by M. M. Kaye
Since Cawnpore was not much more than fifty miles from Lucknow I had fixed a date with Jess for my visit to her, and one of Bets’s friends offered to give me a lift there. The Binnies had a charming bungalow, and they and the faithful Rupert gave me a lovely time – a good deal more enjoyable than my last one in Cawnpore, with Gerry Ross.
I had not seen Mother for some months, for she had been in Srinagar throughout the spring and summer, and she had not taken it at all badly when I wrote to break the news that I had become a ‘bottle blonde’, merely observing that she wasn’t sure that it would suit me, and that Sandy would have a fit: ‘You know how prim and proper he can be!’ (Sandy had invited us both to spend the winter with him.) She didn’t mention the matter again and I began to feel a bit anxious as to how she would react when she actually saw me.
There was also another consideration, one that had never occurred to me when I sploshed on all that peroxide. The expense. I had thought I looked terrific for the first week or ten days of being blonde, but at the end of that the roots of my hair began to look distinctly grubby as it grew out and grew darker and darker and more obtrusive. Had I been able to afford visits to a professional hairdresser once every ten days, or, better still, once a week, all would have been well. As it was, I had to buy more peroxide and ammonia, and deal with it myself, and after a while it began to look dull and strawish, because it’s difficult to paint peroxide on to one’s own head without sploshing it all over the place, and it wasn’t too long before I ended up as a platinum-blonde, which didn’t suit me at all.
So what with one thing and another, I decided that the aggro involved in trying to stay a blonde was simply not worth it, and I made an appointment with Jess’s hairdresser to turn me back to being mouse-brown. The girl was a bit apprehensive, since the dyes she possessed did not include the colour I was after, but in the end I persuaded her to let me mix together several of the ones in stock – something that she was convinced wouldn’t work.
‘Whoever heard of such a thing! Oh well, if you insist, but I take no responsibility for it so don’t blame me if it turns out to look like streaks of different colours – or bright blue or green.’ She need not have worried. It was a terrific success, and couldn’t have looked glossier and in better condition. When Mother saw it she was so impressed that she actually played with the idea of dyeing her own hair, which by now was rapidly becoming white. ‘I always thought,’ said Mother, ‘that dyed hair looked dull and dead and obviously dyed. But yours looks simply wonderful! No one would guess that it’s dyed.’
* * *
Bill and Joy, complete with a baby daughter called Suzan, were back in a bungalow in Delhi and invited me to pay them a visit to be introduced to my first niece. Bill, like so many Indian Army officers, had been on home leave when a letter like the one that had ordered Andrew and George to return to their units immediately was delivered to Bill at his in-laws’ house on the Isle of Wight, where he and Joy had been staying. It arrived, I gather, with the effect of a bombshell, since Bill (like me) had been putting far too much faith in those ‘bits of paper’ that George had been so scathing about. This bit of paper could not be torn up.
It had been headed: MOVEMENT ORDERS IOMOI India Office SWI. PART 1. (Regular Officers on leave or duty.) And it notified Captain W. Kaye, IA, that he was to report not later than twelve noon on the first of September 1939, to the Movement Control Office, Command Headquarters, Chester, where ‘no official accommodation would be available’ (find your own, in fact!). Furthermore: ‘No arrangement can be made for your family to accompany you; nor can any information be furnished as to when they may be able to return to India or Burma.’
Joy did not waste time wringing her hands. She and any number of devoted wives, many of them pregnant and others, like my indomitable sister-in-law, with very new babies (her first-born, Suzan, was barely six weeks old!), realized immediately that this meant war and that the moment it was declared they stood little or no chance of rejoining their men. They therefore descended on the shipping offices in droves and grabbed any berth available on any ship going east, even if it meant travelling steerage.
