The Beauty of All My Days

by Ruskin Bond

I did not see Miss Kellner again. I made friends with some boys in my locality, and there were cricket matches and cycle rides and visits to the cinema to keep me busy. A few months after returning to school, my mother wrote and informed me (casually, and among other bits of news) that Miss Kellner had passed on.

  Ships that pass in the night.

  I did dream of her once. I saw her riding through the sky in her colourful rickshaw, leaving behind a trail of marzipans.

  A boy’s dream.

  And now, seventy-five years later, I pay this little tribute to one who befriended a lonely boy.

  Farewell, Miss Kellner!

  THE LONELY TIMES, THE LONELY CROWDS

  Whenever I have been assailed by loneliness it has almost always been in the big city, seldom in the small town, and never in the hills. The mountains are company in themselves. They may appear to be remote but in fact they are there to be touched. It is people who are elusive, especially in large numbers. Their identity is lost in the crowd. They have merged into nothingness.

  My first encounter with loneliness happened when I was seven, deposited by my mother in a convent boarding-school. I was told by a nun to go and play with the ‘other children’. There were about two hundred of them, shouting and running about on a small playing-field. I shrank at the prospect of playing with this screaming horde! Mother and the nun had left. I stood alone in a corner of the field, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed. Was this what life was all about, being wrenched away from all that was homely and familiar, no matter how unhappy the home? I was miserable for days, hardly touching my food.

  Then, a year or two later, I had my father’s companionship for the entire summer and winter. Just the two of us. We went to the pictures, bookshops, visited Delhi’s monuments. Another boarding school, not so bad this time. Holidays with my father. Then his sudden passing. A terrible void. There was really no one to replace him. For a long time I was alone and lonely. But blessed with a resilient nature, I came out of this slough of despair and began to assert myself.

  I had almost forgotten what it was to be lonely. My walks, my books, the cinema, all helped me to be content with my own company. Sometimes I made a friend, but perhaps I was too intense, too demanding of friendship. It took me some time before I learnt not to be too possessive.

  Late in 1951, when I was seventeen, I made that journey to England and delivered the mora to my aunt.

  At first I went to Jersey, in the Channel Islands. I was very lonely there. It was a beautiful island, and everyone was friendly, but how I longed for home! And by home I meant India—its mud, its grass, its mango blossoms (more redolent than mangoes), sugar-cane juice, the boys on their bullock carts, the girls with jasmine-scented hair, the burning sunshine, cool water from an earthen sohrai, the sharp tang of jamuns, the approach of heavily burdened monsoon clouds, palm trees waving, peepul leaves dancing, the banyan coming to life, herons wading, peacocks calling, the foothills beckoning.

  I worked at several jobs, saved some money, took off for London.

  Foggy London. A tiny attic room. Another office, another job. Lonely evenings at my typewriter, conjuring up the India I’d left behind. The gas pipe leaked. I’d open the window to let out the gas and the fog would seep in.

  I’d put on an old raincoat and go for a walk. Meat and two veg in a cheap restaurant. Sometimes beans on toast. And occasionally I’d buy a cheap South African sherry (2 shillings, 6 pence a bottle) and try to get drunk. But as an alcoholic I’ve always been a failure. Two drinks and I fall asleep.

  How did Ray Milland manage to drink so much in The Lost Weekend? He won an Oscar for his role. It was one of the films I saw during that period. I was constantly drifting into cinemas—West End, East End, wherever my tired feet would take me. I had one pair of shoes and they were wearing out. I washed my Terylene shirt at night and it would be dry by morning.

  There was no bathroom in the lodging house, but I found a public bath down the Belsize Road and once a week I treated myself to a hot-tub bath.

  We three,

  We’re not a crowd,

  We’re not even company . . .

  My echo,

  My shadow,

  And me . . .

  The words of an old song ‘We Three’ ran through my head as I roamed the streets of London. People everywhere, and everyone a stranger.

  Leicester Square. Prostitutes lurking in dark corners. ‘Hello, darling. Come on home with me and I’ll give you a good time.’ ‘Just two pounds, ducky.’

