The Sun in the Morning

by M. M. Kaye

  Except when Mother was able to come back to England, which was roughly once every two years, most of our school holidays were spent in the care of Aunt Bee. Though thankfully not all of them: the exceptions were like manna in the wilderness. We spent two whole holidays and part of a third at Croft House in Kidderminster, the home of Tacklow’s best friend at Winchester, Cull Brinton. The Brintons were everything that we were not: spoilt, clever, attractive, extrovert, rich and afraid of nothing and nobody. We admired them enormously and a holiday at Croft House was always the greatest fun. They were the sort of family who were, one felt, perfectly capable of suddenly saying: ‘There’s nothing to do here — why don’t we go to Tangier? or Timbuctoo?’, and actually going there. Heady stuff for children like ourselves who could seldom afford a bus ticket to the nearest High Street.

  John, the only son in a family of five, was at Oxford (or possibly at Cambridge). The eldest daughter, Diana — ‘Dinnie’ — who married an avant-garde artist called Rupert Lee, went out to India to stay with my parents and go sightseeing with Mother. Later she became secretary to the society that put on the first Surrealist Exhibition in London, where Dali sprang to fame by giving a lecture wearing a diver’s suit and getting stuck inside it because the helmet could not be unscrewed. Noel, the second daughter, was a Bolshevik (the Russian Revolution was less than ten years old) and spent most of her time in Russia; and Anne and Hope were both still at school. The entire family had an endearing habit of deciding at intervals to dress up in togas made from sheets or table-cloths, swathing their brows with wreaths of laurel leaves, and trailing off, bare-footed, to the woods to dedicate an altar to the Unknown God — Cull acting as the High Priest and conducting the proceedings in Greek while the rest of us lit vestal fires and intoned in chorus. A holiday with the Brintons was always stimulating in the extreme, and I was, of course, in love with John who was far too good-looking and didn’t even know I was around. Best of all, no one at Croft House ever criticized, lectured or chivvied us — oh, the peace of it!

  Then there was one truly magical holiday that we spent at the home of Bets’s best friend, Betty Norbury, whose parents owned an old and beautiful Elizabethan house set in acres and acres of some of the loveliest countryside in England: green fields and flower-powdered meadows, woods and spinneys and copses full of primroses and nestling birds. All so unspoiled that one would not have been surprised to hear a horn blow and see the young Elizabeth Tudor and her courtiers come riding out of the woods dressed in green velvet and white satin, as they had done when they rode out a’maying from Hampton Court Palace more than four hundred years ago.

  The Norburys’ house, Wilmcote Hill, had been built on to a little two-storeyed cottage which, according to legend, had belonged to a Mistress Hathaway whose daughter, Ann, married a young village lad suspected of poaching — one Will Shakespeare. For this was Shakespeare’s own county: beautiful, leafy Warwickshire; and the nearest town to Wilmcote Hill was the one in which he had been born, Stratford-upon-Avon.

  It did not rain during that holiday. The air always seemed to be alive with the swallows who were building in the barns behind the house, for Mr Norbury farmed his acres; and I never see larch trees in spring without remembering the thousands of daffodils and narcissi that grew under the larches round the lake below the house.

  Mrs Norbury used to take us into Stratford when she went shopping, and to matinées at the old theatre — which had not yet been burnt down, and was madly mock-Tudor in contrast to the modern structure that would replace it. Once she took us to a Sunday morning service in the little church where Shakespeare lies buried; and on another occasion to spend a long, sunny afternoon at Warwick Castle. But best of all were the hours and days we spent building ourselves a house in one of the Wilmcote Hill woods; a house that I described long afterwards in a children’s book called The Ordinary Princess which I both wrote and illustrated.

  After I left school Bets continued to spend part of her holidays at Wilmcote Hill, and I was very envious when I heard that she and Betty Norbury had made friends with the Shakespeare Company. Bets did pencil portraits of some of the young actors which they signed for her; among them a future film-actor called Bramwell Fletcher, and the young John Laurie who, in old age, became a star all over again in a TV series called Dad’s Army.

