I had sent my Scotland Yard hero to an out-of-the-way inn in moorland country where, on arrival, he is startled to recognize the three villains of the piece (whom he has not seen for years and who have never seen him!), who are staying at the inn. Instantly deciding to stay there himself in order to find out what they are up to, he tries to book a room there, only to be told by the landlord that there are none vacant. Except for those already occupied, all the rest are closed for repainting, or some such excuse. Determined to stay, he pretends his car has broken down, so that he will have to stay. But he is spotted as a menace by the villains, who find the bit of his engine that he has surreptitiously removed in order to immobilize the car.
Knowing nothing about cars, I had been sure that this was something the experts could sort out with one hand tied behind their backs. In fact, I had produced an impossible situation. The villains are not mechanical experts, but they have arrived at the inn in a chauffeur-driven car, and their chauffeur, who is, examines the supposedly stalled car and cannot make out how it got there in the first place. But there must be something to give away the fact that the stalling of the car is deliberate. Well, you try it!
I took that infuriating problem to a flossy great shop that sold only the most expensive cars, and which I think is probably still there, in Piccadilly opposite the Ritz. No one knew a thing about me: I was just a scruffy art student who said she had written a book and would have to rewrite almost the whole thing again if this silly situation could not be solved. But those darling chaps took off their coats, spat on their hands, and took endless trouble to solve it for me. Hours of trouble. No good. ‘Terribly sorry, but it can’t be done!’
I tried all sorts of mechanically-minded car friends, and every time they were sure that they could come up with something. And every time they couldn’t. I was faced with having to rewrite most of that ruddy book when Roger – an Engineer Commander in the Navy – came up with the solution I used. It had to be done on a car called an Alvis. Fortunately Bill Brinton, one of the Brinton cousins, happened to own an Alvis, and I was staying with the Brintons. Bill was very snooty about Roger’s solution. Said it couldn’t possibly work, and that if it was done to his car, he’d spot it at once: no one but an idiot, etc., etc …
Well, I had already explained the whole thing to Beddoes, and as Bill was staying to lunch, I asked Beddoes to try it out on Bill’s Alvis and see what happened. It worked like a charm! Bill got crosser and crosser when he couldn’t get his car to start, and only when he stormed indoors to ring for a taxi and a couple of mechanics did we tell him what we’d done. And he was furious. Fortunately, everyone else thought it was hilarious, and the crosser he got the more they laughed. Poor Bill! It took me ages to live that down as far as he was concerned. But the trick – although terribly far-fetched, as Roger had pointed out – did work, so I didn’t have to rewrite that book after all.
I took the whole thing back to Limerston Street and had it typed by that angel of a girl, and sent it off to the publishers of the bit of total tripe that had decided me to try my hand at writing instead of art. And they took it!
If they hadn’t I would never – hand-on-heart, never – have tried another publisher. I would have put it on the fire or into a trash-can and said, ‘Back to the drawing-board, Mollie!’ and that would have been that. Because I cannot say too often that apart from one brief episode when I can’t have been more than ten years old, when Bargie and I decided to write a book about a haunted house that was going to make our fortunes, I do not remember having any serious leanings towards authorship. On the other hand, I felt pretty confident – until I tried it – that I could make a living as an illustrator. The switch was purely accidental. A single trashy novel, coming on the heels of a whole string of ‘Tuppenny Library’ novels, had convinced me that anyone who was even vaguely educated ought to be able to write one of them. And I was right. Six Bars at Seven was not only accepted, but paid for. More than fifty pounds, no less! I couldn’t believe it. It was too good to be true. And was, of course. I’d neglected to read the small print, and only discovered much later that I had sold it outright.
But Fate was obviously pushing me towards a writing career, for at about the same time I noticed, while working away at the studio, a roll of typed paper lying on the floor beside Temmy’s easel, and asked her what it was. She said it was the MS of the latest Grey Rabbit book, and I asked if I could read it and was told to go ahead. It didn’t take long to read, and I remember handing it back and saying it was pretty good rubbish and I would have thought any chump could have written that kind of stuff. ‘Oh you do, do you?’ observed Temmy with a distinct trace of acid. ‘Well, you go ahead and do it! Try it yourself; and if it’s any good, I’ll illustrate it for you! That’s a promise.’
