Penelope Lively thought she was done with short stories, when to her surprise an idea popped into her head. She had recently completed “Ammonites and Leaping Fish”, a book about memory and ageing that she refers to as “the view from 80”, when she went to an exhibition about Pompeii with her son-in-law.
The pair share an interest in birds, and were going around the British Museum in London spotting them in Roman frescoes. One puzzled them, and a curator was called to identify the large, long-legged wetland fowl as a purple swamphen — the creature that supplies the title for Lively’s latest book, “The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories” (Fig Tree).
“I thought the form had left me completely. I hadn’t written any for almost 20 years,” Lively explains as we talk in front of another bird picture — this one painted in oils by her aunt Rachel Reckitt — on the wall of her north-London sitting room. “I thought I’d like to get back to fiction, but a novel is like hacking at the rock face and I didn’t feel like hacking at the rock face. Then a story came, and another, and so forth — they are so totally unpredictable. The prime thing is the idea, that’s the joy of the short story.”
Lively’s career began in the 1970s in the snatched hours before her children got home from primary school in Swansea, and reached the twin peaks of the Carnegie medal for her children’s book “The Ghost of Thomas Kempe” in 1973, and the Booker prize for her adult novel “Moon Tiger” in 1987. With more than 30 books to her name, she remains the only author to have won both awards, and in 2012 was made a dame of the British empire.
Her new collection includes a couple of ghost stories but is mostly concerned with character, relationships and contrasting points of view: several stories unpick marriages or partnerships, including one, “A Biography”, which reveals two lost babies to be the sad secret buried in the past of a pioneering TV historian. “It’s the one thing you’re constantly confronted with: other people’s relationships, and how wrong you can be about them too,” Lively says. “I don’t think a relationship is always very visible on the surface. I think they can appear to be quite otherwise than they are.”
Lively’s own marriage lasted 41 years, until her husband Jack died aged 69 in 1998. They married when she was 24, having emerged from Oxford University with a history degree and “no career plan whatsoever”, and she had two babies as Jack took his first steps in academia. Determined to look after her children after her own experience of being cared for almost exclusively by a nanny, she says she knew “something had to be done about a job as soon as the bottom one went to primary school”.
The obvious choice was teaching but Lively, though clever, had not been a good student and was reluctant to take any more courses. She decided to try writing and after a few attempts found her register: comic and poignant; drawing on the classic tradition of English children’s stories she had grown up with, but giving it a sharp contemporary twist. “The Ghost of Thomas Kempe”, in which a home counties boy is adopted by a poltergeist, was an instant classic, and took its place on the shelf of postwar English children’s novels alongside books by Philippa Pearce, Susan Cooper, Leon Garfield and others.
Lively names “Thomas Kempe” when asked to name a favourite among her books. “It’s about the power of memory, but for goodness’ sake I don’t want any child to come away from it thinking that,” she says. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently began work on a stage version.
By contrast her other most famous title, “Moon Tiger”, which used the wartime Egypt of her childhood as the backdrop for a love story between a war correspondent and an army officer, “was for a while very definitely my unfavourite book, I got very unfond of it,” she says, recalling the days when she travelled hither and thither delivering workshops, talks and lectures at the behest of the British Council and her publishers — a Booker prize-winner who took the responsibilities of a literary ambassador seriously.
One of the pleasures of old age, says Lively, is knowing she will never see Heathrow again.
Launch parties were never her thing — she says they make any bad reviews even more embarrassing — but in other respects she embraced the role of the professional writer. Fiction was her career, chosen after a childhood and early adulthood in which books were her constant companions. “From about four, I can actually remember the joy of suddenly realising that I could read, that these squiggles on a page were beginning to make sense,” she says. “I was always reading while feeding a baby, reading while stirring things at the stove, and going once a week to the public library with books at one end of the pram and the children in the other.”
