by M. M. Kaye
The last part of the journey, however, is mostly on the level, and by the time we left the gorges and reached Baramullah, a town that stands in the doorway of the valley and from where you can see the twin mountain ranges that wall it in on either side, the air suddenly became sweet with the faint, elusive fragrance of irises – the tall, yellow-bearded purple or white ones that grow among the gravestones in the Muslim cemeteries, and spread out from there across the valley floor between the fruit trees and the poplars, and whose scent has always seemed to me to be the smell of spring. And all at once I was conscious of feeling wildly, gloriously happy, drunk with happiness, because I was back once more in beautiful Kashmir, and it was spring again.
I have never forgotten that quiet evening and the drive from Baramullah to Srinagar city, through the long avenue of Lombardy poplars that line the crest of the embankment upon which the road runs, raised a little above the level of the valley floor against floods. (I tried to describe it when I wrote a whodunnit that I had intended to call There’s a Moon Tonight – the one that ended up as Death in Kashmir.) The last of the daylight had almost left the sky and the first stars were out by the time we reached the bus station and the end of the journey. And there was Mother waiting for me, with Kadera to cope with my luggage. Presently we were driving up to the Walls’ house in Sonawar Bagh, and I was being hugged and kissed by Ma Wall and dear ‘Tugboat Annie’ and her husband the Colonel, as though I were a prodigal daughter. What with Mr Wall’s Australian terriers, Poppiter and Pippiter, leaping and yelping and trying to lick my face, and the servants beaming from ear to ear, it was quite a homecoming. An unforgettable one, followed by one of the khansama’s especially good dinners featuring my favourite dishes. And ‘so to bed’ in the familiar top-storey room I had stayed in so often before.
* * *
The air-letter that I had posted to my publishers at the same time as I sent off the manuscript of Strange Island had arrived with commendable promptness. But a month later the MS had still not turned up, so I sent off another, express, plus a separate letter to say I had done so. That letter too turned up, but not the MS, and my publishers suggested that this was probably due to ‘enemy action’. But when a third copy – the last of the three carbons – failed to turn up, I realized that it was most unlikely that all three ships bearing a copy of Strange Island could have been torpedoed. It was far more likely that the Censor’s Office had been unwilling to wade through that solid wodge of typescript in search of a possible code, and had merely stuffed each one as it arrived into an incinerator. So I asked my publisher if I could sell it locally and, permission being granted, arranged with Thacker Spink of Calcutta to publish it. Which they did with the most unexpected speed. (Due, I suppose, to the scanty supply of publishing material in time of war.) It came out within a week or two of my handing over the top copy, and to the most gushing reviews. I can’t think why, for the proof-reader had done an abysmally bad job. Typist’s errors averaged fifteen to twenty a page, and whenever the print setters dropped or mislaid a paragraph and subsequently found it, they never wasted the missing bit. They merely shoved it in, with no explanation, at the end of the next chapter or wherever there was sufficient space for it.
I nearly wept when my free copies arrived. But I suppose that in time of war the reading public are not fussy. They liked the plot; failed to spot ‘whodunnit’; and were intrigued by the setting. And in the end it made, and is still making me, a small but steady income. For long after it was out of print (and therefore my own property again) I needed to produce another book to fulfil a contractual three-book clause. Time was short, and I couldn’t see how I was going to do it, since in those days I was ‘following the drum’, and always seemed to be packing and moving.
Remembering this long-forgotten mess of a book, I suggested that I rewrite it as a fictitious island off the coast of Mombasa. This was agreed with the publishers (I had an agent by then) and I spent a feverish two weeks rehashing the book, which, in due course, was flung in to plug the gap, retitled Night on the Island.
10
‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…’
Chapter 33
Mother had managed to reserve our old ghat for us at Chota Nageem, and old Ahmadoo Siraj, who was beginning to show his years, was there to meet us and stayed to have tea with us and bring us up to date with all the gossip of the valley. Kadera and Mahdoo were there too, but the boat was not one of our old ones, because there were only the two of us.
The war news was still disheartening, yet here in ‘far Kashmir’, with none of my near and dear as yet involved in it, it still seemed to me as to so many others, ‘a phoney war’. And sitting on the flat roof of our houseboat, looking around me at the beautiful, placid Dāl and the mountains behind Shalimar – at the almond blossom and wild iris and the shimmering line of the far snows – I remembered what Tacklow had said to me one evening at Pei-tai-ho. About the last Great War and the possibility of another one. A Second World War …
Tacklow believed that we should have bowed out of India in the early twenties, using an occasion such as the Prince of Wales’s visit as an opportunity to do so gracefully. It wasn’t, he said, as if we were making anything out of it any more, because we weren’t; and in his opinion we couldn’t afford to play at Empire-building any longer. It was becoming too expensive and the sooner we left the better.
I remember arguing hotly with him, shocked to the core at the very idea of ‘giving up’ the Empire and all that that would mean. I didn’t want to think of such a thing. But Tacklow only reminded me a little impatiently of the endless times he had told me that we were in India on sufferance only, and that we’d promised to leave some day. Well, that ‘some day’, he insisted, was coming closer, and though he hoped very much he wouldn’t live to see it, I might well do so. If there should be another major war, win or lose, once it was over we should have to give up India.
