The Sun in the Morning (51 page)

Seven days of hot sunshine had dried it out only too well, and a hundred cracks in its ancient fabric now leaked water onto our heads with so much enthusiasm that we could not have been much wetter if we'd stood outside in the downpour.

After a vain attempt to catch the leaks in cups, bowls, saucepans and buckets, we donned our mackintoshes and took refuge under the table until the worst was over. And as soon as the rain outside eased off a little, we locked up and fled back to the welcome dryness of that dark and stuffy flat, wondering what on earth we were going to do now, since it was clearly impossible to repair the entire roof of the van. Nor could we use the place while it leaked like a sponge, and with the weather showing every sign of being all set for another spell of non-stop rain, it looked as though we would have to resign ourselves to sitting around in the flat. But at this point Mother was visited by inspiration: ‘Plasticine!' exclaimed Mother. ‘That ought to do it!' And it did. She rushed downstairs to the shop and returned, triumphant, bearing a dozen penny sticks of plain grey plasticine; the kind that one could use for modelling as opposed to the flossier and more expensive coloured varieties that were sold in boxes. Armed with these, we made our way back to the van where we spent the whole of that wet afternoon filling every hole and crack in the roof with plasticine; and from then on, though it was a particularly wet summer, Guard's Van Villa provided us with a safe and comparatively dry retreat.

On the scenic side, our part of the beach could not have been less alluring. There was sand all right; miles of it when the tide was out, because this was the Wash. That huge, square-shaped bite out of the north-east coast of England, with Lincolnshire on one side and Norfolk on the other, both sharing the third, while the North Sea takes care of the fourth or seaward side — but only with a thin layer of water. For this is that same Wash that, back in the year 1216, bad King John, the wicked brother of Richard the Lionheart and chief villain of all those tales about an outlawed folk-hero known as Robin Hood, was attempting to ford when the tide came in with the terrifying swiftness
that is still a notable feature of that vast, shallow inlet. It very nearly cost him his life and definitely, according to legend, lost him the Crown Jewels of England which sank with the rest of his baggage. I like to think that the Crown Jewels are still there, somewhere deep down in the sand, and that one day, when the shallow stretch of water finally silts up (or, more likely, when land-hungry men finally succeed in walling it off from the North Sea and turning it into thousands of ‘desirable building sites'), someone with a bulldozer will uncover that fabulous, long-lost treasure. Though from all one knows of John, I expect he flogged the jewels and invented the story to account for their disappearance.

The shallowness of the sea off Hunstanton makes its beaches safe for children and non-swimmers, since even at high tide we had to wade out for ever before the water became deep enough to come up to our waists. Which was fine by me, for buoyed up by the knowledge that I only had to put down a toe in order to touch the bottom, I soon learnt to swim. Low tide at that beach uncovered acres of firm, flat sand on which there were no rocks; and therefore no pools — except under the endless yards of an eyesore in the form of an enormous iron pipe that in those days stretched far out toward the retreating sea and was one of the town's main drains. It siphoned a constant stream of sewage into the sea, which was an unpleasant thought for parents, who warned their offspring to keep well away from it. Though why we were urged to avoid it I don't know, since the great iron tube on its cumbersome iron supports did not leak, so the only dangerous part about it was the open end that vomited a thick, khaki-coloured liquid into the Wash. This was only visible for the shortest of short periods every day, and once covered by the tide and safely out of sight and out of mind, was blithely ignored by even the fussiest of parents.

Curiously enough (and not forgetting that apart from a solitary week of sunshine and an occasional fine day here and there, the weather was almost uniformly lousy), the holiday was an immense success. After the initial shock, Bill, Bets and I dismissed the unalluring scenery and trappings and got down to the serious business of enjoying ourselves. The place was crawling with children and it was not long before we had made friends with those whose parents had rented the railway carriages to the left and right of our Guard's Van. In their company we swam, played cops-and-robbers or hide-and-seek among
the gorse bushes behind our ‘beach-houses', shrimped at low tide or played rounders on the acres of wet sand. That ghastly main drain proved every bit as entertaining as a rock pool, for since it spent half its time under water it was overgrown with seaweed, barnacles and mussels, and its underside dripped with sea anemones. All kinds of small sea creatures would be trapped by each retreating tide in the pools that the water scoured out between its iron supports, and needless to say no child paid the least attention to instructions to keep away from it.

