Golden Afternoon (44 page)

I don't think any of us caught the name, which had been distinctly mumbled. (It sounded like ‘Gazi' and turned out to be Guernsey.) The Colonel explained that he and Mike were staying at Nedou's Hotel for a few days, and pressed us to return there and have luncheon with them. Which in the end we did.

Mike Something turned out to be a charmer, and from the start we all got on tremendously well together — as we had with Andy and Enid. So it was no surprise when he and Colonel Henslow turned up at Chota Nageem the next day announcing that they couldn't wait to exchange their rooms at Nedou's for a houseboat, and asking for advice. Mike was fascinated by the H. B.
Carlton
, which he compared most favourably to the boredom of living in hotel rooms. But while he prowled enthusiastically through the houseboat, and fraternized with the Andersons and their sealyham (the little dog had greeted him as an old friend, for Mike, like
Tacklow, was good with animals), the Colonel took the opportunity of having a private talk with my parents, on the excuse of wanting to be taken on a tour of the island.

He felt he had to explain, before letting things go any further, why he and Mike happened to be putting up at Nedou's Hotel instead of — as might have been expected — at the Residency, or in one of the state guest-houses or houseboats which were normally put at the disposal of any visiting VIPs, from Members of Parliament or the peerage to film stars on holiday.

The fact of the matter was that Mike was, officially, in dire disgrace and in consequence travelling more or less incognito. (Hence the name by which he had been introduced, which was a secondary title and the one by which he had been known until he succeeded to the earldom, for he was in fact the Earl of Aylesford.) He was also, to all intents and purposes, ‘out on parole' in the custody of the Colonel, with orders to keep a low profile and do nothing to attract the attentions of the press — or anyone else! — until such a time as his family, and the Army, were prepared to pretend that his misdeeds had been forgotten, and that it would be safe for him to return home.

Poor Mike! He told me the whole story in detail later on, and I laughed myself into hiccups over it though I could clearly see why the Establishment and his family must have wanted to wring his neck. But then I could also see Mike's point of view because my darling Tacklow, that most unmilitary of men, had also been ordered into the Army against his will. There had been some excuse for this in Tacklow's day, when Victoria was still firmly on the throne and the children of Victorian parents did what they were told and that was that! But I found it hard to believe that the same sort of thing was possible in my own day and age.

Mike's family, however — not to mention his relations and godparents — had taken it for granted that he would follow his late father's footsteps and serve in the same regiment. He had, he assured me, put in a plaintive protest, because he didn't think he was suited to a military career and had been considering becoming an explorer. But this had been brushed aside, and he ended up as a subaltern in whatever regiment his father had served in. Once there, he discovered that he had been dead right in thinking that the army was not for him. He was the squarest of square pegs in a round hole and it was not long before he lined up in front of his CO and asked for permission to send in his papers and leave the Army.

He swore that he had not expected any serious opposition. But his family and relatives appear to have thrown a collective fit, and followed it up by a series of harrowing scenes that began with ‘Don't talk rubbish, boy', and advanced to an incredulous ‘Have you taken leave of your senses?' before descending rapidly to anger, arguments and a general shouting match and ending, inevitably, in tears and pleas of ‘Think of me', ‘Think of
us
', ‘Think of your poor
father
'. (Mike's poor father had been killed in the First World War, so he didn't remember him all that well!)

Mike said he had found it all very wearing, but had stuck his toes in and refused to budge until, finding that they could do nothing with him, they appealed to the most important of his godfathers to talk him out of it. Which, in Mike's opinion (and mine too), was a really dirty trick, since the godfather in question had not only been a personal friend of his father's but happened to be King George V.

Well, as Mike said, what
can
you say when your monarch himself has you up on the mat and asks you as a personal favour to please reconsider? … ‘He was so
nice
about it,' explained Mike in extenuation. ‘If he hadn't been so nice I might have been able to stick to my guns. But as it was, I couldn't just stand there and say “No”, could I? — could
anyone
?'

