by M. M. Kaye
At this point the Major’s patience snapped, and he sat up in bed and said loudly, ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake make up your minds whose it is, and let me get some sleep!’ A frozen silence descended on the next-door room and was not broken again. By the time the Major surfaced and came out to have his breakfast next morning, the couple in the end room had not waited to be identified, but had ‘folded their tents like the Arab, and silently stolen away’.
There are several versions of this story, which leads me to suppose that a similar occurrence happened fairly frequently, probably every time that a casual visitor, unacquainted with the acoustic hazards of the wooden walls of Gulmarg’s rooms, arrived in that enchanting resort unexpectedly. The last time that Bets and I visited this much-loved haunt of our youth — it was more than sixteen years after the British too had packed their belongings and silently stolen away — we had booked rooms at Nedou’s Hotel and were charmed to discover that the single-plank pine wall that separated our bathrooms was not only thin enough to allow us to chat to each other while we were in our baths, but there was actually a knot hole in it large enough for me to hand my cake of soap through it to Bets when she discovered that she had not been supplied with one of her own.
But on looking back across the years, I think the best description of the flimsiness of the partitions that divided visitor from visitor in the pine-built huts of Gulmarg and the houseboats of Srinagar was voiced by a precious young man, newly arrived from England and experiencing the drawbacks of life in Kashmir for the first time: ‘But my dears, I assure you! I can hear the people in the next room changing their minds!’
One learned to live with it. It certainly made life more interesting and was quite possibly the main reason why, ever since the families of the Sahib-log first took to escaping to the hills to avoid the hot weathers, the hill-stations they favoured acquired a reputation for being hot-beds of scandal. Kipling certainly played a large part in this legend with the publication of his Plain Tales from the Hills, a widely read collection of short stories based on Simla scandals and dedicated to ‘the wittiest woman in India’ — a title eagerly claimed by at least a dozen would-be Mrs Hauksbees, though it was almost certainly meant as a compliment to his mother, the pretty, witty Alice Kipling, who before her marriage had been one of the beautiful MacDonald sisters.
The view of Raj society as a suburban forerunner of the scandalous goings-on that made the blue-blooded denizens of Kenya’s Happy Valley set so notorious is still, after all these years, a widely held one — particularly among writers who were not even born when the British quit India. Personally, I don’t believe it was nearly as bad as they make out; in contrast with what is considered to be normal behaviour in the present day it was, of course, laughably fusty and sedate. But even at its worst it had one redeeming feature: its scandals nearly always turned out to have a comic side to them, at least from the onlooker’s viewpoint, though I don’t suppose that those directly involved found them so wildly funny.
We once missed being eye-witnesses to a famous piece of drama by a matter of yards — four or five hundred at most, the distance that separated our secluded mooring from the scene of the action on Nageem. But we heard all about it at first hand from friends at Nageem who, metaphorically speaking, had seats in the front row of the stalls; and also second-hand from any number of others who were nowhere near Nageem but had passed on the story in convulsions of laughter …
It concerned an attractive and light-minded lady whose houseboat was moored at Nageem and whose husband was spending ten days of his leave fishing on the Bringi, a trout stream some ten or twenty miles from Srinagar. Finding all that time at her disposal, his wife rashly resumed a romance that had had to be put on the shelf when her husband arrived up on a month’s leave. She should have known better, since not even a water-beetle, let alone an illicit lover, could stir among the close-packed ranks of houseboats around Nageem without someone noticing, and commenting on it. Word of the resumed relations with her Don Juan seeped out to other fishermen on the Bringi and, inevitably, since men are worse gossips than women, reached the ears of her husband, who returned with all speed to Srinagar two days before he was expected.
According to the cognoscenti, who are always with us (and endorsed on this occasion by the enthralled occupants of at least half the other boats on Nageem), the lady and her admirer had been celebrating their last-but-one evening together by dining à deux on her boat before going on to dance at the Club, when her husband suddenly appeared on the scene. Ignoring both of them, he marched straight across the dining-room and, without speaking a word, disappeared briefly into the bedroom section of the houseboat, to reappear with his service revolver in his hand.
Fortunately for everyone concerned, the sliding windows on the lake side were wide open, for it was a warm evening; and the Don ‘stood not upon the order of his going’. Though unsuitably attired for aquatics, he did not hesitate. He dived straight out of the window into the lake and swam off into the sunset, encouraged by a revolver shot which missed him by inches but brought at least half of the houseboat population of Nageem rushing to the windows or up to the roofs of their boats. They must have had an excellent view of the ensuing drama, for the irate husband, hitherto invisible to the majority of his audience, ran up to the roof of his own boat from where, only slightly impeded by his hysterical wife, who was clutching his arm and shrieking ‘No! No! No!’ at the top of her voice, he proceeded to scare the daylights out of his onlookers, as well as the lover and the lady, by driving the former to swim under water and, every time the poor chump’s breath gave out and his head showed, carefully placing a shot just near enough to force him to dive again.
