Golden Afternoon (3 page)

We leaned side by side on the balcony rail, drinking in the sight and the sounds and the smell of Calcutta, as though we were a pair of parched travellers in a desert, who had stumbled at long last on an oasis and were slaking our thirst at a pool of cool water. The voice of the city drifted up to us like the sound of a vast orchestra tuning up before a concert: a joyous, muted medley of sounds made up of
tonga
-bells, the cries of street-vendors, horses' hooves and the horns of motor cars, buses and lorries, trams and train whistles; the blare of conchs from a score of temples and the remembered beat of tom-toms; the distant strains of a
fu-fu
band accompanying some bridegroom to his wedding; the cawing of crows, the shouts of children, and the nearer racket and chatter of birds coming home to roost in the nearby trees.

The familiar sounds, backed by the continuous muffled roar of traffic on Chowringhi, blended together into a purring hum like the drone of bees among heather-bloom on a hot summer afternoon, or the crash and drag of waves on a pebble beach. And as the swift green twilight fell and the city began to sparkle with lights, the garden below us awoke to a shimmer of fireflies, while overhead, legions of the fruit-bats which hang up to sleep all day among the trees awoke and flapped silently away to conduct their nightly raids on the orchards that lie beyond the outskirts of the city. And presently the moon rose, its size impossibly exaggerated by the veils of dust and the smoke from cooking-fires. That familiar moon of other days, rising in the dusk to welcome me back …

It was a wonderful homecoming. Better than anything I had pictured. For I have to admit that there were times when I had been afraid that, if I
should
ever have the luck to get back to the land of my birth and childhood, I might find that memory had cheated me and it wasn't in the least as I had pictured it. Or that Time had changed it out of all recognition. I don't think it had occurred to me that what children want most of loved and familiar people and places is that they should remain unchanged.

Most people who have had happy childhoods are afraid of change, and I was no exception. But I was also one of the lucky ones, for I had returned home after nine long years to find — against all the odds — that the happy highways of my recollection had not changed. They were still there. Just as I remembered them. Which is why I can truly say that among so many cherished memories, I count the memory of that particular day among the very best; because it was a dream come true, and therefore touched with authentic magic. A magic, moreover, that did not vanish with the morning; though as I lay listening to all the well-remembered sounds of an Indian dawn — sounds that I had awakened to daily for the first ten years of my life — I began to panic about how I was going to make out as a grown-up.

Judging from my performance on the
City of London
, I was doomed to be an outstanding social flop. For there was an aspect of my return which, in the euphoria of finding that the miracle I had prayed for so long had actually been granted me, I had not given sufficient thought to. If any. The fact that I was bringing back with me something that I had certainly
not possessed when I left Bombay as a skinny ten-year-old. An inferiority complex.

I have told in
The Sun in the Morning
how, on arrival at my first boarding-school, I was pronounced by a mid-Victorian doctor and an equally bigoted and outdated Matron to be
much
too thin: unhealthily so. I needed ‘fattening up'. (Shades of Hansel and Gretel!) And fattened up I was. Systematically stuffed like some hapless Strasburg goose, and dosed three times a day with large spoonfuls of some sickly-sweet goo that was a mixture of malt and cod-liver oil.

Since this regime was approved by our guardian, Aunt Bee,
^*
it was continued throughout the holidays, with the result that I soon put on weight. And then too much weight. So much that my brother Bill, after the manner of brothers, took to calling me ‘Fatty' or ‘Old Piano Legs'. This in an epoch when for the first time in recorded history, women had cut down on petticoats, shortened their previously long skirts to above the knee, chopped off their hair and shingled it, and, disowning such curves as hips, waists and bosoms, endeavoured to look as much as possible like skinny schoolboys in drag.

The 1920s were the heyday of the thin-to-scrawny woman, and although, thanks to the fact that I had been seasick almost non-stop from the day that the
City of London
entered the Bay of Biscay, I could no longer be classed as a ‘fatty', I was still painfully conscious of being an unsophisticated podge who had never yet attended a dance (no discos in those days). This feeling had been strongly reinforced by my failure to attract so much as a speculative glance from any of the many young men on the
City of London
, though every other girl on board seemed to have managed it with ease.

