by M. M. Kaye
By 1904 he had become sufficiently friendly with the Brysons to be invited to spend Christmas Day with them, and when pulling a cracker with some fellow guest he found himself in possession of small trinket — a little silver ring with a flower-shaped boss that was not unlike a daisy — he handed it surreptitiously to Mother, whispering that he hoped she would allow him to exchange it one day for a real one. When that day eventually came she returned the cracker ring to him as fair exchange, and he wore it on his watch-chain to the day of his death. I have it now for safe keeping, because Mother is afraid she might lose it. Though I am not even sure that she would still recognize it; or even remember anything about it. But as long as someone remembers, that is really all that matters. For ‘beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare — rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?’.
When Tacklow finally decided that it was now safe (and also high time) to come out into the open and ask the Rev. Thomas Bryson’s permission to marry his second daughter, the Dadski, not the most observant of men, was astounded. It seems that he had not had the faintest suspicion as to what Captain Kaye was after, let alone whom he was after. When he had recovered from the shock, all he would say was that he ‘did not feel that he could part with the lassie today’. A dusty answer that was to be repeated again and again during the following months.
There used to be a popular song in those days called ‘A Bicycle Made for Two’, with a refrain that began ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do!’ and Mother had had it sung to her for years and was by now heartily sick of it. But though her father prevaricated, she herself had already given Tacklow the answer he wanted. She had said ‘yes’. Yet despite this, his Daisy, now aged eighteen, was remorselessly chaperoned, and had it not been for a sympathetic family friend, a Mrs Edkins who used to invite Mother to tea or out on a picnic and arrange for her swain to be present so that he could snatch a few words with her alone, he would probably never have got to first base. Not that her parents had anything against him. On the contrary, they approved of him; particularly on account of his age, which was exactly twice that of his intended bride. And if that sounds odd to us, it didn’t to the Victorians. Or to the Edwardians either. They preferred mature husbands for their young daughters, being convinced that an older man would, in the approved fashion of the day, be a father-figure who could be trusted to take the greatest possible care of an innocent and inexperienced damsel who had only recently been given permission to put her hair up and let her skirts down. (In my day the process was reversed: hair being ‘bobbed’ or ‘shingled’ and skirts raised well above the knee.) My grandparents’ objection to the marriage was merely a sentimental reluctance to face the fact that the family circle was bound to break up as their children grew into adults. Daisy’s was the first defection. That was all. Tacklow was a very patient man; but there are limits, and eventually he told Mother that enough was enough and that he was going to buy her an engagement ring and then pay a call on her father to demand a straight — and shorter! — answer from him.
That crucial interview took place in the hall of the Brysons’ house in Tientsin. And when the Rev. Thomas gave his usual answer, the lassie in question (who had been hanging anxiously over the banisters on the landing above, listening to every word) marched resolutely down the stairs and, putting her arms about her suitor’s neck, kissed him soundly; whereupon he produced a little diamond ring from his pocket and put it on her finger. At this point her father threw in the towel; though he insisted on an engagement period of at least six months by which time ‘the lassie’ would have turned nineteen and Tacklow’s regiment, their tour of China duty almost over, would be on the verge of embarking for India.
The marriage of Cecil Kaye, Captain 21st Punjabis, eldest surviving son of William and Jane Kaye, to Margaret Sarah (Daisy) Bryson, second daughter of the Rev. Thomas and Mrs Bryson, London Mission, took place not once but twice, on 5 September 1905, in Tientsin. The first ceremony being a civil one conducted in the British Consulate by His Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General, Mr L. C. Hopkins, ‘according to the provisions of the Foreign Marriages Act 1892’. Later that same day the conventional white wedding took place in the Union Church where the address was given by Mother’s brother Arnold, who had like his father taken Holy Orders, and the closing prayer by her father, who had given her away. Major Westhrop-White, who had invited Tacklow to go with him on the fateful march through Tientsin, acted as his best man, and the band of the 47th Sikhs played ‘suitable selections’ — including, one hopes, ‘Marching through Georgia’ — at the wedding reception.
