Enchanted Evening (44 page)

This was their first evening in Ranikhet.

Andrew ‘Aherne', who was a bachelor, had fallen like a load of bricks for that ash-blonde charmer, Mrs Jess Binnie, and George, who had left his wife behind in England (or, more probably, Scotland) and was only interested in finding a temporary party and dance-partner to have fun with for the duration of his leave, found one in me. Together the four of us enjoyed an enormous amount of fun.

In the middle of all this fun and games, Jess fell ill and was removed to hospital for a few days. Andrew was inconsolable. George and I did our best to cheer him up, but he refused to be comforted and took to drink instead. I had the rest of this story from Jess, who regaled me with it when she was discharged. Andrew had visited her in hospital, bearing flowers and fruit, as did most of her friends. But this was not enough for him. Having refused to go partying with George and me, he had retired to his hotel room and got quietly sozzled, and at a late hour of night had been seized with the idea that he
must
say good-night to Jess.

If there hadn't been a full moon that night he would probably have come to grief long before he reached the hospital. But it was another white night, and since among India's many gods and godlings there is one, Bairon, who takes special care of drunks, Andrew, though sloshed to the eyebrows, arrived safely at his goal. Navigating down the long verandah on to which the doors and windows of a line of single-bed hospital rooms opened, he managed to end up outside the correct one, and our Mrs Binnie, abruptly jerked out of a healing sleep by the repetition of her name coupled with bangs on her door, realized with fury who was responsible for it, and called out to this sozzled and unwelcome Romeo, demanding that he leave
at once.

‘Can you believe it?' said Jess indignantly, recounting the scenario to me the next day. To make matters worse, her face had been plastered in cold cream and her hair had been in curlers: ‘
Not
the condition in which one would wish to appear before a devoted admirer – even one who's completely plastered,' said Jess. ‘One has one's pride!' I saw her point. I wouldn't have liked the idea myself if I'd been in her shoes. However, since the lovelorn idiot continued banging on her door and yowling that he ‘only wanner shay goo-nigh to you, Jessie; only shay goo-nigh,' and it was only a question of time before one of the hospital staff arrived hot-foot to inquire into the cause of this unseemly caterwauling, Jess nipped out of bed and, reaching the door, urged her admirer to go away
at once
! – ‘Well, shay goo-nigh then.' ‘Good-
night
, Andrew! And now for goodness sake shut up and go away before you wake the entire hospital:
please,
Andrew…'

But Andrew, having decided that he wanted to say goodnight to her, was not prepared to say it to a closed door. ‘Wanna shee you Jessie … only wan' ter shee you so I can shay goo-ni…'

Jess, by this time getting desperate, realized that unless he saw her he was probably capable of maundering on for the rest of the night – or until he was taken away and locked up. So turning the key, she opened the door a crack and said: ‘Well, you've seen me now. Good-
night,
Andrew! Now for pity's sake
shove off
!' But it was too late. The firm steps of an irate matron could be heard entering the verandah from the far end, and the next second a starched figure mounted the steps and became all too visible in the bright moonlight. Andrew waited not upon the order of his going. Giving the barely open door a violent shove, he pushed past Jess and shot across the room and under her bed with the speed of a startled rabbit, followed with equal celerity by Jess, who leapt into bed, pulled up the bedclothes and pretended to be asleep.

She had shut the door as Andrew shot past her, but had not had time to lock it, and the matron, opening it, stood in the doorway and, having allowed her steely gaze to travel over every inch of it that was visible to her (I presume she switched on the light or had a torch), asked Jess if everything was all right with her. Whereupon Jess gave up the pretence of being asleep, and sat up and said that everything was fine, thank you.

She told me that since a black bar of shadow covered that portion of the verandah on which Andrew had been standing, she thought it was just possible that the matron hadn't seen him vanish into her room, though she was obviously highly suspicious, for she stayed in the doorway making conversation. Jess said that she thought the woman was never going to leave, and that she could willingly have strangled Andrew, who passed the time by thumping the underside of her mattress, making it very difficult for her not to jump and say ‘
Ow
' every time he did it.

