by M. M. Kaye
In the end I was informed that it would be necessary, as a matter of painful duty, for them to write and tell the whole distressing story to my dear parents; and then sent to bed supperless and in floods of tears. (Bets, it seemed, was too young to know any better and had plainly been led astray by her older sister! Too true.)
Well, at least I had clean bedding and a new mosquito-net. And when I told Tacklow the whole story he laughed and said that it served them right for continually telling Mother how devoted they were to all children, what a pleasure and a privilege it was to have ‘young people’ about them, and how happy they would be to look after her little darlings if ever she wanted to take a holiday without us. He had, he said, warned them that entertaining a handful of children wearing party frocks and accompanied by nannies, ayahs or parents to tea followed by decorous games was not at all the same thing as having a couple of them as house-guests for close on ten days. They had refused to believe him, and Mother, much touched by their offer, had been rash enough to accept it. (Largely, I suspect, because she herself had very little idea of what we got up to while in the nominal charge of Punj-ayah.)
Mother, to tell the truth, saw even less of us than our hard-worked father did. Her mornings were occupied by Red Cross work, her afternoons taken up by various committees arranging balls, bazaars, cabarets, floor-shows and other entertainments in aid of this or that war effort or charity, and her evenings spent at the Club playing tennis or chatting with friends on the lawn while the Club band played selections from popular musical comedies of the day — The Merry Widow, The Dollar Princess, Miss Hook of Holland, The Belle of New York, The Quaker Girl and The Arcadians … Bets and I used to go up to the flat roof of Curzon House to listen to those lovely, lilting melodies drifting through the intervening trees in the dusk, and you’ve no idea how sweet and gay and romantic they sounded. At half-past seven, just as we were getting to bed, Mother would hurry home to bath and change before going out again to dine and dance. She had a lovely war! The only thorns in her bed of roses were her fears for the safety of her twin brother, Ken, and her two elder brothers, Tom and Arnold, all of whom were with the Expeditionary Force in France and all of whom came safely through the war years; though Tom, her favourite, was destined to be tragically killed in an accident at Singapore while on his way home to North China to join his wife and baby son in Tientsin.
Tacklow still accompanied her to these dinner-parties and, after seeing that her dance programme was full, came home and went to bed. He spoilt her outrageously. Even on his own birthday his presents always included one from himself to himself which invariably turned out to be something for which he found (with surprise) he had no use, and therefore passed on to Mother: such things as silk stockings, scent, some small piece of jewellery or a box of chocolates tied up with a satin ribbon. My chief memory of her during my childhood in India was of her rushing in to say good-night to us before going out to a party, looking perfectly beautiful in a shimmering ball-dress and smelling divinely of a special scent that was Tacklow’s favourite and that I never came across on anyone else. It was called Le Trefel Incarnat by L. T. Piver of Paris, and everything she possessed smelt of it: her clothes, her furs, her gloves and her evening bags, her luggage, every drawer in her dressing-table and chest of drawers, her cupboards and her bedroom. In later years I had only to close my eyes and sniff a handkerchief or a glove of hers and she was there in person, sparkling and laughing, conjured up like the genie of Aladdin’s lamp by the ghost of a scent that L. T. Piver, if they still exist, stopped making a very long time ago.
I used to think how beautiful she was. And how full of laughter. Tacklow, unfamiliar in a dinner-jacket or looking uncomfortable in a stiff shirt, white tie and tails, would escort her to those parties if he came back from the office early enough to do so. And when he didn’t, some mutual friend would stand in for him: Buckie or Bunting; Sir Charles or Ronnie Graham-Murray; Harley Alec-Tweedie; Lord Clow or Monty Ashley-Phillips … Nowadays their names seem to read like a roster of P. G. Wodehouse’s famous Club, ‘The Drones’! There was never any shortage of escorts and we liked them all — with one exception. The exception was Lord Clow; the ‘Lord’ being a nickname that someone had bestowed upon him and that had stuck. I don’t know how he came by it, for as far as I can remember he was a mere Captain — and not ‘Captain the Lord Clow’ either! A lordly sort of fellow, perhaps? He was certainly a devastatingly handsome one, and he put himself out to be pleasant to Bets and myself. But neither of us could stand him, and I can only suppose that of all Mother’s beaux he may have been the only one she was in danger of taking seriously, and that we sensed this and were jealous — or even afraid? I don’t know. I only know that he was far too attractive and good-looking to be true, and that we could not endure him.
