by M. M. Kaye
I have a tape-recording of Mother telling me that story; though in such a muddled, wavering and croaky voice that one has to listen very carefully to catch what she is saying; and towards the end she goes off at a tangent on to quite another story: one that I never heard from Tacklow and that I have never been able to sort out. A tale about some officer who should have been on guard duty somewhere else and would be court-martialled for dereliction of duty if he failed to turn up on time — which, for some reason (an unacceptable one, obviously) he was not going to be able to do. Tacklow had apparently come to the rescue by offering to stand in for him, and did so by riding ventre à terre from Jhelum to wherever, all through the night like another Paul Revere, to save a fellow officer’s bacon. Mother says on that tape that she always thought that was ‘such a marvellous thing for him to have done’. But she can’t recall anything more than him doing it; ‘for a friend’. It certainly sounds a very dashing exploit for a man of forty who was never a particularly good horseman anyway.
A month or so before the Playfair episode, Tacklow, faced with the prospect of having to send his wife and baby to some hill station for the coming hot weather, had done a number of anxious sums on the backs of envelopes and decided that if he sold part of his cherished stamp collection (he was a keen philatelist and remained hooked on stamps to the end of his days), he could just afford to send them instead to North China to stay with the Brysons in a house that the Dadski had recently acquired at Pei-tai-ho, and let Mother show them their first grandchild. She could stay there for six months and he himself would join them there later, taking four months’ leave, of which two would be spent on the outward and return voyages. This would allow him two with his wife and son at Pei-tai-ho and enable him to bring them back with him.
Mother had been wildly excited at the prospect of showing off ‘Willie’ to his grandparents and his bevy of uncles and aunts. Her only regret was that Tacklow would not be able to accompany them on the outward voyage. But then his leave did not begin until 1 June, and apart from May being the hottest and nastiest month of the hot weather, there were no electric fans, fridges or air-conditioning in those days; nor did any bungalow boast electric lights; it was oil lamps or candles. In the circumstances, Tacklow thought it best to get the long, dusty, sweltering train journey across India to Calcutta over before the temperature soared too high, so the stamps were sold and the passages booked for the middle of April. An ‘experienced travelling ayah’ was engaged to accompany Mother as far as Tientsin to help her look after her nine-month-old baby, and Tacklow obtained his Colonel’s permission to go with them to see that ‘Daisy and the little imp’ got safely aboard ship.
On the evening before they left Jhelum the two of them took their ‘little imp’ for a last airing; but as she pushed the pram along the familiar Cantonment roads and they talked of the voyage that lay ahead and the fun they would have when he joined her at Pei-tai-ho, Mother was seized by a sudden premonition. ‘You won’t come!’ she said, on the verge of tears. ‘Something will happen to stop you coming. I know it will! I’m sure of it — you won’t come!’ Tacklow dried her eyes and told her not to be silly; of course he would come! His leave had been granted and his passage was booked, so there was no need for her to worry. But she could not shake off the conviction that he would not be able to join her in Pei-tai-ho after all, and in spite of anything he could say to the contrary she was still tearfully convinced that she was right when a week later she waved goodbye to him in Calcutta from the deck of the ship that was to take her to China.
This seems to have been the only time in her life when Mother experienced a definite foreknowledge of the future. For she was right. Tacklow, arriving back alone in Jhelum, tired and depressed after the heat and discomfort of the long return journey across India from Calcutta, walked into his bungalow and saw, lying on the hall table waiting for him, a telegram from Army Headquarters saying that he had been transferred to GHQ Simla with the rank of Major and would he please report there immediately.
It was that Playfair business, of course. Anyone who possessed an outstanding talent — even if it was only a wife who could sing! — was sooner or later summoned up to Simla, where they collected talent. For Simla, as any reader of Rudyard Kipling will know, was in those days the summer capital of India to which the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab, together with their respective wives and families, staffs, attendants and hangers-on, retreated to escape from the rigours of the hot weather. And during those six months in which the plains lay scorching in the relentless heat, the entire subcontinent was virtually ruled from that one small town among the pines. Army Headquarters occupied large blocks of offices on the steep hillside below the Mall; there were clubs, shops and churches, a theatre and a racecourse, and any number of hotels and boarding-houses as well as innumerable gimcrack tin-roofed and wooden-walled dwellings that were either privately owned or else hired for the season by rich Indians, British officials or wives and children taking refuge from the heat. Grass-widows, mothers with marriageable daughters, and young men on leave, flocked to it just to have a good time. It was the best-known and most popular hill station in India, and to be posted there was the height of many a man’s ambition, since it was regarded as the gateway to promotion.
