by M. M. Kaye
Khundun’s bibi* would let us play with her latest baby or try our hand at milking the cow, and Khundun would give us handfuls of the brittle-shelled kargassy walnuts when they were in season. And if Buckie were in residence and not too busy, he would come out of his office and call down to us over the verandah rail to come up to have a glass of lemonade and a biscuit with him. The lower verandah was wide and shady, and all along the inner wall were narrow wooden shelves on which Khundun ranged pots of cinerarias — those heat-loving hot-house flowers which prefer the shade to direct sunlight — so that one wall of the verandah was always a blaze of colour; blue and cerise, purple and crimson. Bets and I admired them enormously, particularly the blue ones; and to this day cinerarias mean the lower verandah of Dukani to us. Just as maidenhair ferns will always mean the lower road to The Retreat; though it is the smell of maidenhair fern rather than the sight of it that is such a vivid reminder of the paths through the forests. With the cinerarias, which are scentless, it is the child’s-paintbox colours that remind me of the hot, shadowed verandah that looked out across the orchard towards Simla and smelt of pine wood, as did all the Mashobra houses.
Poor Buckie! He attracted children in much the same way as Tacklow attracted cats. We all loved him, and though he could be endlessly patient and good-tempered he never for a moment allowed us to impose upon him or become a nuisance. When he had had enough of us we were firmly dismissed; and we accepted dismissal without argument and with no trace of rancour; ‘The King has spoken’! I did not realize at that time how unhappy his private life must have been. His first child, a son, had died in infancy and there is a moving reference to his death in one of Lady Curzon’s letters to her mother, Mrs Leiter of Washington and Chicago. Writing in the autumn of 1900, she says:
Tell the girls that Mrs Buck’s baby of three months — my godchild — died suddenly on Sunday through neglect of the nurse & I went down to poor Mrs Buck & actually buried the baby. There was no one but another woman & me to put the dead baby in its coffin & Captain Baker-Carr carried it downstairs. We went to the cemetery — the coffin in a rickshaw — & the Mother & Father & I & Mr Kruber a friend behind & it was the saddest, baldest, most miserable funeral.
There had been two other children; another boy, and a girl who had been crippled by polio while still a child. Both, with their mother, had been in England when Buckie first saw Dukani perched on its lonely hilltop some half-dozen miles outside Simla, fell in love with it and bought it from the Maharajah of Alwar. He was sure his wife would be as captivated by it as he was, and because he wanted to surprise her with this charming home he did not tell her about it, but spent months improving and rebuilding it, choosing furniture and curtains, having it painted and wallpapered in the colours she liked best, and setting Khundun and his assistants to work making a superb lawn and garden, planting fruit trees, digging a tank and cutting winding paths through the woods that clothed the northern slope of his hilltop. Everything was in apple-pie order by the time Annie Buck arrived and he brought her up to Simla and took her out along the Mashobra Road to surprise her with the home he had made for her.
She was surprised all right. But unpleasantly so. She hated it on sight. Not because she had any fault to find with the house or the gardens, the wonderful views from every window or the way in which the rooms had been furnished. In all those aspects it was near perfect. But if Buckie thought she was going to live in such an isolated, back-of-beyond spot as Mashobra, miles from the social life and gaiety of Simla, he could think again! Nothing would induce her to live stranded out here on the edge of nowhere, so the sooner he sold Dukani and acquired a house in Simla the better. It was a bitter blow to Buckie, but since ‘Annie B’ (the name she was known by throughout half India) stood firm, there was nothing for it but to rent another house; which he did, though he was never to sell Dukani for he had become too fond of it. He continued to spend as much time as possible there, and the weekend parties he held at Dukani became famous; though they hardly ever included his wife, whom he kept from going there. I don’t remember meeting either of his two children during the war years, or even knowing that they existed, so I presume they had both been left behind in England; the boy at a public school and little crippled Lorna in the care of relatives.
