Enchanted Evening (19 page)

Mike Aylesford, having almost missed us in Japan, had decided to follow us to Hong Kong. It was good to see him; and better still to discover that we could greet and embrace and laugh together with the affection of dear friends, and without a hint of regret for anything more. We had a great deal of fun together, and while we were about it did not forget to send telegrams of loyal greeting to the Captain, Bosun and one or two senior members of the Nageem Bagh Navy. Roger, too, was in port with his ship; and since he usually formed one of the party at dinner dances at the Hong Kong Hotel, or bathing picnics at Repulse Bay, we made him an Honorary Member of the NBN. Able Seaman 1st class.

All in all, it was a splendid interval, and we came to the conclusion that this was largely because, if one lived on the Peak as a lot of people did, all parties and dances had to stop by 11.45 p.m. at the latest. For that was when the dance-bands closed down, because the last train on the little Peak Railway stopped at midnight on the dot, and if you failed to catch it you must walk home or get a taxi. And taxis were not only in short supply in those balmy days, but very expensive. So with one eye on the clock, the dancers and merry-makers would invariably end up racing through the streets to catch the last train.

This meant that every party finished while you were still enjoying it to the hilt and wishing it would go on for ever, which probably accounts for the impression I have that those few weeks in Hong Kong equalled the most marvellous non-stop party of a lifetime. Masses of lovely men, an enchanting house with a marvellous view and run like clockwork by lots of wonderful silent-footed Chinese servants (you couldn't put a scarf or handkerchief down for one minute without finding it whipped away to be washed and ironed and returned to you, within seconds, in pristine condition, by an enchanting little
amah
). And a garden full of flowers high up on a hillside overgrown by bushes of hibiscus and heliotrope, looking out above the harbour towards the miles of fields and open country, towards the green acres of the golf-course at Fan-Ling and the wooded hills of China.

Only once during our stay did we wake to a sky dark with threatening clouds and a high wind that roared in from the South China Sea, making the junks and the small boats furl their sails and huddle together along the shore in tossing confusion, and sweeping the wide stretch of the harbour free of all but the largest ships. Aunt Lil's Chinese staff had already made sure that every door and window was secured against the gale, the more vulnerable ones being reinforced with shutters. Uncle David pointed out a tall flagstaff, and told me that the balloon that had been hoisted to the top of it could be seen by every boat in the harbour and almost every building in the port, and that it was a signal that warned sailor and citizen alike of the approach of a typhoon.

According to Uncle David, it was only when a black balloon was hoisted that everyone knew what they were
really
in for, and took cover – and prayed hard. During the course of the morning the balloon's colour went from bad to worse, but stopped short of the black. Much to my disappointment, I regret to say, since if the typhoon
had
hit us, there would inevitably have been casualties among the Chinese who lived in the
dhows
– there always were, I was told. But I still hankered to see what it would be like to be caught by a typhoon, for even when the last-but-one signal went up, the spectacle was pretty exciting. Trees, branches, leaves, palms, flowers and roof-tiles, anything that hadn't been nailed down or otherwise secured, whirled through the air, while the sea below us was a wild white froth of flying foam that almost obliterated the packed mass of tossing junks anchored in the harbour. The rain lashed down like steel bullets, driven by a wind that screeched past with the din of a hundred trains blowing their warning whistles, and the noise was so deafening that you almost couldn't hear yourself think. What on earth must it be like to be caught out at sea in this sort of weather?

Fortunately for us, the typhoon missed us, though not by very much, and a day or two later the sun was shining down from a cloudless sky. You would never have believed that there had been anything more than a passing rainstorm.

Tacklow and I went for an evening stroll on the Peak on one of our last evenings, and as we were returning to the Bank House, he suddenly said to me – breaking a long interval of silence during which we had been admiring the sunset and sniffing the lovely scent of heliotrope and hibiscus and new-washed greenstuff – ‘Why won't you marry Roger, Moll? I think he'd make you a very good husband.'

The question was so unexpected that I tried to laugh it off and make a joke of it. I said: ‘But darling, he's such a little man.'

