THE TEA PLANTER'S DAUGHTER:A wonderfully moving story of courage and enduring love: First in the India Tea Series

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  When they arrived at the estate gates, the sheer scale of the tea gardens overawed both her and Kamal. They stretched for miles, covering the hillsides as far as the eye could see. Once they got permission to enter, it took them an hour to drive to the planters’ compound, passing a collection of vast, well-built tea sheds. Scores of labourers were moving through the ranks of bushes, bent under their heavy loads. Clarrie was astonished to see this much activity so early in the season, but here the bushes were already in bloom and the air was mild and moist. At Belgooree they were still having night frosts.

  At the heart of the estate, surrounded by beautiful ornamental gardens, were low bungalows and a clubhouse with a neat polo pitch in front.

  The head mohurer came out of his accounts office to greet them and offer them refreshment. He was Bengali and chatted amiably with Kamal.

  ‘He says he can take you to see the assistant manager,’ Kamal told her. ‘He is in the factory.’

  Clarrie’s insides clenched. ‘What about Mr Robson?’ she asked, dry-mouthed.

  Kamal shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, he is not here.’

  Clarrie was dismayed. ‘When will he be back?’

  Kamal shook his head again. ‘You must speak to assistant manager, Mr Bain.’

  Inside the factory, the noise was deafening. Steam-powered machines cranked and hissed as gigantic rollers turned and fans whirred, drying out huge quantities of leaf. Clarrie thought of their small drying shed with its bamboo trays that took eight pounds of good timber to produce enough charcoal to dry just one pound of tea. She began to see what a gulf there was between the Oxford and Belgooree. No wonder Wesley had been so scathing.

  Maybe this was why her father had been so reluctant to let her socialise with the planters of Upper Assam or visit their estates, for she would have seen how insignificant was their own. She blushed now to think how she had boasted to Wesley of their fine tea garden. Maybe there had been a place for such a small producer in former days, but one glance at this industrialised place showed her that Belgooree was now obsolete.

  Mr Bain was cheerful and red-faced, and looked hardly older than she was. He steered her outside again. When she explained where she had come from, he did not hide his surprise.

  ‘Belgooree? It’s up for sale, isn’t it? I heard the planter there has died.’

  ‘My father,’ Clarrie said.

  ‘Oh Lord, I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?’

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Wesley Robson,’ Clarrie said, reddening. ‘He expressed an interest in buying Belgooree last year.’

  ‘Did he now?’ The manager’s fair eyebrows shot up.

  ‘I was wondering when I could speak to him,’ Clarrie asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Belhaven, but he’s not here any longer. Hasn’t been since September.’

  ‘September?’ Clarrie gasped.

  ‘Yes, I replaced him. He said he’d learned all he needed to. I must say he struck me as a man in a hurry.’

  Yes, Clarrie thought, it sounded just like Wesley to believe he had learned all there was to know about tea growing in less than a year.

  ‘Where has he gone?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Bain blew out hot cheeks, ‘I believe he was heading for Ceylon — compare the tea gardens there — see a bit of India on the way — hunt a few tigers, that sort of thing.’

  ‘So he’s not coming back here?’ Clarrie said, feeling strangely deflated.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said the manager, now eyeing her with open curiosity. ‘I say, was there some sort of understanding between you and Robson?’

  Clarrie flushed. ‘No, nothing like that. It was purely a business call. We weren’t ready to sell Belgooree before, but now, with my father’s passing, we are.’

  Bain nodded.’ I do understand, but I’m not sure it would have made any difference had he been here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, Robson’s not the kind of man to let the grass grow under his feet. I suspect if his offer were turned down once, he wouldn’t reconsider. He’s the type of man to brush it off and go on to the next business idea.’ He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry, this is not very helpful. Let me give you lunch.’

  Clarrie declined. Suddenly she just wanted to be gone from this lush oppressive place. Instead she asked him to provide a tiffin basket with food for her return journey. He looked shocked that she had come this distance with only her father’s khansama as chaperon. But she waved off his protests that she should at least stay the night and left him shaking his head in bafflement at her eccentric behaviour.

  Clarrie had one other mission before leaving. Returning to the accounts office, she asked the Bengali overseer if she could take a look at ‘the lines’, the rows of labourers’ huts. He seemed suspicious, but when she insisted she had the permission of Mr Bain, pointed her down to the workers’ quarters. She was at once assailed by the stench of effluent. Small children played in the muck around the mud-built shacks. Ignoring the shouts of a chowkidar who was policing the lines, Clarrie stooped and entered one of the dwellings.

