Enchanted Evening (16 page)

We had guests to dinner that night and I remember that Tacklow seemed to be in excellent spirits and Mother was as cheerful as ever. Nothing wrong there, I thought; and when, the next day, Tacklow was his usual self I persuaded myself that he had merely been pulling my leg or else I had misunderstood him. I think now that that incident in the courtyard coincided with the day on which he had come, at last, to the painful conclusion that China was not, and never would be again, the enchanted and enchanting country in which he had found such unexpected happiness and romance in the early years of the century. He was not going to be able to settle down and spend the rest of his days there after all, for with China and Japan at daggers drawn it was going to be too dangerous a place in which to leave Daisy and the girls. The sooner they left it the better: he had been mad to bring them here in the first place!

Poor Tacklow. He had pinned such hopes on retiring in the one-time Celestial Kingdom, and on returning there with his Daisy. But the Celestial Kingdom had become a far from celestial Republic; and, worse, the second honeymoon had not proved to be an unqualified success. Mother, to whom Chinese had once been a second language, had forgotten most of it, and made no attempt to learn it again; she thought nothing of the social life of a foreigner in North China as compared to that of India and the Raj – and said so at frequent intervals. And now there was the threat from Japan. And with it an even darker threat: that of another World War …

Japan had been our ally in the war that had ended only fifteen years before. But if there should be another, whose side would she be on? Then there was Russia to be considered – Russia, whose agents were busily at work trying, with alarming success, to convert young China to what the West still thought of as ‘Bolshevism'. And in Germany an ex-house-painter, one Adolf Hitler, who during the war (it was still ‘the' war in those days) had served in the ranks of the German Army, had invented a party of the extreme right which had come to be known as the Nazis, and had already attracted the adherence of most of Italy under the leadership of a short, stout and bald-headed rabble-rouser by the name of Benito Mussolini.

Peking being full of foreign legations, most of whose languages Tacklow could speak, he had come to know and get on friendly terms with many of their consuls and staffs, as well as with a number of well-to-do Chinese. And what he learned in the course of many long ‘off-the-record' conversations after small, men-only dinner-parties in Chinese homes or the Legation Quarters of a number of other foreign countries had reinforced his fear that Europe was moving nearer and nearer to the edge of a precipice that could only lead to another war.

The last one had ended to the accompaniment of hysterical scenes of rejoicing and innumerable solemn ceremonies at memorials to those who had fallen. Yet Tacklow had come to believe that we had learned nothing from the lessons it should have taught us, and that here we were again, advancing blindly towards the same cliff edge like lemmings. If the worst came to the worst and there was another war it was by no means certain that there would be the same allies. North China, with Japan having bombed Chapei and annexed Manchuria, menacing her borders, would be no safe place for his family, and the sooner he moved them elsewhere the better.

No wonder my poor darling parent was in such low spirits. The last thing he wanted to do was move house again; for in spite of the dangerously unstable conditions that prevailed in China, the mess and the muddle, the banditry and the blatant corruption, he was still fascinated by this country which, in spite of all he had seen and knew of it, he still saw through rose-coloured spectacles. The same rose-coloured ones through which he continued to see Mother. If it had not been for her, and the fact that he had never stopped being besottedly in love with her, I believe he would have stayed in China, in which case he would have ended up in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, like too many of Mother's friends and relations. So I suppose it was just as well that he didn't. And since Mother, Bets and I all wanted to go back to India, back to India we went, but by a slow and circuitous route.

