by M. M. Kaye
I have never sorted out the reason for our moves from one house to another during the first four years of my life. It never occurred to me to ask either of my parents why, having rented Chillingham, we didn’t stay there instead of moving for a season into another and much larger house called Stoke Place, and then back again to Chillingham; and from there to our old rooms in the Central Hotel once more. I remember Stoke Place very clearly in a series of pictures. A high, two-storied house with a verandah on both floors; myself proudly wearing a pair of Bill’s cast-off knickerbockers instead of the hated frilly skirts; a firework display on the tennis court in celebration of the Hindu festival of Diwali — the Feast of Light — with Tacklow touching off rockets and Catherine wheels for a deeply appreciative audience consisting of ourselves and the compound children and their equally enthralled parents. Mother in a very long pale-blue dress and a matching hat being photographed in the lower verandah, surrounded by beribboned baskets and bouquets of flowers — the trophies of a last night of, I think, The Quaker Girl; it being the custom of the Gaiety Theatre to present floral tributes to every lady in the cast on the final night of any show.
The plays or musical comedies usually ran for about a week, with a total of half-a-dozen evening performances and two matinées; and it was also customary for husbands, fathers, admirers and friends to send up flowers and boxes of chocolates on the last night. This charming habit made the tiny stage look like a florist’s shop, but led to a good deal of heart-burning, since the tributes were by no means bestowed in recognition of merit, and it was not unusual for the leading lady to end up with two bouquets — one from the management and one from her husband — while some pretty snippet in the chorus, who happened to be the belle of the season, garnered at least ten or twenty. Popularity could defeat acting talent every time.
Chillingham also stays in my memory as a series of disconnected pictures, as does the Central Hotel. A powder-blue ground-glass globe, scattered with engraved stars of clear glass, belongs to the hotel, where it hung in the main hall, enclosing a strong electric light bulb. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and that starry globe still stands in my memory as a symbol of loveliness; even though I am well aware that if I saw it again it would probably strike me as hideous. But to a three-year-old it was a beautiful and desirable object, and I used to stop and gaze up at it in admiration every time I passed through the hall. I looked hopefully for it many years later — long after the curtain had fallen on the Raj and the house lights had gone out — when Bets and I were on a sentimental journey to our birthplace and had persuaded an elderly chowkidar to take us over the closed and shuttered hotel. But the star-powdered pale-blue globe had gone, and the caretaker could not remember ever having seen it. I hope, for old times’ sake, that it is still unbroken and has found a new home with someone whose children are as enchanted by it as I once was.
Chillingham still means Mother’s voice singing, to her own accompaniment on the piano in the drawing-room, the sweet, sentimental songs of that day or, on occasions, the rousing hymns that were popular in missionary circles; such as ‘Pull for the Shore, Sailor’ and ‘Beulah Land, Sweet Beulah Land’. People had to provide their own amusements in those days, and since anyone with any pretensions to a singing voice was expected to take some sheet-music with them to a dinner-party, I used to lie in my cot and listen to the duets and solos being sung in the drawing-room. Music heard at night has an enchantment all its own, and perhaps because of those long-ago musical evenings it never fails to catch at my heart. Chillingham also meant the white flowers of the potato-creeper which grew like a weed in Simla and smothered, in a foam of white-on-green, the high fence of criss-cross wooden slats that screened the servants’ quarters from the house and the drive.
Since there were no cars in those halcyon times, rickshaws were the taxis of Simla and could be hired in the same way. But all who could do so owned their own rickshaw and kept their own jhampanis — the four men who propelled the rickshaw, two pulling from the front and two pushing from behind. Hired rickshaws and those who manned them were, in general, scruffy-looking and unimpressive. But privately owned ones were spick-and-span affairs, gleaming with fresh paint and polished brass lamps, while their jhampanis, who wore smart uniforms, looked down their noses at their less fortunate brethren and considered themselves vastly superior beings. Like all the many household servants who were employed by the Sahib-log, they were the firm friends and allies of their employer’s children, and rides in the rickshaw when Teeta-ayah* was in charge were always a delight. We could chatter non-stop with the jhampanis and hear all their news, and there was little we didn’t know about their family affairs or anything of interest that happened in the world in which they lived; that mysterious, exciting, colourful world of close-packed houses and bazaars that clung to the steep hillside below the Mall.
