The Sun in the Morning (30 page)

Most of the houses had wire netting over the windows to keep the monkeys out. But sooner or later one of the doors leading out on to the verandahs would be left open, and the next thing you would see would be a monkey springing around a bedroom with its hands and face smothered with Mother's face-powder, or fleeing from the dining-room, liberally coated with castor sugar or guava jelly and clutching a stolen table-napkin that had caught its fancy. Gangs of them raided the orchards or tore off the heads of the roses in the gardens. They snatched the wares from the open-fronted shops in the bazaar — particularly the grain and fruit shops — chased each other, fighting, through the streets of the town, or sat in companionable family groups on railings and rooftops, crooning to their babies or carefully searching each other for fleas, lice or other parasites which, when captured, they would examine with interest and then eat. They did a lot of damage and were a major pest. But Simla would not have been Simla without them, and their presence was an integral part of my childhood.

For a very brief period, only one term, Bets and I were pupils at Auckland House, a coeducational school — which was something of a rarity in those days when the sexes were strictly segregated. The school took its name from the man for whom the house had been built, Lord Auckland, who with his sister Emily had occupied the house during the summers of 1838 and 1839, almost twenty years before the Mutiny. At that time it had been known as Government House, but later on it became a boarding-house, then a hotel, and finally, in 1868, a girls' school which almost half a century later had gone coeducational.

Bets and I detested the idea of going to school. Any school! We had successfully dodged it for a long time, but now we found ourselves caught in the net, and every day we were taken by rickshaw to what
we regarded as a prison house. Desks, time-tables, lecturing, hectoring teachers and lessons, lessons, lessons. Our lovely carefree days were over. We bore it because we had to. The verdict had gone out and there was no escape. But it proved easy enough to cajole our
jhampanis
into letting us get out of the rickshaw and walk as soon as we neared the Lakkar bazaar, where we had any number of friends with whom we would pause to pass the time of day, plus acquaintances who would turn a blind eye when, in the manner of the
bandar-log
, we filched a handful of roast
chunna
(gram) from the baskets of the grain-merchants. It was always
chunna
and never anything else; and looking back to those times I imagine that the sweet things —
halwa
and
jellabies
for which I also have a fatal weakness — were too sticky to snatch and conceal. But I have never outgrown my fondness for roast
chunna
, and for some strange reason the
chunna
one paid for never tasted half as good as the
chunna
one snatched on the sly!

True to its name, the Lakkar bazaar (
lakkri
^*
means wood) was where most of the workers-in-wood had their shops: the master craftsmen who could turn a section of oak, pine, sycamore, rosewood or walnut into innumerable charming artefacts. The carvers and joiners; the menders and makers of furniture, toys, ornaments, pipes and walking-sticks. They could all be found there, and the whole bazaar always smelt deliciously of sawdust and pine wood. It was there that the road divided; its left-hand fork plunging steeply down the Lakkar Bazaar Hill while the right went on through the main bazaar towards the Commander-in-Chief's house, Snowdon, and beyond that to Sanjowli and Mashobra and, eventually, Tibet. The steep left-hand fork was lined for several hundred yards by shops purveying different merchandise; flimsy buildings, in which were sold grain, fruit, vegetables and sweetmeats, cloth, medicines, brass and tin-ware, cheap trinkets and fragile glass bangles in glittering, sparkling colours that made the open-fronted shops look like Aladdin's cave. Almost every shop was a treat to the eye, for as anyone who has ever seen an Eastern bazaar will know, the wares, whether grains and spices, vegetables or fruit, are displayed in round shallow baskets that form a patchwork of vivid colours; while the bales of plain or printed materials, piled one on another, wall the cloth-merchants' shops with stripes and
blocks of every shade and hue — shocking-pink, cerise, scarlet and emerald predominating.

