by Isla Blair
Questions to my mother about her daily routine remained unanswered. But I watched her. She was her own housekeeper. She had to oversee everything to do with the servants and the house, she had to check everything, keep the books, she had to draw up rotas for silver-cleaning, floor polishing, linen changing, ordering provisions, writing out menus, relaying recipes to Boy. She was in charge of paying the servants their wages, enquiring as to their needs, both personal and in their duties in the house.
And she set herself a high standard in her appearance each day. She washed, put on clean clothes, applied her make-up and brushed her hair all before breakfast. She was scrupulous in this. She was taught by her mother that she must set an example to us, when we were with her, and to the servants. That to look slatternly would make her slovenly. She should cleanse her skin scrupulously each night at whatever time she went to bed. My mother persisted with this routine until the day she died. She would apply her make-up every morning even if no-one called on her for days on end.
My mother wasn’t really a drinker, but for some women, the gin and tonics persisted throughout the day, and it was considered a very bad failing to be seen in public “pie-eyed” or “squiffy-billy”. Your social equals no longer considered you equal, but someone to be tut–tutted over, someone to turn their backs on, or pretend they hadn’t seen or heard, someone whose visiting card was returned and to whom no visiting card was delivered.
So the days would stretch out towards a limitless horizon.
I can only imagine with hindsight the despair and gnawing pain of such women, the pain of emptiness that they tried to assuage with gin or whisky and more gin – but instead of the hoped for balm, the little scorch of emptiness just burned deeper.
And gradually, the dinner invitations, even the lunch invitations, would cease. Tea was safer. Cucumber and prized Marmite (sent out from home) sandwiches were served and cakes and Scottish pancakes and potato scones. Tea, after all, was tea and gin was not offered.
The community, being small and closed, was rife with gossip – everyone knew everyone else’s business, or thought they did, and judgements were made, sometimes unfairly. Some women were childless, so knew nothing of the misery of sending children home. But their childlessness was its own private despair.
One such woman was Maggie Spence, who put on children’s concerts. Indeed, I made my theatrical debut in one, aged two and a half, as a pixie. I had a tall green hat with long ears growing out of it and I was mortified when the audience laughed as I made my first appearance. I was convinced they were laughing at me and I had my first show of theatrical temperament when I pulled off my hat and walked off the stage (a theatrical gesture I was to repeat some 40 years later in Pirandello’s Henry IV with Richard Harris, but for rather different reasons). In reality, the audience was probably laughing at my two-year-old’s earnestness, more laughing with me than at me. But I hadn’t learnt to distinguish between the two. Maggie was wonderful with the children, coping with tears and tantrums with calmness and a grace that soon soothed hurt hearts and angry breasts. She knew how to cajole and encourage; she had a quiet smile which gave you confidence and you somehow came to believe you were her very favourite child. We all felt that.
Isla and friends in Munnar concert.
People were harsh in their judgement on her and her husband’s childlessness. “Too selfish, my dear. Too set in their ways, both of them. No time. No room for children.” I imagine that one or other of them couldn’t have children and that was Maggie’s secret grief, her own private ache and ongoing longing. My mother remembers her looking through the window of the children’s nursery at the club from which her childlessness excluded her, watching the little ones running round being chaperoned by their own individual ayahs and she said Maggie had a stricken look on her face. She saw a world she could observe, but could not enter; no little girl’s arms would encircle her neck, no sticky lips would kiss her goodnight, no little boy’s knees would need to be washed or dabbed with Mecurochrome. She would never look for toys in Maaraka’s Bazaar. It was a loss for her and I suspect it was a huge one. This was not the era when divorce was taken lightly and not the community that would take kindly to the scandal that divorce carried. It was a sure way to be shunned. One woman got divorced – in fact, her husband left her – and some years later she remarried, but two women in the district never addressed her again. They saw her every week at the Club for thirty years and spoke not one word.
