Golden Afternoon (4 page)

Why it had never occurred to me before that I might have done so, I don't know. Presumably, I took it for granted that speaking a language was like riding a bicycle — once learned never forgotten — so that it must all still be there, stored up in some secure compartment in my brain and ready to bounce out as soon as I wanted it. I do remember thinking that if, by some miracle, I was able to get back to India one day, even if my pronunciation were a bit rusty, the moment I heard people speaking Hindustani again it would all come flooding back to me. This confident assumption was probably based on the fact that whenever I groped for a word in French, it invariably presented itself to me in Hindustani, something that I suspect happened to very many of us ‘children of the Raj', for I well remember a young ex-Indian Army friend of mine, who had assured me that he could speak French fluently, entering a shop in Marseilles in search of a hat and announcing to a bewildered saleslady that, ‘
Hum eck
chapeau
mungta
' (‘I one hat want').

To find myself in the same situation with regard to Hindustani was a nasty shock. And I am ashamed to say that, try as I would, I never again learned to speak it so that I could have passed as a native of the country, but remained at best a speaker of ‘
memsahib's Hindustani-bhat
', the result, I presume, of having a poor musical ear. I could always understand a
great deal more than I could speak though, and I remember Mother, whose vocabulary was considerably larger than mine, being incensed when, many years later, her bearer, Kaderalone,
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who, like all our servants, spoke no English, complained that he did not understand something she had told him, and that he proposed to get ‘
Mollie-missahib
' to translate it for him, because she spoke much better Hindustani. I didn't, of course: I merely attacked it at a gallop, gabbling it at twice the speed and far more colloquially. I have always spoken too fast (and too much) but it sounded OK to him.

Nowadays, few people will admit to speaking Hindustani, and the very name of that useful language is becoming forgotten. Those who remember it like to pretend that it was merely a bastardized form of Kitchen-Urdu, the invention of memsahibs who could not be bothered to learn the languages of the country. In fact, it came into being with the conquest of India by the Moguls — Tartars, Mongolians and Pathans who spoke a mixture of Arabic, Pushtu and Farsee (Persian). This mixture of Urdu and Hindi became in time the lingua franca of the land, and to this day, whenever I return to that great subcontinent that was all ‘India' in my time, if I happen to be in the section that is still India today, old friends in the bazaars say, ‘Ah! I see that the memsahib has not forgotten her Hindi!' and when I cross the border into what is now Pakistan they say, ‘It is good that you still speak Urdu!' I don't, of course. What I am actually speaking — and badly — is Hindustani.

From Calcutta we went on, up-country to Lucknow, leaving by train from Howra Station in the dusty evening, as twilight was falling and lamps were being lit.

The line ran through suburbs where the rich merchants of the East India Company had once lived in pillared and porticoed Georgian houses, shaded by lush green gardens full of banyan, palm and gold-mohur trees, mango groves and bananas and tall thickets of bamboo. These stately mansions had long since fallen into decay and were now little more than slum dwellings, divided into innumerable flatlets or bedsitting-rooms occupied by colonies of Indians and Eurasians who worked in the city as clerks, typists, shop assistants or waiters in one or other of the many hotels.
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By daylight one could have seen the shabbiness and decay that the years had inflicted on these once gracious houses, the discoloured stucco and flaking plaster, the fallen pillars; the lines of washing hung up between the over-grown trees; the
charpoys
on the flat rooftops where many residents slept out under the night skies while the weather remained hot, and the scuffed grass where hens, goats and cattle scratched and grazed on what had once been wide lawns and scented flowerbeds. But in the kindly dusk the scars became invisible, and stateliness returned to the tall white buildings whose pillared porticoes and wide verandahs one could glimpse through the crowding palm trunks, making them appear beautiful again; as beautiful and romantic as the castle of Hans Andersen's sleeping princess seen through the encroaching briar roses. Dusk hid the dirt and decay, and the bamboo branches shimmered with fireflies.

I watched, enchanted, as the train rattled through these once opulent suburbs, for it was as if I were seeing the city as it was in the days of Warren Hastings and Wellesley, William Hickey and Rose Aylmer — poor, pretty Rose who lies buried in Calcutta's Park Street Cemetery, and will always be remembered because Walter Savage Landor wrote two short verses that were engraved upon her tombstone:

In Lucknow we stayed for four days in Government House as guests of Sir William Marris, an old friend of Tacklow's who was at that time the Governor of the United Provinces. I remember that Bets and I were awestruck at seeing our names in two daily newspapers, the
Pioneer
and the
Civil and Military Gazette.
They figured in a couple of identical paragraphs in columns headed ‘The Viceregal Court', which announced briefly that ‘Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye, Miss Kaye and Miss Betty Kaye arrived at Government House, Lucknow on Tuesday afternoon.'

