The Sun in the Morning (20 page)

I knew that this war was different, that it was real and was happening now. I had also been aware of Mother's fear and unhappiness during the weeks of waiting for Uncle Alec's reply from Canada, and for the outcome of Tacklow's efforts to persuade Army Headquarters to release him for active service on the Western Front. Also of her enormous relief when he was ordered to shut up and get on with it, which was as though a light had been switched on. Her spirits had shot up like the fountains in the gardens of the Taj and she had flung herself with renewed and grateful enthusiasm into war-work: which in those days consisted largely of rolling bandages, filling huge parcels for the Red Cross (which I presume must have contained something other than bandages), and knitting endless skeins of khaki-coloured wool into socks, balaclava helmets and fingerless mittens, which came under the heading of ‘Comforts for the Troops'. Or she would help to entertain wounded soldiers who were sent to convalescent homes in Simla and other hill stations, run stalls or raffles at endless charity bazaars in aid of this, that or the other war effort, and act in amateur theatrical or cabaret shows for the same causes.

We children were co-opted to help in all these activities and to us
it was either fun or a boring chore. The children's plays were fun but rolling bandages a terrible chore because they had to be done exactly right; if one was rolled too loosely or untidily it had to be undone and done again. I remember with affection an intensely patriotic play called
Where the Rainbow Ends
in which my lost love Guy's lovely sister Marjorie — hereinafter known as Bargie, that being the name by which all Simla's children knew her — played the part of Will-o'-the-Wisp in a tunic of blue-grey chiffon and a sparkly silver head-dress that I thought beautiful beyond words; almost as entrancing as that star-spangled globe in the hall of the Central Hotel. A girl called Betty Caruana played one of the two midshipmen heroes, Jim Blunders. I fell madly in love with ‘Jim Blunders'. How, I wonder, do little girls escape getting into a terrible tangle over the sexes? ‘Jim Blunders' was a boy: yet he was played by a girl. How could I be in love with the boy and not with the girl? Very strange and unsettling.

I wasn't one of the children who was chosen to act in this play, but I understudied one of them and when she (or was it he?) was smitten by some juvenile disease I went on in his (or her) place. Here, I hate to say, my memory must have gone badly astray, for I could have sworn on oath that I played the part of a white rabbit, and that all I had to do was hop across the dark-green side of the stage. (The dark-green half belonged to the Dragon King, and any human venturing on it could be captured, while the light-green half belonged to England's patron saint, St George.) If it were not for the fact that I possess one of the original programmes, and a photostat copy, donated by a Simla contemporary, of the assembled cast — neither of which include rabbits — I would have continued to swear to it. And I can still see myself hopping across that stage in a white, fluffy suit with long ears and a cottonwool tail, and hear ‘Jim Blunders' real-life as well as stage sister, ‘Betty' (Kitty Caruana), piping: ‘Oh do look at those darling wabbits!'

But whether I was sent on to replace a non-talking rabbit or a tip-toeing fairy, I did go on as someone's understudy for several performances, and the chances are that one of them was watched from the stage box by a small boy called Goff Hamilton who would one day marry me. Sadly, he remembers hardly anything about the play except that he saw it and that somebody was tied to a tree so that the wolves would eat them. He says that he ‘remembers all the wolves'. But as a
matter of fact, they were supposed to be hyenas, not wolves, and there were only three of them. However, it's nice to know that they made an impression on him. (They scared most of the small fry into howls at the children's matinées.)

Perhaps it was during this same year that Mother took part in a song-and-dance show in aid of the Red Cross that was being held at Viceregal Lodge for a strictly limited number of performances. The amateur actors wore pierrot costumes, half black and half white, while the actresses wore white wigs with pierrette dresses that were half white and half black-and-white checks. There is a snapshot of Mother wearing her pierrette outfit, taken at Chillingham; and I presume there must have been a matinée performance of this show for the benefit of those who were too young to stay up for an evening one, because I remember seeing it. I remember too that there was a huge gold picture-frame in the background of the set in which two of the performers, dressed in seventeenth-century costumes, sang a duet: ‘Madam will you walk? Madam will you talk …' Bets and I thought this song was terrific and for years afterwards we used to sing it, accompanied by a minuet, as a party-piece when called upon to show off for the benefit of indulgent aunts and other elderly relatives who considered it ‘sweetly pretty'!