My uncles Tom, Alec, Arnold and Ken were ushers. My aunts Alice, Dorothy and Lillian, carrying baskets filled with marguerites and wearing hats the size of flying saucers made of net and trimmed with daisies, were bridesmaids. And my mother, who had set her heart on wearing a wedding veil so long that it would trail behind her down the aisle, wept bitterly when it arrived that morning (lent for the occasion, as wedding veils were very expensive) and she discovered that it was not much bigger than a pocket handkerchief! That veil was the one blot on an otherwise happy occasion, and accounts for the wooden expression with which she faced the cameras as she descended the Church steps on her bridegroom’s arm under an arch of swords raised by his brother officers. Mother has always said that it was the bitterest disappointment of her life and that it ruined her wedding day…
A yellowed page from the Peking & Tientsin Times of 5 September 1905, which is still in existence, has three columns of print describing the whole festivity in detail and informing the reader that the bride was ‘very becomingly dressed’ in plain white silk made with a ‘transparent yoke’ (!!! surely not?) and that she wore ‘a wreath of orange blossoms under a plain tulle veil’. The reporter adds that ‘she looked remarkably sweet and pretty’. Not in the photographs she doesn’t! She looks excessively po-faced, and she still insists that her nose was red and her eyes pink and swollen from crying and that ‘it was all the fault of that horrid, mingy little veil with its wide, dowdy, hemmed edge — just like an outsized man’s handkerchief, ugh!’. Hence the stuffed expression, I suppose. She never forgot the incident, and when years later my sister Bets married, compensated for it at one remove by buying Bets the longest, widest and flimsiest wedding veil you ever saw. And very pretty it looked too!
The ancient Peking & Tientsin Times that reported the Bryson–Kaye wedding also prints a short account of the speech given by Mr McLeish (described as ‘one of the oldest Tientsin friends of the family’) who proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom. In it he mentions the siege of the Legations and that some humorist in those days had predicted that one of the most striking results of the Boxer Rising would be that some of the ‘soldier johnnies’ would be walking off with some of the Tientsin girls. He also — wouldn’t you know it? — expressed sympathy for Mr and Mrs Bryson who were seeing the first of their brood ‘take flight from the nest’. That ‘soldier Johnnie’, C. Kaye, gets barely a mention, but looks very smug and pleased with himself in the wedding photographs.
I still do not know why Mother married him. She was barely seventeen when she met him and he was not only bald on top — and had been since he turned twenty — but he was twice her age,* and no taller than she was (though he always claimed to be half an inch taller and said she cheated by wearing high heels and having so much hair!). Every young businessman in Tientsin was in love with her — with the exception of the faithful Howard Payne who married her sister Alice not long afterwards — and since they were all in Trade they must have been far better endowed with ‘worldly goods’ than a penniless Captain in an Indian infantry regiment. Yet she chose him, and never regretted it.
The sympathetic Mrs Edkins and her husband, whose daughter Effie had been a flower girl at the wedding, lent the honeymooners their house at Pei-tai-ho, a small town on the Yellow Sea that, in those days, was little more than a village.