So once again I visited my local Woolworths, expended a few pence on a writing block and a small, flat notebook (one penny) and wrote a children’s book about rabbits and field mice and similar country creatures, which I called Potter Pinner Meadow – a name that rose in my mind of its own accord, and that I honestly thought I had invented. But one day, at least a quarter of a century later, when being driven along a lane not far from Pembury in Kent, I saw it on the worn wooden notice-board of a farm and realized that I must have seen it during the days when Helen and I used to explore the country lanes around Pembury. Since then I have never been absolutely certain that something I have written, and been pleased with, is really original, or something I once read, or heard someone say. It worries me at times.
Potter Pinner Meadow got itself written in some rather peculiar places. I had to attend a surgery to be tested to see if too much sugar, if any, was being absorbed into my blood. I don’t remember why this had to be done, but I was warned that I’d be there for several hours. This was because I was fed a large mug of – I think – glucose, after which I sat around for an hour, had a blood test taken, and drank another mug of glucose. And so on, for several hours. The verdict was OK; I wasn’t absorbing sugar. But in intervals, I filled the time by writing Potter Pinner. In fact I very nearly finished it there, though not quite. The last few pages were written during an interval, standing up at the back of the Mercury Theatre where the Ballet Club were putting on a programme.
The story finished, I copied it out neatly in long-hand into the penny notebook, illustrated the cover with a little painting of a clump of primroses, the title and my name in poster colours, and took it round to Collins, who in those days hung out at No. 48 Pall Mall. And here luck took over. Billy Collins used to retire to his home at weekends, taking with him a selection of children’s books to read to his own children. If they liked a book it would probably be published. If not, not.
Well, that Friday, I learned later, he was attending some cocktail party or other on his way home, and didn’t want to lug along a lot of manuscripts. He called in to ask if they recommended any particular offering, and seeing my notebook on the secretary’s table, said: ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh, just some idiot who doesn’t know that all MS have to be typed and double-spaced,’ returned the secretary, picking up the notebook and dropping it into her waste-paper basket. W. Collins (realizing it would fit very easily into his pocket) retrieved it from the basket, pocketed it, and eventually read it to his young; who, bless their little cotton socks, liked it. A secretary rang the Chelsea Illustrators on Monday morning, and that afternoon Temmy and I set off to 48 Pall Mall. And that’s how the Potter Pinner books saw the light of day.
There were five of them in all. And but for the war, there might have been more. Temmy illustrated them all for me, because she had a special talent, shared by the late great Beatrix Potter, for being able to draw, say, a rabbit, and put it in a dress and apron, and call it Mrs Someone, and it looked right. Whereas if I drew a rabbit, it was a rabbit; and that was that. I couldn’t make them look anything else.
Temmy and I had a lot of fun with those books. Her brother, Frank, was the Commodore of the Harwich Yacht Club, and Temmy too was a
sailing buff. She would often take me down to Ipswich for the weekend, where her family home was, to sail and sleep on the Tempest boat, which was moored at Pin Mill near that known-to-all-sailing-buffs inn, the Butt and Oyster. We would take the latest Potter Pinner with us, and work out each page during the train journey from London. The books were all written in Temmy’s beautiful script, and as the illustrations were scattered across the pages, she would often demand that I write an extra word or two – or cut a sentence down to size – in order to fit the script round the pictures.
Years later, when the Second World War had been and gone, and Temmy was on one of her many successful lecture tours, she mentioned the way in which we had worked on those books page by page, sitting in the evening train to Ipswich. At the end of her lecture, she found a couple of elderly sisters waiting to speak to her. They had, they explained, been on the Ipswich train a few years before the outbreak of war, and been enormously intrigued by what the two fellow passengers in their carriage were doing which caused them to explode into laughter at frequent intervals. Now, listening to Temmy’s talk, they had suddenly found this fascinating conundrum solved.