Some women had affairs. Harriet Denton was beautiful. She was long-limbed, fine featured, with high cheekbones and a luscious mouth. Her hair was a tumbling auburn curtain, like a copper beech swaying in a soft summer breeze. She had green eyes and an Irish accent that wasn’t quite a brogue, which sounds bucolic – she had a Dublin lilt that had a flirtatious quality to it, filled with promise and possible secrets.
But Harriet was an innocent, as unaware of her sexuality as Bambi was of hunters in the forest. Harriet was fearful of everything. She screamed with horror at the cockroaches on the train from Delhi to Mussourie, she was afraid of the thought of the rat snakes on her roof protecting her from the rats. She was dismayed by the monsoon and the leeches that came with it. She didn’t know how to address or “order” the servants. She was a city girl and was ridiculed for asking where the nearest Woolworths was. She needed some new makeup. Woolworths? This was the jungle; makeup, clothes, perfume, English food had to be ordered months in advance from the homeland. Harriet was, at first, unnerved by the attention of the men in the Club and the hostility of the women in the ladies’ powder room. But who could blame her from turning from the coldness of the women’s stares and sniggers to the warmth of the men’s admiration. My parents were certain she had affairs – several, one supposes. It was thought she had had an affair with Maraaka the shop owner in Munnar town. I hope she did. She remained childless but loyal to her husband Stanley Denton, who was bald with bad teeth and who I thought looked like a cod.
And some women couldn’t cope with the life at any price, even if they held their husbands in affection. Phyllis Saunders awoke to the silence of the jungle, became terrified of the whispers, wheezes, cries, moans of the night and headed for the traffic and din of her native Glasgow. She had been a working girl, used to taking responsibility for her own professional actions – and indeed her own pay cheque. She tried to make a go of the imagined romantic life and marriage, but it wasn’t like the books or her dreams. It wasn’t like anything she could endure. Of course she was blamed. She didn’t have the stamina. She didn’t have the bottle.
But she got out.
So many didn’t. They got paler, thinner and became shadows of themselves – their personalities consumed by the jungle that engulfed them. Some were defiant for a bit, but could foresee no escape. Some grew bitter and brittle and bitchy; some were resigned and wore patient resignation as a shell to protect them from the little sulphurous pool of disappointment within. Some flourished of course. Usually those who had a passionate love for the man they had married. They took up painting, tennis, jobs in the library in the club, flowers for the church and club. Not many of them, or so it seems to me, even with hindsight, thought of trying to improve the lot of the children or the women in whose country they had come to live. They had very little to do with them. They were part of their lives, but a life apart.
Luckily, Violet’s love for Ian and his for her was passionate and constant. They loved each other’s company and were only lonely when they were deprived of it. Ian would come back for lunch each day (his horse would later be replaced by a motorbike), come in and wash his face, have lunch and half an hour’s “rest” and head out again.
Whoever knows what goes on in any one’s marriage? There were women who got huge pleasure from painting, in the extraordinary light, the vibrant colours of their Indian landscape. Scrap McKay was one of them, as was Gwen Brook. Gwen was a smoker with a smoker’s voice and a slow unhurried way about her – she was a languid Australian, not a fast-talking
one, and she was immensely proud of her Australian-ness. She was married to Tommy Brook, a dapper man, gentrified and stylish and probably rather snobbish. He was an expert rider. He would enter all the gymkhanas and usually win. He played polo with speed and confidence – he was a dashing figure who wore tweed jackets and yellow cravats and shining black riding boots. He always looked immaculate. He and Gwen enjoyed the Indian life, shooting, riding, she painting – and she was always re-decorating her bungalow. They returned to a small village in Sussex, where the riding was too expensive, and there was no shooting, polo or gymkhanas. Tommy was to die a slow death from throat cancer and Gwen was to outlive him by only a few years amongst her blue china jars and paint brushes, looking out on the alien view of daffodils and primroses and yearning for the brightness of the morning glories and the canna lilies. Life seemed pretty dismal without Tommy, so with little fuss, Gwen left the polite English countryside behind and joined him.