  It was a tiny, windowless, airless single room and so dark that at first she could see nothing. The only light or ventilation was from a tear in the thatch. She imagined how the floor would turn to a sea of mud come the rains. Cooking pots and sleeping mats for half a dozen people were piled to one side, while from the smell of it the opposite corner was used as a latrine.

  Clarrie emerged feeling nauseous. Once the humidity of summer returned, the mosquitoes would thrive here. She asked the agitated watchman in faltering Assamese whether he knew a Ramsha from Belgooree in the Khassia hills.

  ‘A tribesman?’ the man asked in disdain. ‘They are too unreliable — always picking fights and running away.’

  Clarrie described him, but the man shrugged, as if to say why waste time on such people? She grew angry.

  ‘His mother is a family friend!’

  Kamal tried to steer her away. ‘He can tell us nothing.’

  ‘I need to find Ramsha. I promised Ama.’ She could not bear it if her whole trip ended in utter failure.

  By the time they had walked back to the compound, word of her spying had spread and the assistant manager was there to confront her. Gone was his pleasant demeanour.

  ‘You really shouldn’t have been down to the coolies’ lines,’ he said in agitation. ‘I never gave any such permission. If the manager finds out—’

  ‘I’m looking for the son of a friend,’ she said, standing her ground. ‘I would like to tell her that I have seen him and that he is well.’

  He gawped at her in disbelief. ‘One of our coolies?’

  ‘Please,’ she asked. ‘I promise I’ll go after that. I’m not here to make trouble.’

  With an impatient sigh, he strode to the mohurer’s office and asked him to deal with her request.

  ‘Then see that Miss Belhaven and her servant are escorted safely off the estate,’ he said, and with a curt nod he left.

  After a search through his records, the head mohurer shook his head in sorrow. ‘I’m sorry. He died two months ago. Like many of the hill men, he was not suited to the climate here.’

  ‘Or the conditions,’ Clarrie muttered. Kamal steered her out of the office and back to their tonga before she caused another scene. Neither could bring themselves to speak until they were almost back to the Brahmaputra River.

  ***

  The following weeks of clearing and packing up the house stopped Clarrie from dwelling too much on their approaching departure. With the house unsold, the bank was to take repossession and she was keen to leave before the humiliation of eviction. She had decided they must make the journey to England with what money they could scrape together from the sale of their personal possessions. An auction was held that brought curious visitors from the cantonment in Shillong; army wives and clerks keen to see the eccentric retreat of the Belhavens.

  Clarrie sent Olive off with her sketchbook to avoid the gawping
crowds and steeled herself to play hostess, serving out tea. At the end, there was hardly a chair left to sit on or book to read. She had drawn the line at Olive’s violin, despite the pleadings of a policeman’s wife who wanted it for her son. Olive’s instrument was going with them to Newcastle, no matter what.

  Tickets on the steamer from Calcutta to London were booked and Clarrie was anxious to leave before the monsoon started, when travel downriver became hazardous. Kamal had declined to go with them.

  ‘I shall return to my village and run teashop,’ he declared, ‘maybe resthouse.’

  Clarrie dreaded the moment she would have to say goodbye to Kamal and Ama. And Prince.

  An army friend of Harry Wilson came up to buy Prince, offering a good price.

  ‘No, he’s not for sale!’ she shouted, seeing the man giving her pony a good checking over.

  Afterwards, Kamal tried to reason with her. ‘You cannot take Prince to England. Your cousins have said so. Why not sell to soldier?’

  Clarrie shook her head. ‘I want to give him as a present to someone special who I know will look after him well.’

  ‘You need rupees, Miss Clarissa,’ Kamal sighed. ‘Who is special someone? Not riff-raff in village?’

  Clarrie laughed. ‘Not riff-raff. You, Kamal. I want you to have Prince.’

  His eyes widened in disbelief. He put his fist to his mouth and pretended to cough. ‘I can’t …’ he spluttered.

  ‘You can. I wish I could give you more for all you’ve done for us.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kamal mumbled and turned from her to hide his tears.

  On her final day at Belgooree, Clarrie got up before dawn and rode up to the swami’s retreat. For the last time, she watched the sun rise and kiss the peaks of the Himalayas and listened to the stirrings in the forest. As she thought back to that fateful morning when Harry had shot the deer and Wesley had carried her unconscious to his tent, she wondered if things would be different now if she had never met them.

