The Sun in the Morning

by M. M. Kaye

  It was a terrible blow. We had been fooled all along and there was no Father Christmas after all. That cherished, multicoloured soap-bubble burst with an almost audible ‘pop!’, leaving nothing but a small wet smudge where something glittering and magical had perished. We shut our eyes tightly and did not stir until the old darlings had finished their work and tip-toed out, clicking off the light as they went and closing the door softly behind them. After a short pause we talked it over in the dark and eventually, having swallowed our disappointment, decided that we had been incredibly lucky in having been able to believe in Father Christmas for so long, and that not for anything would we have missed the anticipation and thrill we had enjoyed on past Christmas Eves as we hopefully hung up our stockings, wondering if Father Christmas would come and fearing that he might not. Nor would we have forgone the wild excitement of waking up in the pre-dawn dark to creep down to the foot of the bed and feel the stocking bulging with delights. Yes, we had indeed been lucky. Enormously lucky! We would never regret having been able to believe in Father Christmas for so long. But oh, how sad we were that it had ended, and that for us that particular magic would never be experienced again.

  It was during this same Christmas holiday that we saw our first Christmas pantomime. We had heard a lot about pantomimes and had greatly looked forward to seeing one. Aunt Lizzie had booked seats for Aladdin at a Bedford theatre, and since we were of course familiar with the story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp, we were wildly excited at the prospect of seeing it acted out on a stage. How would they do the Genie? … the cave of jewels? We could hardly wait! For some forgotten reason, possibly to do with cookery, we arrived at the theatre with only just enough time to find our seats and buy a programme: and then Aunt Lizzie discovered that she had left the tickets at home. Panic! She remembered the numbers, but the theatre attendants were adamant: we could not be admitted without tickets and that was that. It was the vicar and the verger all over again. Bets and I were on the edge of tears as we heard the muffled music of the overture striking up, and even Bill looked shaken. There was nothing for it but for Aunt Lizzie to hurry back to The Birches and fetch the wretched things as quickly as she could. Fortunately, it was not very far; so leaving us in charge of the commissionaire she hurried off, muttering: ‘Oh dear oh dear, how very vexing to be sure!’ — an expression she only made use of when seriously put out (I don’t think she knew any stronger ones).

  We stood forlornly in the empty foyer, a picture of misery and embarrassment while the minutes ticked by and she did not return. We had so looked forward to this treat and now we were doomed to miss a whole act — perhaps two … Perhaps half the show! What if she couldn’t find the tickets? Supposing she had tripped and broken her ankle, hurrying up the front steps …? Despairing tears began to trickle down Bets’s face and the commissionaire’s heart melted. He said that as our seats were in the dress circle we could go in and stand at the back of it until our aunt returned, and he would show us the way and tell her where to find us. Oh joy! We hurried after him and were ushered into the back of the circle and from there had our first sight of a traditional pantomime.

  It came as a worse shock than almost anything that had gone before. Worse than Tilbury or Kensington Gardens or the biscuit-coloured stuff that the English called sand. No one — not even Bill, who from the age of six had been taken to see this form of entertainment during his Christmas holidays — had thought to give us any idea of what a British pantomime was like, so we were thrown in at the deep end. There on the stage, in place of ancient China, were three men dancing a species of clog dance while singing a popular song entitled ‘Where do flies go in the winter time?’; the middle one got up as a caricature of a cockney charlady complete with apron, hair-curlers and striped stockings, and the ones on either side dressed as British ‘bobbies’, policemen. Oh lost illusions, where do you go in this peculiar country?

  It was a very sleazy pantomime put on by a third-rate touring company whose props and scenery were sadly tatty — a defect for which the war years and not the company can be blamed, for it cannot have been easy to get cloth or paint at such a time. But they did their best. And so did Bets and I; dutifully clapping and laughing whenever the audience did, and assuring Aunt Lizzie that we were enjoying it. But it was another sad let-down, as we admitted to each other in whispers after our bedroom lights had been turned out that night. England appeared determined to disappoint us.

