Enchanted Evening (3 page)

China in the spring of 1932 had got itself into a terrible mess, and I still cannot understand how my darling father could have decided to move himself, his wife and his two daughters (neither of whom could speak or understand a word of Chinese) to that war-torn and disaster-prone country, with the intention of spending the rest of his life there. I suppose the Rajputana episode had hit him so badly that he wanted to get shot of India and everyone in it. And he had obviously been remembering China as it was in the old days, when the twentieth century was young and there was still an Empress in the Forbidden City and a Son of Heaven on the Dragon Throne …

A time when he, a bachelor Captain in the 21st Punjabis,
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had not only fallen in love with the country and its people but lost his heart to a girl whom he had first glimpsed on the platform of Tientsin's railway station, had subsequently tracked down and married, and with whom he had spent an unforgettably romantic honeymoon in the little fishing village of Pei-tai-ho on the shores of the Yellow Sea.

All his memories of that lost China were happy ones, and I have come to believe that he thought of it as Tennyson's King Arthur thought of ‘the island valley of Avalon'. ‘Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly', a safe and pleasant refuge where he could rest and, like Arthur, ‘heal me of my grievous wound'. Because for someone like Tacklow the wound had indeed been grievous, and it was a measure of just how bad it had been that he should have returned to the China of the 1930s in the middle of what was casually called ‘the China Incident' without realizing how enormously the country had changed in the past thirty years.

Chapter 2

The usual contingent of Mother's Bryson relations – on this occasion two of her brothers, Arnold and Ken, and their wives – were to collect us off the ship. And since Ken was Mother's twin, he had insisted that we should be his guests during our stay in Shanghai. So it was with him that we finally left the ship and drove away from the docks.

I don't know what sort of house I had expected Uncle Ken to live in. Something on the lines of a bungalow in Old Delhi perhaps? A house with whitewashed walls and wide verandahs, overhung with purple and scarlet bougainvillaea and surrounded by a shady garden full of trees and flowers … In the event it turned out to be as disappointing as my first view of Shanghai. Here too there was no hint of Far-away Places and the Exotic Orient; one might just as well have been in the suburbs of any British ‘New Town' complete with grey skies and a steady drizzle. My spirits fell even further. But China has always kept a card or two up her silken sleeve, and now she produced one …

Uncle Ken, incoherent with disappointment and apology, explained that his Joyce, who had always been delicate, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and been strongly advised by her doctors to return to England to undergo special treatment in a nursing-home. She had already gone, leaving the housekeeping in a state of chaos. And since Ken's office would keep him too busy to entertain us during working hours, and without Joyce on the premises he did not trust his cook to be able to cope with us, we would be staying a mere two days under his roof, after which Aunt Peg and Uncle Alec would be taking over.

I cannot help suspecting that the prospect of having to put up no less than
four
of her in-laws, on top of chronic ill-health, had probably been the last straw for Aunt Joyce, for even having us for those two nights was obviously a strain on Ken's staff – though the twins clearly had a whale of a time discussing the old days and reminiscing about the friends of their youth. The next day must have been a Saturday, for in the morning, urged by Mother, Uncle Ken took us out shopping in Bubbling Well Road, where, in those days, all the best makers and embroiderers of women's underwear lived.

Mother and Bets had a field day here, on the excuse that Bets, now that she was officially engaged, should begin collecting her trousseau. Compared with the prices of today, those lovely garments were absurdly cheap. But I had little money to spare for fripperies, and in the end I settled for a single petticoat: a slip of soft, cream-coloured satin, woven from pure silk (China still scorned to use anything else) and decorated with an elaborate spatter of roses on insets of fine net. It was a work of art, and I still have it, sadly worn and frayed, but still too beautiful to throw away.

In contrast to the beauty of those silk-and-satin creations, Bubbling Well Road was quite as unalluring as the Shanghai docks, a crowded thoroughfare crammed with hurrying humanity in drab city suits and mackintoshes. The Chinese, wearing either black or indigo, outnumbered the foreigners by ten to one, as the rickshaws outnumbered the cars and buses. But half-way through the following day the clouds lifted and the sun came out. And by the next day I had changed my mind about China, and was willing to concede that there might even be something to be said for Shanghai.

