The Sun in the Morning (60 page)

I remember asking him what the Prince of Wales was like to meet and talk to; we all knew what he looked like, because the newspapers of the time were always full of his pictures — this handsome, laughing young man who had made himself such a reputation as an adored Prince Charming. Tacklow said he was a ‘retarded adolescent'. I had never heard that expression before, and when I asked him what he meant, he replied that the Prince was like a spoilt but very attractive and extremely likeable schoolboy of fifteen or so, who having reached that age had decided, like some older Peter Pan, to stay there for good, atrophied in youth.

I had my own reasons for being interested in the Prince, for I had already heard a lot more about his visit to India than appeared in the newspapers. This was because my room-mate Cynthia Hepper had an elder sister, Joan, who was, at that time, one of the reigning belles of Bombay. She was also a prolific correspondent whose frequent letters were proudly read aloud to us by Cynthia. Netta and I were enthralled by them: understandably, since Joan had actually danced with the Prince of Wales — not once but several times — and was madly in love with one of his equerries! This was life with a capital L. Glittering, glamorous, grown-up life. How we envied her!

Joan, with thrilling casualness, referred to the Prince as ‘David', and reported gleefully that he was delightfully unstuffy and had on several occasions stood up some of the ‘frumps' he had been booked to partner, some of them the wives and daughters of senior officials and prominent Indians,
^*
while he danced instead with some pretty young thing who had caught his fancy — Joan presumably among them. Such dashing behaviour had obviously impressed her, and I have to admit that we too thought it was pretty impressive, and spared no thought for the humiliation and embarrassment of those poor, publicly slighted ladies.

The press had reported the whole tour as a roaring success. But in fact it must have been a cross between a severe headache and an Imperial nightmare for all those who were responsible for the young man's safety and his public image, for the Prince detested all the
security arrangements (he called it ‘mollycoddling') and proved from the start to be what any nanny would have termed ‘a handful'. Landing in Bombay, he celebrated the occasion by sending his anxious parents a telegram in clear that said: ‘Wonderful welcome! Forty-six dead, four hundred injured, and a thousand arrested' — or words to that effect — and throughout the remainder of the tour behaved like that little girl in the nursery rhyme who ‘When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid'. One of the latter periods culminated in Peshawar in a ferocious row with his host in that city, Sir John Maffey, over his security measures. He had flown into a royal rage, and Sir John, losing his cool, had exploded in his turn and metaphorically speaking torn a strip off him. Whereupon the Prince, scarlet with fury, stormed off to his rooms: emerging an hour or so later to find Lady Maffey soothing her jangled nerves with a cup of tea on the lawn. She told Mother later that he had come to a stop beside her, and after standing there for a minute or two with his head down and his hands in his pockets, moodily kicking the turf with the toe of one foot and looking for all the world like a guilty schoolboy summoning up the courage to confess to some youthful peccadillo, he blurted out ruefully: ‘By jove, Lady Maffey, your husband does talk straight to a fellow!' At which point, she confessed, her heart melted and she would have forgiven him anything. But oh, the sigh of relief that must have gone up from Peshawar to Cape Cormorin when he finally left India, still in one piece…

Tacklow admitted that when it was all over he had the first good night's sleep he had had for weeks, and I think that that royal visit must have marked the lowest point in his term of duty as DCI, India. The highest and best (which strangely enough involved another heir to a royal throne), makes a fascinating story that could only have happened in the East, for it concerns the ruler of one of India's Independent States who fell in love with a dancing-girl. She was only a common
nautch
-girl off the streets, already pregnant by some unknown customer when she entered the royal harem; yet despite this, when she gave birth to a son some six months later the ruler became almost as besotted by the boy as he was by its mother. Eventually, since his legal wives had given him no male heir and by now were unlikely to bear him any more children (the
nautch
-girl would have made sure of that!), he petitioned the Government of India to declare
her little bastard the legal heir, by adoption, to his throne.

The Government was profoundly shocked and besought His Highness to reconsider; pointing out that he was not yet old enough to give up hope of having a son of his own, and that if at some later date he should acquire one, he would be unable to demote the
nautch
-girl's offspring in favour of his own. The Law was the Law and one could not play games with it; had His Highness fully appreciated that? His Highness insisted that he had, and in time the deed was done. But sadly, the Sirkār had been right. A day came when the
nautch
-girl's charms began to fade and His Highness took another wife, who bore him a son: a fair-skinned child of the blood royal whom he grew to idolize. It was then that, realizing the Sirkār would never go back on its word and declare his own boy the heir, he decided that there was nothing for it but to resort to bribery; and calling upon his ministers he instructed them to draw up a list of every influential man in the entire Government of India, and to write against each one the sum for which that man's support could be purchased. It was done as he ordered. But somehow word of that highly secret list came to the ears of the Government, who instantly became very anxious to get their hands on it, because the sums of money written against each name would serve to pinpoint officials who were in the habit of taking bribes. (A modest figure could be taken as clear evidence that the owner of that name was known to be bribable, for the compilers of the list would make no mistake about
that
.)

To cut a long story short, a copy of the list was obtained and, by his order, placed unread into the hand of the Viceroy, Lord Reading — who for obvious reasons was intended to be the only person allowed to see it. However, having read it he sent for Tacklow (whose department had been responsible for filching it) and said: ‘I know that I am not supposed to show this to anyone, even you. But it contains something that I think you should be allowed to see, and I know I can trust you to forget the rest.' With that he handed over a scroll containing a list of names that began with his own, against which (the state in question was a very rich one!) was written a really whopping sum of money. The sums against the other names varied widely; some being suspiciously small. But only one name among all those names had written against it a word instead of a number. The word was ‘unbribable' and the name was Tacklow's.

