The Sun in the Morning (69 page)

The S.S. ‘City of London' stopped to coal by night off Alexandria. A noisy, messy business; the hot flare of torches accompanied by the chanting of the coalers and clouds of coal-dust that settled in a black film on the ship and the oily sea. By morning the decks were clean again, and ahead of us, lifting up out of a satin sea like an old, familiar friend who has hardly altered at all after a long period of separation, lay Port Said, friendly and welcoming. Here once more were the ‘gully-gully' men — surely the same ones we had seen twice before? The same cheerful, noisy, grinning little boys who bobbed about in the water surrounding the ship and dived for the coins that passengers tossed overboard. The same sellers of rugs and carpets and Turkish Delight. And, once ashore, the familiar, crowded aisles of Simon Artz's shop where Bets and I gleefully bought ourselves new topis to replace those so much smaller ones that, close on nine long years ago, we had flung overboard as we sailed out of Port Said and headed for England, wondering tearfully if we should ever see India again.

The big, white-painted Victorian hotel on the edge of the sands was just as we remembered it, and once again we lunched in its airy dining-room where all the windows stood wide open to catch the warm sea breeze that riffled through the palms and bougainvillaeas. Even the menu seemed the same — as did the lines of bathing-huts out on the hot sands by the water's edge and those stranded blue jellyfish along the shore. Once again we saw the streak of flame and the puff of white smoke as the midday gun was fired, and once again we waited, fascinated, to hear the boom that lagged so far behind the flash and provided a practical demonstration of the relative speeds of light and sound. To our great disappointment the ‘City of London' left after dark, so we passed through the first part of the Suez Canal during the night, and after anchoring for a time in the Bitter Lakes to let the westward-bound traffic go through, reached the Gulf of Suez in the evening, where we went ashore in a Canal Company launch to dine in Port Tewfik at the French Club with an official of the Company who was an old friend of Tacklow's.

In those days many French officials of the Suez Canal Company had houses there, at the eastern end of the Canal. And though tiny Port Tewfik appeared to consist of a single tree-shaded street, lined on one side by gardens and on the other by the Canal itself, while beyond it
on the far bank lay nothing but desert, it was one of the prettiest places you could imagine. A two-by-four flower-scented oasis of green in a waste of blinding sand, rock and salt water. After dinner we strolled back in the moonlight down the long avenue of trees that ends on a point where a crouching lion, carved in stone, stands as a memorial to all those men of the Indian Army who during the First World War lost their lives fighting in the Middle East. Here, sitting on the warm sandstone of the low surrounding wall, we looked out across the Gulf of Suez while our host told us fascinating tales of the early days of the Canal Company. The moonlight and the tree shadows made lacy patterns on the white dust,
sable on argent
, as he talked, and I remember how sweet the air was with the scent of night-flowering stock and tobacco plants, and that across the shimmering expanse of the Gulf we could see a spangle of lights that were the town of Suez and the nearer lights of ships lying at anchor; one of them the ‘City of London'. I was almost half-way home — !

The Red Sea lived up to its name. The temperature must have been somewhere up in the nineties and even my VIP cabin was red-hot, for although there was a brisk wind — enough to curdle the sea with white horses — it was a ‘following wind'. The ship dipped and bucked to it and I was seasick again; but by the time we reached Port Sudan the wind had died and we docked in a flat calm sea. I don't know why we put in at Port Sudan. It is not a place that passenger-liners normally visit and I have never been there since. It was a hot, sandy, treeless and unattractive-looking place, but it had one thing to its credit that ought to have made it a star tourist attraction — and for all I know, may have done so by now. About a mile out from the shore there was a sunken reef, that we were taken out to in a glass-bottomed boat from which we could look down at the coral and the underwater life of the Red Sea.

It was a fantastically beautiful sight. Better by far than anything I have ever seen since. Better even than the Great Barrier Reef. The water was glass-clear and the blazing sunlight, slanting through it, lit up the reef as vividly as though it had been a stage in the glare of footlights, spotlights and floodlights, so that you could see every tinge and tint of colour in the corals and sea anemones, the seaweeds and sea creatures below you. It was like some fabulous fairy-tale garden out of the Arabian Nights, in which the trees were all fashioned from different corals and the birds were jewelled and enamelled fishes that
flitted through the branching coral and hovered over flowerbeds of rose quartz, topaz and aquamarine anemones.

