by M. M. Kaye
It had been decided in family council that Bill would remain in the care of Aunt Molly and Uncle Richard Hamblin for the next eighteen months or so; after which Mother planned to return with Bets and myself and make arrangements to leave all three of us with one or other of their relatives — a normal but heart-breaking business that for over a century had faced all colonial service parents. Aunt Molly must have come down from Scotland to collect Bill and see us off. But although I had it on her authority that girls were allowed to cry, I was sure that mothers could not possibly count as girls; yet here was mine crying her eyes out after saying goodbye to Bill.
She would probably have cried even harder had she realized, as she stood sobbing and waving to him from the deck of the liner drawing slowly away from the crowded dockside, that she would never again see her darling Willie as a little boy in a sailor-suit. For it was not to be eighteen months before she returned to England, but more than six years. She was to miss the whole of the rest of his childhood; and when they met again they would not even recognize each other!
* Britain. Hence ‘Blighty’ — Army slang for ‘home’. See also musical songs of the era, e.g. ‘Hi-tiddley-ighty, take me back to Blighty!’, etc., etc.
Chapter 9
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning!
Eleanor Farjeon, Songs of Praise
That voyage was made memorable to me by the fact that like legions of young women before and after me — though in general they were a good deal older than I was! — I fell in love and enjoyed my first shipboard romance. His name was Guy Slater and I am happy to say that his sister Marjorie — ‘Bargie’ — became my best friend. And still is; even though close on three-quarters of a century has passed since we met on that voyage.
Guy must at the time have been at least eight years old: possibly even nine; though to me he seemed a lot older than that since he was a good bit taller and broader than I was. A stocky, sturdily-built child, with sandy hair, a snub nose and freckles, he was a born charmer and I can have been only the first of a long line of young women who were destined to lose their hearts to him. He took me under his wing from the start and I imagine that Mother must have been deeply grateful for the services of this unpaid and totally reliable child-minder. She knew that I was safe with Guy, whom I obeyed as I had never obeyed any nurse or ayah, and who would not let me climb the railings or fall down companionways.
Hand-in-hand we went for daily walks round the deck, explored the ship and leaned over the side to watch the dolphins and the flying fish. And when one day, temporarily on my own, I strayed unknowingly into that male holy-of-holies, the smoking-room, and was angrily rebuked and ordered out by a choleric grey-beard, Guy rushed to the rescue like some avenging knight of the Round Table. Grabbing me by the slack of my pinafore he pulled me behind him, and facing the enemy with clenched fists and blazing eyes said furiously: ‘Don’t you talk to her like that! She didn’t know she wasn’t allowed in here — she is only a baby!’ And turning away he marched me out leaving the grey-beard open-mouthed and struck dumb with surprise. Can you wonder that I adored him from that moment on? One of the grown-ups, intrigued by his interest in me, asked him one day what he saw in me and why he bothered about a small girl of four-and-a-half? I still remember his reply: ‘I like the feel of her hand. It’s so small, and it holds on so tight.’ The macho male and the feminine clinging vine in embryo, I suppose. Surprising to find evidence of it so early.
I have only the vaguest recollection of Guy’s family at that time; and that only because his mother and mine became great friends during the voyage and used to sit side-by-side in their deck chairs and gossip a lot — when not surrounded by a circle of shipboard admirers, for both of them were young, pretty and lively grass-widows. Muriel Slater was a red-headed charmer who was known in Simla as ‘the Goldfish’; presumably in compliment to that shining red-gold hair. But her daughter Marjorie and her second son, Tony, were both black-haired, blue-eyed and strikingly beautiful, as was a third son, Dick, born a year or two later in Simla. Only in Guy had that red-gold hair been transmuted to a sandy ginger, and he alone had no trace of the family’s outstanding good looks. He did not need them, for he had more than his fair share of the quality that the present generation calls ‘charisma’, and mine would have called ‘charm’. Even at that early age he could, as the Irish say, ‘charm a bird out of a tree’. And I well remember howling my eyes out on the down platform of Simla railway station when Guy was eventually sent back to England to become a boarder at some English preparatory school. In fact Anjuli, the small girl who hero-worshipped the boy Ashton/Ashok in my novel The Far Pavilions, and the child Victoria, who adored the youthful Eden De Brett in my whodunit, Death in Kenya, and who ‘wept bitterly and uncontrollably, greatly to Eden’s disgust and her own mortification’ when she said goodbye to him on the platform at Nairobi, both carry strong echoes of myself when young and my tearful parting with my hero and first love, Guy Slater. It is lowering to remember that when I next saw him, a good ten or eleven years later and, as it happened, on the platform of another railway station, this time in London, he hadn’t the remotest idea who I was and couldn’t even remember me!
