The Sun in the Morning (14 page)

I loved Simla. I loved passing the time of day with the proprietors of the Indian-owned shops along the Mall and stopping, fascinated, to watch the men who made designs of birds and flowers and butterflies on lengths of cloth, using a curious, white, gooey stuff that looked like very soft putty.
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The craftsman kept a lump of this stuff on the ball of the left hand, from where it was transferred with a slim wooden spatula to the cloth, pressed down with one finger and, when the leaf, stem or whatever was complete, brushed with metallic powder in a dozen tints as well as gold, silver and bronze. I have no idea if this particular form of folk-art is still practised, but I hope it is, for watching one of these craftsmen at work was a high spot of any walk along the Mall in my early days in Simla.

Talking of the Mall, I would like to say that of all the lavish helpings of canned twaddle, dished out by those writers who make a mint of money out of denigrating the Raj and all its works on the basis of second-, third- or fourth-hand information, one of the silliest is that before the First World War the British did not allow Indians to walk
in the Mall. Even such well-known writers and reporters as Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre repeated this anti-British fairy-tale in their bestseller,
Freedom at Midnight.
Do these busy little authors
never
look at old photographs, or talk to any left-overs from the Raj? Or are they so anxious to blacken its name that they invent these tales deliberately? — as E. M. Forster invented some of the preposterous statements he made in that virulent attack on his own race,
A Passage to India
; a book that seems to be regarded as Holy Writ by the trendy who have swallowed every word of it and for some reason like to think the very worst about the British in India. Forster has been equally slanderous and nasty about Indians. Nastier, in fact — though none of his admirers has chosen to notice that. Or perhaps they think that Indians are not quick enough on the uptake to know when they are being insulted?

The ‘no Indian could walk in the Mall' story, and others like it, was probably invented on the spur of the moment by some youthful anti-British supporter of the Congress Party or the Muslim League in the ‘Quit India' days and, like many similar ones, could be disproved by a few minutes spent on research. Or even a few seconds' thought! How, for instance, would it have been possible for so many of the shops that line the Mall to be owned by Indians if no Indian was allowed to walk there? How did he or his assistants
reach
the shop? Or leave it? Hasn't anyone, hurrying to jump on the
Passage to India
bandwagon (‘We are all guilty!'), read
Kim
? That book was written when Queen Victoria was still Empress of India and the British Raj seemed as strong as the Rock of Gibraltar. But anyone who cares to dip into it will learn that Kim goes up from the Lower Bazaar to ‘the broad road under Simla Town Hall' — which is the Mall — where he meets a Hindu child who takes him to Lurgan's shop
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(which was also on the Mall; and still is — or was when I was last in Simla in the 1960s). The book includes a list of some of Lurgan-Sahib's ‘many and curious visitors', most of whom were Indians!

Fancy-dress parties were a popular form of entertaining children as well as amusing grown-ups, and I can remember being dressed up,
reluctantly, as a Rani to match Bill's Rajah. The jewel on my forehead scratched, and despite the aid of Mother's hairpins I couldn't prevent the sari from slipping off my head. I preferred the Japanese party — which shows plainly in photographs. But though in time I came to enjoy ‘dressing-up', I never overcame my hatred of children's parties. Out of scores that I must have attended I can remember enjoying only one — and I must have been a good deal older by then; at least seven or eight.

I have never sorted out the reason for our moves from one house to another during the first four years of my life. It never occurred to me to ask either of my parents why, having rented Chillingham, we didn't stay there instead of moving for a season into another and much larger house called Stoke Place, and then back again to Chillingham; and from there to our old rooms in the Central Hotel once more. I remember Stoke Place very clearly in a series of pictures. A high, two-storied house with a verandah on both floors; myself proudly wearing a pair of Bill's cast-off knickerbockers instead of the hated frilly skirts; a firework display on the tennis court in celebration of the Hindu festival of Diwali — the Feast of Light — with Tacklow touching off rockets and Catherine wheels for a deeply appreciative audience consisting of ourselves and the compound children and their equally enthralled parents. Mother in a very long pale-blue dress and a matching hat being photographed in the lower verandah, surrounded by beribboned baskets and bouquets of flowers — the trophies of a last night of, I think,
The Quaker Girl
; it being the custom of the Gaiety Theatre to present floral tributes to every lady in the cast on the final night of any show.

