by M. M. Kaye
This one too, like the senior member of the Suez Canal Company who had given us such an entertaining evening at Port Tewfic when we were on our way out to India several years previously,2 was, I think, a Frenchman; though I could be wrong about that, because I never met him. But whatever his nationality he was plainly loaded, since he seemed to have houses in several different countries. On learning that Tacklow intended returning to China, he wrote to say that he happened to have a house in Peking that he hadn’t made use of for several years and, if Tacklow liked, it was at his disposal for as long as he cared to live there. The house was furnished and in the charge of an efficient and thoroughly reliable resident K’ai-mên-ti,3 who could be trusted to engage such house servants as would be needed, and Tacklow would be doing the absentee landlord a favour by seeing that the place was lived in again. Or words to that effect … Well –!
That letter had caught up with Tacklow when we reached Tientsin, so my parents left for Peking as soon as they could to see if this magnificent offer was going to prove an answer to their prayers, or a booby-trap that had to be politely but gratefully declined. What sort of house was it? Large, small, ‘all-mod-con’ or mid-Victorian plumbing? And where situated? Inside or outside the Tartar Wall, or somewhere out in the suburbs, and if so, how far out? Above all, if it had lain empty for a number of years, would it need a lot of expensive repairs before it could be lived in? These and several other questions would have to be answered before Tacklow could reply to that magnificent offer, and if for any reason it had to be turned down, some serious house-hunting would have to begin, which meant that my parents could be absent from Tientsin for some time.
They had intended from the first to buy or rent a house in Peking. But there had been no hurry about moving there until mid-autumn at the earliest, since Peking was intolerably hot during the summer. Moreover, the Bryson clan always spent their summer holidays in Pei-tai-ho, the little town on the shores of the Yellow Sea where Tacklow and Mother had spent their honeymoon in the early years of the century. The Granddadski (‘the Dadski’ for short) had a house on the beach in which, by tradition, his family would foregather in the hot weather, either en masse or in relays; they had already rented another one for us, further along the beach. The plan was that after a short stay in Tientsin to meet the family we would go straight to Pei-tai-ho, leaving all our heavy luggage in one of Uncle Cam’s garages, and that once we were settled in there, Tacklow and Mother would leave on a house-hunting expedition to Peking while one of the Aunts could move in to keep an eye on Bets and me and help us cope with the servants who went with the house and who only spoke Chinese. This programme had now been abruptly altered, and our parents dumped us on Aunt Dor for an unspecified time and left at short notice for Peking.
We had expected them to be away for at least ten days. But in the event they were back in a fraction of that, though I still think of it as being an inordinately long time in which I did nothing but wander around that cold, empty drawing-room singing, to Bets’s accompaniment: ‘Pale hands, pink tipped like lotus buds that float on those cool waters where we used to dwell.’ Oh, beautiful Kashmir! – what wouldn’t I give to be back there! All the same, we made several good friends in Tientsin. Among them was Evelyn Young, who drew like a baby angel and who I was sure would one day make a name for herself with her enchanting sketches of Chinese children. Then there was a most attractive American girl called Florise4 Chandless, and the two daughters of Colonel Hull, the commanding officer of the Queen’s Regiment which was stationed at the time in Tientsin and would later move up to Peking.
Tientsin can’t have been an ugly city, but I remember it as such. Red brick and mid-Victorian ugly. And in retrospect (though I know this too cannot be true), the short time that we spent there seems endless and I don’t remember seeing anything old or picturesque. All I remember being shown were the few remaining late Victorian buildings that had been designed by the Dadski; the church that Tacklow and Mother had been married in; the platform of the Tientsin railway station where Tacklow had first seen Mother and fallen in love with her on sight, and the house in which she had been living when he proposed. Interesting, naturally, for family reasons, but apart from that we could just as easily have been in Camden Town or Clacton.
Then suddenly, Tacklow and Mother were back. They had not had to go house-hunting because the house they had been offered was, according to Tacklow, perfect; a single-storey house on the Jade Canal, adequately furnished and with a small garden; kept in apple-pie order by the elderly K’ai-mên-ti and his wife, who had agreed to choose a staff of servants ready to receive us when we moved in at the summer’s end. Mother confined herself to being reassuring about the plumbing and I visualized a modern European-style house in a row of similar houses.
