The Sun in the Morning (24 page)

When not planning novels and dream-shopping, Bargie and I, accompanied by Bets and her special friend, Bargie's second brother Tony, would climb the hill path to Dukani; a house that stood on the crest of the hill behind Oaklands and which belonged to Sir Edward Buck, known universally as ‘Buckie' — ‘the finest shot in India'. He was also the author of
Simla Past and Present
, and for more years than anyone could remember had been Reuter's chief representative on the subcontinent. Any number of Simla's children knew and loved Buckie, and Bets and myself, his nearest neighbours except for the Roberts who lived in a house called The Bower on the far side of the hill, were allowed to treat Dukani as a second home.

If Buckie should be out we would take the path at the back of his house that led downward for a few hundred yards to The Bower, and
look up Sybil Roberts, another Simla child who has remained a lifelong friend, and whose mother, Lady Roberts, had fascinated me ever since I learned that she was the grand-daughter of ‘Afghan' Warburton, whose story had been told to me by the Khan Sahib: a story that, to borrow a favourite phrase of the Kojah's, ‘since you have not heard it, I will now proceed to relate' —

During the British occupation of Kabul in 1841, a young man in the service of the East India Company, Henry Arthur Warburton of the Bengal Sappers and Miners, while taking a stroll through the streets of the city, had been seen by a beautiful Afghan Princess who had been peering down through the carved wooden lattice that screened the windows of the women's quarters. The Princess was already married to a nephew of Dost Mahommed, the Amir of Afghanistan, whom the British had just deposed. But this did not stop her from falling in love on sight with the young Englishman. She managed to find out who he was and to smuggle a letter to him arranging an assignation, and as soon as he saw her he too fell fathoms deep in love; for she was very beautiful. Eventually the two eloped and her husband divorced her. But though her brother-in-law, Akbar Khan, put a price on her head and gave orders to the Afghan Army that she and her lover were to be hunted down and killed, they managed to escape, and after many adventures were married. Their son was the Warburton I referred to in the last section of
The Far Pavilions
; the one who had been about to leave India when the Second Afghan War began to loom upon the horizon, and who had offered to return to the Frontier. Had he done so, our chances of abandoning that unjust and futile campaign (or, alternatively, of winning instead of losing it) would have been greatly improved, for his mother's kinsmen saw to it that he was kept in touch with Afghan affairs, and the Government of India, had they listened to him, would have avoided stumbling into many fatal quicksands. As it was, they declined his offer and he duly sailed from Bombay — and the repercussions of that war are still with us.

Sybil's mother, Lady Roberts, always known as ‘Lady Mickey', was a grand-daughter of ‘Afghan' Warburton and his lovely, wayward Princess; and I have been told that another Warburton, this time a great-grandson, arriving to join his unit on the North-West Frontier
just after the Second World War had ended, and not long before Partition and Independence, got out of the train in his pyjamas to stretch his legs in the dawn, and found himself faced with a vast crowd of Afghans who packed the little platform from end to end. They were all kinsmen of his great-grandmother, gathered here to welcome and pay their respects to her great-grandchild. And if anyone still wants to know why the British who served in India had such a deep and enduring affection for that country, this episode alone should serve to explain a great deal!

Most of our meals during Bargie and Tony's visits were picnics. Sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, curry-puffs and cake were packed into rucksacks by Mother and eaten by us on the slopes of the golden, grassy hillsides that looked out across the enormous valleys below us towards the great Himalayan ranges that are the outer bastions of Tibet. Even the nights were exciting when Bargie was a visitor, for we would hold midnight feasts; popular entertainments that were tremendous fun to plan and prepare, though it must be admitted that nine times out of ten by the time midnight struck and our elders and betters were (we hoped) safely asleep, we ourselves were far too drowsy to get much enjoyment out of them. As for the provender that we so carefully collected and hid away in toy-cupboards or under the beds, the best that could be said about it was that it could have been worse. Though not much. This was because the first rule governing such nocturnal bun-fights was that the feast
must
consist of food that had been collected without the knowledge of any grown-up — which restricted it to cold potatoes or soggy lumps of pudding whipped off our plates into a waiting handkerchief during lunch, bits of cake or biscuits filched during tea, and bottles of lemon squash surreptitiously sneaked from the larder when no one was looking. And since the pudding- and/or potato-filled handkerchiefs were then stuffed up our bloomers in order to remove them unseen from the dining-room (children's knickers in those days were invariably bloomers with elastic at the waist and knee) the collected delicacies were not all that appetizing. But then anything eaten by stealth and at an unauthorized hour possessed the charm of forbidden fruit.

