by M. M. Kaye
Chapter 4
There were two bathing rafts at Pei-tai-ho, complete with diving boards, one anchored off Lighthouse Point and more or less the property of the Ambassador and his guests, and the other in deep water off the little bay that was almost opposite our bungalow. This was the one that we used every day, and I was charmed to discover that it was the same one that Mother and her family and friends used to swim out to and dive from back in the early years of the century, and that Tacklow had presented them with a diving board.
Oddly enough, the next year, 1933, the Peking and Tientsin Times of 27 August printed a ‘Thirty Years Ago’ column, one paragraph of which read: ‘We have seen some fine amateur photographs of the Pei-tai-ho Beach. Some of them showing remarkably graceful diving from the raft by a young lady expert. If all we hear to be true, the gentlemen will have to look to their honours in this respect.’ And a month later, someone who had read that column had told on Mother, for another column of the same paper quoted the paragraph, and went on to say: ‘This paragraph referred to Miss Daisy Bryson, and by an extraordinary coincidence she chanced to be at Pei-tai-ho, still diving from the raft on possibly the same beach, when this paragraph reappeared. The photograph reproduced on page eight, taken of Lady Kaye (as she is now) diving at Pei-tai-ho Beach this summer, shows that she is as graceful as ever in this exercise.’
As far as I remember, it was during our first summer at Pei-tai-ho that Edda Mussolini and her husband Galeazzo Ciano spent a holiday there. They were not there for long, and we saw very little of Edda. But her handsome husband could be seen daily, displaying his spectacular torso in the shade of a pang1 to an assortment of admiring young women of several different nationalities. We did not need to be told that the Count was a famous Casanova, because we had already seen him at work in Shanghai. He attracted women like wasps to jam. There was also a female of that species, the Countess of Carlisle, who matched him in glamour.
She, like the Count Ciano, was one of those glamorous creatures whom a future generation would nickname ‘the Beautiful People’, and on many a moonlit night you would see her floating down the beach with a rug on one arm and a Lieutenant-Commander on the other. I imagine she must have broken the hearts of at least half of the officers in the China Fleet. But romance, that summer, was not only confined to the celebrity fringe, for my parents were clearly enjoying a second honeymoon, and were charmed to discover how little Pei-tai-ho beach had changed. The bungalow that old Miss Winterbottom had lent them that first time looked exactly the same. So did the rocks that enclosed the little bay below it, where they used to bathe and laze and laugh together, and make plans for the future when the twentieth century was still in its hopeful infancy.
When the tide went out the long stretch of wet sand was still strewn with small, iridescent shells that Tacklow had never forgotten and which he now took to collecting, sorting them each evening into sizes and colours – pearl-pink and yellow and apricot, pale green, turquoise and lavender. I still have some of these shells, for he kept the best of them and had them made into spoons by a Peking silversmith: the smallest size for salt spoons, the next for coffee spoons, the next for teaspoons, and a few of the largest for sugar spoons. When I look at one now, I find it difficult to believe that these fragile things can actually be the same shells that were once, so very long ago, left by a receding tide on the shores of the Gulf of Pe-chih-li in North China, and picked up by darling Tacklow.
Mother spent much of her time sketching, and Bets, who also went in for landscape painting in watercolours, would often go with her. But although I too did a good bit of painting that summer, I hadn’t yet become interested in landscape painting or found a style of my own and a medium that suited me. The only stab I had ever made at painting in oils had been over a year before, in Kashmir, when, inspired by the view from our houseboat, I had spent all the money I had made from the sale of some of my illustrations on oil-paints, brushes and turpentine, in order to try my hand.
The result was a very amateurish effort, totally lacking in either style or technique; one look at the finished painting was enough to convince me that oils were not my medium. Yet curiously enough, that amateur daub somehow managed to pin down the exact look and feel of the scene that faced me from the roof of our houseboat on that long-ago spring morning in Kashmir. For that reason I cherish it, and it hangs on the wall of my study, where I can see it as I write, a reminder of how beautiful that now war-torn and devastated valley once was.
