To a Mountain in Tibet(15)

In my father’s wartime letters censorship precludes any word of military activity. He surrounds this void with casual incident, humour and remarks on flowers and birds. Even from the shell-racked beachhead of Anzio his letters tell my mother that April violets and wild crocus are growing there, with vetches, scarlet pimpernels and orchids. His caravan at divisional headquarters, he writes, is adorned with photographs of her, my sister and myself, among walls of cigarette tins stuffed with irises and cyclamen. There are birds too (‘but of course not many owing to the continual explosions’)–yellowhammers and nightingales, which sing by day, and ‘the prettiest is a wren-like little bird rather like a goldfinch’, which reminds him of her. Only obliquely does he mention the shell craters around him, or the death of fellow officers, or–months later–how his caravan (and our photographs) was shredded by shrapnel.

Sometimes the darkened world and wasted years seem only a tunnel to the dream light of reunion. But their mutual danger went on haunting them. During the Blitz my mother had driven trucks in the London docks. Then my father begins to mention the Russian advance, and the Wehrmacht’s decline. (‘Our prisoners are poor fellows compared to those we captured in Tunis.’) As the war nears its end, the scent of pines in the Italian hills starts to remind him of India, and on VE Day anemones and sorrel are whitening in the Austrian woods. He had not seen my mother for over two and a half years.



We are standing on a railway station in Hampshire, my hand in hers. My sister Carol is on her other side, I think. I am barely seven years old. At school I have announced that my father has killed all the Germans and is coming home to put up the Christmas decorations, in May. And now the steam train has pulled in, and returning servicemen are flooding down the platform. I scan their faces in paralysed suspense. I cannot remember what my father looks like. The men approaching us have alien moustaches and shining boots. Then a staff cane comes somersaulting out of a carriage window and my mother cries: ‘That will be him! He’s always joking.’ The next moment he is striding towards us. My mother’s hands loosen in ours. He is almost six foot five, huge for his day, unreachably handsome and covered in medals. And he is suffused with happiness. He is the father every schoolboy wants. I am at once scared and elated. When we arrive home my rediscovered parents do not reach the sitting room but fall embracing on the spare bed off the hall. Carol and I watch in stunned surprise, then enfold each other in copycat confusion.



I close the letters up, with the photo albums that my father kept even before his marriage. In his earliest, Indian snapshots the young officers go unnamed. But who were the women, I wonder, left behind in sepia faintness, labelled ‘Diana’ or ‘Marjorie’? Or the merry flapper who inscribed above her photograph in parting: ‘Good luck, old thing’? He never spoke of them. He liked to imagine, my mother said, that there had been nobody before her.

But in my mother’s first snapshots she is no more than a tiny girl; in my father’s he is a twenty-year-old cadet; and for seven years of marriage the camera records a carefree childlessness. Around these early albums–for their leftover child–something subtly shifts. The couple who inhabit them lived before I existed. They are young again, far younger than I am now, and a little mysterious. She kneels among her Dalmatian puppies or rides her horse in an army point-to-point. He is buffooning at the regimental party, dressed as a conjuror. They live in roles and contexts where I no longer miss them, and this separateness assuages mourning. They inhabit their own lives, and I lose them a little. The tall lieutenant jokes with his comrades five years before he met my mother, fifteen before I was born. You recognise at last that their lives were not yours.

Yet strangely, in all but the youngest photos, the opposite is also true. Somehow, as if they possessed precognition or you were seeing them bifocally, they are already your parents, already senior, and inexplicably, although blithely young, are forever older than you.



All day a wind has been whipping up the Karnali valley, and intensifies at evening as we approach Yangar. From a distance the village might be built of card houses. They mount on one another’s shoulders precipitously above the river, until they merge with living rock, flat-roofed and raised in horizontal courses of timber and stones, their flagpoles streaming prayers into the wind. Women are washing clothes where a brook splashes down, and turn their oval faces to us, smiling. We might already be in Tibet. We tramp the labyrinthine lanes under blank walls and beetling eaves. Serried beam-ends poke out like tiers of cannon. The houses loom in an interlocking maze of shifting levels and walkways. The alleys are twilit ravines. All around us long ladders climb and descend to aerial yards and terraces, and the voices of invisible people sound from the sky.

These dizzy perspectives multiply even after a family invites us in. The Dendu Lamas are farming people with short, Tibetan faces and ebony eyes. Yet they inhabit the air. In these eyries a woman may emerge to chat from the door of a terrace two yards away, but between you yawns a thirty-foot drop into the street. The heads of horses apparently stabled underground gaze into lanes at first-storey level. You ascend three tiers only to find yourself on somebody else’s ground floor, and cowbells jangle from what you imagined to be an attic. Nobody can afford to sleepwalk. Dhabu sits down by mistake on a rickety balustrade, and is nearly pitched, laughing hysterically, into the alley below.

Dendu, our host, is forty and spry. He wears Western dress like all the village men–anoraks and shabby trousers made in China–and a peaked cap blazoned ‘Life Plus’. His big, loose mouth gives him a deceptive air of languor. We scale a series of ladders–giddy flights of notched tree trunks–and stoop into rooms whose deep-framed windows leak in a dead, sunless light. Their floors, ceilings and pillars are all of heavy sal wood, where the dents of axe and chisel still show, but embedded now to a sombre, burnished strength. Dendu says his father built this ancient-seeming keep. Its pillars drive down two or three floors to the rock, and its beams are patterned with white circles native to Tibet. It was built for stocky mountaineers. Its furniture is thick and dwarfish. I bang my head on the door lintels. The low table looks like a bench, and the blundering Westerner sits down on it. Tolerantly Dendu motions to the floor, and in the faded light we sit in a genial circle round their stove, where his wife bakes bread. She is too shy at first to speak. Her jet-black hair parts into pigtails round high-coloured cheekbones. The shelves behind her are banked with gleaming tins and thermoses, a clock and a gutted radio, and hung with polished ladles. She hands out milk fresh from their cow. Beside her a bridal cupboard in Pompeian red is limned with faded flowers. She slaps the dough between her hands, on and on, then smoothes it on the hob to brown into thin bread, while Dendu pounds pickles in a wooden mortar.