by M. M. Kaye
Tom Mix, took after his mother, but goodness knows where she picked up his father, for Buck Jones was mainly black with white markings, while Harry Carey was mostly ginger with a white face, one black ear, and a black patch over the opposite eye which gave him a rakish air and was so distinctive that Bets and I, returning close on ten years later on a sentimental journey to see what had become of Hillingdon and dear Three Trees, seeing a cat who had been lying asleep in the long grass at one end of the garden start up and stare at us over the grass, said with one voice: ‘Harry Carey! — it’s Harry Carey.’ The cat vanished with the speed of light, but there could be no mistaking that cockeyed white face with its rakish black eye-patch and single black ear. Harry C. had obviously returned to the wild and was doing all right, for he looked very stout and sleek; and the sight of him made our day.
Three Trees had not changed; nor had the Park. But there was now a house on the empty plot next door, built on the spot where in our day there had been a ring of tall Scots pines, and all the once vacant plots had been bought and built on. The whole place was beginning to look crammed with houses, but the house opposite Three Trees looked just the same. Back in the Twenties it had belonged to a Colonel Hutchinson who worked for a publicity firm in London and had written a book that had become a terrific best-seller. It was called The W Plan, and I remember him telling us, as though it was a tremendous joke, that its success was entirely due to his knowledge of what he called ‘the publicity racket’. He had, he said, had the bright idea of having the title of the book in huge print pasted high up along the side of every London bus, and the expense involved had paid off, since you couldn’t move in London without seeing the w plan screaming at you from every angle.
He was an amusing and extrovert man, and an excellent neighbour. We got to know him and his wife and young family well, though I have to admit that I thought nothing of his book. He gave us a signed copy of it which unfortunately perished along with all the rest of Tacklow’s books.
I can still see him quite clearly in my mind’s eye, but though I may not have appreciated his book — which must have been one of the very first to be hyped into best-sellerdom by expert publicity — I thought that his garden must be the most beautiful in all England. It made me wish I could have seen Hillingdon in its great days, for judging by this one, the gardens must have been spectacular. There were, I was told, four separate gardens, each one in a different colour, and our writer friend had bought a large plot that included the whole of the Blue Garden. It was a dream of a garden! A long strip of velvety grass, flanked by wide flowerbeds, led down an avenue of dark, beautifully cut blue-green yew that broke into arches where other walks bisected it. And in the flowerbeds, in every possible shade of blue, grew delphiniums and larkspur, Himalayan poppies, drifts of forget-me-nots and lobelia, clumps of hydrangea, lilacs and hibiscus, violas, lavender, violets and gentians, campanula and clematis, and all the other blue and bluish-mauve flowers you can think of; plus blue-leaved hostas and lots of things with lacy silver-grey foliage and no flowers.
We were told that our lawn had once been part of the Red Garden. But all that remained of that was an overgrown, nettle-filled avenue of Canadian and Japanese maple trees that lay on the other side of the fence at the far end of our lawn, and belonged to the nuns. The trees turned unbelievable shades of crimson and scarlet in the autumn, but the avenue was so choked with weeds and brambles that you could no longer see even a trace of the herbaceous borders that had once lined it. No one seemed to know where the yellow and white gardens had been, and the only one to survive was that magical blue one.
That’s about all I remember about the Hillingdon interval; except a couple of pop tunes, one of which, entitled ‘When My Sugar Walks Down the Street’, was played dangerously near to the point of justifiable homicide by Bill, who was learning to play the banjo — banjos were the ‘in’ instruments of the Twenties — and this was the only tune he knew. The other, also played to exhaustion by Bill, but on the gramophone, was a ditty called ‘Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now’. I don’t know which was worse.
Surprisingly, since he was an exceptionally good-looking youth, Bill had not started collecting girl-friends, so when the time came round for the first Summer Ball at The Shop, I thought for a brief time that he might — just possibly might — ask me to go with him. Unfortunately, he still thought of me as an unalluring schoolgirl; ‘Old Piano Legs’, in fact; and I don’t think that the idea that he might ask me to the ball so much as crossed his mind. However, being partnerless, he asked Mother instead; which turned out to be one of his better ideas, for much to his surprise she was a wild success with his fellow students who couldn’t believe that anyone could have a mother as young and pretty and good company as that. She was at the time just short of her thirty-eighth birthday, and except for her once pretty hands could easily have passed for twenty-five.
I remember that she wore a dress Tacklow had seen in the window of a shop in Bond Street, and had thought so pretty that he did what was, for him, an unprecedented thing: he walked straight in and bought it. ‘It looked as though it was made out of opals,’ explained Tacklow, ‘and I couldn’t resist it.’ He loved opals above all other stones because, he said, they were the only precious stones that couldn’t be faked. All the others could be made out of glass and fool nearly everyone; even pearls could be Mikimoto fakes. But not the opal. So he only bought opals for Mother (he could never have afforded to give her emeralds or diamonds, anyway). The dress was made of smoky-blue chiffon and lace embroidered all over with opal-coloured beads and sequins that shimmered when the wearer moved, and Mother wore her opals with it and went off to the ball looking as glamorous as Cinderella. Bill said he nearly burst with pride when his friends vied with each other to dance with her, and that he only managed to get two dances with her himself; and that with difficulty!