I had accused him of being an old Jeremiah, and put it down to the disillusionment he had suffered over the Tonk affair and his disappointment over China. Nor had I given any thought to it since we left. But I did now, and realized that he could be right, and that if he was, I was going to lose all this beauty, so much of which I had taken for granted. ‘Win or lose,’ Tacklow had said …
That same evening I made up my mind that while I still had it – while it was still here – I would follow the advice of one of my favourite poets,1 who in a poem entitled ‘Fare Well’ had urged us to ‘look [our] last on all things lovely, every hour’. Instead of fretting and fuming at being ‘stranded in India’ as so many were doing, I would thank God daily for letting me be one of the lucky ones who, in this violent hour, was able to spend my days in this paradise half a world away from the firing-line and the wail of air-raid warnings and the crash of bombs.
There were times when it didn’t seem fair that, with my country embroiled in yet another murderous war, people like myself should be able to carry on living in much the same way as we had done before there was any thought of war. On the other hand, now that it had begun, there was no way I could get back to England even if I had wanted to.
Remembering Tacklow’s many attempts to take part in the fighting during the First World War, I sympathized with the frustration of the British Indian Army men, all of whom seemed to be spending their time inundating Headquarters with letters begging for transfers to home units, or anywhere near the front line. They all seemed to think that the war would be over before they had a chance to take part in it.
When the war was over we who had not been in the thick of it – had never heard the sirens shrieking their warning of air-raids, had never run for cover when the bombs began to fall, or helped to dig in the smoking ruins for the shattered bodies of our friends and family and neighbours – found ourselves feeling almost as though we were from another planet, speaking a different language. Not that our men need have tried so hard to get themselves transferred back to one of the home-based battalions
, because their own particular slice of hell was waiting for them in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, in Libya and Crete, Sardinia and Monte Cassino. And after that in Burma and Malaysia, Singapore and Java and Hong Kong. Their turn came all too soon.
The only time I felt that I would give anything – anything at all – to be back in London was during that time when it really seemed that England was going to be invaded. Everything had gone wrong for us. Our troops had had to withdraw from Norway. Neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg had been invaded. Rotterdam had been bombed into extinction and the Dutch forced to surrender. King Leopold of the Belgians had ordered his army to stop fighting and the British forces to withdraw from Flanders. The bulk of the BEF2 were beaten back as town after town fell to the enemy, to be cornered at last at Dunkirk, from where the majority of them were evacuated in a spectacular rescue operation by the Navy, assisted by a fleet of little ships – sailing boats, Thames barges, tugs, motor-boats – every craft owned by those English who love ‘messing about in boats’ and spend their holidays doing so. Every fishing-boat and pleasure boat from every port on the south-east coast of England, and every cross-channel steamer, set out to pick up our defeated army off the beaches of Dunkirk … Close on 4,000 ships of every shape and size had, between them, snatched 335,000 men off those terrible bloodstained sands and brought them back home to a country that will remember their rescue long after the tales of victories are forgotten.
As Churchill reminded us, Dunkirk may have been a minor miracle, but it was also a major defeat. The rest of the world certainly saw it as such. Hitler made a ferocious speech in which he declared a war of ‘total annihilation’ against us. Italy declared war against Great Britain. Mussolini was not the only one to write us off after Dunkirk. The French had relied too heavily on their ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line, but in the event they did not have to put that impregnability to the test, for the Germans simply ignored it. They went round one end of it, and having chased the BEF out of Calais, advanced on Paris. And so sure were we all that Hitler would attempt to invade us that hundreds of schoolchildren were evacuated from London and frantic preparations were made to delay the advance of troops making for the capital.
It was only then, as I listened to the radio broadcasts, that I visualized the destruction of London and suddenly saw the streets and parks and historic buildings, Limerston Street and the little pub at the corner of the road, Park Walk, Battersea Bridge and that brand new – and to my mind hideous! – power plant on the other side of the Thames, invaded by hordes of jackbooted enemy troops armed to the teeth and firing as they came.
My first reaction was total fury and a passionate regret that I too was not there and able to clobber one of them with any weapon that came to hand – a rolling-pin or a golf-club or a garden rake. Anything that one could hit with – hard! It would be worth dying just to get in one good clout at the so-and-so’s. I genuinely felt that Churchill had been talking for all of us when he said that if they came we would fight them in the fields and on the beaches; even though I was aware – we all were – that there were appeasers in high places who were clamouring for a negotiated peace, despite the fact that they must have known that any peace terms would, at that time, have been dictated by Hitler.
I also remember hearing, with horrified disbelief, a popular young officer in a famous regiment of Indian Cavalry holding forth on this subject at a drinks party one evening. He was all for suing for peace before we were invaded because, according to him, it was only too obvious that we were hopelessly out-gunned and out-manned on land, sea and in the air, and the sooner we realized that the better. Why wait until London was reduced to a pile of rubble and a few thousand more men, women and children were dead?
