The Sun in the Morning (49 page)

There were no corridors on trains in those days, and so little standing-room in the narrow second-class carriages that I stood sandwiched between the bony knees of strangers, with my back to the carriage, staring bleakly out of the window at this hideous country that my parents spoke of as ‘home'. I had never travelled second-class in India, though I had often thought it would be fun to do so because the passengers, jammed together as they were with their bundles, baskets and babies, always seemed to be enjoying themselves, chattering and laughing together like a flock of parrots in a date palm. Well, now I was doing so. But here no one spoke, let alone laughed. They sat in glum silence, reading their newspapers or staring stodgily ahead of them at nothing. I hated every minute of that journey.

Because of the vast distances that were covered by India's trains,
their first-class compartments were always sleepers; each one large enough to accommodate four berths, two to each side, with ample room between for luggage. And since this was before the days of corridor trains, each compartment had its own adjoining lavatory, complete with handbasin and running water. In this train too there were no corridors. But no loos either! I dreaded to think what would happen if I had need of one. Did one have to jump out when the train stopped at a station? (and if so, what if the train left again before one had finished, leaving one stranded in this daunting place?) It was a terrifying prospect!

If the ‘Ormond' had docked at Southampton or Dover I might have taken a slightly less unfavourable view of my native land. But to arrive at Tilbury on a cold, wet, overcast day, and have to make the dreary train-journey from there to Central London, through some of the most depressing built-up areas in the country, was a terrible introduction to England. As I gazed, horrified, from the rain-spotted window, it seemed to me as though there were no open spaces here at all. Nothing but mile after mile of squalid, soot-stained walls, warehouses and dingy streets lined with small, grimy terraced houses in which, unbelievably, my native people,
Angrezis
— ‘Sahib-log!' — actually lived…

Tacklow's pay had never run to renting a house of the size and style that the ‘Heaven-Born' occupied, and even The Rookery, which was the largest house we had ever lived in in India, had no running water, modern sanitation or refrigerator; and no garden beyond the row of flower-pots on the gravel-covered terrace-cum-drive, and the steep, cosmos-covered slope below the buttressed wall that supported it. Yet in both Simla and Delhi the houses in which the British and the well-to-do Indians lived enjoyed a large degree of privacy, and did not look into each other's windows. Nor was it possible to hear from one's bedroom or verandah what one's next-door neighbours were saying. I can only imagine that it must have been for this reason that the very idea of
Angrezi-log
having to live cheek-by-jowl in those claustrophobic terraces of two-up, two-down houses that faced each other across a rainy street shocked me so much; almost as much as the squalor and dirt!

I had so often heard English people complain of the squalor and dirt of India that I had subconsciously come to believe that England must, by contrast, be a model of cleanliness and order. But nothing I
had seen in India — not even the
bustees
and back alleys of her crowded cities, where goats, pi-dogs, monkeys and Brahmini bulls wandered at will among people who flung their rubbish into the streets, defecated in the gutters, chewed
paan
and spat out the resulting streams of scarlet juices broadcast — was more depressingly squalid than this endless wilderness of mean streets. Here everything in sight, including the drizzle and the dingy lines of washing that hung limply in many of the tiny, rubbish-strewn back gardens, seemed to be permeated with soot. And no wonder! For in those days coal was almost the only source of energy. Railways, factories, ships and power-plants burned it, the chimney-pots of every house within sight belched smoke from coal fires and coal-burning stoves, and only lighting and street lamps relied on gas.

My untutored view of my homeland and its natives received yet another rude shock when we finally arrived at our destination, Lord Clow's flat, which occupied the second floor of one of those large, white-painted Victorian mansions in a square near Palace Gate in Kensington. Whoever owns it now probably paid well over a hundred thousand pounds for it and could sell it tomorrow for close on a million; but it failed to meet with my approval. A lift took us and our luggage up to it and there were fires in every room and crumpets for tea. The tall sash windows of the front rooms looked out onto plane trees and down upon a wet street bounded by the high railings of a garden that formed the centre of the square. But our bedrooms, Bets and mine, and I think Bill's and the cook-housekeeper's too, as well as the kitchen and all the ‘usual offices', looked out onto an inner shaft: a sort of brick-lined well constructed to allow air and a certain amount of light into the inner rooms of the tall, terraced houses lining the square, all of which, as far as I could make out, had been built back-to-back with the houses in another square behind us. This meant that the view from these inner rooms was restricted to brick walls and windows that avoided looking into each other by being set at different levels. As an added precaution, the windows were provided with a double set of curtains: the outer ones of net or Nottingham lace remaining permanently drawn, while the inner, more solid ones were drawn only when the lights were lit. Though in fact the lights more often than not were on from dawn until bedtime, because England was enjoying a particularly wet spring that year and even when it was
not raining the sun never broke through and the days were as dark as an Indian dusk.

