The Sun in the Morning (19 page)

Worried by this, since it augured ill for the future (how was I ever going to be a success on reaching marriageable age if I refused to go to parties and make the ‘right contacts' while I was young?), she urged Tacklow to acquire a pony for me so that I could at least learn to ride. Riding carried a certain social cachet, and few girls got anywhere by keeping their noses permanently stuck in a book (this last in reference to the fact that having taught myself to read because I could not find enough people to read to me, my nose was almost always stuck in a book). But Mother was right about riding. Nearly all my little British contemporaries, certainly the children of the Heaven-Born, could be met with any day of the week, correctly dressed in hard hats and smartly cut jodhpurs and jackets, riding their ponies along the Mall or around Jakko with an attendant syce trotting behind them.

Tacklow obliged, and a pony, plus a second and younger syce, was added to the Kaye ménage. But the addition proved a total loss because I disliked the pony quite as much as I disliked parties. To be frank, I
was terrified of it, and even now, when my elder daughter breeds the creatures and my young granddaughter has, since the age of two, treated them with the fond familiarity with which even the most timid of humans handles a baby rabbit, I still subscribe to the minority view that all horses are offensive weapons and not to be trusted a yard. At nearly six years old I was scared stiff of them, and of falling off them, and I remember those daily rides on a lead-rein as purgatory. Particularly the slope leading down to and past the Cecil Hotel, where the pony always broke into a brisk canter and would, had the syce permitted, have galloped; in which case I would instantly have fallen off.

Mother, Bets and I did not, as planned, return to England in the autumn of 1914, the following year. For on the fourth day of the last month of summer, one day after Bill's eighth birthday and seventeen days before my sixth, the ‘Great War' — now known as the First World War — broke out, putting an end to countless plans and uncounted lives.

My adored Guy was one of the first of many British children to be hastily shipped off home for fear that they might be trapped in India without proper schooling (which it never seems to have occurred to anyone to provide) should the optimists who insisted that the war would be ‘over by Christmas' turn out to be wrong.

To me, at that age, war was something that I had heard about from ayahs and the story-tellers in the bazaars who told tales from the Ramayana — the great Hindu epic that tells the story of Rama and Sita — and of the campaigns of the Moguls and the sack of great cities; Delhi, Kabul and Chitor, and the bloodstained field of Panipat where the fate of India had thrice been decided in battle. But all these heroic events were just stories which had happened in the distant past and which belonged either to history or to legends and fairy-tales. They could not possibly happen
now
! Not in this day and age. Not in my own lifetime!

I can't remember when I first learned that there was actually a war — a world war! — being fought
now.
But I do remember the shock that the discovery gave me; and also, as though it were yesterday, saying to Tacklow: ‘But are people really fighting each other
now
? A real war? You mean they are
killing
each other?' And being aghast when he said
‘Yes' and explained how it had come about. Even then it took a long time to sink in. And even longer before I could really believe that it was true and get used to the idea; for it seemed to be an incredibly silly way of settling an argument and I thought that ‘grown-ups' ought to know better.

After the initial shock, the fact that there was a war on began to make itself felt in many different ways; the worst of these being that Mother was frequently in tears as a result of some problem involving my father. I could not help being uneasily aware of this, but I only learned the reason for it long after the war was over. It seems that my darling Tacklow, in all other ways an intelligent, peaceable and levelheaded man — Tacklow, who would have liked to have been an actor, and failing that a member of the Indian Civil Service or better still a barrister if he hadn't been pushed into the Army sorely against his will! — had written a long letter to his black-sheep brother Alec in Canada, asking if he would give Mother, Bets and myself a home for the duration of hostilities while he, Tacklow, went off to the war. Having posted it and received an affirmative reply, he had gone to the head of his Department and requested permission to leave immediately for England in order to join up in the ranks if he could not obtain a commission in the ‘Contemptibles' (the Kaiser has recently referred to the British Expeditionary Force as ‘a contemptible little army'). He was after all, he said, a soldier, so he should by rights be fighting in Flanders instead of sitting safe and snug behind a desk in Simla while other and better men died in the fields of France and Flanders.

Permission had been flatly refused. Not only once, but again and again; for Tacklow kept on trying. It seemed to him indecent that while the flower of a generation, thousands of young civilians from every walk of life who had rushed to join the colours, were being blown to bits in the blood and mud of the trenches, professional soldiers such as himself should remain on the side-lines. Alec had written that he and his wife would do their best, and Tacklow went ahead with plans for taking us to Canada and either joining a Canadian regiment bound for France or, if that proved impracticable, taking ship for England and joining up there; a prospect that terrified Mother, who went about the house with a white face and a wet handkerchief clenched in one hand.

She need not have worried. The Brass-hats at Army Headquarters
remained adamant. As a soldier Tacklow was no great shakes; but as a cipher expert his value was above rubies. He was irreplaceable. There was no one who could take over from him, for cipher experts are born and not made, and his services could not be spared. The Commander-in-Chief himself sent for him and told him in no uncertain terms that there was not the faintest chance of his being cannon-fodder in Flanders, so he might as well save his breath and get on with the job in hand! To soften the blow he would be promoted to Deputy Chief Censor with a rise in pay, and the fact that he had not seen active service would not count against him in his Army career, for when the war ended he would be treated as though he too had fought in it — with a subsequent rise in rank; possibly to Brigadier General. He would be able to console himself with the thought that he had earned it.

