Chapter One
‘The End of the World’
One day I was walking down Wanstead Park Avenue to the tram terminus with my Father. As I recollect it, it was a day of sunshine and blue skies, but of course all days are like that when young. My Father, with complete abruptness broached the subject of my future.
“Have you given any thought to what you would like to be when you leave school?” he shot at me without warning.
“Well” I replied after some hesitation “I’d like to be a writer on a newspaper, or something”.
My Father frowned as he continued his purposeful stride down Wanstead Park Avenue, his walking stick swinging in vital gyration as he was wont to do. He muttered, “I’m afraid I don’t know much about newspapers or how you get employed by them”. Then with a tone of mild and pained surprise he asked “Haven’t you ever considered being a sailor like your father?”
“Why, yes of course” I replied, “but if I go to sea I’d sooner be an engineer”.
Now that quite definitely was the wrong answer, I could sense my parent fairly bristle with fury. That was one of the many wrong answers I was destined to give to my Father throughout my life. We seemed to see life through different lenses. I could understand his point of view but he could never understand mine. He was right in that of course; I have since learnt that the successful man sees only his point of view because he knows it can be the only right one. Honest doubt breeds failure. That is why, at the present stage of human development a true democracy must fail, for it concedes to the views of those who doubt authority and can flout disciple with impunity. My Father was no democrat. He bristled,
“Ye’ll be no engineer!” he snapped, his Highland accent taking on a sharper edge with the intensity of his passion. “No son of mine will ever be a damned ash-cat: Ye’ll go on the Bridge.” He mastered his rage with an effort, adding as an explanatory afterthought, “It’s the only decent profession left for a gentleman, anyway. To give you a good start I’ll put you on the ‘Worcester’ – which is a darn sight better than I had – and don’t let’s hear any more about engineers.”
He didn’t – at least not for twenty two years.
H.M.S. Worcester
And so I joined the cadet training ship ‘HMS Worcester’ which lies off Greenhithe in Kent. But before I joined I had my last boyhood’s summer holiday. This was a summer holiday which, in a sense, ended all holidays. It ended an epoch; it put a final full stop to Pax Brittanica. It marked the close of an era wherein the wealth of Britain was at last beginning to filter down to make more full the lives of those whose fathers laboured in the early days to lay its foundations. It was a time of plenty but the old social structure on which Britain has been built had, up to this time, not been seriously questioned. The majority of people didn’t want to question it but the long haired idealists were at work and when they began to prove they had little difficulty in finding things that stank.
My Father went off to sea again and the summer sun of 1914 rode high in the sky as my Mother and I prepared for the holidays with all the excitement which summer holidays spell for youth. In July we went to Felixstowe. We didn’t even go by train but went down to Woolwich where we joined the London paddler ‘London Belle’. There was nothing in the world to approach the fun of standing on the pier watching those trim little steamers with their buff funnels, white and gold saloons and sleek, black hulls, gliding inshore with idling paddle wheels. Then with a tinkle from the telegraph the paddles would churn the brown river water to creamy foam and the steamer would sidle alongside with soft creaks and groans from the big rope fenders and a rattle from capstans as the lines were hove taut.
The London Belle
It was a wonderful voyage. Once aboard I began to see myself in the figure striding up and down the little bridge, white capped and smart, obviously complete master of the situation, and the helmsman twirling the little steering wheel with one finger which made the sweating steering engine chatter and race as it pulled the rudder chains. But the warm smell of hot oil and steam sizzling through a slack gland drew me to the engine room where I stood and hypnotised by the shining crankshafts tumbling over with effortless ease under the impulse of the relentless connecting rods. Their lazy gyrations made me want to put my hand out to stop them. There has never been, nor can be again anything which can outmatch the fascination of the steam reciprocating engine. It makes you its slave. It gripped Kipling and made him write a masterpiece in ‘MacAndrew’s Hymn.’ Kipling knew ships and he knew men and he knew the reciprocating steam engine; there is a sort of affinity which connects all three.
Late that afternoon we landed on the pier at Felixstowe with a fresh wind slapping the sea in little dollops over the low foredeck. We took the tram to the root of the pier and so to our lodgings. I don’t remember those lodgings – but I shall never forget the pretty little steam driven ‘London Belle’.