It was while I was at Château d'Oex that I learnt to my amazement that thanks to that eyesore, the Cuthbert Grundy Shield, I would be leaving The Lawn a whole year earlier than I would normally have done.

Apparently my ungrateful headmistress had written to inform my parents that since dear Mollie seemed to be uninterested in anything but art, they would be wasting her time and their money if they kept her at The Lawn any longer, and had much better send her off at the end of the summer term to a good art school: Miss Hoskins strongly recommended her own, the MacMunn Studio in Park Walk, Chelsea…

Tacklow had replied briefly that in that case he saw no point in my wasting another summer term at her school and would remove me at the end of the Easter term. So that was that.

Considering that I had won that hideous trophy for her practically single-handed, I took a poor view of Dub-dub's letter, which seemed to me distinctly unfair. But apart from that I was delighted at the prospect of an earlier release from school, and I had always hankered to be a painter. Not a painter of pictures that were exhibited at the Academy and bought by city councils for their art galleries, but an illustrator of children's books; fairy-tales for preference. A famous one, of course.

My parents, though a trifle miffed by Dub-dub's letter, were all for my studying at the Slade: and I am proud of the fact that I was
actually accepted as a student. However, an interview during which the curriculum was explained to me in detail proved that Miss Hoskins's advice was sound. The Slade produced — or aimed to produce — serious Artists. And since that was not in the least what I was after, I backed down hurriedly and signed on at Miss Hoskins's old studio after all. Which may have been a wise move or a grave mistake; I have never been quite sure about that; because to study at the Slade was, in the Twenties, the height of every aspiring young artist's ambition, and I had been given the chance and thrown it away.

On the whole, I had quite enjoyed my years at The Lawn. Though I was not in the least sorry to leave it and I cannot say that I acquired anything that could be called an Education there. They never succeeded in teaching me to spell or speak French or do the simplest sums. Nor did they attempt to teach me any of the social skills that would have made me popular with the kind of young man whom Mother expected me to marry; skills such as riding, playing golf and tennis, and being an adequate dancing partner on a ballroom floor. I was no earthly good at any of those things. I was, and still am, afraid of horses; I detested card games, was a poor swimmer and an indifferent ballroom dancer, and, worst of all, I was fat!

All that ‘feeding-up' had done its worst and doomed me to the fate of all fat girls — perpetual self-consciousness on the score of one's figure and the boredom of diets that never work because as soon as you stop them you instantly put back all the pounds you have so painfully lost (and often a few extra ones by way of a bonus). Nor did the fact that my dear brother had nicknamed me ‘Old Piano Legs', when I was at my most sensitive age, do anything for my morale.

The only thing The Lawn had done for me, apart from engaging Miss Hoskins to take over the art class, was to keep me occupied and tolerably happy during the bleak years of separation from my parents and exile from the country I thought of as ‘home'; though the stresses and strains of holidays with Aunt Bee undoubtedly served to make the term-times more pleasant than they would otherwise have been. Beyond that, The Lawn had done nothing much, either socially or mentally, to equip me to cope with life in a competitive world, and I can only be profoundly grateful that I was born into a time and a class in which girls were still not expected to go out to work, but only to marry and get on with producing the next generation. Because had
there been, as there is now, the pressure to get a job at all costs, I would have found myself at a terrible disadvantage.

Dub-dub was fond of saying smugly: ‘
All
my girls marry'! But I can remember meeting in middle age one of my school-mates who had not, and who said bitterly that she would never forgive Dub-dub for that fatuous remark, or for failing to provide her with an education that would enable her to get, and hold down, a good job when she left The Lawn. I saw her point, since I have always regarded myself as being self-educated — or rather, Tacklow-educated — and had I on leaving school been told to earn my own living, I could not have held down any job. I would not even have made a good ‘daily', since all my end-of-term reports always included the same six-word comment by Matron: ‘Mollie is as untidy as ever'; a remark that never failed to irritate my normally placid father…

‘What do I pay these women for?' he would demand. Well actually, for knowing that during our long periods of separation from him and Mother we would be tolerably happy. On the other hand, scholastically the school was dire, and had I not been a voracious reader with a passion for history (for which Tacklow and not my form-mistress was responsible) I would have finished my school years virtually uneducated. Yet the only thing I regret about this was not being taught to speak French. Yes, of course we were
taught
it; but by an Englishwoman who, I suspect, wouldn't have done any too well if she'd suddenly found herself being parachuted into France. She never made the French language come alive, and though I coped within reason with her endless written exercises, I always failed to pass the few oral ones and thankfully forgot the whole thing the minute I left. However, although my weekly position in class was generally somewhere near the bottom, I could sail through the end-of-term exams and come top of the list in subjects like history, English, botany, composition, scripture and, oddly enough, geometry. (Why geometry, when I couldn't do maths, and algebra was always a closed book to me? Could it be that geometry has something to do with drawing?) I was adequate at cookery but ham-handed at sewing and music, and could only
just
scrape past at Latin. The Lawn did not teach physics, chemistry or any modern language except a smattering of that painfully British-French that has recently been immortalized by Miles Kington as ‘Franglais'.