by M. M. Kaye
The Rev. Thomas married my grandmother in 1875 during his first home leave from China. I never saw her, but if the daguerreotypes taken of her at the time of her marriage are anything to go by, she was a very pretty creature indeed. Moreover, like Jo March in Little Women, she cherished dreams of becoming a writer. Like Jo, she wrote a story under a pen-name — in her case ‘Isa Carr’ in place of Isabella Carruthers — and her story was accepted for publication by one of the few women’s weekly magazines of her day. When it appeared as a serial, Isabella, again like Jo, read it aloud to her family without disclosing that she was the author until she had finished reading them the final instalment. Triumph! Apparently they had all enjoyed it immensely. Though it is hard to know why, as I have to admit that it bored me rigid when in the 1920s I read, in a cherished bound volume, the relevant chapters removed from that forgotten mid-Victorian magazine. Its meek, virtuous and much persecuted heroine (Jane Eyre’s ‘Helen’ diluted with pints of buttermilk) was so determinedly long-suffering that one felt she deserved everything she got.
As ‘Isa Carr’ my grandmother also wrote poetry; equally dire and only comparable to the poetical effusions of dear Wally Hamilton, a real-life character out of one of my historical novels, The Far Pavilions. But after her marriage to my grandfather, Isabella took to writing books for the China Inland Mission under her own name: beautifully bound volumes profusely illustrated with steel engravings, of which only one, Child Life in Chinese Homes, is worth reading. The rest are almost impossible to plough through because their themes are overloaded with pious and sugary Victorian platitudes. She was undoubtedly a good and truly Christian woman who was dearly loved by her husband and her eight children (nine, if one counts ‘Little Lily, born at Wuchang on the Yang-tse-Kiang, died at Chepoo on the Yellow Sea’, to whose memory her mother dedicated that book about Chinese children). I would like to have met her, but I never did. She died in 1913 in North China; the land in which she spent the greater part of her life and where most of her children were born and one was buried.
Two of those children, my mother — who was christened Margaret Sarah but never called anything but ‘Daisy’ — and her twin brother Kenneth, were born on 26 August 1886, in the Mission House in Tientsin that had been built by their father the Dadski. Isabella’s eight surviving children, Tom, Alec, Arnold, Alice, the twins Daisy and Ken, Dorothy and finally Lillian, were eventually taken back to England and to school by their mother, who brought her Chinese house-servant, Jen-Nan, with her and installed the family in a large rented house in Blackheath — in those days a green and rural spot on the outskirts of London where the London Missionary Society had a school for the children of missionaries; this was later attended by the young Eric Liddell, the ‘Flying Scotsman’ of Olympic fame, whose story was told in an award-winning film called Chariots of Fire.
Jen-Nan, who like Voltaire’s Habakkuk appears to have been capable de tout, ran the house with the utmost efficiency, acting as cook and general factotum and, despite the fact that his English was limited to a few words of ‘Pidgin’, sallying out to do the household shopping pigtailed and wearing his customary grey or blue Chinese dress complete with black silk slippers and black skull-cap with a button on top; invariably accompanied by an interested crowd of local citizens which included almost every child in Blackheath, enthralled by their first sight of a slant-eyed, yellow-skinned son of the Celestial Kingdom. Mother says he thoroughly enjoyed the sensation he created among the ‘Outer Barbarians’.
Jen-Nan went back to China with Isabella when she returned there to rejoin her husband, leaving her children with a distant kinswoman who lived in Bedford and was known as ‘Aunt Lizzie’: a childless little woman with a face like a frog’s and a heart of gold and marshmallow, who was dearly loved by three generations: Isabella and her children and her children’s children — for we in our turn would often spend the school holidays with Aunt Lizzie when our parents had to return to the East without us.
My mother and her brothers and sisters went to school first in Blackheath and then in Bedford, and when Isabella returned again (this time without Jen-Nan) they went back to Blackheath, where Mother acquired her first beau; a dashing young man called Owen Kentish. Apparently Alice, the eldest of the four Bryson sisters, had a tendre for the handsome Owen and was sadly cast down at overhearing him confide to a friend that ‘the one I’d like to marry is Daisy — if she wasn’t still much too young’! A remark which, repeated to her by some little pitcher with long ears, did wonders for Mother’s morale, however much it may have lowered poor Alice’s.
