by M. M. Kaye
We all slept late the following morning. We would have slept even later if one of the Gurkha officers hadn’t woken us with a top-priority message from HQ to Andrew and George, recalling them immediately to their unit. I remember George’s face as he read it. And Andrew’s. They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time and was probably only a minute, while their faces stiffened. All at once they no longer looked like the carefree happy-go-lucky pair of holiday-makers I had been laughing and partying with, but two much older people. Older and grimmer. George went to the window and called down to his bearer on the verandah below, telling him to see that there was enough petrol in the car and to pack the suitcases, because we had to get back to Ranikhet as soon as possible: ‘Jaldi-se. Taze-jaldi!’ (‘Quickly. Very quickly.’)
‘Why must we?’ I asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Don’t be silly!’ said George impatiently. ‘War, of course. What did you think? Are you two coming back with us or would you prefer to stay here for the rest of the “Week”? – I’m sure we can arrange for someone to give you a lift.’
Well, naturally we opted for going back with them and seeing them off. After swallowing a hasty breakfast and making our apologies to our host, we returned to Ranikhet a good deal faster than we had come.
Once there, while the boys were rushing round the town settling accounts and paying bills, I painted a picture of a pin-up girl on the lines of the ‘Petty Girl’ who used to appear in the Saturday Evening Post, for George to take into battle with him. Not that I believed that there would be any battles. Just because a couple of Army officers on leave had been recalled to their unit it didn’t mean that war was about to break out. It was just a precaution. But when I said as much to George (in an attempt to reassure myself rather than him) he told me not to be a half-witted ostrich, and asked me if I really thought that he and Andrew were the only ones who had been recalled. ‘I’ll bet you anything,’ said George, ‘that thousands of chaps all over the globe are being whipped back to their jobs this minute. We’ve all been expecting it for months. Don’t you ever listen to the radio?’
‘What about “Peace in Our Time”?’ I said.
‘Piece of paper!’ sniffed George. ‘I told you that before. If it hasn’t been torn up already, it will be within a day or two.’
They left. And a few days later, on the third of September, we heard the tired voice of our Prime Minister informing the Empire that we were at war. The little piece of paper that had promised ‘Peace in Our Time’ had, after all, been torn up and consigned to Herr Hitler’s waste-paper basket.
The announcement had been made at 11 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time. But Ranikhet did not hear it until much later in the day, and I don’t remember how I heard it. I think someone in the Club must have told me, but I don’t know who, only that I felt stunned and stupid. I went for a long walk on the road that looks down on the Club and, having passed the entrance to the hotel, goes on to meander round a steep, forest-clad hill that was a favourite walk of Bets’s and mine, because it reminded us of Simla. Bets wasn’t there to walk with me that evening, for she and baby Richard had left a week or so earlier to help WHP move house to his new posting in Lucknow. But today I did not miss her, because I wanted to be alone to think. And to remember …
To remember very clearly my six-year-old self asking Tacklow with a mixture of awe and disbelief if it was true that there was a war on now, this very minute. And being horrified when he told me that there was and tried to explain why. But I hadn’t been interested in ‘why’. Only appalled by the discovery that War – in other words grown-ups, hundreds of grown-ups killing each other – was not something that only happened in books or the tales that professional story-tellers told in the bazaars, but was actually happening now, in real life.
I remembered other things too. The wounded men who had been sent to recover from their wounds in various convalescent soldiers’ homes in Simla. Mother and her friends organizing picnic parties for convalescent ‘Tommies’. Rolling bandages for the Red Cross and knitting endless numbers of wool mufflers, balaclava helmets and fingerless gloves for the troops in the trenches. And Sir Charles’s brother, in the guise of a tin-helmeted Hun, spreading mayhem among the amateur actresses who wore sashes labelled ‘Belgium’, ‘Serbia’ and so on in the course of a patriotic pageant on the stage of Simla’s Gaiety Theatre.
The pageant, and any number of other fund-raising activities, had all been in aid of the ‘War Effort’ – the ‘War to end War’. I suppose a good many people believed that. I certainly had. The ‘Great War’ had dominated my childhood. For one thing, if it had not broken out I would never have had that conversation with Tacklow, because Bets and I would, like Bill, have been back in England in a boarding school. Everything would have been different – even the songs of my youth. No ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, and Smile, Smile, Smile’. No ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, or ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and all those others.
Yet the war that had brought such appalling sorrow and tragedy to uncounted thousands of people all over the world had given me a wonderfully happy childhood. It remained so clear in my memory that the gap between the past and the present seemed incredibly short. I had even set the opening chapter of my first ever novel, Six Bars at Seven, in the few weeks before the end of the Great War. My hero was a youthful Second-Lieutenant who, having fallen asleep in a bomb-damaged château ‘somewhere in France’, wakes up to find that a surprise attack, and a subsequent Allied retreat, have left him stranded in enemy-held territory.
If I could remember the Great War as clearly as that, then there must be any number of men who had fought in it and who were going to find themselves fighting again – many of them, this time, alongside their sons. How could they bear it? How could their wives and mothers bear it? Only twenty-one years ago! And now back again to those terrible trenches … It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t possible!