Chapter Two
The Clan Macfadyn
The Clan Macfadyn came originally from Northern Ireland, like St. Columba and the early missionaries to Scotland. In Ireland they were part of the McFadden tribe. Crossing the seas of the Western approaches they appear to have gained a foothold on the Island of Mull where they were given the protection of the powerful Clan McLean of Loch Buy and allocated a bit of land in the south-west corner of the island. The Macfadyns fought alongside the McLeans in the in their feuds and forays. They appear to have had an itch for roving from early times for some left Mull and settled elsewhere. The name, like most old family names, suffered from the unreliable spelling of mediaeval times and now crops up all over the world as MC.Fadyen, Macfadsean or Mc.Fadzeen besides the original Scots Macfadyn or Irish Mc.Fadden.
My Father’s father came from the island of Islay to the west of Kintyre, son of a fisherman-farmer, he somehow or other, in the first half of the nineteenth century got to know a Barbara Mc. Isaac. Barbara was the daughter of another fisherman-farmer but this ancestress came from the Mull of Kintyre near Campbletown. Her father owned several fishing boats and a few small farms. They farmed land at a place called Feochaig on the Mull of Kintyre a little south of Davaar Island.
However the Macfadyn must have had something about him other than worldly possessions for he married Barbara McIsaac.
My Father was born at Burnside, Campbletown on December 30th, 1858.
In the great world beyond the narrow confines of Kintyre it was just two years after the Indian Mutiny. In Britain the railway Age was at its crazy climax. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, that creator of railway engineering miracles, died of a broken heart in that year, after his huge steamer ‘Great Eastern’ had stuck on the landing ways.
In the cities of Britain the conditions under which the factory and mine-workers existed were beginning to exercise the minds of men. John Stuart Hill published in 1859 his political philosophy in his treatise ‘On Liberty’. In the same year Charles Darwin shook the world of Victorian polite society with his ‘Origin of Species’. Socialism was a word which, in the drawing rooms, could only be whispered and was usually associated with Russian Nihilista and maniacs. But the bacillus was developing. Into that changing world my Father was born.
He was christened ‘Donald’. His upbringing was on the severe lines of a Free Kirk as interpreted by Barbara Macfadyn. Broadly speaking this meant a literal observance of the ten Commandments with the option of some distinctly Old Testament forms of punishment for lapses from the path of righteousness. In ones behaviour towards the Excise Officer however, certain laxity of behaviour was permitted, the Excise Officer being English and therefore no better than he aught to be anyway.
I heard very little of my Grandfather, which makes me think that Barbara Mc.Isaac was the stronger character. According to my Father’s birth certificate my Grandparent was a Sheriff Officer, a post which carried some legal weight in Scotland. My Father, together with his mother and sisters, left ‘Feochaig’ and settled in Glasgow on the death of my Grandfather.
Donald seems to have been an assiduous student at the academy which he attended in Glasgow. His Master was one of those fastidious Dominis who had a sound foundation of essential knowledge and knew how to impart it to the turbulent young. Scripture, Latin, English, Arithmetic and geography were the subjects in this co-educational establishment. Great pains were taken to produce a flowing, copperplate handwriting.
Donald’s sister, my Aunt Isabella, also attended this school. Donald and ‘Bella were deeply attached to one another. ‘Bella became a school teacher in Glasgow. Her affection for her Mother, and my Father’s financial contributions towards her upkeep for many years form a vivid picture of filial devotion and the spirit of responsibility which then prevailed. There were no State funds, no pensions and no alternative to the poor house. The Highland spirit of the mid-nineteenth century abhorred and rejected charity in any form. The family had to be self-supporting or lose all self respect and court social eclipse.
When Donald Macfadyn left school he was articled to a Lawyer; in which move I see the dead hand of the Sheriff Officer. It must have been approved by the imperious Barbara, of course. I can imagine her mind at work along the lines dictated by the Victorian striving after ‘respectability’ in an era when the world was waiting to be opened like an oyster by the man with an educated brain and a good social background. Who indeed could be supposed to excel in the requisite gifts more than a lawyer? Barbara was indeed astute in her ambitious scheming for together with Chartered Accountant the Lawyer now holds the Western world very much in bondage.
