by Paul Scott
It was marvellous from then on though. We had the whole compartment to ourselves and a lovely breakfast brought in. You know, until now I never did quite believe that story you told me about the time Sir Nello was turned out of a first class compartment by a couple of box-wallah Englishmen. It seemed to me that if the railways allow an Indian to make a first class booking then no one should be able to stop them using what they’ve paid for. I think if you hadn’t been at Pindi station to see us off, though, there’d have been trouble with these two women about Lili and me actually getting in. Me only because I was with Lili. Was that why you got into the carriage first and condescended to them in that marvellous nineteenth-century way, before they had a chance of seeing her and realising they were going to have to travel with an Indian woman?
When I remember how awful it is travelling at home in the blackout, with no heating in the trains, just a dim blue light, and the stations in darkness, people jam-packed in the corridors as well as in the compartments, but on the whole everyone helping everyone else and trying to be cheerful, I get really angry about the kind of thing that happens over here. Honestly, Auntie, a lot of the white people in India don’t know they’re born. Of course I never travelled first class at home, and there was sometimes bad feeling among the noncommissioned boys in the services when they were packed like sardines and the pinkest young subaltern fresh out of Octu travelled in comparative comfort, but that’s service life. This is to do with civilians. Well, I mustn’t go on about it.
It’s much warmer here in Mayapore than Pindi. I only need a sheet at night and it won’t be long before I have to have a fan going all the time. Lili’s given me a marvellous room all to myself, and a super bathroom (although the seat’s a bit wonky on the wc! and there’s an inhibiting paper-holder guarded by lions). The MacGregor House is fascinating. I have to keep reminding myself that you never actually visited it because Uncle Henry had retired and left the province before Nello bought the place. But of course you remember Mayapore itself, although Lili says there have been lots of changes since then. The Technical College, for instance, the one Nello built and endowed and got his knighthood for, and the new buildings put up by the British-Indian Electrical. They’re building an aerodrome out at Banyaganj which the English people say has ruined the duckshooting! How Hitler would laugh! (There are some lakes out there which Lili says were a favourite European picnic spot.) A couple of evenings ago we went to dinner with the Deputy Commissioner and his wife, Robin and Constance White, who said they met you and Uncle Henry years ago, but didn’t think you’d remember them because they were very junior. Mr White was under a Mr Cranston at the time, and they said you’d remember him all right if only because of the occasion when he was in camp, touring his district, and you and Uncle Henry, who were also touring, called in unexpectedly and found him bathing in a pool. Apparently you both stood on the bank talking for ages and he stood there doing his best to answer sensibly and be polite, standing very straight as if at attention, up to his waist in rather muddy water, and not daring to move because he had no bathing-drawers on. He thought afterwards that you and Uncle Henry knew, and were just keeping him in that awkward situation for the fun of it. I promised Mr White I’d mention this when I wrote to you, and ask if you really did know, because he’s always wondered. It seems Mr Cranston never was certain. But it is one of the funny stories about the Governor and his Lady that went around for years and years – as you can judge, since it came up only the other night here in Mayapore, after all that time.
I liked Mr White, and his wife, although like all pukka mems she is a bit frightening at first. (I used to be frightened of you.) But they both seem to admire and respect Lili. It was a very private and friendly sort of party, with just two other men to balance Lili and myself at the table – Mr Macintosh the Civil Surgeon, who is a widower and another old friend of Lili’s, and Judge Menen. He’s married, but his wife is in the local nursing home at the moment. I liked the judge. He has a wonderful sense of humour, or so I realised later in the evening. At first I thought him a bit snooty and critical, and put it down to an inferiority complex about being the only male Indian present. He’s much older than Mr White, but then of course it takes an Indian longer to rise to a position of authority, doesn’t it? Anyway, after a bit I saw that he was pulling my leg in a way I’d have cottoned on to at once if he’d been English. It reminded me of when I first met Lili. Those dry amusing things she sometimes comes out with. If she were English, you’d laugh at once, but because she’s not, then until you get to know her you think (as I used to think) What is she getting at? What’s behind that remark? How am I supposed to reply or react without giving offence or appearing to have taken offence?