At long last, after raking the room with yet another searching glance, the matron left and Jess said she sat there in the darkness, holding her breath as she listened to the brisk receding footsteps. Not until she was quite sure that the coast was clear did she bang on her mattress and order Andrew, in a furious whisper, to come out at once, and get going while the going was good. Only to discover that the wretched man had fallen into a drunken slumber and was now beginning to snore. At which point she really
could
have murdered him and pleaded justifiable homicide. No jury, insisted Jess, would have convicted her. I don't think she knows how she managed to drag the dear boy out from under the bed and get him on his feet again. But she managed it at last (powered, I imagine, by sheer fury) and, with a parting shove, pushed him out of the room and into the verandah – straight into the arms of the matron, who was clearly a good deal more clued-up than she had appeared to be.

Jess's version of the episode, acted out for us later, was hilarious, though she kept on assuring us that it was all very well for us to laugh, but it hadn't been in the
least
funny at the time! Possibly not. But it had us shrieking at second-hand.

*   *   *

The four of us would picnic in the woods, and sometimes, lying out on the warm sunny hillsides, we would discuss the latest world news and the possibility of war. Jess and I were still inclined to be reassured by that ‘peace in our time' speech, but George and Andrew were pessimistic. They took a poor view of all these ‘scraps of paper' that were continually being signed by diplomats and heads of state. The British had signed a defensive agreement with Turkey – and Italy had responded by signing up with Germany. Yet another Anglo-Polish pact had been signed in London by von Ribbentrop; Prime Minister Chamberlain had reaffirmed our pledge to Poland, and Germany had appalled everyone by signing one with Russia (Nazism and Communism cosying up in the same bed? It was
impossible
!). ‘Bits of paper,' said George scornfully. ‘They'll tear them up in less time than it took to write them. You'll see!'

We celebrated my birthday with a picnic lunch in the woods and that night, with the addition of six or eight mutual friends, a dinner followed by a dance at the Club. A day or two later, invited by friends of George's, we left Ranikhet to spend a few days at Almora as guests of the Gurkhas stationed there, who were celebrating a yearly Week' in commemoration of some regimental triumph.

Almora was a small station roughly thirty miles from Ranikhet, along a narrow mountain road that winds and twists along the steep slopes of largely treeless hillsides that the sun has bleached to the uniform tint of a digestive biscuit. We were met by a Gurkha officer and put up in a large, two-storeyed wooden house that would have accommodated a far larger party and must have been the equivalent of a State guest-house. This makes me think that Almora and its surroundings must once have belonged to some small Hill Rajah, since the house was certainly far too large and rambling to be a Dâk bungalow.

The officer, having shown us to our room and told us that someone would collect us after we had had time to wash and unpack, hurried off to greet other arrivals who were apparently being put up in the houses of British officers which lay out of sight behind a curve of the hillside. Either Andrew or George (possibly both) had brought a bearer along, and this Admirable Crichton dealt with the unpacking, and chased up the skeleton staff that went with our outsize guest-house to see that cans of hot water were produced. And presently the young man who had greeted us reappeared and took us along to the cantonment proper, where we were introduced to the Colonel and his officers and their wives and the rest of their guests.

The whole cantonment was
en fête
and there were strings of flags and a large
shamiana
,
5
in the shade of which the guests sat down to a resplendent tea and were given a list of all the entertainments in store. These started with a large cocktail party that evening, for which we were allowed to disperse so that we could change into evening dress. No sooner was the cocktail party over than we were all ushered in to dinner. And when that was over, there was a dance, and I'm not too sure that there wasn't a ‘Beating the Retreat' somewhere, for I have a fleeting memory of bagpipes playing ‘The Road to the Isles'. But my recollections of that visit to Almora are very muddled and hazy, for it had been a very long day. The four of us gave up around one o'clock, and retreated, unobserved, to our commodious guest-house.

