Enchanted Evening (4 page)

This was the first time I had seen ‘China' ponies – or, to be accurate, ‘Mongolian' ones, since they are imported from the grasslands of Mongolia. These miniature creatures from Central Asia look like shaggy nursery toys when they arrive, but when they have been clipped and groomed, and properly dieted, they look very presentable; and they are renowned for being tough, quick on their feet, and capable of carrying really heavy weights for long periods. They even made very passable polo ponies, despite the fact that the soles of their riders' boots were alarmingly close to the ground.

Seen for the first time, these sturdy little ponies seemed tiny. But it's surprising how soon one gets used to their size: less than two years later, when I saw a normal-sized racehorse in Hong Kong, it looked to me as large and as clumsy as a carthorse compared with the little ‘China ponies' I had become accustomed to.

I had been enthralled by Singapore and Hong Kong; they were both places that I had taken an instant fancy to and felt that I would dearly like to stay in for a long while – two or three years, perhaps. Or even more. They were places where one could put down roots. Not so Shanghai. Although socially speaking I couldn't have had a better time, I always felt that I was a raw newcomer, a foreigner from a different world.

Back in what was then British India the social structure had been different: starting at the top with the Viceroy and his staff and moving down to Governors of Provinces. Next came members of the ‘Heaven-born' – ICS (India Civil Service) – and the Foreign-and-Political, followed by the Army, the British Cavalry, British Infantry, Indian Infantry and Cavalry, and finally the merchants and traders, whom Anglo-India loftily called
‘box-wallahs'.
There was no such pecking order in Shanghai. Here the
box-wallah
was King and the Shanghaiers behaved as though they were a breed apart – free citizens of some powerful city-state. It was this, I suppose, that had enabled the denizens of the International Settlement to stand out in the street in evening dress and watch with detached interest as Japanese marines attacked the Chinese suburb of Chapei. It was not their business. It still astonishes me to think that only a little while later, while ugly wisps of smoke could still be seen rising from the ruins of Chapei, I was lunching, dining, dancing and generally enjoying a terrific party in a city where the curtain had already gone up on the hideous overture to the Second World War – and where representatives of every nation that was to take part in it had been able to sit and watch the opening of hostilities from the stalls …

The protagonists were all there. The French and British, Americans, Japanese, Germans, Jews and Gentiles from every country in the world. Russians, too; hundreds and hundreds of Russians. For the late Great War-To-End-War had only been over for fourteen years, the Russian Revolution for fifteen. Hordes of ‘White Russians' had fled for their lives. The westernized ones, who had money in foreign banks, made for Europe, while the rest turned eastward, trudging across Siberia to Vladivostok and, when that too fell to the Red Army, to Harbin in Manchuria – and eventually, to Tientsin and Shanghai.

Many died on that journey. But many survived, and one of the saddest sights of Shanghai during the early years of the Revolution was the sight of White Russians: tattered and barefoot men, begging from coolies or, if they were lucky, pulling rickshaws. By the time Tacklow brought us to Shanghai the Russians in that city were estimated to number more than 25,000 – they were the second largest group of foreign nationals, the first being the Japanese. And though still technically stateless, the White Russians had taken over the night-life of the city. Every dance-hall had its quota of Russian ‘hostesses', some as young as twelve or fourteen, some elderly and raddled, women who would partner anyone for a price, either for the duration of a dance or for the remainder of the night. You saw them everywhere, working as shop-girls, waitresses, hat-check girls, or in the chorus-lines of cabarets or floor-shows. Their men played in dance-bands and orchestras, sang, acted or put on performances of the ballet. There was more than one Russian theatre in the city and several Russian churches.

Many of the women claimed to be princesses, or the daughters of grand-dukes, and some of them may well have been. But in one respect their stories were chillingly similar: the horrors they had witnessed or endured at the hands of the Bolsheviks. The terrible hardships of escape and flight across endless, empty miles of some of the most hostile territory in the world, where the weakest – the old or the very young – had died from thirst or starvation, or merely from exhaustion. Many of these refugees were robbed and cheated by the wandering tribes of Central Asia and Mongolia, with the result that by the time they reached China – or Manchuria – they were penniless and forced to beg for food or for any work, however ill-paid or degrading.