These midnight feasts came to be known as ‘Chunkychaddles', because Bargie, being of a methodical turn of mind, had on one
occasion written down a detailed plan: who was to collect what, the exact time that each one of us left his or her room, etc., etc., in the manner of a military exercise. And having concluded the list, she had thrown her pencil down and said: ‘And after that, Chunkychaddle bust!' The newly-minted word appealed strongly to her fellow conspirators and from then on, to any member of our own particular circle of friends, a midnight feast was always known by that name. But the final and most famous of our Chunkychaddles was destined not to take place at either our house or the Slaters', but at Sybil's — or rather her mother Lady Mickey's.

The Bower was one of Simla's oldest houses, having been built in the heyday of the East India Company and later on owned for a time by a certain Lieutenant-Colonel in the Company's 7th Bengal Light Cavalry; one Thomas David Colyear. Thos. David had married twice; both times to Indian ladies. The coffin of the first Mrs Colyear (a Muslim lady who died in 1865 and whom he had buried in an elaborate marble mausoleum in the garden of one of his houses) was eventually dug up and re-interred beside that of her husband in the third of Simla's five cemeteries, after a subsequent purchaser of the house objected to the presence of a corpse in the garden. The Colonel, according to the marriage register in Simla's Christ Church that records his second marriage, claimed to be a son of the Right Honourable the Earl of Portmore. Presumably an illegitimate one, since he is referred to only by his military rank and never as ‘Lieut.-Col. the Hon. Thomas Colyear'. His second wife, who appears on the same document as ‘Alice, spinster, daughter of Jewtoo, Hindu', hailed from Kangra; which makes me wonder if she could have been the inspiration for Lizpeth, the girl in one of Kipling's
Plain Tales from the Hills
who also appears in
Kim
as the Woman of Shamlegh. Hill women from that region are known to be fair-skinned and very beautiful.

The Colonel married Alice, daughter of Jewtoo, Hindu, only a few months after the death of his Muslim wife. And ten years later when he himself died he left her The Bower (then called ‘Alice's Bower') in his will: together with a very comfortable fortune. Buckie says in
Simla Past and Present
that her relations in Kangra Valley immediately descended upon the widow with the intention of getting their hands on the money, and that she ‘died soon afterward' — he does not say of what. He adds that ‘for a time' her ghost was supposed to haunt
The Bower, and includes a story that was certainly not the one that I was told in the early 1930s by old friends in the bazaars of Mahasu, Mashobra and Simla.

In the years I am writing about The Bower belonged to Buckie, who had rented it to Sybil's father, Sir ‘Mickey' Roberts; and it seems that at that time half Simla knew that one room in the house was haunted. But since this particular room was always kept unfurnished and unused, no one bothered much about the ghost of poor Alice, which for its part behaved with the utmost tact and kept itself to itself. That is, until Lady Mickey threw a weekend party for a number of her friends, including Bargie's parents and mine, who were invited to bring their children with them in order to keep Sybil amused — there being nothing more certain to ruin an adult party than a bored seven-year-old tagging around after the grown-ups and generally getting underfoot.

The Bower was a good deal larger than it looked, but with so many guests the only way of fitting them in was to put all the children together in one room, dormitory fashion. And since the adults had been very careful not to breathe a word about the ghost to any of the children (and an order to that effect had long ago been issued to the servants), it was decided that it would be quite safe to put the kids into the haunted room — in the belief that although anyone who knew about the ghost might well start imagining all sorts of peculiar things and seeing and hearing all kinds of imaginary movements and noises (their nerves would see to that!), a bunch of high-spirited and blissfully ignorant children would be entirely unaffected: and in any case, the story was a load of old rubbish! The haunted room was therefore opened and thoroughly spring-cleaned, and five beds were procured and made up in it.

