Enchanted Evening (11 page)

The point-to-points across the open country and the racecourse at Pa-Ta-Ch'u were a popular form of amusement throughout the winter, and despite the fact that anything to do with horses bores me rigid, I would always accept an invitation to attend them, merely because ‘
tout
Peking' turned out for them: the foreign contingent to participate or watch, and the indigenous to bet. Lacking the courage to admit to my unfashionable dislike, I would roll myself up like a sausage in winter woollies and spend hours out in the freezing (and totally uninteresting) countryside – clutching a muff. My nose and toes blue with cold, my teeth gritted together to prevent them from chattering, I pretended an interest in watching relays of tough little ponies from Outer Mongolia scuttling over the banks and ditches and artificial jumps with what seemed to me hulking, oversized riders on their backs. Looking back on those hours of self-inflicted purgatory, I can't think how I can have been so wimpish. But since the winter point-to-points were as much a part of expatriate life in Peking as the dust-storms, they deserve a mention. Especially as I wrote them down, most unjustly, as another black mark against life in China.

The plus marks were the art classes and some of the more exotic parties. There was the one given by a rich and flamboyant character who had fallen in love with Peking on a visit to China, and had bought himself a beautiful Chinese house. I remember the rooms in some detail because I thought they were simply wonderful. The walls of one of them had been papered with the large, square sheets of gold or silver paper that one could buy in Peking. The paper used here was dull gold and the thin lines formed by gold edge-to-edge squares made a lovely pattern on the walls and a wonderful background to the carvings and other Chinese
objets d'art
that stood against them.

Another room had a pair of oval-topped niches in the wall, one each side of the door as far as I can remember. And in each niche stood a carved and gold-lacquered wooden vase bearing something that looked very like the stylized flower and leaves of a full-blown artichoke, such as one often sees in Chinese temples decorating the altar tables where the incense bowls and offerings stand before Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, and her celestial attendants. The vases stood on circular stands that turned out to be a pair of ordinary wooden kitchen sieves covered on the upper or mesh side with oiled paper, and each hiding an electric light bulb which, when switched on, lit the vases from below and gave them the enchanting effect of being made of Lalique glass.

I hadn't seen anything prettier in years, and from then on I hunted through the junk shops of Peking, hoping against hope to find another pair. But though I saw plenty of them in the temples, I came across none that were for sale; until at long last, grubbing around in a shop full of assorted rubbish in one of the villages near a temple in the Western Hills, Mother came across a rather battered specimen, and bought it for me. I still have it, though I can't think how it managed to survive. Sadly, in its travels, it has lost at least two of its branches of leaves, and though I meant, for years, to give it a sieve to stand on, so that I could light it from below and see if it would look like Lalique glass for me, I never did.

I can only remember attending one party in that fabulous house, and since my memory for names has always been hopelessly bad, I am only guessing when I say that I think our host was Harold Acton. But the high spot of the evening's entertainment was definitely memorable. The guests, about twenty in all, were seated in a ring against the drawing-room walls, some on chairs and sofas and the remainder on the floor, and all the lights were turned out except for a dim one that enabled the host to turn on a gramophone record of ‘L'Après-midi d'un Faune'. As soon as the music started a single spotlight was switched on, to disclose, in the empty centre of the room, a young man curled up pretending to be sound asleep and (apart from a few blotches of brown paint here and there) apparently starkers.

We had barely taken in the fact that he appeared to have no clothes on when at the bidding of the music he began to wake up and we saw that the lower third of him, that is from his buttocks downwards, was covered by a furry and extremely skimpy pair of tights, and that we were in for an imitation of Nijinsky dancing the young satyr in ‘L'Après-midi'… I don't know what anyone who had seen Nijinsky dance the faun would have felt about that earnest young man writhing about in the almost-nude to the strains of Stravinsky played on a gramophone. But the whole performance struck me as hysterically funny, and I nearly burst a lung trying not to laugh.

