The Sun in the Morning (3 page)

Perhaps because she had used the word ‘frightening', it was then that I realized how paltry, in the face of the swift centuries, is the
‘three score years and ten' that the Bible reckons as man's allotted span. For by then Mother had been a widow for several years, my brother and sister were both married and had children of their own, and our family circle had broken up. Yet that first visit to the Bombay Zoo in the dawn of the twentieth century, when she was still a schoolgirl who had not even put her hair up or met her future husband, still seemed to her as though it had happened ‘only yesterday'.

I learned in that moment what all of us learn in the end: that on the inside most of us stay the same even though our outsides change so greatly, wrinkling, withering or growing stout and unwieldy; our hair turning grey and unattractive things happening to our chins. Yet within that ageing outer shell we remain very much the same as we did in our late teens and early twenties. Mother, for instance, became infuriated on being told that she could not accompany my sister Bets and myself to India when we flew there to watch part of my
Far Pavilions
being filmed in Jaipur. She wanted so much to come with us, and insisted that she was perfectly capable of doing so and that any number of her Indian friends would be only too delighted to see her again and put her up. Which, alas, was no longer true, since those friends are either dead or far too advanced in years to cope with a very frail old lady.
Eheu fugaces
indeed! But since I am writing about my parents, let us go back to the daybreak years of this century —

Victoria has died at long last and her eldest son, stout, jolly, bearded Edward VII (who once complained that he had got used to the idea of an everlasting father but considered it a bit hard to be saddled with an everlasting mother as well), has ushered in the rollicking and often scandalous Edwardian era. And young Daisy Bryson — having taken her first look at Imperial India and spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Bombay Zoo before travelling on to catch a glimpse of Colombo, Madras, Calcutta, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — has crossed the Taku Bar and sailed up the Wang Po River, to disembark at her birthplace, the North China treaty port of Tientsin.

In that part of the world, in those days, young unmarried European women were as rare as butterflies in December. This meant that when the steamer carrying Isabella Bryson and her brood drew into the dock, every male ‘foreign devil' in that thriving port who could find
an excuse to do so was there to watch it berth and to take a good look at Isabella's daughters. Among that watching crowd was a young businessman, Howard Payne, who, smitten to the heart by his first sight of Alice walking down the gangway in the wake of her mother, announced loudly and firmly: ‘That's the girl I'm going to marry!' And marry her he did, though in the event it was Daisy who married first, with Alice as her chief bridesmaid. Which brings me to Father — who was seldom if ever called by that name, but for some forgotten reason, long lost sight of in the mists of childhood, I used to call ‘Tacklow'. So Tacklow he will remain for the rest of this book.

According to my mother the first time he set eyes on me as a small, shawled bundle in a bassinette, barely two days old and newly washed and tidied up for what was — until a certain June morning over thirty years later — to be the most important meeting in my life, he took one look at me and said: ‘This one's for me!' Unfortunately, my memory does not go back as far as that momentous occasion. But the attraction was mutual. I adored him from the start. He was mine; my own particular and special property. Perfection personified. No one ever had a better father, and my only complaint against Providence in this matter is that I saw far too little of him during the long years of school in England. He was much too conscientious to badger the Powers-that-Be for leave, and would send Mother home whenever he could afford to do so (which was not often, what with heavy school bills to pay and a perennial shortage of money), while he himself stayed at his desk, working and saving all the harder.

Any skill I may have with words I owe to Tacklow, who started reading to me almost before I had learned to talk. He never read me babyish books, or any of the innocuous wish-wash about jolly elves and bunnies on which future generations would be brought up. Instead, he started me on Kingsley's
Heroes
, which is full of lovely lines that can sound like poetry. I suspect him of occasionally paraphrasing for my benefit, because a sentence from the end of the story of Perseus sticks in my head to this day as: ‘And Polydectes and his guests sit there still; a ring of cold grey stones upon the mountain side!' — which is not a strictly accurate quotation; as I was to discover years later when I spotted a battered copy of
The Heroes
on a second-hand bookstall in London's Fulham Road, and bought it for sixpence. He read me Kipling's
Jungle Books
and I remember crying my eyes out when
Mowgli has to leave the jungle and go down to the croplands to join his own kind — and laughing my head off at the tales in
Uncle Remus
; another book that I bought off a second-hand bookstall, only to find that I could not make head or tail of the dialect spoken by Uncle Remus, which Tacklow (who really should have been an actor) had read aloud to me with such fascinating fluency and effect.

