FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  The mental picture I have of my mother then is very 1940s (not surprising because it was the 1940s): she has streaky light-brown hair rolled up away from her face like a Hollywood film star of the time, and she is sitting at a dressing table (people don’t seem to have dressing tables any more, the same way they don’t use tea sets) wearing a robe in some floppy material, and leaning forward – either to wipe Pond’s Cold Cream off her face with a wodge of cotton wool, or to stroke bright red lipstick on to her big smiley mouth stretched open for this purpose in an O. Mum had pretty hands with tapering fingers – I got Dad’s wrinkled stubby ones in the DNA lottery, as well as a husky croak instead of her lovely singing voice. She played the piano, and used to entertain us with Kipling’s poems set to music, or mournful Irish ballads. Her favourite was about an emigrant who is leaving Ireland for the United States but his girlfriend hasn’t turned up to say goodbye. ‘Oh Kathleen Mavourneen, my sad tears are falling/To think that from Erin and thee I must part.’ Then there was another about a child who has a nightmare that her father will be killed in a mining accident: ‘So tell your mates of my dreams, Daddy/For sure as the stars that shine/Something is going to happen today/So Daddy, don’t go down the mine.’ And yet another about a dying child: ‘Will I be an angel, Mother? An angel in the sky?’ Sometimes Dad used to sing to Mum, always one of two songs – ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ and ‘Lady Be Good’ – and though he’d fling his arms out in a jokey dramatic way, we knew that he meant every single word.

  Like Dad, Mum was born and mostly raised in India until she was a teenager when she was sent to a convent in Ipswich where, she told us, the girls had to wear thin cotton shifts in the bath in case they themselves, or – worse – any other girl, saw their bodies. It was at this convent that my mother overheard the most popular girl in the school complaining to her pals that too many people wanted to be in their group. ‘We’ve got to draw the line somewhere,’ the girl said, ‘so we’ll draw it at Maisie Moss’ (my mum).

  When she was a child in Madras (now Chennai) Mum’s father kept a pet monkey – a big gibbon called Jacko which had the run of the house. Mum was scared stiff of him, but she loved telling us how he once snatched my grandmother’s cut-glass butter dish off the breakfast table and then climbed the tallest tree in the garden with it, licking the butter. Granny made everyone stand round the tree holding out sheets so that when Jacko finished his feast, got bored and dropped the dish, it would fall into the stretched-out cotton and wouldn’t break; Jacko seemed to understand what was up, Mum said, and took hours revelling in the attention before he let the dish go. I don’t remember what exactly happened in the end, but it must have fallen safely into the sheets because it was always on our breakfast table in India, inspiring Mum to tell the story.

  Mum’s first husband died (of septicaemia) when she was just twenty-one after only a year of marriage, and her younger brother Dick had joined the International Brigade and gone to fight in the Civil War in Spain where he had disappeared (the family lived in desperate hope that news of him would come one day), but she was unbowed: glamorous and clever and fun and full of laughter, and in those days she was up for anything. Before she became pregnant with me, for instance, she went all the way back to England from India by bus with six-year-old Moira, my sister, so that she could buy a quilted coat in Damascus en route (it was in the dressing-up box for years). In the modern world she would have had a good job – I always imagine she might have been at the BBC or on a newspaper, but she could have been a teacher too; as it was, she wrote a couple of children’s books for Tessa and me, and ran a small nursery school at home in England (until we moved, when she had to close it again); she painted well, designed and stitched beautiful needlepoint tapestries, was an excellent dressmaker, worked as a guide for NADFAS (National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies), played bridge and was very good at making all our temporary houses look nice, with no money. I adored her and Dad, and will always miss them and be grateful to them for passing on their energy and enthusiasm for life. Mum used Chanel No. 5 – it was her annual birthday/Christmas present from Dad – and I still have the spray bottle that was on her dressing table when she died. I don’t allow myself to smell it because it makes her loss too painful, even now, more than twenty years on.

