more.

Lively's books (those I have read) are quiet books, when reading you really need to pay attention. She has lots to tell you about the world and her perspective on it. I feel like I know now what it was like to be a child in Egypt in the 30's and 40's.

The narrator of the talking book is excellent - I now have her voice in my head as Lively's. I'll never know if she is even close

[Sandie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Penelope Lively is British and has written many books, mostly fiction, and some for children. This one is a memoir of her growing up in the Cairo Egypt in LShe spends a lot of time with her Nanny, Lucy, who only gets 1/2 day & sometimes one evening off a week and who shares a bedroom with her. Lucy is also her educator, as there are no schools for her. Eventually she returns to post-war Britain,, which is cold and where everything is rationed.

She writes well, and is able to picture her earlier life through the eyes of a child, without letting too much adult sensibility get in, and without being smarmy. An interesting read. Contains fuzzy black and white photos.

[Jolene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was definitely an interesting read. I wavered at first on whether or not I was enjoying it. Lively seems to analyze things quite a bit at the beginning, which is a bit of a turn-off. However, if you stick with it, it gets better. I enjoyed the sort of conversational feel that the book has, as she discusses things looking back. It was short, and historically interesting as well. It made for a nice Christmas break read!

[Ann Costello · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this first volume of Lively's memoirs after enjoying her recent "Dancing Fish and Ammonites". This book concerns memory and how it affects our personal autobiography. To illustrate, she writes beautifully about her unusual childhood in Egypt before and during World War II. There were interesting people, animals, birds, and the Nile. There was also a loving portrait of her governess, her de facto mother. Short and memorable.

[Larisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've actually read this twice now--once in my 20s, once in my 40s. It's part memoir, part an investigation of how memory and childhood awareness develops. As such, it is both a personal and objective reflection of how this British author grew up in Egypt in the late 1930s/early 1940s and the harsh adjustment to life in England when both WWII and her parents' divorce forced her to move to her "home" country that felt nothing like home.

[Jan Bailey · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting account of Penelope Lively's early years in Egypt. She tries valiantly to express her childhood as she experienced it rather than through adult eyes, but it doesn't always make for the best read. There is humour and sadness. The divorce and consequent return to England to start a new chapter at boarding school and under the care of 2 grandmothers. The parting from her nanny must have been especially painful too.

[Tommie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Delightfully more self-aware than I was expecting (especially after reading another Egypt memoir (Harem Years) from a privileged author who just ignored the whole having slaves as a noteworthy concern bit), but it suggest from my problem with a lot of memoirs which is to say there isn't such a cohesive narrative and although the anecdotes probably make her a delightful conversationalist, it doesn't make for such a gripping book.