The Sun in the Morning (11 page)

The sympathetic Mrs Edkins and her husband, whose daughter Effie had been a flower girl at the wedding, lent the honeymooners their house at Pei-tai-ho, a small town on the Yellow Sea that, in those days, was little more than a village.

Tacklow used to talk to me about that honeymoon as though it was an enchanted time in some dreamlike Shangri-La: the lonely house standing on low cliffs above a small, secluded beach that was screened on the south-west by a fantastic cluster of tall rocks; the shimmering expanse of the Yellow Sea stretching below. From their cliff-top, they would look out together across the flat lands that curved away eastward in a wide bay to where, on the far side of that bay, lay the small coastal
town of Chingwantao where the Great Wall of China ends in the sea. He told me of a day-long expedition by rickshaw to the Lotus Hills that lie to the west of Pei-tai-ho, where they had picnicked and wandered among the ancient temples that are a feature of those peaceful, pine-clad hills; returning in the cool of the evening by the pale light of a huge, apricot-coloured September moon to that quiet house on the cliff. And best of all, one unforgettable sight — the most beautiful, he said, that he had ever seen before or since — Mother, wading out naked ahead of him into a satin-smooth sea in the dawn, her hair hanging down loose to below her waist with the rising sun, shining through it, turning it to every colour in the world; red, green, blue and violet, glittering gold and burnished copper … Venus Anadyomene, robed in a rainbow. That picture would remain with him for ever, indelibly printed on his memory by the camera of his eye, and he spoke of it as though Mother had been Eve herself bathing, new-made, in a lake in Eden in the radiant sunrise of the world's morning.

He never forgot it. Nor did he ever look at any other woman. I honestly do not think he ever noticed there were any others around! He cherished and spoilt her and loved her dearly, and when, years later, his knighthood appeared in the Honours List, a woman friend of hers rushed into the ladies room of the Old Delhi Club, brandishing the newspaper and shouting excitedly: ‘Daisy's got her K!'

I have also seen the telegram, lovingly preserved by Tacklow, that she sent him on their Silver Wedding day to thank him for his gift — they were not together for the anniversary, for he had sent her to the cool of the hills and was tied himself by work in the scorching heat of the plains. The telegram, handed in at Srinagar in Kashmir on 5 September 1930 and delivered an hour later in Rajputana, begins: ‘Happy Returns. Solomon one two …' (Those who are interested can look that one up in the Bible — Song of Solomon,
Chapter 1
, Verse 2.)

Not long after they returned to Tientsin, Tacklow and his bride and the 21st Punjabis said a sad farewell to North China and embarked on the troopship that was to take them back down the Pei-ho River to the Taku Bar. Once across the bar it was southward across the Yellow Sea, past Shanghai and Formosa, Hong Kong and Hainan, into the South China Sea. Then northwards at Singapore through the Straits of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, and southward again to Ceylon; from where they would turn north once more into the Arabian Sea, past Cochin, Calicut, Mahé, Goa, Bombay and the great peninsula of Kathiawar, to Karachi. From here they travelled by river-boat up the Indus to Jhelum, a garrison town on the borders of the North-West Frontier Province where the 21st Punjabis had been posted, and where it was discovered on arrival that owing to some official miscalculation there was no Army quarter available for Captain and Mrs Kaye.

It did not worry them. They cheerfully agreed to make do with two sparsely furnished rooms in the Dâk-bungalow
^*
— a singularly comfortless building that looked, when I last saw it, almost exactly as it had done when it became Mother's first home as a married woman — or so she assured me, and judging by her old and faded photographs of it, she was right!