It was an odd-shaped room; in outline rather like one of those old-fashioned square ink-bottles. The neck of the bottle had windows on three sides and a peaked roof overhead which jutted out from the main expanse of corrugated tin (a material that roofed ninety per cent of Simla's houses). Two beds were placed on either side of this neck below the long side windows, and a small dressing-table stood in front of the end one. The rest of the room, the bottle part, was large and square and had been hastily furnished with an almirah, a chest of drawers and a chair or two, in addition to the other three beds. There
was a fireplace in the wall facing the windowed neck, and on the two side walls to the left and right of this there were two doors, one opening inwards off a wide landing while the opposite one on the far side of the room opened into a bathroom and loo.

The outer wall of the bathroom was part of the outer wall of the house. And since the house itself stood on a flat piece of ground that had been hacked out of the steep hillside, there was on that side a vertical cut, some fifteen feet deep and roughly eight wide, between the outer wall and the hillside above. This was spanned by a stout wooden bridge onto which the outer bathroom door opened and across which the
bheesti
would carry water for the baths, and the sweeper come with his basket to clean the loo. No one crossing the bridge could do so without advertising their presence, for the planks creaked loudly when trodden on, and every footstep echoed hollowly in the cut below — I remember that because we children preferred to reach the hillside by way of the bathroom and the bridge rather than downstairs and out by the front door.

Sybil, Bets and Tony had the beds in the main part of the room, while Bargie and I, as the two eldest, bagged the beds in the neck of the bottle. And this being a festive occasion, we decided to celebrate it with a super-special Chunkychaddle. So on the Saturday we raided the larder and acquired the usual scraps off the lunch table or during tea — fortunately there was a ‘nursery table' in the dining-room where the children ate, so no beady-eyed grown-ups spotted us slipping pudding or whatever off our plates and into the waiting handkerchiefs.

We had a lovely day. I can still remember the scent and the sound of it: the smell of pine needles and flowers, the feel of the hot sun on our backs, the huge iridescent red and green and blue dragonflies that swooped and hovered over the lily-pond in the garden, and, towards dusk, the flying-foxes waking up and sailing down the hillsides from the tops of the tall deodars, dark against a green and gold sky. There was a full moon that night and not a cloud in the sky, and after our respective mothers had heard our prayers and kissed us good-night, Sybil's ayah locked and bolted the outer bathroom door giving onto the bridge, turned out the oil lamps and went away, shutting the door behind her. No sooner had she gone than Bargie and I drew back the curtains she had earlier drawn across the windows, and sat bathed in brilliant moonlight which made the rest of the room seem so dead
black by contrast that we could not see Bets, Sybil and Tony, who lay in their beds only a few feet away and talked to each other in whispers for fear that someone in authority would hear them and come in and tell them to shut up and go to sleep.

There was not a breath of wind that warm night, and with no soothing surf-sound of the breeze through pine needles, we could hear the grown-ups talking and laughing below and, later, the sound of a piano and someone singing. As the moon moved up the sky and the shadows of the pine trees shortened, we became sleepier and sleepier and began to wonder if the grown-ups were
ever
going to stop talking and go to bed; but after what seemed an age we heard the drawing-room door open and the sounds of the house-party dispersing to their own rooms. We gave them the best part of another hour in which to fall asleep, and then, when the house was still as a pond in a hard frost, Bargie stopped yawning and announced that the Chunkychaddle would commence. And immediately Tony, Sybil and Bets roused themselves, and having scuffled around under their beds and pillows for the provender that they had collected earlier in the day, brought it over to our beds and settled down there to enjoy the feast.

By now the moon no longer shone directly into our windows, but the five of us sat pyjama-clad in the clear light that was reflected off the roof outside, as we ate (with relish I have no doubt) an assortment of food that almost certainly included cold rice-pudding, squashed blancmange and some very crumbly cake and broken biscuits, washed down with orange juice and water drunk out of tooth-mugs. Our spirits were high and I remember that there was a great deal of giggling and the occasional burst of laughter, hurriedly suppressed.