We had become attached to our Guard's Van, but were seldom inside it for we more or less lived in our bathing-suits; and when one is collecting crabs or swimming it doesn't matter in the least whether it is raining or not, so we couldn't have cared less about the weather. Mother took us on a day's expedition by train to see Sandringham, the country-house and estate owned by the royal family and a favourite retreat of the King, George V, who was to die there in 1936. I didn't think much of the house, which is fussy and spiky and very Victoria-and-Albert in design; vaguely reminiscent of Viceregal Lodge in Simla and not at all the sort of house that I had imagined Kings and Queens would live in. I think I had expected a Cinderella-style castle (Buckingham Palace had been equally disappointing). On another day, a non-rainy one for a change, we spent a few hours in Old Hunstanton and realized why Tacklow had cherished such happy memories of the place. But we were having such fun in New Hunstanton that we did not regret the error that had landed us there.

I have only one unpleasant memory of that holiday; in retrospect, embarrassing rather than unpleasant. On our first Sunday, one of those sunny days that caused the leaks, Mother marched us off as usual to church, dressed in our Sunday best. Bill in his school suit and Bets and I in identical white dresses, white socks, black patent-leather strap shoes, and with our hair tied on top of our heads with vast bows of hand-wide black moiré ribbon. On arrival at the church — large, Anglican and on or near the seafront — we were prevented from entering by a black-gowned verger on the grounds that ‘the young ladies' (aged eight and ten!) ‘were improperly dressed'. Their heads were uncovered. (Hats for the female sex were apparently obligatory.) Mother, unable to believe her ears, began by treating the matter lightly. She said cheerfully that that could be easily remedied, and turning to
us, flattened out those huge bows of ribbon until they formed large black pancake hats that more than covered our heads — and looked very smart too! But the verger remained adamant. He knew when a hat was not a hat, and had no intention of allowing any female, however youthful, to enter his church without wearing a proper one.

In the end Mother was driven to insist that he fetch the vicar, and when this reverend gentleman arrived, she was flabbergasted to discover that in the matter of headgear he was in complete agreement with his verger. She explained that as the service was due to start in a few minutes there was no time to return to the flat and collect our school hats, and that no one could say that our heads were not more than adequately covered. When he too remained adamant, she lost her temper and quoted the Scriptures to him in a manner that did credit to the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Bryson and a sister of the Reverend Arnold.

I don't remember much of it, except that she obviously knew her Bible a jolly sight better than the vicar knew his. She demanded to be told exactly where and in what chapter and verse there was any mention of ‘hats', and said she had not realized until now that the words Christ had spoken to the Disciples who had tried to drive the children away had not been ‘suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not', but ‘suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not — except those girls who are not wearing regulation hats and any boy who may have forgotten to take his off'! I do remember her ending by telling him that he was a disgrace to the Church and that rather than attend any service over which he had the effrontery to preside she would prefer to turn to Rome — or Buddha! With which she swept off, herding her scarlet-faced and deeply embarrassed offspring before her.

Looking back, it still strikes me as extraordinary that such a thing could happen in this century and during my own lifetime, and I am no longer surprised that Christianity seems to have lost its way, and that so many churches are deconsecrated and sold off as private homes or business premises, because they have not attracted sufficient worshippers to keep them going. Men like that vicar and his verger helped to bring about this sorry state of affairs, and one can only hope that their Bishop (to whom Mother wrote to complain, and who took the trouble to write a personal letter of apology on behalf of that
unchristian Christian) tore a hefty strip off the culprits and brought them to see the error of their ways. But as Mother angrily reminded that pompous pair of bigots, ‘It needs be that offence must come, but woe unto him by whom the offence cometh!'