Mother is a very old lady now, and there are times when she thinks I am her sister Alice and that the two of us, wearing, I presume, high buttoned boots and frilly cotton petticoats under ankle-length summer frocks with eighteen-inch waistbands and leg-of-mutton sleeves, plus large flat hats, are walking up the steep road into Folkestone during a long-vanished seaside summer holiday to meet the Kentish boys. I am interested, and more than a little amused, to discover that she is not above twitting Alice (who has been dead for many years) on the subject of Owen’s known preference for herself, and find it fascinating to discover myself cast in the role of a love-lorn seventeen-year-old back in early Edwardian England, being needled by a pretty chit of a younger sister who will grow up to be my mother.
Not long after this particular holiday Isabella, who had come home again for a furlough in England, returned once more to China taking some if not all of her children with her. Their ship put in at a great many ports during that long, exciting voyage; among them Bombay, where the family went ashore to see the sights and visit the Zoological Gardens. Almost a third of a century later — in the year, in fact, that the Second World War broke out — Mother and I spent an afternoon at the same zoo, and she paused before the entrance and looking up at the wide iron arch that spans the top of the gate proclaiming the Zoological Gardens, said thoughtfully that the last time she walked under that arch she had been fifteen years old and on her way out to China. I observed lightly that that must seem a very long time ago, and she sighed and shook her head and said, ‘No; that’s what is so frightening. It seems as though it was only yesterday.’
Perhaps because she had used the word ‘frightening’, it was then that I realized how paltry, in the face of the swift centuries, is the ‘three score years and ten’ that the Bible reckons as man’s allotted span. For by then Mother had been a widow for several years, my brother and sister were both married and had children of their own, and our family circle had broken up. Yet that first visit to the Bombay Zoo in the dawn of the twentieth century, when she was still a schoolgirl who had not even put her hair up or met her future husband, still seemed to her as though it had happened ‘only yesterday’.
I learned in that moment what all of us learn in the end: that on the inside most of us stay the same even though our outsides change so greatly, wrinkling, withering or growing stout and unwieldy; our hair turning grey and unattractive things happening to our chins. Yet within that ageing outer shell we remain very much the same as we did in our late teens and early twenties. Mother, for instance, became infuriated on being told that she could not accompany my sister Bets and myself to India when we flew there to watch part of my Far Pavilions being filmed in Jaipur. She wanted so much to come with us, and insisted that she was perfectly capable of doing so and that any number of her Indian friends would be only too delighted to see her again and put her up. Which, alas, was no longer true, since those friends are either dead or far too advanced in years to cope with a very frail old lady. Eheu fugaces indeed! But since I am writing about my parents, let us go back to the daybreak years of this century —
Victoria has died at long last and her eldest son, stout, jolly, bearded Edward VII (who once complained that he had got used to the idea of an everlasting father but considered it a bit hard to be saddled with an everlasting mother as well), has ushered in the rollicking and often scandalous Edwardian era. And young Daisy Bryson — having tak
en her first look at Imperial India and spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Bombay Zoo before travelling on to catch a glimpse of Colombo, Madras, Calcutta, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — has crossed the Taku Bar and sailed up the Wang Po River, to disembark at her birthplace, the North China treaty port of Tientsin.
In that part of the world, in those days, young unmarried European women were as rare as butterflies in December. This meant that when the steamer carrying Isabella Bryson and her brood drew into the dock, every male ‘foreign devil’ in that thriving port who could find an excuse to do so was there to watch it berth and to take a good look at Isabella’s daughters. Among that watching crowd was a young businessman, Howard Payne, who, smitten to the heart by his first sight of Alice walking down the gangway in the wake of her mother, announced loudly and firmly: ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry!’ And marry her he did, though in the event it was Daisy who married first, with Alice as her chief bridesmaid. Which brings me to Father — who was seldom if ever called by that name, but for some forgotten reason, long lost sight of in the mists of childhood, I used to call ‘Tacklow’. So Tacklow he will remain for the rest of this book.