There had been a chorus of protest. But not, as far as I remember, an ill-tempered one. Most of it was on the lines of ‘Oh, come off it, old boy! You can’t really believe that!’ or ‘You must be tight, old man!’ I certainly never raised a squeak myself; kept silent, I suppose, by an inbred British horror of making a scene in public.
* * *
I acquired another beau at that party. Gordon was an officer in that famous Frontier-Force regiment, Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides. I had been fascinated by the history of that particular regiment ever since Tacklow had recited me a poem by Sir Henry Newbolt entitled ‘The Guides at Kabul’. He had recited it to illustrate a shining example of loyalty and heroism on the part of a handful of Guides in 1879, who, against incredible odds, fought and died to the last man in defence of the British Residency in Kabul, and though I can’t have been more than ten or eleven when Tacklow first told me that story, it made an enormous impression on me. A bit of the glamour of that tale seemed to me to have rubbed off on every member of that Corps.
Gordon too had been shocked at the opinions of the appeaser in our midst, and I took to him at once because he had announced loudly that he didn’t know what the would-be quisling was so scared about, ‘considering we were all lounging around sipping pink gins in perfect safety, several thousand miles removed from where the action was – and likely to remain so, worse luck, for as long as the Brass-Hats in Simla persisted in yammering about “Internal Security” and refused to let the bulk of the Indian Army off the leash’. Or words to that effect.
The defeatist officer did not take up the challenge, and I invited Gordon to have supper on our houseboat at Chota Nageem, where he took to Mother on sight and spent most of the rest of his leave in our company.
* * *
One of Mother’s best friends in Srinagar, and quite one of the nicest people in Kashmir, was the wife of Sir Peter Clutterbuck, Chief Conservator of Woods and Forests in the State (the appointment was one of those in the gift of His Highness the Maharajah). Everyone knew and liked the Clutterbucks; including ‘Tiger’, the little heir to the throne, for whom Lady Clutter used to give children’s parties.
He was an enchanting child, and Lady Clutter doted on him. I met him at her house on several occasions when she asked me to help at a children’s party or chat up members of the little heir’s entourage – who naturally had to accompany him everywhere. Many years later when he was grown up and married, I met him again when Bets and I were making a sentimental return journey to the haunts of our youth, and maharajahs had officially been abolished.
We were in Delhi, watching a performance of Indian dancing, and during the interval someone I had been talking to mentioned that a man standing near me was the son of the late Maharajah of Kashmir. I said: ‘You mean that’s Tiger?’ and he heard me and whipped round and said: ‘How did you know? Should I know you?’ I said that he wouldn’t remember me, but that I’d met him once or twice at Lady Clutterbuck’s house in Kashmir, and he laughed and said, ‘Dear Lady Clutterbuck. I was so fond of her!’ and we stood and talked for a little about the old days. It was good to find that the charming child had grown up to be such a very charming man.
Everyone loved Lady Clutterbuck. She was one of those rare people who seem to have no enemies, large, placid and comfortably upholstered, with an endearing sense of humour (she had been charmed at receiving a letter addressed to ‘Lady Junglebuck’). Her friends and acquaintances were legion, and I don’t suppose she was in the least taken aback when her abdar announced one afternoon, with some awe, that a well known holy man, a Yogi, had called and wished to speak with her. Would the lady-sahib receive him? Of course she would! She hurried out into the hall to greet the holy gentleman and ushered him into the drawing-room.
He had to come to ask her, he said, if she would be so good as to invite all her influential friends to a gathering in her garden, at which he would give a demonstration of the power of Yoga. No, no, he would take no payment. Nor did he wish to give a talk on the subject. He had learned that talking was of little use: it was better to see with one’s own eyes, and he would wish, in these troubled times, to demonstrate that there were other resources than bullets and bombs.
He made such an impression on Lady
Clutter that, despite some initial doubts, she ended by agreeing to the holy man’s request, and the party was on. I don’t know how I managed to wangle an invitation to it, for I certainly could not lay claim to being influential, and the majority of guests were of Mother’s generation, not mine. But thank goodness I was asked, for I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
There must have been about thirty of us seated at little tables round two sides of the large lawn at Forest Lodge. Tea was handed round first, and when that had been dealt with, Lady Clutter introduced the Yogi, who told us that he only intended to demonstrate one aspect of the many that could be achieved by the study of Yoga. This was to prove that it is possible to see without the use of one’s eyes.
Turning to Lady Clutterbuck, he asked her to bandage his eyes and ensure that he could not see, and Lady Clutter (who had not been briefed as to what precisely he meant to do, and had resolved to keep a watchful eye on the two chelas3 who accompanied him) thought she really had him. Bustling off to her kitchen, she got her khansama to mix some dough, and having watched him do so, collected one of Sir Peter’s woollen scarves from the hall. Armed with the scarf and the ball of dough, she hurried back to the Yogi, and having turned the ball into a roll, laid it across his eyes and pressed it down with her fingertips, so that it sealed his eyes completely – ‘I was sure he wouldn’t have thought of anyone using a sticky mass of dough,’ she said afterwards.
