by M. M. Kaye
In the late autumn of that year, ad 1927 of blessed memory, we made ready to sail for Calcutta on the S.S. ‘City of London’. Oh joy, oh rapture! We were actually going back to India! I was going home — home — home! Only one fly sullied the pure ointment of my joy. My weight.
One of the things that I hoped to find in that much-loved country was Love — conjugal love, naturally. (In those days one took that for granted, though nowadays there would appear to be more options floating around.) I didn’t much care who the ‘Right Man’ for me turned out to be, provided that (a) I could take one look at him and think ‘That’s the one!’ — and fall in love on sight as Tacklow had done on the platform of Tientsin’s railway station. That (b) when (not ‘if’, you note!) he asked me to marry him, I could reply: ‘I’ll be ready in five minutes — no, make it three!’ And finally (c) that the Someone to Watch Over Me (hopefully for ever) should be in some India service. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man … provided his work lay in India so that I could live there for at least the next thirty years, I couldn’t care less.
You may wonder why I didn’t come up with the obvious answer: marry an Indian and stay for good. But at that time attitudes and customs that by now have softened to an extent that would have been undreamt of in the first quarter of the twentieth century were still set hard in ancient moulds, so that that particular solution simply did not enter my calculations. Admittedly I had often thought how pleasant it would be to be able to marry into one of the Indian families whose children had been my friends and playmates, and be accepted into their close-knit, loving, bickering, clannish family circle. But I knew only too well that the very idea of an Angrezi daughter-in-law would have horrified the parents of any of the Indian children I knew; while as for their grandparents — ! To the older generation I would always be a casteless person. Or a Kafir, since even the families of my Muslim friends, who were not bothered by caste, would not have cared for the connection.
Possibly, and unfairly, the problems arising from a mixed marriage would have seemed less if it was the husband who was the Westerner and the wife an Indian. Yet even now Western women who marry Eastern men are very rarely ones who have been born and spent their formative years in the East, and who spoke their husband’s tongue before their own. Which could be because the native-born knew too much? You cannot have been a child in India, playing with Indian children, talking, thinking, squabbling and making up in their language, not yours, without becoming as aware as they are of the number and importance of religious and social rules that order their lives from birth to death. Taboos that from being handed down by so many successive generations have become, to them, as much a part of their lives as breathing; but which to you, because you are not of their blood, are fatally easy to infringe, however well intentioned you may be.
Much later, I came across several very happy and successful marriages between Western men and Asian women — who make marvellous wives! But not one, the other way round, that has lasted. By the law of averages there must be hundreds that are flourishing; but I am speaking only of those I know. Being native-born, I knew far too much about Indian attitudes to flatter myself by thinking that I could ever make an acceptable or a satisfactory Indian wife. And I also knew that India is a land in which the male is still always in the right. Even though in public its womenfolk may say differently, in private (though they will condole with you) a wife who fails to give her husband a son is still regarded as having let the side down; in addition to giving the poor fellow a valid reason — should he happen to need one — for discarding her and acquiring a newer and younger model. Which has been known to happen; though time changes all things and the future was to see any number of shifts in public opinion that would once have been unthinkable. But as far as this book is concerned I am, for the moment, back in the England of the 1920s. Still gazing mournfully at the reflection of my over-generous contours, mercilessly displayed in one of those hideous Twenties bathing-suits in a looking-glass at Three Trees, and thinking what a pity it is that I wasn’t born in the days of Rubens or Titian when walloping goddesses and roly-poly nymphs were the fashion.
Unfortunately, never at any previous time had actual thinness, as opposed to slimness, been so fashionable or so highly prized by women as in the decade following the end of the First World War, when suddenly, and for the first time in recorded history, the female of the species discarded long skirts (and with them bosoms, waists and hips), cropped their hair short like boys and strove to look as much like Peter Pan as possible. And but for the systematic stuffing I had received at the hands of well-meaning adults, I too might have rejoiced in the general shape of a stick insect — which had now become the accepted ideal of the ‘female form divine’, and still is — and been able to face the future with a reasonable amount of confidence.
