The Sun in the Morning by M. M. Kaye
How could anyone, even a grown-up, have described this bleak and tidy park as being superior to the flower-scented tangle of Begum Kudsia’s garden? We could not understand it, and as we trudged dutifully along the crowded paths and stared silently at the Round Pond and disapprovingly at the statue of Peter Pan (which turned out to be another let-down, being a statue of the wrong Peter — not the baby Peter of Kensington Gardens at all, but the Peter of Captain Hook, the Lost Boys and the Never-Never Land), our aching sense of exile grew greater with every lagging step. It was no surprise when this expedition, like others, ended in rain and hasty return to the flat in damp coats, hats and spirits.
Many of Mother’s efforts at entertaining us were defeated by the weather, for rain and wind kept us flat-bound for the greater part of our visit, and my clearest recollection of that first introduction to London is of the three of us — Bill still a stranger — lying on our stomachs in front of a gas-fire in that dismal back bedroom, with all the lights turned on, and drowning the sound of the wind and the falling rain by playing records on one of those wind-up gramophones with large green-painted horns, our favourite record being a song called ‘K-k-k-Katy’, (‘beautiful Katy, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore’). I have never heard it since, yet the refrain and the words still stay obstinately in the jam-packed attics of my mind, and I have only to hum them to see again that dark, rain-beleaguered flat.
There was soon to be a song called ‘Roses of Picardy’ which will always mean school to me. For the fell matter of school could no longer be avoided. Bill, together with his cousin Dick Hamblin, was already at Lynams, the famous Dragon School in Oxford, since it was to Oxford that Tacklow’s parents, having hastily sold Freshfields, had retreated on the outbreak of war — presumably because that city, being too far north of London to be within reach of German zeppelins, was considered a lot safer than Southampton. Their daughter, Aunt Molly Hamblin, now widowed, had moved down from Scotland to keep an eye on them, bringing Bill and her own three children, Maggie, Grace and Dick, with her. It was to her house that we went for a few days after leaving London, so that Mother could meet her in-laws again, see her son back to his preparatory school and discuss the vexed question of a suitable boarding-school for her daughters.
In those days the Dragon School had not become coeducational, so there was no question of Bets and me being sent there. And I can only suppose that my grandparents showed no sign of being willing to take on housing Cecil’s daughters in order that they could attend some other local school as day-girls, and that Aunt Molly thought she had done more than enough for her eldest brother by lumbering herself with Bill. For after a few days, Mother took off for Bedford and Aunt Lizzie; possibly with some idea of entering us for her own old school, Bedford High. If so, that too came to nothing, and eventually we travelled down to the Isle of Thanet, to Birchington, to look at a boarding-school where (on the advice of dear ‘Mrs Ponson’) Mother had finally decided to leave Bets and me.
The summer term was due to start at any moment, but she brought us down to Birchington a couple of days ahead so that we could see the school and its surroundings before being left there. We put up at the Bungalow Hotel (which seemed to be a fairly new addition to the landscape and probably was) and Mother took us for a walk on the beach, which she thought would be a better introduction to the prospect of school than starting with the school itself.
Mercifully it was not raining, and though the day was a grey one it was windless and the sea was calm. But this excellent ploy very nearly foundered when we arrived at the shore to find that the tide was out, and inquired a little blankly why there was no sand. ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Mother, ‘there’s masses of it!’ ‘Where?’ returned Bets and myself with one voice, staring around us. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mother. ‘You’re standing on it.’ She had forgotten that the only sand we had ever seen, except long ago at Findhorn, was the silver sand of India and Egypt: hot countries where the rocks and reefs and empty shells that make up sand are bleached white by the sun, and where the shores are washed by coral seas and the river banks covered with powdered silver that shows blinding white at midday and by moonlight, and takes on every shade of pearl in between. But this stuff that we were standing on was a yellowish, biscuit-beige colour; and so coarse that you could separate its grains into different minute pebbles on the palm of your hand. We were astounded. And, once again, disapproving. The stuff looked dirty! The situation was, however, saved by the chalk cliffs and a wreck —
Owing to the fact that the ‘Ormond’ had come up the Channel by night, we had missed seeing Beachy Head and the White Cliffs of Dover; which was perhaps just as well, as here the white chalk cliffs were far smaller and much less impressive. On the other hand they were also full of caves and were the first thing in England that really caught my fancy. For one thing, you could scramble up them, and in those days the land that lay above them was all open country: acres and acres of grass and gorse bushes and wildflowers, masses of sea lavender and tufts of sea pinks that bordered the cliff edge along which the feet of strolling villagers and visitors had worn a long, straggling path that ran from The Gap to Minnes Bay. The beach too (apart from that coarse and disappointingly coloured sand) could not, from a child’s point of view, have been improved upon; for in addition to those alluring caves there were innumerable rock pools full of anemones, starfish, shrimps and other small sea creatures trapped by the tide. And when we reached the spot where the cliffs dwindled and ended and the bungalows began, the land flattened and curved away in a long, sweeping beach where, stranded some thirty or forty yards out in shallow water and held fast by the rocks, lay the wreck of a Scandinavian freighter driven ashore by the same storm that the ‘Ormond’ had encountered in the Bay of Biscay.