With that problem settled, we left for Pei-tai-ho by train, and I took my first long look at China’s countryside. I found it in general flat and featureless, dotted here and there with walled villages and the occasional clump of trees that denoted a graveyard. Watching the scenery trundle past the windows, I found it hard to believe that most of the land had once been covered with forest – and not all that long ago either. For Abbé Huc, one of the Jesuit missionaries who had worked in China, had complained bitterly, back in the early years of the nineteenth century, that nowhere in the world had the cutting down of trees been so devastating – or so stupidly short-sighted. Daniel Vare, writing in 1939, says that even then the last of the old virgin forest at Tung Ling was being cut down, leaving little more than a waste of tree-stumps, and that the whole of North China had been stripped of its trees so that already the sands of the Gobi Desert were beginning to creep inside the Great Wall. This, he pointed out, led inevitably to floods and drought and famine, which in turn led to civil war, revolution and anarchy. ‘And all because they have cut down the trees!’ I was told that even during my few short years in China the magnificent avenue of rare white pines at the temple of Lung-men-ssu in the Western Hills was chopped down by order of some self-styled ‘General’ whose private army of vandals were in sore need of fuel for warmth and cooking-fires, and for the construction of shelters during a hard winter.
You could see why they did it, for at several of the station platforms where we stopped there were troop-trains standing in the sidings – open trucks packed with bewildered young soldiers who had almost certainly been farm-lads or shop-assistants until caught by the press-gangs of one or other of the war lords and forced to serve in the ranks of his private army. Some of them were only boys, wearing uniforms that had obviously been intended for grown men. At one station a squad of some twenty or thirty of them, their faces drawn with exhaustion and their ill-fitting uniforms grey with the dust of the unmade roads, had collapsed on to the platform, sitting on the ground with their backs to the fence that surrounded it, their legs stretched out before them. I saw with horror that, although the uniforms looked new, their feet were shoeless and the rags and cardboard and newspaper that they had tied on to them with string had disintegrated into bloodstained fragments, the result, presumably, of days of marching and counter-marching across country as the fortunes of their particular ‘General’ rose and fell.
Those poor boys! I hadn’t really taken in the fact that their country was in turmoil, or what civil war and anarchy were actually like, until I saw those exhausted ranks of young soldiers whose feet had been reduced to bloodstained pulp. The sight of them stays in my memory as an illustration of the cruelty and stupidity of war, and did nothing towards reconciling me to life in China. For it is one thing to read about such happenings, but quite another actually to witness them yourself.
* * *
Pei-tai-ho, when we reached it, was a relief. A small town, then little more than a village on the shores of the Gulf of Pe-chih-li, it was set on a sandy plain dotted with wind-blown pines, casuarina scrub and fields of Indian corn and kao-liang (sorghum millet) and protected from the sea by a line of Victorian-style villas, white-painted, clapboard houses
with wide verandahs, standing on the landward side of a long, sandy beach that curved away to left and right towards distant hills and far-off mountains. At one of these houses we unloaded the Dadski and Aunt Dor and her offspring, before moving further on down the beach to the one that had been hired for us.
I still have the impression that there was nothing more to Pei-tai-ho than these houses, though a photograph of the place from the air shows that behind that sandy track and the casuarina scrub lay a not insignificant little Chinese town.
Our houses all faced out on to a long, sandy shore sloping downwards to the sea’s edge, where it formed itself into several small bays, interspersed by outcrops of rock and long sweeping stretches of sand. To our left, looking seaward, the beach rose in a line of low cliffs that became higher to form a headland that was known as Lighthouse Point, on which the British Embassy had a holiday house, or rather, houses. Beyond this promontory, among a series of little bays, lay the Cathedral Rocks, and up on the East Cliffs stood the little cottage which, almost thirty years before, a Miss Winterbottom had lent to Mother and Tacklow for their honeymoon. Beyond that again the shore and the flat lands swept away in a wide bay to meet the mountains that lay along the eastern horizon, and the town of Shan-hai-kwan, where the eastward end of the Great Wall of China ends in the sea.