With Japan cast as the villain of the piece, you would have thought that any father of a family would have avoided that country like the plague. Not so my darling Tacklow. If we had to move, then let us move to Japan. Not permanently, of course. Just for a time. Long enough to see something of the country and learn a little about its people. Anyway, he had always wanted to see Japan, and this was an ideal opportunity to do so …

Well, as it happened I too had wanted to see Japan. Not for ‘always', but ever since my schooldays when Tacklow had given me a book by H. de Vere Stacpoole, an author who had made his name with a crashing best-seller called
The Blue Lagoon.
This one, also a best-seller, was a very short novel set in Japan in the early years of the twentieth century. It was entitled
The Crimson Azaleas,
and I suppose I must have been about fourteen at the time that I read it. When I handed it back to Tacklow I remember saying with the utmost fervour, ‘I've
got
to see Japan one day. I've simply got to!' Tacklow laughed and said: ‘Yes. That's the way it took me, too – I have got to go there myself one day.'

*   *   *

Once again there was the packing to be faced. But this time it was far less trouble than it had ever been before, for on the advice of China-side friends we hired a team of professionals to do the job for us. The result was a bit like watching a troupe of expert gymnasts at work. Mother, who rather prided herself on being a good packer, watched open-mouthed, and was betrayed into an unladylike shriek when, having urged a man who was wrapping up a much cherished cut-crystal bowl to be careful how he handled it, he finished turning it into a ball of dried grass and string, which he then flung across the room to demonstrate how well it would travel.
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And how right he was. The team stowed all our breakable goods and chattels in barrels, not packing cases, and when, months later, they were unpacked in Delhi, nothing had suffered so much as a crack, let alone been broken.

Considering how China and the Chinese had scared me, and how reluctant I had been to go there, I was surprised to find how sad I was to see the last of Peking and that fabulous house on the Pei-ho-yen. I suppose it was because I knew that I was seeing the last flicker of the China that Tacklow had fallen in love with. Soon there would be nothing left of that world.

There was a round of farewell parties in Peking, and more of the same in Tientsin, where we stayed for a few days to say our goodbyes to all Mother's relations before embarking on the SS
Kaizan Maru
for Kobe. And China, the country that I had known from the first I would never feel comfortable in, and whose people scared me stiff, forgave me for it and presented me with one last lovely parting present, something that has stayed with me always as another ‘white stone'…

We had stayed on the open deck of the
Kaizan Maru
to see the last of the land, and by the time we crossed the Taku Bar and headed for the open sea, dusk had fallen and an apricot-coloured harvest moon, impossibly large in the dusty, golden-brown twilight, drifted slowly up out of the darkening sea. The sea, which only moments before had appeared to be as empty as the palm of my hand, was all at once full of ghostly silver shapes, as the strengthening light of the rising moon caught the lateen sails of the fishing fleet and laid a glimmering carpet across the waters of the Gulf of Pei-chih-li.

Years ago, when I was a very small girl, I had looked down at sunset from the then tree-covered slope of Bombay's Malabar Hill, and seen another fishing fleet sail out to meet the gathering night – its sails bright in the last rays of a sinking sun. It had seemed to me then, and still does, one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen, and I have never forgotten it. Now China had repeated it for me. And again it seemed incredibly lovely, and, for some reason that I can't explain, more than a little sad.

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Interlude: Japan

Chapter 12

We were not alone on our trip to Japan. John and ‘Teddy Bear' and ‘George Blank' (another of the British Legation's ‘stupid interruptors') had decided to join our party, and had wangled enough leave in order to do so. This proved to be a godsend, because although none of us spoke a word of Japanese, Tacklow and all three of the interpreters could write it – a curious anomaly that arose from the fact that the two languages, though totally different when spoken, are the same when written. I have no idea when, or how, this curious split came about, but I suspect that Japan had no written language for long after China had invented one, and that when their people at last decided that they must have one too, they couldn't be bothered to invent one – they merely appropriated the sign-writing of China, and that was that.

