These reasons alone would have made that art exhibition stand out in my mind as a memorable occasion. But in the event it was to prove far more important to Mother than it was to me. For her it was a real gold-letter day, for among the scores of amateur efforts displayed on the rows of canvas screens which filled the Club’s ballroom were three that stood out like diamonds on coal-dust.
The pictures were signed M. Molesworth and we were all riveted by them. I felt that I would have given almost anything to be able to paint like that, and Mother wasted no time in hunting up the exhibition’s harassed Secretary and demanding to know if M. Molesworth gave painting lessons. The Secretary said she had no idea, but that she could give her the artist’s address. This turned out to be a tent in a large camp pitched on about an acre of ground dotted with chenar trees, near the entrance to Gupkar Road; it had a name, ‘Chenar Bagh’, I think. The tents were usually hired out to impecunious subalterns who could not afford to take rooms in one of the hotels or guest-houses, or to hire a houseboat. But since Mother hadn’t realized that, she had neglected to ask the Secretary whether M. Molesworth was male or female, and had made up her mind that whoever it was must be an established artist; she was expecting to see someone aged at least forty, and was very taken aback to discover that M. Molesworth was an eighteen-year-old girl.
The M. stood for Mollie, and she said she would be delighted to give Mother a few lessons at five rupees an hour since she needed the money, though she had never taught anyone before and hadn’t a clue how to set about it. However, if Mother was willing to take the risk, she would certainly do her best. The deal was clinched and the two of them started on the first lesson that same week. And what a bargain it turned out to be. True, Mollie was no teacher. She couldn’t put it into words. But she could do better than that: she could snatch the brush from you and demonstrate brilliantly.
The few lessons she gave Mother before she left Kashmir turned Mother from a painstaking amateur into a painter of real charm. Better still, a painter whose paintings sold — which was to prove a godsend to Mother in the lean years after Tacklow died and she found herself having to make ends meet on a widow’s pension of £394 a year, a sum that was not increased until right into the early seventies. Her paintings saved her from penury, and today there must be hundreds of them scattered in homes all over India, in houses and bungalows and clubs and regimental messes that were once owned by the British. Not long before she died there was an article in the Telegraph on the dwindling numbers of British, nearly all of them widows, who had ‘stayed on’ in Ootacamund after India became independent, because they no longer wanted to return to England. The writer of the article included a description of the ‘typical drawing-room’ in any of the bungalows they inhabited, a decor dating back to the Raj — chintz-covered chairs and sofas, mantelpieces and occasional tables cluttered with faded, silver-framed photographs and snapshots of men and women long dead and children who by now must be grandparents, ‘and watercolour paintings by Lady Kaye on the walls’.
I gave the article to Mother and told her that this was Fame! I wish I’d kept it, because I doubt if there are any of those who decided to stay on left in all India, let alone in ‘Ooty’.
I can still remember, in detail, one of those paintings of Mollie’s that we saw that morning, and I still regret, bitterly, that we could not afford to buy it — or any of her other pictures. Heaven knows they were cheap enough. But, knowing her worth, she had priced them a good deal higher than the average amateur exhibitor had dared to do. I only have two of her pictures: one of them a painting of a pine tree that she did to show Mother how it should be done, and which I was fortunate enough to see her do, having gone with them to watch.
The method, sureness and swiftness of the execution was a revelation to me, and I was dumb with admiration. It is the only one of her demonstrations that survived among Mother’s papers. The other is a quick, unfinished and, alas, unsigned sketch of Vernag, the little colonnaded pool teeming with carp which are said to be the descendants of those put there by the Emperor Akbar. It was given to me by Mollie’s husband in the 1980s, and from him I learned that she had, while still in her twenties, given a one-girl exhibition of her work in a London gallery that had been a sell-out. He showed me the press comments and a laudatory half-page article in, I am almost sure, the Illustrated London News.
