by M. M. Kaye
The play, entitled Vanity, was about a spoilt musical comedy star who gets her come-uppance (that’s all I remember about the plot), and the action throughout took place in the drawing-room of her flat in Mayfair. This gave us a lovely chance to discard a rough sketch put forward as a suggestion by an old acquaintance of ours, Mr de la Rue Brown, the manager of the Gaiety. The ‘de la Rue’ had been suggested many years ago by some humorist commenting on the manager’s habit of standing outside the door into the green-room, which gave on to the Mall, smoking a long cheroot for the larger part of the day. Brown had instantly adopted it. No one knew how old he was, but he had been the manager in Kipling’s day, and according to himself, for many years before that. He had always seemed to us to look as old as Rip Van Winkle, and he still did. He hadn’t changed a whisker. What’s more, he was still the old tyrant he had always been. Fortunately he had a soft spot for us, and did not raise too much fuss when we vetoed his suggestion for the standing set, and substituted one that, believe it or not, was considered positively daring.
Brown’s idea of the décor of a theatrical star’s Mayfair flat had been incredibly dowdy and pedestrian and, judging from photographs of previous drawing-room comedies put on by the Simla ADS, exactly like every one of its predecessors. Bets and I threw out the chintz-covered chairs and sofa and the matching curtains, and substituted draped satin, a couch piled with cushions, and ‘pouffes’ in place of chairs, added one of those then fashionable floppy Parisian pierrot dolls, and topped it off by muralling the walls with decorative blossom-trees and weeping willows à la Erté.
That set was a terrific success, and every night of its run earned a spontaneous round of applause when the curtain rose on an empty stage for Act I. Our dress designs were equally novel and gained us a good many approving paragraphs in the press; though they were the cause of a spectacular row between the leading lady, a Mrs Jane Franklin, and the number two lead, whose name has escaped me.
My part in the play happened to be as the curtain rose, and on the first night the applause for the set very nearly led to my missing my entrance, because this was something I was not prepared for. The scenario called for the curtain to rise on an untenanted room in which a telephone had just started ringing …
Brief pause (I had been instructed to count five slowly) and then: ‘Enter briskly a French maid from centre door. She crosses stage to where the telephone stands concealed by the skirts of a crinolined doll’ (a ghastly but very popular 1920s gimmick) ‘and picks up phone: “Allo? Allo?“’ — and so on. But that round of applause for the set had not been anticipated by anyone; and it drowned out the telephone. I dithered wildly on the far side of the door and was finally pushed on by our flustered producer, and very nearly earned a second ovation for my dress. I had designed myself a classic maid’s outfit, complete with very saucy cap and distinctly frivolous apron but in lilac and lace instead of the traditional black and white. It was at least original and, combined with that particular set, very effective.
When it came to designing the Act I outfit for the leading lady, Bets and I decided that she ought to wear something really arresting that would establish her star-status on sight. We came up with lounging pyjamas, which at that date were still considered to be a very daring innovation. (Trousers? — very ‘fast’!)
Slacks and pyjamas for women were still a fairly new idea in the world of modern fashion, and despite the fact that in Asia women had been wearing them for centuries, they had not yet been taken up by Anglo-India, so the pair we designed for Mrs Franklin created a mild sensation. Since the set and its furnishing was pastel-coloured, we had the lounge pyjamas made up in black satin, decorated with a modernistic design of flowers painted on to the material with ordinary oil paint, and both Mrs Franklin and the director were delighted with the effect. Not so the second lead …
The row blew up during a rehearsal in a building called the Chalet — a sort of annexe to the men-only United Services Club further up the hillside, where dances were held twice a week, and parties were occasionally thrown by members of the Club. I had brought along a coloured sketch of the trousered outfit, and while our leading lady and the cast applauded it, our number two lead was simply furious. This, it turned out, was because her part called for her to make a brief appearance in the third and last act, daringly clothed in nothing but (wait for it) a nightdress! Believe it or not, she had apparently been looking forward to creating a sensation by rushing on stage in such intimate garb. But now, she complained bitterly, if Mrs Franklin were to make her first appearance in Act I wearing a pyjama suit (which incidentally covered her up from top to toe in black satin and was about as unrevealing an outfit as you could wish for), it would completely ruin the impact of her own entrance in Act III, and she wasn’t going to stand for that. Either Mrs Franklin turned down the pyjamas or she, Mrs Whozit, would leave the cast — So there!