  We did eventually discover that not all Christmas pantomimes were as tatty and terrible as this one, because a year or two later someone took us to see another; Cinderella this time, staged in one of London’s largest and most resplendent theatres, Drury Lane. It was wonderful! No tat here, but as much glamour and glitter as even the most critical child’s heart could desire. A dashing Prince (we did not realize, poor innocents, that he was a she), a ravishing ‘Cinders’ and an enchanting Fairy Godmother; a glass coach drawn by real ponies and a succession of ‘transformation scenes’ that left us dumb with admiration.

  Yet it was on this occasion that Bets, entering the auditorium, stopped dead in the aisle and, looking indignantly round the huge theatre, announced in ringing tones: ‘It isn’t nearly as big as the Simla theatre!’ Alas, the years were passing, and as she herself grew up the memory of that little doll-sized theatre, on whose boards she had last appeared as Tinkerbell, had swelled in retrospect to a size that made Drury Lane seem puny. For the past in which she and I had been so small had stayed still; as it must for all of us. And though we were to see that little theatre again and again, and act in it too, to this day we both still think of its stage as an enormous expanse on which we first danced in The Pageant, when a mere slice of it represented the whole of Great Britain, Europe and the Middle East!

  Aunt Lizzie sent us back to Portpool with a large tuck-box crammed with home-made toffee, fudge and chocolates, in addition to several of her superlative cakes; all of which led to a distinct upsurge in our popularity, despite the fact that we continued to speak to each other in Hindustani and were not Indian Princesses, or even Indians — crimes for which we were never really forgiven. But apart from the temporary success of our tuck-box, only three other incidents connected with Portpool remain in my memory. The brightest by far was the day when the entire upper school was taken by bus to see, at a matinée in the Winter Garden Theatre at Margate, that legendary prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova.

  In later years some balletomane of the Thirties wrote of her that if you were to ask almost any well-known dancer what had made them take up ballet, the chances were ninety-nine to one in favour of the reply being that either she or he, or their parents, had once seen Pavlova dance. That statement was no exaggeration. I had never seen ballet before, and never imagined that any mere human could create such beauty: could move like that. Dance like that. It was a revelation. Pavlova danced the Autumn Leaf as though she weighed no more than gossamer being blown here and there in an October wind. She danced as though she was a butterfly; or a mayfly new-hatched, above a trout stream in June. As if she could, if she chose, dance across a field of corn without bending a single stem. And at the last she danced her famous Dying Swan so that there was not a dry eye in the house. Almost every girl from Portpool left that theatre in a daze of ecstasy, firmly resolved to follow in her footsteps and become a prima ballerina: Bets being among the worst hit. I don’t know if any of them followed this up, but I am sure that not one of them ever forgot that shimmering afternoon in the Winter Garden at Margate.

  The second incident descends abruptly from the realm of the sublime to the painfully silly. One of the girls in my dormitory, an overweight child of about twelve years old, plumped herself down during the night on one of the Victorian china chamber-pots that were provided in case of emergency (pupils were discouraged from traipsing down the passages to the lavatory in the small hours). The pot, proving unequal to the strain, shattered into about fifty pieces, most of which had to be picked out of her wincing posterior one by one. No
one could fail to sympathize with her, but at the time, and unkind though it may seem, the incident struck the entire dormitory as hilariously funny and we were laughing ourselves into stitches as we tried to help the shrieking sufferer, while the girl who was sent to fetch help reeled away whooping with mirth, and apparently had some difficulty in making herself understood when delivering her message. Miss Florence refused to see the joke. So did Miss Barnes, who had been awakened by the racket and hurried over to inquire into the cause, and who proceeded to blast us into silence with a brief, blighting speech that would have done credit to a Kommissar in the KGB, and sent us scuttling back to bed as Miss Florence whisked the howling victim off to the sanatorium.