Ian and Violet
When the sun shone, which it did only sometimes in the monsoon months, we would venture onto the tennis court and walk round the garden. But you had to be careful. Because there was so much rain, leeches were only a heartbeat away. They would smell blood as soon as you set your foot outside and would seem to stand on end, waving their horrid leechy-ness, waiting to latch onto your legs or, God forbid, get too close to a bush and they would find their way onto your neck. I found them repulsive and although the bites didn’t hurt exactly, you couldn’t pull them off once they had taken hold. You had to wait until they were full of your blood and then they’d fall off. Cows and horses seemed immune to them, as did the tea pluckers; but I became mesmerised by the sometimes moving carpet on the lawn; they would always find their way over your boots, under your trousers into your socks.
One day I was in my mother’s bedroom, trying on her earrings and necklaces, when there was a great shout from Michael: “Madam, Missy come quickly – elephants.” And indeed there was a herd of wild elephants in the lower part of the jungle, a large herd, about twelve of them, and there was a newborn baby, a calf, with them. We piled into the car and headed to the sighting with our binoculars around our necks. There they were – red? covered in the red, rusty mud – not grey and elephanty, but like proud warriors in their paint. We whispered with delight and awe as these proud magisterial creatures made short shrift of the bamboo. There was one large one that seemed to be the boss. Daddy said it was the oldest female, the matriarch – she was bossing the others. It surprised me; I thought it would be one of the great tuskers, but it was grandmother Baba who pulled the others’ strings. They started to move further into the jungle, pushing the baby into the middle to protect it, and reluctantly we had to let them go, as we could no longer see them clearly.
We made our way back to the car but Oh! Oh! My God! The ground, it moved and all the way up our legs were leeches – thick and dark brown, some of them with yellow stripes on their backs. Screaming ensued. The more we stopped to try to pull them off, the more climbed onto us and soon we were just leech-legs. We ran and ran and got to the car. Michael had given us bags of salt to pour onto the leeches, should it be necessary, but that didn’t work, so my father got out his lighter. We were hysterical, but the lighter worked!
Leeches are used now in hospitals, as they were long ago, but I’d have to be given a general anaesthetic just to let them near me with their arching, looping bodies, soon to become swollen with ME. All sorts of things were tried by my father and the servants to keep them off: mustard oil on the skin, bags of salt to drop on them. The itchy bites would sometimes suppurate and when you tried to pull the leech off, they would stretch like an elastic band and there would be a round reddy/blue circle left on your skin, from their teeth presumably, and the blood would go on oozing for ages, despite loo paper and cotton wool swabbed on them.
Arriving back home, we settled down and pulled our boots, socks and trousers off – any sign of leeches? We had tea and buttery toast and started to feel calm. I went to the loo and there, embedded in the topmost part of the inside of my thigh was the largest, blackest, swollen-est leech ever seen. I was mesmerised with horror, unable to make any sound, but I could see the leech’s head underneath my skin – bluish, bruised looking, under my paleness. I had to wait, paralysed, till it dropped off.
ELEVEN
Learning to Fly
St Maray’s, our school in Scotland, was to be closed down. It was being such a happy day when we received this news; we were picnicking at Top Station, a lovely place high in the High Range hills, isolated and cut off from all the other estates. My father had been born there. Pine trees and eucalyptus gums grew in profusion and there was a beautiful river that fed into a lake where we would fish for trout and cook them over a bonfire – not eaten by me obviously.
Daddy read out the letter and we all went into shock. Mrs Dunsmuir had written that the school was to be closed from the moment of her writing; there was to be no reprieve, no-one would buy her out and, as we had left no personal belongings at the school, there was nothing she needed to forward to us. That was it. Our life at St Maray’s was over.
Fiona went into hysterical shock. Tears flowed, rage glowed – understandably, she was fifteen and coming up for her O levels, a terrible time to change schools, leaving her friends who had become her security, her little corner of belonging, and all without warning. It transpired that the Ministry of Education had been made aware, and therefore concerned, that there were so many unqualified teachers at the school. Indeed, Mrs Cock – the English teacher and deputy head – was the only member of staff who had any training at all. This apparently was not uncommon just after the war. But what was to become of us? Phone calls (very unusual) and telegrams were sent backwards and forwards to my mother’s sister Ailsa in England. Might it be possible to get us in to her daughter Pam’s school in West Sussex?