I had read about wrecks but had never seen one before, and the sight of this one more than made up for the rash of brand-new jerry-built bungalows and the dullness of the landscape behind the bay. We were all fascinated by it, and removing our shoes and socks — in Mother’s case, stockings — we paddled out as far as we could in order to see it at even closer range; though as the tide was now coming in fast we didn’t make much headway. Still, it added a distinct fillip to the scenery. And what with those lovely rock pools and the charm of those chalk cliffs and smugglers’ caves, (for surely such caves must have been used by smugglers?) I began to think better of England. Discussing it later that day, we decided that Birchington was really a very pretty place; and we even took a lenient view of the school, Portpool, and the two Misses Barnes who owned and ran it. But not for long.
Mother had taken us there next morning to see the house and meet our future headmistress, Miss Barnes, and her sister Miss Florence who acted as matron. Miss Barnes was thin, bespectacled and grey, and Miss Florence large and bosomy and ditto. Both seemed kind enough and the house, though a school, was not bad as schools go. But Portpool and the Misses Barnes were to do me a great disservice that I would suffer from all my life. The sisters had taken one look at me and, turning shocked eyes on Mother, remarked that anyone could see that I came from India since I was much too thin, skinny and sallow for my age and clearly in need of ‘building up’. They had never, they said, had any Anglo-Indian pupils before, but they were aware that the quality of Indian milk — and indeed all food in Eastern countries — was lamentable. However, Mrs Kaye was not to worry; they would soon put this to rights and she would see a remarkable change in her little daughter after a few months of good English food, fresh milk, sea-bathing and bracing air.
Mother looked a bit startled, but agreed that I was fairly thin. And to tell the truth, I had two popular parlour tricks which used to amuse my juvenile friends in Simla and which, for what is known in Show Business as a ‘limited season’, were to prove equally successful with the members of my dormitory at Portpool; I could turn my navel inside out, and hide both my clenched fists under my rib cage — tricks that only the skinny can perform.
The sisters Barnes s
Stuffed with pints of rich milk, pounds of butter and jars of cod-liver oil and malt, I began to put on weight, and the Misses Barnes and Mother, as well as various women friends and relatives such as Aunt Molly Hamblin, my Kaye grandmother and ‘Aunt Bee’ Lewis (Mother’s friend from the Jhelum days, who had never married and now reappeared on the scene), were delighted with my progress. For it was, unfortunately, an age in which plumpness was considered a healthy condition in children, and the winner of the Best Baby Competition was always some dangerously overweight infant with fat red cheeks and dimples and creases galore. The unsightly excess poundage known as ‘puppy-fat’ would, one was assured, vanish like the dew of morning as soon as one turned eighteen.
Nowadays doctors have decided that a fat child generally grows up to be a fat adult. How right they are. In my new character of a poor- little-undernourished-shrimp-from-India I was stuffed as systematically as a Strasbourg goose, with the result that I became one of those unfortunate fatties who spend half their life on a diet without ever achieving a slim figure.
* Bargie (now Lady Cunningham) says she remembers me trying to make her take the same oath; with no success!
Chapter 21
Which is something between
A bathing machine,
And a very small second-class carriage.
Gilbert, The Gondoliers
I was not happy at Portpool, and it is a period of my life that I do not enjoy looking back on. That Bets and I made a bad start was not entirely our fault. The two Misses Barnes had told their pupils that two new girls from India would be joining their ranks that term, and for reasons best known to themselves their ignorant little pupils decided that we actually were Indians, and looked forward to meeting a pair of young Maharanis in gold-embroidered saris and diamond nose-studs. The arrival of Mollie and Betty Kaye, who looked no different from themselves, was therefore a sad disappointment which they took out on us.
Their leader, an unpleasant girl whose name I have long forgotten, fancied herself as a singer, and her favourite song, frequently requested by her admiring juniors, was the aforementioned ‘Roses of Picardy’. Picardy and Portpool are for ever bracketed together in my mind, courtesy of that school bully … ‘She is watching by the poplars, Colinette with the sea-blue eyes’ … ugh!