It was only much, much later, long after the Great War had been re-named the First World War because there had been a second one, and after that one too was over, that happening to leaf through an old photograph-album belonging to my mother-in-law, I discovered that she too had been a member of that same concert party and had actually sung that song! Neither she nor my mother had remembered that the other had been in the show, and I regret now that I didn't ask her to identify any of the other performers from the group photograph. She may have done so, of course; but if she did, I hadn't the sense to write down the names.

The only two I can identify are Lady Grant and a Mrs Brocas-Howell who (though one would never have believed it on the evidence of this photograph) had the reputation of being a notable charmer in the Mrs Hawksbee tradition and having a train of lovers. And the only reason why I remember her is because we children learned to detest her when, a year or so later, she played the part of Britannia in a patriotic extravaganza known as ‘The Pageant' — a show which, like
many others during the war years, was produced and directed by our dancing-teacher, pretty Mrs Strettle, later Lady Strettle, whom we all adored, and who ran a weekly children's dancing-class in Simla during the summer months and in Old Delhi during the cold weather. However, ‘The Pageant' and Mrs Brocas-Howell came later…

I don't remember how or why we came to be living in a long, rambling house called Harvington that stood (and still does) on an outlying spur of the hills a mile or two outside Simla, facing the ridge along which the mountain road to Mashobra, Kufri, Fargu and the Kulu Valley winds and twists on its way to the high passes and the snows of Tibet. Puran Baghat's road —

Harvington belonged to a cosy old lady called Miss Cullen who ran it as a boarding-house: for which reason it was always known as ‘Miss Cullen's' and never as Harvington. The girl who played the midshipman in
Where the Rainbow Ends
, and on whom I had a juvenile crush, lived with her parents at Miss Cullen's, and although a good deal older than most of the other children there, was kindness itself to all of us. I still remember the floods of tears when she was sent home to England a month or so after acting in that play, her parents having decided that the dangers of the submarine warfare that Germany had declared on all British and Allied shipping was, on balance, of less importance than having their darling daughter spoiled rotten and growing up half-educated.

Bets and I loved Harvington and Miss Cullen. The wooded hillside that fell away so steeply at the far edge of the lawn was our favourite playground: an enchanted world which in springtime was white with drifts of the wild Himalayan lily-of-the-valley, and later with the sweet, evocative scent of the yellow, climbing wild-roses which spangie our hillsides in the months before the monsoon breaks. After that came the rhododendrons; so many of them that for miles around the hillsides seemed on fire. With the autumn a pink, fruitless blossom tree flowered
throughout the hills as though it were a second springtime; and always, maidenhair fern dripped from every rock.

No one who has not been a child in the Himalayas can know how beautiful they are, and how full of colour and scent and wonder. We built an entire fairy world among the tree-roots and moss and wildflowers some fifty yards or so down the hillside below the lawn, and when we put out biscuit and cake crumbs for the gnomes, elves and other ‘People of the Hills' and found them gone the next morning, we were certain that they were being served up at some fairy banquet, and would have angrily rejected any suggestion that birds, animals or insects were responsible — though the woods were always full of those, and of other forest creatures.

Two of my earliest recollections of the war years are linked with Miss Cullen's, for Bets and I spent at least two cold weathers there in the charge of a new ayah and an English nanny called Lizzie; our parents having moved down to Delhi when the Viceroy, the Government of India, the Commander-in-Chief and Army Headquarters departed
en masse
for the plains in an annual winter migration. This began as soon as the Simla season finished at the end of October, and would take place in reverse when the approach of the next hot weather drove them back to the cool of the hills once more.