After that initial failure I returned to my first love, illustration in watercolour, and painted such subjects as ‘Undine’, floating up through sun-spangled water, the Kashmiri Love Songs – ‘Ashoo at Her Lattice’, ‘The Song of the Bride’, and ‘Kingfisher Blue’ – together with various nursery rhymes: the lullabies, and the one about the ‘King of Spain’s daughter’. These sold well at art exhibitions; largely, I think, because the subjects chosen by amateur artists are nearly always landscape or flower-pieces – plus the occasional portrait. Illustrations, particularly nursery ones, were few and far between. So while Mother and Bets went sketching, and Tacklow accompanied them to carry Mother’s gear and laze in the shade of the rocks nearby, I stayed behind in the wide, covered verandah that doubled as the sitting-room of our bungalow, and drew Madonnas and mermaids and the Spanish Infanta who, according to the nursery rhyme, ‘came to visit me, and all for the sake of my little nut-tree’.
In spite of the fact that both Bets and I would much rather have been in Kashmir, the summer had been a very pleasant one for both of us, and I was beginning to feel more kindly towards the Chinese. I liked the three members of our staff and was captivated by the artistry of their nation. There were still astonishing examples of craftsmanship to be seen in the little shops of even such a small seaside resort as Pei-tai-ho, and one superlative one on the shore.
This last was a man who practised an ancient craft that I had never heard of before – and have never heard of since. He modelled tiny figurines out of a soft clay and carried the tools of his trade around with him in a light wooden frame which included a stool on which he could sit while he worked. Each figure was built on to and around one end of a slip of bamboo, not much more than six inches long and no thicker than a matchstick. He had an enormous repertoire of characters for you to choose from: court ladies with wonderful, elaborate headdresses, Emperors in their state robes, Manchu Bannermen, armed to the teeth, legendary heroes, heroines and villains, and innumerable gods and demons and goddesses.
To watch him at work was to know that you were in the presence of a master craftsman, and that here was the mind of China. The patience and application, the painstaking attention to minute detail, the beauty and the ferocity – the horrific, grimacing faces of the Demons and Guardians of the Gate – hideous monsters who brandished thunderbolts and bloodstained swords.
The tiny masterpieces cost so little. But money was always tight with us, and there were so many things that had to be paid for before I could think of spending even the smallest coin on something I didn’t need. But watching was free, and I must have watched the making of scores of those enchanting trifles that summer, in the course of which, inevitably, I could not resist buying a few for myself. The paste of which they were made dried fairly quickly, and when dry had the appearance and feel of being carved from bone or ivory. But they were as fragile as bone china, and did not stand up well to the constant packing and unpacking to which they were subjected as we moved from one house or country to another. I have only the broken remains of one left, and no longer remember what character he represents; a Demon or a Guardian of the Gate? He is a scarlet-faced, scowling and ferocious little man with a white beard that positively curls with fury, and whose minute hand (broken, I fear) clutches an elaborate spear. The other arm is missing. But he retains his magnificent headdress and most of a wide, brightly-striped sash that he wore swathed about his hips.
I still have a clear mental image of that sash being made. The artist, having mix
ed a small supply of the modelling paste with several different colours, took a pinch of each and, having rolled each one separately into a tiny ball, placed them all into the palm of one hand, kneaded them together and rolled them out flat, as you would roll out a piece of pastry. And there, believe it or not, was a neatly striped piece of red, yellow, emerald green and white dough, exactly the right size to do duty as a sash. Those colours are still as bright as on the day it was made, and each stripe in the tiny sash is no wider than a strand of cotton. But alas, I feel sure that Mao and his murderous Red Guards will between them have put an end for ever to the men who practised that particular and fascinating craft. Certainly no one who had been forced to work as a farm labourer for three years would have been able to model those beautiful little objects, for the hands of the man who fashioned them with such skill and speed on Pei-tai-ho beach were not made for digging and ploughing and pulling up weeds.
