Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  The awful thing was that it was funny. I had so wanted the performance to go without a hitch on this special occasion, and this ghastly man had ruined it. But exasperated as we were, neither Judy nor I could stop laughing; we practically rolled in the aisles. The only person who could see nothing amusing in it was our poor leading lady, who was furious. She was to become even more so during the last act, which wasn’t really the inebriated Mr M.’s fault so much as whoever was in charge of the scene-shifting. (Not us, thank heaven.)

  In the last act Marguerite is discovered in prison, about to be hanged for the murder of her illegitimate child. This was Lady Crosthwaite’s big scene and she looked terrific, togged up in a long white robe and with her splendid blonde wig (hitherto done up in plaits) loose and flowing all down her back. The prison cell called for no special scenic effects, and Judy and I, still weak from giggling, were congratulating ourselves that at least there was nothing here that the inebriated Mr M. could ruin. We wronged him. Our scene-shifters, understandably flustered by the weird goings-on, had failed to notice that the backdrop had not been lowered to its full extent, and that there was a gap of at least six inches between the bottom of the dungeon wall and its floor (an error that must be fairly easy to make, because years later I saw exactly the same thing happen at a London theatre, on a very star-studded occasion indeed! — the opening night of Sir James Barrie’s last play, The Boy David, starring Elisabeth Bergner in the title role).

  Since the last act of Faust takes place in the cell of a medieval prison, and the backdrop in question was painted to represent dark stonework, the scene was pretty gloomy and that six-inch slit showed up as a brilliant strip of light. Well, that wouldn’t have mattered too much, because sooner or later someone back-stage would have spotted it and had it eliminated. But unfortunately, the interval till someone in the front of the house hurried round to get the backdrop lowered was a good deal longer than one would suppose, because it hadn’t occurred to anyone that it wouldn’t be corrected in double-quick time. Glaringly obvious to the audience, it was, on account of the darkness on the other side, barely visible to those back-stage. By the time we had woken up to the fact that the back-stage lot hadn’t spotted it, and managed to get around to the stage door and sounded the alarm, the harm had been done. For on the far side of the canvas our Mephistopheles, still as merry as a mayfly, had decided to dance a jig in time to the music, and the sight of a pair of long-toed scarlet slippers, attached to two or three inches of scarlet legs, performing an Irish jig, proved too much for the audience. They began to laugh, and found they couldn’t stop. Gales of laughter spread through the house and once again the wretched Marguerite found herself trying to sing to an audience that was literally rolling about in its seats if not actually in the aisles. And once again, although I could willingly have strangled that infuriating man, I found myself laughing as helplessly as any of the convulsed audience.

  Fortunately, this state of affairs didn’t last very long. As soon as the back-stage lot found out what was going on, the backcloth was hastily lowered and the scene returned to the gloom of the dungeon. The audience mopped its eyes and pulled itself together, a shaken and furious Marguerite and a rapidly disintegrating Faust got on with the final act, and when at last the curtain came down, it fell to thunderous applause, presumably because the audience was feeling slightly ashamed of itself and was trying to reward the other members of the cast for gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds. As for Judy and me, who could have wept for the ruin that had been made of the scenery and effects we had been so proud of and had taken so much trouble over, we had to admit that in spite of our rage and disappointment we had laughed ourselves into stitches, and that it had been one of the most entertaining nights of our lives.

  We were fated to have at least one more of the same in Simla, this time at the Gaiety Theatre, when Lady Crosthwaite (late Marguerite) put on, for a single night, a performance entitled In a Persian Garden. It was in aid of some charity or other, I think for Lady Dufferin’s Fund for Medical Aid to the Women of India. And I don’t know how Judy and I came to be mixed up in it, because I can’t remember doing any scene painting or costume designing for it. Yet we were obviously in on it from the beginning because we attended every rehearsal, and were always on call, for some reason or another.

