The Sun in the Morning (50 page)

Owing to the fact that the ‘Ormond' had come up the Channel by night, we had missed seeing Beachy Head and the White Cliffs of Dover; which was perhaps just as well, as here the white chalk cliffs were far smaller and much less impressive. On the other hand they were also full of caves and were the first thing in England that really caught my fancy. For one thing, you could scramble up them, and in those days the land that lay above them was all open country: acres
and acres of grass and gorse bushes and wildflowers, masses of sea lavender and tufts of sea pinks that bordered the cliff edge along which the feet of strolling villagers and visitors had worn a long, straggling path that ran from The Gap to Minnes Bay. The beach too (apart from that coarse and disappointingly coloured sand) could not, from a child's point of view, have been improved upon; for in addition to those alluring caves there were innumerable rock pools full of anemones, starfish, shrimps and other small sea creatures trapped by the tide. And when we reached the spot where the cliffs dwindled and ended and the bungalows began, the land flattened and curved away in a long, sweeping beach where, stranded some thirty or forty yards out in shallow water and held fast by the rocks, lay the wreck of a Scandinavian freighter driven ashore by the same storm that the ‘Ormond' had encountered in the Bay of Biscay.

I had read about wrecks but had never seen one before, and the sight of this one more than made up for the rash of brand-new jerry-built bungalows and the dullness of the landscape behind the bay. We were all fascinated by it, and removing our shoes and socks — in Mother's case, stockings — we paddled out as far as we could in order to see it at even closer range; though as the tide was now coming in fast we didn't make much headway. Still, it added a distinct fillip to the scenery. And what with those lovely rock pools and the charm of those chalk cliffs and smugglers' caves, (for surely such caves
must
have been used by smugglers?) I began to think better of England. Discussing it later that day, we decided that Birchington was really a very pretty place; and we even took a lenient view of the school, Portpool, and the two Misses Barnes who owned and ran it. But not for long.

Mother had taken us there next morning to see the house and meet our future headmistress, Miss Barnes, and her sister Miss Florence who acted as matron. Miss Barnes was thin, bespectacled and grey, and Miss Florence large and bosomy and ditto. Both seemed kind enough and the house, though a school, was not bad as schools go. But Portpool and the Misses Barnes were to do me a great disservice that I would suffer from all my life. The sisters had taken one look at me and, turning shocked eyes on Mother, remarked that anyone could see that I came from India since I was much too thin, skinny and sallow for my age and clearly in need of ‘building up'. They had never,
they said, had any Anglo-Indian pupils before, but they were aware that the quality of Indian milk — and indeed
all
food in Eastern countries — was lamentable. However, Mrs Kaye was not to worry; they would soon put this to rights and she would see a remarkable change in her little daughter after a few months of good English food, fresh milk, sea-bathing and bracing air.

Mother looked a bit startled, but agreed that I was fairly thin. And to tell the truth, I had two popular parlour tricks which used to amuse my juvenile friends in Simla and which, for what is known in Show Business as a ‘limited season', were to prove equally successful with the members of my dormitory at Portpool; I could turn my navel inside out, and hide both my clenched fists under my rib cage — tricks that only the skinny can perform.

The sisters Barnes soon put a stop to that. I was put down for ‘extra milk' and given mugs of it at frequent intervals; which I must say I much enjoyed, having discovered with pleased surprise that English milk, unlike its Indian counterpart, tasted delicious. It was like drinking the best single cream and I was all for it. While the rest of the school made do with a scraping of margarine on their bread, I was given butter (another ‘extra' on the bill) because I needed ‘building up'. And four times a day, for the same reason, I was made to swallow a large, glutinous spoonful of cod-liver oil and malt. Not that I minded that either, since the malt successfully disguised the taste of the cod-liver oil, and the stuff was very sweet — like thick honey.

Stuffed with pints of rich milk, pounds of butter and jars of cod-liver oil and malt, I began to put on weight, and the Misses Barnes and Mother, as well as various women friends and relatives such as Aunt Molly Hamblin, my Kaye grandmother and ‘Aunt Bee' Lewis (Mother's friend from the Jhelum days, who had never married and now reappeared on the scene), were delighted with my progress. For it was, unfortunately, an age in which plumpness was considered a healthy condition in children, and the winner of the Best Baby Competition was always some dangerously overweight infant with fat red cheeks and dimples and creases galore. The unsightly excess poundage known as ‘puppy-fat' would, one was assured, vanish like the dew of morning as soon as one turned eighteen.