In addition to her art, China was to provide me with two of those magic moments that I imagine all of us experience at least once in the course of our lives, and for which I have no explanation. I can only describe them as a brief span of time in which the ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary, and we know, without a shadow of doubt, that this is something that will be stamped on our memory long after a host of far more important things have been smudged out and forgotten.
The first came one September evening when Bets and I had gone for a walk to Lighthouse Point and, having reached the high ground, sat down on a boulder to admire the view. In those days there were hardly any houses between the British Embassy buildings and the Cathedral Rocks which marked the far end of a long, shallow curve of beach. If there were any, they too were hidden by dips in the ground, and all around us was barren, uncultivated land patched with wind-blown scrub and grass.
To our left, beyond the Cathedral Rocks, the land sloped down and merged with a wide expanse of plain that stretched away to meet the mountains that hemmed it in on the north, and the small garrison town of Shan-hai-kwan where (according to the Chinese) the Great Wall of China begins, or alternatively (according to the Europeans) where it ends. And in contrast to the biscuit-brown country around us, every inch of the plain appeared to be cultivated. Fields and fields of kao-liang stretched across it like a pale blue carpet, dotted here and there with the occasional tree or a cluster of brown-tiled Chinese farmhouses. In front of and around us there was nothing but barren ground and the squat stump of the ancient, stone-built lighthouse, and I remember thinking how drab and uninspiring it was, and that I would never want to paint it. As the sun went down behind us, any colour there may have been before drained away and left the whole world looking depressingly dreary …
And then suddenly it was as if I was watching one of those transformation scenes that were an obligatory part of the pantomimes of my youth, when Cinderella’s kitchen seems to quiver and melt and change before your eyes into the shimmering crystal caves where a host of dwarfs and fairies are busy making those glass slippers. A moment before I would have said that there wasn’t a cloud in that Isabella-coloured sky. But as the daylight faded and the sky began to darken to a soft Adam green I realized that the whole expanse of the eastern sky had in fact been full of invisible threads of vapour, some no longer than the palm of my hand. The vanished sun was now catching them, turning them from gold and apricot to every possible shade of pink, until the whole sweep of the sky, and the satin-smooth sea that reflected it, glowed and shimmered like some fabulous fire-opal.
There was at no time any harshness in those colours, and as the hidden sun sank lower and lower and the duck-egg green of the sky darkened to jade and amethyst, it remained a picture in pastel and gold dust. We stayed where we were on the headland, watching while the colours flamed up and faded, and though I had in the past seen more spectacular sunsets and would, I was sure, see more of them in the future, I knew that this one was different. This one was special. One of those things that are ‘marked with a white stone’.
The house lights of Shan-hai-kwan at the far end of the bay had begun to flower in the dusk before Bets and I tore ourselves away and made for home. And a few days later, having booked the house for next summer, we left Pei-tai-ho and set off for Peking.
Chapter 5
Neither Tacklow nor Mother had told us much about the house in Peking. Only that it was a Chinese-style one, but not to be compared with Aunt Peg and Uncle Alec’s lovely house in Shanghai. I can only suppose that, realizing that both their daughters took a poor view of China, they hoped to surprise us. They did.
We broke our journey at Tientsin, and after spending a night there we left for Peking, our train pulling out from the same platform on which, some thirty years previously, Tacklow – until then a confirmed bachelor – had caught sight of a pretty teenager kissing her father goodbye, and fallen in love on the spot.