  I remember that after our headmistress had turned the lights out and departed, we lay awake for a long time speculating in whispers as to the form of treatment being undergone by our absent room-mate. Prayer or stitches? For by now we were all well aware of something that was officially a secret, but that in the not too distant future was to break up the school: that Miss Florence was a Christian Scientist and that Miss Barnes was undoubtedly aware of it.

  As matron, Miss Florence paid lip-service to the parents of non-Christian-Science children by employing a local doctor as the ‘school’ doctor; but she did not send for him if she could help it, preferring to stick to the lines laid down by her faith. I realize now that this must have been why our dear Mrs Ponson had recommended Portpool — because she herself secretly shared Miss Florence’s beliefs; I think it was naughty of her not to tell Mother. The end for the school came when one of its pupils went down with a severe attack of something like pneumonia or typhoid or one of those pre-antibiotic-days killer diseases, and instead of calling in the doctor, Miss Florence relied on prayer and ‘inculcating faith’ in the delirious child (‘pain is not real … all sickness is in the mind and can be exorcised by prayer and faith …’).

  I must have been a poor judge of character, for had anyone asked me, I would have said that Miss Barnes was the dominant sister. But the evidence provided by this affair shows that Miss Florence was the tougher of the two. She stuck to her guns even when the child became far too ill to understand anything that was said to her, let alone exhortations of this nature, and it was only at the eleventh hour that Miss Barnes lost her nerve and sent for the doctor. That gentleman, finding the girl too ill to be moved, hurriedly imported a couple of nurses from the nearest hospital and summoned the child’s parents; who arrived by the earliest possible train and naturally raised hell all round. Luckily for everyone concerned the child survived — though it had been a narrow squeak. The school was less fortunate. I gather that the incensed parents wrote to the parents or guardians of every other Portpool girl (in these cash-oriented days they would of course have sued for vast damages), with the result that a good many parents snatched their little darlings away. Of the remainder, some allowed their children to stay with Miss Barnes, while the rest — all of them Christian Scientists — went off with Miss Florence who presumably founded a small school for the Faithful somewhere else.

  Bets and I were removed and sent to another ‘private enterprise’ school on the other side of England; in Clevedon — a small town in Somerset on the shores of the Bristol Channel.

  Chapter 22

  … some wet bird-haunted English lawn…

  Arnold, ‘Obermann Once More’

  Our new school was called The Lawn, and the majority of its fifty or sixty fledgling birds were the children of India-service people. I believe it had begun in a modest way as a home-from-home, plus a certain amount of basic education, for three or four small children whose parents, like Kipling’s, were compelled to leave them behind in England for years at a time. But complimentary opinions about it having been circulated by satisfied Anglo-Indian parents, it was not long before the initial home-plus-teaching experiment blossomed into a full-scale boarding-school whose pupils could, if necessary, stay on and be looked after and entertained during the holidays as well as in term-time. It also accepted a small number of day-girls.

  At that time there were several well-known schools specially tailored to meet the needs of the children of the Raj, and my parents had originally intended to send us to the largest and best-known of these. But Tacklow had backed out at the last minute because the school in question sent him a copy of the minutes of its latest Board Meeting which, among other things, stated that the chairman, a retired Anglo-Indian, had ‘opened the proceedings with a prayer’. Unfortunately the chairman turned out to be a man my parents knew too much about and Tacklow had declared forcefully that no child of his was going to be educated at a school that allowed a hypocritical, two-faced, double-dealing bribe-taker like old Whatsizname, who had never had a Christian thought in his head, to open any proceedings ‘with a prayer’. It was an affront to the Almighty!

  And that was why Bets and I had been abruptly re-routed to Birchington and Portpool — on the strength of a few cosy words from Mrs Ponson and very little else; since apart from the fact that the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had died and been buried in the parish church of that quiet little seaside town, they knew nothing at all about Birchington. Or the school either. But now that Portpool had proved unsatisfactory, we were dispatched to The Lawn; a smaller and more modest edition of the original school whose chairman of the Board of Governors had been permitted (despite his own and well-known ‘manifold sins and wickedness’) to put up prayers in public. I for one was delighted at the move, because among its pupils was my dearest and oldest English friend, Bargie the Beautiful, and the prospect of seeing her again would have made Borstal seem attractive to me!