I recall a couple of days during which for some forgotten reason Bets and myself were ‘sent to Coventry’ by our fellow pupils (which meant that no one would speak so much as a word to us). We retaliated by talking to each other in Hindustani, which both fascinated and dumbfounded them, and when after a couple of days of this they gave up, we continued to use that language because no one else had any idea what we were saying and it maddened them. It also relieved our feelings to be able — smiling sweetly the while — to pass rude and uncomplimentary remarks about them to their faces, which they could neither translate nor resent.
When at last the term ended we spent our first summer holidays, traditionally, at the seaside. And since Tacklow had once spent part of his school holidays at Hunstanton (pronounced, also traditionally, ‘Hunstun’), a town on the Wash which he had described to us in lyrical terms and urged Mother to visit, she booked lodgings there for six weeks in August and September. Unfortunately he had neglected to add that there were two Hunstantons — Old Hunstanton and new Hunstanton. His had been the old one. But Mother, writing for information to a newspaper that devoted several pages to advertising holiday accommodation, ended up booking us, for a very reasonable sum, a ‘self-service flat only two minutes’ walk from the sea front, with exclusive use of a large and fully furnished beach-house, complete with kitchenette’. Or words to that effect. Anyway, it sounded, for the price, too good to be true. And was, of course.
Since our straitened circumstances did not permit Mother to travel to Norfolk in order to inspect this alluringly advertised accommodation, our first sight of it was a horrid shock. The ‘flat’ was the upper storey of a largish shop in a noisy street in the brash and booming town of New Hunstanton; a mile or two — and a world away! — from the prim, old-fashioned charms of the Old Town. The shop was called ‘The London Bazaar’, and a bazaar it was: a cheap and gaudy one full of junk goods of every description. Bets and I took to it on sight. Not so poor Mother. The flat, which except for the holiday season was lived in by the owners of the shop, was littered with personal belongings they had neglected to remove. Some of the cupboards and several drawers still held a few ancient coats, hats, boots and peculiar examples of woollen underwear, all smelling as strongly of mothballs as the rooms themselves smelt of bygone meals which (if one’s nose was anything to go by) had consisted largely of boiled cabbage.
It was the noisiest flat you can imagine, for the London Bazaar did a roaring trade from dawn until long after dark. The street was a busy one and pubs abounded; so too, inside, did green plush trimmed with bobbles, and red rep curtains edged with fringe. There were also Nottingham lace curtains, several aspidistras in pots, and endless bits of china lettered in gold with ‘A Present from Blackpool’ or wherever — the towns were all different; any modern interior decorator with a penchant for Victoriana would have gone into ecstasies over it. We thought it was pretty dreadful, and were frankly horrified by the beds, which like too many British beds sagged dismally in the middle. The ones we had been used to in India had thin mattresses laid on tightly stretched interwoven bands of narwa, a tough form of webbing which does not sag.
‘Never mind,’ comforted Mother, ‘we won’t have to see much of this place. We’ll sleep here, and cook our lunch and tea and perhaps supper too at the beach-house, and spend the day there.’ We all had high hopes of the beach-house and thought it was very kind of the proprietor of the London Bazaar, from whom we collected the key next morning, when he insisted on sending one of his shop assistants — or maybe a relative — to take us there in case we lost the way. In the event we couldn’t have found it without him, for the ‘large and fully furnished beach-house’ lay over half a mile beyond the outskirts of the town.
The first part of the way took us through a complicated tangle of streets and past the esplanade, and when that was behind us there was a long trudge along a rough and sandy track that meandered between gorse bushes, where the view of the sea on our right was obstructed by a long line of empty and decrepit railway carriages. On our left lay a flat and featureless stretch of singularly unattractive common land that strayed away to the horizon, and needless to say it was another grey and sunless day, though fortunately, windless and rainless: there was that much to be thankful for.
We should have been warned, but I don’t believe that even Mother realized what we were in for. Bill, Bets and I certainly did not, and we were left speechless when at long last our guide turned right between the blocks of abandoned railway carriages, stopped and said brightly: ‘’Ere we are then! You ‘ave got the key, Madam, ‘aven’t you? Good-oh! then I’ll be getting along now — cheery-bye all.’ And departed, whistling: leaving us staring in silent disbelief at the fully furnished beach-house which we had hoped to use as our headquarters for the next six weeks…
It was in fact the Guard’s Van at the end of that particular string of railway carriages, and the ‘furniture’ consisted of a small and very rusty oil-burning cooker (which presumably constituted ‘the kitchenette’), a ricke