As it was I had none. When at the early age of fourteen — probably as a result of all this forced feeding — I developed a Dolly Parton bust and begged to be given a proper brassiere in order to avoid the embarrassment of pounding down the hockey field or the cricket pitch (how I detested those compulsory games!) with these newly acquired appendages bouncing up and down like marker-buoys in a choppy sea, I was curtly informed that I was far too young for such an adult garment, and made to wear instead a ghastly thing called a ‘liberty bodice’. This object merely flattened me down as firmly as the wide bandages that Chinese and Japanese women used to tie tightly about their bodies, from armpits to hips, in order to acquire the pencil-shaped figure that is considered ideal in the Orient — and which enables them to look so enchanting in a chongsam or an obi: items of attire that, when worn by the possessor of a pair of Western bosoms encased in uplift bras, look anything but attractive.
Alas, those liberty bodices effectively removed my chances of acquiring any natural uplift in later life. Frankly, I drooped (and looked awful in a bathing-suit). And what embittered me further was that anything I asked for, my elders, headed by Aunt Bee, refused to grant me on the grounds that I was ‘far too young’. Yet when I finally became old enough to qualify for such things as proper ‘bras’, high heels, court shoes in place of strapped ones, long evening dresses, lipstick, face-powder, costume jewellery, or permission to stay up late in order to go to a dinner-party or a dance, they were also immediately granted to Bets; this time on the grounds that ‘it isn’t fair on poor little Bets that you should have them and she should not’! So Bets, my junior by two years, graduated to a bra on the same day as I did: even though she did not need one, being the possessor of an enviable shape. It is no thanks to Aunt Bee, or to Mother either, that I did not grow up to dislike and resent my young sister.
I resented this favouritism all right. Bitterly! But I had the sense to realize that it wasn’t Bets’s fault, and to put the blame where it belonged. So we remained the best of friends; even when I realized that she would always be more popular than I, since she possessed many more social assets and was always gay, easy-going and good-tempered. Everyone always liked Bets, so I saw nothing odd in the fact that she was Mother’s favourite daughter; she was, after all, the baby of the family. And I had Tacklow. Nevertheless I resented those extra years that I had to wait before I was allowed to wear and do grown-up things, only to see Bets get them the minute I did. It not only took the gilt off them, but was to mean, when we finally got back to India, that word got around that Mollie Kaye couldn’t be asked out to a party unless her school-age sister was invited too. So hostesses who did not want an extra two girls (and two more men to partner them) stopped asking me out, and I missed a lot of fun. Which was initially Bee’s fault, but later on Mother’s…
Poor Mother … poor, silly old darling! She is dead now. She died just two months after her ninety-seventh birthday, while I was working on the first draft of this book, and I could not feel sad for her, because she had so hated being old. She could not and would not come to terms with it. The fact that she could no longer do things that she wanted to do, or go where she w
anted to go (usually somewhere on the far side of the world), irked her unbearably, and someone had to be blamed for it. Somehow it was somebody else’s fault: the doctor’s, for one. If he knew his job he would give her something that would ‘cure her’! If ‘you children’ (Bets and myself — both grandmothers!) had any consideration for her wishes, we would allow her to go out to India or South Africa for the winter months instead of ‘forcing her’ to stay and freeze in England.
It was only at the very end, when she was almost seven weeks into her ninety-eighth year and another autumn had begun — an Indian Summer of an autumn with leaves turning gold in the windless, golden days — that I got tired of being blamed for preventing her from leaving, swallow-like, for the warm south, when all I had done was to point out the difficulties that would face her if she tried to go jaunting off to Jaipur or Cape Province or wherever, now that she was so lame. Besides, thanks to the success of The Far Pavilions, I had, as she knew, been able to put a large sum of money into her bank account; large enough to allow her to do almost anything (within reason!) she happened to feel like doing. So now, for the first time, I pointed out that she only had to pick up her telephone and ask for the village taxi to collect her and take her down to her nearest travel agents — who by this time knew her well — and book herself a flight to the sun; why not do that?
