The Sun in the Morning (44 page)

By tea-time the fish had still not been landed and most of the spectators had lost interest and drifted away to deal with their own affairs: Mother presumably to sketch in some more paintable spot and Tacklow and Mr Perrin to take their customary evening walk. Bets and I arrived back to find that there was no one on the bank but the intrepid Mrs Perrin and one or two idlers, and as the sky began to turn gold and green with the sunset she belatedly threw in her hand. Deciding that Tacklow could have been right, she called up a stalwart young man who had been squatting on his hunkers watching the proceedings for the past hour or so, and asked him to row her out in one of the flat-bottomed river-boats that were moored nearby. Bets and I immediately clamoured to come too, and the four of us set out across the river; the young man rowing and Mrs Perrin standing up amidships, rod in hand and reeling in as she went.

Tacklow
had
been right. Somewhere well below the deceptively smooth surface of the great river the currents had scoured out a deep channel, and the fish had only to sink below its overhanging rim and face upstream and nothing could shift him. But once out in mid-stream and above the hidden channel Mrs Perrin could play him again; and he was exhausted by the day-long struggle. Nevertheless he put up a good fight before admitting defeat, and by the time he did so and allowed himself to be drawn alongside and scooped into the boat, Bets and I were completely on his side. I thought he deserved to get away and hoped that Mrs Perrin would throw him back; but then I am not a fisherman. Instead she knocked him on the head and returned in triumph with the captive of her rod and reel. I believe the grown-ups ate him for lunch on the following day; and if so it was lucky for me that I don't eat fish because I would certainly have jibbed at eating that one!

The poor fellow turned out to be a good deal smaller than he had looked from the flashing glimpses we had had of him as he swirled and leapt at the end of the line. A fairly modest size for one of his
species, judging from the snapshot that Mother took of Mrs Perrin holding her trophy on the following morning. But despite the evidence of that snap, in memory he still seems enormous: a huge, almost mythical fish that took a whole day to capture.

Back once more in Delhi we got our first look at what the twentieth century had in store in the way of mass entertainment. The Cinemascope!

Bill had already been taken to see this modern wonder during our brief stay in England — Bets and I had been considered much too young — but the treat had proved a failure, because the film that Mother plainly found riveting, and had wrongly supposed would appeal to her six-year-old son, contained shots of lions, rhinos and charging elephants, with a lengthy sequence involving a python or a black mamba, or some species of large snake. Turning to ask Bill if he was enjoying it, she was horrified to find that he had vanished, and a hasty search revealed that he had been so scared by this reptile that he had gone to ground under his seat and was crouching there with his eyes tight shut. But despite this inauspicious introduction to the joys of canned entertainment, Mother must have agreed with Kipling that small girls have stronger nerves than small boys (he wrote some verses about how Shakespeare got the material for his plays which contain the following lines: ‘
How at Bankside, a boy drowning kittens Winced at the business; whereupon his sister
—
Lady Macbeth aged seven
—
thrust ‘em under, Sombrely scornful
'). At all events, she took a chance on it and allowed Punj-ayah to escort us to a brand-new cinema on or near the Chandi Chowk.

I don't think she can have realized that she was in fact committing herself to allowing us to go there once a week for the remainder of the season. But that was how it turned out, for the cinema was showing a serial that featured one of the very earliest stars of what is now referred to as the Silent Screen. Her name was Pearl White and the serial, which ran for weeks and weeks, was called
Lost Island
. Having seen the first episode it was, of course, out of the question that we should miss the next one; and then the one after that; and that, and that … In the end we saw them all, and the whole thing made such an indelible impression on our minds that we can both remember the tune and most of the words of the title song played at the beginning
and end of every performance on one of those wind-up gramophones with a horn like an outsize arum lily: ‘
O sweet girl of Lost Island I'm longing for you, Won't you come back to my land where hearts beat true?
…' and so on. I remember it started with the eruption of a volcano — the lost island getting lost perhaps? — and the frantic exodus of hundreds of silently screaming extras fleeing from the special-effects fireworks. The heroic Miss White (played as a tot by some forerunner of Shirley Temple) finished up every episode in dire straits, hanging by a rope over a snake-pit or about to be sacrificed to some ferocious Eastern Idol, and we had to wait until the matinée next Thursday or Tuesday or whatever, to see if she was going to be rescued in the nick of time. She always was, though that did nothing to allay our anxiety on the next occasion when crocodiles were advancing upon her or the man-eating lion was preparing to spring. For how could we be sure that the square-jawed and long-suffering hero wouldn't oversleep this time, or break a leg or something, and arrive on the scene too late? The suspense was terrible!

