by M. M. Kaye
My glamorous pin-up girls were knocked down for enormous prices, and the fête, like most of these fund-raising affairs, proved a riotous success and raised a great deal of money. It also brought me into contact with a great many people I might otherwise have never met, and for the rest of my stay in Calcutta there was never a dull moment.
Bets and I were invited to do the scenery and costumes for a production of Sir James Barrie’s Quality Street. This entailed hours of shopping in the Crawford Market – an enormous covered bazaar in which all the material we needed could be bought for a song, and where Bets and I spent many hectic hours. We designed all the costumes in pastel colours, with the exception of the leading man’s, and even his coat looked charming by itself. But when we came to put them together at the first costume rehearsal, we were disappointed with the total effect, which was too wishy-washy, and were wondering what to do about it when I had a brainwave …
I had recently seen a London play designed and dressed by Motley with a Regency setting. There was one scene that was surrounded by an oval wreath of flowers. I thought we could manage the frame of flowers by designing a permanent set that would stand in front of the curtain, and be shaped like a wide doorway, edged by a wreath of large formalized flowers. We tried it out with one of the theatre’s old safety-curtains, on which we drew and painted the flowers, and cut out and discarded the centre doorway.
It couldn’t have looked better, for we matched the colours of the flowers to any of the costumes we wanted emphasized. It really was the prettiest of stage sets. The youthful performers rose to the occasion and made a great success of the run, and I found myself being inveigled into acting in Calcutta’s prestigious Amateur Dramatic Society in a run of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. I played the flighty niece who flirts with her dour and forbidding Uncle. It’s what I believe is known to actors as a ‘cameo’ part; which means that you’re on for a total of five minutes – if that! However, it was great fun to play, but I’m afraid I trod on the designer’s toes within a very short time.
He had designed dresses for the Barrett women and their servants in exactly the drab colours that you felt the father of that oppressed family would have approved of. But the flighty niece had obviously never been oppressed in her life, and was used to parties and gaiety. Yet this spoilt, flirtatious snippet had been given a dress in the drabbest of drab-coloured materials, and might have been a schoolmarm or an elderly housemaid.
I registered a strong protest, and the producer, who didn’t care what his actors wore as long as it was in period, unexpectedly backed me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘now that you mention it, that girl should wear a pretty dress, if only to underline the deadly life of her cousins.’ The designer was furious, and rehearsals stopped while the cast argued the case. They all agreed with me. Until, that is, my opponent pointed out that there wasn’t any time to make another one, or – more importantly – any money. The costume department had already exceeded their budget, and a new dress, needing new materials and hours of extra work, could not be afforded. The cast nodded gloomily and agreed. It was at this point that I remembered Bets’s smash-hit performance as Lydia Languish in the Simla Theatre only the year before. She was certain to have kept that costume, and all we had to do was adapt it. So, keeping my fingers crossed, I said I would provide my own costume, free. This settled the matter; and since Bets still had her Lydia costume, which hardly needed any alterations, I wore this, plus a very fetching bonnet with yards of matching ribbon that Bets and I manufactured to go with it. Great success!
In between all this I did quite a bit of work for All India Radio, and lined up, together with half Calcutta, in answer to an urgent appeal for blood donors, only to be told by a harassed and over-worked matron that my blood was of such poor quality that it was no use to the Blood Bank, and of very little use to me, so not to report again please. This lowering piece of news was handed to me in a manner that suggested that I should have known it from the first and refrained from wasting their valuable time. But I have to admit that having made the gesture, it was a relief to find that I need not donate a pint a week in future.
