by M. M. Kaye
Tin-lined packing-cases, their contents redolent of the dried leaves of neem or tobacco, were among the more familiar hallmarks of the Sikār — the old Raj that vanished shortly after the ending of the Great War of 1914-18. One of them still stands, a forlorn, empty, rusting relic of Empire, in our garage in Sussex. And perhaps one day (if it is not broken up for firewood before then) it will achieve the status of an antique and be exported to Germany or South America!
I don’t remember anything at all of the long train journey from Simla to Bombay, or my first voyage on a P.&O. steamer — the famous Peninsular and Oriental passenger-ships that Kipling called ‘the Exiles Line’ and which were in time to become just that to me; though not in the way he meant it, since for me the exile was from the other hemisphere. Mother told us later that on the second night out from Bombay, while the grown-ups were all at dinner, there was a cry of ‘Man overboard!’ and that she and every parent on board leapt to their feet and raced down to their cabins in a panic, terrified that a child might have strayed onto the deck or managed to unfasten a porthole and fallen into the sea. She said that it gave her a terrible insight into the innate selfishness of human beings, to discover that as soon as she found that her own three children were safe (and sound asleep!) her instant reaction was profound relief and an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness that we were all right! She said the relief was so great that she couldn’t have cared less about anyone else’s child. Though in fact it wasn’t a child at all but a man, a passenger, presumed to be drunk, who had climbed onto the rail and jumped from it. The ship had been stopped and turned back to search for him, but though the sea was like a mill-pond there was no trace of him, and after an hour or two they went on their way. I remembered that story when I had small children of my own and was terrified of them climbing deck rails or crawling through a porthole during one of the voyages we took while following the drum.
My Kaye grandparents, now retired, had bought a large, rambling house called Freshfield, not far from Southampton. It was no great distance from the docks and the city, but in those days the area was completely rural and the house stood among green fields, orchards and meadows that looked out across Southampton Water. A young and pretty English nanny had been engaged to look after us, and together with her we were given a set of rooms in one wing of the house, well out of sight and sound of our grandparents and any other grown-ups, including of course our parents; Grandmother, a selfish and tyrannical old woman, being a firm believer in the old adage that children should be seen and not heard. We were also, to Mother’s horror, given different food: a plain and stodgy diet that consisted of suet puddings and boiled potatoes with the minimum of meat, and few fresh vegetables — even though the house possessed a large orchard and an equally large kitchen garden. But it seemed that the choicer fruits and vegetables were grown only for grown-ups, while the nursery was restricted to spinach and boiled cabbage and, on rare occasions, a raw apple. Mother tried to persuade her mama-in-law to give us less stodge and more fresh fruit, vegetables and milk (yes, they also kept their own dairy cows) but she only succeeded in putting the old lady’s back up; not a difficult thing to do.
Grandfather, equally Victorian and autocratic, had on retiring written to his children to inform them that he was putting the considerable savings of his years in the Indian Civil Service into acquiring this over-large house and extensive estate — plus the staff necessary to run it with clockwork efficiency and keep house and grounds in immaculate order — solely from the most selfless of motives: to wit, that his children and grandchildren should always have a home there. This pious announcement turned out to be pure spinach, for we had been there less than ten days when my grandfather told his son and heir that the bother and noise caused by the presence of three small grandchildren, a daughter-in-law and a nanny was too much for his mother’s nerves, so would he please remove himself and his family immediately. The selfish old basket must have known only too well that his dear Jane had never had so much as a nodding acquaintance with a nerve in all her life; and also that all the sanctimonious bilgewater about ‘spending his all’ to provide a home-from-home for his family was merely an excuse for spending every cent on himself and his own comfort, while at the same time furnishing him with a cast-iron alibi for not being able to give any of them any financial help.
Tacklow, who had accepted his father’s noble-sounding fairy-tale as the truth and arranged to spend his leave in this umpteen-bedroom home-from-home, wired his sister Molly to ask if she and her husband, Richard Hamblin, now retired and living in Scotland, would take us in as paying guests until he could make other arrangements. When she replied in the affirmative, he packed us up and removed us with all speed to her house in Forres, a small provincial town in the far north of Morayshire.
