by M. M. Kaye
I remember thinking that he seemed very sure of the answer, that perhaps he knew, though he had never shown the smallest sign of it, that he was a ‘catch’, and that therefore the very idea of being turned down had never even crossed his mind. The thought was a disturbing one and I am sure quite untrue. But it worried me a bit at the time, because that stay in Delhi, during which Mike and I saw as much of each other as we had in Kashmir, had also shown me a couple of disturbing things about my lovable Peter Pan that had never once shown up, even faintly, in all the Nageem Bagh Navy days or during the festivities in Peshawar. He drank too much and he could not hold his drink. Nor did he know how to choose friends: anyone who flattered him and laughed at his jokes was ‘a terribly good bod! — we must enlist him as an Able Seaman!’
He collected a crowd of hangers-on from the bars at Maiden’s Hotel, the Cecil, the Old Delhi Club and New Delhi’s IDG, and they sponged on him mercilessly. A typical example was a night on which Bets and I were dining with him at Maiden’s. There were only four of us to begin with, Mike and a friend of ours, one John Gardner of the Central India Horse, whom we had introduced to Mike, and whom he had invited to make a fourth. Unfortunately we had started the evening with a few drinks in the bar, and someone — probably the barman, or a waiter (Mike was staying at the hotel) — had addressed him as ‘M’ Lord’.
There were not all that many peers of the realm skating about India in those days, and one or two young men, who were already a bit tipsy, caught the name and turned to stare, as did several grizzled topers with very fruity-looking noses. I saw one of the latter lean over and speak to one of the barmen in an undertone, and presently he came across to Mike with an outstretched hand and said, ‘You’re Aylesford, aren’t you? Thought I recognized you. My old man used to be a friend of your father’s. I rather think we met shootin’ somewhere. Don’t suppose you’d remember. Name’s Bloggs (or whatever). Jimmy Bloggs —’ Mike gazed at him a bit woozily. It was obvious that neither the name nor the face meant anything to him. But then he was always a friendly creature who attracted people as fly-paper attracts flies, so he smiled vaguely and shook the outstretched hand, and within five minutes he was being introduced to a whole clutch of total strangers, and was standing them drinks.
They did not leave us when a waiter touched Mike’s arm and said that the dinner he had ordered was ready, they merely followed us to our table and suggested in hearty tones that we and they put our tables together and make a party of it. They were all pretty merry by now, and Mike could see no objection to this: he liked parties. And when dinner was over and one of them suggested that we all go off to dance at the IDG in New Delhi, Mike was all for it. But I noticed that when the bills for the dinner were discreetly produced not one of the freeloaders who had gatecrashed our party stayed to pick one up. They all with one accord faded rapidly away in the direction of the men’s cloakroom on the excuse of ‘spending a penny’ or collecting their coats and hats, leaving Mike to sign for the lot of them. Nor did any of them suggest paying for themselves when they returned. The bills were forgotten as we all piled into cars and set off for the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club, which in those days lay on the far side of New Delhi, near the racecourse and the lovely little tomb of Saftar Jung. Nowadays, worse luck — so fast and so swiftly has the city grown — there is no open country beyond Saftar Jung’s Tomb, only an ocean of new suburbs, wave after wave of them as far as the eye can see.
We arrived at the IDG and swept into the hall in a mob. There must have been at least fifteen of us, all told; and here, once again, the pattern was repeated. While Bets and I retired to the ladies’ room to primp and preen, Mike’s new-found friends vanished into the Gentlemen, and from there into the ballroom, leaving Mike and John Gardner landed with signing for the entire party. John, who was later to become a good friend of Mike’s, had no feelings of noblesse oblige towards that crowd of parasites and thought Mike was an ass to allow himself to be sponged on in this manner; nor, as a subaltern, could he afford to pay for half of them. He signed for himself, which as the invited guest he need not have done, and since none of the hangers-on returned to the hall, Mike signed for the rest. ‘I like this friend of yours; he’s a good chap,’ approved John, telling me what had happened, ‘but he doesn’t seem to have cut his milk teeth yet. He oughtn’t to let himself be conned into footing the bill for that lot of freeloaders, and you should tell him so. What that boy needs is a keeper!’
