Kipling and Trix

How Fear Came-1

HOW FEAR CAME

1871-1877‘Rudyard, I’m not going to tell you again. Let go of Trixie’s hand. Come and sit in your own place and eat up your tea.’

He stared back at the strange woman who wanted him to call her ‘Auntie Sarah’ and said he must forget about India.

At the other side of the table, Harry, the big boy who called the woman ‘Mother’, stuck out his tongue.

‘You live in Southsea now and that’s where you’re staying. And you’re lucky to be away from those heathens,’ she kept telling him. He didn’t believe her. Not staying for years and years. Not till he was nine or ten and grown up.

Trix was crying again.

She wasn’t eating that bread and butter either, even though for Trix, Auntie had put sugar on it. He patted Trix’s head, like Ayah did when they hurt themselves. He was big, nearly six, he had to look after Trix. Three was very little.

‘Trix, Trix, don’t cry. Mama and Papa are going to come back. Soon. They’ll come back soon.’

He could feel the strange woman waiting, her eyes on him.

He shook his head.

Losing patience, Sarah Holloway swept round the table and dragged him back to his chair, where he sat, not eating, glaring defiance.

‘Do you know what happens to bad children?’ she asked.

‘No, what?’ In spite of his misery he couldn’t help asking.

‘God sees what they do and he marks them down for punishment. He watches them all the time and when they die he sends them to burn forever in Hell.’

The children were glazed with shock.

‘We have different gods in India,’ he attempted boldness. Then, quavering, ‘Mama wouldn’t let him. Ayah –’

‘It was because you’re so bad and wicked that Mama left you. And anyway your Mama has to do what God tells her.’

Struck silent, he gazed trembling at the new world that she had revealed, while Trix sucked frantically at her thumb.

* * *

‘How does it work?’ Ruddy’s words came out with difficulty. His chin rubbed against the stiff, thick collar of the new jacket when he tried to talk. He pulled again on the old man’s hand.

The broad figure of Sarah Holloway’s husband, Pryse Agar Holloway, turned, responding to the tugging away down on his left. Inclining slightly, he pointed above their heads to the whistling rigging.

‘See those ropes going upwards to the top of the mast, Ruddy? The proper name for them is the shrouds. And the little ropes that look like a ladder, they’re called ratlines – I can’t see those too well myself, can’t make out things as I used to – Well, that’s exactly what the ratlines are used for, so that the sailors can climb up to that platform at the top of the mast.’

Shrouds. Ratlines. Ruddy tasted the words. But he still wasn’t sure – what happened when you got to the top of the shrouds? How did you get onto the top of the mast? He peered upwards through the foggy air. But he didn’t want to disappoint Uncle Pryse.

‘Yes,’ he said firmly, ‘I see.’

‘That hand of yours seems a bit cold. We’ll have to go home soon.’

There was a moment’s silence, a shared hesitation. The winter afternoon darkened.

‘I’ll tell you what, Ruddy, let’s see if you can remember the list of all the ships I sailed in, in the right order. You can sing them out to me as we go along.’

Hand in hand the two trudged off into the gathering dusk, while snatches of a treble chant – ‘the Brisk, the Stormrider, the Apart’ – flew away into the wind.

* * *

‘Lorne Lodge, Havelock Park, Southsea.’

Trix was practising as she stood muffled up in the hall, waiting. That was what you had to tell a policeman if you were lost. Trix did not want to get lost. To be left behind, all forgotten, like that little dog who wandered up and down outside their house. She’d had to hold her hands over her ears to keep out his crying.

Auntie says this house is five years old. I’m going to be five. In the summer.

‘Why is it called Southsea?’ Trix asked.

Auntie was sticking a long pin into her hat in front of the looking-glass. There was another one sticking out from her mouth.

Trix had to wait till Auntie had taken it out.

‘Because it’s by the sea, of course, dear.’

‘But you have to walk a lot to get there.’

Auntie didn’t reply. Once they were out on the street, she closed the metal gate behind them with a clang.

‘I don’t say it’s convenient but it is very select here.’

Slekt? Ruddy would know.

Auntie took Trix out with her every day.

‘Watch where you’re stepping dear. The amount of sand and grit that the builders spill everywhere is just shocking. I wonder they don’t mind the waste. But we don’t want it on our shoes and treading into the house, do we Trixie?’

Trix didn’t like it, seeing the earth all bare and torn up, with nothing growing any more. There were only wide brown puddles. If you slipped into them you would drown.

She stopped looking. She smiled back up at Auntie, clutching tight at her hand.

Most days they turned towards the place where Auntie did her shopping. Trix had to wait outside the butcher’s after the day when she was sick onto the sawdust floor. But she didn’t mind the grocer’s. She enjoyed watching Mr. Taylor’s clean pink fingers as they twisted the sugar up into a blue paper bag with little ears.

On days when Auntie was going to visit her friend, Mrs. Possiter, they went the other way up the road. Just a little way along, enough to count up to twenty going slowly, they came to the place where the men were building the new houses. There were heaps of pebbles and muddy pools and pieces of string pulled tight with little pegs.

‘No, don’t touch, you’ll get all muddy,’ Auntie told her. ‘They’re to mark out the spaces for the new houses, more houses like Lorne Lodge. Though not so exclusive. There’s going to be street after street of them, more’s the pity. It’ll be going on for years.’

