Golden Afternoon (36 page)

The air changed and became cooler and the hillsides greener and more leafy as we left the plains behind; and soon we were among the pines and the familiar sights and scents of my enchanted childhood: ferns and pine-needles and wafts of the delicious scent of the wild climbing roses that the garden centres call ‘Himalayan Musk'. Presently we saw the signpost that marks the turn leading upwards to Kasauli and Sanawar, and the one that leads down to Dugshai — the little military cantonment to which Tacklow had been posted on his arrival in India as a raw young ‘griffen' in 1889. From there he would cross the Kalka–Simla road, and climb the steep hillside above it to sit and study for his language exams in the peace and quiet of a small British cemetery that dated back to East India Company days, when Sir Henry Lawrence, of Mutiny fame, first established a school for the sons of army men in Sanawar.

The Dâk and PWD bungalows, which had been built a day's march apart for the convenience of travellers, and the bazaars of little hill villages that now boasted ramshackle but surprisingly efficient garages where petrol was sold by the can, were unchanged. And so too, when at last the road parted from the Jatogue tunnel and swept round the slope of the mountain, was Simla …

We stopped the cars at the edge of the road and sat there staring at it, finding it difficult to believe that we were seeing it again, and that after those nine long years of exile it had not changed. There it lay, sprawled
along the top of a ridge of the foothills and bright in the evening sunlight, with its bazaars pouring down to the valley below in a cascade of flat tin rooftops, and the pine- and deodar-clad heights above it dotted with the houses, hotels and offices of
Sahib-log
and rich Indians. There was Christ Church, standing out ivory white against a backdrop of trees and buildings; and there, at the opposite end of the town, perched up on a hilltop, was that Victorian monstrosity, Viceregal Lodge, its windows, like many others from Summer Hill to Chota Simla, glittering like diamonds as they caught the late afternoon sunlight.

Tacklow had arranged for us to stay at the Grand Hotel in the ‘Cottage', a wooden building separate from the rest of the hotel which was built out on a hilltop at one end of the central section of Simla. The public rooms, the entrance hall, sitting- and dining-room and so forth, were on a comparatively level plot of ground. But from there the rest rose up sharply, the guest-rooms, bisected by the steepest of drives, rising with it in tiers on either side. The most convenient rooms were those nearest the public rooms, and the best ones, though approached by a steep walk (up which the older, stouter and less agile guests preferred to let their rickshaw-coolies pull them), were the suites built on the flat of the hill, from where the views were superb. The cottage, however, lay some way below these, and could have been visible to them only as an area of red-painted corrugated-tin roofs; for the drive, having reached the crest of the hill, dived sharply downwards for a couple of hundred yards to end at the front door of the cottage, which had been built to fit neatly on to a flat-topped bit of rocky ground that jutted out of the hillside. The building, like most of those in Simla, was constructed out of the lightest possible materials, wood and tin, and this one had the usual corrugated-tin roof and was surrounded by a wide, glassed-in verandah, from the edge of which one looked straight down a terrifyingly long drop on to the tops of trees and the roofs of other houses built far below. We were, in fact, perched upon the top of a small hiccup of rock on an exceedingly steep hillside.

I had not been allergic to heights during the first fifteen or sixteen years of my life, and could not understand it when I suffered a bad attack of vertigo while climbing a smallish mountain in Switzerland called Mont Cray, whose name is graven into my memory when much else has left no mark. I had suddenly found, when nearing the top, that I couldn't move, hand or foot, and had to be escorted down, inch by inch, by two
infuriated members of the party who had wanted to reach the summit. I have seldom felt so humiliated. But though looking down from the edge of our verandah brought back a horrid memory of Mont Cray, earlier memories of playing in the garden of Chillingham, and similar Simla gardens poised on the edge of precipices, helped me to get over it; and after the first day or two I ceased to worry. This, after all, was where I came in …

The ‘cottage' consisted of a round, single-storey building with a large and somewhat dark centre room, out of which the bedrooms and bathrooms led, and since the road that led down to it was a cul-de-sac, and we took all our meals except tea in the hotel's dining-room, you can see that in order to eat, shop, visit friends or go for walks, we were faced with a stiff climb to the top of our cul-de-sac, followed by an equally steep descent down to the dining-room or the town, and the same in reverse when we returned to our eyrie. The result was admirable. We all became beautifully svelte.

