The Sun in the Morning

by M. M. Kaye

  He had heated a short piece of scrap iron, part of a rusty bed-leg, until it was white-hot (little did poor Aunt Lizzie know what went on in her kitchen during the hours devoted to her afternoon nap!) and having hammered it onto one end of that length of iron pipe, heated them both and treated them to a bit more hammering to ensure that the metal plug would stay put. After which, to make doubly sure, he did a bit of soldering. A touch-hole was then drilled, and ammunition provided in the form of a long, stout piece of wood, carefully cut and carved so that it would fit snugly into the pipe. Finally a wooden cradle was designed to hold this home-made cannon, with chocks that could lift or lower the angle of the barrel according to the height and distance of the target. When all was ready, Bill and the inventor of this peculiar weapon rode out into the countryside on their bicycles to put it through its field trials in a wood; accompanied by a vivandière in the person of myself riding pillion on the carrier of Tommy’s bike.

  Fixing the gun into its cradle with the muzzle pointing at the trunk of a beech tree some twenty yards away, we mixed together, presumably in the correct proportions, the contents of the three paper packets acquired from different and unsuspecting chemists, and having made the mixture up into small sausage-shaped packets with the aid of Bromo, at that time the world’s best-known lavatory paper, dropped one into the mouth of our cannon, rammed it down with the head of a long knitting-needle purloined from Aunt Lizzie, followed it with the ‘ammunition’ (that length of wood), put a wax vesta into the touch-hole, lit it and stood well back. I have to admit that at this point I put my fingers in my ears because I hate bangs and loud noises. The thing worked splendidly, and though on that first occasion our heavy wooden bullet fell short of the mark, we soon learned by trial and error how much gunpowder to use and how high or low to aim; by the time the holidays drew to a close we could hit almost anything we aimed at, using the same ‘bullet’ again and again.

  That gun brought us endless amusement. But the fact of its existence was kept to the three of us and I wasn’t even allowed to tell Bets about it until we were safely back at school; because Tommy wouldn’t trust ‘the kids’ — Beana, Bets and Joan — not to give it away by mistake. He was quite certain (rightly so) that although the grown-ups might stand for aerial railways, tree-houses and a playground in disused premises, if they should hear about this they would put their collective feet down hard. So we kept quiet about it and let them and ‘the kids’ imagine that our frequent bicycle rides into the country were just that and no more. It was only on the last day of the holidays that things went wrong.

  Tommy had decided to use up all the remaining gunpowder in order to see just how far we could fire that home-made wooden bullet. So we took it out through the back door of the garden into ground that belonged to the railway, and having set it up facing acres of empty shunting yards, rain-soaked piles of coke and coal and derelict sheds full of rusty machinery and broken signal-lamps, we packed it with the last of our Bromo-encased gunpowder, jammed in that heavy wooden projectile and touched it off…

  I can only thank heaven that in anticipation of an even louder bang than usual I had taken the precaution of standing really far back, and that Bill and Tommy had had the sense to move well away on one side as soon as the wax vesta was lit. For this time the T. Richardson Patent Gun literally blew up. There was one blast of flame and a bang that almost split my eardrums despite the fact that my fingers were firmly plugged into my ears, and Tommy and Bill were knocked flat. The back of Bill’s suit got smeared with mud, soot and coal-dust, but otherwise he was unharmed. But Tommy, who had been nearer, had his hair, eyebrows and lashes well singed, and suffered a number of superficial cuts from flying chips of stone. Railway officials came running and so did the aunts and the Ransomes, and my recollections of the next half-hour or so are a bit confused. The only thing I can remember clearly is that we all put in a bit of spirited lying. And I mean lying; not ‘prevaricating’ — though by now I haven’t the least idea what our story was. Bill and I merely supported our leader and stuck firmly to whatever he said.