*   *   *

As someone coming from India, where holy places and different religious beliefs yearly give rise to riots, bloodshed and general uproar in one part or another of that priest-ridden country, the Chinese attitude towards the gods struck me as astonishing – and admirable. Temples abounded; it would have been hard to throw a brick in any direction without hitting one. And they all seemed to be well attended by devout believers. There were as many gods and as many festivals here as there were in India – and as many priests: but those one came across seemed a remarkably gentle and tolerant lot, and I was fascinated by the fact that any foreigner who had the means to do so could rent one of the temples as a week-end cottage. Or a full-time one if he wished. The larger and more important temples in the Hsi Shan – the Western Hills that fringe the amphitheatre of mountains which encircle Peking to the north and west – are really monasteries, and temples such as T'an-chê-ssu and Chieh-t'ai-ssu (whose kindly and much respected Abbot was well known to the foreign contingent in Peking) kept rooms that were at the disposal of any visitors wishing to stay overnight, but could not be reserved for a season as the smaller and less important ones were.

The first time I ever spent a night in one of the latter was when we were invited to spend the weekend with Colonel and Mrs Hull and their two daughters. The Hulls had rented a small temple out on the plain, and nearer to the city than to the hills. And since the temple was only a small one and accommodation was strictly limited, Bets and I were asked if we would mind sharing the girls' bedroom. This, I was fascinated to discover, turned out to be the ‘Goddery' itself. And here once again the goddess was dear Kwan-yin, the Mother-figure that all religions seem to have revered since the beginning of Time, the Goddess of Mercy, of whom it is said that ‘there is no sweeter story told' than that having reached the gates of Paradise, she turned back – because she heard a baby crying.

Carved from wood and lacquered in gold, she sat enthroned, flanked by her attendants and backed by a panelled and lacquered screen that ran the length of the room, as did the altar in front of her, a long narrow table bearing the incense bowls and vases of temple flowers, also carved from wood and lacquered in gold.

The windows were criss-crossed with thin red lacquer in geometrical designs, as in all Chinese buildings, and in place of glass there was the usual oiled paper. Our four beds were set up in a row facing the row of Heavenly Ones, and there was a moon that night: a full moon that shone from a frosty, cloudless and, in those days, unpolluted sky so brightly that, as on the lakes of Kashmir, one could have read a newspaper by its light.

I'm not sure what woke me, the moonlight or a sound. Or both. I woke up suddenly, and there, moving noiselessly in front of the gods, was a white-robed figure. Talk about your heart jumping into your throat –! Mine almost jumped out of my mouth, and for a crazy moment I was sure that this time I really
was
seeing a ghost instead of just hearing one.
1
The ghost, perhaps, of some devout Chinese who had taken exception to the Goddery being used as a spare bedroom by foreign devils. Well, it wasn't of course. It was one of the Hull girls who had woken with a bad toothache and, slipping out of bed in her nightie, had tiptoed out in search of her mother who would know what to do about it. She had put about ten years on my life in the process.

*   *   *

Some time during the early weeks of the winter I had acquired what my grandparents would have termed a
‘beau'
and the twentieth century had taken to calling a ‘boyfriend'. John was a language student attached to the British Legation, and in his company and that of his fellow students, among whom we made many friends, Bets and I attended a seemingly endless round of Peking parties, went shopping, explored the Forbidden City and were taken on numerous expeditions to the Summer Palace, the Jade Fountain Pagoda and the Black Dragon Pool. We spent hours wandering around the Temple and the Altar of Heaven, and the little, blue-tiled temple that was then known as the Temple of Rain, but in the modern tourist guidebooks is called the Temple of Agriculture, which may sound more brisk and forward-looking, but is not nearly so romantic.