I was sorry to leave my grandparents’ house, though not my grandparents, whom I can barely remember having set eyes on during our stay — apart from an occasional and terrifying summons to the drawing-room, for which we were washed and brushed, dressed in freshly ironed and spotless clothes and warned to be on our best behaviour. But since even these awe-inspiring audiences seldom lasted for more than twenty minutes before we were thankfully dismissed back to the nursery wing, the old lady’s steely nerves really cannot have suffered overmuch wear and tear. The same cannot be said of ours. The more likely reason for our dismissal from her house was that the presence of visitors, any visitors, upset the ordered routine of her comfortably cushioned days. In other words, pure selfishness — combined with a strong miserly streak which she preferred to call ‘thrift’ and which made her resent paying for the extra food, coal and firewood consumed by her son and his family. Not forgetting his children’s nanny.
Oddly enough, considering how short a time I spent there, I can still remember Freshfield quite clearly. Not the interior. Only how it looked from the outside. The long gravel path that ran past the windows of the nursery wing. A cedar tree that shaded the wide lawn to the south of the house and the bank that sloped towards it, down which we loved to roll — doubtless to the accompaniment of delighted squeals that could well have been the ‘noise’ that so grated upon Jane Beckett Kaye’s imaginary nerves.
There is also one other memory that I took away with me from that pleasant but disapproving house, and which is a small fragment of history. The memory of walking across green, flower-spangled meadows, those fresh fields from which the house took its name, holding tightly to our nanny’s hand because I was afraid of cows (I still am) and reaching the long, empty shore of Southampton Water to watch an enormous ship steam slowly past. We walked out, I remember, on to a breakwater of huge wooden piles overgrown with mussels and seaweed, below which the tide-driven shingle lay banked along one side; full of a flotsam and jetsam of shells and assorted debris. When we reached the end of it, nanny lifted me up in her arms so that I could see better, and explained that the great ship was the newest, largest and most luxurious liner afloat. And the safest too, because she had been built with so many watertight doors that it would be impossible to sink her. This last observation both startled and alarmed me, since it had never occurred to me until that moment that the liner on which we had travelled from India could possibly sink!
The ship that we watched steaming majestically down Southampton Water on that long ago day was the ill-fated ‘Titanic’, pride of the White Star Line. And I can only suppose that the reason why the events of that sunny morning are etched so deeply on my memory is because only a very short time later I heard the shocked voices of grown-ups in the servants’ hall and the drawing-room discussing the appalling tragedy that had befallen the great liner — and realized that those vaunted watertight doors had proved useless when, on her maiden voyage, she struck an iceberg which sliced through them and sent her to the bottom of the Atlantic with the loss of over a thousand lives. This appalling news cast a gloom over all Britain, and it is not surprising that I remember the sight of her so clearly, for frankly, I was scared stiff. The thought o
f that vast ship being sliced open with such ease by an unseen ledge of ice, and all those hundreds of people drowning in a calm, black sea, haunted me for many weeks, and I have never quite trusted ships since then.
A few days after that we exchanged the springtime meadows and orchards of southern England for the snow and fog of north-east Scotland.
All that I can remember of Forres, which in those far-off Edwardian days was a comparatively small town (and for all I know still is) is my aunt’s house, Ramnee: a name presumably given to it in fond memory of India days, but which will be bracketed for ever in my memory with boiled cod.
Due to the fact that refrigerators and deep freezers had not yet been invented, and that I had hitherto lived several thousand miles from the sea, my diet had seldom if ever included fresh fish. I do not even remember being offered any on board ship or during our brief stay at Freshfield. But early on during our stay in Ramnee, the starched and elderly martinet who ruled the nursery (Aunt Molly’s youngest child, Dick, was roughly the same age as Bill) insisted that I ate up every scrap of a large helping of boiled cod with white sauce which was the cook’s idea, and hers, of a suitable lunch for children. The cod, from which neither the skin nor the bones had been removed, tasted unattractively fishy, the white sauce tasted of nothing at all — unless it was wallpaper paste? — and the vegetables (over-boiled cabbage and potatoes) were watery and saltless. I thought it was disgusting, and after one or two cautious spoonfuls, refused to eat any more; though eventually, and reluctantly, I did finish the vegetables. But not the cod.