‘Speaking as another little man,' said Tacklow severely, ‘I resent that! And don't beg the question. You'd make an excellent Navy wife. You like moving around and seeing new countries and strange places, and you don't mind living in rented rooms and boarding houses. Besides, he's a reliable type; a good man. I like him.'

‘So do I,' I said. ‘But I don't love him. I wish I did.'

‘So do I,' sighed Tacklow – and changed the subject.

Poor Tacklow. I only realized later what a weight it would have taken off his mind if he could have seen both his daughters safely married to men he liked and considered reliable. China, that charmed country that he had looked back on with such affection, had proved to be a sad disappointment. He had been forced to leave it and, worse still, to return to India, to see his younger daughter married to a man of whom he knew next to nothing, and at the same time try to find a job for himself that would allow him to remain in that country until his elder daughter found a husband for herself, or proved that she really could make a reasonably good living with her paintbrush. It must have seemed a bleak outlook for him.

Mike threw a terrific farewell party for us at the Majestic Hotel, and we sailed next day for Calcutta, stopping briefly at Singapore, and for a night and the best part of two days at Penang. There we spent most of our time at one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen, a small secluded horseshoe of white sand, shaded by coconut palms and bushes of scarlet hibiscus, and sheltered by a high, thickly wooded hill. There was no one else there but ourselves, a few birds and any number of butterflies. The sea was like silk and here too it was clear as crystal. Enormous sea-worn rocks formed a natural breakwater on each side of the beach, and it was one of the most perfect spots you can imagine.

I had an old friend in Calcutta, one I had made while I was staying in Simla with the Birdwoods.
1
He was theatre-mad and had written several short one-act comedies in which Judy and I had appeared. When not on leave, he was head of the Customs Department, with headquarters in Calcutta; he sent down one of his young men to get our luggage off in time to catch the mail train.

I had imagined that with the help of one of the Customs Department we could sail through the barriers. But I had reckoned without my darling Tacklow. The trouble was that Mother, enchanted by the charm and cheapness of the trinkets and pretty things for sale in Peking's Chinese City – particularly in Flower Street and Bead Street – had had what she regarded as a brainwave. She had decided to spend her picture-money on buying a large selection of this enchanting junk, to see if she could set up shop with it in one room of the house we had rented for the cold weather in Old Delhi.

Thrilled by the prospect of making her fortune, she had acquired enough baubles, bangles and beads and other pretties to fill several outsize packing cases. And I, foreseeing hours wasted sitting about under the hot tin roofs of the Customs shed while ham-handed
coolie-log
undid the careful work of expert Chinese packers, had written to Charles (can't remember what his surname was!) enclosing details of all the junk, plus the prices paid, and inquiring if he could see to it that we did not have to have the stuff unpacked, because no way –
no
way – could it be repacked properly. We ourselves couldn't do it! Charles had risen to the occasion and the young man he had sent down to the docks to help us couldn't have been more helpful. He had gone through the lists and noted that this type of goods was not listed as dutiable, nor were there any of the proscribed items on the list that Customs officers hand to you in large type, and reel off if you don't seem to have taken it in.

The Customs officers, by this time exhausted by going through doubtful luggage and no doubt longing to get shot of the whole ship-load so that they could get a coffee-break, were preparing to chalk an ‘OK' hieroglyphic on all those packing-cases of Mother's, when Tacklow suddenly drove up to the fact that this nice man who had met us in the Customs shed and been so helpful was not merely a boyfriend of Moll's, but a representative of the Head of Customs and Excise in Calcutta, and as such was apparently engaged in pulling illegal strings on our behalf. Up with this he
would
not put!