Tacklow had warned us that amateur theatricals have a knack of leading to an incredible amount of animosity and in-fighting over the most trivial of questions, and had illustrated from a hilarious list of personal experiences, designed to encourage us to watch our step, and, like Brer Rabbit, ‘lay low and say nuffin’. His stories had made us laugh a lot, but most of them seemed so absurd that I think we both took them with a large pinch of salt. But here we were, in our first grown-up show at the Gaiety, bang in the middle of a dust-up of fantastic proportions, complete with tears, fireworks, hysteria and threats of a walk-out. It was unbelievable, and forgetting Tacklow’s stories of similar shenanigans and his advice as to lying low and saying nothing, I unwisely rushed in where St Michael himself might have feared to tread. I suggested that there was a gap of a good two-and-three-quarters of an act between the leading lady’s first entrance and the brief appearance of the number two seed wearing a demure white nightdress. Surely no one in the audience would, by then, remember what the leading lady had been wearing, let alone make any connection between very mod black satin lounging pyjamas and a very ordinary nightgown!
This tactless olive-branch was not well received. It merely incensed both combatants even further, and they turned on me, as the designer. At which point the director, who had been horrified by the threats of resignation, entered the fray with disastrous results. He suggested that as the stage directions did not include lounging trousers, but did mention the nightgown, perhaps — er — perhaps Mrs Franklin might …? But alas, Mrs F. fancied herself no end in those black satin piggies, and nothing was going to induce her to part with them. If Mrs Whateverhernamewas didn’t like them, she knew what she could do about it. Her part was not all that important anyway, and there must be dozens of girls in Simla who would be able to take it on at a moment’s notice.
At this point the director, panic-stricken, re-entered the fray like a rocket. Bets and I, finding ourselves temporarily ignored by all three combatants, beat a hasty retreat up the narrow staircase that led to the upper rooms of the Chalet, and half-way up collapsed on to the steps at a point from where we could listen unseen to the battle raging below, and were overcome by gales of helpless giggling. I hadn’t laughed so much since my school days, and I can’t think why the whole affair should have struck us both as being hilariously funny. Perhaps because we were both still young enough to think of our elders and betters as ‘grown-ups’, or because we hadn’t quite believed Tacklow’s stories about the temperamental fireworks that so frequently enlivened anything to do with amateur theatricals. Yet here we were, seeing a magnificent example of them on our very first show.
I don’t remember how the fracas ended. But Mrs Franklin obviously won on points, because she wore the pyjama-suit in Act I during the entire run of the show (one week!) and added a very long ivory cigarette-holder for extra effect (and I don’t remember any of the male members of the cast complaining that she had ruined their bit of business in Act II where they light up a cigarette). The nightdress in Act III got a round of applause all to its little self, possibly provided by Mrs Whozit’s husband
and her friends and supporters but more likely because, believe it or not, in those innocent days, to run on to a stage wearing nothing but a nightgown (even such a non-see-through as Mrs Whozit’s) was considered pretty risqué and almost tantamount to streaking. The Simla audience loved it.
Since Sandy had become an ADC in attendance on the Governor of the Punjab, Bets and I got asked to all the more frivolous dances and parties at Barnes Court, the Governor’s summer residence, while Mother, with a reluctant Tacklow in tow, had a lovely time going to all the sixteen-button-glove affairs — balls, white-tie dinner parties, lunch and garden parties. I had thought Delhi was a very social place. But it was nothing to Simla. There were dances and fancy-dress balls given by the Most Hospitable Order of the Black Hearts — founded in 1891 and consisting of a Grand Master, a Prelate and Knights, all bachelors or grass-widowers (married men whose wives had not been able to accompany them out to India were permitted to qualify as Knights Bachelor).
