The Sun in the Morning (18 page)

I loved that farm. We all did. We were allowed to help with the haymaking and the cows and the baby pigs, and with feeding the ducks and chickens and collecting hens' eggs. The house was large, low-ceilinged, old-fashioned and comfortable, and there was only one thing about it that I did not like: a dark, arched passageway through which the farm carts could be driven from the front of the house to the big, stone-flagged yard at the back. I hated having to go through that passage and would go to almost any lengths to avoid doing so; for there was a stuffed fox in it, and though I knew it was not alive I was terrified of it. The taxidermist who had set it up had plainly been a master craftsman, for he had drawn its lips back in a snarl and made it crouch a little as though it were creeping with flattened ears towards some helpless rabbit or hypnotized pheasant. The staring glass eyes would catch the light and glitter as though they were alive, and I was never quite sure that it wasn't pretending to be dead and would not spring at my throat as I passed. Yet because I was more afraid of being laughed at than I was of the fox, I never told anyone that I was frightened of it, and there were always occasions on which I could not avoid being sent through that haunted passageway, shivering with terror and with my heart in my mouth. I would edge past it, my back to the wall, and once past I would run like the wind in case it might leap off its pedestal. I suppose that was my first real experience of fear.

Nothing else of any interest can have happened to me on my first visit to the land that I had been taught to call ‘home' but always thought of as
Belait
,
^*
because I have no recollection of anything else. We apparently spent the winter with Aunt Lizzie and her husband in
Bedford, but apart from a shadowy impression of fog pressing against the window-panes, and a man who rang a bell and cried ‘Muffins! Hot Muffins!' in the icy, misty street outside, nothing remains. Nothing but Bill in a white sailor-suit looking lost and bewildered and struggling not to cry because Aunt Molly, who had somehow reappeared upon the scene, had just told him sharply that boys never cried: only girls cried — girls and babies! That must have happened in January or February, and during a spell of unusually fine weather, because I associate it with sunshine and green leaves rustling in a sharp, blustery wind; laurels, perhaps? I suppose it could have taken place in a London park, for Mother says we spent a night in a hotel in London on our way to Tilbury and the docks from where the P.&O. liners set sail for India and the Far East.

Tacklow had already left for India some months previously, and now Mother and Bets and I were to return there to join him. But Bill was now six years old, which according to the thinking of that day was considered far too old for a boy to be allowed to stay out in India. Popular opinion held that a boy should be ‘sent home' no later than five or six, in order to avoid being spoilt by Indian servants and becoming overbearing and backward as a result of missing the early training, education and discipline provided by British preparatory schools. Fortunately (like crying!) the same standards did not seem to apply to girls, who could apparently grow up to be spoilt, self-willed and dictatorial without anyone giving a damn. Something for which I, personally, have always been deeply grateful, since but for that I too might well have been left behind in England like poor little Bill. Or like my future husband, Goff, who was dumped on a clutch of maiden aunts in Ireland at the tender age of four.

It had been decided in family council that Bill would remain in the care of Aunt Molly and Uncle Richard Hamblin for the next eighteen months or so; after which Mother planned to return with Bets and myself and make arrangements to leave all three of us with one or other of their relatives — a normal but heart-breaking business that for over a century had faced all colonial service parents. Aunt Molly must have come down from Scotland to collect Bill and see us off. But although I had it on her authority that girls were allowed to cry, I was sure that mothers could not possibly count as girls; yet here was mine crying her eyes out after saying goodbye to Bill.

She would probably have cried even harder had she realized, as she stood sobbing and waving to him from the deck of the liner drawing slowly away from the crowded dockside, that she would never again see her darling Willie as a little boy in a sailor-suit. For it was not to be eighteen months before she returned to England, but more than six years. She was to miss the whole of the rest of his childhood; and when they met again they would not even recognize each other!

That voyage was made memorable to me by the fact that like legions of young women before and after me — though in general they were a good deal older than I was! — I fell in love and enjoyed my first shipboard romance. His name was Guy Slater and I am happy to say that his sister Marjorie — ‘Bargie' — became my best friend. And still is; even though close on three-quarters of a century has passed since we met on that voyage.