I think I have mentioned elsewhere that my darling Pa had a horror of the slightest dishonesty. ‘Word of an Englishman' and all that. All very laudable. But it could, at times, be irritating, and this was one of them …

Tacklow had noticed that among the things that had to be declared was silk. Presumably in quantity, since clothing – even Bets's lovely trousseau underwear, and the wonderful dress-lengths of Tribute silk – had been glanced at and replaced with a total lack of interest. Even Tacklow seemed to think that things like Mother's scanties and his silk ties need not come under the heading of ‘Silk' with a capital S. But when he discovered that the packing cases, on the word of this stranger from the Customs HQ, had been passed without being opened, he recalled that among the objects in them were at least a dozen four-sided hanging lampshades of carved blackwood, each panel being removable so that they packed flat and every panel (at a guess, probably four inches by seven inches) of stretched silk painted with designs of birds or sprays of flowers.

My parent, who ought to have known better, tried to explain this to the overworked Indian official who was dealing with our stuff, and merely succeeded in muddling the unfortunate man, who obviously had no idea what kind of silk the Sahib was going on about, and in the end demanded to be shown it. This meant opening a packing case – the wrong one of course. By the time a sample lantern was finally unearthed, the floor a sea of tissue paper and straw, and the silly little squares of silk with their flight of painted storks or whatever declared ‘not dutiable', everyone was thoroughly out of temper, and the young man from Head Office said crossly: ‘Why on earth did you bother to get me down here to help you get the boxes through Customs? You must have known what your father is like! Is he
always
like this?'

I said, ‘Unfortunately, yes,' and apologized for getting the young man out of bed for nothing. It was all my fault really. I ought to have explained that I had written to Charles about the packing cases. As it was, I had only managed to give Tacklow the impression that I was pulling rank in order to put a fast one over the Customs! Oh dear –!

William Henry, Bets's fiancé, had been on the dock to meet us, and Bets says that Mother hissed in her ear that if she, Bets, found that she had changed her mind about him, she (Mother!) would get her out of it somehow. I think WHP must have felt much the same, for he had brought a squad of friends with him to break the ice and make conversation. However, fortunately we knew most of them, so all went well. They took us out to Tollygunge for lunch and saw us off on the Night Mail that evening.

It was heavenly to be back again in India. It was, and always is, like coming home. The familiar smells and sounds; the sights and the faces; the fireflies dancing in the canebreaks as darkness fell, and the yellow dawn sky reflecting itself between the little white water-lilies that spangle the ditches alongside the track. There were the familiar names of stations, telling us we had left Bengal and Bihar behind us and were clattering northward across the United Provinces to Delhi. Benares and Allahabad, Cawnpore and Agra, and so many more in between; all of them familiar since childhood. I remembered a story of Kipling's called ‘William the Conqueror' in which an engaged Anglo-Indian girl is on the train to Lucknow, where she will be spending Christmas and getting married: ‘the large open names of the home towns were good to listen to. Umballa, Ludianah, Phillour, Jullundur, they rang like the coming marriage bells in her ears.' We too would be spending Christmas in Delhi, and I wondered if the familiar names of the towns that we were passing through were sounding wedding-bells to Bets? She and William Henry were still a little stiff with each other, which was not surprising after nearly two years of separation.

Kadera and Mahdoo
2
were waiting on the platform to garland us when the train pulled into Delhi Central in the late afternoon, and we received an affecting welcome. But it was nothing like the one that awaited Mother when we arrived at 8b Atul Rahman Lane, Old Delhi, the whitewashed bungalow that Tacklow had arranged to rent for the season. Our monkey, Angie – ‘Angelina Sugar-peas' – who doted on Mother and had not seen her for what, to a monkey, must have amounted to a lifetime, had been sitting on the ground at the foot of the pole on which Kadera had set up her house in the waste ground behind the bungalow, and she stood up on her hind legs at the sight of a stranger as Mother rounded the house. Then – even though the distance between them was all of two hundred yards – she gave a shriek of joy and, racing forward to the limit of her chain, leapt up and down screaming and yelling with excitement, and, when Mother reached her, leapt into her arms and clung to her, both arms tight round her neck in a strangling embrace, crooning and hugging her, rubbing her cheek against Mother's, which was wet with tears. I think we all shed a few. Tacklow denied that he had, but he and Kadera and old Mahdoo did a lot of nose-blowing.