The Prince of Wales (the one better known as the Duke of Windsor) was made a temporary member during his ill-fated visit to India.
The object of the members was to repay collectively the hospitality they had received individually from Simla hostesses, and the parties they gave were certainly memorable. Their uniforms on these occasions consisted of black knee-breeches with evening dress, a red shoulder cape ornamented with the black heart of their order, and another black heart worn suspended from a red ribbon around their necks. The motto of the order, which appeared on all their invitations and official stationery was: ‘He is not so — as he is painted’, the missing word being only known to members. The story goes that the first Grand Master and his Knights, having chosen a motto, arranged for a painter in the Simla bazaar to paint it tidily on a large notice board that would be displayed on the occasion of any Black Heart festivity. The industrious fellow obeyed, but his English was very sketchy and he mixed up two of the words, transposing the fifth and the last; when this was pointed out, he blotted out the fifth, leaving a rather grubby blank (the paint underneath had not been dry), and the first of a long list of Grand Masters, instead of hitting the ceiling, shouted with laughter and told him to leave it like that, with a tidy black bar in place of the grubby grey blotch. The Order would keep the missing word a secret and let outsiders try guessing what it was.
My own bet — knowing India’s fondness for muddling up sentences — is that the original motto was to have been ‘He is not so black as he is painted’* and that the sign-painter from the bazaar was worried by the idea that any sahib should seriously wish to paint himself black. (Why black, for goodness sake? Why not, if he really wants to be a different colour, a nice shade of copper? Or better still blue, like the Lord Krishna?) But to become a Kala ardmi, a black man? No! There must be some mistake, and it was up to him to put it right. I bet it was that.
My first invitation from the Black Hearts in Simla (they had hosted at least two in Delhi) was to a fancy-dress ball, preceded by a dinner party at the United Services Club. Other parties for invitees were being held all over Simla, and as far as I remember the main shindig was timed to begin after the dinner parties were over and the guests given time to arrive at the Chalet, where on this occasion — and possibly on others as well — all the guests, from the Viceroy and his wife to the most unimportant teenager present (who might, that year, have been Bets) were, on arrival, marshalled into line and made to make their entrance into the ballroom one by one and feet first, through a pair of black curtains and down a chute, at the bottom of which two masked Knights of the Order waited to catch them and hoist them to their feet. The Black Heart parties were nothing if not informal.
I had been to the Bachelors’ Ball in Delhi dressed as the young Queen Victoria, and I went to this one as my great-grandmother, the mother of the Sophia with whom Tacklow used to spend fishing holidays in Scotland when he was still only a schoolboy. (There is a portrait of her by Raeburn — now somewhere in America, I gather — in Regency dress and with her hair cut short and curled and held up on the top of her head by a filet in the fashion made famous by Madame Récamier in the days following the French Revolution, and first made popular in England by the notorious Lady Caroline Lamb, who, having publicly snubbed Lord Byron at a London ball, fell violently in love with him and created one of the greatest scandals of the Regency years.)
Since Tacklow was against cutting my hair off, I curled the ends and piled it up on the top of my head, and Mother lent me her opal tiara, necklace and earrings for the occasion, which made my evening.
Since time is running out for me, I shall not attempt to track events down by laborious research, but just tell them as things that happened to me in Simla — date unknown. There was the occasion, for instance, when Simla was hit by a smallpox epidemic, and we were all ordered to be vaccinated.
