The Sun in the Morning (65 page)

Tacklow said that when that happened the dole would have to be increased to keep pace with inflation; until in the end it wouldn't be worth anyone's while to do any of the small but necessary jobs unless they were paid more — perhaps a good deal more! — for doing them than they could get on the dole for doing nothing. Since the general public wouldn't be able to afford to pay them that sort of money, they would take the dole instead; and presently hordes of immigrants who couldn't make a living in their own countries would come hurrying over to ours to get a share of the bonanza. Then the next generation would start thinking, and saying, that they were ‘owed a living' as a human right; which in Tacklow's opinion was something that no human was ‘owed' by its own kind — excepting only its parents who, because they brought them into the world, owe it to their children, and to their country, to bring them up to be responsible citizens who know how to stand on their own feet and not stamp on other people's.

Odd to think that although I should remember so clearly everything that Tacklow said that day as we walked to and fro under those three tall pine trees, I did not realize, until long after he was dead, that though he had in a sense been ‘dreaming true' — as he had done twice before when he dreamt the winner of the Derby days before the race was even run — he failed to foresee another and more immediate threat. The then unthinkable one of another world war that would deliver a far worse blow to his country's power and prestige, let alone her riches, than the first had done, and be the means of hastening the disintegration of the Empire on which, like the one that Spain had once possessed, ‘the sun never set'.

It has set now. But if historians of the future have the courage to
resist the pressures that will be put upon them by the rulers or dictators of their respective countries to re-write history to suit their nationals (you should see some of the stuff that is already being written — how George Orwell would have laughed!), then a time may come when the world will look back on the era of the Pax Britannica as a golden age, and not, as the present tendency seems to be, a dark, disgraceful period of brutal colonial suppression.

When I read any book set in the period between the two world wars, I realize how important a part the General Strike of 1926 played in the history of Britain. Tacklow had given me a strong interest in history, starting me off at a very early age on
Little Novels of English History
and telling me riveting tales of India's past which for action, zip, intrigue, goriness and glamour outdid anything that our forefathers in the United Kingdom ever got up to. Yet despite this I was at the time of the strike (and to a great extent have remained) uninterested in contemporary history. (Unless, of course, it happens to be written up by someone like A. J. P. Taylor, who not only writes as Tacklow spoke, but — if my television set is to be trusted — speaks with his voice, stands as he did, uses his hands in the same way and even
looks
a little like him.)

The reason for this incuriousness must I suppose be because, like so many of us, I find it difficult to think of something that is actually happening here and now as History with a capital H. And also because something that is happening today invariably becomes political. If it's bad, whatever Government happens to be in power gets the blame, while if it's good they grab the credit — even if it's only a matter of a record harvest which is in fact due to the weather! The General Strike therefore meant little to me beyond preventing me from getting to the Studio, which I resented. But then I could always carry on drawing at home; and did. I put in a lot of drawing at Three Trees; and because Bets was still at The Lawn, Bill at The Shop, Tacklow (also housebound by the strike) busy writing articles and editing in his study while Mother coped with cooking, washing, ironing and all
the other endless chores that come under the heading of ‘housework', I had to use myself as a model, with the aid of the full-length looking-glass on the inner side of my cupboard door or the triple mirror on Mother's dressing-table. Which is why, to this day, the type of face I find easiest to draw is my own.

I enjoyed my time at the Studio, and since the teachers knew their job my work began to improve; though in fact I learnt less from them than from my fellow students. It was both an education and a revelation to see how someone else handled a subject or an object that I myself was looking at and struggling to put onto paper; while the totally different way in which others obviously
saw
exactly the same thing intrigued me enormously. It taught me to look at everything with a new eye, and it was my good fortune to have, for a term or two, three fellow students who were, in partnership, to become famous as theatrical designers under the name of ‘Motley': Peggy and Audrey Harris and Elizabeth Montgomerie. The last in particular taught me that if you are bold enough you can put together colours that clash wildly with each other, and make them look marvellous. One of their first successes was the job of designing and making the costumes for
Richard of Bordeaux
, a play starring the young John Gielgud. It was an enormous success, and those three girls produced the costumes for it on a shoestring budget, co-opting members of the studio to stencil medieval patterns in gold, silver and a variety of colours onto the cheapest and heaviest materials available, and making the stuff look like hand-woven brocades and tapestries. The result had to be seen (and touched) to be believed, and it is nice to know that the name of Motley will go down in theatrical history.

Another student, again a girl, with the unusual name of Merlyn Mann, was so good and so individual in style that I confidently expected her to end up among the greats. One of her pen-and-ink drawings was hung in the Royal Academy when she was only sixteen, and when she suddenly took a dislike to an unfinished one and tossed it into the Studio's wastepaper bin, I snatched it out; much to her disgust. ‘You
can't
like that,' said Merlyn, ‘it's a mess!' But I managed to flatten it out with an iron and had it framed, and I have it to this day — or rather my younger daughter has it now, because she liked it as much as I did. Merlyn's trouble was that she was too good. She needed an old-fashioned ‘patron' to buy up all her work and make her
fashionable. I could sell bits of rubbish for cheap reproduction, but her work called for an expensive book with really beautiful illustrations: the kind of book that people will pay top prices for. I don't know what became of her. Like Tacklow's young genius who broke the Playfair cipher, she seems to have vanished from the public eye without trace.

