The Best of Ruskin Bond Part 16

The records were kept flat in a cardboard box to prevent them from warping. If you didn't pack them flat, the heat and humidity turned them into strange shapes which would have made them eligible for an exhibition of modern sculpture.

The winding, the changing of records and needles, the selection of a record were boyhood tasks that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was very methodical in these matters. I hated records being scratched, or the turntable slowing down in the middle of a record, bringing the music of the song to a slow and mournful stop: this happened if the gramophone wasn't fully wound. I was especially careful with my favourites, such as Nelson Eddy singing 'The Mounties' and 'The Hills of Home', various numbers sung by the Ink Spots, and a medley of marches.

All this musical activity (requiring much physical exertion on the part of the listener!) took place in a little-known port called Jamnagar, on the west coast of our country, where my father taught English to the young princes and princesses of the State. The gramophone had been installed to amuse me and my mother, but my mother couldn't be bothered with all the effort that went into playing it.

I loved every aspect of the gramophone, even the cleaning of the records with a special cloth. One of my first feats of writing was to catalogue all the records in our collection-only about fifty to begin with-and this cataloguing I did with great care and devotion. My father liked 'grand opera'-Caruso, Gigli, and Galli-Curci-but I preferred the lighter ballads of Nelson Eddy, Deanna Durbin, Gracie Fields, Richard Tauber, and 'The Street Singer' (Arthur Tracy). It may seem incongruous, to have been living within sound of the Arabian Sea and listening to Nelson sing most beautifully of the mighty Missouri river, but it was perfectly natural to me. I grew up with that music, and I love it still.

I was a lonely boy, without friends of my own age, so that the gramophone and the record collection meant a lot to me. My catalogue went into new and longer editions, taking in the names of composers, lyricists and accompanists.

When we left Jamnagar, the gramophone accompanied us on the long train journey (three days and three nights, with several changes) to Dehra Dun. Here, in the s.p.a.cious grounds of my grandparents' home at the foothills of the Himalayas songs like 'The Hills of Home' and 'Shenandoah' did not seem out of place.

Grandfather had a smaller gramophone and a record collection of his own. His tastes were more 'modern' than mine. Dance music was his pa.s.sion, and there were any number of foxtrots, tangos and beguines played by the leading dance bands of the 1940s. Granny preferred waltzes and taught me to waltz. I would waltz with her on the broad veranda, to the strains of The Blue Danube and The Skater's Waltz, while a soft breeze rustled in the banana fronds. I became quite good at the waltz, but then I saw Gene Kelly tap-dancing in a brash, colourful MGM musical, and-base treachery!-forsook the waltz and began tap-dancing all over the house, much to Granny's dismay.

All this is pure nostalgia, of course, but why be ashamed of it? Nostalgia is simply an attempt to try and preserve that which was good in the past. . . . The past has served us: why not serve the past in this way?

When I was sent to boarding-school and was away from home for nine long months, I really missed the gramophone. How I looked forward to coming home for the winter holidays! There were, of course, some new records waiting for me. And Grandfather had taken to the Brazilian rumba, which was all the rage just then. Yes, Grandfather did the rumba with great aplomb.

I believe he'd moved on to the samba and then the calypso, but by then I'd left India and was away for five years. A great deal had changed in my absence. My grandparents had moved on, and my mother had sold the old gramophone and replaced it with a large radiogram. But this wasn't so much fun: I wanted something I could wind!

I keep hoping our old gramophone will turn up somewhere-maybe in an antique shop or in someone's attic or store-room, or at a sale. Then I shall buy it back, whatever the cost, and instal it in my study and have the time of my life winding it up and playing the old records. I now have tapes of some of them, but that won't stop me listening to the gramophone. I have even kept a box of needles in readiness for the great day.

A Little World Of Mud.

I had never imagined there was much to be found in the rainwater pond behind our house in north India except for large quant.i.ties of mud and sometimes a water-buffalo. It was Grandfather who introduced me to the pond's diversity of life, so beautifully arranged that each individual gained some benefit from the well-being of the ma.s.s. To the inhabitants of the pond, the pond was the world; and to the inhabitants of the world, maintained Grandfather, the world was but a muddy pond.

