Golden Afternoon (62 page)

That year, when the Srinagar season ended and one by one the houseboats, hotels and guest-houses emptied as the summertime visitors, tourists and holiday-makers packed up and left for the plains, we did not leave with them. Old Mr Nedou rented us the little cottage that stood in the grounds of the hotel. And here we settled in to spend what we imagined would be a very dull winter. It wasn't.

While the season was in full swing, and noisy with holiday-makers and dance-nights, I hadn't bothered to notice how many elderly people had retired in Kashmir, renting houses from local Kashmiris or the state and settling down with their cats, dogs and parrots to end their days in this beautiful, peaceful valley. There were any number of them, the majority being widows, since the Almighty has rather unfairly decided that women should, for the most part, outlive their men. Which is our bad luck.

These elderly dames were known in Srinagar as ‘Yaks', because of their habit of wearing somewhat shaggy fur coats of local manufacture, which they habitually donned when taking their daily walks along the Bund to
collect their letters from the Post Office, medicines from Lambert's the Chemists, or to cash their modest cheques at the bank. Bets and I got to know quite a lot of the Yaks, and we promised ourselves that if neither of us married, or if we did, and lost our husbands, we would come back to Kashmir and end our lives together as a couple of old Srinagar Yaks. And we might well have done so, if only the Kashmir we knew and loved had not become yet another blood-soaked battleground, torn to pieces because people who yelp of the sacred cause of ‘Freedom' and the iniquity of ‘Colonialism' think nothing of turning on their neighbour with tanks and bombs and hatred, and annexing his vineyard just as soon as they have got back their own.

My parents were not the only ‘Brits' in Srinagar to have members of a younger generation staying with them that winter. Many of those who had retired to Kashmir, and several whose work kept them there, had young visitors staying with them — cousins, nieces, or Aunt so-and-so — and the winter months were enlivened by gramophone dances and a cabaret show in aid of the Ski-Club of India, functions which were held at the Srinagar Club, since both the ballroom and stage at Nedou's Hotel were closed for the winter.

Bets and I were inevitably roped in to perform in the cabarets, together with a chorus-line of girls and the invaluable Bingle — though I have no idea what he could have been doing in Srinagar at that time of year; I must ask him one of these days. He was probably ADC to the Resident or — being a young man of infinite resource and sagacity — had wangled some military appointment for himself so that he could keep in touch with an extremely pretty girl with whom he was temporarily enamoured. I remember he danced a minuet with her, wearing powdered hair, a satin coat and buckled shoes (costumes designed by the sisters Kaye, of course), and supported by an exclusively female chorus in panniers and white wigs.

The same chorus in different dresses (yellow net, if I remember rightly) supported Bingle and myself in another song and dance item. The song was one that still, after all these years, turns up again and again on TV or radio — ‘The Sunny Side of the Street'.

The valley under snow was a most beautiful sight, and the only one of us who failed to appreciate it was Angelina Sugar-Peas (she had acquired the surname because the wooden box that was her home had once contained tins of that commodity, and advertised the fact by having the
words printed right across one side of it). Angie, whose forebears came from Rajputana and were strangers to extreme cold, had never seen snow before and she took a dim view of it. We brought her in from the garden and established her on a little covered verandah at the back of the cottage, and Mother and Bets knitted her a series of woolly jumpers, the first two of which gave her hours of fun as she painstakingly worked out how to unravel them.

Having done so, she lost no time reducing them to a pile of wool, an operation that clearly fascinated her. I think she thought, from the way it ran out, that it was alive. Having reduced it to a fluffy mass and discovered that it was inedible — and also that without it around her she was uncomfortably cold — she tried draping it about her skinny little shoulders and, when it wouldn't stay there, carried it all into her hutch and hunkered down in the middle of it in the manner of a dormouse in its nest.