Nothing was going to induce Joy to be parted from ‘Beloved’, and that was that. The only ship that had a few spare berths was an Italian one sailing from Tripoli, and the minute Bill left, Joy packed a small holdall with anything that Suzan might need, plus the minimum in the way of clothing for herself, took the next ferry boat from the island to the mainland, and caught a train to Dover. She got herself across the Channel and to Paris, where, she said, there was a most unhelpful British Consul – I presume the poor man must have been badgered to death by anxious young wives bent on being vivandières and sticking to their men. In the end she managed to get on to an overcrowded train – a series of them, I think – that eventually landed her in Italy.
Joy said the journey across France to the Italian border was sheer hell, made more so by the French, who could not, she insisted, have been unkinder or more unhelpful. She had not expected this from people who were our allies, and had begun to dread what it would be like in Italy. But the Italians couldn’t have been nicer to this convoy of exhausted British women who (very properly, in their opinion) were following their husbands.
From then on, their entire journey was comparatively trouble-free. Joy actually made it back to India before Bill. Quite an achievement, I reckon, and worthy of a medal; if medals were given for this type of thing. If they had been, a good many women could have lined up for one, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross going to a girl whose name I can no longer remember. She, like Joy, realized at once that the recall of her darling husband meant war, and she didn’t wait to find out if she was right. She was expecting her first baby in the near future, but that didn’t stop her from taking off at top speed for London and the India Office, where she wheedled them into giving her one of the last passages in a cargo-boat leaving within a couple of days for Calcutta, via the Atlantic and Pacific route. She caught it, and set off, and a day or two after war was declared the ship was torpedoed. Luckily she was among the survivors, and no sooner had they landed than she was back at the War Office and, I gather, making such a nuisance of herself that if only to get rid of her they wangled her a berth on a ship going east via the Mediterranean. She embarked again. And was torpedoed once more …
Put ashore in some Mediterranean country, she managed, for the third time, to get herself on to a ship that took her through the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean, via Ceylon, to Calcutta – where she learned that her husband’s regiment had been moved to Quetta – roughly 2,000 miles away on the far side of the sub-continent. Undeterred, she caught the next train and arrived in Quetta … to find that her telegram to her husband had crossed one of his telling her to stay put, because the regiment were about to leave for – guess where? – Calcutta! She was just in time to travel back there with him. And half-way across India that baby, doubtless fed up by all this fuss and bother, and deciding that enough was enough, jumped the gun and arrived unexpectedly, but in excellent form, in their railway carriage, its entry into the world being assisted by its father and the Regimental MO.
I never heard the end of that story, and frankly, I don’t want to, in case that girl’s man was one of the many who never came back from Burma, or wherever it was that his regiment was sent. I do hope and pray that he survived. But if he didn’t, at least he and his young wife had a few days together and he had been able to see and hold his child.
Bill’s return journey was far less exciting, though it had had its moments. Arriving as ordered at Command Headquarters in Chester, in company with a horde of IAOs,1 he and they were sent by train, on 2 September, for an ‘Unknown Destination’, which turned out to be the SS Duchess of Bedford, one of several liners that had been commandeered to take 2,000 military and civil officers back to India. The Duchess was docked somewhere on the Clyde, and did not sail until 5 September. By that time war had been declared and the Athenia had been torpedoed. B
ut no one was allowed off the ship, or to communicate in any way with friends or family ashore. Bill, who had been put in a dark and pokey four-berth cabin on D-deck, was greatly relieved when he was suddenly moved up to a larger and more comfortable one on B-deck, thereby evicting a Lieutenant Hamilton because Bill, being a Captain, outranked him.
Their darkened ship, by this time in convoy with ten other liners and escorted by seven or eight cruisers (and later, off the south coast of Ireland, a battleship), moved out late at night, silently and with every light blacked out. Legend has it that as they moved down the Irish Sea they met the Irish mailboat with all her lights ablaze, and that the shock she got at finding herself at dead of night in the middle of a ghostly convoy of warships put years on her Captain and crew.
The voyage in those overcrowded ships was hideously uncomfortable and not without its exciting moments, for the convoy was twice attacked by enemy submarines, one of which was said to have been sunk. Lifebelts had to be worn at all times, and since blackout conditions were the rule, all windows and portholes were shut between darkness and dawn (the latter being kept hermetically sealed throughout the entire voyage). According to Bill, the temperature between decks in the Red Sea in September could not be imagined.
