Enchanted Evening (5 page)

I have never been able to play the piano, but Bets could, and did – once I succeeded in weaning her off ‘Night and Day', which I did with the aid of Laurence Hope and Amy Woodford-Finden and the fact that we were both bitterly homesick for Kashmir. From then on the ‘Beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom' gave way to ‘Kingfisher blue, bird of the sunlight, who/Over the silent streams at will doth wander.'

We sang those songs solo or as duets, again and again, and even now if I hear one of them – as I very occasionally do on some Golden Oldie radio programme – it jerks me back into Aunt Dor's drawing-room in Tientsin. Although I have forgotten so many things that I should have remembered, I can still remember nearly all the words of those songs and the fear that was in my mind as I sang them, nagging at me that it might be years and years before I saw Kashmir or Delhi again. Because the reason that Bets and I had been left behind in Tientsin with Aunt Dor was because our parents had gone house-hunting in Peking.

Tacklow, as I have mentioned before, was not a particularly sociable type. He was a kind, quiet man who, while not exactly unsociable, far preferred to stay at home with a pipe and a good book than to go out partying – he left all that sort of thing to Mother, who adored it. But he must have done quite a bit of Making Friends and Influencing People when he was young, for he seemed to have the most unexpected friends in all parts of the world, few of whom he had laid eyes on since his careless youth, but all of whom had kept in touch with him ever since by letter. Now, once again, another friend of his youth turned up trumps.

This one too, like the senior member of the Suez Canal Company who had given us such an entertaining evening at Port Tewfic when we were on our way out to India several years previously,
2
was, I think, a Frenchman; though I could be wrong about that, because I never met him. But whatever his nationality he was plainly loaded, since he seemed to have houses in several different countries. On learning that Tacklow intended returning to China, he wrote to say that he happened to have a house in Peking that he hadn't made use of for several years and, if Tacklow liked, it was at his disposal for as long as he cared to live there. The house was furnished and in the charge of an efficient and thoroughly reliable resident
K'ai-mên-ti,
3
who could be trusted to engage such house servants as would be needed, and Tacklow would be doing the absentee landlord a favour by seeing that the place was lived in again. Or words to that effect …
Well
–!

That letter had caught up with Tacklow when we reached Tientsin, so my parents left for Peking as soon as they could to see if this magnificent offer was going to prove an answer to their prayers, or a booby-trap that had to be politely but gratefully declined. What
sort
of house was it? Large, small, ‘all-mod-con' or mid-Victorian plumbing? And where situated? Inside or outside the Tartar Wall, or somewhere out in the suburbs, and if so, how far out? Above all, if it had lain empty for a number of years, would it need a lot of expensive repairs before it could be lived in? These and several other questions would have to be answered before Tacklow could reply to that magnificent offer, and if for any reason it had to be turned down, some serious house-hunting would have to begin, which meant that my parents could be absent from Tientsin for some time.

They had intended from the first to buy or rent a house in Peking. But there had been no hurry about moving there until mid-autumn at the earliest, since Peking was intolerably hot during the summer. Moreover, the Bryson clan always spent their summer holidays in Pei-tai-ho, the little town on the shores of the Yellow Sea where Tacklow and Mother had spent their honeymoon in the early years of the century. The Granddadski (‘the Dadski' for short) had a house on the beach in which, by tradition, his family would foregather in the hot weather, either
en masse
or in relays; they had already rented another one for us, further along the beach. The plan was that after a short stay in Tientsin to meet the family we would go straight to Pei-tai-ho, leaving all our heavy luggage in one of Uncle Cam's garages, and that once we were settled in there, Tacklow and Mother would leave on a house-hunting expedition to Peking while one of the Aunts could move in to keep an eye on Bets and me and help us cope with the servants who went with the house and who only spoke Chinese. This programme had now been abruptly altered, and our parents dumped us on Aunt Dor for an unspecified time and left at short notice for Peking.