We all slept late the following morning. We would have slept even later if one of the Gurkha officers hadn't woken us with a top-priority message from HQ to Andrew and George, recalling them immediately to their unit. I remember George's face as he read it. And Andrew's. They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time and was probably only a minute, while their faces stiffened. All at once they no longer looked like the carefree happy-go-lucky pair of holiday-makers I had been laughing and partying with, but two much older people. Older and grimmer. George went to the window and called down to his bearer on the verandah below, telling him to see that there was enough petrol in the car and to pack the suitcases, because we had to get back to Ranikhet as soon as possible:
‘Jaldi-se. Taze-jaldi!'
(‘Quickly. Very quickly.')

‘Why must we?' I asked. ‘What's happened?'

‘Don't be silly!' said George impatiently. ‘War, of course. What did you think? Are you two coming back with us or would you prefer to stay here for the rest of the “Week”? – I'm sure we can arrange for someone to give you a lift.'

Well, naturally we opted for going back with them and seeing them off. After swallowing a hasty breakfast and making our apologies to our host, we returned to Ranikhet a good deal faster than we had come.

Once there, while the boys were rushing round the town settling accounts and paying bills, I painted a picture of a pin-up girl on the lines of the ‘Petty Girl' who used to appear in the
Saturday Evening Post,
for George to take into battle with him. Not that I believed that there would be any battles. Just because a couple of Army officers on leave had been recalled to their unit it didn't mean that war was about to break out. It was just a precaution. But when I said as much to George (in an attempt to reassure myself rather than him) he told me not to be a half-witted ostrich, and asked me if I really thought that he and Andrew were the only ones who had been recalled. ‘I'll bet you anything,' said George, ‘that thousands of chaps all over the globe are being whipped back to their jobs this minute. We've all been expecting it for months. Don't you
ever
listen to the radio?'

‘What about “Peace in Our Time”?' I said.

‘Piece of paper!' sniffed George. ‘I told you that before. If it hasn't been torn up already, it will be within a day or two.'

They left. And a few days later, on the third of September, we heard the tired voice of our Prime Minister informing the Empire that we were at war. The little piece of paper that had promised ‘Peace in Our Time' had, after all, been torn up and consigned to Herr Hitler's waste-paper basket.

The announcement had been made at 11 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time. But Ranikhet did not hear it until much later in the day, and I don't remember how I heard it. I think someone in the Club must have told me, but I don't know who, only that I felt stunned and stupid. I went for a long walk on the road that looks down on the Club and, having passed the entrance to the hotel, goes on to meander round a steep, forest-clad hill that was a favourite walk of Bets's and mine, because it reminded us of Simla. Bets wasn't there to walk with me that evening, for she and baby Richard had left a week or so earlier to help WHP move house to his new posting in Lucknow. But today I did not miss her, because I wanted to be alone to think. And to remember …

To remember very clearly my six-year-old self asking Tacklow with a mixture of awe and disbelief if it was true that there was a war on
now,
this very minute. And being horrified when he told me that there was and tried to explain why. But I hadn't been interested in ‘why'. Only appalled by the discovery that War – in other words grown-ups,
hundreds of grown-ups
killing each other – was not something that only happened in books or the tales that professional story-tellers told in the bazaars, but was actually happening
now,
in real life.

I remembered other things too. The wounded men who had been sent to recover from their wounds in various convalescent soldiers' homes in Simla. Mother and her friends organizing picnic parties for convalescent ‘Tommies'. Rolling bandages for the Red Cross and knitting endless numbers of wool mufflers, balaclava helmets and fingerless gloves for the troops in the trenches. And Sir Charles's brother, in the guise of a tin-helmeted Hun, spreading mayhem among the amateur actresses who wore sashes labelled ‘Belgium', ‘Serbia' and so on in the course of a patriotic pageant on the stage of Simla's Gaiety Theatre.