I never quite determined how Donald got his release from the office stool. Maybe it was because of his elder brother Jack had gone to sea. Perhaps the younger lad worked away from his Mother’s determinate until it was sufficiently undermined to allow her Donald to seek fame and fortune by the less tortuous methods of the sea. At any rate my Father left the law office and became indentured to the Loch Line of sailing ships out of Glasgow.
It must have been about 1875 when he joined the new four masted full rigged ship Loch Fyne of 1233 tons on her maiden voyage. His introduction to the sea was a turbulent one for the big ‘four poster’ was dismasted in a Biscay gale on her maiden voyage and had to beat back to port under jury rig. Back at Glasgow she was completely re-rigged with lighter spare and , I believe changed to barque rig.
Young Donald finished his time in her on the Australian trade but to the end of his days he remembered the ‘Loch Fyne’ as a man killer. It was the days when sailing ships were getting bigger. They were beginning to be built of iron and lowermasts and yards were iron too. To drive them along and thus compete with the steamers, builders and owners tended to overmast them. They were somewhat undermanned and to carry sail too long meant disaster. My father told me of at least one occasion when, running the easting down in half a gale the ‘Loch Fyne’ took it over green and washed half of the watch overboard. On another occasion in the Bay of Bengal she shifted her cargo of linseed one dark night with a high sea running. She took such a list that my father was unable to open his door in the half deck because of the weight of the water on it. Then by flinging himself against it he opened it sufficiently to squeeze out, only to be sucked overboard in the undertow as the ship reached to windward. But for the trailing end of the lee fore brace I should not have been in a position to tell of his adventures. It is curious to stop and think how one’s existence hangs on a lee fore brace trailing overboard on a dark night in the bay of Bengal. It smacks of Omar Khyam.
After my father left Loch Fyne she disappeared at sea with all hands.
Having in due course convinced the Board of Trade examiners of his fitness to hold a Second Mate’s ticket. Donald was touring the Glasgow waterside one day when he stopped to admire a beautiful ship-rigged craft loading outwards. She had dove grey topsides and painted parts and her copper shone from dry-docking. Her three masts rose in tapering elegance above the decks. The Mate of her noticed my father and invited him aboard.
That clipper was the ‘County of Lancaster’. The small sailor with a brand new second mate’s Ticket burning a hole in his pocket lost his heart to her. He signed as second mate.
County of Lancaster
Of 999 tons registered tonnage the ‘County of Lancaster’ was one of a number of ‘Counties’ owned by Craig, a Glasgow man who had himself been a sailing ship master. Built by Stevens of Linhouse the ‘County of Lancaster’ was of composite construction being teak planked on iron framing. Her lower mass was also of plated iron construction. She was truly ‘brass bound and copper bottomed’ her bitts and fife walls being sheathed in brass besides the usual brass work on the poop. The inside panels of her teak bulwarks were rich with carving.
Aloft she carried double topsails on the fore and mainmasts and a single t’gallant sails. She was fitted for carrying stun’sls but during my father’s time in her they were never bent.
The new Second Mate of the ‘County of Lancaster’, watched the tug cast off at the Tail of the Bank and paddle away back to Greenock, was not to see Scotland for some years.
“The Skipper seemed a bit doubtful about my capabilities at first on account of my small stature and inexperience,” my Father once wrote. “But by the time we were well down the Irish Channel he seemed to be satisfied with my work and left me alone on watch.”
I can give my wholehearted sympathy to that little Second mate. His son knows how much more the small man has to do to overcome the prejudice of ‘big’ people. The world is made for ‘big’ people – very often by ‘small’ people. The extra effort required to convince the world that a small man is as good as his large sized brother probably accounts for the many small men who have made history.
Donald Macfadyn from the farm at Feochaig took the ‘County of Lancaster’ all over the world during the next few years. He sailed her up the River Plate and up the Panama to Rosario. He often told me the Argentine Pilot burst into a rhapsody of Latin adulation when the ‘County’ sailed up a tortuous stretch of river where most sailing ships had to take a tow. This co static character, rejoicing in the name Lagazio Gregario was so exalted by the clipper’s sailing that he kissed the astonished second Mate on both cheeks.
And there were voyages between the Cape and Australia. And to India for rice and tea. My father had a theory that tea carried better in the timber built ship than in a steel one, a belief that was popular at one time but may have been fostered by the increasing threat of iron and steel built steamers.
