Children Invariably Take Everything for Granted Or Fix Their Interest on a Familiar Object
I.
Extenuation.
The charm of an ocean voyage lies in the unfamiliarity of the transport, the sense of adventure, each day taking you into the unknown, the foreign ports with their alien peoples and the strange scenes and colours. But, if one travels over the same route a score or so times, all this charm is lost, and facts and impressions become merged and blurred with too familiar repetition. The voyage from England to India is no exception, and to the monotony, for a woman anyhow, is often added the sorrow of partings from children or husband. Some relieve the daily routine of deck-games, and the little gamble of the sweepstake on the Day’s run, by an “affaire” with someone who fades into oblivion the moment one lands at one’s destination.
Children invariably take everything for granted or fix their interest on a familiar object rather than on something strange, like the little boy who was taken to the zoo and spent the afternoon talking about a common alley-cat that he had caught a glimpse of in the grounds. But the man or woman who goes East for the first time is to be envied. I often watched these voyagers to capture their reactions second-hand. Nearly all were enthusiastic and gullible. They would go ashore and buy unutterable rubbish and the most fantastic sun-hats at Simon Artz in Port Said, nothing like those actually worn further East. There was also the sceptical girl, who, when a typical “pucca” Indian Army Major told her he was going to Poona, burst into peals of laughter and said “Don’t be funny, there is no such place”. Somewhere in her subconscious must have lurked a remembrance of “Colonel Chutneys from Poona” connected with the Variety Stage.
At Aden “The Barren Rock” of an Empire Outpost where it only rains once in three years, ships as soon as they were anchored were surrounded by small rowing boats and Somali and Sudanese boys dived for coins in the shark-infested sea, catching the coins under water long before they reached the bottom. I remember one boy who swam and dived as well as any of them in spite of having lost one leg to provide a shark’s dinner.
If one arrived at Bombay in May or June it was a joy to see the brilliant patches of flaming orange of the gold-mohur trees against the darker green foliage of the shore. The coconut palms were convincing evidence that this was the East and that England had been left many many miles behind and an entirely different way of life is now to begin.
As with voyages, so with countries to those who were born in them, familiarity breeding contempt and strange happenings appearing normal. I, now having attained that comfortable grey-haired state of middle-age, look back over the years gone by as if turning the pages of a picture book. Small incidents and scenes are recalled which, though of no importance, make a part of the pattern of one’s past and gently colour its mediocrity. A past life of fifty years that brings one to the end of the book, the book of British India which is finished, for India is no longer under a British Government. It has been handed back to the “Indians” as suddenly as the night descends on that land, with no twilight. A night which, we who have spent our lives serving that country dreaded for we knew it would bring bloodshed and civil-war to the millions of her peoples, so diverse in race and religion, whose many good qualities I admire and whose faults I know too well.
Now, in 1947 those fears have been realised a hundredfold, for even we, did not anticipate trouble to the extent that it has come. The victims in the bloody massacres are in their thousands, innocent silly children, playing with fire arms and knives, inflamed by religious propaganda and vile rumours, dazed with freedom and lack of balanced control. What do they care for Treaties and Agreements made by an educated handful of their fellow countrymen? They are literally mere scraps of paper to them, scraps they cannot read or understand. It is a heaven sent opportunity for the fierce frontier tribes, Waziris Mahsuds, Afghans and Afridis to sweep down into the fertile plains of India to slit the throats of fat rich Hindu bhunias and loot their godowns (storerooms).
I weep for them, I am sorry for their leaders who clamoured for the removal of the British, for most of them realise they have bitten off more than they can chew. God knows we have made many mistakes and individually we British women have often lacked sufficient interest in their problems, but I speak truly when I say that the honesty and integrity of purpose behind the majority of the British so beyond doubt. The men I have known, who, in Kipling’s time would have been called “Empire Builders” have borne a white-man’s burden on every page, an old tradition in every line and they and their women have frequently suffered and given their lives to India, the country of their adoption. What matter if the “Old school Tie” was waved alongside the Union Jack? So long as the Union Jack was the mare obvious. No more will either proudly wave o’er India’s mountains, plains and jungles. No longer will our sons govern its varied peoples, and so, I sit and try to piece together the bits and pieces that made up the last fifty years of a British woman’s life under British rule. They are but glimpses for I am no Historian. So much has already been written about the races, religions and languages of India, it would be presumptuous of me to try. I can only hope to show you some of the pictures in my Indian Scrap-book.
II.
Family and Camping.
