The Sun in the Morning (13 page)

There was a popular song in the 1930s with a refrain that began: ‘
When I fall in love, it will be for ever. Or I'll never fall in love
'. … I don't know exactly when I fell in love with India, but it was certainly for ever and it must have happened at a very early age. About the same time that I began to talk, I imagine, for the first language that I spoke with any fluency was Hindustani
^*
and all the earliest songs that I became familiar with were the old, old lullabies of India: ‘
Arre ko ko; jarre ko ko'; ‘Nautch kurro, Baloo'; ‘Ah'za dindah'; ‘Ninni, baba, ninni
', and many others. I loved the sounds of India. The myriad noises that seem weird or harsh, or merely ‘foreign' to the ear of the average Westerner, will always spell ‘home' to me. I loved the scent of India. The look of it. The colour of it. And most of all I loved its people.

To begin with it never occurred to me that I wasn't one of them. I merely thought of myself as belonging to a particular sect in a land that was chock-full of sects and castes and races speaking a wide variety of different languages and a bewildering number of dialects. It was as simple as that. And fortunately for me, neither of my parents would have known what you were talking about if you mentioned that modern and grossly overworked epithet ‘racist'. To Tacklow, as with the early Greeks and Romans, and in their day the Venetians, all men were ‘people' irrespective of race or colour: there were good people and bad ones, nice or nasty ones, clever or stupid ones, interesting or
boring ones — plus all the degrees that range between those poles. But all the same. Just ‘people'. His fellow men. As for Mother — born in China of devout missionary parents who believed that the Bible was an exact account of man's beginnings — she assumed that all men and women, no matter what country of the world they were born in, were descended from Adam and Eve; and that was that!

Mother had only been in Simla for a few weeks and was looking forward to enjoying some of the gaiety for which the town was famous, when she discovered that she was pregnant again. The prospect of my arrival was, in consequence, hardly a welcome one, and she told me that taking the advice of some of her married girl-friends, she went for gruelling walks and rides round Jakko and also jumped hopefully off the kitchen table several times! However, these amateur attempts at dislodging me proved useless, and she was forced to resign herself to the inevitable.

It wasn't that she did not want a large family, for she did: she came from one herself. But ‘Major Kaye's pretty American wife' had already caused a mild stir in Simla's social circles, and invitations to parties, picnics and balls arrived daily. That ‘American' story, which stuck to her for several seasons, was due to the ‘Tientsin accent' she had acquired during her years there: a peculiar amalgam of half-a-dozen foreign accents, predominantly Scottish and American, that arose from Tientsin being full of missionaries and men of different nationalities engaged in trade with China. It was those clipped ‘A's of the United States and Scotland that caught people's attention and made them certain that Mother must be an American; and it did her no harm. In fact, it added considerably to her attractions, for the Viceroy's wife, Lady Curzon, who had been Miss Mary (‘Daisy') Leiter of Chicago, was such a beautiful and enchanting woman that every man in India seems to have fallen in love with her on sight. Tacklow was no exception: he told me that it was almost worth the boredom of having to attend Viceregal functions just to be able to sit and admire her! You can see what she was like in her photograph in this book: remembering that in those days ‘ladies' did not use make-up — or if they did, so discreetly that the fact that they were doing so could not be noticed. Just think what a modern make-up expert would have done with that face and those marvellous eyes!

Mother has always adored parties and dancing and fun. She still
does. Her eyes light up at the very word ‘party' and her many friends have always insisted that if we throw one at her funeral she'll leap out of her coffin and join in the fun. The merry-go-round of social life in Simla was therefore very much to her taste, and she enjoyed every minute of it; aided and abetted by her like-minded girl-friends and a phalanx of male admirers — the latter headed by her very anti-social husband whose character does not seem to have contained one single grain of jealousy.

