by M. M. Kaye
The cupboard itself was merely the enclosed angle between the base of the upper staircase that led up from the hall to the first floor, and I have no idea why that wedge-shaped bit of space should have been closed in to make a cupboard in the first place. Nor do I know why we didn’t break our necks getting in and out of it, since the feat had to be accomplished by leaning out across the well of the staircase below, supporting oneself on the far wall with the palm of one hand while walking along a narrow wooden ledge not much more than three inches wide. However, we became so adept at this that we could whip in or out in a matter of seconds, and once inside, lock ourselves in with a bolt bought during holiday-time and firmly screwed onto the inside. This hideaway gave us as much pleasure as Bets and I had got out of our secret place on the top of Begum Kudsia’s ruined gateway. In it we stored all manner of possessions including torches, candle-ends and matches, and (the school food being unbelievably dreadful) cheese, jars of pickles and tins of ginger biscuits: commodities that Helen, whose parents were still living in a house in Clevedon to which she returned at weekends, found it easy enough to buy in the town. Once, for a dare, we even spent an entire night in Giggleswick just to prove that we could do it. But that of course was before I was sentenced to banishment at Lawnside…
Looking back on that sentence in the light of a permissive age in which every child is expected to know everything there is to know about sex from the earliest possible age, I am astounded by the fact that neither Helen nor I had the remotest idea why such a fuss should have been made out of what was, to us, a fairly harmless escapade. We could see no reason why so much trouble was taken to keep us apart, or why Dub-dub and her minions should have blown their tops and behaved as if another world war had broken out in their midst. No sense of proportion! — that was the trouble with grown-ups.
Yes, I had heard about Sappho and her Isle of Lesbos. But the word ‘lesbian’ meant nothing to me beyond that, and I had not given it another thought. Not even when I later got my hands on a copy of a notorious, banned novel, The Well of Loneliness, which, since I missed the point completely, bored me stiff. I abandoned it half-way through and was not sufficiently interested to care what all the fuss had been about or why the Lord Chamberlain, or whoever, had bothered to ban it. Why shouldn’t a woman prefer other women to men, or have a ‘pash’ on a member of her own sex? All schoolgirls were apparently expected to have ‘pashes’ for other girls: as witness all that tedious business of Y-Aying! Why, I myself had been pressurized by public opinion into Y-Aying Beryl Beale, and I did not believe for one moment that Dub-dub’s jungle-drums would have failed to inform her of the existence of that particular custom in her school. Or that she would have been incapable of putting a stop to it had she disapproved!
It was not until I was well into my twenties and staying with Helen and her parents in Kent that her mother enlightened us. We had been reminiscing about our schooldays, and having touched with some glee on the futility of old Dub-dub’s efforts to keep us apart, were writing her off as a monster of injustice, when Helen’s mother gave us an odd, sideways look and said: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you two really don’t know why she did her best to separate you? I should have thought you would have worked that out by now! She had to do it, after you were found in bed together.’ When we still looked blank she explained the mystery a trifle tartly; adding that our headmistress had discussed the matter with her at the time and accepted her word for it that both of us were, in this respect, as pure as the driven snow — or, more accurately I imagine, as dumb as a couple of lead weights. Had Miss Wiltshire not been convinced of this we would both have been expelled. But having been persuaded that there was no vice in us, she agreed to let us stay on ‘on probation’, though continuing to keep a hawk-like eye on us. ‘You see,’ said Helen’s mother, ‘this is something that every headmistress and every headmaster has to watch out for. It is one of the known hazards of boarding-school life.’
Well, you could have knocked us down with that proverbial feather! Dear me, what half-wits we must have been. That was the first time that I realized what a lesbian was — or that they even existed outside ancient Greece. And what I longed to ask was: ‘What do they actually do?’ (imagination was boggling like anything). However, I didn’t like to and as I have never bothered to find out, I am still in a state of ignorance. Anyway I am all for letting consenting adults get on with it. Provided, of course, that they refrain from frightening the horses.