That cinema, as far as I recall, was a shocking flea-pit constructed out of several rickety shops or warehouses, hastily knocked into one and furnished with rows of seats, a screen, a projection-room and a piano. And that gramophone, of course. The front was quite impressive; well plastered with lurid posters. But there were always a good many non-paying customers in the form of rats who ran to and fro along the rafters overhead and the odd nesting pigeon and its mate whose coos and flapping accompanied the pianist and/or gramophone throughout the performance. However, these were trifles and we enjoyed the show enormously. As did Punj-ayah, regardless of the fact that, since she could not read the subtitles, she had no idea what was going on up there and we had to explain it to her as it went along. I suspect it made her a movie-addict for life.

I suppose we must have seen other films, but the only other one that I remember was one that we saw in Simla in a cinema that had started up above the roller-skating rink. I don't remember its title, but I do remember the name of the star. It was Annette Kellerman. She was a forerunner of the much later talking-and-Technicolor swimming stars such as Esther Williams, and a champion swimmer off as well as on the screen. The film was about a mermaid who fell in love with a human — or vice versa — and I remember it vividly as a sort
of dream-cum-nightmare, because I happened to be running a high temperature at the time and was feeling fairly peculiar. I would not admit this for fear that Mother would insist on taking me home and I'd miss seeing the rest of it; even though the story seemed to repeat itself over and over again in a meaningless manner and sometimes the mermaids on the screen were real and swimming towards me and sometimes they grew so hazy that I could barely see them at all.

Eventually, perhaps in the interval, Mother spotted that all was not well, and despite my tears and protests took me home in a rickshaw and put me to bed. I have a dim recollection of her taking my temperature and rushing to the telephone to call a doctor, and after that nothing much else for several days. Which was not surprising: for the year was 1918 and I and several million others had fallen victim to the virulent influenza epidemic that swept the world in the wake of the war; a result, it was widely believed, of the hundreds of thousands of corpses rotting on the battlefields of France and Flanders. It was to claim the lives of far more people than the total casualty figures of the entire 1914-18 war, and India was one of the worst sufferers. Bets caught it a few days later and there is a snapshot of the two of us, convalescent but still confined to our beds at The Rookery, clutching Moko and Teddy and staring wanly at the camera.

There had already been one children's play that year, staged as usual by Mrs Strettle and her dancing-class. It was called
The Lost Colour
and it concerned the smallest colour in the rainbow, Tiny Tint (pink, and if memory serves, played by a girl called Iris Gillian) being kidnapped by some bad character and rescued by the Rainbow King, one Gerry Ross, a pretty creature a few years my senior who possessed a head of lovely copper-coloured curls and wore a gold tunic to match. The curtain rose on the sleeping rainbow composed of members of the dancing-class in order of size, two of each colour (Bets and I were respectively small and large yellow), who to the strains of the Viceregal orchestra's arrangement of Sinding's ‘Rustle of Spring', woke up, yawning and stretching, got to their feet and danced in a dreamy manner before rushing all over the stage in alarm as the lights dimmed, sheets of tin were energetically clashed in the wings, and lightning flashed all over the place to indicate that a thunderstorm had blown up. Under cover of all this uproar, the members of the dancing-class nipped into the wings and collected long silk scarves, each in her own
colour, and as the storm died out and the lights came up we did a dance with the scarves, waving them in time to the music — the rainbow coming out after the storm. ‘How charming!' sighed all the proud mamas in the audience.

