by M. M. Kaye
It was a wildly exciting sport, in the course of which we all got soaked to the skin, and I still cannot imagine why none of us were swept overboard. For the ‘Ormond’ was bucking and pitching and throwing herself to and fro like a frenzied colt in some rough-riding competition, and every wave looked as though it was bound to engulf her. Only once in my life would I see such waves again. They looked more like huge dark cliffs with ragged white bushes growing along the top of them; as though the whole Atlantic had reared up as the Red Sea had done to let the Israelites pass through, and was now about to crash down again as it had crashed onto the pursuing Pharaoh and all the Chariots of Egypt.
The decks were swept again and again with foaming water and the air was full of stinging spray as we whizzed to and fro, shrieking with excitement, until Authority, in the form of a justly infuriated ship’s officer, grabbed us, boxed our ears (instant disciplinary action was not discouraged in those days), and, having confiscated our tea-trays, marched us all below and gave us a tongue-lashing that made our faces burn more than our ears had done. He took our names, but nobly refrained from reporting us to our parents, and we decided unanimously that it had been well worth it.
* Entertainment, spectacle; a show, fun.
* Essence of roses.
† Areca-nut and lime wrapped in a green paan leaf, to be chewed. The red betel juice is spat out all over India!
* Alum Din was away on sick-leave.
5
Unwillingly to School
Chapter 20
My native land — Good Night!
Byron, Childe Harold
By the time the S. S. ‘Ormond’ entered the English Channel the wild weather had passed, and the Thames was as flat as an old unpolished pewter plate as the liner edged slowly up it on a dawn tide in the care of two squat black tugs.
I have never forgotten that traumatic day. Even now I can recall it as clearly as though I have gone back in time and am living it once again; standing on the wet deck to watch the dank grey wharfs and the gaunt cranes and warehouses slide slowly past through a veil of the faint, persistent drizzle that the British call a ‘Scotch mist’; a drizzle that was barely visible to the eye and did no more than dampen the winter coat that Mother had taken out of mothballs and made me put on before I went up on deck.
So this was Belait! This was ‘home’. This wet, flat, dark-grey country with its black, oily river, ugly buildings and drably clad dock-workers. It seemed to belong to another world from the one I had left behind less than three weeks earlier, so different was it from the crowded docks at Bombay in the blinding Indian sunlight, the noise, the heat, the hurrying coolies and the colours — the brilliant clashing colours…
There had been a breeze blowing in from the sea at Bombay, but today in the docks at Tilbury there was barely a breath of wind to stir that small rain, and only a few passengers were on deck. I heard one of them, an elderly man in an overcoat, ask a ship’s officer why the flag was flying at half-mast; and learned that a small child who had been in the sick-bay for some days had died during the night. The child was not one I knew, and nor did I know its mother except by sight. But most of the women on board had known that the child was seriously ill and had done what they could to help and encourage its anxious mother. And now it was dead. I remember looking up at the sodden bit of bunting that drooped at half-mast and feeling the rain on my face, and thinking that it was only fitting that the day should be grey and dreary as though it too, like the flag, was in mourning.
The tugs were easing the great ship along the left bank of the river, the Gravesend side opposite Tilbury, when either the current caught her or the pilot made an error, for we crunched into a pier which must have had some tall structure on it that damaged the ‘Ormond’s bridge; and suddenly the quiet of the early morning was shattered as shouts, splinters and bad language flew in every direction. A startled passenger hustled me below deck, where I forgathered with Bets and we ate breakfast in a state of deep gloom and made another vow that we would never love this depressing foreign country or regard it as ‘home’ — so there!* That vow too remained unbroken for the larger part of my life, and was only partially lifted when I came to live in Sussex; for to this day the word ‘home’ instantly conjures up a picture of India as clear as the one of Bombay that the Thames and Tilbury Docks showed me on that long-ago morning.
