The Sun in the Morning (5 page)

She turned out to be a pretty young woman with a dazzling peaches-and-cream complexion, a slim, hour-glass figure, the bluest eyes he had ever seen and the golden hair that all proper Princesses should have. She was also very shy: almost as shy as he was! But in his own words, ‘a darling'. He was very taken with her. Her name was Princess May of Teck and he had every reason to remember her, for a year or two later she became engaged to young ‘Eddie', Duke of Clarence, eldest son of the future Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. And when less than a month after that poor Eddie died of pneumonia (fortunately, it would seem, since he appears to have been a bad hat
^*
), his grandmother, Victoria, who had arranged the match because she thought that ‘dear May' would make an admirable Queen of England — and how right she was! — set about re-engaging her to Eddie's younger brother, George, with whom, according to the press, she had been in
love all the time, though expediency and a strong-minded mother had forced her to accept the proposal of the late Duke of Clarence. The dutiful May accepted George and eventually became that much-loved and greatly admired character, Queen Mary, grandmother of Elizabeth II.

The second, and far more intriguing incident, was a curious and completely inexplicable affair that fascinates me to this day. The RMA
^*
used to run a betting book on the Derby, and the cadet in charge of this operation asked Tacklow if he'd care to have a flutter? My parent, no betting man and totally uninterested in racing, hunting or horses in general, cast an eye down the list of runners and seeing no name that attracted his attention, declined. But that night he dreamt that he was at a race-meeting — something he never attended in his life.…

He was standing among a dense crowd of jostling, peering people who were all looking in one direction, and he could hear a thunder of approaching hoof-beats that grew louder and louder until, over the heads of the crowd, he caught a brief glimpse of jockey caps flashing past and heard a roar of cheering. The race was obviously over and a man standing near him tapped him on the shoulder and said: ‘So-and-so's won', mentioning the winning horse by name. Tacklow turned about and saw the numbers going up on a board and, at that point, woke up. Since his memory worked entirely by sight (as, to a large extent, does mine) he remembered the number next morning though he had completely forgotten the name. However, he hunted up the cadet with the betting book and said he had decided to put his all on number 16, or whatever; his all being £10, which was a
vast
sum in the days when a farthing (a quarter of an old penny) could still buy a stick of candy. But as the animal who bore the number was an outsider and the odds against it winning were in the region of 100 to 1, the cadet regretfully declined to accept the bet on the grounds that should the impossible happen, there would not be enough money in the kitty to pay out that amount. So Tacklow agreed to a reduction of the odds from 100 to 20, and won a staggering £200.

This story has a very curious sequel. Many years later when Victoria and her century were dead and gone and Tacklow was a Major serving on Kitchener's staff in Simla (Kitchener was then Commander-in-Chief, India),
he told this tale at a dinner-party at the United Services Club and was urged by everyone present to do it again and dream another winner. But how on earth, demanded the indignant Tacklow, could anyone
make
themselves dream anything? Nevertheless, bowing to popular demand, he agreed to see what he could do about it, and thereafter set himself to try to dream about a race-meeting: though he had still never attended a real one. Every night, before he went to sleep, he would concentrate on horse-racing in the hope that it was just possible that one might dream about the last thing one had been thinking about before falling asleep. But no luck. Always, as sleep overtook him, his mind would wander off onto something else. Then suddenly, when he had given up trying, he dreamed the same dream. Once again he was standing among a crowd of racegoers. Once again he heard the same thunder of approaching hooves, caught the same flashing glimpse of jockeys' heads streaking past, heard the roar of cheering and was tapped on the shoulder by a man who said that so-and-so had won. He turned, as he had before, to see the numbers going up on the board. But by now he was a married man, and it was at this crucial point that Mother turned over in her sleep and woke him before he saw it.

As I have said, his memory worked by sight and had he seen the number he would have remembered it But try as he might, he could not recall the name. All he could remember was that it had at least five syllables and began, he thought, with the letter ‘C'. The members of the United Services Club and half Army Headquarters fell on the sports pages of
The Civil and Military Gazette, The Pioneer
and
The Statesman
— India's three main English-language newspapers — but no Derby runner had a name beginning with C. Or one of five syllables either!

