The Sun in the Morning (53 page)

Bets and I were removed and sent to another ‘private enterprise' school on the other side of England; in Clevedon — a small town in Somerset on the shores of the Bristol Channel.

Our new school was called The Lawn, and the majority of its fifty or sixty fledgling birds were the children of India-service people. I believe it had begun in a modest way as a home-from-home, plus a certain amount of basic education, for three or four small children whose parents, like Kipling's, were compelled to leave them behind in England for years at a time. But complimentary opinions about it having been circulated by satisfied Anglo-Indian parents, it was not long before the initial home-plus-teaching experiment blossomed into a full-scale boarding-school whose pupils could, if necessary, stay on and be looked after and entertained during the holidays as well as in term-time. It also accepted a small number of day-girls.

At that time there were several well-known schools specially tailored to meet the needs of the children of the Raj, and my parents had originally intended to send us to the largest and best-known of these. But Tacklow had backed out at the last minute because the school in question sent him a copy of the minutes of its latest Board Meeting which, among other things, stated that the chairman, a retired Anglo-Indian, had ‘opened the proceedings with a prayer'. Unfortunately the chairman turned out to be a man my parents knew too much about and Tacklow had declared forcefully that no child of his was going to be educated at a school that allowed a hypocritical, two-faced, double-dealing bribe-taker like old Whatsizname, who had never had a Christian thought in his head, to open
any
proceedings ‘with a prayer'. It was an affront to the Almighty!

And that was why Bets and I had been abruptly re-routed to Birchington and Portpool — on the strength of a few cosy words
from Mrs Ponson and very little else; since apart from the fact that the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had died and been buried in the parish church of that quiet little seaside town, they knew nothing at all about Birchington. Or the school either. But now that Portpool had proved unsatisfactory, we were dispatched to The Lawn; a smaller and more modest edition of the original school whose chairman of the Board of Governors had been permitted (despite his own and well-known ‘manifold sins and wickedness') to put up prayers in public. I for one was delighted at the move, because among its pupils was my dearest and oldest English friend, Bargie the Beautiful, and the prospect of seeing her again would have made Borstal seem attractive to me!

Since Mother was still in India, all the arrangements had to be made by letter, and we were taken down to Clevedon by that friend of her early days in Jhelum, Miss Beatrice Lewis; hereinafter known to us as Aunt Bee,
^*
to whom Mother had appealed for help and who had agreed to take charge of us during our holiday in return for a ‘consideration', plus all expenses.

As at Birchington, we arrived in Clevedon and were installed at The Lawn a day or two in advance of the start of a new term and the arrival of our fellow pupils. Two or three of them spent their holidays there and were therefore special pets of the headmistress, Miss Wiltshire, who could obviously be a totally different and very likeable person during holiday time, though she was an awesome personage during the term — which was the only time the majority of us ever came into contact with her. One of her year-round boarders, Cynthia Hepper, a girl of my own age who became a friend of mine during those first out-of-term days, had been in her care, on and off, since the age of three and was devoted to her. But though Cynthia attached herself to me at once, and I was grateful for her kindness to a newcomer, I was really only interested in meeting Bargie again and could hardly wait for her arrival. Unluckily I had not had the sense to realize that the gap between our respective ages, which had not mattered in the least while we were carefree children in Simla and Delhi, might be an unbridgeable gulf in the regimented world of a British boarding-school.

Bargie was now in the sixth form; and not only a senior but a prefect, with all the responsibilities, privileges and rights that this entailed, including the right to use the Prefects' Room — a holy-of-holies that no one but another prefect, or a member of the teaching staff, could enter unless summoned. And to the hoi-polloi, a summons only meant that one had erred in some way or another and was therefore about to receive a sharp dressing-down by that august body. I, on the other hand, had suddenly become that lowest and most insignificant of creatures, a ‘new girl'; already consigned to the third form and therefore light-years removed from Prefect Marjorie Slater (no one at The Lawn called her ‘Bargie' and I had to drop that loving nickname pretty smartly! — though not at her request). The fact was that at least half the junior school and most of the seniors adored her, and had taken instant exception to the use of such a ‘hideous' nickname applied to their goddess: and by a new girl, at that — a mere third-former!

