The Sun in the Morning (66 page)

So many friends; so many lovely places; so many memories. And so much happiness! It wasn't possible that I should not be able to go back again one day. But when I looked at the work of people like Merlyn and Elizabeth and the Harris sisters — to name only four out of at least half-a-dozen outstanding students at one minor studio — and realized how many studios there were in London alone, I became less confident that I could earn the sort of money I would need to get me back to India. And once again England seemed to grow smaller and to close in on me as it had done on the wet, grey day that the ‘Ormond' docked at Tilbury.

Tacklow had acquired a cat in the usual way: attracting a stray. A lean, slinking outlaw, probably descended from some barnyard cat who had kept down the rats in the days when Hillingdon was a great house. This shy and unattractive moggy lived in a small, dense wood of lilac trees opposite the garage and the woodshed at Three Trees, keeping body and paws together by preying on the rabbits, birds and rodents that inhabited our garden and the Park. Bets and I had long been aware of a pair of hostile yellow eyes in a whiskered, sandy-coloured face, glaring at us from the undergrowth below the lilacs, and once I had seen the cat trotting across the drive carrying the corpse of a rabbit, almost as large as itself, in exactly the way that a tiger carries its prey. But if we called to it or made any move in its direction, it was off like a flash.

Tacklow never really wanted a cat. It was always the cats who wanted Tacklow, and this one was no exception. It took to watching him as he strolled round the garden of an evening, and when he spoke politely to it, it stood its ground instead of instantly nipping back into cover as it did when anyone else addressed it. Eventually it came out to share his walk, and ended up feathering his ankles and purring when he tickled it under the chin. It never allowed us to do more than stroke it — and that only occasionally — and made no attempt to venture into the house. Nor did Tacklow encourage it to do so; which surprised me a little since he had already dubbed it Chips. But he said that for its own sake it would be kinder to let it remain an outdoor cat. Did he, I wonder, have a premonition that our stay in Three Trees would not be long, and that when we left it could be for somewhere where we could not take a cat with us?

The Hillingdon Chips remained an outdoor cat; catching her own meals and fending for herself even in the worst of weather, until, on a spring morning when the lilac wood was a blaze of mauve and white and purple blossom that smelt as though you had drenched it with bottles and bottles of
Temps de Lilas
— a once popular scent made by Messrs Houbigant of Paris — Tacklow went out to the woodshed to cut some more kindling for the fire and reached automatically into the trug behind the door in which he kept the small hand-axe. Whereupon the trug exploded like a dropped electric-light bulb, slashing him sharply in the process and giving him the fright of his life. In the next second a sandy-coloured strip of fur streaked through the half-open door, yowling indignantly. Chips to the rescue! — ‘Here come the United States Marines!'

Our moggy had evidently decided that the woodshed, which had an ill-fitting door that allowed her to get in and out of it even when padlocked, was a better place for her kittens than whatever outdoor spot they had been born in; for they had not been there when we last went into the woodshed for kindling, and they were obviously at least ten days old and probably more, since they had their eyes open — and knew how to spit and use their claws! They had attacked Tacklow's intrusive hand with instant fury and whizzed off in different directions to cower among the piles of logs: three minute balls of terrified multicoloured fluff.

Tacklow tied up his hand with his handkerchief and spent a few minutes apologizing to Chips for upsetting her kittens, and smoothing down her bristling fur, before returning to the house to exchange his handkerchief for a strip of plaster and fetch a saucer of milk. I remember saying that Chips would certainly have removed herself and her family by the time he got back, but he only said ‘Nonsense, cats always know on which side their bread is buttered.' And sure enough, when we returned to the woodshed Chips had either carried or herded her family back into the trug and was standing guard over them, looking tigerish and wary. The three small, pansy faces spat at the sight of us, and as Chips made one of those disapproving cat noises that are half-way between a growl and a miaow, Tacklow ordered us all back to the house, saying that if we wanted them to stay around we'd better leave them severely alone until they had had time to settle down.