The homes of the nobility and gentry, Indian and British, were dotted among the pines and deodars* on the heights, while the town itself poured down the hillside in a wide cataract of flimsy wooden walls and crowded roof-tops of corrugated tin. Kipling said that it climbed up; but since I saw it first from above, to me it always pours down. Here is the way he saw the purely Indian part of the city, known as the Lower Simla Bazaar, in 1887, the year that his Plain Tales from the Hills was published. And this is how he was to describe it many years later in that retrospective love-letter to India, Kim:
… the crowded rabbit-warren that climbs up from the valley to the Town Hall at an angle of forty-five. A man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India’s summer capital; so cunningly does verandah communicate with verandah, alley-way with alley-way, and bolt-hole with bolt-hole. Here live those who minister to the wants of the glad city — jhampanis to pull the pretty ladies’ rickshaws by night and gamble till the dawn; grocers, oil-sellers, curio-vendors, firewood-dealers, priests, pickpockets and native employees of the Government. Here are discussed by courtesans the things which are supposed to be the profoundest secrets of the India Council; and here gather all the sub-sub-agents of half the Native States.
And here is his description of the Mall, in —
… the mysterious dusk, full of the noises of the city below the hillside, and the breath of a cool wind in deodar-crowned Jakko, shouldering the stars. The houselights, scattered on every level, made, as it were, a double firmament. Some were fixed. Others belonged to the rickshaws of the careless open-spoken English folk, going out to dinner.
That’s Simla — that was. And probably still is! Though ‘the careless open-spoken English folk’ have gone long ago.
The Commander-in-Chief, India, at the time that my father deciphered the Playfair, was none other than Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, and an order from his Army Headquarters in Simla was not to be disobeyed. Or even questioned. Not that Tacklow would have considered doing either, for it meant an immediate step upward in rank and a consequent rise in pay, and he knew that Mother would love to spend a season or two in a hill station that had the reputation of being the gayest city in India (gay in the old-fashioned sense of that once delightful word, I hasten to add). How could he have guessed that his desire to try his hand at proving that the Playfair could and had been broken might lead to this? He ought to have known that he hadn’t heard the last of it. But Simla — ! If only that telegram had arrived a few days earlier it would have solved all their problems. The three of them could have gone up together to the cool air of the hills and there would have been no need for him to ship Daisy and the ‘little imp’ off to China alone, for
there would be proper accommodation for them in Simla — perhaps even a house of their own. And they would all have been together…
Tacklow thought seriously of sending a cable to Penang, which would be their first port of call, telling Mother to come back. But then what if it should prove difficult to get a return passage to India for herself and her son (not forgetting the ‘experienced travelling ayah’, who rejoiced in the unforgettable name of Sarah Nicodemus)? They might have to stay in Penang for days. Even weeks! Besides, her mother had not been too well of late and who knew, apart from God, when there would be another opportunity for Isabella to see her first grandchild, or her darling Daisy again? Perhaps not for years. He spent a sleepless night going over all the pros and cons of the problem and then decided to let Mother go on to China and spend the summer with her family in Pei-tai-ho. It proved to be the right decision, for had she left the ship at Penang she would never have seen her mother again. A year later Isabella suffered a stroke from which she never recovered, and though she lingered on for some years, she died before her Daisy had another chance to see her.
Tacklow packed up his belongings and left for Simla alone.
One of the things I still bitterly regret is that after he died, Mother put all our ‘furniture and effects’, which included Tacklow’s many books, papers and family records (together with her own collection of photograph-albums that she had meticulously kept ever since she was in her early teens), into storage in a warehouse in London that was gutted by fire barely two years later. We lost so much of our past in that fire, and had it not been for the affection that the Brysons and their children, and later on, their grandchildren, had for dear Aunt Lizzie in Bedford, and hers for them, there would be no photographs at all of Mother’s youth or her wedding or her children’s early years. But luckily Mother had never stopped writing to Aunt Lizzie and sending her copies of family snapshots, and after the latter’s death I found a drawer full of them, lovingly hoarded, and annexed them.
I owe the existence of almost all the early photographs of Mother and her three children to Aunt Lizzie’s magpie-storing of old snapshots. But unfortunately she cannot have been sent a copy of a group photograph of Lord Kitchener and the officers of Army Headquarters, taken in Simla in, I think, about 1907. We must have had a copy of it once, but if so it was probably burnt in that warehouse fire. Nor do I know how the key to it managed to survive. Yet survive it did, for we still have it: a printed copy of a rough pen-and-ink drawing of the sitters in that old group photograph (only one row actually sitting, the remaining four rows standing). Each outline bears a number and there is a list of names below that can be matched with them. Number 9, among those seated in the front row, and drawn wearing that impressive and familiar moustache, is Lord Kitchener — his name followed by a whole alphabet of initials, starting with the GCB. The list of names includes two future Commanders-in-Chief, Lord Birdwood and Sir John Cassalls, and several future Generals; as well as the Colonel Malleson who married Wigram Battye’s* only sister and, when my kinsman Sir John Kaye died leaving his contemporary History of the Sepoy Rebellion unfinished, completed it and had the full text published as Kaye and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny. (He was not, incidentally, nearly so good a writer as John Kaye!) At the right hand of row 3 and bearing the number 61 is Major C. Kaye, no less; standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a Captain G. C. E. Wylley, VC (and I wonder what happened to him and where and when he won that Victoria Cross?). This key-drawing gives no date, but I imagine that the original photograph must have been taken during the summer of 1907; about the same time as a charming snapshot of Mother and my brother Bill taken on the beach at Pei-tai-ho.