But in the event I need not have panicked, for the week we spent in Calcutta turned out to be one long, glorious party. The Tegarts were a deservedly popular couple and Lady Tegart, Thomas' to her friends, was a notable hostess who could not help giving her guests a good time.

She took us to the races, and to dine at Firpos and the Saturday Club. To swim and have breakfast at Tollygunj, and for an all-day picnic on the Hoogly in a police launch, from which we returned by moonlight to the romantic strains of a portable wind-up gramophone playing records
by such contemporary heart-throbs as Rudy Vallee and ‘Whispering Jack Smith'. I remember that one of the songs was, inevitably, ‘Moonlight and Roses', an old favourite that, to this day, still crops up on radio programmes featuring dance tunes from the long-ago twenties. Also that one of the young men in the party held my hand for most of the return journey, an attention that thrilled me to the core until I discovered that he had fallen asleep. Well, at least he had been awake when he took it, so someone had actually made a tentative pass at me, and landing from that launch I walked on air.

Among a multitude of new faces I can only put a name to two of the young men who had been roped in by Thomas Tegart to partner us at dinners and dances, and the only reason I remember those two was because they happened to be look-alike twins, although they bore different surnames: ‘Ike', the elder by a short head, being at that time a Viscount, while his twin was merely an ‘Hon', later to marry Barbara Jacomb-Hood, the child who had danced the Egyptian dance in the ‘Pageant', an amateur entertainment in Simla that I wrote about at some length in
The Sun in the Morning.
All the other names have escaped me. Yet I can still remember in great detail the dress I wore for my first dance at the Saturday Club …

Like all our dresses, this one had been made up by one of those invaluable ‘little women round the corner' who used to support themselves by dressmaking and were the prop and stay of all of us who could not afford to buy ready-made clothes — let alone
couturier
-designed dresses! I had designed it myself and actually succeeded, after prolonged pleading, in persuading Mother to allow me to have it made up in black net and taffeta. It had been no easy victory, since Mother (strongly supported by Aunt Bee) held the view that black was an ‘unsuitable' colour for a young girl. Only married women and middle-aged-to-old ones should wear it. The young should wear white, or pale colours. The paler the better.

Undeterred, I stuck to my guns, pointing out that since black was known to be unkind to a poor or an ageing skin, but complimentary to a young one, why wait until I reached an age where it made me older and sallower instead of using it now to show off one of my few really good points, which was a pretty good line in complexions? Besides, black was also considered to be slimming, an invaluable plus in my opinion, since I was well aware that I veered towards podginess; and pale pink and baby blue merely emphasized that unfortunate fact. All of which, in my opinion,
added up to the conviction that now was the time to wear black and look good in it.

These arguments eventually prevailed, and the dress was made up in a daring new design: short in front (an inch or two above the knee was still obligatory at that time, which was bad luck for those with unattractive legs), but dipping down on each side to reach, with the assistance of a wide hem of black net, ankle length at the sides and the back. It also boasted a tight-fitting bodice, with the thinnest of thin shoulder-straps and a sweetheart neckline edged with a frill of the same net. It was a resounding success. Mother was still doubtful —
black
… and while I was still in my teens! I might well (horrors!) get a reputation for being
fast
! But Thomas, bless her for ever, gave it her enthusiastic approval, and in it I felt gloriously grown-up and sophisticated and, in some odd way, almost as if I had put on a different identity and was as successfully disguised as someone wearing fancy dress at a masked ball.

