A Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively – Book Group report and #20BooksofSummer2025 -No 2 – AnnaBookBel
When our Book Group, which is picking flora or fauna related titles at the moment, didn’t pull this one out of the hat for ‘J’, we recycled it for ‘O’!
Published in 1994, Lively’s memoir centres on her childhood in Egypt in the 1930s. Her father worked for an Egyptian bank in Cairo; her mother socialised, they lived outside Cairo in small town now gobbled up by the city’s expansion. Young Penelope was left in the care of Nanny Lucy, who stayed with her until her return to England in 1945 when Penelope was twelve, and shortly went off to boarding school. It was an isolated childhood with the class system ensuring that she rarely had any ‘suitable’ playmates.
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 accordance with the teachings of one culture but surrounded by all the signals of another. Egypt was my home, and all that I knew, but I realized that in some perverse way I was not truly a part of it.
A good part of our discussions centred around Penelope’s mostly absent parents. Her father seems to have been jolly on occasion, but was always at work. Her mother just ignored the poor girl – indeed she ran off with another man – leading to her parents’ eventual divorce, something more stigmatising than staying separated. Even once she reached England, and was shunted between grandmothers for the next few years during the holidays, there was no mention of her parents, her father who’d been seconded to the Khartoum branch for a while, was meant to be following her to England in a matter of months – but we never hear when he arrived. We questioned whether we’d been too hard on her parents – we decided no, but would give the father some leeway.
Meanwhile, Penelope did have a surrogate mother in Lucy, with whom she stayed in contact until her death, after Lucy moved on to another family – her talents being in demand. Lucy was everything to Penelope, she loved her very much, and they did nearly everything together – including lessons. All the English schools were in Cairo and transport was an issue, so Lucy found the Parents National Education Union – a homeschooling organisation set up in the 1890s (which lasted until 1984). Together they navigated through its lesson plans – often subsituting books at hand for those recommended, and learning the maths together. It was fascinating to read about 1930s lesson plans!
Interspersed throughout the novel, Lively comments on the differences between childhood and adult perception of events and places. We didn’t feel that these ruminations added much to the memoir. Adult hindsight being naturally different to childish innocence. Indeed her innocence came over clearly, isolated child that she was, and Lively is able to remember how she felt as a child.
The whole, however, was a little bland. Although a good thing, young Penelope’s life was not dramatic. The drama of her parents split happened off-stage as it were, and she, having Lucy, wasn’t really involved until the plan to return to England as the war ended happened. Indeed, WWII didn’t seem to have touched their lives in Egypt much. All in all, this memoir did provoke a really good discussion, particularly about the way things were done back then if you were of a high enough class, and being short at 180 pages in the hardback, made it a good book group read.
Source: Own copy. Viking hardback 1994, 180 pages. BUY from Blackwell’s (Penguin Mod Classics) via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)
