by M. M. Kaye
Bets and I lived for letters from India to such an extent that to this day the sight of an Indian stamp on an envelope awakes a faint echo of the thrill it once brought me. Though not all the news those letters contained was good. I remember the shock of learning that people I loved had died: the dear Khan Sahib; our old bearer; and other friends too … Why is it that children think of the friends of their youth as immortal and are stricken to the heart by the discovery that they are not? I had lost too many of them during that terrible flu epidemic. Raji had been a victim, and Mumtaz and Gully; and my old ally, Mali-ji, who had thought that my photograph was a picture of a cauliflower. Their deaths had cast a shadow over our last year in India, but at least we had been there to cry on the shoulders of their grieving relatives and to mourn with their families. But this reading of the passing of some old familiar friend, known to us all our days, made death a very cold and lonely thing; and I became frightened for my parents, particularly Tacklow who was already (horrors!) in his fifties and therefore (if the Bible was to be trusted) had less than twenty years left out of those ‘three score years and ten’. It was then that I began to ask God every night to please, please allow me to be happily married and with several children of my own before time ran out for Tacklow; so that I should to some extent be insulated against the anguish of losing him.
During the first few years of our exile many of the letters we received from India were from Indian friends, some of whom, the younger and less sophisticated ones, obviously did not realize that although we could chatter to them in their own language we could neither read nor write it. The address on their envelopes had been painstakingly copied out in English, but as the letters inside were in the sender’s own beautiful, graceful script, I could never be certain who had written them and had no idea how to get them translated. In the end, though alarmed at the extra cost (stamps on all non-family letters had to be paid for out of our meagre pocket-money), I finally sent them out to Tacklow, asking him to give my love and suitable messages to the writers. This he did; but it was not a popular move. Our young correspondents either did not like the idea of their letters being read by my father, or resented him knowing that they could not write in Angrezi; for though I wrote to them I never had a reply. The servants, however, had no such inhibitions. They employed a bazaar letter-writer whose ornate and flowery style has always fascinated me; I enjoyed answering them. But as the months lengthened into years and the years plodded by, the letters came at longer and longer intervals; until at last, as memories began to fade and the past retreated, they stopped altogether. I kept one or two of them for years. But in the end these too perished in that fire.
Contrary to all expectations, I quite enjoyed my years at The Lawn, though I saw little or nothing of Bargie except from a distance, and on the only occasion when I asked if I could walk with her she explained gently that it was unheard of for a senior to pair with a junior when the school went out walking two-by-two in ‘crocodile’. She was very nice about it and did her best not to hurt my feelings. But I realized then that the gap between us had grown too great to be bridged and that neither of us could flout the prevailing laws of The Lawn. So I gave up. And anyway I had already blotted my copybook sufficiently badly by insisting on walking with Bets one day a week. Even we did not dare to go further than that, for the opposition that it aroused was fierce and vocal: (a) fourth-formers did not walk with juniors who were only in the second form: it was ‘not done’; (b) girls of my age did not pair for walks with mere ‘kids’ who were two years younger than themselves: it was unsuitable; (c), (d), (e) and (f) sisters never walked with each other: even the Leslie-Jones twins did not! It was unheard of…
However, since these prohibitions were not officially supported by the headmistress, Miss Wiltshire — known to the entire school, though not to her face (or to her staff either) as Dub-dub* — I defied public opinion and stuck out for that one day. And since there was nothing that my schoolmates could do to prevent it, Bets and I were able to talk to each other in a limited amount of privacy. For there was a major drawback attached to our transfer from Portpool to The Lawn: a large proportion of Dub-dub’s pupils were children of the Raj, so that too many of them knew enough Hindustani to understand anything we said in that language. This meant that even those who, like Bets and myself, had once been able to speak it as their mother tongue, stopped doing so and eventually forgot it — in my own case (due to having a poor ear for music) almost completely.