The social ambition of Barbara may have seeded in her son Donald. Or it may have been that he was canny enough not to let his love of ‘sail’ blind himself to the juggernaut progress of steam. We find the Second Mate of the ‘County of Lancaster’ in Indian Ports curiously contemplating the goings-on of the immaculate Mates of the British India Steam Navigation’s steamers in their white suits and gold braid. The B.I. skippers’ gigs, with brass rowlocks flashing in the Indian sunshine as their smart lascar crew pulled the ‘Old Man’ ashore, may have given the little sailorman ideas. Lying at buoys in the Hughli River, Donald Macfadyn in his beloved clipper could not but have been impressed by the flotilla of trim steamships, their black funnels with two white bands sitting proudly on a cushion of sun-bleached awnings.
But the second mate of the ‘County of Lancaster’ had to return with his ship to Glasgow. At the end of that voyage however, he left the ‘County’ to try the feel of a steam boat. He got himself a job as Second Mate of a little tramp steamer trading to Balboa, Spain for iron ore and sometimes through the Straits of Gibraltar for fruit. I have never seen a picture of that vessel but I can imagine what she looked like. Full bodied forward and nearly as bad aft. Two pole masts setting drivers on each and a foresail on the forestay. A Bridge that was little more than a canvas dodger mounted on a skeleton superstructure and carrying a big man-powered steering wheel and a dry-card compass.
Directly abaft the bridge would be the long, black smoke stack sweeping wide arcs against the flying Biscay cloud wrack as the old tub rolled desperately under the impetus of a gut-ful of iron ore.
Oil lamps everywhere. The Officers’ cabins tiny and often awash. The crew’s forecastle noisome, and always awash.
The skipper who navigated by dead reckoning, four points bearing and the deep-sea lead. Two Mates who were not supposed to navigate at all. Three Engineers who spent their on-watch periods checking the leaping piston-rods as the plunging steamer lifted her cast-iron screw clear of the water.
As second mate Donald, as he clung to the rolling iron handrail, he must have had nostalgic recollections of a bluer sea and of a trim little steamer with a black funnel with two white bands. My Father may not have suspected it then, but India had got at him as she has got at some of the finest characters in British history. With my Father she used the British India ships as her bait.
Back in Glasgow, and probably with a few hints from his elder brother jack, Donald Macfadyn got himself signed on for a three year spell on the Indian Coast in the Service of the British India Steam Navigation Company. For the honour of joining such a select band of brothers he had to climb down to Fourth mate. He wasn’t even in charge of a watch. The reduction in rank probably irked my Father very little really, for he must have known that promotion was fast. A feature which aided the young B.I. Officer up the ladder of promotion in those days was neatly summed up by one of them as, “The British India Drama in three acts – The Staff, the hospital, and the tomb”. So my Father soon began the climb as the less robust, or less fortunate or perhaps less careful wasted and died in that land where fever was an ever present companion and plague, cholera and dysentery lurked at your elbow.
As he attained to more senior and responsible rank he became aware of a certain something which was unknown in the sailing age and un-noticed during his brief spell on the Balboa tramp. My Father came up against the ‘Ingineers’. Glasgow born to a man, these men as a class were aware of a new found authority as Lords of the shiny rods and gleaming crankshafts that made the steamship go. They realised, and were not slow to irritate by pointing out, that without the ‘Ingineers’ the ‘Old Man’ was useless. They soon got under the skin of the little sailorman and never ceased to be a perpetual irritant for the next twenty years or so.
In one of those far-away ports my father went aboard a sister ship to have a yarn with his opposite number. He found a round-faced, fair young man who spoke with the accent of Aberdeenshire. His name was Forbes – Jack Forbes. They became friends and when they had Home leave, exchanged visits. At Jack Forbes’ home in Aberdeen my Father met Jack’s several rather pleasant sisters. To Edith Alice he remarked in an absent minded whisper, “My, but ye’d mak a bonny widow!”
As a gambit to love-making it is probably unique, but ten days later Edith Alice had promised to marry Donald. He left next day on his way to India for another three year spell.
