Golden Afternoon (29 page)

I can't remember how I acquired my first engagement ring. I don't
think
I passed on Mother's criticisms on the subject to Donald, and I have a strong feeling that it was actually Lady Maggie herself who took the poor young man aside and gave him a lecture on the subject, though I may be maligning her. But whoever was responsible, it resulted in my getting a temporary engagement ring in the form of Donald's signet ring — there being no European-style jeweller's shop in Kashmir, and Donald refusing to buy one of the Indian-style rings on offer. The signet ring was too big and kept slipping off my finger. And not surprisingly, what with Mother finding that there was something that she didn't quite like about his face, and Lady Maggie putting her oar in, the brief affair culminated in tears and high words and the return of the signet ring to its owner, and that was that. ‘Told you he'd think better of it,' said Bill briskly, adding, presumably by way of consolation, ‘Bad luck, old girl. Don't take it too hard. There's plenty more fish in the sea.'

It might have been expected that Bill's pessimistic view of my chances of acquiring a husband, added to the fact that I had already succeeded in losing a couple of ‘possibles', and endured the horrors of my first Residency dance and the shock of being loudly accused of theft and lying, would have cast a gloom over my first season in Kashmir. Yet I still look back on it with delight. The valley seemed to get more impossibly beautiful every day, and it was difficult to believe that I had ever thought it was ugly.

Lady Maggie, possibly suffering from a guilty conscience over the part she had played in putting paid to my brief engagement to Donald, invited me to stay with her and General Sir Andrew for a week on their houseboat at Ganderbal on the Jhelum, where His Highness the Maharajah had lent them one of his private
ghats
(moorings) for the summer. I think she may
have expected me to be nursing a wounded heart, and that a change of scene would do me good. If so, she was wasting her sympathy, for I can't remember losing much sleep over the ‘man who got away', and I had a lovely time at Ganderbal; going out painting with Lady Maggie — who like most visitors to Kashmir had become a keen amateur watercolourist — and meeting the many Indian officials of the state who came out to have lunch or tea with the Skeens. It was a nice, peaceful interlude; and since I sold every painting at the next Srinagar exhibition, a very lucrative one from my point of view.

Later on in the year, as Tacklow still had a certain amount of work to do relating to the group of twenty-one Rajputana states that included such fascinating names as Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bundi, Tonk and Jelawar, it had been arranged that he would spend a month or so in Tonk as the guest of a British couple who were in the service of the Nawab, from where he could pay a series of visits to the rulers of various other adjoining states; and since Mother wished to go with him but could not leave Bets and myself alone and unchaperoned at the Red House, the Howells very kindly stepped in and invited Bets and me to stay with them in the summertime Residency up in Gulmarg while our parents were away. Their offer was accepted with considerable gratitude by our parents, and delight from us, and Bets and I moved up there on the same day that our parents left — taking with them Kadera and Pozlo (from whom Tacklow refused to be parted), and leaving Mahdoo to keep an eye on the Red House.

The Gulmarg interlude was enormously enjoyable, and more than made up for that agonizing Residency dance. The Howells could not have been kinder, and the days passed at racing-car speed. Why, oh why do the days have to sweep past like a millrace when one is enjoying life, and crawl like a land tortoise when one is sad or unhappy? Every summer visitor in Gulmarg was on holiday and there was a dance or a dinner party every night, to which you rode on your
tat
(hill pony).

The place was a golfer's paradise, for the gently undulating
marg
was divided up into several different courses, and it was here that India's pros competed yearly for the ‘Hill Vase'. Neither Bets nor I played golf, but there were wonderful walks and rides round the Outer Circular Road and up through the pine-woods to Khilanmarg and Apharwat — yearly playgrounds of the Ski Club of India — or down through the forest to Ferozpur Nullah, where the little river that is fed by the glaciers of
Ferozpur Peak cuts its way through the rocks and the steep hillsides to wind down past Tanmarg on its way to join the Jhelum.