This, in the view of Dick’s nanny, was Mutiny. And she immediately set about putting it down. I was to get nothing else to eat, she announced, until I had finished every scrap of cod — even if it took me the rest of the day! Bill, who for two pins would have followed my example, decided that discretion was the better part of valour and forced himself to swallow the nauseous stuff. So did Bets, who was too young to know better, while Dick, accustomed to this type of nursery-fodder, ate everything on his plate as a matter of course. After which all three were given pudding (probably sago or suet, so I don’t suppose I missed much), and lunch being over, Bets was put to bed for her afternoon nap and Bill and Dick sent off to play while I, forbidden to leave the table, sat staring stubbornly at the helping of cod that was by now congealing on my plate.
Tea-time came round with brown-bread-and-butter, bannocks and honey and mugs of milk for the others, and the cold cod and lumpy wallpaper paste for me. Mother, appealed to for help, proved a broken reed, for she was plainly just as scared of the uniformed tyrant as the tyrant was scornful of mere mothers who dared to try and interfere in any way with her running of Nursery Affairs. Supper (biscuits and milk) was duly eaten by Bill, Bets and Dick, while I was again presented with the rejected cod; the nanny remarking menacingly that if I didn’t eat it that day I would have to eat it for breakfast tomorrow; or for lunch, if I remained obdurate. I remember taking the plate away and sitting with it on my lap on the nursery stairs, watering it liberally with tears as I wondered if I could possibly force myself to eat it and thereby put an end to the whole ghastly business — which by this time felt as if it had been going on for days rather than hours. The chances are that had I been left alone to struggle with the problem a bit longer, I would have capitulated. But the martinet’s patience had given out and she made the mistake of trying to feed it to me forcibly.
Scooping me up off the stairs, plate and all, she plumped down on a chair, and holding me on her lap in an iron grip with my head hard back against her starched shoulder, she forced a spoonful of cold cod into my mouth and ordered me to swallow it. I got it down all right. All of it, as far as I remember. But my stomach evidently felt quite as affronted by the stuff as my taste-buds had been, and refusing to accept the offering, returned it — with interest — all over the woman’s glossy white uniform. I was appallingly sick, and Mother, coming up to say good-night, found me pallid and weeping, retching helplessly as the infuriated nanny boxed my ears. There followed an invigorating row, won this time by Mother, and I have never touched cod, or any other fish if I can help it, from that day to this. Nor do I recall having any further trouble from that nurse, so I imagine she must have given in her notice and flounced out.
Apart from the Cod War, my recollections of the months we spent in Forres are hazy. Ramnee has left an impression of a big, ugly, Victorian house with one of those large gardens full of tidy flowerbeds in which the flowers all seem to be red, blue or orange — geraniums, lobelias and border marigolds planted in tidy rows. I remember that when we first arrived it was under snow, and that I wore a thick white coat adorned with a circular shoulder cape, and a bonnet made of white sheepskin that tied under my chin with ribbons; both made by Mother. I remember rehearsals for a series of tableaux, including one from A Midsummer Night’s Dream which, according to a programme that miraculously still survives among our collection of what Tacklow always termed ‘Kag’, was followed by one of those single-act farces that were much in vogue in Victorian and Edwardian amateur-acting circles. This one was in two acts and called Browne with an E; and as far as I remember the whole performance took place either in some village hall or on a makeshift stage in a private house — a much larger house than Aunt Molly’s.
The first tableau was very much a family affair, with Dick’s younger sister, Grace, appearing as Titania, Dick as Puck, Bill as Bottom, and Bets and myself as a pair of blue fairies. There were also a pair of pink ones and an Oberon played by a Miss C. Mackenzie; but I don’t remember them at all. Or the fact that on the evidence of the programme I seem to have appeared in another tableau entitled ‘Ceres and the Four Seasons’, in the part of ‘Spring’. All that remains is the memory of the sheer boredom of having to remain perfectly still and not fidget or scratch between the times that the curtains parted on the tableau and the moment when they closed again; tempered by the satisfaction of being able to dress up as a fairy, complete with wings and wand. A painfully Edwardian fairy, I’m afraid, and not at all the sort that Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote about that moonlit wood near Athens.