I also had my photograph taken by one of my Calcutta friends, Sidney Ralli, whose husband was in Ralli Brothers, one of the best known firms in that city of businessmen. Sidney became a great friend, and still is. Her photograph shows me wearing a huge hat which was, actually, the tail of the silver fox fur that I bought with my very first Potter Pinner cheque, and had made into a cape. It was very much in the style of the early Cecil Beaton, and was reproduced again, much to Sidney’s amusement, on the cover of the American hardback edition of one of my whodunnits nearly half a century later. Remembering the success of my photographs of Jess with stacks of hydrangeas and a silvery curtain, Sidney and I went shopping in the Crawford Market for a background for the photograph, and returned with a length of cheap silver gauze and a dozen of the huge paper and tinsel flowers that are a feature of Indian festivities. Both made a successful appearance in this photograph.
It would not have occurred to me that one could use such gaudy and obviously artificial flowers as a decoration in one’s own house, if I had not seen how effectively Nancy Caccia had used their Chinese counterparts in her house in the British Legation in Peking. So when a mutual friend of Marcia’s and my parents, J. B. Taylor, the head (I think) of Grindlay’s Bank, suggested that Marcia and I do up the Bank House – a huge white-walled ‘John Company’ edifice – we incorporated, with great success, a good many of those artificial flowers in the décor. We had the greatest fun decorating that enormous barn of a house, and in return we got asked out to a great many of his lunch and dinner parties.
* * *
Our Calcutta mornings used to begin with chota-hazri (small breakfast) just as the sun rose behind the long veil of smoke from a thousand cooking-fires and the mist off the Hoogly river. By the time it had risen above both, and set the garden and the trees and the wasteland beyond them a-glitter with dewdrops, we were ready to pile into the car and drive out to the zoo.
Early morning – the earlier the better – was the best time in which to visit the zoo, for it was then the peacocks would screech to each other and parade up and down the gravel paths and the dewy lawns, their shimmering tails spread wide. The peacocks and many of the birds were not behind bars, and they seemed to know very well which side their bread was buttered, and stayed where they were safe and well cared for. Even the creatures in cages appeared well-fed and contented, as they stretched out in the early morning sunlight, the tigers and leopards licking their paws and looking exactly like outsized pussycats.
Chapter 32
All India Radio asked me to do a series of playlets based on the war news. The idea was that every Friday night someone in the AIR newsroom (where the day’s news-flashes were received and handed on to newsreaders and newspapers) should select two or three of the latest and hottest items and hand them over to me to turn into short playlets. I would only have an hour in which to write them, and after that only just enough time for the cast to read through them once before going on the air. This called for quite a lot of quick thinking on everyone’s part, not only mine! Bearing that in mind, I selected my team of amateur actors with considerable care, impressing on them that for the next couple of months at least they would have to keep Friday nights free. All India Radio provided a brilliant shorthand typist and assured me that they would be able to produce copies of the script for us ‘in no time at all’. And we were off!
The project worked very much better than I thought it could. I would arrive at the AIR building, armed with a block of lined paper, several sharpened pencils and an india rubber, and would be handed the two or three typed items that the AIR decided were the most important. Sitting in a secluded corner I would read them and decide how best to make them into plays that my team could manage. I used to take any female parts that I thought I could manage myself: hospital nurses; women caught in an air-raid or a bombed munitions factory, or reading a lett
er from a soldier. But in general there were more men involved than women, and I had a couple of good ones. One youngish and one well into his sixties, and both of them very good at accents. As soon as I had decided on my plots and scribbled the dialogue down in pencil, I would ring for my shorthand typist, who would appear with the speed of a diving duck. And having read the playlets to her, I only had to walk across the road to a nearby eatery, where the team would have collected, and while we were eating our supper, outline the plots to them and allot the parts.
Such was the efficiency of the AIR staff that quite often carbon copies of the script would be brought to us before we had even stopped eating; and they never failed to be handed to us the moment we returned. Clutching them, we were hurried into an inner room where we ran through the scripts at speed, did a couple of voice tests, and were on the air. I don’t think that the AIR paid their contributors very much in those days, but as the entire team had donated their earnings to one or other of the war charities, I imagine that the Indian Red Cross (or whoever) were handed a tolerably useful subscription.