Kipling says in Something of Myself, his disappointingly brief and sketchy autobiography, that he and his sister Trix spoke Hindustani far more fluently than they spoke their mother tongue, and that when they saw their parents, the servants would warn them to ‘remember to speak English to Mama and Papa’! That was true of all of us: or if not all, of the majority of the India-born children of the Raj. For in our day it was considered a disgrace to be unable to speak to the real owners of the land in their own tongue. It was only later, after the end of the First World War — known then as ‘the Great War’ — that standards declined and the rot set in as it became fashionable among the Johnny-come-latelys and their wives and children to affect not to be able to speak or understand the language of those whom they professed to rule. Too many confined themselves to a few useful words of command and a smattering of ‘kitchen-Hindustani’ and considered that this was quite sufficient. But oh, what a lot they missed! For the world behind the bungalow was full of interest. And of dear friends and allies.
Our servants and their families lived in quarters behind their employer’s house and since children are indifferent to colour, creed, class or rank (until or unless they are taught otherwise by some grown-up) every inmate of those quarters was a personal friend. There was far more caste discrimination between the occupants of the servants’ quarters than there was between them and us, and one learned the rules by ear and without knowing it; I suppose one could almost say that we absorbed them through the pores of the skin. Bets and I learned without being told that this or that food or action was taboo to Sundra because of her caste, but all right for Kullu and his nine-year-old daughter Umi because of theirs. That Ahmad Shah could do things that little Hira Singh couldn’t, because one was a Pathan and the other a Sikh — and so on. This is the best way to learn anything: particularly languages.
But all these things were merely immutable rules that one’s Indian friends obeyed and that we accepted as such: just as they accepted the fact that we had a paler skin (and not all that paler, either!) and lots of habits that they regarded as disgusting: toothbrushes, for instance —ugh! It did not prevent our being friends. Or getting into fights for that matter. And it is interesting to remember that the children of my parents’ Indian friends, with whom we played, seemed equally oblivious of class distinctions and played and quarrelled, as we did, on an equal footing with their servants’ children.
Kipling, who knew a lot about India, mentions this fact at the very beginning of Kim, in which three children, Kim, ‘the poorest of the poor whites’, Abdullah the sweetmeat-seller’s son, and ‘little Chota Lal in his gilt-embroidered cap’, are playing ‘I’m the King of the Castle’ on the great green bronze gun, Zam-Zammah, that stands to this day on a plinth opposite the Municipal Museum in Lahore. Kipling says of Chota Lal that ‘his father was worth perhaps half a million sterling, but India is the only democratic country in the world’. By present standards that half-million would be worth more than twenty times as much. But the comment about democracy was still valid in my day: at least, among children. The divisions of caste and class only showed up in later year
s. But when one was young one found playfellows everywhere, and every man, woman or child in the compound was a friend and an ally. Nor do I think that my parents were in any way exceptional in encouraging this, and it is certain that we gained a great deal from it and never came to any harm.
There were always a great many servants, and the ignorant who criticize the life-style of the ‘colonial’ British have never failed to use this as a stick (one of many!) to belabour those of their fellow countrymen who spent their working lives in the service of India: condemning it as typical of that ostentation and self-aggrandisement that made such suburban nonentities feel superior — etc., etc. It was nothing of the sort. Anyone who knows the first thing about India must know that in those days (and, whatever is said to the contrary, in these too!) caste dictated everything that an Indian could or could not do.
