Golden Afternoon, Page 2

  By ‘Delhi’, I mean Old Delhi, for when I was a child New Delhi — the latest (and possibly last) of the cities of Delhi — had yet to be built. My Delhi was the wonderful walled city that the Mogul Emperor Shah Jehan, self-styled ‘Ruler of the World’, built for himself on the banks of the Jumna river among the ruins of the six previous Delhis that had been built and fallen into ruins on those plains. That was my Delhi, and I loved every stick and stone of it.

  Calcutta, on the Hoogly, not only lay a long, dusty, two and a half days’ train journey to the south-east (no aeroplanes in those days) but was the capital city of Bengal. And there are a good many differences between Bengalis and the Himalayan hill folk; or, come to that, between the people of the UP — the United Provinces.* But I couldn’t have cared less, as the car whisked us away from Garden Reach to the city that was once no more than a slimy mudflat, almost covered with water at every tide — for the Hoogly is a tidal river.

  As far back as 1690 the mudflat had been given, in no kindly spirit (the gift had, in fact, been intended as a deliberate insult), by the local overlord, one Nawab Ibrahim Khan, to a Mr Job Charnock of the East India Company, in response to a petition for a site on which to build a small trading-post. Charnock had swallowed the insult and, having accepted the mudflat with every appearance of gratitude, landed on it at low tide accompanied by thirty of the Company’s soldiers, whom he set to work raising an enclosing wall, inside which they then built strong fortifications which Job named Fort William for the then King of England, William of Orange.

  That erstwhile mudflat was destined to become the great city of Calcutta — which to this day can often carry a distinct smell of sewage; as it must have done on the day that Mr Charnock and his long-suffering thirty began shovelling up the mud and the mudworms and banking up the stuff against the returning tide.

  Perhaps because of its beginnings, Calcutta has the reputation of being one of India’s more insalubrious cities, and nowadays, despite the almost fanatical loyalty and affection in which a majority of its citizens hold it, there is no denying that much of it is a major eyesore. But as we drove through its streets on that memorable evening it seemed, to my infatuated gaze, the most beautiful city in the world, populated by the most colourful and enchanting people and smelling of everything that I had missed for so long: sandalwood, incense and spices; masala, mustard oil, garlic and ghee; the heady smell of smoke from dung fires and the never-to-be-forgotten one of water sprinkled on sun-scorched ground. And, underneath it all, that faint, pervasive odour of sewage and rotting vegetable matter which is apt to haunt the bazaars and the poorer quarters of any Indian city, but which that afternoon was subdued by the sweet scent of fresh flowers — roses and marigolds and frangipani, and the jasmine blossoms in the garlands about my neck.

  The Tegarts’ house was a tall three-storey mansion that must have dated back to the latter days of the East India Company. It stood among trees in a quiet road well out of earshot of the roar and bustle of Chowringhi, Calcutta’s main street, where the European shops and big hotels stand looking out across a stream of traffic to the wide spaces of the maidan and the massive white marble Victoria Memorial, that pretentious would-be Taj Mahal housing a museum that is — or was — very well worth visiting.

  One of the Tegarts’ house servants took Bets and me up to our bedrooms, which were on the top storey, and I shall never forget the feeling of pure rapture with which I looked around that room, knowing that I had come home again … No more cluttered British bedrooms with their heavily lined curtains and hideous Axminster carpets. No more frilled or flounced pelmets and cumbersome mahogany furniture, squashy, eiderdowned beds, or fireplaces. No more patterned wallpaper liberally adorned with gilt-framed pictures. They were all in the past — over and done with. This was what the bedrooms of my childhood had looked like, and here once more were those familiar boltless doors, ‘and the high ceiled rooms that the Trade blows through’ that Kipling had written of, and remembered to the end of his life …

  This room was high and very spacious, with whitewashed walls that were innocent of pictures, and in the centre of it, directly underneath the large, white-painted ceiling-fan, stood a single iron bedstead fitted with poles and a mosquito-net. The polished chunam* floor was covered with matting and the furniture consisted of an almirah (a cupboard made from cretonne and criss-crossed slats of wood), a marble-topped dressing-table, a morah (a stool made of reeds), a cheval-glass and a couple of cane chairs. That, apart from a small bedside table, was all. But I wouldn’t have added to it or altered it for anything in the world. This was what a proper bedroom ought to look like. It was heaven!

  Bets’s room opened off it and was slightly smaller than mine. She came running back to me shouting, ‘Mouse, do come and look!’ and dragged me into her bathroom (there was one to each room). Despite the fact that we were on the top floor, and that there was actually a cold water tap, the bathrooms too were of the old, familiar pattern. The tin tub stood in a stone-paved section ringed off by a brick rim a few inches high, so that when the bath was emptied by being tipped up, the water did not flood the entire floor but drained away through an outlet pipe in one of the corners of the enclosed space. There was a wooden towel-horse and an old-fashioned washstand complete with china fittings, a box-commode, and, standing beside the tin tub, an enormous earthenware chatti (jar) full of cold water, and a tin dipper for ladling it out; the only modern innovation in the room being that single cold tap, from which the chatti was filled. There were wooden jalousies over the windows, and through them we could see the dense green foliage of the trees that towered up outside and filled the high-ceilinged room with a shimmering, watery light, flecked with blobs and ripples of gold as the leaves stirred in the evening breeze.

  Bets and I looked around us with a rapture too deep for words, and I remember that we hugged each other before going back into my bedroom and out through the french windows on to the balcony outside my room, to look down at the small enclosed garden below and out towards the great, sprawling city whose rooftops lay spread out all around us in the last of the sunset. It was the hour of the evening meal, when the dust of the hot day merges with the smoke of innumerable cooking-fires to draw an opal haze over the city. The sky above us was dotted with kites; paper ones flown by children, and feathered birds of prey — ‘Cheil the Kite’, who swoops and hovers all day in the enormous Indian skies, searching for food.

  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 wer
e 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 eno
ugh 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.