  At last, in November 1925, Tacklow’s tour of duty ended. And this time he stuck to his guns in opting for retirement and that little house in the country that he had always dreamed of. Though by now it was far too late for him to watch his children grow up. Bill, whom he had only seen once in the past twelve years, would be leaving Repton in the spring and going to ‘The Shop’,* for he had opted for the Gunners and, he hoped, the Indian Army. I too had only one more term to go before I left school and became an art student, and Bets alone had still to serve a year or two in the ranks while her brother and sister were demobbed. In mid-December, when the winter term ended, Aunt Bee took charge of us for the last time, and it was under her flinty eye that we three travelled out to Château d’Oex in Switzerland, to meet our parents and spend Christmas with them in the Hotel Rosa, high above the town.

  The Channel crossing was a rough one and, to my surprise and indignation, I was appallingly seasick; for remembering the tea-tray episode in the Bay of Biscay I had thought myself immune to wild water. Puberty had obviously altered that as well as other things; though it had not rid me, as promised, of my ‘puppy-fat’ (for which I blamed Bee, who had insisted, despite all my pleas, on my keeping to the same old ‘growing girls need feeding-up’ regime, initially foisted upon me at Portpool). Aunt Bee said bracingly that my seasickness was merely due to nerves and imagination and I must ‘snap out of it’ — Bill and Bets hadn’t been sick and nor had she! Well maybe they hadn’t. But they all looked pale green and seemed disinclined to eat anything. Unfortunately, Bee’s French was good enough to enable her to be dictatorial to the Customs officials and Passport Officers at Calais, and rude to the porters at the railway stations as well as almost everyone we met on the train. It was not a soothing journey and next day we were sadly disappointed to find that very little snow had fallen that year and all the ski-ing resorts were in a panic about it. However, there on the platform to meet us were our parents. Back, this time, for good. We launched ourselves at them with shrieks of joy. Darling, darling Tacklow! It was a marvellous moment and more than made up for our bitter disappointment that as Tacklow had retired, there would be no going back to India for any of us — except Bill if he managed to get into the Indian Army when he passed out of The Shop.

  Bee stayed with us as a guest over Christmas before returning to England, and we saw her off with suitable expressions of affection and gratitude. And indeed we really were grateful. Not only for all she had done for us (we had enough sense to realize that we could have been in much worse hands — just look at what happened to poor little Rudyard Kipling, for example), but because we were so thankful that it was all over, and we would never have to be infuriated or embarrassed by her again. We didn’t see much of Aunt Bee after that, though we kept in touch; dutifully remembering to send cards and small presents when Christmas or her birthday came round. Sometimes Mother invited her to visit us, or travelled down to Southampton to spend a night or two with her in her top-floor flat in a Southampton suburb; but the last time Bets and I saw her was in the latter half of the Thirties, when she invited us to have lunch with her at a hotel in Southampton —

  Bets was married by then and we had both been on a brief visit to her mother-in-law, who lived somewhere around those parts, and were returning to London via Southampton: a circumstance that I suppose Mother must have mentioned in a letter to Bee — hence the invitation. It was a pressing one that left us no option but to accept; though her sister (who was finding Bee more and more difficult to deal with as she grew older) had confessed to Mother that Bee had exchanged high words with so many of Southampton’s taxi-drivers that the fraternity had virtually ‘blacked’ her, and th
at any call for a taxi in her name was refused; which made it very difficult for her to get around, since she could only walk very short distances with the aid of a stick.