Looked at in another way, caste was also a splendid device for ensuring full employment; and we who live in an age and a country in which trade-union rules insist that a painter stops work in order to send for a carpenter to bang in a single nail or unscrew a single screw, because the nails and screws are not his business but a carpenter’s, or waits for an electrician to come and remove a wall plug before he can finish painting a skirting-board, should have every sympathy for the servants of the Sahib-log who devised this ploy hundreds of years before the unions woke up to its advantages. In my day India had never heard of such a thing as a cook-general, and would have objected strongly to the creation of this useful hybrid. The result was that the lowliest British subaltern or secretary was compelled to employ a whole range of servants to run even the humblest of ménages, and as his pay and position improved, so, inevitably, did the number of his employees increase.…
There was the lordly abdar (butler), who ruled the Sahib’s servants with an iron hand in an iron glove, and the Sahib’s bearer who looked after his clothes and kept track of the bills. There was the Memsahib’s ayah who did the same for her — but who would not sew so much as a button on her Sahib’s pyjamas! There was the hamal who dusted the rooms by the simple process of flapping a cloth which shifted the dust from A to B and back again; the kansamah (cook) who produced delicious meals at any hour of the day or night — and for any number of unexpected guests as well — without a murmur. The khidmatgar waited at table, laid it, and looked after the knives and forks, crockery and glasses that the masalchi (who had a chokra to assist him) washed up but would not handle when dry. There was the children’s ayah as distinct from the Memsahib’s, and another and more junior bearer for the son of the house; a bheesti who fetched and carried water and filled the tin bath-tubs, and a sweeper and/or his wife the metharani, who dealt with the disposal of what is euphemistically known as ‘night soil’ (why only night?). Then there was the dirzi who sat cross-legged on the verandah all day behind his whirring sewing-machine, making and mending clothes for the household. Like the cook, he was a genius; he could copy almost anything if one showed him a picture, and all the ladies-of-the-Raj were dressed by him. A dhobi and his wife attended to the washing and ironing, and a mali and his assistant cared for the garden. There was a syce or syces for the horse or horses; jhampanis to draw the rickshaw and, last but by no means least, a chowkidar — a nightwatchman — to discourage robbers and other nefarious persons from breaking in during the hours of darkness. Or at least that was the idea, though in practice these gentlemen did little more than sleep soundly all night in the shelter of the porch, where anyone coming home late from a party must step over a recumbent and sheeted form in order to open the front door: a feat that was always performed without waking the slumberer.
Rumour has it that all chowkidars are members of a criminal gang and that their employment is merely a form of insurance — a sort of ancient Asiatic version of the ‘protection racket’ — and that anyone refusing to hire one would soon discover that it was a lot cheaper to pay the man’s modest wage and be free of his gang’s attentions! I wouldn’t know about that. But as you can see from the preceding list, any family man paying the wages of less than seven or eight servants at the end of each month could consider himself lucky: and probably lived in cramped discomfort in a small flat or half a bungalow! Yet by nineteenth-century standards even a dozen servants was staggeringly modest. That talented and entertaining snob, the Hon. Miss Emily Eden, despiser of Anglo-Indian society, whose acid pen did much towards colouring the views of later writers who, following her example, though unable to match her in the matter of blue blood, wrote off anyone who served in India (Governors-General, peers and all those related to them excepted, of course) as a collection of deadly little provincials married to vulgar dowds from suburbia, would herself have been waited on by considerably more than two hundred servants, since her brother, the deplorable Lord Auckland, happened to be Governor-General. He was also, incidentally, responsible for the calamitous Afghan War of 1839–42 which in the words of my revered kinsman Sir John Kaye, who wrote the contemporary history of that brawl, ‘was disastrous because it was unjust. It was in principle and in act, an unrighteous usurpation, and the curse of God was upon it from the start.’