According to my mother the first time he set eyes on me as a small, shawled bundle in a bassinette, barely two days old and newly washed and tidied up for what was — until a certain June morning over thirty years later — to be the most important meeting in my life, he took one look at me and said: ‘This one’s for me!’ Unfortunately, my memory does not go back as far as that momentous occasion. But the attraction was mutual. I adored him from the start. He was mine; my own particular and special property. Perfection personified. No one ever had a better father, and my only complaint against Providence in this matter is that I saw far too little of him during the long years of school in England. He was much too conscientious to badger the Powers-that-Be for leave, and would send Mother home whenever he could afford to do so (which was not often, what with heavy school bills to pay and a perennial shortage of money), while he himself stayed at his desk, working and saving all the harder.
Any skill I may have with words I owe to Tacklow, who started reading to me almost before I had learned to talk. He never read me babyish books, or any of the innocuous wish-wash about jolly elves and bunnies on which future generations would be brought up. Instead, he started me on Kingsley’s Heroes, which is full of lovely lines that can sound like poetry. I suspect him of occasionally paraphrasing for my benefit, because a sentence from the end of the story of Perseus sticks in my head to this day as: ‘And Polydectes and his guests sit there still; a ring of cold grey stones upon the mountain side!’ — which is not a strictly accurate quotation; as I was to discover years later when I spotted a battered copy of The Heroes on a second-hand bookstall in London’s Fulham Road, and bought it for sixpence. He read me Kipling’s Jungle Books and I remember crying my eyes out when Mowgli has to leave the jungle and go down to the croplands to join his own kind — and laughing my head off at the tales in Uncle Remus; another book that I bought off a second-hand bookstall, only to find that I could not make head or tail of the dialect spoken by Uncle Remus, which Tacklow (who really should have been an actor) had read aloud to me with such fascinating fluency and effect.
I could discuss anything with my father. He treated me as an adult from the start and would talk to me by the hour, so that I came to know a lot more about him than I ever learned about Mother. So much, indeed, that he must have a chapter or two all to himself.
* A wandering holy man. (The story of Puran Baghat appears in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book.)
Chapter 2
Let us now praise famous men,
And our fathers that begat us.
Ecclesiasticus XLIV.i.
He was born in 1868 in the early hours of Wednesday, 27 May: the first surviving son of William Kaye, of the Indian Civil Service, and his formidable wife, Jane, who had been Jane Beckett. It was Derby Day, and his father, who had plunged heavily on a horse listed as ‘Tom Bowline Colt’ at odds of fifteen to one, had declared his intention of naming the latest infant after the horse: provided of course that the baby was a boy and the animal won. Thomas Bowline Colt Kaye … The mind boggles! But that was my grandfather all over.
Fortunately for the new arrival, though a sad blow for the family bank balance, the Derby was won that year by the favourite, a horse called Bluegown.* Which is why my beloved parent ended up being christened ‘Cecil’ instead, a name that in those days was considered distinctly cissy, being regarded as more a girl’s name than a man’s. It was in fact bestowed upon him in compliment to his grandmother, Mary Cecilia, a daughter of the Gibson-Craigs of Riccaton House, near Edinburgh, from whom his parents may have cherished expectations on his behalf. (If so, they did not come to anything.)
When he was old enough to be sent to his public school (which for some inexplicable British reason is the name we choose to apply to our private ones), his Christian name was recorded in its rolls as ‘Caecilius Kaye’ because, by tradition, Winchester still inscribes the names of its pupils in Latin. Despite this, he managed for a time to give his classmates the impression that his name was Charles: a simple ambition which was eventually thwarted by a doting maiden-aunt who wrote to him addressing the envelope to ‘Master Cecil Kaye’. Thereafter he was stuck with it. He seems on the whole to have enjoyed his schooldays, and in the course of them he made at least one lifelong friend: Reginald ‘Cull’ Brinton of Kidderminster, who like himself actually enjoyed Greek and Latin and was equally stage-struck.