History does not relate the end of their story. It just stops there, like so many Raj stories. To follow it up would have been considered bad taste and an infringement of privacy, mere vulgar curiosity, in fact. As far as the Raj was concerned scandals, particularly of the domestic variety, were more likely to draw shrieks of laughter than raised eyebrows, while the more notorious of its erring ladies acquired colourful nicknames such as the ‘Charpoy Cobra’, ‘Bed-and-Breakfast’, the ‘Passionate Haystack’ and the ‘Subaltern’s Guide to Knowledge’, by which they were known from one end of the subcontinent to the other. All very reprehensible, I suppose, yet it had one redeeming feature. There was seldom any real spite or viciousness in the gossip and scandal-mongering; something I discovered to be one of the great differences to which I had to adjust when the Raj ended and I was back once more in my native land. Here there was no trace of humour in the whispers of the tale-bearers whom I was to encounter; only plenty of envy and malice, and a lot of real cattiness. Perhaps it was the loss of Empire that had soured the once tolerant and easy-going islanders so thoroughly. Or perhaps they had used up all their reserves of good temper in surviving those long, agonizing years of war, with its terrible toll of death and destruction. I don’t know.
* Shameful talk.
7
‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’
Chapter 24
We had been delighted with the size of our island and the privacy it gave us. But we were not to remain in sole possession of it for more than a few days, for shortly after our arrival we met and offered mooring space to the Andersons, a honeymoon couple who became lifelong friends. Andy — Ronald Anderson (I believe his old friends used to call him ‘Ronnie’ but he was always Andy to us) — was a Sapper Captain, based in Peshawar, and since neither he nor his bride had taken kindly to the lack of privacy on Nageem, we took pity on them and invited them to share our nearby but more spacious ghat in Chota Nageem. A day or two later, while collecting our mail at the Post Office on the Bund in Srinagar, we were hailed by an old friend, Colonel Henslow, whom we had last met when he was bear-leading the young Duke of Northumberland a year or so before. Now here he was again, and once more acting as guide, mentor and family friend to another, though far less exalted member of the peerage, a Michael Something.
I don’t think any of us caught the name, which had been distinctly mumbled. (It sounded like ‘Gazi’ and turned out to be Guernsey.) The Colonel explained that he and Mike were staying at Nedou’s Hotel for a few days, and pressed us to return there and have luncheon with them. Which in the end we did.
Mike Something turned out to be a charmer, and from the start we all got on tremendously well together — as we had with Andy and Enid. So it was no surprise when he and Colonel Henslow turned up at Chota Nageem the next day announcing that they couldn’t wait to exchange their rooms at Nedou’s for a houseboat, and asking for advice. Mike was fascinated by the H. B. Carlton, which he compared most favourably to the boredom of living in hotel rooms. But while he prowled enthusiastically through the houseboat, and fraternized with the Andersons and their sealyham (the little dog had greeted him as an old friend, for Mike, like Tacklow, was good with animals), the Colonel took the opportunity of having a private talk with my parents, on the excuse of wanting to be taken on a tour of the island.
He felt he had to explain, before letting things go any further, why he and Mike happened to be putting up at Nedou’s Hotel instead of — as might have been expected — at the Residency, or in one of the state guest-houses or houseboats which were normally put at the disposal of any visiting VIPs, from Members of Parliament or the peerage to film stars on holiday.
The fact of the matter was that Mike was, officially, in dire disgrace and in consequence travelling more or less incognito. (Hence the name by which he had been introduced, which was a secondary title and the one by which he had been known until he succeeded to the earldom, for he was in fact the Earl of Aylesford.) He was also, to all intents and purposes, ‘out on parole’ in the custody of the Colonel, with orders to keep a low profile and do nothing to attract the attentions of the press — or anyone else! — until such a time as his family, and the Army, were prepared to pretend that his misdeeds had been forgotten, and that it would be safe for him to return home.
Poor Mike! He told me the whole story in detail later on, and I laughed myself into hiccups over it though I could clearly see why the Establishment and his family must have wanted to wring his neck. But then I could also see Mike’s point of view because my darling Tacklow, that most unmilitary of men, had also been ordered into the Army against his will. There had been some excuse for this in Tacklow’s day, when Victoria was still firmly on the throne and the children of Victorian parents did what they were told and that was that! But I found it hard to believe that the same sort of thing was possible in my own day and age.
Mike’s family, however — not to mention his relations and godparents — had taken it for granted that he would follow his late father’s footsteps and serve in the same regiment. He had, he assured me, put in a plaintive protest, because he didn’t think he was suited to a military career and had been considering becoming an explorer. But this had been brushed aside, and he ended up as a subaltern in whatever regiment his father had served in. Once there, he discovered that he had been dead right in thinking that the army was not for him. He was the squarest of square pegs in a round hole and it was not long before he lined up in front of his CO and asked for permission to send in his papers and leave the Army.
He swore that he had not expected any serious opposition. But his family and relatives appear to have thrown a collective fit, and followed it up by a series of harrowing scenes that began with ‘Don’t talk rubbish, boy’, and advanced to an incredulous ‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’ before descending rapidly to anger, arguments and a general shouting match and ending, inevitably, in tears and pleas of ‘Think of me’, ‘Think of us’, ‘Think of your poor father’. (Mike’s poor father had been killed in the First World War, so he didn’t remember him all that well!)