He had given in, of course; and it had proved a fatal mistake. Because once having returned to duty it hadn't been long before he realized that he really could not cope with army life and the sooner he made this quite clear to one and all, the better. This decision received strong support from a like-minded friend who had only been waiting to see how Mike had fared before following his example and sending in his own papers. I don't remember the friend's name, or anything more about him, but apparently the two of them discussed the matter at some length before coming to the conclusion that the only course left open to Mike was to go AWOL for an extended period, thereby forcing the authorities to lose patience with him and throw him out.

The friend decided not to waste time arguing his case, as Mike had done, but to abscond with him, and the two packed a suitcase apiece, pocketed their passports and as much money as they could scrape together, left brief messages to be delivered to their families and their commanding officers and took off for France.

Considering that Mike had already made one determined effort to get out of the Army, you would have thought that his regiment would have
been pleased to see the last of him. (His friend's, on the other hand, evidently took the departure of their escapee with admirable calm.) It was not so, however, with Mike's lot, who seem to have gone straight up into the stratosphere. For no sooner did they learn that he had made a break for liberty, and was now on the loose in foreign parts, than they dispatched the Military Police — or whoever deals with absconding soldiery — in pursuit. And I suspect, though this is only a guess, that his family too must have hired someone to chase after him and bring him back, for according to Mike's account of his subsequent adventures, there would seem to have been a plethora of human bloodhounds baying on the trail.

His version of those adventures was probably embroidered a good bit here and there, but they certainly made hilarious listening. The two of them appear to have had a number of hair-breadth escapes from capture, including one from a modest commercial hotel in a small and unimportant town, miles away from the tourist trail or any place of interest. No one, they decided, would dream of looking for them in such a dull, out-of-the-way dump as this. But within a day or two of their arrival a young and excitable member of the staff, with whom they were on friendly terms — Mike had a talent for attracting friends and allies wherever he went — scratched on their door to warn them in a dramatic whisper that there were a couple of sinister characters below, possibly plain-clothes
flics
, who were asking to see the hotel's register and inquiring about two young Englishmen who, judging from the description they were giving the receptionist on the desk …

It was dark, and to make matters worse it was raining; and Mike's account of their flight by way of an exceedingly ancient and very slippery apology for a fire escape, and their subsequent, and successful, efforts to muddy their trail, was hysterically funny. From his family's and the Army's point of view, however, the whole, rousing, round-and-round the mulberry bush business must have been exasperating, and I still cannot understand why they let it go on so long. Eventually, however, they did what they ought to have done from the first — called off their respective bloodhounds and left the two fugitives to their own devices, in the sure knowledge that sooner or later they would run out of money, and get bored to bits with supporting themselves by part-time jobs on farms, or washing dishes in city cafés, and come home. Which of course they did.

You may have noticed — I have only just done so myself — that in
all these Keystone Kops chases there never seems to have been any trouble over passports; nowadays no one could possibly go swanning around the Continent without having their passport demanded of them with depressing frequency.

Anyway, once it became clear that no one was prepared to waste any more time or money on playing silly games of hide-and-seek, the whole escapade became a bore, and they returned sheepishly to the fold. Mike's friend seems to have got off fairly lightly, being allowed to send in his papers and leave. But Mike was dismissed from the service, and officially disgraced, ‘His Majesty the King having no further use for his services' — or whatever the formula is. Colonel Henslow was roped in to take him out of the country and keep him out, until such a time as the scandal he had created had died down and been forgotten. But over a decade later His Majesty the King (not the same one, for he was dead, but his successor, George VI) was to find a use for Mike's service after all. For when the Second World War broke out, Mike managed to get himself commissioned into — I think — the Artists' Rifles; and returning across the Channel with them to fight for King and Country, he was killed somewhere on the Continent in the black year of Dunkirk and the fall of France.

