by M. M. Kaye
Odd to think that although I should remember so clearly everything that Tacklow said that day as we walked to and fro under those three tall pine trees, I did not realize, until long after he was dead, that though he had in a sense been ‘dreaming true’ — as he had done twice before when he dreamt the winner of the Derby days before the race was even run — he failed to foresee another and more immediate threat. The then unthinkable one of another world war that would deliver a far worse blow to his country’s power and prestige, let alone her riches, than the first had done, and be the means of hastening the disintegration of the Empire on which, like the one that Spain had once possessed, ‘the sun never set’.
It has set now. But if historians of the future have the courage to resist the pressures that will be put upon them by the rulers or dictators of their respective countries to re-write history to suit their nationals (you should see some of the stuff that is already being written — how George Orwell would have laughed!), then a time may come when the world will look back on the era of the Pax Britannica as a golden age, and not, as the present tendency seems to be, a dark, disgraceful period of brutal colonial suppression.
* A humble girl who was expected to scrub the floors, peel potatoes, wash the dishes and in general do all the dirty work that no one else wanted to do.
* Years later I read of similar behaviour, in some magazine. The writer must have seen Grandpapa up to his tricks! Or heard about them from someone who had.
Chapter 26
Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day…
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
When I read any book set in the period between the two world wars, I realize how important a part the General Strike of 1926 played in the history of Britain. Tacklow had given me a strong interest in history, starting me off at a very early age on Little Novels of English History and telling me riveting tales of India’s past which for action, zip, intrigue, goriness and glamour outdid anything that our forefathers in the United Kingdom ever got up to. Yet despite this I was at the time of the strike (and to a great extent have remained) uninterested in contemporary history. (Unless, of course, it happens to be written up by someone like A. J. P. Taylor, who not only writes as Tacklow spoke, but — if my television set is to be trusted — speaks with his voice, stands as he did, uses his hands in the same way and even looks a little like him.)
The reason for this incuriousness must I suppose be because, like so many of us, I find it difficult to think of something that is actually happening here and now as History with a capital H. And also because something that is happening today invariably becomes political. If it’s bad, whatever Government happens to be in power gets the blame, while if it’s good they grab the credit — even if it’s only a matter of a record harvest which is in fact due to the weather! The General Strike therefore meant little to me beyond preventing me from getting to the Studio, which I resented. But then I could always carry on drawing at home; and did. I put in a lot of drawing at Three Trees; and because Bets was still at The Lawn, Bill at The Shop, Tacklow (also housebound by the strike) busy writing articles and editing in his study while Mother coped with cooking, washing, ironing and all the other endless chores that come under the heading of ‘housework’, I had to use myself as a model, with the aid of the full-length looking-glass on the inner side of my cupboard door or the triple mirror on Mother’s dressing-table. Which is why, to this day, the type of face I find easiest to draw is my own.
I enjoyed my time at the Studio, and since the teachers knew their job my work began to improve; though in fact I learnt less from them than from my fellow students. It was both an education and a revelation to see how someone else handled a subject or an object that I myself was looking at and struggling to put onto paper; while the totally different way in which others obviously saw exactly the same thing intrigued me enormously. It taught me to look at everything with a new eye, and it was my good fortune to have, for a term or two, three fellow students who were, in partnership, to become famous as theatrical designers under the name of ‘Motley’: Peggy and Audrey Harris and Elizabeth Montgomerie. The last in particular taught me that if you are bold enough you can put together colours that clash wildly with each other, and make them look marvellous. One of their first successes was the job of designing and making the costumes for Richard of Bordeaux, a play starring the young John Gielgud. It was an enormous success, and those three girls produced the costumes for it on a shoestring budget, co-opting members of the studio to stencil medieval patterns in gold, silver and a variety of colours onto the cheapest and heaviest materials available, and making the stuff look like hand-woven brocades and tapestries. The result had to be seen (and touched) to be believed, and it is nice to know that the name of Motley will go down in theatrical history.