In really bad moments, Ruddy tried to make himself brave enough to carry on for years and years, even forever, on his own. He was never sure what he’d find when he woke up in this place. Trix might go away and leave him too. Sometimes he did wonder whether she actually liked crying and making the Woman come. That in a way she didn’t mind getting him into trouble.

Thinking this was so bad it made his head feel queer, so that he had to sing the chant he had invented. Over and over he sang, till his head felt better. There were just names in the chant, Indian names, the names of the servants who still lived in the house in Bombay. That was the place the people he used to call Mama and Papa had gone back to.

‘Why did they leave us here? Why didn’t they explain?’ he would ask Trix.

‘Auntie said –’

‘No, Trix, that’s not true, what Auntie says. I’m sure. I mean I think –’

Trix kept looking doubtful, even though she would nod in the end and seem to agree.

At night before he went to sleep, Ruddy started going through the list of his old companions one by one, starting with Kamal, the new little kitchen boy, who made faces behind the back of the fat cook. Through Chowkidar standing up tall, wooden lathi in his hand to beat off burglars, Mali out in the garden doing the watering, Sais standing at the head of his pony after breakfast, right up to Meeta, the bearer, he would sing, rocking himself. The chant finished in triumph with ‘Ayah, Ayah, Ayah!’

He had to share Harry’s bedroom. One night the horrible boy heard him, even though he was whispering it into the bedclothes.

‘Cry baby, cry baby!’ Harry jeered. Harry was twelve, a whole five years older than him.

He wasn’t crying. The stupid boy just couldn’t recognise the sounds, he didn’t know Hindustani. No-one here knew Hindustani, except him and Trix. But at night, in his dreams, he heard it all about him.

But those dreams were fading. The colour seemed to be leaking out of everything that he knew. Ayah’s strong, warm, brown hand pulling him along, when the tall coconut palms along the beach banged together in the wind. Fat red mangoes in Crawford Market. The man with the flute and the green turban who made snakes dance, the day he was four. Marigold petals in the dust near the temple. He made up new games, new magic to bring the colour back, to keep alive the Hindustani voices in his head. They might keep out the ugly Woman and her screech.

Now that he could read, that helped, but it was not enough to stay deep inside books. She kept taking them away, for one thing.

‘You mustn’t strain your eyes,’ she repeated.

He didn’t believe her. She just wanted an excuse. So it frightened him one day to realise that he could no longer see the blackboard at school, even if he sat in the very front row.

She might be right about other things. About God and Hell. That might be true. However was he going to tell?

He shivered when he was going to bed that night, though his head felt hot.

* * *

‘Never mind, Trix’, Ruddy relented, seeing her lip begin to quiver. She nearly always got sad when it was close to bedtime. It was different for him. He was eight and a boy. ‘I’ve got an even better story today. But you have to pay attention.’

So long as Trix was listening he could go on forever, the stories spilling out of him. His words turned into pictures that heaped and piled around them where they sat on the dust-coloured drugget, like the silks that man spread out over the verandah for them to buy. The trouble was, Trix would fall asleep and then it didn’t work. His voice seemed to dry up to just a whisper. That made him frightened. It was Trix listening that he needed, her eyes that went round at the specially exciting bits and the giggles that she pressed back into her mouth with her fists. No-one must overhear them.

That Woman caught them at it one day.

‘What nasty stuff are you filling her head with? Trixie, come away at once.’

And Trix was kept close to Auntie’s side for a long fortnight of mourning.

Alone in the musty basement they’d been given for a playroom, Ruddy valiantly kept up with his own private magic. He piled up the sacred wall, the bastion that kept everything out, and crouched behind it, humming. Yet though at first he was able to summon the stories in his head and to step inside them, by the end of the first week, those that came to him slithered away and would not let him in. Then he found that sounds made deep in his throat while he rocked himself were better than keeping silence. He could hear something. He could hear himself.

The day Trix was allowed back, she came peeping round the yellow pine door, then ran to throw her arms round him. He did not dare to feel glad. Now he knew what would happen. When there was no-one to listen a trap closed its teeth on him. He was afraid he might die.

‘Iyam, Iyam paying attention, Ruddy,’ Trix insisted, struggling.

If he wasn’t quick she’d be making enough noise to bring That Woman running. He refused to call her Auntie Sarah, not inside his own head, whatever she made him do in front of her. He was sorry for Trix. She was still a baby, not even six yet. But he wished she would be more careful about keeping their secrets. Not telling everything to That Woman.

‘Sit up then, and stop sucking your thumb.’

At her look of hurt surprise, he felt a stab of misery.

‘Come on now, this is a really special one.’

And he moved, though he had not meant to when he started, to telling the tale of the Djinn who helped the Sultan with the thirteen beautiful daughters. Each more beautiful than the moon – but none more beautiful than Princess Trix, ‘who was the best beloved of them all’. Chanting this chorus, eyes sparkling, Trix sat bolt upright till the storyteller’s voice softened to a close.

‘I do love you, Ruddy,’ she breathed into the silence. Her brother reached over and patted the curls out of her eyes as he had seen Ayah do.