by Francis King
My sister, always eager to be my acolyte, raced off to fetch the model plane. I now stood behind the man, listening to what passed between him and my mother. When I had looked up from the white shoes, I had felt an immediate attraction, I do not know why. Short, mahogany-skinned and muscular, he was dressed in tattered khaki trousers and grubby white shirt. His hair, reaching to his shoulders, was ebony and shiny in the sunlight. The line of the jaw was strong. Later, when he finally turned away, his errand successfully accomplished, I saw the square face, with a puckered scar on the forehead, a nose that was all but flat, and soft, dark eyes.
After all her years in India, my mother still spoke only rudimentary Hindi. The man’s English – because of the time that he had spent at the mission school, he said – was far, far better. It was therefore in English that they talked while I – and later my sister, the aeroplane cupped in both her hands as though it were a bird – listened.
‘Have you any experience as a cook?’
‘Oh, yes, lady. I was assistant to cook at other mission. I learn everything from him.’
‘The sahib is fussy about his food. He isn’t easy to please. About what he eats, I mean.’ So ascetic in all other respects, my father was a constant, almost neurotic complainer about the meals served to him. Of all the luxuries of his previous life in England, good food remained the only one now important to him.
‘I am sure I can please the sahib. I can learn.’
In the event, my mother, herself an excellent cook, found him the aptest of pupils. He was also, unlike our previous cook, as obsessive as my mother about hygiene. About that previous cook my mother often told a story to illustrate how ‘impossible’ (invariably her word when on the subject, a favourite of hers) Indian servants could be. At a dinner-party for the Governor, then on a visit to the city, and some prominent members of the English community, there had been an interminable wait for the main course, leg of lamb. My mother had eventually excused herself and hurried along to the kitchen. She had there found the cook squatting on the floor, with the bone of one of the two legs of lamb clasped between big toe and the one next to it as he struggled to carve the far too tough meat with a knife far too blunt. Slices were falling on to the grimy floor. My mother had hesitated and had then decided that, since there was no alternative, the lamb had better be served up to the guests.
With Joseph everything perishable would be stored away in the larder or the giant icebox, the flypapers would be constantly renewed, and stacks of dirty crockery no longer waited to be washed from one meal or even one day to another, as in the past. Joseph, my mother would often say, was a treasure.
My father, too, approved of rum. He could scramble eggs exactly as my father insisted on having them, neither too watery nor too dry, his puff pastry was miraculously light, and he always used boiling water to make the China (never Indian) tea of which my father drank so much. From time to time, seated at his desk while, hands clasped before him, Joseph stood respectfully in front of him, my father would start some religious conversation of a kind that my mother, if she was present, would soon find a way to terminate. Poor Joseph could find no such way. ‘I have been thinking of the Gaderene swine,’ I heard my father begin on one occasion. On another it was: ‘Have you ever wondered when reading of the Prodigal Son …?’ He was a genuinely religious and decent man, constantly tormented by the mysteries both of the Bible and of the faith that he painfully and persistently tried to derive from it. He was also an excellent doctor, with the natural flair for diagnosis essential for success in those days when scientific tests were far fewer and more fallible.
My mother assigned to Joseph what was no more than a mud hut in the servants’ quarters. Instead of a door it had a curtain improvised from a tattered, gaudily striped green-and-orange bedspread, Indian in manufacture, that had once covered the bed of a nanny who had long since left us. There were two bungalows between ours – the one closest to the toy church, with its perfunctory gothic ornamentation and crooked spire – and the gate to the compound. In one of the other bungalows lived Dr Penrose, the grey, grim, childless head of the mission, inconsolable for the loss of his wife to typhoid, and in the other the young, recently married couple, the Roches, with the ready smiles and the Geordie accents, who had arrived only a few weeks before. The couple, along with my mother, conducted lessons in the little, airless hall behind the church.
