The Sun in the Morning (57 page)

That year we spent our Christmas holidays in a hideous semi-detached house on the Woodstock Road at Oxford, which Mother had rented so that Tacklow would be able to see something of his parents and his sister Molly as well as his own family. Of all the many rented houses we lived in, this was by far the worst: an ugly little villa with no redeeming features. A foot or two of gravel and a laurel hedge lay between the front windows and the road, and there was a dreary little strip of garden at the back. Inside, the house was furnished with spiky and dangerously unstable chairs, sofas, occasional-tables and a vast hat-stand, all manufactured from the antlers of innumerable stags.
Scores of the creatures must have perished to make that appalling furniture, which was quite the most uncomfortable to sit on, or even to walk past, that anyone could imagine. No wonder the Victorians wore endless petticoats and a crinoline if this was the sort of thing they imagined their Queen went in for at Balmoral! The upholstery throughout was bobble-trimmed plush, and every inch of wall-space was crammed with highly coloured oleographs of religious pictures; bleeding ‘Sacred Hearts', ‘Our Lady of Sorrows' or saints being martyred wherever one looked. To make matters worse the house was lit and heated entirely by gas (of which, in conjunction with boiled cabbage, it smelt strongly) and the weather was so vile that even beautiful Oxford and its ‘dreaming spires' managed to look cold, cross and thoroughly bloody-minded. The only good thing about that nasty little villa were the books…

There were literally
hundreds
of them of every kind and description. Crammed higgledy-piggledy into varnished pitch-pine bookshelves that lined the landings; stacked up in dusty piles on the floor of the attic, or standing in tidy rows in glass-fronted cupboards and revolving bookcases in almost every room in the house … I can't think who acquired them;
surely
not the same person who had made or bought that awful antlered furniture. Or the devout and presumably colour-blind one who plastered the walls with holy pictures. The only solution that occurs to me is that whoever owned the house also owned a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, and this was where they kept the spare stock. But whatever their reasons, I fell on those books with the rapture of a treasure-hunter stumbling across a chest full of doubloons, and spent most of my time reading; lying flat on my stomach in front of a wheezing gas-fire in my back bedroom while the rain lashed at the windows and the gas sucked all the oxygen out of the room and gave me a permanent headache.

Since Tacklow had only been able to fit in a very short leave before taking up his new appointment, the best he could manage was to join us here for ten days that included Christmas; after which he and Mother would return to India together early in the New Year. He had particularly asked that we would not meet him at the station; he would prefer to take a cab (he still thought of taxis as cabs) and drive straight to the house. I think he was afraid that he might cry in public when he saw Willie again; the little son whom he could only remember as a
six-year-old in a sailor suit, so very long ago.

When the day and the hour of his arrival finally came, all four of us were lined up waiting with our noses pressed to the window-panes of Mother's bedroom upstairs; a vantage-point from which we could see both the road and the gate without being stymied by that laurel hedge. And when at last the taxi stopped in front of the gate and Tacklow got out, Bill, who had not seen his father for the best part of a decade and thought this must be a stranger, said: ‘Who's that funny little man?'…

Now that is real tragedy. I think both Mother and I, and perhaps, young as she was, even Bets, recognized it as such and were conscious of an appalling sense of shock; because none of us answered. We looked at each other, and then, with guilt and dismay, at the unconscious Bill. It had never occurred to anyone to tell him that his father was a little man; a short, tubby one who in many of the snapshots I have of him could, except for his height, easily have doubled for Winston Churchill (particularly when the latter was photographed in the Middle East wearing a topi). A man who although he was the same height as Mother always looked shorter because of her hair and her high heels. Nor had we realized that the father Bill would remember would be a tall man who towered over him as they walked hand-in-hand along the winding Simla roads. (‘What's that house doing, Daddy?' ‘Standing up.' ‘
No
, Daddy! What's it
doing
?'…)

