The Sun in the Morning (6 page)

Two days later Tacklow returned — to find his faithful hound not only installed in the house but occupying, as by right, the most comfortable chair in the drawing-room. How Foxy had managed this was never fully explained, but he had obviously succeeded in charming the flinty heart out of my grandmother's solid, bombazine-and-lace-encased bosom. And from then until the end of that home leave and the departure of the two of them, hand in paw back to India, he remained a beloved and honoured guest and the apple of my grandmother's eye — in which, it seems, there was actually a tear when he left! Foxy's conquest of her is about the only interesting thing I know about my grandmother: apart from the fact that one of her sisters married the younger son of Scotland's favourite poet, the immortal
Robert Burns of ‘Comin' through the Rye' and ‘Auld Lang Syne'.

As for Foxy, he died very peacefully of old age, and Tacklow, who was not prone to tears, confessed that he wept buckets and missed him so sorely that he made a solemn vow never, never again ‘to give his heart to a dog to tear', as Kipling puts it. That vow was never broken. There were other pets of course: cats, monkeys, mongooses (or should that be ‘mongeese'?), squirrels, parrots and bulbuls; but never another dog. He never forgot Foxy. The little photograph that went with him everywhere right up to the day of his death is proof of that.

After Foxy, he acquired a pair of brown monkeys called Jacko and Jillo; an exhilarating but exhausting pair of pets, as anyone who has ever owned a monkey will know. The havoc that one small member of this tribe (let alone two) can cause in the space of sixty seconds has to be seen to be believed; I suppose it comes from having four hands instead of two, and excellent teeth. There was one occasion when the demon pair managed to capture a crow and were in the process of plucking out its feathers one by one when the shrieks of the victim alerted Tacklow, who rescued it, tailless, just in time; getting bitten in the process by Jillo and severely pecked by the ungrateful crow. The pair eventually joined forces with a troop of their wild brethren whom they had quite obviously invited in to share their owner's bungalow, and when after a period of chaos and anarchy the friends were successfully evicted, Jacko and Jillo elected to go with them and were last seen in their company eating stolen corn-cobs on the roof of a shop in the bazaar. Tacklow said that he missed them, but that life was a lot more peaceful after their departure.

His next pet was a mongoose that had somehow got into his bathroom, and finding itself shut in, behaved like a lunatic; racketing around the walls and upsetting tin water-cans, soap-dishes, razors and other movable objects in its frenzy. The noise, which was considerable, merely increased its panic, and drew Tacklow to investigate; and since he had always wanted a mongoose, he shut himself into the bathroom with it and sat down cross-legged on the floor, where he remained without moving for over an hour — I think that his ability to remain silent and immovable for long periods was probably the secret of the rapport he was able to establish with animals and birds. After some ten or fifteen minutes the mongoose ceased to dash wildly round the
room and retreated behind the upturned tin bathtub. But as Kipling says, every mongoose is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity and the motto of the mongoose family is ‘
Run and Find Out
'. This one ran true to form. It could not resist peering round the side of the bath to discover what this strange human creature was doing, and after a time it began to creep forward, inch by inch, until at long last, having cautiously investigated Tacklow's shoes and then his ankles, it climbed up onto his knee, sniffed at his watch-chain and nibbled at a coat-button, and exhausted by its previous shenanigans, yawned and went to sleep. When, after a further hour, it woke up, it allowed itself to be stroked; and from then on they were the best of friends for two glorious years.

I once had a mongoose myself, and they are the most adorable and entertaining of creatures. Tacklow's Rikki (the name was new in those days — Kipling's
Jungle Book
, which contains the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, having only recently been published) was the best of companions. He slept on Tacklow's pillow, went along with him to the office, and to the Mess where he shared his meals, sitting on his knee and occasionally venturing onto the table to take a drink of water from one of the finger-bowls. Like his famous namesake he kept the bungalow and the surrounding compound free from snakes, and he would accompany Tacklow on his morning rides and evening walks; tearing along across the scrub-covered plains between the kikar trees or along the river banks, and sitting up and chittering loudly when he wished to be picked up and given a lift. Tacklow told me that he always came when called and learned, on those evening walks, to come to heel when danger threatened or caution demanded it. The only thing he objected to was crossing the vast open space of the sun-scorched Parade Ground, where there was no cover and he knew that he was vulnerable to kites and other birds of prey. When Tacklow did that, Rikki would run between his feet in the protection of his shadow; but otherwise he came and went as he pleased. As did my Rikki, years later.