We liked all the others though, even the good-looking ones like Bunting and Harley, and some whose names I have forgotten and whom even Mother no longer remembers when I show her snapshots of them. She only frowns and looks on the back to see if there is a name there and then shakes her head and says: ‘Yes, I do remember him; he used to make me laugh; but I’ve no idea who he was … Henry someone? Or was it Peter: no, Peter had a moustache — or am I thinking of Alan?’ She gives up. Tacklow took all her admirers in his stride, and appears to have had no qualms about leaving her to dance the nights away and be brought home in the small hours by one or other of them. He probably trusted to her mission upbringing to keep her from straying; and in any case he needed his sleep and could not lie in as late as she could of a morning. As, for instance, she did on a certain January night when she stayed dancing into the small hours at the Bachelors’ Ball — a yearly fancy-dress affair held by custom at the Old Delhi Club — and, returning to her sleeping husband at around 4.30 a.m., crawled thankfully into bed and thrust her toes down into an ice-cold and sopping wet patch instead of the warm hot-water bottle she had expected. Throwing back her bedclothes with a shriek she leapt out; to find that her hot-water bottle having developed a leak, our faithful Punj-ayah, discovering this, had carefully sewn up the slit in the rubber with a needle and cotton before stowing it away in the bed.
Apart from the weekend picnics and expeditions with our parents, there were always other parents who took their children and their children’s friends out for picnics. Buckie, for one, could be counted upon to take a party of us out to Okhla at least once a month. His parties were regarded as great treats because he had three hard-and-fast rules: no parents, no nannies, no ayahs. Just himself and his driver (there were few owner-drivers in those days, Mother being a rare exception) and a selected band of children. He stood no nonsense from any of us, and any child who misbehaved or made a nuisance of itself was never asked again.
At least once a month his enormous car, packed and stacked to the roof with picnic baskets and children, would whisk us off to Okhla where, on arrival, he would line us up like a company on parade near the weir, and announce in a sergeant-major blare that the first one who fell into the water would get their ears boxed — so there! I remember how once, while we were standing in a row near the edge of the river, Joanie Kirkpatrick, who did not know him as well as the rest of us did, took a scared step backwards, and plop! there she was in the water. Buckie dealt efficiently with the situation. He fished her out and stripped her, and having rolled her up in a tartan rug, locked her into the back of the car with a bag of toffees to console her, while he took the rest of us off to fish for chilwa — bringing us back an hour or two later to enjoy a picnic tea alongside the car so that we could feed poor Joanie through the windows.
Picnics were some of the best things about Delhi. I remember one given by a friend of Mother’s, a Lady Grant who later, as Margaret Grant, became a musical comedy actress and whom we last saw when we had tea with her in her dressing-room at — I think — Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, where she was starring in a show called The Good Old Days. She took us out to the grounds of the Khutab Minar with one or two of her own child
ren, plus Bargie and Tony Slater, Bets, Mother and me. The Khutab is a tremendous minaret that has stood there for well over a thousand years before the birth of Christ, for its foundations were laid and the building of it begun in 1200 b.c. It stands more than two hundred and thirty-eight feet high, faced with red sandstone that is fluted and carved and inlaid with white marble, and is divided into five sections by carved stone balconies that encircle it like fretted bracelets. That picnic stays firmly in my mind because in the course of it Bets and I climbed the Minar three times. (I rather think we all did: except for the Grant children who would have been too young, and the two grown-ups.) We climbed it once on arrival, once after lunch and once after tea.