I remember too being shown a drowned swan that lay like a fly in amber just below the glass-clear surface of a frozen lake; and — though this must have been months later — being taken to a magical place called Findhorn where there was a long, curving beach on which the open sea broke in lines of white foam. Behind the level shore and the sea lay a maze of sand dunes, down which one could toboggan, and patches of fat scarlet toadstools with white spots on them, exactly like the ones that elves sit on or under in illustrated children’s books.
I have no idea how long we stayed at Ramnee with the Hamblins. Probably well into the summer, if those expeditions to Findhorn are anything to go by. But I don’t think we can have been there for more than three to four months, because I know we spent August and the best part of the autumn with a friend or a relative who had a farm at Streatfield, and that it was during this visit that I celebrated my fourth birthday with a family picnic in nearby woods and a home-made birthday cake smothered in white icing and decorated with pink sugar roses whose leaves were cut from angelica. It was the first time I had ever come across angelica, which I thought delicious, and because it was my birthday my hostess (who had made the cake) gave me the whole stick of it to nibble. Even now, angelica reminds me of the farm at Streatfield. Just as cod will always mean Forres.
I loved that farm. We all did. We were allowed to help with the haymaking and the cows and the baby pigs, and with feeding the ducks and chickens and collecting hens’ eggs. The house was large, low-ceilinged, old-fashioned and comfortable, and there was only one thing about it that I did not like: a dark, arched passageway through which the farm carts could be driven from the front of the house to the big, stone-flagged yard at the back. I hated having to go through that passage and would go to almost any lengths to avoid doing so; for there was a stuffed fox in it, and though I knew it was not alive I was terrified of it. The
taxidermist who had set it up had plainly been a master craftsman, for he had drawn its lips back in a snarl and made it crouch a little as though it were creeping with flattened ears towards some helpless rabbit or hypnotized pheasant. The staring glass eyes would catch the light and glitter as though they were alive, and I was never quite sure that it wasn’t pretending to be dead and would not spring at my throat as I passed. Yet because I was more afraid of being laughed at than I was of the fox, I never told anyone that I was frightened of it, and there were always occasions on which I could not avoid being sent through that haunted passageway, shivering with terror and with my heart in my mouth. I would edge past it, my back to the wall, and once past I would run like the wind in case it might leap off its pedestal. I suppose that was my first real experience of fear.
Nothing else of any interest can have happened to me on my first visit to the land that I had been taught to call ‘home’ but always thought of as Belait,* because I have no recollection of anything else. We apparently spent the winter with Aunt Lizzie and her husband in Bedford, but apart from a shadowy impression of fog pressing against the window-panes, and a man who rang a bell and cried ‘Muffins! Hot Muffins!’ in the icy, misty street outside, nothing remains. Nothing but Bill in a white sailor-suit looking lost and bewildered and struggling not to cry because Aunt Molly, who had somehow reappeared upon the scene, had just told him sharply that boys never cried: only girls cried — girls and babies! That must have happened in January or February, and during a spell of unusually fine weather, because I associate it with sunshine and green leaves rustling in a sharp, blustery wind; laurels, perhaps? I suppose it could have taken place in a London park, for Mother says we spent a night in a hotel in London on our way to Tilbury and the docks from where the P.&O. liners set sail for India and the Far East.
Tacklow had already left for India some months previously, and now Mother and Bets and I were to return there to join him. But Bill was now six years old, which according to the thinking of that day was considered far too old for a boy to be allowed to stay out in India. Popular opinion held that a boy should be ‘sent home’ no later than five or six, in order to avoid being spoilt by Indian servants and becoming overbearing and backward as a result of missing the early training, education and discipline provided by British preparatory schools. Fortunately (like crying!) the same standards did not seem to apply to girls, who could apparently grow up to be spoilt, self-willed and dictatorial without anyone giving a damn. Something for which I, personally, have always been deeply grateful, since but for that I too might well have been left behind in England like poor little Bill. Or like my future husband, Goff, who was dumped on a clutch of maiden aunts in Ireland at the tender age of four.