  Our childhood was very ordered: we lived in the type of bungalows you can still see in the old cantonment areas (now of course used by the Indian military); everyone around us wore a khaki uniform; and our surroundings were immaculately tidy and well-organised. The trees were whitewashed from their waists down and the bricks edging the paths were painted white, and the hard brown earth was perpetually being swept with grass brooms (the sound of gentle sweeping is the background noise of my childhood, along with cawing crows). There was nearly always a Lutyens-style redbrick church somewhere in each compound, so any time I find myself driving through Larkhill, the military town on Salisbury Plain, I am reminded of the cantonments in India because there is one there too.

  Our houses had deep verandas for shade, and inside, the chick blinds at the windows were kept rolled down and sprinkled with water for coolness, so that we lived in semi-darkness with the dazzling glare outside filtered through finely split bamboo. The houses were quiet, with the ceiling fans whirring round in a whisper, and the staff and us children padding about in bare feet – but round at the back, by the kitchen area with its fire and beaten-earth floor, where we spent a good deal of time with our ayah, there was always a hubbub of servants and chat.

  Most of the indoor quietness was because Tessa and I had no friends – I suppose this was because we didn’t go to school; we were too young to be sent off somewhere outside the cantonment: Mum taught us reading and writing at home. To this day, more or less the only history I can remember is (in rhyme) from a children’s book called Kings and Queens: ‘So the Barons brought a Deed/Down to rushy Runnymede/Magna Carta was it hight/Charter of the People’s right . . . “Sign! Sign! Sign!” they said./“Sign, King John, or resign instead.” ’

  Of course, among their army colleagues, our parents had lots of friends with children, and once in a while we would meet up with them for marvellous picnics or excursions, but these depended on our families finding themselves in the same postings. Tessa and I had each other and didn’t miss friends – though later when we were in Poona (now Pune) and actually had one (Angeli Dev, the local doctor’s daughter), we realised it could be fun. (Mum also made a friend in Poona, a Parsee lady called Siloo Cama; they stayed in touch for years and years: Mrs Cama used to come and stay in England wearing saris, bringing a touch of our beloved India as well as exotic presents like glass bangles for us girls; we liked her a lot.)

  At one point I made up an imaginary friend called Ann Brown, but this was not out of loneliness, it was to make myself seem deeper and more interesting to the grown-ups. When I announced her existence – ‘I’ve got a friend, she’s called Ann Brown, but you can’t see her or hear her, only I can’ – their attention lasted long enough to say, ‘How nice for you, darling,’ so I gradually phased Ann Brown out and never referred to her again.

  Because it was an army base, a cantonment housed everyone and everything the military might need – mechanics, cooks, cleaners, grooms, gardeners, soldiers, weapons I suppose, vehicles of all sorts – but best of all were the animal lines where the horses, mules and donkeys were kept. One of the songs Mum used to sing us was a Kipling poem called (I found out when I grew up) ‘Parade-Song of the Camp-Animals’, and it somehow brought the distant war closer to us children because we’d often be taken to see the animals Kipling was writing about, in our own base. ‘See our line across the plain,/Like a heel-rope bent again,/Reaching, writhing, rolling far,/Sweeping all away to war!/While the men that walk beside,/Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,/Cannot tell why we or they/March and suffer day by day.’

  Kipling would have been very pleased to see the memorial to the animals killed in war in Hyde Park.

  Our fruit
and veg were always washed in a solution of permanganate of potash which coloured the water pink – pinky pani they called it – and our milk, in a jug with a net cover weighted down with beads, was always boiled so it had thick skin on it (which I loved). In some of the houses we lived in, the furniture stood in saucers of paraffin or water to stop ants getting to the wooden legs and eating them, and all of us slept under cotton mosquito nets, which was the cosiest thing – you were in your own safe space where no spiders or snakes or bugs could get at you. I would have liked to wrap myself in a mosquito net all day long. We must, at some stage, have lived in a house or houses without electricity because in the evenings Tessa and I sat at a table with a paraffin lamp on it – having our supper? doing lessons? – and to our horror swarms of fleshy flying ants flew blindly into it and us, and I have a mental picture of a punkah wallah, or fan man, squatting on the veranda pulling a string with his toe to make the banner of cloth hung across the ceiling of the sitting room swing to and fro causing a breeze, but maybe I have just seen that in a picture somewhere. It is hard to know, seventy years on, what the true memories are, and what are family legends and stories, or things seen in books, that have implanted themselves as memories. I am determined to keep things accurate, but does it matter?