Guy must at the time have been at least eight years old: possibly even nine; though to me he seemed a lot older than that since he was a good bit taller and broader than I was. A stocky, sturdily-built child, with sandy hair, a snub nose and freckles, he was a born charmer and I can have been only the first of a long line of young women who were destined to lose their hearts to him. He took me under his wing from the start and I imagine that Mother must have been deeply grateful for the services of this unpaid and totally reliable child-minder. She knew that I was safe with Guy, whom I obeyed as I had never obeyed any nurse or ayah, and who would not let me climb the railings or fall down companionways.

Hand-in-hand we went for daily walks round the deck, explored the ship and leaned over the side to watch the dolphins and the flying fish. And when one day, temporarily on my own, I strayed unknowingly into that male holy-of-holies, the smoking-room, and was angrily rebuked and ordered out by a choleric grey-beard, Guy rushed to the rescue like some avenging knight of the Round Table. Grabbing me by the slack of my pinafore he pulled me behind him, and facing the
enemy with clenched fists and blazing eyes said furiously: ‘Don't you talk to her like that! She didn't know she wasn't allowed in here — she is only a baby!' And turning away he marched me out leaving the grey-beard open-mouthed and struck dumb with surprise. Can you wonder that I adored him from that moment on? One of the grown-ups, intrigued by his interest in me, asked him one day what he saw in me and why he bothered about a small girl of four-and-a-half? I still remember his reply: ‘I like the feel of her hand. It's so small, and it holds on so tight.' The macho male and the feminine clinging vine in embryo, I suppose. Surprising to find evidence of it so early.

I have only the vaguest recollection of Guy's family at that time; and that only because his mother and mine became great friends during the voyage and used to sit side-by-side in their deck chairs and gossip a lot — when not surrounded by a circle of shipboard admirers, for both of them were young, pretty and lively grass-widows. Muriel Slater was a red-headed charmer who was known in Simla as ‘the Goldfish'; presumably in compliment to that shining red-gold hair. But her daughter Marjorie and her second son, Tony, were both black-haired, blue-eyed and strikingly beautiful, as was a third son, Dick, born a year or two later in Simla. Only in Guy had that red-gold hair been transmuted to a sandy ginger, and he alone had no trace of the family's outstanding good looks. He did not need them, for he had more than his fair share of the quality that the present generation calls ‘charisma', and mine would have called ‘charm'. Even at that early age he could, as the Irish say, ‘charm a bird out of a tree'. And I well remember howling my eyes out on the down platform of Simla railway station when Guy was eventually sent back to England to become a boarder at some English preparatory school. In fact Anjuli, the small girl who hero-worshipped the boy Ashton/Ashok in my novel
The Far Pavilions
, and the child Victoria, who adored the youthful Eden De Brett in my whodunit,
Death in Kenya
, and who ‘wept bitterly and uncontrollably, greatly to Eden's disgust and her own mortification' when she said goodbye to him on the platform at Nairobi, both carry strong echoes of myself when young and my tearful parting with my hero and first love, Guy Slater. It is lowering to remember that when I next saw him, a good ten or eleven years later and, as it happened, on the platform of another railway station, this time in London, he hadn't the remotest idea who I was and couldn't even remember me!

The Slaters and the Kayes, having disembarked at Bombay, travelled up to Simla together, where Tacklow had again rented Chillingham for the season. He had hoped very much to buy it, and had he been able to do so it would have saved us a great deal of money in the years to come and probably made a lot of difference to our lives. But he had no capital, and since he must live on his pay, supporting a wife and two children in India and paying expensive school-fees as well as bills for ‘keep', clothes, shoes and endless extras for a son in England, there was no hope of his being able to buy Chillingham unless he could borrow the money, at interest, from his parents. The price, in those days, was a mere £100 for the freehold of the little house and its minuscule garden, and Grandfather paid far more than that for one of his carriage horses, while his wife had a very comfortable income of her own, derived from the Beckett interests in India and safely stashed away in the Funds. It would have been no hardship to lend Tacklow that modest sum, on which he would have paid full interest. But no! Cecil must bear in mind that they had ‘saddled themselves' with a large house and extensive grounds solely for the benefit of their children and grandchildren (oh yes?) and therefore … etc., etc. Tacklow swallowed his disappointment and thereafter, for almost a quarter of a century, paid ever rising rents for houses in or near Simla.