The impromptu playlets, based on the last-minute news of the war, were not the only thing I wrote and directed for the AIR while I was in Calcutta. They wanted something patriotic, so I wrote them a one-act playlet called England Awakes. It was a ghost-story really, and strongly influenced by my fond memories of a children’s play that had been performed in Simla’s Gaiety Theatre in the early years of the First World War.
The setting of my one-act play was London in the blackout, and the action began with a terrific bang that was meant to be a bomb falling somewhere near Westminster Abbey, followed by the clatter of falling masonry and, very far away, beyond Vauxhall Bridge and on the other side of the river, the wail of an air-raid warning. The voice of an air-raid warden with a strong cockney accent speaks into a patch of silence: ‘Strewth, wot a bleedin’ row! Nearly broke me eardrums that did. Loud enough to wake the dead. You all right, Nobby?’ A second voice says he is and that he must be getting along. You hear its owner’s footsteps retreating and the sound of falling rubble fades away and there is a moment of silence. Then someone says quite softly: ‘To wake the dead.’ The first speaker says: ‘’Alt! ’Oo goes there?’ and the newcomer says, in a Liverpool accent, that men call him the ‘Unknown Soldier’. Then one after another the great ghosts of the past come out of the Abbey and speak their bit: Queen Elizabeth, who defied the Spanish Armada; Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher and Nelson; the Duke of Wellington and old Queen Victoria. They all make speeches on the lines of ‘never give in!’ It ended with St George and the ‘God for Harry!’ battle cry.
Unlike the newsflash playlets, this one had to have a bit of rehearsal, mainly because of the sound effects. It turned out to be a great success, and was repeated no less than four times ‘by popular request’. I took two of the parts myself: Elizabeth I and Victoria, and was delighted to discover that although the two sounded properly autocratic, the voices were quite different. I had worried over how to sound like an old lady who had just celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, and had practised various degrees of croakiness, none of which seemed right, until I had a brainwave – by no means an original one I am told, though I’d never heard of it before. I stuffed my cheeks with pieces of sponge, and that, together with the pitch, worked beautifully.
I continued to do the news playlets until I left Calcutta some time towards the end of March, to join Mother, who was back with old Mrs Wall. I had meant to make straight for Kashmir, taking the Frontier Mail from Calcutta to Rawalpindi, and from there by bus to Srinagar. But J B had invited me to join Marcia and her family, whom he had asked to spend a couple of weeks with him in the Bank House on Bombay’s Malabar Hill. That beautiful green garden of a hill – once so full of flowering trees but already being built over by the modern white houses of merchant princes – was where I had once seen and never forgotten the fishing fleet sailing out into a long-ago sunset.
Marcia urged me to accept, and since there was really no reason why I shouldn’t I set off to Bombay with the Marindens, this time by a shorter route which entailed a couple of changes at stations where we were royally entertained by bank managers pushing the boat out for the boss.
Bombay as a guest in JB’s house was quite an experience. He seemed to throw luncheon and dinner parties, and grand dinners from which the entire party would go on to dance at the Taj Mahal Hotel or some other night spot, almost daily. And oh, the saris worn by JB’s Indian guests! Marcia and I used to drool over them, and moan to each other over our own darzi-made evening dresses. The women were so beautiful and so soignée. Their men were as well-groomed as their wives, and almost as good-looking.
It was at a dance in the Taj ballroom that I saw one of the four most beautiful women I have ever seen: a slim and enchanting Parsee girl wearing a chalk-white Molyneux dress and a single, wide diamond bracelet – an item of jewellery that was once almost part of any rich or pretty woman’s party-going apparel.