Bets and I never rode in our rickshaw down the Lakkar Bazaar Hill; we ran down it instead. The incline always seemed to us to be nearly perpendicular, so we had to run very fast in order to keep from falling over. We would race the hordes of small children who hang around any bazaar; barking pi-dogs enthusiastically joining in, Punj-ayah scolding fruitlessly far in the rear, and the grinning
jhampanis
holding well back so as not to be run away with by the weight of the rickshaw. At the time it did not occur to me that the kids who raced with us were a cross-section of India; not only as to religion and sect but ranging from ragged little beggar-brats to the sons and daughters of affluent merchants who could have bought out our parents ten times over. For like Kipling's Kim, we too ‘consorted on terms of perfect equality' with the small boys of the bazaar: and with the small girls too.

What chiefly shocked poor Punj-ayah about this was that we would race either bare-footed or in our socks, because we learned early that stout strap shoes were all very well for walks on the Mall and at school, but a grave handicap when it came to pelting flat-out down an exceedingly steep hill. If we'd kept our shoes on we would never have won a single race, whereas without them we would occasionally defeat the competition; which was no ordinary triumph, since it was formidable. Even Punj-ayah, for all her disapproval, was pleased when I won and felt that I had done something to uphold the
izzat
^*
of the Away Team.

Our days at Auckland House, together with those races down the Lakkar Bazaar Hill, were brief. The school was strictly for the children of Europeans, which naturally included a very large proportion of what were then called Eurasians, the majority of whom spoke with a lilting sing-song accent that was very like a Welsh one and was known as
chi-chi
(pronounced ‘chee-chee', not ‘she-she'). It had a catchy lilt that was only too easy to pick up and copy; particularly when almost all our schoolmates spoke it! I can still remember with a mixture of fascination and embarrassment the day on which our teacher made the class rise in turn and recite two lines of Tennyson's ‘The Brook' and
I suddenly realized that I was the only one who was going to read it in a totally different way from my fellows — unless I deliberately copied their accent, which might give the impression that I was making fun of them…

I had already had the mickey taken out of me on the playground for speaking in a ‘lah-di-dah' voice; and anyway the teacher — who spoke broad Scots — knew perfectly well how I spoke and would think I was being gratuitously rude. However, before I could make up my mind it was my turn to rise, and I did so and stumbled through my two lines in a near inaudible mumble that earned me a sharp rebuke from the teacher and an outbreak of giggling from the rest of the class. But that poem was to save both Bets and myself from any more terms at Auckland House, for when school was over that afternoon and the day-pupils, as opposed to the boarders, left for their several homes, I gave a repeat performance to Bets of my little classmates reciting ‘The Brook'. She was as fascinated by it as I had been, and it amused us so much that we took to chanting it, verse and verse about, to each other. We also, somewhat naturally, picked up a good deal of school slang and catchwords which we repeated as we had heard them spoken — in
chi-chi.

Mother was not amused. She was, in fact, so horrified that I can only suppose that she visualized us speaking with a
chi-chi
accent for the rest of our lives; though she should have known that children can lose an accent just as easily as they can acquire one. She started correcting our pronunciation, and as soon as we realized that she was really worried we saw a way of escaping from any more terms at school by becoming more
chi-chi
than ever.

It worked! It worked like a charm. Once that term ended we did not return to Auckland House. And except in Delhi, where in future we were to spend our winters and go to classes at the house of one of Mother's friends, whose children's English governess agreed to let us join in their lessons, we had no more proper schooling until the war ended and we were taken ‘home' and sent to boarding-school. Yet Tennyson's ‘Brook' still stays in my memory as I first heard it recited — shrilly and at top speed: ‘
Chat
-ter,
chat
-ter,
lit
-ell
brook, In
this
ca
-mand
sun
-ee
weath
-er.
Men
-may come and
men
-may go, but
I
go on for
ev
-er.' The cadence is irresistible, and I am deeply grateful to it for saving me hours and weeks and months — perhaps even years — of schoolroom
lessons, and for being the means of letting me spend the time instead running wild in the lovely Simla hills.

