by Rumer Godden
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The River
A Novel
Rumer Godden
CONTENTS
Preface to The River
The River
A Biography of Rumer Godden
PREFACE
There is a vast difference between a book that is ‘vouchsafed’, its idea or theme coming of itself into your mind, and a book that comes from searching for a story or plot that fits the idea that is in your mind. The River was one of those rare books that are given to you.
Jean Renoir, the great French film director, who made the exquisite film of The River, called the book ‘a tribute to India and to childhood’; which I suppose it is – to my own childhood, though I never had a small brother who was killed by a cobra.
In my young days all English people living and working in the East, except those who were very poor or very wise, sent their children back to England to be brought up, even though this meant years of separation during which the children were exiles. We, my sister Jon and I, were two small English girls; India was where our father worked, and we lived there until we were left with our grandmother in London, far from our home. Then suddenly, in 1914, we were fetched back, reprieved.
I was only seven but realized, as soon as we were back, how homesick I had been. Jon too. Perhaps the thing we had missed more than anything else was the dust: the feel of the sunbaked Indian dust between sandals and bare toes; that and the smell. It was the honey smell of the fuzz-buzz flowers of thorn trees in the sun, and the smell of open drains and urine, of coconut oil on shining black human hair, of mustard cooking oil and the blue smoke from cowdung used as fuel; it was a smell redolent of the sun, more alive and vivid than anything in the West, to us the smell of India.
In the background of our house at Narayanganj in Bengal – now Bangladesh – there were always three sounds: the regular puff of escaping steam from the Jute Works across the road, puff – wait – puff like the pulse of our days and nights; then, from first daylight until dusk, the cawing of crows in the garden and, all day and most of the night, the tympany of the bazaar: a chatter like sparrows, street cries, a woman wailing, a baby’s cry. Sometimes there was a light rhythmic drumming which meant the monkey man was passing: he always had two performing monkeys dressed up as a man and a woman; the servants used to gather round them and not let us see what they were laughing at. There were other intermittent noises: the Jute Works noise of trucks pushed by hand, of presses working, chantings of coolies as they pushed or moved some heavy truck or piece of machinery, of bellows and of iron hitting iron from the forge. River noises came: the whistle of a launch, the deep hoot announcing a steamer. Every now and then there was a near and immediate noise of jarring, which meant the big gates of the house were being rolled open by the gatekeeper; it was always an exciting noise, heralding an arrival; all those noises are still there.
The gates were high and green, made of solid wood for privacy, under an arch of bridal creeper that canopied them with a cloud of green and white. On the garden side was the gatekeeper’s lodge, a small cell built into the wall; in the left-hand gate a door was cut through which servants or peons went in and out but, for any of the family, even for a child coming back from a ride on her pony, the full panoply was gone through, the gates rolled open with a rumble that alerted the whole house.
A wide gravelled drive made a half circle round an enormous cork tree, whose feathery green reached as high as the roof parapet; in December it burst into a tent of white blossom and had round its foot a bed of amaryllis lilies with red streaked trumpets. I called it my tree. Lawns spread away on either side. On the left was a glimpse of a tennis court with screens of morning glory.
I suppose it was a monstrous house, a great rectangle of pale grey stucco, standing on a high plinth that was hidden by plumbago and a hedge of poinsettias – it has always seemed strange to us that in England, for Christmas, poinsettias are sold singly at large prices. Verandahs, stone arched and green shuttered, ran the full length of the two floors, each arch ornamented with white carving. The roof was flat, with a high parapet which was cut into loopholes. Double steps, banked with pots of budding chrysanthemums, led up from the drive.
Narayanganj’s river was the Lakya, part of the vast network of the Brahmaputra, and was the only direct way in to the town; a branch line railway ran to Dacca, Bengal’s capital – now called Dhaka – eleven miles away and, going to Dacca too, was a road built high on a bund above the jute and rice fields, but these were only side routes: the main traffic was by river.
