by M. M. Kaye
After all these years I can’t remember what it was. A car crash, perhaps? Anyway, an accident of some kind in which they were fortunate enough to die together. Their house passed to their grieving parents, who could not bear to live in it: and in any case did not want to, since they had their own house. Yet they could not bring themselves to sell it, so they decided to let it furnished until they had made up their minds what to do with it. But they wanted a certain kind of person to take it and not just anyone: no one that the two young people who had built it would not have liked. They had already turned down several applicants when they had seen Tacklow’s advertisement, and something about the letter he sent them in reply to theirs had made them decide to drive over to Kew and see him, and if they liked him, to urge him just to come and look at the house.
He looked and was lost. He couldn’t afford the rent they were asking, but he went up on his maximum figure and they went down on their minimum one, and we furnished Three Trees and settled down to … what? To live happily ever after? I think that is what Tacklow would have liked to do; for in spite of its sad history, no trace of sadness lingered in any corner of the rooms or the garden of that pleasant, friendly house; and had it not been for us — Mother, Bets and myself — I believe he would have been only too happy to end his days there. Perhaps if he had been able to buy it — ? But he could not possibly afford to do so. And anyway it was not for sale at that time, so there was never any question of our being able to own it. Then there was the added expense of having to furnish it; for apart from pictures and ornaments, a few rugs, and things like china and glass, a certain amount of silver and masses of books, we hadn’t a chair or a table to our name, let alone beds and cupboards and all the hundred-and-one things that one needs when moving into an empty house.
Bets went back to school and Bill went off to Woolwich; and Mother and I took on all the cooking and housework, because what with buying furniture and paying more than we had meant to for the rent, we could not afford a ‘daily’, let along a living-in cook-general. I well remember the horror with which I noticed for the first time that Mother’s pretty hands had become red and wrinkled from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. And the day that the first of our neighbours decided to pay a call on Lady Kaye, and Mother, who had been in the kitchen cleaning the silver — or to be strictly accurate, the silver plate — answered the doorbell wearing a duster tied round her head, a vast and rather grubby cooking apron over her dress, and with her hands blackened and her face liberally adorned by the dark smudges that an amateur at the job is apt to acquire when first trying her hand at cleaning either silver or brass.
Confronted by two elderly, grey-haired ladies dressed in their best, hatted and gloved, armed with calling cards and inquiring in impeccable upper-class accents if her mistress was at home, Mother said baldly: ‘Yes.’ And, having ushered them into the drawing-room, fled upstairs, whipped off duster and apron, washed her hands and face and applied a dab of powder and lipstick, and returned after a few minutes looking as serene as any lady of leisure, apologizing for keeping them waiting. Believe it or not, they never realized that the ‘maid’ and the ‘mistress’ were one and the same. Either because they were very short-sighted or, more likely, because they belonged to an earlier generation in which ‘the gentry’ often did not notice servants.
Mother was no cook. Nor was I much better at that time. But we learned — the hard way. At first the number of dishes that were taken straight from the stove to the dustbin was shaming and Mother was often reduced to tears; not because of the failures, but because of the waste of money. When we spoiled food we either made do with a ‘ploughman’s lunch’ of bread and cheese and pickles, or something out of a tin. But in time we both became pretty good cooks. We also discovered the value of a haybox, which is something I earnestly recommend to anyone who is bothered about electricity bills. We made a double one for ourselves out of one of the wooden boxes in which groceries were delivered in those days, lining it, including the lid, with odd bits of material padded with hay, and then filling it with more hay in which we made two nests, each one big enough to put a covered saucepan in, and finally making another hay-filled cushion to lay on top of them. For those who don’t know how to use a haybox, you bring to the boil a saucepan full of stew, porridge, lentils, soup-bones or anything that needs long, slow cooking, cover it and put it into the nest in the hay, place the padded cushion on top, shut the lid and leave it alone overnight. By morning it’s cold but perfectly cooked, and all you need do is heat it up. Simple! A saver of time and temper as well as a money-saver if ever there was one, since the stuff in your saucepan can’t burn, scorch or boil over, and doesn’t need to be watched.
We still had our failures, though. There was the sad case of a Christmas plum-pudding, made in September because Aunt Lizzie (who gave us her special recipe) told us that the longer you kept it the better; and certainly her own Christmas puddings were the best ever. Unfortunately she was getting very old, and her handwriting had always been early Victorian — very spidery and with a tendency to write her s’s as f’s — and she had written ‘tbs’ (tablespoon) instead of ‘tsp’ (teaspoon). Any experienced cook would have spotted the mistake at once, because it referred to black treacle: ‘4 tbs black treacle’. Alas, we were only amateur cooks learning by trial and error, and since black treacle is extremely thick and gooey it didn’t occur to either of us that four tablespoonfuls of the stuff was far too much. (The mixture seemed stiff enough, goodness knows!) Only when Christmas Day came round and, after boiling it up for the correct number of hours, we attempted to decant it from its bowl and display it in all its glory, did disaster strike. For the treacle having melted, the pudding streamed out in a dark, relentless flood, filling the plate, pouring over the edge onto the kitchen table and from there, within seconds, onto the floor, like lava from an active volcano. Table and floor were awash with the ghastly stuff before we could collect our wits and transfer our sticky Vesuvius to the sink — which in turn filled up. You wouldn’t have thought it possible that one fair-sized pudding-basin could have contained so much, and I am sorry to report that we received neither help nor sympathy from the non-cooking members of the family who were too busy falling about with laughter.
