Enchanted Evening (42 page)

Since I was the only guest, and Sir Harry was not always able to appear on the dot, I used to bring with me whichever book I happened to be reading, and only put it down when I heard him approaching. The house was full of books. There were rows of them in every room. And since no one ever bothered me to do this or that, or go here or there, I had a field-day. For I am, and thanks to Tacklow always have been since the age of four, a compulsive bookworm. The only thing I am really frightened of is going blind. I could, I think, cope with almost anything else. But not to be able to read…! How could I bear it? How does anyone? Non-stop ‘talking books', I suppose.

I had been the only guest at Government House for several days when Sir Harry, hurrying into the anteroom before lunch, suddenly noticed that I had as usual a book in my hands and said, ‘You always seem to be reading one of the Mutiny books. Is it a subject that particularly interests you?' I must have looked surprised at what I considered a silly question, and I said, ‘Well, of course I am. I'm a Kaye!'

‘Good Lord – how silly of me! Yes, of course you'd be interested – '
2
Sir Harry talked about the Mutiny for most of that lunchtime, and afterwards opened a safe in which the Government House archives were kept and gave me a letter written in 1858, when the main fire of the Mutiny had been stamped out, though here and there a flame still flickered. It was a hand-written copy of the original which had been written by a girl who had come out to India to spend a season with her brother. She had been caught up by the Mutiny and spent close on a year captive in an Indian household in Lucknow, regaining her freedom only after the second and final relief of the beleaguered Residency and the fall of the city. She and her brother had been among the British who had taken refuge in the house of the Commissioner of Sitapur, from where they had escaped into the jungle when the sepoys who had been guarding the house joined the mutineers and attacked it.

The letter, telling her family of the murder of her brother and all that had happened to her, had been copied in spidery Victorian handwriting now yellowed with age, and sent out to Lucknow to be added to the Mutiny archives of the capital city of Oudh, the Province that Sir Henry Lawrence had done his best to keep peaceful and where, having failed, he had died in the besieged Residency.

I read that letter, and decided there and then that one day I
must
write a novel about the Mutiny in Oudh, and use that girl's story. It was all there. Handed to me on a plate by a girl who had lived through all the horrors of that rising and the terrifying day in which the Mutiny broke out in Sitapur, an unimportant district within the borders of Oudh.

Once again, as in the miracle year that had brought me back to India, when we had stayed on our way north in this same Government House, I was taken round the Mutiny sights – the battered Residency, with its cellars in which so many women and children had existed for day after day during the burning heat and the continuous gunfire of the siege, and in which so many of them had died. The shattered remains of the room in which Henry Lawrence had been killed; the cemetery with its more than doubtful labelling of graves, and the ruins of the Alum Bagh, the ‘Garden of the World'.

I can't remember whether I left for Kathgodarm with Sir Harry and his party, yet I think I must have done, for I certainly didn't travel alone, but in company with several other people. We took the night train to Kathgodarm, which we reached in the dawn; a little station among the foothills on the edge of the plains.

The party I had travelled with from Lucknow, presumably the Government House one, was bound for Naini Tal. But since the little hill railway did not go as far as Ranikhet, I was transferred into a hired car and did the rest of the journey in that. I remember that car-ride with pleasure to this day. As hill roads go, it was much the same as any others I had travelled on: a gritty, dusty surface, edged on the outer side with a low dry-stone wall constructed from loose slabs of rock piled on one another, and winding and twisting in a manner that would once have made me car-sick, but which I had learned how to deal with. For one thing, I sat in the front seat beside the driver; and that makes all the difference.

