Golden Afternoon (26 page)

That first season in Kashmir was a lot of fun. Bets got co-opted to perform in a charity song-and-dance show at Nedou's Hotel, as a member of the chorus in several numbers and solo in another two. Nedou's was equipped with a proper stage, complete with footlights and spotlights, heavy crimson curtains and dressing-rooms (normally the ladies' cloakroom). The Srinagar season always included a number of cabarets and revues, and this particular song-and-dance show was put on by Helen Don, an ex-schoolmate of ours who as a child had been one of the shining lights of our dancing classes at the Lawn, with ambitions to become a professional. She had evidently not thought much of my efforts as a high kicker, or else she considered that my legs were not up to standard, for I was not invited to join her six-girl chorus-line consisting of herself and Bets, the Jenn sisters, Meg Macnamara and a girl called Noreen Bott,
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all in the shortest of short skirts and wearing tap shoes (see photograph, if I can find it). The talented Miss Don designed their costumes, and Bets and I designed the ones for Bets's solo dances.

In the days of the Raj the
Sahib-log
who served in India had to make their own amusements, and since there were only a handful of theatres for touring companies to appear in — and even fewer companies who were prepared to face the hazards and discomforts of touring in the East — amateur theatricals flourished like bay trees. Almost every hall in every British Club was provided with a small stage and a pair of curtains, and there was always a pool of amateur talent to call upon. Everyone seemed to think they could act, and one or two of them actually could; Sylvia Coleridge among them. We designed our own costumes, which our
darzis
made up for us out of the materials bought in the bazaar for the most modest of sums. Who can ever forget those piled bales of Bokhara silk?
Lovely, shimmering stuff like heavy taffeta, in every conceivable shade of every colour you can think of, ‘shot' or plain, and selling for eight annas a yard. That's about sixpence, and I well remember the shock and lamentation when somewhere around the early thirties it rose to one rupee! I don't know if it's even made now; it was very much a ‘fancy-dress dance' type of material, for if you spilt water or any liquid on it, all the colour came out, leaving you with a whitish blot surrounded by a dark ring. You couldn't wash it, and dry-cleaning, which was in its infancy then, did it no good at all. But for anything in the nature of theatricals it was spectacular.

Simla, when Tacklow first went there in Edwardian days, had topped the list of social hill-stations in India — but, as some latter-day Mrs Hauksbee was to remark acidly, it was a place where you ‘couldn't sleep at night for the grinding of axes'. To the British, Kashmir, as a semi-independent native state, owned and ruled by its Maharajah, was a holiday playground where you could go camping or trekking, dance every night, play tennis, golf or polo, go fishing for trout in its rivers, shoot
chikor
on the hillsides and bear in the forests, stalk
markor
in the high mountains, and ski in the winter. If you were a painter, you could sit down almost anywhere and be sure of at least four wonderful views to paint — the one in front of you, the one on your left and the one on your right, and, by turning round, the one behind you. And for the benefit of would-be artists, the Srinagar Club held two art exhibitions a year, and up in Gulmarg, the Club there held another one. British and Indians alike flocked up in their hundreds.

Mother had always dabbled in watercolours, and since the art exhibitions consisted entirely of paintings by amateurs, she decided that she, Bets and I should all send in a few pictures to one of the exhibitions that year and try our luck.

I don't remember what my family's entries were, or if they sold any of them, but I remember what mine were. Realizing that ninety-nine per cent of the entries would be sketches of Kashmir, I decided to try something different and sent in a small line-and-wash drawing that I called ‘Madonna of the Cherry Trees', and an illustrated verse for a child's bedroom or a guest-room, which incorporated a couple of guardian angels, neither of whom can have been keeping an eye on the job, since they were both sound asleep. The whole thing was very much in the style of Margaret Tarrant and the verse was by that well-known poet, Anon.
Even after all these years I still remember every line of it; and remember, too, that I sold both those pictures within minutes of the exhibition being declared open.