  Since Mother was still in India, all the arrangements had to be made by letter, and we were taken down to Clevedon by that friend of her early days in Jhelum, Miss Beatrice Lewis; hereinafter known to us as Aunt Bee,* to whom Mother had appealed for help and who had agreed to take charge of us during our holiday in return for a ‘consideration’, plus all expenses.

  As at Birchington, we arrived in Clevedon and were installed at The Lawn a day or two in advance of the start of a new term and the arrival of our fellow pupils. Two or three of them spent their holidays there and were therefore special pets of the headmistress, Miss Wiltshire, who could obviously be a totally different and very likeable person during holiday time, though she was an awesome personage during the term — which was the only time the majority of us ever came into contact with her. One of her year-round boarders, Cynthia Hepper, a girl of my own age who became a friend of mine during those first out-of-term days, had been in her care, on and off, since the age of three and was devoted to her. But though Cynthia attached herself to me at once, and I was grateful for her kindness to a newcomer, I was really only interested in meeting Bargie again and could hardly wait for her arrival. Unluckily I had not had the sense to realize that the gap between our respective ages, which had not mattered in the least while we were carefree children in Simla and Delhi, might be an unbridgeable gulf in the regimented world of a British boarding-school.

  Bargie was now in the sixth form; and not only a senior but a prefect, with all the responsibilities, privileges and rights that this entailed, including the right to use the Prefects’ Room — a holy-of-holies that no one but another prefect, or a member of the teaching staff, could enter unless summoned. And to the hoi-polloi, a summons only meant that one had erred in some way or another and was therefore about to receive a sharp dressing-down by that august body. I, on the other hand, had suddenly become that lowest and most insignificant of creatures, a ‘new girl’; already consigned to the third form and therefore light-years removed from Prefect Marjorie Slater (no one at The Lawn called her ‘Bargie’ and I had to drop that loving nickname pretty smartly! — though not at her request). The fact was that at least half the junior school and most of the seniors adored her, and had taken instant exception to the use of such a ‘hideous’ nickname applied to their goddess: and by a new girl, at that — a mere third-former!
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br />   In those days, and I suspect in these, it was almost obligatory to select one of the seniors as an object of one’s admiration, and I remember my owl-eyed surprise when I was asked: ‘Who are you going to Y-A?’ — the initials stood for ‘Young Adorer’, and a prefect’s popularity could be gauged by the number of her Y-As: in which respect Bargie (sorry, Marjorie), had a slight edge over the head-girl, a statuesque seventeen-year-old called Doreen Hepper, cousin of the friendly Cynthia. When the custom had been explained to me and I replied that I wasn’t going to Y-A anyone, I was firmly informed that it was a must; everyone Y-Ayed someone until they reached the sixth form and became eligible to be Y-Ayed instead of Y-Aying. ‘I suppose’ said my informant, ‘that you’ll be Y-Aying Marjorie Slater, as you used to know her.’

  Used! Ah me, what a knell that word sounded in my sore heart! I remember replying tartly that no one could possibly Y-A a friend: it would be too silly. Cynthia urged the claims of her cousin, the lovely Doreen, but I thought the whole idea was too stupid for words, and when the pressure of public opinion became too much for me I selected the senior with the fewest Y-As to her credit, one Beryl Beale, for whom I dutifully fetched and carried, presented with small bunches of flowers and hung about the boot-hole and cloakroom of an evening in order to say good-night when the seniors passed on their way back from supper. I remember becoming quite fond of her in a detached sort of way; rather as though she represented a small firm in which I had bought a few shares. When she left after her final term I did not bother to Y-A anyone else; and I have to admit, regretfully, that as far as I know no one ever Y-Ayed me. But then I never rose to become a prefect or even a sixth-former.