Unfortunately, Tacklow did not know that one of Rikki's favourite hot-weather retreats, where he liked to take a nap when the temperature soared, was a culvert under the drive leading to the bungalow; and he was there one hot afternoon in mid-June when the first storm of the approaching monsoon swept down without warning and a flash-flood
fell like a cataract out of the sky. Within seconds the whole Cantonment was awash, and Rikki, trapped by a deluge of water pouring in from both sides of the culvert, was drowned.

After that, Tacklow acquired cats and the occasional parrot. Not intentionally, as he had acquired Rikki, but because they attached themselves to him and he allowed them to stay. But no cat ever took the place of Foxy; or of Rikki either. And each in turn bore the same name because by tradition all Kaye cats were called ‘Chips'.

All cats liked Tacklow. They would see him coming, and remarking to themselves in pleased surprise ‘Ah! — a man who likes cats!', would rise to their paws and come to meet him, arching their backs, tails well up, and rubbing themselves against his ankles. A walk with him in any place where there were cats — Naples being a case in point! — closely resembled a ‘royal' on walkabout. He would exchange a word or two with them and they would reply, presumably in Italian. But the creature that Tacklow would most have liked to own (failing a dog, of course) was an elephant. For it is true that they have a remarkably good memory, and since their life-span is a long one, with luck they could outlive you. They are also very intelligent and truly endearing. But unfortunately they need a lot of space and a great deal of care and attention, plus a vast amount of fodder. His pad-elephant, Pramekali, and her
mahout
^*
were only hired by Tacklow for a few seasons during the tail-end of the 1890s; and then only when he was on shooting leave in the Terai. But he loved her dearly and never forgot her, and would often say wistfully that if only he were rich he would buy a large estate — a
zemindari
— somewhere on the edge of the Terai, and acquire a baby elephant of his own and just live there and grow old with it.

There were a great many elephants in India even in my day; and when my father was a young man their numbers must have been far larger, for in those days the Army used them to haul guns and carry tents, baggage, ammunition and stores. They were also the normal, everyday transport of forest officers and their families and assistants, as well as of countless Sahibs on shooting leave. They worked in logging camps, moving, lifting and stacking huge tree-trunks; and in
timber yards all over India, handling the great balks of seasoned wood — the sleepers on which the railway tracks ran for thousands of miles, criss-crossing the subcontinent, and the logs and planks that were used for building houses, bridges and factories. They and their
mahouts
were used for keddahs: the driving of herds of wild elephants into huge stockades in the jungles of Assam and Mysore, where they were roped between two tame elephants and taken away to be trained to work. Princes and potentates, Maharajahs, Rajahs, Nawabs and Ranas, with their Queens and Princesses and Ministers, rode on them in processions at weddings or religious festivals and on state occasions. And so also, in those days, did Viceroys and Governors of Provinces.

Pramekali's
mahout
would come of an evening to the verandah of the forest hut in which my father stayed when shooting in the Terai, to smoke his hookah and gossip and tell enthralling stories about the elephant-folk and their ways. He told Tacklow that the
mahouts
speak to their elephants in a special language that is the last remnant of the language that was spoken in the days when the world was new and elephants were the masters and men their servants. He taught him some of that language, and Tacklow taught it to me when I was a child. But by now I can only remember two words of it, perhaps because I myself heard them used fairly often by other
mahouts
— though I am ashamed to say that I have forgotten which means what! The two words were ‘Dutt' and ‘Dug': one means ‘Take a long step' and the other ‘Push it down with your head'. And as Tacklow said, even the most intelligent dog would be hard put to tell the difference between those two very similar monosyllables. Yet an elephant never makes a mistake. He may be loafing across the countryside in the manner of one who has his hat over one eye and his hands in his pockets, paying no attention to the scenery, when his
mahout
taps him on the head and says ‘Dutt!' (or it may be ‘Dug') and without pausing he will lengthen his stride and pass safely over the yawning ditch, or alternatively, pause to push over a young tree that is obstructing the path; putting it down with his head if it is a large one, or using one foot if he judges that to be sufficient. Yet there are gaps in their intelligence: which is just as well. Because there was an occasion when Tacklow, on local leave down south, accepted an offer to cross the Bay of Bengal on a tramp steamer that was taking a consignment of elephants to Burma; and very nearly did not live to tell the tale.…