  My wages were five pounds a week. I had two pounds in my pocket that evening, and I accompanied a good-looking girl back to her flat. She’d looked quite attractive under the street lights but she seemed to age even as we climbed the steps to her room. She suffered badly from varicose veins. Not an easy way to make a living.

  She brought out a large biscuit tin, and I thought she was going to offer me a biscuit like Miss Kellner when I was small boy. But the tin was full of condoms.

  ‘Take one,’ she said.

  I gave her the money and said I’d come another time. For weeks her cheap scent clung to my coat. I sent it to the laundry. But the odour wouldn’t go away. And I couldn’t stand it. Hundreds of men must have left that room carrying with them that same sickly smell. It also represented a failure on my part, and I was to stay away from highly scented women for a long, long time.

  Who’s in the tree? I don’t remember. A pret, or a tree spirit perhaps. I think the picture was taken in Rupar, during one of my field trips for CARE. We had a project with young farmers. Not that I know anything about farming. I had simply to send in reports and recommendations.

  Well, I couldn’t attend the office in a raincoat, so I looked for the cheapest store in Camden Town and invested in a corduroy jacket. It took me through my remaining two years in London. At this time I was lucky enough to sell a short story to BBC Radio’s Third Programme. I was paid about £12, a useful amount, and I had planned to spend it on clothes, but just then a number of big musical shows were running in London’s theatres, and all my spare money went on seeing them. Paint Your Wagon, Guys and Dolls, Pal Joey and others. And having grown up on a rich fare of Hollywood musicals, I couldn’t resist going to see these stage performances; but they did eat into my income. I went to the opera too, and saw an uninspired performance of Carmen; and at Christmas time I saw Peter Pan, with Margaret Lockwood (a former film star) as Peter, and Donald Wolfit, the Shakespearean actor, as Captain Hook. But I was always on my own.

  In a way, the cinemas suited me better. They were cheaper, and you could walk in at any time; there were no fixed timings. I became an addict of foreign-language films, usually subtitled in English, and saw some great films: Battleship Potemkin (Russian), Pépé le Moko (French), Rashomon (Japanese), Bicycle Thieves (Italian), Los Olvidados (Mexican), and many others at the Academy. The little Everyman Cinema in Hampstead had seasons of classics ranging from the Marx Brothers to Orson Welles, and I took them all in.

  I was always moving from one lodging house to another. I couldn’t really settle in any of them, although most of my landladies were really quite decent to me. Perhaps they were all widows or spinsters; I never saw their husbands. They were Jewish, or so I gathered. So were my employers, who ran a small business manufacturing photographic accessories. I got on quite well with my office colleagues but they lived in far-flung suburbs outside London and dashed off to catch their trains as soon as the office closed.

  The underground railway could take you almost anywhere in London or its periphery—to Epping Forest in the north-east, to Harrow in the north-west; to the East End (Wapping and Whitechapel); south to Kew Gardens or Wimbledon (if you liked tennis) or to the Oval (if you liked cricket).

  Those pigeons nesting in the roof make a lot of noise early in the morning. And daybreak is the best time for writing. Everything I have written during the last thirty-eight years has been penned at this desk, in this small study-cum-bedroom. I sleep well in it, too.

  Someti
mes, on a Sunday, I would venture out to some unfamiliar part of London and then explore the area on foot. In this way I came to know London (and the underground) quite well.

  My favourite destination was Wapping, London’s dockland, as I was familiar with this area from many of the Dickens novels I’d read in India—Our Mutual Friend, Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist, Sketches by Boz. And just as the young Dickens had walked the streets of the East End, I walked them too—up and down the Mile End Road, up to Whitechapel (where Jack the Ripper had slain his victims) and down to the Surrey Docks. Here, too, W.W. Jacobs had set his humorous stories of dockland life, and Arthur Morrison had described it in his Tales of Mean Streets. But a lot had changed from the time of Dickens and I could find little that was reminiscent of the London he knew and described. Nor did I meet any of Jacobs’s comical longshoremen. They may have been there once, or perhaps they’d only existed in his fiction.

  It was the same with Wodehouse’s characters, who really belonged to West End clubs or country estates. In all my time in England I never met anyone who remotely resembled Jeeves or Bertie Wooster or Lord Emsworth or his pig. And, yet, back in India I’d loved these characters; they seemed to epitomize English eccentricity and good humour.

