It was cold enough when we actually arrived and, after rick-shawing it up and down and uphill again to the Windermere and not being sure of accommodation, we transferred ourselves to Mount Everest, where we were sure of a roof over our heads. We had rooms overlooking the ‘snows’ – at least the hotel authorities said so – mine did certainly, but Bob’s, with the exception of about two inches in one corner, overlooked the well next door. Anyway, we were extremely lucky throughout and even the weather, although not always clear, didn’t deter us from enjoying ourselves. We had fires in our rooms day and night and how we needed them. It was so lovely to come in after the cinema at night, cold and breathless after the last climb up the drive, to turn the key in the lock and to see the fire burning brightly in the grate and feel the warmth leaping out to greet us.
We usually spent the mornings walking aimlessly and doing odd bits of shopping and got back in time for lunch. After tiffin we would draw up the sofa in front of the fire and have a sleep until teatime. At first we started to make toast at the fire and started seriously to collect butter for it, keeping what was left from breakfast and so on, but then we discovered delicious sausage rolls in the village and from then on we heated them up daily, in readiness for 4pm, when the bearer would enter with the tea tray. He always tiptoed in but immediately proceeded to knock things over as soon as he arrived. He had attached himself to Bob at the station and proved reliable and very helpful. After tea we sallied forth to the cinema – every night except Sunday, when we went to church! Usually the show was quite good and the place was always full of Tommies who saw all the jokes. Then the long climb home again in the cold night air and uphill all the way. Bob had found the elevation trying for the first week but I didn’t notice it. Unfortunately, I was unable to get any films at all, so couldn’t take any snaps with my camera – and just when I most wanted them. But we were able to buy very good photos of Darjeeling and the mountains, but then they have nothing personal about them. I was disappointed.
Kanchenjunga was a grand sight on days when it was clear – usually early in the morning while we were having breakfast. I shall never forget the first morning when I went across to the window – there it was looming so closely I felt I could lean out of the window and touch it. The eternal snows – how they must have intrigued and exasperated travellers and explorers and painters and poets of all ages. Always there, if not always to be seen. Sometimes the green valley below was full of woolly clouds like a great sea with the peaks standing crystal clear and sunlit above them; sometimes they would vanish completely as though they had been some product of the imagination. Always it seemed like some far fair promised land, ever beckoning, tantalizing and luring one on to find it. How I would have loved to follow on ‘beyond that last great mountain capped with snow’ away into Tibet, far from wars and the army. Then, the last evening, as we stood at the window and watched the sunset – the valley clouded and most of the mountains obscured – the very tips of the furthest peaks were clearer, standing out and glowing in the setting sun. It was a lovely last glimpse of those great mountains that maybe neither of us shall see again. We had had a fortnight there – completely removed from the maddening crowd – and returned to Calcutta early on Wednesday morning. I stayed in town that night as I wasn’t due back on duty until the Friday.
I saw Bob off on the train on Thursday evening bound for Bombay and Basrah. That’s a week ago now and it seems like a dream already that he has been and gone his way again. Now everything seems flat and uninspiring and I have a definite feeling that something is missing. I went to D1 for the first few days but appear to have come to roost for the moment in E2, with Watson. It’s pleasant there – quiet and tucked away and no one bothers us.
I have discovered a Welshman – a minister’s son – from Pembrokeshire in H Ward (TB) and he has a friend, Davies, from Portmadog who is a patient in one of the other wards. They are an interesting pair. Davies is mixed up with the Welsh National Theatre and knows many people that I knew once upon a time. Like a breath of fresh air from the Caernarvonshire hills, it is, to talk about the old spots again. But it fills me with ‘hiraeth’67 all over again and I am not sure it is good for me.
There have been letters from Gwen, Mali and Ruthin cousins this week and one from Mother. It seems that sister Mona has been appointed leading lady in Night Must Fall.68 They must be busy, wherever they are doing their war service; at all events she must have some more energy than I have. I’m in the throes of a wretched cold, which is rather shocking just on top of a month’s leave. The weather is still very lovely, warm in the sun and the nights are cool, not cold.
