Free Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively Page A

shelters and have to lie and wait to be bombed. They don’t matter so much as the children, of course, but something might be done . . . The
Evening Standard
carried a front page article on how the old and infirm are able to be evacuated, but are not availing themselves of the opportunity. It is cruel as of course it is entirely untrue and merely raises their hopes. The poor old things are dying to go in hundreds of cases.”
    “Exciting . . .” she says, more than once. And I imagine that in an eerie way it was, to a young woman whose life hitherto had been led in the rural tranquility of west Somerset. The experience affected her deeply; not only did it provoke an artistic response, but the revelation of urban poverty turned her into a lifelong socialist. She voted Labour thereafter, to the bewilderment of my grandmother, an entrenched conservative.
    The blitz – the war in general – has taken on a sepia quality today, and, indeed, a sense of romance has taken hold. You don’t get any fictional slant on the 1940s – on the page or onscreen – in which young love does not take center stage. For many, those years probably did have that flavor; certainly, hasty wartime marriages were a feature. I was the wrong age for the war, I realize; a child is a bystander. Ten years older, and you stood a good chance of getting killed, or you might have the time of your life.
    By 1945 I was no longer a child, perched now on that perilous interface between childhood and adult life. There weren’t teenagers back then; the status had not been invented. We were apprentice adults, very much on sufferance; our clothes were bought to last, we must not smoke or drink or go to restrictedfilms, we must behave ourselves and mark time until admitted to the real world. Most of us left school at fifteen, and were pitched into adult work; relatively few made their way into the privileged holding-pen of student life.
    My university years seem to me now to have been lived in a sort of mindless trance. Not in an academic sense – I was reading history, and I know that those reading years have colored my thinking ever since – but in absence of response to what was going on in the world. This was the early 1950s; plenty was going on, but it was not a time of student activism. Membership of the Oxford Union – the student debating society – was open to men only; those with political ambitions spoke there, and jockeyed for office. I have a vague memory of Michael Heseltine, a youth with floppy golden hair, and impeccably cut suits at a period when most male students wore gray flannels and duffel coats. I must have voted for the first time, but I don’t remember the event.
    The autumn of 1956 woke me up. The Suez crisis. I was in Oxford still, working as research assistant by then to a Fellow of St. Antony’s College. St. Antony’s was – is – a graduate college, specializing then in Middle Eastern and Soviet studies. It was international, a hotbed of young intellectuals. The group with which I became friendly included Americans, a Frenchman, an Israeli, a German, and Jack Lively, from Newcastle, my soon-to-be husband, who had come over from Cambridge to a research fellowship at the college. The unfolding drama of Suez, and the growing possibility of British/French intervention after Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal, polarized opinion throughout the country; Oxford was in a ferment of discussion, with those opposed to Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s increasingly belligerent stance in a majority. Jack, along with a colleague at St. Antony’s, set about a campaign to coordinate a response by senior members of the university, immediately after the first bombing raids on Cairo. I remember cycling round from college to college delivering personal letters summoning sympathizers to a meeting at which a statement was drafted, signed by three hundred and fifty-five members of Senior Common Rooms and ten heads of colleges, led by Alan