Nowadays doctors have decided that a fat child generally grows up to be a fat adult. How right they are. In my new character of a poor-
little-undernourished-shrimp-from-India I was stuffed as systematically as a Strasbourg goose, with the result that I became one of those unfortunate fatties who spend half their life on a diet without ever achieving a slim figure.

I was not happy at Portpool, and it is a period of my life that I do not enjoy looking back on. That Bets and I made a bad start was not entirely our fault. The two Misses Barnes had told their pupils that two new girls from India would be joining their ranks that term, and for reasons best known to themselves their ignorant little pupils decided that we actually were Indians, and looked forward to meeting a pair of young Maharanis in gold-embroidered saris and diamond nose-studs. The arrival of Mollie and Betty Kaye, who looked no different from themselves, was therefore a sad disappointment which they took out on us.

Their leader, an unpleasant girl whose name I have long forgotten, fancied herself as a singer, and her favourite song, frequently requested by her admiring juniors, was the aforementioned ‘Roses of Picardy'. Picardy and Portpool are for ever bracketed together in my mind, courtesy of that school bully … ‘
She is watching by the poplars, Colinette with the sea-blue eyes
' … ugh!

I recall a couple of days during which for some forgotten reason Bets and myself were ‘sent to Coventry' by our fellow pupils (which meant that no one would speak so much as a word to us). We retaliated by talking to each other in Hindustani, which both fascinated and dumbfounded them, and when after a couple of days of this they gave up, we continued to use that language because no one else had any idea what we were saying and it maddened them. It also relieved our feelings to be able — smiling sweetly the while — to pass rude and
uncomplimentary remarks about them to their faces, which they could neither translate nor resent.

When at last the term ended we spent our first summer holidays, traditionally, at the seaside. And since Tacklow had once spent part of his school holidays at Hunstanton (pronounced, also traditionally, ‘Hunstun'), a town on the Wash which he had described to us in lyrical terms and urged Mother to visit, she booked lodgings there for six weeks in August and September. Unfortunately he had neglected to add that there were two Hunstantons — Old Hunstanton and new Hunstanton. His had been the old one. But Mother, writing for information to a newspaper that devoted several pages to advertising holiday accommodation, ended up booking us, for a very reasonable sum, a ‘self-service flat only two minutes' walk from the sea front, with exclusive use of a large and fully furnished beach-house, complete with kitchenette'. Or words to that effect. Anyway, it sounded, for the price, too good to be true. And was, of course.

Since our straitened circumstances did not permit Mother to travel to Norfolk in order to inspect this alluringly advertised accommodation, our first sight of it was a horrid shock. The ‘flat' was the upper storey of a largish shop in a noisy street in the brash and booming town of New Hunstanton; a mile or two — and a world away! — from the prim, old-fashioned charms of the Old Town. The shop was called ‘The London Bazaar', and a bazaar it was: a cheap and gaudy one full of junk goods of every description. Bets and I took to it on sight. Not so poor Mother. The flat, which except for the holiday season was lived in by the owners of the shop, was littered with personal belongings they had neglected to remove. Some of the cupboards and several drawers still held a few ancient coats, hats, boots and peculiar examples of woollen underwear, all smelling as strongly of mothballs as the rooms themselves smelt of bygone meals which (if one's nose was anything to go by) had consisted largely of boiled cabbage.

It was the noisiest flat you can imagine, for the London Bazaar did a roaring trade from dawn until long after dark. The street was a busy one and pubs abounded; so too, inside, did green plush trimmed with bobbles, and red rep curtains edged with fringe. There were also Nottingham lace curtains, several aspidistras in pots, and endless bits of china lettered in gold with ‘A Present from Blackpool' or
wherever — the towns were all different; any modern interior decorator with a penchant for Victoriana would have gone into ecstasies over it. We thought it was pretty dreadful, and were frankly horrified by the beds, which like too many British beds sagged dismally in the middle. The ones we had been used to in India had thin mattresses laid on tightly stretched interwoven bands of
narwa
, a tough form of webbing which does not sag.