It was fortunate for me that Helen’s mother, whom I had taken to calling ‘Aunt Winnie’ after the custom of the time, had had the sense to realize, from conversations with her daughter, what a pair of unsophisticated clots we were when it came to sexual matters, and to take up the cudgels on my behalf with the anxious Dub-dub. Otherwise, with the shadow of expulsion hovering over me, my parents thousands of miles away, and only that martinet spinster Aunt Bee (who would have been shocked rigid and probably believed the worst) in my corner, I should have been in dire trouble. As it was, Aunt Winnie, bless her, apparently persuaded Miss Wiltshire to treat the whole affair as a juvenile prank (which in fact it was) and not to worry my parents by writing to them of her fears. So Tacklow and Mother, thank heaven, remained undisturbed.
Mother was plainly having a lovely time in India. She and Tacklow had exchanged their quarters in Curzon House for a bungalow in Old Delhi’s Rajpore Road, where Mother grew sweetpeas and roses and experimented with interior decoration. Snapshots of the house and garden, of Tacklow and herself and various old friends and acquaintances, arrived in every letter, filling us with envy and nostalgia. In Simla the new Viceroy and Vicereine, Lord and Lady Reading, gave a Chinese Ball — the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ — at Viceregal Lodge, for which Mother designed and painted a number of decorations. She sent us sketches and snapshots of painted lanterns, a vast panel on which a dragon sprawled, and others that bore the Chinese characters for good fortune, success and happiness; and later, snapshots of herself and Tacklow in the Chinese costumes they had worn at the ball.
Other letters told us about various festivities laid on for the Prince of Wales, and there was a fascinating account by Tacklow of a Viceregal dinner in honour of King Carol of Romania (or would he have been only Crown Prince Carol then?) in the course of which Mother, on being told the name of the guest of honour, leaned out, laughing, to get a look at him at the precise moment that Carol — bored by the two stout and elderly Very-Important-Ladies sitting on either side of him — glanced down the line of guests and caught her eye. When dinner was over and Lady Reading asked him if there was anyone in particular whom he wished to be introduced to, he replied promptly that yes, there was: the pretty laughing one in the pink-and-gold dress over there. He pointed her out, and an ADC was sent to summon Mother to the dais at one end of the ballroom, where a regal-looking sofa and a number of chairs had been placed for the mighty…
Unfortunately one of her shoes had been pinching her and she had eased it off, and had been unable to locate it when the Vicereine gave the signal for the ladies to rise and leave the dining-room. There had been nothing for it but to thank her lucky stars that evening-dresses were still long and that hers included a small train, and to limp out of the room wearing only one shoe. Taken up to meet Carol and seated primly beside him on the sofa, she kept the unshod foot tucked out of sight under her train, and it was only when the band struck up and he asked her to dance that she explained in a whisper why she could not accept. Whereupon Carol went off into shrieks of laughter and said that in that case, would she sit it out with him? They sat together, giggling helplessly, while the rest of the guests waltzed and two-stepped and kept on staring at them, wondering what on earth Daisy Kaye was saying to keep the monarch rolling about with laughter. But Nemesis was about to overtake her, for when the band stopped and the dancers left the floor, the doors at the far end of the room were thrown open and there entered, with as much pomp as the bearer of a boar’s head at some medieval banquet, a magnificently unifor
med and turbaned Viceregal servant carrying a large silver salver on which reposed a single pink shoe.
Advancing at a slow and stately walk up the length of the ballroom he mounted the dais, bowed and offered it to my flustered and scarlet-cheeked parent, who had no alternative but to accept it. She was forced to withdraw her stockinged foot out of hiding and don the shoe under the pop-eyed gaze of half Simla, and to the accompaniment of uninhibited mirth from the visiting VIP who was later reported to have told the ADCs that he hadn’t enjoyed himself so much for years, a sentiment that Tacklow obviously endorsed.