I hoped that this would make her face facts at last and realize that she was not the only member of her generation who was growing old. She had already outlived so many friends whom she used to visit in India and the Seychelles; in Ceylon, Singapore, Canada, Africa and America — not to mention England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales! And those few who remained were now too old themselves to cope with a house-guest who was only four years short of her century and had, at ninety-two, fallen and smashed her hip, and so could no longer climb stairs; though she nipped around pretty briskly with the aid of a stick, and detested being helped! What I did not tell her was that several of these friends, while continuing to write to her to ask when she was coming to stay with them again, had at the same time written privately to Bets or myself to say: ‘Please don’t let Daisy come out here again! We love her dearly but we cannot cope any longer with the responsibility of having her as a house-guest; she is so frail, and so obstinate — she still thinks she can do anything and everything, and she won’t do what she’s told. Please don’t let her know we have written to you, but do, do discourage her from coming out, because it is all we can do to look after ourselves these days.’
I wish I had realized that when, confronted with the discovery that no one was going to prevent her from making the attempt, she would have to stop pretending, and face the inescapable fact that her travelling days were over. Because once she had accepted that never again would she be able to pack her bags and set off across the sea towards the sunrise, she metaphorically turned her face to the wall and stopped living. It was as simple as that…
Yet she herself had said, only a few days before she left us on her last journey, that she had had a wonderful life and would not have exchanged it for anyone else’s. It’s quite something to be able to say that. And at the end God was very good to her, for during her last three days she thought she was back in Kashmir on a houseboat on the Dal Lake, and that the manji, the owner, kept turning his boat around. Each morning and once in the evening, she said: ‘Why has my bed been moved? It was on the other side last night. … Oh, how silly of me; of course, Kadera* must have told them to turn the boat the other way; he knows that I sometimes like to look at a different view.’
How lovely just to drift off to sleep, convinced that you are in one of the most beautiful places in this still beautiful world, and knowing that Tacklow would be there waiting for her when she woke up.
* Her Kashmiri bearer, Kadera-lone, who had been with her for more than thirty years.
Chapter 27
Far to Southward they wheel and glance
The million molten spears of morn —
The spears of our deliverance
That shine on the house where we were born.
Kipling, ‘Song of the Wise Children’
Once again I will go back in time to a much earlier autumn. To the fall of 1927, when Mother was still young enough to be every bit as happy and excited as Bets and myself at the prospect of returning to India. Happier, in fact; since she had never known what it was like to be a desperately self-conscious teenager embarrassed by her shape and terrified of being a social flop!
However, a most unexpected (and while it lasted, thoroughly unpleasant) circumstance was about to come to my rescue. Seasickness, of all undignified things. Good old mal de mer. Once safely embarked for India, I proved to be such a bad sailor that I spent a large part of that longed-for voyage with my head over a basin, and though I went on board looking like Nellie the Elephant, by the time I landed in Calcutta I was, if not exactly a sylph, at least a tolerably attractive member of the human race. But I cannot recommend the treatment.
To begin with, all had been well, for though the Channel was once again appallingly rough, this time it did not bother me in the least; not even when, during the night, the S. S. ‘City of London’ turned the corner of Spain.…
By morning the wind had risen to gale force and far more than half the passengers had not been able to leave their bunks; Mother and Bets among them. I, however, was feeling on top of the world as I blithely accompanied Tacklow down to the almost deserted dining saloon and grandly ordered myself an Upton House-sized breakfast, starting — shall I ever forget? — with porridge. It came; and I had begun to pour cream on it when the only other passenger out of the four who last night had made up our table of eight at dinner, leant forward and inquired in jocular tones: ‘Have you just eaten that, or are you going to?’