*   *   *

Tacklow's intention had been to travel to Tientsin by the Shanghai Express. But he changed his mind when he learned that the train had recently been ambushed (and not for the first time) by night and in the middle of nowhere, probably by the private army of one of the self-styled Generalissimos who were rampaging around in those days, creating havoc wherever they went. The train had been stopped in a particularly desolate stretch of country, its passengers robbed of everything they possessed, and a good few rich Chinese taken captive and held for ransom. One or two people who had objected had been shot, and after that the rest of the passengers and crew had given no trouble.

We were told that one intrepid Consular lady, an Austrian or Italian Contessa as far as I remember, had not only had the sense to realize at once what had happened, but, acting with lightning speed, had tilted the entire contents of her well-stocked jewel-case into a brown silk head-scarf and, unseen in the darkness and confusion, had jumped down on to the track, hastily scratched a hole in the nearest bit of earth, buried the loot and scrambled back into her compartment. There she brushed the mud from her hands, filled the empty jewel-case with odds and ends of make-up and hair curlers, and put on a convincing act of being asleep when the raiders reached her compartment and proceeded to strip it of all her cash and belongings, together with any of the carriage fittings that were not actually nailed down.

And did the resourceful Contessa get her jewels back? Yes, she did indeed. But I imagine that the tale of how she nearly lost them may have had something to do with Tacklow's decision to finish our journey by sea.

We said goodbye to Shanghai with some regret, for thanks to Aunt Peg we had had a lot of fun there – and expected to have a lot more, for Peg had said: ‘Once you get really settled into a house of your own, and begin to get used to living here, I hope you'll come down here and visit us whenever you feel like a change of air. We shall expect to see a lot of you.'

But we were never to see Shanghai again, or Peg and Alec either – though Mother did, when they were old and ill and living in England and the Shanghai they had known was about to become no more than a memory. A happy one for almost all of the ex-Shanghaiers, for in later years I never met one of them who did not say: ‘It was a wonderful city to have lived in. We had such
fun
!'

Chapter 3

The voyage from Shanghai to Tientsin was not a long one: a few days at most. And there was nothing much to look at, because the ships in those days (and even more so now, I gather) feared piracy more than bad weather, and did not hug the coast. Our ship took us northward up the Yellow Sea to Tsing-tao, where we stopped briefly, and from there past Wei-hai-wei, still at that time a British Concession and headquarters of our China Fleet. On across the Gulf of Pe-chih-li to Ta-ku, where we waited for the tide before crossing the Ta-ku bar and sailing up the Wang-Pu river to Tientsin, which like Shanghai and Calcutta is a major port on a tidal river, and not directly on the sea.

We must have passed Wei-hai-wei in the dark, because I don't remember anything about it. But I do remember the scenery on the way up river, and the Ta-ku forts, which had been fired on in the days of the ‘Old Buddha' Tse Shi, the last Empress of China, and created an international incident. They were to create another one in the future, but that was still a good many years ahead.

Contrasting our voyage up river to Calcutta with our present one up the Wang-Pu, I gave the present one no marks at all. For once again the sky was grey and lowering, and the clouds were spitting a thin drizzle that did nothing for the scenery. If this was China proper, I thought nothing of it. The land appeared to be harsh, flat and treeless, and land, houses and people together a study in grey and beige. I couldn't think how Tacklow could have fallen in love with it so many years ago when he came this way in a Victorian troopship. Bets and I leant side by side on the railings and stared at the view in mutual condemnation.

Tientsin was another Treaty Port in which, as in Shanghai, a variety of different nations had been granted Concessions. It turned out to be far less attractive than Shanghai (and I hadn't thought much of
that
). To begin with it was much more parochial, and there seemed to be none of the speed and excitement about it that had been so noticeable in Shanghai. Tientsin plodded. We were now in June, and it was summer, but even when it stopped raining and we were treated to patches of warm sunlight, the temperature was depressingly low and the central heating in all the houses was much too high.

We shivered outside and sweated indoors, and my memory of those first few days is muddled and chaotic. We met and made laborious conversation to a series of unfamiliar people: aunts, uncles and numerous cousins, none of whom, to my knowledge, we had ever met before. Our first few nights were spent with a Mr Isemonger, whose daughter had been a friend of ours in India. He had been Chief of Police in Peshawar in the days when Tacklow had been head of CID, and they were old friends. When his wife died and his daughter married, he decided to retire in North China – heaven only knows why!