Another student, again a girl, with the unusual name of Merlyn Mann, was so good and so individual in style that I confidently expected her to end up among the greats. One of her pen-and-ink drawings was hung in the Royal Academy when she was only sixteen, and when she suddenly took a dislike to an unfinished one and tossed it into the Studio’s wastepaper bin, I snatched it out; much to her disgust. ‘You can’t like that,’ said Merlyn, ‘it’s a mess!’ But I managed to flatten it out with an iron and had it framed, and I have it to this day — or rather my younger daughter has it now, because she liked it as much as I did. Merlyn’s trouble was that she was too good. She needed an old-fashioned ‘patron’ to buy up all her work and make her fashionable. I could sell bits of rubbish for cheap reproduction, but her work called for an expensive book with really beautiful illustrations: the kind of book that people will pay top prices for. I don’t know what became of her. Like Tacklow’s young genius who broke the Playfair cipher, she seems to have vanished from the public eye without trace.
The Miss MacMunn who owned and ran the Studio had a brother in the Army (Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, KCB, KCSI, DSO, no less!) whose wife, dear Lady MacMunn, was excessively stout and shaped rather like the Victorian idea of an operatic diva. Back in Simla, her three rickshaw men had been known as Faith, Hope and Charity; the one who pushed at the back being Faith, because Faith, we are told, can move mountains. Lord Reading, a man not noted for a sense of humour, said of her that she was an admirable woman, ‘but I do wish,’ he said — extending his finger and thumb at arm’s length in front of him — ‘that she would not wear a carnation out here’. He was also rumoured to have made her the subject of his only known joke. Some energetic do-gooder in authority had decided that it would be a good idea to replace the noonday gun, that told the city it could knock off for luncheon, with a siren instead; and on the first occasion that it sounded, his Lordship, caught unawares by its eldritch shriek, leapt in his chair and exclaimed: ‘Good heavens, someone must have stuck a pin into Emily!’
Everyone liked Emily MacMunn. But her George was a terrible old bore, and having known him from early on, I was all in favour of avoiding the lecture on Art (with lantern-slides) he was billed to give at the Studio in the afternoon of a half-holiday. The students, who were clearly expected to attend, were invited to bring relatives and friends with them, and typed leaflets announcing this, plus the subject, date and time of the lecture, were distributed to one and all. Tacklow announced firmly that he would, most unfortunately, be far too busy on the sixth — er, seventh? — to be able to take the afternoon off (shades of his father!). But Mother, who was fond of Lady MacMunn, insisted on going and taking me with her. We arrived late, and as the lights (with the exception of a single spotlight focused on the speaker) had already been switched off, we groped our way in the gloom to a couple of empty chairs amid a chorus of shhh-ing to which the General, already in full flight, paid no attention.
The subject of his lecture had been advertised as ‘Art in the Middle East’ (which apparently included India and Greece). But in fact it turned out to be largely about himself, and he had arranged for one of the second-year students, a fat, phlegmatic girl
in spectacles, to man the magic lantern and change the slides every time he thumped twice on the floor of the model’s platform with the stick that he was using as a pointer. Apart from one or two of the slides appearing on the screen upside down (his fault, not hers, since he had loaded the boxes of slides), this arrangement worked well. All the slides were of course in black-and-white, and many of them had been taken by the General himself. But he had managed to appear in all the others, posing in a martial manner in front of famous ruins; Roman, Greek, Persian and Egyptian, as well as the occasional shot of a Hindu temple or a Moslem mosque.