  For some time – I don’t know if it was weeks or months – we lived a life of total bliss (as far as I was concerned anyway) in a tented military encampment with both Mum and Dad. It was in a place in the hills called Wah in what is now Pakistan, but I have no idea why we were there or what Dad was doing, and strangely there are no photos of us in tents in the album. All I know is that we had a dining-room tent, a sitting-room tent, bedroom tents and bathroom tents, all connected by tent corridors, rather like a spreading one-storey card house. Some of the tents leaked and there were buckets to catch the drops, but that just seemed like part of the excitement to me. My sister Moira, who must have been about eleven or twelve then (I was four or five), took me for walks in the pine woods around the camp and we found a little cave in a mossy bank which became my doll’s house for the remaining time we were there. We spent entirely happy days together furnishing it with bits of twig and stones for chairs and tables and furry leaves for bedcovers. Maybe the cave was where my enthusiasm for doing up houses was born – this became a positive obsession a couple of years later when I read the Little Grey Rabbit books. Grey Rabbit’s home was my dream: it was so pretty and cosy and secure and stable – all I wanted was to live in a house like hers. It occurred to me the other day that, in fact, I have tried to make every house I’ve lived in look like Grey Rabbit’s, with white paint on the walls, pretty plates on a kitchen dresser, crisp bedspreads, patchwork and gingham. Forget Kevin McCloud or World of Interiors, my design guru has always been Little Grey Rabbit.

  Our tented camp was near Taxila, the well-known archaeological site dating back to the sixth century BC (now a UNESCO monument). We were taken there one day by Mum and Dad who explained its history as we went around the ruins, and then Moira found an old bead in the mud and people got genuinely excited and crowded round to look, and I was sick with jealousy until I came across the dirty, dried-up old core of a sweetcorn cob and everyone told me that it was an amazing find, and how astonishingly clever and sharp-eyed I was, but I knew they were only trying to make me feel better.

  India gets cold in winter but it seems to me now that my sisters and I only ever wore light cotton frocks with matching knickers because of the intense heat, and when the monsoon rains came, we flung off the dresses and ran out into the garden and danced wildly in the downpour, and breathed in that wonderful smell of water on parched earth which haunts everyone who has ever lived in a hot country. Our gardens were dusty and bare, with rows and rows of plants in terracotta pots, but the lawn area and flowerbeds were surrounded by little mud walls so that when, every evening, the mali (gardener) flooded them with the hose, no water escaped, and they were green.

  In our day the population of India was four times less than it is now – only 350 million instead of 1.28 billion – and there was enough space for houses, even in military compounds, to have quite large, rambling gardens – with snakes. As Rumer Godden’s novel The River tells so heartbreakingly, snakes were a real and present danger to young children in India, and my parents would, once in a while, hire a snake charmer to come and gather them up, much as you would get the council to send someone to deal with a rat problem in England. Snakes were my horror, my nightmare, my worst terror; we came across them quite often in the garden, and sometimes they would venture into the house so we always had to tap out our shoes for snakes and scorpions before putting them on. When I heard about St Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland I yearned to live there more than anything.

  Kipling’s story of ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, in which Nag the cobra and his wife plot to kill the little English family – exactly like ours – in whose garden they live, scares me even now. Cobras were our greatest fear, though we were also taught to watch out for the small but deadly banded krait, aka the seven-step snake because if you are bitten by it you can only take seven steps before you drop dead. Tessa and I made up a song about it: ‘The banded krait/Has every right/To bite you in/The middle of the night/If you go out without a light/The banded krait/Has every right . . .’ and so on . . . and on and on; we would chant it in the car on long journeys, driving our parents mad.

