by M. M. Kaye
The Tragedy of all our East is laid
On those white decks beneath the awning shade —
Birth, absence, longing, laughter, love and tears,
And death unmaking ere the land is made.
We never told Tacklow what Bill had said. Their situation was difficult enough without that. And they had so little time in which to resolve it and get to know each other. That they never did succeed in closing the gap left by those lost years is not surprising: it yawned too wide and they had barely ten days in which to build a bridge that would span it. In any case the distance that separates six from fourteen is the widest in one’s life, because to the latter a six-year-old is still no more than a little boy who has yet to lose his baby teeth, while the fourteen-year-old has already begun to think of himself as an adult in the making.
Perhaps if they had had a peaceful ten days in which to get to know each other things might have been different. But Tacklow’s parents insisted on their full share of his attention and expected him to dance attendance on them; while as for me, I was so delighted to see him again that I could hardly bear to let him out of my sight. So I don’t think Bill had much chance. Besides, he was now at public school, which is a giant step up from being a preparatory school boy. And he had gone to Repton and not, as Tacklow had hoped, to Winchester, a disappointment for which the war was responsible. Tacklow had put his name down for Winchester at the correct time and date laid down by the College rules, but a long time later, when it would soon be Bill’s turn to clock in as a ‘Commoner of this College’, he received a telegram to say that by the luck of the draw his son’s name had been the last for that particular term, and since owing to some trifling error there was one pupil too many, there would be no vacancy for him after all.
It later transpired that some nouveau riche had offered the headmaster a new cricket pavilion if he would wangle a place for his son at the College. So Bill, as the last entry for that year and term, was dropped and as the only public school which could come up with a vacancy at such short notice was Repton, Bill went there. Shortly afterwards the bribe-taking headmaster was quietly moved out and replaced (one hopes) by a more worthy holder of that high office.
It might have helped the bridge-building if Bill had been a Wykehamist and he and Tacklow could have discussed the various aspects of life and customs at a school they both knew. But what they needed most was time, and that was something they were never to get. At least we all celebrated Christmas together; though the Christmas dinner, with its traditional and indigestible turkey, plum-pudding, mince-pies, brandy-butter and all the seasonal trimmings that the British owe to a German Prince Consort and an English novelist, Charles Dickens, was eaten at our grandparents’ house in company with that ancient and ossified pair and an assortment of their children and grandchildren. We all went to see a pantomime at one of Oxford’s theatres, and Mother took us to see a famous Pre-Raphaelite painting that hangs in the chapel of one of the colleges — Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’. I admired the intricate detail, because that sort of thing was right up my street; but otherwise I was unimpressed. Then Aunt Bee arrived. And gloom and doom moved in with her.
I never could understand why Mother and Aunt Bee had become friends. Perhaps there had been very few Angrezi women in Jhelum when Mother arrived there as a bride? Or perhaps Bee Lewis was one of the few young ones and it was their youth, and possibly loneliness, that drew them together. I imagine boredom played as large a part in it as anything; but the friendship had thrived, and here was Bee Lewis again, preparing to take charge of her friend’s children. Well, all one could say was that she was preferable to Aunt Molly!
Poor Bee, having failed to find a husband in India, had returned to England to settle down to the life of an English spinster living on a minute annuity left her by parents, long dead, whose lives had been lived in a time when a yearly income of a hundred pounds had been considered more than adequate for a single woman’s needs. No one who lived in those days ever seems to have given a passing thought to the possibility of inflation in the future, and poor Bee eked out her small income by looking after the left-behind children of friends and relatives whose work tied them to India. The trouble was that she didn’t know the first thing about children. And did not want to! However, that was something Mother never realized; she merely knew that Bee could be trusted to look after us — which she did with something of the manner of a head-warder at Borstal — and that she needed the money. It was difficult to be fond of Aunt Bee, and we weren’t. And now she was about to take charge of us for the last week of that Christmas holiday in Oxford, and see that we got safely back to our respective schools when it was over, because early in January Tacklow and Mother would have to leave for London and Tilbury Docks to board a P. & O. liner bound for Bombay.
