Friends In Small Places Read online

  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 years 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 topsy-turvy 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?

  The headmaster, 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.

  My Mother*

  I’d had this old and faded negative with me for a number of years and had never bothered to make a print from it. It was a picture of my maternal grandparents. I remembered my grandmother quite well, because a large part of my childhood had been spent in her house in Dehra after she had been widowed; but although everyone said she was fond of me, I remembered her as a stern, somewhat aloof person, of whom I was a little afraid.

  I hadn’t kept many family pictures and this negative was yellow and spotted with damp.

  Then last week, when I was visiting my mother in hospital in Delhi, while she awaited her operation, we got talking about my grandparents, and I remembered the negative and decided I’d make a print for my mother.

  When I got the photograph and saw my grandmother’s face for the first time in twenty-five years, I was immediately struck by my resemblance to her. I have, like her, lived a rather spartan life, happy with my one room, just as she was content to live in a room of her own while the rest of the family took over the house! And like her, I have lived tidily. But I did not know the physical resemblance was so close—the fair hair, the heavy build, the wide forehead. She looks more like me than my mother!

  In the photograph she is seated on her favourite chair, at the top of the veranda steps, and Grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a large mango tree which is not in the picture. I can tell it was a mango tree because of the pattern the leaves make on the wall. Grandfather was a slim, trim man, with a drooping moustache that was fashionable in the twenties. By all accounts he had a mischievous sense of humour, although he looks unwell in the picture. He appears to have been quite swarthy. No wonder he was so successful in dressing up ‘native’ style and passing himself off as a street-vendor. My mother tells me he even took my grandmother in on one occasion, and sold her a basketful of bad oranges. His character was in strong contrast to my grandmother’s rather forbidding personality and Victorian sense of propriety; but they made a god match. Unlike my parents . . .

  But here’s the picture, and I am taking it to show it to my mother who lies in Lady Hardinge Hospital, awaiting the removal of her left breast.

  It is early August and the day is hot and sultry. It rained during the night, but now the sun is out and the sweat oozes through my shirt as I sit in the back of a stuffy little taxi taking me through the suburbs of Greater New Delhi.

  On either side of the road are the houses of well-to-do Punjabis. Industrious, flashy, go-ahead people. Thirty years ago, fields extended on either side of this road, as far as the eye could see. The Ridge, an outcrop of the Aravallis, was scrub jungle, in which the black buck roamed. Feroz Shah’s fourteenth-century hunting lodge stood here in splendid isolation. It is still here, hidden by petrol pumps and lost within the sounds of buses, cars, trucks and scooter-rickshaws. The peacock has fled the forest, the black buck is extinct. Only the jackal remains. When, a thousand years from now, the last human has left this contaminated planet for some other star, the jackal and the crow will remain, to survive for years on all the refuse we leave behind.

  It is difficult to find the right entrance to the hospital, because for about a mile along the Panchkuin Road the pavement has been obliterated by tea shops, furniture shops and piles of accumulated junk. A public hydrant stands near the gate, and dirty water runs across the road.

  I find my mother in a small ward. It is a cool, dark room, and a ceiling fan whirrs pleasantly overhead. A nurse, a dark pretty girl from the south, is attending to my mother. She says, ‘In a minute,’ and proceeds to make an entry on a chart.

  My mother gives me a wan smile and beckons me to come nearer. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, due possibly to fever; otherwise she looks her normal self. I find it hard to believe that the operation she will have tomorrow will only give her, at the most, another year’s lease on life.

  I sit at the foot of her bed. This is my third visit since I flew back from Jersey, using up all my savings in the process; and I will leave after the operation, not to fly away again, but to return to the hills which have always called me back.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

  ‘All right. They say they will operate in the morning. They’ve stopped my smoking.’

  ‘Can you drink? Your rum, I mean?’

  ‘No. Not until a few days after the operation.’ She has a fair amount of grey in her hair, natural enough at fifty-four. Otherwise she hasn’t changed much; the same small chin and mouth, lively brown eyes. Her father’s face, not her mother’s.

  The nurse has left us. I produce the photograph and hand it to my mother.

  ‘The negative was lying with me all these years. I had it printed yesterday.’

  ‘I can’t see without my glasses.’

  The glasses are lying on the locker n
ear her bed. I hand them to her. She puts them on and studies the photograph.

  ‘Your grandmother was always very fond of you.’

  ‘It was hard to tell. She wasn’t a soft woman.’