Someone took us out to lunch at the Golf Club, where I was startled to see a large noticeboard in the hall which said: ‘Players finding their ball in a coffin may remove it without penalty.' On demanding an explanation for what I took to be a macabre joke in distinctly bad taste, I was told that as a general rule the only uncultivated land in that part of China would be a disused graveyard – particularly if it had a few clumps of trees growing on it. If it were not so, the trees would almost certainly have been cut down for firewood or building material, and the land used for crops or hay. Only when a graveyard fell into disuse, either because of overcrowding or because the descendants of the dead had moved away or their line died out, leaving no one to tend the graves or remember the names of those who lay there, would the land be regarded as waste and left unused.

The Tientsin golf course was a case in point, and since the Chinese do not bury their elaborate wooden coffins deep in the ground, but place them in a shallow trench and cover them with earth on which they plant grass and flowers and seedling trees, centuries of wind and rain would have worn down each grassy hillock into little more than a low mound and rotted the wooden coffins within, exposing the bones of the long-forgotten occupants in a shallow depression that trapped many a golf-ball.

All I remember about Mr Isemonger's house is that it was as depressingly Edwardian-suburban in design as Uncle Ken's had been, that it was much too hot, and that there were several fantastic Japanese goldfish in a large glass bowl in the drawing-room. One of the goldfish was jet-black, and astonishingly like a miniature version of Mr Isemonger's little dog, a very small and equally jet-black Peke. The resemblance between the two was remarkable, and both appeared to be aware of it, for the little dog would get on to a chair from where he could press his nose to the glass, each quite obviously admiring the other. The only other memory I have of those first days in Tientsin is a tune.

Mr Isemonger had a wind-up gramophone and a stock of gramophone records, and the top one of the pile of records was new to us; neither the tune, nor the Astaire–Rogers film that it appeared in, had yet reached India, let alone any of the dance-bands in Shanghai. Bets, left alone in the house one morning, put the record on, and was so fascinated by it that she spent the next hour or so playing and re-playing it. It was still being played, for at least the twentieth time I gather, when the rest of us returned to the house. And Bets continued to play it whenever she had the chance. It was one of Cole Porter's best: the immortal ‘Night and Day' which still surfaces frequently to this day; and whenever I hear it – even just the opening bars of it – I am back in Tientsin. Finding Bets so smitten with it, Mr Isemonger presented her with the record, so that the melody followed us to our next port of call, ‘Ewo'
1
– the large and very comfortable house in which Mother's sister Dorothy, ‘Aunt Dor', and her husband, Cameron Taylor, lived.

Here Bets and I were left for some days in the care of Aunt Dor. And fortunately for me, since I don't think I could have stood the non-stop ‘Beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom', there was not only a gramophone in Aunt Dor's vast drawing-room, but an outsize grand piano plus piles of sheet music of the type that Victorians and Edwardians liked to bully their guests into singing after dinner as an alternative to playing whist or bridge. Among these were the ‘Indian Love Lyrics' of one Adela Florence Nicolson, better known as ‘Laurence Hope', set to music by someone who rejoiced in the name of Amy Woodford-Finden. I feel pretty sure that there can be few people of my age group who have not, at one time or another, heard some concert-circuit baritone or tenor warbling, ‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.'

Mother having been the first of my ‘China-side' grandparents' family to marry and acquire a family, Bets and I were the oldest of the Bryson grandchildren, the rest of whom were still attending the Tientsin High School at a fairly junior level. (A later alumna of Tientsin High was to be that world-famous prima ballerina, Dame Margot Fonteyn.) Dor's lot – Mary, Ian, Alan and Robin Taylor – left for school after an early breakfast and did not reappear again until tea-time; and, since Uncle Cam spent most of his days in his office in the city, and Aunt Dor, who was addicted to Good Works, spent most of her days dealing with the wants and woes of others, Bets and I often found ourselves alone in the house (with the exception of four or five silent, soft-footed and unobtrusive Chinese servants who ran the place with the utmost efficiency).