The Sun in the Morning (48 page)

There were a good many of our friends and contemporaries on board, and since we had all been well and truly infected with the Amateur Dramatic bug during the war years, we put on a children's song-and-dance show for our long-suffering elders, in which Bets and I sang and danced to ‘Madam, will you walk?' and Bargie brought the house down singing ‘I'm Gilbert the Filbert, the Kernel of the Nuts', decked out in white tie and tails which she must have borrowed from some schoolboy of her own age among the passengers. She also made a sizable dent in the heart of one of the ship's officers, who fell madly in love with her and was for ever inviting her to his cabin to look at his photograph-albums or drink tea or whatever. (I do hope he was a bachelor.) Admittedly, he was extremely good-looking; but in my opinion far too old to carry on like that. Why, he could easily have been as much as
thirty!

I could not blame him, for I too thought Bargie must be the most beautiful thing since Helen of Troy. Now rising fourteen, and, by Indian standards a woman grown, she had the violet eyes, the ebony hair and perfect features of a famous film-star as yet unborn, Elizabeth Taylor, when that gorgeous creature was at the height of her beauty. But though Bargie was beautiful she was by no means dumb, and on the rare occasions when her love-sick officer managed to persuade her to accept one of his invitations, she insisted on taking me along with
her. Not until much later did I realize how he must have detested the skinny, ten-year-old chaperone who kept a close and beady eye upon him while cheerfully scoffing the lion's share of the chocolates, lemon squash, ice cream and sugared cakes he provided for the purpose of luring the lovely Slater-child into his cabin.

Port Said, which I had last seen the year before the Great War, seemed quite unchanged and astonishingly familiar. The white-painted Victorian-style hotel on the sands. The rows of bathing-huts and deck chairs. The brilliant blue of scores of jellyfish stranded and melting in the hot sun above the high-tide mark. The
gully-gully
men who addressed every white woman as ‘Missis Queen Victoria' and who produced adorable, cheeping, day-old chicks from our ears or the crown of our hats or hair ribbons. The round wooden boxes of Turkish Delight which we bought at Simon Artz, and lunch in the big, white dining-room of the hotel that looked out on the sands and the sea…

To all home-bound Anglo-Indians, the East was only left behind when they entered the Mediterranean. After that there was no longer any need to protect themselves from a savage sun with a solar topi, and for this reason it had become a tradition to throw these emblems of servitude overboard while the ship was still within sight of Port Said. A legend had grown up that if your topi sank you would never return, but if it floated you were sure to go back. So those who had hated their time in India, and had no wish to set foot in it again, would cheat by weighting their topis with a soda-water bottle or a handful of annas wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, or anything else heavy and expendable, and cheer when it sank. The rest would watch with bated breath and feel relieved or depressed according to whether theirs floated or sank. But Bets and I (who by this time knew every lascar on the ship by name and had taken the precaution of asking them for advice) did not fling our topis into the wake, but dropped them very carefully, holding them as though they were bowls of water. And Glory, Glory, Alleluia! they floated! We watched them bobbing away in the glitter of the Mediterranean sunlight, and felt as though a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. We would come back!

Bargie and Tony had also dropped their topis overboard, but though unweighted, both sank almost immediately, so perhaps there was something in that old Anglo-Indian legend after all, for neither of them ever returned to India.

According to Mother, we went ashore at several other places in the course of that voyage; among them Aden, Malta and Marseilles. But if so I don't remember doing so. I only remember Port Said and, towards the end of the voyage, a truly horrendous storm in the Bay of Biscay. It was so violent that the Captain of the ‘Ormond' had to turn the ship about so that she went with it instead of fighting it. We were apparently blown many miles off course, and we learned later that the storm had been responsible for an appalling number of wrecks on the coasts of half-a-dozen countries, including England. We had run into the fringes of it shortly after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, and Mother and most of the adult passengers had made for the privacy of their cabins and collapsed with seasickness. But a handful of children, including Bargie, Tony, Bets and myself, who were not in the least affected by seasickness (a failing that I, for one, have been fatally prone to ever since!), had a whale of a time tobogganing down the drenched and tilting decks on tea-trays that we had filched from a pile outside one of the galleys.