When Grandfather first showed me the pond world, he chose a dry place in the shade of an old peepul tree, where we sat for an hour, gazing steadily at the thin, green sc.u.m on the water. The buffaloes had not arrived for their afternoon dip, and the surface of the pond was still.

For the first ten minutes we saw nothing. Then a small black blob appeared in the middle of the pond; gradually it rose higher, until at last we could make out a frog's head, its great eyes staring hard at us. He did not know if we were friend or enemy and kept his body out of sight. A heron, his mortal enemy, might have been wading about in search of him. When he had made sure we were not herons, he informed his friends and neighbours, and soon there were several big heads and eyes just above the surface of the water. Throats swelled, and a wurk, wurk, wurk began.

In the shallow water near the tree we could see a dark shifting shadow. When touched with the end of a stick, the dark ma.s.s immediately became alive. Thousands of little black tadpoles wriggled into life, pushing and hustling each other.

'What do tadpoles eat?' I asked.

'They eat each other most of the time,' said Grandfather. 'It may seem an unpleasant custom, but when you think of the thousands of tadpoles that are hatched, you'll realize what a useful system it is. If all the young tadpoles in this pond became frogs, they'd take up every inch of ground between here and the house!'

'Their croaking would certainly drive Grandmother crazy,' I said.

All the same, I took home a number of frogs, placed them in a large gla.s.s jar, and left them on the window-sill of my bedroom.

At about four o'clock in the morning the entire household was awakened by a loud and fearful noise, and my grandparents, aunts and servants gathered on the veranda for safety. They were furious when they discovered that my frogs were the cause of the noise. Seeing the dawn breaking, the frogs had with one accord begun their morning song. Grandmother wanted to throw the frogs, bottle and all, out of the window; but Grandfather gave the bottle a good shaking and the frogs stayed quiet. Everyone went back to bed, but I was obliged to stay awake, to shake the bottle whenever the frogs showed signs of bursting into song. Long before breakfast, I had let them loose in the garden.

I was soon visiting the pond on my own, exploring its banks and shallows; and taking off my shoes, I would wade into the muddy water up to my knees, and pluck the water-lilies floating on the surface.

One day, when I reached the pond, I found it occupied by buffaloes. Their owner, a boy a little older than me, was swimming about in the middle of the pond. He pulled himself up on the back of one of his buffaloes, stretched his slim brown body out on the animal's glistening back, and started singing to himself.

When the boy saw me staring at him, he smiled, showing gleaming white teeth in his dark, sun-burnished face. He invited me into the water for a swim. I told him I couldn't swim, and he offered to teach me. I hesitated, knowing that my Grandmother held strict and rather old-fashioned views about my mixing with village children; but, deciding that Grandfather-who sometimes smoked a hookah on the sly-would get me out of any trouble that might arise, I took the bold step of accepting the boy's offer. And once taken, the step did not seem so very bold.

He dived off the back of his buffalo and swam across to me. And I, having removed my shirt and shorts, followed his instructions until I was floundering about among the water-lilies. His name was Ramu, and he promised to give me swimming lessons every afternoon; and so it was during the afternoons-especially summer afternoons when everyone was asleep-that we met.

Before long I was able to swim across the pond to sit with Ramu astride a contented buffalo standing like an island in the middle of a muddy ocean. Sometimes we would try racing the buffaloes, Ramu and I sitting on different beasts. But they were lazy creatures and would leave one comfortable spot only to look for another; or, if they were in no mood for games, would simply roll over on their backs, taking us with them into the mud and green slime of the pond. I would emerge from the pond in shades of green and khaki, slip into the house through the bathroom, and bathe under the tap before getting into my clothes.

Ramu came from a family of low-caste farmers and had received no schooling. But he was well versed in folklore and knew a great deal about birds and animals.

'Many birds are sacred,' he told me, as a bluejay swooped down from the peepul tree and carried off a gra.s.shopper. Ramu said that both the bluejay and the G.o.d Shiva were called Nilkanth. Shiva had a blue throat, like the bird, because out of compa.s.sion for the human race he had swallowed a deadly poison which was meant to destroy the world. Keeping the poison in his throat, he had not let it go further.

'Are squirrels sacred?' I asked.