On one side of the road the hillsides soared steeply upward, for the most part pine-clad, while on the other the ground dropped away to the foothills and the plains. Here, too, for a time, I could look down on to jungle. Most of it was tiger-jungle, which like that of the Mysore Ditch is not thick and green and tropical, but in general thin and lion-coloured and full of thorn and sal-trees, elephant grass and scarlet-flowered dhak trees. As our road took us higher and higher into the mountains, the trees dropped away; and presently, for miles in every direction, the hillsides were as bare as the back of your hand and sculpted all over by little shell-shaped fields, each one edged with a low wall of mud and stones and somehow reminiscent of the honeycombs of industrious bees. These hills too were part of the Himalayas. But they were not in the least like the mountains of Kashmir, or even Simla.

The trees began again as we neared Ranikhet, a green splash of pines, flowering trees and the roofs of houses, scattered along a high ridge, the far side of which overlooked a vast green valley whose far wall was rimmed by a rampart of mountains, among them the high white peak of Nanda Devi, surrounded by her attendant snows.

*   *   *

Ranikhet must, I think, be one of the prettiest of India's hill stations, and one of my many regrets is that I never kept any of my paintings of it. That is the worst of being skint and needing to earn enough money to live on. You are delighted when your work sells well, and it is only later, when things have become easier, that you regret not keeping just one or two of your own sketches. Another thing I had to economize on was films. I still only had my ancient Box-Brownie, and there were no colour films on the market as yet (anyway, as Bets has pointed out, we couldn't have afforded them if there had been!). So I have almost nothing to remind me of Ranikhet, apart from a few snapshots taken by other people, and one really good one of my great friend Jess Binnie. But apart from that, nothing tangible remains to remind me of the beauty of that little hill station.

Like many other summer resorts, this one was strung along the crest of a high ridge, and those houses that had failed to find a foothold on the top of it clung to the steep sides of the mountain as they do in Simla and Murree, Mussorie and Darjeeling. The buildings of the hotel in which I had taken rooms clung in descending layers to the southward slope, rather in the manner of a colony of swallows' nests, and consisted of two long rows of rooms, one below the other and separated from the next block by lawns and flower-beds. My room was in the lowest block, in the middle of the upper storey, and looked out on to a long communal verandah that was reached by a curving iron stairway at the near end.

The Ranikhet Club lay on the opposite side of the ridge, its tennis-courts giving the impression of being hacked out of the sheer hillside, and its windows looking out across that enormous valley to the white-topped mountain range on the far side. Often, during the months of the monsoon, the valley would fill up with mist, leaving only the lovely line of the snow-peaks to catch fire at sunset, as they used to do when I watched them from the verandah of our house in the hills beyond Simla, when I was a child. Only here they were even more spectacular, because they were so much nearer. So near that there were times when I felt I could almost reach out and touch them.

The white peaks that one looks out at from Ranikhet are merely the ladies-in-waiting to Nanda Devi, the Goddess of those snows, who stands in the centre of a ring of mountains that form the Nanda Devi basin. It is only at sunset and sunrise that you can tell which one is the goddess, for since they stand protectively around her, it follows that half of them are closer to you than she is, and therefore look much taller. But if you watch that glittering array of peaks at sunrise or sunset, you will see a single peak catch fire before the dawn, or hold the light while the rest are only cold silhouettes at sunset. That one is Nanda Devi.

The little town and its bazaar stood among pines and deodars and scores of a flowering tree that was strange to me. It was covered with pink and almost scentless blossoms, each one more than twice the size of any fruit blossom I knew, and the sight of the far snows seen through that foam of pink petals will stay with me always. Ranikhet was full of flowers. The hillsides were thick with wild balsam and cosmos, and the steep slope above the path that led down from the main road to the hotel had been planted with a mass of zinnias in every colour of the rainbow. I love zinnias, because they will brighten your garden when drought and heat have shrivelled almost every other flower that grows, and they thrive on the poorest soil and in the unkindest of temperatures.

I have tried and tried to grow them in England, but without success; they come up on thin straggly stalks and produce the smallest of flowers, and those only in the hot and angry colours that set my teeth on edge, instead of the huge and beautiful pale-coloured ones that are white or dusty-pink, or primrose-yellow – or any of the clear, soft colours. I persuaded the hotel
mali
to let me choose which ones I would like for the vase in my room, because his own choice was always for the reds, oranges and red-browns; and though he deplored my preference for the ones he obviously considered to be deadly dull, he gave in with a good grace.

