The Sun in the Morning (7 page)

The crack of the shot was not followed by any noticeable movement from the spot he had aimed at, and the orange and white patches were still there; though in a slightly different position. But everyone seemed to be shouting at him, and the Commissioner's elephant came trundling down the line with the Commissioner himself bellowing furiously from his
howdah
,
^*
demanding to know what the devil young Kaye meant by loosing off like that and ruining the whole dam' shoot? ‘Not at nothing, sir,' replied Tacklow politely. ‘It was the tiger. And what's more, I think I must have got it.' And he had. Smack between the eyes. The Commissioner was not pleased: true, he had served for many years in India and had taken part in a great many tiger-shoots, but he had yet to bag his first tiger and this particular one had been specially marked down for him. It should by rights have emerged near the centre of the line, and the sportsmen on either side of him, who knew the form, would certainly have held their fire and let him have first shot. Instead of which the wretched animal had elected to sneak up at the far end of the line and get picked off by a scrubby little ‘griffen' fresh out from home, whose sole function had been to act as a stop.

Tacklow, on the other hand, was delighted. People did not go around armed with loaded cameras in those far-off days, so there is no
photograph of him posing with a foot on the King of the Jungle. But when the skin was cured he sent it to his school-friend, Cull Brinton, then working in the family firm of Brinton's Ltd in Kidderminster, where I saw it many years later — faded by time to a pale beigy-grey and denuded of most of its hair by reason of being walked on for so long. It still retained a claw or two, and Cull gave me one as a memento of his friend and my father's first tiger. That is the one I still have. Tacklow was not a keen
shikari
. Only one more tiger and, much later on, a single tigress, fell victim to his rifle. And I fancy those, like that first one, were lucky flukes, because he was the first to admit that as a marksman he was firmly on the wrong side of ‘average'.

To any animal-lover-cum-conservationist who reads this and immediately suffers a rise of blood-pressure, I would like to point out that back in the last century — and right up to the day that the Raj ended — the tiger population of India was very large. Too large, according to the villagers who suffered most from their depredations. It was only after the British left and every peasant who could afford it bought a gun and a woodman's axe — using the former to kill any wild animal that preyed on his crops and his cattle, and the latter to hack down trees and decimate the jungle in order to increase his holding — that the number of tigers, together with their one-time habitat, began to shrink like a water-hole in a year of drought; almost to vanishing-point. And if anyone does not believe this, I would suggest that they write to the headquarters of the World Wildlife Association and ask for the actual figures: which will (I hope) shock them more than somewhat.

Among my favourite
shikar
stories were those that Tacklow told me about his pad-elephant, Pramekali, who when he was on shooting-leave in the Terai used to present herself daily at
chota-hazri
^*
time before the verandah of whatever forest bungalow he happened to be staying in. Fruit is always served with
chota-hazri
and if there was one food that Pramekali really fancied above all others it was fresh fruit. When Tacklow gave her apples, oranges or bananas, or any ordinary-sized fruit, she would take it elegantly with the tip of her trunk and pop it into her mouth. But when he gave her something like a melon or a papaya (pawpaw, to you!) she would place it carefully on the
ground, and then lift up a foot like a trip hammer and bring it down so gently that instead of smashing the fruit to pulp she merely broke it into suitably-sized pieces.

He told me, too, of a day when the entire line of elephants, plodding in single file through the thick jungle, was brought to a halt by a single king cobra who reared up in the middle of the narrow, marshy track and weaved its spectacled hood and its small, wicked head from side to side in a menacing manner, daring the leading elephant to move one step further. The dare was not accepted and word passed back down the line to send up Pramekali who, being a lady of strong common-sense, took in the situation at a glance and dealt with it competently. She merely plucked a trunkful of the tall grass that formed a high, impenetrable wall on either side of the path, and brandished it in the cobra's face, simultaneously bombarding the creature with fids of wet mud kicked up with her forefeet. The cobra lowered its hood and departed at speed and Pramekali tossed away the grass and led the procession forward. Tacklow always swore he heard her sniff in a contemptuous manner.