It was a wildly exciting sport, in the course of which we all got soaked to the skin, and I still cannot imagine why none of us were swept overboard. For the ‘Ormond' was bucking and pitching and throwing herself to and fro like a frenzied colt in some rough-riding competition, and every wave looked as though it was bound to engulf her. Only once in my life would I see such waves again. They looked more like huge dark cliffs with ragged white bushes growing along the top of them; as though the whole Atlantic had reared up as the Red Sea had done to let the Israelites pass through, and was now about to crash down again as it had crashed onto the pursuing Pharaoh and all the Chariots of Egypt.

The decks were swept again and again with foaming water and the air was full of stinging spray as we whizzed to and fro, shrieking with excitement, until Authority, in the form of a justly infuriated ship's officer, grabbed us, boxed our ears (instant disciplinary action was not discouraged in those days), and, having confiscated our tea-trays, marched us all below and gave us a tongue-lashing that made our faces burn more than our ears had done. He took our names, but nobly refrained from reporting us to our parents, and we decided unanimously that it had been well worth it.

By the time the S. S. ‘Ormond' entered the English Channel the wild weather had passed, and the Thames was as flat as an old unpolished pewter plate as the liner edged slowly up it on a dawn tide in the care of two squat black tugs.

I have never forgotten that traumatic day. Even now I can recall it as clearly as though I have gone back in time and am living it once again; standing on the wet deck to watch the dank grey wharfs and the gaunt cranes and warehouses slide slowly past through a veil of the faint, persistent drizzle that the British call a ‘Scotch mist'; a drizzle that was barely visible to the eye and did no more than dampen the winter coat that Mother had taken out of mothballs and made me put on before I went up on deck.

So this was
Belait!
This was ‘home'. This wet, flat, dark-grey country with its black, oily river, ugly buildings and drably clad dock-workers. It seemed to belong to another world from the one I had left behind less than three weeks earlier, so different was it from the crowded docks at Bombay in the blinding Indian sunlight, the noise, the heat, the hurrying coolies and the colours — the brilliant clashing colours…

There had been a breeze blowing in from the sea at Bombay, but today in the docks at Tilbury there was barely a breath of wind to stir that small rain, and only a few passengers were on deck. I heard one of them, an elderly man in an overcoat, ask a ship's officer why the flag was flying at half-mast; and learned that a small child who had been in the sick-bay for some days had died during the night. The child was not one I knew, and nor did I know its mother except by
sight. But most of the women on board had known that the child was seriously ill and had done what they could to help and encourage its anxious mother. And now it was dead. I remember looking up at the sodden bit of bunting that drooped at half-mast and feeling the rain on my face, and thinking that it was only fitting that the day should be grey and dreary as though it too, like the flag, was in mourning.

The tugs were easing the great ship along the left bank of the river, the Gravesend side opposite Tilbury, when either the current caught her or the pilot made an error, for we crunched into a pier which must have had some tall structure on it that damaged the ‘Ormond's bridge; and suddenly the quiet of the early morning was shattered as shouts, splinters and bad language flew in every direction. A startled passenger hustled me below deck, where I forgathered with Bets and we ate breakfast in a state of deep gloom and made another vow that we would never love this depressing foreign country or regard it as ‘home' — so there!
^*
That vow too remained unbroken for the larger part of my life, and was only partially lifted when I came to live in Sussex; for to this day the word ‘home' instantly conjures up a picture of India as clear as the one of Bombay that the Thames and Tilbury Docks showed me on that long-ago morning.