She told us, that first day in Srinagar, that she had won a scholarship at one of the more prestigious London art schools — I can’t remember which — but that they wouldn’t take her until she was nineteen. As that left her with a year to fill in, she sailed for India, where she had an uncle who was a General, and having stayed with him for a week or two, left to do a working tour of India, paying her way by selling her pictures. We never met her again, but some time in the early thirties she married a young missionary doctor and they came up to Kashmir for their honeymoon. On the way back there was an accident; the taxi they had hired to take them down the mountain road to Rawalpindi went over the edge. Her husband, though injured, survived, and so I think did the driver. But Mollie was killed.
Some years after she died, an acquaintance of mine took me to have tea with a middle-aged lady who lived somewhere near Tunbridge Wells in Kent and who turned out to be a relative of Mollie’s — an aunt, I think. She showed me an enchanting illustrated diary that Mollie had made on a trek to Tibet, and any number of sketches that she had done some years before her marriage, while she was spending a few months somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. Her sketches of snow-covered mountain ranges silhouetted against the fantastic patterns of the aurora borealis, or icebergs like crystal palaces moving slowly down green and blue channels of open water among the ice-floes, with the pale sun shining through them, were some of the strangest and most beautiful pictures I have ever seen.
I managed, in the 1980s, to trace Mollie’s husband, but all he had, apart from a framed selection of her paintings, were a few unfinished and unsigned rough sketches (one of which, the one of Vernag, he gave to me) and an illustrated diary of a trek to Lhasa, which wasn’t a patch on the one to Tibet. I don’t even know how she managed to get there, for in those days Tibet was a closed country. But then she had fairly high-powered relations scattered around the world, of the type whose names do not get into print but who, behind the scenes and unobtrusively, can pull quite a few strings.
Among the ‘regulars’, the people who came up year after year to spend the hot weather in Kashmir, were many who had been friends of my parents for years and whom I had known in my childhood; among them Sir Micky and Lady Roberts, and ‘Smiler’ Muir. In the old days, when Smiler had been Personal Private Secretary to the Viceroy, or something of the sort, he had spent the summers in Simla, as had the Robertses, who used to lease a haunted house known as the Bower at Mashobra, some five or six miles outside the town. (I have told the tale of our encounter with the Bower ghost in the first volume of my autobiography.) Smiler Muir had officially retired some years ago, and now spent his summers in Kashmir with the Robertses on their houseboat on the Jhelum at Srinagar, where Micky, who was a doctor and still practising, would join them when on leave.
The Robertses’ daughter, Sybil, who had been one of our childhood friends, was now grown-up and married, so for a large part of the season Lady Micky and Smiler were the only occupants of the houseboat, a fact that, despite their ages (Lady Micky was no chicken, while Smiler must have been at least sixty — and looked it!) had attracted the attention of a group of elderly regulars, who, having taken exception to the post-war (the 1914–18 one) influx of jazz-age visitors, whose standards, mores and morals were, they considered, getting laxer every year, had founded a Purity League.
A deputation from this august body requested an interview with the Resident, and when ushered into the Presence inquired sternly if he was aware that two well-known British visitors were ‘letting the side down’ by publicly living-in-sin on a houseboat not far from the Residency. If so, what did he propose to do about
it? — or, for that matter, about the shocking ‘goings-on’ in shikarras and houseboats out at Gagribal Point and Nageem,* the details of which could not be described, but could be attested to by members of the League who, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes, had combined to buy a telescope, with the aid of which they had been able to confirm their worst fears. In the opinion of the League, a bit more of this and the Raj would fall.
The Resident asked for the names of the erring couple first mentioned, and on being told, exploded into laughter. Controlling himself with difficulty, he pointed out that, since that particular connection had been countenanced by at least three Viceroys, he thought it was a bit late in the day to start criticizing it. Smiler was a born bachelor, and his devotion to Lady Micky had been accepted for years by everyone (including Micky) as just that. As for the ‘goings-on’ at Nageem, he suggested that he might be willing to do something about that in exchange for a good long look through the telescope. The League, aware that they were being trifled with, were furious and stamped out without further words. Lady Micky and Smiler continued placidly to live on the same houseboat; the ‘goings-on’ at Nageem presumably continued uninterrupted, and the summer visitors laughed their heads off.
