by M. M. Kaye
The second and equally vivid memory is of being taken for our daily walk by Ayah or Nurse Lizzie, or both; I on foot and Bets in a push-cart, week after week along a narrow, slippery path between high walls of hard-packed, discoloured snow that had frozen solid. These icy walls were far taller than I was, and even Nurse Lizzie could not see over them; for as in Kim, ‘Jakko Road was four feet deep in snow that year.’ And when a path is cleared through roads that lie under four feet of snow, the surplus shovelled onto the initial depths raises it by another four feet to create icy canyons through which one walks without ever seeing anything but the sky or the black, dripping deodar branches directly overhead.
With the spring our parents returned from Delhi and we all moved back into Chillingham, and while we were here one of Mother’s Indian friends presented her with a magnificent fan made from peacock feathers. It was a dazzling affair almost the size of a complete peacock’s tail, and Mother was delighted with it. Fans being rather the ‘in’ thing in the way of room decoration (see any contemporary photographs), she set it up as a fire-screen in the drawing-room, against the advice of several of her girl-friends who assured her that peacock feathers in a house brought bad luck. ‘Pooh!’ said Mother. ‘As if anything so beautiful could be unlucky!’ But that same afternoon she tripped over the stand of her cheval-glass, which toppled over and smashed into smithereens. And as all superstitious people know, to break a looking-glass is supposed to herald seven years’ bad luck. Mother, as a missionary’s daughter, had no time for such superstitions, but she was shaken by the accident. And even more shaken when less than half an hour afterwards Bets, who was supposed to be in bed enjoying her afternoon nap, appeared in the doorway complaining that her head ached and her throat ‘felt funny’.
Mother carried her back to bed, took her temperature, and finding it alarmingly high, sent for a doctor (of whom there were three in Simla at that time; rejoicing in the names of Slaughter, Blood and De’ath; can you believe it?) The doctor examined Bets and announced that she had diphtheria, and though in these days she would have gone straight into hospital, in those, people were whenever possible nursed at home. A night-nurse arrived within the hour and after a frantic SOS to that great friend of the family, Sir Charles Cleveland, who lived a luxurious bachelor life in a large house at the other end of Simla and had no fear of infection — or anything else! — I was despatched with Ayah, a suitcase and that tiresome pony and its syce, to stay with him until Bets should be out of danger. The danger was very great, for in those days diphtheria was a killer and ranked among the most dreaded of children’s diseases. The moment I had gone Mother rushed into the drawing-room and taking that wonderful peacock-tail fan out into the garden, poured kerosene oil over it and set a match to it. And from that day to this she has been incurably superstitious about peacock feathers, and will not have one in the house.
Bets, I am happy to say, recovered. But I can’t say that I enjoyed my stay under Sir Charles’s roof, for though I was truly fond of him, and devoted to his silky black retriever, Kate, I was terrified of the stuffed leopard who peered out realistically from a clump of dried grass in a large glass case that adorned his hall, and I detested the riding lessons he insisted on giving me every morning. My antipathy to horses was to prove a grave handicap when I grew up and was old enough to be asked out to parties and dances during various horse-show weeks up and down India; for the Cavalry Regiments ranked next to the Heaven-Born in the social scale, and cavalry officers preferred their girl-friends to be horsey and ‘debby’; and I was neither. But since that wretched pony had been sent along with me, together with its syce, Sir Charles considered it was his duty to ensure that by the time I was returned to my family I should be so proficient a rider that I would win all the prizes at the Children’s Gymkhanas that were held at intervals on Annandale — the Simla racecourse that lies in a cup among the hills over a mile below the Mall.
With this end in view he would spend half an hour every morning between chota-hazri and breakfast, sitting on his verandah steps and calling out instructions, strictures and encouragements while I rode up and down or round and round the lawn in front of him; scared to death that the pony would get bored and bolt with me, and struggling to do all the things I was being ordered to (‘Keep a straight back’, ‘Relax!’, ‘Grip with your knees’, ‘Keep your hands low’, ‘Trot!’, ‘Canter’, ‘No, no, no! don’t bump in your saddle — rise in your stirrups!’, and so on and so on).
