Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

With love from Betty Feathers

(Card discovered unposted fifty years on in the Donheads down the cushions of a great red chair.)

Four: A letter from the bride to Judge Sir William Pastry of Hong Kong, posted in Valetta, Malta.

Valetta, Malta

Dear Uncle Willy,

We are up at “Mabel’s Place” and I don’t think I have to explain that it’s the medieval palace of the great Mabel Strickland on the hilltop and the blue sea all around. The walls must be six feet thick and inside there are miles of tall and shadowy stone passages, slit windows for arrers , no furniture except the occasional dusty carpet woven when Penelope was a girl, massy candelabra standing on massy oak chests. Our bed could be rented out in London as a dwelling: four posts, painted heraldry, old plumes drooping thick with dust, thick bedlinen like altar cloths. Wow!

But I expect you’ve been here lots of times. One day you’ll make a wonderful governor of Malta and they’d love you as much as they love Mabel in her darned stockings and tweed skirts. If you won’t do it then I’d push Edward for governor instead. We’d bring up our ten children here and become passionate about the Maltese, and have picnics on the beach (the Maltese perched on chairs and making lace) and watch the British flag going up and down with the sun. Until it’s folded up and put away.

But you won’t even think of it. Are you still wanting Thomas Hardy and Dorset? I can’t think why. Dorset sounds stuffy — full of people like us — and Malta is cheerful, flashing with the light of the sea. And they still like us here and we like them. That will become rare. Quite soon, Edward thinks.

But at present Grand Harbour is alive with British ships hooting and tooting, and the streets are alive with British tars and all the girls roll their black eyes at them on their way to Mass which seems to take place every half-hour. Their mothers, believe it or not, still stride the corkscrew streets in flowing black, their heads draped in black veiling arranged over tea trays. Oh — and flowers everywhere, Uncle W! Such flowers!

It’s been terribly bombed, of course, and it’s pretty filthy. Sliema Creek is covered by a heavy carpet of scum. The Royal Navy swims in it though the locals tell them not to. It’s the main sewer. They wag their heads. There’s a rumour of bubonic plague and yesterday a big black rat ran across Mabel’s roses not looking at all well.

Of course the food is terrible, as ever it was. It was we who taught them Mrs. Beeton’s mashed potato! There is not much in the way of wine. But the wonderful broken architecture from before the Flood stretches everywhere: hundreds of scattered broken villages — Africa-ish — the occasional rose-pink palace decorated like a birthday cake. There are about a hundred thousand churches, bells clanking all day long and half the night. Dust inside them hangs as if in water, incense burns and the roofs (because of the war) are mostly open to the sky.

There is a passion for building here and they’re all at it with ropes and pulleys. Restoring and starting anew. It would be wonderful for Eddie’s practice: plenty of materials. Malta is one big rock of ages cleft for us. It is full of cracks and overnight the cracks fill with dew and flowers. The smell of the night-scented stocks floats far out to sea.

(Scene: Hong Kong

Willy’s Dulcie: You aren’t still reading Betty’s letter!

Willy: She grows verbose. Don’t like the sound of it.)

It will remain a mystery that the island never fell to the enemy. It was dive-bombed night and day, the people hiding deep in caves and (I gather) quarrelling incessantly and threatening each other’s authority most of the time. There was almost a revolution. Then, in limped the battered British convoys with flour and meat and oil and sugar, and the pipes all playing and the cliffs black with cheering crowds.

(Willy: Now it’s military history. She’s holding back.

Dulcie: She’s going to be a British blimp in middle age if she’s not careful. What about the honey moon?

Willy: I think she’s coming to that.)

We arrived here by sea from Rome. We flew to Rome from East Pakistan and we arrived in East Pakistan from Bhutan! I think we were the only tourists. The king of Bhutan is pretty insular but he let us in because he was at Christ Church with Eddie. Not that they met. Then or then. He’s an insular king — like you and Thomas Hardy. And maybe George VI.

London tomorrow. We’ll be in Eddie’s old London pad until we can find somewhere else. The Temple’s bombed to bits still. I think — but don’t spread it — that Eddie wants to come back to live in Hong Kong and so do I, especially if you and Dulcie stay. Don’t be lured back to the dreary Donheads.

I’m sorry. I run on with no means of stopping — Oh, God — History!

(Willy: I think she’s stopping.

Dulcie: You’ll be late for Court.)

I have so much to tell you, my dear godfather I’ve known since Old Shanghai. This was to have been a simple letter of thanks. Thanks for being such a prop and stay at the wedding, for giving me away, for being so diplomatic at Le Trou Normand about Amy breastfeeding (tell Dulcie sorry about that, I didn’t know it would upset her) and especially when Mrs. Baxter was sick. You were wonderful. I’m afraid my Edward kept a seat near the back! He was silent for a long time but as we passed through Sikkim en route for Darjeeling and we saw slender ladies plucking tea leaves with the very tips of their fingers — their saris like poppies in the green, their little heads bound round with colours and I was transported with joy — he said, “I am not enough for you.”

Oh dear — I have been carried far away. Please, dear Uncle W, don’t show Dulcie this. Well, I expect you will.

In Dacca Eddie bought me a red chair. The old, old man who sold it lived far down the back of his shop in the dark, his eyes gleaming like a Maltese plague rat. The chair is to be sent to the Inns of Court, The Temple, London EC4!

Oh — I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on thanking you. If only Ma and Pa were here. “You are my mother and my father,” as the Old Raj promised India, or rather they said, “I am.”

Isn’t it odd how Hong Kong holds us still? Isn’t it odd how the “Far East” has somehow faded away with the Bomb? Do you understand? Now the British live out there by grace. I shall call my first daughter Grace.

I promise, dear Uncle Willy, to grow more sage: more worthy of your affection. I shall grow tweedy and stout and hairy, with moles on my chin, and I shall be a magistrate and open bazaars in support of the Barristers’ Benevolent Society. You won’t be ashamed of me.

Thanks for liking Eddie, with much, much love from

Betty x

(Letter left in Judge Pastry’s Will to Her Majesty’s Judge Sir Edward Feathers QC, residing in the Donheads, carefully dated and inscribed and packed in a cellophane envelope, and bequeathed to Edward Feathers’s Chambers where it may still be mouldering.)

You are grinning all over your face, Mrs. Feathers.”

“I’m happy, Mr. Feathers. I’m writing to Pastry Willy.”

“About a hundred pages, at a guess. Come on. It’s a picnic.”

“Picnic?”

“On the cliffs, Elisabeth. With the local talent. Well, the local English talent. Quick. No ‘PS xx.’ Envelope, stamp and off. Silver salver at the portcullis. Take your suncream and I’ve got your hat.”

“I love you, Edward Feathers. Why are we going off on a picnic with all these terrible people? We could be eating tinned pilchards with Mabel.”

“It’ll be tinned pilchard sandwiches on the cliffs. Come on, there’s a great swarm going. Planned for years. Since the end of the war. It’s all expats with no money, no education and big ideas. All drunk with sunlight. They drifted to Malta. They can’t go home. Nothing to do.”