‘Never mind,' comforted Mother, ‘we won't have to see much of this place. We'll sleep here, and cook our lunch and tea and perhaps supper too at the beach-house, and spend the day there.' We all had high hopes of the beach-house and thought it was very kind of the proprietor of the London Bazaar, from whom we collected the key next morning, when he insisted on sending one of his shop assistants — or maybe a relative — to take us there in case we lost the way. In the event we couldn't have found it without him, for the ‘large and fully furnished beach-house' lay over half a mile beyond the outskirts of the town.

The first part of the way took us through a complicated tangle of streets and past the esplanade, and when that was behind us there was a long trudge along a rough and sandy track that meandered between gorse bushes, where the view of the sea on our right was obstructed by a long line of empty and decrepit railway carriages. On our left lay a flat and featureless stretch of singularly unattractive common land that strayed away to the horizon, and needless to say it was another grey and sunless day, though fortunately, windless and rainless: there was that much to be thankful for.

We should have been warned, but I don't believe that even Mother realized what we were in for. Bill, Bets and I certainly did not, and we were left speechless when at long last our guide turned right between the blocks of abandoned railway carriages, stopped and said brightly: ‘'Ere we are then! You ‘ave got the key, Madam, ‘aven't you? Good-oh! then I'll be getting along now — cheery-bye all.' And departed, whistling: leaving us staring in silent disbelief at the fully furnished beach-house which we had hoped to use as our headquarters for the next six weeks…

It was in fact the Guard's Van at the end of that particular string of railway carriages, and the ‘furniture' consisted of a small and very rusty oil-burning cooker (which presumably constituted ‘the
kitchenette'), a rickety table and several even ricketier (if there isn't such a word there should be) wooden chairs, a three-legged metal stool (had the Guard once sat on this?) and several exceedingly dilapidated deck chairs. The lock-up cupboards were full of rubbish left behind by the last tenants, and the larder, constructed out of a partitioned section of the van and not much more than a shallow cupboard with a few flimsy shelves, contained a selection of chipped enamel mugs, jugs and plates; none of which matched. A teapot, kettle and a few basic cooking utensils, much battered but still serviceable, hung from or stood on a shelf above the stove. The windows were adorned with faded cotton curtains and the walls with out-of-date calendars and curling postcards fixed to the woodwork with drawing-pins, while the ‘all mod cons' consisted of a couple of enamelled buckets that had seen better days, plus a basin and a soap-dish, ditto. And that was it — apart from a strong smell of kerosene oil and decayed seaweed that pervaded the derelict van like a tangible presence.

No one said anything for a long time and I suspect that Mother was on the verge of tears. If so, she swallowed them bravely, and while we three were out taking our first dip of the summer holidays (we had wasted no time over that!) she set about cleaning the place with the aid of a duster and a dustpan and brush she had had the forethought to buy that morning at the London Bazaar, having discovered from the proprietor that nothing of that description was included in the effects of the ‘furnished beach-house'.

She was to do wonders with that van; brilliantly demonstrating that one determined woman can bring order out of chaos when she sets her mind to it. Everything she needed was to be found, and at a price she could afford, at that invaluable London Bazaar, and she bought chintz and paint and paint-brushes, a potted geranium, a broom, a scrubbing-brush and a mop, a piece of linoleum, and various other useful items with which she transformed that Guards' Van. The gaily patterned chintz (threepence a yard in those days!) was sewn into new curtains for the windows and loose covers for the chairs and the stool. The doors and walls got a fresh lick of paint and the floor a more easily cleanable covering of linoleum. Even the cooker began to take a pride in itself, and when the overcast skies relented and gave place to a week of sunshine that dried out the damp and got rid of the smell of mildew, kerosene and rotting seaweed (well,
almost
got rid of it),
we decided that our now spick-and-span beach-hut deserved a name, and painted a sign for it that said ‘Guard's Van Villa'. But we had barely nailed it up when the sun vanished and the clouds rolled up again and down came the rain. And suddenly we were standing under a sieve in place of a roof.