The children of other English families with which we from time to time exchanged visits were forbidden by their parents to go near any servant quarters, theirs or anyone else’s, much less to enter them. But, highly unusual for that era, our parents had no qualms about our doing so. They were a couple without any racial prejudice. My mother’s severe judgements were directed impartially at white and brown alike, and my father made absolutely no differentiation of treatment between his many Indian patients and his few European or American ones.
However, both my parents retained the acute sense of class distinction imbued in them – my mother the daughter of a baronet with a small country estate, my father the son of a successful barrister – from their earliest years. Among their closest friends were a grand Indian couple who lived in a rambling house, not unlike some Victorian vicarage in a wealthy parish in England, called, despite its relatively modest size, ‘The Palace’. The man, who had been educated at Harrow and Oxford, would have been the maharajah of a small state if his grandfather had not abdicated on becoming a Christian. To Indians not of this sort of standing, my parents were always courteous and friendly; but their attitude remained essentially one of superiors to inferiors and patrons to protégés. Such people were never among their dinner guests, just as their equivalents would never have been their dinner guests back in England.
Maria and I had already been in the habit of visiting the servants’ quarters even before Joseph’s arrival. Now we went there frequently I used to feel an inexplicable excitement as, without declaring my presence before doing so, I jerked aside the old bedspread and entered, followed by Maria. Often, for want of a chair, Joseph would be squatting or reclining on the narrow, low bedstead, which, unlike our two beds, did not have springs but, instead, horizontal and vertical cords interwoven in a crisscross pattern. He always seemed to be happy to see us, putting down the book or newspaper that he had been reading and simultaneously screwing up his eyes and smiling up at us as his face caught the sunlight all at once introduced by my raising of the improvised curtain.
Although, at the age of eight, both of us were now avid readers, I was curiously uninterested in the books, usually written in English, that he would hold up to show us. But Maria would glance at them and sometimes even read a page or two. Many years later, when we were in our thirties, she told me that one of these books had been Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and another the first volume of Das Kapital in an English translation. Could that have been true? She had a gift not merely for causes but also for misremembering.
As soon as we had returned from school – to which an elderly orderly would take us and bring us back – we would often rush over to Joseph’s quarters to see if he were there. By then my parents would have had their lunch and my mother, never my father, would be having what she called ‘a little he-down’ Joseph would be free. Maria would sit on the bed beside him and I would squat on the mud floor. Later my mother would chide me ‘The seat of those shorts is filthy! What have you been doing?’ Joseph told us that he had learned to play the recorder at the previous mission. He would now pick up the instrument set out, together with his few books, his turban and his pair of white shoes (given to him, he had by now told us, by one of the missionaries) on a page of The Times of India in one corner of his room. On it he would play to us. At the time there seemed to me nothing incongruous in hearing him play ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’ or ‘Greensleeves’, two staples of his repertoire. I can never hear either of those tunes now without a mingled feeling of longing, sadness and bewilderment.
Something else that Joseph told us that he
had learned at the previous mission was woodcarving. He would do this with a two-bladed penknife, working deftly and quickly on wood that he foraged from the trees in our compound. Sometimes we would ourselves bring him suitable pieces of wood The objects that he produced were usually animals – cats, dogs, bullocks, donkeys – crude and showing no particular skill but easily recognisable. At Christmas he produced some diminutive sheep and cattle for the crib that my mother would set up each year. Some of these objects he would present to us, some to other members of the mission or to friends of ours.
On the bed, Maria had a way of sitting extremely close to him. She would even lean against him, her face upturned as he talked or played to us. Occasionally he would put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her even closer. Then an expression of dreamily abstracted happiness would appear on her face, and she would shut her eyes, as if about to go to sleep. Even my parents might have disapproved of this proximity between their daughter and a servant. Our British and American neighbours would certainly have done so. But to me, at that age, it seemed in no way odd, much less an occasion for disapproval or alarm.