JB’s wife, Betty,1 had decorated the Bank House à la Syrie Maugham: that is, ‘all white’ with only touches of colour. The only room I can remember in detail was the guest bedroom allotted to me, and I was charmed by it. Like Aunt Peg’s all-white bedroom in Shanghai, only not as large, looking-glass had been used to give an illusion of size, and since it was an L-shaped room with two windows, one facing towards the sea and the other towards the garden, it seemed at least twice as large as it really was. Betty, explained JB, had done all the décor of the house astonishingly cheaply. She had bought all the furniture in the ‘Chor Bazaar’ (Thieves’ Bazaar) – a well-known source of second-hand junk – and had it spray-painted in matt white. The curtains, cushions and upholstery were all of different materials, some shiny, some rough surfaced, but all in white, as were the shaggy, raw-cotton rugs. The vases and ornaments were of pottery, some white and others the colour that went with that particular room – in the case of my bedroom, turquoise blue – and instead of flowers there were sprays of skeleton leaves, dried leaves, or spray-painted branches. The whole effect was not only attractive but astonishingly cool, which was what she had aimed for, since Bombay’s climate is notoriously unpleasant.
In the city itself the temperature was already well into the eighties, but up on Malabar Hill it was still pleasantly cool, and I was sorry to leave it and exchange my ravishing white-and-turquoise room for three days in a hot and dusty railway carriage, with no Marcia to talk and laugh with. But it was high time I got back to Kashmir and did some paintings for the spring Art Exhibition, if I didn’t want to run out of money. Besides, there had been an embarrassing evening when Marcia and Jocelyn had been dining out with friends, and JB and I had been dining à deux at the Bank House. I had rather enjoyed the prospect of a peaceful evening and not having to dress up and go dancing for a change, and for a time all had gone well. But when dinner was over and the servants had finally gone back to their quarters, the conversation suddenly took a most unexpected turn, and before I knew it I found myself behaving exactly like one of those nit-wit heroines of the Silent Screen days, who, having misread the motives of the elderly villain, winds up being chased round and round the dining-room table.
The situation looks absurd enough on the screen – unless it’s being played for laughs with someone like Charlie Chaplin doing the chasing. But in real life, it’s merely deeply embarrassing. I’ve never felt so silly in my life, and I could have strangled J B. Which I probably would have done if he’d been quicker on his feet and hadn’t put away so many glasses of wine at dinner. Fortunately for everyone, the Marindens arrived back unexpectedly early from their dinner – their hostess having been smitten with a migraine or something of the sort – and broke up this ridiculous round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush nonsense.
We had not heard the car-wheels on the gravel but we heard Marcia’s unmistakable laugh, and J B stopped and said: ‘Damn!’ and I fled out by a side-door and up the stairs to my bedroom, where Marcia came in to tell me why they had had to leav
e their dinner-party so soon. When I told her how grateful I was for her hostess’s misfortune, and why, she shouted with laughter, and said didn’t I know that JB was a well known ‘fatal scuffler’? He tried it out on all his girl-friends.
‘And you’d be surprised,’ said Marcia, ‘how many women have allowed themselves to be caught!’ It was all his wife’s fault for hating ‘abroad’ and leaving him high and dry: ‘He never looks at anyone else when she’s around, but when he gets left on his own for months on end, he gets restless, and starts putting in a bit of practice.’ Poor JB. He really was a dear man, not like the general run of fatal scufflers, and we remained on the best of terms. All the same, I thought it was time to leave for Kashmir.
JB, Marcia and Jocelyn and an assortment of friends came to see me off, and stacked my carriage with books, flowers and ice, boxes of chocolates and baskets of fruit. And despite that awkward interlude I felt truly sorry to be leaving, while at the same time delighted to be going back to the Punjab again. And to Kashmir.
I had arranged with the bank at Rawalpindi to book me a front seat in a bus going to Srinagar (having discovered that I didn’t get car-sick provided I sat in the front seat beside the driver, when travelling in a car or a bus). I can’t say I enjoyed that part of the journey, for scenically lovely as most of it is, I cannot feel happy when being driven at top speed on a winding mountain road cut into the side of an almost perpendicular gorge, at the bottom of which – a sheer drop of 500 feet below the outer edge of the road – rages a foaming torrent, while a third of the inner side is overhung by terrifyingly unstable-looking rocks. To be honest, I spent a good deal of the drive with my eyes shut, praying.