Oh God, how I hated it! I never once felt in control of my mount, who did more or less as it liked while I, willy-nilly, went along with it. And though I was sincerely sorry when some months later it came to a sticky end,* it was a tremendous though unacknowledged relief to discover that shortage of money (those day- and night-nurses had cost poor Tacklow a packet) prevented my dear parents from buying a replacement. As great a relief as it had been when, Bets being convalescent and all danger of infection past, I was allowed home again and knew that I had no longer to face those dreaded daily riding lessons. I regretted disappointing dear Sir Charles who had had my best interests at heart, since he knew the importance of the Raj’s social snob-charter even if my unworldly father and feather-headed mother did not.
Tacklow and Mother had honestly believed that I would enjoy having a pony to ride; other parents’ children seemed to do so! — but only, I noticed, the British ones; when it came to girls, the fortunate daughters of our parents’ Indian friends were not expected to ride, and I used to envy Chote and Moni, Pushpa and Hamida and other friends of my own age-group who were spared the shame of having to display a deplorably bad seat and hands in public and live in terror of being ignominiously thrown or bolted with.
That year when the Simla season ended, our parents packed up the house and returned to the plains once more; leaving us, after tearful farewells, at Miss Cullen’s in the un-tender care of Nurse Lizzie. This harridan had come to us with the highest possible recommendation from personal friends of my parents. These friends, describing her as a ‘treasure’, must have been as fooled by her as my mother was, and did not realize that children do not tell tales about those into whose charge they have been placed. When in the course of time the truth leaks out, the parents of children who have suffered at the hands of sadistic nannies, governesses or tutors ask: ‘But why didn’t you tell us?’
There is no satisfactory answer. Or there was not in those far-off times. Nowadays, when children are being turned into little monsters by parents who refuse to discipline them in any way (when not battering them to death or imbecility) that question cannot arise very often. But in my young days discipline was given a high priority in bringing up children to become responsible citizens, and the young accepted this. We accepted anything that grown-ups did (however foolish, inexplicable or downright fatuous it may have seemed to us) as right and proper, for the simple reason that it was a responsible grown-up, ‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’ (or he, as the case might be), who did it. We never questioned their right to order us about or to punish us when we misbehaved. And just because we regarded our elders as our betters, it would never have occurred to us to tell tales or carry complaints about them to other grown-ups; least of all to the parents who had selected them to take charge of us.
I always think of Lizzie as being ‘old’. About fifty or sixty. But looking back, I realize that she cannot have been much more than thirty, if that. Memory paints her as a thinner and bonier version of the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass; the one who was always yelling ‘Off with her head!’. I don’t know how accurate this is, but as no snapshot of her survives I cannot check. In character she was every bit as ferocious as the Red Queen and we were soundly beaten for every peccadillo, however trivial. She would put us across her knee, pull down our frilly drawers, yank up our vests and belabour our small bare bottoms with the back of her hairbrush until they were sore and scarlet and exceedingly painful to sit down on. Hardly a day passed without one or other of us being beaten, and I am convi
nced that she enjoyed it, because I honestly cannot remember either of us being a particularly naughty child. On the contrary, I think we were very ordinary and peaceably disposed children who never got up to any spectacular mischief and were, in consequence, probably thoroughly boring.
Unfortunately for me, I not only grew to hate Nurse Lizzie with a bitter hatred I remember to this day, but I was sufficiently stubborn to resolve that never, under any circumstances, would I let her make me cry. I used to set my teeth and concentrate on hating her when she beat me, but I wouldn’t scream and I wouldn’t weep, and I can remember only one occasion when I broke this vow. That was when, realizing that she could not reduce me to the weeping, screaming pleas and apologies that she could draw so easily from poor little Bets, she decided to punish me instead by burning my most cherished possession: a white, silver-spangled scarf that someone, I think Sir Charles, had given me for my ‘dressing-up box’. (They still make these scarves in India to this day: the material is coarse net and the glitter is applied by innumerable narrow strips of silvery metal threaded through the net and pressed flat so that the shimmering stuff feels as heavy and cold and slippery as a snake.) I would not plead with her not to burn it, so she threw it on the fire. And having watched, appalled and disbelieving as it shrivelled and turned black and melted into nothingness, I crawled into bed and pulled the blankets over my head so that the hateful woman could not see that I was crying.
