Olivia Manning - Early Years

Early Years

Olivia Manning was born in North End, Portsmouth on 2 March 1908. Her father, Oliver Manning, was a naval officer who rose from naval trainee to lieutenant-commander despite a lack of formal schooling. At the age of 45, while visiting the port of Belfast, he met Olivia Morrow, a publican's daughter fourteen years his junior; they married less than a month later in December 1904, in the Presbyterian church in her home town of Bangor, County Down.

Manning adored her lively, handsome, womanising father who entertained others by singing Gilbert and Sullivan and reciting poetry he had memorised during long sea voyages. In contrast, her mother was bossy and domineering, with a "mind as rigid as cast-iron", and there were constant marital disputes. The initially warm relationship between mother and daughter became strained after the birth of Manning's brother Oliver in 1913; delicate and frequently ill, he was the centre of his mother's attention, much to the displeasure of Manning, who made several childish attempts to harm him. This unhappy, insecure childhood left a lasting mark on her work and personality.

Manning was educated privately at a small dame school before moving to the north of Ireland in 1916, the first of several extended periods spent there while her father was at sea. In Bangor she attended Bangor Presbyterian School, and while in Portsmouth Lyndon House School, and subsequently Portsmouth Grammar School, developing, as she recalled, "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". Schoolmates described her as shy and prone to tantrums; her tendency to tell boastful tall-tales about her family led to ostracism by her peers. Supported by her father, Manning read and wrote extensively, preferring novels, especially those by H. Rider Haggard. Her mother discouraged such pursuits, and confiscated material she thought unsuitable; when she found her daughter reading the Times Literary Supplement she scolded that "young men do not like women who read papers like that", and that Manning should focus on marketable job skills, such as typing.

Indeed, when financial circumstances forced Manning to leave school at sixteen, she worked as a typist, and spent some time as a junior in a beauty salon. A talented artist, she took evening classes at the Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, where a fellow student described her as intellectual and aloof. In May 1928, she had a painting selected for an exhibition at Southsea, and was subsequently offered a one woman show of her works. Manning seemed to be poised for a career as an artist, but she had meanwhile continued her interest in literature, and at the age of twenty determined instead to be writer. Her artist's eye is apparent in her later intense descriptions of landscapes.