The weather was perfect and the sea so clear that you could see a dazzling variety of fishy life fathoms deep below the surface. Above them schools of porpoises accompanied us, leaping, diving and frolicking in the bow waves – and sometimes there would be a basking shark. And the islands…! Oh, to be able to stop the ship and go ashore and spend a whole day on one. Oh, to
own
one, and have it all to yourself …

Coming from a family whose mother was second generation ‘China-side', and whose father had lost his heart to that country many years ago, I had been familiar with Chinese and Japanese art from an early age. The houses of the Bryson aunts and uncles, and ours too, were full of Chinese or Japanese bowls, vases, willow-pattern plates and wall hangings. And now here I was, sailing past the real thing. Here were the very same islets that I had seen a hundred times painted on scrolls. And they were real. The artists had not exaggerated. They had painted exactly what they saw, no more and no less. And in this calm weather the tiny, rocky islands, carved into a hundred decorative shapes by centuries of wind and waves and topped by old, old pine trees, swept and bent sideways by the prevailing gales, were duplicated for us by their reflections on a mirror-smooth sea.

Mother and Bets rushed down to their cabins to fetch their cameras, but as soon as they appeared on deck with them one of the ship's officers swept down upon them and, hissing politely, took them firmly into custody (the cameras; not Mother and Bets). It was forbidden, said the officer, to take photographs in Japanese waters. The same went for Mother's and Bets's sketchbooks. No photographs. No sketches. I went down to my cabin and took several photographs with my Box-Brownie and wondered why, when they were so fussy about visitors sketching or taking snapshots of their shoreline, they hadn't the sense to close or black out the portholes. Unfortunately, the snapshots turned out to be a total failure, for the little islands were too far away. Just small spots on a waste of sea.

Later on, when we cannot have been too far from Kobe, the
Kaizan Maru
slowed down almost to a stop as we approached a narrow strip of sea between an island on the right and an arm of the mainland to the left. A launch with several uniformed Japanese aboard came out to meet us, and a ladder was put down for them to come aboard. I presumed that they were were port officials, or from the pilot boat; and possibly some were. But two or three of them had come out to interview and meet my father. Tacklow, looking slightly surprised, was introduced to them by the Captain, after which they and Tacklow were ushered into the Captain's quarters, from where they did not reappear for some time.

I learned later that they knew almost everything there was to know about my dear parent – probably, since they are a thorough race, down to his taste in ties and the colour of his pyjamas. Tacklow had emerged wearing what I used to call his ‘innocent as an oyster' expression when he and the reception committee came out on deck again just before we docked at Kobe, and they all appeared to be on excellent terms with each other. But after that – courtesy of the Japanese Government – we had an official guide attached to our party, presumably to keep an eye on us, because Tacklow said they were convinced that because he had been head of the CID he must have come to spy out the land – or something of the sort. The top Indian in the terrorist line, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-British Communist, one Subas Bose,
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who had escaped jail by sliding out of India, some time back in the days of the First World War, had taken refuge in Japan where he had been welcomed with open arms. It was on his behalf that the reception committee had come aboard to interrogate Tacklow and find out what he was up to, and I can't think why they did this, since it was perfectly clear that they weren't prepared to believe for a moment that Tacklow had retired years ago. Even less that he no longer had any connection with (or interest in!) the Intelligence Service, but was merely visiting their islands as a tourist. Still, as long as it made them happy to think he was on some secret spying mission it was no skin off our collective noses, and we all found the official guide most useful in any number of ways. He not only spoke excellent English, but was a mine of information, while as for his effect on shop-keepers, it was electric: one look and a brief word from him, and inflated ‘tourist prices' tumbled – he must have saved us quite a lot of money.

*   *   *

I had been wondering how to describe Japan, when memory came up with a phrase that had become something of a catchword in my family. It dated from the days when audiences queued to see the latest light opera by Gilbert and Sullivan at London's Savoy Theatre, and Tacklow, a dedicated Gilbert and Sullivan fan, had been taken to the opening night of
Ruddigore
by an elderly friend who was the music critic of one of London's newspapers. The old gentleman had not been favourably impressed by the opening acts and had said so in a series of audible asides. At last the score came up with the ditty that begins: ‘There grew a little flower…' and this so caught his fancy that he kept on repeating, throughout: ‘
Sweetly
pretty! –
Sweetly
pretty!'