'The G.o.d Krishna loved them,' said Ramu. 'He would take them in his arms and stroke them with his long fingers. That is why they have four dark lines down their back from head to tail. Krishna was very dark, and the lines are the marks of his fingers.'

Both Ramu and my grandfather felt that we should be more gentle with birds and animals, that we should not kill them indiscriminately.

'We must acknowledge their rights on the earth,' said Grandfather. 'Everywhere, birds and animals are finding it more difficult to live, because we are destroying their forests. They have to keep moving as the trees disappear.'

Ramu and I spent many long summer afternoons at the pond. We never saw each other again after I left my grandparents' house; he could not read or write, so we were unable to keep in touch.

No one knew of our friendship. Only the buffaloes and the frogs were our confidants. They had accepted us as part of their own world, their muddy but comfortable pond. And when I went away, both they and Ramu must have a.s.sumed that I would return again like the birds.

Adventures Of A Book Lover.

My father died when I was ten, and for the next few years books became a scare commodity in my life, for my mother and stepfather were not great readers. In my rather lonely early teens I was to discover that books could be good friends, reliable companions, and I seized upon almost any printed matter that came my way, whether it was a girl's cla.s.sic like Little Women, or a Hotspur or Champion comic, or a detective story, or The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates. The only books I balked at reading were collections of sermons (amazing how often they turned up in those early years) and self-improvement books, since I hadn't the slightest desire to improve myself in any way.

I think it all began in that forest rest-house in the Siwalik Hills, a sub-tropical range cradling the Doon valley in northern India. Here my stepfather and his guntoting friends were given to hunting birds and animals that roamed those forests. He was a poor shot, so he cannot really be blamed for the absence of wild-life today; but he did his best to eliminate every creature that came within his sights.

On one of these shikar trips, we were staying in a rest-house near the Timli Pa.s.s. My stepfather and his friends were 'after tiger' (you were out of fashion if you weren't after big game) and set out every morning with an army of paid villagers to 'beat' the jungle, that is, to make enough noise with drums, whistles, tin trumpets and empty kerosene tins, to disturb the tiger and drive the unwilling beast into the open where he could conveniently be dispatched. Truly bored by this form of sport, I stayed behind in the rest-house, and in the course of a morning's exploration of the bungalow, discovered a dusty but crowded bookshelf half-hidden in a corner of the back veranda.

Who had left them there? A literary forest officer? A memsahib who had been bored by her husband's camp-fire boasting? Or someone like me who had no enthusiasm for the 'manly' sport of slaughtering wild animals, and brought his library along to pa.s.s the time?

Possibly the poor fellow had gone into the jungle one day, as a gesture towards his more blood-thirsty companions, and been trampled by an elephant or gored by a wild boar, or (more likely) accidentally shot by one of his companions-and they had taken his remains away and left his books behind. Anyway, there they were-a shelf of some fifty volumes, obviously untouched for several years. I wiped the dust off the covers and examined the t.i.tles. As my reading taste had not yet formed, I was ready to try anything. The bookshelf was varied in its contents-and my own interests have remained equally wide-ranging.

On that fateful day in the forest rest-house, I discovered two very funny books. One was P. G. Wodehouse's Love among the Chickens, an early Ukridge story and still one of my favourites. The other was The Diary of a n.o.body by George and Weedon Grossmith, who spent more time on the stage than in the study but are now remembered mainly for this hilarious book. It isn't everyone's cup of tea. Recently I lent my copy to a Swiss friend, who could see nothing funny about it. I must have read it a dozen times; I pick it up whenever I'm feeling low, and on one occasion it even cured me of a peptic ulcer!

Anyway, back to the rest-house. By the time the perspiring hunters came back late in the evening, I had started on M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, which had me hooked on ghost stories for the rest of my life. It kept me awake most of the night, until the oil in the kerosene lamp had finished.

Next morning, fresh and optimistic again, the shikaris set out for a different area, where they hoped to locate their tiger. All day I could hear the beaters' drums throbbing in the distance. This did not prevent me from finishing James or a collection of stories called The Big Karoo by Pauline Smith-wonderfully evocative of the life of the pioneering Boers in South Africa.

My concentration was disturbed only once, when I looked up and saw a spotted deer crossing the open clearing in front of the bungalow. The deer disappeared into the forest and I returned to my book.

