by M. M. Kaye
The prospect was not one that held much appeal for Tacklow; and in the event that last promise proved a hollow one, being conveniently forgotten the moment the Armistice was signed. But at least Mother was happy again. She had been petrified at the thought of being hurried off by way of the Pacific to Canada, to be dumped with her two small daughters on an errant and eccentric brother-in-law and his wife whom she had never met, while her husband marched off to embroil himself in the appalling carnage in Europe and left her struggling to make ends meet and living in hourly dread of receiving a telegram from the War Office to say that he was dead or, worse, ‘missing believed killed’ — that most harrowing of tragic uncertainties.
Army Headquarters’ flat refusal to let Major Kaye go came, for-Mother, as an answer to prayer, and her spirits immediately soared as high as Tacklow’s plummeted. It was not that he had any desire to fight or kill anyone. But he loved his country, and now that she was fighting for her life he felt that the very least that anyone could do was to come to her aid and, if necessary, die that she might live. Since that privilege (he was sufficiently patriotic and old-fashioned enough to regard it as such) was denied him, he turned back to the task that his seniors considered that he was best qualified to do, and drove himself unsparingly; working late into the nights as well as through the weekends, and only very rarely allowing himself to take any leave.
Since I have always been incapable of solving the simplest crossword puzzle, I cannot begin to understand the workings of a mind that can break codes and solve complicated ciphers, and apart from the basic principle I never had the faintest idea how the trick was done. My impression even now is that it involved the use of some form of mental water-divining, and that something in Tacklow’s brain sensed the meaning lurking under the surface muddle, just as a dowser’s forked stick twitches and turns downward in answer to the pull of something unseen. I realized that mathematics played a significant part in it, though maths had always been a closed book to me — and still is! But it seemed to me that there must be something more than that: a sixth sense that enabled certain people to break ciphers. I still think so, and here are two stories that support my belief —
On several occasions ciphers that had baffled the experts in England were sent on to India in the hope that Kaye might be able to break them. And Kaye did. One such, having landed on his desk after being given up by any number of top cipher-experts in Britain, was broken in double quick time because Tacklow, having looked at it thoughtfully for about five minutes, said to his team: ‘I’ve got a strong feeling that this one works on a key phrase. Quite a short one; not more than two or three words. Let’s try it out: we’ll start with something obvious like “Gott Straffe England!“’ So they did. And it was! That of course was a glorious fluke. But it supports my contention that the early cipher-experts must have had a lot in common with dowsers.
Tacklow also broke the Russian cipher, though Russian was not one of the many languages he spoke. Russia was at the time one of the Allies. But being Russia, she had her own private codes to which her allies did not have the key (or would not have had, had it not been for Tacklow’s peculiar type of brain). Also, being Russia, the Allies were never quite sure whose side she was likely to end up on — if anyone’s, since throughout her history Russia has never been on any side but her own. It was therefore considered vitally necessary to know what the Muscovites were really up to, and Tacklow was asked to give the matter his attention. He duly cracked their code — though how he did it I have no idea, considering that without the help of a Russian-English dictionary he could not have translated their messages even if they had been sent in clear!
But he did even better than that. The Russians changed their code once a month, and always on the same date: let’s say on the 24th. And within a day or two, never more than three, Tacklow had cracked the new one. He gained tremendous kudos from this spectacular feat, and only some considerable time after the war had ended, when he was asked to give a talk on ciphers and deciphering to the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge, in the hope of interesting the young in this vital branch of warfare and security, did he blow the gaff.…
The secret of his impressive performance lay in the fact that the Russians are a methodical people. Their new code came into operation on the 24th of each month, so on the 23rd, to ensure that those who used it should have no trouble understanding it, they sent out the new code in the old one. It was as simple as that! The apparent delay of a couple of days or so (in which Tacklow was supposed to be beavering away at solving it) was merely eyewash designed to distract attention from this glaring breach in the Russian defences. Surprisingly enough, they never tumbled to it. And since Tacklow never let anyone into the secret for fear that someone might think it too good a story and tell it in confidence to one of Simla’s many gossips, he gained a reputation for brilliance that was undeserved. Though he had, of course, cracked the original one, in a language he did not speak.