But although Bets and I could no longer talk to each other in a secret language, we could at least talk of India and our friends there, and we invented a long-running serial story in which we won the Calcutta Sweep and used the money to build an enormous house of glass, on the lines of a bigger and better Crystal Palace, inside which we assembled a life-sized copy of all our favourite places in India. Okhla with its weir and its sandbank and Number 3 Groin. The Kudsia Bagh. The Taj. The squirrel trees. The Purana Kila and the Pepper-pot Bridge. Parts of the Chandi Chowk and all of Curzon House. We could not include Simla or Mashobra, or any part of the hills, because that would have been ridiculous, and the game would have lost half its charm if we went beyond the bounds of the possible. We started with the building, then the heating and lighting, and bit by bit worked out how we would construct a replica of this or that; importing sand and trees, plants and animals, birds and butterflies, and finally paying vast sums to all the people we were particularly fond of to come overto England and live in it, in exact copies of their real homes. I remember that we had a lot of difficulty persuading the jolly proprietor of the Tree Shop in the Clock Tower Square of the Chandi Chowk to bring his family and come to live in our mock-up version of his shop, and that ‘Vika’s ‘rich-as-creases’ parents could not be lured into moving!
It was a deeply satisfying game and our make-believe world became so real to us that we almost felt that we really could retreat into it, and spend an afternoon stalking river turtles at Okhla when things went badly on the school front or we happened to be suffering from a particularly bad bout of homesickness.
I discovered poetry at The Lawn, and read it avidly because I found that so much of it put into enchanting words thoughts which had hitherto swirled untidily around in my head. There was Housman, for instance: ‘That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And shall not come again’ I can remember repeating that to myself on the day that a letter came from India telling us that Tacklow would be retiring in the following year and that he and Mother would be coming back to England for good. ‘And shall not come again’ …! No, that couldn’t be true. Somehow or other, when I was grown-up, I would manage to walk those happy highways again even if I had to crawl back on my hands and knees as certain pilgrims did to the Cave at Amanath. Or if necessary I’d swim! The prospect of never seeing India again was too bitter to be borne and did not bear thinking about. ‘Someday,’ said Bets and I to each other; ‘one day …’
Bargie left at the end of the next summer term. She shortened her skirts, shingled her lovely hair and went gaily off into the great world to become a Breaker of Hearts and a fully fledged grown-up. Doreen Hepper had already left; Beryl Beale went shortly afterwards, and I made a new friend: a day-girl called Helen Keelan who was another cousin of Cynthia’s. Cynthia was not pleased by our friendship, but Helen turned out to be a real soul-mate. She was a giggler, and people who can giggle have always appealed to me. I don’t mean the silly sort of giggling that is really sniggering, and only indulged in by empty-headed schoolgirls of the dimmest variety, but the spontaneous and semi-suppressed variety that rolls you up and makes you shed tears of mirth.
Together we wrote endless plays for our classmates to perform—the whole school, probably due to its Anglo-Indian affiliations, was nuts on amateur dramatics. Every form put on at least one play a year for the benefit and criticism of the other forms, and during my first term at The Lawn my lovely erstwhile chum of Simla days appeared as the heroine of
a vaguely medieval drama with music, written and produced by the sixth form, in which the head-girl, Doreen Hepper, playing the hero, serenaded Bargie/Marjorie; the latter teetering dangerously on a step-ladder behind a flimsy canvas tower with her top half sticking out of a window cut in it. The song, a popular dance band tune of that year, was entitled ‘Memories’, and though I can’t remember ever hearing it since, the tune and the words still stick in my mind when much else of far more importance has been forgotten.
Of two other tunes that bring back vivid memories of The Lawn, one — ‘My Dear Soul’ — used to be played on the seafront by the Town Band in the course of concerts that they gave for the tourists on summer evenings. It is, appropriately, a Somersetshire song, for Clevedon is in Somerset, and the words on the sheet music are written in dialect: ‘Zoul’ for Soul and ‘Zumerzet’ for Somerset. Played by a distant brass band on a warm, golden summer evening when the swallows are flying high, it is one of the most charmingly sentimental and evocative melodies one could wish to hear, and I used to hang out of my dormitory window to listen to it.
