Enchanted Evening (6 page)

Few people now alive can realize how shocked I was by this statement. ‘But Florise, he'd only just
met
you!' I protested. ‘Surely you don't expect a man to kiss you the very first time he takes you out? Englishmen don't.' ‘Americans do!' retorted Florise. ‘And so do the French – and the Italians!'

The unsophisticated British were evidently still clinging to a code of morals and behaviour that had died with the Great War and the arrival of the Roaring Twenties. It had never occurred to me that any young man whom I had met for the first time at a dinner party, and later that evening danced with, would attempt to kiss me when we said goodnight, however much I might have been attracted to him – or him to me!

Discussing the matter with Evelyn, Bobbie and Bets, we agreed that this was probably the pattern of the future, because anything that Americans did was sure before long to cross the Atlantic and be copied by Europe. Florise had merely shown us the shape of things to come. But we did not envy her. On the contrary, we felt sorry for her, because she missed all the fun – the thrill of meeting someone you were attracted to, and hoping that he might with luck feel the same about you. Of watching for the signs that he did; of seeing more and more of him, and then wondering if – when – he would kiss you.

‘Courting' was, on average, a long-drawn-out affair and as fascinating as dancing a minuet or a pavane. For the ‘Colonial' British still lived in a world that was at least a quarter of a century behind the times, and probably more, a world in which a kiss was still a serious thing, almost as binding as a proposal. A kiss still meant ‘I love you', and was accepted as such. I suppose you could say that we were among the last generation to be ‘courted'; and we wouldn't have changed it for anything. Fancy swapping all that thrill and expectation for a kiss taken and accepted as a matter of course after only an hour or two's acquaintance, and knowing perfectly well that every girl the man had previously fancied, however briefly, had also been kissed by him, and that it didn't mean a thing. I could only be grateful that I had been born when I was, and not into the heyday of the Thoroughly Modern Millies. They may have had more freedom, but we had more fun.

I had not imagined that we would have much fun in Pei-tai-ho, and had resigned myself to making the best of it. But in fact we had a wonderful summer – two wonderful summers, for by now I find that I cannot separate them in my mind, or remember if this or that happened during the first year, or the second. We seem to have done exactly the same things in both years: had one long party, with never a dull moment.

This was largely because as soon as the weather in Peking became uncomfortably hot, the British Ambassador with his daughters and his staff moved down to Pei-tai-ho. In consequence it had become the custom for a British warship of the China Fleet to visit Pei-tai-ho and ‘show the flag'. Each ship on arrival would throw a cocktail party on board to which all the summer visitors were invited, and the Ambassador would reciprocate by entertaining the members of the Wardroom, and giving them the use of the Embassy tennis courts and bathing raft. In this way we came to know all the officers of each ship in turn.

Bets played tennis with them on the Embassy courts, and there were picnics to the Lotus Hills, and to Shan-hai-kwan and any number of normally inaccessible little coves, in one of the ships' boats. The only reason I know the order in which the ships came in is because Mother was a compulsive album keeper, and there is a photographic record of both summers. The first ship to pay a courtesy call during that first summer was HMS
Kent,
commanded by a Captain Drew who, together with his junior officers, added greatly to the gaiety of the various nationalities who were holidaying at Pei-tai-ho, while the sight of HMS
Kent
at anchor offshore gave the European contingent a welcome feeling of security.

That security was needed, for ever since 1911, when the Manchu dynasty had fallen and the last of its Emperors, young Pu-yi, had been deposed, all China, in particular the northerly territories, had been subjected to a series of lawless uprisings, instigated, as often as not, by some ambitious landowner who had hitherto owed allegiance to the throne but who now saw himself as the possible ruler of a province. The undisciplined armies raised by these Candidates-for-Power all too frequently degenerated into bandit hordes who ravaged the countryside, looting and burning. Only recently three British citizens, a girl, and two young men who had been out with her for a morning ride in the open country surrounding Ching-wan-tao – one of the popular summer resorts of the northern Treaty Ports – had been kidnapped and held to ransom by a gang of hooligans, who had kept them chained to one another for the best part of a month.