I have forgotten how much Collins paid me as an advance on the first of the series, but I know that together with the outright payment I got for Six Bars at Seven, I was suddenly in possession of the huge sum of £75! And this in a day and age when the return fare from London Docks to Bombay and back again, Tourist Class – three weeks either way with all meals included and no limit on how long one stayed at the end of an outward trip – was forty pounds! £40! Unbelievable nowadays, isn’t it? I looked at my seventy-five-pound windfall and realized with incredulous joy that if I could make that kind of money by writing, then I could write anywhere. I didn’t have to stay in London in a bed-sit in Limerston Street with the rain dripping dismally down on the cobblestones outside, when I could live a good deal cheaper on a houseboat on the Dāl Lake with lotus lilies looking in at my window. I was rich, I was rich, I was rich! Moreover, Fudge Cosgrave, the other lifelong friend I had made at the Chelsea Illustrators, had left before me. Her father, Sir William, had been appointed Chief Commissioner of the Andamans, and Fudge had given me a pressing invitation to spend the whole of the cold weather there. It was a chance not to be missed, and now – oh wonderful day! – I could afford to take it up.
Roger gave me a farewell party at the Hungaria, and Mike and Bargie and Sir Harold Snagge – the man she was to marry as soon as her divorce from the unsatisfactory Tancred was finalized – came down to Tilbury to see me off. I left England on a wet, cold, blustery day in early October, clutching under my arm a carbon copy of Six Bars at Seven, in case the publishers lost the top one before it appeared in print! I remember being scared stiff that some ill fate might befall it before it saw the light of day; the whole thing still seemed too good to be true.
Oddly enough, I don’t remember anything at all about the ship or the voyage out, except that we ran into dense fog in the Bay of Biscay, and for the whole of one day we crawled forward into nothingness with our fog-horn howling like a demented sheep every few minutes, and being answered at intervals by the fog-horns of other ships (the Bay seemed to be full of them!) baying mournfully in reply. And the only reason I remember that is because I was afraid that if we collided with another ship in the fog, and had to take to the boats, I might lose my precious MS. I was so scared of that that I crammed the manuscript into my sponge bag,2 in case it got damaged by salt water, and tied it on to myself – just in case! I blush to recall it.
Apart from that the entire voyage is a blank. I imagine I must have spent most of it with my feet at least ten inches above the deckplanks, metaphorically speaking, from sheer elation, for I was going home, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I was going to see my family again, and Kadera and Mahdoo, and any number of old friends, as well as all the loved and familiar places. I felt as if I had been away for years and years instead of only two, for so many things had happened since I had left India in that sad spring when Tacklow died. Among others, I had recently become an aunt, for Bets was now the mother of a baby son, Richard Henry Pardey, born in Srinagar, Kashmir, in the late summer of 1936. Since she and her baby, and Mother as well, had been spending the summer months in Simla as paying guests of a mutual friend, I intended to make Simla my first port of call, before setting off to join Fudge in the Andaman Islands.
Somebody must have met me and put me up for a day or two in Bombay, because I remember meeting one of the Burma-Shell people, whom I had known in Delhi, at the racecourse – one Sinclair, known to his friends as Sinbad – and telling him proudly that I had been able to come back under my own steam, because I had written a book that was shortly to be published. I rather expected to be congratulated on this success, but was firmly slapped down and snubbed when Sinbad asked what the book was about, and on being told, remarked loftily that anyone who had enough intelligence to get a book published ought to be above writing the sort of trashy rubbish that I had obviously gone in for. I have seldom had such a crushing put-down, and it remains like a sore patch in my memory to this day. Typical of Sinbad, said my friends consolingly. And it was, of course.