* * *
The sun had set and dusk was falling by the time I returned to the hotel, and though the sky still held some of the colours that had recently blazed there, they had faded now to a soft opalescence in which the first stars were barely visible, while the moon that had been full only a day or two before we left so light-heartedly for Almora was rising slowly from behind the ranges of the Gharwal hills. On the high bank to the left of the path that led down to the hotel’s entrance, cosmos had replaced the zinnias of early summer, and the dusk was sweet with their distinctive, polleny scent.
I stopped on the path to sniff it nostalgically, and in doing so became aware of a movement among the mass of pink and white flowers above and a little ahead of me. Something or someone was making its way down the bank of cosmos, and since there was no breath of wind, and it was managing to move soundlessly through that feathery jungle, I stayed where I was; curious to see whether it was an animal – a jackal or a hill fox – or (remembering how Bets and I used to make secret tunnels through the cosmos at the Rookery) one of the children in the hotel.
It was none of them. And it was just as well that I had stopped when I did, because seconds later, still without making a sound, a full-grown leopard sprang down on to the path immediately in front of me. Checking briefly on seeing me, it gave me a long, yellow stare, decided that I posed no threat, looked away and took off again, crossing the path and disappearing down the slope with the speed and grace of a swallow.
The whole episode could not have taken more than a minute at most, and in all that time I don’t remember hearing the slightest sound beyond the normal murmur of voices from the hotel and the servants’ quarters behind it, and, occasionally, from the road above. Night falls so quickly in the East that by the time I dared to move again, the hotel, in which only a scattering of lights had been switched on when I started down the path, now glowed brightly from every door and window, while its grounds and buildings, which only moments ago had been grey in the dusk, were suddenly bathed in silver and blotched with black shadows as the mo
onlight gathered strength. There was no sign of the leopard, and I had no idea which way it had gone or whether it was lying low in one of those black, sharp-edged shadows. But with lighting-up time the hotel servants had begun to appear on the verandahs and paths, and what with the general air of bustle and activity that had succeeded that curious twilight interval, I managed to summon up enough courage to return to my room running into my room-bearer en route …
Still on edge from my close encounter with a leopard, I told him about it. But when I urged him to warn the other servants to be on their guard, he replied cheerfully that I had nothing to worry about. Everyone knew that there were very many leopards in these hills, and that they did no harm unless wounded or attacked, or with cubs. Since the Miss-Sahib was unlikely to meet one in that condition, she need have no fear; and having practically patted me on the head and said ‘There, there – what a fuss about nothing!’ he trotted away, leaving me feeling reassured but exceedingly small.
George and Andrew having departed almost as swiftly as the leopard, I dined alone and went to bed early. And so, for me, ended the day on which the Second World War began.
* * *
I don’t remember how or where I met Rupert, but I imagine that it was, again, Jess who introduced us because his regiment was at that time stationed at Cawnpore, where the Binnie family were temporarily ensconced. But since Rupert too preferred blondes, he may well have introduced himself. A keen golfer, he managed to interest me in the game, and I took to it with enthusiasm. The course at Ranikhet was a paradise for beginners. It could have been designed with the ‘Complete Rabbit’ in mind since, provided one hits the ball, it almost can’t help landing on the green, which is not all that far from the starting point, but slightly below it on the hillside immediately opposite you. The fact that between the player and the green lies a deep valley into which your ball will roll if you don’t hit it fair and square doesn’t really matter much, because you’ll have to toil up hill and down without ceasing if you want to get round the course. But that first swipe (unless, of course, you miss the ball or merely top it) is almost bound to cross the grassy crevice at your feet, and land you somewhere on the flattened saucer of hillside that is waiting to receive it, giving you an initial surge of triumph that does wonders for your confidence. I actually became quite an adequate player. But only on that miniature switchback of a course among the mountains. When I tried playing it on the plains, I was a disaster.
I became very fond of Rupert, and there were times when I would have given almost anything I possessed to have a talk with Tacklow about him and ask for advice. But I always ended up realizing that Tacklow would have told me that I was quite old enough now to make up my own mind, and what about that test sentence: ‘I’ll be ready in five minutes.’ Did that still stand? Had I tried it? Yes, of course I’d tried it! But somehow it didn’t work any longer, for I still wavered. I was still in love with love, still hoping that some day, one day, that legendary Prince Charming would come riding past on his white horse and scoop me up off the pavement. That is, if such a person existed, which I was beginning to doubt.
Jess’s husband, Steve, who worked for ICI, came up on leave and took Jess away on a trek to one of the famous pilgrimage places among the high mountains. And Bets too having left, I would have found myself with a lot of time on my hands if it had not been for Rupert, who filled the gap in my social life for the term of his leave. I discovered that being one of a twosome was not nearly as much fun as one of a foursome, or, even better, one of a crowd as I had been before the arrival of Andrew and George. Still, as half of a twosome I was never without a dancing partner.
Rupert escorted me to dinner-dances at the Club, played golf with me several times a week, drove me down miles of winding hill road to a popular picnicking spot on the river at its foot, where there were stretches of silver sand and deep, clear pools in which one could bathe. There, incidentally, he took the very first photograph of me as a blonde. This snapshot was to appear many years later on the back of one of my whodunnits.
