Enchanted Evening (32 page)

There were five of them in all. And but for the war, there might have been more. Temmy illustrated them all for me, because she had a special talent, shared by the late great Beatrix Potter, for being able to draw, say, a rabbit, and put it in a dress and apron, and call it Mrs Someone, and it looked right. Whereas if I drew a rabbit, it was a rabbit; and that was that. I couldn't make them look anything else.

Temmy and I had a lot of fun with those books. Her brother, Frank, was the Commodore of the Harwich Yacht Club, and Temmy too was a sailing buff. She would often take me down to Ipswich for the weekend, where her family home was, to sail and sleep on the Tempest boat, which was moored at Pin Mill near that known-to-all-sailing-buffs inn, the Butt and Oyster. We would take the latest
Potter Pinner
with us, and work out each page during the train journey from London. The books were all written in Temmy's beautiful script, and as the illustrations were scattered across the pages, she would often demand that I write an extra word or two – or cut a sentence down to size – in order to fit the script round the pictures.

Years later, when the Second World War had been and gone, and Temmy was on one of her many successful lecture tours, she mentioned the way in which we had worked on those books page by page, sitting in the evening train to Ipswich. At the end of her lecture, she found a couple of elderly sisters waiting to speak to her. They had, they explained, been on the Ipswich train a few years before the outbreak of war, and been enormously intrigued by what the two fellow passengers in their carriage were doing which caused them to explode into laughter at frequent intervals. Now, listening to Temmy's talk, they had suddenly found this fascinating conundrum solved.

I have forgotten how much Collins paid me as an advance on the first of the series, but I know that together with the outright payment I got for
Six Bars at Seven,
I was suddenly in possession of the huge sum of £75! And this in a day and age when the
return
fare from London Docks to Bombay and back again, Tourist Class – three weeks either way with all meals included and no limit on how long one stayed at the end of an outward trip – was
forty pounds
!
£40!
Unbelievable nowadays, isn't it? I looked at my seventy-five-pound windfall and realized with incredulous joy that if I could make that kind of money by writing, then I could write anywhere. I didn't have to stay in London in a bed-sit in Limerston Street with the rain dripping dismally down on the cobblestones outside, when I could live a good deal cheaper on a houseboat on the D
ā
l Lake with lotus lilies looking in at my window. I was rich, I was rich, I was
rich
! Moreover, Fudge Cosgrave, the other lifelong friend I had made at the Chelsea Illustrators, had left before me. Her father, Sir William, had been appointed Chief Commissioner of the Andamans, and Fudge had given me a pressing invitation to spend the whole of the cold weather there. It was a chance not to be missed, and now – oh wonderful day! – I could afford to take it up.

Roger gave me a farewell party at the Hungaria, and Mike and Bargie and Sir Harold Snagge – the man she was to marry as soon as her divorce from the unsatisfactory Tancred was finalized – came down to Tilbury to see me off. I left England on a wet, cold, blustery day in early October, clutching under my arm a carbon copy of
Six Bars at Seven
, in case the publishers lost the top one before it appeared in print! I remember being scared stiff that some ill fate might befall it before it saw the light of day; the whole thing still seemed too good to be true.

Oddly enough, I don't remember anything at all about the ship or the voyage out, except that we ran into dense fog in the Bay of Biscay, and for the whole of one day we crawled forward into nothingness with our fog-horn howling like a demented sheep every few minutes, and being answered at intervals by the fog-horns of other ships (the Bay seemed to be full of them!) baying mournfully in reply. And the only reason I remember that is because I was afraid that if we collided with another ship in the fog, and had to take to the boats, I might lose my precious MS. I was so scared of that that I crammed the manuscript into my sponge bag,
2
in case it got damaged by salt water, and tied it on to myself – just in case! I blush to recall it.