They would not let us go to the station to see them off, because there is nothing worse than parting from someone you love very much, and do not know when you will see again, on a crowded platform of a railway station. So we said our goodbyes instead in that dark, ugly little villa among the Balmoral furniture — all those rickety, spiky stags’ horns (Mother had taken down the Sacred Hearts and hidden them in a cupboard). Outside it was raining again. And there was a fog too, which made the day even darker, and which was so thick that we could barely see the laurel hedge. We were given our parting presents with instructions not to open them until the taxi had gone, and I remember Mother cried and cried and that Tacklow suddenly looked old: so old that all at once I felt frightened.
How old would I be before I saw him again? And when I did, would I find that I had grown away from him as Bill had done? Would I ever be able to talk to him as freely as I used to? I was already within sight of my teens and had begun to think of myself as almost a grown-up; for had not girls in the days of the Tudors married even earlier than that? Time had begun to move faster. Only a little faster, it is true, but enough to scare me. It was easier to part with Mother. Somehow or other she would go on managing to get back to England every two years, even if it meant giving up all the little luxuries that her friends enjoyed. Tacklow had already given up everything he could possibly give up, and sold everything that could be sold, to pay for her passages: but he would still need every penny he earned to pay for school bills and holidays for us, so I knew he would not come back again for a long time. Perhaps not until I had grown up … I remember that day as one of the bleakest in my life; a rehearsal for another and far worse one that still lay far ahead in the future. Because I knew now that my childhood was over for good.
Our parents tore themselves away at last and we rushed to the window and saw them run down the tiny drive and jump into the waiting taxi; heard it start up and watched it vanish into the rain and fog. They were gone —
* A famous collection of stamps which had recently been broken up and sold in separate lots at auction.
Chapter 24
Bound to the wheel of Empire, one by one,
The chain-gangs of the East from sire to son,
The Exiles’ Line takes out the exiles’ line,
And ships them homeward when their work is done.
Kipling, ‘The Exiles’ Line’
Aunt Bee, with all the tact of a charging rhinoceros, marched briskly into the room and inquired in stentorian tones what we thought we were doing, sitting around moping and snivelling instead of opening our parcels and enjoying ourselves! She then read us a stern lecture to the effect that we were all old enough to know better and to realize that our parents felt just as badly about this parting as we did and were only leaving us for our own good, and that anyway two years, or even three or four, would pass very quickly. And after a rousing exhortation, calculated to drive even the mildest of worms into turning and trying to bite her on the ankle, she wound up by saying that she had a lovely surprise for us. Our dear parents, anticipating a certain degree of gloom following their departure, had bought tickets to a matinée of a musical comedy, The Dollar Princess, that
very afternoon. There now! Wasn’t that exciting?
We agreed wanly: anything to get this brisk Patrol Leader out of the room. And when at last she removed herself we discussed the future with something approaching despair. Were we really going to be given into the charge of this bossy, sharp-tongued and acidulated shrew for the next few years? And if so, how were we going to bear it? The answer to the first was yes: we were indeed. To the second, well — we’d have to manage.