Since Annie B was crazy about horses and had no time to bother about anything else, the crippled child was brought up to think that horses were the most important thing in life, and though almost immobile on the ground, once lifted onto a horse’s back and settled into a side-saddle, she learnt to ride by balance alone and became an accomplished horsewoman and a ‘bruising rider to hounds’. I don’t think Buckie saw much of her when she was little, or of his much-loved second son either, since his work tied him to India. But when the war broke out his boy, barely old enough to enlist, joined up, and like so many youthful Second-Lieutenants was killed almost at once on the Western Front. Perhaps that was why Buckie was so good with children, though at the time I had no idea that he had lost two sons and had a sorely crippled daughter.
Whenever I think of Mashobra, which is often, I see it basking in bright sunlight. But in fact for at least half of the time, if not more, it was smothered in clouds and hidden under a pall of rain. Delhi, in those pre-fridge and air-conditioning days, became too hot for comfort by the middle of April, so it was then that the Government of India made its stately and cumbersome trek up to Simla. Spring in Simla, with the cuckoos calling and the hillsides awash with wild balsam and lily-of-the-valley, was marvellously cool after the hot winds and dust-storms of the plains, while the pine-scented breezes that blew off the snows seemed like heaven to the parched refugees from the heat. May and June were wonderful months; but towards the end of June all India waited for the arrival of the monsoon, and when at last it swept in from the sea, telegrams would go out to carry the news to every part of the Indian subcontinent, for it was easy to calculate how long it would take to travel northward.
Once it hit Bombay we could be fairly certain when it would reach Simla. And after the first downpour we knew more or less where we were and how long it would last, for there was a pattern to the monsoon; it was not all swirling mist and drenching rain. The initial tidal wave of water would be followed by a long period when the sun would rise every day in a cloudless sky above a thoroughly washed world in which every leaf and twig and blade of grass glittered with raindrops and the far snows looked so near and so clear that it almost seemed as though you could spit a cherry-stone at them and score a hit. On those days Bets and I would walk down Oaklands’ long drive as far as the Mahasu bazaar with Tacklow, the rickshaw following behind in case we should wish to ride back (a ridiculous idea, as who, at that age, would not prefer to walk?), and having seen him off on his five-mile hike to his office, we would spend half-an-hour or so chatting to various friends in the bazaar before making our way home in the full blaze of the morning sunlight. And every day without fail we would see, as we walked back up the drive, a little cloud no bigger than a dandelion clock in the waste of blue. It grew with incredible speed until by the time we reached the house it would have covered a third of the sky. Half an hour later the orchard trees would have been swallowed up by the encroaching mist, and within minutes the whole world would be grey and even the tubs of blue agapanthus lilies, that stood a bare eight feet from the verandah’s edge, would have vanished. Then the rain would come down again and for the rest of the day we lived with the sound of water drumming steadily on the corrugated tin of the roof.
There were many breaks during the rains. Sometimes for as long as a week and sometimes for only a day or two. The rain-washed air was as clear and as brilliant as a table-cut diamond and the world was full of birds and butterflies, and the scent of flowers and pines and wet grass, and one could see every ridge and wrinkle and glacier among the high snows. Not until the first tree fern died did one know that the monsoon was nearly over. But although there were never enough breaks, and in general the monsoon lasted from the end of June
until mid-September, Oaklands and Mashobra stay for ever in my mind in sunlight. Hot, bright, glorious sunlight…
Mother became worried about our lack of schooling and imported a governess. Two, in fact. One after the other. The first one was young and the second middle-aged. The young one, who was always remembered in the family as ‘Miss Violets’ because she had a passion for the colour, wore no other shade, drenched herself in cheap violet scent and stunned my poor parents on her first night at Oaklands by sailing down to dinner (which was never more than a light supper) in full evening dress with bunches of artificial violets tucked into the brass-gold waves of her hair. My parents had not expected her to join them, for she had her own sitting-room and was well aware that arrangements had been made for her to take her evening meal there; and they themselves never dressed for supper unless there were guests. Mother explained, for the second time, that although as our governess she would take her breakfast, lunch and tea with us in the dining-room, once the children were in bed there was no need for her to join her employers at dinner, which was a meal that Tacklow, after a hard day at the office, liked to eat těte-à-těte with his wife whenever he got the chance. Miss Violets retorted haughtily that she was accustomed to being treated as one of the family and had never before been asked to eat alone in her sitting-room. And telling the khidmatgar to lay another place for her, she plumped herself firmly down at the table.
