by M. M. Kaye
The upper stage, which was small and narrow, had a net curtain stretched tightly across it so that the characters inhabiting this cloud-cuckoo-land appeared faintly hazy and unreal. As well they might, considering that they were representing such abstractions as Peace, Plenty, Love, Courage, and so on, played by grown-ups draped like Greek goddesses in yards of white cheesecloth, who, when the curtain rose, were discovered lolling around on grassy banks apparently sound asleep. The lower and much larger stage, minus any net screens, was supposed to represent a portion of the world; and bang in the middle of it, leaning negligently on a plaster pillar that supported a model of a battleship, stood Britannia in the person of Mrs Brocas-Howell, holding a trident in one hand and a large shield painted with a Union Jack in the other.
This sharp-tongued and short-tempered lady was draped in yet another seven yards of cheesecloth topped, if memory serves, by a brassiere made of overlapping tin scales and a helmet that looked distressingly like a brass coal-scuttle. Other grown-ups, representing France (another coal-scuttle), Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, Greece and Serbia (hands up who remembers Serbia*) and possibly a few more countries, stood dotted about the stage, each with a group of children wearing the appropriate national costume sitting at their feet. Bets and I were little Belgians (not, as one would suppose from the photographs, little Netherlanders). Bargie was a junior Greek, while a kid called Barbara Jacomb-Hood, who was the star pupil of our dancing-class, was little Egypt; solo. The rest of us were in groups of four or more.
The curtain rose on a scene of sweetness and light; Britannia beaming at her battleship and everyone smiling from ear to ear as one after another the little Britons, French, Belgians et al., got up and performed their national dances before exiting L. or R. to great applause — leaving the mother-countries in possession of the stage. I don’t know why we all detested ‘Britannia’. I only remember that we did and that she started it. But by the time The Pageant had run its course she must have detested us with equal fervour, for it became a point of honour with us that as each set of child dancers pranced off into the wings, gaily waving to the audience, they would do their best to knock against her shield or upset her column and boat. The trick was to do it so that it looked like an accident; which in the circumstances was not difficult, since we merely pretended that we couldn’t wave at the paying customers and watch where we were going at the same time. So poor Britannia had a rough ride, and in retrospect, serve her right! It never pays to be rude to children.
During all this jolly national-dancery the upper stage remained in darkness. But no sooner had the last of the kindergarten element gone waving off into the wings than the lights came slowly up on the Elysian Fields, and, to the strains of the Viceroy’s band playing Mendelssohn, the cheesecloth goddesses awoke from their slumbers and began to wander gracefully around with their arms about each other’s waists, smiling down approvingly on the lower deck, where Britannia had laid down her trident and shield and was idly tinkering with her ship, while France (or was it Belgium?) operated a spinning-wheel — and so on. Then suddenly, accompanied by a crashing chord from the orchestra, on rushed an enormous uniformed Hun, spiked helmet, grey uniform, jackboots and all, who grasped poor Serbia by her flowing locks (her own hair too, not a wig, so one can safely say that the amateur actress representing that unhappy country really did ‘suffer for her Art’) and dragged her screaming off the stage. Reappearing in two ticks he weighed in on Belgium and the Netherlands (one in each hand) and, throwing them to the ground, took a slash or two at them with his sabre before turning his attentions to France.
At this point Peace, Plenty, Justice, etc., becoming aware of the fracas, started to run to and fro behind their mosquito net and make gestures indicative of alarm and disapproval. Peace flung herself on her knees before an angel who I think must have been St Michael (a Mr Someone; wings, white butter-muslin and tinfoil armour), who was finally persuaded to unsheath the sword that he wore hanging from a belt, and wave it threateningly at the lower orders, who were instantly blacked out; thus allowing the various countries, prone as well as upright, to scurry off unseen into the wings with their props (battleship, spinning-wheel, and so on) leaving the stage clear for four small girls, Sybil Roberts, Iris Mant, Iris Gillian and one other whose name escapes me, to do the Dance of the Four Winds to the tune of Schubert’s ‘Moment Musicale’. Even now I never hear that played without getting an instant mental vision of four small, bare-footed figures, wearing minute ragged tunics of pale green, grey and blue chiffon, cross-strapped in the Greek manner with silver ribbon, pretending to play on silver pan-pipes as they skip to and fro in a sort of square dance. I can even remember some of the steps, though I don’t remember a single step, or the tune either, of the dance that Bets and I did as ‘baby Belgians’. Nor had I, then or now, any idea how the Four Winds got into the act. Could they perhaps have been summoning help from the Empire?