Those five short words that were Bill's instant reaction on seeing again the loved and admired parent to whom, as a bewildered and tearful little boy, he had waved goodbye so many long years ago perfectly illustrate something that Rudyard Kipling put into verse in a poem about the P. & O. liners that brought the children of Anglo-Indians home and took their parents back again alone to India:

We never told Tacklow what Bill had said. Their situation was difficult enough without that. And they had so little time in which to resolve it and get to know each other. That they never did succeed in closing the gap left by those lost years is not surprising: it yawned too
wide and they had barely ten days in which to build a bridge that would span it. In any case the distance that separates six from fourteen is the widest in one's life, because to the latter a six-year-old is still no more than a little boy who has yet to lose his baby teeth, while the fourteen-year-old has already begun to think of himself as an adult in the making.

Perhaps if they had had a peaceful ten days in which to get to know each other things might have been different. But Tacklow's parents insisted on their full share of his attention and expected him to dance attendance on them; while as for me, I was so delighted to see him again that I could hardly bear to let him out of my sight. So I don't think Bill had much chance. Besides, he was now at public school, which is a giant step up from being a preparatory school boy. And he had gone to Repton and not, as Tacklow had hoped, to Winchester, a disappointment for which the war was responsible. Tacklow had put his name down for Winchester at the correct time and date laid down by the College rules, but a long time later, when it would soon be Bill's turn to clock in as a ‘Commoner of this College', he received a telegram to say that by the luck of the draw his son's name had been the last for that particular term, and since owing to some trifling error there was one pupil too many, there would be no vacancy for him after all.

It later transpired that some
nouveau riche
had offered the headmaster a new cricket pavilion if he would wangle a place for his son at the College. So Bill, as the last entry for that year and term, was dropped and as the only public school which could come up with a vacancy at such short notice was Repton, Bill went there. Shortly afterwards the bribe-taking headmaster was quietly moved out and replaced (one hopes) by a more worthy holder of that high office.

It might have helped the bridge-building if Bill had been a Wykehamist and he and Tacklow could have discussed the various aspects of life and customs at a school they both knew. But what they needed most was time, and that was something they were never to get. At least we all celebrated Christmas together; though the Christmas dinner, with its traditional and indigestible turkey, plum-pudding, mince-pies, brandy-butter and all the seasonal trimmings that the British owe to a German Prince Consort and an English novelist, Charles Dickens, was eaten at our grandparents' house in company
with that ancient and ossified pair and an assortment of their children and grandchildren. We all went to see a pantomime at one of Oxford's theatres, and Mother took us to see a famous Pre-Raphaelite painting that hangs in the chapel of one of the colleges — Holman Hunt's ‘The Light of the World'. I admired the intricate detail, because that sort of thing was right up my street; but otherwise I was unimpressed. Then Aunt Bee arrived. And gloom and doom moved in with her.

I never could understand why Mother and Aunt Bee had become friends. Perhaps there had been very few
Angrezi
women in Jhelum when Mother arrived there as a bride? Or perhaps Bee Lewis was one of the few young ones and it was their youth, and possibly loneliness, that drew them together. I imagine boredom played as large a part in it as anything; but the friendship had thrived, and here was Bee Lewis again, preparing to take charge of her friend's children. Well, all one could say was that she was preferable to Aunt Molly!

Poor Bee, having failed to find a husband in India, had returned to England to settle down to the life of an English spinster living on a minute annuity left her by parents, long dead, whose lives had been lived in a time when a yearly income of a hundred pounds had been considered more than adequate for a single woman's needs. No one who lived in those days ever seems to have given a passing thought to the possibility of inflation in the future, and poor Bee eked out her small income by looking after the left-behind children of friends and relatives whose work tied them to India. The trouble was that she didn't know the first thing about children. And did not want to! However, that was something Mother never realized; she merely knew that Bee could be trusted to look after us — which she did with something of the manner of a head-warder at Borstal — and that she needed the money. It was difficult to be fond of Aunt Bee, and we weren't. And now she was about to take charge of us for the last week of that Christmas holiday in Oxford, and see that we got safely back to our respective schools when it was over, because early in January Tacklow and Mother would have to leave for London and Tilbury Docks to board a P. & O. liner bound for Bombay.