She is shocked by the political turmoil of the last year, by the vote for Brexit and the decline in support for the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties she has always backed, and she misses her husband, a political theorist and vigorous sparring partner for the less combative Penelope (never Penny). “I’m always wanting to say to him, ‘Now look what’s happened, what do you think of this?’” she says. “It’s funny but the older I get, the more important it seems to become: I really need to know what’s going on. I’ve noticed some of my contemporaries are not taking much interest [in current affairs], but for some reason I am.”
She has got used to solitude, and agrees that life as an only child may have helped prepare her for it, but she dreams about her husband all the time: “There’s always a companion figure, who sometimes is recognisably him, and other times not, but I sort of know it is him, and our behaviour is as it would have been in life. Sometimes I’m cross and we’re having a row, and often he does this thing which a psychologist would have fun with: he disappears. We’re somewhere together, then suddenly he’s not there and I’m hunting for him.”
In defiance of the fashion for memoirs that deal explicitly with bereavement in its rawest, most agonising forms, Lively has chosen not to analyse her own darkest hours in public. “I don’t want to go into the whole black business of grief,” she wrote in one article about widowhood.
Similarly, she has never written in any detail about the other bleakest passage in her life — the period when, as a young teenager, she was sent from Cairo back to England following her parents’ divorce, and shuttled between two grandmothers and a boarding school she describes as “appalling”. In her memoir “Oleander, Jacaranda”, which Lively began when her first grandchild was born, she touched on this episode. Now, she says that with hindsight she recognises both that she was bullied, and that staff knew what was going on but failed to protect her. But when the letters she wrote during those years were returned to her, by her nanny-turned-governess Lucy Williams, the woman who had been “more than a mother to her”, Lively read them once and destroyed them. They were heartbroken letters from a girl separated from everything she knew: the mother who remarried and did not see her again for two years, the father still abroad, the country she had grown up in and Lucy, the person she loved most and who now worked for another family.
“American audiences ask the sort of questions I sometimes think English audiences would like to ask but don’t dare to,” Lively replies when I ask how she recovered. “I remember when I toured with that book, a man said, ‘You sound as though you’ve had a really screwed up sort of life at points, how come you seem to be a perfectly ordinary person?’ There’s no answer to that, really.”
One answer might be that she was an unusually resourceful person. When I put this to her, Lively says she can remember thinking, about halfway through her time at boarding school, that she would never again be so unhappy. “That was quite a mature thing to be thinking because it implied I would get through it,” she adds, “and I was right.”
A further consequence of her displacement was what Lively describes as a tin ear for the British class system. A child with few friends, who was educated in suburban Cairo according to a home-schooling system designed for expats, she vividly recalls the experience of meeting another girl on a visit to her father in Khartoum, and being made to understand that the friendship was unsuitable. It is easy to see how, back in England at her games-obsessed boarding school, such social clumsiness made her vulnerable, but in the long run Lively thinks it helped her: “It put me slightly outside that framework of acceptance of the social rigidities of the time, and enabled me to see how it was. I married somebody from the northern working class, I’m from the southern gentry and that wasn’t in any sense a problem.”
The gradations of English class, and the way that individuals negotiate these, is a recurring theme in her fiction.
William Golding is the novelist Lively most admires, while the writer Jane Gardam is among her close friends, but she doesn’t feel part of a distinct group of British writers, and believes such labels were less prevalent before “Granta” magazine published its first “best of young British writers” list in 1983.
Lively says she “never expected to turn up my toes” in London, seeing herself as a country girl who might have become a gardener or an archaeologist had her life played out differently. Her husband moved to Sussex university from Swansea, and even after the couple bought their first London house in 1980 they spent much of their time in another home in rural Oxfordshire. But she gave it up when she was widowed. “You can’t live in two houses when there’s only one of you.” Lively’s mother and grandmother both lived into their 90s and she looked after her mother, who she believes was sorry in her old age for their earlier separation. But physically well apart from a long-standing back problem, Lively says she has “no wish to compete” with their longevity. She hopes the RCS won’t take too long getting “The Ghost of Thomas Kempe” ready for the stage. “I’m 83, and I want to be here to see it.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