He did of course. And his charm was such that when he really needed one, there always seemed to be one there to step into the breach and give him a helping hand. John was to become one of these, but though I tried to be one, I made a botch of it; I suppose because I was still too callow and inexperienced to cope. And trying to cope with Mike on the loose in Delhi, no longer as a minor but officially and legally grown-up and master of his fate, was a little like having to control that proverbial cannon that has broken loose on board ship during a storm at sea. The example I have just given, of how we began an evening in Old Delhi as a decorous foursome dining at Maiden’s Hotel, and ended up in a riotous party in the Gymkhana Club in New Delhi, was merely one of many similar evenings. On one occasion the night’s entertainment ended in my helping one of the hotel bearers put Mike to bed in the small hours. I thought he was dead — or anyway, dying — and, being scared to death, I insisted on waking up a doctor (presumably the hotel’s resident medic), who was not pleased. Nor was Mike when he heard about it. He wanted to know how I could have made such a silly fuss about it, when I should have helped hush it up!
The trouble was that almost every evening, when the day’s work was over and shops and offices shut, the British gathered on the lawns of their Clubs to ‘eat the air’ as the delightful Indian phrase puts it, listen to a band, and drink gimlets and whisky sours, gin slings, pink gins and a variety of other short drinks with fearsome names. Later on (probably driven in by mosquitoes) they would gather in hotel bars and places where they could drink, by this time suitably dressed in dinner-jackets for dining or dancing, or whatever entertainment they had planned for the evening. (Yes, they did always ‘dress for dinner’, even when dining alone in their own bungalow, and even when camping in the jungle! That at least is truth and not legend.) And in these places they might occasionally be accompanied by one of the lawful owners of the land. Not very often, because caste Hindus, although not totally forbidden all forms of alcohol, as Muslims are, prefer to do their drinking in decent privacy behind closed doors.
This ‘sundowner’ drinking was a long-established habit among the Empire Builders, and Mike took to it like a duck to water. He had never once been drunk during our unsophisticated Nageem Bagh Navy days, only, at most (and then only very occasionally), getting what in those days we would probably have called ‘tightly slight’ or ‘slightly sozzled’. Which to my mind proves that drink was something he could take or leave. He didn’t need it in the euphoric days of the NBN when we were all riding high on clouds of laughter and silliness and sheer high spirits. There wasn’t all that much drinking in the NBN because none of us could afford it. Not even Mike, while Colonel Henslow held the purse-strings. But the partying in Delhi was on a different level from the youthful fun-and-games in Kashmir. There was a lot more drinking, for one thing, and far too many parties finished with Mike getting well and truly plastered.
I couldn’t handle it. And for a rather silly reason: when he was sober he was in love with me, and he could be so very sweet. But when he was drunk, I ceased to be special and became someone of no importance at all — a faceless stranger who merely happened to be a member of the party he was in that night. Well, there is that old saying: in vino veritas, isn’t there — ‘In wine is truth’. I was reminded of that too often in those Delhi days. Particularly on those occasions when I realized that it was high time that Bets and I went home and, saying goodnight to him, realized that he had not the faintest idea who I was.
I had tried, on the first occasion that I realized he h
ad too much to drink, to persuade him that he had had enough. But that had been a hopeless failure — as anyone who has ever tried that will know! All I got was a degrading row, beginning with Mike drawing himself up to his full height and staring at me like some pompous Peter the Great who has been insulted by one of his moujiks, and demanding, in a voice that could be heard from one end of the room to another, if I was ‘daring to shuggess that he had had too mush to drink. Because if sho …’ Anyone who has ever been silly enough to argue with someone who is well and truly plastered can take it on from there. I don’t suppose the scenario varies very much.