I cannot remember his ever telling me how or why he should have become so fascinated by the theatre. Perhaps he did not know himself. But from the time that he was a small boy in a nankeen suit he had written, directed and sometimes acted in plays that were performed during the holidays before an audience of indulgent grown-ups, while many of his leisure hours were spent in poling his brothers and sisters around in a punt named ‘The White Indian’ on the upper lake at Tetworth Hall — a house in Bedfordshire then owned by his grandparents — and dragooning them into being Red Indians on the warpath or early settlers in hostile territory. I still have a playbill that dates from his teens and advertises a single performance (matinée only) of a pantomime ‘devised, written and directed by C. Kaye’.
His theatrical ambitions, however, were stamped on with the utmost firmness; Victoria’s England believing to a man, and certainly to a woman, that the trap-door in the centre of every stage, out of which the Demon King would spring up during the pantomime season in scarlet tights and accompanied by a glare of red light and some effective pink smoke, did in fact lead straight down to Hell.
Winchester, which has the distinction of being the oldest public school in England, takes its name from the cathedral town in which it stands. It was founded in 1387 by a colourful character called William Wykeham who also founded New College, Oxford.
It is one of my regrets for an opportunity lost that I never visited Winchester with my father. I would have enjoyed a Tacklow-conducted tour round the College and the city, but it was one of those things that we were always going to do some day and for some reason or another never found the time to. Today there is a small tablet in the organ loft of the chapel to ‘the memory of Sir Cecil Kaye, Kt, CSI, CIE, CBE, 21st Punjabis Indian Army, a Commoner of This College.’* I saw Winchester for the first time when I went there to see the Bursar about the wording and positioning of the tablet. And again to see it dedicated. Later on I would sometimes go there to look at it and to walk through the cloisters and the various buildings that Tacklow had described so vividly that I felt as though I knew them. But I did not go very often, because there was nothing of him there: not even the shadow of a shadow. If his ghost walks anywhere it goes punting on the upper lake at Tetworth or fly-fishing in the glass-clear waters of the Test; or perhaps, sometimes, it sits on a low curved block of silvery, lichen-spotted stone that stands high above the winding Simla road on a spur of the foothills, looking out bet
ween the tall trunks of the pine trees at what he once described as ‘one of the loveliest views in all India, if not in all the world’. From here, on a clear day, it really does seem as though one can see for ever and ever. To the right the foothills fall away to merge into the wide, golden vastness of the plains, while ahead and below, embedded among pine trees, lies the little Cantonment town of Dugshai, and on the left the rising ridges of the hills are backed by the long, long line of the high Himalayas, spanning the horizon with shimmering snow peaks that stand out like a jagged fringe of white satin against the limitless blue distance.
During the lengthy periods that my grandparents spent overseas, their children, in common with most children whose parents served in India, were either left behind in the care of home-based relatives or, like poor little Rudyard Kipling, to the less than tender mercies of professional child-minders. But Tacklow, when not at Tetworth, had the good fortune to spend a number of his school holidays with his maternal grandmother at Riccaton House near Edinburgh. Having learned the art of fly-fishing on the chalk streams near Winchester, he would go after salmon in the Scottish lochs and rivers, and became a skilful and dedicated fisherman.
In those days that great British institution, the country-house weekend, which had come into vogue in Georgian times, was still flourishing, and owners of stately homes either gave or attended these functions — which seem to have lasted from Friday afternoons to Monday mornings — as a matter of course. A popular form of after-dinner entertainment on these occasions was amateur theatricals, and it was at one of these house-parties — after a performance of She Stoops to Conquer by a group of lively and talented young amateurs — that a larger-than-life gentleman walked in on Tacklow while he was busy removing his make-up, and congratulated him warmly on his performance as Tony Lumpkin. It was, he said, the best he had ever seen, and should young Mr Kaye be interested in taking up acting as a profession, he, personally, would always be pleased to employ him. Here was his card. … He handed it over with a flourish; as well he might, for the name engraved upon it is remembered to this day. It was Sir Henry Irving — the first Knight of the Theatre.