Immediately after breakfast on the morning after our arrival, Bets and I set out to explore and were enormously relieved to discover how little Simla had changed. Everything was just as we had left it, with two notable exceptions. As in old Delhi, too many of the shopkeepers on the Mall whom we had been on familiar terms with had retired or moved away or died, while their children with whom we had played had grown up and married; the girls to leave home and become mothers of large families, and their brothers to attend colleges or acquire wives and jobs in far-away metropolises such as Calcutta and Bombay. We had forgotten that nine years is a very long time in the East, where children are often betrothed while still in short socks, and are married and have children of their own at an age when a western child would still be struggling with homework.

None of the older generation, all of whom were now grandparents, even great-grandparents, recognized us, and only a handful remembered us — or pretended to do so. The only noticeable exception was one of the men who worked in the ‘waxwork' shop, who, long ago, we would watch by the hour together as they patterned pieces of plain dark cloth intended as wall-hangings, cushion-covers or shawls, with lotus lilies and sprigs of blossom, and a gaudy assortment of birds, bees and butterflies. Even he did not immediately recognize us, but after we had reintroduced ourselves, and possibly because we had once been such dedicated admirers
of his skill, he managed to recall us well enough to ask after Punj-ayah, our long-suffering but much loved ayah.

As for the kids we used to race down the one-in-one slope of the Lucker-Bazaar hill on our way to school at Auckland House, they were all grown men — fathers of families and heads of households, and totally unrecognizable. The only other way in which Simla had changed was its size. The place had shrunk. I had thought of it as a very large town. The distance between Scandal Point and the Cecil Hotel, for instance, or Harvington to the Bandstand on the Ridge — which I used to walk six days a week, there and back, when in the care of the dreaded Nurse Lizzie — had seemed an enormous distance to the short legs of a child. Yet now they were no distance at all. A fifteen-minute walk at most. The Town Hall, which I remembered as an imposing building, was nothing to write home about, while as for the Gaiety Theatre, on whose boards Bets and I had pranced and danced in so many children's shows, it was
tiny
. How
could
we have fitted the entire dancing class on to it for the rainbow ballet in
The Lost Colour
, one of the last children's plays that I had appeared in before being shipped ‘home' to England and boarding-school?

I was to spend part of three separate ‘Seasons' in Simla. But since I never kept a diary or any written record of my life, I cannot, at this date, be any too certain what year this or that happened in, or in what order. For which reason I shall steer clear of dates. What I
am
clear about are the events of that first return to the much-loved town in which I was born.

Sandy Napier, a schoolfriend of my brother Bill's, who spent much of his school holidays with us and had come to be regarded as a member of the family and a brother-by-adoption, was also in Simla that year, having been made an ADC to the Governor of the Punjab. So was Bob Targett, and a number of other friends from Delhi. And, of course, ‘Buckie' — Sir Edward Buck, Head of Reuter's and still greatly loved by all the children of his friends, as he had been when Bets and I were small.

Buckie — or to be accurate, the Times Press in Bombay — had just published a revised and more up-to-date version of
Simla Past and Present
, a book he had written over twenty years before at the bidding of Lord Curzon, one of the earlier Viceroys of India, who had just discovered that the house he was living in had originally been lived in by that excellent author, artist and Queen of Snobs, the Lady Emily Eden — sister of the deplorable Governor-General, Lord Auckland, who back in the days of
the East India Company had, almost single-handed, brought about the disastrous Afghan war of 1840–42. Lord Curzon, who had evidently read and enjoyed Emily's chatty and catty account of her time in India, wanted a book about the Simla of her day and his, and Buckie had duly come up with one, which he dedicated to Curzon. The reprint, much updated, was dedicated to another, and more recent Viceroy, Lord Reading …

To anyone interested in the history of a town — once made world-famous by the tales that were written about it by a young newspaper reporter by the name of Rudyard Kipling (see
Plain Tales from the Hills
and
Kim
), Buckie's
Simla Past and Present
is a must, and I was charmed to see the updated version prominently displayed in every bookshop one passed. Buckie himself had retreated to his beloved house, Dukani, perched on its hilltop some six miles outside Simla, above the little village of Mashobra. When at last Bets and I got around to paying him a visit, we left our rickshaws on the mule-track behind Oaklands, the house in which as children we had spent two happy summers, and instead of going on by road, we climbed up from there by the almost invisible goat-track which had been our favourite way of reaching Dukani in the old days.