  Mother had passed this bit of information on to us and we feared the worst; especially after waiting in the hotel lounge for a good half-hour after the time that Bee had settled on for our meeting. Then at long last we heard a familiar sound floating up to the open windows from the pavement below. A high, authoritative voice was giving a piece of its mind to someone who was returning it with interest. ‘That’ll be Aunt Bee!’ sighed Bets, rising. We ran downstairs and hurried through the foyer; and of course it was. She was shaking that well-known ebony stick at a taxi-driver and telling him just what she thought of him. Apparently he had grossly overcharged her because he took her for a poor, defenceless old woman who could be swindled with impunity, but this time he had met his match for she had taken his number and intended to report him to the police and the City Council and the editor of the local paper … and so on and so on. Age had certainly not changed the infinite zip with which criticism and invective tripped off that acid tongue. The taxi-driver, no mean adversary, was clearly outclassed, and in the end, having joined the list of the many Southampton taxi-drivers who would no longer answer a call from her address, he drove away, untipped, leaving Aunt Bee the victor on points.

  She gave us a blow-by-blow account of the battle over luncheon; complaining bitterly of the insufferable rudeness of public servants in this mannerless age, enumerating many examples, and boasting of the restraint with which she had conducted herself in the face of the shocking and totally unprovoked behaviour of the hoi polloi, who ‘did not know their place’. She then argued over the bill. It was just like old times! When we kissed her goodbye and saw her leave (by bus) it was with genuine regret; for there is something strangely comforting in discovering, in a rapidly changing world, that even one thing — in this case one person — has remained exactly as you remembered them. We never saw her again. But we have never forgotten her. Ave atque vale, Bee; I wouldn’t have liked to be in St Peter’s shoes when you arrived at Heaven’s gate, and I bet you bullied him into letting you go to the head of the queue!

  Our stay in Château d’Oex was supposed to help me brush up my French. It failed. Largely, I think, because whenever I groped for a word I wanted in French, it arrived in Hindustani; even though I would have sworn that I had forgotten it and, if asked for it in that language, would have been unable to lay my tongue to it. I only added one new French word to my meagre vocabulary, and that, for some strange reason, has never escaped me. The French for a Jerusalem artichoke.* That one word, and two totally different scenes, stay in my mind to be recalled whenever Switzerland or the name Château d’Oex is spoken. The first scene is in the category of my ‘Seven Most Beautiful Things’, together with that moonlit fragipani tree beside the Kalka–Simla Road, the Taj Mahal at sunrise and the ‘Cutty Sark’ under full sail. This is how I happened to see it…

  Our set of rooms at the Hotel Rosa all opened onto a wide private balcony, open to the sky, from which we could look out across the town below us to the snow-covered mountains on the far side of the valley; and sometime between midnight on Christmas Eve and the earliest minutes of Christmas Day, we were awakened by Tacklow and Mother shaking us and urging us to ‘Come out and listen to this!’ Huddling on our dressing-gowns and slippers and with our eiderdowns thrown shawl-wise round our shoulders, we went out onto the balcony and into bright moonlight. There had been a light fall of snow on the previous evening, but now the sky was clear and the windless night was full of stars: stars in the sky and Stardust sparkling on the snow where the moonlight struck it — on the mountains on the far side of the valley and the pointed eaves of the hotel, the snow-covered trees and the balcony rails. And silver-sweet in the silence of that still and shining night, an unforgettably beautiful sound: the voices of an unseen choir from the parish church singing carols in the snow among the black tree-shadows below the hotel.

  The carols were not ones that I had ever heard before. But even if it had not been Christmas Eve — or Christmas morning — no one could have mistaken them for anything else. This was how the angelic choir must have sounded to the listening shepherds on that hillside above Bethlehem, high, pure, sexless voices singing Hosannas to the Highest…

  The second Château d’Oex memory is also a Christmas one. We arrived at the little English church in plenty of time for the morning service, only to find that it was already packed solid with visiting Britons. There was no hope of our being able to sit together, but a harassed verger managed to squeeze us in here and there among the congregation, where we were instantly lost to sight. Tacklow had remained standing at the back of the church until he was sure that his womenfolk and his son were seated, and then the kindly occupants of a pew near the door managed to squash up enough to make room for him just as the service began. Only when it was half-way through did it occur to him that, as Keeper of the Privy Purse, he had quite forgotten to dish out money for the collection plate to his family, who would, he felt sure, be gravely embarrassed when it was presented to them and they had nothing to put in it.