  My elder sister Moira used to say that our life in India was in Technicolor, and that after we returned to Britain it was all in grim black and white, and this is true, but there was an underlying dark side as well. In fact I was often afraid: our childhood took place in the tumultuous years around Indian Independence and Partition, and I was horribly aware, even as a seven or eight year old, of our family being part of a tiny privileged white minority in a vast hostile world which wanted to get rid of us, and in which anything might happen at any moment. I was pretty certain that I would end up a penniless orphan like the poor beggar children we saw every time we went out of our compound (after all, why them and not me?) and I used to practise wearing my nightie in different ways – with a belt round the waist or my mother’s scarf round the neck – so that if it was the only garment left to me, I would still manage to look like a respectable person.

  And then of course there were the terrifying things that had happened to us British during our history in India – and how did anyone know they might not happen again? I tried to work out how, by lying on the floor with my face near the window, I could have been one of the survivors of the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta where, the story goes, more than a hundred British prisoners held overnight nearly all suffocated and died, or I would imagine myself rushing about being helpful among the 1,280 men, women and children trapped in the Siege of Lucknow for nearly five months, so that they’d make sure I got some food. (Later, whenever we played charades – which we did for years – there would nearly always be a scene from the Siege of Lucknow with someone playing the part of the young Scottish girl who first hears the bagpipes of the Scottish Highlanders in General Havelock’s relieving force. Our young Aunt Joan was fond of this role, crying, ‘Dinna ye hear it? Dinna ye hear it? The pipes of Lucknow . . .’ – words which I only discovered lately were wrongly quoted from a poem by an American, John Greenleaf Whittier, which had made the relief of Lucknow famous for decades.)

  Mysterious and scary things happened in India: we learned about the Indian Rope Trick in which (the story goes) a travelling magician hurls a rope high into the air – so far up you can’t see the end of it – which stays there with no support, and then a child climbs up and disappears. And we heard about our mother’s friend who was asked for a lock of her hair by a fortune teller who came to her house. Not wanting to hand over something so intimate, she cut a tiny wisp from a reddish fur rug she had, and gave that instead. That night she was woken by the swishing sound of the fur rug slowly sliding out of the bedroom – if she’d given her hair, of course, it would have been her . . .

/>   One breakfast time our parents told us about the magnificent dinner they’d been to the night before, given by some rajah, at which the entertainment was men putting skewers through their cheeks and tongues and arms and legs – allegedly magically, with no blood or cuts or pain. But we heard Mum and Dad discussing it later and it seemed that as they drove away at the end of the evening they had noticed several men lying at the side of the driveway and worried that they were the supposedly uninjured performers who had done the tricks.

  There was a time when we used to drive for picnics to a beauty spot where there was an ancient well – it was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a daredevil British officer who had tried to jump over it on his horse but missed, so he and his mount plunged into the black depths of the water, many feet below. The well was in the middle of nowhere and shadowed by a tree hung with the weird, alien, nests of weaverbirds – like tubular flasks made of woven grass – and we once saw a big snake slide away into the undergrowth. I thought it was a sinister place, and I hated going there; sometimes it comes into my dreams even now.

  When my new baby sister Tessa suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the winter of 1942, I was furiously jealous, and angry at how all the grown-ups spent so much time cooing over her and saying how exactly like my father she was. But then there was a terrible panic when she nearly died because I had poisoned her. I don’t think I intended to kill Tessa, but it seems that, under interrogation, I told my mother that she had liked the berries I fed her, but not the paper, or perhaps it was the other way around. Tessa was tiny, and desperately sick, and had to be given a teaspoon of water every half hour through the days and nights, and Mum was in a complete panic because Ayah had gone on leave, home to Madras, and there was no one to help her – and then an odd thing happened: Ayah suddenly reappeared saying that on the train home she’d had a feeling her babies needed her so she’d turned around and come back.