Read Golden Afternoon for Free Online

remember the Mutiny, and when I was a child a large number of them had told me enthralling stories about those days. But it was more than exciting to find that here in Lucknow, and guarding the ruins of a building that had once been the British Residency in the final days of the East India Company, there were two people who had actually seen it all happen and could describe it to me: men who had seen Sir Henry Lawrence, Lady Inglis of the diaries, the irascible Mr Gubbins, and young Second-Lieutenant Bonham of the Artillery, who was wounded four times and whose son would one day marry my husband’s Aunt Lily.
    I could not hear enough. But H. E.’s Private Secretary and the ADCs, who had accompanied us, had taken too many visitors around the Mutiny sights and were, by this time, plainly bored stiff by the whole business. And since I was much too shy to stick my toes in and keep them waiting, we were hurried away far too soon and it was not until thirteen yearslater that, staying once more at Government House, this time with another Governor, I was presented with a piece of information, in the form of an unpublished letter that must still, I imagine, be preserved among the Government House archives, which was to result, after another long interval, in my writing the first of my three historical novels,
Shadow of the Moon.
    Strangely enough, my memory-bank has recorded two quite separate Government Houses, neither of them bearing the slightest resemblance to the other, despite the fact that there had apparently been no alteration to either house or garden — give or take a few trees that had fallen or been cut down in the interval between that first visit and the next. Odd. I wish I could account for this, but I can’t.
    From Lucknow we went to Cawnpore, the
Pioneer
duly reporting that Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye, Miss Kaye and Miss Dorothy (
sic
) Kaye had left Government House. (My sister was christened Dorothy Elizabeth, but no one has ever called her by either of those names. She has always been ‘Bets’, just as I have always been known to my nearest and dearest as ‘Mouse’, which I would have said was a most unsuitable name. But then there is no accounting for nicknames: one is given them in an idle moment, and they stick.)
    In Cawnpore we stayed with yet another family friend, Charlie Allen, — ‘C. T.’ Allen — whose father, Sir George, owned, among other things, the
Pioneer
newspaper, and had given a young cub reporter named Rudyard Kipling a job on its staff back in 1887. We had stayed with the Allens before; but in England. Freechase, their beautiful house in Sussex, contained something that I would have given almost anything in the world to possess, the original plaster relief of ‘The Jat’ — one of the illustrations that Lockwood Kipling had done for his son Rudyard’s famous novel,
Kim
. Rudyard had given it to Charlie’s brother George, who had become a great friend of his, and I used to sit and stare at it enviously.
    These two brothers had a fascinating history, and I have always hoped that someone — preferably C. T.’s grandson, another Charles Allen * — would start work on one. Their grandfather had gone out to India in the heyday of the East India Company in the hope of making his fortune there. His first step in this direction was to hawk beer and soft drinks offa barrow to the British and Indian Army troops who were besieging Delhi in the summer of the Black Year. This enterprise obviously paid off handsomely, and he eventually ended up a millionaire tycoon, owning a tannery and a handful of cotton mills and this and that. He had two sons, and Tacklow always said that it was an indictment of the public school system that when he died his eldest son, George — who, having been born before he made his pile, was educated at a board school * — had taken over and built up his father’s holding into a thriving empire