From what Lili tells me a lot of the English here are rather critical of the DC. They think of him as a man who does more than is absolutely necessary to show friendly to the Indians. They say he’ll find himself taken advantage of, eventually. They talk about the ‘good old days’ of his predecessor, a Mr Stead, who kept ‘a firm hand’ and made it quite clear in the district ‘who was boss’. This kind of attitude has been brought home to me in the two days I’ve worked at the hospital and I realise how lucky I’ve been so far, living with you, and not getting mixed up with average English people. Matron, a marvellous woman who’s been out here for years and knows the score, said one particularly interesting thing when she interviewed me. The interview was fixed up by Lili through the Civil Surgeon who is medical overlord of everything that goes on in the district – but you know that! Matron said, ‘You have three sponsors, Mr Macintosh, myself, and your own surname which is one people in this area remember as distinguished even if at the time there were a lot who disagreed with your uncle’s progressive policies. If you’re wise you’ll trade on all three but avoid too obvious an association with the fourth.’ Well, I knew what she meant by ‘the fourth’ and I must say I got my hackles up, and said, ‘My real sponsor is Lady Chatterjee.’ She said, ‘I know. It’s mainly why I’m taking you on. Even voluntary workers have to pass my personal test of worthiness. But this is a British general hospital, and I am its matron, and have long ago learned the lesson I had to learn if I were ever to do my job properly, and that lesson was to understand the necessity of excluding as extraneous any considerations other than those of the patients’ well-being and the staff’s efficiency’ (she talks like that, rather officially, as if she has learned a speech). ‘There’s a lot’ (she went on) ‘that you may instinctively dislike about the atmosphere in which you’ll be working. I don’t ask you to learn to like it. I only ask, indeed demand, that your work won’t be affected by the atmosphere.’ ‘Perhaps the atmosphere should be changed,’ I said. At that moment, you know, I couldn’t have cared less whether I was allowed to work at the hospital or not. After all, I wasn’t going to be paid. She said, quick as a flash, ‘I’m sure it should. I hope one day it will. If you’d prefer to delay working here until it does, and let someone else do the rewarding job of making sick people as comfortable as you can you only have to tell me. I shall quite understand. Although I’m sure that when you were driving an ambulance at home in the Blitz you never stopped to worry about what the wounded people you were taking to hospital felt about life or what their prejudices were. I imagine you were more concerned to try and stop them dying.’ Well of course it was true, what she said. I stared at her through these awful glasses I have to wear if I’m to feel absolutely confident and I wished I was driving an ambulance still. I did get a kind of kick out of it, even if I was terrified a lot of the time. 1940. How long ago it seems! Only eighteen months, but an age and a world away, as they say. Here the war has only just begun – and sometimes I’m not sure a lot of people realise that it has. Back home it seemed in a curious way to be already over, or to be settled down to go on for centuries. In Mayapore I think more than ever of poor Daddy and poor David. The war that killed them has only just caught up with Mayapore. At times it’s like waiting for them to be killed all over again,
at other times like thinking of people who lived and died on another planet. I’m glad Mummy went before it all started. I can’t, as most of the English here do, blame the Indians for resisting the idea of war, a war they have no proper say in. After all I’ve seen the real thing, in a minor civilian way, but most of the people who lay down the law here about beating the Jap and the Hun (those awful old-fashioned expressions that seem to give them heart but always depress me) haven’t even heard a rifle fired in anger. British India is still living in the nineteenth century. To them Hitler is only a joke, because ‘he was a house-painter and still looks like one even in uniform’. Three cheers for the Cavalry. Up the Navy! Sorry! I guess I’ve had one too many of Auntie Lili’s gimlets. I’ve got to get the old glad rags on soon, because we’re having a party to which no less a person than the District Superintendent of Police is coming. Lili says he’s a bachelor. I hope a dedicated one! I can’t bear the type of man who tries not to look as if he’s noticed I’m not really attractive. Remember Mr Swinson? !! Auntie dear, I love you and think often of you and of us together in Pindi. I long really to be going up to Srinagar with you in May, but Auntie Lili seems determined to keep me here, and of course I’m now committed to the hospital. And I am seeing more of India this way. There are a couple of other local voluntary bodies like me in the civilian wing, but the rulers of the roost are the official VADs and the QAs. You should see the airs some of the QAs give themselves. At home they’d simply be ordinary ward nurses, or staff nurses at most. Here they rank as sisters. Neither they nor the voluntary bods are supposed to do anything menial. That’s all left to the poor little Anglo-Indian girls. Today, for the war effort, I rolled miles of bandages – I mean rolling bandages is clean. But I stood on my feet to do it, and they’re killing me! Well, the boy has just come in to draw my bath. More presently. I’m loving it but finding it strange all over again, as I did when I came out last year. Mayapore is a bit off-putting in a way dear old Pindi isn’t. Is it something to do with the fact that that part of the world is predominantly Muslim, and here it is Hindu? Please look after yourself and think often of your loving niece.
