From the Author

Abstract

From the Author Penelope Lively I did not conceive "The Mozambique Channel" as an isolated short story. This story is part of a larger work of fiction called Making It Up that takes those moments in my life when a decision was made and looks at what might have happened had a different decision been made, a sort of "garden of forking paths." It is fiction but it has elements of nonfi ction and memoir. Originally the book was to be named Confabulation, but my publishers would not agree to it so now it's called Making It Up. It is a shame because "confabulation" is a wonderful, technical word describing people whose memories are disturbed in some way, either by old age or something else, and so they confabulate to fill in the blanks. The bookends in this story are my own voice, my real memories. Those parts are me, nonfiction, the rest is more or less fiction, my filling in the blanks. What attracted me to this story, and the project as a whole, was the way individual lives are directed by public events in which we think we make choices but circumstance overrules us. Life is an extraordinary marriage of choice and contingency. And so I wanted the story to reflect this extraordinary way in which the war was a collision of private and public, where lives were invaded by the war. Reading about the war you get this very vivid sense of people's intense private lives being lived out against this backdrop of the five years of the war. I was also interested in the absence of reality, the absence of accepting what was going to happen. I remember when I was seven or eight and it looked as though Egypt was going to fall to the Germans. When you read the histories now, with the benefit of hindsight, it was fairly expected that Rommel would sweep through Egypt onto the oilfields of Romania, and yet I have no recollection of there being any sense at the time that this might happen. All we thought was that things would be all right in the end. Th e fi ctional families in the story are really not too bothered about this at all; they treat it like a sort of grand holiday. That's my recollection of Cairo during the war, people were having a fine old time. The British community was just having a fine old time, [End Page 42] perhaps because they were all so very young. All of the principal players were between twenty and thirty, excepting the generals, who were in their forties. It was a young community, and they were having a whale of a time, spending the evenings in the nightclubs, and then the next day they'd go off into the desert, where they were maybe going to be shot. The British upper class were viewing this as a marvelous piece of travel; they were getting to places they had never been to before, to Palestine and the Middle East. This is part of Shirley's tragedy. She has become a part of no world; she has been digested into this upper class world and yet she is not comfortable there, but she is also no longer at home with her family. She is not exactly a servant. She is deracinated. She bridges these worlds just as she bridges the children's world from the adult. And the adults in this story are rather foolish and frivolous, mere children themselves. And this leaves Shirley to be the voice of rationality and decency. She is matter of fact, unimaginative. She isn't particularly perceptive or thoughtful, except that there is sort of glimmering of realization that things might be different somehow. And through it all she behaves decently. Shirley is such a tragic character in so many ways. In her relationship with Alan Baker, which goes against the expectations that every soldier was looking out for a bit of romance and sex where he could get it. But Alan is a decent sort, and Shirley recognizes this. It is supposed to be a love story, and the tragedy is that...