The other one is MacDowell’s ‘To a Wild Rose’, which I had to play as a piano solo at a school concert. A grisly ordeal, since I have never been in the least good on the piano: or any musical instrument for that matter, unlike Bets, who passed all her public pianoforte exams with flying colours.
But the songs that not only remind me of The Lawn but that I still cherish most are the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century melodies that John Gay adapted for Polly, the sequel to his smash-hit success, The Beggar’s Opera.*
Both of these eighteenth-century operas were revived in the 1920s, and Bets and I were taken to see Polly, played on tour by a light opera company in the Pavilion Theatre at — I think — Rhyl, during a summer holiday spent in Wales. We had never seen or heard anything like it before and we both, having fallen instantly and madly in love with it, spent every penny of our combined pocket-money on the sheet music and the records, and on our return to The Lawn infected the entire school with our enthusiasm. We made a puppet stage out of a drawer from one of the dormitory chests of drawers, painted a whole set of scenery, drew the entire cast on cardboard (every member of it in at least a dozen different positions), coloured them and cut them out, fixed them on small blocks of wood, and with the aid of records and spoken dialogue, gave endless performances.
Because we saw Polly first, we always preferred it to the far more popular Beggar’s Opera. We still do. One of the records, the best of course (it would be), got broken many years later. But the other two still survive: very scratchy but still greatly appreciated. And Bets still has the original piano score bought with her pocket-money at a music shop in Clevedon.
The last of many songs that remind me of my schooldays is a hymn, the one that we, and probably all British schools in those days, sang at the beginning and at the end of every term: ‘Lord, receive us with Thy blessing, once again assembled here’ for the first day of term, and ‘Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing’ for the last.
There is so much that I remember of those days, but since reminiscences of other people’s schooldays come high on the list of ‘things we don’t in the least want to hear about’ I shall pass over the fire that started in the coal-hole in the basement and that the entire school enthusiastically helped to put out; the time that I won a bet by dressing up as a boy and sneaking out of the school and down to the seafront, where I bought half-a-dozen ice cream cones and returned safely with them as proof; and the triumphant success of The Puddleton Pantomime, written, produced and acted in by the Misses M. Kaye and H. Keelan (both of whom thought it was hilariously funny and laughed a good deal more over writing it than the audience did while watching it).
There are, however, two incidents that should be mentioned; the first because it was a sight that still stands in my memory as one of the most beautiful things I have seen in this beautiful world. I shall always be grateful to Dub-dub for having the imagination to send the entire school down to the seafront, to witness ‘The Cutty Sark’, that most famous of all the old nineteenth-century tea clippers, moving slowly up the Bristol Channel with the tide and a light breeze. She was under full sail for the last time — or so we were told then — and it was a day of full summer. A hot, blue, almost windless afternoon without a cloud in the sky, but with a soft summer haze lying on the Channel so that one could not see the far shore. Sky and sea were as smooth and as palely coloured as a milk opal, and except for an occasional gull nothing moved; until slowly and softly that stately, white-winged wonder materialized out of the haze like some ghost from a slower and unbelievably lovely past.
The second memorable school experience is not something I saw, but an incident that deserves a mention if only because it illustrates how extraordinarily innocent we were in those far-off days.
I had achieved the dignity of a single bedroom (of which there were only two in the house apart from those occupied by the staff) and Helen, who by then was no longer a day-girl but a boarder, occupied one of the five or six beds in the Explosion Room: a dormitory next door which got its name from the fact that Dub-dub had once accidentally kicked on the switch of the gas-fire one night as she left her sitting-room below, and that holy-of-holies filled with gas which blew up with a horrendous bang when a housemaid with a lighted candle entered it early next morning. The housemaid was blown back across the hall, through the big drawing-room beyond, and accompanied by a great deal of glass, catapulted through the windows and out into the garden; where she was retrieved from a rose bush, unhurt except for a few bruises and a scratch or two. She was the only casualty, apart from the damage to the house. And though the blast was reportedly heard in villages miles outside Clevedon, one member of the dormitory slept right through the whole thing, despite the fact that the blast blew a huge hole through the middle of the floor, leaving her bed poised on the edge of a yawning drop. Hence ‘the Explosion Room’. It was before my time.
