Enchanted Evening

by M. M. Kaye

  * * *

  I owe a lot to Helen and her parents, for they let me treat the Manor House as my home and set aside a room for me there, an enchanting little attic room reached by a steep winding stairway, with a window looking out across Pembury Green. It had probably housed at least three housemaids in the days of whichever Hanoverian George was on the throne when it was built (at a guess, George II) but since I was used to living in a houseboat it seemed fairly commodious to me, and Auntie Winnie allowed me to leave a lot of my luggage and various bits and pieces there. Helen’s house was the one bit of stability I found in England in those days, and it was here, on another and much later occasion on a spring morning, sitting under an apple-tree in blossom in the Manor House orchard and doodling in pencil in an old school rough notebook, that I started to write a fairy story called The Ordinary Princess.

  It turned out to be one of those rare and enchanting occasions when your brain and hand take over and write the story for you, and it was only to happen to me on one other occasion, many years later. But this time the story wrote itself for me in a single day, and with hardly any corrections. My hand could hardly keep up with the story that my brain – or possibly Amy, the Ordinary Princess – was telling me. I didn’t do anything with that story for years, though now and again I used to do a few pencil sketches of the characters, and once I wasted an entire day making a doll’s-house-size mock-up of what the story would look like as an illustrated book. But I didn’t do anything with that either for years. It got put away and forgotten.

  * * *

  Mother continued to be a problem, and I decided that it was high time we ceased to burden our friends and rented a house or flat of our own. Mother had always been good with houses. She was a born home-maker, and it was a family joke that even during brief stops for a night at some Dâk bungalow she would produce a bed ‘throw’ and a few knick-knacks, and always a vase of flowers and her silver-backed brushes and comb, plus a few framed photographs, so that in no time at all the room was Mother’s, and no one else’s. Remembering this, and the series of bungalows, houseboats and houses in the hills on which she had put her own unmistakable stamp, I started to house-hunt in earnest. Not for a permanent home, but for a base from which we could scout around for one.

  Mother had been staying for a couple of weeks with a friend from the old days, also widowed. She was the mother of a friend of mine from the Delhi days, Liz Glascock, a one-time member of the ‘gang’. I had visited Mother there in order to meet Liz again, and been much taken with the little village of Yateley, near Camberley, where they lived. Mrs Glascock told me about a small house nearby that was to let furnished, and said that it would suit us down to the ground, and that it would be lovely to have ‘Daisy living so close’. I thought so too. Liz’s mother was a cosy old darling, and it would do mine a lot of good to be anchored for a while instead of moving restlessly and at short notice from one friend’s house to the next, in a vain attempt to escape from unhappiness.

  Mother liked the house and, even more, the idea of living so close to an old friend who knew all the ‘Raj women’ that she knew. So we hired it for a provisional six months and moved in, plus ‘Shao-de’,3 the Siamese kitten that a friend had given her ‘because they were such good company’. Shao-de, which is Chinese for ‘small piece’, was certainly that, and I was optimistic enough to believe that the worst was now over, and that I could start by looking for a job, while Mother took over doing the housework and cooking – she had become a very good cook during our time at ‘Three Trees’, the house we had rented unfurnished and that Tacklow had hoped to buy one day when he had retired from India Service in the early twenties.

  Among the ‘furniture and effects’ in our furnished house were several cookery books, and I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I saw her take them down and flip through them. But the relief was premature. She merely put them back and never looked at them again and, since we could not possibly afford a ‘daily’, if I hadn’t taken over the cooking and cleaning we would have lived in squalor and existed on a diet of baked beans and biscuits and anything else that was cheap and came out of a tin.

  It was only then that it dawned on me that for the past quarter of a century, Mother had been playing the role of home-maker solely for the benefit of an admiring audience of one – Tacklow. Now that he had gone, she ‘couldn’t give a damn’. What’s more, she wouldn’t even try. Once I had taken that in, I realized that we had made a fatal mistake in bringing her to England.

  We ought to have taken her straight back to Kashmir and kept on Kadera and Mahdoo to look after her. And that night I sent an SOS off to Bill, beseeching him to ask for ‘compassionate’ leave to come back to England to collect her. India was the only place in which she could live comfortably on her pension and really feel at home. Besides, she would have both him and Bets there, as well as loads of old friends, both Indian and British. Best of all, she would be able to supplement her pension by selling her sketches, which would help pay for Mahdoo and Kadera and a small car. As for me, I would be able to set about supporting myself, which I hadn’t been able to do while I had Mother on my hands in a perpetual pond of tears and despair. Bill cabled his agreement, and when I broke the news to Mother she cheered up wonderfully and ‘couldn’t think why we’ (Bill and I!) ‘hadn’t thought of it before!’

  * * *

  I remember discussing the situation with Mike who, bless him – may he inherit one of those many mansions in Paradise – turned up on our doorstep one afternoon and, leaving Shao-de to look after Mother, drove me to London, gave me dinner at the Berkeley where he had rooms, and told me that he was in the doghouse with the manager and the staff because he had brought back a couple of wolf cubs that had been a gift from the head-man of a village somewhere in the Pamirs, where he had been on trek.