As far as I remember, their fate was still in the balance when we arrived in Pei-tai-ho and, judging from the daily bulletins in every newspaper, at least half the English-speaking world was putting up prayers for their safety. Happily, these were answered, and later the girl, a pretty young thing by the name of ‘Tinko' Pawley, wrote her account of the terrifying affair in a book entitled
My Bandit Hosts.

If the kidnapping of young Tinko Pawley and her friends shed an unpleasant light on one side of the Chinese character, the present that Tacklow gave me on my birthday threw an equally bright light on another. It was a three-quarter-length kimono in dull, heavy-weight Chinese silk of a curious grey-blue colour. It was very plain, except for three Chinese ‘good fortune' characters embroidered in pale grey silk: one near the bottom of each sleeve, and one on the back between the shoulder-blades. It fastened with matching grey silk cords and tassels and was lined with peach-coloured silk.

I had seen it hanging up in a little shop in the Bazaar, among a number of garish machine-made and pseudo-Chinese-style garments which, judging from the plethora of spangled dragons, phoenixes, birds and bats that crawled all over them, must have been intended for the tourist market. It stood out among that mess of tinsel and clashing colours like a Quaker girl in a line-up of bedizened cabaret dancers, and I pestered Tacklow into buying it for me. It was only when I had it in my hands that I discovered that every inch of the peach silk lining, even to the lining of those full Chinese sleeves, was hand-embroidered in a slightly paler shade of peach, with a design of birds and butterflies among branches of apple-blossom. No one but the Chinese would have taken the trouble to do that exquisite embroidery where it would never be seen, and only the wearer would know that it was there.

Chapter 4

There were two bathing rafts at Pei-tai-ho, complete with diving boards, one anchored off Lighthouse Point and more or less the property of the Ambassador and his guests, and the other in deep water off the little bay that was almost opposite our bungalow. This was the one that we used every day, and I was charmed to discover that it was the same one that Mother and her family and friends used to swim out to and dive from back in the early years of the century, and that Tacklow had presented them with a diving board.

Oddly enough, the next year, 1933, the
Peking and Tientsin Times
of 27 August printed a ‘Thirty Years Ago' column, one paragraph of which read: ‘We have seen some fine amateur photographs of the Pei-tai-ho Beach. Some of them showing remarkably graceful diving from the raft by a young lady expert. If all we hear to be true, the gentlemen will have to look to their honours in this respect.' And a month later, someone who had read that column had told on Mother, for another column of the same paper quoted the paragraph, and went on to say: ‘This paragraph referred to Miss Daisy Bryson, and by an extraordinary coincidence she chanced to be at Pei-tai-ho, still diving from the raft on possibly the same beach, when this paragraph reappeared. The photograph reproduced on page eight, taken of Lady Kaye (as she is now) diving at Pei-tai-ho Beach this summer, shows that she is as graceful as ever in this exercise.'

As far as I remember, it was during our first summer at Pei-tai-ho that Edda Mussolini and her husband Galeazzo Ciano spent a holiday there. They were not there for long, and we saw very little of Edda. But her handsome husband could be seen daily, displaying his spectacular torso in the shade of a
pang
1
to an assortment of admiring young women of several different nationalities. We did not need to be told that the Count was a famous Casanova, because we had already seen him at work in Shanghai. He attracted women like wasps to jam. There was also a female of that species, the Countess of Carlisle, who matched him in glamour.

She, like the Count Ciano, was one of those glamorous creatures whom a future generation would nickname ‘the Beautiful People', and on many a moonlit night you would see her floating down the beach with a rug on one arm and a Lieutenant-Commander on the other. I imagine she must have broken the hearts of at least half of the officers in the China Fleet. But romance, that summer, was not only confined to the celebrity fringe, for my parents were clearly enjoying a second honeymoon, and were charmed to discover how little Pei-tai-ho beach had changed. The bungalow that old Miss Winterbottom had lent them that first time looked exactly the same. So did the rocks that enclosed the little bay below it, where they used to bathe and laze and laugh together, and make plans for the future when the twentieth century was still in its hopeful infancy.