  ‘It was her money that got you to Jersey, when you finished school. It wasn’t much, just enough for the ticket.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘The only person who ever left you anything. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to leave you, either.’

  ‘You know very well that I’ve never cared a damn about money. My father taught me to write. That was inheritance enough.’

  ‘And what did I teach you?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . . Perhaps you taught me how to enjoy myself now and then.’

  She looked pleased at this. ‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself between troubles. But your father didn’t know how to enjoy himself. That’s why we quarrelled so much.’

  ‘He was much older than you.’

  ‘You’ve always blamed me for leaving him, haven’t you?

  ‘I was very small at the time. You left us suddenly. My father had to look after me, and it wasn’t easy for him. He was very sick. Naturally, I blamed you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me take you away.’

  ‘Because you were going to marry someone else.’

  I break off; we have been over this before. I am not there as my father’s advocate, and the time for recrimination has passed.

  And now it is raining outside, and the scent of wet earth comes through the open doors, overpowering the odour of medicines and disinfectants. The dark-eyed nurse comes in again and informs me that the doctor will soon be on his rounds. I can come again in the evening, or early morning before the operation.

  ‘Come in the evening,’ says my mother. ‘The others will be here then.’

  ‘I haven’t come to see the others.’

  ‘They are looking forward to seeing you.’ ‘They’ being my stepfather and half-brothers.

  ‘I’ll be seeing them in the morning.’

  ‘As you like . . .’

  And then I am on the road again, standing on the pavement, on the fringe of a chaotic rush of traffic, in which it appears that every vehicle is doing its best to overtake its neighbour. The blare of horns can be heard in the corridors of the hospital, but everyone is conditioned to the noise and pays no attention to it. Rather, the sick and the dying are heartened by the thought that people are still well enough to feel reckless, indifferent to each other’s safety! In Delhi there is a feverish desire to be first in line, the first to get anything . . . This is probably because no one ever gets around to dealing with second-comers.

  When I hail a scooter-rickshaw and it stops a short distance away, someone elbows his way past me and gets in first.

  So I stand on the pavement waiting for another scooter, which doesn’t come. In Delhi, to be second in the race is to be last.

  I walk all the way back to my small hotel, with a foreboding of having seen my mother for the last time.

  Uncle Ken*

  Granny’s fabulous kitchen

  As kitchens went, it wasn’t all that big. It wasn’t as big as the bedroom or the living room, but it was big enough, and there was a pantry next to it. What made it fabulous was all that came out of it: good things to eat like cakes and curries, chocolate fudge and peanut toffee, jellies and jam tarts, meat pies, stuffed turkeys, stuffed chickens, stuffed eggplants, and hams stuffed with stuffed chickens.

  As far as I was concerned, Granny was the best cook in the whole wide world.

  Two generations of Clerkes had lived in India and my maternal grandmother had settled in a small town called Dehra Dun . . .

  Granny was glad to have me because she lived alone most of the time. Not entirely alone, though . . . There was a gardener, who lived in an outhouse. And he had a son called Mohan, who was about my age. And there was Ayah, an elderly maidservant, who helped with the household work. And there was a Siamese cat with bright blue eyes, and a mongrel dog called Crazy because he ran circles round the house.

  And, of course, there was Uncle Ken, Granny’s nephew, who came to stay whenever he was out of a job (which was quite often) or when he felt like enjoying some of Granny’s cooking.

  Roast Duck. This was one of Granny’s specials. The first time I had roast duck at Granny’s place, Uncle Ken was there too.

  He’d just lost a job as a railway guard, and had come to stay with Granny until he could find another job. He always stayed as long as he could, only moving on when Granny offered to get him a job as an assistant master in Padre Lai’s Academy for Small Boys. Uncle Ken couldn’t stand small boys. They made him nervous, he said. I made him nervous too, but there was only one of me, and there was always Granny to protect him. At Padre Lal’s, there were over a hundred small boys.

  Although Uncle Ken had a tremendous appetite, and ate just as much as I did, he never praised Granny’s dishes. I think this is why I was annoyed with him at times, and why sometimes I enjoyed making him feel nervous.

  Uncle Ken looked down at the roast duck, his glasses slipping down to the edge of his nose.

  ‘Hm . . . Duck again, Aunt Ellen?’

  ‘What do you mean, duck again? You haven’t had duck since you were here last month.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Uncle Ken. ‘Somehow, one expects more variety from you, Aunt.’