I learned of this episode many years later from Mother, who somewhat naturally resented it bitterly, and the chances are that I too would have held it against that selfish and close-fisted old couple but for the fact that Mother's disclosure, added to the way in which poor Tacklow had been requested to remove his family from the large and comfortable house which (he was expected to believe) had been acquired solely for his and his brothers' and sister's and their children's benefit, relieved me of a secret load of guilt. You see I had imagined, as I suppose the majority of us do, that it was more or less obligatory to love and honour one's grandparents — all my Indian friends did! — and the fact that I found it impossible even to
like
my paternal ones had weighed heavily on my conscience. But having heard how Tacklow's request for a modest loan with which to buy Chillingham had been flatly refused, that load was removed from me permanently, and from then on William senior and his Jane became, as far as I was concerned, non-persons; or as we say in India, ‘
kutch-nays
' (nothings). It was a great relief.

I also learned something that my grandmother's generation do not seem to have taken in: love between parents and their children is not something that flowers automatically from the act of birth, and since no child asks to be born it is up to the parents to do their best for it when it is, and that ‘gratitude' should not come into it. In fact, the popular nineteenth-century cry, ‘After
all
I've done for you children!', which still crops up with great frequency in a large part of the world, is pure nonsense. Love, any kind of love, has to be earned. And by that I do not mean ‘bought' though I suspect that is often tried. I suppose Tacklow must once have loved his parents, because Victorian children were told that it was their duty to love dear Papa and Mama, and Victorians were great ones for doing their duty. He certainly never said a word against them; or even hinted one. Yet I have my doubts. His black-sheep brother, Alec, who absconded to Canada, obviously had no use for them at all. I would have liked to hear his opinion of them.

Chillingham was not the same without Bill. But I did not miss him too much because the Slaters lived quite near us, so I continued to see a lot of Guy; and I still had a resident playmate in Bets, who was growing up, as were a good many old friends in the big houses, the servants' quarters, the shops and the bazaars of Simla. Growing up much too fast, in my opinion. Umi, for instance, now rising nine, was actually married — and inclined to look down her nose at me and give herself airs on that account, even though she would not be going to her boy husband's home for some years to come, so that her situation did not appear to have altered overmuch. I pretended that I was going to marry Guy, but I'm afraid she didn't believe me. Everyone, retorted Umi loftily, knew that
Angrezi
girls didn't get married until they were old and wrinkled!

A number of the
Angrezi
children with whom I used to play had gone home to England; several Muslim ones had gone into
purdah
and could no longer attend mixed parties, and one of the Maharajah's covey of daughters and/or nieces had been formally betrothed to the youthful heir to some princely state and become as toffee-nosed about it as Umi. But thankfully, my grown-up friends — people like Buckie and Sir Charles, the Khan Sahib and the gentle, soft-voiced Diwan
^*
Sahib — looked just the same and did not appear to have grown a day older. Which I found very reassuring, as I felt that I had been away for years and years.

There were just as many children's parties as ever and I still hated them. Except, in a small way, for the fancy-dress ones; and that was only because I enjoyed the dressing-up, not the party itself. My heart used to sink into my strapped shoes whenever Mother showed us yet another large, gilt-edged card and told us that we had been asked to little Angelica or Archie or Ashok's birthday party, and wasn't it exciting? I wonder how many children actually enjoy children's parties? Not too many, I suspect. The only time I made a serious effort to get out of attending one of these juvenile gatherings, my anti-social attitude astounded and upset Mother. Herself a great party-girl, she could not understand my objection. Why, parties were fun! They were great treats and I was a very lucky little girl to be asked to so many. In the end I began to think there must be something wrong with me, because
all
children, according to Mother, liked parties, and of
course
I would enjoy myself … I would have a lovely time, ‘Just wait and see!' When I persisted, I was told not to talk nonsense and that I needed a course of iron tonic (filthy stuff that left a nasty taste in one's mouth) or a dose of Gregory's Powder. I suspect I was given both. But if so it did me no good, for I continued to dislike children's parties.