The Sun in the Morning (62 page)

It took me a long time to come to terms with that discovery and it was only after I left school, and became used to it, that I mentioned it to Tacklow: and was charmed and comforted by his answer.

‘But I never wanted a brainy wife,' said Tacklow. ‘I have to use my brain all day in the office, and when I get home I don't want intelligent conversation — I can get that at the Club. I want a beautiful woman who can take my mind off work and worry, and make me laugh; and your mother has always been, and always will be, a source of pride and delight to me.' I felt a lot better after that: and less ashamed of myself. But the incident played its part in casting a shadow over Grandpapa's house. Even though I was beginning to know that cantankerous old curmudgeon rather better because of the hours we spent together messing about among the beehives. I also admired the way he refused to be bossed about by Aunt Battle-axe, and one particularly pleasant memory of him remains with me: his reply to her when she announced at breakfast one morning, after opening her mail, that her dear friends, Eustacia and Hugo Smith-Piggot let us say, had accepted her invitation to spend a couple of nights at Upton House next month and would be arriving in time for luncheon on the fourteenth and leaving after breakfast on the sixteenth — or whatever. She had not asked her father's permission, or expected it; she just stated the fact. Grandpapa merely nodded and said musingly: ‘Ah, yes, the Smith-Piggots. The fourteenth to the sixteenth, I think you said? … Um … I'm afraid I shall
not
be very well on the fourteenth — or on the next two days either.' And he wasn't. He remained firmly in bed for two and a half days, coming down again only after the guests had departed.

Apart from members of his family, whom he endured rather than enjoyed having to stay, he detested guests, and ‘not being well on the twentieth to the twenty-second of next month' (or whenever it was
his daughter-cum-housekeeper announced the arrival of visitors), was a well-known gambit of his. But he didn't always win, for I also remember an occasion when Aunt Molly told an extremely overpowering and talkative guest, who had been saying how
very
sorry she was to ‘miss seeing your dear father', that Papa was quite well enough to receive a visitor who was such an old friend and who would not expect him to talk too much and tire himself. With which she ushered the ‘old friend' into his bedroom and left him to endure an hour of non-stop chat from which there was no escape, since he was clad in pyjamas and tucked up in bed.

Thinking back on the many embarrassments inflicted on us during weekends at Upton House, there is one other incident that deserves mention; Morning Service in the parish church, with whose vicar Grandpapa appeared to be permanently at odds (which did not mean that he would ever consider failing to turn up for the eleven o'clock service every Sunday. Or let any of us skip it, either!). The church was a very old one and the front pews, reserved for centuries by the owners of the few large houses, had high sides and doors that were shut by the verger on the last person to enter. The pew immediately below the pulpit went automatically to the owner of Upton House, and once inside it, with the door closed, only the vicar (or whoever happened to be preaching the sermon) could look into it. Which was just as well, because Grandpapa had a rooted dislike of long sermons. With a view to correcting the vicar's tendency to talk too much he would make a tower of the coins he intended to put into the plate, carefully piling them one on the other before ostentatiously taking out his pocket-watch and placing it beside them where the preacher, looking down into the pew, could not fail to see them. For the first five minutes of the sermon (very occasionally more, provided Grandpapa was interested) the tower remained untouched; but after that with each circuit of the minute hand on his watch one coin was removed until, if the sermon went on too long, the entire lot had been returned to base and the collection plate got nothing at all from old Mr Kaye of Upton House.
^*

I used to watch this irreverent performance torn between
embarrassment on behalf of the vicar and a wild desire to burst into giggles as I watched his hypnotized gaze creep back again and again to the shrinking tower of coins, and heard his voice begin to speed up. I still don't know why he didn't ignore the whole business instead of giving in, Sunday after Sunday, to what can only be described as blackmail. At least it worked; and there have been times when, pinned down in a pew and compelled to listen to the droning of some worthy gentleman in Holy Orders who should never ever have been allowed within five hundred yards of a pulpit, I would have dearly liked to follow Grandpapa's example and see if I could make it work too.

