by M. M. Kaye
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Foreword
1. China: Spring 1932
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
2. Interlude: Japan
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
3. On a Clear Day …
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
4. Digs in London
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
5. Islands in the Sun
Chapter 22
6. Golconda
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
7. Ranikhet
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
8. Persian Interlude
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
9. Raja Santosh Road, Calcutta
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
10. ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…’
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Notes
Glossary
By the Same Author
Copyright
For
Tacklow,
who once told me that
on a clear day, from a
certain hillside above the
road to Simla, one could ‘see
forever’.
Foreword
Having finally got down to writing my autobiography instead of thinking about doing so, and managing to complete the first volume, I imagined that writing the next one would be a piece of cake. After all, it was not as though I had to invent characters or worry about a plot, as one had to with novels. This was just remembering the past and writing it down as it happened. Simple.
Sadly I had omitted to make any allowance for advancing years and what they can do to you. I had managed to keep arthritis within bounds if not at bay, but angina at its nastiest was a bolt from the blue, and meant that Volume 2 of Share of Summer had to be put on hold for several years. When at last I started to write again it was only because I knew that if I once said: ‘I can’t do it,’ I would never be able to write again. So I made myself a solemn promise to write something every day, even if it was only a line. Even if I knew that I would rub it out next day! Anything – anything – that would keep the book inching forward.
I kept that promise faithfully. But the result was, to say the least of it, entirely unexpected, for when at last I was able to say (as I handed the final chapter to Margaret, the noble girl who manages with the aid of a word processor to make sense out of my sheaves of pencilled foolscap) ‘Well, that’s Volume Two finished,’ she replied with some asperity: ‘You mean Volumes Two and Three; you can’t possibly compress this lot into a single book. Have you any idea how much you have written?’
Well, I hadn’t, of course. And Margaret was right again when I protested that it wouldn’t cut in half successfully, and she pointed out that on the contrary, it would cut very neatly – where Tacklow1 decides to take himself and his family off to China. It did. Which is how I found myself in the curious position of someone who has written an entire book by mistake; practically a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records.
And now I come to think of it, any reader who has not read The Sun in the Morning or Golden Afternoon will have no idea what I am doing on an Italian passenger ship, en route across the Indian Ocean to North China. Why China of all places? Well, anyone who has read either of the two previous volumes will know, and can skip the rest of this preface, which I will try to make as short as possible …
My dearly loved father, having retired with a knighthood after a term of years as Director of Central Intelligence, had been recalled by the Government of India to revise Aitcheson’s Treaties – treaties that had been made back in the previous century between Britain and the princely states of India. When that job was completed he had been urged by the ruler of Tonk to stay on as his President of the Council of State. I don’t think my father had any desire to do so. But since Mother, my sister Bets and myself were all for it, and he could never refuse Mother anything that was in his power to give her, he accepted; and at first everything went like a marriage bell. But alas, the old Nawab died and the whole thing fell apart in an incredible welter of lies and palace intrigue that ended in darling Tacklow being dismissed in the shabbiest manner by the Nawab’s successor.
Convinced that after a long and distinguished career he had been publicly disgraced, he planned a second retirement. Not to England this time, but to China. Which was something he had always dreamed of doing because, long ago in the dawn of the twentieth century, his regiment, the 21st Punjabis, had been sent to China to help clear up the shambles that had been made in that land by the Boxer Rising.
Since he happened to be a language buff – he spoke nine major languages and seventeen dialects, Mandarin and Cantonese among them – he was immediately at home and at ease in China and with the Chinese. He fell in love with the country from the moment he set foot on it. And with my mother the moment he first saw her, on the Tientsin railway station platform. Her father, known to the family as ‘the Grand-dadski’, was a Scottish missionary, and Tacklow had a hard time getting himself accepted as a son-in-law. It took him the best part of three years, but he won her at last and they were married and spent a halcyon honeymoon in Pei-tai-ho, a little seaside town on the Gulf of Pei-chih-li. It was the happiest time of his life, and when he talked to me of China it was always as though he was remembering paradise. As for Mother, he adored her to the end of his days.
That was why, when he had been so bitterly hurt by the débâcle of Tonk, he felt, like Tennyson’s King Arthur, that if he could go back there, back to that almost legendary land in which he had found such happiness, he could forget the bitter wound that India had dealt him. Hence the SS Conte Rosso, en route to the Far East.
1
China: Spring 1932
Chapter 1
The Conte Rosso was one of an Italian line of passenger ships that plied between Genoa and the Orient, and though in the interests of economy Tacklow1 had booked us to travel Tourist Class, we ended up travelling in great luxury in first class. For which we had to thank the fact that in those far-off times anyone who had a handle to their name – particularly a British one – was automatically a ‘Milord’. And, naturally, all Milords must be rich.
This drew attention to the fact that Tacklow and his family were travelling ‘rough’ and the Captain was curious. He went out of his way to be gracious to Tacklow and, on discovering that he spoke Italian with great fluency, leapt to the conclusion that he must have been born and brought up in that country.