In the end the ‘Ormond’ must have anchored in mid-stream, because I remember Mother taking us up on deck — where there were now many more passengers — to lean over the rail and watch for Bill who would, she had been promised, be brought to Tilbury to meet us. By now it must have been getting on for mid-morning, and though the rain had stopped there was a nasty, cold little wind. Then suddenly Mother cried: ‘There he is! That’s him! — Willie!’ She began to wave wildly. There were tears running down her cheeks, and I felt as deeply embarrassed for her as I had for myself when I found that I was crying in public on the station platform at Delhi, and on the deck of the ‘Ormond’ as I watched Tacklow walk away. For had not that fountain of wisdom, Kashmera, once told me sternly when I wept because I had cut my arm badly on one of the wicked double-pronged thorns of a kikar tree, that I must remember that I was English and that ‘Angrezi-log kubi nai rota!’ (‘English people never cry!’). I had tried to live up to that; and had envied my Indian playmates for whom it was obviously OK to howl their eyes out whenever they happened to feel like it. (Even the boys — some quite big boys — were allowed to yell the roof off, and instead of being scolded, were petted and coaxed and made a fuss of.)
To make matters worse, I knew that Mother had dressed very carefully for this meeting. She was wearing her best suit and her most fetching hat, and looking as pretty as paint in them. Yet here she was, busy spoiling it all by acquiring red eyes and a runny nose and tear-spots all down the front of her jacket. One consolation was that Willie, in that rowboat, was probably much too far away to be able to see such details, so I stopped worrying about Mother and stared down instead at the occupants of the little rowing-boat that was bobbing about on the water some fifty feet below. Two of them were grown-ups; one presumably the owner, since he was rowing it; the other, I recognized with annoyance, was Lord Clow — not my favourite person. The third was a boy between twelve and thirteen years old, who was a complete stranger to me and plainly suffering, as I was myself, from acute embarrassment.
When one is a child, a snapshot or a studio photograph gives a misleading impression of the sitter: particularly when it is in black-and-white — and in those days colour photography had not been invented and most snapshots were taken with a Box Brownie. So it is not surprising that poor Willie had only the vaguest idea of what his mother looked like, or which of the many faces that peered down at him from somewhere near the top of that enormous towering cliff of a ship belonged to her. Even when her wild waving and calling enabled Lord Clow to spot her and point her out to him, he did not recognize her — or his sisters either. All three of us were as much strangers to him as he was to Bets and myself, and even to Mother, who had left behind a little six-year-old son and was now looking at a schoolboy of more than double that age.
Bill told me a long time afterwards that it was the most embarrassing moment of his life, for not only were we all strangers to him, but he had no idea what to do or say to us, and when Mother waved and called out to him he felt as though the eyes of every single one of the massed ranks of passengers looking down from the ‘Ormond’s decks were focused on him. It was as though, he said, he was standing on a stage in the glare of a spotlight and had forgotten the lines he was supposed to say.
He looked like it too, and I felt for him. They should never have brought him out in that dinghy, but waited until the ship had docked so that he could have met us in our cabin or a corner of the saloon; or even in the crowded Customs shed on shore. As it was, he was compelled to stay put for what seemed like hours to me and days to him; getting colder and colder in the biting wind and beginning to feel seasick
from the constant bobble of the little boat and the strain of looking up and waving, keeping a fixed and nervous grin on his face and occasionally shouting some fatuous question or answer which the wind blew away. Until at long last Lord Clow took pity on him and, having yelled up to us that they would see us in the Customs Shed, told the boatmen to row them ashore.
I don’t remember what I felt or what any of us did when we finally met. In fact I don’t remember anything at all of all that business of disembarkation, except for saying goodbye to Bargie and managing by a superhuman effort not to cry, even though I was by that time bleakly convinced that I would never see her again. I can’t even remember if my first love, Guy, was there to meet her and the rest of his family. He probably was, but if so I was too depressed to register the fact. Yet once out of the Customs Shed, I remember very clearly piling into a crowded second-class carriage so full of strangers that I and brother Willie (hereinafter to be known as Bill) had to stand, while Bets sat on Mother’s lap.
There were no corridors on trains in those days, and so little standing-room in the narrow second-class carriages that I stood sandwiched between the bony knees of strangers, with my back to the carriage, staring bleakly out of the window at this hideous country that my parents spoke of as ‘home’. I had never travelled second-class in India, though I had often thought it would be fun to do so because the passengers, jammed together as they were with their bundles, baskets and babies, always seemed to be enjoying themselves, chattering and laughing together like a flock of parrots in a date palm. Well, now I was doing so. But here no one spoke, let alone laughed. They sat in glum silence, reading their newspapers or staring stodgily ahead of them at nothing. I hated every minute of that journey.