In the end the ‘Ormond' must have anchored in mid-stream, because I remember Mother taking us up on deck — where there were now many more passengers — to lean over the rail and watch for Bill who would, she had been promised, be brought to Tilbury to meet us. By now it must have been getting on for mid-morning, and though the rain had stopped there was a nasty, cold little wind. Then suddenly Mother cried: ‘There he is! That's him! —
Willie!
' She began to wave wildly. There were tears running down her cheeks, and I felt as deeply embarrassed for her as I had for myself when I found that I was crying in public on the station platform at Delhi, and on the deck of the ‘Ormond' as I watched Tacklow walk away. For had not that fountain of wisdom, Kashmera, once told me sternly when I wept because I had cut my arm badly on one of the wicked double-pronged thorns of a kikar tree, that I must remember that I was English and that ‘
Angrezi-log kubi nai rota!
' (‘English people never cry!'). I had tried to
live up to that; and had envied my Indian playmates for whom it was obviously OK to howl their eyes out whenever they happened to feel like it. (Even the boys — some quite big boys — were allowed to yell the roof off, and instead of being scolded, were petted and coaxed and made a fuss of.)

To make matters worse, I knew that Mother had dressed very carefully for this meeting. She was wearing her best suit and her most fetching hat, and looking as pretty as paint in them. Yet here she was, busy spoiling it all by acquiring red eyes and a runny nose and tear-spots all down the front of her jacket. One consolation was that Willie, in that rowboat, was probably much too far away to be able to see such details, so I stopped worrying about Mother and stared down instead at the occupants of the little rowing-boat that was bobbing about on the water some fifty feet below. Two of them were grown-ups; one presumably the owner, since he was rowing it; the other, I recognized with annoyance, was Lord Clow — not my favourite person. The third was a boy between twelve and thirteen years old, who was a complete stranger to me and plainly suffering, as I was myself, from acute embarrassment.

When one is a child, a snapshot or a studio photograph gives a misleading impression of the sitter: particularly when it is in black-and-white — and in those days colour photography had not been invented and most snapshots were taken with a Box Brownie. So it is not surprising that poor Willie had only the vaguest idea of what his mother looked like, or which of the many faces that peered down at him from somewhere near the top of that enormous towering cliff of a ship belonged to her. Even when her wild waving and calling enabled Lord Clow to spot her and point her out to him, he did not recognize her — or his sisters either. All three of us were as much strangers to him as he was to Bets and myself, and even to Mother, who had left behind a little six-year-old son and was now looking at a schoolboy of more than double that age.

Bill told me a long time afterwards that it was the most embarrassing moment of his life, for not only were we all strangers to him, but he had no idea what to do or say to us, and when Mother waved and called out to him he felt as though the eyes of every single one of the massed ranks of passengers looking down from the ‘Ormond's decks were focused on him. It was as though, he said, he was standing on a
stage in the glare of a spotlight and had forgotten the lines he was supposed to say.

He looked like it too, and I felt for him. They should never have brought him out in that dinghy, but waited until the ship had docked so that he could have met us in our cabin or a corner of the saloon; or even in the crowded Customs shed on shore. As it was, he was compelled to stay put for what seemed like hours to me and days to him; getting colder and colder in the biting wind and beginning to feel seasick from the constant bobble of the little boat and the strain of looking up and waving, keeping a fixed and nervous grin on his face and occasionally shouting some fatuous question or answer which the wind blew away. Until at long last Lord Clow took pity on him and, having yelled up to us that they would see us in the Customs Shed, told the boatmen to row them ashore.

I don't remember what I felt or what any of us did when we finally met. In fact I don't remember anything at all of all that business of disembarkation, except for saying goodbye to Bargie and managing by a superhuman effort not to cry, even though I was by that time bleakly convinced that I would never see her again. I can't even remember if my first love, Guy, was there to meet her and the rest of his family. He probably was, but if so I was too depressed to register the fact. Yet once out of the Customs Shed, I remember very clearly piling into a crowded second-class carriage so full of strangers that I and brother Willie (hereinafter to be known as Bill) had to stand, while Bets sat on Mother's lap.