I caught the Frontier Mail to Delhi and travelled up across India with my nose pressed to the windowpane, revelling in every mile of the beloved land unrolling before my infatuated eyes. My companion in a two-berth purdah carriage (women only) was not, as I had hoped, some Indian lady on whom I could practise my Hindustani but a youngish Scots missionary, returning to a mission hospital in the hills after a holiday in Bombay. She may once have been dazzled by the charm of India, but if so, the gilt had worn off, and a too close association with the dark side of that great sub-continent had made her take a dim view of the country and its people. She could not understand how I could find anything to admire in the land that streamed endlessly past the windows of our carriage, and though plainly she was a kind-hearted and obviously dedicated do-gooder, she was not a particularly enlivening companion on a long train journey.
We parted at Delhi, where she retained her seat and I changed trains for the one that took me to Kalka in the company of a cosy old pahareen – a hillwoman, bound for her home village somewhere beyond Kasauli – who thought my Hindustani was hysterically funny. Kalka is in the foothills of the Himalayas where the white, winding mountain road that leads to Simla begins, and I was decanted in the dawn on to a station platform that I had been familiar with ever since I first stepped down on to it at the ripe age of three. I took the rail-motor to Simla in preference to the much slower narrow-gauge railway in which I had always travelled before. This was on Mother’s advice. She said it cost more but got there much quicker. I knew every inch of that road. Or thought I did. And as we passed Dugshai and saw the road veer away towards Sanour, I leaned out of the window to look up at a ridge that is high above both railway and road, where Tacklow lies buried, and felt like shouting out to him, ‘I’m all right, darling. I’m back!’ I didn’t of course, but I expect he knew.
I don’t think there was any part of the road, from the clumps of candelabra cactus on the bare lower hills, to the pines and deodar and rhododendron on the higher ones, and the villages and wayside shrines, that was unfamiliar to me. But I had forgotten the scents. There is a little yellow climbing rose that has the sweetest and most penetrating scent and which brings back the past as nothing else could – more even than the smell of pine needles and pine-cones. The rail-motor stopped, as the train always did, at Jatogue on the Simla side of the long and gritty Jatogue tunnel, for long enough for the passengers to alight and eat breakfast at the railway restaurant. And that too had not changed a whisker since I had eaten my first breakfast there back in the autumn of 1913. The restaurant used to make an odd form of scrambled egg that tasted exactly like the awful dried-egg concoctions that food-rationed Britons put up with during the Second World War. And I bet they still do!
Mother and Bets were on the Simla platform to meet me, and we were once more a family. I ha
d come home again.
5
Islands in the Sun
Chapter 22
I had brought two special parcels with me from England, in addition to that MS. One, for Mother, was a life-size head-to-waist portrait of Tacklow that Pedder, one of the Chelsea Illustrators, who was an excellent portrait painter, had painted from a photograph. Dear Pedder knew very well that I couldn’t possibly afford the prices she got for her portraits, and she did that superlative one of Tacklow for eight pounds – which I imagine just about covered the canvas and the tubes of paint. The hours she spent on it were free, and altogether the whole thing cost me ten pounds, because Pedder couldn’t invent the colouring of the uniform and medals, so I hired those, at a pound a time, from one of the theatrical and fancy-dress firms that dealt with this sort of thing.
Roger nobly sat for the portrait, dressed up in the ICS full-dress kit and orders, and the result could not have been better. I bought a large gilt frame for it at a junk shop on the Portobello Road for ten shillings (ah me, those were the days!). Mother took one look at it and burst into tears, and I was afraid that I had pushed her back into the ponds of woe that had made life so impossible for all her friends and relatives during the months after Tacklow died. But thank goodness, no. She thought the picture was a speaking likeness, which it was. And is. And for the rest of her life it accompanied her on all her travels. Nowadays it hangs in my hall, at the top of the stairs, and it is Tacklow standing there. As with Vermeer’s Head of a Girl, if you smile at him he smiles back.
The other thing was a tablet to his memory, which was put up on the right-hand wall of Simla’s Christ Church, the church in which both Bets and I were christened. I presume it is there still. I modelled it myself in clay, bought the bronze, and MG, who had a kiln in her back garden (her husband had been a well-known sculptor), cast it for me for nothing. They were a nice lot, those Chelsea Illustrators. I am eternally indebted to them.