I don’t know if Jess was matchmaking or not, but she invited me to spend a week or ten days with her that cold weather, as soon as I could fit it in. The invitation ensured that Rupert and I would be seeing each other in the near future, unless (a word that must now be added to every plan) unless or until his regiment was sent off to the war. For the enemy had opened hostilities immediately and murderously, by torpedoing the Athenia, a British liner full of women and children, neutrals, non-combatants, home-going Americans who were hoping to take their children or themselves to safety until the war (if there had to be a war) was over.
I remember hearing the news of that tragedy only the day after Chamberlain’s announcement that Britain and Germany were at war, and thinking what an unbelievably stupid thing for Hitler’s gangsters to have done. If they didn’t know that the passengers on that ship were non-combatants their Intelligence Department must have been staffed by boneheads. For there is little doubt that a similar sinking of a Cunard liner, the Lusitania, during the last war had helped to swing American public opinion in favour of supporting the Allies. To get in the first blow of this war by sinking a ship such as the Athenia must have sent a shudder through the entire world. Perhaps that was what it was meant to do? If so, it certainly showed us what we were in for: this was going to be a truly brutal war. And it was. It began with a brutal act, and ended with one – the atomic bomb.
Chapter 28
After Ranikhet, where the evenings and the early mornings had begun to hold an invigorating nip in the air, Lucknow seemed intolerably hot and dry. But I knew that once the cold weather set in it would return to being the city of which Kipling – who lived there as a cub-reporter – describing it in Kim, says: ‘There is no city … more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow, whether you see her from the bridge over the river, or from the top of the Imambara looking down on the gilt umbrellas of the Chutter Manzil and the trees in which the town is embedded.’
It was then, and I hope it still is, one of the leafiest of cities, and ‘garish’ is right. I don’t think she could have changed very much since Kipling first saw her. The school that Kim attended, the famous La Martinière – which has the distinction of being the only school in the world to possess a Battle Honour – certainly had not. The Pardey house was quite near to it, and Bets and I used to walk past it of an evening.
It was while I was in Lucknow that some of our boxes, put into storage in Delhi a good ten years earlier, were sent for, under the mistaken impression that WHP would not be moved to another posting for at least three years. In the event, owing to so many of their young men having hurried off to enlist – WHP among them – the posting and re-posting of Burma-Shell staff became every bit as erratic as the Army ones. My brother-in-law, having failed to pass the Army medical tests, had supposed that his firm would leave him where he was for a few years. But it was not to be. Bets had barely had time to settle down in Lucknow before her husband was transferred to the Calcutta office. That was some time after I left them. And well after the boxes from Delhi had been opened.
There were not many of them, and only one was of any interest to us. It was a small tin-lined wooden box, additionally protected by Mother with a stout covering of that coarse cloth woven from hemp and known in India as tart, on which she had painted our names and a number. We cut the stitches and wrenched out the rusty nails in mounting excitement, for the contents of this one case were more valuable than rubies and we would not have swapped them for the Crown Jewels: Moko and Teddy!… Moko, my beloved life-sized monkey, who had once belonged to my brother Bill and had been annexed by me when Bill outgrew stuffed toys, and Teddy, the rotund, ginger-brown teddy-bear that was the joy of Bets’s heart in the days when she and I played at being ‘Mrs Jones and Mrs Snooks’, and Moko and Teddy were our loved and obstreperous offspring.
They had been packed away carefully and brought out to India in the hope that one of these days we would get married
and have children of our own to inherit these invaluable treasures. I had failed to do so and was considered to be firmly on the shelf. But Bets had a baby son, and now at last we could open that wooden box and hand over Teddy to the legal heir …
Too late, too late – we had been beaten to it by a different kind of bear, the voracious little insects that were known as ‘woolly-bears’. Two or three of them must have sneaked in among the packing paper and proliferated at an alarming rate, chewing away at the contents of that box, thriving and raising families until there was barely anything you could recognize as the original contents. Certainly nothing that was re-usable. We almost wept at the horrid sight and ended up carrying the tin-lined box and what little was left of the contents – which amounted to barely more than a pile of dust, two glass eyes (Teddy) and a couple of boot-buttons (Moko), plus about a million little woolly-bear corpses and at least five million eggs the size of a grain of dust – into the backyard, where we gave poor Moko and Teddy a Maharajah’s funeral, complete with piles of logs which we soaked in kerosene. It was a sad but most impressive send-off.
My only other memory of this particular visit to Lucknow is of being woken up in the middle of the night by the unmistakable roaring of a tiger coming, apparently, from the back garden. This would have scared me more than somewhat if I hadn’t been warned about it by Bets, who told me that the tigers were actually safely behind bars in the zoo in which poor Angie had died, which was a long way off. But that when the wind was blowing from a certain direction, the sound travelled clearly between a high, curved wall behind the tigers’ enclosure and the wall at the bottom of Bets’s garden. This explanation reassured me, though not entirely. (I still used to wonder if this time, one of the tigers hadn’t managed to escape?)