Apart from that the entire voyage is a blank. I imagine I must have spent most of it with my feet at least ten inches above the deckplanks, metaphorically speaking, from sheer elation, for I was going home, and I couldn't believe my luck. I was going to see my family again, and Kadera and Mahdoo, and any number of old friends, as well as all the loved and familiar places. I felt as if I had been away for years and years instead of only two, for so many things had happened since I had left India in that sad spring when Tacklow died. Among others, I had recently become an aunt, for Bets was now the mother of a baby son, Richard Henry Pardey, born in Srinagar, Kashmir, in the late summer of 1936. Since she and her baby, and Mother as well, had been spending the summer months in Simla as paying guests of a mutual friend, I intended to make Simla my first port of call, before setting off to join Fudge in the Andaman Islands.

Somebody must have met me and put me up for a day or two in Bombay, because I remember meeting one of the Burma-Shell people, whom I had known in Delhi, at the racecourse – one Sinclair, known to his friends as Sinbad – and telling him proudly that I had been able to come back under my own steam, because I had written a book that was shortly to be published. I rather expected to be congratulated on this success, but was firmly slapped down and snubbed when Sinbad asked what the book was about, and on being told, remarked loftily that anyone who had enough intelligence to get a book published ought to be above writing the sort of trashy rubbish that I had obviously gone in for. I have seldom had such a crushing put-down, and it remains like a sore patch in my memory to this day. Typical of Sinbad, said my friends consolingly. And it was, of course.

I caught the Frontier Mail to Delhi and travelled up across India with my nose pressed to the windowpane, revelling in every mile of the beloved land unrolling before my infatuated eyes. My companion in a two-berth
purdah
carriage (women only) was not, as I had hoped, some Indian lady on whom I could practise my Hindustani but a youngish Scots missionary, returning to a mission hospital in the hills after a holiday in Bombay. She may once have been dazzled by the charm of India, but if so, the gilt had worn off, and a too close association with the dark side of that great sub-continent had made her take a dim view of the country and its people. She could not understand how I could find anything to admire in the land that streamed endlessly past the windows of our carriage, and though plainly she was a kind-hearted and obviously dedicated do-gooder, she was not a particularly enlivening companion on a long train journey.

We parted at Delhi, where she retained her seat and I changed trains for the one that took me to Kalka in the company of a cosy old
pahareen
– a hillwoman, bound for her home village somewhere beyond Kasauli – who thought my Hindustani was hysterically funny. Kalka is in the foothills of the Himalayas where the white, winding mountain road that leads to Simla begins, and I was decanted in the dawn on to a station platform that I had been familiar with ever since I first stepped down on to it at the ripe age of three. I took the rail-motor to Simla in preference to the much slower narrow-gauge railway in which I had always travelled before. This was on Mother's advice. She said it cost more but got there much quicker. I knew every inch of that road. Or thought I did. And as we passed Dugshai and saw the road veer away towards Sanour, I leaned out of the window to look up at a ridge that is high above both railway and road, where Tacklow lies buried, and felt like shouting out to him, ‘I'm all right, darling. I'm back!' I didn't of course, but I expect he knew.

I don't think there was any part of the road, from the clumps of candelabra cactus on the bare lower hills, to the pines and deodar and rhododendron on the higher ones, and the villages and wayside shrines, that was unfamiliar to me. But I had forgotten the scents. There is a little yellow climbing rose that has the sweetest and most penetrating scent and which brings back the past as nothing else could – more even than the smell of pine needles and pine-cones. The rail-motor stopped, as the train always did, at Jatogue on the Simla side of the long and gritty Jatogue tunnel, for long enough for the passengers to alight and eat breakfast at the railway restaurant. And that too had not changed a whisker since I had eaten my first breakfast there back in the autumn of 1913. The restaurant used to make an odd form of scrambled egg that tasted exactly like the awful dried-egg concoctions that food-rationed Britons put up with during the Second World War. And I bet they still do!

Mother and Bets were on the Simla platform to meet me, and we were once more a family. I had come home again.