Once again the countryside was not particularly interesting. The same fields of kao-liang and Indian corn, the same shortage of trees. A pagoda, a temple, narrow canals, walled clusters of farmhouses with their distinctive tiled roofs tip-tilted in the Chinese fashion, a sprinkling of fruit trees, willows, almond and walnut trees. And always, somewhere in the picture, a little man in a rush hat ploughing his fields with the aid of a lumbering water-buffalo. This, after my disappointment at finding that neither Shanghai nor Tientsin looked in the least like the China of my romantic imaginings, was distinctly encouraging. For one thing, it looked a lot more like the place Tacklow had tried to describe to me, the country that he had fallen in love with so long ago, even before he had laid eyes on Mother. And for another, it was exactly like one of those fascinating little landscapes, lightly sketched in monochrome on yellowed scrolls of silk by Chinese craftsmen using the minimum of lines to maximum effect. Those landscapes were actually there outside the windows of our railway-carriage, exactly as they appear on the scrolls. Perhaps after all we were not too late to see the fabulous China of history and legend before the West, we, the ‘Outer Barbarians’, succeeded in destroying it.
Peking was there at last. But oddly enough, I don’t remember anything about our first sight of it, except that the station was much like any other station, and that the built-up area around it was as forgettable as the surroundings of most railway stations. Grimy and industrial. Our new Number-One-Boy, a relative of the K’ai-mên-ti, as were all the staff, was there to meet us, and in no time at all we found ourselves packed on to rickshaws and whisked off through the mazes of this most ancient of cities, Tacklow’s leading and the rear one being brought up by the new Number-One-Boy’s.
The first nip of cold weather had already been felt in Peking, and everywhere the trees were turning gold or red as if to match the colours of a city whose massive walls and gate-towers were every shade of red from rose-madder to scarlet, while the glazed roof-tiles throughout the enormous acreage of the Forbidden City glistened with the Imperial Yellow that in China is the prerogative of royalty. Most of the roads we passed along were dusty and full of potholes and, apart from a few reasonably tall European buildings, few of the Chinese houses seemed to be more than a single storey high; most were hidden behind high walls, so that all one could see of them were ridges of those grey or brown tiled roofs with their tip-tilted eaves, with here and there clusters of tree-tops that told of unseen gardens.
* * *
Tacklow had told us that our house had no name and was known only as No. 53 Pei-ho-yen. This had instantly made me visualize a solid row of Pont Street houses, all exactly alike, until he added that Pei-ho-yen meant ‘the Jade Canal’, which sounded much more romantic. I should have learned by now to make allowance for the Chinese love of bestowing wonderfully fanciful titles on almost everything within reach – ‘The Black Dragon Pool’, ‘The Green Cloud Temple’, ‘The Gate of Quietude in Old Age’, ‘Hill of a Thousand Flowers’, ‘Pavilion of Great Happiness’, and many, many others.
The Jade Canal, when we reached it, certainly lived up to its name. It was a long, narrow st
rip of water, crossed at intervals by enchanting humpbacked bridges and bordered on both sides by willow trees that leaned above their own reflections and turned the whole thing into a long, green tunnel. The water too was green, the darkest of jade greens. It also, unfortunately, possessed a good dark-green smell. Which was not surprising, since it turned out to be a main drain.
Fortunately for the success of the day, I had barely taken in this unpleasant fact when our cavalcade stopped at a gate in a long stretch of wall that ran parallel to the canal on one side of the dusty road. The gate was open, and outside it stood the K’ai-mên-ti and an assortment of Chinese servants, making welcoming noises. It seemed we had arrived. And suddenly the rest of the day became magic.
For this I shall always be grateful to Tacklow, who had known from the first that both Bets and I took a poor view of this move to China. But apart from our initial and instinctive wails of protest and woe, once we had taken in the fact that both he and Mother had set their hearts on it and were not going to change their minds, we had done our best not to spoil it for Tacklow by continuing to grizzle. Any further hostile criticism was to be kept strictly between the two of us, for we were both aware that he had – at considerable cost to himself – given us ample opportunity to meet and marry that legendary Mr Right whom the majority of girls of our class and generation were brought up to believe was waiting somewhere out in the great blue yonder to meet and marry us. If I had failed to do so, it was no fault of dear Tacklow’s, and now that Bets was engaged, it was high time that the poor darling did what he wanted for a change.