When the tide went out the long stretch of wet sand was still strewn with small, iridescent shells that Tacklow had never forgotten and which he now took to collecting, sorting them each evening into sizes and colours – pearl-pink and yellow and apricot, pale green, turquoise and lavender. I still have some of these shells, for he kept the best of them and had them made into spoons by a Peking silversmith: the smallest size for salt spoons, the next for coffee spoons, the next for teaspoons, and a few of the largest for sugar spoons. When I look at one now, I find it difficult to believe that these fragile things can actually be the same shells that were once, so very long ago, left by a receding tide on the shores of the Gulf of Pe-chih-li in North China, and picked up by darling Tacklow.

Mother spent much of her time sketching, and Bets, who also went in for landscape painting in watercolours, would often go with her. But although I too did a good bit of painting that summer, I hadn't yet become interested in landscape painting or found a style of my own and a medium that suited me. The only stab I had ever made at painting in oils had been over a year before, in Kashmir, when, inspired by the view from our houseboat, I had spent all the money I had made from the sale of some of my illustrations on oil-paints, brushes and turpentine, in order to try my hand.

The result was a very amateurish effort, totally lacking in either style or technique; one look at the finished painting was enough to convince me that oils were not my medium. Yet curiously enough, that amateur daub somehow managed to pin down the exact look and feel of the scene that faced me from the roof of our houseboat on that long-ago spring morning in Kashmir. For that reason I cherish it, and it hangs on the wall of my study, where I can see it as I write, a reminder of how beautiful that now war-torn and devastated valley once was.

After that initial failure I returned to my first love, illustration in watercolour, and painted such subjects as ‘Undine', floating up through sun-spangled water, the Kashmiri Love Songs – ‘Ashoo at Her Lattice', ‘The Song of the Bride', and ‘Kingfisher Blue' – together with various nursery rhymes: the lullabies, and the one about the ‘King of Spain's daughter'. These sold well at art exhibitions; largely, I think, because the subjects chosen by amateur artists are nearly always landscape or flower-pieces – plus the occasional portrait. Illustrations, particularly nursery ones, were few and far between. So while Mother and Bets went sketching, and Tacklow accompanied them to carry Mother's gear and laze in the shade of the rocks nearby, I stayed behind in the wide, covered verandah that doubled as the sitting-room of our bungalow, and drew Madonnas and mermaids and the Spanish Infanta who, according to the nursery rhyme, ‘came to visit me, and all for the sake of my little nut-tree'.

In spite of the fact that both Bets and I would much rather have been in Kashmir, the summer had been a very pleasant one for both of us, and I was beginning to feel more kindly towards the Chinese. I liked the three members of our staff and was captivated by the artistry of their nation. There were still astonishing examples of craftsmanship to be seen in the little shops of even such a small seaside resort as Pei-tai-ho, and one superlative one on the shore.

This last was a man who practised an ancient craft that I had never heard of before – and have never heard of since. He modelled tiny figurines out of a soft clay and carried the tools of his trade around with him in a light wooden frame which included a stool on which he could sit while he worked. Each figure was built on to and around one end of a slip of bamboo, not much more than six inches long and no thicker than a matchstick. He had an enormous repertoire of characters for you to choose from: court ladies with wonderful, elaborate headdresses, Emperors in their state robes, Manchu Bannermen, armed to the teeth, legendary heroes, heroines and villains, and innumerable gods and demons and goddesses.

To watch him at work was to know that you were in the presence of a master craftsman, and that here was the mind of China. The patience and application, the painstaking attention to minute detail, the beauty and the ferocity – the horrific, grimacing faces of the Demons and Guardians of the Gate – hideous monsters who brandished thunderbolts and bloodstained swords.

The tiny masterpieces cost so little. But money was always tight with us, and there were so many things that had to be paid for before I could think of spending even the smallest coin on something I didn't need. But watching was free, and I must have watched the making of scores of those enchanting trifles that summer, in the course of which, inevitably, I could not resist buying a few for myself. The paste of which they were made dried fairly quickly, and when dry had the appearance and feel of being carved from bone or ivory. But they were as fragile as bone china, and did not stand up well to the constant packing and unpacking to which they were subjected as we moved from one house or country to another. I have only the broken remains of one left, and no longer remember what character he represents; a Demon or a Guardian of the Gate? He is a scarlet-faced, scowling and ferocious little man with a white beard that positively curls with fury, and whose minute hand (broken, I fear) clutches an elaborate spear. The other arm is missing. But he retains his magnificent headdress and most of a wide, brightly-striped sash that he wore swathed about his hips.