Mother arranged various ‘indoor outings' for us. She took us to the Natural History Museum, which was a great success, and to lunch with a massive Edwardian dame called Mrs Alec-Tweedie, who turned out to be Harley Alec-Tweedie's mother. Mrs Alec-Tweedie painted highly coloured and very slapdash pictures in water-colours, travelled widely and recorded her travels in books with titles such as
My Adventurous Journey, Through Finlandia in Carts
, and so on. She gave us a splendidly grown-up meal in a dining-room crammed with pictures (her own impressionistic efforts competing with large and gloomy family portraits), and afterwards took us to a matinée of
The Lilac Domino
, a musical comedy that we thought was marvellous.

A day or two later Mother took us to a children's matinée of Maskelyne and Devant's Magic Show which we enjoyed; though only mildly, since children who had seen the tricks that Indian conjurors can perform are inclined to be blasé about magic shows. We were far more thrilled, when it was over, to find ourselves emerging from the theatre into a real London fog of the type that used to be called a ‘pea-souper'. This was something we had certainly never seen before! The fog was not white or grey, but a curious, dirty yellow that smelt strongly of soot and was so dense that you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Our cabbie took us back to the flat at a snail's pace and Mother fretted the whole way for fear that he would knock someone down and run over them, or drive us all into the river.

Early on during that London visit she took us with her to the bank to deposit the money that Tacklow had given her for travelling and arrival expenses, and I shall never forget the incredulous, pop-eyed amazement of the clerk behind the counter when she handed over a small Gladstone bag which proved to be full of gold sovereigns; coins that he could not have seen for years. But Edward VII had been on the throne and sovereigns and half-sovereigns were normal currency when Tacklow had last been in England.

Then there was our first visit to the Zoo; taken in company with three young cousins and their mother, Aunt Norah Bryson, wife of Mother's eldest brother, Arnold. This ‘treat' became a disaster, since the day turned out to be a Bank Holiday and apparently every other paterfamilias in all England had set out with the same intention,
accompanied by his wife, children, parents and in-laws and their respective progeny. The crush was beyond anything I had witnessed up to that time. Even the crowds who celebrated Diwali and Id were not greater, and I don't remember being able to see a single animal except the heads and necks of the giraffes and the top half of an elephant who plodded through the mob giving rides to children. The youngest Bryson could not have seen even that much, and my clearest memory of this exhausting day is of his piping voice reiterating tirelessly, like a gramophone whose needle has got stuck in a groove, ‘Is this a lift, Mummy? … Mummy, is this a lift? Is this a lift …?' It seems — heaven knows why — that since a very early age his infant ambition had been to ride in a lift and Aunt Norah had rashly told him that we would be doing so that day. I believe we did at some point; but it failed to stop that shrill and repetitive question, and I still can't think why some public-spirited Londoner didn't strike the child a hefty clout with a bottle or an umbrella.

An even more disappointing event was a walk in Kensington Gardens — the ‘Delectable Gardens' made famous by Sir James Barrie's immortal fairy-tale,
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
. They were once the private park of Kensington Palace, where Victoria spent a large part of her childhood and which was her home at the time she was proclaimed Queen. But since they were also the gardens that some fatuous grown-up had assured us were infinitely larger and more beautiful than our beloved Kudsia Bagh, our disillusion that day was quite as traumatic as it had been on the day we docked at Tilbury. So
this
was what the British called a ‘garden'! This — this
maidan
! Acres and acres of grass criss-crossed with paths worn by the feet of children and bisected by broad, gravelled roads edged with low railings. Trees of the type one could not climb; neat flowerbeds that bore notices forbidding the public to pick flowers; a plethora of sooty laurel shrubs, a few benches and, dotted about in pairs, innumerable iron chairs on which one could not seat oneself without a watchful park attendant hurrying up to collect a small sum for the privilege of doing so.

