Enchanted Evening (52 page)

It was only then, as I listened to the radio broadcasts, that I visualized the destruction of London and suddenly saw the streets and parks and historic buildings, Limerston Street and the little pub at the corner of the road, Park Walk, Battersea Bridge and that brand new – and to my mind hideous! – power plant on the other side of the Thames, invaded by hordes of jackbooted enemy troops armed to the teeth and firing as they came.

My first reaction was total
fury
and a passionate regret that I too was not there and able to clobber one of them with any weapon that came to hand – a rolling-pin or a golf-club or a garden rake.
Anything
that one could hit with –
hard
! It would be worth dying just to get in one good clout at the so-and-so's. I genuinely felt that Churchill had been talking for all of us when he said that if they came we would fight them in the fields and on the beaches; even though I was aware – we all were – that there were appeasers in high places who were clamouring for a negotiated peace, despite the fact that they
must
have known that any peace terms would, at that time, have been dictated by Hitler.

I also remember hearing, with horrified disbelief, a popular young officer in a famous regiment of Indian Cavalry holding forth on this subject at a drinks party one evening. He was all for suing for peace before we were invaded because, according to him, it was only too obvious that we were hopelessly out-gunned and out-manned on land, sea and in the air, and the sooner we realized that the better. Why wait until London was reduced to a pile of rubble and a few thousand more men, women and children were dead?

There had been a chorus of protest. But not, as far as I remember, an ill-tempered one. Most of it was on the lines of ‘Oh, come off it, old boy! You can't
really
believe that!' or ‘You must be tight, old man!' I certainly never raised a squeak myself; kept silent, I suppose, by an inbred British horror of making a scene in public.

*   *   *

I acquired another beau at that party. Gordon was an officer in that famous Frontier-Force regiment, Queen Victoria's Own Corps of Guides. I had been fascinated by the history of that particular regiment ever since Tacklow had recited me a poem by Sir Henry Newbolt entitled ‘The Guides at Kabul'. He had recited it to illustrate a shining example of loyalty and heroism on the part of a handful of Guides in 1879, who, against incredible odds, fought and died to the last man in defence of the British Residency in Kabul, and though I can't have been more than ten or eleven when Tacklow first told me that story, it made an enormous impression on me. A bit of the glamour of that tale seemed to me to have rubbed off on every member of that Corps.

Gordon too had been shocked at the opinions of the appeaser in our midst, and I took to him at once because he had announced loudly that he didn't know what the would-be quisling was so scared about, ‘considering we were all lounging around sipping pink gins in perfect safety, several thousand miles removed from where the action was – and likely to remain so, worse luck, for as long as the Brass-Hats in Simla persisted in yammering about “Internal Security” and refused to let the bulk of the Indian Army off the leash'. Or words to that effect.

The defeatist officer did not take up the challenge, and I invited Gordon to have supper on our houseboat at Chota Nageem, where he took to Mother on sight and spent most of the rest of his leave in our company.

*   *   *

One of Mother's best friends in Srinagar, and quite one of the nicest people in Kashmir, was the wife of Sir Peter Clutterbuck, Chief Conservator of Woods and Forests in the State (the appointment was one of those in the gift of His Highness the Maharajah). Everyone knew and liked the Clutterbucks; including ‘Tiger', the little heir to the throne, for whom Lady Clutter used to give children's parties.

He was an enchanting child, and Lady Clutter doted on him. I met him at her house on several occasions when she asked me to help at a children's party or chat up members of the little heir's entourage – who naturally had to accompany him everywhere. Many years later when he was grown up and married, I met him again when Bets and I were making a sentimental return journey to the haunts of our youth, and maharajahs had officially been abolished.

We were in Delhi, watching a performance of Indian dancing, and during the interval someone I had been talking to mentioned that a man standing near me was the son of the late Maharajah of Kashmir. I said: ‘You mean that's
Tiger
?' and he heard me and whipped round and said: ‘How did you know? Should I know you?' I said that he wouldn't remember me, but that I'd met him once or twice at Lady Clutterbuck's house in Kashmir, and he laughed and said, ‘
Dear
Lady Clutterbuck. I was so fond of her!' and we stood and talked for a little about the old days. It was good to find that the charming child had grown up to be such a very charming man.