Unfortunately, the Derby attracted a great many entrants and the Indian newspapers of that day did not bother to print the names of horses who were classed as ‘also-rans' — the hopeless outsiders. And since wireless-telegraphy was still in its infancy and only used for more serious matters of State, it was not until the day after the race was run that India learnt that it had been won by a 100 to 1 outsider; a filly named ‘Senorinetta' … five syllables and beginning with the
sound
of C! I was told later, by several middle-aged and, by then, very senior gentlemen who remembered the occasion, that the Corridors of Power
in Simla echoed to the sounds of lamentation and hair-tearing for at least a week afterwards.

Tacklow never again tried to dream a race to order. He told me that he had tried to ‘dream true', though without success, after reading George du Maurier's haunting novel
Peter Ibbetson.
But that odd experience of his always intrigued me, and several years after his death I tried it myself: concentrating, as he had done, on race-meetings and horses before I fell asleep. Like him, I gave it up in disgust — and then suddenly dreamt I was at Epsom on Derby Day, standing against the rails at Tattenham Corner. Someone shouted: ‘Here they come!' and the leading horses came sweeping round the bend. In the same moment a piece of waste paper, caught by the wind, flapped across the course in the path of the oncoming horses, and the leader jinked sharply sideways so that I saw the number — I think it was 6 — on its saddlecloth before it lost its place to those behind it. That was all. The dream ended there, and all I had learned from it was not to put any money on number 6. Which, not being a betting type, or a horsey one either, I was unlikely to do in any case; though I would certainly have bet my all on anything I had seen coming first past the winning-post. However, the story does not end there —

I was at that time in Ootacamund in southern India, and a few days later, on the day that the Derby was run, we were listening in to a running commentary on our radio. I have forgotten the name of number 6 — call it ‘George's Joy' — but the commentator at Tattenham Corner knew it and announced excitedly that ‘Here comes George's Joy! — rounding the corner a good length ahead of Mabel's Mum and Percy's Pottage' (or whatever). And in the next second, his voice rising to a frenzied shout, he informed us that George's Joy had shied wildly at a piece of paper blowing across the course and was now virtually out of the race.…

Well, how does one explain that? It did me no good and it seems odd, to say the least of it, that I should have been handed a piece of totally useless advance information well before it had occurred.

Having passed top into Sandhurst, with record marks, Tacklow's exit was a lot less spectacular. He passed out at number 16, though with honours, and shortly afterwards embarked for India to join a British regiment, the First Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment
which was stationed at that time at Dugshai in the Simla hills. Here Tacklow got down to studying for his language exams; it being standard practice, right up to the outbreak of the Second World War, that all candidates for the Indian Army must serve an attachment to a British regiment stationed in that country until such time as they were reasonably fluent in at least two of India's many major languages. Should they fail (I believe candidates were allowed three tries) they were sent back to England as unsuitable material for the armies of the Raj, and ended up in some British regiment instead.

That square-peg-in-a-round-hole, C. Kaye, who collected languages much as other young men collect birds' eggs or stamps, passed his preliminary examinations with flying colours and was eventually posted to the 21st Punjabis; a Frontier Force regiment that vanished from the Army List in 1922 during one of the periodic amalgamations of several regiments. Since the 21st had been part of the Kurram Valley Field Force which was commanded by General Sir Frederick Roberts — ‘Bobs Bahadur' — during the second Afghan War, I managed to insert a reference to it in
The Far Pavilions
solely because it was once my father's regiment. And many years later, after the Raj had faded into history and legend and a large part of north-west India had become the new and independent country of Pakistan, I was shown his name, written in his own hand on the old Rolls of the Punjab Regiments, when I was invited to luncheon in the Regimental Centre by serving officers whose fathers had not even been born when that yellowed, faded ink was fresh.