The Slaters and the Kayes, having disembarked at Bombay, travelled up to Simla together, where Tacklow had again rented Chillingham for the season. He had hoped very much to buy it, and had he been able to do so it would have saved us a great deal of money in the years to come and probably made a lot of difference to our lives. But he had no capital, and since he must live on his pay, supporting a wife and two children in India and paying expensive school-fees as well as bills for ‘keep’, clothes, shoes and endless extras for a son in England, there was no hope of his being able to buy Chillingham unless he could borrow the money, at interest, from his parents. The price, in those days, was a mere £100 for the freehold of the little house and its minuscule garden, and Grandfather paid far more than that for one of his carriage horses, while his wife had a very comfortable income of her own, derived from the Beckett interests in India and safely stashed away in the Funds. It would have been no hardship to lend Tacklow that modest sum, on which he would have paid full interest. But no! Cecil must bear in mind that they had ‘saddled themselves’ with a large house and extensive grounds solely for the benefit of their children and grandchildren (oh yes?) and therefore … etc., etc. Tacklow swallowed his disappointment and thereafter, for almost a quarter of a century, paid ever rising rents for houses in or near Simla.
I learned of this episode many years later from Mother, who somewhat naturally resented it bitterly, and the chances are that I too would have held it against that selfish and close-fisted old couple but for the fact that Mother’s disclosure, added to the way in which poor Tacklow had been requested to remove his family from the large and comfortable house which (he was expected to believe) had been acquired solely for his and his brothers’ and sister’s and their children’s benefit, relieved me of a secret load of guilt. You see I had imagined, as I suppose the majority of us do, that it was more or less obligatory to love and honour one’s grandparents — all my Indian friends did! — and the fact that I found it impossible even to like my paternal ones had weighed heavily on my conscience. But having heard how Tacklow’s request for a modest loan with which to buy Chillingham had been flatly refused, that load was removed from me permanently, and from then on William senior and his Jane became, as far as I was concerned, non-persons; or as we say in India, ‘kutch-nays’ (nothings). It was a great relief.
I also learned something that my grandmother’s generation do not seem to have taken in: love between parents and their children is not something that flowers automatically from the act of birth, and since no child asks to be born it is up to the parents to do their best for it when it is, and that ‘gratitude’ should not come into it. In fact, the popular nineteenth-century cry, ‘After all I’ve done for you children!’, which still crops up with great frequency in a large part of the world, is pure nonsen
se. Love, any kind of love, has to be earned. And by that I do not mean ‘bought’ though I suspect that is often tried. I suppose Tacklow must once have loved his parents, because Victorian children were told that it was their duty to love dear Papa and Mama, and Victorians were great ones for doing their duty. He certainly never said a word against them; or even hinted one. Yet I have my doubts. His black-sheep brother, Alec, who absconded to Canada, obviously had no use for them at all. I would have liked to hear his opinion of them.
Chillingham was not the same without Bill. But I did not miss him too much because the Slaters lived quite near us, so I continued to see a lot of Guy; and I still had a resident playmate in Bets, who was growing up, as were a good many old friends in the big houses, the servants’ quarters, the shops and the bazaars of Simla. Growing up much too fast, in my opinion. Umi, for instance, now rising nine, was actually married — and inclined to look down her nose at me and give herself airs on that account, even though she would not be going to her boy husband’s home for some years to come, so that her situation did not appear to have altered overmuch. I pretended that I was going to marry Guy, but I’m afraid she didn’t believe me. Everyone, retorted Umi loftily, knew that Angrezi girls didn’t get married until they were old and wrinkled!
A number of the Angrezi children with whom I used to play had gone home to England; several Muslim ones had gone into purdah and could no longer attend mixed parties, and one of the Maharajah’s covey of daughters and/or nieces had been formally betrothed to the youthful heir to some princely state and become as toffee-nosed about it as Umi. But thankfully, my grown-up friends — people like Buckie and Sir Charles, the Khan Sahib and the gentle, soft-voiced Diwan* Sahib — looked just the same and did not appear to have grown a day older. Which I found very reassuring, as I felt that I had been away for years and years.
There were just as many children’s parties as ever and I still hated them. Except, in a small way, for the fancy-dress ones; and that was only because I enjoyed the dressing-up, not the party itself. My heart used to sink into my strapped shoes whenever Mother showed us yet another large, gilt-edged card and told us that we had been asked to little Angelica or Archie or Ashok’s birthday party, and wasn’t it exciting? I wonder how many children actually enjoy children’s parties? Not too many, I suspect. The only time I made a serious effort to get out of attending one of these juvenile gatherings, my anti-social attitude astounded and upset Mother. Herself a great party-girl, she could not understand my objection. Why, parties were fun! They were great treats and I was a very lucky little girl to be asked to so many. In the end I began to think there must be something wrong with me, because all children, according to Mother, liked parties, and of course I would enjoy myself … I would have a lovely time, ‘Just wait and see!’ When I persisted, I was told not to talk nonsense and that I needed a course of iron tonic (filthy stuff that left a nasty taste in one’s mouth) or a dose of Gregory’s Powder. I suspect I was given both. But if so it did me no good, for I continued to dislike children’s parties.