Since these were the first pictures I had ever sold, I was not so much thrilled as relieved: I was a wage-earner! And if I could sell my pictures, I could make my own pocket-money and earn my own keep, and so relieve poor, darling Tacklow of some of the burden of supporting his family; something that I was aware pressed heavily on him. It would soon press even more heavily, once he had completed the task that the Government of India had called him back to do and was again living on a very small pension — now smaller than ever because he had commuted a portion of it to bring Mother, Bets and myself out with him.

These reasons alone would have made that art exhibition stand out in my mind as a memorable occasion. But in the event it was to prove far more important to Mother than it was to me. For her it was a real gold-letter day, for among the scores of amateur efforts displayed on the rows of canvas screens which filled the Club's ballroom were three that stood out like diamonds on coal-dust.

The pictures were signed M. Molesworth and we were all riveted by them. I felt that I would have given almost anything to be able to paint like that, and Mother wasted no time in hunting up the exhibition's harassed Secretary and demanding to know if M. Molesworth gave painting lessons. The Secretary said she had no idea, but that she could give her the artist's address. This turned out to be a tent in a large camp pitched on about an acre of ground dotted with chenar trees, near the entrance to Gupkar Road; it had a name, ‘Chenar Bagh', I think. The tents were usually hired out to impecunious subalterns who could not afford to take rooms in one of the hotels or guest-houses, or to hire a houseboat. But since Mother hadn't realized that, she had neglected to ask the Secretary whether M. Molesworth was male or female, and had made up her mind that whoever it was must be an established artist; she was expecting to see someone aged at least forty, and was very taken aback to discover that M. Molesworth was an eighteen-year-old girl.

The M. stood for Mollie, and she said she would be delighted to give Mother a few lessons at five rupees an hour since she needed the money, though she had never taught anyone before and hadn't a clue how to set about it. However, if Mother was willing to take the risk, she would certainly do her best. The deal was clinched and the two of them started
on the first lesson that same week. And what a bargain it turned out to be. True, Mollie was no teacher. She couldn't put it into words. But she could do better than that: she could snatch the brush from you and demonstrate brilliantly.

The few lessons she gave Mother before she left Kashmir turned Mother from a painstaking amateur into a painter of real charm. Better still, a painter whose paintings sold — which was to prove a godsend to Mother in the lean years after Tacklow died and she found herself having to make ends meet on a widow's pension of £394 a year, a sum that was not increased until right into the early seventies. Her paintings saved her from penury, and today there must be hundreds of them scattered in homes all over India, in houses and bungalows and clubs and regimental messes that were once owned by the British. Not long before she died there was an article in the
Telegraph
on the dwindling numbers of British, nearly all of them widows, who had ‘stayed on' in Ootacamund after India became independent, because they no longer wanted to return to England. The writer of the article included a description of the ‘typical drawing-room' in any of the bungalows they inhabited, a decor dating back to the Raj — chintz-covered chairs and sofas, mantelpieces and occasional tables cluttered with faded, silver-framed photographs and snapshots of men and women long dead and children who by now must be grandparents, ‘and watercolour paintings by Lady Kaye on the walls'.

I gave the article to Mother and told her that this was Fame! I wish I'd kept it, because I doubt if there are any of those who decided to stay on left in all India, let alone in ‘Ooty'.

I can still remember, in detail, one of those paintings of Mollie's that we saw that morning, and I still regret, bitterly, that we could not afford to buy it — or any of her other pictures. Heaven knows they were cheap enough. But, knowing her worth, she had priced them a good deal higher than the average amateur exhibitor had dared to do. I only have two of her pictures: one of them a painting of a pine tree that she did to show Mother how it
should
be done, and which I was fortunate enough to see her do, having gone with them to watch.