He told me a lot of cipher stories. But here is one I learned from Mother. … A Top Secret message from a British General commanding a brigade in action somewhere in the Middle East was delivered by hand at our house late one night, together with a note to say that since it was a very long one the duty officer thought that it might be too urgent to be left until morning, so would Major Kaye please …? Hauled out of bed in the small hours, Major Kaye fetched the code book from the safe in his study, and waking his sleeping wife asked her to help him out by reading out the relevant numbers from the ‘crib’. Yawning and heavy-eyed (she told me she had only just fallen asleep after returning late from a dance), she put on a dressing-gown and dutifully complied by the light of a bedside lamp. The message was a particularly long one, and as the ‘very model of a modern Major-General’ who had despatched it was in a potentially dangerous situation she, like Tacklow and the duty officer, was prepared for news of vital importance. The message came out slowly, letter by letter, which as Tacklow wrote them down formed themselves into words: PASSED … THROUGH … FIELDS … OF … WAVING … CORN … At which point Tacklow said something that Mother would not even repeat to me, and telling her to go back to sleep, turned out the lamp and went to sleep himself. But the incident passed into family legend and for many years afterwards anything totally irrelevant and time-wasting was described as ‘only a bit of waving corn’.
The war years that wrought such terrible havoc in Europe and the Middle East, killing or maiming appalling numbers of people and breaking the hearts and wrecking the lives of twice as many more, were, for me, the happiest in my life. A Golden Age that I look back on as Eve must have looked back at lost Eden. I knew there was a war being fought, ‘a Great War’, because Tacklow had told me so. But then he had also read me Kingsley’s Heroes, and told me about the Trojan Wars and Thermopylae and of Arthur’s last fight, and about Saladin and the Crusaders too. They were just stories in a book. Or in the case of Arthur a poem —
So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonesse about their Lord …
I knew that this war was different, that it was real and was happening now. I had also been aware of Mother’s fear and unhappiness during the weeks of waiting for Uncle Alec’s reply from Canada, and for the outcome of Tacklow’s efforts to persuade Army Headquarters to release him for active service on the Western Front. Also of her enormous relief when he was ordered to shut up and get on with it, which was as though a light had been switched on. Her spirits had shot up like the fountains in the gardens of the Taj and she had flung herself with renewed and grateful enthusiasm into war-work: which in those days consisted largely of rolling bandages, filling huge parcels for the Red Cross (which I presume must have contained something other than bandages), and knitting endless skeins of khaki-coloured wool into socks, balaclava helmets and fingerless mittens, which came under the heading of ‘Comforts for the Troops
’. Or she would help to entertain wounded soldiers who were sent to convalescent homes in Simla and other hill stations, run stalls or raffles at endless charity bazaars in aid of this, that or the other war effort, and act in amateur theatrical or cabaret shows for the same causes.
We children were co-opted to help in all these activities and to us it was either fun or a boring chore. The children’s plays were fun but rolling bandages a terrible chore because they had to be done exactly right; if one was rolled too loosely or untidily it had to be undone and done again. I remember with affection an intensely patriotic play called Where the Rainbow Ends in which my lost love Guy’s lovely sister Marjorie — hereinafter known as Bargie, that being the name by which all Simla’s children knew her — played the part of Will-o’-the-Wisp in a tunic of blue-grey chiffon and a sparkly silver head-dress that I thought beautiful beyond words; almost as entrancing as that star-spangled globe in the hall of the Central Hotel. A girl called Betty Caruana played one of the two midshipmen heroes, Jim Blunders. I fell madly in love with ‘Jim Blunders’. How, I wonder, do little girls escape getting into a terrible tangle over the sexes? ‘Jim Blunders’ was a boy: yet he was played by a girl. How could I be in love with the boy and not with the girl? Very strange and unsettling.