His method of lecturing was simple. Having introduced himself to his audience and told us that he was only a bluff old soldier, but by jove, he knew what he liked when he saw it, and that his career having taken him out into the furthest parts of our far-flung Empire he had been fortunate enough to see many wonderful works of art, he paused and gave the floor two sharp taps with his stick. There followed a whirring noise, a glare of white light, and a photograph of the Sphinx being upstaged by the General appeared on the screen. He then told us how he, not the Sphinx, came to be there and we heard a bit about his war experiences in Mesopotamia, which seemed slightly odd considering that the Sphinx … oh well, forget it. When he had said everything he could think of about the Sphinx he tapped again and we got the ‘rose-red city — half as old as Time’, and another view of the General. And so it went on. Drone, drone, drone, blither, blither, blither ‘… er — um — well I think that’s all I can tell you about that’; tap, tap, and the slide would vanish and be replaced by another. By endless others…
Since almost everyone smoked in that age of the cigarette, the atmosphere in the darkened studio became more and more hazy and hotter and stuffier with every crawling minute. The seats of the cheap wooden chairs, hired for the occasion, grew increasingly hard and uncomfortable and the audience became noticeably restless as the Lecturer ploughed on with all the determination of an elephant fording a river in flood. Presently, as yet another slide appeared on the screen, a voice from somewhere ahead of us murmured as though unconsciously speaking a thought aloud: ‘Can’t stand any more of this!’ and an enormous, shadowy figure surged up from its seat and made for the door. ‘That’s Emily!’ said Mother, instantly recognizing the shape and size of that familiar outline. And rising in her turn she followed the Lecturer’s Lady out into the fresh air.
I would have given much to follow them; and so it seemed, from the number of turned heads and envious profiles, would many others. However, good manners prevailed and we stuck it out through a series of Persian tiles, Coptic frescoes and bits of Babylon, until it petered out — literally. The General, having talked for a good five minutes about a slide showing some battered fragment of statuary dug up by someone or other from the ruins of Troy or Abydos or somewhere, ran out of things to say about it and thumped the signal for the next slide. Nothing happened. He thumped again, louder this time. Still no response. ‘Another slide, please!’ barked the General in parade-ground tones, repeating his thumps for the third time. ‘There aren’t any more,’ announced the operator flatly. And with that the lecture ended, and I collected Mother and Lady MacMunn from the courtyard, where they had been having a cosy gossip in the dusk while the shops and street lamps of Chelsea lit up around them.
Miss MacMunn had laid on tea and biscuits for the exhausted audience, and afterwards Mother and I caught a bus to Baker Street where we met Tacklow. And all the way back to Three Trees Mother talked of the places and people that she and Emily had been reminiscing about: re-telling scraps of the gossip of Northern India that either Emily or George had told her that afternoon, until I could have wept from homesickness. All through my schooldays I had been sure that once school was over I would be able to go home to India again. And when Tacklow retired and that hope died, I used to tell myself that if I worked hard at art and saved every penny I made, I would one day be able to pay for a passage back to Bombay and see all my friends, and Delhi and Simla and Okhla again. And put up at Laurie’s Hotel at Agra and see dear Miss Hotz, and wait once more at twilight in the quiet gardens of the Taj to see the moon rise over the dusty plains of India and transform that wonder in white marble into something as fragile and shimmering as a soap bubble floating above the shadowy mass of the trees.
So many friends; so many lovely places; so many memories. And so much happiness! It wasn’t possible that I should not be able to go back again one day. But when I looked at the work of people like Merlyn and Elizabeth and the Harris sisters — to name only four out of at least half-a-dozen outstanding students at one minor studio — and realized how many studios there were in London alone, I became less confident that I could earn the sort of money I would need to get me back to India. And once again England seemed to grow smaller and to close in on me as it had done on the wet, grey day that the ‘Ormond’ docked at Tilbury.
Tacklow had acquired a cat in the usual way: attracting a stray. A lean, slinking outlaw, probably descended from some barnyard cat who had kept down the rats in the days when Hillingdon was a great house. This shy and unattractive moggy lived in a small, dense wood of lilac trees opposite the garage and the woodshed at Three Trees, keeping body and paws together by preying on the rabbits, birds and rodents that inhabited our garden and the Park. Bets and I had long been aware of a pair of hostile yellow eyes in a whiskered, sandy-coloured face, glaring at us from the undergrowth below the lilacs, and once I had seen the cat trotting across the drive carrying the corpse of a rabbit, almost as large as itself, in exactly the way that a tiger carries its prey. But if we called to it or made any move in its direction, it was off like a flash.
