The Kitemaker: Stories Read online

  It was always a delight to accompany my father to one of the record shops in Connaught Place, and come home with a new record by one of our favourite singers.

  After a few torrid months in the tent-house and then in a brick hutment, which was even hotter, my father was permitted to rent rooms of his own on Atul Grove Road, a tree-lined lane not far from Connaught Place, which was then the hub and business centre of New Delhi. Keeping me with him had been quite official; his superiors were always wanting to know why my mother wasn’t around to look after me. He was really hoping that the war would end soon, so that he could take me to England and put me in a good school there. He had been selling some of his more valuable stamps and had put a bit in the bank.

  One evening he came home with a bottle of Scotch whisky. This was most unusual, because I had never seen him drinking—not even beer. Had he suddenly decided to hit the bottle?

  The mystery was solved when an American officer dropped in to have dinner with us (having a guest for dinner was a very rare event), and our cook excelled himself by producing succulent pork chops, other viands and vegetables, and my favourite chocolate pudding. Before we sat down for dinner, our guest polished off several pegs of whisky (my father had a drink too), and after dinner they sat down to go through some of my father’s stamp albums. The American collector bought several stamps, and we went to bed richer by a couple of thousand rupees.

  That it was possible to make money out of one’s hobby was something I was to remember when writing became my passion.

  When my father had a bad bout of malaria and was admittted to the Military Hospital, I was on my own for about ten days. Our immediate neighbours, an elderly Anglo-Indian couple, kept an eye on me, only complaining that I went through a tin of guava jam in one sitting. This tendency to over-indulge has been with me all my life. Those stringy convent meals must have had something to do with it.

  I made one friend during the Atul Grove days. He was a boy called Joseph—from South India, I think—who lived next door. In the evenings we would meet on a strip of grassland across the road and engage in wrestling bouts which were watched by an admiring group of servants’ children from a nearby hostelry. We also had a great deal of fun in the trenches that had been dug along the road in case of possible Japanese air raids (there had been one on Calcutta). During the monsoon they filled with rainwater, much to the delight of the local children, who used them as miniature swimming pools. They were then quite impracticable as air raid shelters.

  Of course, the real war was being fought in Burma and the Far East, but Delhi was full of men in uniform. When winter came, my father’s khakis were changed for dark blue RAF caps and uniforms, which suited him nicely. He was a good-looking man, always neatly dressed; on the short side but quite sturdy. He was over forty when he had joined up—hence the office job, deciphering (or helping to create) codes and ciphers. He was quite secretive about it all (as indeed he was supposed to be), and as he confided in me on almost every subject but his work, he was obviously a reliable Intelligence officer.

  He did not have many friends in Delhi. There was the occasional visit to Uncle Fred near the railway station, and sometimes he’d spend a half-hour with Mr Rankin, who owned a large drapery shop at Connaught Circus, where officers’ uniforms were tailored. Mr Rankin was another enthusiastic stamp collector, and the two of them would get together in Mr Rankin’s back office and exchange stamps or discuss new issues. I think the drapery establishment closed down after the War. Mr Rankin was always extremely well dressed, as though he had stepped straight out of Saville Row and on to the steamy streets of Delhi.

  My father and I explored old tombs and monuments, but going to the pictures was what we did most, if he was back from work fairly early.

  Connaught Place was well served with cinemas—the Regal, Rivoli, Odeon and Plaza, all very new and shiny—and they exhibited the latest Hollywood and British productions. It was in these cinemas that I discovered the beautiful Sonja Henie, making love on skates and even getting married on ice; Nelson and Jeanette making love in duets; Errol Flynn making love on the high seas; and Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert making love in the bedroom (Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife). I made careful listings of all the films I saw, including their casts, and to this day I can give you the main performers in almost any film made in the 1940s. And I still think it was cinema’s greatest decade, with the stress on good story, clever and economical direction (films seldom exceeded 120-minutes running time), superb black and white photography, and actors and actresses who were also personalities in their own right. The era of sadistic thrills, gore and psychopathic killers was still far away. The accent was on entertainment—naturally enough, when the worst war in history had spread across Europe, Asia and the Pacific.

  *

  When my father broached the subject of sending me to a boarding school, I used every argument I could think of to dissuade him. The convent school was still fresh in my memory and I had no wish to return to any institution remotely resembling it—certainly not after almost a year of untrammelled freedom and my father’s companionship.

  ‘Why do you want to send me to school again?’ I asked. ‘I can learn more at home. I can read books, I can write letters, I can even do sums!’

  ‘Not bad for a boy of nine,’ said my father. ‘But I can’t teach you algebra, physics and chemistry.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a chemist.’

  ‘Well, what would you like to be when you grow up?’

  ‘A tap-dancer.’

  ‘We’ve been seeing too many pictures. Everyone says I spoil you.’

  I tried another argument. ‘You’ll have to live on your own again. You’ll feel lonely.’

  ‘That can’t be helped, son. But I’ll come to see you as often as I can. You see, they’re posting me to Karachi for some time, and then I’ll be moved again—they won’t allow me to keep you with me at some of these places. Would you like to stay with your mother?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘With Calcutta Granny?’