All my young life was lived on or by Indian rivers and was concerned with tides and weather warnings, with steamers, launches, flats, motor-boats, any kind of boats. Rivers of European countries were pygmies to these Indian rivers; they were often two miles wide, flowing between banks of mud and white sand from which fields stretched flat to the horizon under a weight of sky. If we children grew up with a sense of space in us, it was from the sky.
I left India – at least living there – in 1945, immediately after the Second World War. In my last winter – cold weather as we called it – I was asked to do a report for the Women’s Voluntary Services on what British women were doing in the way of war work; derogatory questions had been raised in Parliament. I was told to choose a province, so chose Bengal which I knew best and which allowed me to be in and out of Calcutta where Jon could look after the children. I travelled unobtrusively, wearing every kind of uniform so that people took me for granted; the result was a book, Bengal Journey.
As part of the journey I had to go from Dacca to Narayanganj, driving along the road that was utterly familiar to me.
My hostess-to-be at Narayanganj had telephoned early that morning; the manager of one of the Jute Works that spread on both banks of the river had died and was to be buried that morning as is the custom in a hot country – it was April – and, of course, every European in Narayanganj’s small community had to drive into Dacca to attend the funeral. As I was booked to leave on the midday steamer for Calcutta it was impossible to postpone my visit and, ‘Would you mind,’ she asked, ‘being received by the babu (Indian clerk) in charge?’ Mind! I could not have been more relieved but had no idea of what was waiting for me.
Indians do not change; their clothes and customs are timeless and there was not one Westerner in the little town to disturb this. As I walked through the bazaars and the Jute Works, along the river, past the Club, the bamboo-built church and school, the houses I had known, it was as if I had gone back thirty or more years and was – seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve – again. Everything was the same: I had lunch on the verandah of one of the houses, waited on by white-clad servants who might have been our own. On the way to the ghat, we passed the gates of our house; I could see the top of my cork tree over the gate. A short way up its trunk was a hole, my secret hole where I kept the poems I wrote and showed to no one else but Jon. For a moment I hesitated. ‘Go in. Go in,’ the babu urged but I could not bring myself to do that.
Most uncanny of all was the steamer; it was one of my father’s double-decked paddle-wheeled steamers – Fa was in the Inland Navigation Company of India – with the first class forward on the upper deck, where I was the only passenger. As the paddle wheels began to turn I stood at the front rail.
Usually, as I knew well, the steamers drew away from the ghat, then turned in a wide circle to go upstream but now, for some reason, the steamer backed. She backed further and further so that I, looking at the town, its banks along the river, its houses, mosques, temples and bathing s
teps, saw it grow smaller and smaller until it was like looking at it down a telescope, smaller but more and more clear until it was out of sight.
As the steamer turned I went to my cabin and began to write The River.
THE RIVER
The river was in Bengal, India, but for the purpose of this book, these thoughts, it might as easily have been a river in America, in Europe, in England, France, New Zealand or Timbuctoo, though they do not of course have rivers in Timbuctoo. Its flavour would be different in each; Bogey’s cobra would, of course, have been something else and the flavour of the people who lived by the river would be different.
That is what makes a family, the flavour, the family flavour, and no one outside the family, however loved and intimate, can share it. Three people had the same flavour as the child, Harriet, who lived in this garden; were her contemporaries, her kin; Bea was one, the others were Bogey and Victoria. They lived in their house beside the river, in a jute-pressing works near a little Indian town; they had not been sent away out of the tropics because there was a war; this war, the last war, any war, it does not matter which war.
It is strange that the first Latin declension and conjunction should be of love and war:
Bellum
Amo
Bellum
Amas
Bellum
Amat
Belli
Amamus
Bello
Amatis
Bello
Amant
‘I can’t learn them,’ said Harriet. ‘Do help me, Bea. Let’s take one each and say them aloud, both at once.’
‘Very well. Which will you have?’
‘You had better have love,’ said Harriet.
In the heat they both had their hair tied up on top of their heads in topknots, but Bea wore a cerise ribbon; the effect of it on her topknot gave her a geisha look that was interesting and becoming. Her eyebrows, as she studied this Latin that it was decreed that they should learn, were like fine aloof question marks.