We had expected them to be away for at least ten days. But in the event they were back in a fraction of that, though I still think of it as being an inordinately long time in which I did nothing but wander around that cold, empty drawing-room singing, to Bets's accompaniment: ‘Pale hands, pink tipped like lotus buds that float on those cool waters where we used to dwell.' Oh, beautiful Kashmir! – what wouldn't I give to be back there! All the same, we made several good friends in Tientsin. Among them was Evelyn Young, who drew like a baby angel and who I was sure would one day make a name for herself with her enchanting sketches of Chinese children. Then there was a most attractive American girl called Florise
4
Chandless, and the two daughters of Colonel Hull, the commanding officer of the Queen's Regiment which was stationed at the time in Tientsin and would later move up to Peking.

Tientsin can't have been an ugly city, but I remember it as such. Red brick and mid-Victorian ugly. And in retrospect (though I know this too cannot be true), the short time that we spent there seems endless and I don't remember seeing anything old or picturesque. All I remember being shown were the few remaining late Victorian buildings that had been designed by the Dadski; the church that Tacklow and Mother had been married in; the platform of the Tientsin railway station where Tacklow had first seen Mother and fallen in love with her on sight, and the house in which she had been living when he proposed. Interesting, naturally, for family reasons, but apart from that we could just as easily have been in Camden Town or Clacton.

Then suddenly, Tacklow and Mother were back. They had not had to go house-hunting because the house they had been offered was, according to Tacklow, perfect; a single-storey house on the Jade Canal, adequately furnished and with a small garden; kept in apple-pie order by the elderly
K'ai-mên-ti
and his wife, who had agreed to choose a staff of servants ready to receive us when we moved in at the summer's end. Mother confined herself to being reassuring about the plumbing and I visualized a modern European-style house in a row of similar houses.

With that problem settled, we left for Pei-tai-ho by train, and I took my first long look at China's countryside. I found it in general flat and featureless, dotted here and there with walled villages and the occasional clump of trees that denoted a graveyard. Watching the scenery trundle past the windows, I found it hard to believe that most of the land had once been covered with forest – and not
all
that long ago either. For Abbé Huc, one of the Jesuit missionaries who had worked in China, had complained bitterly, back in the early years of the nineteenth century, that nowhere in the world had the cutting down of trees been so devastating – or so stupidly short-sighted. Daniel Vare, writing in 1939, says that even then the last of the old virgin forest at Tung Ling was being cut down, leaving little more than a waste of tree-stumps, and that the whole of North China had been stripped of its trees so that already the sands of the Gobi Desert were beginning to creep inside the Great Wall. This, he pointed out, led inevitably to floods and drought and famine, which in turn led to civil war, revolution and anarchy. ‘And all because they have cut down the trees!' I was told that even during my few short years in China the magnificent avenue of rare white pines at the temple of Lung-men-ssu in the Western Hills was chopped down by order of some self-styled ‘General' whose private army of vandals were in sore need of fuel for warmth and cooking-fires, and for the construction of shelters during a hard winter.

You could see why they did it, for at several of the station platforms where we stopped there were troop-trains standing in the sidings – open trucks packed with bewildered young soldiers who had almost certainly been farm-lads or shop-assistants until caught by the press-gangs of one or other of the war lords and forced to serve in the ranks of his private army. Some of them were only boys, wearing uniforms that had obviously been intended for grown men. At one station a squad of some twenty or thirty of them, their faces drawn with exhaustion and their ill-fitting uniforms grey with the dust of the unmade roads, had collapsed on to the platform, sitting on the ground with their backs to the fence that surrounded it, their legs stretched out before them. I saw with horror that, although the uniforms looked new, their feet were shoeless and the rags and cardboard and newspaper that they had tied on to them with string had disintegrated into bloodstained fragments, the result, presumably, of days of marching and counter-marching across country as the fortunes of their particular ‘General' rose and fell.

Those poor boys! I hadn't really taken in the fact that their country was in turmoil, or what civil war and anarchy were actually like, until I saw those exhausted ranks of young soldiers whose feet had been reduced to bloodstained pulp. The sight of them stays in my memory as an illustration of the cruelty and stupidity of war, and did nothing towards reconciling me to life in China. For it is one thing to read about such happenings, but quite another actually to witness them yourself.