In Emily’s day the household staff was vast and the ‘who-does-what’ unofficial union rules were a lot stricter. It is interesting to learn that Honoria Marshall, arriving at Calcutta in 1837 to marry Henry Lawrence, a man she had not seen for over nine years, records in her diary that when, amazed by the enormous number of servants in her hostess’s house, she inquired how many there were, she was told: ‘Not more than sixty. We run a very modest household here!’ It is also worth noting that in a recent book on the partition and independence of India, there is a group photograph of some four hundred or so of the five thousand-odd servants deemed necessary for the running of the then Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, in the days of the last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Admittedly the close-packed ranks of liveried men include members of the Viceroy’s Bodyguard, but a note below mentions that among the missing thousands who could not be included in the photograph was a man whose sole duty was to pluck chickens, and that no less than fifty boys were employed to scare away birds from the lovely Mogul Gardens. I wonder how many gardeners they had — twenty? thirty? forty? But I still think that the whole scheme was a superlative method of jacking up the employment figures.
Emily Eden and Co. would have been horrified at the smallness of the staff employed by households in my father’s day, and he in turn would probably have been surprised by the far smaller size of mine in the 1940s. But everyone in the servants’ quarters behind our particular bungalow became a friend and partisan of my two small daughters; as Tacklow’s had been to Bets and myself. And my children too spoke English as a second language rather than a first.
Mother thinks we moved from the Central Hotel into Chillingham in the autumn of 1908. I would have been around ten or eleven weeks old by then, so do not recall the occasion. But as Mother’s memory for dates is now fairly hazy, I’m inclined to think that we probably stayed put in the hotel until the beginning of the next Simla season, because the smaller roads, such as the steep, winding one that leads down to Chillingham, are deep in snow during the winter months, and only the main ones such as the Mall, the Lakkar bazaar and the Ladies’ Mile are kept passable. We had certainly moved by the next spring and summer, for a photograph of Teeta-ayah, Bill and myself, playing in the sun in Chillingham’s apology for a garden, is one of those that survived among Aunt Lizzie’s collection of Mother’s snapshots.
Not many houses in Simla could boast a large garden, because in many places the hillsides on which they were built were too steep to allow for more than a front drive barely wide enough for a rickshaw to turn on; plus, with luck, a small lawn to one side that could just about support a single flowerbed. And that was it. The entrance to Chillingham (nicknamed ‘Warmingham’ by Mother’s many friends!) led straight off the hill road at a right angle, while the drive, having skirted one of those small lawns, turned left onto a level strip of ground bounded on one
side by the porch and the front verandah, and on the other by a line of flowerpots and a wooden railing that topped a high stone wall which buttressed the shelf of ground on which the house stood. Below this wall the hillside dropped so steeply that we could look down onto tree-tops and the roof of a neighbour’s house, as well as out toward the distant ridges of the foothills that fell away in ever diminishing folds until at last they melted into the yellow heat-haze of the plains.
That gravel frontage was really all the garden that we possessed, and since the hillside rose as steeply behind the house as it fell before it, our servants’ quarters were strung out in a line along the curve of the hill, screened from our view by a high, lattice-work fence that was covered in white-flowered potato-creeper and had a green-painted door in it.
My memories of that first stay in Chillingham are so inextricably mixed up with a subsequent one that I cannot really tell how much belongs to the first time. Very little, I suspect. But there are certain things I am sure of; among them, that potato-creeper and the wide drive with its wooden rail giving onto nothingness, which was our playground. I remember, too, being dressed up in a variety of fancy-dresses and being photographed in them by Mother before being taken off by ayah to some children’s party. One of these snapshots showed me dressed as a Columbine or a fairy or something of the sort, in a tight white bodice and a very short and very full skirt of white tarlatan. Tacklow presented a print of it to the mali, who was a particular friend of mine and was delighted with it. He was gazing at it with deep appreciation when Tacklow, becoming aware that he was holding it upside down, asked him what he thought it was? Whereupon the mali scratched his head and after a thoughtful pause said tentatively: ‘Shaid fullgobi hoga?’ (‘Perchance it is a cauliflower?’). Dear Mali-ji!