Tacklow would accompany her to the balls and fancy-dress dances for which Simla was famous, and, having waited to see that her dance programme was full, and arranged for someone to see her safely into her own rickshaw when the festivities ended, he would return home and go placidly to bed; happy in the knowledge that his youthful Daisy was having a lovely time dancing the night away. And in case you don't know what a dance programme is, they were a relic of the Victorian age that lasted in India to the very end of the Raj: little gilt-edged cards, folded in half like a book-cover, on one side of which were listed the dances and the tunes that accompanied them, while the opposite side bore dotted lines on which people could write down, with the aid of a tiny pencil attached by a thin silk cord, the names of the partners they were booked to dance with. I still have one; stuck in a 1940s photograph-album and affectionately preserved as a sentimental souvenir. But alas, minus its pencil, because the album would not shut properly if it was included, so I had to cut if off; and lost it of course.

Mother's singing voice was small but pretty, and as a member of the Simla Amateur Dramatic Society she appeared in the chorus of
The Quaker Girl, The Little Michus, The Dollar Princess
and other popular musical comedies of that era; shows for which Tacklow wrote the words for the inevitable topical songs, sung by the comic, that the Simla ADS liked to include. I sometimes wonder if my own and my sister's love for the theatre, and the fact that my younger daughter, Nicola, is an actress, could have anything to do with pre-natal influence, since Mother spent quite a sizeable portion of her time treading the boards of Simla's Gaiety Theatre while carrying me, and later on my sister. Though when I come to think of it, she herself knocked a large hole through that ‘pre-natal influence' theory by deciding that she wanted her first-born to be an artist, and painting assiduously during the months of her pregnancy with a view to bringing this about. The
experiment was a total flop, for Bill has never been able to draw a straight line; and by the time she was carrying me she was having far too much fun to waste any of it painting wildflowers or sketching the Himalayas. The same went for my sister: not a single painting accompanied her gestation — though there was plenty of music and dancing, and I have to admit that since she grew up to be good at both it may have worked for her. And possibly all that pre-natal painting that failed to work on my brother had a delayed-action effect on his sisters: which may account for the fact that both of us draw and paint.

After weeks of house-hunting, Mother at last found one that she liked, at a rent that Tacklow could afford. It was a small two-storey house called Chillingham on the road to Chota Simla, but since it would not be vacant until the autumn (when its occupants would be leaving) they decided to keep their hotel rooms for another season and move into the house in October. Thus it was that in the summer of 1908 I came to be born in a bedroom in the Central Hotel on the twenty-first day of August —
just
. I say ‘just' because Mother says I arrived in a terrific hurry and complaining at the top of my voice, at eleven minutes to midnight. She also says it was a Thursday, and though I have never checked this, I feel it must be true because the old rhyme that starts: ‘Monday's child is fair of face', goes on to say that ‘Thursday's child has far to go', and that, I am happy to say, has certainly come true for me, for it has been my great good fortune to travel all over the world.

I have gone from one end of India to the other, stayed on a coral island in the Bay of Bengal and another off the coast of East Africa, lived in Peking and Hong Kong and walked on the Great Wall of China. I have sailed through the Inland Sea to Japan and visited ‘Nikko the beautiful', where the Shoguns sleep; lived in Egypt and Cyprus, Malta, Persia, Germany and Austria, America, Italy, France and Spain; travelled to Denmark, Norway and Finland and … Well, you name it and I've probably been there. There must have been more than one good fairy at my christening in Christ Church, Simla, for I was given two invaluable gifts: an excellent memory, and what I can only describe as a personal video set somewhere in my head that I can switch on whenever I wish, and that has recorded, in sound, scent and colour, almost everything that my eyes have seen.

Sadly, my memory is at last beginning to fail me; which fills me with dismay. It seems curious that I should have visualized losing so much, and known and accepted the fact that Time would inevitably afflict me with undignified complaints such as rheumatism, arthritis and indigestion (and if I last long enough, rob me of eyesight and hearing and probably hair and teeth as well!) but never thought that I could possibly forget the past. How foolish can one get? I find it strange too that it was only fairly recently that I discovered that a tenacious memory and a private video in the brain (and, for that matter, an ability to water-divine!) were not things that everyone possessed. Obviously, if you yourself have always had something of that kind, it does not occur to you that there is anything unusual about it, or cross your mind that everyone else may not have it too. It took me a long time to discover how very fortunate I was to have been born with these built-in assets, and I am deeply grateful for them.