I needed something like that to get me through the evening, because in those days I did not possess so much as a shred of self-confidence, and was painfully and humiliatingly gauche. It does not seem to have occurred to my unworldly parents that since they presumably hoped that Bets and I would find husbands for ourselves in the shortest possible time, it would have been a good idea to see that we were taught a few elementary social graces — such as how to dance, for instance. Our dancing lessons at school had been of a fairly high standard, but they had not included ballroom dancing, although that would have proved a far more useful accomplishment to most of us (certainly to me!) than ballet classes. As it was, I hadn't a
clue
how to dance the Charleston, let alone a foxtrot, two-step or tango, and the only reason why I had a vague idea of how to waltz was because that particular dance had featured in an end-of-term school play set in Victorian days, in which I had taken part.

I had to learn all these things the hard way: by practical demonstration, pushed or propelled by young men, most of whom didn't know much more about it than I did. Bets, a born dancer, fared better, and my partners were all kind enough to apologize each time I stumbled or trod on their toes, as if it was their fault and not mine. I could have
hit
them! However, buoyed up by the sight of my reflection in that flattering and sophisticated dress, and by the attention that it received, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening.

This was an India I had only caught glimpses of before and with which I had hitherto had nothing whatever to do — the India of the Raj at play. Mother's India, for which she had dressed in those pretty silks and satins,
crěpes de Chine
and marocaines I used to admire so much when she kissed Bets and me goodnight in the nursery, or waved goodbye from the rickshaw that was taking her to a garden party or a luncheon or a race meeting at Annandale. No wonder she had been so delighted at the prospect of returning to it! I had no idea one could have so much fun. Or that it was so heavenly to be grown-up.

That dance at the Saturday Club was the first grown-up one I had ever attended — if one discounts the occasional ‘gramophone-hops' on the deck of the
City of London
(very few of which I had been able to attend because of seasickness) — and because I had enjoyed it, the weight of that terrifying inferiority complex that I had acquired at Portpool, the first of my two English boarding-schools, and had never been able to shed, began to lighten a trifle. In consequence, I had a lovely time in Calcutta.

There were, however, several flies in my delicious pot of honey. One, a mere gnat, was the slightly disturbing fact that Mother had once again (as she had done almost nightly on board ship) gone back on her decision that Bets would not be allowed to attend any dinners or dances until she was seventeen. Instead, she had wavered and said, ‘Well — just this
once
!' Which was lovely for Bets, but to me an ominous repetition of the ‘bra and high-heels syndrome' that had soured my school days. I had begged to be allowed to wear these and other status symbols of approaching young-ladyhood (such as make-up and flesh-coloured silk stockings) but had been firmly told that I was stiller
too
young and must ‘wait until I was older'. Yet no sooner had I achieved that necessary age limit than Bets, a full two years my junior, was immediately accorded them too. Now here it was again, and I have to confess that it made me uneasy, for I foresaw complications ahead.

A more obtrusive fly was a justifiable fear of putting on weight. For my parents had a great many Indian friends in Calcutta with whom we lunched or dined or attended receptions, and in their homes we ate once more the spicy food that I had missed so sorely during my years of exile in England.

The gulf between the delicious, spicy food of Asia and the bland diet of mashed or baked potatoes, over-boiled vegetables and tasteless stews,
followed by tapioca, rice, suet or bread puddings, which British boarding-schools (and Aunt Bee) considered just the thing for ‘growing girls', was ocean-wide, and one of the chief joys of being back in India again was being able to eat
Raan
and
Shahjahanibiriani
again, not to mention
balushahi
and other
halwas
(sweets). But I feared the effect they might have on my vital statistics, improved out of all knowledge by that abominable seasickness which, by the time we landed, had succeeded in removing well over a stone off my weight, so that for the first time in years I was no longer a fatty but the proud possessor of a comparatively slim figure. This, assisted by the flattering hemline of that black taffeta outfit (which was, at that date, revolutionary enough to make heads turn), plus the joyful fact that Mother had had to take the bodice in by inches, gave me the illusion of being fashionably shaped as well as fashionably dressed and did wonders for my exceedingly fragile morale.

The third, and by far the largest fly in my ointment — an outsized bluebottle of a fly — was the devastating discovery that I had forgotten nearly all the Hindustani that I had once spoken with far more fluency than my mother tongue.