Because of the vast distances that were covered by India’s trains, their first-class compartments were always sleepers; each one large enough to accommodate four berths, two to each side, with ample room between for luggage. And since this was before the days of corridor trains, each compartment had its own adjoining lavatory, complete with handbasin and running water. In this train too there were no corridors. But no loos either! I dreaded to think what would happen if I had need of one. Did one have to jump out when the train stopped at a station? (and if so, what if the train left again before one had finished, leaving one stranded in this daunting place?) It was a terrifying prospect!
If the ‘Ormond’ had docked at Southampton or Dover I might have taken a slightly less unfavourable view of my native land. But to arrive at Tilbury on a cold, wet, overcast day, and have to make the dreary train-journey from there to Central London, through some of the most depressing built-up areas in the country, was a terrible introduction to England. As I gazed, horrified, from the rain-spotted window, it seemed to me as though there were no open spaces here at all. Nothing but mile after mile of squalid, soot-stained walls, warehouses and dingy streets lined with small, grimy terraced houses in which, unbelievably, my native people, Angrezis — ‘Sahib-log!’ — actually lived…
Tacklow’s pay had never run to renting a house of the size and style that the ‘Heaven-Born’ occupied, and even The Rookery, which was the largest house we had ever lived in in India, had no running water, modern sanitation or refrigerator; and no garden beyond the row of flower-pots on the gravel-covered terrace-cum-drive, and the steep, cosmos-covered slope below the buttressed wall that supported it. Yet in both Simla and Delhi the houses in which the British and the well-to-do Indians lived enjoyed a large degree of privacy, and did not look into each other’s windows. Nor was it possible to hear from one’s bedroom or verandah what one’s next-door neighbours were saying. I can only imagine that it must have been for this reason that the very idea of Angrezi-log having to live cheek-by-jowl in those claustrophobic terraces of two-up, two-down houses that faced each other across a rainy street shocked me so much; almost as much as the squalor and dirt!
I had so often heard English people complain of the squalor and dirt of India that I had subconsciously come to believe that England must, by contrast, be a model of cleanliness and order. But nothing I had seen in India — not even the bustees and back alleys of her crowded cities, where goats, pi-dogs, monkeys and Brahmini bulls wandered at will among people who flung their rubbish into the streets, defecated in the gutters, chewed paan and spat out the resulting streams of scarlet juices broadcast — was more depressingly squalid than this endless wilderness of mean streets. Here everything in sight, including the drizzle and the dingy lines of washing that hung limply in many of the tiny, rubbish-strewn back gardens, seemed to be permeated with soot. And no wonder! For in those days coal was almost the only source of energy. Railways, factories, ships and power-plants burned it, the chimney-pots of every house within sight belched smoke from coal fires and coal-burning stoves, and only lighting and street lamps relied on gas.
My untutored view of my homeland and its natives received yet another rude shock when we finally arrived at our destination, Lord Clow’s flat, which occupied the second floor of one of those large, white-painted Victorian mansions in a square near Palace Gate in Kensington. Whoever owns it now probably paid well over a hundred thousand pounds for it and could sell it tomorrow for close on a million; but it failed to meet with my approval. A lift took us and our luggage up to it and there were fires in every room and crumpets for tea. The tall sash windows of the front rooms looked out onto plane trees and down upon a wet street bounded by the high railings of a garden that formed the centre of the square. But our bedrooms, Bets and mine, and I think Bill’s and the cook-housekeeper’s too, as well as the kitchen and all the ‘usual offices’, looked out onto an inner shaft: a sort of brick-lined well constructed to allow air and a certain amount of light into the inner rooms of the tall, terraced houses lining the square, all of which, as far as I could make out, had been built back-to-back with the houses in another square behind us. This meant that the view from these inner rooms was restricted to brick walls and windows that avoided looking into each other by being set at different levels. As an added precaution, the windows were provided with a double set of curtains: the outer ones of net or Nottingham lace remaining permanently drawn, while the inner, more solid ones were drawn only when the lights were lit. Though in fact the lights more often than not were on from dawn until bedtime, because England was enjoying a particularly wet spring that year and even when it was not raining the sun never broke through and the days were as dark as an Indian dusk.