*   *   *

It wasn't just the sunshine and a blue sky that made me change my mind, though possibly that helped. It was discovering that there was more to Shanghai than a disappointing number of English-suburban houses, the ugliness of the docks, and the unexpected drabness of Bubbling Well Road. It depended largely on which quarter of the city you lived in. For in those days most of the British and Americans, as well as a great many other foreigners trading with China, had their homes in the International Settlement, which in times of stress could be barricaded off from the Chinese sections of the city. The French, however, had obtained a separate concession of their own, and since you did not have to live in your own concession, Uncle Alec had been able to acquire a house in the French Concession.

Mother's family were, on average, a noticeably good-looking lot with the exception of Alec, who looked like a prize-fighter crossed with a bull-frog. He was, in fact, an extremely skilful and successful surgeon with a reputation that stood high among the rich Chinese as well as among his fellow
gweilos
(‘foreign-devils', as they were still referred to by a majority of the citizens of the country). Aunt Peg, on the other hand, more than made up for her husband's lack of good looks, for she was the most attractive and elegant creature, and I suspect that their choice of a house and its stunning interior decoration had nothing to do with Alec's taste, and everything to do with hers. It was an old Chinese house, which she had subtly modernized; and though I was to see a great many more such during the next few years, this was the first one. And by far the most beautiful.

The house, as with the houses of all well-to-do Chinese of the old school, consisted of a series of one-room, single-storey quarters built around a paved courtyard. The graceful tiled and tip-tilted Tartar roofs extended over the verandahs and curved upward to show a profusion of carved and painted flowers and mythical gods and animals decorating the underside of the eaves. The rooms had doors and windows only on the side facing a courtyard, and the nearest courtyard was connected to the main house by a moon gate, a perfect circle cut in the courtyard wall. The entire complex, which surrounded three sides of a wide lawn, was protected by a high wall above which we could see tree-tops and the graceful roofs of other Chinese houses, and Peg had decorated the long main room – which would once have been either a reception room or a hall of ancestors – in the Chinese manner.

The furniture was of lacquer or carved blackwood, and the curtains and cushions were of heavy, cash-patterned Tribute silk.
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The floor was of exquisitely inlaid and polished wood, strewn with old Chinese carpets, and the long room was dotted with wonderful examples of Chinese art, every one of which was a gem in its own right. It was easily the most beautiful room I have ever seen, and it goes to my heart to realize that the entire house, and with it those whose roofs showed above the surrounding wall, would almost certainly have been smashed into rubble by Japanese bombs in that attack on Shanghai during the Second World War. So much beauty destroyed. And so very many lives – among them Aunt Alice's husband, Howard Payne, the young man who had happened to see the seventeen-year-old Alice walking down the gangplank of a ship that had brought her, with my mother and grandmother, back to North China, and seeing her had said: ‘That's the girl I'm going to marry!'
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No less than five – or was it six? – of Mother's family were held in the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai. Poor Uncle Howard died there.

The only room in the Brysons' house that contained no trace of China, but was wholly twentieth-century European, was the master bedroom. It was pure Syrie Maugham,
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and Bets and I were left gasping with admiration. We had seen photographs of this style of decoration in the glossier women's magazines, and knew that all-white rooms were very much the fashion. But we had never actually seen one before; probably because no one we knew well would have been able to afford the vast dry-cleaning bills.

Peg's bedroom was a revelation. One entire wall was covered in looking-glass which reflected a king-size double bed backed by graceful draperies and standing on a platform approached by three shallow steps. The floor was carpeted from wall to wall in plain deep-pile carpet of Chinese manufacture – possibly the only Chinese thing in the room – and there were white flower-vases full of lilies, filling the room with their scent. A final touch of charm and opulence was the enormous rug made from polar-bear skins that covered the steps leading up to the bed. Some years later, audiences in a London theatre watching a long-forgotten musical show entitled
Helen
were to gasp with admiration at a scene depicting the legendary Helen in an all-white bedroom. The set that earned this nightly tribute from London audiences was the work of that famous theatrical designer, Oliver Messel. But Peg had anticipated him.