The first of those two early memories of Miss Cullen's is a vivid recollection of being awakened out of sleep late one night by Ayah, who snatched me out of bed, bundled me up in an eiderdown and ran out, carrying me in her arms into the cold black darkness of the garden. Lizzie was already there with Bets in her arms and so were a number of servants and, I suppose, the rest of Miss Cullen's guests; though the darkness prevented me from seeing them. I realized with alarm that Ayah was frightened, but when I asked her what we were running away from she would only say through chattering teeth: ‘
Zalzala
! …
Zalzala
! …' The word being unfamiliar to me, my respect for the wisdom of grown-ups took its first knock, since whatever this monster was, it seemed to me the height of stupidity to run out into the night where it could pounce on us in the dark from behind a clump of bushes or a tree-trunk. Surely we would be far safer if we hid from it under one of the beds or locked ourselves into a cupboard? The grown-ups must have taken leave of their senses! In fact, it was an earthquake; and a fairly severe one at that. But as I had been sound asleep when
Ayah snatched me from my bed, and had, throughout, been clutched in the arms of someone who was shivering with fright, I had not been aware that the ground was shaking, or that inside the house the ceiling lamps were swaying to and fro and pictures and ornaments were tumbling off walls and table-tops as though a hurricane were rampaging through the house. I was to experience a fair number of
zalzalas
in the future; but that was the first.

The second and equally vivid memory is of being taken for our daily walk by Ayah or Nurse Lizzie, or both; I on foot and Bets in a push-cart, week after week along a narrow, slippery path between high walls of hard-packed, discoloured snow that had frozen solid. These icy walls were far taller than I was, and even Nurse Lizzie could not see over them; for as in
Kim
, ‘Jakko Road was four feet deep in snow that year.' And when a path is cleared through roads that lie under four feet of snow, the surplus shovelled onto the initial depths raises it by another four feet to create icy canyons through which one walks without ever seeing anything but the sky or the black, dripping deodar branches directly overhead.

With the spring our parents returned from Delhi and we all moved back into Chillingham, and while we were here one of Mother's Indian friends presented her with a magnificent fan made from peacock feathers. It was a dazzling affair almost the size of a complete peacock's tail, and Mother was delighted with it. Fans being rather the ‘in' thing in the way of room decoration (see any contemporary photographs), she set it up as a fire-screen in the drawing-room, against the advice of several of her girl-friends who assured her that peacock feathers in a house brought bad luck. ‘
Pooh!
' said Mother. ‘As if anything so beautiful could be unlucky!' But that same afternoon she tripped over the stand of her cheval-glass, which toppled over and smashed into smithereens. And as all superstitious people know, to break a looking-glass is supposed to herald seven years' bad luck. Mother, as a missionary's daughter, had no time for such superstitions, but she was shaken by the accident. And even more shaken when less than half an hour afterwards Bets, who was supposed to be in bed enjoying her afternoon nap, appeared in the doorway complaining that her head ached and her throat ‘felt funny'.

Mother carried her back to bed, took her temperature, and finding it alarmingly high, sent for a doctor (of whom there were three in
Simla at that time; rejoicing in the names of Slaughter, Blood and De'ath; can you believe it?) The doctor examined Bets and announced that she had diphtheria, and though in these days she would have gone straight into hospital, in those, people were whenever possible nursed at home. A night-nurse arrived within the hour and after a frantic SOS to that great friend of the family, Sir Charles Cleveland, who lived a luxurious bachelor life in a large house at the other end of Simla and had no fear of infection — or anything else! — I was despatched with Ayah, a suitcase and that tiresome pony and its syce, to stay with him until Bets should be out of danger. The danger was very great, for in those days diphtheria was a killer and ranked among the most dreaded of children's diseases. The moment I had gone Mother rushed into the drawing-room and taking that wonderful peacock-tail fan out into the garden, poured kerosene oil over it and set a match to it. And from that day to this she has been incurably superstitious about peacock feathers, and will not have one in the house.