It needs be that offence must come
… That ‘must' is the operative word, and I find it a daunting one. Yet at the time, and strictly from a child's point of view, the whole shocking episode (and Bill, Bets and I were so deeply shocked and embarrassed by it that none of us has ever forgotten it) had its bright side. For Mother refused to take us to any other church in that town, and instead, on the remaining Sundays, she read us a chapter from the Bible and some of the prayers from the Morning Service, after which we sang a hymn of our choice before being allowed to go off and play on the beach.

We left Hunstanton and the kind and friendly proprietors and staff of the London Bazaar with regret, and as far as I can remember, spent the last two weeks of the holidays at Aunt Lizzie's in Bedford. Bill went back to the Dragon School and Bets and I returned to Portpool. And a fortnight later Mother came down to the Bungalow Hotel in Birchington for a night, to say goodbye to us before sailing for India.

No one who has not experienced them can know just how cruel such partings can be. They were by far the heaviest part of the price that was paid for Empire, and it was the women and children who paid most of it, for their men at least had work to fill their days and occupy their thoughts. I had minded the parting with Tacklow a good deal more than I minded saying goodbye to Mother who, I was well aware, was fonder of Bets, her ‘baby', than of me, and fondest of all of her Willie — her first-born and her only son. But it was still a terrible wrench to watch her leave, knowing that I would not see her again for two years at the very least, probably three; and to be afraid that one of the many deadly diseases that were still so prevalent in India might take her away for good. It was a horrible leave-taking and I felt like one of those unfortunate sea anemones that we had so blithely pried loose from their secure foothold on the underside of the town drain in Hunstanton, and attempted to keep alive in a bucket. Bill joined us again when term ended and the three of us travelled to Bedford to spend the Christmas holidays at The Birches with Aunt Lizzie.

For Bets and me, this first-ever Christmas without our parents held none of the excitement and anticipation of those Christmasses in India. Aunt Lizzie supported an indigent spinster sister, Aunt Emily — a thin, bony relic of the Victorian era who never spoke above a whisper and lived in a small back room of The Birches from which she emerged only in order to do a few household chores, eat her meals, and take the same daily walk to the Library and back. We were fond of Aunt Lizzie, but almost fonder of Emily, whose few carefully cleaned and pressed clothes, high-necked leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouses and buttoned boots belonged to an age that had vanished before Mother was born. She could easily have been taken for a ghost out of one of Charles Dickens's novels, for she moved without noise and her curiously dry, whispering voice added to the illusion of other-worldliness. Mother was to tell me later that every Saturday evening, just before Emily returned from her daily walk, Aunt Lizzie would slip into her sister's room and put seven shillings and six pennies under the clock on the mantelpiece: never more and never less. It was the only money Emily possessed, since the work she had done when young (I never learned what it was, but suspect that she may have been a governess) was badly paid and did not carry a pension, so that in her old age she had no savings to fall back on and no recourse but to live on the charity of her widowed sister, with whom she had quarrelled many years ago.

The quarrel must have been a bitter one, and I often wondered if it had been over Aunt Lizzie's handsome husband, Uncle Tom. Had Emily — who must have been pretty when young — expected to marry him, and had he jilted her for Lizzie? That seemed unlikely, since Aunt Lizzie, though a darling, could never have possessed a trace of physical beauty; she looked exactly like the Frog Footman in
Alice in Wonderland
, and cannot have been more than four foot ten or eleven in her shoes. Whatever the cause of the quarrel it had clearly not been forgotten or forgiven, for the two old ladies never spoke a word to each other if they could possibly avoid it.

Perhaps that was why Emily loved to talk to us. And we loved to listen; enthralled by that whispering voice as it described in detail various wonders its owner had seen in the shops that she passed on her daily walk. She was a passionate window-shopper. Poor darling, she could
never
have afforded to buy anything! But to hear her describe something as ordinary as a length of pink satin ribbon entranced us
(pink was her favourite colour and she pronounced it
peeeink
giving it two syllables on which she lingered lovingly as though it was something very special). To Emily everything she saw had something wonderful about it, and it was her special gift that she could communicate something of that wonder to others.