Dâk-bungalow or no, she enjoyed Jhelum and still looks back on her time there with nostalgic affection. But she was not allowed to spend the summer there because she was expecting her first baby, and
the heat being as near unbearable as makes no matter, Tacklow sent her up to the hills to Naini Tal and the care of his intimidating elder sister, Aunt Molly — the human battle-axe previously referred to. Here, on 3 August 1906, my brother William (originally called ‘Willie' but eventually, thank goodness, shortened to ‘Bill') was born to the proud nineteen-year-old Daisy, while his father sweated in Jhelum in a temperature that moved between 103 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Only when autumn came round and the weather turned cooler did he allow her to return to Jhelum with her son, and a few months later they were able to move into half a bungalow; the other half of which was occupied by a much older and more senior Army couple: a Colonel and Mrs something-or-other, with whose niece, or it may have been cousin? a Miss Beatrice Lewis, Mother had already made friends.

‘Bee' Lewis had come out to India as a hopeful member of what Anglo-Indians
^*
chose to call ‘the Fishing Fleet'. Sadly, though, she became one of the equally cruelly named ‘Returned-empties'. But during her stay in Jhelum she earned Mother's lasting gratitude by hotly supporting her when certain of the more hidebound ladies in the station were snootily critical of young Mrs Kaye's insistence on pushing her son's pram herself when she took him out on her morning and evening walks along the tree-shaded Cantonment roads, or across the mile-long iron bridge that spans the Indus, ‘the Father of Rivers', at Jhelum. Such undignified behaviour, said these old pussies, demeaned the British and ‘let the side down'. Pushing prams was ‘servant's work', and they lectured Mother about it and told her she should let the ayah or a
chokra
^†
push it. Mother said that she greatly enjoyed pushing it herself and didn't see why she shouldn't; it was
her
baby! To the dismay of the disapproving Top Cats, Tacklow supported her. They considered that he should have known better. But since Tacklow was uninterested in their views, his Daisy continued to push her son's pram around Jhelum.

And now back to Major Brownlow and that stag-party in Tientsin…

The story that Tacklow had told on that occasion about his Sandhurst room-mate who had broken the unbreakable Playfair cipher was, even at that date, an old one — the episode having occurred a good many years previously. Now, after several more had passed, Major Brownlow, the friend who had taken him to that dinner-party, happened to be dining at Flagstaff House in Peshawar with the GOC Peshawar District, General Smith-Dorrian, when, as in Tientsin, the conversation chanced to turn to ciphers and the General observed that at least there was one unbreakable cipher, the Playfair. Not so, said Major Brownlow; he knew a man who had actually broken it — and who was, what's more, at that moment stationed in Jhelum! (Either the Major's memory was hazy or else he had been paying over-much attention to the port, for all that he could remember was that Cecil Kaye had claimed that the Playfair was breakable; QED Cecil Kaye himself must have broken it.) General Smith-Dorrian didn't believe a word of it. The fellow must have been pulling their legs. Or else he was trying to show off. Well, he'd show him — !

The upshot was a large official envelope that arrived on Tacklow's desk some two days later. It contained a message written in Playfair, a sealed envelope, and a curt letter from the General himself that said in effect: ‘I have been informed that you claim to have broken the Playfair. Well, let's see you do it! Here is a message in Playfair, and in case you can't solve it I have sent the code word in a sealed envelope. Yours, etc.'

This bolt from the blue arrived on a sultry morning in mid-April when the leaves were beginning to curl up and turn brown in the heat and the brain-fever bird had begun to sing its maddening hot-weather song. Tacklow read it with amazement and then, realizing what must have occurred, sat down and wrote an immediate reply. He said that the General's informant had got the wrong end of the stick, as he himself had no knowledge of ciphers. He merely claimed to have known someone who had deciphered this one. Also, the test message was unfair in that it was much too short; which made it twice as difficult to solve. However, as he still retained a vague memory of how his room-mate of more than twenty years ago had worked the trick, if the General would send him a slightly longer message he would dearly like to have a stab at cracking it.