In those days, and right up to the day on which India became independent, there was no restriction on climbing to the top of the Khutab; anyone was allowed to do it. Nor was there an ugly iron ‘lion’s cage’ plonked on its summit either! There are three hundred and seventy-nine steps, and climbing them is a picnic compared to coming down again. But we seem to have taken it in our stride and thought nothing of it. When I panted up it in 1942, almost a quarter of a century later, there was still no iron cage and I got acute vertigo at the top and had to sit down on the top-step-but-one with my feet firmly below the roof-level — scared to bits of falling! It was then that I stopped seeing anything funny in the story, reported in the Statesman, about a villager from Jullunder, who was on the top of the Minar when the last ripple of the terrible earthquake that decimated Bihar reached Delhi and rocked the great tower to and fro. The poor fellow had gasped out to a reporter, who saw him stagger out of the tower some fifteen minutes later, that when it happened he hadn’t been able to make up his mind whether to jump off the top or ‘risk going down by the stairs’. I thought that was hilariously funny when I first read it, but after that day in 1942 I know just how he felt, for I might easily have had difficulty in deciding myself. (You notice that the gentleman from Jullunder apparently considered that there was no risk — or a lot less anyway — attached to jumping off the top!)
Twenty-one years later still, during one of our nostalgic return visits to the land of our birth, Bets and I decided to climb the Minar for one last time before old age and arthritis got their hooks into us; only to discover that no one was allowed to go further than the first balcony. Beyond that the stair was blocked. This, explained the local chowkidar, was because too many people had used the Minar to kuttum-hogai themselves (literally ‘finish’ themselves) by leaping off the higher ones — a messy business that entailed a great deal of bother and trouble scraping the remains off the paving-stones at the bottom. I pointed out that as the lowest balcony was a good forty feet above the pavement, anyone jumping off it would surely kuttum-hogai themselves just as efficiently as the ones who went off the top, or one of the higher balconies. But he was not convinced. Unquestionably, a soul-mate if not a near relative of that man from Jullunder. It made me feel even more at home.
Better than the picnics, though not as exciting as the shooting-camps, were the weekends at Agra; for even in those far-off times Agra was only a short distance from Delhi. There was a night train that left a couple of hours after midnight and would get us there in the early morning; which meant that if Tacklow could get Saturday off (most people took Saturdays off as a matter of course!) he could leave Agra by the Sunday-night train that got us back early enough on Monday morning for him to have a bath and breakfast at Curzon House before leaving for his office in Metcalfe House.
Agra was always a magical place to me. It still is. Even though so much has changed and Barber’s city is now full of brand-new package-tour hotels, each one crammed to bursting-point with noisy tourists of every shape, size and nationality who bargain loudly for souvenirs when not clicking their forests of cameras or applauding the twice-nightly floor-shows which consist of so-called ‘Traditional Indian Folk Dancing’, i.e. girls in spangled skirts gyrating to the sound of what in our day were called ‘Fu-fu bands’.
But all that still lay in the future; along with the car age and the air age. Back in the teenage years of the twentieth century Agra was still a green and quiet town, living on past memories of the Great Moguls and brooded over by that pearl of pearls, the Taj Mahal. Its great past had gone and its vociferous tomorrow was still to come, and Bets and I were privileged to know it in the sunset of its peaceful days, when the fact that there was a world war raging ensured a total absence of globe-trotting tourists and permitted Agra and its glories to sit back and weave dreams.