Here, in a wide pool below the neck of the
nullah
, one could fish for snow-trout, which would go straight into the pan to be fried over a fire of fir-cones and fallen deodar branches, as the main course of picnic lunches eaten on the sun-baked boulders by the waterside. The sunshine and smell of the pines and the woodsmoke, and the rushing sound of snow-water, acted as a powerful soporific, and most picnics ended with everyone falling asleep for most of the afternoon. We would wake when the sun left the
nullah
and the shadows and the blue-green snow-water brought a chill to the air, and ride back up through the woods to the Gap.

Alternatively, one could ride or walk up to picnics on Khilanmarg, the ‘Meadow of Goats', which is the long slope of open, grassy ground that marks the height at which the snow-line cuts off the forests as cleanly as with a sharp knife. From there you can look down on Gulmarg lying in its green, tree-fringed cup at your feet, or ahead at the whole sweep of the Kashmir valley, its shimmering lakes and the rampart of mountains that form its far wall. On a clear day, you can see the white cap of Haramokh, 16,900 feet above sea level, and the silver spear that is Kolahoi. Far to the right of both is the tiny white triangle that is K
₂
, the second highest mountain in the world. And, if you are fortunate, high up in the sky above the snow-line, and eighty miles distant across the valley, something that at first glance appears to be a small white cloud floating in the blue, but that you suddenly realize is a mountain. One of the most beautiful mountains in the world — Nanga Parbat, the ‘Naked Maiden'. She is only the eighth highest mountain in the world, being outranked, among others, by Everest, K
₂
, Kinchingunga and Dhwalagiri (a mountain I had never even heard of). But when she condescends to show herself, which is something she can be maddeningly capricious about, you can understand why she would have won the golden apple every time if the gods had held a beauty contest for mountains. The secret of her charm is that she has no competition. She is not hemmed in, as Everest and that other Naked Goddess, Nanda-Devi, are by a squad of ladies-in-waiting who make it difficult to see which one among them is the Queen. Nanga Parbat stands alone, enthroned in the sky a good 10,000 feet above her nearest neighbours in that stretch of the Outer Himalayan Range that faces Gulmarg.

Tourists, climbers, and mountain-fanciers by the thousand have travelled half-way round the world just to see her, to paint or photograph her, and have had to leave without catching so much as a glimpse of her. But luck was with us, for the sky was cloudless for almost the whole of our stay with the Howells, and when it rained it only did so at night. Day after day, in a clean washed sky, we would look out across the valley from the windows or the verandah of the Summer Residency and see that adorable mountain floating serenely in the blue; seeming so close that we felt it must be possible to hit her with the catapult that one of the
mali
's more junior assistants used to scare birds from robbing the kitchen gardens.

In those days, the
thé dansant
still flourished, and most evenings, riding back from some picnic among the woods or a walk across the
marg
, we would drop in at the Club — it was the original Club then, the old one near the polo ground — to drink tea and dance, before returning to bath and change and, on most evenings, ride out again either before or after dinner, depending on where we were dining, to dance until well after midnight at Nedou's Hotel or the Club, without a care in the world. That was a wonderful time; sun-soaked and pine-scented days, and moonlit or star-spangled nights, laughter and dancing, and a band playing hit tunes of the day — ‘I can't give you anything but love, Baby', ‘One alone', ‘The Birth of the Blues', ‘Me and My Shadow', and ‘Charmaine' — How well I remember them.

Looking back, I find it very hard to realize that in the eyes of history all those dancing years were no more than a very brief ‘half-time' between two devastating wars, and that so many of those light-hearted young men with whom I laughed and danced were fated to die in the jungles of Burma and Malaya, in Japanese prison camps or on the Death Railway; in North Africa and Greece and Italy; on the beaches of Dunkirk and Anzio, the Normandy landings and scores of other battlefields on land and sea and in the air. Perhaps it's just as well that we can't see into the future.

