Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

Not for me the cool level tone of dispassionate narration. Perhaps I should write like the scribes of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, saying in the same breath that an archbishop passed away, a synod was held, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. Why not, after all? Beliefs are relative.

By the time we were both at university Mother was well into her retirement from history. She had drawn south Dorset around her like a shawl and blocked out as many aspects of our times as she could.

Caesar, contemplating the Sussex coast. Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Captain Cook … all those mundane travellers preoccupied with personal gain or seized by congenital restlessness, studying compasses and dealing with the natives while they make themselves immortal.

How could you envisage slavery and secession, the Gold Rush, the Alamo, Transcendentalism, Hollywood, the Model T Ford, Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe McCarthy? Vietnam. Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake. You were worried about God, the climate, the Indians, and those querulous speculators back in London.

Those who struggle through that fearful first winter do their best to interfere with nature. You fell trees by the thousand; you manure your fields with herrings, improbably, arranging them heads up in little mounds of earth like Cornish stargazy pies; you are as historically calamitous for the beaver and the otter as for the Wampanaug and the Narragansett. You affected the lives of the periwinkle and the quahaug, quiet clean-living sea-creatures who found themselves turned into money, polished and drilled to become wampum, Indian hard currency in the fur trade. The price of beaver on the London market determined the value of wampum; an agreeably bizarre economic circumstance – that a hat worn under a rainy Middlesex sky should be a matter of life and death for sea-shells creeping in the shallows of Cape Cod.

She amused and intrigued me – this small unreachable alien creature locked in her amoral pre-literate condition with no knowledge of past or future, free of everything, in a state of grace. I wanted to know how it felt. I would question her, craftily, with adult sophistry, with the backing of Freud and Jung and centuries of perception and opinion. And she would slip away from me, impervious, equipped with her own powers of evasion, with Indian lore, with techniques of camouflage.

a husband generally referred to as a prominent local estate agent and in my view a ripe example of British degeneracy between the Age of Macmillan and the Age of Thatcher. To these have we sunk.

So how am I to present Him – this invisible all-pervasive catalyst? How am I to suggest to my reader (no informed enlightened reader – a visitor from outer space, let us say) the extraordinary fact that for much of recorded time most people have been prepared to believe in the presidency over all things of an indefinable unassuageable Power?

It is in these words that reality survives. The snow, the twenty degrees below zero temperatures of the winter of 1941; the Russian prisoners herded into open-air pens and left till they died of either cold or starvation; the furnace of Stalingrad; the thirty destroyed cities, the seven million slaughtered horses, the seventeen million cattle, the twenty million pigs. And beyond the words the images: the skeletal buildings pared by fire to chimney stacks and naked walls; the bodies chewed by frost; the screaming faces of wounded men. This is the record; this is what history comes down to in the end; this is the language of war.

This is a bang-up-to-date nineteen-forty-one medieval urban scene; a structured world in which you can see who everyone is. Those are two Sephardic Jewish ladies and that is a Sikh officer and there is a tribe of three from the home counties. That man knows how to fly an aeroplane and that one is trained to command tanks and that girl knows how to dress a wound. And over there if I am not mistaken is this chap who might wangle me a ride up to the front if I play it right.

Statistically, afterworlds – be they Christian, Greek, Pharaonic – must be populated almost entirely by children. Infants, toddlers. A terrible acreage of swaddled bundles, of little potbellied stick-limbed creatures, of wizened malformed dwarfs. With, prowling among them, a few bearded patriarchs, a scattering of old women, and a regiment of forty year olds. I see it as a scene by Hieronymus Bosch. There would be dragons, too, and devils with pitchforks and monstrous winged creatures. No angels; no heavenly choirs.

The aftermath of war is disorder. An example, incidentally, of the misuse of language: aftermath is a decent agricultural term, it has a precise meaning – the aftermath is the second crop of grass which appears after the mowing of the first. The aftermath of war should, correctly, be another war; it usually is.

For a nation, it is a great historical convenience to have edges. Islands do disproportionately well. I remember thinking about this when I first saw the cliffs of Dover again in 1945. There they were, those cliffs, conjuring up Shakespeare, the dry squeak of chalk on school blackboards and that song about bluebirds. They had barbed wire at their feet and pill-boxes on their tops.

She has taught herself to cook, brave Mother, since the defection of the last of the village helps. Claudia gave her Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking for Christmas which was received politely but without enthusiam; no coq au vin or quiche lorraine has appeared on the table at Sturminster Newton.