Worried by this, since it augured ill for the future (how was I ever going to be a success on reaching marriageable age if I refused to go to parties and make the ‘right contacts’ while I was young?), she urged Tacklow to acquire a pony for me so that I could at least learn to ride. Riding carried a certain social cachet, and few girls got anywhere by keeping their noses permanently stuck in a book (this last in reference to the fact that having taught myself to read because I could not find enough people to read to me, my nose was almost always stuck in a book). But Mother was right about riding. Nearly all my little British contemporaries, certainly the children of the Heaven-Born, could be met with any day of the week, correctly dressed in hard hats and smartly cut jodhpurs and jackets, riding their ponies along the Mall or around Jakko with an attendant syce trotting behind them.
Tacklow obliged, and a pony, plus a second and younger syce, was added to the Kaye ménage. But the addition proved a total loss because I disliked the pony quite as much as I disliked parties. To be frank, I was terrified of it, and even now, when my elder daughter breeds the creatures and my young granddaughter has, since the age of two, treated them with the fond familiarity with which even the most timid of humans handles a baby rabbit, I still subscribe to the minority view that all horses are offensive weapons and not to be trusted a yard. At nearly six years old I was scared stiff of them, and of falling off them, and I remember those daily rides on a lead-rein as purgatory. Particularly the slope leading down to and past the Cecil Hotel, where the pony always broke into a brisk canter and would, had the syce permitted, have galloped; in which case I would instantly have fallen off.
Mother, Bets and I did not, as planned, return to England in the autumn of 1914, the following year. For on the fourth day of the last month of summer, one day after Bill’s eighth birthday and seventeen days before my sixth, the ‘Great War’ — now known as the First World War — broke out, putting an end to countless plans and uncounted lives.
My adored Guy was one of the first of many British children to be hastily shipped off home for fear that they might be trapped in India without proper schooling (which it never seems to have occurred to anyone to provide) should the optimists who insisted that the war would be ‘over by Christmas’ turn out to be wrong.
To me, at that age, war was something that I had heard about from ayahs and the story-tellers in the bazaars who told tales from the Ramayana — the great Hindu epic that tells the story of Rama and Sita — and of the campaigns of the Moguls and the sack of great cities; Delhi, Kabul and Chitor, and the bloodstained field of Panipat where the fate of India had thrice been decided in battle. But all these heroic events were just stories which had happened in the distant past and which belonged either to history or to legends and fairy-tales. They could not possibly happen now! Not in this day and age. Not in my own lifetime!
I can’t remember when I first learned that there was actually a war — a world war! — being fought now. But I do remember the shock that the discovery gave me; and also, as though it were yesterday, saying to Tacklow: ‘But are people really fighting each other now? A real war? You mean they are killing each other?’ And being aghast when he said ‘Yes’ and explained how it had come about. Even then it took a long time to sink in. And even longer before I could really believe that it was true and get used to the idea; for it seemed to be an incredibly silly way of settling an argument and I thought that ‘grown-ups’ ought to know better.
After the initial shock, the fact that there was a war on began to make itself felt in many different ways; the worst of these being that Mother was frequently in tears as a result of some problem involving my father. I could not help being uneasily aware of this, but I only learned the reason for it long after the war was over. It seems that my darling Tacklow, in all other ways an intelligent, peaceable and levelheaded man — Tacklow, who would have liked to have been an actor, and failing that a member of the Indian Civil Service or better still a barrister if he hadn’t been pushed into the Army sorely against his will! — had written a long letter to his black-sheep brother Alec in Canada, asking if he would give Mother, Bets and myself a home for the duration of hostilities while he, Tacklow, went off to the war. Having posted it and received an affirmative reply, he had gone to the head of his Department and requested permission to leave immediately for England in order to join up in the ranks if he could not obtain a commission in the ‘Contemptibles’ (the Kaiser has recently referred to the British Expeditionary Force as ‘a contemptible little army’). He was after all, he said, a soldier, so he should by rights be fighting in Flanders instead of sitting safe and snug behind a desk in Simla while other and better men died in the fields of France and Flanders.
Permission had been flatly refused. Not only once, but again and again; for Tacklow kept on trying. It seemed to him indecent that while the flower of a generation, thousands of young civilians from every walk of life who had rushed to join th
e colours, were being blown to bits in the blood and mud of the trenches, professional soldiers such as himself should remain on the side-lines. Alec had written that he and his wife would do their best, and Tacklow went ahead with plans for taking us to Canada and either joining a Canadian regiment bound for France or, if that proved impracticable, taking ship for England and joining up there; a prospect that terrified Mother, who went about the house with a white face and a wet handkerchief clenched in one hand.
She need not have worried. The Brass-hats at Army Headquarters remained adamant. As a soldier Tacklow was no great shakes; but as a cipher expert his value was above rubies. He was irreplaceable. There was no one who could take over from him, for cipher experts are born and not made, and his services could not be spared. The Commander-in-Chief himself sent for him and told him in no uncertain terms that there was not the faintest chance of his being cannon-fodder in Flanders, so he might as well save his breath and get on with the job in hand! To soften the blow he would be promoted to Deputy Chief Censor with a rise in pay, and the fact that he had not seen active service would not count against him in his Army career, for when the war ended he would be treated as though he too had fought in it — with a subsequent rise in rank; possibly to Brigadier General. He would be able to console himself with the thought that he had earned it.