I retired in tears, and Mike, waking next morning with a terrible hangover (serve him right!), couldn’t remember the details. Only that he had been drunk and exchanged a good few wingèd words with someone — he wasn’t even sure with whom, but as soon as he could see straight, he swallowed a couple of Maiden’s Hotel’s special blend of prairie oysters* and, I imagine, a lot of black coffee, and came rushing round to 80/I The Mall. When finally admitted, he went down on his knees and apologized in dust and ashes, promising faithfully that if only I would forgive him, ‘just this once’, such a thing would never happen again — never, never, never. After a tearful scene in which I seem to remember we both wept buckets, peace was restored and for a day or two, everything came up roses. Then bingo — we went back to the same routine.
I never again made the mistake of trying to stop him drinking once he had ‘drink taken’. I merely left the party the minute I realized that I had ceased to be me and become just-one-of-those-present. And every time that happened Mike would arrive at 80/I next morning and go through the same hoops again: grovelling, apologizing, coaxing, swearing that if only I would forgive him that he’d never, ever … Oh dear! The truth was, of course, that he felt, at last, that he was his own man, and no one could make him do anything he didn’t want to do, ever again. There used to be an old music-hall song in Tacklow’s day that sums it up beautifully: ‘I’m twenty-one today! Twenty-one today! I’ve got the key of the door, never been twenty-one before! Father says’ (in Mike’s case, Mother) ‘I can do what I like, so shout “Hip-hip hooray” I’m a jolly good fellow, twenty-one today!’ Yes, he was twenty-one and he was throwing his hat into the air and getting his teeth into freedom — and enjoying every single minute of it! Plenty of time ahead in which to sober down and start toeing the line.
The only thing that I find strange, having lived in a world that was still enormously influenced by Victorian values and morals, is the fact that in all my early love affairs, sex never even got a look in. Girls like myself just didn’t. And that was that. Had I been asked to give an opinion based solely on my own experience, I would have gone on believing that this was the norm, and that only around one in fifty of my contemporaries had ever fallen by the wayside. However, I have since learned, with genuine surprise from popular novels, that the wholesale slaughter of young men during the 1914–18 war, and the harsh fact that when a girl saw her particular young man off to war she knew that her chances of ever seeing him again were small, had broken down the sex-barrier in Europe fairly sharply; and that from then on it became pretty shaky.
Well, maybe; but the Raj was still in many ways a backwater, left reasonably undisturbed by the winds and tides of change, and by and large the majority of its Fishing Fleet did not sleep around, and the ones who did were few and far between. But it was interesting to note that as soon as one of these dashing creatures lost her virginity, she couldn’t wait to try to persuade her girlfriends to follow her example. A fact that suggests that the ‘fallen’ longed to be back in a huddle with the cosy majority instead of knowing that they were still very much out on a limb and considered to be ‘fast’, the worst label you could slap on a young unmarried woman. I can remember one of these modern and emancipated young women, who had been prodding me about my love-life, saying in superior tones, ‘Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t been put through your paces yet? For heaven’s sake! — how Victoria!’ And in restrospect I am inclined to sympathize with her. But I also feel enormously grateful for the fact that only one of the young men with whom I enjoyed a romantic flirtation let his feelings get out of hand and became a nuisance. Otherwise, it really was a case of ‘No sex please. We’re British.’ And only the other day, reminiscing about old times with someone who had in his rollicking youth been a handsome and dashing young heart-breaker, he said: ‘It was pretty difficult for young men like myself, you know. All of us bouncing with joie de vivre and raring to go, because where single girls were concerned, sex was definitely out. You lot just wouldn’t play, and we knew it and didn’t try it on. But grass widows were considered fair game, and there were always plenty of those around. Married women who had been sent up to the hills to escape the hot weather, and were left husbandless for weeks on end, had a field day. They used to mow us down in droves! Remember the one who was nicknamed “The Subaltern’s Guide to Knowledge"? Yes, I bet you do! Well, that’s how we coped with the situation; I don’t know how you “nice” single girls managed.’