In those days, and I suspect in these, it was almost obligatory to select one of the seniors as an object of one's admiration, and I remember my owl-eyed surprise when I was asked: ‘Who are you going to Y-A?' — the initials stood for ‘Young Adorer', and a prefect's popularity could be gauged by the number of her Y-As: in which respect Bargie (sorry,
Marjorie
), had a slight edge over the head-girl, a statuesque seventeen-year-old called Doreen Hepper, cousin of the friendly Cynthia. When the custom had been explained to me and I replied that I wasn't going to Y-A anyone, I was firmly informed that it was a must;
everyone
Y-Ayed someone until they reached the sixth form and became eligible to be Y-Ayed instead of Y-Aying. ‘I suppose' said my informant, ‘that you'll be Y-Aying Marjorie Slater, as you used to know her.'

Used!
Ah me, what a knell that word sounded in my sore heart! I remember replying tartly that no one could possibly Y-A a friend: it would be too silly. Cynthia urged the claims of her cousin, the lovely Doreen, but I thought the whole idea was too stupid for words, and when the pressure of public opinion became too much for me I selected the senior with the fewest Y-As to her credit, one Beryl Beale, for whom I dutifully fetched and carried, presented with small bunches
of flowers and hung about the boot-hole and cloakroom of an evening in order to say good-night when the seniors passed on their way back from supper. I remember becoming quite fond of her in a detached sort of way; rather as though she represented a small firm in which I had bought a few shares. When she left after her final term I did not bother to Y-A anyone else; and I have to admit, regretfully, that as far as I know no one ever Y-Ayed me. But then I never rose to become a prefect or even a sixth-former.

Bets and I lived for letters from India to such an extent that to this day the sight of an Indian stamp on an envelope awakes a faint echo of the thrill it once brought me. Though not all the news those letters contained was good. I remember the shock of learning that people I loved had died: the dear Khan Sahib; our old bearer; and other friends too … Why is it that children think of the friends of their youth as immortal and are stricken to the heart by the discovery that they are not? I had lost too many of them during that terrible flu epidemic. Raji had been a victim, and Mumtaz and Gully; and my old ally,
Mali-ji
, who had thought that my photograph was a picture of a cauliflower. Their deaths had cast a shadow over our last year in India, but at least we had been there to cry on the shoulders of their grieving relatives and to mourn with their families. But this reading of the passing of some old familiar friend, known to us all our days, made death a very cold and lonely thing; and I became frightened for my parents, particularly Tacklow who was already (horrors!) in his fifties and therefore (if the Bible was to be trusted) had less than twenty years left out of those ‘three score years and ten'. It was then that I began to ask God every night to please,
please
allow me to be happily married and with several children of my own before time ran out for Tacklow; so that I should to some extent be insulated against the anguish of losing him.

During the first few years of our exile many of the letters we received from India were from Indian friends, some of whom, the younger and less sophisticated ones, obviously did not realize that although we could chatter to them in their own language we could neither read nor write it. The address on their envelopes had been painstakingly copied out in English, but as the letters inside were in the sender's own beautiful, graceful script, I could never be certain who had written them and had no idea how to get them translated. In the end, though
alarmed at the extra cost (stamps on all non-family letters had to be paid for out of our meagre pocket-money), I finally sent them out to Tacklow, asking him to give my love and suitable messages to the writers. This he did; but it was not a popular move. Our young correspondents either did not like the idea of their letters being read by my father, or resented him knowing that they could not write in
Angrezi
; for though I wrote to them I never had a reply. The servants, however, had no such inhibitions. They employed a bazaar letter-writer whose ornate and flowery style has always fascinated me; I enjoyed answering them. But as the months lengthened into years and the years plodded by, the letters came at longer and longer intervals; until at last, as memories began to fade and the past retreated, they stopped altogether. I kept one or two of them for years. But in the end these too perished in that fire.