My mother was born at sea, off the Cape of Good Hope and christened at St. Helena, in the days of sailing ships. Her father and mother had recently suffered the hardships and terrors of the besieged in the British Residency at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny. The Residency still stands with its bullet-holed walls as a memorial to British pluck and endurance and the loyalty of those Indians who chose to remain with them. In spite of being born at sea, my mother had no love for it and could never board a ship without some misgivings. This feeling was engendered by the tragedy of her youngest sister Lilian, who had married a young subaltern in the Royal Artillery. A few weeks after their marriage he had had to rejoin his Battery in India. They sailed in an Anchor Line ship and in the Bay of Biscay ran into a severe storm. The ship foundered off the coast of Portugal, with all hands, there was but one survivor. The horrors of being battened down below decks with huge seas crashing over the frail vessel and realising one’s own impotency and eventual fate, must have been terrible, but at least Lilian and her husband were together.
My paternal grandfather, a Scotsman, served in the East India Company during the last years of its existence, and also with the British India Shipping Co. His sixth son, my father born in Stornaway, was a typical red highlander, 6ft 4ins in his socks. His courage in regard to the fair sex belied his height, or perhaps it was just Scottish caution, for having met my mother, “a wee bit of a lass” of 5ft 11ins with large grey eyes and light brown hair, it took him five years to summon up his courage to propose. They were married, and in the course of a hazardous existence she bore him three sons and three daughters, of whom I was the eldest. Two sons died in infancy of dysentery, the scourge which took such heavy toll of babies in the East.
Father’s work in the Indian Survey necessitated spending seven months of every year touring his District a large area in the Bombay Presidency, only returning to headquarters in Poona during the monsoon or rainy season, from the beginning of June to the end of October. In 1897, as children, we always toured with him and revelled in the free open-air life. Camping was no hardship to us, but I am sure mother must often have wearied of the continuous packing and trekking it entailed. We were seldom able to travel by rail, and as the roads across country were little more than cart-tracks, the only means of transport was by bullock-cart. The Indian bullock-cart is springless and in design and structure precisely the same as it was hundreds of years ago, a slow cumbersome vehicle. Progress in Eastern countries is proverbially slow and seemingly ill-adapted to Western bustle and rush.
Our journeys were made by night, as it was cooler than during the heat of the day. The family bullock-carts were first heaped with straw, on which were laid our mattresses and bedding, and we led the procession of twenty to twenty-five carts laden with the remainder of our tents, camp furniture, stores and servants. Half the camp was sent on ahead the day before, to pitch tents and prepare breakfast. Owing to the slowness of the bullocks and the roughness of the tracks, we could seldom cover more than fifteen miles a night. Occasionally a tiger or a panther crossed our path and disappeared into the jungle growth on either side of the track. Although father always had his rifle by his side, he kept it for an emergency, and did not shoot in case he missed and provoked them to attack a part of the convoy out of range. Monkeys roused from their slumbers by the creaking of the carts and the shouts and grunts of the drivers, chattered their annoyance overhead. The carts and bullocks were hired from the native villages, but we always had with us the riding horses of my parents, at least two buffaloes to provide us with milk and butter, so much better and richer than that of the Indian cow, and various pets. Father’s clerical staff, composed of Brahmins, the highest caste of the Hindus, had a camp apart from us, for close proximity might mean defilement of their caste laws. Should even a shadow of anyone outside this caste fall on their food, that food would be polluted and have to be thrown away.
It has been the policy of the British Government to respect all Indian Religions, of which there are many. With the exception of suttee, the Hindu custom of a widow immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, and the infanticide of unwanted baby girls, we have interfered little with their religious rites and ceremonies. These Brahmins deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own Hindu countrymen, whom they call “untouchables” and who, after thousands of years of oppression actually accept this position. Besides this Brahmin theocracy and enormous Hindu population of all castes, there are in India seventy millions of Moslems, a race of greater physical vigour, and a religion only too ready for war and conquest. Between these two races and creeds the gulf is impassable. Under British rule they have become used to living side by side in superficial toleration, but the rivalry and hatred between them is undeniable, as has been shown in the whole of India’s history.
In actual fact there is no such thing as a history of India, but there are the histories of the different races who, from time to time, have entered the country for good or ill. Some have swept over the land blighting and destroying and departing. Others have remained in the country and married the daughters of the land, leaving the heritage they had won by the sword to descendants in whose veins flowed the blood of the two races. Here and there, a legend, a tradition or an inscription on a rock or a pillar may give a glimpse of history, but all is fragmentary. It was not until the Moslem Conquest 1000-1030, that the real history begins. Until the Hindu Rajahs might have defeated the Muslim invaders, but they were divided by feuds and jealousies and the country fell to the Muslims.