To the right of our house, apart from a few small caves, the shoreline stretched away westward, flat and featureless, to the foot of the Lotus Hills, pine clad, enchanting, and full of old temples and carved stone stelae erected to the memory of men and women long dead. The most charming of these were enormous tortoises carved in elaborate detail, supporting a tall slab on which characters giving the name and deeds of the departed were cut deep into the weather-worn stone.
The staff who went with the house consisted of a Number One Boy, a cook and an amah. They spoke ‘Pidgin’ – in other words Pidgin English – a fascinating language that had come to be the lingua franca of coastal China and can now be regarded as a language in its own right, since books have been written about it, and poems and songs5 written in it. Tacklow and Mother could speak to them in their own tongue, and though neither Bets nor I ever got further with Chinese than a handful of phrases, we could just make out in Pidgin.
Still homesick for Kashmir, and missing Neil6 far more than I had thought I would, I hadn’t expected much of that first summer in North China. But, looking back on it, I don’t remember a single day when the sun did not shine. The sea was almost on our doorstep and we more or less lived in it, bathing for half an hour or so before breakfast and again at intervals during the day. Two of the girls we had made friends with in Tientsin, Evelyn and ‘Bobbie’ (I don’t think I ever heard Bobbie’s real Christian name) were on their summer holidays in Pei-tai-ho, and the four of us used to spend long, lazy hours in a casuarina-shaded sandpit, discussing life and speculating about the future.
Evelyn and I were going to be artists (famous ones we hoped), while Bobbie, who was engaged to a young man in the Diplomatic Corps, already had a fairly shrewd idea of what lay ahead of her – as had Bets. Our American friend, Florise, paying a flying visit to Pei-tai-ho, joined our quartet for the duration of her stay. It is a sharp reminder of how greatly the pattern of behaviour has changed since then that Florise, who had been out the previous evening on what she called a ‘blind date’ (the term was new to us), after describing the events of the evening and speaking enthusiastically about the charms of the said date (a young Englishman newly arrived in North China), ended up by admitting, regretfully, that she had completely failed to make a hit with him. Since this was something that I could not believe – Florise, as I have said before, being a notable charmer – I demanded to know how she could possibly know that? ‘Well, he didn’t even try to kiss me when we said goodnight,’ said Florise indignantly.
Few people now alive can realize how shocked I was by this statement. ‘But Florise, he’d only just met you!’ I protested. ‘Surely you don’t expect a man to kiss you the very first time he takes you out? Englishmen don’t.’ ‘Americans do!’ retorted Florise. ‘And so do the French – and the Italians!’
The unsophisticated British were evidently still clinging to a code of morals and behaviour that had died with the Great War and the arrival of the Roaring Twenties. It had never occurred to me that any young man whom I had met for the first time at a dinner party, and later that evening danced with, would attempt to kiss me when we said goodnight, however much I might have been attracted to him – or him to me!
Discussing the matter with Evelyn, Bobbie and Bets, we agreed that this was probably the pattern of the future, because anything that Americans did was sure before long to cross the Atlantic and be copied by Europe. Florise had merely shown us the shape of things to come. But we did not envy her. On the contrary, we felt sorry for her, because she missed all the fun – the thrill of meeting someone you were attracted to, and hoping that he might with luck feel the same about you. Of watching for the signs that he did; of seeing more and more of him, and then wondering if – when – he would kiss you.
‘Courting’ was, on average, a long-drawn-out affair and as fascinating as dancing a minuet or a pavane. For the ‘Colonial’ British still lived in a world that was at least a quarter of a century behind the times, and probably more, a world in which a kiss was still a serious thing, almost as binding as a proposal. A kiss still meant ‘I love you’, and was accepted as such. I suppose you could say that we were among the last generation to be ‘courted’; and we wouldn’t have changed it for anything. Fancy swapping all that thrill and expectation for a kiss taken and accepted as a matter of course after only an hour or two’s acquaintance, and knowing perfectly well that every girl the man had previously fancied, however briefly, had also been kissed by him, and that it didn’t mean a thing. I could only be grateful that I had been born when I was, and not into the heyday of the Thoroughly Modern Millies. They may have had more freedom, but we had more fun.