Contrary to all expectations, I quite enjoyed my years at The Lawn, though I saw little or nothing of Bargie except from a distance, and on the only occasion when I asked if I could walk with her she explained gently that it was unheard of for a senior to pair with a junior when the school went out walking two-by-two in ‘crocodile'. She was very nice about it and did her best not to hurt my feelings. But I realized then that the gap between us had grown too great to be bridged and that neither of us could flout the prevailing laws of The Lawn. So I gave up. And anyway I had already blotted my copybook sufficiently badly by insisting on walking with Bets one day a week. Even we did not dare to go further than that, for the opposition that it aroused was fierce and vocal: (a) fourth-formers did not walk with juniors who were only in the second form: it was ‘not done'; (b) girls of my age did not pair for walks with mere ‘kids' who were two years younger than themselves: it was unsuitable; (c), (d), (e) and (f) sisters
never
walked with each other: even the Leslie-Jones twins did not! It was unheard of…

However, since these prohibitions were not officially supported by the headmistress, Miss Wiltshire — known to the entire school, though not to her face (or to her staff either) as Dub-dub
^*
— I defied public
opinion and stuck out for that one day. And since there was nothing that my schoolmates could do to prevent it, Bets and I were able to talk to each other in a limited amount of privacy. For there was a major drawback attached to our transfer from Portpool to The Lawn: a large proportion of Dub-dub's pupils were children of the Raj, so that too many of them knew enough Hindustani to understand anything we said in that language. This meant that even those who, like Bets and myself, had once been able to speak it as their mother tongue, stopped doing so and eventually forgot it — in my own case (due to having a poor ear for music) almost completely.

But although Bets and I could no longer talk to each other in a secret language, we could at least talk of India and our friends there, and we invented a long-running serial story in which we won the Calcutta Sweep and used the money to build an enormous house of glass, on the lines of a bigger and better Crystal Palace, inside which we assembled a life-sized copy of all our favourite places in India. Okhla with its weir and its sandbank and Number 3 Groin. The Kudsia Bagh. The Taj. The squirrel trees. The Purana Kila and the Pepper-pot Bridge. Parts of the Chandi Chowk and all of Curzon House. We could not include Simla or Mashobra, or any part of the hills, because that would have been ridiculous, and the game would have lost half its charm if we went beyond the bounds of the possible. We started with the building, then the heating and lighting, and bit by bit worked out how we would construct a replica of this or that; importing sand and trees, plants and animals, birds and butterflies, and finally paying vast sums to all the people we were particularly fond of to come overto England and live in it, in exact copies of their real homes. I remember that we had a lot of difficulty persuading the jolly proprietor of the Tree Shop in the Clock Tower Square of the Chandi Chowk to bring his family and come to live in our mock-up version of his shop, and that ‘Vika's ‘rich-as-creases' parents could not be lured into moving!

It was a deeply satisfying game and our make-believe world became so real to us that we almost felt that we really
could
retreat into it, and spend an afternoon stalking river turtles at Okhla when things went badly on the school front or we happened to be suffering from a particularly bad bout of homesickness.

I discovered poetry at The Lawn, and read it avidly because I found that so much of it put into enchanting words thoughts which had
hitherto swirled untidily around in my head. There was Housman, for instance: ‘
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And shall not come again
' I can remember repeating that to myself on the day that a letter came from India telling us that Tacklow would be retiring in the following year and that he and Mother would be coming back to England for good. ‘
And shall not come again'
…! No, that
couldn't
be true. Somehow or other, when I was grown-up, I would manage to walk those happy highways again even if I had to crawl back on my hands and knees as certain pilgrims did to the Cave at Amanath. Or if necessary I'd swim! The prospect of never seeing India again was too bitter to be borne and did not bear thinking about. ‘Someday,' said Bets and I to each other; ‘one day …'