I still find it difficult to be just to Aunt Bee. She was the sort of person who is rude to shop assistants, waiters and taxi-drivers, and in the years ahead there were to be endless occasions on which we would try to disown her by edging away and pretending we were attached to somebody else, usually the nearest stranger, while she berated some hapless shop assistant who had had the temerity to tell her either that the store did not stock whatever it was she had asked for, or that its price had gone up a ha’penny since the last Budget. Or when she accused a waiter or a taxi-driver of trying to overcharge her. We never succeeded; for having given someone what she called ‘a piece of her mind’, she would invariably turn to look for us and cry: ‘Bill! Moll! Bets! — come here, children. We’ll have to try somewhere else; there must be some decent shops in this place!’ And having collected us by name (oh, the shame of it!) she would sweep out, herding us ahead of her: to repeat the whole embarrassing process somewhere further along the street. She did not seem able to help it, and we couldn’t believe that she had always been like that, for if she had, how could Mother …? But in those Jhelum days she would have been fifteen years younger. She may even have been pretty and dreaming of romance. And one had to remember that she had been very kind to Mother…
Poor Aunt Bee! How can one tell what had happened to her to make her so cross and belligerent? There must have been some reason for it; some unspoken tragedy. A love-affair, perhaps, that went wrong? Or one that had gone wrong for her in England before she set foot in India, and led to her being sent out to Jhelum to help her get over it and in the hope that she might meet and marry some Indian-service officer or a rich ‘box-wallah’ — or even a poor one? (For she was, after all, in her mid-twenties when Mother first knew her, and any unmarried woman of that age was regarded in those days as being at her last prayers.) It was, too, a time when few jobs were open to women of her type except teaching or caring for other people’s children. And life had not fitted her for either. She may not have had the qualifications that would have enabled her to teach; and she certainly lacked both the temperament and the patience! So, faut de mieux, she settled for the second option; which was bad luck on the children involved and possibly even worse for herself. How she must have hated it!
Years later, when she was old and crippled with arthritis and had been reluctantly re-admitted to a nursing home that she had been thrown out of once (they had only agreed to take her back because none of the long list of nursing homes that she had subsequently tried and ended up being expelled from would have her back, even though by then she was dying), she said bitterly to Mother: ‘They say I’m rude to the nurses. Really Daisy! How can they say such a thing? I’ve never been rude to anyone in all my life!’ And this, mark you, reported Mother despairingly, on the heels of being outrageously rude to the unfortunate nurse who had just brought in her tea-tray. What does one do with someone like that who really believes that she has never been rude to anyone, ever? ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Mother, ‘poor Bee — poor, dear Bee!’
Poor Bee indeed. But poor us, too. It is not easy to like anyone whose tongue is permanently dipped in acid. Yet she took on all the drudgery of finding and hiring suitable lodgings for our holidays, of fetching us from and taking us to London to catch the trains that would bring us from school or return us there, and of seeing that we went back each term with our school trunks full of the clothes we would need, all carefully listed and marked with name-tapes sewn into every garment. With her we spent three holidays on the Isle of Wight — a winter and a spring one in a house called ‘Nesscliff’ in Shanklin, and one on the outskirts of that town in a house on the cliffs surrounded by open country, where in the company of several other children whom she was looking after we spent a long summer holiday.
Two of these other children were her nephew and niece, both much younger than we were: Maxine and ‘Sprag’ Mitchell, whose parents, like ours, were in India. Sprag, nicknamed ‘Spraggen’ after a character in Pickwick Papers, was only a baby and we all spoiled and adored him. But Maxine developed a tiresome passion for us and insisted on following us around like an adoring puppy, carrying a bucket and spade from which she refused to be parted. The handle of the bucket was rusty and it squeaked mercilessly as she panted along the seashore in our wake, driving us to distraction. Aunt Bee was annoyed by our efforts to lose this maddeningly persistent shadow, and on the only occasion that we succeeded in doing so she gave us the mother and father of a dressing-down and sent us to bed without supper. We had told the trusting Maxine that if she lay on a certain patch of lawn under a rug with her eyes shut, and then counted to five hundred, slowly, she would find herself on the other side of the world in Australia. The credulous innocent did so; believing that we, the big children, must be right. And as soon as she was safely hidden under the rug we tip-toed away and fled to the beach and our own ploys; free at last. Poor Maxine lay where we left her for what must have seemed like hours, dutifully counting, until at last she ran out of fingers or lost count, removed the rug and found herself alone and not, as promised, among the kangaroos. Whereupon her disappointed howls brought Aunt Bee at the double, breathing fire and slaughter.