I don’t remember how The Pageant ended. The real war was still going strong at the time, so Peace, Plenty and the rest of the cheesecloth brigade, not to mention poor Serbia, could only keep their fingers crossed. I suppose that the real St Michael, who was presumably in the confidence of the Almighty, must have known what was going to happen. But everyone else could only hope and pray; and would go on doing so for at least another year. I do remember that the villain of the piece, the Hun, was still on his feet in the final tableau — tottering, no doubt, but still upright and able to take his bows. This unpopular character had been played with considerable zing by Sir Charles Cleveland’s younger brother, after Sir Charles himself had backed out. It had been hoped that he would play the Hun, for not only did he possess the physique of a champion heavyweight boxer in his prime, plus a strong resemblance to a truculent bulldog, but he was judged to be ‘the ugliest man in Simla’ — or it may have been ‘in India’? Unfortunately Sir Charles, who had originally been in favour of playing the part, overheard a fellow member of the United Services Club repeating that last observation, and took umbrage and cried off. A great pity, as he would have played it to perfection and he cannot possibly have had any illusions about his looks. Or his charms either! His mistresses were legion — Britannia being the most notorious, though naturally I did not learn this until years later: together with the story of how that particular and carefully concealed liaison was discovered…
It seems that Sir Charles had invited the lady to join a large shooting camp at which her husband would be unable to be present. She accepted and was given a single tent well away from his, and during the daylight hours they sedulously avoided each other’s company. But alas, among the guests there was an unkind humorist who one night took the trouble to sneak out and sweep the sand clear between the tents as soon as the last guest had retired to bed. And sure enough, there in the morning as the guests assembled for breakfast, lay a clear line of footprints leading from Sir Charles’s tent to Britannia’s and back again. Everyone seems to have regarded this as screamingly funny — with the exception of the host and his inamorata and, when he heard of it, the lady’s husband, who was furious. But furious! The repercussions, I gather, were endless.
From a child’s point of view all this patriotic ‘in-aid-of’ acting and dancing was tremendous fun, since all children, and a great many grown-ups, get a kick out of dressing-up. I certainly did, though I continued to dislike parties, fancy-dress ones included, of which there were a good many. One of these was an Advertisement Party at Viceregal Lodge to which we were all expected to go dressed up as well-known advertisements. Bets went dressed up as the girl on the Erasmic Soap boxes while I went as the one on somebody’s tin of talcum powder — I forget whose. Another was a Down-on-the-Farm Party at Peterhof, for which Mother dressed us as dairy-maids in identical dresses and sunbonnets of checked cotton, mine blue and Bets’s pink, with white aprons and fichus and armed, if I remember rightly, with a pail apiece.
There was only one children’s party that I really enjoyed, and that was a Pink Party
given to celebrate the birthday of a girl called Phyllis Moncrieff-Smith whose mother, a truly awe-inspiring woman who looked as though she had been hewn out of a solid block of marocain, obviously had more imagination than one would have given her credit for. All the little guests were asked to wear either pink or white trimmed with pink — a request that aroused considerable hostility among the boys but was fine for the girls — and the rooms in which the party was held were decorated in pink. Everything we ate was either pink or white, and instead of all those excruciating party games (how I loathed them!) or a conjuror or magic-lantern show, we were all issued with large pink aprons and white chefs’ caps, given a bag containing a pound of icing sugar, a pastry board and a rolling pin, a bowl and a set of little tin pastrycutters, a bottle of peppermint essence and another of cochineal, and told to make sweets — fondants or peppermint creams, with a prize for the one who produced the best batch. It was enormous fun, like making really glorious mud pies. And we could not only eat the result but take home any that were left over to show off to our parents, neatly packaged in pink paper bags provided by Phyllis’s mum. That party kept about thirty children gloriously happy, sticky and occupied for a full two hours or more, and stands out in my memory as the only large birthday party in Simla that I really enjoyed.