I had not imagined that we would have much fun in Pei-tai-ho, and had resigned myself to making the best of it. But in fact we had a wonderful summer – two wonderful summers, for by now I find that I cannot separate them in my mind, or remember if this or that happened during the first year, or the second. We seem to have done exactly the same things in both years: had one long party, with never a dull moment.
This was largely because as soon as the weather in Peking became uncomfortably hot, the British Ambassador with his daughters and his staff moved down to Pei-tai-ho. In consequence it had become the custom for a British warship of the China Fleet to visit Pei-tai-ho and ‘show the flag’. Each ship on arrival would throw a cocktail party on board to which all the summer visitors were invited, and the Ambassador would reciprocate by entertaining the members of the Wardroom, and giving them the use of the Embassy tennis courts and bathing raft. In this way we came to know all the officers of each ship in turn.
Bets played tennis with them on the Embassy courts, and there were picnics to the Lotus Hills, and to Shan-hai-kwan and any number of normally inaccessible little coves, in one of the ships’ boats. The only reason I know the order in which the ships came in is because Mother was a compulsive album keeper, and there is a photographic record of both summers. The first ship to pay a courtesy call during that first summer was HMS Kent, commanded by a Captain Drew who, together with his junior officers, added greatly to the gaiety of the various nationalities who were holidaying at Pei-tai-ho, while the sight of HMS Kent at anchor offshore gave the European contingent a welcome feeling of security.
That security was needed, for ever since 1911, when the Manchu dynasty had fallen and the last of its Emperors, young Pu-yi, had been deposed, all China, in particular the northerly territories, had been subjected to a series of lawless uprisings, instigated, as often as not, by some ambitious landowner who had hitherto owed allegiance to the throne but who now saw himself as the possible ruler of a province. The undisciplined armies raised by these Candidates-fo
r-Power all too frequently degenerated into bandit hordes who ravaged the countryside, looting and burning. Only recently three British citizens, a girl, and two young men who had been out with her for a morning ride in the open country surrounding Ching-wan-tao – one of the popular summer resorts of the northern Treaty Ports – had been kidnapped and held to ransom by a gang of hooligans, who had kept them chained to one another for the best part of a month.
As far as I remember, their fate was still in the balance when we arrived in Pei-tai-ho and, judging from the daily bulletins in every newspaper, at least half the English-speaking world was putting up prayers for their safety. Happily, these were answered, and later the girl, a pretty young thing by the name of ‘Tinko’ Pawley, wrote her account of the terrifying affair in a book entitled My Bandit Hosts.
If the kidnapping of young Tinko Pawley and her friends shed an unpleasant light on one side of the Chinese character, the present that Tacklow gave me on my birthday threw an equally bright light on another. It was a three-quarter-length kimono in dull, heavy-weight Chinese silk of a curious grey-blue colour. It was very plain, except for three Chinese ‘good fortune’ characters embroidered in pale grey silk: one near the bottom of each sleeve, and one on the back between the shoulder-blades. It fastened with matching grey silk cords and tassels and was lined with peach-coloured silk.
I had seen it hanging up in a little shop in the Bazaar, among a number of garish machine-made and pseudo-Chinese-style garments which, judging from the plethora of spangled dragons, phoenixes, birds and bats that crawled all over them, must have been intended for the tourist market. It stood out among that mess of tinsel and clashing colours like a Quaker girl in a line-up of bedizened cabaret dancers, and I pestered Tacklow into buying it for me. It was only when I had it in my hands that I discovered that every inch of the peach silk lining, even to the lining of those full Chinese sleeves, was hand-embroidered in a slightly paler shade of peach, with a design of birds and butterflies among branches of apple-blossom. No one but the Chinese would have taken the trouble to do that exquisite embroidery where it would never be seen, and only the wearer would know that it was there.