  The show consisted of a series of tableaux vivants taken, vaguely, from someone’s illustrations to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and each tableau was accompanied by a singer who sang the matching quatrains, standing in front of the curtains which parted, when the singer had finished, on the appropriate tableau. I imagine that Lady Crosthwaite must have been one of the singers along with some of the cast of Faust. Lady C. was the mainspring of the whole show, and she cracked the whip with enthusiasm over anyone who had anything whatever to do with it, beginning with old de la Rue Brown, who, having managed the theatre from way back in the 1880s, considered that he owned it and did not take kindly to being chivvied about. Neither did the Viceroy’s bandmaster, whose men were again acting as orchestra, and had taken to referring bitterly to the proceedings as: ‘This ‘ere Perishing Garden!’

  Lady C., besides being a notable battle-axe, had considerable social pull, which she had used to co-opt a number of young Indian royals to appear in two of the tableaux. These privileged infants would turn up for rehearsals guarded by phalanxes of retainers, and decked with the most amazing jewels, which had an alarming habit of coming detached from their settings or simply falling off as the result of inadequate fastenings, to the fury of Mr Brown, who was forced to turn sweeper and personally brush out the premises after every rehearsal, or risk having the resident sweeper and cleaners accused of pocketing some missing trinket worth a small fortune. Not, I feel sure, that the royals or their attendants would have noticed the loss, or troubled to make a fuss about it if they had. Probably the jewels were only their second-best, and hardly worth bothering about. Or that was the impression I got one evening when I trod on an emerald and diamond earring, fringed with seed pearls, and handed it over to the senior lady-in-waiting in charge of its four-year-old owner. She didn’t actually say, ‘What — that old thing?’ but I got the impression if she’d been the one to tread on it, she would have dropped it into the nearest waste-paper basket. It was the sort of incident that made me realize how incredibly, fantastically rich most of the ruling princes were.

  The dress rehearsal of the ‘perishing garden’, which had an invited audience, many of them relatives of the cast, turned out to be even more hilarious than the last night of Faust, and if it is true that ‘a bad dress rehearsal makes a good play’, then the play ought to have been one of the best ever, for nothing seemed to go right. Lady Crosthwaite (never the most tactful of women) lost her cool and bit everyone within sight, which had the unfortunate result of inciting several insulted males to retaliate in kind, while reducing the rest to nervous jellies.

  There was a short sharp encounter early on with Mr Brown over the lighting of one of the tableaux, ‘Myself when Young’ — the part of ‘myself’ being taken by the obedient but bewildered heir to one of Rajputana’s greatest kingdoms, while the accompanying quatrain was slightly unsuitably sung by a sahib in full evening dress, white tie and tails, the lot. The audience enjoyed the encounter to the hilt.

  For some reason Lady C. took a dislike to the lighting of this tableau. Too yellow, I think. She rose from her seat in the stalls like some over-clothed Venus rising from the waves, and, ignoring the invited audience, called a halt to the proceedings and shouted authoritatively for Mr Brown. When that wizened character eventually sidled out from the wings she demanded that he should scrub the yellow lights and try the amber. This was eventually done, only to be greeted by a howl of horror: ‘No, no, no! Mr Brown. That’s terrible! No we can’t have that, try the pink.’ The pink was duly tried, with even less success, as was the green, and Lady C. eventually called for blue. Nothing happened. ‘Blue, Mr Brown,’ repeated Lady C. fortissimo. The lights rem
ained stubbornly green. ‘Mister Brown!’ trumpeted our directrice, ‘I said I wanted to try the blue lights. Blue! Mr Brown! Blue lights.’

  Old Mr Brown’s head protruded from the wings looking exactly like an elderly tortoise in spectacles: ‘Ain’t no bloody blue lights!’ snarled Mr Brown, and stumped away to go to ground again in his office. The audience was entranced.