*   *   *

Pei-tai-ho, when we reached it, was a relief. A small town, then little more than a village on the shores of the Gulf of Pe-chih-li, it was set on a sandy plain dotted with wind-blown pines, casuarina scrub and fields of Indian corn and
kao-liang
(sorghum millet) and protected from the sea by a line of Victorian-style villas, white-painted, clapboard houses with wide verandahs, standing on the landward side of a long, sandy beach that curved away to left and right towards distant hills and far-off mountains. At one of these houses we unloaded the Dadski and Aunt Dor and her offspring, before moving further on down the beach to the one that had been hired for us.

I still have the impression that there was nothing more to Pei-tai-ho than these houses, though a photograph of the place from the air shows that behind that sandy track and the casuarina scrub lay a not insignificant little Chinese town.

Our houses all faced out on to a long, sandy shore sloping downwards to the sea's edge, where it formed itself into several small bays, interspersed by outcrops of rock and long sweeping stretches of sand. To our left, looking seaward, the beach rose in a line of low cliffs that became higher to form a headland that was known as Lighthouse Point, on which the British Embassy had a holiday house, or rather, houses. Beyond this promontory, among a series of little bays, lay the Cathedral Rocks, and up on the East Cliffs stood the little cottage which, almost thirty years before, a Miss Winterbottom had lent to Mother and Tacklow for their honeymoon. Beyond that again the shore and the flat lands swept away in a wide bay to meet the mountains that lay along the eastern horizon, and the town of Shan-hai-kwan, where the eastward end of the Great Wall of China ends in the sea.

To the right of our house, apart from a few small caves, the shoreline stretched away westward, flat and featureless, to the foot of the Lotus Hills, pine clad, enchanting, and full of old temples and carved stone stelae erected to the memory of men and women long dead. The most charming of these were enormous tortoises carved in elaborate detail, supporting a tall slab on which characters giving the name and deeds of the departed were cut deep into the weather-worn stone.

The staff who went with the house consisted of a Number One Boy, a cook and an
amah.
They spoke ‘Pidgin' – in other words Pidgin English – a fascinating language that had come to be the lingua franca of coastal China and can now be regarded as a language in its own right, since books have been written about it, and poems and songs
5
written in it. Tacklow and Mother could speak to them in their own tongue, and though neither Bets nor I ever got further with Chinese than a handful of phrases, we could just make out in Pidgin.

Still homesick for Kashmir, and missing Neil
6
far more than I had thought I would, I hadn't expected much of that first summer in North China. But, looking back on it, I don't remember a single day when the sun did not shine. The sea was almost on our doorstep and we more or less lived in it, bathing for half an hour or so before breakfast and again at intervals during the day. Two of the girls we had made friends with in Tientsin, Evelyn and ‘Bobbie' (I don't think I ever heard Bobbie's real Christian name) were on their summer holidays in Pei-tai-ho, and the four of us used to spend long, lazy hours in a casuarina-shaded sandpit, discussing life and speculating about the future.

Evelyn and I were going to be artists (famous ones we hoped), while Bobbie, who was engaged to a young man in the Diplomatic Corps, already had a fairly shrewd idea of what lay ahead of her – as had Bets. Our American friend, Florise, paying a flying visit to Pei-tai-ho, joined our quartet for the duration of her stay. It is a sharp reminder of how greatly the pattern of behaviour has changed since then that Florise, who had been out the previous evening on what she called a ‘blind date' (the term was new to us), after describing the events of the evening and speaking enthusiastically about the charms of the said date (a young Englishman newly arrived in North China), ended up by admitting, regretfully, that she had completely failed to make a hit with him. Since this was something that I could not believe – Florise, as I have said before, being a notable charmer – I demanded to know how she could possibly know that? ‘Well, he didn't even
try
to kiss me when we said goodnight,' said Florise indignantly.