I wasn’t one of the children who was chosen to act in this play, but I understudied one of them and when she (or was it he?) was smitten by some juvenile disease I went on in his (or her) place. Here, I hate to say, my memory must have gone badly astray, for I could have sworn on oath that I played the part of a white rabbit, and that all I had to do was hop across the dark-green side of the stage. (The dark-green half belonged to the Dragon King, and any human venturing on it could be captured, while the light-green half belonged to England’s patron saint, St George.) If it were not for the fact that I possess one of the original programmes, and a photostat copy, donated by a Simla contemporary, of the assembled cast — neither of which include rabbits — I would have continued to swear to it. And I can still see myself hopping across that stage in a white, fluffy suit with long ears and a cottonwool tail, and hear ‘Jim Blunders’ real-life as well as stage sister, ‘Betty’ (Kitty Caruana), piping: ‘Oh do look at those darling wabbits!’
But whether I was sent on to replace a non-talking rabbit or a tip-toeing fairy, I did go on as someone’s understudy for several performances, and the chances are that one of them was watched from the stage box by a small boy called Goff Hamilton who would one day marry me. Sadly, he remembers hardly anything about the play except that he saw it and that somebody was tied to a tree so that the wolves would eat them. He says that he ‘remembers all the wolves’. But as a matter of fact, they were supposed to be hyenas, not wolves, and there were only three of them. However, it’s nice to know that they made an impression on him. (They scared most of the small fry into howls at the children’s matinées.)
Perhaps it was during this same year that Mother took part in a song-and-dance show in aid of the Red Cross that was being held at Viceregal Lodge for a strictly limited number of performances. The amateur actors wore pierrot costumes, half black and half white, while the actresses wore white wigs with pierrette dresses that were half white and half black-and-white checks. There is a snapshot of Mother wearing her pierrette outfit, taken at Chillingham; and I presume there must have been a matinée performance of this show for the benefit of those who were too young to stay up for an evening one, because I remember seeing it. I remember too that there was a huge gold picture-frame in the background of the set in which two of the performers, dressed in seventeenth-century costumes, sang a duet: ‘Madam will you walk? Madam will you talk …’ Bets and I thought this song was terrific and for years afterwards we used to sing it, accompanied by a minuet, as a party-piece when called upon to show off for the benefit of indulgent aunts and other elderly relatives who considered it ‘sweetly pretty’!
It was only much, much later, long after the Great War had been re-named the First World War because there had been a second one, and after that one too was over, that happening to leaf through an old photograph-album belonging to my mother-in-law, I discovered that she too had been a member of that same concert party and had actually sung that song! Neither she nor my mother had remembered that the other had been in the show, and I regret now that I didn’t ask her to identify any of the other performers from the group photograph. She may have done so, of course; but if she did, I hadn’t the sense to write down the names.
The only two I can identify are Lady Grant and a Mrs Brocas-Howell who (though one would never have believed it on the evidence of this photograph) had the reputation of being a notable charmer in the Mrs Hawksbee tradition and having a train of lovers. And the only reason why I remember her is because we children learned to detest her when, a year or so later, she played the part of Britannia in a patriotic extravaganza known as ‘The Pageant’ — a show which, like many others during the war years, was produced and directed by our dancing-teacher, pretty Mrs Strettle, later Lady Strettle, whom we all adored, and who ran a weekly children’s dancing-class in Simla during the summer months and in Old Delhi during the cold weather. However, ‘The Pageant’ and Mrs Brocas-Howell came later…
* Pronounced dee-wān — Prime Minister. He either was, or had been, the chief minister of one of the Independent Native States.