Bets had taken up residence in the house with Connie,
née
Tallon (by then Mrs Tom Hughes), several weeks before I arrived, and had made friends with a number of that season's visitors. It was she who introduced me to Jess Binnie, who not only made my stay, but became a lifelong friend. I don't believe that anyone has ever made me laugh more than Jess. She was a jewel, and my only complaint against her was that she was also a dedicated and exceedingly good bridge player. Since I detest all card games, I would be deprived of her exhilarating company for large portions of each week. Jess was much too good a player to be left in peace by the bridge-fiends, and she made quite a bit of money out of the game, which is more than her opponents did! But when she wasn't playing bridge she spent a lot of time making me fall about laughing. It wasn't all intentional; it was just the tone of her voice and the way she phrased things that made you roll in the aisles; you could never repeat something that Jess said to you and make it sound funny. This was something that was uniquely Jess – I don't believe that she had any idea that she was doing it! It just came out that way. But knowing her gave me a hilarious summer.

It was Jess who suggested that I should try being a blonde, in order to test that theory that ‘gentlemen prefer them'. Well she should know, for she had the most beautiful hair you ever saw, a natural ash-blonde, which is a hundred times better than being a golden or yellow one. Hers was that true, pale silvery colour that is a soft grey in the curves and curls and shimmers with pale gold highlights. She was also very slim, and she insisted that it was the combination of the two that made her such a success with ‘the boys'. For there were no two ways about that. Men fell for Jess in droves.

‘You see,' she explained, ‘whenever I walk into a room in a strange place, the men turn round to have a look, and the minute they see my hair, and that I'm the right size, they sit up and take notice, and start straightening their ties. By the time I've got close enough to them to let them see that I have a face like a boot' (which was a
gross
libel) ‘it's too late, because their brains have registered that I am an attractive blonde, and the dear saps are hooked. All I have to do is look them over and haul one in.' And it was true. At close range, her personality and her talent to amuse took over, and they couldn't care less what she looked like – they were hooked.

I knew that nothing I could do with a bottle of peroxide was going to produce the same effect that Jess produced so effortlessly, and I hadn't as yet seen anyone I would like to impress. But one fine morning, having nothing better to do, we walked off to the shops which adjoined the bazaar, found a chemist's and bought a bottle of peroxide and another of ammonia. And that afternoon, assisted by Jess, I sloshed peroxide and ammonia all over my head and covered it with a bathing cap, tied a towel over it, and waited the regulation time as advised by the chemist's assistant. I couldn't
wait
to turn myself into a pale gold blonde, and I remember the excitement with which I removed that towel-turban and rubber cap when the specified time was up …

Alas, the result was a disaster! Instead of a glamorous pale gold, my hair had turned an angry ginger-biscuit colour that was truly hideous. A second application only produced a depressing shade of Oxford Marmalade, and it took a third to achieve anything
approaching
the colour I had been aiming for. Jess was all for trying a fourth while I was about it; but by then I was exhausted, both mentally and physically. And anyway, we had run out of either ammonia or peroxide, I forget which (it was probably both). But Jess and the author of that crashing best-seller
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
had been right. They certainly do.

On my initial appearance in the Club lounge, heads had automatically turned as members who were already seated there looked round in order to see if the newcomer was a friend, or, if a stranger, anyone worth taking note of – for this was, after all, the beginning of ‘the Season'. My arrival had been briefly noted, but that was all. No one had taken a second look or bothered to stop talking. The difference this time was dramatically different. I might not have a sylph-like figure, but I was a young, blue-eyed blonde, and there was a distinct moment of silence as almost everyone in that long room stopped talking and took it in. ‘Told you so!' hissed Jess, who had been sitting with a group of friends at the far end of the room, waiting for me to arrive.