The Miss MacMunn who owned and ran the Studio had a brother in the Army (Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, KCB, KCSI, DSO, no less!) whose wife, dear Lady MacMunn, was excessively stout and shaped rather like the Victorian idea of an operatic diva. Back in Simla, her three rickshaw men had been known as Faith, Hope and Charity; the one who pushed at the back being Faith, because Faith, we are told, can move mountains. Lord Reading, a man not noted for a sense of humour, said of her that she was an admirable woman, ‘but I do wish,' he said — extending his finger and thumb at arm's length in front of him — ‘that she would not wear a carnation out
here
'. He was also rumoured to have made her the subject of his only known joke. Some energetic do-gooder in authority had decided that it would be a good idea to replace the noonday gun, that told the city it could knock off for luncheon, with a siren instead; and on the first occasion that it sounded, his Lordship, caught unawares by its eldritch shriek, leapt in his chair and exclaimed: ‘Good heavens, someone must have stuck a pin into Emily!'

Everyone liked Emily MacMunn. But her George was a terrible old bore, and having known him from early on, I was all in favour of avoiding the lecture on Art (with lantern-slides) he was billed to give at the Studio in the afternoon of a half-holiday. The students, who were clearly expected to attend, were invited to bring relatives and friends with them, and typed leaflets announcing this, plus the subject, date and time of the lecture, were distributed to one and all. Tacklow announced firmly that he would, most unfortunately, be
far
too busy on the sixth — er, seventh? — to be able to take the afternoon off (shades of his father!). But Mother, who was fond of Lady MacMunn, insisted on going and taking me with her. We arrived late, and as the lights (with the exception of a single spotlight focused on the speaker) had already been switched off, we groped our way in the gloom to a couple of empty chairs amid a chorus of
shhh
-ing to which the General, already in full flight, paid no attention.

The subject of his lecture had been advertised as ‘Art in the Middle East' (which apparently included India and Greece). But in fact it turned out to be largely about himself, and he had arranged for one of the second-year students, a fat, phlegmatic girl in spectacles, to man the magic lantern and change the slides every time he thumped twice on the floor of the model's platform with the stick that he was using as a pointer. Apart from one or two of the slides appearing on the screen upside down (his fault, not hers, since he had loaded the boxes of slides), this arrangement worked well. All the slides were of course in black-and-white, and many of them had been taken by the General himself. But he had managed to appear in all the others, posing in a martial manner in front of famous ruins; Roman, Greek, Persian and Egyptian, as well as the occasional shot of a Hindu temple or a Moslem mosque.

His method of lecturing was simple. Having introduced himself to his audience and told us that he was only a bluff old soldier, but by jove, he knew what he liked when he saw it, and that his career having taken him out into the furthest parts of our far-flung Empire he had been fortunate enough to see many wonderful works of art, he paused and gave the floor two sharp taps with his stick. There followed a whirring noise, a glare of white light, and a photograph of the Sphinx being upstaged by the General appeared on the screen. He then told us how he, not the Sphinx, came to be there and we heard a bit about his war experiences in Mesopotamia, which seemed slightly odd considering that the Sphinx … oh well, forget it. When he had said everything he could think of about the Sphinx he tapped again and we got the ‘rose-red city — half as old as Time', and another view of the General. And so it went on. Drone, drone, drone, blither, blither, blither ‘… er — um — well I think that's all I can tell you about
that
'; tap, tap, and the slide would vanish and be replaced by another. By endless others…

Since almost everyone smoked in that age of the cigarette, the atmosphere in the darkened studio became more and more hazy and hotter and stuffier with every crawling minute. The seats of the cheap wooden chairs, hired for the occasion, grew increasingly hard and uncomfortable and the audience became noticeably restless as the Lecturer ploughed on with all the determination of an elephant fording a river in flood. Presently, as yet another slide appeared on the screen, a
voice from somewhere ahead of us murmured as though unconsciously speaking a thought aloud: ‘Can't
stand
any more of this!' and an enormous, shadowy figure surged up from its seat and made for the door. ‘That's Emily!' said Mother, instantly recognizing the shape and size of that familiar outline. And rising in her turn she followed the Lecturer's Lady out into the fresh air.

I would have given much to follow them; and so it seemed, from the number of turned heads and envious profiles, would many others. However, good manners prevailed and we stuck it out through a series of Persian tiles, Coptic frescoes and bits of Babylon, until it petered out — literally. The General, having talked for a good five minutes about a slide showing some battered fragment of statuary dug up by someone or other from the ruins of Troy or Abydos or somewhere, ran out of things to say about it and thumped the signal for the next slide. Nothing happened. He thumped again, louder this time. Still no response. ‘Another slide, please!' barked the General in parade-ground tones, repeating his thumps for the third time. ‘There aren't any more,' announced the operator flatly. And with that the lecture ended, and I collected Mother and Lady MacMunn from the courtyard, where they had been having a cosy gossip in the dusk while the shops and street lamps of Chelsea lit up around them.

Miss MacMunn had laid on tea and biscuits for the exhausted audience, and afterwards Mother and I caught a bus to Baker Street where we met Tacklow. And all the way back to Three Trees Mother talked of the places and people that she and Emily had been reminiscing about: re-telling scraps of the gossip of Northern India that either Emily or George had told her that afternoon, until I could have wept from homesickness. All through my schooldays I had been sure that once school was over I would be able to go home to India again. And when Tacklow retired and that hope died, I used to tell myself that if I worked hard at art and saved every penny I made, I would one day be able to pay for a passage back to Bombay and see all my friends, and Delhi and Simla and Okhla again. And put up at Laurie's Hotel at Agra and see dear Miss Hotz, and wait once more at twilight in the quiet gardens of the Taj to see the moon rise over the dusty plains of India and transform that wonder in white marble into something as fragile and shimmering as a soap bubble floating above the shadowy mass of the trees.