The prospect was not one that held much appeal for Tacklow; and in the event that last promise proved a hollow one, being conveniently forgotten the moment the Armistice was signed. But at least Mother was happy again. She had been petrified at the thought of being hurried off by way of the Pacific to Canada, to be dumped with her two small daughters on an errant and eccentric brother-in-law and his wife whom she had never met, while her husband marched off to embroil himself in the appalling carnage in Europe and left her struggling to make ends meet and living in hourly dread of receiving a telegram from the War Office to say that he was dead or, worse, ‘missing believed killed' — that most harrowing of tragic uncertainties.

Army Headquarters' flat refusal to let Major Kaye go came, for-Mother, as an answer to prayer, and her spirits immediately soared as high as Tacklow's plummeted. It was not that he had any desire to fight or kill anyone. But he loved his country, and now that she was fighting for her life he felt that the very least that anyone could do was to come to her aid and, if necessary, die that she might live. Since that privilege (he was sufficiently patriotic and old-fashioned enough to regard it as such) was denied him, he turned back to the task that his seniors considered that he was best qualified to do, and drove himself unsparingly; working late into the nights as well as through the weekends, and only very rarely allowing himself to take any leave.

Since I have always been incapable of solving the simplest crossword
puzzle, I cannot begin to understand the workings of a mind that can break codes and solve complicated ciphers, and apart from the basic principle I never had the faintest idea how the trick was done. My impression even now is that it involved the use of some form of mental water-divining, and that something in Tacklow's brain sensed the meaning lurking under the surface muddle, just as a dowser's forked stick twitches and turns downward in answer to the pull of something unseen. I realized that mathematics played a significant part in it, though maths had always been a closed book to me — and still is! But it seemed to me that there must be something more than that: a sixth sense that enabled certain people to break ciphers. I still think so, and here are two stories that support my belief —

On several occasions ciphers that had baffled the experts in England were sent on to India in the hope that Kaye might be able to break them. And Kaye did. One such, having landed on his desk after being given up by any number of top cipher-experts in Britain, was broken in double quick time because Tacklow, having looked at it thoughtfully for about five minutes, said to his team: ‘I've got a strong feeling that this one works on a key phrase. Quite a short one; not more than two or three words. Let's try it out: we'll start with something obvious like “
Gott Straffe England!
“' So they did. And it was! That of course was a glorious fluke. But it supports my contention that the early cipher-experts must have had a lot in common with dowsers.

Tacklow also broke the Russian cipher, though Russian was not one of the many languages he spoke. Russia was at the time one of the Allies. But being Russia, she had her own private codes to which her allies did not have the key (or would not have had, had it not been for Tacklow's peculiar type of brain). Also, being Russia, the Allies were never quite sure whose side she was likely to end up on — if anyone's, since throughout her history Russia has never been on any side but her own. It was therefore considered vitally necessary to know what the Muscovites were really up to, and Tacklow was asked to give the matter his attention. He duly cracked their code — though how he did it I have no idea, considering that without the help of a Russian-English dictionary he could not have translated their messages even if they had been sent in clear!

But he did even better than that. The Russians changed their code once a month, and always on the same date: let's say on the 24th. And
within a day or two, never more than three, Tacklow had cracked the new one. He gained tremendous kudos from this spectacular feat, and only some considerable time after the war had ended, when he was asked to give a talk on ciphers and deciphering to the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge, in the hope of interesting the young in this vital branch of warfare and security, did he blow the gaff.…

The secret of his impressive performance lay in the fact that the Russians are a methodical people. Their new code came into operation on the 24th of each month, so on the 23rd, to ensure that those who used it should have no trouble understanding it, they sent out the new code in the old one. It was as simple as that! The apparent delay of a couple of days or so (in which Tacklow was supposed to be beavering away at solving it) was merely eyewash designed to distract attention from this glaring breach in the Russian defences. Surprisingly enough, they never tumbled to it. And since Tacklow never let anyone into the secret for fear that someone might think it too good a story and tell it in confidence to one of Simla's many gossips, he gained a reputation for brilliance that was undeserved. Though he had, of course, cracked the original one, in a language he did not speak.

He told me a lot of cipher stories. But here is one I learned from Mother. … A Top Secret message from a British General commanding a brigade in action somewhere in the Middle East was delivered by hand at our house late one night, together with a note to say that since it was a very long one the duty officer thought that it might be too urgent to be left until morning, so would Major Kaye please …? Hauled out of bed in the small hours, Major Kaye fetched the code book from the safe in his study, and waking his sleeping wife asked her to help him out by reading out the relevant numbers from the ‘crib'. Yawning and heavy-eyed (she told me she had only just fallen asleep after returning late from a dance), she put on a dressing-gown and dutifully complied by the light of a bedside lamp. The message was a particularly long one, and as the ‘very model of a modern Major-General' who had despatched it was in a potentially dangerous situation she, like Tacklow and the duty officer, was prepared for news of vital importance. The message came out slowly, letter by letter, which as Tacklow wrote them down formed themselves into words:
PASSED … THROUGH … FIELDS … OF … WAVING … CORN
… At which point Tacklow said something that Mother would not
even repeat to me, and telling her to go back to sleep, turned out the lamp and went to sleep himself. But the incident passed into family legend and for many years afterwards anything totally irrelevant and time-wasting was described as ‘only a bit of waving corn'.

The war years that wrought such terrible havoc in Europe and the Middle East, killing or maiming appalling numbers of people and breaking the hearts and wrecking the lives of twice as many more, were, for me, the happiest in my life. A Golden Age that I look back on as Eve must have looked back at lost Eden. I knew there was a war being fought, ‘a Great War', because Tacklow had told me so. But then he had also read me Kingsley's
Heroes
, and told me about the Trojan Wars and Thermopylae and of Arthur's last fight, and about Saladin and the Crusaders too. They were just stories in a book. Or in the case of Arthur a poem —