3
Morning’s at Seven
Chapter 10
Teach us to bear the yoke in youth …
Kipling, ‘The Children’s Song’
I don’t remember how or why we came to be living in a long, rambling house called Harvington that stood (and still does) on an outlying spur of the hills a mile or two outside Simla, facing the ridge along which the mountain road to Mashobra, Kufri, Fargu and the Kulu Valley winds and twists on its way to the high passes and the snows of Tibet. Puran Baghat’s road —
Harvington belonged to a cosy old lady called Miss Cullen who ran it as a boarding-house: for which reason it was always known as ‘Miss Cullen’s’ and never as Harvington. The girl who played the midshipman in Where the Rainbow Ends, and on whom I had a juvenile crush, lived with her parents at Miss Cullen’s, and although a good deal older than most of the other children there, was kindness itself to all of us. I still remember the floods of tears when she was sent home to England a month or so after acting in that play, her parents having decided that the dangers of the submarine warfare that Germany had declared on all British and Allied shipping was, on balance, of less importance than having their darling daughter spoiled rotten and growing up half-educated.
Bets and I loved Harvington and Miss Cullen. The wooded hillside that fell away so steeply at the far edge of the lawn was our favourite playground: an enchanted world which in springtime was white with drifts of the wild Himalayan lily-of-the-valley, and later with the sweet, evocative scent of the yellow, climbing wild-roses which spangie our hillsides in the months before the monsoon breaks. After that came the rhododendrons; so many of them that for miles around the hillsides seemed on fire. With the autumn a pink, fruitless blossom tree flowered throughout the hills as though it were a second springtime; and always, maidenhair fern dripped from every rock.
No one who has not been a child in the Himalayas can know how beautiful they are, and how full of colour and scent and wonder. We built an entire fairy world among the tree-roots and moss and wildflowers some fifty yards or so down the hillside below the lawn, and when we put out biscuit and cake crumbs for the gnomes, elves and other ‘People of the Hills’ and found them gone the next morning, we were certain that they were being served up at some fairy banquet, and would have angrily rejected any suggestion that birds, animals or insects were responsible — though the woods were always full of those, and of other forest creatures.
Two of my earliest recollections of the war years are linked with Miss Cullen’s, for Bets and I spent at least two cold weathers there in the charge of a new ayah and an English nanny called Lizzie; our parents havi
ng moved down to Delhi when the Viceroy, the Government of India, the Commander-in-Chief and Army Headquarters departed en masse for the plains in an annual winter migration. This began as soon as the Simla season finished at the end of October, and would take place in reverse when the approach of the next hot weather drove them back to the cool of the hills once more.
The first of those two early memories of Miss Cullen’s is a vivid recollection of being awakened out of sleep late one night by Ayah, who snatched me out of bed, bundled me up in an eiderdown and ran out, carrying me in her arms into the cold black darkness of the garden. Lizzie was already there with Bets in her arms and so were a number of servants and, I suppose, the rest of Miss Cullen’s guests; though the darkness prevented me from seeing them. I realized with alarm that Ayah was frightened, but when I asked her what we were running away from she would only say through chattering teeth: ‘Zalzala! … Zalzala! …’ The word being unfamiliar to me, my respect for the wisdom of grown-ups took its first knock, since whatever this monster was, it seemed to me the height of stupidity to run out into the night where it could pounce on us in the dark from behind a clump of bushes or a tree-trunk. Surely we would be far safer if we hid from it under one of the beds or locked ourselves into a cupboard? The grown-ups must have taken leave of their senses! In fact, it was an earthquake; and a fairly severe one at that. But as I had been sound asleep when Ayah snatched me from my bed, and had, throughout, been clutched in the arms of someone who was shivering with fright, I had not been aware that the ground was shaking, or that inside the house the ceiling lamps were swaying to and fro and pictures and ornaments were tumbling off walls and table-tops as though a hurricane were rampaging through the house. I was to experience a fair number of zalzalas in the future; but that was the first.