How could anyone, even a grown-up, have described this bleak and tidy park as being superior to the flower-scented tangle of Begum Kudsia's garden? We could not understand it, and as we trudged dutifully along the crowded paths and stared silently at the Round Pond and disapprovingly at the statue of Peter Pan (which turned out
to be another let-down, being a statue of the wrong Peter — not the baby Peter of Kensington Gardens at all, but the Peter of Captain Hook, the Lost Boys and the Never-Never Land), our aching sense of exile grew greater with every lagging step. It was no surprise when this expedition, like others, ended in rain and hasty return to the flat in damp coats, hats and spirits.

Many of Mother's efforts at entertaining us were defeated by the weather, for rain and wind kept us flat-bound for the greater part of our visit, and my clearest recollection of that first introduction to London is of the three of us — Bill still a stranger — lying on our stomachs in front of a gas-fire in that dismal back bedroom, with all the lights turned on, and drowning the sound of the wind and the falling rain by playing records on one of those wind-up gramophones with large green-painted horns, our favourite record being a song called ‘K-k-k-Katy', (‘beautiful Katy, you're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore'). I have never heard it since, yet the refrain and the words still stay obstinately in the jam-packed attics of my mind, and I have only to hum them to see again that dark, rain-beleaguered flat.

There was soon to be a song called ‘Roses of Picardy' which will always mean school to me. For the fell matter of school could no longer be avoided. Bill, together with his cousin Dick Hamblin, was already at Lynams, the famous Dragon School in Oxford, since it was to Oxford that Tacklow's parents, having hastily sold Freshfields, had retreated on the outbreak of war — presumably because that city, being too far north of London to be within reach of German zeppelins, was considered a lot safer than Southampton. Their daughter, Aunt Molly Hamblin, now widowed, had moved down from Scotland to keep an eye on them, bringing Bill and her own three children, Maggie, Grace and Dick, with her. It was to her house that we went for a few days after leaving London, so that Mother could meet her in-laws again, see her son back to his preparatory school and discuss the vexed question of a suitable boarding-school for her daughters.

In those days the Dragon School had not become coeducational, so there was no question of Bets and me being sent there. And I can only suppose that my grandparents showed no sign of being willing to take on housing Cecil's daughters in order that they could attend some other local school as day-girls, and that Aunt Molly thought she had done more than enough for her eldest brother by lumbering herself
with Bill. For after a few days, Mother took off for Bedford and Aunt Lizzie; possibly with some idea of entering us for her own old school, Bedford High. If so, that too came to nothing, and eventually we travelled down to the Isle of Thanet, to Birchington, to look at a boarding-school where (on the advice of dear ‘Mrs Ponson') Mother had finally decided to leave Bets and me.

The summer term was due to start at any moment, but she brought us down to Birchington a couple of days ahead so that we could see the school and its surroundings before being left there. We put up at the Bungalow Hotel (which seemed to be a fairly new addition to the landscape and probably was) and Mother took us for a walk on the beach, which she thought would be a better introduction to the prospect of school than starting with the school itself.

Mercifully it was not raining, and though the day was a grey one it was windless and the sea was calm. But this excellent ploy very nearly foundered when we arrived at the shore to find that the tide was out, and inquired a little blankly why there was no sand. ‘What do you mean?' demanded Mother, ‘there's masses of it!' ‘Where?' returned Bets and myself with one voice, staring around us. ‘Don't be silly,' said Mother. ‘You're standing on it.' She had forgotten that the only sand we had ever seen, except long ago at Findhorn, was the silver sand of India and Egypt: hot countries where the rocks and reefs and empty shells that make up sand are bleached white by the sun, and where the shores are washed by coral seas and the river banks covered with powdered silver that shows blinding white at midday and by moonlight, and takes on every shade of pearl in between. But this stuff that we were standing on was a yellowish, biscuit-beige colour; and so coarse that you could separate its grains into different minute pebbles on the palm of your hand. We were astounded. And, once again, disapproving. The stuff looked
dirty
! The situation was, however, saved by the chalk cliffs and a wreck —