The majority complied, and I remember the shock Bets and I got, climbing up the hill from the lower road below the main bazaar and about to bypass the Cecil Hotel, when we remembered that a particular friend of ours, one Walter Harvey of the F and P, was staying there. We decided to look him up, and having been told by the man on the desk that Mr Harvey was in, we went along and banged on the door. Walter’s voice demanded to know who was there, and having found out, invited us cordially to come in. When we did so we found that his sitting-room was empty, but that the door into his bedroom was ajar: ‘Come on in,’ urged Walter, ‘if you don’t mind seeing me in pyjamas. I’m in bed.’ We pushed open his door and went in, to be greeted with enthusiasm, until, somewhat belatedly, he said: ‘Hey — don’t come too close! You’d better stay by the door. The doctor says I’ve got smallpox.’
He had too! It turned out that of all the people at Army Headquarters, plus their wives and families, Walter had been the only one who refused flatly to be inoculated. I forget what his reasons were, but they can’t have been merely frivolous. After all, he was an intelligent chap. But he was the only European in Simla to disobey that order; and he was the only one to catch smallpox. He survived. And before one of the rabid anti-Raj lot starts yowling about ‘racial discrimination’ — yes, everyone in Simla, and throughout the bazaars, who did not refuse to be inoculated as Walter had done, was inoculated, and the epidemic was contained.
There must have been a fair number of casualties among the native population, as smallpox is endemic throughout India, and compulsory inoculation would not have been possible in a place like Simla Bazaar. But only one of the Europeans whom we all knew died of smallpox that year, and I am not sure if she was involved in any way with that particular epidemic. She was the pretty niece of Sir Ernest and Lady Burden, who had been invited to spend a season with them and, like Walter, had refused flatly to be inoculated. Her reason, we were told, was religious. I don’t know if that was merely a rumour or the truth. What is true is that the only two ferengis who refused inoculation both caught smallpox. The rest of us went around with itching arms and got away with it. Maybe the Lord was underlining the point that He helps those who help themselves? After all, one of His apostles was a physician, and surely He would not have included Luke among the chosen if He had disapproved of doctors? (No; I haven’t forgotten that He also chose a traitor. Or that He provided us with brains and a mind of our own.)
Bob Targett was up in Simla for the hot season. I saw quite a lot of him and discovered, with relief, that there was no slightest stirring of that previous romance; or of embarrassment either. Only lots of liking still. Which was just as well for me, as it didn’t take long to discover that Bob was already heavily involved in a rather tricky romance with a gay grass widow whose charms — and experiences! — I could not have hoped to rival. But what with Bob and Sandy and Walter and a few other bachelor acquaintances, we were never short of partners at any of the many dances and dinner parties, and though for once I was completely fancy-free, and had been, surprisingly, ever since the disappearance of Donald from the scene, I must have been in love with life instead of in love with love that season. B
ecause one of my clearest memories is of walking — no, not walking, dancing — dancing, skipping, running, along the Mall from the Combermere Bridge to the Cecil Hotel on a misty afternoon. I’ve forgotten what errand I was on, or if I was just out for a walk. All I remember was the feel of light raindrops, (in Scotland they would call it a Scotch mist) fingering my face and running down my mackintosh, and a wonderful sense of lightness and happiness. I had come back to my starting point, and found that all was right with my world.
* ‘Devils are not so black as they are painted’ — (?) Thomas Lodge.
6
‘Song of India’
Chapter 21
I ‘came of age’ that year. A magic date which in those days was twenty-one, but has now been reduced to eighteen, and already looks like being reduced to sixteen. The occasion was celebrated with a dinner party and dance at the Cecil Hotel, and I remember, with regret, that when my parents asked me what I wanted for my twenty-first birthday present, I asked for an evening dress that I had seen in one of the European shops on the Mall, and, of all the silly things, a wildly expensive ostrich-feather fan to go with it. Tacklow did his best to persuade me to choose something that would last. But I had set my heart on that dress, and even more so on that fan, for huge ostrich-feather fans were all the rage that year, and the Tatler and the Sketch and all the glossy European magazines were full of lovely ladies carrying them.