On the theatrical side, I have a foggy memory of another ‘in-aid-of’ song, dance and tableaux show at the Gaiety Theatre in which Bargie and young Tony took part; Tony appearing (under protest) in another of the tableaux, starkers, or very nearly so, as Cupid. Mother and some of her contemporaries sang a song about, ‘To Peru we’ll hunt the kangaroo, the elephant and the bumble-bee, so pack up your traps and come with me; the newt we’ll shoot —’, etc. It’s odd how, if a tune sticks, the words that go with it stick too. A whole raft of First World War songs still stick in my head; no doubt taking up valuable room that should have been used for the storage of more useful items.
Bets and I must have spent a lot of time coming into Simla for rehearsals, performances, or children’s parties during our years at Oaklands. And once, in company with Bargie and a few of our friends, we gave a special performance of The Pageant, taking all the parts between us (Peace, Plenty, St Michael-or-whoever, the Hun, Britannia — the lot!) in Buckie’s drawing-room at Dukani before an indulgent audience of grown-ups. We enjoyed that even more than the real Pageant I think, as it gave us a marvellous opportunity to show off: though I suspect that the performance must have been a fairly tedious experience for the spectators.
That was a lovely summer! The ‘Butterfly Summer’ … I did not know then that it would be our last at Oaklands. Durroo caught a huge black-and-gold one the size of a saucer with my topi. And a small, thin, elderly man called Professor Something-or-other, whom Tacklow said was a world authority on butterflies, came out from Simla to spend a weekend with us during a break in the rains. He was travelling through India in search of new specimens, and Tacklow took him out to Fargu, which lies beyond Dane’s Folly on the road to Kulu and Tibet and is famous for its butterflies. But though the hillsides were shimmering with them, the Professor remained unimpressed: they were all ones that he was familiar with — ‘common’ green-and-gold minauls; yellow or black-and-red swallow-tails; blue-and-black ‘window-pane’ butterflies; potato butterflies (monarchs), and scores of others. (Those, by the way, are not their proper names but the ones we always called them by.) That was on a Saturday. On the Sunday the Professor went butterfly-hunting in the grounds of Oaklands and was equally unimpressed by the lovely lilting specimens that were taking the air that day. Then suddenly, returning crossly from a foray onto the upper lawn, he spied a very boring-looking butterfly investigating the agapanthus lilies and gave a shrill yell of excitement; an ‘I think I’ve got it! By Jove I’ve got it!’ sort of yell that brought Tacklow up at the double.
Bets and I couldn’t think what there was to get so excited about. The butterfly wasn’t even a nice colour. It was a sort of dirty white and quite small; a bit smaller than a cabbage white and with rather tattered-looking wings. However, it was evidently something new and special, for even Tacklow was excited, and the Professor’s expression as he stalked it, net in hand, was enough to tell even an eight-year-old that this was on a par with finding a real live unicorn nibbling the roses in one’s garden. We all held our breath as he advanced, wild-eyed and on tip-toe with his net at the ready. But just as he was about to make his swoop, the butterfly decided against the agapanthus and sailed off — the Professor in hot pursuit.
For the next half-hour it led him an exhausting dance up and down the garden, around the orchard and back again, until eventually, getting bored with the garden, it started off down the drive, lilting carelessly through the freckled shadows and pausing here and there, tantalizingly, to inspect a flower or a blade of grass before sailing on again. When at last it reached the pond it rested for ages on a bough of a tree that overhung the water and was well out of reach of the Professor’s net; sunning itself and lazily opening and shutting its wings in a provocative manner.