Everyone loved Lady Clutterbuck. She was one of those rare people who seem to have no enemies, large, placid and comfortably upholstered, with an endearing sense of humour (she had been charmed at receiving a letter addressed to ‘Lady Junglebuck'). Her friends and acquaintances were legion, and I don't suppose she was in the least taken aback when her
abdar
announced one afternoon, with some awe, that a well known holy man, a Yogi, had called and wished to speak with her. Would the lady-sahib receive him? Of course she would! She hurried out into the hall to greet the holy gentleman and ushered him into the drawing-room.

He had to come to ask her, he said, if she would be so good as to invite all her influential friends to a gathering in her garden, at which he would give a demonstration of the power of Yoga. No, no, he would take no payment. Nor did he wish to give a talk on the subject. He had learned that talking was of little use: it was better to see with one's own eyes, and he would wish, in these troubled times, to demonstrate that there were other resources than bullets and bombs.

He made such an impression on Lady Clutter that, despite some initial doubts, she ended by agreeing to the holy man's request, and the party was on. I don't know how I managed to wangle an invitation to it, for I certainly could not lay claim to being influential, and the majority of guests were of Mother's generation, not mine. But thank goodness I was asked, for I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

There must have been about thirty of us seated at little tables round two sides of the large lawn at Forest Lodge. Tea was handed round first, and when that had been dealt with, Lady Clutter introduced the Yogi, who told us that he only intended to demonstrate one aspect of the many that could be achieved by the study of Yoga. This was to prove that it is possible to see without the use of one's eyes.

Turning to Lady Clutterbuck, he asked her to bandage his eyes and ensure that he could not see, and Lady Clutter (who had not been briefed as to what precisely he meant to do, and had resolved to keep a watchful eye on the two
chelas
3
who accompanied him) thought she really had him. Bustling off to her kitchen, she got her
khansama
to mix some dough, and having watched him do so, collected one of Sir Peter's woollen scarves from the hall. Armed with the scarf and the ball of dough, she hurried back to the Yogi, and having turned the ball into a roll, laid it across his eyes and pressed it down with her fingertips, so that it sealed his eyes completely – ‘I was sure he wouldn't have
thought
of anyone using a sticky mass of dough,' she said afterwards.

With the thick layer of dough in place, she tied her husband's scarf around the Yogi's head, making sure that the woolly material stuck to the dough, and having done that, led him around a bit so that everyone could see that he hadn't a hope of peeking out from under
that
bandage. He had only asked for two things in advance without explaining what they were for. One was a bag of flour which Lady Clutter had taken the precaution of borrowing, at the last moment, from the storeroom of one of her friends: ‘Just to ensure there was no hanky-panky, dear,' she explained. The other was a blackboard and a piece of chalk which, again, she had borrowed at the eleventh hour from the Tyndall-Biscoe school in Srinagar. Having no idea what the flour or the blackboard were for, she had kept both firmly under her eye until the Yogi asked for them.

He now asked for the bag of flour, which he did not touch, merely asking Lady Clutter to select anyone she chose from the company around her, and ask him or her to make a small hole in the bottom of the bag and then walk around the lawn and the garden, allowing it to trickle out and leave a white line which, when the bag was empty, he would walk along. And that was exactly what he did.

He could not possibly have seen through that bandage. Or have forced open eyelids that were glued shut with dough. Yet he walked unhesitatingly along the white line that zig-zagged to and fro, turning and twisting and making complicated patterns on the grass; and watching him, there was no doubt at all that the man could see what he was doing.

When he had come to the end of that line, he turned on his heel, walked back to Lady Clutter and asked her if he might have the blackboard set up. That being done, he asked if anyone in the audience would write something on it, leaving enough room below for him to copy whatever they had written. Several people had a try at this in several different languages, among them French, German, Greek and Latin. And each time when they had finished, he picked up the chalk and copied what they had written. It was uncanny.