The war news remains good: Kursk re-taken by the Russians and the Solomons evacuated by the Japanese. Oh, if only it would all finish soon!
June 19th 1943
What a shocking lapse and so much, so very much has happened in the interim that I just can’t think where to begin. To begin with for instance, I am married. Even as I write it, I rather wonder if it is true – but I have my marriage certificate so I suppose I haven’t dreamed it. Also I distinctly remember saying, ‘I do’ rather remotely and nervously and hearing David say the same, even more so as he stood beside me. That was on May 20th, a little over a month ago, and David is long ago back among the flying things and I am endeavouring to run the staff, nurse the patients and control the equipment on my large and difficult ward, Surgery A – BMH. I left Loreto to do night duty about three months ago and I have remained here since, living in my more sane moments in No. 5 Minto Park.
Mona, very nobly, came all the way from Dehra Dun to lend me moral support on my wedding day. David had come down the previous Sunday. What a week that was in Calcutta: a taxi strike and a water strike. We had to gharry or rickshaw everywhere. And whereas at one stage in my life, I might have considered it highly diverting and delightful to be conveyed thus to my destination, the idea of arriving thus at the church door on my wedding day definitely had no appeal. Geoffrey Holland arrived that day with no less than two beautiful gharries complete with the usual weary and disillusioned-looking horses, having captured them triumphantly at Enbally and brought them all the way for the purpose. However at the very last moment David had managed to enlist the sympathy of an RAF padre who conveyed each of us in turn safely and comfortably to the appointed place in his camouflaged car. I have never appreciated the ordinary motor car as a means of transport until this occasion. The water problem, which was desperate indeed – I loathed washing piecemeal any time and go breakfast-less daily in order to have my morning bath – was solved at the eleventh hour, when the taps decided to run. So I was saved the indignity of having to proceed to my wedding unwashed!
Those present included Mona, Geoffrey (who gave me away), and Edward Selwyn who supported David and duly handed over the wedding ring at the right moment, and Vera Fairweather and the RAF padre: a small but select party. It was a simple service – short and rather beautiful and I think even Dafydd,69 who doesn’t altogether love churches, was also moved. We went on to the Great Eastern Hotel and had drinks and then lunch. There were one or two little speeches, which I’d like to have remembered, but have not. Then we went our several ways, David and I taking up our abode in the Victoria Hotel for the remainder of my leave, which was altogether one week. It was pleasant there and comparatively cool and airy.
Edward came to lunch and to dine with us a few times and Geoffrey came – very preoccupied with prickly heat – to tea on the last afternoon. Dafydd and I distinguished ourselves by ‘allowing’ a light to shine forth from the bathroom window on the last night. There was a pane of glass missing – it had been so for nine months or so it seems – and it was spotted by the police at last. The management seemed upset but I didn’t give it another thought as I considered it entirely their affair, but a day or so ago a detective walked in and opened up the subject again. It was rather amazing as they suspected a first-rate mystery and had had five men on the job for more than three weeks. I have to go and see the Commiss
ioner of Securities and tell him my story. I didn’t tell him, as I should like to have done, that the manager of the Victoria Hotel had followed the detective that afternoon and had asked me to back up his miserable story that we had ‘removed the shade from the light’. He nearly wept, saying that he would lose his job and so on, but I told him that he should have thought of that before. He agreed. Furthermore, unfortunately, David had signed D.H. Davies in the civilian register, although that was their fault, of course, as they knew perfectly well that he was in the RAF. I’ve heard nothing more so I presume that the matter has been settled ‘out of court’.
There were one or two incidents – amusing now – one at the close of the following Sunday morning service and resulting in a waste paper basket full of torn up manuscripts: such a waste of paper and time. Poor David!