Chapter Three
The English Bit
I have before me a page from a Victorian Bible. Its ornate decoration is printed in a pale mauve. The type faces are mixed and typical of the Victorian fonts with which the engravers of the nineteenth century loved to illustrate their skill. To the modern typographer it would be a thing of horror but it shook the foundation of one pillar supporting the structure from which I spring. It is a page from my maternal grandmother’s family Bible.
Alexander Knight Forbes was born in Arbroath, Scotland on the 22nd May 1838. Little knowledge of his early life is available to me for I never saw him and my Mother rarely spoke of him. It is reasonably certain that he came of a family interested in and possibly owning linen mills in Arbroath. However he must have come south to London about the middle of the century; he may have been his father’s representative in the metropolis, a likely supposition for he certainly became acquainted and on accepting terms with the Lovelock family of Islington about that time, and Lovelock pere was ‘something in the city’.
Probably grandfather Alexander made the laborious journey south partly by coach, as no through mail line railway then existed. He would not have crossed the Forth Bridge for that great engineering feat was beyond the horizon of time by another thirty years.
On the 5th, of June 1861, Alexander Knight Forbes married Mary Ann Lovelock the daughter of the English ‘City Man’. The ceremony took place at Christ Church, Highbury in the parish of Islington, the officiating Priest being a Revd. E.H. Lovelock, Rector of Mildenhall, Suffolk and brother of the bride. The page from the family Bible divulges that the bride was born on the 3rd October 1836 in Islington. So she was not quite twenty-five when she stood at the Altar on that summer’s day in 1861, and was her groom’s senior by nearly two years.
I expect the young couple had before their eyes visions of great fields to conquer, perhaps hardly knowing which victory to pluck first for they came from a class who stood on top of the world.
England was changing rapidly – too rapidly – from the agricultural country to an industrial one. The ‘dark Satanic mills’ were bringing wealth to the industrialists and a bare existence to the unfortunate driven from the land by Enclosure, and herded with Irish immigrants in utmost squalor. Only seven years before this ceremony in Highbury Church, 20,000 people in England died of cholera, an epidemic aggravated by overcrowding in unsanitary slums.
In the domestic scene the classical austerity of Regency time was being buried under an avalanche of drapery turned out cheap by the new mills. Curios sent home by Britain’s adventuring sons across the seas of the world cluttered every nook and corner as something new and amazing in this brave new world. It was the clouded dawn of Britain’s greatest era. It was at one a magnificent age and a terrible age. It was an age of hard work and great rewards; it was the age of back breaking toil for a miserable pittance. A wheaten loaf was one shilling and eight pence; a glass of gin was three ha’pence. It was cheaper to take a short course of oblivion.
A social class had sprung to authority – the authority of the almighty £ - without the tradition or responsibility for its fellows which had enlightened a preceding age, or the element of humanitarianism culled from true Christianity to teach them the wisdom of restraint. The people who wielded such authority cannot really be blamed, in the way that they are blamed today by the left-wing school. It was the first time in history that such an avalanche of prospective wealth had so rapidly descended upon the world and the hysterical recipients used the traditional law of supply and demand to make their personal fortunes. And wealth begets wealth.
Mary Anne Lovelock’s father was a man undoubtedly of some substance. Amongst other things he was one of the founders of the Royal Liver Friendly Society.
Alexander Knight Forbes and his bride travelled to far off Arbroath where, after a while, he set himself up in the weaving trade. He must have profited for a while and all went well enough anyway for Mr and Mrs Forbes to produce a large family in accordance with the custom of the age. Seven children were born who survived beyond childhood.
Some times during his early married life and when some of his family must have been quite young, Alexander Knight Forbes took to partnership a gentleman of Teutonic origin and shaky morals who disappeared one night with all the firm’s portable and realisable assets. My Grandfather, a generous easy-going gentleman, was broken in more ways than one by this flagrant breach of faith. He repaid his debts but the business brought him to an early death. Thanks to my Grandmother’s generous dowry from her astute father the family were still able to live fairly comfortably in the social sphere to which they were accustomed.
But it seems obvious that there was no room for idle hands in the Forbes menage after that. If you were a man of course, you were settled in a good way of earning a living and that was that. Most of the children, being girls, they too had to adventure out into the labour market, in those days a terribly limited field for the impoverished middle class female. If you say the words ‘nursery governess’ you practically sweep the field from end to end.
