The Sun in the Morning (67 page)

However, all that is by the way, and I merely introduce Sandy at this point because he was to play a large part in our lives.

Apart from Sandy, and the two or three youths who, outnumbered ten to one by young women, were studying art at the Studio in Park Walk, I can't remember meeting any young men during my time at Three Trees. There were a few married ones of course, and perhaps a dozen or so boys ranging from six months to eight or nine years old. But it has to be remembered that the male population of Great Britain had been drastically reduced by the slaughter of the First World War, which had landed the United Kingdom with no less than three million of what the newspapers ungallantly referred to as ‘surplus women'. Three million women who would never have a husband, never have a white wedding, a honeymoon or a baby, and never be a grandmother. For it was still a marriage-or-nothing time for us.

With post-war Britain still suffering from a staggering shortage of marriageable men, it was becoming all too clear to me that, short of a miracle, I was bound to join the ranks of those three million surplus if I didn't make a move to escape from my present cosy little rut in the fairly near future. Brother Bill was obviously going to be of no help. And anyway he would soon be heading for India to join a mountain battery stationed on the North-West Frontier — having taken his passing out exams and scraped into the Gunners by the narrowest of margins. Bets, I thought, would probably make it to the altar, since she was far better equipped to be popular with young men than I was.

Bets was a good artist and, if she had only stuck to it, would have been a really good pianist. As it was she could vamp any dance tune, and there are few more popular social assets than that. She was also a good tennis-player, a more than adequate rider who could (if Tacklow had been able to run to keeping a horse, which he couldn't) have developed into an excellent one; and she could both dance and sing. I always thought she would end up in musical comedy, beginning in the chorus and graduating to be a star. I still think she might have done so if things had turned out differently. And if she had been a different kind of person; one with more determination and a harder streak in her character. But there is no steel in Bets's make-up. She
had, and still has, an almost pathological fear of rows and loud angry voices, and she would do anything to avoid them; anything at all. Nevertheless I still believe that if we had stayed on at Three Trees she would have found her way into musical comedy and ended up famous. As for me, that miracle I needed turned up after all, in the shape of a letter from the India Office asking Tacklow to return to India and take on the job of revising Aitcheson's Treaties, which were in dire need of an overhaul, having been made way back in the last century, between the British and the rulers of a number of India's Princely States.

Tacklow was happy at Three Trees. His editorial work was interesting and he enjoyed our daily walks through the park, to and from the station, and our lunch-times at the Kardomah. He liked strolling round the garden attended by Hillingdon Chips and her three cowboy kittens, now grown into large and prosperous cats — though still inclined to wear their stetsons well over one eye and be quick on the draw. He liked keeping an eye on the house and seeing that broken gutters were mended before they leaked, and that cracked panes of glass were replaced quickly. Ordinary, everyday things of that sort which he termed ‘pottering about'. I vividly remember the day on which he decided to do a bit of pottering in the attic, because I happened to be in bed with a bad cold when he incautiously put a foot on the lath-and-plaster instead of keeping to the beams, and the next second a large chunk of ceiling hit me on the head, nearly laying me out cold. My room dissolved into a maelstrom of dust and plaster, and looking up groggily, I discerned my beloved parent's left leg waving wildly from a hole above me. It took the united efforts of his family to extract him because none of us could stop laughing.

No, I do not think Tacklow wanted to go back to India. But he thought
we
wanted to. And how right he was. Mother had never, to my knowledge, complained. But he must have realized that she could not help missing the gaiety of India; all the parties and dances and shooting-camps, ‘the folly and the fun'. And then there were Bets and myself. He knew that the job would not take him away for long: only a little more than a year — if that. But he had already been parted from his children for too long, and neither his wife nor his daughters took kindly to the idea of losing him for another year. I do not think that that last consideration weighed with him as much as one might have expected, for after all, a year was only a year. What did count
with him, I suspect, was a combination of three things: Mother's return from that ball at Woolwich, looking as pretty and sparkling as though she had just emerged from a dip in the Fountain of Youth; and by contrast, the way she looked after a hard day's housework when nothing had gone right and she had scalded her hand with boiling water, scorched the front of a newly washed shirt with a too hot iron and burnt the stew: one of
those
days. Then there was the sour aftermath of the General Strike. That too played its part. And finally, the realization that his elder daughter was no longer a child but a young woman, and that the younger one would soon be leaving school. What was he going to do about them?

In his father's day, and his grandfather's, the girls would have been looking forward to ‘coming out' with all the fun and festivity that that entailed. But in the post-war world, and on his India service pension, he could neither afford to launch them on a London Season or send them to finishing-schools in France. And who was there for them to marry? His son, whom he barely knew, never brought any of his friends to Three Trees — with the exception of young Sandy who had by now become more or less adopted into the family. And though Bill himself had been invited to debutante dances in country houses and in London (sometimes by people he did not even know!) he had never been asked to take his elder sister along, and as yet she had been invited to few parties and no dances. Anyway, Bill would soon be in Rawalpindi with his Battery…

Tacklow had always known how Bets and I felt about India, and though he would have preferred to stay on in Three Trees and hope one day to be able to buy it, he decided to accept the job of revising Aitcheson's Treaties and go back there. But not alone. He would take all three of us out with him.