5

Islands in the Sun

Chapter 22

I had brought two special parcels with me from England, in addition to that MS. One, for Mother, was a life-size head-to-waist portrait of Tacklow that Pedder, one of the Chelsea Illustrators, who was an excellent portrait painter, had painted from a photograph. Dear Pedder knew very well that I couldn't possibly afford the prices she got for her portraits, and she did that superlative one of Tacklow for
eight pounds
– which I imagine just about covered the canvas and the tubes of paint. The hours she spent on it were free, and altogether the whole thing cost me ten pounds, because Pedder couldn't invent the colouring of the uniform and medals, so I hired those, at a pound a time, from one of the theatrical and fancy-dress firms that dealt with this sort of thing.

Roger nobly sat for the portrait, dressed up in the ICS full-dress kit and orders, and the result could not have been better. I bought a large gilt frame for it at a junk shop on the Portobello Road for ten shillings (ah me, those were the days!). Mother took one look at it and burst into tears, and I was afraid that I had pushed her back into the ponds of woe that had made life so impossible for all her friends and relatives during the months after Tacklow died. But thank goodness, no. She thought the picture was a speaking likeness, which it was. And is. And for the rest of her life it accompanied her on all her travels. Nowadays it hangs in my hall, at the top of the stairs, and it is Tacklow standing there. As with Vermeer's
Head of a Girl
, if you smile at him he smiles back.

The other thing was a tablet to his memory, which was put up on the right-hand wall of Simla's Christ Church, the church in which both Bets and I were christened. I presume it is there still. I modelled it myself in clay, bought the bronze, and MG, who had a kiln in her back garden (her husband had been a well-known sculptor), cast it for me for nothing. They
were
a nice lot, those Chelsea Illustrators. I am eternally indebted to them.

Bets's first-born, a placid blue-eyed baby with a head covered in pale gold curls, only needed a pair of wings to be mistaken for one of the Heavenly Host, and was one of the best-tempered babies I have ever come across. He was uninterested in teddy-bears or rubber balls, and his two favourite things were an empty cigarette tin with a pebble in it, which made a fascinating rattle, and, of all things, a small enamel basin which gave him hours of amusement. He either sat in it – it just fitted his plump little behind – or turned it over and sat on it. And, when that palled, he used it as a
tabla
, an Indian hand-drum, or put it on his head where it looked like a First World War tin hat. He got hours of amusement out of those two everyday objects, both of which had to be put into his cot at night. I have often thought that it's a pity more mothers don't try the effect of similar things on their offspring, instead of wasting vast sums of money on coloured bricks and expensive woolly animals. He was an adorable baby, and grew up to design those hideous oil platforms that litter the North Sea.

I spent a month in Simla and then left for Calcutta, from where I was to set sail for the Andaman Islands to spend the rest of the cold weather with Fudge and her parents. I had booked a passage for myself on the SS
Maharajah,
the little steamer that was the only link between India and the Andamans, and which only called there once a month. I don't know who originally owned the Andamans, but someone must have done (it certainly was not India). Judging from the early nineteenth-century prints that I once saw, it was annexed in the usual high-handed manner by a British Admiral (or maybe he was only a Captain) in command of one or two Royal Navy ships. I got the impression from the prints, which included a lot of cotton-wool puffs coming out of the ships' guns, that they happened upon the islands by chance, fired on the few Andamanese who unwisely appeared on the beaches, and, when these ran away, sent a jolly-boat ashore to run up the Union Jack and announce that the islands were now a part of the British Empire. I know that the prints referred to the cotton-wool puffs as ‘the battle of Port Blair'.

Having pinched the islands, the only thing we could find to do with them was to use those incredibly beautiful places as a penal settlement for convicted murderers who were considered to have had some excuse for their crime. (The ones who got ‘life' instead of being hanged.) Much later, very much later and after my time, it was used, briefly, as a prison for political offenders. Much has been made of this last, to the detriment, naturally, of the Raj. The place has been made out to be a ghastly Devil's Island. In fact, it was anything but. The prison was a pink, star-shaped fort built of coral rag and surrounded by coconut palms, and the cells led off wide verandahs and were about the size of the average single room in a tourist hotel on the Costa-de-Whatsiz.