They would not let us go to the station to see them off, because there is nothing worse than parting from someone you love very much, and do not know when you will see again, on a crowded platform of a railway station. So we said our goodbyes instead in that
dark, ugly little villa among the Balmoral furniture — all those rickety, spiky stags' horns (Mother had taken down the Sacred Hearts and hidden them in a cupboard). Outside it was raining again. And there was a fog too, which made the day even darker, and which was so thick that we could barely see the laurel hedge. We were given our parting presents with instructions not to open them until the taxi had gone, and I remember Mother cried and cried and that Tacklow suddenly looked old: so old that all at once I felt frightened.

How old would I be before I saw him again? And when I did, would I find that I had grown away from him as Bill had done? Would I ever be able to talk to him as freely as I used to? I was already within sight of my teens and had begun to think of myself as almost a grown-up; for had not girls in the days of the Tudors married even earlier than that? Time had begun to move faster. Only a little faster, it is true, but enough to scare me. It was easier to part with Mother. Somehow or other she would go on managing to get back to England every two years, even if it meant giving up all the little luxuries that her friends enjoyed. Tacklow had already given up everything he could possibly give up, and sold everything that could be sold, to pay for her passages: but he would still need every penny he earned to pay for school bills and holidays for us, so I knew he would not come back again for a long time. Perhaps not until I had grown up … I remember that day as one of the bleakest in my life; a rehearsal for another and far worse one that still lay far ahead in the future. Because I knew now that my childhood was over for good.

Our parents tore themselves away at last and we rushed to the window and saw them run down the tiny drive and jump into the waiting taxi; heard it start up and watched it vanish into the rain and fog. They were gone —

Aunt Bee, with all the tact of a charging rhinoceros, marched briskly into the room and inquired in stentorian tones what we thought we were doing, sitting around moping and snivelling instead of opening our parcels and enjoying ourselves! She then read us a stern lecture to the effect that we were all old enough to know better and to realize that our parents felt just as badly about this parting as we did and were only leaving us for our own good, and that anyway two years, or even three or four, would pass very quickly. And after a rousing exhortation, calculated to drive even the mildest of worms into turning and trying to bite her on the ankle, she wound up by saying that she had a lovely surprise for us. Our dear parents, anticipating a certain degree of gloom following their departure, had bought tickets to a matinée of a musical comedy,
The Dollar Princess
, that very afternoon. There now! Wasn't that exciting?

We agreed wanly: anything to get this brisk Patrol Leader out of the room. And when at last she removed herself we discussed the future with something approaching despair. Were we
really
going to be given into the charge of this bossy, sharp-tongued and acidulated shrew for the next few years? And if so, how were we going to bear it? The answer to the first was yes: we were indeed. To the second, well — we'd have to manage.

I still find it difficult to be just to Aunt Bee. She was the sort of person who is rude to shop assistants, waiters and taxi-drivers, and in the years ahead there were to be endless occasions on which we would
try to disown her by edging away and pretending we were attached to somebody else, usually the nearest stranger, while she berated some hapless shop assistant who had had the temerity to tell her either that the store did not stock whatever it was she had asked for, or that its price had gone up a ha'penny since the last Budget. Or when she accused a waiter or a taxi-driver of trying to overcharge her. We never succeeded; for having given someone what she called ‘a piece of her mind', she would invariably turn to look for us and cry: ‘Bill! Moll! Bets! — come here, children. We'll have to try somewhere else; there must be
some
decent shops in this place!' And having collected us by name (oh, the shame of it!) she would sweep out, herding us ahead of her: to repeat the whole embarrassing process somewhere further along the street. She did not seem able to help it, and we couldn't believe that she had always been like that, for if she had, how could Mother …? But in those Jhelum days she would have been fifteen years younger. She may even have been pretty and dreaming of romance. And one had to remember that she had been very kind to Mother…