Enchanted Evening Read online

  I had not counted the Treaty Port of Hong Kong as ‘China proper’, because in those days it was still part of the British Empire, with the date on which it was due to be handed back to China so far in the future that it did not even occur to me that I might live to see it. But Shanghai, despite its impressive Western-style buildings and the fact that it was at that time a truly international city, was also unmistakably Chinese. The swarming crowds on the dockside, the coolies and dock-workers, the stevedores who were loading or unloading cargoes or coaling the ships and, almost without exception, the merchants and educated middle-class men and women who had come to greet or wave goodbye to passengers were Chinese, dressed as their nation had dressed for many centuries past, and would, all too soon, never dress again.

  Looking down at them from the deck of the Conte Rosso, I did not realize that I was seeing the very last of that Old China, the fabled country which many of its citizens refer to as the ‘Middle Kingdom’, because to them it occupies the centre of the world, and who had dressed in this self-same fashion when the British were living in caves and painting their bodies with woad. Had I known, I might have been less critical of the scene below me. And for the first time since we left Delhi, I was afraid. Deadly afraid that I was never going to see India again, doomed to spend the rest of my life in this chilly, colourless country whose people spoke a language that had no alphabet but only picture-symbols – thousands of them, a different one for each word.

  It was all very well for Tacklow, who acquired languages as other people collect stamps or matchboxes, and for Mother, who had been born in China and had spoken the language from her babyhood – as I had spoken Hindustani. But I could not see myself at my age learning a new and very complicated language. Besides, I didn’t want to, because I had no intention of staying in this country for longer than I could help.

  Perhaps if the sun had been shining I would have taken a kinder view of Shanghai. But the day was grey and lowering, and a chilly wind was sweeping along the decks and singing through the funnel stays. And ominously, in the far distance beyond and behind the crowded rooftops that stretched to the horizon, the grey of the overcast sky was smudged here and there with darker stains of smoke that rose up sluggishly into the cold air and were, had I but known it, a grim reminder that below them lay the ruins of what had once been the overcrowded Chinese workers’ suburb of Chapei, which was still burning.

  Barely two months before, and without warning, the Japanese had attacked it, and, as I was to learn later, on the night when the attack was launched the firing had brought the Westerners in the International Settlements, who were streaming out of theatres and cinemas, crowding into the streets in evening dress to see what was going on, and staying there to watch. They were quite confident that because they were foreigners and this was nothing to do with them, no one would harm them.

  That story of an interested crowd watching without realizing it the death of Shanghai as an International City and the birth pangs of the Second World War reminded me of a tale about the early days of the American Civil War, when the crinolined ladies of a Southern city were so confident of victory that they put on their prettiest bonnets, took their parasols and picnic baskets, and drove out to watch the progress of a decisive battle – which the South lost. It took the obliteration of Chapei to show the West that the Japanese would stop at nothing.

  Standing on the deck of the Conte Rosso, and looking at those smoke-stains on the sky, all I thought was that there must be a house on fire somewhere out there. It never occurred to me to ask questions. It was just another dreary smudge on a dreary view, and I missed the colour of the Indian crowds. Here the only colour was the blue of the picture on willow-pattern plates, which I learned was the cheapest of dyes: indigo. This vegetable dye had been used for centuries and made the fortunes of successive generations of indigo planters until some intelligent inventor came up with a synthetic dye of the same colour, with the added bonus that it did not fade. Whereupon the indigo planters all went broke. Almost every working man or woman I could see from my vantage point on the top deck was wearing clothes that had been dyed willow-pattern blue with indigo, in every shade of that colour. The new clothes were dark blue, while the less new, down to worn-to-rags raiment that was a pale dingy grey-blue, rang all the changes in between.

  The more affluent middle class wore sober street-wear in black or slate grey – long coats with high collars fastening with elaborately designed loops and toggles over slightly longer skirts that were slit at one side. The outfit was completed by thick-soled shoes of black silk, and topped by a small round cap with a button on top. Many of the older men sported long, thin mustachios and a long narrow beard; exactly as they do in the pictures and paintings of grey-haired family elders in bygone China.

  There were a good many alarming incidents taking place in China at that time, but I was soon to discover that not only Shanghai but the world in general had chosen to refer to the most serious of them – the Japanese takeover of Manchuria and the recent bombing and total destruction of Chapei – as ‘the China Incident’ and refused to take it seriously. The trouble was that Shanghai considered itself to be unique among the cities of the world, in that it was truly ‘international’. This was because back in the nineteenth century the Chinese had been pressured into granting settlements or ‘concessions’ of land to the merchants and traders of a large number of foreign countries – among them Japan. The Japanese settlement of Hondew lay on the far side of Garden Bridge, and its market was said to be the largest in Asia, while its population had swollen to such proportions that it was nicknamed ‘Little Tokyo’.