After that, Mother got the
darzi
to make her a couple of padded red flannel coats which proved a great success. She never even tried to remove them, so she had obviously worked out what they were for. Yet surprisingly, she never worked out a much simpler problem …

Bets and I used to bring her into our workroom — an upper room above the dining-room that was set aside for our exclusive use, but where Tacklow and Mother would usually join us (by invitation) of an evening, because it was the warmest room in the house. There was electricity in Kashmir, but it was erratic, to say the least. On an ‘off-day' (or night) a sixty-watt bulb often produced less light than a Christmas tree candle. So electricity was seldom used for heating, and most houses (and all houseboats) relied on wood-burning stoves that stood in the centre of the room, circular tin affairs with a hole on top through which logs were fed, and another from which a chimney, in the form of a tin tube, led up, and out, through a hole in one of the window panes. Why Srinagar, with its wooden houses, was never destroyed by fire I can't imagine. But fires were rare, and these flimsy, makeshift heaters were remarkably effective. Once started and fed with logs, their tin sides would glow red with heat, and the very first time we brought Angie into the room, riding on Mother's shoulder, she gave a squeak of excitement at the sight of this glowing object and, before any of us could stop her, she had leapt down on to the floor and patted the side of the red hot stove.

Yelling with pain, she rushed to Mother to be comforted, and was
petted and made much of. Well, you would have thought that once was enough. But believe it or not, every single evening she would prance into the room and circle the stove cautiously, obviously wondering if this hostile object would or wouldn't bite her again if she touched it. Would it? … or wouldn't it? We would shout at her to warn her (she knew perfectly well what ‘No' meant). But the curiosity of her kind was too strong for her — she
had
to find out. She would stretch out a paw towards it, and then snatch it back again and again, but always in the end she couldn't resist giving it a quick touch. And burning her paw for the umpteenth time.

Oh well, it's a depressing thought, but we all do it, don't we? My revered kinsman Sir John Kaye wrote a contemporary account of the Afghan War which should be required reading in every Military Establishment. (He didn't call it ‘the First Afghan War', because he didn't realize that there were going to be another four or five in fairly rapid succession — all of them ending in a British defeat.) Anyone who'd read his book would, you would have thought, have avoided getting embroiled in a second one. But did they? Not on your life. And when the curtain came down on the British Empire, and Russia decided that she could do better, did any of her generals or colonels or staff officers bother to glance at the accounts of the various British–Afghan brawls and the way they ended? Of course not. They barged bald-headed into the same old traps, and the Afghans routed them in the old familiar way. No one
ever
seems to learn by experience; their own or anyone else's. As Kipling wrote in The Gods of the Copybook Headings', ‘And the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire'. Poor Angelina Sugar-Peas!

We had expected to spend Christmas in Kashmir, but a telegram arrived from Bill asking us down to Kohat for Christmas week — accommodation fixed. Mother wired our acceptance, and the usual female wail of ‘I haven't a thing to wear' was raised. Fortunately, Mother was one of those people who never throw anything away, and we had with us one of the trunks she had brought out from England. It was full of her old clothes — coats and skirts, evening dresses, bits of bead embroidery and fur.

Our verandah
darzi
, who had been having rather an idle time of it since the last cabaret costumes and Angie's winter wardrobe were finished, was set to work on producing new outfits from old for Bets and me to wear during Christmas week. It was the first time I realized that hoarding old clothes is not always a waste of space, for Bets and I set out for Kohat
with what appeared to be completely new wardrobes, but were in fact what Tacklow called a ‘cook-up' of attractive bits and pieces, some of which dated back to Mother's trousseau. We left Kashmir by the Abbottabad road and were lucky to get through as easily as we did, for the forests and hillsides were deep in snow, and most of the road was ‘one-way-only', which made for slow going. But it looked unbelievably beautiful, for we had struck a good patch of weather and the sky behind the towering white peaks and the glittering Christmas trees was a cloudless cerulean, while every shadow on the snow was an impossible Reckitt's blue.

Bill's quarters in Kohat were half of a bungalow, and since the occupants of the other half had been invited to spend Christmas with friends somewhere at the opposite end of Punjab, they had given Bill the use of it for a week. The bungalow had a gruesome history, for it had been the scene of a spectacular incident that made headlines all round the world some time in the early twenties: the murder by a handful of tribesmen of a Major and Mrs Ellis, and the kidnapping of their seventeen-year-old daughter, Mollie. Mollie Ellis had eventually been retrieved by a Mrs Starr, an English nurse, who, braving the tribesmen, followed them up into tribal territory and, after a lengthy and hair-raising interval, managed to persuade them to return the girl.