I wasn’t unduly upset at the school’s closure. I had not been especially happy at St Maray’s; my friends had not been particularly close. Only one thing troubled me. I held a secret to myself which no-one knew of except Fiona and she never spoke of it. It was a silent secret, lied over, acted around, bluffed out by me. And a change in school meant that it might now be discovered. I mustn’t think about that. It was enough dealing with the certain knowledge that our time in Munnar with our parents was coming to an end.
But where would we go in the holidays? Would we stay with Aunt Ailsa – and where?
Would I be lonely? Would I make friends? Or would people find out about me and not want to be my friend? These were the imponderables, but I couldn’t ponder them now. I had to make the most of every minute with my parents and the newly re-discovered joy of being home. I tried to imprint every pineapple, every banana frond, each patch of dappled grass under the lime trees, on my memory. I wanted to remember how my parents talked, the soft, slow way my father had, the lilting, fast talking way Mummy had when she was excited. I wanted to remember the feel of the soft fur of our cat Chang, the rough weave of the linen sofa. I wanted to hold in my head the scent of home and the lavender water Daddy put on his handkerchief, cut up limes, the beguiling smell of starched cotton sheets, Daddy’s pipe tobacco, Mummy’s perfume and the scent of the tea in the moist monsoon air.
Before we knew it, we were driving down the ghat once more, through the misty hills and the rubber, the coffee and the pepper groves and we would be in the warm sun of Cochin, waiting for that little aeroplane to take us from these parents we’d only just started to get to know again. All day there was a heavy sick feeling in my stomach. I tried to do the remembering thing; the bougainvillea creeper by the side of the swimming pool, the way hair curled in different directions on my Dad’s neck, the mole by my mother’s mouth. We clung to our parents and laughed for the camera, even though our sickness inside was growing and rising into our throats. It was impossible to eat. All one’s effort went into not crying or looking stricken, but all too soon that treacherous little plane swooped us up and away leaving
them tiny dots on the ground – Daddy in his checked shirt and khaki shorts, and Mummy in the grey dress with white spots on it that I loved. That morning she had let me comb her hair and put on her earrings for her, clasp the little string of pearls around her neck. Little offices, intimate and terrible because they would be the last I could perform for her, until when? Another two years? I would feel the warmth of her neck under my fingers, try to imprint on my brain the little blonde hairs on her nape, another little mole under her right ear. I was so full of love and a violent tenderness, I wanted to crush them both to me and beg and plead to stay. But British reserve always came to the rescue. British reserve was needed.
I know why they call it the British Stiff Upper Lip. So tight and painful is the effort of not betraying your feelings, let alone crying, that your lips become paralysed and painful – like a block of wood – rendering speech impossible. And you don’t betray your feelings, because the consequences would be disastrous – floodgates would open and all sorts of pain would be spread about like a tumultuous river, like a plague. So you bore it. Whatever the grief, whatever the pain, you bore it with stoicism and fortitude. It’s easy to laugh now at British reserve and apparent lack of emotion, but actually I think there is something rather admirable about it. Besides it wasn’t lack of emotion, it was having too much, an excess of vulnerability; to let it loose, unbridled, uncontained, would have brought the Empire “on which the sun never sets” to its knees.
* * * * *
A new life awaited me at West Preston Manor School for Girls in Rustington, Sussex. I was to come out of the dark and cold of our repressed Scottish school into the gentle English sunshine.
I was eleven years old when I met Miss Boykett.
Dorothy Boykett was short and stout, with white hair pulled into a tight bun. She had piercing blue eyes that really looked at you. I’d never been looked at like that before; it was as if she was really seeing me. It was intimidating, but fascinating too. I felt I wanted to please her. She was round, like a little grey wren or a fierce little merlin with a beaky nose, which was patrician. She smiled rarely, but when she did, it transformed her from the ferocious little hawk into the comfortable little wren.