Mike said he had found it all very wearing, but had stuck his toes in and refused to budge until, finding that they could do nothing with him, they appealed to the most important of his godfathers to talk him out of it. Which, in Mike’s opinion (and mine too), was a really dirty trick, since the godfather in question had not only been a personal friend of his father’s but happened to be King George V.
Well, as Mike said, what can you say when your monarch himself has you up on the mat and asks you as a personal favour to please reconsider? … ‘He was so nice about it,’ explained Mike in extenuation. ‘If he hadn’t been so nice I might have been able to stick to my guns. But as it was, I couldn’t just stand there and say “No”, could I? — could anyone?’
He had given in, of course; and it had proved a fatal mistake. Because once having returned to duty it hadn’t been long before he realized that he really could not cope with army life and the sooner he made this quite clear to one and all, the better. This decision received strong support from a like-minded friend who had only been waiting to see how Mike had fared before following his example and sending in his own papers. I don’t remember the friend’s name, or anything more about him, but apparently the two of them discussed the matter at some length before coming to the conclusion that the only course left open to Mike was to go AWOL for an extended period, thereby forcing the authorities to lose patience with him and throw him out.
The friend decided not to waste time arguing his case, as Mike had done, but to abscond with him, and the two packed a suitcase apiece, pocketed their passports and as much money as they could scrape together, left brief messages to be delivered to their families and their commanding officers and took off for France.
Considering that Mike had already made one determined effort to get out of the Army, you would have thought that his regiment would have been pleased to see the last of him. (His friend’s, on the other hand, evidently took the departure of their escapee with admirable calm.) It was not so, however, with Mike’s lot, who seem to have gone straight up into the stratosphere. For no sooner did they learn that he had made a break for liberty, and was now on the loose in foreign parts, than they dispatched the Military Police — or whoever deals with absconding soldiery — in pursuit. And I suspect, though this is only a guess, that his family too must have hired someone to chase after him and bring him back, for according to Mike’s account of his subsequent adventures, there would seem to have been a plethora of human bloodhounds baying on the trail.
His version of those adventures was probably embroidered a good bit here and there, but they certainly made hilarious listening. The two of them appear to have had a number of hair-breadth escapes from capture, including one from a modest commercial hotel in a small and unimportant town, miles away from the tourist trail or any place of interest. No one, they decided, would dream of looking for them in such a dull, out-of-the-way dump as this. But within a day or two of their arrival a young and excitable member of the staff, with whom they were on friendly terms — Mike had a talent for attracting friends and allies wherever he went — scratched on their door to warn them in a dramatic whisper that there were a couple of sinister characters below, possibly plain-clothes flics, who were asking to see the hotel’s register and inquiring about two young Englishmen who, judging from the description they were giving the receptionist on the desk …
It was dark, and to make matters worse it was raining; and Mike’s account of their flight by way of an exceedingly ancient and very slippery apology for a fire escape, and their subsequent, and successful, efforts to muddy their trail, was hysterically funny. From his family’s and the Army’s point of view, however, the whole, rousing, round-and-round the mulberry bush business must have been exasperating, and I still cannot understand why they let it go on so long. Eventually, however, they did what they ought to have done from the first — called off their respective bloodhounds and left the two fugitives to their own devices, in the sure knowledge that sooner or later they would run out of money, and get bored to bits with supporting themselves by part-time jobs on farms, or washing dishes in city cafés, and come home. Which of course they did.
You may have noticed — I have only just done s
o myself — that in all these Keystone Kops chases there never seems to have been any trouble over passports; nowadays no one could possibly go swanning around the Continent without having their passport demanded of them with depressing frequency.
Anyway, once it became clear that no one was prepared to waste any more time or money on playing silly games of hide-and-seek, the whole escapade became a bore, and they returned sheepishly to the fold. Mike’s friend seems to have got off fairly lightly, being allowed to send in his papers and leave. But Mike was dismissed from the service, and officially disgraced, ‘His Majesty the King having no further use for his services’ — or whatever the formula is. Colonel Henslow was roped in to take him out of the country and keep him out, until such a time as the scandal he had created had died down and been forgotten. But over a decade later His Majesty the King (not the same one, for he was dead, but his successor, George VI) was to find a use for Mike’s service after all. For when the Second World War broke out, Mike managed to get himself commissioned into — I think — the Artists’ Rifles; and returning across the Channel with them to fight for King and Country, he was killed somewhere on the Continent in the black year of Dunkirk and the fall of France.
But all that was still far ahead of us. By the time Colonel Henslow and my parents returned from their stroll around the island the Andersons and Mike were on the best of terms, so when Colonel Henslow asked for permission to share our mooring (provided he and Mike could find and rent a suitable boat and our manjis were agreeable) the ayes had it. Ahamdoo Siraj, who had found us the H. B. Carlton, found a small, two-bedroom boat for them and they duly moved in.