The plays or musical comedies usually ran for about a week, with a total of half-a-dozen evening performances and two matinées; and it was also customary for husbands, fathers, admirers and friends to send up flowers and boxes of chocolates on the last night. This charming habit made the tiny stage look like a florist's shop, but led to a good deal of heart-burning, since the tributes were by no means bestowed in recognition of merit, and it was not unusual for the leading lady to end up with two bouquets — one from the management and one from her husband — while some pretty snippet in the chorus, who happened to be the belle of the season, garnered at least ten or twenty. Popularity could defeat acting talent every time.

Chillingham also stays in my memory as a series of disconnected pictures, as does the Central Hotel. A powder-blue ground-glass globe, scattered with engraved stars of clear glass, belongs to the hotel, where it hung in the main hall, enclosing a strong electric light bulb. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and that starry globe still stands in my memory as a symbol of loveliness; even though I am well aware that if I saw it again it would probably strike me as hideous. But to a three-year-old it was a beautiful and desirable object, and I used to stop and gaze up at it in admiration every time I passed through the hall. I looked hopefully for it many years later — long after the curtain had fallen on the Raj and the house lights had gone out — when Bets and I were on a sentimental journey to our birthplace and had persuaded an elderly
chowkidar
to take us over the closed and shuttered hotel. But the star-powdered pale-blue globe had gone, and the caretaker could not remember ever having seen it. I hope, for old times' sake, that it is still unbroken and has found a new home with someone whose children are as enchanted by it as I once was.

Chillingham still means Mother's voice singing, to her own accompaniment on the piano in the drawing-room, the sweet, sentimental songs of that day or, on occasions, the rousing hymns that were popular in missionary circles; such as ‘Pull for the Shore, Sailor' and ‘Beulah Land, Sweet Beulah Land'. People had to provide their own amusements in those days, and since anyone with any pretensions to a singing voice was expected to take some sheet-music with them to a dinner-party, I used to lie in my cot and listen to the duets and solos being sung in the drawing-room. Music heard at night has an enchantment all its own, and perhaps because of those long-ago musical evenings it never fails to catch at my heart. Chillingham also meant the white flowers of the potato-creeper which grew like a weed in Simla and smothered, in a foam of white-on-green, the high fence of criss-cross wooden slats that screened the servants' quarters from the house and the drive.

Since there were no cars in those halcyon times, rickshaws were the taxis of Simla and could be hired in the same way. But all who could do so owned their own rickshaw and kept their own
jhampanis
— the four men who propelled the rickshaw, two pulling from the front and two pushing from behind. Hired rickshaws and those who manned them were, in general, scruffy-looking and unimpressive. But privately
owned ones were spick-and-span affairs, gleaming with fresh paint and polished brass lamps, while their
jhampanis
, who wore smart uniforms, looked down their noses at their less fortunate brethren and considered themselves vastly superior beings. Like all the many household servants who were employed by the Sahib-log, they were the firm friends and allies of their employer's children, and rides in the rickshaw when Teeta-ayah
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was in charge were always a delight. We could chatter non-stop with the
jhampanis
and hear all their news, and there was little we didn't know about their family affairs or anything of interest that happened in the world in which they lived; that mysterious, exciting, colourful world of close-packed houses and bazaars that clung to the steep hillside below the Mall.