Meanwhile I myself was enjoying a lovely idle time at The Lawn. This was because I could draw, and in those days all but the hopelessly inept members of the art class were expected to take the Royal Drawing Society examinations for which (if you managed to wriggle through) you were awarded either a pass, or a ‘highly commended’ certificate printed on a piece of flossily decorated card and signed by someone in authority. All school art classes pushed their young hopefuls through these exams, and in our part of the country the school that did best on average was awarded something called the Cuthbert Grundy Shield for Art: a large, ornate and outstandingly hideous silver monstrosity, mounted on a huge wooden shield and surrounded by miniature silver shields engraved with the names of the various schools that had won it. The winning school could only keep this object for a year, after which (with their name now engraved on one of the attendant shields) it was returned to base to be competed for again.
During my last year at The Lawn the art class was fortunate enough to acquire a new instructress; a Miss Hoskins who — though no great shakes as an artist — was that rare thing, an inspired teacher. Under her stimulating influence anyone who could draw or paint at all suddenly began to draw and/or paint better. The art class woke up from its former lethargy and began to enjoy itself and produce good work, and since I was regarded as one of its leading lights, Miss Hoskins decided to enter me for all the RDS exams that I had not already passed. She managed to persuade Miss Wiltshire to let me off a number of classes in other subjects in order to give me time for extra tuition in art, on the grounds that although our school was a small one, if we did well in examination we might, strictly ‘on average’, bring home the bacon in the form of the Cuthbert Grundy Shield.
Little did the well-meaning Miss Hoskins (or for that matter Dub-dub either) realize that they were letting me out of doing any work at all for the rest of the term. Taking shameless advantage of the situation I absented myself from any lessons that bored me or that I did not like, on the excuse that I had to do ‘extra drawing’. I didn’t count drawing as work, and Dub-dub’s staff must have been a slack lot because no one ever bothered to check up, even when I hadn’t understood a problem because of missing a class. Not surprisingly I did terribly badly in the normal end-of-term exams. But I passed all the art ones with honours, and this impressive total, bolstered by sterling work by Bets and Helen and one or two others who also did well in that line, duly won us the Cuthbert Grundy Shield and the privilege of hanging it over the fireplace in the Big Schoolroom for the next year. After which there was no more extra drawing and I had to get back reluctantly to doing some work.
* Victorians and Edwardians had a tiresome habit of making children refer to adult family friends as Aunties and Uncles.
* Shorthand for ‘Jungle-drums’, which were credited with informing her of everything that went on in the school.
* No, not the one featuring Mac the Knife.
Chapter 23
For now I am in a holiday humour.
Shakespeare, As You Like It
The last chapter was mostly concerned with term-times at school, with only one mention of a holiday. But there were, of course, a good many holidays. Several of these were spent in Bedford in the care of that ancient pair of honorary aunts, Lizzie and Emily, and one in particular, an Easter holiday, was enlivened by the children of a Mrs Richardson, a school-friend of Mother’s who had married an Englishman in the service of the Chinese Customs Department. Jessie Richardson, en route to Shanghai to join her husband, had parked her three children on the Ransomes, who lived next door to Aunt Lizzie and also had Far East connections — their daughter Nona, another school-friend of Mother’s, was at the time acting as tutor-companion to the deliciously pretty little Manchu wife of Pu-yi, the last Emperor of China.
Jessie’s son Tommy was about the same age as my brother Bill, and he and his two kid sisters, Beana and Joan, fraternized happily with Bill, Bets and me. The six of us enjoyed a wildly exhilarating holiday that must have put years on poor Lizzie and Emily, not to mention the Ransomes, for Tommy, a born ‘boffin’, put his fertile brain to work on a variety of schemes calculated to keep the young interested and entertained and to drive their elders into nervous breakdowns.
He began harmlessly enough by constructing an overhead postal-line by which messages could be dispatched from his room in the Ransomes’ house to Bill’s in Aunt Lizzie’s. But on finding that it worked a treat, he advanced to a bigger and better version; one that we could slide down ourselves. I can’t think why one of us wasn’t killed, but the young are tough, and we survived. His next ploy was a series of tree-houses that we built high up in the soot-caked horse chestnut trees in Aunt Lizzie’s narrow, walled-in strip of garden, the far door of which led directly into the shunting yards of Bedford railway station. The tree-houses were brilliantly constructed and very hard to spot from below, and we learned to climb up to them with a swiftness that would have done credit to Tarzan, and to lie low there when we wished to avoid an aunt or a Ransome bent on making us do something we didn’t want to.