‘Oh, they must have been put out here on purpose!' cried Mother as a portly, turquoise-blue parrot fish swam majestically through a crowd of tiny triangular orange-and-black striped ‘football' fishes. ‘They
can't
have come here by chance! Those tour people must have put them here.' It was a nice thought — considering that we were almost a mile off shore and surrounded by the glittering expanse of the Red Sea — and it conjured up a pleasing picture of a squad of Middle-Eastern entrepreneurs emptying bucketfuls of tropical fish into the ocean in the hope that they would stay put where dumped. Dear Mother!

We could have spent hours there, getting badly sunburnt as we gazed and gazed, gasping and exclaiming at the lovely sight. But the ‘City of London' was only making a very short stop and we had to return. Aden next: the port that to all Anglo-Indians is fixed in their memory like a folk-legend of Empire. Kipling described it in one of his Barrack-room Ballads as ‘Old Aden like a barrick stove that no one's lit for years and years', and in its honour a Scotsman composed a famous pipe melody; one that is still played when the pipers march out at the head of Scottish regiments, cloaks swaying and kilts a'swing to the skirl of ‘The Barren Rocks of Aden'. We ate lunch in a hotel on the hill above the town and took another brief, uneasy look at what we were again told were the dried remains of a mermaid — a real one! (Well, all I can say is that she must have been a very old and unalluring one!) Then back on board and out into the Indian Ocean at last.

Onto that dark, unforgettable, sapphire-blue sea whose water is so clear that you can see the foam bubbles sinking down through it for long seconds like pale-blue marbles, and watch the floating jellyfish, or a school of dolphins at play a yard or two below the surface, effortlessly keeping pace with the slicing bow, while flights of flying fish take off from the top of every wave to skitter away like a handful of winged quicksilver. Sometimes we would see basking sharks; or whales spouting. And always at night the foam was brilliant with phosphorus and the star patterns overhead changed their stations and became far brighter than they had been on even the clearest nights in England. Here again, above me, were the old familiar constellations that Tacklow had first pointed out and named for me on the Ridge at Simla and the flat roof of Curzon House in Delhi. And soon, very
soon, I would see the Southern Cross lift up above the horizon to blaze in that enormous sky. Yes, I was nearly home.

Oh, those long sea voyages eastward! How wonderful they were. And how much do travellers in this hurrying, scurrying age miss as their jet planes whisk them in a single night from London to India without their seeing anything but blackness or a sea of clouds. (That was Cyprus, that was … there goes Arabia!) How fortunate I was to have lived in a time when one travelled by train and ship instead of through the air, and could look and look and look. The ‘City of London' must, I think, have made straight from Aden to Ceylon, since I cannot remember — and will not believe I could have forgotten — stopping at either Karachi or Bombay; especially Bombay. So presumably the City Line ships, being bound for Calcutta, took the shortest route across the Indian Ocean and made their next landfall at Colombo.

I had been assured that once we were clear of the Gulf of Aden I would be free from seasickness at last. And on first sight the Indian Ocean seemed to bear this out, for it was as smooth as the proverbial mill pond and not a breath of wind stirred. But there had been a great storm somewhere far to the southward, and rumours of it reached up across the equator in the form of a long, smooth swell that was invisible to the eye until you had some part of the ship to measure it by. Prone once more in my cabin I could see the dressing-gown hanging on my door swing slowly out towards me as the ship rolled lazily to the swell, and watch it return as slowly as the ‘City of London' slid gently into the trough. From the deck, if you watched the horizon line it would be well above the deck rail one minute, and a minute later it would sink gently below it; yet always so slowly that you were almost unaware of any movement. After a day or two I was able to appear in the dining-saloon and eat a carefully chosen meal (no more porridge; or anything of the same consistency, such as thick soup or stew), always provided I kept my gaze well away from the portholes, beyond which the horizon of that deceptively calm sea rose and fell with the regularity of a soundless metronome.