Buckie was at home, and delighted to see us; as was his old head-
mali
, Kundun, and Kundun's
bibi
(wife), both of whom, apart from some grey hairs, were surprisingly unchanged. Dukani too had not changed — though like Simla, it had shrunk a bit in the course of time. I had remembered it as much larger. The bunches of violets that patterned the wallpaper in the guest-room in which Bets and I had always slept when we visited Buckie of old were a bit faded, and blotched here and there with the faint stains of damp. But otherwise we could have occupied it only yesterday. The lower verandah was still banked with the pots of cinerarias that had always been Kundun's pride, and Buckie's cluttered study was reassuringly familiar.

We spent a wonderful afternoon there, and when the time came to leave, Buckie said that we must sign his guest-book — a bulky volume that took up a lot of space on his overcrowded desk, and was full of the names of those he had entertained at Dukani during the years. Many of those names were famous, or have become famous. But what interested me most were certain topical verses by Tacklow that had appeared in the comments column of the guest-book to mark various weekend visits by my parents. I wish I'd had the sense to ask Buckie if I could copy them out, but I didn't think of it. It was pushed out of my mind by an intriguing
coincidence that still fascinates me. Buckie had said: ‘Let's look back and see when you two last visited me; it's bound to be here.'

It was. There were our names in handwriting that was still childish and unformed. But what made it startling was the date, which, except for a single numeral in the year, was the same as the one we had only just written after our names on the current page of the guest-book. We had returned to Dukani ten years to the day after our farewell visit in 1918. We stood and stared at it unbelievingly, and a little later, walking back down the narrow hill path to our old home, Oaklands, we both half expected to meet ourselves round every turn — two small girls in short brown dresses, brown strap-shoes and khaki
topis
(those large pith-helmets that all
ferengis
wore as a protection against heat-stroke) — scrambling up the familiar goat-track to play in Buckie's garden with Kundun's latest baby; as, somewhere back in time, we are certainly still occasionally doing.

That we should join the Amateur Dramatic Club goes without saying. After all, both of us, and Mother before us, had appeared on the boards of the Gaiety Theatre a good many times already. And though compared to the vast expanse of stage that we remembered it seemed to have shrunk to the size of a pocket handkerchief, Simla would not have been Simla without it. So naturally we joined the players, and appeared in our first grown-up play in walk-on parts. Mine consisted of a few lines of the ‘Madam is not at ‘ome ziz morning' genre (I played a French maid) and we don't think Bets spoke at all. As far as we can remember she merely delivered a parcel from a dress-shop, and that was that. But we were jointly responsible for designing the costumes and the set, and we really went to town on that.

The play, entitled
Vanity
, was about a spoilt musical comedy star who gets her come-uppance (that's all I remember about the plot), and the action throughout took place in the drawing-room of her flat in Mayfair. This gave us a lovely chance to discard a rough sketch put forward as a suggestion by an old acquaintance of ours, Mr de la Rue Brown, the manager of the Gaiety. The ‘de la Rue' had been suggested many years ago by some humorist commenting on the manager's habit of standing outside the door into the green-room, which gave on to the Mall, smoking a long cheroot for the larger part of the day. Brown had instantly adopted it. No one knew how old he was, but he had been the manager in Kipling's
day, and according to himself, for many years before that. He had always seemed to us to look as old as Rip Van Winkle, and he still did. He hadn't changed a whisker. What's more, he was still the old tyrant he had always been. Fortunately he had a soft spot for us, and did not raise too much fuss when we vetoed his suggestion for the standing set, and substituted one that, believe it or not, was considered positively daring.