  The cubs had had to spend a few months4 at the zoo before he was allowed to take them away, and he had driven up with them to the front entrance of the Berkeley and said to the doorman, who had opened the door for him, ‘Watch out for the back seat, I’ve got a couple of wolves in there!’ The doorman smiled tolerantly, thinking it was a joke, and got the fright of his life when he found it wasn’t. In the end Mike was reluctantly given permission to take them through the hall (where the mere sight of them cleared the place of the usual crowd of cocktail-drinking customers in a matter of seconds) and down to the cellars, in one of which they were locked up for the night.

  Apparently the creatures were now parked in a special wired-off section of the park at Mike’s ancestral home, Packington. He said the staff of the Berkeley had not been amused. I don’t wonder.

  We sat talking for so long that we missed a good half of the musical comedy he had booked us in for – Balalaika I think – and finished up in a nightclub somewhere in Regent Street called the Slip-in, one of several such clubs owned by a lady affectionately known to the gilded youth of her day as ‘Ma Merrick’. It was the first time I had ever driven through London in the small hours when the streets were empty, and so quiet that you could hear the footsteps of the ‘Bobbies’ – London’s policemen – on the beat, the miaow of a prowling cat and the racket (it seemed no less) of the car and the occasional home-going taxi.

  The silent city fascinated me, and later when I was living alone in a London ‘bed-sit’, one of my favourite amusements when I could not sleep was to walk through the London streets after midnight, admiring those shop-windows that remained lit up all night. For some reason it always gave me a feeling of belonging. That I belonged to London, and that it belonged to me. It was my city. That was in the thirties, which still seem only a little way behind me. Sadly, few women of any age would dare to stroll alone through the midnight streets of any city in these ‘peaceful’ post-war days.

  It must have been getting on for about four o’clock when we neared Camberley, and Mike said, ‘Don’t let’s go back to the house. Let’s go to Portsmouth – there’s a chap I know there who has a small hotel near the fro
nt; you can see the sea from it. He won’t mind giving us an early breakfast. What do you say?’ What I said was ‘No’, because if Mother found I was still missing when she woke up, she’d have a stroke. ‘Nuts,’ said Mike – or words to that effect. ‘We’ll write her a note and push it through that slot in the front door, and tell her we’ll ring her later to say we’re OK and when we’ll be back.’

  So we did; and oh! how well I remember that part of the drive … how beautiful England looked on a clear, dewy morning with the sun still below the horizon but the whole world bright with the dawn and as empty as the palm of my hand. No dual-carriageways or roundabouts, and many of the towns that have by now become cities were villages then. Everything was so green – miles and miles of woodlands, fields, commons and meadows, and hedges full of wild roses – and always a cuckoo calling.

  The staff of the hotel were barely awake, but its proprietor, an ex-Navy type, came out in his pyjamas and we were given an excellent breakfast, sitting in the glassed-in verandah and looking out at the Channel, watching the ships go by. Mike rang Mother around eight o’clock, and I remember we made an unsuccessful attempt to pay an unofficial call on Andy and the Bosun.5 The night out with Mike, and that drive through sleeping London and through the dawn-lit countryside to Portsmouth and the Channel, still stay in my memory as a bright splash of colour in an otherwise grey and unhappy period, full of regrets. As does a visit we paid to Packington, not long before Bill’s arrival. Mike drove down to spend another night with us, and on the following day he drove us up to Packington to spend a few days with him.

  It was quite a long drive from Yateley, and I believe that the nearest town to the estate was Coventry. Packington was one of the weirdest houses I have ever been in. It was a huge Georgian pile that strongly suggested The Fall of the House of Usher, for it gave the impression (correctly as it happened) of being neglected for too many years. It must once have had wonderful gardens, but they had been shockingly uncared for and had become overgrown and run to seed. As for the vast park in which it stood, the entire space seemed to have been smitten by some disease. And that too was correct. The disease was called ‘rabbits’.

  Wherever one looked, the ground was humped and bumped and riddled with the burrows of rabbits, so many of them that when one walked out in it, the whole park seemed to surge up and run away, as if the ground itself was alive. You’ve no idea how gruesome the effect of scores of rabbits bolting into their warrens can be. Every inch of grass appeared to have been nibbled off short, and the entire place was patched with earth scratched out of the rabbit-riddled ground. The house itself was equally neglected, except for one end of it, which the brothers Adam had fiddled about with, adding their familiar touch of pillars painted to look like marble to a large entrance hall, in which there was a beautiful curving Regency staircase that swept up the wall and appeared to be attached to it only by gravity and mathematics.

  Even Mike confessed to feeling nervous about it on occasions – when he was about half-way up, and looked down at the hall below. I don’t blame him. I never felt 100 per cent safe on it myself. The sets of guest-rooms on that end of the house were modern and very attractive, but the majority of the rooms in the rest of the house were dusty and tattered. Apparently Mike’s grandmother (a formidable Victorian beauty and girlfriend of the future Edward VII) had, when her son, Mike’s father, was killed and her husband died, refused to retire to the Dower House as expected, but had dug herself with firmness into Packington and metaphorically drawn up the drawbridge and sat it out in the big house, allowing it to decay around her until she died.