  I suppose George Orwell came closest to describing the real London, the real England, as it was just before the Second World War. Down and Out in Paris and London and Keep the Aspidistra Flying portrayed a city and a people that I could recognize.

  Aspidistras as house plants are out of fashion now, but even in the 1950s you could find them in almost every lodging house, taking up some corner of the hall or parlour where the sun never penetrated. It was also known as the cast-iron plant because it could put up with any kind of neglect. It was popular in gloomy, gaslit Victorian homes, where sunlight seldom penetrated the heavily curtained rooms.

  I moved around a good deal when I was in London, and there was almost always a potted aspidistra on the landing or in the hallway. They are handsome plants if given some attention. I would water them occasionally, even though my landlady would say, ‘They don’t like too much water.’ And if I suggested a brighter situation she would say, ‘They don’t like the light!’ Poor aspidistras, they were typical Londoners, preferring to stay indoors rather than going out into the London drizzle!

  When I was a child in Jamnagar we had a wind-up gramophone, and among the 78-rpm records that I used to play, there was one called the ‘The Lambeth Walk’, sung by a music-hall comedian called Lupino Lane. It was a catchy tune, conjuring up visions of jolly Cockneys two-stepping down the streets of London.

  I can still sing it (to myself, no one likes to hear my singing voice):

  Any time you’re Lambeth Way,

  Any evening, any day,

  You’ll find us all

  Doing the Lambeth walk

  And so, on my explorations, I went down Lambeth Way, taking the underground to Elephant and Castle and then walking around Lambeth in search of musical Cockneys. But my only memorable encounter was with a group of Teddy boys (unemployed and unemployable hoodlums) who, for no particular reason, flung insults at me and told me to get off their turf. Most Teddy boys carried knives and were happy to use them, so I hurried back to the tube station and the comparative safety of Haverstock Hill in north London.

  Most of the Teddy boy gangs seemed to favour south London, so I made it a point to avoid the line going down to Tooting and Clapham Common.

  It was strange that I felt so much of an outsider in a city where my own family had its origins. After all, my grandfather had been a Londoner, as his Army Service Book confirms. Born in the borough of Islington, enlisting in the Scottish Rifles at Bow Street police station at the age of seventeen, and being shipped off to India a year or two later to find himself marching to Herat in the middle of one of those pointless Afghan border wars, wars that never solved anything, then or now.

  Did my young grandfather run away from home? Or was he simply fed up with life in dear old Islington, an area without colour or character (as I discovered on one of my walking tours). In India, he was route marching most of the time, along with Kipling’s amiable Soldiers Three. In camp at Jubbulpore (now Jabalpur) he married the daughter of an indigo planter. His eldest boy was born in Barrackpore, my father in Shahjahanpur, the youngest, Arthur, in Hoshangabad, a daughter in Chittagong. A wide range of fledgling cantonments and army outposts. They certainly kept those soldiers on the move. Babies born all over the place, regardless of border wars and local uprisings. This was in the 1880s and 1890s—Kipling’s time in India—and he captures the life of ordinary soldiers in his Barrack-Room Ballads:

  We’re marchin’ on relief over Injia’s sunny plains,

  A little front o’ Christmas-time an’ just be’ind the Rains;

  Ho! get away you bullock-man, you’ve ’eard the bugle blowed,

  There’s a regiment a-comin’ down the Grand Trunk Road,

  With its best foot first

  And the road a-sliding past,

  An every bloomin’ campin-ground exactly like the last . . .

  I quote from memory. ‘Route Marchin’ and ‘Boots’, as put to music and sung by Nelson Eddy on an old gramophone record in my father’s collection.

  In spite of the monotony of the early cantonments and camping sites, Grandfather plodded on to reach the dizzy heights of a drill sergeant before retiring and setting down in Kolkata with his family. There was no thought of returning to dear old London.

  * * *

  By the time I left London, after my two-year sojourn, I must have known the city better than most Londoners. But, sadly, I did not know any Londoners. Nor did I know anyone who spoke like Bertie Wooster, except for an Oxford-educated Indian who always greeted me with a ‘What ho!’ or a ‘What-what!’ Wooster lives on in India.