The only other thing I remember in detail is that at one of the dances at the Kohat Club a prize was given to the regiment, unit or corps that put on the best amateur cabaret turn. I thought all the turns were excellent — competition was fierce! — but was delighted when it was won for the Sappers by a friend of Bill's, ‘Jug' Stewart, who happened to be a member of our party on that occasion. Most of the turns were song and dance ones, but Jug went solo on behalf of his corps, and on the final vote won easily by rubbishing a dramatic and well-known Edwardian ‘party-piece', ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God'. He recited this with actions to suit the lines, and though the earnest and patriotic Victorian who wrote it must have been spinning round in his grave with fury, Jug had his entire audience literally rolling in the aisles. We laughed so much that he had to keep on stopping until the house was quiet enough to hear the next few words, and his surprised and pained expression on these occasions was almost funnier than his action-packed rendering of such lines as: ‘But for all his foolish pranks, he was
worshipped
in the ranks … and the Colonel's daughter
smiled
on him as well.'

That performance still remains a bright spot in my life, as does his
wife, who had been Topsy Hartnell before she married Jug. Topsy later invited me to stay with her in Peshawar while Jug was away on one of the army's interminable ‘exercises', and I spent a week with her, most of it, if memory serves, laughing. Her account of the hilarious happenings that had marked her brother, Norman Hartnell's, rise to fame and fortune as one of Europe's best-known
couturiers
really should have been taken down by a tape-recorder for posterity — except that tape-recorders hadn't been invented then. In later years her brother's name became synonymous with ‘glamour'; famous for the lovely glittery embroidery that was a feature of his dresses. He became the Royal Family's favourite designer and wowed all Paris with the shimmering crinoline-style evening dresses that Queen Elizabeth (the present Queen Mother) wore on a state visit to France. He also designed the then Princess Elizabeth's wedding dress and the dresses of her bridesmaids, and, later still, the dresses that she and her maids-of-honour wore at her Coronation.

Topsy did her best to teach me how to wear clothes with the same flair that she possessed. But it was no use. I just hadn't the figure, and even the simplest ‘little black dress' made by Hartnell looked as though it had been made by a verandah
darzi
when worn by me. But then high fashion was wasted on the India of the Raj, because one met the same people over and over again at the merry-go-round of dances, parties, balls and races.

I learned one important lesson early on. One of the Fishing Fleet had decided that when
she
came out to India she was going to knock the eye out of the Delhi men and missahibs by wearing really stunning models. She saved up her pocket-money for months and then spent it all, plus overdrawing her allowance for at least two years ahead, on two ravishing evening dresses and an equally striking garden-party and races outfit. And set sail for India, confident of teaching us all a little about high fashion.

Her first appearance was every bit as sensational as she had hoped. She looked marvellous in the sort of dress that every woman dreams of possessing — and most of us have the sense to know we couldn't wear successfully if we did. It had the lowering effect of making every other woman's dress in the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club look as though its wearer had run it up on an elderly sewing-machine that same afternoon. We were all green with envy.

The second dress was equally successful. But you tend to remember perfection, so the next time the first model reappeared, people said, ‘Oh,
you're wearing that heavenly dress again!' The third time it was worn, no one commented, and someone was overheard to say, ‘She's wearing her old yellow (or whatever) number again.' And the same went, of course, for the second dress. The trouble was that in a station like Delhi — and there were dozens of them, Bombay, Calcutta, Simla, Lahore … you name it — there were too many dances attended by the same people, and what one needed was not two beautifully cut model dresses, but twelve to fifteen different little numbers, each one made in a different material, obtainable, astonishingly cheaply, from a cloth shop in the bazaar, and run up by that old genius, the verandah
darzi
. Better still, the entire lot could cost you far less than one ‘exclusive model'.