In the end, however, much as I may have disliked my school-time visits to Upton House, my memories of the place were sweetened by the fact that on my last visit, a good many months after I had left The Lawn and put my hair up (in those days becoming a grown-up meant putting one's hair up and letting one's skirts down), I fell in love with a friend of my brother Bill's. I haven't the remotest idea what his name was but I can still remember his face as clearly as though I had seen him an hour ago; an attractive puckish face, alight with laughter and made up almost entirely of triangles. He was by no means the first to whom I had lost my heart, for I was always losing it: there was Guy Slater when I was still not five years old, and after him a succession of other idols: young Kurram who wasn't a bit afraid of horses and looked so lordly and handsome as he galloped, nose in air, past my plodding pony on the Mall; Gully, who besides having such beautiful eyes and the whitest of teeth, knew
everything
about everything; Betty Caruana in her character of Jim Blunders in
Where the Rainbow Ends
; as well as endless characters from books, ranging from Robin Hood to Rupert of Hentzau. Then, briefly, there had been Tommy Richardson, who was succeeded by a red-haired and spotty-faced youth who sang in the choir of St John's Church at Clevedon, to whom I never even spoke, and who was soon eclipsed by a long list of actors and film-stars, among them, of course, Pitt Chatham who played the part of MacHeath in
Polly
.

Looking back on my early youth I don't seem to remember any time after the age of four and a half, which was when I met Guy, that I wasn't in love with some member of the opposite sex — not counting Tacklow, with whom I had obviously fallen in love at first sight. I think most of my generation were a sentimental lot who in general
thought highly of Love. The whole thing became too raucous later on. It was a lot more romantic when such affairs of the heart were a closely guarded secret.

The ‘flicks' — the silent cinema — were really getting into their stride in the Twenties. And since we saw at least one film, and often two, every week during our holidays (in those days the price of a seat in any one of the front six or eight rows was sixpence!) I fell in love with the hero of practically every film that I saw, and lost my heart on an average of one-and-a-half times every seven days; until the day when I met a real live West End actor who switched my attention from the cinema to the stage and was to make an important contribution to my life.

Mother had taken me to an At Home given by Mrs Alec-Tweedie. This outdated function was a relic of Edwardian days at which tea, sandwiches and cakes were served, and friends and acquaintances of the hostess dropped in to exchange gossip and show off their latest hats and dresses. A schoolgirl was definitely
persona non grata
at such gatherings, and Mother had only taken me there because she had been landed with me for half-term, and after a morning spent shopping, didn't know what else to do with me. Attired in my hideous school hat, gym tunic and regulation black cotton stockings, and feeling terribly out of place among all those society women with their high-pitched, pea-hen voices, dauntingly smart dresses and modish hats, I retreated hastily to a dark corner of one of the rooms and tried to make myself as small as possible behind a potted palm. I must have lurked there, hungry and embarrassed, for at least half an hour when I was winkled out by an enchanting elderly man, quite old enough, I thought, to be my father, who brought me a cup of tea and a plate of delicious sandwiches, plumped himself down beside me and kept me fascinated, amused and in gales of giggles for the best part of an hour — and this in spite of our hostess's determined efforts to lure him away! He continued to brush aside all her pleas of ‘
Dear
Sir Gerald, may I introduce you to Lady Catherine de Burgh who is
dying
to meet you?' with the greatest charm and went on telling me silly stories, and I only learned later that he was a famous actor, Sir Gerald du Maurier, son of the author and illustrator of two of my favourite books,
Trilby
and
Peter Ibbetson.
(And also, incidentally, father of the Daphne du Maurier who would one day become famous as the author of
Jamaica
Inn, Rebecca
, and scores of other best-selling novels, but at that date would still have been in short socks!)

He obviously liked children and knew exactly how to get on with them and put them at their ease, and he was the only person in the room to realize how miserably embarrassed I was feeling — a young and gawky crow among this flock of peacocks and birds of paradise — and to come to my rescue. Meeting him had a long-lasting side-effect, because after Mother returned to India I badgered and badgered Aunt Bee to take me to see him act and eventually wore down her resistance until she actually took us to see a matinée of
The Last of Mrs Cheyney
, in which he played opposite lovely Gladys Cooper in the title role. Had Aunt Bee known what the play was about I am sure she would have considered it unsuitable for children. But fortunately the words ‘light comedy' on the playbills outside the theatre misled her, and once we were firmly embedded in our seats in the dress circle she could hardly march us out in the middle of an act. Anyway, she couldn't help enjoying it, even though by the standards of that day it was considered to be very daring; in fact terribly
risqué
— dear me, what an age of innocence that was!