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘When the War’s over I’ll take you with me to England. But for the next year or two we must stay here. I’ve found a nice school for you.’

  ‘Another convent?’

  ‘No, it’s a prep school for boys in Simla. And I may be able to get posted there during the summer.’

  ‘I want to see it first,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll go up to Simla together. Not now—in April or May, before it gets too hot. It doesn’t matter if you join school a bit later—I know you’ll soon catch up with the others.’

  There was a brief trip to Dehradun. I think my father felt that there was still a chance of a reconciliation with my mother. But her affair with the businessman was too far gone. His own wife had been practically abandoned and left to look after the photography shop she’d brought along with her dowry. She was a stout lady with high blood pressure, who once went in search of my mother and stepfather with an axe. Fortunately, they were not at home that day and she had to vent her fury on the furniture.

  In later years, when I got to know her quite well, she told me that my father was a very decent man, who treated her with great courtesy and kindness on the one occasion they met.

  I remember we stayed in a little hotel or boarding house just off the Eastern Canal Road.

  Dehra was a green and leafy place. The houses were separated by hedges, not walls, and the residential areas were criss-crossed by little lanes bordered by hibiscus or oleander shrubs.

  We were soon back in Delhi.

  My parents’ separation was final and it was to be almost two years before I saw my mother again.

  My Father’s Last Letter

  1944. The war dragged on. No sooner was I back in prep school than my father was transferred to Calcutta. In some ways this was a good thing because my sister Ellen was there, living with ‘Calcutta Granny’, and my father could live in his own home for a change. Granny had been living on Park Lane ever since Grandfather had died.

  It meant, of course, that my father couldn’t come to see me in Simla during my mid-term holidays. But he wrote regularly—once a week, on an average. The War was coming to an end, peace was in the air, but there was also talk of the British leaving India as soon as the war was over. In his letters my father spoke of the preparations he was making towards that end. Obviously he saw no future for us in a free India. He was not an advocate of Empire but he took a pragmatic approach to the problems of the day. There would be a new school for me in England, he said, and meanwhile he was selling off large segments of his stamp collection so that we’d have some money to start life afresh when he left the RAF. There was also his old mother to look after, and my sister Ellen and a baby brother, William, who was to be caught in no-man’s land.

  I did not concern myself too much with the future. Scout camps at Tara Devi and picnics at the Brockhurst tennis courts were diversions in a round of classes, games, dormitory inspections and evening homework. We could shower in the evenings, a welcome change from the tubs of my former school; and we did not have to cover our nudity—there were no nuns in attendance, only our prefects, who were there to see that we didn’t scream the place down.

  Did we have sexual adventures? Of course we did. It would have been unreasonable to expect a horde of eight to twelve-year-olds to take no interest in those parts of their anatomy which were undergoing constant change during puberty. But it did not go any further than a little clandestine masturbation in the dormitories late at night. There were no scandals, no passionate affairs, at least none that I can recall. We were at the age of inquisitive and innocent enquiry; not (as yet) the age of emotional attachment or experimentation.

  Sex was far down our list of priorities; far behind the exploits of the new comic-book heroes—Captain Marvel, Superman, the Green Lantern and others of their ilk. They had come into the country in the wake of the American troops, and looked like they would stay after everyone had gone. We modelled ourselves on our favourite heroes, giving each other names like Bulletman or Wonderman.

  Our exploits, however, did not go far beyond the spectacular pillow-fights that erupted every now and then between the lower and upper dormitories, or one section of a dormitory and another. Those fluffy feather pillows, lovingly stitched together by fond mothers (or the darzi sitting on the veranda), would sometimes come apart, resulting in a storm of feathers sweeping across the dorm. On one occasion, the headmaster’s wife, alerted by all the noise, rushed into the dorm, only to be greeted by a feather pillow full in the bosom. Mrs Priestley was a large-bosomed woman—we called her breasts ‘nutcrackers’—and the pillow burst against them. She slid to the ground, buried in down. As punishment we all received the flat of her hairbrush on our posteriors. Canings were given only in the senior school.

  Mrs Priestley played the piano, her husband the violin. They practised together in the assembly hall every evening. They had no children and were not particularly fond of children, as far as I could tell. In fact, Mrs Priestley had a positive antipathy for certain boys and lost no opportunity in using her brush on them. Mr Priestley showed a marked preference for upper-class English boys, of whom there were a few. He was lower middle class himself (as I discovered later).

  Some good friends and companions during my two-and- a-half prep school years were Peter Blake, who did his hair in a puff like Alan Ladd; Brian Abbott, a quite boy who boasted only of his father’s hunting exploits—Abbott was a precursor to Jim Corbett, but never wrote anything; Riaz Khan, a good-natured, fun-loving boy; and Bimal Mirchandani, who grew up to become a Bombay industrialist. I don’t know what happened to the others.

  As I have said, I kept my father’s letters, but the only one that I was able to retain (apart from some of the postcards) was the last one, which I reproduce here.

  It is a good example of the sort of letter he wrote to me, and you can see why I hung on to it.