Helen and I became inseparable. Together we fell madly in love with Pitt Chatham, the actor who played MacHeath in Polly and whom Helen had never even seen. We talked a lot about love. Both of us were set on falling in love as soon as we left school, and getting married and living happily ever after: in the meantime we cut out articles about and pictures of the fascinating Mr Chatham as MacHeath, which we stuck in a jointly owned photograph-album. Together we listened, enthralled, to his voice singing those charming songs in the dusty, candle-lit darkness of our secret hideaway — a small, disused cupboard which we named ‘Giggleswick’, not in honour of the famous public school of that name, but because we laughed so much in it. Closeted in here we nibbled illicitly acquired pickled onions, plotted new plays and composed scurrilous limericks about the teaching staff, or read aloud to each other; a habit that eventually led to our downfall.
Helen would often sneak into my room after lights-out and squash into my single bed where we would either read with the aid of a torch or a purloined candle-end whatever book, poem or piece of homework happened to interest us at the time, or lie and discuss life in general, plot further plays or indulge in fits of giggling in the dark. Very often we would end by falling asleep, and she would whizz silently back to her bed in the Explosion Room in the small hours. Tacklow had given me the inclusive edition, 1885 to 1918, of Rudyard Kipling’s verses, and browsing through it one night just on the verge of sleep, we had read ‘The Explorer’, which begins: ‘There is no sense in going further —it’s the edge of cultivation …’. My bed was of the usual narrow, iron, for-boarding-schools-and-institutions type, and I, as the rightful owner, had the side against the wall while Helen had the outer one. She had a habit of talking in her sleep and an hour or so later I was awakened by her muttering something. Presently she turned over, and lying poised on the extreme edge of the bed said aloud and quite clearly: ‘Here’s the edge of cultivation … What’s the use of going further?’, and fell out onto the floor…
I exploded into helpless giggles, and she woke in
a state of high dudgeon and demanded to know what was so funny about falling out of bed and bruising yourself black and blue? It was some time before my unseemly mirth allowed me to explain, and when it did, she too went off into gales of laughter; in the middle of which the door suddenly opened and in stalked the matron.
Well, I can’t say we didn’t expect reprisals. Though not to that degree. We simply couldn’t understand why she should be so unreasonably furious, and we put it down to the fact that we both kept exploding into giggles during the tirade that followed (we still thought it was funny). Matron didn’t, and Helen was practically frog-marched back to her bed while I was locked into my room. First thing next morning, after I had washed and dressed under Matron’s stony gaze, I was taken down to Miss Wiltshire’s study where Dub-dub herself, every hair of her impressive moustache quivering with outrage, lit into me as though I had been a Victorian scullery-maid caught stealing the spoons.
You never heard such a hullabaloo! It ended with me being banished to Lawnside, the annexe-house next door where most of the form-mistresses and only a handful of senior pupils had rooms, and being put into a three-bed dormitory with Cynthia (who as Dub-dub knew very well had always been jealous of my friendship with her cousin Helen) and an older girl called Netta Something-or-other. Even that was not the end of it, for up to the day that I left school the teachers made every effort to keep Helen and me apart. We were not allowed to stand together, sit together, walk together in crocodile — or out of it — and an embargo was placed on Helen putting so much as a foot in Lawnside. Needless to say these tactics were unsuccessful and we derived enormous entertainment from circumventing them; greatly assisted by the fact that we could still, when pressed, retreat into Giggleswick where no one could reach us, or even think of looking for us, since it was positioned above the stairs leading down to the basement and well above eye-level.