  We spent a lot of time exploring layers of empty rooms, when not punting around on the lake – or was it lakes? There was an enormous shuttered and never-used drawing-room that must have been redecorated (presumably in the heyday of Grandma, and towards the end of Victoria’s reign) by Messrs Wedgwood. A mistake, I thought. The whole thing was a riot of Wedgwood blue plaques showing scantily clad gods and goddesses. There was also a State bedroom somewhere in that maze of upper rooms, the chief feature of which was the vast and imposing four-poster bed. I remember walking round it, and thinking that even a feather-duster and a pot of glue would have been a help.

  Somewhere well below the house lay a huge cellar, complete with enormous beer barrels that must have been built in situ, since they could not possibly have been man-handled there. These were scribbled all over with the signatures of distinguished guests, only one of which has stuck in my memory: poor Czar Nicholas, who had been murdered less than a decade earlier in a cellar in Ekaterinburg. I remember touching it with a kind of horror; because it suddenly made him real.

  The wolves inhabited a nature reserve of their own in a large wired-in enclosure in the Park, not far from the house. The surrounding fence must have been fifteen to twenty feet high (it seems that wolves excel as high-jumpers) and turned inward in a line of spikes along the top. The fence surrounded a pinewood and (well underground) a disused ice-house in which they had made their den. Mother wouldn’t go near the place, for the very idea of timber-wolves being kept as pets revolted her. But on the day after our arrival Mike asked casually if I’d like to meet his wolves, and as the very casualness of the voice in which he put the question made me ‘think nothing of it’ I said yes. He fetched a key and together we strolled off to the wolf-pen.

  I must say that they looked pretty scary as they slunk through the pine-trunks of the wood, like the illustrations of wolves in one of Ernest Thompson-Seton’s animal stories, and I wasn’t surprised at the precautions that had been taken to see that they didn’t get out. I hoped that they couldn’t dig as well as they could jump, and was interested to find that there were two locked sections to the entrance. Mike unlocked the outer door of a short, wired-in approach corridor and, having locked it behind him, walked down to the end of it to unlock one at the far end. ‘Just a precaution in case they make a sudden dash for freedom,’ said Mike as he ushered me through the second gate and locked that one too behind us.

  The wolves shot out of the shadows of the wood like a couple of grey torpedoes fired by an enemy submarine, and, ignoring Mike, came straight for me, nearly knocking me over as they jumped up at me, smelling me all over and finally giving me a few slavering licks. I accepted their exuberant welcome with pleasure, patting them and scratching them behind their ears, and interested to find how coarse their thick coats were when they looked so fluffy. Having given me the once-over, they turned their attention to Mike, fawning on him, putting their paws on his shoulders and lavishing loving kisses on him, and obviously trying to persuade him to play ‘Chase-me-Charlie’ with them.

  I suppose we must have spent the best part of half an hour in there walking through their wood, while they gambolled beside us. They sobered up and became slightly hostile when Mike showed me the mouth of a dark, sloping tunnel that led down into the heart of a tall hillock that rose between the tree trunks over the spot where the ice-pit had been dug more than a century ago. ‘They’re a bit possessive about the ice-pit,’ explained Mike. ‘Probably because they regard it as home.’ We left them to it, and only when both doors were locked and bolted behind us and we started walking back to the house, did Mike say: ‘Well done, Number One. Nice work! I knew you could do it.’

  ‘Do what?’ I inquired.

  ‘Meet the chaps,’ said Mike airily. ‘Do you know that you are the very first person to go in there that hasn’t beaten a hasty retreat? My gamekeeper has made a hell of a fuss about going in there, ever since they tried to take a bite out of him. They don’t like strangers.’

  I could have killed him! – and I said so in no uncertain terms. If I’d had any idea that those creatures had attacked other people who had been introduced to them, nothing would have induced me to go inside that cage, let alone pat those creatures’ heads and make a fuss of them. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. Don’t be silly!’ retorted Mike impatiently. ‘Because you’d have been scared, and the chaps would have known it. As it was
, just because I gave you the impression that they were safe as houses, they welcomed you in with open paws! Now that they’ve accepted you, you’ll be able to go in whenever you like.’ I replied suitably to that suggestion and didn’t go near them again. They had a nasty habit of sitting on top of their hillock with their noses straight up to the sky, howling most mournfully at first light every morning and last light at night. It was a most haunting sound, a real ‘call of the wild’ in the depths of the English countryside.

  * * *

  Bill duly turned up to fetch Mother, and I seized the opportunity to go up to London and see Mrs Goulden, a one-time teacher at McMunn’s Studio where I (and incidentally the three girls who made a great name for themselves6 as theatrical designers in the thirties and who are still remembered as being among the greatest in their craft) studied when I first left school. Mrs Goulden, who was never known as anything but ‘MG’ to the generations of students who passed through her hands, was the only person I could think of who might give me sound advice as to what to do with myself in the commercial art world. And I was right. It was due to her that I was accepted into a group of artists who called themselves the Chelsea Illustrators.