Docking at Bombay on the 27th, they found that the Taj Mahal Hotel had been turned into an Officers’ Mess. It continued to be used as one for several days while these flocks of homing pigeons were sorted out, provided with rail warrants, and booked on to trains that would take them to their various destinations. As one of them wrote at that time: ‘The three or four delightful days that most of us spent there, largely at Government expense, fully made up for any inconvenience we may have suffered on the voyage.’
An example of the way in which the Taj and Bombay ‘pushed out the boat’ for the passengers of the Duchess was a dinner and dance which included a cabaret show and ended with the management offering a magnum of champagne as a prize for the best performance by an amateur. A large number of enthusiastic amateurs, all of them pleasantly inebriated, entered for the contest, which was won hands down by the young Lieutenant who had lost his berth in the cabin on B-deck owing to the superior rank of Captain Bill Kaye.
This entrant for the Magnum-stakes put on a performance that was described to me by a dear friend, Robbie Barcroft, as one of the best he had seen in years. ‘He was as tight as an owl, of course,’ explained Robbie, ‘or he wouldn’t have done it. He just got up and strolled across the ballroom with a glass of champagne in one hand, asked the leader of the band if they could play some fairly recent dance tune, and when the chap nodded, got up on the stage, grasped the microphone in the other hand, and began to sing some exceedingly risqué songs in French. Only it wasn’t French. It was some rubbish that he made up as he went along that sounded exactly like French, and he sang it as someone like Maurice Chevalier might have done in a late-night cabaret in Paris. It was the gestures and the expression which made you think he was saying something terrifically risqué,’ explained Robbie. ‘He’d pause and look at the audience as if it was unbelievably shocking, and they fell about laughing at cracks that he hadn’t made, in a language that they didn’t understand. It brought the house down. I laughed until my jaws ached. We all did. He could have taken twenty encores if he’d wanted to, and he won easily by a unanimous show of hands. It was a splendid end to the night’s entertainment!’
* * *
On the morning after my arrival in Delhi I made my way to the office of a man in Intelligence, who had worked under Tacklow, and asked if I could be of any use in the way of war-work in that Department. I thought perhaps I could do something in the way of propaganda. Line drawings. Posters, perhaps? He had seen some of my murals in the Secunderabad Club, and had bought several of my ‘little pics’ at art exhibitions, and I ended up being engaged to do illustrations in a propaganda magazine aimed at the Middle East – on the same terms that Tacklow, long before I was born, had been given by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, who wished him to produce and edit a magazine for the Indian Troops. The terms being: ‘Find your own time and no pay.’
Well, that suited me, because it would not restrict me to staying in one place. Provided they always knew where I was they could send me a list of the material they needed and the latest day on which I must deliver. The only snag, which I discovered later, was when they asked for weapons to be illustrated, for I was not familiar with guns of any sort, and had to get hold of photographs to copy. As far as I remember the illustrations were always in black and white, with the occasional extra line-block in red on the cover, or the heading of a story. A list of subjects that needed illustrating arrived a few days later, and I laid in a supply of my favourite hot-press paper, indian ink, mapping pens, pencils and rubbers, and anything else in the art line that might soon become scarce or unavailable if the submarine war intensified.
Mother had done the same, buying her paints and paper from Lamberts the Chemists in Srinagar before she left Kashmir to join me in Delhi. We spent a few days there together and then, accompanied by Kadera, for whom we had to get a passport and presumably a visa, we set out on our travels again, war or no war. This time, via Bombay, for Persia.
8
Persian Interlude
Chapter 29
Sandy had been posted as Vice-Consul to Khorramshah in Persia and wanted his bungalow (which he described as ‘a tip’) taken in hand and turned into something more fitting the home of a Vice-Consul.