  Fortunately there was no proof, the T. Richardson Patent Gun having exploded backwards and buried itself in the process. There wasn’t a sign or a sniff of it. Or any trace of that wooden bullet either, though we searched everywhere. For all I know it may have disintegrated. Or even landed up in the next county, chalking up an unofficial amateur record? In any case the holiday that had ended with such a spectacular bang was one of the best and most interesting of my childhood. Never a dull moment, and Tommy temporarily attached to my chariot wheels. We exchanged a chaste goodbye kiss in a dank passageway between the Ransomes’ house and Aunt Lizzie’s; careful not to be seen doing so for fear of being hooted at by our contemporaries for being ‘soppy’.

  There were many other holidays. But Mother was only home again for three of them; two summer holidays, one spent in Devon and one in Wales, and a winter one in Oxford. The one in Wales was another Hunstanton fiasco which turned into an unexpected success. Once again Mother had rented lodgings at the seaside, only this time it was a house and not just rooms. The advertisement had described the place in glowing terms: ‘Situated in rural surroundings near small, quiet village; garden running down to the seashore, private diving pier’ … It sounded wonderful! Mother took it, and we arrived to find that the front door opened directly onto the pavement of the main coast road along which buses, cars and lorries thundered at the rate of at least one a minute. (Today it would be six per second, but these were early days.) Also, barely five hundred yards away, there was a quarry where blasting took place once every hour, filling the air with din, dust and flying chips of stone, and causing all traffic to stop — a lot of it just the other side of our front windows — until the quarry’s hooter blew the ‘All Clear’.

  Worst of all was the discovery that although the garden did indeed run down to the sea, a railway line, bristling with notices that forbade us to cross it, ran between us and the high-tide mark, so that in order to reach the shore we had to walk for nearly a mile along the main road to a tunnel that ran under the line. And that private diving pier? Well, that turned out to be a huge, disused pier, at least thirty feet high, on which, once upon a time, trolleys containing crushed stone for road-works used to run out on rails to be loaded onto ships that tied up at the pier. Since the quarry had stopped using it long ago, no ships called any more; and anyone mad enough to try diving off it would have had to have been in the Olympic class. (Anyway, there was no way of getting up to it except off the deck of a ship!) However, Mother was back for the holidays; and so, from North China, was Grandfather Bryson, the Grand-Dadski. And that was when we went to see Polly at the theatre near Rhyl — or was it Llandudno? — and fell madly in love with the music and MacHeath. So what more could one want?

  The holiday in Devon, for which Mother again made the long trip from India, was a roaring success from start to finish, even though she had, as usual, booked our holiday accommodation ‘sight unseen’. This time it was a house called Lanka; which is the old name of Ceylon. It had a large garden, and an orchard from where one could either walk down a long, steep path, little more than a goat-track, to reach the seafront, or alternatively, climb up the hillside behind to reach the heavenly heather-clad moors above. It was during this summer that the Dadski, once again with us, told me how he had ‘received the call’ and become a China missionary. And it must have been towards the end of this year that Tacklow returned to England for the first time since 1913…

  Tacklow’s job had come to an end with the signing of the Peace Treaty, and since none of the promises made to him when he had been refused permission to rejoin his regiment had been kept, he decided on early retirement. Moreover, besides being tired of separation from his family, he disliked and mistrusted the shape of things to come. Now that the war, in which India had supported and fought for the Allies with great gallantry, was over, he and many others like him had confidently believed that plans would immediately be set
in train for the Indianization of the Civil Service, the Army, Navy and Police, in preparation for Dominion status, which carried with it the right to secede. A small move in this direction had actually been made. But only a very small one; snail-slow, niggling and guaranteed to exasperate every thinking Indian and turn too many of the unthinking into anti-British revolutionaries and rioters.