Only one other memory of Auckland House remains, and that one is connected with the playground where we were released, under strict supervision, to amuse ourselves during the half-hour break at mid-morning. There was a craze at that time for collecting cigarette cards, and the enthusiasts would bring their spare cards out, crying hopefully ‘Change-ee? Change-ee?' to advertise the fact they were prepared to exchange their duplicates for ones they had not yet got in their collection. The volume of sound created by some thirty or forty kids all bleating that call at the same time was quite something: rather like nesting-time in one of those bird sanctuaries for black-backed gulls or whatever — plaintive, deafening and unforgettable.

Bets and I and our particular friends continued to be obsessed by amateur theatricals, and when the members of Mrs Strettle's dancing-class were not involved in some official production directed and stage-managed by grown-ups, I would write plays and sketches which our group would perform to audiences of other children and the occasional parent: or, as often as not, merely for our own amusement. Play-acting, however, was by no means our only entertainment, and we continued to find endless sources of amusement. Even without the whole of Mashobra to play in, I still cannot remember ever having been bored — except in class. And then only by some teacher who could not be bothered to explain things clearly, so that one sat there in a fog of misapprehension. Yet even then I could amuse myself by making up stories or inventing future ploys. The Mermaids' Cave, for instance, was invented during an algebra lesson; a subject that has never made sense to me, and I have to confess that I still cannot see why X should equal anything except a kiss, a no-go sign, or simply two crossed sticks.

The Mermaids' Cave was in fact an unused
gussal-khana
, a bathroom, attached to a redundant spare bedroom on the ground floor of The Rookery, which Mother had turned into a box-room. Since the bathroom was never used, I asked if Bets and I could have it as an extra playroom and do what we liked with it. Permission being granted, we began by painting the walls and ceiling greenish-blue, using a bucket of cheap whitewash and a few packets of powdered dye which one
could buy in the bazaar for a few
pi
a packet — a
pi
being a small copper coin, now long vanished, worth one twelfth of an anna, of which there were sixteen to every rupee. What an age and what a country to be young in! No wonder we felt rich when our pocket-money was one anna a week; you could buy a lot for one
pi
in the bazaar, and I remember Durroo telling me that a man and his family could live comfortably on two rupees eight annas a month. A
month!
Shades of the Vicar of Wakefield who considered himself to be ‘passing rich on twenty pounds a year'.

We already owned a box of crayons, and with these we chalked fishes and underwater scenery, corals and seaweed, on the blue-green walls. Jellyfish and starfish too, and rocks with sea-anemones and crabs on them. We strewed the floor with sand wheedled out of
Mali-ji
, the gardener, collected moss-covered boulders from the hillside behind the house and piled them here and there against the walls, and, having painted more fishes on cardboard, cut them out and strung them up on threads of black cotton, one end of which was stuck to the ceiling with plasticine, so that they swayed to and fro at different levels about our heads and looked as though they were alive. We also cut long, jagged strips of brown paper to look like seaweed and did the same to that; anchoring the top to the ceiling and the bottom to the rocks on the floor. And finally we covered the window-panes with green crepe paper and painted the single 15-watt electric light bulb with blue paint.

It looked marvellous! Just as though one was standing on the bottom of the sea in a cool, greeny-blue, watery light with weed and fishes swaying to and fro around one in time to the movement of some underwater current. We used to sit there and pretend to be mermaids, ‘swimming' whenever we moved about the little room, and making up stories about ancient wrecks and drowned cities.

We went roller-skating at the rink below (or was it above?) the Cinema, with our friends. We built tree-houses and hides in the woods, and played, over a period of months, a long-running and complicated series of games loosely based on ‘French and English' (who remembers that one, I wonder?) — though since Tacklow had enthralled us with tales from Indian history, it was ‘Maharattas and Rohillas', ‘Sikhs and Jats', or ‘Moguls and Persians'.

We made our own puppet-theatres, drew, painted and cut out the
characters who appeared in them, and spent hours and days constructing a maze of passages and hideaways among the tall, tough stems of the flowering cosmos that formed a dense, feathery jungle on the sloping ground below the buttress wall in front of The Rookery. At a guess, this wilderness of cosmos must have covered a strip of between fifty to sixty yards in width and about half that in depth, ending at the top of another wall and a drop of some ten feet onto the upper road that circled Jakko.