The third, and more ordinary, demonstration of his ability to see without eyes was one that is often done in provincial theatres by conjurors and thought-readers. He asked people in the audience to show him things and he would tell them what they were holding up. The only difference was that no patter accompanied this performance, and that he walked among his audience telling each one, briefly, what they were showing him. A pipe. A bandana handkerchief (he described it). A tie (ditto). A necklace, a watch, a ring. A cup and saucer off one of the little tables. When he came to Mother, she took an unopened envelope out of her bag. (We had stopped on the way to the Clutterbucks to collect our mail from the Post Office and Mother had not yet had time to read any of it.) The Yogi told her what it was, and to whom it was addressed, and Mother said: ‘And what's inside it?' At which point, and for the first time, the holy man came near to losing his temper with this unenlightened flock of sheep. He shook his head impatiently: ‘Haven't I
told
you that I do not need eyes to see what you can see with yours? Do
you
know what is in that envelope?' ‘I haven't opened it yet,' said Mother, ‘so of course I don't.' ‘Exactly,' said the holy man. ‘I can't see what's inside it either. Not until you open it.'

Mother opened it and took out the contents, and that man described each item. There was a short note from Bets and several snapshots of Richard, taken in Ootacamund where they were spending the hot weather. ‘Shall I read what your daughter has written?' asked the blindfolded Yogi in a distinctly sarcastic voice, and Mother, understandably shaken, shook her head and stuffed the note and the snapshots back into her bag, rather as if they might bite her. I remember feeling pretty shaken myself at the discovery that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. That man could see. There was no doubt about it at all. But a surprisingly large proportion of his audience on that afternoon persuaded themselves they had been the victims of mass hypnotism, which seems to me even more improbable.

Lady Clutterbuck told us later that it had taken the best part of half an hour to get the dough out of ‘that poor man's' eyes and eyelashes, ‘Not to mention his ears and the back of his neck, dear.' And although a lot of her guests had left donations on the letter tray in the hall (convinced that the exhibition they had witnessed must be in aid of some charity or other) the Yogi had refused to accept it, insisting that he was not a professional performer of tricks. He merely felt it was his mission to interest the ‘unenlightened' in Yoga. Perhaps among all the Lady-Sahib's friends who had watched him that afternoon, one or two might be sufficiently interested to take up the study of Yoga. He sincerely hoped so.

Perhaps one or two of them did? I don't know. When one is living through a
Götterdämmerung,
one's mind is likely to be concentrated in a single direction.

*   *   *

It must have been in this same year, towards the end of May, that I had another odd experience. This time it was strictly personal to myself. I had been suffering badly from toothache, and our dentist, Mr Soni, told me that the cause was an impacted wisdom-tooth that must come out, and that he would have to give me gas, the sooner the better. An appointment was made and I duly presented myself at his surgery for the ordeal. Mother was away on trek, painting, but Mrs Soni, a red-haired Scotswoman of considerable charm and good sense, and a personal friend, accompanied the anaesthetist and stood by to lend a hand in case I didn't take to the gas. The dentist's chair faced a big many-paned window, on the far side of which hung trails of some sort of creeper falling down from the edge of a balcony above. I was looking at them when the gas mask was clamped on to my face and I heard the stuff hiss as it was turned on …

*   *   *

I was nine years old and sitting on my favourite seat in the drawing-room of the Rookery, the bow-window seat, from which I could look out across the gravelled drive and its wooden railings at all Simla, and the far away view of the plains laid out forty miles below.

I had an open book on my lap, but I was idly watching Bets, who was sitting on the edge of the verandah with her sandalled feet hanging down among the pots of scarlet geraniums lined up below. She was aimlessly kicking the flower heads, obviously bored, and presently she looked round and said, ‘Oh, come on, Mouse. Let's
do
something!' The windows stood open, for the day was hot and cloudless and without a breath of wind, and putting my book aside I stood up and jumped down on to the verandah, turning my ankle in the process so that a loose blakey on the sole of my shoe stuck into the wood. (A blakey, for those who do not know, was a kidney-shaped piece of iron with prongs on one side, that could be hammered into the sole of children's shoes to prevent them getting worn down by wearers with a tendency to walk on one side of their feet.) The prongs of my errant blakey had fixed themselves firmly, if crookedly, into the wooden planks of the verandah, so I removed my shoe and used it to hammer the blakey hard into the wood.