Mother returned from Rajputana and Bets and I from Gulmarg. Mother reporting that the Nawab of Tonk had set aside one of the official guest-houses for Tacklow's use, and that he and Pozlo had settled in very comfortably with a temporary staff. It was sad not to have them with us, but what with painting for the autumn art exhibition, taking part in yet another charity cabaret show, attending a resplendent ball thrown at the River Palace by H. H. of Kashmir, and Mother's chickens, we didn't have time to miss them over much.

The chickens were another of Mother's efforts to bolster up the Kaye bank balance, but they proved to be a disaster. Anxious to do her bit, she had been lured by one of her Kashmiri friends into buying a large number of day-old chicks, the idea being that she would in time be the owner of a thriving business, a sort of poultry-queen of Kashmir. Those enchanting balls of yellow fluff had indeed grown, in a remarkably short space of time, into a flock of boring chickens which had to be fed twice a day and needed a large number of wooden coops. But after ruining an outsize expanse of lawn, enclosed for their use and wrecked in what seemed a matter of minutes by their scratching up all the grass, the wretched creatures contracted a distressing malady peculiar to chickens, called ‘the gapes', and died one by one in no time at all. The whole thing
was reminiscent of the Black Death and the less said about it the better. Poor Mother! It had been an expensive venture and she wept buckets, both for the unfortunate chickens and the financial loss (she was sadly out of pocket), and blamed herself for not sticking to painting instead of trying her hand at poultry farming to jack up the family finances.

Watercolour sketching was not really in my line. I preferred children's book illustration, and found, to my pleased surprise, that the public bought the things — possibly because they were a change from endless pictures of ‘Sunset on the Dāl Lake' and ‘Apple-blossom-time in Kashmir'. That painfully twee painting of a couple of sleeping angels and a pear-tree in the moonlight, designed as a decoration for a verse entitled ‘Sleep Sweetly', was a huge success. The original had sold within a minute or two of the exhibition being opened, and demands for copies from a sentimental public kept me busy for weeks.

Over half a century later I came across the original pencil drawing of this piece of marshmallow, and on impulse traced it on to a bit of hot-press, painted it — plus verse — and put it into the Bexhill Art Exhibition (where it only narrowly avoided being blackballed by the Chairman of the Selection Committee). Once again it was bought almost immediately, this time by a summer visitor from Holland, who wrote to me on his return to the Netherlands to tell me how charmed he was by both picture and verse. He had, he said, hung it in his guest-room, where it had ‘drawn much admiration'.

I did, however, try my hand at sketching the Black Marble Pavilion in the Shalimar Gardens. Without much success. Mother and Bets were far better at this sort of thing than I was, and, recognizing that melancholy fact, I gave up trying to put Kashmir on paper and went back instead to book illustration, and to trying to describe it in long letters to friends back home. European writers, travellers, explorers and humble tourists by the thousand have attempted this ever since Marco Polo the Venetian lauded the beauty of Kashmir's women; when Thomas Moore wrote his potted drama
Lalla Rookh
, which caught the fancy of the early Victorians, he became one of the long procession of poets and writers who have written about that delectable country and will do so in the future, following in the footsteps of Francois Bernier, who visited the country in 1665 and was himself following Marco Polo.

Here are three more modern stories of the valley — the first one is dated 1925, only two years before I first saw it.

When the time came for the Old Maharajah — General His Highness Maharajah Sir Pratep Singh, ruler of Jammu and Kashmir since 1885 — to die, he did so in the Shergarhi Palace on the left bank of the Jhelum river and (as is customary with kings, who have little privacy), in the presence of a large number of ministers, relations, courtiers and priests. The windows of his room had been opened to help the dying man breathe, and a moment after he drew his last breath, a large moth that had been hiding somewhere in the draperies behind the royal bed fluttered out and flew through the open windows. The story goes that someone in the room said in an awed whisper: ‘It is his soul,' and that those who leant from the windowsill to watch its progress as it dipped down to skim across the placid surface of the Jhelum saw a large fish rise with a swirl and a splash, and take it. Afterwards, an order was given that held in my day and for all I know still does, forbidding all fishing for a certain distance up-stream and down from the spot where the moth had met its end, for fear that someone might catch and eat the fish that had swallowed His Highness's soul.