The ‘career’ of Nursery Governess’ too often opened up a sordid existence to a girl wherein she had neither the means of escape from her employer which was enjoyed by the lower servants, not yet was she a member of the family.
It is happy to note then, that the Forbes sisters who took this plunge, neither seems to have been any the worse for it. On the other hand it seems obvious that both profited by the adventure, both in experience and happiness. In the case of my Mother, Edith Alice, she found employment with the family of Judge Kennedy, a Judge of the High Court in London. The judge’s town house was one of a number of lovely houses in Bayswater. It was during this time that my Mother acquired her excellent knowledge of London’s West End, Theatreland, art galleries and museums. In her old age she still spoke of the glorious family holidays at Broadstairs.
Judge Kennedy’s small son, who was my Mother’s especial charge, suffered from a withered arm. This trouble was a consequence of some technical error during birth. The withered arm seems to have been a familiar feature during the nineteenth century; amongst the great we have the cases of the Prince Consort and Kaiser Wilhelm II which spring to mind.
In the case of the Kennedy child the treatment prescribed by the doctors was massage, which had to be done very frequently and at length. This was one of my Mother’s responsibilities. Unfortunately the constant massaging caused her hands to swell so badly that it threatened to cause serious disability and finally she had regretfully to resign her position.
Returning to Scotland Miss Edith Alice Forbes settled down into the pleasant round of late nineteenth century life in a middle class. She gave instruction in the school on cooking and domestic matters, subjects on which I can vouch she had every qualification of a practical nature if not the impressive string of letters by which the Universities advertise their wares in these days. Then like a rocket my small but volcanic male parent erupted over her placid horizon with the shattering comment – “My! But ye’d mak a bonny widow!”
My Father and Mother were married in Madras Cathedral in 1897. I was born in Rangoon on 29th October 1900.
St Georges Cathedral, Madras
Chapter Four
Sunshine
My Father and Mother and I lived in a flat in Old Post Office Street, Calcutta. We lived in other places too. There was, for instance, a bungalow at Madras at one time but I remember only the Old Post Office home. My mind can picture the big, airy rooms, the large windows screened against the sun’s rays by green jalousies. Over-furnished and intensely ‘fussy’ by modern standards, these rooms nevertheless radiated a peace and happiness I have seldom since experienced. The heavy draped punkahs wafted lazily to and fro, actuated by a simple device of a cord over a pulley in the wall and tugged at by the prehensile toe of a native servant squatting drowsily in the passage outside. I can sense the bearded, kindly Diljhan, the Butler, moving through those rooms with the confidence of a shipmaster on his navigating bridge. He was the Memsahib’s right hand man and through him alone the orders went to the lesser servants, the cook, cleaner and coachman.
The Author
I had an Ayah, of course, although strangely enough I remember little of her. One of my greatest excitements was to accompany her on a shopping expedition to the bazaar to buy food. This was an integral part of a servant’s duties in India in those days, and a duty to which the Butler and his staff clung with fervid tenacity of a British Trade Union Leader to his rights. The reason behind this remarkable devotion to duty was not without a certain element of chicanery, giving as it did, ample scope for the Oriental practice of appropriating a percentage as just dues.
Family with servants.
Chowringhi Bazaar was a cacophony of heckling voices; a symposium of all the scents of the Orient; a congregation of ramshackled stalls under a droning nimbus of flies; an eastern bazaar such as the Mogul Emperors knew. The bargaining frequently reached a pitch and fervency at which only the sue of most lurid language could keep business from collapsing into a stalemate. I used to listen with the utmost admiration and delight to the swiftly flowing Hindustani invective pouring from the lips of the bargainers.
Their lifting syllables fascinated me, the little sahib of four years, and their unerring use of fascinating adjectives held me spell bound in open mouthed admiration. It was an education. But not the sort my parents had intended for their son and heir.
Syllables fascinated me, the little sahib of four years, and their unerring use of fascinating adjectives held me spell bound in open mouthed admiration. It was an education. But not the sort my parents had intended for their son and heir.
One dark night as I watched the lamp light from the sitting room drawing funny patterns on the high ceiling of my room, the mournful notes of a conk shell, blown by a virtuoso in torturing sound, wailed up from the courtyard at the rear of the flats. Then a human voice joined in, the echoing drubbing of a tom-tom filled in a ground base. The concert went on some time and presently put me to sleep.