Mother, frugal to the last, rescued all she could of the liquid pudding and served it up for luncheon for weeks afterwards with flour, breadcrumbs, rice or broken biscuits mixed into the lava to thicken it. It was like that apricot year at Oaklands all over again, and very nearly succeeded in putting us all off Christmas pudding for life.
We were not the only people to have culinary problems, for Mother reported that she and Tacklow, while shopping in Oxford Street, had bumped into Sir Charles Cleveland, now retired and living in a small flat in London. It had been a joyful meeting and they had taken him into the nearest café for lunch and heard all about his struggles with cookery: an art that he too was in the process of mastering on the basis of trial and error. He had instanced the ‘Case of the Vanishing Mushrooms’, a pound of which he had recently bought off a street barrow. The barrow-boy had told him that a child could cook them — all that was needed was a frying-pan and some butter, ‘and Bob’s yer uncle!’ — and following these instructions Sir Charles had dumped the entire bag of mushrooms, plus a good dollop of butter, into a frying-pan and had left them to get on with it. On returning he discovered that the mushrooms had absorbed the butter: and they continued to do so in a manner which suggested that they drank the stuff. In the end they shrivelled up into no more than a teaspoonful of small, rubbery flakes of blackness. He found it very disheartening.
This meeting happened on the same day that my parents, returning on the Underground, met another old friend: an ex-Governor of Assam, also retired, who recalled wistfully that on the last occasion that they met he was on an official visit to the Viceroy and had arrived in Calcutta in the Governor’s private yacht, to travel up to Simla in a special train complete with platoons of ADCs, assorted hangers-on and
acres of red carpet. And now here he was, fighting for a strap on the Underground!
Five days a week, Monday to Friday, except when the Studio was closed for the holidays, I would accompany Tacklow up to London.
Leaving together after an early breakfast, we would take a short-cut across the park to the railway station, where we could catch a District train to Baker Street: that long, wide street that runs off Oxford Street and is known all over the world because Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr Watson had rooms in one of the houses that line either side of it. Here our ways parted; Tacklow boarding a bus that would take him to his office and I another that would take me in the opposite direction to Chelsea and the Studio in Park Walk, just off the King’s Road. A few hours later we would meet again for a snack lunch at the Kardomah Café in Piccadilly, opposite the Burlington Arcade. And at five o’clock we would make for Baker Street once more to catch a home-bound train and walk back in the dusk across the park to Three Trees.
The Kardomah Café sold and served wonderful coffee, but the thing I liked it for most was the fascinating mural that decorated the walls of the long, narrow, table-filled room. It was painted in the style of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and illustrated the story of Briar Rose, the Princess who pricked her finger on a spindle and fell asleep for a hundred years. I cannot believe that it was by the hand of the great man himself, for if so it would have cost a fortune. But whoever painted it must have been an admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and a considerable artist in his own right, because its decorative style would have done credit to William Morris, let alone Burne-Jones. I never grew tired of looking at it, and many years later was saddened by the discovery that both the Kardomah and its excellent coffee had vanished from Piccadilly; and with it the enchanted world of the Princess and her courtiers lying asleep among the formalized sprays and tendrils of the encroaching briars. As the Pre-Raphaelites had, at that time, gone so completely out of fashion that you could have bought one of their paintings for peanuts, it is just possible that a masterpiece by one of their lesser lights could have been wrecked in the process of pulling down the Kardomah to make way for another shop. I wonder if anyone else still remembers that mural?
Those daily journeys to London and back became a familiar and pleasant routine which, apart from my Studio holidays, was broken only once; by the General Strike that stunned the whole country in the spring of 1926. Looking back on those days I have the impression that the great majority of the public were taken completely by surprise and could not really believe that such a thing had actually happened. No one seemed to want it, apart from a small group of union militants, and a corresponding number of high-spirited chinless wonders of the P. G. Wodehouse variety who appear to have regarded it as an opportunity for a glorious rough-house on the lines of a Varsity Rag Week. Presumably a lot of people must have seen it coming, but I suspect that most people at that time were, like myself, deeply uninterested in politics. I certainly do not remember seeing anyone in the third-class carriages in which Tacklow and I, and thousands of our fellow commuters, travelled daily to London, reading anything but the sports pages of their newspapers. And that is something that I can swear to, because in the run-up to the strike, when the trains were overcrowded and I was feeling bored by the sea of newspapers that restricted my view, I used to try and read over the shoulders of my nearest neighbours; only to discover, time after time, that they were reading about football or cricket, boxing, racing or tennis. Even Tacklow, who read The Times, seemed far more interested in its crossword puzzles — which were new things in those days and tiresomely full of obscure quotations from Horace. But then half Tack-low’s editorial job consisted of reading newspapers from all over the world, so I suppose doing The Times crossword during the daily journey to London provided a welcome break. I knew that he had been worried about the possibility of a General Strike and took an extremely serious view of a situation for which he blamed the Government, who should, he considered, have been aware of the despair, resentment and anxiety that had been building up among the unemployed, and done something about it instead of adopting a policy of ‘Don’t look round and perhaps it will go away!’