Tacklow never really wanted a cat. It was always the cats who wanted Tacklow, and this one was no exception. It took to watching him as he strolled round the garden of an evening, and when he spoke politely to it, it stood its ground instead of instantly nipping back into cover as it did when anyone else addressed it. Eventually it came out to share his walk, and ended up feathering his ankles and purring when he tickled it under the chin. It never allowed us to do more than stroke it — and that only occasionally — and made no attempt to venture into the house. Nor did Tacklow encourage it to do so; which surprised me a little since he had already dubbed it Chips. But he said that for its own sake it would be kinder to let it remain an outdoor cat. Did he, I wonder, have a premonition that our stay in Three Trees would not be long, and that when we left it could be for somewhere where we could not take a cat with us?
The Hillingdon Chips remained an outdoor cat; catching her own meals and fending for herself even in the worst of weather, until, on a spring morning when the lilac wood was a blaze of mauve and white and purple blossom that smelt as though you had drenched it with bottles and bottles of Temps de Lilas — a once popular scent made by Messrs Houbigant of Paris — Tacklow went out to the woodshed to cut some more kindling for the fire and reached automatically into the trug behind the door in which he kept the small hand-axe. Whereupon the trug exploded like a dropped electric-light bulb, slashing him sharply in the process and giving him the fright of his life. In the next second a sandy-coloured strip of fur streaked through the half-open door, yowling indignantly. Chips to the rescue! — ‘Here come the United States Marines!’
Our moggy had evidently decided that the woodshed, which had an ill-fitting door that allowed her to get in and out of it even when padlocked, was a better place for her kittens than whatever outdoor spot they had been born in; for they had not been there when we last went into the woodshed for kindling, and they were obviously at least ten days old and probably more, since they had their eyes open — and knew how to spit and use their claws! They had attacked Tacklow’s intrusive hand with instant fury and whizzed off in different directions to cower among the piles of logs: three minute balls of terrified multicoloured fluff.
Tacklow tied up his hand with his handkerchief and spent a few minutes apologizing to Chips for upsetting her kittens, and smoothing
down her bristling fur, before returning to the house to exchange his handkerchief for a strip of plaster and fetch a saucer of milk. I remember saying that Chips would certainly have removed herself and her family by the time he got back, but he only said ‘Nonsense, cats always know on which side their bread is buttered.’ And sure enough, when we returned to the woodshed Chips had either carried or herded her family back into the trug and was standing guard over them, looking tigerish and wary. The three small, pansy faces spat at the sight of us, and as Chips made one of those disapproving cat noises that are half-way between a growl and a miaow, Tacklow ordered us all back to the house, saying that if we wanted them to stay around we’d better leave them severely alone until they had had time to settle down.
I remember that he spent most of the rest of that day there, merely sitting on a log by the open doorway of the woodshed, reading a newspaper and smoking one of the cheap Indian cheroots he had acquired a taste for as a young subaltern. Chips graciously accepted the saucer of milk and ended up by going to sleep on his knee in the attitude of one of Landseer’s Trafalgar Square lions, and by sunset she allowed him to remove the axe from under her kittens. He would not let us go near them and would not handle them himself until he was quite sure that they had accepted him as a friend, and during the next few days he fed them with morsels of raw meat; only when they were no longer afraid of him did he stroke them with a finger. When at length he could pick them up by the scruff of their necks, as Chips did, and dump them on his shoulder or in his lap, he knew that it would be safe to let us play with them. But though all kittens are appealing bits of fluff when they are the size of a bridge roll, these ones, even when small, looked what they were — wild young toughs. For which reason we named them after three of the then best-known stars of cowboy Westerns: Tom Mix, Harry Carey and Buck Jones. Funny that Bets and I should both remember those names still.