I could discuss anything with my father. He treated me as an adult from the start and would talk to me by the hour, so that I came to know a lot more about him than I ever learned about Mother. So much, indeed, that he must have a chapter or two all to himself.

He was born in 1868 in the early hours of Wednesday, 27 May: the first surviving son of William Kaye, of the Indian Civil Service, and his formidable wife, Jane, who had been Jane Beckett. It was Derby Day, and his father, who had plunged heavily on a horse listed as ‘Tom Bowline Colt' at odds of fifteen to one, had declared his intention of naming the latest infant after the horse: provided of course that the baby was a boy and the animal won. Thomas Bowline Colt Kaye … The mind boggles! But that was my grandfather all over.

Fortunately for the new arrival, though a sad blow for the family bank balance, the Derby was won that year by the favourite, a horse called Bluegown.
^*
Which is why my beloved parent ended up being christened ‘Cecil' instead, a name that in those days was considered distinctly cissy, being regarded as more a girl's name than a man's. It was in fact bestowed upon him in compliment to his grandmother, Mary Cecilia, a daughter of the Gibson-Craigs of Riccaton House, near Edinburgh, from whom his parents may have cherished expectations on his behalf. (If so, they did not come to anything.)

When he was old enough to be sent to his public school (which for some inexplicable British reason is the name we choose to apply to our private ones), his Christian name was recorded in its rolls as ‘Caecilius Kaye' because, by tradition, Winchester still inscribes the names of its pupils in Latin. Despite this, he managed for a time to give his classmates the impression that his name was Charles: a simple ambition which was eventually thwarted by a doting maiden-aunt
who wrote to him addressing the envelope to ‘Master Cecil Kaye'. Thereafter he was stuck with it. He seems on the whole to have enjoyed his schooldays, and in the course of them he made at least one lifelong friend: Reginald ‘Cull' Brinton of Kidderminster, who like himself actually
enjoyed
Greek and Latin and was equally stage-struck.

I cannot remember his ever telling me how or why he should have become so fascinated by the theatre. Perhaps he did not know himself. But from the time that he was a small boy in a nankeen suit he had written, directed and sometimes acted in plays that were performed during the holidays before an audience of indulgent grown-ups, while many of his leisure hours were spent in poling his brothers and sisters around in a punt named ‘The White Indian' on the upper lake at Tetworth Hall — a house in Bedfordshire then owned by his grandparents — and dragooning them into being Red Indians on the warpath or early settlers in hostile territory. I still have a playbill that dates from his teens and advertises a single performance (matinée only) of a pantomime ‘devised, written and directed by C. Kaye'.

His theatrical ambitions, however, were stamped on with the utmost firmness; Victoria's England believing to a man, and certainly to a woman, that the trap-door in the centre of every stage, out of which the Demon King would spring up during the pantomime season in scarlet tights and accompanied by a glare of red light and some effective pink smoke, did in fact lead straight down to Hell.

Winchester, which has the distinction of being the oldest public school in England, takes its name from the cathedral town in which it stands. It was founded in 1387 by a colourful character called William Wykeham who also founded New College, Oxford.