Daphne.
*
The MacGregor House,
MacGregor Road,
Mayapore, I.
Friday, 17th July, 1942.
Dear Auntie Ethel,
Many thanks for your letter and news of the goings on in Srinagar. Glad you got the photograph safely and in time for your birthday, but gladder still that you liked the dress length. The photograph seemed to me so awful that I had to send something else as well to make up for it, and then wondered choosing that colour whether I hadn’t made everything worse! Not much clothes sense, I’m afraid, although I did feel that particular piece would suit you. Relieved you think so too! Hope old Hussein doesn’t make a mess of it. Actually he’s a better tailor than the man we have here. Lili and I had an iced cake in honour of your birthday, and a few people in to share it who stayed on afterwards for drinks (which I felt you would approve of!).
The rains have really set in now down here after a late start that set everyone in Mayapore hoarding foodstuffs in case of famine. I mean everyone in Mayapore who could afford it. Jack Poulson says it’s the curse of India, the way the middle-class and well-to-do Indians swoop into the stores the moment a crisis even threatens. But that’s apparently nothing to the corruption that goes on in higher circles where bulk foodstuffs are handled.
The grass at the front of the house is unbelievably green. I adore the rains. But how damp everything gets. The boy cleans all my shoes, every day, just to stop them from going mouldy. I’ve bought myself a huge cape and a sort of sou’wester, not that I’ve had much need of either because I mostly get a lift to and from the hospital in Mr Merrick’s car which he sends round with a police driver (a very militant Muslim who tells us all the Hindus have concealed weapons in their houses to chop off the heads of English and Mohammedans alike). If it’s a petrol-less day (how we all complain about that) Mr Merrick sends his official truck, ostensibly on urgent duty (transferring prisoners from the jail to the courthouse). I find it a bit embarrassing and have told him several times that I can quite easily go on my bicycle on any day, or anyway get a tonga, but he insists that with all this Congress-inspired anti-British feeling boiling up again, and the MacGregor House being isolated on the outskirts of the cantonment, it’s really his duty to see I don’t come to any harm.
I like him better than I used to. I can’t close my eyes to the fact that he’s been kind and considerate. It’s his manner that’s against him (and something behind his manner, naturally). And of course a District Superintendent of Police is a bit off-putting. But now that I’ve got used to him – and got over something that I think I must tell you – I quite enjoy the times he takes me out. Except when he adopts an official tone, as on a night or so ago when he warned me against what he called my association with Mr Kumar, which he said had set people talking, not English people only but Indians as well. I’m afraid I laughed and thoughtlessly said, Oh stop acting like a policeman all the time. Which I realized at once was the last thing one ought ever to say to him because he takes his job very seriously and is proud of having got where he is and is determined to shine at the job and not to care who dislikes him for doing it properly.
I feel I must tell you, but please keep it to yourself, I’ve told nobody, not even Aunt Lili. About a month ago he invited me to his bungalow for dinner. He’d gone to a lot of trouble. It was the best English-style meal I’ve had in India (except that time when you had the Swinsons and they made such a fuss beforehand about hating Indian food). Another point in his favour from my point of view was that his houseboy is obviously devoted to him, and took pleasure in arranging everything properly for his sahib’s candle-lit dinner for two. The excuse for the dinner, if there had to be an excuse, was for me to hear some of his records afterwards. You remember I told you at the time about the show put on by the military at the end of April, complete with band and parade? And about meeting Brigadier Reid who said he met us in Pindi? And how I went to the show with a couple of the girls from the hospital and on to the club afterwards with some young army officers? Ronald Merrick looked in at the club later that evening (he had had a lot to do, controlling the crowds, etc). Well we were all saying complimentary things about the music and the marching – it was rather striking – and I must have been more full of it than the others. Anyway Ronald turned to me and said, ‘Oh, you like military bands? So do I.’ Apparently he had piles of records. He said I must hear them some time.