Funds were on hand for this purpose, and he wanted us to come for the cold weather and to stay on for as long as we liked after we’d ‘tished the place up’. I think we were both enthralled by the idea of living in Persia; and equally enthralled by the prospect of taking the Vice-Consulate in hand. So we accepted joyfully, setting out on a small coastal steamer to travel, via a brief stop at Karachi, up the Persian Gulf to the oil town of Abadan, which stands at the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab waterway.
It was a slow and idyllic voyage. No shred of cloud or breath of breeze came to ruffle the glassy blue of sea and sky as we steamed across the Gulf of Cambray, past the little Portuguese islands of Daman and Dui and the long western shores of Gujerat and Cutch, to cross the Tropic of Cancer and steam up the Gulf of Oman past Jask and through the Strait of Ormuz, into the Persian Gulf and some of the most godforsaken country I have ever seen.
It probably doesn’t look nearly as bad now, because the oil-rich countries have, I am told, made miles of the desert lands bloom like the rose, with the aid of desalination plants and such-like modern inventions. But, at the time I am writing about, the hills and the mountain ranges behind them were grey and bleached and lifeless. Not a speck of green or even the skeleton of a dead tree broke the miles of waterless rock and shale. Nor was there any colour in it – just grey. Ash-grey, as though the once liquid rock had only recently cooled.
A more desolate and inhospitable land I have yet to see. And just to make the landscape even less alluring, the sea here was no longer blue, but green with the dull green of over-boiled spinach, and alive with water-snakes – hundreds of them, weaving and writhing through the water in which, on the previous days, there had been platoons of jellyfish, families of smiling, frisking dolphins, shoals of shimmering unidentified fish and flights of flying-fish.
I asked the ship’s Captain if the Gulf was always full of snakes, and he said no, only at certain times of the year, and probably only after a particularly large hatch of them. He himself had only seen them in this quantity once before in all his years of plying those waters, and didn’t care if he never did so again. He believed, he said, that they were considered a delicacy among some of the Gulf people.
We ran out of the ‘snake belt’ eventually, not far from the little island of Bahrain – then an almost barren and practically unknown dot on the map – and passed through a fleet of fishing boats whose occupants called out greetings to us and held out their outstretched palms in the manner of beggars soliciting alms. But when I remarked a
cidly that they couldn’t possibly catch a coin at that range, the Captain laughed and said they weren’t begging, they were showing off their day’s catch. ‘Oh, fish,’ I said. ‘Nothing so ordinary: pearls,’ replied the Captain. One of the neighbouring islands was the headquarters of the Gulf’s pearl fishery. Not a very big one, but its pearls were greatly prized.
One casualty of that dream-like voyage was Mother’s anti-rheumatic charm, which had not only cured her rheumatism but, we were to discover, ensured that neither that nor any form of arthritis would ever trouble her again. That little white floret had died, as the doctor had told her it would unless it had a glassful of fresh milk every day. And alas, after the first day, there was no fresh milk available until we reached Abadan. I have since been told that the doctor’s magic floret was obviously only the germ of yoghurt. And I suppose this is so. Yet I have never seen anything quite like it; all the other ‘seeds’ of yoghurt have been much smaller than this one, and none have acted so instantly. Nor has the cure been permanent, as it was with Mother. I have a feeling that this curious organism must be the special yoghurt that some tribe or other from the wilds of Soviet Russia are supposed to live on, which enables them to live until they are a hundred and seventy or thereabouts.
Sandy, plus a horrid stink, met us as our ship docked in Abadan. He appeared to be in the best of spirits and, noticing that Mother held a strongly scented handkerchief to her nose (the stink met us from a good half-mile down the river), apologized for it, adding that she couldn’t expect anything else from an oil refinery and that all the ‘oil chaps’ and their families didn’t even notice it after the first few days. But it wasn’t like this in Khorramshah. Which proved to be true, except on those occasions (fortunately rare) when the wind was blowing towards us from Abadan, and we would hastily rush round the house shutting every door and window, and lighting joss-sticks to try and counter that pervasive nastiness.
