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on, up-country to Lucknow, leaving by train from Howra Station in the dusty evening, as twilight was falling and lamps were being lit.
    The line ran through suburbs where the rich merchants of the East India Company had once lived in pillared and porticoed Georgian houses, shaded by lush green gardens full of banyan, palm and gold-mohur trees, mango groves and bananas and tall thickets of bamboo. These stately mansions had long since fallen into decay and were now little more than slum dwellings, divided into innumerable flatlets or bedsitting-rooms occupied by colonies of Indians and Eurasians who worked in the city as clerks, typists, shop assistants or waiters in one or other of the many hotels. *
    By daylight one could have seen the shabbiness and decay that the years had inflicted on these once gracious houses, the discoloured stucco and flaking plaster, the fallen pillars; the lines of washing hung up between the over-grown trees; the
charpoys
on the flat rooftops where many residents slept out under the night skies while the weather remained hot, and the scuffed grass where hens, goats and cattle scratched and grazed on what had once been wide lawns and scented flowerbeds. But in the kindly dusk the scars became invisible, and stateliness returned to the tall white buildings whose pillared porticoes and wide verandahs one could glimpse through the crowding palm trunks, making them appear beautiful again; as beautiful and romantic as the castle of Hans Andersen’s sleeping princess seen through the encroaching briar roses. Dusk hid the dirt and decay, and the bamboo branches shimmered with fireflies.
    I watched, enchanted, as the train rattled through these once opulent suburbs, for it was as if I were seeing the city as it was in the days of Warren Hastings and Wellesley, William Hickey and Rose Aylmer — poor, pretty Rose who lies buried in Calcutta’s Park Street Cemetery, and will always be remembered because Walter Savage Landor wrote two short verses that were engraved upon her tombstone:
    Ah, what avails the sceptred race
,
Ah, what the form divine
,
When every virtue, every grace
,
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
    Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see
,
A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee!
    In Lucknow we stayed for four days in Government House as guests of Sir William Marris, an old friend of Tacklow’s who was at that time the Governor of the United Provinces. I remember that Bets and I were awestruck at seeing our names in two daily newspapers, the
Pioneer
and the
Civil and Military Gazette.
They figured in a couple of identical paragraphs in columns headed ‘The Viceregal Court’, which announced briefly that ‘Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye, Miss Kaye and Miss Betty Kaye arrived at Government House, Lucknow on Tuesday afternoon.’
    Years later, after Tacklow was dead, I was to stay for some time in this same house with a later Governor, who was also a friend of his, and my recollection of that second visit is a good deal clearer than that of the first one — which remains in my memory as a period of acute embarrassment. This was because Sir William’s ADCs appeared to consider it their duty to entertain us by endless games of tennis. (Not for nothing was ‘Anyone for tennis?’ a favourite catchphrase of the Roaring Twenties.) They simply would not believe that I, for one, wasn’t. Of
course
I played tennis.
Everyone
played tennis! Well, if they did, I was obviously the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, I have never been able to hit or catch anything that is thrown at me. I believe this is because I have one shutter missing in my range of sight, and I was once given a technical description of this, plus the Latin name of the condition, but did not really grasp what it was all about, except that I lose sight of theball, or any object moving towards me, for a fraction of a second, and, as a result, I haven’t a