Yet another of his Terai stories was about a tiger-shoot in which a half-circle of pad-elephants, each carrying a rough-and-ready
howdah
containing one or two Sahibs in addition to its
mahout
, were listening to the shouts and yells of the approaching beaters and waiting for the tiger to emerge into the clearing ahead, when a porcupine scuttled wildly out of the jungle scrub. Faced with a line of elephants it made straight for the nearest one who, being young and nervous, lost his nerve and attempted to kneel on it.

The porcupine fought back gamely, shooting off quills in a manner that would have done credit to Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, until the elephant, realizing its mistake, scrambled to its feet and began to fling itself to and fro in an endeavour to rid itself of the quills; dislodging its
mahout
, who lost his grip and was catapulted into a clump of pampas grass while his three Sahibs and their
shikari
were thrown from side to side of the
howdah
like peas in a drum. The tiger, emerging suddenly from the jungle, took one shocked look at this disgraceful scene before streaking past the firing-line to disappear into the safety of the tall grass behind — closely followed by the hysterical elephant, the occupants of its
howdah
, the infuriated
mahout
, and the victorious porcupine; in that order. Not a single shot was fired, for
the simple reason that the rest of the assembled company, Sahibs,
shikaris
and
mahouts
alike (and possibly the elephants as well), were so helpless with laughter that when a second tiger loped out of the jungle ahead of the beat, it too got off scot free. The hunt had to be called off and the rest of the day was spent pulling quills out of the elephant and applying arnica to the bruised and battered occupants of its
howdah
.

There were also other kinds of stories; four of which I put into my Mutiny novel,
Shadow of the Moon
, from which they were removed by an editor. So I put them into
The Far Pavilions
instead. There was the story of the Higher-standard Languages Examination that my hero, Ashton, fails; the one about the three drops of water on a biscuit-tin which he used to explain the Trinity; his verdict on the sepoy who shot at an unknown man riding a supposedly stolen horse; and lastly the death of an incautious Brass-hat who took an evening stroll on the Frontier.

It was Tacklow who failed that examination paper and whose
munshi
^*
rushed to his Colonel, insisting that he get back the papers because there must be some mistake — Kaye-Sahib was the best pupil he had ever taught and it was not
possible
that he could have failed! The Colonel complied, and when the papers were returned they were found to have written across them in red ink: ‘
Flawless. This officer has obviously used a crib
'! Unlike my hero, my father sat the exam again, put in a few deliberate errors and passed with higher marks than anyone had ever achieved before; or since.

It was also Tacklow, not Ash, who, when asked to explain the Trinity by a group of his sepoys with whom he had been sitting round a campfire discussing theology (the regiment was out on Autumn Manoeuvres), picked up the lid of a biscuit-tin they had been using as a makeshift frying-pan, and after pouring a drop of water into each of three corners, tilted the lid to make the three separate drops run together, and said: ‘Those three are now one, are they not? Yet all three are still there.' And it was a local missionary doctor who, riding homeward by moonlight on a grey pony, was challenged by a sepoy on sentry duty whose orders were to look out for a grey horse that had recently been stolen. The pony took fright and bolted without giving the doctor a chance to reply, whereupon the sentry, convinced
that this must be the thief and that he was attempting to escape, fired at the rider and fortunately missed — but by such a narrow margin that the infuriated doctor laid a complaint and the sentry was duly brought up for judgment. The sentence delivered by the Colonel, and received with loud and appreciative applause by the rank-and-file, was three days' detention with loss of pay for having shot at a Sahib, and a further twenty for having missed him when he did.

I allowed Wally Hamilton, one of the real-life characters in
The Far Pavilions
, to tell how a red-coated and bemedalled General, who had ridden out from Peshawar to inspect a Frontier Force battalion on manoeuvres, had taken a stroll beyond the perimeter of the camp to admire the view, and been shot by one of the local tribesmen for no better reason than that his red coat presented such an alluring target in that waterless, treeless, dun-coloured region that the temptation to take a pot-shot at him had proved irresistible. That story too I had from Tacklow, who told me that the elders of the tribe had brought the marksman in for judgment, explaining that the General-Sahib had been greatly to blame for putting temptation in the way of a young man with a brand new
jezail
.
^*
No harm, they urged, had been intended.