I rather think that Tiny Tint must have been shanghaied during the storm, for the next act was a wood on Earth where Bargie, looking as pretty as paint as a wood nymph, did a solo dance followed by a
pas de deux
with the Rainbow King; after which Gerry staged a fight with the villain and rescued Tiny Tint. I imagine there
must
have been a smattering of dialogue, but I don't remember any. Only a lot of dancing and prancing, scarf-waving and mime; and even after all these years I have only to hear the opening bars of ‘Rustle of Spring' and I am back again on the dusty little stage of Simla's Gaiety Theatre, dressed in a skimpy yellow silk tunic with a gold girdle (bazaar tinsel, no doubt), bare-footed and with a gold filet in my hair — and fancying myself no end.

A second play, staged in the early autumn, was a peculiar one-act version of
Peter Pan
that coincided with the arrival of the flu epidemic in Simla. This potted playlet was preceded by a lot of dancing — to which Bets and I contributed yet another minuet! This filled the first half of the programme and in the second half, Gerry Ross played Peter and Bargie played Wendy, while Bets and I were a couple of non-speaking, pyjama-clad Lost Boys. Nana had been eliminated from the script, together with Mr Darling, Captain Hook and the entire Never-Never Land, but Mrs Darling was still present and correct, played by the pretty daughter of the Governor of the Punjab, Una O'Dwyer, who sang a charming Irish lullaby, ‘Husheen', to send us all to sleep before the arrival of Tinkerbell and Peter. Though what half-a-dozen Lost Boys were doing in the Darlings' nursery is anyone's guess!

No one did any flying and the play ended with Peter, Wendy, Tinkerbell and the Boys going into another dance routine. Curtain. I still remember the words and music of ‘Husheen', but that's about all — which is not surprising, considering that the killer epidemic had broken loose in Simla, and was striking down people left and right and playing havoc with the show. One by one the juvenile cast went down with it, and Bets, among the last to be smitten, ended up dancing several other performers' dances in the first half of the show and acting several other people's parts in the play as each one fell ill. The ranks
of the non-speaking Lost Boys were reduced daily and Bets took over playing Michael, and then John, and finally Tinkerbell, before collapsing in her turn. I still can't think why the grown-ups didn't cancel the whole thing. It is possible, of course, that the full seriousness of the epidemic had not yet been recognized and even our parents had no idea what had hit them. They may even have thought that it was just as well to keep us all busy and interested — and on our feet. If so, they could have been right; for though some of the British children only just pulled through, I don't think any of them died. But it was quite otherwise with the children in the crowded bazaars and close-packed, insanitary houses below the Mall, and their parents and grandparents. Yet what we had seen in Simla was only the beginning of the horrors to come…

In the late autumn of that year, after we had moved back to Delhi, Tacklow and Mother accompanied Sir Charles and a few of his friends on what was to have been a ten-day trip down the Ganges by boat from either Gurmuktaser or Gujrowla, to the head of the Ganges Canal — our beloved Narora. It was not the first time they had spent a short leave in this fashion, but on this occasion the object of the trip was to shoot
mugger
and
gharial
for their skins, since Sir Charles, anticipating retirement, had been thinking up ways of supplementing his pension while enabling him to keep one foot in India, and had come to an agreement with a tannery in Cawnpore to supply them with skins to be made up into crocodile-leather suitcases, trunks, shoes, women's handbags and so on, to their mutual profit. This scheme was doomed to prove a disastrous flop for a reason that I have already mentioned: the unsuitability of Indian crocodiles' skins for such purposes. However, Sir Charles's retirement was still some way off, and this ten-day trip down the Ganges was merely intended to be a trial run.

His party planned to embark on one of the big, open, wooden-built river-boats that are steered by a single oar; the servants and various hired assistants following some way behind in a second and even larger and slower one, bringing the tents, food and luggage, and picking up
en route
any
muggers
that had been shot by those in the first boat — whose occupants would mark them by a yellow flag fixed to a stake that had been driven into the sand near the creature's head. Towards evening Sir Charles and his lot would pick a suitable spot in which to
camp for the night and wait there until the second boat hove in sight with the tents and equipment. After which they would go off to shoot duck and partridge for the pot, while the camp was set up and meals prepared, and Kashmera and his henchmen got down to skinning the crocodiles and then pegging out and salting the skins. These would later be rubbed with ashes and dispatched by runner to the nearest railway station to be sent to Cawnpore to be tanned; or that, at any rate, was the plan. But it did not work out like that, and within three days of setting out the entire party arrived back in Delhi again.