As for Mother, she came back looking like a girl again; or a flower that has been drooping for lack of water and is suddenly revived by a shower of rain. She loved to dance; and for the first time I realized how much life must have changed for her and just how much she must miss the gaiety of India — the dances, the lights and the music — the admiration … Well, all that was finished and done with. For her the party was over. But for Bets and myself it had not yet begun, and there were times when I used to think gloomily that at this rate it would never begin! For we were not in the ‘Débutante Set’ with the prospect of a London Season ahead. (Few India service people, outside the Heaven-Born, were.) And anyway Tacklow could not have afforded to ‘bring us out’. Nor were our present neighbours — the people who had built new houses and settled on the Hillingdon estate — the kind whose drawing-rooms were big enough to use as ballrooms. Besides, they were either too young to have sons and daughters of an age to go to grown-up dances, or elderly couples whose children had long ago left home.
I don’t remember meeting anyone in my own age-group while we lived at Three Trees, and the only friend of Bill’s whom he ever asked there for the holidays was a boy of his own age, Alexander ‘Sandy’ Napier; the only child of parents so elderly that they had given up all ideas of having a family when Sandy’s arrival took them completely by surprise. Thereafter they had treated him more as though they were his grandparents than his parents — and Victorian grandparents at that. They never seemed to know quite what to do with him, and Sandy began to look on us as his family: an attitude that we reciprocated. He remained an honorary brother for the rest of his days, which I suppose is the reason why neither Bets nor I ever fell in love with him; for he was the dead ringer for that one-time Prince Charming, Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor. So much so that when immediately after the Abdication the new Duke went into hiding, Sandy — who had been posted to Peshawar as Deputy Commissioner — caused a terrific sensation by arriving in that city, driving his very ancient Rolls-Royce. Half the onlookers instantly leapt to the conclusion that this was their ex-King Emperor, who must have decided to take refuge among them.
The excitement was intense!
However, all that is by the way, and I merely introduce Sandy at this point because he was to play a large part in our lives.
Apart from Sandy, and the two or three youths who, outnumbered ten to one by young women, were studying art at the Studio in Park Walk, I can’t remember meeting any young men during my time at Three Trees. There were a few married ones of course, and perhaps a dozen or so boys ranging from six months to eight or nine years old. But it has to be remembered that the male population of Great Britain had been drastically reduced by the slaughter of the First World War, which had landed the United Kingdom with no less than three million of what the newspapers ungallantly referred to as ‘surplus women’. Three million women who would never have a husband, never have a white wedding, a honeymoon or a baby, and never be a grandmother. For it was still a marriage-or-nothing time for us.
With post-war Britain still suffering from a staggering shortage of marriageable men, it was becoming all too clear to me that, short of a miracle, I was bound to join the ranks of those three million surplus if I didn’t make a move to escape from my present cosy little rut in the fairly near future. Brother Bill was obviously going to be of no help. And anyway he would soon be heading for India to join a mountain battery stationed on the North-West Frontier — having taken his passing out exams and scraped into the Gunners by the narrowest of margins. Bets, I thought, would probably make it to the altar, since she was far better equipped to be popular with young men than I was.
Bets was a good artist and, if she had only stuck to it, would have been a really good pianist. As it was she could vamp any dance tune, and there are few more popular social assets than that. She was also a good tennis-player, a more than adequate rider who could (if Tacklow had been able to run to keeping a horse, which he couldn’t) have developed into an excellent one; and she could both dance and sing. I always thought she would end up in musical comedy, beginning in the chorus and graduating to be a star. I still think she might have done so if things had turned out differently. And if she had been a different kind of person; one with more determination and a harder streak in her character. But there is no steel in Bets’s make-up. She had, and still has, an almost pathological fear of rows and loud angry voices, and she would do anything to avoid them; anything at all. Nevertheless I still believe that if we had stayed on at Three Trees she would have found her way into musical comedy and ended up famous. As for me, that miracle I needed turned up after all, in the shape of a letter from the India Office asking Tacklow to return to India and take on the job of revising Aitcheson’s Treaties, which were in dire need of an overhaul, having been made way back in the last century, between the British and the rulers of a number of India’s Princely States.
Tacklow was happy at Three Trees. His editorial work was interesting and he enjoyed our daily walks through the park, to and from the station, and our lunch-times at the Kardomah. He liked strolling round the garden attended by Hillingdon Chips and her three cowboy kittens, now grown into large and prosperous cats — though still inclined to wear their stetsons well over one eye and be quick on the draw. He liked keeping an eye on the house and seeing that broken gutters were mended before they leaked, and that cracked panes of glass were replaced quickly. Ordinary, everyday things of that sort which he termed ‘pottering about’. I vividly remember the day on which he decided to do a bit of pottering in the attic, because I happened to be in bed with a bad cold when he incautiously put a foot on the lath-and-plaster instead of keeping to the beams, and the next second a large chunk of ceiling hit me on the head, nearly laying me out cold. My room dissolved into a maelstrom of dust and plaster, and looking up groggily, I discerned my beloved parent’s left leg waving wildly from a hole above me. It took the united efforts of his family to extract him because none of us could stop laughing.