  Anyone else would have realized that there was nothing one could do about it beyond putting the family’s combined collection money in the plate when it came to his turn to contribute, and letting it go at that. Not my Tacklow! He merely waited until the congregation sat down at the conclusion of ‘Hark the Herald’ or whatever, and then, solemnly climbing on to the pew, stood up and peered over the top of his spectacles at the congregation, like some latter-day Stout Cortez taking a look at the Pacific from that mountain top. Having located us one by one and memorized our several positions, he got down again, sorted out the collection money and trod quietly down the aisle to distribute it — the startled occupants of the pews obediently handing it along the line until it reached the Kaye it was intended for. It never occurred to him to feel embarrassed, or think that we might be. But we were, of course. And all four of us, Mother included, owned up afterwards that we came within an ace of handing the money to our next-hand neighbour.

  We had been at the Hotel Rosa for about a week when a flock of letters and telegrams arrived addressed to ‘Sir Cecil Kaye’. And that was how we discovered something that Tacklow had known about for some months past: that he was to be knighted. Technically he would not become ‘Sir Cecil’ until the King touched him on his shoulder with a sword at an Investiture at Buckingham Palace in another month or two. But once such announcements appeared in the New Year’s Honours List, everyone chose to ignore that and used the prefix on envelopes and articles. Scores of the letters arriving for ‘Sir Cecil’ came from India, for he had made a great name for himself during his term as Director of Central Intelligence. He had always believed that the post, which was a top security-and-police job, should by rights be held by a policeman and that it was unfair that it should always be given to a member of the ICS. How, he argued, could anyone expect to persuade the best men to opt for a career in a service in which they knew from the start that however hard they worked, and however good they were at their job, they could never reach the top rung of the ladder because custom reserved that for the Civil Service — a plum for the Heaven-Born.

  His own appointment had caused a good deal of resentment because he was an Army man and not a civilian. But it had broken the pattern, and one of the tasks he had set himself was to ensure that the next DCI, and all subsequent ones, would be a policeman. He succeeded in this, and when he retired The Times of India wrote a valedictory column that I still cherish and that must have pleased him.*

  Buckie told me that it was written by an Indian. I don’t know where he got his information from, for the article was not signed. But I expect he was right, for almost forty years later — sixteen years after India became independent and long after both Buckie and my father were dead — a senior Indian police officer, to whom I had to show my passport while revisiting the dear country of my birth, noti
ced that my maiden name had been Kaye and asked me if by any chance I was related to a Sir Cecil Kaye who had been DCI, India in the years following the end of the First World War? When I said that I was his daughter, he leapt to his feet and embraced me (and for two pins would, I think, have kissed me), babbling excitedly that this was wonderful — wonderful! — that when he had been a young man my father had been so good to him. So kind and so helpful. Everyone in the Department had loved and revered him and would be forever grateful for the encouragement he had given them: ‘We worshipped your father; he was a truly good man!’ That was a great moment for me — and obviously for him too, for I have seldom seen a man so deeply and genuinely moved.

  Bill, Bets and I were naturally thrilled to bits by the news of that knighthood, and charmed to learn that our parents would in future be known as ‘Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye’. Mother was equally thrilled; but the reactions of the recipient himself were a good deal more muted and could at best be summed up, in Ko-Ko’s famous phrase, as ‘modified rapture’. Tacklow warned us that it would only mean that from now on everything was going to be a lot more expensive, because the Great British Public believed that anyone with a handle to his name must automatically be rolling rich, and charged him accordingly! The same went for ‘abroad’: only more so, for there, even a man with a modest ‘Sir’ before his name was instantly a ‘Milor’ and, of course, loaded. But the fact remained that we were far from rich, and now that he had retired on a small pension (the job had been a civil one but the pension was an Army one, and his Army rank was Lieutenant-Colonel) we were going to have to count every penny. The salaried days were over.