The elephants were below decks tethered in two rows, each in a separate stall, and on the second day out, with the sea as flat as a skating rink, one of them decided to relieve the tedium by rocking gently from side to side. Presently another and then a third took it up, until the ship itself began to sway. The elephants found the movement delightful and soon they were all doing it. The steamer, which was not a large one, began to tip from port to starboard and back again like a canoe in a cross sea, and it became alarmingly clear that it was only a matter of time — and not much of it either! — before one gunwale or the other dipped below the water level and the sea rushed in and sent the entire ship to the bottom.

Seamen and
mahouts
together raced below to put a stop to this blissful but deadly game. But to no avail. Until at last, and only just in time, some genius suggested tethering every other animal the opposite way round. This was done with frantic haste. And it worked! The elephants, who had been enjoying themselves just as much as kids enjoy a swing or a see-saw, continued to rock from side to side, but could not work out that if number one swayed to the left his neighbour must now sway to the right. Fortunately, they never did work it out; for if they had, nothing could have stopped the steamer from sinking like a stone in that enormous, glassy sea. And since launching a lifeboat in those circumstances would have been out of the question and there was no wireless on board, the chances are that there would have been no survivors and the total disappearance of the steamer in a flat calm sea would have become another ‘Unsolved Mystery of the Sea'.

The reason why I know so much about my father's childhood and his early years in India is because he used to reminisce to me about those times. He had a fund of real-life stories that I treasure. As I treasure the claw of his first tiger and the tale of how he came to shoot it. This last took place somewhere in the Terai, which is (or was) a wide belt of jungle and grassland that skirted the foothills of the Himalayan range for almost two thirds of its length, but which at present is shrinking rapidly before the encroachments of India's exploding and rapacious population. The tiger's claw must by now be almost a hundred years old; which I find difficult to believe, because I can remember so clearly Tacklow telling how he acquired it; and the tale is still so real to me that like Mother's first visit to the Bombay Zoo, it seems as though it happened only yesterday.…

Seated on the backs of a line of elephants, the shooting-party had been waiting for what seemed like hours; rifles at the ready as they listened to the noises of the jungle and the far-off sounds of the approaching beaters. Tacklow, as the most junior member of the party, was on the extreme left of the line; a spot from which it was highly unlikely that he would get so much as a glimpse of a tiger, since immediately in front of him, separating him from the jungle, lay a dry ravine full of elephant-grass and thorn-scrub that the head
shikari
^*
who had planned the beat, judged would dissuade the tiger from coming that way and ensure that it would make for the centre of the line and the rifle of the Commissioner-Sahib for whose benefit the beat had been laid on.

Tacklow's position being little more than that of a stop, he was able to give his undivided attention to the varied and entertaining assortment of jungle wildlife that emerged from cover ahead of the beat to scud through the waiting line of elephants and vanish into the jungle behind them. The beaters were still a long way off when his eye was caught by what he took to be a jungle-cock — a bright flash of colour among the scrub in the ravine. He could see the vivid orange neck ruff and the white eye of the bird, but as he watched it idly, wondering how long it would be before it decided to run for it, the patch of colour between the grass stems and the thorn boughs seemed to cohere and become clearer: ‘like a photographic print in a tray of developing solution' was the way he put it. And suddenly, he was looking at the face of a crouching tiger. It was staring directly at him and he lifted his rifle very, very slowly — hearing the whispered protest of his
shikari
, who had not seen it — and pulled the trigger.