Mother says she wept buckets when she got Tacklow’s letter telling her of his new posting and breaking the news that he would not be able to join her because his leave had been cancelled. Not that she was in the least surprised, because she had been quite sure that he would not come and that something was going to stop him. In fact she was, I think, rather pleased with herself over the accuracy of her prediction, while the news that she would not have to return to Jhelum, but would be going up to live in Simla instead, went a long way towards making up for her disappointment. She thoroughly enjoyed her summer in Pei-tai-ho, and when she returned to India in October, was enchanted by her first sight of Simla; even though, by the time she arrived there, it was already half empty and most of the houses were closed and shuttered. For by then the Government of India had moved down to the plains for the cold weather, leaving Simla to shiver under a deep quilt of snow that would cover it from the end of November to as late as the first week of March; sometimes even later.
A skeleton staff remained in Simla during the winter months, and this year Tacklow was among them. He had engaged rooms at the Central Hotel, and that year the snow came late and the town enjoyed a prolonged and golden Indian Summer during which Mother walked and rode, painted pictures of wildflowers and went house-hunting for a suitable cottage for the next season. There were no cars in Simla in those days, or indeed right up to the end of the Raj. Even in the late 1930s only the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab were allowed to own a car, for the roads were steep and narrow and never intended for motorized traffic: people walked or rode, or were conveyed in rickshaws. Mother no longer pushed the pram, for the grades were too steep, and Bill went for walks with his ayah or, at weekends, with his father, who took him along the road that leads over the Combermere Bridge and past the shop that had once belonged to Lurgan-Sahib — the ‘Healer of Pearls’ in Kipling’s Kim — and up to the ridge, where Christ Church stood and where there was a bandstand in which the Viceroy’s band would often play of an evening during the Simla season.
Tacklow was baffled by the fact that his first-born, holding tightly to his hand as they went walking together and talking of this and that, had a favourite question that he had no idea how to answer. Had it been ‘What’s that man doing?’ he could have coped. But Bill was not in the least interested in what men, animals or birds were doing, because he could see for himself what they were up to. What he wanted to know was ‘What’s that tree doing?’ or ‘What’s that house doing?’.
Tacklow had tried, ‘Standing up’; to which Bill would reply a trifle impatiently: ‘I know. But what’s it doing?’ ‘Growing’ or ‘Sitting down’ were equally unacceptable and were greeted with: ‘Yes, but what’s it doing?’. This question, asked again and again during their walks, defeated Tacklow because it was clear to him that his son was after something and was not just being silly-childish. He really did want to know. He wanted an answer; a proper answer. But how did one answer a question like that? In the end Tacklow took to dealing with this teaser in one of two ways: he would either reply ‘Sliding down a coalpit’ or ‘Climbing up a steeple’; whereupon Bill, who had enough sense to know that he was being trifled with, would throw his hand in.
He was four years old when his father woke him up one night and, lifting him out of his cot, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him out into the darkness to show him something; telling him again and again that he was to remember what he had seen. He has never forgotten this incident, though he could not remember what it was that he was shown. It was in fact Halley’s Comet — trailing its gorgeous, glowing train across the unpolluted skies above the Simla hills; the comet that passes our planet every seventy-six years and is supposed to presage disaster. Tacklow wanted Bill to see it because not many people can claim to have seen it twice.
Poor Tacklow! And poor ‘little imp’! They spent such a small part of his childhood together. Only six years. After that, like so many parents and children of the great Age of Empire, the service of the Raj was to separate them, and they never grew to know each other at all. That was sad for both of them; but it was part of the price of Empire — the heaviest part. And very many paid it.
Tacklow did not know it then, but Simla was to be home to him for six months of each year for the greater part of his working life. The ot
her six months would be spent in Delhi, where the Government of India moved as soon as the leaves began to fall on the wooded slopes of Jakko, and the snow-line moved downwards on the long ramparts of the Himalayas that spanned our horizon to the north. He would never again return to regimental duty, and his work thereafter was of an ambiguous nature: something vaguely connected with ciphers, security, and intelligence matters, under the guise of one of the many humdrum jobs at Army Headquarters.
Kitchener sent for him soon after his arrival and asked him if, in addition to his other work, he would produce and edit a magazine for the Indian Army, to be entitled Fauje Akbar: ‘You’ll do it on the usual terms, of course; “Find your own time and no pay!"’ Tacklow did it — on the usual terms. And, I am told, it is still being published. A friend of his once told me that my father’s arrival in Simla caused a good deal of confusion, because whenever anyone mentioned that Kaye had said or done or written this or that, it was instantly assumed that the speaker was referring to or quoting Kitchener — there being only one ‘K’ in Simla in those days.
In due course ‘K’ left and was succeeded by another Commander-in-Chief. But Tacklow was to spend another twenty-four hot weathers there. Almost a quarter of a century…
* Lit. post bungalow. A local rest-house in which travellers could obtain a bed and a meal on payment of a small sum, and could normally put up for two or three days at most.
* In those days the term applied to the British who served in India, and not, as now, to people of mixed blood, who were known as Eurasians.