A longer message duly arrived and Tacklow set to work. It took
him the best part of a week — Mother says she can't remember exactly how long but that it seemed ages to her, because she helped him by making lists of paired letters and reading out lines of numbers. She never could understand the way in which a code could be cracked, for it was all miles above her head (mine too!). But she
does
remember the long hours he worked at it and his excitement, and hers, when at last it began to come out. The thing hinged on a key word that was chosen at random by whoever happened to be encoding the message; which I suppose was the reason it was considered to be unbreakable, since the key word was likely to be different every time — the choice of words being virtually endless. Tacklow returned the sealed envelope to Smith-Dorrian with the seal still unbroken and a letter that said: ‘Your key-word is so-and-so; message reads as follows —'

I have a tape-recording of Mother telling me that story; though in such a muddled, wavering and croaky voice that one has to listen very carefully to catch what she is saying; and towards the end she goes off at a tangent on to quite another story: one that I never heard from Tacklow and that I have never been able to sort out. A tale about some officer who should have been on guard duty somewhere else and would be court-martialled for dereliction of duty if he failed to turn up on time — which, for some reason (an unacceptable one, obviously) he was not going to be able to do. Tacklow had apparently come to the rescue by offering to stand in for him, and did so by riding
ventre à terre
from Jhelum to wherever, all through the night like another Paul Revere, to save a fellow officer's bacon. Mother says on that tape that she always thought that was ‘such a marvellous thing for him to have done'. But she can't recall anything more than him doing it; ‘for a friend'. It certainly sounds a very dashing exploit for a man of forty who was never a particularly good horseman anyway.

A month or so before the Playfair episode, Tacklow, faced with the prospect of having to send his wife and baby to some hill station for the coming hot weather, had done a number of anxious sums on the backs of envelopes and decided that if he sold part of his cherished stamp collection (he was a keen philatelist and remained hooked on stamps to the end of his days), he could
just
afford to send them instead to North China to stay with the Brysons in a house that the Dadski had recently acquired at Pei-tai-ho, and let Mother show them their first grandchild. She could stay there for six months and he himself
would join them there later, taking four months' leave, of which two would be spent on the outward and return voyages. This would allow him two with his wife and son at Pei-tai-ho and enable him to bring them back with him.

Mother had been wildly excited at the prospect of showing off ‘Willie' to his grandparents and his bevy of uncles and aunts. Her only regret was that Tacklow would not be able to accompany them on the outward voyage. But then his leave did not begin until 1 June, and apart from May being the hottest and nastiest month of the hot weather, there were no electric fans, fridges or air-conditioning in those days; nor did any bungalow boast electric lights; it was oil lamps or candles. In the circumstances, Tacklow thought it best to get the long, dusty, sweltering train journey across India to Calcutta over before the temperature soared too high, so the stamps were sold and the passages booked for the middle of April. An ‘experienced travelling ayah' was engaged to accompany Mother as far as Tientsin to help her look after her nine-month-old baby, and Tacklow obtained his Colonel's permission to go with them to see that ‘Daisy and the little imp' got safely aboard ship.

On the evening before they left Jhelum the two of them took their ‘little imp' for a last airing; but as she pushed the pram along the familiar Cantonment roads and they talked of the voyage that lay ahead and the fun they would have when he joined her at Pei-tai-ho, Mother was seized by a sudden premonition. ‘You won't come!' she said, on the verge of tears. ‘Something will happen to stop you coming. I
know
it will! I'm sure of it — you won't come!' Tacklow dried her eyes and told her not to be silly; of course he would come! His leave had been granted and his passage was booked, so there was no need for her to worry. But she could not shake off the conviction that he would not be able to join her in Pei-tai-ho after all, and in spite of anything he could say to the contrary she was still tearfully convinced that she was right when a week later she waved goodbye to him in Calcutta from the deck of the ship that was to take her to China.

This seems to have been the only time in her life when Mother experienced a definite foreknowledge of the future. For she was right. Tacklow, arriving back alone in Jhelum, tired and depressed after the heat and discomfort of the long return journey across India from Calcutta, walked into his bungalow and saw, lying on the hall table
waiting for him, a telegram from Army Headquarters saying that he had been transferred to GHQ Simla with the rank of Major and would he please report there immediately.