I rarely visited Joseph in the kitchen but Maria often did so. Soon she had become both his part-time assistant and his pupil. He instructed her in how to thicken gravy, make a roux, poach an egg, prepare vegetables. She could have learned all these things from our mother but she preferred to learn them only from him. Divinity fudge, always tricky, was a speciality of our mother. But it was from Joseph that Maria acquired a skill in making it that remained with her into old age. On the rare occasions when she came to stay with me, she would announce ‘I think I’m going to make you some divinity fudge’ and my heart would then sink. She would leave the kitchen in a mess that affronted my natural tidiness, with the pan often burned. Worse, having loved the glistening mini-peaks of peppermint-flavoured sugar and white of egg as a child, I now hated an excessive sweetness that made my teeth ache.
Maria, unlike myself, had never been a docile child. But she always did precisely what Joseph told her. Once she said to me: ‘Oh, I do wish Joseph were younger!’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because then I could marry him when I grow up.’ ‘Oh, that would be no good! He’s so poor.’ ‘I don’t care.’
In March, as the temperature began to rise and rise and my mother and father debated whether she should or should not take us both up to Naini Tal, leaving him to suffer the hot weather on his own, Maria and I celebrated our joint ninth birthday. On both that day and the day before it Joseph would allow neither of us into his kitchen. He was preparing a surprise for us, he told us. We guessed what the surprise would be. It would be roast chicken with sage and onion stuffing, bread sauce, roast potatoes and tinned peas. Chicken was our favourite dish.
Chicken it was, when we sat down for lunch on that Saturday. ‘Joseph’s bread sauce is better than mine,’ our mother said, admiringly but not wholly pleased.
‘You’ve made him into a first-rate cook,’ my father said.
‘He has a natural talent. That Ahmed was beyond any teaching.’
‘Oh, don’t talk of Ahmed. I often thought he’d poison me with that filthy kitchen and the flies and the ice-box dripping water.’
At the end of the meal our mother announced: ‘Now we have Joseph’s surprise.’ She got up and went out to the kitchen.
We knew from previous birthdays what we would hear next. From far down the corridor between the kitchen and dining room we heard her strong, not always accurate contralto:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday, dear children,
Happy birthday to you …
Then Joseph was singing, in a nasal, no less loud tenor. Maria and I giggled, not in mockery, but in surprise and pleasure. He entered the room first, carrying the large, murderous knife that we so often watched him sharpening, sparks whirling away from the whetstone, when we were to have a Sunday joint. Behind came my mother, bearing a huge cake, the flames of its eighteen candles, nine for Maria, nine for me, juddering in the dry, dust-laden wind that had been blowing in through the open window.
She set down the cake with a sigh. Her forehead was damp, straying hairs sticking to it. ‘ There you are, children! Look what Joseph has prepared for you!’
Maria pointed: ‘Us! Us! They’re us.’
Joseph had carved two figures, standing close to each other, their arms intertwined. One was a boy, dressed in white shorts and a blue, short-sleeved shirt, just like ones that I often wore. The other was a girl in a gym-tunic with black strap shoes fashioned not out of leather but some sort of black cloth. The two figures were inseparable, we later discovered, carved from a singe piece of wood.
Maria’s eyes glittered in the light of the candles. Her mouth was open, as though she were about to cry out. I, too, stared transfixed.
‘Isn’t that lovely?’ our mother said. ‘Oh, Joseph, you’ve been to so much trouble. You shouldn’t have! You shouldn’t have!’
Later, we quarrelled about who was to keep the conjoined figures. I think that we both felt, though we would never say it, that they were symbolic of the lives that we had shared so closely. We did then not realise how soon and abruptly those lives would be separated, as though someone had taken an axe to the figures, splitting the single piece of wood into two. We were doomed to become remittance children, like thousands and thousands of others packed off ‘home’, to be looked after by relatives, friends or even total strangers. I would go to an uncle and aunt, who already had a brood of six brats and certainly did not welcome another. Maria would go to our German grandmother in Switzerland, where she would be cosseted and indulged. We would rarely see each other again until the war was over and we were past twenty.