The method, sureness and swiftness of the execution was a revelation to me, and I was dumb with admiration. It is the only one of her demonstrations that survived among Mother's papers. The other is a quick, unfinished and, alas, unsigned sketch of Vernag, the little colonnaded pool teeming with carp which are said to be the descendants of those put there
by the Emperor Akbar. It was given to me by Mollie's husband in the 1980s, and from him I learned that she had, while still in her twenties, given a one-girl exhibition of her work in a London gallery that had been a sell-out. He showed me the press comments and a laudatory half-page article in, I am almost sure, the
Illustrated London News
.

She told us, that first day in Srinagar, that she had won a scholarship at one of the more prestigious London art schools — I can't remember which — but that they wouldn't take her until she was nineteen. As that left her with a year to fill in, she sailed for India, where she had an uncle who was a General, and having stayed with him for a week or two, left to do a working tour of India, paying her way by selling her pictures. We never met her again, but some time in the early thirties she married a young missionary doctor and they came up to Kashmir for their honeymoon. On the way back there was an accident; the taxi they had hired to take them down the mountain road to Rawalpindi went over the edge. Her husband, though injured, survived, and so I think did the driver. But Mollie was killed.

Some years after she died, an acquaintance of mine took me to have tea with a middle-aged lady who lived somewhere near Tunbridge Wells in Kent and who turned out to be a relative of Mollie's — an aunt, I think. She showed me an enchanting illustrated diary that Mollie had made on a trek to Tibet, and any number of sketches that she had done some years before her marriage, while she was spending a few months somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. Her sketches of snow-covered mountain ranges silhouetted against the fantastic patterns of the aurora borealis, or icebergs like crystal palaces moving slowly down green and blue channels of open water among the ice-floes, with the pale sun shining through them, were some of the strangest and most beautiful pictures I have ever seen.

I managed, in the 1980s, to trace Mollie's husband, but all he had, apart from a framed selection of her paintings, were a few unfinished and unsigned rough sketches (one of which, the one of Vernag, he gave to me) and an illustrated diary of a trek to Lhasa, which wasn't a patch on the one to Tibet. I don't even know how she managed to get there, for in those days Tibet was a closed country. But then she had fairly high-powered relations scattered around the world, of the type whose names do not get into print but who, behind the scenes and unobtrusively, can pull quite a few strings.

Among the ‘regulars', the people who came up year after year to spend the hot weather in Kashmir, were many who had been friends of my parents for years and whom I had known in my childhood; among them Sir Micky and Lady Roberts, and ‘Smiler' Muir. In the old days, when Smiler had been Personal Private Secretary to the Viceroy, or something of the sort, he had spent the summers in Simla, as had the Robertses, who used to lease a haunted house known as the Bower at Mashobra, some five or six miles outside the town. (I have told the tale of our encounter with the Bower ghost in the first volume of my autobiography.) Smiler Muir had officially retired some years ago, and now spent his summers in Kashmir with the Robertses on their houseboat on the Jhelum at Srinagar, where Micky, who was a doctor and still practising, would join them when on leave.

The Robertses' daughter, Sybil, who had been one of our childhood friends, was now grown-up and married, so for a large part of the season Lady Micky and Smiler were the only occupants of the houseboat, a fact that, despite their ages (Lady Micky was no chicken, while Smiler must have been at least sixty — and looked it!) had attracted the attention of a group of elderly regulars, who, having taken exception to the post-war (the 1914–18 one) influx of jazz-age visitors, whose standards, mores and morals were, they considered, getting laxer every year, had founded a Purity League.

A deputation from this august body requested an interview with the Resident, and when ushered into the Presence inquired sternly if he was aware that two well-known British visitors were ‘letting the side down' by publicly living-in-sin on a houseboat not far from the Residency. If so, what did he propose to do about it? — or, for that matter, about the shocking ‘goings-on' in
shikarras
and houseboats out at Gagribal Point and Nageem,
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the details of which could not be described, but could be attested to by members of the League who, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes, had combined to buy a telescope, with the aid of which they had been able to confirm their worst fears. In the opinion of the League, a bit more of this and the Raj would fall.