Nor do I, really; it certainly wasn’t because we were frigid, so I can only suppose that fear of the possible consequences of sleeping around had been so deeply and successfully embedded in our subconscious that it had become more than strong enough to keep even something as powerful as the sex-urge in check. As for all that ‘Keeping myself pure for the “Right Man”; one alone to be my own, one alone to share my caresses’ stuff, it was so much eyewash: icing-sugar on the cake. For you have to remember that in those days birth control was still pretty much in its infancy, and abortions were performed by sleazy back-street practitioners whose addresses were not easy to come by; nor, thank heaven, did young men setting out on a romantic date carry condoms in their pockets. The very idea would have been enough to take all the romance out of an evening. And oh, how romantic we were!
We sipped imitation champagne and held hands under the tablecloth while somewhere on the far side of the room some would-be Bing Crosby — or possibly the great man himself on a record — moaned tunefully about moonlight and roses bringing memories of you, or some other top-of-the-pops. And when we danced to the sweet melodies of George and Ira Gershwin, Buddy de Silva, or a new young composer called Noël Coward, it was cheek-to-cheek, and we really did feel, as we clung together and swung around together on those crowded ballroom floors, that the words of the songs we danced to were true — ‘Heaven, I’m in heaven’*… We didn’t really need all that panting, sweating and struggling together among the sheets which nowadays, according to our cinema and TV screens, is regarded as the inevitable — and boringly familiar — ending to every good party; preceded, I gather, by the baldly unromantic question ‘Your place or mine?’ Ugh!
That Delhi interlude was not a very happy one for me. But it ended at last. To be followed by a halcyon period, another of the wonderful slices of my life that, like the NBN, is marked with a white stone.
* Uncle Remus, Legends of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris.
* The standard Raj remedy for a hangover: a raw egg in a mixture of Worcestershire sauce and other unexpected items.
* Yes, I know that tune belongs to the 1940s. But it also belonged to my generation.
Chapter 26
It was no surprise to me that after Mike had seen Mother’s photographs of the Ganges trips, and heard her stories, and Tacklow’s, of the trips they had made in the past, he had set his heart on doing the same. For I too had been fascinated by those snapshots, and had always resented the fact that there was a strict rule, originally formed and thereafter firmly enforced by Sir Charles Cleveland, that under no circumstances whatever were any children permitted to join the party. I would have given anything to be included in one. And now I was going to be.
Sir Charles had been dead for some years now. He had died of cancer and was, I believe, one of the first humans to have a cancer treated by that comparatively new discovery of Madame Curie’s, which she called ‘X-rays’. A
s far as I remember, a fragment of radium had been enclosed in a small metal container and implanted in Sir Charles’s body, in the hope that it would burn away the cancer. It didn’t. It merely killed him in what must have been an agonizing manner. Tacklow said that it had only been an experiment, and that Sir Charles, who had never been afraid of anything, had volunteered to play guinea-pig, knowing what he was in for if it didn’t work. Which sounds so like him. Dear Sir Charles! He was a great man in every sense of the word. Kashmera, his shikari, was, however, still very much alive, as were several of the men who had been recruited for those previous Ganges trips; and these, together with Mahdoo and Kadera and the English-speaking down-country bearer who was shared by Mike and Colonel Henslow, made up our crew.
I can’t remember whether we drove or went by train to Gujrowla. By train, I imagine; because we would not be coming back that way. But I do remember how heart-warming it was to see again the old iron railway bridge that spanned the great river at Gujrowla looking exactly the same as it did in the days when we used to transfer there into small river craft, to cross to the far bank where carts would be waiting for us to take us inland to whatever shooting-camp had been laid on for the Christmas holidays.
Kashmera had made all the arrangements for this trip, as he used to do for Sir Charles and Buckie, Tacklow and Mother; and the two big wooden boats lay waiting for us under the shadow of the bridge. These boats were typical of the kind that had carried the river traffic for centuries before steam and trains were even dreamt of, let alone invented, and their design had not altered for hundreds of years. They were clumsy, flat-bottomed craft, fashioned entirely from wood in a manner that would surely have been familiar to Noah.