The tales that Tacklow told me make up a sort of mental photograph-album-cum-diary, the pages of which bring him so clearly to mind that I might almost have known him in his youth. I can see him as a toddler because I have not only a photograph of him but an original water-colour sketch, painted by some doting aunt, which shows a small, fair-haired one-year-old in short socks and wearing a vast hat and a full-skirted white dress with puff sleeves and a blue sash that could have been worn equally well by a girl. Apparently the sexes in the nineteenth century were dressed exactly alike for the first few years of their lives.

I also have a clear mental picture of him, aged about six, and having been instructed by his autocratic mother — who was taking him to lunch with an elderly relative noted for her lavish hospitality — that
he was to wait until he was asked before expressing a preference for any dish, surveying the selection on offer and announcing loudly: ‘When I'm
asked
, I shall say Pie!' I can see him too as a schoolboy, fishing for trout in the chalk streams near Winchester or for salmon in the lochs and rivers of Scotland. One favourite inn, at Tummel Brig, used to serve a special kind of bap which as a boy he was particularly fond of; and revisiting the inn after a lapse of forty years he asked if they still made them. He was assured that they did, but when they were brought to the table in a covered dish, the waitress whispered in Tacklow's ear: ‘Th' Cook's varra nairvous; she hopes ye won't be thinkin' she's the same cook!' There are no early photographs taken of him in Scotland, but there are a few of him in cricketing flannels and the traditional Wykehamist's straw hat, sitting with folded arms and a stern expression among the other members of his house eleven; looking extraordinarily like his son, my brother Bill.

Another ancient photograph, that still survives, always stood for as long as I can remember, on his dressing-table wherever we happened to be. I removed it from the last of these a few days after he died. It is a very small studio photograph, mounted on heavy card that is printed in gold with the photographer's name and town — Chas. Johnson, Gillingham — and it portrays an alert but otherwise undistinguished mongrel terrier. Foxy had been rescued by Tacklow only a few months after his arrival in India; starving, mangy, suspicious and forlorn, age unknown, but obviously once the property of a British Tommy who had abandoned the unfortunate creature when his regiment had been ordered home, for the dog answered instantly to a British voice and cringed away from an Indian one. Tacklow had a way with all animals. They seemed to know at once that here was someone they could trust, and all our family pets were never ours for more than a day or two at most; after that they attached themselves to him and were his and no one else's. I honestly believe that he could have attracted and tamed a tyrannosaurus or a sabre-toothed tiger.

Foxy's faith in humans must have been sorely strained when his original master left him, and he had very nearly reverted to the wild by the time Tacklow first befriended him. He was, it seems, a sorry sight; gaunt, ragged, dirty and inclined to snap and snarl or else cringe in expectation of a kick, he had been forced to live on his wits for some considerable time and the mongrel element in his ancestry was
very apparent. Tacklow had not really wanted a dog. Dogs were a liability in a country where the threat of hydrophobia and a hideous death was ever present, and where there was only one place in all India, Kasauli, where anti-rabies vaccine was obtainable — and to reach Kasauli in time to take the treatment was not always possible. There were also other hazards that faced dogs in India. Snakes for instance, in particular the little dust-coloured kraits whose bite is fatal; or leopards, who relish the flesh of dogs. All the same Tacklow decided to adopt this disgraceful waif, and within a month all the diamonds in Golconda would not have bought Foxy from him. They doted on each other; and for twelve long and happy years they were never apart for more than a few hours, except for a brief interval during Tacklow's first home leave.…

There being no quarantine regulations in those carefree days, Foxy had travelled home with him. But as I have already mentioned, my paternal grandmother, like her daughter my Aunt Molly, was a considerable battle-axe, and this formidable old despot (see photograph; the camera, in this case, does not lie!) gave one basilisk glare at the mongrel at her eldest son's heels and banished Foxy to the stables. On no account whatever would he be permitted to enter the house; let alone sleep in it! There was no appeal. During the next few days Tacklow and his faithful adorer spent as much time as possible in the garden or the countryside together, and their nights apart; and when, after a few days, Tacklow had to go up to London to report himself to the War Office (it was probably still called The Horse Guards in those days) Foxy was perforce left behind in the stables.