Kipling says in
Something of Myself
, his disappointingly brief and sketchy autobiography, that he and his sister Trix spoke Hindustani far more fluently than they spoke their mother tongue, and that when they saw their parents, the servants would warn them to ‘remember to speak English to Mama and Papa'! That was true of all of us: or if not all, of the majority of the India-born children of the Raj. For in our day it was considered a disgrace to be unable to speak to the real owners of the land in their own tongue. It was only later, after the end of the First World War — known then as ‘the Great War' — that standards declined and the rot set in as it became fashionable among the Johnny-come-latelys and their wives and children to affect not to be able to speak or understand the language of those whom they professed to rule. Too many confined themselves to a few useful words of command and a smattering of ‘kitchen-Hindustani' and considered that this was quite sufficient. But oh, what a lot they missed! For the world behind the bungalow was full of interest. And of dear friends and allies.

Our servants and their families lived in quarters behind their employer's house and since children are indifferent to colour, creed, class or rank (until or unless they are taught otherwise by some grown-up) every inmate of those quarters was a personal friend. There was far more caste discrimination between the occupants of the servants' quarters than there was between them and us, and one learned the
rules by ear and without knowing it; I suppose one could almost say that we absorbed them through the pores of the skin. Bets and I learned without being told that this or that food or action was taboo to Sundra because of her caste, but all right for Kullu and his nine-year-old daughter Umi because of theirs. That Ahmad Shah could do things that little Hira Singh couldn't, because one was a Pathan and the other a Sikh — and so on. This is the best way to learn anything: particularly languages.

But all these things were merely immutable rules that one's Indian friends obeyed and that we accepted as such: just as they accepted the fact that we had a paler skin (and not all that paler, either!) and lots of habits that they regarded as disgusting: toothbrushes, for instance —
ugh
! It did not prevent our being friends. Or getting into fights for that matter. And it is interesting to remember that the children of my parents' Indian friends, with whom we played, seemed equally oblivious of class distinctions and played and quarrelled, as we did, on an equal footing with
their
servants' children.

Kipling, who knew a lot about India, mentions this fact at the very beginning of
Kim
, in which three children, Kim, ‘the poorest of the poor whites', Abdullah the sweetmeat-seller's son, and ‘little Chota Lal in his gilt-embroidered cap', are playing ‘I'm the King of the Castle' on the great green bronze gun, Zam-Zammah, that stands to this day on a plinth opposite the Municipal Museum in Lahore. Kipling says of Chota Lal that ‘his father was worth perhaps half a million sterling, but India is the only democratic country in the world'. By present standards that half-million would be worth more than twenty times as much. But the comment about democracy was still valid in my day: at least, among children. The divisions of caste and class only showed up in later years. But when one was young one found playfellows everywhere, and every man, woman or child in the compound was a friend and an ally. Nor do I think that my parents were in any way exceptional in encouraging this, and it is certain that we gained a great deal from it and never came to any harm.

There were always a great many servants, and the ignorant who criticize the life-style of the ‘colonial' British have never failed to use this as a stick (one of many!) to belabour those of their fellow countrymen who spent their working lives in the service of India: condemning it as typical of that ostentation and self-aggrandisement that
made such suburban nonentities feel superior — etc., etc. It was nothing of the sort. Anyone who knows the first thing about India must know that in those days (and, whatever is said to the contrary, in these too!) caste dictated everything that an Indian could or could not do.

Looked at in another way, caste was also a splendid device for ensuring full employment; and we who live in an age and a country in which trade-union rules insist that a painter stops work in order to send for a carpenter to bang in a single nail or unscrew a single screw, because the nails and screws are not his business but a carpenter's, or waits for an electrician to come and remove a wall plug before he can finish painting a skirting-board, should have every sympathy for the servants of the Sahib-log who devised this ploy hundreds of years before the unions woke up to its advantages. In my day India had never heard of such a thing as a cook-general, and would have objected strongly to the creation of this useful hybrid. The result was that the lowliest British subaltern or secretary was compelled to employ a whole range of servants to run even the humblest of ménages, and as his pay and position improved, so, inevitably, did the number of his employees increase.…