One paid a small fee to enter those parts of the Forbidden City which were open to the public, and though the sum was a very modest one I was always surprised to find how few people took advantage of it. Judging from occasional press photographs, that is no longer true and you can hardly move for the crowds of comrades and conducted tourists who swarm through the city in their thousands. But it was not so in the early years of the thirties, and one of the charms of the Forbidden City was that I often felt that there was no one there except myself and the ghosts of a tremendous past. Certainly no one ever bothered us as we strolled through the vast deserted rooms with their acres of dusty floors and locked cabinets which presumably contained the treasures of the great days that were gone. Those that were still on display were inadequately guarded, and I remember walking along a narrow, only partly roofed passageway between two halls, and coming across a fabulous oval block of jade that had been hollowed out to form something that could have been a baby's bath-tub. The outer sides of this were elaborately and most beautifully carved into a panorama of woods and trees and winding paths, temples and pagodas, barns and houses, all peopled by groups of little figures – village folk hoeing in their fields or herding their animals, and rich folk jogging past on horseback, escorting their women who were carried in palanquins …

The whole staggering work of art was standing on a brick plinth which brought it up to just below eye-level, and it was protected – if you could call it that – by a rusty piece of chicken-wire that covered the whole. Inside this fantastic tub, along with an accumulation of dust and dead flies and the odd sparrow's feather, there was a somewhat grubby visiting card, on which someone had scribbled in Chinese, English and French, ‘Empress's Jade Flower-bowl'.

Mother used to sketch a lot in the Forbidden City; it was one of the few places where she could sit down on her sketching stool, put up her easel and get down to it without immediately attracting a horde of children and passers-by who would crowd around, breathe down the back of her neck and ask endless questions. It was one of the advantages of that entrance fee. Unfortunately, I have only one sketch left out of all the many she painted in the Pei-hai, and that is unfinished.

I liked going sight-seeing with Tacklow best, because he had actually seen the Forbidden City when there was still an Emperor of China and a Dowager Empress, the Old Buddha herself, living there, surrounded and waited upon by innumerable courtiers and concubines, eunuchs and servants. And just as he had done when I was a small girl in Delhi, and he had made the history of its Seven Cities and its great and violent past come alive for me as we drove back from Okhla by moonlight from picnics among the ruins, so now did his tales of the rise and fall of the Manchus and the fantastic and often gruesome things that had happened within the walls of the Forbidden City, during his own lifetime, people for me the empty halls and gardens and palaces with the throngs of gorgeously dressed aristocrats and their servants, hangers-on and hordes of scheming eunuchs who had once lived and died here.

There were endless tales and legends that I would never have heard if Tacklow had not told me them. One was the story of the Chung Lou, the Bell Tower, built some time in the thirteenth century. Another was the legend of the Lonely Pagoda. There were so many pagodas in and around Peking and scattered among the Western Hills that I don't remember now which one the Lonely Pagoda was. Nor do I remember which of the many temples was the one that told fortunes, except that it was in one of the maze of
hutungs
in the Tartar City, not far from the Temple of the Polar Star, and that one of the language students took me there, presumably John.

The Temple was small and dark and full of smoke and the scent of joss-sticks, and the ‘fortunes' were engraved on long slips of bamboo stacked in a large bronze jar on the altar in front of the gold-lacquered gods. A second bronze jar stood at the opposite end of the altar, and between the two was a large oblong bowl, also bronze, full of the ashes of innumerable joss-sticks. There were also bowls of temple flowers, lotus buds and flowers, seed pods and leaves, each on its own long stalk and all of them exquisitely carved out of wood and lacquered in gold.

The left-hand bowl was full of joss-sticks, and I was told to take one and, having lit it, to add it to the small forest of smoking sticks of incense that worshippers had stuck into the bowl full of ashes; then to draw out one of the slivers of bamboo at random and hand it to the priest, who would read the characters engraved on it. I did so, and the old man peered at it incuriously and then wagged his head and smiled widely, as did every other Chinese in the room – several of the women reaching out to touch me, as though some of my good luck would rub off on them. For it seemed that I had drawn the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. According to my fortune-stick, I was to have
seven sons
! The women looked at me enviously and the men made approving noises, and having tipped the priest we left on a wave of congratulations and good will … Far from having seven sons, I finished up with two daughters.