  The incident of the blue lights, however, was not the only unrehearsed side-show that evening for, owing to a deplorable lack of rapport between the curtain-raiser and the scene-changers, the curtains on two separate occasions parted prematurely, disclosing work still in progress. On the first occasion, the lovers who were supposed to be sitting underneath a bough and sharing a flask of wine, a book of verse and thou, prior to singing in the wilderness, had dutifully taken up their positions. But far from being alone together, they were accompanied by a couple of beefy stage-hands in their shirt-sleeves who, oblivious of all else, were engaged in hammering nails into the bough in order to keep it securely in place. Their horror at being suddenly put on display to a considerable audience was greeted with a howl of mirth, which rose to a crescendo when both men made a simultaneous dive for the wings in the manner of a rugby tackle. That really did bring the house down. It was greeted with yells of ‘Goal’ and ‘Off-side’ and similar tribal noises.

  I don’t know why this sort of thing should be so funny, but it is; and Judy and I were not the only two who, from our privileged seat in one of the boxes, fell about laughing, and once we had started, could not stop. From then on, to the embarrassment of the cast, every scene — and every song too! — was greeted with gales of mirth and uproarious applause, and I can only suppose that this demoralized everyone back-stage. The same style of incident that had ruined the earlier tableau was repeated, to even greater enthusiasm on the part of the house, by the most elaborate of the tableaux: the one that was supposed to show the ‘Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep’ and which happened to involve the greatest number of juvenile royals.

  This time a different assortment of back-stage helpers, also in shirt-sleeves and wearing the most deplorable trousers, were disclosed moving busily to and fro, backs to the audience and bottoms in the air, placing gorgeous cushions and bolsters in position, and oblivious of the fact that several of the ‘court ladies’ were clearly hissing between clenched teeth and rigidly smiling mouths: ‘Get off the stage!’ — the curtain’s up! Get off the stage!’ Well, they got off in due course, and by much the same rugby-tackle fashion as the others had used — a frantic dive into the wings and shouts of ‘Goal!’ from, I suspect, several members of the Viceroy’s band. The show itself, when it came on, was a great success and raised a nice, solid sum in aid of the charity it had been put on for. But the paying customers, who greeted every song and its accompanying tableau with polite applause, didn’t get half the fun for their money as the invited audience that had laughed themselves into hiccups over the dress rehearsal.

  Among the many other things that I remember about my return to Simla as a grown-up are two people and a story. One of the people was a young man who was to become known to half the world as ‘Jai’, His Highness the Yuveraj of Jaipur — I don’t think he was the Maharajah yet — an incredibly handsome young man and every bit as charming as a Prince in a fairy-tale. The other was a blond and good-looking young Scandinavian by the name of Aage Thaarup, who had taken rooms at the Grand Hotel and set up in a modest way as a hatter. (He eventually became hatter to the Queen and half the fashionable ladies in London.) I was fascinated by those hats, and even more so by the fact that the young designer had a habit of trying them on himself. Greatly daring — and having saved up for several months — I ‘bespoke’ one in my price-range, a very small black felt hat rather in the style of a pancake. I remember him telling me severely, ‘Now remember, in zis hat you have only ze one eye!’ He then jammed it on his own head, well over his left eye, to illustrate, looking, I have to admit, far more attractive in it than I did, for he, like Jai, was a most beautiful young man and a pleasure to look at.

  The story was one that was told me by old Mr Bevan-Petman, when I was staying with him and his wife in the summer of — I think — 1929. They were old friends of my parents and lived during the summer in one of the oldest of the Simla houses, a big three-storeyed wooden house with wide, glassed-in verandahs and large dark inner rooms, built on and partly into the steep hillside above Davico’s ballroom and the road that led to the Lucker bazaar and Snowdon. From those glassed-in verandahs one looked out on to a most wonderful view, fold after fold of foothills and valleys stretching away on to the high mountains and the long line of snow-peaks that lay along the horizon. The house was surrounded by a small flower garden and a well-stocked vegetable one, that like all Simla gardens appeared to be pegged to the steep hillside by a few tall deodars. Above these lay the thickly wooded acres of Jacko Hill.