I had nothing else that I valued enough for her to burn, except Roller-bear, my adored white teddy-bear who accompanied me everywhere, and without whom I would not (could not!) go to sleep. I imagine that she would have burned him too if she had dared. But the bitch-woman must have realized that everyone, even a small girl, has a breaking-point, and that I would fight for Roller-bear with teeth and claws — or a knife or a pair of scissors if I could get my hands on them! She would also have known that my parents would be bound to ask what had become of him when they returned and discovered him to be missing, and that if asked a direct question I would reply with the truth. So she never touched Roller-bear, but she devised another form of punishment, the effects of which have lasted the rest of my life and can still cause problems.
She knew that I hated having to take castor-oil. I loathed the taste, detested the oiliness and suffered cramping tummy pains shortly before the beastly stuff took effect. In those days a dose of castor-oil was prescribed for any child suffering from low spirits or lethargy or anything else that could be ascribed to constipation, which was considered the root cause of any childish ailment, from loss of appetite to acne. (I believe an earlier generation looked upon Gregory’s Powder as a similar cure-all.) How that dreadful woman discovered my loathing for castor-oil I don’t know. But discover it she did, and it served to provide her with a splendid new way of punishing me; in addition to a splendid new reason for doing so in the first place.
Lizzie was being courted by a certain Sergeant Smith who used to meet her by the bandstand on the Ridge; and for this reason our daily walk was always the same one. Every afternoon, come rain or shine, we would set off for the Ridge: Punj-ayah,* Lizzie, myself and the push-cart boy pushing Bets whose short, fat little legs could not keep up with my thin, bony ones; let alone with Lizzie’s or Ayah’s. Our route took us past the unalluring Victorian pile of Auckland House — built in the heyday of the East India Company for the Governor-General of that name — and on up a steep hill to the Lakkar Bazaar, where it joined the level road that circles Jakko — the wooded hill that is crowned by a monkey temple. Turning right in the bazaar, our road passed Davico’s Ballroom’ and came out on the Ridge here Christ Church stands, and the bandstand and the Library. From where, on one side, you can see down over the rooftops to Simla bazaar descending the mountainside below in a ramshackle avalanche of houses, and from the other onto fold after fold after fold of hills, to where the snow peaks lie in a glittering rampart along the far horizon.
Here Lizzie would meet her Sergeant and Punj-ayah would be ordered to take charge of Bets and her pram-pusher and me, and keep us out of the way for the next half-hour; which she did by taking us down to the Mall to watch one of our favourite sights — the men who applied those paste decorations to shawls and wall-hangings that I have already described, and who could be guaranteed to keep us riveted in admiration for their skill as the patterns flowed and glowed under their swiftly moving fingers. Punj-ayah would allow us to squat on the shop front watching the workers and chatting to them for twenty minutes or so, before herding us back to the Ridge to rejoin Nurse Lizzie for the return to Miss Cullen’s. And it was at this point that my purgatory would begin…
The walk from Miss Cullen’s to the Ridge was not a short one for a child, and though there was a ladies cloakroom at the Library, Lizzie would never allow me to visit it. With the result that half-way back to Miss Cullen’s the effect of a dose of castor-oil would invariably catch up with me, and the most that Lizzie would allow was to let me run on ahead in the vain hope of reaching the house in time. I never made it. I would run ahead, sobbing and breathless, racked with pains that signalled the imminent approach of disaster, to arrive befouled, smelly and desperate, weeping with despair and embarrassment as I rushed, too late, into the bathroom and sank down on to the seat of the ‘thunder box’ — the only type of lavatory that Simla homes boasted in those days. Lizzie would arrive as I was frantically trying to clean up the mess with wads of Bromo paper, and after a furious tirade would decree the usual punishment: another whacking dose of castor-oil which would be repeated if, as so often, I failed to keep down the first one; and which led, inevitably, to the same crime followed by the same punishment, day after day.