  AA Bond 108485 (RAF)

  c/o 231 Group

  Rafpost

  Calcutta 20/8/44

  My dear Ruskin,

  Thank you very much for your letter received a few days ago. I was pleased to hear that you were quite well and learning hard. We are all quite O.K. here, but I am still not strong enough to go to work after the recent attack of malaria I had. I was in hospital for a long time and that is the reason why you did not get a letter from me for several weeks.

  I have now to wear glasses for reading, but I do not use them for ordinary wear—but only when I read or do book work. Ellen does not wear glasses at all now.

  Do you need any new warm clothes? Your warm suits must be getting too small. I am glad to hear the rains are practically over in the hills where you are. It will be nice to have sunny days in September when your holidays are on. Do the holidays begin from the 9th of Sept? What will you do? Is there to be Scouts Camp at Taradevi? Or will you catch butterflies on sunny days on the school Cricket Ground? I am glad to hear you have lots of friends. Next year you will be in the top class of the Prep. School. You only have 3½ months more for the Xmas holidays to come round, when you will be glad to come home, I am sure, to do more Stamp work and Library Study. The New Market is full of book shops here. Ellen loves the market.

  I wanted to write before about your writing Ruskin, but forgot. Sometimes I get letters from you written in very small handwriting, as if you wanted to squeeze a lot of news into one sheet of letter paper. It is not good for you or for your eyes, to get into the habit of writing small. I know your handwriting is good and that you came 1st in class for handwriting, but try and form a larger style of writing and do not worry if you can’t get all your news into one sheet of paper—but stick to big letters.

  We have had a very wet month just passed. It is still cloudy, at night we have to use fans, but during the cold weather it is nice—not too cold like Delhi and not too warm either—but just moderate. Granny is quite well. She and Ellen send you their fond love. The last I heard a week ago, that William and all at Dehra were well also.

  We have been without a cook for the past few days. I hope we find a good one before long. There are not many. I wish I could get our Delhi cook, the old man now famous for his ‘Black Puddings’ which Ellen hasn’t seen since we arrived in Calcutta 4 months ago.

  I have still got the Records and Gramophone and most of the best books, but as they are all getting old and some not suited to you which are only for children under 8 yrs old—I will give some to William, and Ellen and you can buy some new ones when you come home for Xmas. I am re-arranging all the stamps that became loose and topsyturvy after people came and went through the collections to buy stamps. A good many got sold, the rest got mixed up a bit and it is now taking up all my time putting the balance of the collection in order. But as I am at home all day, unable to go to work as yet, I have lots of time to finish the work of re-arranging the Collection. Ellen loves drawing. I give her paper and a pencil and let her draw for herself without any help, to get her used to holding paper and pencil. She has got expert at using her pencil now and draws some wonderful animals like camels, elephants, dragons with many heads—cobras—rain clouds shedding buckets of water—tigers with long grass around them—horses with manes and wolves and foxes with bushy hair. Sometimes you can’t see much of the animals because there is too much grass covering them or too much hair on the foxes and wolves and too much mane on the horses’ necks—or too much rain from the clouds. All this decoration is made up by a sort of heavy scribbling of lines, but through it all one can see some very good shapes of animals, elephants and ostriches and other things. I will send you some.

  Well, Ruskin, I hope this finds you well. With fond love from us all. Write again soon. Ever your loving daddy . . .

  *

  It was about two weeks after receiving this letter that I was given the news of my father’s death. Those frequent bouts of malaria had undermined his health, and a severe attack of jaundice did the rest. A kind but inept teacher, Mr Murtough, was given the unenviable task of breaking the news to me. He mumbled something about God needing my father more than I did, and of course I knew what had happened and broke down and had to be taken to the infirmary, where I remained for a couple of days. It never made any sense to me why God should have needed my father more than I did, unless of course He envied my father’s stamp collection. If God was Love, why did He have to break up the only loving relationship I’d known so far? What would happen to me now, I wondered . . . would I live with Calcutta Granny or some other relative or be put away in an orphanage?

  Mr Priestley saw me in his office and said I’d be going to my mother when school closed. He said he’d been told that I had kept my father’s letters and that if I wished to put them in his safe keeping he’d see that they were not lost. I handed them over—all except the one I’ve reproduced here.

  The day before we broke up for the school holidays, I went to Mr Priestley and asked for my letters. ‘What letters?’ He looked bemused, irritated. He’d had a trying day. ‘My father’s letters,’ I told him. ‘You said you’d keep them for me.’ ‘Did I? Don’t remember. Why should I want to keep your father’s letters?’ ‘I don’t know, sir. You put them in your drawer.’ He opened the drawer, shut it. ‘None of your letters here. I’m very busy now, Bond. If I find any of your letters, I’ll give them to you.’ I was dismissed from his presence.

  I never saw those letters again. And I’m glad to say I did not see Mr Priestley again. All he’d given me was a lifelong aversion to violin players.

  Untouchable

  The sweeper boy splashed water over the khus matting that hung in the doorway and for a while the air was cooled.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out of the open window, brooding upon the dusty road shimmering in the noon-day heat. A car passed and the dust rose in billowing clouds.