It is one of my regrets for an opportunity lost that I never visited Winchester with my father. I would have enjoyed a Tacklow-conducted tour round the College and the city, but it was one of those things that we were always going to do some day and for some reason or another never found the time to. Today there is a small tablet in the organ loft of the chapel to ‘the memory of Sir Cecil Kaye, Kt,
CSI, CIE, CBE
, 21st Punjabis Indian Army, a Commoner of This College.'
^*
I saw Winchester for the first time when I went there to see the Bursar
about the wording and positioning of the tablet. And again to see it dedicated. Later on I would sometimes go there to look at it and to walk through the cloisters and the various buildings that Tacklow had described so vividly that I felt as though I knew them. But I did not go very often, because there was nothing of him there: not even the shadow of a shadow. If his ghost walks anywhere it goes punting on the upper lake at Tetworth or fly-fishing in the glass-clear waters of the Test; or perhaps, sometimes, it sits on a low curved block of silvery, lichen-spotted stone that stands high above the winding Simla road on a spur of the foothills, looking out between the tall trunks of the pine trees at what he once described as ‘one of the loveliest views in all India, if not in all the world'. From here, on a clear day, it really does seem as though one can see for ever and ever. To the right the foothills fall away to merge into the wide, golden vastness of the plains, while ahead and below, embedded among pine trees, lies the little Cantonment town of Dugshai, and on the left the rising ridges of the hills are backed by the long, long line of the high Himalayas, spanning the horizon with shimmering snow peaks that stand out like a jagged fringe of white satin against the limitless blue distance.

During the lengthy periods that my grandparents spent overseas, their children, in common with most children whose parents served in India, were either left behind in the care of home-based relatives or, like poor little Rudyard Kipling, to the less than tender mercies of professional child-minders. But Tacklow, when not at Tetworth, had the good fortune to spend a number of his school holidays with his maternal grandmother at Riccaton House near Edinburgh. Having learned the art of fly-fishing on the chalk streams near Winchester, he would go after salmon in the Scottish lochs and rivers, and became a skilful and dedicated fisherman.

In those days that great British institution, the country-house weekend, which had come into vogue in Georgian times, was still flourishing, and owners of stately homes either gave or attended these functions — which seem to have lasted from Friday afternoons to Monday mornings — as a matter of course. A popular form of after-dinner entertainment on these occasions was amateur theatricals, and it was at one of these house-parties — after a performance of
She Stoops to Conquer
by a group of lively and talented young amateurs — that a larger-than-life gentleman walked in on Tacklow while he was busy
removing his make-up, and congratulated him warmly on his performance as Tony Lumpkin. It was, he said, the best he had ever seen, and should young Mr Kaye be interested in taking up acting as a profession, he, personally, would always be pleased to employ him. Here was his card. … He handed it over with a flourish; as well he might, for the name engraved upon it is remembered to this day. It was Sir Henry Irving — the first Knight of the Theatre.

Hurrying back to Tetworth, Tacklow hopefully showed it to his parents and grandparents. But it failed to make the smallest impression. The chances are, of course, that none of them had ever even
heard
of Henry Irving (‘An actor-fellow, for heaven's sake! What next?'). In any case, young Cecil was destined for service in India where the family links were strong, three of his father's first cousins having served in the East India Company; Charles Kaye in the Madras Civil Service and the other two, Sir John, the historian, as political secretary, India Office, and his brother Edward as a General in the Bengal Artillery. Then there was John's son Ernest, who was in the Bengal Police, and … but why go on? The list is a long one. In any case it was the duty of the eldest son to follow his father into the ICS
^*
and since my grandfather's views on the matter were fully endorsed by his formidable wife Jane — who was a Beckett and a tough character if ever there was one — there was nothing more to be said. One did not argue with Victorian parents. Tacklow abandoned the unequal struggle.

The elder of his two younger brothers, my Uncle Elliot, was graciously permitted to choose which service he would enter. Provided, of course, that it was an Indian one. Whereupon, apparently with the object of irritating his papa and mama rather than from any love of playing trains, he chose the Indian Railways, and, when forced to abandon this deliberate tease, stuck out for joining the Police. And did so. The youngest brother, Alec, a born black sheep if ever there was one, flouted tradition and refused to have anything whatever to do with India, or the forces of law and order either, and, metaphorically speaking, ran away to sea. In point of fact he set sail, steerage, for Canada, and was written off as a dead loss. Letters occasionally turned up from him, but only at long intervals. He seems to have worked for
a time as a logger and then as a trapper (furs, one presumes?) and later, inevitably, taken part in the great California Gold Rush. He ended up as a mining engineer; at which he would appear to have been reasonably successful, for he acquired a house on Vancouver Island and a wife.