When the swell diminished Bets and I, true to form, took a hand in getting up an impromptu cabaret show which was performed the night before we reached Ceylon and docked at Colombo. I can only remember the two items that Bets and I thought up and arranged. Costumes being difficult to come by, we recruited a chorus line of six
girls whom we dressed in pyjamas and armed with pillows to do a ‘pillow-fight dance' which ended with the entrance of the Matron (the tallest girl on the ship) and the dancers miming a hasty leap into bed and pretending to be sound asleep. In the second turn we all wore navy-blue skirts, with ‘tropical-white' uniform jackets and peaked caps borrowed from the ship's officers, and sang and danced to ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor' — shades of the children's cabaret show when homeward-bound on the old ‘Ormond'! And now we were on our way back again. It seemed a fitting curtain-raiser to our return to India, and I am happy to say that both items received standing ovations from an uncritical and possibly over-enthusiastic audience.

Ceylon might almost have been India. Coconut palms bowing to the trade winds. Blue seas crashing in lines of foam-frilled breakers on long white beaches. Gold-mohur, frangipani and jacaranda trees, and the lovely sight and heavenly scent of familiar flowers; jasmine, bougainvillaea, orange-blossoms, hibiscus. Bazaars full of dark-skinned, gaily clad crowds, and the trees full of crows and parrots and little chittering
galaries.

We had friends in Colombo; one of them a schoolmate who had gone out to join her parents and was already engaged to be married — a piece of news bringing a whiff of romance that was headier than the scent of flowers. Norah (not her real name) was both stocky and plain. Yet here she was, almost visibly exuding joy and confidence, wearing a diamond on the correct finger and excitedly planning her trousseau. Well, if
her
, there was surely hope for me? It was an intoxicating thought; and going into dinner that night in the long dining-room of the Galleface Hotel, where a band was playing dance music on the terrace outside, I was pleasantly aware of the appraising gaze of a large number of apparently unattached men who took note of us as we made our way to our table. And charmed to see that they outnumbered the women present by at least four to one.

I had always been nuts about Romance. I used to think about it a lot and wonder what it was like to
really
fall in love. I couldn't wait to do so. But despite the success of the cabaret turns, my morale had sunk well below sea-level by the time we reached Ceylon, for I had made the lowering discovery that I was about the only girl on the ‘City of London' (except for Bets, who was too young) who hadn't collected an admirer or fallen in love with someone, however temporarily,
in the course of the voyage. It did not augur well for the future, and I had been forced to the reluctant conclusion that Romance was not for me and I had better face the fact now, and resign myself to ending up a spinster. But twenty-four hours in that enchanting island, aided by the romantic music of a dance band playing under a sky full of stars, the interested glances of the numerous men who were dining at the Galleface that night, and above all, the personable young tea-planter to whom my plain, chunky, hockey-playing ex-schoolmate had become engaged, had made me feel that there was hope for me yet, and I left Ceylon feeling a good deal happier and far less pessimistic about myself and the future.

Our last-but-one port of call was Madras, which stays in my mind as white lines of surf breaking on a long low shore, and clouds of large black-and-scarlet butterflies lilting through the hot, salty air above the jetty where the liner docked. Those butterflies were proof that I had indeed come home, for they were old friends; the same as the ones who used to haunt the poinsettia hedges at Narora. It was wonderful to see them again, and as I stepped off the gangplank and onto the dock I felt like going down on my knees and kissing the ground — as Pope John does when he travels abroad. I could have cried from sheer happiness.

Several Indian friends of Tacklow's, hearing of his return, were on the dock to meet him, and in the charming fashion of their country they hung garlands of flowers, and elaborate necklaces of tinsel-ribbon decorated with gold-embroidered satin medallions, about his neck before embracing him. I kept one of those glittering necklaces, and over half a century later we used it in the filming of
The Far Pavilions.
I still have it. A few days later, after anchoring for a night at the Sandheads that lie several miles out at sea opposite the mouth of the Hoogly River, the S. S. ‘City of London' took up a pilot and started on the last lap of the voyage up the river to Calcutta.