Next day I heard my Father telling a visitor how he had descended on the musical festival like Genghis Khan on the plains of India and routed the revellers utterly. “Right under the kid’s window with their caterwauling,” he emphasised with indignation. “The appalling row was enough to frighten the life out of any child.” I remember feeling a twinge of surprise. I realised I was the ‘kid’ referred to but for the life of me I couldn’t see what there was to be afraid of. My Father forgot that I was a son of India. He, poor man, was horrified when I howled at the bagpipes of the Black Watch Band in the Eden Gardens. That was not my music in those days – the Indian conk shell and tom-tom was; and the wailing semi-tones of that unseen voice.
The only other incident which remains from those days arose from a childish desire to show grown-ups how really sophisticated and grown-up I was. It resulted in a hiding from my scandalized Father and a severe tongue lashing for the servants from that fiery little shipmaster.
It all happened like this. My Father and Mother were giving a little dinner party to a fellow Captain and his wife and a few shore based colleagues one evening. I rather fancy that it was a trifle formal, as these functions tended to be in those days, and everyone was on their best behaviour – except me.
I was not invited to the party, of course, which probably rankled a bit as I lay in my bed under the mosquito net. My room was separated from the dining room by a thick curtain only and the noise of laughter and chattering and tinkling silver and glasses came in tantalizing waves. These grown-ups thought they were very big and clever as well. But I knew a trick or two which would make them sit up. I’d heard it all in the Chowringhi Bazaar.
So I slipped out of bed in my nightgown and pulling aside the door curtain, stood and surveyed the scene, a small white figure against the dark folds of the curtain. The chattering stopped as I hailed the brilliant little party with “Ho! Sowars” (Ho! Pigs). Then I unleashed a torrent of bazaar invective which dealt faithfully with the party, their doubtful ancestry, their problematical chastity and bodily functions, embellished with point and fluency peculiar to eastern language and foul enough to poison the light of the moon.
Diljhan stopped dead in his tracks, a silver dish of curry poised in his hand. An awful silence held for a second and then my outraged father came hurling towards me. I fled to my bed, followed by hardly suppressed gusts of masculine laughter.
Nothing more remained of India in my recollection except a mind-searing blaze of sunshine; white, dusty roads; the busy quaysides where the British India ships lay loading and discharging cargo, and dimly remembered smalls of those eastern cargoes. All my life, whenever I got a whiff of an East Indiaman lying perhaps in London Docks, my early years rushed back in billowing nostalgia and little shivers of ecstasy ran up the back of my neck.
When I was five we came home. I remember little of the voyage except a fish. As our ship passed a Bibby liner in the Suez canal some bright young spark flung a large and wriggling fish he had just caught, over the intervening water onto our saloon deck. It landed with a horrible thud and an equally bright young man on our ship picked it up and flung it back. I thought it beastly cruel and was all on the side of the fish.
Weeks later we landed at Plymouth. Grey skies, hurrying clouds and a grey sea whipped into thin foam is the background of that picture. Bitter, stinging brine sprays wet my face from the bow wave of the tender ferrying us ashore to England. I didn’t think I was going to like it.
Chapter Five
East Winds
Strangely enough the grey, granite city of Aberdeen is the next reel in the film of my recollections. Pore over the tablets of memory as I will I cannot decipher the half-smeared passages telling of how my Mother and I got from Plymouth to Aberdeen. It may have been via Kamschatka or Kensington, I haven’t a clue. Not that any sleep is going to be lost on that account. Strangely enough my Father disappeared too, probably back to India on one of his three year spells “on the coast” with which my very young life seemed to be mapped out. This was common with seafarers of those days when talk about standards of living, repressions and what have you were not current. The girls they left behind them were prevented as much by a rigid social code as anything else from basking in the smile of other charmers while their legal partners were away earning their keep. The fact that said partners might be having quite a gay time with the girls in foreign parts was not, apparently, considered so bad.
Such unpredictable comings and goings must have been difficult for a child to fit into the scheme of things. To have a dimly remembered stranger erupt into ones little family circle and completely disrupt ones life by carrying off ones best loved Mama, and at the same time demand as if by right, obedience, respect and some little understood condition called love, was an exceedingly difficult state of affaires for a child to adjust himself too. It was also probably not a little difficult for the other beings concerned.