  To Tacklow, who throughout the war years had been keeping an eye out for talent among the Indian members of his staff, encouraging, training and promoting it in order that there should be men standing ready to step in and take over authority — thereby ensuring that there would be no hitch in the smooth running of his department — the nit-picking and prevarication that was bogging down all progress towards self-government seemed a betrayal of trust. Like his friend Claude Auchinleck, he felt that it could only lead to distrust and the souring of relations between those Indians and British who had hitherto been friends; and since this was something he did not wish to see, he decided to accept retirement. But only a few days before he was due to leave Simla for Bombay and home, he was sent for by the Head of the Viceroy’s Council, Sir William Vincent, who greeted him by saying: ‘If you think I’ve asked you here to say goodbye and good luck, or anything like that, you’re wrong! I’ve asked you here because I hope to be able to persuade you to change your mind and stay on.’

  Tacklow laughed and said ‘Not on your life!’, or its 1920s equivalent; adding that he was sorry, but he was getting out while the going was good and he still had Indian friends, and that nothing would persuade him to stay on. ‘Not even the offer of a totally different kind of job?’ asked Sir William.

  ‘Not for anything,’ returned my parent. ‘I’m going to retire to somewhere quiet like Cornwall where I can grow cabbages and watch my children grow up, and catalogue the Ferrari Collection* in my spare time.’

  ‘Well, at least let me tell you what I have to offer before you turn it down,’ urged Sir William. ‘There are three jobs for you to choose from.’ He listed them in turn, but though the first two were plums, Tacklow rejected both out of hand. The third, however, turned out to be the one appointment in all India that he would have liked to hold but could never aspire to. Because it was strictly reserved for members of the ICS, and so was just another of the many things that he had forfeited so long ago in London when he failed the examination that would have taken him into the ranks of the Heaven-Born. Yet now, unbelievably, Sir William Vincent was inviting him to become Director of Central Intelligence in succession to Sir Charles Cleveland, who after a long and brilliant spell in that post was at last about to retire. Tacklow told me later that he couldn’t believe his luck! It sounded too good to be true, for he had always considered Sir Charles’s post the most interesting in India: ‘I used to envy him so,’ confessed Tacklow. He accepted, of course.

  We heard the news with mixed feelings. Delight for his sake and pleasure that it would be he and not some stranger who would be stepping into dear Sir Charles’s shoes. And also hoping against hope that he would stay in them long enough to allow us to go out to India again once the school years were over (we did not realize that the post was a three-year one, and that Sir Charles had only held it for longer because of the war), but sad because we had been so looking forward to having him with us again for good. It was a bitter blow to learn that because of this new appointment our chances of seeing either of our parents, particularly Tacklow, during the next few years were slim. In the event he promised to take short leave in England before starting work as DO, India.

  Mother came back ahead of him towards the end of the winter term at The Lawn, and we were taken down to the Clevedon railway station to meet her. I remember that Bets and I felt curiously shy and embarrassed because we had not seen her for two years and she seemed different from what we remembered; but that wore off very quickly. She stayed for the weekend at a small private hotel at the end of Albert Road, kept by a formidable spinster who ran our school troop of Girl Guides, and next day, a Sunday, took us to morning service in the Anglican church that Dub-dub’s pupils always attended. Here she was horrified by the processions, banners and incense — St John’s, Clevedon, was very ‘High Church’ and it happened to be some Saint’s Day. To a member of the Kirk of Scotland it smacked of Rome, and Mother complained to Dub-dub, who said coldly that if she preferred a ‘Low Church’ service for her children it could be arranged for us to attend the small, old and charming church that stood on the slope of a little hill at the far side of a wide shallow bay to the south of the town. Mother marched us off there that same day to attend Evensong. But though service, church and vicar met with her approval, the walk from The Lawn and back again was a long one, and when on the return journey it began to rain and we all got soaked and half frozen, and Bets complained tearfully of a blister on her heel, she abandoned the idea of having us sent there every Sunday. But the incense, and all that genuflecting and banner-toting, continued to rankle.