One of the visitors that year was the young Duke of Northumberland, a tall, thin-faced, lanky young man who was taking a look at the Empire under the wing of an elderly ex-Indian Army officer, Colonel Henslow, who was to become a great friend of ours. The two spent some time in Srinagar, as guests of the Resident, and I saw quite a lot of young George, who, I discovered, was enormously interested in ghosts. I remember spending an entire morning in the foyer of Nedou’s Hotel discussing the subject, in the course of which I told him about the Bower ghost and the grateful one who used to put in an appearance in my grandfather’s house in times of crisis. George was intrigued by both, especially by the latter, for he too had never heard of a grateful ghost before. But what really interested him about ghosts is why there should be any. What made a ghost decide to haunt a given spot? A favourite theory was that if someone died a violent or a terrible death, the sum of their terror and agony must leave an impression on the spot where they died — on the atmosphere and the very place itself, like a picture registering itself on photographic plate or a piece of film. This, however, according to George, couldn’t possibly be true, because as far as he knew his own castle of Alnwick was not haunted, though once, in fairly recent times, doing a survey of the dungeons below the castle, a hitherto unknown one was discovered which, when opened, was found to contain the skeletons of prisoners taken after some Border raid, who had plainly been locked in there and forgotten. ‘Just imagine what they went through before they died,’ said George. ‘If a terrible death could leave any impression on the atmosphere, then at least one of the poor brutes must have left behind his ghost to haunt the place. Yet they haven’t. So that can’t be the reason.’
Well, he had a point there. And I wasn’t surprised at his fascination for ghosts, for his family name was Percy and throughout history almost any form of mayhem or conspiracy that cropped up seems to have ended with a Percy having his head chopped off on Tower Hill. George himself was destined to die on a battlefield early on in the Second World War.
Several times that year, once for a long weekend but more often for the day, Ken Hadow would drive us all out to have a picnic with the Bakewells in the Lolab Valley, which is one of the most beautiful of the many side valleys in Kashmir. Ken had a passion for sea-shanties, and it became a habit with us to sing them with him in chorus as he drove. His favourite was ‘Shenandoah’ and, as with most of my clearest memories, there is an accompanying tune that immediately invokes those long drives through glittering sunlight and the lovely Kashmir scenery to the Lolab: ‘Oh Shenandoah, I’m bound to leave you … away, you rolling river’.
Bruce and Edna Bakewell lived in an enchanting forest lodge, a log house on a hillside overlooking the valley and the Lolab river, a rushing mountain stream that was one of the tributaries of the Jhelum river. The deodar forest rose up protectively on three sides of it, dwarfing and sheltering it, while its front windows faced the level sweep of the valley with its orchards and walnut groves and the forests that swept up again on the far side. The air smelled deliciously of pine-needles, herbs and woodsmoke, of the little yellow climbing roses that grow wild in the Himalayas, and of the flowers that Edna Bakewell grew in the garden below the verandah. Bruce would tell us stories about his adventures as a forest officer, and he had a fund of tales about the wildlife in woods and forests and uplands.
He and Edna had twice played foster-parents to bear-cubs found abandoned and starving in the forest and brought in by one of his rangers. They made, he said, wonderfully entertaining and affectionate pets, but were very hard on the furniture, on which they liked to sharpen their claws. Both had eventually, and successfully, been returned to the wild. On bright, blazing summer days we would bathe in an arm of the little river just below the house, and ride the logs that were carried down from the logging camps higher up the valley. The logs floated majestically down, turning lazily to the current on their way to the Jhelum, and from there down the gorges to the great timber-yards on the plains. Even on the hottest day the water was ice-cold, for it came straight from the glaciers and the snow-peaks of the mountains. Sometimes we would walk up to one of the logging camps, or climb up through the shadowy forest by paths made by deer and bear and other forest creatures — to come out on bare, grassy uplands, where the deodars stopped and the only trees were silver birches and rhododendron scrub, and one could look back and down on the valley, and up towards belts of scree and a waste of rocks where patches of melting snow still lingered, with behind and above that a dazzle of snow-peaks.