I remember that he spent most of the rest of that day there, merely sitting on a log by the open doorway of the woodshed, reading a newspaper and smoking one of the cheap Indian cheroots he had acquired a taste for as a young subaltern. Chips graciously accepted the saucer of milk and ended up by going to sleep on his knee in the attitude of one of Landseer's Trafalgar Square lions, and by sunset she allowed him to remove the axe from under her kittens. He would not let us go near them and would not handle them himself until he was quite sure that they had accepted him as a friend, and during the next few days he fed them with morsels of raw meat; only when they were no longer afraid of him did he stroke them with a finger. When at length he could pick them up by the scruff of their necks, as Chips did, and dump them on his shoulder or in his lap, he knew that it would be safe to let us play with them. But though all kittens are appealing bits of fluff when they are the size of a bridge roll, these ones, even when small, looked what they were — wild young toughs. For which reason we named them after three of the then best-known stars of cowboy Westerns: Tom Mix, Harry Carey and Buck Jones. Funny that Bets and I should both remember those names still.

Tom Mix, took after his mother, but goodness knows where she picked up his father, for Buck Jones was mainly black with white markings, while Harry Carey was mostly ginger with a white face, one black ear, and a black patch over the opposite eye which gave him a rakish air and was so distinctive that Bets and I, returning close on ten years later on a sentimental journey to see what had become of Hillingdon and dear Three Trees, seeing a cat who had been lying asleep in the long grass at one end of the garden start up and stare at us over the grass, said with one voice: ‘
Harry Carey!
— it's Harry Carey.' The cat vanished with the speed of light, but there could be no mistaking that cockeyed white face with its rakish black eye-patch and single black ear. Harry C. had obviously returned to the wild and was doing all right, for he looked very stout and sleek; and the sight of him made our day.

Three Trees had not changed; nor had the Park. But there was now a house on the empty plot next door, built on the spot where in our day there had been a ring of tall Scots pines, and all the once vacant plots had been bought and built on. The whole place was beginning to look crammed with houses, but the house opposite Three Trees
looked just the same. Back in the Twenties it had belonged to a Colonel Hutchinson who worked for a publicity firm in London and had written a book that had become a terrific best-seller. It was called
The W Plan
, and I remember him telling us, as though it was a tremendous joke, that its success was entirely due to his knowledge of what he called ‘the publicity racket'. He had, he said, had the bright idea of having the title of the book in huge print pasted high up along the side of every London bus, and the expense involved had paid off, since you couldn't move in London without seeing
the w plan
screaming at you from every angle.

He was an amusing and extrovert man, and an excellent neighbour. We got to know him and his wife and young family well, though I have to admit that I thought nothing of his book. He gave us a signed copy of it which unfortunately perished along with all the rest of Tacklow's books.

I can still see him quite clearly in my mind's eye, but though I may not have appreciated his book — which must have been one of the very first to be hyped into best-sellerdom by expert publicity — I thought that his garden must be the most beautiful in all England. It made me wish I could have seen Hillingdon in its great days, for judging by this one, the gardens must have been spectacular. There were, I was told, four separate gardens, each one in a different colour, and our writer friend had bought a large plot that included the whole of the Blue Garden. It was a dream of a garden! A long strip of velvety grass, flanked by wide flowerbeds, led down an avenue of dark, beautifully cut blue-green yew that broke into arches where other walks bisected it. And in the flowerbeds, in every possible shade of blue, grew delphiniums and larkspur, Himalayan poppies, drifts of forget-me-nots and lobelia, clumps of hydrangea, lilacs and hibiscus, violas, lavender, violets and gentians, campanula and clematis, and all the other blue and bluish-mauve flowers you can think of; plus blue-leaved hostas and lots of things with lacy silver-grey foliage and no flowers.

We were told that our lawn had once been part of the Red Garden. But all that remained of that was an overgrown, nettle-filled avenue of Canadian and Japanese maple trees that lay on the other side of the fence at the far end of our lawn, and belonged to the nuns. The trees turned unbelievable shades of crimson and scarlet in the autumn, but
the avenue was so choked with weeds and brambles that you could no longer see even a trace of the herbaceous borders that had once lined it. No one seemed to know where the yellow and white gardens had been, and the only one to survive was that magical blue one.