She might have got away with it if she had not insisted on keeping up a non-stop flow of exceedingly genteel chat throughout the meal, which almost succeeded in driving poor Tacklow round the bend. It was more than he could bear, and when she again swept haughtily into the dining-room on the following night (this time in a mass of violet-tinted organdie frills and even more violets in her hair and at her waist) and never drew breath except to do a bit of chewing, he insisted on Mother taking a stand. Mother, deeply embarrassed, took one, and Miss Violets, losing her gentility and her temper, took offence, packed her two trunks, three suitcases and a couple of hatboxes, and flounced out. She made quite a procession of it, according to Mother, who says she had to hire an extra rickshaw and two coolies to convey Miss Violets and her belongings back to Simla only two days after paying for two rickshaws and two coolies to bring her out. I remember that Bets and I hung out of a window in the top verandah and, like the ranks of Tuscany, ‘could scarce forbear to cheer’! We hadn’t liked what little — very little — we had seen of Miss Violets.
The next governess was a good deal older and lasted a good deal longer, but I can’t recall her teaching us anything. In fact if it had not been for Tacklow reading us books at bedtime and giving us such an appetite for stories that we could both read from an early age, I imagine that we would have acquired no education at all. Presumably Governess Number 2 taught us a smattering of arithmetic, geography, history and scripture (though of the two last, I owe my interest in the former to Tacklow and had already received a sound grounding in the latter from Mother). But whatever else she did or did not teach us, she was certainly a disciplinarian and the time-table she drew up for us was strictly adhered to. She kept our noses firmly to the grindstone, which was no doubt very good for us; but her chief drawback in our eyes was that she was continually losing her voice. Not completely, worse luck, since she could always manage to talk to us in a perfectly audible whisper, but enough to prevent her calling out to us to come in from the garden. We were therefore restricted during our leisure hours to playing on the small lawn onto which the nursery window looked, and nowhere else. She could keep an eye on us there, and when play-time was up she would lean out and clap her hands to summon us inside. We were never allowed to move out of earshot of that sound. Or out of eyeshot either!
I don’t know how long she stayed with us, but it seemed like years, while to her it must have seemed like centuries, since the poor woman must have been bored rigid. There was no social life for her at all, so far outside Simla. No friends, no one to talk to but a couple of kids who until her arrival had been allowed to run wild and resented their lack of freedom under her rule. The thing I remember most about her reign is the sheer bliss of being able to race about the garden again after she left — down to the pond and the orchard and the tennis court, and up to the mule track and across the hillsides and along the forest paths. We had been barred from all of them for so long that we had almost forgotten what they looked like.
One of the high-spots of that year occurred while Sir Charles Cleveland was spending a long weekend with us. He told us that a very august personage, the Rajah of Bhong, would be calling at Oaklands in order to take tea with him and our parents, and that if we were very good we might even be allowed to meet him! But he was a very shy person who disliked crowds and large parties and hated to be stared at by strangers, because he happened to be a dwarf. However, he was very nice and with luck he might agree to see us. We were thrilled to bits, and when we came in from our walk that afternoon we went straight up to our bedroom to change into our best clothes and listen excitedly for the sound of his arrival — we had been warned against being seen peering out of the windows.