Dusk had fallen when I heard the party returning from the hunt. The great men were talking loudly and seemed excited. Perhaps they had got their tiger! I came out on the veranda to meet them.

'Did you shoot the tiger?' I asked.

'No, Ruskin,' said my stepfather. 'I think we'll catch up with it tomorrow. But you should have been with us-we saw a spotted deer!'

There were three days left and I knew I would never get through the entire bookshelf. So I chose David Copperfield-my first encounter with d.i.c.kens-and settled down in the veranda armchair to make the acquaintance of Mr Micawber and his family, along with Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Mr d.i.c.k, Peggotty, and a host of other larger-than-life characters. I think it would be true to say that Copperfield set me off on the road to literature; I identified with young David and wanted to grow up to be a writer like him.

But on my second day with the book an event occurred which interrupted my reading for a little while.

I had noticed, on the previous day, that a number of stray dogs-some of them belonging to watchmen, villagers and forest rangers-always hung about the bungalow, waiting for sc.r.a.ps of food to be thrown away. It was about ten in the morning (a time when wild animals seldom come into the open), when I heard a sudden yelp coming from the clearing. Looking up, I saw a large, full-grown leopard making off with one of the dogs. The other dogs, while keeping their distance, set up a furious barking, but the leopard and its victim had soon disappeared. I returned to Copperfield, and it was getting late when the shikaris returned. They looked dirty, sweaty and disgruntled. Next day we were to return to the city, and none of them had anything to show for a week in the jungle.

'I saw a leopard this morning,' I said modestly.

No one took me seriously. 'Did you really?' said the leading shikari, glancing at the book in my hands. 'Young Master Copperfield says he saw a leopard!'

'Too imaginative for his age,' said my stepfather. 'Comes from reading so much, I expect.'

I went to bed and left them to their tales of 'good old days' when rhinos, cheetahs and possibly even unicorns were still available for slaughter. Camp broke up before I could finish Copperfield, but the forest ranger said I could keep the book. And so I became the only member of the expedition with a trophy to take home.

After that adventure, I was always looking for books in unlikely places. Although I never went to college, I think I have read as much, if not more, than most collegiates, and it would be true to say that I received a large part of my education in second-hand bookshops. London had many, and Calcutta once had a large number of them, but I think the prize must go to a small town in Wales called Hay-on-Wye, which has twenty-six bookshops and over a million books. It's in the world's quiet corners that book lovers still flourish-a far from dying species!

One of my treasures is a little novel called Sweet Rocket by Mary Johnston. It was a failure when it was first published in 1920. It has only the thinnest outline of a story but the author sets out her ideas in lyrical prose that seduces me at every turn of the page. Miss Johnston was a Virginian. She did not travel outside America. But her little book did. I found it buried under a pile of railway timetables at a bookstall in Simla, the old summer capital of India-almost as though it had been waiting there for me, these seventy years!

Among my souvenirs is a charming little recipe book, small enough to slip into an ap.r.o.n pocket. (You need to be a weightlifter to pick up some of the cookery books that are published today.) This one's charm lies not so much in its recipes for roast lamb and mint sauce (which are very good too) but in the margins of each page, enlivened with little Victorian maxims concerning good food and wise eating. Here are a few chosen at random: There is skill in all things, even in making porridge.

Dry bread at home is better than curried prawns abroad.

Eating and drinking should not keep men from thinking.

Better a small fish than an empty dish.

Let not your tongue cut your throat.

I have collected a number of 'little' books, like my father's Finger Prayer Book, which is the size of a small finger but is replete with Psalms and the complete Book of Common Prayer. Another is The Pocket Trivet: An Anthology for Optimists, published by The Morning Post newspaper in 1932 and designed to slip into the waistcoat pocket. But what is a trivet, one might well ask.

Well, it's a stand for a small pot or kettle, fixed securely over a grate. To be right as a trivet is to be perfectly and thoroughly right-just right, like the short sayings in this tiny anthology which range from Emerson's 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' to the j.a.panese proverb: 'In the market place there is money to be made, but under the cherry tree there is rest.'

It helps me forget the dilapidated old building in which I live and work, and to look instead at the ever-changing cloud patterns as seen from my small bedroom-c.u.m-study window. There is no end to the shapes made by the clouds, or to the stories they set off in my head.