  China in the spring of 1932 had got itself into a terrible mess, and I still cannot understand how my darling father could have decided to move himself, his wife and his two daughters (neither of whom could speak or understand a word of Chinese) to that war-torn and disaster-prone country, with the intention of spending the rest of his life there. I suppose the Rajputana episode had hit him so badly that he wanted to get shot of India and everyone in it. And he had obviously been remembering China as it was in the old days, when the twentieth century was young and there was still an Empress in the Forbidden City and a Son of Heaven on the Dragon Throne …

  A time when he, a bachelor Captain in the 21st Punjabis,6 had not only fallen in love with the country and its people but lost his heart to a girl whom he had first glimpsed on the platform of Tientsin’s railway station, had subsequently tracked down and married, and with whom he had spent an unforgettably romantic honeymoon in the little fishing village of Pei-tai-ho on the shores of the Yellow Sea.

  All his memories of that lost China were happy ones, and I have come to believe that he thought of it as Tennyson’s King Arthur thought of ‘the island valley of Avalon’. ‘Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly’, a safe and pleasant refuge where he could rest and, like Arthur, ‘heal me of my grievous wound’. Because for someone like Tacklow the wound had indeed been grievous, and it was a measure of just how bad it had been that he should have returned to the China of the 1930s in the middle of what was casually called ‘the China Incident’ without realizing how enormously the country had changed in the past thirty years.

  Chapter 2

  The usual contingent of Mother’s Bryson relations – on this occasion two of her brothers, Arnold and Ken, and their wives – were to collect us off the ship. And since Ken was Mother’s twin, he had insisted that we should be his guests during our stay in Shanghai. So it was with him that we finally left the ship and drove away from the docks.

  I don’t know what sort of house I had expected Uncle Ken to live in. Something on the lines of a bungalow in Old Delhi perhaps? A house with whitewashed walls and wide verandahs, overhung with purple and scarlet bougainvillaea and surrounded by a shady garden full of trees and flowers … In the event it turned out to be as disappointing as my first view of Shanghai. Here too there was no hint of Far-away Places and the Exotic Orient; o
ne might just as well have been in the suburbs of any British ‘New Town’ complete with grey skies and a steady drizzle. My spirits fell even further. But China has always kept a card or two up her silken sleeve, and now she produced one …

  Uncle Ken, incoherent with disappointment and apology, explained that his Joyce, who had always been delicate, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and been strongly advised by her doctors to return to England to undergo special treatment in a nursing-home. She had already gone, leaving the housekeeping in a state of chaos. And since Ken’s office would keep him too busy to entertain us during working hours, and without Joyce on the premises he did not trust his cook to be able to cope with us, we would be staying a mere two days under his roof, after which Aunt Peg and Uncle Alec would be taking over.

  I cannot help suspecting that the prospect of having to put up no less than four of her in-laws, on top of chronic ill-health, had probably been the last straw for Aunt Joyce, for even having us for those two nights was obviously a strain on Ken’s staff – though the twins clearly had a whale of a time discussing the old days and reminiscing about the friends of their youth. The next day must have been a Saturday, for in the morning, urged by Mother, Uncle Ken took us out shopping in Bubbling Well Road, where, in those days, all the best makers and embroiderers of women’s underwear lived.

  Mother and Bets had a field day here, on the excuse that Bets, now that she was officially engaged, should begin collecting her trousseau. Compared with the prices of today, those lovely garments were absurdly cheap. But I had little money to spare for fripperies, and in the end I settled for a single petticoat: a slip of soft, cream-coloured satin, woven from pure silk (China still scorned to use anything else) and decorated with an elaborate spatter of roses on insets of fine net. It was a work of art, and I still have it, sadly worn and frayed, but still too beautiful to throw away.

  In contrast to the beauty of those silk-and-satin creations, Bubbling Well Road was quite as unalluring as the Shanghai docks, a crowded thoroughfare crammed with hurrying humanity in drab city suits and mackintoshes. The Chinese, wearing either black or indigo, outnumbered the foreigners by ten to one, as the rickshaws outnumbered the cars and buses. But half-way through the following day the clouds lifted and the sun came out. And by the next day I had changed my mind about China, and was willing to concede that there might even be something to be said for Shanghai.

  * * *

  It wasn’t just the sunshine and a blue sky that made me change my mind, though possibly that helped. It was discovering that there was more to Shanghai than a disappointing number of English-suburban houses, the ugliness of the docks, and the unexpected drabness of Bubbling Well Road. It depended largely on which quarter of the city you lived in. For in those days most of the British and Americans, as well as a great many other foreigners trading with China, had their homes in the International Settlement, which in times of stress could be barricaded off from the Chinese sections of the city. The French, however, had obtained a separate concession of their own, and since you did not have to live in your own concession, Uncle Alec had been able to acquire a house in the French Concession.

  Mother’s family were, on average, a noticeably good-looking lot with the exception of Alec, who looked like a prize-fighter crossed with a bull-frog. He was, in fact, an extremely skilful and successful surgeon with a reputation that stood high among the rich Chinese as well as among his fellow gweilos (‘foreign-devils’, as they were still referred to by a majority of the citizens of the country). Aunt Peg, on the other hand, more than made up for her husband’s lack of good looks, for she was the most attractive and elegant creature, and I suspect that their choice of a house and its stunning interior decoration had nothing to do with Alec’s taste, and everything to do with hers. It was an old Chinese house, which she had subtly modernized; and though I was to see a great many more such during the next few years, this was the first one. And by far the most beautiful.