And now we are both back at our jobs again and the monsoons are breaking – half-heartedly as yet – and the heat is still around and about us and altogether life isn’t comme il faut. However, there are compensations – letters arrive fairly well and the frangipani still blooms and the poinsettias have been a perfect glory – like a hundred burning bushes on Chowringhee and in the garden of Minto Park. Convoys come in – and go out, almost as quickly: hospital ships, troopships and ambulance trains bringing boys down from Burma, where something still goes on – presumably.
The Middle East of course is finished70 and everyone waits breathlessly for news of a ‘second front’. Clwyd has actually been home for a month’s leave and sister Mona was able to join him, from the second AGH in the tablelands of Queensland. Clwyd is now an S/Sgt, Glyn a bombardier and stationed somewhere near Sydney. Mali and Gwen write regularly and I write not so regularly to them and occasionally to others. I drift on in a state of semi-coma from day to day and what I do with my alternate half-days, I couldn’t rightly say. Waste them – it is to be presumed.
I am writing this on a 10–1 shift, and a moment ago my bearer came up and said that a ‘soldier sahib’ wanted to see me. It was a sergeant with a Welsh accent whom I didn’t know. He told me that he was Miss Timothy’s nephew (shades of Llanerch Road) and that a S/Sgt Lewis, whose wife knew me once upon a time, wanted to call and see me, but ‘didn’t like to’ for some reason. I can’t think who she used to be but I told the boy to tell him to call just the same.
And now its 12 midday and I must change my uniform and proceed to lunch.
June 27th 1943
A half-day and as is becoming usual these days, I got down on my bed until 4pm and then went downstairs for tea. Since then I have been writing to David. Edward called for a moment, and we made arrangements to meet for lunch – all three of us at Christies, on the 14th.
How tired I am these days. It amazes me when I consider myself three years ago and the energy I then possessed and how little I can muster now. It irritates me too; in three years I haven’t become appreciably older and I should still be capable of a good day’s work. Now, with a half-day off on alternate days, I feel mentally and physically worn out. This monsoon weather is rather depressing, we all feel that, but it is really the war that gets on top of me. I won’t talk about it here; I have it around and about me all day and that is more than enough. I long for a quiet hill station; nothing spectacular at all, removed from all excitement and glamour. It would revive me, I know. The Eastern Army did a round at 10.30 today – Sunday – notwithstanding the usual nonsense and all patients wearing red ties and at their beds, looking sheepish and silly. I had to take the senior man around and tell him what was what, while the CO and Matron and numerous lesser lights such as brigadier generals and full colonels and all their satellites, not to mention our own MOs, trailed languidly behind. Such a waste of time although, I admit, it is why on these occasions, one can get anything done on a ward.
July 1st 1943
July – I can’t believe it. How the months slip by; the second half of the year now – and yesterday it seems I was writing 1942.
I had a remarkable letter from David yesterday, regarding an American function I had promised to attend, as one of ten from the BGH. Some time back I had been told of a Welsh concert at the YWCA and had at once decided to attend that instead (ah me, ‘what mighty contents arise from trivial things?’). But tonight – tonight is golden – the palms stand straight and tall and unstirring against the setting sun. Here at least, there is nothing to jar, to irritate or to disillusion the unquiet spirit. I have just finished reading and enjoyed Osbert Sitwell’s Open The Door. The radio is pouring out some unknown symphony and through my still open shutters I can see the crows flying home to rest in the mango trees on the lawns below.
July 3rd 1943
Just another half-day and c’est tout!
July 18th 1943
David has been and gone his ways again. He had 48 hours travelling time in order to see his play produced and broadcast on the radio. I went to Sealdah station to meet him and arrived at 8.30, the supposed time of arrival. The train – labelled simply ‘Burarah’ – ambled into the dark station about 9.25pm with no murmur or apology for my long wait. These Indian stations always seem to be crowded with sleeping half-naked bodies day and night, it’s just the same. I believe I was the only European there among them. I sat in the shadows on a seat alongside an Indian gentleman – caste unknown – with a large black monsoon umbrella. I wondered what was passing through his mind as he sat there immovable, inscrutable, amid all these heaps of rags in diverse postures covering, or making some pretence of covering, some miserable forms of humanity. Although one is used to it long since and often does not even notice such a scene at all, or think it unusual, there are still occasions when it strikes the eye and an impression is left indelibly upon the mind. Then at such times, I long to be able to paint it all – I feel that there are no words for it. There is a mix of glamour and pathos about the East – the colour, the sounds, even the evil smells: all life is there.