Tacklow used to talk to me about tha
t honeymoon as though it was an enchanted time in some dreamlike Shangri-La: the lonely house standing on low cliffs above a small, secluded beach that was screened on the south-west by a fantastic cluster of tall rocks; the shimmering expanse of the Yellow Sea stretching below. From their cliff-top, they would look out together across the flat lands that curved away eastward in a wide bay to where, on the far side of that bay, lay the small coastal town of Chingwantao where the Great Wall of China ends in the sea. He told me of a day-long expedition by rickshaw to the Lotus Hills that lie to the west of Pei-tai-ho, where they had picnicked and wandered among the ancient temples that are a feature of those peaceful, pine-clad hills; returning in the cool of the evening by the pale light of a huge, apricot-coloured September moon to that quiet house on the cliff. And best of all, one unforgettable sight — the most beautiful, he said, that he had ever seen before or since — Mother, wading out naked ahead of him into a satin-smooth sea in the dawn, her hair hanging down loose to below her waist with the rising sun, shining through it, turning it to every colour in the world; red, green, blue and violet, glittering gold and burnished copper … Venus Anadyomene, robed in a rainbow. That picture would remain with him for ever, indelibly printed on his memory by the camera of his eye, and he spoke of it as though Mother had been Eve herself bathing, new-made, in a lake in Eden in the radiant sunrise of the world’s morning.
He never forgot it. Nor did he ever look at any other woman. I honestly do not think he ever noticed there were any others around! He cherished and spoilt her and loved her dearly, and when, years later, his knighthood appeared in the Honours List, a woman friend of hers rushed into the ladies room of the Old Delhi Club, brandishing the newspaper and shouting excitedly: ‘Daisy’s got her K!’
I have also seen the telegram, lovingly preserved by Tacklow, that she sent him on their Silver Wedding day to thank him for his gift — they were not together for the anniversary, for he had sent her to the cool of the hills and was tied himself by work in the scorching heat of the plains. The telegram, handed in at Srinagar in Kashmir on 5 September 1930 and delivered an hour later in Rajputana, begins: ‘Happy Returns. Solomon one two …’ (Those who are interested can look that one up in the Bible — Song of Solomon, Chapter 1, Verse 2.)
* Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers.
* She had wanted to add a year to her age on the marriage licence so that no one could say that her bridegroom was twice as old; but when her father refused to countenance this, she persuaded Tacklow to subtract a year from his. This he did, and that is why their marriage lines show her to be nineteen and he thirty-seven — not thirty-eight.
Chapter 6
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these
All things are subject …
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
Not long after they returned to Tientsin, Tacklow and his bride and the 21st Punjabis said a sad farewell to North China and embarked on the troopship that was to take them back down the Pei-ho River to the Taku Bar. Once across the bar it was southward across the Yellow Sea, past Shanghai and Formosa, Hong Kong and Hainan, into the South China Sea. Then northwards at Singapore through the Straits of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, and southward again to Ceylon; from where they would turn north once more into the Arabian Sea, past Cochin, Calicut, Mahé, Goa, Bombay and the great peninsula of Kathiawar, to Karachi. From here they travelled by river-boat up the Indus to Jhelum, a garrison town on the borders of the North-West Frontier Province where the 21st Punjabis had been posted, and where it was discovered on arrival that owing to some official miscalculation there was no Army quarter available for Captain and Mrs Kaye.
It did not worry them. They cheerfully agreed to make do with two sparsely furnished rooms in the Dâk-bungalow* — a singularly comfortless building that looked, when I last saw it, almost exactly as it had done when it became Mother’s first home as a married woman — or so she assured me, and judging by her old and faded photographs of it, she was right!
Dâk-bungalow or no, she enjoyed Jhelum and still looks back on her time there with nostalgic affection. But she was not allowed to spend the summer there because she was expecting her first baby, and the heat being as near unbearable as makes no matter, Tacklow sent her up to the hills to Naini Tal and the care of his intimidating elder sister, Aunt Molly — the human battle-axe previously referred to. Here, on 3 August 1906, my brother William (originally called ‘Willie’ but eventually, thank goodness, shortened to ‘Bill’) was born to the proud nineteen-year-old Daisy, while his father sweated in Jhelum in a temperature that moved between 103 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Only when autumn came round and the weather turned cooler did he allow her to return to Jhelum with her son, and a few months later they were able to move into half a bungalow; the other half of which was occupied by a much older and more senior Army couple: a Colonel and Mrs something-or-other, with whose niece, or it may have been cousin? a Miss Beatrice Lewis, Mother had already made friends.