Mother hurried upstairs to tell us that Tacklow and Sir Charles had left to meet His Highness on the road and escort him to the house, but that unfortunately he had come by the upper road and missed them, and that as he could not stay long and they were still waiting for him somewhere on the lower road, he would be pleased to see us now. So down we went — and sure enough, there he was! A tiny little man with an enormous head and a long beard, wearing a huge turban and lots of jewellery, and standing on the velvet-draped table in front of the curtained door that led out of the drawing-room into Tacklow’s office; which put him more on the level with an ordinary grown-up.
He was the greatest fun! Mother told us to curtsey to him and be on our best behaviour, and he could not have been more friendly and amusing. He cracked jokes that made us double up with laughter, kept on pulling his ear or scratching his head, which nearly made his turban fall off, sang a song for us in a high falsetto voice and actually did a little dance for us, rather like a clog dance except that he was wearing gold-embroidered shoes with long, curled-up toes. He gave us a box of Turkish Delight, and then suddenly said he was feeling tired and would like to take a little nap. We begged him not to go before our father and Sir Charles came back, and told him how much we had enjoyed meeting him, and after we had said goodbye and curtsied to him again Mother shoved us out of the room and up to the nursery. Later on we heard Tacklow’s and Sir Charles’s voices talking to him in the drawing-room and a lot of laughter, and were delighted to know that they had not missed seeing the enchanting little Rajah.
We talked about him for days afterwards, and it was not until we had both reached the dignity of double figures that we learnt — even then with almost total disbelief! — that the Rajah had been Sir Charles using his hands for feet in those golden, curl-toed shoes, while the animated arms and those restless, expressive hands that kept on almost knocking his turban off and rescuing it just in time, belonged to Tacklow who was standing behind him, hidden by the curtain … To tell you the truth, we would both have preferred not to know, for they had worked the trick so well that we would have been prepared to swear that we had seen a real person who was self-conscious about being a dwarf and did not like people to come too near him or stare too closely — an attitude we had every sympathy with. But that half-hour still remains like a bright scrap of gold tinsel in my mental rag-bag.
* Bergenia saxifragaceae — according to a gardening friend.
* Wife.
Chapter 13
‘Hey! diddle-de-dum! An actor’s life is fun!’
Collodi, Pinocchio
He said: ‘I look for butterflies’ …
Carroll, Through the hooking Glass
I can only suppose that the beautiful and indefatigable Mrs Strettle of the children’s dancing-classes was responsible for dreaming up and producing the patriotic piece of flag-waving-cum-fund-raising that was known as
‘The Pageant’. Because her entire flock seems to have taken part in it.
This oddly named mixture of mime and dance had originally been intended as a Grand Finale to a day-long Garden Fěte in aid of the war effort. The Fěte was to be held in the grounds of Viceregal Lodge, where there were several lawns (three of them, on different levels, providing an ideal setting for The Pageant), and I believe it was a great success. But shortly before our show was due to begin, the weather went back on us and rain stopped play, forcing us to do our stuff in the State Ballroom instead, with only the inadequate help of a platform on which the Viceroy and his more high-ranking guests were expected to sit in overstuffed chairs and sofas during the intervals between dances at Viceregal balls.
The entire performance must have been incomprehensible to the paying customers, because there should by rights have been two stages; an upper and a lower one (Earth below and a sort of other-worldly Elysium on the upper). But since there had been no time to construct a split-level platform, Earth, the audience and the Viceroy’s band were all on the same level, and so inextricably mixed up that I doubt if even those who managed to get seats in the front row caught more than an occasional glimpse of the action — just enough, I imagine, to make them wonder what the heck was going on. However, despite this initial setback (or possibly because of it?) The Pageant was considered good enough to be repeated and was subsequently put on for a proper run, complete with matinées, at Simla’s Gaiety Theatre. A double stage was built for the occasion, and Hi! diddle-de-dee! — we were off!