  The house, as with the houses of all well-to-do Chinese of the old school, consisted of a series of one-room, single-storey quarters built around a paved courtyard. The graceful tiled and tip-tilted Tartar roofs extended over the verandahs and curved upward to show a profusion of carved and painted flowers and mythical gods and animals decorating the underside of the eaves. The rooms had doors and windows only on the side facing a courtyard, and the nearest courtyard was connected to the main house by a moon gate, a perfect circle cut in the courtyard wall. The entire complex, which surrounded three sides of a wide lawn, was protected by a high wall above which we could see tree-tops and the graceful roofs of other Chinese houses, and Peg had decorated the long main room – which would once have been either a reception room or a hall of ancestors – in the Chinese manner.

  The furniture was of lacquer or carved blackwood, and the curtains and cushions were of heavy, cash-patterned Tribute silk.1 The floor was of exquisitely inlaid and polished wood, strewn with old Chinese carpets, and the long room was dotted with wonderful examples of Chinese art, every one of which was a gem in its own right. It was easily the most beautiful room I have ever seen, and it goes to my heart to realize that the entire house, and with it those whose roofs showed above the surrounding wall, would almost certainly have been smashed into rubble by Japanese bombs in that attack on Shanghai during the Second World War. So much beauty destroyed. And so very many lives – among them Aunt Alice’s husband, Howard Payne, the young man who had happened to see the seventeen-year-old Alice walking down the gangplank of a ship that had brought her, with my mother and grandmother, back to North China, and seeing her had said: ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry!’2

  No less than five – or was it six? – of Mother’s family were held in the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai. Poor Uncle Howard died there.

  The only room in the Brysons’ house that contained no trace of China, but was wholly twentieth-century European, was the master bedroom. It was pure Syrie Maugham,3 and Bets and I were left gasping with admiration. We had seen photographs of this style of decoration in the glossier women’s magazines, and knew that all-white rooms were very much the fashion. But we had never actually seen one before; probably because no one we knew well would have been able to afford the vast dry-cleaning bills.

  Peg’s bedroom was a revelation. One entire wall was covered in looking-glass which reflected a king-size double bed backed by graceful draperies and standing on a platform approached by three shallow steps. The floor was carpeted from wall to wall in plain deep-pile carpet of Chinese manufacture – possibly the only Chinese thing in the room – and there were white flower-vases full of lilies, filling the room with their scent. A final touch of charm and opulence was the enormous rug made from polar-bear skins that covered the steps leading up to the bed. Some years later, audiences in a London theatre watching a long-forgotten musical show entitled Helen were to gasp with admiration at a scene depicting the legendary Helen in an all-white bedroom. The set that earned this nightly tribute from London audiences was the work of that famous theatrical designer, Oliver Messel. But Peg had anticipated him.

  Bets and I might be stunned by that bedroom, but Uncle Alec was less enthusiastic. He said it was OK for his decorative wife to wake up and see herself reflected in acres of looking-glass, but the sight of his own face, first thing every morning, never failed to give him a nasty shock: ‘Talk of Beauty and the Beast!’ grumbled Alec. ‘One may be fully aware that one resembles the latter, but it doesn’t help to have it rubbed in first thing in the morning – especially when one has gone to sleep after a late night on the tiles!’

  I couldn’t help sympathizing with him. Uncle Alec cannot, at the best of times, have been shown to advantage in that setting. But Uncle Alec in pyjamas, waking up with a shocking hangover, unshaven and with bags under his eyes, must however have been no ordinary blot in those glamorous surroundings. He may only have been pushing out the boat for us, but the fact remains that during our stay in that
lovely house we went out dancing and partying every night, and it soon became clear to me that my uncle’s lack of good looks did not prevent him from being a wow with women and a very popular guest at parties. Our stay with him and Aunt Peg turned out to be one enjoyable party after another, interspersed with sight-seeing, and meeting such exotic wildfowl as Mussolini’s daughter and her husband Count Ciano.

  My clearest memory of that stay in Shanghai is of dining and dancing into the small hours in a series of fascinating nightclubs. Tacklow, no dancing man, would make his excuses and fade unobtrusively away fairly early on in the evening. Not so Uncle Alec! Alec was always among the last to leave, and I well remember an evening – or rather an early morning – at ‘The Little Club’ when, noticing the time and the fact that my uncle was on the top of his form, I remarked anxiously to the man I was dancing with that Alec would never be able to keep his appointment to operate on someone at six a.m. To which my partner replied that I obviously didn’t know much about Alec. ‘Your uncle,’ he said, ‘has the reputation of being a superb surgeon when sober, but an inspired genius when tight – ask the Chinese. Ask anyone!’ I presume that verdict was correct, for it is certain that rich Chinese queued up for his services.