No, I do not think Tacklow wanted to go back to India. But he thought we wanted to. And how right he was. Mother had never, to my knowledge, complained. But he must have realized that she could not help missing the gaiety of India; all the parties and dances and shooting-camps, ‘the folly and the fun’. And then there were Bets and myself. He knew that the job would not take him away for long: only a little more than a year — if that. But he had already been parted from his children for too long, and neither his wife nor his daughters took kindly to the idea of losing him for another year. I do not think that that last consideration weighed with him as much as one might have expected, for after all, a year was only a year. What did count with him, I suspect, was a combination of three things: Mother’s return from that ball at Woolwich, looking as pretty and sparkling as though she had just emerged from a dip in the Fountain of Youth; and by contrast, the way she looked after a hard day’s housework when nothing had gone right and she had scalded her hand with boiling water, scorched the front of a newly washed shirt with a too hot iron and burnt the stew: one of those days. Then there was the sour aftermath of the General Strike. That too played its part. And finally, the realization that his elder daughter was no longer a child but a young woman, and that the younger one would soon be leaving school. What was he going to do about them?
In his father’s day, and his grandfather’s, the girls would have been looking forward to ‘coming out’ with all the fun and festivity that that entailed. But in the post-war world, and on his India service pension, he could neither afford to launch them on a London Season or send them to finishing-schools in France. And who was there for them to marry? His son, whom he barely knew, never brought any of his friends to Three Trees — with the exception of young Sandy who had by now become more or less adopted into the family. And though Bill himself had been invited to debutante dances in country houses and in London (sometimes by people he did not even know!) he had never been asked to take his elder sister along, and as yet she had been invited to few parties and no dances. Anyway, Bill would soon be in Rawalpindi with his Battery…
Tacklow had always known how Bets and I felt about India, and though he would have preferred to stay on in Three Trees and hope one day to be able to buy it, he decided to accept the job of revising Aitcheson’s Treaties and go back there. But not alone. He would take all three of us out with him.
To Bets and myself, and to Mother too, it was like winning the Calcutta Sweep or being given the most marvellous present in the world. I remember wanting to cry and then wanting to run out onto the lawn and scream for joy … to stick flowers in my hair and dance bare-foot between the trees in the park. It was too good to be true! I remember Mother flinging her arms about Tacklow’s neck and bursting into tears while Bets and I hugged each other and any outlying portions of him that we could get at, before dancing round and round the living-room like a pair of demented March hares. That was a truly unforgettable day, ‘a day to be marked with a white stone’…
Since the revising of Aitcheson’s Treaties was only a temporary assignment, the India Office was prepared to pay Tacklow’s fare and travelling expenses, but not ours. So he made a last visit to Upton House to see his father and ask for a loan (not an interest-free one either!) to pay for those three extra passages. He might have known that he’d get a dusty answer. Once again the sum was a very modest one, since even in the 1930s one could get a return ticket from England to India for as little as £40, ‘tourist class’. And as we were still in the Twenties, the sum required was probably no more than £200 — certainly not more than £300 — and it would have saved Tacklow from having to commute part of his pension; which was the only other way he could raise the extra money. However, my miserly old grandfather turned him down flat; not because he hadn’t the money and so couldn’t afford it — no, no; he wouldn’t have liked anyone to think that. But ‘as a matter of principle’.
It had been a faint chance, but worth taking. And left with no option, Tacklow duly commuted £100 a year of his pension. He could have done with that extra hundred a year in the days to come, but it paid for our passages and left quite a bit ov
er. Poor Tacklow — darling Tacklow! I have one of his account books in which he wrote down every single one of the pennies he had to count with such care, written in the microscopic handwriting that he had developed because it helped him in decoding ciphers. The sums are so small. And so meticulously listed, down to the last farthing. He really needed to keep track of every penny, for now that he had commuted part of his pension he was left, after tax, with exactly £700 a year for the four of us to live on. This was something that I only discovered much later, because he never talked about money: a legacy from his Victorian youth and childhood I suppose, when men did not talk about money to women and it was considered vulgar to mention it in general conversation.
I don’t think even Mother knew how little we had to live on, because he paid all the bills, dealt with all matters of finance and ‘managed’ somehow. But it must at times have been very difficult, for he never said ‘no’ unless it was impossible to say ‘yes’; and he was incurably generous. He would never lend money to a friend because he held that to do so might lead to losing their friendship and it was always better to give it (if it was there to give) and keep one’s friends. Once, long ago, he had made that mistake when a friend and fellow officer in dire need asked him for a loan. He had instantly cashed in his life insurance — the only savings he had — and handed it over. The recipient, hysterical with relief and gratitude, promised that it would be repaid within a matter of months. It never was. His friend began to avoid him, and shortly afterwards left for England, where he did very well for himself. Some years later, meeting Tacklow by chance in London, he cut him dead.