‘Do you like Latin, Bea?’
‘No, of course I don’t, but if I have to learn it,’ said Bea, ‘it is better to learn it quickly.’ She glanced across at Harriet. ‘You are always trying to stop things happening, Harriet, and you can’t.’
But Harriet still thought, privately, that she could.
It was the doldrums of the afternoon and Bea and Harriet, the older children, had to do their homework, opposite one another, at the dining-room table. It was hot. Outside the garden was filled with hot, heavy, sleepy sun; there was a smell of leaves and grass and of sun on the house stone. Beyond the garden was the sound of the river and from far away came a whoop from Bogey. I wonder what Bogey has found now, thought Harriet, and wriggled. The fan blew on her forehead, but it only blew hot air, the polish of the table was sticky and held the skin of her arms, there was a dusty dry feeling of dust between her toes. ‘You will get hookworm, Harriet, if you go barefoot,’ Nan told her. ‘Why do you? Bea doesn’t.’ Harriet looked now under the table to see. No, Bea’s feet were gracefully crossed in their correct sandals.
‘You had better get on, Harry,’ said Bea. ‘You have algebra to do as well, and music, and you haven’t learnt your Bible verses yet. Better hurry, Harriet.’
Harriet sighed. Latin, and algebra, and music and other things: eating liver, having an injection, seeing a mad paidog – how did Bea manage to take them all so quietly? How? Harriet sighed. She could not, nowadays, aspire to Bea.
‘Nan, why is Bea so different?’
‘She always was,’ said Nan.
‘No, she is changing.’
‘She is growing up,’ said Nan. ‘We all have to, willy-nilly.’ Harriet did not much like the sound of that expression, ‘willy-nilly’.
‘Oh, well!’ she said, and sighed again and her mind went off on a rapid Harriet canter of its own, too rapid for stops. Will-I-get-hookworm-you-get-all-kinds-of-worms-in-India-and-diseases-too-there-is-a-leper-in-the-bazaar-no-nose-and-his-fmgers-dropping-off-him-if-I-had-no-fingers-I-couldn’t-learn-music-could-I-no-March-of-the-Men-of-Harlech. She looked at her own fingers, brown and small and whole, except that one had a nail broken where Bogey had banged it, and one had a scratch new that morning, and two were stained bright yellow from the dye she had been making from the yellow flower of a bush that grew beside the cook-house.
The middle finger of Harriet’s right hand had a lump on the side of it; that was her writing lump; she had it because she wrote so much, because she was a writer. ‘I am going to be a poet when I grow up,’ said Harriet; and she added, after another thought, ‘Willy-nilly.’ She kept a private diary and a poem book hidden in an old box that also did as a desk in an alcove under the side-stairs, her Secret Hole, though it was not secret at all and there was no need to hide her book because she could not resist reading her poems to everyone who would listen. Sometimes she carried her book pouched in her dress. She was writing a poem now, and, as she began to think of it, her eyes grew misty and comfortable.
‘Saw roses there that comforted her heart
And saw their crimson petals plop apart.’
‘Plop apart?’ asked Bea, her eyebrows more clear and more surprised and Harriet blushed. She had not known she had spoken aloud.
‘Do get on, Harry.’