Years later, after Tacklow was dead, I was to stay for some time in this same house with a later Governor, who was also a friend of his, and my recollection of that second visit is a good deal clearer than that of the first one — which remains in my memory as a period of acute embarrassment. This was because Sir William's ADCs appeared to consider it their duty to entertain us by endless games of tennis. (Not for nothing was ‘Anyone for tennis?' a favourite catchphrase of the Roaring Twenties.) They simply would not believe that I, for one, wasn't. Of
course
I played tennis.
Everyone
played tennis! Well, if they did, I was obviously the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, I have never been able to hit or catch anything that is thrown at me. I believe this is because I have one shutter missing in my range of sight, and I was once given a technical description of this, plus the Latin name of the condition, but did not really grasp what it was all about, except that I lose sight of the
ball, or any object moving towards me, for a fraction of a second, and, as a result, I haven't a clue where it is going to land.

However, this did not let me off the hook, and those tennis sessions proved a blood-curdling embarrassment to me — made all the worse by whichever ADC had been unlucky enough to draw me as a partner apologizing to me for what were plainly my mistakes … ‘Sorry, partner — I should have taken that one — not your fault/etc., etc. Oh dear! His Excellency's ADCs gallantly took it in turns to partner me; and Bets (no Helen Wills, but a more than adequate player) and her partner invariably defeated me and mine.

The only redeeming features of the visit were, as far as I was concerned, the obligatory sightseeing tours that were laid on for guests at Government House. For this was beautiful, garish, decadent Lucknow, the city that Kipling described as being ‘the centre of all idleness, intrigue and luxury'. Here, memories of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 were still green — so much so that there was still an old retired soldier attached to the staff in charge of the ruins of the old Residency, a white-whiskered veteran who seventy years previously had, as a drummer-boy, actually served there during the famous siege; while among the caretakers was an ancient, white-bearded Indian who had been a mere
chokra
(boy) in the service of the
Sahib-log
during that fateful summer, and who remembered the arrival of General Havelock's relief force — the one that had been meant to raise the siege, but which had ended up joining the beleaguered garrison and standing siege themselves.

The years had been kind to these ancient gentlemen, both the English one and the Indian. The one-time drummer-boy (who could not have been more than ten years old at the time of the Mutiny) still wore the scarlet coat of Victoria's army with, proudly pinned upon it, the campaign medals of a past century. His particular charge was the cemetery in which so many of the besieged British, including Sir Henry Lawrence, were buried, and he told me, in a hoarse aside, that in fact the cemetery, in addition to being heavily shelled during the siege, was subsequently dug up and desecrated after the remnants of the original garrison, together with the force that had hoped to relieve them, were forced to withdraw from Lucknow under cover of darkness and retreat to Cawnpore. This meant that when, almost a year later, Lucknow was finally retaken by the British, no one really had the least idea who had been buried where, or to whom the scattered bones and skulls had once belonged. So most of
the Mutiny gravestones I had seen were no more than guesswork, and highly unlikely to match the remains of the men and women who were buried under them; a gruesome detail that I was to verify a good many years later when I was doing the research for
Shadow of the Moon.

I had been told tales of the ‘Black Year' ever since I was a small child in Old Delhi, so I was fascinated to come across relics of it here. Although by this time I had of course read Sir John Kaye's account of that rising,
The History of the Sepoy War
, it did not include the full story of Lucknow because he had got no further than the relief of Delhi when he died, leaving his readers with the fate of the besieged Residency in Lucknow still unknown.
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I wandered all over the ruined Residency, trying to picture it as it must have looked when the old man with the white beard, who had elected to stay within the defences and continue to serve the
Sahib-log
, had been young, and the ex-drummer-boy, now acting as custodian of the cemetery, had been a ten-year-old fighting alongside other schoolboys inside these bullet-riddled and shell-shattered ruins. For the pupils of La Martinière, the only school (it survives today) that can boast of a battle honour, had taken refuge in the Residency and stood siege there, fighting and dying beside their house and form masters.

Ten years earlier there had been many citizens of Delhi who could remember the Mutiny, and when I was a child a large number of them had told me enthralling stories about those days. But it was more than exciting to find that here in Lucknow, and guarding the ruins of a building that had once been the British Residency in the final days of the East India Company, there were two people who had actually seen it all happen and could describe it to me: men who had seen Sir Henry Lawrence, Lady Inglis of the diaries, the irascible Mr Gubbins, and young Second-Lieutenant Bonham of the Artillery, who was wounded four times and whose son would one day marry my husband's Aunt Lily.

I could not hear enough. But H. E.'s Private Secretary and the ADCs, who had accompanied us, had taken too many visitors around the Mutiny sights and were, by this time, plainly bored stiff by the whole business. And since I was much too shy to stick my toes in and keep them waiting, we were hurried away far too soon and it was not until thirteen years
later that, staying once more at Government House, this time with another Governor, I was presented with a piece of information, in the form of an unpublished letter that must still, I imagine, be preserved among the Government House archives, which was to result, after another long interval, in my writing the first of my three historical novels,
Shadow of the Moon.

Strangely enough, my memory-bank has recorded two quite separate Government Houses, neither of them bearing the slightest resemblance to the other, despite the fact that there had apparently been no alteration to either house or garden — give or take a few trees that had fallen or been cut down in the interval between that first visit and the next. Odd. I wish I could account for this, but I can't.