  All Simla gardens, in particular those on the slopes of Jacko, were apt to be raided at frequent intervals by bands of the monkey-folk — the brown, thievish, noisy bandar-log who haunt the forests and chase each other across the tin-roofed houses. But I had been a guest of the Bevan-Petmans’ for at least a week before it occurred to me that during that time I had not seen a single monkey on their premises. And this at a time when the cherries were ripe, not to mention the peas and french beans.

  Normally Simla is as full of the bandar-log as a London garden is of sparrows, since Jacko, the hill that many of the houses are built on, has on its highest point a temple, complete with a resident priest, dedicated to the monkey god, Hanuman, who holds a prominent place in Hindu mythology. The top-storey windows of all our houses, and many of the lower ones too, were screened by wire-netting to keep the bandar-log from stealing anything that happened to catch their fancy and was small enough to carry away — items such as spoons and forks, articles of clothing, and anything edible. Groups and troops of them were an integral part of Simla’s scenery, and the clatter and clash of half-a-dozen monkeys chasing each other across the red, corrugated-tin roofs of our houses became as familiar a sound to us as the shrill whistling of the kite-hawks that wheeled above the bazaar, or the sough of the wind through pine-needles.

  I began to look out for the creatures, but though the rest of Simla was still as infested by monkeys as ever, I never saw a single one on the roofs or in the gardens or the orchard of the Bevan-Petmans’ house, and one day, having commented on this to my host, he told me the reason.

  It seems that until a few years earlier the house and grounds had been plagued by hordes of monkeys who would descend like locusts upon the kitchen garden and the orchard, as soon as the produce of either was nearing the point where it would be ripe enough to pick, and strip it bare. They seldom ate the flowers, but they enjoyed tearing the heads off them and would rampage through the garden like a gang of nasty little boys, snatching off the heads of the roses and carnations or whatever was in flower, and pelting each other with them. And despite all the careful netting of vegetables and fruit, the erecting of scarecrows, the yard-strings that when touched activated rattles, plus a dozen other tricks of the trade, very little survived their depredations. Nor did wire-screens succeed in keeping the house completely secure from their pilfering fingers.

  I don’t remember for certain what it was that pushed the harassed household to the breaking point, but at a guess it was probably an incident that old Mrs Bevan-Petman described to me with considerable bitterness, and which after a lapse of several years still rankled: the sight of a large dog-monkey sitting on the bough of a pine tree crooning to itself as it carefully pulled to pieces a satin and lace petticoat that she had bought only an hour before at a sale of embroidery by the pupils of a Mission School in Kalimpong, and had left for not more than five minutes on one of the verandah tables, still wrapped. I bet that was the final straw, and I can just see Mrs B.-P. running screaming to her husband demanding vengeance. She was not a patient lady. Anyway, whatever the cause, it was sufficient
to send her husband reaching for his gun …

  Bevan-Petman senior was known to be one of the best shots in India. But until now, however severe the provocation, he had never even considered shooting one of the bandar-log, for the simple reason that a great many Hindu citizens of India regarded them as sacred — or at least semi-sacred — by reason of being under the special protection of Hanuman. But by this time, he had had it. If the opposition wanted war they should have it, and from then on he shot monkeys. With, I may say, the approval of his servants; particularly his Muslim head mali, who, given any encouragement, would have started shooting them long ago.

  The bandar-log took a little time to realize that they were up against serious opposition, but as their casualties mounted the message finally got across, and their raids on the Bevan-Petman estate got fewer and farther between until, at long last (I believe it took a full year) they ceased altogether, and there came a time when for several months at a stretch not a single member of the tribe was either seen or heard on the premises. The B.-P.s congratulated themselves on their victory and were a trifle scornful towards fellow-sufferers who flinched from copying their tactics. But they congratulated themselves too soon.