It is strange to think that in the years that led up to the Second World War, Mussolini and his Blackshirts inflicted the same punishment on those rash enough to disagree with them out loud. The shaming embarrassment suffered by the victim was part of the fun; as Lizzie discovered a long time before the Italian Fascists woke up to it. I wonder if she ever married her Sergeant and had any children of her own? Heaven help them if she did, for not unnaturally my insides have never worked properly since then. (Well, just try dosing a child almost daily with massive dollops of castor-oil and see what happens to its interior plumbing!) It could even be that I shall live for fewer years than I would otherwise have done had I not met that sadistic ‘treasure of a nanny’.
Mother no longer remembers how she found out about Lizzie. It was certainly not because either Bets or myself had uttered a cheep of complaint, for it had not occurred to us to do so; frightened little twits that we were. But she learned of it somehow. Some other woman, Miss Cullen perhaps, had noticed that I was getting thinner and peakier and having to be bullied to eat any food, and instituted inquiries. I myself am inclined to think that Punj-ayah, my only refuge in those dark days, talked to the Harvington servants, and that either Miss Cullen’s ayah, or her old bearer who was a particular friend of ours and a great power in the house, told on the Nurse-Missahib, and that Miss Cullen — or someone — wrote to Mother. Whatever happened, it was enough to bring her hurrying up to Simla a month early and without any warning.
She had, I know, been worried about us, for she used to come up to Simla for short visits whenever she could afford to, just to see that we were all right, and I suppose she had found me looking pale and listless and generally out-of-sorts — and probably shockingly constipated. For Lizzie-the-treasure naturally suspended all punishments while Mother was there, and without their normal ‘fix’ of castor-oil my insides no longer worked at all, having become hooked on the beastly stuff — with withdrawal symptoms that were most uncomfortable. There is also the possibility that poor Bets’s tearful shrieks while being spanked with a hairbrush had been overheard by a sympathetic fellow guest, who blew the gaff on Nurse Lizzie.
The upshot was that Bets and myself were sent out for a walk with Punj-ayah and the pram-boy — for once in the opposite direction to our usual route — and when we returned it was to
find Lizzie had gone, bag and baggage.
Mother scolded me, between tears and hugs, for not having told her about Lizzie’s reign of terror. Why had I never mentioned it in those carefully printed letters that had arrived once a week in Delhi? Well, that was a silly question if ever there was one! I hadn’t because Lizzie vetted every letter as well as stamping them and personally placing them on the tray in the hall, from where all letters from Harvington were collected by a chuprassi* and taken to the nearest pillar-box. Then why hadn’t I told Miss Cullen? Because kind as she was, she was another grown-up and so would presumably agree with Lizzie that I needed punishing. And also because I was far too embarrassed to explain what it was that Lizzie punished me for, even though it was the direct cause of the subsequent crime.
I don’t know what happened to Nurse Lizzie or where she went. She must have left Simla, for we never saw or heard of her again and she would have known that her chances of being employed there as a child’s nurse were nil. I hope she married her Sergeant and became a model wife and mother, because no one can know what drives another person to behave like that. How is one to know? I am sorry I ever met her, but I hope things came right for her in the end.
The Great War — the ‘war to end war’ — never became quite real to me. I knew that it was happening, but it was happening on the other side of the world. I also knew that it was horrible and terrifying, for Tacklow had once explained trench warfare to me and told me that to him almost the worst thing about it was the thought of the mud. He said he used to dream about it; of having to plod through it, stand ankle-deep in it, sit in it, lie down to sleep in it … Mile upon mile of wet, sticky, shell-splattered mud, pocked with craters and spiked with the shattered remains of what had once been trees. A grey wilderness on which the rain fell steadily and unceasingly and bullets pattered down like nuts in autumn. That was a horrible part of war. So were the books of propaganda cartoons in the Public Library on Simla Ridge.