Most of our living has to happen in the mind. And, to quote an anonymous sage from my Trivet: 'The world is only the size of each man's head.'

Upon An Old Wall Dreaming.

It is time to confess that at least half my life has been spent in idleness. My old school would not be proud of me. Nor would my Aunt Muriel.

'You spend most of your time sitting on that wall, doing nothing,' scolded Aunt Muriel, when I was seven or eight. 'Are you thinking about something?'

'No, Aunt Muriel.'

'Are you dreaming?'

'I'm awake!'

'Then what on earth are you doing there?'

'Nothing, Aunt Muriel.'

'He'll come to no good,' she warned the world at large. 'He'll spend all his life sitting on walls, doing nothing.'

And how right she proved to be! Sometimes I bestir myself, and bang out a few sentences on my old typewriter, but most of the time I'm still sitting on that wall, preferably in the winter sunshine. Thinking? Not very deeply. Dreaming? But I've grown too old to dream. Meditation, perhaps. That's been fashionable for some time. But it isn't that either. Contemplation might come closer to the mark.

Was I born with a silver spoon in my mouth that I could afford to sit in the sun for hours, doing nothing? Far from it; I was born poor and remained poor, as far as worldly riches went. But one has to eat and pay the rent. And there have been others to feed too. So I have to admit that between long bouts of idleness there have been short bursts of creativity. My typewriter after more than thirty years of loyal service, has finally collapsed, proof enough that it has not lain idle all this time.

Sitting on walls, apparently doing nothing, has always been my favourite form of inactivity. But for these walls, and the many idle hours I have spent upon them, I would not have written even a fraction of the hundreds of stories, essays and other diversions that have been banged out on the typewriter over the years. It is not the walls themselves that set me off or give me ideas, but a personal view of the world that I receive from sitting there.

Creative idleness, you could call it. A receptivity to the world around me-the breeze, the warmth of the old stone, the lizard on the rock, a raindrop on a blade of gra.s.s-these and other impressions impinge upon me as I sit in that pa.s.sive, benign condition that makes people smile tolerantly at me as they pa.s.s. 'Eccentric writer,' they remark to each other, as they drive on, hurrying in a heat of hope, towards the pot of gold at the end of their personal rainbows.

It's true that I am eccentric in many ways, and old walls bring out the essence of my eccentricity.

I do not have a garden wall. This shaky tumbledown house in the hills is perched directly above a motorable road, making me both accessible and vulnerable to casual callers of all kinds-inquisitive tourists, local busybodies, schoolgirls with their poems, hawkers selling candy-floss, itinerant sadhus, sc.r.a.p merchants, potential n.o.bel prize winners. . . .

To escape them, and to set my thoughts in order, I walk a little way up the road, cross it, and sit down on a parapet wall overlooking the Woodstock spur. Here, partially shaded by an overhanging oak, I am usually left alone. I look suitably down and out, shabbily dressed, a complete nonent.i.ty-not the sort of person you would want to be seen talking to!

Stray dogs sometimes join me here. Having been a stray dog myself at various periods of my life, I can empathize with these friendly vagabonds of the road. Far more intelligent than your inbred Pom or Peke, they let me know by their silent companionship that they are on the same wave-length. They sport about on the road, but they do not yap at all and sundry.

Left to myself on the wall, I am soon in the throes of composing a story or poem. I do not write it down-that can be done later-I just work it out in my mind, memorize my words, so to speak, and keep them stored up for my next writing session.

Occasionally a car will stop, and someone I know will stick his head out and say, 'No work today, Mr Bond? How I envy you! Not a care in the world!'

I travel back in time some fifty years to Aunt Muriel asking me the same question. The years melt away, and I am a child again, sitting on the garden wall, doing nothing.

'Don't you get bored sitting there?' asks the latest pa.s.sing motorist, who has one of those half beards which are in vogue with TV news readers. 'What are you doing?'

'Nothing, aunty,' I reply.

He gives me a long hard stare.

'You must be dreaming. Don't you recognize me?'

'Yes, Aunt Muriel.'

He shakes his head sadly, steps on the gas, and goes roaring up the hill in a cloud of dust.