I find it curious that although I lost my sense of smell almost thirty years ago, the memory of a scent can still come back to me, and I imagine I can smell the pines and the wild climbing roses, the special smell of the sun-baked grass on the uplands, and even — as happened once, when in a hollow on a bare ridge above the forest we came across the remains of a leopard’s kill being disposed of by half-a-dozen hill crows — a scent that is not an unfamiliar one in the plains: the nauseating, sickly-sweet smell of corruption.
* Another ex-schoolmate.
* Pronounced N’geem; though later on, for some unknown reason, it began to be spelt (though never pronounced) ‘Nagim’.
4
‘Charmaine’
Chapter 16
In those days, as a favourite holiday resort of innumerable carefree girls, grass widows and single men on leave, Kashmir must have been one of the most romantic places in the world. Coming on top of that enchanted spring, my sense of this was heightened by two weddings; one of them the wedding of Peggy Spence, a girl we had known in the days of our Simla childhood.
Peggy was marrying a handsome young man in the Foreign and Political Service,* and since her parents had been friends of ours for many years, her mother asked if Bets and I would make the bouquets for Peggy and her bridesmaids; though I can’t think why we were selected for this task since neither of us had any skill in flower-arranging.
Possibly it was because we were reputed to be ‘artistic’, and ‘If you can draw and paint then surely you can cope with bunching up a few flowers?’ Anyway, we accepted gaily and Peggy’s mother told us that she had arranged with an elderly and prominent member of the Kashmir Old Guard, one Mrs Hart, to provide the flowers for us. This ancient autocrat lived almost next door to us, in a large, ramshackle house surrounded by an equally large garden in which you could scarcely move for flowerbeds.
Peggy’s mother took us over to meet her and Mrs Hart led us round, so that we could get an idea of what flowers were available (frankly, I’d never seen so many; the Chelsea Flower Show wasn’t in it), and afterwards asked us in to tea. The interior of her house proved to be a riot of Reckitt’s blue — blue walls, doors and paintwork — and as crammed with occasional tables loaded with assorted bric-à-bra
c as her garden was with flowers. The overall effect was dark and gloomy, and one hardly dared stir for fear of knocking over some dusty piece of Chelsea or Meissen china. Very unnerving.
It was arranged that we should come over to pick what flowers we needed not earlier than five o’clock in the evening on the day before the wedding, so that we could carry them back to the Red House and stand them overnight up to their heads in water on our back verandah. White flowers for Peggy, roses, lilies, pinks and carnations, plus various silvery-grey foliage plants and sweet peas for the bridesmaids. The Kashmiri head mali (gardener) would be warned to expect us: ‘He is going to be simply furious,’ said Mrs Hart. ‘He seems to think the garden is his, and always makes a terrible scene whenever I want flowers for the house. This is really going to upset him! Silly old fool!’
She tittered maliciously, and I remember smiling weakly because I thought she meant to be funny. Alas, no. It was no joke, and had I realized what we had let ourselves in for, I would have wriggled out of the assignment then and there, however unpopular the move. For though we had received fair warning about the mali, no one had thought of warning us that Mrs Hart, who was well known to be an outstandingly tough baby, was also the possessor of a totally unreliable memory. Or that her house guest, a companion or niece or whatever, who happened to be out that day, was equally quick on the draw and had the lowest flashpoint on record. These omissions were to let us in for one of the most embarrassing half-hours of our lives.
In the cool of the evening on the appointed day, Bets and I, armed with baskets, scissors and secateurs, trundled dutifully over to Mrs Hart’s garden like a couple of lambs to the slaughter, and set about selecting sufficient flowers to kit out one bride and three attendant bridesmaids. But we had barely been at work for five minutes when a human typhoon came charging down between the flowerbeds, breathing fire and slaughter. It was the mali, and Mrs Hart had not exaggerated. He obviously regarded the garden as his personal property and every flower in it as a favourite son.