Unfortunately I had not heard that hoary old traveller’s joke before, and it took me a full fifteen seconds to work it out. When I did, I looked down at the bowl of porridge … and in the next moment I was on my feet and stumbling away between the wildly tilting tables and the empty, storm-chained chairs, making for the two-berth cabin I shared with Bets, where I remained, flat on my back in my bunk and wishing I could die, for the rest of that week.
Even with my previous experience of seasickness I could not have believed that it was possible to feel so ill and still remain alive. Our cabin stewardess and the ship’s doctor evidently agreed, for when the ship reached Gibraltar and some VIP who had only been travelling as far as the Rock vacated his luxury cabin, they persuaded the Captain to have me moved into it. Which is how I came to occupy for the rest of that voyage the kind of shipboard accommodation that is normally reserved for Viceroys or millionaires, instead of a cramped little inside cabin on B deck. I didn’t even have to lie on a bunk, since the VIP suite had a proper bed — and proper windows too, that looked out onto its own private bit of deck. Not portholes.
I was much impressed and only wished that I could have enjoyed it more. But sadly, I continued to be seasick on and off for most of the rest of that trip, because instead of steaming through the Straits of Gibraltar into a calm blue Mediterranean, we found ourselves sailing into more foul weather. This stayed with us all the way to Naples, where, praise be, we stopped for two blessed days and saw the sun come out for the first time since we left England.
It was heaven to be on dry land again! The sun blazed down and we were met by a strong smell of drains and, just outside the dock gates, the reek of a dead sheep that lay in the road; cheerfully ignored by one and all and smelling even stronger than the garlic that our enthusiastic guide breathed all over us with every word he spoke.
We had not wanted a guide, but there were such hordes of them, and they were so clamorous and persistent, that in the end Tacklow decided that it was better to be accompanied by one rather than followed by an importunate mob. And how right he was, for no sooner had he selected one of them than the winner turned like a tiger on his rivals, chasing them away with a torrent of shrill invective that Tacklow refu
sed to translate. We didn’t get much out of our so-called guide except at second hand, for as soon as he found that Tacklow could speak Italian he embraced him as a brother and thereafter abandoned his wonderfully fractured English in favour of his own tongue — the two of them chatting happily away for the rest of our time in Naples.
In those days the hillside to the west of the city, which is now a solid mass of concrete high-rise flats, was a mass of green trees; a truly lovely spot from where one could look down on Naples and see, across the beautiful bay, a thin plume of smoke rising up into the clear blue air from the crater of Vesuvius. We drove to Pompeii in an open horse-drawn carriage, and I remember our guide taking Tacklow aside and surreptitiously hurrying him into one of the excavated houses where women tourists were not permitted because it had once been an expensive brothel. Tacklow said there were a lot of rather racy frescoes on the walls but refused to elaborate.
The sun continued to shine for most of the following day, but towards evening ominous black clouds began to pile up over the sea, and shortly after sundown we sailed out of the Bay of Naples in the most spectacular thunderstorm I had ever seen; our way lit by furious, blazing flashes of lightning and the sort of noise that one associates with the last act of The King, when Valhalla is burning and the drums and brass in the orchestra are being assisted to raise the roof by a bevy of stage-hands flapping sheets of tin in the wings.
I watched on deck until we were clear of the harbour, and was then forced to retreat to my VIP cabin with another attack of seasickness. This one lasted until we reached Malta, which I remember as a beautiful, pale-gold island whose capital, Valetta of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, looked as though it were made of frozen lace. It was here, walking through its narrow streets in the warm moonlight, that I caught the first authentic, heart-stirring whiff of the East … jasmine, orange-blossom and spices and the scent of sun-baked dust. And heard, softened by distance, men’s voices (Highlanders from some Scottish regiment on garrison duty on Malta, perhaps?) singing ‘The Skye Boat Song’. I remembered that night many years later, and described it in a chapter of Shadow of the Moon which was cut from the original edition, but replaced in a subsequent reprint.