For us its spell began to work long before we reached it. First there were suitcases to be packed and a special kind of bottled milk to be bought to take with us, because Mother wouldn’t let us drink hotel milk. The bottled stuff had a distinctive taste faintly reminiscent of malt and we considered it delicious. Punj-ayah did not accompany us on these expeditions, but Moko and Teddy went along, and on a Saturday evening, after an early supper, we and they were put to bed in Curzon House with instructions to go to sleep as quickly as possible and not lie awake whispering. It is difficult to do this when one is keyed up and excited, and though we did not dare whisper, I for one would lie awake for a long time, listening to the night noises and especially to the far-away sounds of trains arriving or leaving Delhi. To anyone of my generation there will always be something haunting about the sound of distant trains heard by night: not modern trains that run on diesel or electricity, but the steam-trains of our youth. Which of us will ever forget ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’? To this day the sound of a train in the night speaks to me of Delhi and those magical visits to Agra … For the space of a few heart-beats I am young again and back in my bed in Curzon House; and wherever I happen to be, no matter in which city or town or country, it is India that lies outside, hidden from me only by the dark.
In the end, of course, we always fell asleep; to be woken at midnight and taken by tonga or tikka-ghari to the station which, no matter what the hour, was never empty. There Alum Din would take charge of the luggage and see to the unpacking of bistras, and while our parents were busy deciding who should sleep on which berth, Bets and I would escape the eye of authority — easy enough in those swirling, chattering crowds! — and make for our favourite part of the station: the great metal circle that lay out in the moonlight beyond the furthest end of the platform, where the clumsy, coal-burning engines that ended their run at Delhi were turned around on something that looked like a huge turntable, to face the direction they had come from, in readiness for the return journey. It was a sight that never failed to fascinate us, and no arrival or departure from Delhi station was ever complete until we had seen it. It was for us part of a ritual: yet as I look back and remember, I am once again astonished by the amount of freedom we were given. So much, that we could make off alone and dive into the midst of that pandemonium which was, and still is, the normal state of affairs on the platforms of any major railway station in all India, without our parents or ourselves — least of all ourselves! — thinking for one moment that we could come to any harm. We never did. Partly, I suppose, because we always knew we were among friends; but largely because Indians as a whole are a kindly and tolerant people.
Arriving in Agra in the cool, pearly dawn we always drove straight to Laurie’s Hotel and a warm welcome from the proprietress, dear Miss Hotz — who was ‘young Miss Hotz’ then, though to Bets and myself she always seemed old — and as soon as we finished breakfast we were off to the Taj. I don’t know how many times I have seen that Wonder of the World, because it never occurred to me to keep count. A hundred, perhaps? though even that may be an understatement. Tacklow, of course, had spent his leaves in Agra, back in the nineteenth century when his father was Commissioner of that town and the district surrounding it, so he had seen the Taj again and again when he was a newly-joined and impressionable young subaltern. I was a good deal younger than he had been then, but to use his own expressive phrase, it ‘hit me where I live’. I have never got used to it. Each time has always
been as though it was the first time, and it still has the power to make my heart contract.
Many people have tried to describe the Taj, but for me only Kipling has succeeded in putting it into words; and he only saw it in the dawn from the window of a railway carriage taking him down south — and vowed never to see it closer for fear of spoiling that first breathtaking vision. Tacklow quoted me Kipling’s description of it, and since I know it by heart and it cannot be bettered, here it is:
It was the Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come; it was the realization of the gleaming halls of dawn that Tennyson sings of; it was veritably the ‘aspiration fixed’, the ‘sigh made stone’ of a lesser poet; and over and above concrete comparisons, it seemed the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy. That was the mystery of the building … the thing seemed full of sorrow — the sorrow of the man who built it for the woman he loved, and the sorrow of the workmen who died in the building — used up like cattle. And in the face of this sorrow the Taj flushed in the sunlight and was beautiful, after the beauty of a woman who has done no wrong.
I have to admit that, unlike Kipling, the Taj never struck me as being full of sorrow. Or if it was there, it passed me by. But it was then and is now both the ‘sigh made stone’ and the ‘Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come’. And what made it so perfect was that we could spend the whole day there, wandering up and down, around and all over the buildings and the gardens alike, without anyone ever saying ‘You mustn’t’ or ‘You can’t’. Very often we would be the only visitors there. It was empty and quiet, and peaceful beyond words. No noises but the birds and the squirrels, the splash of the fountains and the sigh of the wind crooning through the marble tracery and under those serene arches.