In the days of my childhood there were no shorthand typists and father’s clerks wrote all their reports in Mahratti with a quill pen, “blotting” the ink with fine black sand. Father spoke five Eastern languages and was able to write in several of them. We children spoke both Mahratti and Urdu fluently, which we unfortunately rapidly forgot when we went to school in England.
The majority of the peoples of India are illiterate. In consequence when they wish to correspond they employ a professional letter-writer and reader. For a few annas he will write at their dictation in the vernacular and sometimes in English. In camp, the servants would ask Mother, in preference to Father’s clerks, who might charge a small fee, to read any letters in English that they might receive. Some were masterpieces such as the one in which the writer apologised for not writing before “as he had fallen on biscuit tin and cut his arse”. If they wanted leave it was quite a common thing to produce a telegram which read “Come at once mother dangerous”.
Ayah was the only woman amongst our many servants. She was a Hindu but of a much lower caste than the Brahmin and without his complex over contamination. Dressed in a white saree edged with a small coloured border, she was always scrupulously clean, a bad disciplinarian, but patient and good tempered with her charges, my two young sisters, Margery and Joan. My brother Kenneth, and I were beyond her jurisdiction, but my mother did her best to control our headstrong spirits and endeavoured to give us instruction in the three “Rs”, though intermittently owing to our continually moving camp. There was one thing my Mother was most particular about and that was our accents. As she never allowed the servants to speak English to us, we always spoke Urdu or Maharatti to them, so never picked up the sing-song “Chi-chi” accent which a great number of British children acquire.
We more or less ran wild in camp and spent the whole day in the open in sun hats and the minimum of clothing. It was a great diversion for Kenneth and me when Ayah let us share her curry and rice, for she only laughed when we ate with our fingers, rolling the mixture into a ball and dropping it into our mouths with our heads thrown back, copying her actions exactly. Needless to say, my Mother never knew of these feasts, though she may have wondered sometimes why we were not as hungry as usual at our own lunches.
All my life I shall remember the evenings in camp. There is no twilight in India, it is dark an hour after sunset. It is then, after the heat of the day, that the air gets perceptibly cooler, a slight ground mist rises, the birds squabble overhead in the trees as they settle for the night and jackals from all directions start their howling. In a nearby village the women are cooking their evening meal over a fire of wood and dried dung, and little spirals of smoke rise in the still air. The stars come out one by one, as it gets darker, and the lamps in our tents under the big mango trees throw a circle of light in the gloom, while little fire-flies dart hither and thither their tail lights twinkling like the lights on fairy wands. The dogs are fed and chained up inside the tents to save them from a prowling panther or hyena. A dog is a toothsome morsel and a panther will dare much to procure one for his dinner.
We go to bed and Mother comes to read us a story, hear our prayers and kiss us good-night. Ayah goes to her dinner, returning later with her bedding to sleep on the ground by my sisters’ beds. In the hush of the night every sound seems clearer and louder, the bark of a dog or the clop of a horse’s hoof as he moves restlessly while the syce lays his bedding straw. Flying-foxes quarrel shrilly in the trees and always, the howling of jackals, the scavengers of the jungle world, crying to each other the glad news they have found something very dead to eat.
Then, there is a whispered “Are you asleep yet Babas?” “No no, come in” we cry, and into our tent steps old Balu (the bear), a putta-wallah, literally a badge wearer, in Father’s office. He is a grand old Maharatta with a grey moustache, tall and dignified in his navy frock-coat, with leather belt and a cross band from his shoulder to his waist on which is the badge of his office as messenger to the British Raj, a badge he is proud to wear as a symbol of his loyalty and faithfulness. Balu squats on the ground between my brother’s bed and mine and after some by-play and persuasion from us, he tells us old Maharatta fairy tales of “Nagoba, the snake-king”, “Parwati and the beggerman”, “The lid of the Sacred Casket” and of gods and demons, of holy-men, Princes and Princesses. The Princes and Princesses not only marry and live happily ever after, but the Princesses must become pregnant and produce beautiful baby sons. Thus we learnt at a very early age that it was the duty of every right-minded Princess to produce sons, but the biological facts were still a closed book. How we loved the dear old man, and how he loved us, so much so, that when we went Home to school he became ill and died. The British doctor said he could find no cause of death except a broken heart and no desire to live without the beloved Babas.