Had it not been for that new invention the ‘crystal set’, which made the absence of newspapers no more than a minor irritation, I suspect that the strike would have had far more impact, for with the nation deprived of all news, rumour would have taken over. Which would have made the situation ten times worse, since rumour is always scare-mongering and frequently wildly inaccurate. As it was, the Government controlled the air waves and put out frequent news bulletins; and since anyone who hadn’t got a crystal set of their own knew someone who had, people could always cluster round the nearest available one when the bulletins were put out, to learn what was going on and be urged by a hearty voice, speaking through a barrage of squawks, squeaks and crackling, not to panic, to keep calm and ride out the storm — or whatever — and assuring everyone that everything was under control.
Those wirelesses, like the radios in the Second World War, made a great difference to the nation’s morale; as did the scores of light-hearted ‘strike jokes’ that were soon in circulation; most of them concerned with the antics of the Bertie Wooster-type strike-breakers. There was the one about the youthful undergraduate who in his capacity of volunteer engine-driver succeeded in bringing his train into Basingstoke station. To the dismay of the would-be passengers who packed the platform, waiting to board it, the train passed slowly through with its driver leaning from the cab yelling: ‘Don’t worry! — I’ll be back for you as soon as I find out how to stop this damned thing!’
The country refused to panic and there were surprisingly few ugly incidents. Strikers and strike-breakers alike kept their cool and remained firmly and staunchly British and proud of it. The bloodshed and civil war that had been predicted never occurred, largely because the British of that day were still at heart a law-abiding lot who did not approve of violence. Or of civil war either. So when the Liberal leader, Sir John Simon (later Viscount Simon), who was reputed to be the greatest living authority on law, declared the General Strike to be illegal, the nation took a hasty step back from the brink, and the TUC decided to call the whole thing off.
Considering my indifference to politics, it is odd that the two things I remember most clearly about our time at Three Trees should be the General Strike and the introduction of what was known as ‘the dole’. And I only remember the dole because of Tacklow’s reaction to it. On the day it became law, after listening to the news on the wireless he went out and spent a long time walking slowly up and down the short gravel drive. And during the rest of that day he hardly talked at all; which was not all that unusual, for as I have said, he was a quiet man. But the next morning, after having read the morning papers, he became — even for him — unusually silent and absent-minded. Knowing that he was troubled, I followed him when he went out again to pace to and fro under the three pine trees that gave the house its name, and when I asked him what was the matter he looked at me for what seemed a long time and almost as though he had not heard what I said, and then at last he said: ‘This dole business.’
I suppose I must have looked blank, for he explained what it was, and said that it sounded such a marvellous idea. So civilized and humanitarian: something that should have been done long ago, since it was not right that in a country as rich as ours a person should starve and be driven to beg or steal for food, merely because he could not find work or was sick. That was shameful and barbaric, and now it would stop. But all the same, ‘I think this may well be the end of us,’ said Tacklow. ‘Unless they handle it right, this could be the beginning of the end of Britain.’ When I asked how (for it seemed to me to be a wonderful scheme), he said that unless the dole was tied to the Labour Exchanges it would end by rotting us. That if a jobless person was offered a job and turned it down, not because he couldn’t do it but because he ‘didn’t fancy it’, then he should not be given the dole. If there was no work available, then it was
only fair that someone who needed it should be given enough money to keep themselves and their dependants from want. But once dole money was handed out to people who turned down available jobs, we would stop being Great Britain. ‘Because,’ said Tacklow, ‘if people can turn down a job and still get the dole, a day is going to come when everyone who is working will, in effect, be supporting several who are not — for the money will have to come from somewhere; and that somewhere will be taxes. Then when India gets her freedom — which she must do very soon — all the Colonies will start demanding theirs; and we shall give it to them because we are beginning to think that having colonies is not such a good idea. But when we lose India, and eventually all the rest of the Empire, we shall no longer be the rich and powerful country that we are now. And since the cost of living is always going up, and never down, it won’t be long before a sum that at present a family can manage to live and save on will not be enough to feed a rabbit!’
Tacklow said that when that happened the dole would have to be increased to keep pace with inflation; until in the end it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s while to do any of the small but necessary jobs unless they were paid more — perhaps a good deal more! — for doing them than they could get on the dole for doing nothing. Since the general public wouldn’t be able to afford to pay them that sort of money, they would take the dole instead; and presently hordes of immigrants who couldn’t make a living in their own countries would come hurrying over to ours to get a share of the bonanza. Then the next generation would start thinking, and saying, that they were ‘owed a living’ as a human right; which in Tacklow’s opinion was something that no human was ‘owed’ by its own kind — excepting only its parents who, because they brought them into the world, owe it to their children, and to their country, to bring them up to be responsible citizens who know how to stand on their own feet and not stamp on other people’s.