A conversation that I put into
Shadow of the Moon
in fact took place between Tacklow and his Pathan orderly in the 1890s. The orderly had just returned from the rifle range, and Tacklow, having asked him how he'd done at the butts and been told that he had scored a bullseye, two inners and two outers, said that he presumed they were in the opposite order: the outers first and the bullseye last, since the reverse would be poor shooting. ‘Not so,' returned the Pathan grimly. ‘In
my
country it is the first shot that counts; if you miss with that you may not get a chance to fire another!'

Senior Indian Army officers in those days were apt to be elderly and liverish grey-beards, and on one frontier campaign (the border was seldom at peace) Tacklow and his Subadar-Major and about a hundred
jawans
^†
of the 21st Punjabis, who were perched on a stony ridge overlooking tribal territory, were kept waiting for over an hour for the arrival of the Brigadier in charge of operations — that dignitary being so old and fat and infirm that the only way he could reach the
ridge was with the help of three hefty young sepoys, two of whom towed him from in front while the third pushed hard from behind. When at last they made it, puffing and panting in the chill air of early dawn, the Subadar-Major turned to Tacklow and remarked acidly in Punjabi: ‘Now that all the halt and lame have arrived, perhaps we may be permitted to begin the battle?'

Tacklow got on with Indians. All Indians; irrespective of religion, caste or kind. He felt completely at ease in their company, for being one of those fortunate individuals who can pick up languages as easily as other people pick up pebbles off a beach, he never had the slightest difficulty in communicating with them. He spoke and wrote nine major languages besides his own (eleven, if one counts Latin and Greek, which he himself would not have thought of including, since in his day anyone with a public school education was automatically expected to have a sound working knowledge of both). The nine were French, German, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic, Hindustani (which included Hindi and Urdu), Pushtu and Chinese — Mandarin as well as Cantonese. In addition to these he spoke eighteen dialects; which by no means covers all those spoken in India and her border countries, but should do to go on with. As a consequence of this he acquired a great many lifelong friends in far-away places. Yet he was never any good at making friends among his own people. Partly, I suspect, because the attitude of some of the British in India irritated him, but largely because he was, at heart, a loner. He did not really
need
other people. … Take, for instance, the case of the fort —

Somewhere in the vast area in which his regiment operated in the 1890s there was a small, isolated and almost forgotten fort which, at that time, it was the unpopular duty of the 21st Punjabis to garrison. This they did with a token force consisting of one junior British officer and a small detachment of
jawans
who faced the unenviable prospect of spending three months there before being relieved by the next batch; and so on. … The assignment was dreaded by one and all, for the ancient fort lay in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an endless sea of sand dotted with small islands of pampas grass and outcrops of rock, and in the opinion of the Punjabis a term of garrison duty there was the equivalent of three months' solitary in a particularly spartan jail. In the course of time it came to the turn of Second-Lieutenant C. Kaye to take over this unenviable chore, and accompanied by a
reluctant but resigned platoon of Punjabis he set off into the wide and sandy yonder. Only to put in for an extension when the three months were up.

Such a thing had never happened before in the history of the regiment, but the astonished Adjutant (having first made sure that young Kaye had not gone off his head) agreed to his taking over the new platoon. And at the end of the next spell of duty received another request for a further extension. Tacklow eventually succeeded in spending nine months there — and would probably have been quite content to spend the rest of his life there had his seniors not decided that enough was enough. He told me that he enjoyed every minute of it because, apart from inventing a number of new and original ploys to keep the platoon interested and on their toes, it gave him time to think and read and write. And also, of course, because he quite literally did not know what it was like to be bored; which is a trait that I have been fortunate enough to inherit from him, and for which I have always been truly grateful.