So this was the occasion. I don’t like them all that much! Not well enough to want to listen to records, so whenever he raised the subject afterwards I sort of put it off. Actually I’d almost forgotten about the records when he finally asked me to dinner. I said yes before I knew what I was doing, and when he said: ‘Good, and afterwards you can hear some of those records I’ve been promising to play,’ I thought Oh Lord! What have I let myself in for! In the event it wasn’t too bad (the music I mean). We’d been around quite a bit together and there was tons to talk about. By now the music was just a part of a pleasant evening. I’d been to his bungalow before, but only with other people for a Sunday morning beer party, but seeing it empty I realised how comfortable and pleasant it was. He doesn’t smoke, or drink much, so I suppose his money goes further than that of men in similar positions who do. The bungalow is mainly PWD furnished, of course, but he has several rather glamorous things of his own. To begin with there was this super radiogram (on which he played a couple of Sousa marches). Then he had very nice tableware, and a marvellous Persian rug that he said he’d bought in an auction in Calcutta. His taste in pictures though was what really struck me. He’s so very conventional in his behaviour you’d expect something nondescript on his walls. It’s true there were pig-sticking and polo pictures in the dining-room and a David Wright cutie in his bedroom (he showed me round the whole bungalow but in such a sweet way that there wasn’t anything
awkward about the bedroom, as there might have been with another man) but in the living-room there was nothing on the walls except these two rather good reproductions of those Henry Moore drawings of people huddled in the underground during the Blitz, which I find difficult to look at, but do admire. He seemed touchingly pleased when I said, ‘Oh, Henry Moore! What a surprising man you are!’ One other thing that struck me – in the closet (the one used by guests just off the hall) he’d had the boy put out scented soap (Coty Chypre) and a little pink hand towel which was obviously brand new. I had the feeling it had been bought especially for the occasion. (The soap in his own bathroom was Lifebuoy, so don’t jump to the wrong conclusion!)
There was another surprise too. After he’d played a couple of these Sousa marches he put on another record and said, ‘I like this kind of thing, too,’ and what do you think it was? The Clair de Lune movement from Debussy’s Suite Berga-masque, played by Walter Gieseking. It was one of my brother David’s favourites. When it began I thought: Whenever did I tell Ronald that David loved this? Then knew I never had. It was extraordinary. All that awful blaring (but sometimes stirring) Sousa and then this tender moonlit music that actually I could hardly bear to listen to, but loved all the same, although it seemed such an unusual thing for a policeman to like as well.
While it was playing the boy brought in the coffee – Turkish. There was a choice of brandy or liqueurs (curaçao or crème de menthe, very dull). All the bottles were unopened – fresh from the store, just for me. I expect if I ever dine there again the brandy will be at the same level we left it. While we were drinking it he asked me a lot of questions about my family, about how David was killed, and about daddy, and then about me, and what I thought about life and all that sort of thing, but in a chatty, sympathetic way that made me open up. (He must be a wizard at interrogation! That’s not fair. But you know what I mean.) Gradually I realised he had begun to talk about himself. And I was thinking: People don’t like you much, but you’re fundamentally kind and that’s why you and I have always got on surprisingly well. He said he came of ‘a very ordinary family’ and that although his father had done well enough, he was still only a grammar school boy and his grandparents had been ‘pretty humble sort of people’. He had worked hard and done all right so far in the Indian Police which he thought of as an essential if not especially attractive service, and his main regret was that being in it he wasn’t allowed to join up. His other regret was that he’d never really had any ‘youth’ or met ‘the right sort of girl’ for him. He was often ‘pretty lonely’. He knew he hadn’t much to offer. He realised his background and mine were ‘rather different’. Our friendship meant a lot to him.