Then the great searchlight on the front of the train appeared around the bend and at once the whole station was alive again. The forms that looked like bundles of filthy rags, sprang up and ran – ran anywhere – up and down the platform, screaming and pushing, arguing and gesticulating. I wondered idly if most of their lives were spent like this, day after day, night after night. And while I pitied them, I half envied them – untroubled as they are with possessions, ambitions or hopes. They have nothing and I do not doubt that they hope for nothing. With a shrug of the shoulders they go on existing from day to day and on the last day of their lives they go to join the sea that ‘gathers all things unto itself’.
I saw David from far off, tall and lean in a large Mackintosh cape and topee: a curious combination in anyone else but Dafydd. Although I had sent two wires to say I would meet him, he hadn’t received either and must have wondered as to whether I would be there. We got a taxi then to Fairlawns and then went out to a nearby Chinese restaurant and had some dinner. It was a small pokey room at the hotel into which, it seemed, they had pushed at the last moment, a second bed; still it was a room and it served. Someone with a curiously diverse taste in music played Grieg and the latest jazz alternately so after being transported into a rarefied state during Peer Gynt, we were driven to despair by the latest hit song. We continued to eat dinner there twice and the service was so superb that we romped through about six courses in about as many minutes. Ray Conaughton and his delightful Indian girl Oomah ate with us one night – the night of the play. We collected some of the cast for BESA71 still dressed as they appeared in the show and proceeded to the radio centre where Edward was already. I sat in a room apart and listened and David joined me as soon as he had said his lines. Edward and Mary were really splendid but Annie was a sad disappointment. She romped through her lines and her voice was too shrill and unsympathetic. All the while, however, I believe David was well satisfied with it. He’s had so little time with them, less than an hour altogether, so that it was amazingly good really. David gets 25 chips – all of it – for this effort and that
goes to start a sinking fund – for holidays and such – or so we fondly hope.
I had to get up early next morning, before six, and get myself back to the mess in a rickshaw, there being no taxis about, and in the pouring rain. It was my half-day (I stole the previous one and got away with it for once) and returned to Fairlawns soon after 2pm. David was OUT, had slept until 12.30 and then proceeded to take himself into Park Street to have his photograph taken. He returned later with a cake and a copy of Byron, which it transpired was for me and for which I was ungracious enough to say it did not particularly interest me. He changed it later for a complete W.H. Davies which pleased me much. We spent the evening indoors and returned at midnight, the rain still streaming down, in a rickshaw bound for Minto Park. The poor willing rickshaw driver panted and strained in the rain and all his and David’s frantic cry for a taxi proved pointless. The rain seeped down through the hood and trickled down our legs and we were cramped and damp and chastened in spirit. David got a lift back by taxi fortunately and I do hope he managed to get another as he was to leave about 3am, an ungodly hour to embark on that dreary journey. I was as sorry about it as I know very well how he hates Chittagong and everyone in it or near it in his present state of mind. It is too bad that he cannot be posted elsewhere, if not Calcutta, and given some work to do of real interest to him. However, we’ll see.
And now the second offensive has begun. The Allies are installed in Sicily and gaining a grip daily, or so we are assured. One presumes that something will start on this front after the rains are over. David thinks his crowd will end up in China. Odd that we can say it and write it and accept it as though one were to say, ‘I may be going to the races next week.’ Will there be anything left to fill us with wonder and surprise, when all this is over? I doubt it. Well if it is China, it is a dreary prospect: irregular mail, so little hope of an odd meeting, so many months of wondering and worrying. I try to live beyond all this, to get beyond the unsatisfactory present, to be patient, to accept it all with some semblance of reason and grace. Sometimes I can, but most often, I can’t.
Joyce's War Page 20