‘I’m older than he is. So I should have them,’ Maria said.
‘But I’m the boy!’ I shouted. ‘Anyway she’s only twenty minutes older.’
‘He likes me better. Joseph likes me better.’
‘Liar!’
‘If I were Solomon I’d cut that piece of wood in two,’ our father said.
‘Why don’t you toss for it?’ my mother proposed.
Reluctantly we agreed.
Maria won, as she usually did when we tossed for anything. She looked at me, worried and sad. ‘I’m sorry’ she said. Suddenly
she held out the figures. ‘You have them if you want. I don’t mind.’ I shook my head. It was not the first time that it was brought
home to me that she had a far more generous nature than I had.
It was two or three weeks later that the unbelievable thing happened. With its abruptness and horror it might have been a car crash or train crash or an attack of the cholera that had been reported to be spreading in the native quarter.
It was yet another unbearably hot day. On the one following it, after repeated changes of mind, my mother had resolved at last to take Maria and me up into the hills of Naini Tal. Two electric fans were whirring at either end of the dining-room. The windows were closed, as they now always were until the scorching air outside had begun to cool with the sinking of the sun. Our bearer was on holiday and so it was Joseph’s assistant, the kitmatgar, little more than a boy with the vestige of a moustache above his long, thin upper lip, who staggered in with an overloaded tray bearing our lunch. From time to time, either my mother or father would say ‘We really must get a trolley’ but neither did anything about it.
My mother leaned across the table and picked up the cut-glass jug containing filtered water. A lace doily, fringed with beads, covered it. She jerked off the doiley. ‘Who’s for water?’ She and my father never drank alcohol, even though they always provided it for their guests. My father held out his glass. Meantime, the boy began to unload his tray. My father loved curry, as he also loved the sticky Indian sweets that most westerners abhorred. He also liked his curry to be extremely hot, which my mother, my sister and I certainly did not. As a result whenever we had curry, as on this Sunday, Joseph prepared two different dishes, one mild for
us and one hot for him. The boy set down before my mother the silver entrée dish, with the crest of her family on it, containing the one curry. He set down the other curry, also in a similar entrée dish, before my father. My father, who, even on that Sunday, had from the early hours been visiting patients too ill to come to his surgery, was ravenous, as always. He grabbed a serving spoon and, plate in hand, dug out some rice from another dish, placed equidistant from all of us in the centre of the table. Then he piled two spoonfuls of his curry on top of it.
‘Mango chutney?’ my mother asked, herself taking up a spoon.
Reluctant to open his mouth for any purpose other than eating, my father merely shook his head. He never took chutney, as the rest of us did, but my mother nonetheless always offered it to him.
He piled a fork high with rice and curry, raised it to his mouth and swallowed greedily. Then he again began to pile the fork high. Suddenly he gageed, put a hand to his throat and began to gasp and snort, his eyelids fluttering. My mother leaped to her feet, knocking back her chair, and raced round the table. Later, she was to say that she thought that he was having a stroke. It was from a stroke that she had seen her father die when she was still a child. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
Stupefied, Maria and I remained seated, staring in amazement and terror.
Suddenly my father began to vomit, with an astonishing, projectile force. A particularly violent spasm caused him to topple from his chair, with a resounding crash.
As always in an emergency, my mother was wonderfully decisive. She turned to the boy, cowering in a corner of the room, his head lowered and his hands clutched together in front of him, and shouted in Hindi: ‘Get Dr Penrose – get him, now, now, hurry, hurry!’ If he were not at home, then the boy should summon the young Geordie couple, the Roches, she added. She turned to us: ‘Go to your room! At once! Both of you! And stay there – stay there till I tell you.’