My Mother and I stayed with her Mother, the redoubtable little Mrs. Knight-Forbes, in one of those silver grey glistening granite villas which make the city of Aberdeen look like an outcrop of its natural rock. The address was 27, Gray Street, a most appropriate name. There was a large granite school in an expanse of playground down the road from No. 27 and I was solemnly warned against hob-nobbing with the boys – Board School boys – a type which I gathered from the nature of the warning, might be addicted to any crime of violence, lewdness and even cannibalism. Needless to say I let that order go in one ear and out the other. Fancy telling a child of six not to hob-nob with other children, especially if the said children were in the habit indulging in such delightful orgies!
It wasn’t long before I got embroiled with some of the worst possible types in the school. I can distinctly remember one breath-taking gallop with a large lump in my mouth which I was certain must be my whole stomach, and followed closely (as I believed) by a mammoth policeman after being detected escaping from an orchard.
However it was not until later, when one of the gang, probably objecting to my extreme youth, landed me a punch on the nose and sent me home bawling and bleeding profusely, that the horrid secret got out. I was treated to cold water compresses by my Mother and grandmother, assisted by the maid uttering Gaelic keening sounds, and was handed out a little homily entitled ‘The awful story of Aunt Marion and the Gypsies.’
Aunt Marion I remember in later years as a large, buxom and kindly soul with little or no instinctive desire to indulge in a nomadic existence. When Aunt Marion was a little girl however, things were different. Apparently she had a distressing habit of talking to perfect strangers. One day she failed to return home and the horrid suspicion dawned on the family that one of the strangers had turned out to be not so perfect. The Police were informed. Several days later a stalwart Officer of the Aberdeen Constabulary came upon a gypsy encampment out in the wilds. On the steps of a caravan sat a fair haired little girl, obviously a gorgio, clothes in rags and devouring a huge black treacle sandwich with relish. Around the caravan played the gypsy children, one small girl sporting the bedraggled and filthy finery owned by the little gorgio. The fair haired little girl was forcibly restored to the bosom of her family, the clothes apparently being written off as ‘untouchable’. I never found out what happened to the gypsies, probably something nasty.
And with the sad story of Aunt Marion ringing in my ears as a sad example of what happens to people who talk to strangers I restrained my childish urge to be sociable with all and sundry, and to my regret have never been able to recapture it.
It was during our stay in 27, Gray Street that my brother, Roderick Duncan, was born. It seems strange to me that apparently I had no inkling that such an event was about to take place. No doubt it was shrouded in the intense gloom, fog and darkness which surrounded all matters even remotely pertaining to sex in those days. I wasn’t told any stories about storks or gooseberry bushes as such ‘arrant lees’ would have been as unacceptable to the Scottish mind of the early 20th century as would a frank discourse on the facts of life.
No, I was simply told by my Granny one morning that I had a little brother, and wasn’t I pleased? With the thoughtless frankness of youth I muttered that i’d sooner have had a kitten!
With the kindness which alternated with hardness in my Granny’s make-up I was given a kitten, a little ginger thing which was probably quite unconsciously maltreated by me and overlooked by the grown-ups in their flutterings around the new baby. The kitten died. I wanted to keep it; perhaps it was my only real companion in those days. But my Grandmother thoughtfully provided a little wicker basket and placing the kitten therein we went out to the garden and buried it.
Aberdeen holds few pictures more for this scrapbook. There are glimpses of Union Street with its little, open-top electric trams; the famous harbour once the home port of the Aberdeen clippers but even in my childhood given over to coasters and the inevitable fishing fleet. Girdleness lighthouse, its grey granite tower soaring upwards in sweeping curves, is inextricably mixed in my memory with a dun-coloured little electric train which fascinated me by its apparent lack of locomotion. I had seen an Indian juggler conjure an empty cowrie shell to slide along the deck of my Father’s ship once, simply by whistling at it and snapping his fingers, but that was India and did not strike me as out of the way. In this dull, drab country however, where the sun never shone and nobody ever did unusual things, a train that ‘went’ without a steam engine to pull it was an event.
Part Two