I still cherish a vivid recollection of Aunt Lizzie’s consternation when, following Bets up the steep front-hall staircase, she noticed that the youngest Kaye’s knickers were not only black with soot but torn to shreds. She embarked on a horrified tirade, and Tommy, bringing up the rear, remarked nonchalantly: ‘Oh, they’re always like that!’
It was Tommy who scrambled over the wall on the left-hand side of the garden, to explore an empty and dilapidated house that stood there, and who, charmed by the discovery that it had no lock on the back door and was in a shocking state of disrepair inside, immediately decided to take possession of it on the grounds that finders were keepers and that we needed a Clubhouse in which we could play on wet days. The rest of us agreed enthusiastically, and it became a marvellous playground-cum-bolt-hole, far larger than the tree-houses and a whole lot dryer.
Surprisingly, our elders (from whom it had proved impossible to conceal this latest bit of territorial annexation) did not declare the derelict property Out of Bounds, but rather unfairly put us on our honour not to go upstairs to the bedrooms or the attics or down to the basement, for fear that the fabric of the ruined house might collapse on or under us. But as this still left us the main living-rooms, we gave them our word and annexed for our Clubroom what had once been a large Victorian drawing-room whose windows overlooked a weed-grown and rubbish-strewn garden. Here, on wet days, we played badminton, rounders or charades, read and painted, discussed Life and our elders, or just picnicked.
The house had been one of many commandeered by the Army during the years of the 1914-1918 war for the use of troops, either as a hostelry or possibly only as a temporary staging-post for reinforcements bound for the southern ports and those terrible trenches in Flanders. But when the war ended and the last of them marched out, the house was abandoned; together with the furniture, which judging from the state of the garden had obviously been heaved out of the windows or lugged into the open to make a bonfire. Not everything had burned, for the ground was littered with the remains of rusty, fire-scorched bedsteads and bits of chairs and tables, in addition to piles of empty tins and broken bottles, and a few pieces of iron piping, one of which Tommy annexed for future use.
The whole place had been systematically vandalized and we learned a good many new words (ones that even Bill and Tommy had not yet come across) from the g
raffiti that defaced the flaking plaster walls of that once-elegant Victorian drawing-room. There had also been a great many crude drawings, in both senses of the word. But these Bill and Tommy, who were not unmindful of their responsibilities as elder brothers, had hastily camouflaged with the aid of a box of coloured chalks before their respective sisters were allowed on the premises. When, towards the end of that particular holiday we decided to give a party in the Clubroom, and invite the aunts and the Ransomes to feast on home-made lemonade and a variety of biscuits that we bought with our combined pocket-money (then averaging sixpence a week — the girls got threepence each and the boys a shilling — riches in those days!), we took the precaution of buying a packet of whitewash, and with a bucket and a brush borrowed from Aunt Lizzie, covering up as many of the graffiti as we could reach, before assisting our apprehensive guests over the wall. I hasten to add that they were not required to climb it because we had managed to borrow a couple of step-ladders for the afternoon. But it was a pleasant sight to see those prim, law-abiding relics of the nineteenth century, in their long skirts, befrilled petticoats and buttoned boots, resignedly negotiating the wall to trespass in a derelict house that still, presumably, had a legal owner.
It was, of course, Tommy who thought up a way of using the pieces of iron piping that had been found among the nettles and fireweed growing on the remains of that bonfire. A day or two later he sent me to a chemist’s shop to buy two penny-worth of powdered charcoal. I have forgotten what he told me to say if I was asked what I wanted it for, but I feel sure that I was provided with some watertight reason; Tommy never left anything to chance. He and Bill separately, and from two other chemists’ shops in Bedford, bought sulphur and saltpetre, and with these three ingredients in our hands, he unveiled his latest invention.