But all that was still far ahead of us. By the time Colonel Henslow and my parents returned from their stroll around the island the Andersons and Mike were on the best of terms, so when Colonel Henslow asked for permission to share our mooring (provided he and Mike could find and rent a suitable boat and our
manjis
were agreeable) the ayes had it. Ahamdoo Siraj, who had found us the H. B.
Carlton
, found a small, two-bedroom boat for them and they duly moved in.

Parked one behind the other, our houseboats with their cookboats made an imposing fleet. I don't remember what happened to the Colonel, except that he left us at this point. I presume he realized that Mike would be all right with us, so he could safely go off to visit old friends on the Frontier. Anyway, he vanished from the scene, to rejoin us some time later, and he was never a member of the Nageem Bagh Navy.

It was Andy who founded the Nageem Bagh Navy, and dubbed the H. B.
Carlton
the Flagship. The whole thing was invented one night when he and Enid and Mike were having dinner with us on our houseboat. The party had been a hilarious one, and Andy had declaimed a nonsense poem about a ship called the ‘Walloping Window-blind', and another,
from the
Bab Ballads
, that numbered among its crew and a ‘Bo'sun Tight and a Midshipmite and the crew of the Captain's gig'.

By the time the party broke up that night we were all life members of the N B N. Andy was the Captain and Mike was the First Officer, ‘Number One'. I was the Midshipmite and Enid the Bo'sun Tight (Bets and I never called her anything but ‘Bo'sun' to the end of her days — which, as I write, was only the other day.
Kiwa Grabrata
, dear Bo'sun! Be seeing you), Bets was the Cabin Boy, Mother the Quartermaster and Tacklow the Paymaster-General, while the Andersons' sealyham was, of course, the Dog-watch. We designed and made a flag to fly on the flagship (I have it still) and a motto, which was also a password: ‘
Kiwa Gabrata
'
^*
— which loosely translated means: ‘This Puzzle's the Beetle.' But please don't ask me why. It had a reason once, but I've forgotten that too. Oh woe!

I find it hard to describe in words, let alone pin down on paper, the sheer
fun
we had with our Navy that autumn. I only know that looking back on those days through the long, leafy avenue of the years, they stand out as one of the happiest times of my life — a time in which we never seemed to have stopped laughing. And just to add an extra touch of champagne fizz and sparkle to those light-hearted, laughter-filled days, Mike and I fell in love.

That we should have done so was more or less inevitable, for Kashmir, as it was in those far-off times, might have been made for lovers. To begin with, as I have already said, it was purely a holiday resort and all those young men, who had left the stifling heat and toil and discipline of offices and cantonments behind them and come up there on leave, threw off the restraints that work had imposed on them and got down to enjoying themselves. They went fishing, camping or trekking, went riding through the woods around Gulmarg or lazed on houseboats and bathed in the lakes. And every evening except Sundays most of them went dancing.

Those who hadn't already got a girl collected one, and night after night, when the dancing was done, they saw her home in a
shikarra
by moonlight or starlight, or, more often than not by the pale yellow light of dawn, serenading her the while with the strains of some sentimental record played on a wind-up gramophone. If they owned a car, they drove her
back, frequently by the way of the lake road, branching off on to the one that winds up the hillside to Chasma-Shahi, the ‘Imperial Spring', which is the smallest and, with one exception,
^*
probably the most attractive of the many gardens with which the Mogul Emperors adorned the Kashmir Valley.

This particular garden had been designed and built to the order of that most loving of husbands, Shah Jehan — he who raised the Taj Mahal to the memory of his adored wife who had died giving birth to their thirteenth child. From here you could look down and see all Srinagar city and miles of the valley laid out below you: the Takht-i-Suliman and the fort of Hari Parbat; the winding silver ribbon of the Jhelum river, and the narrow waterways that link the many lakes — Gagribal and the Dāl, Nageem and Naseem, Nishat and Harwan, and very far away, the shimmer of Manasbal and the Wular lake.