  LEFTOVERS FROM THE RAJ

  By the time I’d finished school in 1950 most of the British and Anglo-Indian boys had left, their families emigrating to the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The Muslim boys (about one-third of the school’s strength) had already left in 1947, at the time of Partition and the subsequent bloodletting across northern India and newly created Pakistan. These boys, mostly Pathans, had been very popular in school, and my friends Azhar and Omar were among them. Riots were going on in Simla and the boys had to be evacuated in army trucks; they got home safely, but they left a void, and it was two or three years before the school recovered from the sudden drop in numbers. Then the Sikh boys came in, redressing the balance.

  A page from my album. At the Taj Mahal with friends, circa 1958. I would visit Agra occasionally. Its old-world atmosphere appealed to me. The city, the cantonment, the fort, Fatehpur Sikri, all steeped in history . . .

  Back in Dehradun, my home town, there had been quite an exodus of Anglo-Indian families. The more affluent left on their own steam. Those who could not afford the journey could apply to the British High Commission for ‘assisted passages’. My mother did apply on my behalf. The local padre, acting on behalf of the high commission, came to check me out. He decided that I was ineligible because my mother was now married to an Indian national. And so, when I did leave at the end of 1951, it was my mother who paid for my passage.

  When I returned to India in March 1955, there were still a few Anglo-Indians and British nationals living in Dehra. Some were down and out. Others, like Sir Edmund Gibson, were comfortably off and even owned property; in his case, a farm outside Dehradun. He would drive into town in his old Morris Minor and visit some of the Astley Hall shops. He did not buy much (he left that to his manager) but liked to gossip with the shop owners.

  That was how I met him. I’d just had my novel, Vagrants in the Valley, serialized in the Illustrated Weekly of India. This was a sequel to The Room on the Roof, and I’d written it in 1956, while living in Bibiji’s Astley Hall flat. Bibiji’s small provision store was down below, and sometimes I would help her with her accounts. It was in her shop that I was accosted by Sir Edmund.


  Tall, red-faced, bulging at the belt, he towered over me and barked: ‘You must be that young writer fellah, Bond. Didn’t they teach you geography at school? What do you mean by placing Doiwala before Raiwala on the railway line to Dehra?’

  I had indeed made such a blunder, or something like it, and I apologized profusely, promising to carry the mistake if ever the novel was published. (I never did!) Mollified, he told me that he had known my parents in Jamnagar, when he was the British Resident in the Kathiawar States. He had fond memories of Kathiawar and of Mahatma Gandhi, whose arrest he had once ordered. He told me that he and Gandhiji had got on famously and that he had preserved letters from the great man. He also told me that while he was a governor he had been shot at by a terrorist—three shots in succession—and every shot had missed.

  ‘Must have been a lousy weapon,’ I remarked. ‘Or you were destined for better things.’

  He liked the idea of staying on in India, and he hated the English climate, so there he was grumbling and mouldering away on his large estate.

  Not many Englishmen settled on the land or took to farming, unlike the colonials in South Africa or Rhodesia, who had settled on the land in large numbers and were loath to give up their chosen way of life. In India there wasn’t land enough for the locals, let alone foreign settlers. When the British left, all they had to do was give up their bungalows.

  The Anglo-Indians (formerly called Eurasians) had jobs to lose—jobs in the railways or police—and for them the wrench of parting was more difficult.

  It was the older people who suffered the most. Like the old couple (British but India-born) who lived on their own in a two-storey house just off Rajpur Road. They had been there for half a century, living on a tiny income, keeping a garden and minding their own business. Nobody bothered them. But when Independence came, they had nowhere to go—no friends, no family or relatives abroad, and practically no income. Their savings soon dried up. The garden become a wilderness. They fell sick and couldn’t get about. The tradesmen—the box-wallahs—stopped coming. No bread, no milk. The electricity connection was cut, as more than a year’s bills hadn’t been paid. They hadn’t been seen for weeks, when a postman walked into the house with a bill or a letter, and found them lying dead beside each other—side by side, in their double bed. They had simply starved to death.