Another two Aunt Bee summer holidays were spent on the South Coast. One in the top storey of a tall house on the pebble beach near the top of the steep road that leads up to the seaside town of Folkestone: the same steep road that Mother had walked up when she and Alice went up to Folkestone’s Leas to meet the Kentish boys when she was barely fifteen. The other summer was spent in ‘rooms with board’, in a cottage on the outskirts of the little village of Shaldon on the west bank of the River Dart where it runs into the sea. The owner of Myrtle Cottage was a dear old thing who was very proud of the fact that she had won some local award for ‘the prettiest cottage garden’ three years running. And she deserved it. The garden was exactly like the English cottage gardens that one sees, or used to see, on the covers of chocolate boxes and birthday cards; tiny and packed with flowers, and smelling of lost Eden.
Two successive Easter holidays with Aunt Bee were spent as paying guests with friends of hers; a pair of elderly sisters who lived in a pleasant house standing in an overgrown garden near Bushey Heath, where we met an equally elderly gentleman who wrote books about birds. His name was Cherry Kearton and Bill was greatly impressed at actually being able to talk to the great man; for at that time, boys by the thousand bought or borrowed his books and attended his lectures. As a result of meeting him we spent every spare moment of those holidays bird-watching in the woods and on the heath. We also, though I don’t remember in which year, were taken to tea at a house near Bushey Heath where we met a small, pale and rather pudgy little boy whose name was Peter Scott. I knew all about his father — everyone in the country knew about Scott of the Antarctic; so of course I was interested to meet him. But not nearly as interested as I was at being shown a portfolio of small water-colour sketches of snowfields, icebergs and frozen seas, and being told by my hostess (Peter Scott’s mother? grandmother? aunt? — I don’t remember who she was) that they were painted by the expedition’s doctor who was, I think she said, Peter Scott’s godfather and had left them to the child in a Will found in the snowed-in tent in which Scott and his companions had died. I thought that was a most moving story and I often meant to write to Sir Peter and ask if I’d got it right:* were those pictures left to him, and where are they now?
Some of the Aunt Bee holidays were fun; in particular those two springtime ones at Bushey Heath, because the old dears whose paying guests we were were just that: old dea
rs. One of them was a talented artist in the Art Nouveau line, and both of them liked and understood children. So did our landlady at Myrtle Cottage who, despite a tendency to get a bit crisp over such matters as seaweed in the bedrooms and damp sandy footmarks in her minute and specklessly clean hall, was a darling. Other holidays included one in a house in Lyndhurst in the New Forest that stays in my memory chiefly because in the course of it King George V’s only daughter, Princess Mary, got married with all the fanfare and ballyhoo that attends a royal wedding. Bets and I discussed it endlessly with the cook and the ‘daily help’ whom Aunt Bee had engaged for the duration of the holiday, and who, like us, thought the whole affair was wildly romantic. This view seemed to be shared by the entire press of Great Britain, for the newspapers and women’s magazines were full of articles by dewy-eyed news-hens disclosing ‘exclusive’ details about the royal love-affair (that nobody but the Princess and her betrothed could possibly have known about) and speculating endlessly on the design of her wedding-dress and where the happy couple would spend their honeymoon. Half the country (or the female half of it, anyway) appeared to be light-headed with romance and orange-blossom. And this notwithstanding the fact that, judging from the newsreels and all those photographs in the daily papers, even the most gushing of sob-sisters could not pretend that the bridegroom was anything remotely like a handsome fairy-tale Prince. Physically, like it or lump it, he was clearly just another frog. She had obviously kissed the wrong one.
I remember being equally disappointed with her wedding-dress, and saying so to some expensive friend of Aunt Bee’s who lived in a large and beautiful house near Ringwood and had asked us all over to luncheon. Our hostess had laughed and said that she had been told by a friend who went to the same dressmaker, that according to its designer by the time that Queen Mary had had her say, and the Queen Mother* had had hers, and ‘Mary had had her little whimper’, there wasn’t a trace of originality left in the dress. I had a soft spot for the poor Princess Royal from then on. The only other thing I remember about that holiday is the rain. As usual there was lots of that. The New Forest is a lovely place when the sun shines, but it is not much fun when the rain is pelting down; and too much of that holiday was spent cooped up indoors.