I enjoyed every minute of the play, but there was one brief conversation, I think in Act 2, that was to be of great use to me in the future. Gerald du Maurier as the hero, Lord Something-or-other, says to one of the women guests at a weekend house-party (it was that sort of play) that he wants to ask her a strictly hypothetical question: what would she say if he asked her to marry him? To which she replies promptly: ‘I'd be ready in five minutes — no, make it three!'

I don't know why that should have made such a deep impression on me, but it did. Then and there I made up my mind that I would never marry anyone unless I felt exactly like that about him; no doubts whatever; no ‘Shall I?', ‘Shan't I?' Just ‘
I'll be ready in five minutes
—
no, make it three!
' It became my yardstick in the future and saved me again and again from lurching into disaster; for although it didn't stop me from falling in love with regrettable frequency, I always applied that test when it came to a serious proposal of marriage: and the answer that came up was always: ‘No — not in three minutes — not even five!' Until one day there was no need even to ask it, since I knew the answer was: ‘I'll be ready in three minutes — no, make it
one
!' And for being saved for that day, I shall be grateful for ever to dear Gerald
du Maurier, who understood children and recognized the depth of my misery as I cringed in my corner at a fashionable London ‘At Home'. I wonder if people still have ‘At Homes'? I imagine not. They must have ended with the Second World War. Together with
thé-dansants
and the Charleston…

Tacklow was knighted at the first Investiture of 1925 by King George V. Sadly, neither Bill nor I, nor Bets, saw that ceremony, for we were all three back at school: Bill and I for the last time. Even Mother did not accompany Tacklow to Buckingham Palace to see him knighted, though she would have loved to do so. But then he did not know that if the recipient of an honour applied to the Palace it was possible to be given permission to take one's nearest and dearest (up to a maximum of three!) to watch it being handed out by the monarch. That was something Mother only discovered later, and she was justifiably annoyed at missing a chance that, since Tacklow had now retired, would never come her way again. I don't know how he managed to talk himself out of that one; but I suspect that this was probably the reason why, shortly afterwards, he took Mother to Menton on the French Riviera for a holiday that he could not really afford, but which they enjoyed enormously.

He had hoped to be able to buy a cottage in the country where he could potter about in the garden and occupy his spare time in compiling a catalogue of Ferrari's famous stamp collection. But the ending of the First World War was followed by inflation and a rocketing rise in the cost of living, and everything went up — except pensions, which remained more or less where they had been in the reign of Edward VII, though there were still school bills to be paid for Bets and art school ones for me, and Bill at Woolwich would need an allowance. So Tacklow went to work again, this time as a civilian. He became the editor of a weekly magazine called
The Near East and India
, and since the head office of that publication was in London, he arranged to rent a tiny furnished house in Kew that belonged to a cousin of his.

The house was about the size of a postage stamp, but after spending a week in it Mother went out shopping and came back with yards of coconut matting and half-a dozen packets of something called Rudell's Salts that claimed to ‘comfort tired feet'; because the passage between the front door and the kitchen was paved with red brick and our feet had become so bruised from walking back and forth on it that we
could hardly stand up. The coconut matting was a tremendous success, but the Rudell's Salts a disaster; for though they were undoubtedly comforting to soak tired feet in, they merely softened the wretched things and turned them into cissies instead of toughening them up to take more punishment — as Bets and I had done for ours when we ran bare-foot at Okhla. Oh, darling Okhla! — would we ever see you again? It seemed highly unlikely, and there were days when, staring out through a thin curtain of drizzle at the row of small, smug and almost identical suburban houses that faced ours on the other side of the wet grey street, I felt as though I would have sold my soul for the sight of a hot, silver sandbank with a row of mud-turtles basking at the water's edge, or the blaze of crimson and purple bougainvillaeas pouring over a whitewashed wall. ‘
No more, no more, the folly and the fun: our little day was brave and gay, but now it's done!
' Was it
really
all over and done with? Would I never get back, ever? I couldn't and wouldn't believe it.