  All the same, he took two large helpings and ate most of the stuffing before I could get at it. I took my revenge by emptying all the apple sauce onto my plate. Uncle Ken knew I loved the stuffing; and I knew he was crazy about Granny’s apple sauce. So we were even.

  ‘When are you joining your parents?’ he asked hopefully, over the jam tart.

  ‘I may not go to them this year,’ I said. ‘When are you getting another job, Uncle?’

  ‘Oh, I’m thinking of taking a rest for a couple of months.’

  I enjoyed helping Granny and Ayah with the washing up. While we were at work, Uncle Ken would take a siesta on the veranda or switch on the radio to listen to dance music. Glenn Miller and his Swing Band was all the rage then.

  ‘And how do you like your Uncle Ken?’ asked Granny one day, as she emptied the bones from his plate into the dog’s bowl.

  ‘I wish he was someone else’s Uncle,’ I said.

  ‘He’s not so bad, really. Just eccentric.’

  ‘What’s eccentric?’

  ‘Oh, just a little crazy.’

  ‘At least Crazy runs round the house,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen Uncle Ken running.’

  But I did one day.

  Mohan and I were playing marbles in the shade of the mango grove when we were taken aback by the sight of Uncle Ken charging across the compound, pursued by a swarm of bees. He’d been smoking a cigar under a silk-cotton tree, and the fumes had disturbed the wild bees in their hive, directly above him. Uncle Ken fled indoors and leapt into a tub of cold water. He had received a few stings and decided to remain in bed for three days. Ayah took his meals to him on a tray.

  ‘I didn’t know Uncle Ken could run so fast,’ I said, later that day.

  ‘It’s nature’s way of compensating,’ said Granny.

  ‘What’s compensating?’

  ‘Making up for things . . . Now at least Uncle Ken knows that he can run. Isn’t that wonderful?’ . . .

  ‘It’s high time you found a job,’ said Granny to Uncle Ken one day.

  ‘There are no jobs in Dehra,’ complained Uncle Ken.

  ‘How can you tell? You’ve never looked for one. And anyway, you don’t have to stay here for ever. Your sister Emily is headmistress of a school in Lucknow. You could go to her. She said before that she was ready to put you in charge of a dormitory.’

  ‘Bah!’ said Uncle Ken. ‘Honestly, Aunt, you don’t expect me to look after a dormitory seething with forty or fifty demented small boys?’

  ‘What’s demented?’ I asked.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Uncle Ken.

  ‘It means craz
y,’ said Granny.

  ‘So many words mean crazy,’ I complained. ‘Why don’t we just say crazy. We have a crazy dog, and now Uncle Ken is crazy too.’

  Uncle Ken clipped me over my ear, and Granny said, ‘Your Uncle isn’t crazy, so don’t be disrespectful. He’s just lazy.’

  ‘And eccentric,’ I said. ‘I heard he was eccentric.’

  ‘Who said I was eccentric?’ demanded Uncle Ken.

  ‘Miss Leslie,’ I lied. I knew Uncle Ken was fond of Miss Leslie, who ran a beauty parlour in Dehra’s smart shopping centre, Astley Hall.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Uncle Ken. ‘Anyway, when did you see Miss Leslie?’

  ‘We sold her a bottle of mint chutney last week. I told her you liked mint chutney. But she said she’d bought it for Mr Brown who’s taking her to the pictures tomorrow.’

  Uncle Ken does nothing

  To our surprise, Uncle Ken got a part-time job as a guide, showing tourists the ‘sights’ around Dehra.

  There was an old fort near the river bed; and a seventeenth-century temple; and a jail where Pandit Nehru had spent some time as a political prisoner; and, about ten miles into the foothills, the hot sulphur springs.

  Uncle Ken told us he was taking a party of six American tourists, husbands and wives, to the sulphur springs. Granny was pleased. Uncle Ken was busy at last! She gave him a hamper filled with ham sandwiches, home-made biscuits and a dozen oranges—ample provision for a day’s outing.

  The sulphur springs were only ten miles from Dehra, but we didn’t see Uncle Ken for three days.

  He was a sight when he got back. His clothes were dusty and torn; his cheeks were sunken; and the little bald patch on top of his head had been burnt a bright red.

  ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ asked Granny.

  Uncle Ken sank into the armchair on the veranda. ‘I’m starving, Aunt Ellen. Give me something to eat.’