Tacklow disabused him of this idea, but in the course of conversation mentioned an old friend of his, an Englishman named Wyatt who during the First World War had served as a liaison officer, or something of that sort, with the Italian army, and been so taken with the country and its people that he had retired there and become a citizen.
Wel
l, we all know that it’s a small world, so you will not be too surprised to learn that the Captain’s home town was the one in which Commendatore Wyatt had settled, and that the two were old friends. And, since the ship happened to be half empty, the Captain insisted on moving us up to two vacant first class cabins. The Italian-speaking members of the crew took Tacklow to their bosoms, and for the remainder of that voyage we were treated like royalty.
It was a marvellous voyage, for since my sister Bets2 had just become engaged to a young man in Burma-Shell’s India section, I was secure in the knowledge that with Bets’s future decided, even if my parents did decide to settle in China, there would always be somewhere in India that I could return to; because Bets would be there. Without that comfortable assurance this would have been just another voyage into exile. But as it was I could sit back and enjoy myself.
I find it odd now that it never once occurred to me that although I knew I could always count on a welcome from Bets, her husband might be less welcoming. So, freed from the dreary prospect of yet another period of exile that could, this time, possibly be permanent, I was free to enjoy to the full the experience of travelling in luxury on a ‘slow boat to China’. And this time, thank heaven, I was not seasick, not for a single hour.
The Conte Rosso loafed across blue seas under cloudless skies, escorted by teams of dolphins and attended by the occasional sea bird. The seas we sailed on were still unpolluted, and the water so clear that every jellyfish or basking shark showed up as though it were embedded in glass. I was no stranger to sea voyages, and had on several occasions seen the white fountains thrown up by spouting whales. But I had never before seen them from so close; whole families of them. So very many that it does not seem possible that, in the years since then, those huge, harmless leviathans have become an endangered species, hunted to the verge of extinction.
For the first few days of the voyage we saw no sign of another ship, and no glimpses of land. Nothing but leagues of empty ocean rimmed by a seemingly endless horizon; until suddenly the empty world became sprinkled with islands. Hundreds of them. Tiny, romantic patches of dense greenery fringed by white beaches and encircled by opal-coloured lagoons, most of them apparently uninhabited and all of them, seen from the sea, unbelievably beautiful. I think now that they must have been either the Andamans or the Nicobar Islands, and I remember them as pure magic – the coral islands of story and legend. Once in the Straits of Malacca we saw more land and more ships, then another flurry of islands and we were docking at Singapore.
The Conte Rosso was to stay in Singapore for two days, and Tacklow had booked rooms for us at Raffles Hotel. We went there in rickshaws, which in those days outnumbered taxis by twenty to one, if not more, and I remember that the open sea was on our right for the whole way. When we reached Raffles, it seemed a very big building in contrast to the small wooden shacks of the fisher-folk and shopkeepers that clustered along the left-hand side of our road. I remember too, very clearly, a young Chinese woman standing on the dock looking up at the faces of the passengers who lined the deck rails of the Conte Rosso, as they waited to disembark. She was wearing a plain white cheong-sam and black silk Chinese-style slippers, and she stays in my mind as one of the four most beautiful women I have ever seen.3
In those days the garden of Raffles Hotel ended in a large swimming-pool that lay between the green lawns and the open sea, and I remember being told a horror-story about it by one of the local inhabitants. Singapore had recently been badly battered by the tail-end of a hurricane that had sent huge waves crashing over the sea wall at the far side of the swimming-pool. One of them had carried with it a large shark, which found itself trapped in the pool once the storm had passed. Because of the damage to the trees and flower-beds and the endless debris to be cleared away, no one had gone near the pool for at least a week, and the shark had got hungrier and hungrier. And when at last the sun rose in a cloudless sky, the ravenous creature discovered that there was only one place where it could hide from the glare – in the black shadow thrown by the diving-boards. It was lying there when the first swimmer, a young woman off one of the tourist ships, came down for a pre-breakfast dip, and jumped in off the high diving-board straight into the jaws of the shark. ‘She hadn’t got a chance, poor girl,’ said my informant with an eloquent shudder.
I don’t know if that story was true, or merely invented to take the mickey out of me; if so, he had a very nasty imagination, for his horrifying tale gave me nightmares for months afterwards, and it was years before I stopped myself instinctively checking any shadow in a swimming-pool in case it harboured a hungry shark. The pool has vanished long ago, and with it all but the façade of the old Raffles Hotel, which now looks out on a mile or more of houses, roads and skyscrapers galore, where once there was open sea. None of the distinguished visitors who stayed there in Victorian and Edwardian days, and throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, would recognize much of the old Singapore.