Bets and I might be stunned by that bedroom, but Uncle Alec was less enthusiastic. He said it was OK for his decorative wife to wake up and see herself reflected in acres of looking-glass, but the sight of his own face, first thing every morning, never failed to give him a nasty shock: ‘Talk of Beauty and the Beast!' grumbled Alec. ‘One may be fully aware that one resembles the latter, but it doesn't help to have it rubbed in first thing in the morning – especially when one has gone to sleep after a late night on the tiles!'

I couldn't help sympathizing with him. Uncle Alec cannot, at the best of times, have been shown to advantage in that setting. But Uncle Alec in pyjamas, waking up with a shocking hangover, unshaven and with bags under his eyes, must however have been no ordinary blot in those glamorous surroundings. He may only have been pushing out the boat for us, but the fact remains that during our stay in that lovely house we went out dancing and partying every night, and it soon became clear to me that my uncle's lack of good looks did not prevent him from being a wow with women and a very popular guest at parties. Our stay with him and Aunt Peg turned out to be one enjoyable party after another, interspersed with sight-seeing, and meeting such exotic wildfowl as Mussolini's daughter and her husband Count Ciano.

My clearest memory of that stay in Shanghai is of dining and dancing into the small hours in a series of fascinating nightclubs. Tacklow, no dancing man, would make his excuses and fade unobtrusively away fairly early on in the evening. Not so Uncle Alec! Alec was always among the last to leave, and I well remember an evening – or rather an early morning – at ‘The Little Club' when, noticing the time and the fact that my uncle was on the top of his form, I remarked anxiously to the man I was dancing with that Alec would never be able to keep his appointment to operate on someone at six a.m. To which my partner replied that I obviously didn't know much about Alec. ‘Your uncle,' he said, ‘has the reputation of being a superb surgeon when sober, but an inspired genius when tight – ask the Chinese. Ask anyone!' I presume that verdict was correct, for it is certain that rich Chinese queued up for his services.

Tacklow had been interviewed by a variety of local journalists on the day we landed, and later we had all been photographed for one of Shanghai's magazines. The photographs, and another article, appeared on our first day at Aunt Peg's, and I was shaken to see in cold print that: ‘Sir Cecil Kaye, one-time Head of the CID India, has arrived in Shanghai with the intention of retiring in China.' No ‘ifs' or ‘buts' about it. I could not believe that he could be serious. Not now, when only a few months before over 14,000 Chinese and Japanese had died at Chapei, while many times that number of wounded and homeless Chinese, who had fled for their lives into the countryside beyond, were being attacked and robbed by hordes of bandits – men of their own race. It was unbelievable.

Four photographs accompanied that ominous article, one of each of us. Unlike most newspaper photographs, these were very nice and we were charmed when the paper sent us each a couple of large complimentary copies of the set. I still have them.

In the mornings we went shopping with Peg (she shopped, we just looked and envied, for none of us could afford to buy the glittery, alluring things displayed in those wonderful Aladdin's Cave shops that lined the main streets of the city). But it was quite an experience just to look at the tempting objects on offer. Wonderful clothes from London, Paris and New York; furs and hats and shoes (there was a tale that the film star Mary Pickford bought all her shoes in Shanghai). Shops that sold jewels that would have graced a Queen; incredibly elegant shops that sold make-up and scents in fascinating bottles, and others that sold works of art and wonderfully illustrated and bound books.

After several hours of wandering and window shopping, Peg would take us to lunch in one of the city's splendid hotels that lined the Bund; and on one occasion we spent a sybaritic day at the races. On another we were taken out to see what memory has labelled as a meet of the ‘Shanghai Hunt' – though that cannot be true, because first, there was no huntable animal in China (in India ‘the Raj' used to hunt jackals), and second, it was late May, a time when the young crops would have been at their most vulnerable and the year well into the ‘closed season'. I also don't remember seeing any hounds; only ponies and their
mafoos
(grooms) and a lot of chatty people in riding coats and hard hats milling around.