To Bets and myself, and to Mother too, it was like winning the Calcutta Sweep or being given the most marvellous present in the world. I remember wanting to cry and then wanting to run out onto the lawn and scream for joy … to stick flowers in my hair and dance bare-foot between the trees in the park. It was too good to be true! I remember Mother flinging her arms about Tacklow's neck and bursting into tears while Bets and I hugged each other and any outlying portions of him that we could get at, before dancing round and round the living-room like a pair of demented March hares. That was a truly
unforgettable day, ‘a day to be marked with a white stone'…

Since the revising of Aitcheson's Treaties was only a temporary assignment, the India Office was prepared to pay Tacklow's fare and travelling expenses, but not ours. So he made a last visit to Upton House to see his father and ask for a loan (not an interest-free one either!) to pay for those three extra passages. He might have known that he'd get a dusty answer. Once again the sum was a very modest one, since even in the 1930s one could get a return ticket from England to India for as little as £40, ‘tourist class'. And as we were still in the Twenties, the sum required was probably no more than £200 — certainly not more than £300 — and it would have saved Tacklow from having to commute part of his pension; which was the only other way he could raise the extra money. However, my miserly old grandfather turned him down flat; not because he hadn't the money and so couldn't afford it — no, no; he wouldn't have liked anyone to think
that.
But ‘as a matter of principle'.

It had been a faint chance, but worth taking. And left with no option, Tacklow duly commuted £100 a year of his pension. He could have done with that extra hundred a year in the days to come, but it paid for our passages and left quite a bit over. Poor Tacklow — darling Tacklow! I have one of his account books in which he wrote down every single one of the pennies he had to count with such care, written in the microscopic handwriting that he had developed because it helped him in decoding ciphers. The sums are so small. And so meticulously listed, down to the last farthing. He really needed to keep track of every penny, for now that he had commuted part of his pension he was left, after tax, with exactly £700 a year for the four of us to live on. This was something that I only discovered much later, because he never talked about money: a legacy from his Victorian youth and childhood I suppose, when men did not talk about money to women and it was considered vulgar to mention it in general conversation.

I don't think even Mother knew how little we had to live on, because he paid all the bills, dealt with all matters of finance and ‘managed' somehow. But it must at times have been very difficult, for he never said ‘no' unless it was impossible to say ‘yes'; and he was incurably generous. He would never lend money to a friend because he held that to do so might lead to losing their friendship and it was always better to give it (if it was there to give) and keep one's friends.
Once, long ago, he had made that mistake when a friend and fellow officer in dire need asked him for a loan. He had instantly cashed in his life insurance — the only savings he had — and handed it over. The recipient, hysterical with relief and gratitude, promised that it would be repaid within a matter of months. It never was. His friend began to avoid him, and shortly afterwards left for England, where he did very well for himself. Some years later, meeting Tacklow by chance in London, he cut him dead.

In the late autumn of that year,
ad
1927 of blessed memory, we made ready to sail for Calcutta on the S.S. ‘City of London'. Oh joy, oh rapture! We were actually going back to India! I was going home — home —
home!
Only one fly sullied the pure ointment of my joy. My weight.

One of the things that I hoped to find in that much-loved country was Love — conjugal love, naturally. (In those days one took that for granted, though nowadays there would appear to be more options floating around.) I didn't much care who the ‘Right Man' for me turned out to be, provided that (a) I could take one look at him and think ‘
That's
the one!' — and fall in love on sight as Tacklow had done on the platform of Tientsin's railway station. That (b) when (not ‘if', you note!) he asked me to marry him, I could reply: ‘I'll be ready in five minutes — no, make it three!' And finally (c) that the Someone to Watch Over Me (hopefully for ever) should be in some India service. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man … provided his work lay in India so that I could live there for at least the next thirty years, I couldn't care less.

You may wonder why I didn't come up with the obvious answer: marry an Indian and stay for good. But at that time attitudes and customs that by now have softened to an extent that would have been undreamt of in the first quarter of the twentieth century were still set hard in ancient moulds, so that that particular solution simply did not enter my calculations. Admittedly I had often thought how pleasant it would be to be able to marry into one of the Indian families whose children had been my friends and playmates, and be accepted into their close-knit, loving, bickering, clannish family circle. But I knew only too well that the very idea of an
Angrezi
daughter-in-law would have horrified the parents of any of the Indian children I knew; while as for
their grandparents — ! To the older generation I would always be a casteless person. Or a
Kafir
, since even the families of my Muslim friends, who were not bothered by caste, would not have cared for the connection.

Possibly, and unfairly, the problems arising from a mixed marriage would have seemed less if it was the husband who was the Westerner and the wife an Indian. Yet even now Western women who marry Eastern men are very rarely ones who have been born and spent their formative years in the East, and who spoke their husband's tongue before their own. Which could be because the native-born knew too much? You cannot have been a child in India, playing with Indian children, talking, thinking, squabbling and making up in their language, not yours, without becoming as aware as they are of the number and importance of religious and social rules that order their lives from birth to death. Taboos that from being handed down by so many successive generations have become, to them, as much a part of their lives as breathing; but which to you, because you are not of their blood, are fatally easy to infringe, however well intentioned you may be.

Much later, I came across several very happy and successful marriages between Western men and Asian women — who make marvellous wives! But not one, the other way round, that has lasted. By the law of averages there must be hundreds that are flourishing; but I am speaking only of those I know. Being native-born, I knew far too much about Indian attitudes to flatter myself by thinking that I could ever make an acceptable or a satisfactory Indian wife. And I also knew that India is a land in which the male is still always in the right. Even though in public its womenfolk may say differently, in private (though they will condole with you) a wife who fails to give her husband a son is still regarded as having let the side down; in addition to giving the poor fellow a valid reason — should he happen to need one — for discarding her and acquiring a newer and younger model. Which has been known to happen; though time changes all things and the future was to see any number of shifts in public opinion that would once have been unthinkable. But as far as this book is concerned I am, for the moment, back in the England of the 1920s. Still gazing mournfully at the reflection of my over-generous contours, mercilessly displayed in one of those hideous Twenties bathing-suits in a looking-glass at
Three Trees, and thinking what a pity it is that I wasn't born in the days of Rubens or Titian when walloping goddesses and roly-poly nymphs were the fashion.