‘Yes, Bea – Amo, Amas, Amat … Bellum … Belli … Bello …’
War and love. How many children, wondered Harriet, yawning, had had to learn those since – she cast round in her mind for someone prominent who could have learnt them – since Julius Caesar, say, or Pontius Pilate (they must have learnt them, they were Romans) or even Jesus – perhaps-if-Jesus-went-to-school. She yawned again and reached for the Outline of History. Loves-and-Wars, she thought, flipping over the pages. Xerxes-Alexander-Goths-and-Huns – Arthur-and-Guinevere-RichardtheLionheart-Marlborough-Kitchener. Love and war, love and hate all muddled up together. She remembered she had no history to prepare; it was Bible verses and she shut up the book and opened Father’s old Bible that they used for lessons. Ever-since-AdamandEve, cantered off Harriet, Cain-Abel-Jacob LeahandRachel-the-Children of Israeland-all-the-rest-of-them. Even in stories, even in plays, and she looked at Bea’s elbow holding down the edges of the Shakespeare’s flimsy pages that blew up under the fan. Shylock and Portia-and-RomeoandJuliet-and-Cleopatra. She liked Cleopatra best, but even thinking of Cleopatra she wondered that no one ever grew tired of it, of all this love and all this war. Or if they do, she thought, someone starts it all over again. It is as much life as living, thought Harriet. You are born, you are a he or a she, and you live until you die … Willy-nilly. Yes. Nan is right. It all is willy-nilly, though I think you could live very well without a war … and I suppose without being loved. But I hope I am loved, thought Harriet, as much as Cleopatra, and she thought, I wish I were not so young … children don’t have loves or wars. She drew circles on her algebra. Or do they? wondered Harriet. Do they … of their kind?
A drum began to beat softly in the village behind the house. Harriet sat up. ‘Bea. Tonight is Diwali.’
‘I know. But if you haven’t done your homework,’ Bea pointed out, ‘you won’t be allowed to go.’
Bea loved Diwali night as much as Harriet did, but when she was excited, she managed to contain her excitement as she contained her likes and dislikes. How? Harriet gave her another long look and sank back baffled. ‘I thought you had forgotten,’ she said.
‘How could I forget?’ said Bea. ‘Listen to the drums.’
All day the drummers had been going round the town and the villages that lay around it. Diwali was the Hindu festival of the Feast of Lights.
There are ritual festivals in every religion throughout the year, and every family keeps those it needs, the Chinese and the Roman Catholics being perhaps the most elaborate in theirs, though the old Russians and the Hindus come close and Tibet has charming holidays of its own. Diwali was a curious festival to find in the keeping of a European family, but in Harriet’s, as in e
very large household in India, there was always someone who had to keep some one of the different festivals as they occurred: Nan was a Catholic; Abdullah, the old butler, was a Mohammedan, and so was Gaffura his assistant; Maila, the bearer, was a Buddhist from the State of Sikkim; the gardeners were Hindu Brahmins, Heaven Born; the sweeper and the Ayah were Hindu Untouchables and Ram Prasad Singh, the gateman, the children’s friend, was of the separate sect of Sikh. Now the gardeners were away in the bazaar, buying the little saucer earthenware festival lamps and the wicks and oil to float in them, while Abdullah and Maila were not interested. The children kept Diwali because it is an irresistible festival and no one could live in the country in which it is held and not be touched by it.
Tonight when it is dark, thought Harriet, her eyes anywhere but on her work, Ram Prasad will have bought for us a hundred or two hundred lamps. They are made of earthenware, shaped like hearts or tarts or leaves, and they cost two pies each (a pie is a third of a farthing), and in each we shall put oil and float a wick; then we shall set them all along the roof and at the windows and in rows on the steps and at the gate and over the gate, and we shall light them. Everywhere, on every house, there will be lights, and on the river the boats will have them burning and we shall see them go past, and other lights on rafts will be floated down and the rich Hindus will give feasts and feed the poor and let off fireworks and we shall stay up to dinner to see.
Diwali, to the children, was also the official opening of the winter. The greenfly came, millions of insects that flew around the lights at dusk. The gardeners began to plant out vegetables and flower seeds. There was a coolness in the mornings and evenings, a thicker dew, more mosquitoes. Then Diwali came, and it was winter. Winter, the cold weather. That is the best time of all, thought Harriet with relish. It seemed to her, as she looked forward to it, a pageant of pleasantness. Soon we shall have fires, thought Harriet, and sweet peas. I wonder what we shall do this winter? What will happen? And as people far wiser than Harriet have thought, she answered herself. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing ever happens here. And then she asked Bea, across the table, ‘Bea. Is Captain John coming tonight?’