My memory, which works almost entirely by sight, goes back to the day I saw mother breast-feeding my sister Betty — christened Dorothy Elizabeth but always known as ‘Bets'. I cannot have been more than two-and-a-bit at the time — say two years and two months at the most. Yet I remember it with a photographic clarity that can probably be explained by the fact that it struck me as such a peculiar way of feeding this fascinating new addition to our family (Bill and I got our meals out of cups and plates!). As I write I can still see Mother sitting in a big, white-painted, wicker chair on the screened side-verandah that led off her bedroom at Chillingham in which Bets had been born. She is wearing a lacy, flowing, lilac-coloured robe that in those days was called a ‘tea-gown', and her lovely hair is all loose about her shoulders. The year is 1910 and the month is October. Edward VII had died barely five months earlier, but although the Edwardian era had ended, echoes of it were to last well into the reign of his successor. The thin silk tea-gown has a silvery belt that fastens with a Chinese buckle enamelled with a pattern of irises — half of which survived into the early Thirties, even though it was useless without the half that had been lost. I suppose Mother kept it because it was so pretty, despite the fact that by then it had become bent and the enamel was chipped. She probably threw it away when we left India to go and live in North China, and if so, since things outlast
people, it will still be around somewhere; as will its other half. India seldom wastes anything!

Another early memory, equally clear, is of being trundled along the Mall in a push-chair by my ayah, and looking down the steep flight of steps that forms a ‘cut' (there are many such in Simla), leading from the Mall to the Lower Bazaar. This one was opposite the Green Room door of the little Gaiety Theatre, and strung high above those steep, descending steps, roofing them in, were innumerable strings of brightly tinted paper flags. From where I sat in my push-cart it was like looking down a long tunnel of fluttering colours, and when I asked Ayah what they were for, she said that it was for the Durbar. The word was a new one to me, and I applied it for some years afterwards to any coloured decorations — they were all ‘Durbars'! It was not until long afterwards that I woke up to the fact that those flags had been strung up in anticipation of the Great Durbar that was to be held in Delhi in the following month for the new King and Queen: George V and Queen Mary — the same ‘Princess May' who had once danced with Tacklow when he was a cadet at Sandhurst. The year was 1911 and I was then aged three-and-a-quarter.

We had moved into Chillingham the previous autumn, and we spent the next two years there. And Simla being Simla, even the children of the Raj led a very social life. Party after party after party. … Unlike Mother, but painfully like my father, I was no party-goer. I hated them: these large gatherings of noisy kids, some of whom — the ones with rich parents or fathers who held important posts in the Civil Service — were accompanied by British nannies while the rest (the offspring of less exalted parents who could not afford British nannies) were in the charge of ayahs. We, the ayah brigade, were fully conscious of our luck and would not have changed places with the nanny-lot for anything in the world: it was snobbery in reverse. Ayahs, with few exceptions, doted upon their little charges; they sympathized with their sorrows and rejoiced in their happiness; aided, abetted and petted them, and invariably spoke to them in the vernacular so that they too learnt to speak it with considerably greater fluency than their mother tongue. Best of all, ayahs could be twisted round their charges' little fingers!

We fortunate ones were not dragooned into good behaviour by martinets in buttoned boots and crisp white uniforms, who spoke in
platitudes (‘Now you eat that up at once, Miss Enid! Just think how many poor little boys and girls would be only too grateful to have that lovely rice pudding!' ‘Don't speak with your mouth full, Master Eddie! It's rude.' ‘Smiles before eleven, tears before seven!' — and so on). The nanny-children envied our greater freedom and our ability to chatter to any Indian we met in the Bazaar or the Mall, in our own or other people's houses, or anywhere else. Their nannies would read them stories at bedtime;
Peter Rabbit
or
Little Red Riding Hood.
But our ayahs, together with our many acquaintances in the town, would tell us enthralling tales about the doings of gods and heroes. We learned early why Ganesh has the body of a man and the head of an elephant, how the languars — the grey, long-tailed and white-whiskered monkeys that were Kipling's
bander-log
— acquired their black faces, and how Rama rescued Sita from the demon King of Lanka (which in my day was known as Ceylon) with the help of the monkey god, Hanuman. Our ayahs would sing us to sleep with the age-old nursery songs of Hindustan, and let us run wild in a way that no British nanny would have permitted. We felt truly sorry for the nanny-children.