  That year we spent our Christmas holidays in a hideous semi-detached house on the Woodstock Road at Oxford, which Mother had rented so that Tacklow would be able to see something of his parents and his sister Molly as well as his own family. Of all the many rented houses we lived in, this was by far the worst: an ugly little villa with no redeeming features. A foot or two of gravel and a laurel hedge lay between the front windows and the road, and there was a dreary little strip of garden at the back. Inside, the house was furnished with spiky and dangerously unstable chairs, sofas, occasional-tables and a vast hat-stand, all manufactured from the antlers of innumerable stags. Scores of the creatures must have perished to make that appalling furniture, which was quite the most uncomfortable to sit on, or even to walk past, that anyone could imagine. No wonder the Victorians wore endless petticoats and a crinoline if this was the sort of thing they imagined their Queen went in for at Balmoral! The upholstery throughout was bobble-trimmed plush, and every inch of wall-space was crammed with highly coloured oleographs of religious pictures; bleeding ‘Sacred Hearts’, ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’ or saints being martyred wherever one looked. To make matters worse the house was lit and heated entirely by gas (of which, in conjunction with boiled cabbage, it smelt strongly) and the weather was so vile that even beautiful Oxford and its ‘dreaming spires’ managed to look cold, cross and thoroughly bloody-minded. The only good thing about that nasty little villa were the books…

  There were literally hundreds of them of every kind and description. Crammed higgledy-piggledy into varnished pitch-pine bookshelves that lined the landings; stacked up in dusty piles on the floor of the attic, or standing in tidy rows in glass-fronted cupboards and revolving bookcases in almost every room in the house … I can’t think who acquired them; surely not the same person who had made or bought that awful antlered furniture. Or the devout and presumably colour-blind one who plastered the walls with holy pictures. The only solution that occurs to me is that whoever owned the house also owned a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, and this was where they kept the spare stock. But whatever their reasons, I fell on those books with the rapture of a treasure-hunter stumbling across a chest full of doubloons, and spent most of my time reading; lying flat on my stomach in front of a wheezing gas-fire in my back bedroom while the rain lashed at the windows and the gas sucked all the oxygen out of the room and gave me a permanent headache.

  Since Tacklow had only been able to fit in a very short leave before taking up his new appointment, the best he could manage was to join us here for ten days that included Christmas; after which he and Mother would return to India together early in the New Year. He had particularly asked that we would not meet him at the station; he would prefer to take a cab (he still thought of taxis as cabs) and drive straight to the house. I think he was afraid that he might cry in public when he saw Willie again; the little son whom he could only remember as a six-year-old in a sailor suit, so very long ago.

  When the day and the hour of his arrival finally came, all four of us were lined up waiting wi
th our noses pressed to the window-panes of Mother’s bedroom upstairs; a vantage-point from which we could see both the road and the gate without being stymied by that laurel hedge. And when at last the taxi stopped in front of the gate and Tacklow got out, Bill, who had not seen his father for the best part of a decade and thought this must be a stranger, said: ‘Who’s that funny little man?’…

  Now that is real tragedy. I think both Mother and I, and perhaps, young as she was, even Bets, recognized it as such and were conscious of an appalling sense of shock; because none of us answered. We looked at each other, and then, with guilt and dismay, at the unconscious Bill. It had never occurred to anyone to tell him that his father was a little man; a short, tubby one who in many of the snapshots I have of him could, except for his height, easily have doubled for Winston Churchill (particularly when the latter was photographed in the Middle East wearing a topi). A man who although he was the same height as Mother always looked shorter because of her hair and her high heels. Nor had we realized that the father Bill would remember would be a tall man who towered over him as they walked hand-in-hand along the winding Simla roads. (‘What’s that house doing, Daddy?’ ‘Standing up.’ ‘No, Daddy! What’s it doing?’…)

  Those five short words that were Bill’s instant reaction on seeing again the loved and admired parent to whom, as a bewildered and tearful little boy, he had waved goodbye so many long years ago perfectly illustrate something that Rudyard Kipling put into verse in a poem about the P. & O. liners that brought the children of Anglo-Indians home and took their parents back again alone to India: