NONFICTION - April 10, 1994

OLEANDER, JACARANDA: A Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively. HarperCollins: $20; 160 pp.) Lively believes that the experience of childhood is “irretrievable” ;all that remains is a “headful of brilliantly frozen moments.” Born in Cairo in 1933, she was shipped back to England in the last year of the Second World War, losing her mother to divorce and her beloved nanny in the process. Aside from the fact that the frozen moments in this memoir sparkle beautifully, the glue that holds them together is the clear connection we as readers are able to make between Lively’s post-Victorian/Edwardian upbringing, in which the motivations and rationalizations used by adults for their actions are completely hidden from their children, and what I take to be her sincere puzzlement over the irretrievability of childhood. Everything about her childhood is shrouded in a mystery created by convention. Relationships, like those between servants and children are “rich with ambiguities.” “I am a hardheaded woman nowadays,” writes Lively, in a passage describing her memory of a particular tree. “Nevertheless, there lurks within me somewhere the spirit of a person who once quite naturally and unquestioningly communed with a thirty-foot eucalyptus tree.” She does not yearn, in these pages, for her inner child, but revels in what she calls the “discovery of concealed experience.” To the modern American reader, this may be the most exotic thing about “Oleander, Jacaranda.”