‘Bee’ Lewis had come out to India as a hopeful member of what Anglo-Indians* chose to call ‘the Fishing Fleet’. Sadly, though, she became one of the equally cruelly named ‘Returned-empties’. But during her stay in Jhelum she earned Mother’s lasting gratitude by hotly supporting her when certain of the more hidebound ladies in the station were snootily critical of young Mrs Kaye’s insistence on pushing her son’s pram herself when she took him out on her morning and evening walks along the tree-shaded Cantonment roads, or across the mile-long iron bridge that spans the Indus, ‘the Father of Rivers’, at Jhelum. Such undignified behaviour, said these old pussies, demeaned the British and ‘let the side down’. Pushing prams was ‘servant’s work’, and they lectured Mother about it and told her she should let the ayah or a chokra† push it. Mother said that she greatly enjoyed pushing it herself and didn’t see why she shouldn’t; it was her baby! To the dismay of the disapproving Top Cats, Tacklow supported her. They considered that he should have known better. But since Tacklow was uninterested in their views, his Daisy continued to push her son’s pram around Jhelum.
And now back to Major Brownlow and that stag-party in Tientsin…
The story that Tacklow had told on that occasion about his Sandhurst room-mate who had broken the unbreakable Playfair cipher was, even at that date, an old one — the episode having occurred a good many years previously. Now, after several more had passed, Major Brownlow, the friend who had taken him to that dinner-party, happened to be dining at Flagstaff House in Peshawar with the GOC Peshawar District, General Smith-Dorrian, when, as in Tientsin, the conversation chanced to turn to ciphers and the General observed that at least there was one unbreakable cipher, the Playfair. Not so, said Major Brownlow; he knew a man who had actually broken it — and who was, what’s more, at that moment stationed in Jhelum! (Either the Major’s memory was hazy or else he had been paying over-much attention to the port, for all that he could remember was that Cecil Kaye had claimed that the Playfair was breakable; QED Cecil Kaye himself must have broken it.) General Smith-Dorrian didn’t believe a word of it. The fellow must have been pulling their legs. Or else he was trying to show off. Well, he’d show him — !
The upshot was a large official envelope that arrived on Tacklow’s desk some two days later. It contained a message written in Playfair, a sealed envelope, and a curt letter from the General himself that said in effect: ‘I have been informed that you claim to have broken the Playfair. Well, let’s see you do it! Here is a message in Playfair, and in case you can’t solve it I have sent the code word in a sealed envelope. Yours, etc.’
This bolt from the blue arrived on a sultry morning in mid-April when the leaves were beginning to curl up and turn brown in the heat and the brain-fever bird had begun to sing its maddening hot-weather song. Tacklow read it with amazement and then, realizing what must have occurred, sat down and wrote an immediate reply. He said that the General’s informant had got the wrong end of the stick, as he himself had no knowledge of ciphers. He mere
ly claimed to have known someone who had deciphered this one. Also, the test message was unfair in that it was much too short; which made it twice as difficult to solve. However, as he still retained a vague memory of how his room-mate of more than twenty years ago had worked the trick, if the General would send him a slightly longer message he would dearly like to have a stab at cracking it.
A longer message duly arrived and Tacklow set to work. It took him the best part of a week — Mother says she can’t remember exactly how long but that it seemed ages to her, because she helped him by making lists of paired letters and reading out lines of numbers. She never could understand the way in which a code could be cracked, for it was all miles above her head (mine too!). But she does remember the long hours he worked at it and his excitement, and hers, when at last it began to come out. The thing hinged on a key word that was chosen at random by whoever happened to be encoding the message; which I suppose was the reason it was considered to be unbreakable, since the key word was likely to be different every time — the choice of words being virtually endless. Tacklow returned the sealed envelope to Smith-Dorrian with the seal still unbroken and a letter that said: ‘Your key-word is so-and-so; message reads as follows —’