Mother arranged various ‘indoor outings’ for us. She took us to the Natural History Museum, which was a great success, and to lunch with a massive Edwardian dame called Mrs Alec-Tweedie, who turned out to be Harley Alec-Tweedie’s mother. Mrs Alec-Tweedie painted highly coloured and very slapdash pictures in water-colours, travelled widely and recorded her travels in books with titles such as My Adventurous Journey, Through Finlandia in Carts, and so on. She gave us a splendidly grown-up meal in a dining-room crammed with pictures (her own impressionistic efforts competing with large and gloomy family portraits), and afterwards took us to a matinée of The Lilac Domino, a musical comedy that we thought was marvellous.
A day or two later Mother took us to a children’s matinée of Maskelyne and Devant’s Magic Show which we enjoyed; though only mildly, since children who had seen the tricks that Indian conjurors can perform are inclined to be blasé about magic shows. We were far more thrilled, when it was over, to find ourselves emerging from the theatre into a real London fog of the type that used to be called a ‘pea-souper’. This was something we had certainly never seen before! The fog was not white or grey, but a curious, dirty yellow that smelt strongly of soot and was so dense that you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Our cabbie took us back to the flat at a snail’s pace and Mother fretted the whole way for fear that he would knock someone down and run over them, or drive us all into the river.
Early on during that London visit she took us with her to the bank to deposit the money that Tacklow had given her for travelling
and arrival expenses, and I shall never forget the incredulous, pop-eyed amazement of the clerk behind the counter when she handed over a small Gladstone bag which proved to be full of gold sovereigns; coins that he could not have seen for years. But Edward VII had been on the throne and sovereigns and half-sovereigns were normal currency when Tacklow had last been in England.
Then there was our first visit to the Zoo; taken in company with three young cousins and their mother, Aunt Norah Bryson, wife of Mother’s eldest brother, Arnold. This ‘treat’ became a disaster, since the day turned out to be a Bank Holiday and apparently every other paterfamilias in all England had set out with the same intention, accompanied by his wife, children, parents and in-laws and their respective progeny. The crush was beyond anything I had witnessed up to that time. Even the crowds who celebrated Diwali and Id were not greater, and I don’t remember being able to see a single animal except the heads and necks of the giraffes and the top half of an elephant who plodded through the mob giving rides to children. The youngest Bryson could not have seen even that much, and my clearest memory of this exhausting day is of his piping voice reiterating tirelessly, like a gramophone whose needle has got stuck in a groove, ‘Is this a lift, Mummy? … Mummy, is this a lift? Is this a lift …?’ It seems — heaven knows why — that since a very early age his infant ambition had been to ride in a lift and Aunt Norah had rashly told him that we would be doing so that day. I believe we did at some point; but it failed to stop that shrill and repetitive question, and I still can’t think why some public-spirited Londoner didn’t strike the child a hefty clout with a bottle or an umbrella.
An even more disappointing event was a walk in Kensington Gardens — the ‘Delectable Gardens’ made famous by Sir James Barrie’s immortal fairy-tale, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. They were once the private park of Kensington Palace, where Victoria spent a large part of her childhood and which was her home at the time she was proclaimed Queen. But since they were also the gardens that some fatuous grown-up had assured us were infinitely larger and more beautiful than our beloved Kudsia Bagh, our disillusion that day was quite as traumatic as it had been on the day we docked at Tilbury. So this was what the British called a ‘garden’! This — this maidan! Acres and acres of grass criss-crossed with paths worn by the feet of children and bisected by broad, gravelled roads edged with low railings. Trees of the type one could not climb; neat flowerbeds that bore notices forbidding the public to pick flowers; a plethora of sooty laurel shrubs, a few benches and, dotted about in pairs, innumerable iron chairs on which one could not seat oneself without a watchful park attendant hurrying up to collect a small sum for the privilege of doing so.