The Governor, who was a friend of Tacklow’s, sent an invitation to lunch and a car, and in the afternoon we were given a tour of the island and its famous and beautiful Botanical Gardens, which, in those days, no car except the Governor’s was allowed to enter. I remember it as being green and scented – and full of shade and orchids and brightly coloured birds. Towards evening it rained, and I was told that this was a feature of Singapore’s climate, that nearly every day ended with a tropical shower which not only saved people having to water their gardens, but made the evenings pleasantly cool.
The Conte Rosso sailed next day at sunset. And as the ship threaded its way out between the tiny islets that lie scattered round the harbour, we saw a graceful white steam-yacht coming in to anchor offshore in the lee of one of the islets, and were told by the pilot that it belonged to that world-famous clown of the silver screen, Charlie Chaplin, who was on a honeymoon cruise, following his marriage to the second (or was it third?) Mrs Chaplin, the beautiful Paulette Goddard. And instantly the quiet, opal-coloured evening became drenched with romance, and I thought with envy how heavenly it must be to marry the man of your dreams and be able to sail away with him to such enchanting places as this. Lucky, lucky Paulette; what wouldn’t I give to be in her shoes! Provided, of course, that I could choose a different bridegroom. For at that time, having never seen the famous comic except on screen, I could only think of him as a funny little man in baggy trousers with an absurd moustache.
The weather changed as we turned northward into the South China Sea, and it was there that I saw my first water-spouts, thin, dark columns, very far away, racing across a slate-grey sea. Tacklow called us out on deck to see them and the Captain told us that they might look interesting enough from a distance, but could be lethal if they struck a ship broadside on. The wind driving them had not yet reached us (I would have been prone in my bunk if it had!) and the horizon was a jet-black line dividing the ink-dark sea from a long bar of almost white sky. Above this lay a dark pall of cloud that had the appearance of being held up by the pillars of the water-spouts. The whole enormous seascape looked like a steel engraving of one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Dante’s Purgatory. But though the wind was beginning to reach us in little whining gusts, I made no attempt to go below, for another water-spout was forming right in front of us.
It was the most uncanny thing I have ever seen. It began with that ominous pall of clouds turning darker and darker, and then beginning to sag down at one point towards the sea until it seemed that it must burst at any moment and empty its load of rainwater into the sea. Instead of which, it was sucking the sea up towards it. We saw the sea pucker up, as though drawn up by a gigantic suction-pump towards the cloud-bank above it, which by now had formed itself into a long funnel that was swirling round at a ferocious speed and drawing the sea remorselessly into it. Another few seconds and the two columns would have joined and gone racing away, sucking up more and more salt water as they went. But the wind had been too quick for it. The sinister, swirling funnel of
clouds had barely touched when it hit them with what must have been the speed of an express train and blew them apart, and the great hill of water fell back into the sea with an enormous splash.
I’m glad I saw it. Even though the very thought of it still gives me a shiver down the spine, because both the grey, foam-flecked water that appeared to be lifting itself up and the black, groping funnel reaching down for it seemed to be alive and know what they were doing. That must have been the way the Red Sea looked when it lifted up and drew back to let the Israelites pass over – and when it fell back on the pursuing army of Egypt.
The Conte Rosso left the bad weather behind, and the skies were once again blue and cloudless by the time we reached Hong Kong, where we were met on the dock by one of Mother’s sisters, Aunt Lilian, and her husband, Uncle David Evans-Thomas (at that time the manager of the local branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank), who drove us up to the Bank House on the Peak, and from there to lunch at the Repulse Bay Hotel.
Hong Kong, like Port Taufic on the Suez canal,4 was one of the places that I fell in love with on sight. You have no idea how green and glittering and beautiful it was, back in the decade which was fated to end with the Second World War. There were few skyscrapers in those days and I remember (probably inaccurately) the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building as being much the tallest on the waterfront. There were sampans and sea-going Chinese junks among the ships reflected in the clear blue and green waters of the uncluttered harbour, and the hillsides that surrounded it were thick with flowering shrubs: yellow, red and coral-pink hibiscus and acres of heliotrope, that sweet-smelling plant that at one time used to grow in every cottage garden in England, and which the country-folk nicknamed ‘cherry-pie’. The air was heavy with its scent – and full of butterflies, more brilliant than any I had seen in India, and so large that at first I thought they must be brightly coloured birds until their lilting flight betrayed them.
Our next stop was Shanghai, where, on a cold day, we parted with regret from the Conte Rosso5 and her friendly crew. Their next call was Japan, while ours was in the North China Treaty Port of Tientsin. The business of disembarkation took a great deal longer than we had expected, and Bets and I, after having our faces checked against our passport photographs, were left to our own devices for what seemed like hours, while our parents queued patiently to be interviewed by a number of Chinese port officials, explaining to the satisfaction of passport officers their reasons for wishing to enter China and how long they expected to stay, answering endless questions put to them by customs officials and health inspectors, and finally signing any number of papers. All this meant that I had plenty of time in which to take my first look at China proper. Frankly, I thought nothing of it.