That's about all I remember about the Hillingdon interval; except a couple of pop tunes, one of which, entitled ‘When My Sugar Walks Down the Street', was played dangerously near to the point of justifiable homicide by Bill, who was learning to play the banjo — banjos were the ‘in' instruments of the Twenties — and this was the only tune he knew. The other, also played to exhaustion by Bill, but on the gramophone, was a ditty called ‘Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now'. I don't know which was worse.

Surprisingly, since he was an exceptionally good-looking youth, Bill had not started collecting girl-friends, so when the time came round for the first Summer Ball at The Shop, I thought for a brief time that he might — just possibly might — ask me to go with him. Unfortunately, he still thought of me as an unalluring schoolgirl; ‘Old Piano Legs', in fact; and I don't think that the idea that he might ask me to the ball so much as crossed his mind. However, being partnerless, he asked Mother instead; which turned out to be one of his better ideas, for much to his surprise she was a wild success with his fellow students who couldn't believe that anyone could have a mother as young and pretty and good company as that. She was at the time just short of her thirty-eighth birthday, and except for her once pretty hands could easily have passed for twenty-five.

I remember that she wore a dress Tacklow had seen in the window of a shop in Bond Street, and had thought so pretty that he did what was, for him, an unprecedented thing: he walked straight in and bought it. ‘It looked as though it was made out of opals,' explained Tacklow, ‘and I couldn't resist it.' He loved opals above all other stones because, he said, they were the only precious stones that couldn't be faked. All the others could be made out of glass and fool nearly everyone; even pearls could be Mikimoto fakes. But not the opal. So he only bought opals for Mother (he could never have afforded to give her emeralds or diamonds, anyway). The dress was made of smoky-blue chiffon and lace embroidered all over with opal-coloured beads and sequins that shimmered when the wearer moved, and Mother
wore her opals with it and went off to the ball looking as glamorous as Cinderella. Bill said he nearly burst with pride when his friends vied with each other to dance with her, and that he only managed to get two dances with her himself; and that with difficulty!

As for Mother, she came back looking like a girl again; or a flower that has been drooping for lack of water and is suddenly revived by a shower of rain. She loved to dance; and for the first time I realized how much life must have changed for her and just how much she must miss the gaiety of India — the dances, the lights and the music — the admiration … Well, all that was finished and done with. For her the party was over. But for Bets and myself it had not yet begun, and there were times when I used to think gloomily that at this rate it would never begin! For we were not in the ‘Débutante Set' with the prospect of a London Season ahead. (Few India service people, outside the Heaven-Born, were.) And anyway Tacklow could not have afforded to ‘bring us out'. Nor were our present neighbours — the people who had built new houses and settled on the Hillingdon estate — the kind whose drawing-rooms were big enough to use as ballrooms. Besides, they were either too young to have sons and daughters of an age to go to grown-up dances, or elderly couples whose children had long ago left home.

I don't remember meeting anyone in my own age-group while we lived at Three Trees, and the only friend of Bill's whom he ever asked there for the holidays was a boy of his own age, Alexander ‘Sandy' Napier; the only child of parents so elderly that they had given up all ideas of having a family when Sandy's arrival took them completely by surprise. Thereafter they had treated him more as though they were his grandparents than his parents — and Victorian grandparents at that. They never seemed to know quite what to do with him, and Sandy began to look on us as his family: an attitude that we reciprocated. He remained an honorary brother for the rest of his days, which I suppose is the reason why neither Bets nor I ever fell in love with him; for he was the dead ringer for that one-time Prince Charming, Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor. So much so that when immediately after the Abdication the new Duke went into hiding, Sandy — who had been posted to Peshawar as Deputy Commissioner — caused a terrific sensation by arriving in that city, driving his very ancient Rolls-Royce. Half the onlookers instantly leapt to the conclusion that this was their
ex-King Emperor, who must have decided to take refuge among them. The excitement was intense!