Bets, Tacklow and I, who by now were losing interest in the chase, subsided onto the sunny bank on the near side of the pond to chew grass-stems and watch Quacky-Jack and the other ducks dabbling about in the water. Eventually Tacklow dispatched the chokra who kept an eye on the ducks up to the house with a message for Mother, who presently appeared with the khidmatgar and a few helpers bearing a picnic lunch which we ate beside the pond. Not that the Professor ate much. He was too busy keeping both eyes on that butterfly, and when at last it took off and came down to have a closer look at the water, he scrambled to his feet with such haste that he put his foot in the potato salad — or was it a fruit salad? — anyway, something messy in a glass bowl that broke. Bets and I thought this was excruciatingly funny, but Mother was not amused: she had been fond of that bowl. I don’t think the Professor even noticed. He was off on the trail like a bloodhound, and that wretched butterfly led him several times round the pond, in and out of the shallow water at the edge and always just out of reach, until finally it drifted out across the water and came to rest on the back of one of the ducks. Its baffled pursuer hesitated on the brink, aware that if he waded in the duck would certainly swim away from him, and he had taken a cautious step into the water, soaking his boots, socks and the bottom of his trousers in pond water and duckweed, when the big drake sailed up and snapped the butterfly off the duck’s back as he passed.
The Professor was absolutely furious and it was the first and only time I have ever seen anyone literally dance with rage. He actually took his hat off (it was the regulation topi) and threw it on the ground and jumped up and down on it, shouting the while a good many words that I had never heard before and hastened to add to my vocabulary; though sadly, Tacklow vetoed their use before I had a chance to try them out (he also ticked us off for laughing, and when I pointed out that he had laughed himself, he admitted it and said: ‘But not out loud’!). The Professor returned to Simla by rickshaw with his damp boots, socks and slacks in a bundle in the back, and still in such a bad temper that Mother complained that he gave the impression of thinking that the whole affair from start to finish was a put-up job solely designed to upset him, and that she personally had trained that drake to eat rare butterflies off the backs of other ducks — and possibly imported the butterfly in the first place!
Bets and I, who had rolled about laughing and thought the potato/fruit salad episode even funnier than Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Cops, were grateful that it was the big drake and not our beloved Quacky-Jack who had gobbled up the ‘unique specimen’, and the day of the Great Butterfly Hunt passed into family history.
There were swallows too at Oaklands. Every year several pairs of them built their mud nests high up against the wall of the lower verandah, and it was sometime during the Butterfly Summer that Tacklow and Mother, returning late one night from some official Simla dinner-party in the pelting downpour of the monsoon rains with the thunderstorm raging overhead, saw b
y the light of the solitary oil lamp that had been left burning for them in the hall that there was a lidless biscuit-tin on the hall table with something alive in it. Six baby swallows! Someone had bedded them down on a bit of flannel on the bottom of the tin, and Mother said they all opened their beaks hopefully when she peered down at them. The nest had fallen a few hours earlier and Alum Din, finding it lying on the wet verandah in the dark, had scooped up the baby birds and carefully deposited them in the flannel-lined tin which he had left on the hall table where it was bound to catch the Sahib’s eye when he returned. Well, there was nothing they could do about it at that hour, but Tacklow was up at dawn to nail a hastily constructed wooden box (made by the mali) to the spot where the nest had been and pop the babies into it, tin and all.
The parent birds, who throughout these proceedings had been whizzing to and fro twittering hysterically, did not, as we feared, refuse to go near this modern-style jerry-built bungalow, but were back again and busily feeding their young within minutes of the jerry-builders quitting the verandah. What’s more, when that lot were fledged, the parents brought up a second brood in the box. And were possibly quite happy to use it again next year. But alas! in the following spring we were no longer there to see our swallows return, for all good times, like all good things, have a sad habit of coming to an end, and inevitably a day came when we had to leave Oaklands and say goodbye to our friends in the bazaar and from Tibet, to all our favourite places, and move back into Simla. This time into a house called The Rookery. Strangers moved into Oaklands, and though we often came out at the weekend to eat Sunday lunch at Dukani, or to spend a day with Sybil at The Bower, we never had occasion to visit Oaklands again. Not until many years later; long after India became independent.