  Wesley had stirred up the old bitter rivalry between Belhavens and Robsons and brought to a head the crisis over Belgooree’s future. In the romantic solitude of this favourite place she could admit to having been attracted to him. Yet she despised herself for it. Wesley was driven and self-centred, and having seen the conditions in which Ramsha had lived and died at the Robsons’ tea estate she would never forgive his heartlessness in tracking down Ama’s favourite son. Her old nurse had been inconsolable at the news of Ramsha’s death and the sound of her wailing and keening through the night had been almost unbearable.

  The swami appeared and interrupted her thoughts. They greeted each other and the old man came forward and placed a garland of flowers around her neck as if he knew she was leaving. Into her hand he pressed a smooth pink stone, the colour of the mountains at sunrise. Touched, she thanked him and pulled a present for him from her pocket.

  ‘They’re seashells,’ she explained, ‘from a beach in Northumberland in England. My father kept them to remind himself of the sea — of his home. That’s where I’m going. I’ve never seen this North Sea. My father said it’s often the colour of storm clouds.’ She put them into the hands of the holy man. ‘I thought they would be nice in your garden.’

  He nodded and smiled. As she left, he began to sing a high-pitched song of joy. She could hear it even after the jungle had closed about her again and he was long gone from sight.

  Kamal cooked them scrambled eggs for breakfast that neither Olive nor she could eat. He was to accompany them as far as the steamer at Gowhatty and then go his separate way to West Bengal. The empty bungalow echoed to their footsteps as they took a last look round. On the veranda, Olive threw her arms about her and clung on.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she wept. ‘I’m sorry for all those things I said to you. I never meant them.’

  Clarrie hugged her. ‘I know you didn’t.’

  ‘Promise me you’ll never leave me like Mother and Babu,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I promise,’ Clarrie said, squeezing her tight. ‘Now, come on. Kamal’s waiting.’

  With one last look at the closed and shuttered bungalow, she steered her weeping sister out of the compound and into the tonga that Kamal would drive while she rode Prince. They stopped in the village, and Ama came out with her daughters to tearfully hug them goodbye. Clarrie noticed Ama was wearing the brooch and necklace she had given her as a parting gift. They had belonged to her mother and now they were Ama’s because she had been her substitute mother these past eight years.

  ‘We will come back,’ Clarrie promised, ‘some day, you’ll see.’

  She was glad that she could ride behind the tonga for the next few hours through the jungle, where her weeping was drowned out by the screeching of birds and monkeys.

  The following day they reached Gowhatty and the ghat where the steamer was moored. Here it was hot and humid and early rains had already swollen the river to twice the size it had been in April. Islands that had existed before were now submerged and the water was brown with silt carried down from the foothills.

  In the garden of the resthouse, beside a defunct cannon, they said farewell to their beloved Kamal. Tears trickled into his beard as he allowed them to hug him goodbye and promised to let them know how he was doing from time to time.

  ‘It is honour to know you and Belhaven sahib,’ he croaked. ‘May Allah protect you.’

  ‘The honour was ours, Kamal.’ Clarrie smiled and cried at the same time. ‘You have been our greatest friend. Thank you.’

  Then she stroked Prince and buried her face in his warm neck for one last time.

  ‘Ride well, my Prince,’ she whispered in his ear. The pony snorted and nuzzled her in disquiet as if he guessed at their parting.

  Their last sight of Gowhatty, as the steamer pulled away from the busy ghat, was of Kamal astride Prince, saluting them. They waved and shouted to him until he was just a speck in the distance.

  Numb, they sat on chairs on the foredeck and watched the wooded Garo hills to the east go by, far beyond which lay their home at Belgooree. As they progressed downriver, taking on passengers, the Brahmaputra widened almost into a sea. Crocodiles snoozed on sandbanks and the crew fished off the stern at night.

  After two more days on board, they arrived at Rungpore, the railway junction from which they would journey onwards by train to Calcutta. Clarrie had only hazy memories of travelling this way with her parents in the days when they had gone to the big city for business, new outfits and a night at the theatre. Olive remembered none of it and grew more subdued and quieter the further from Assam they travelled. By the time they reached Calcutta and the mission house where they had booked two nights before leaving India, she had ceased to utter a word.

  They sailed on the eighth of July, in a hot stifling wind, with the sun bouncing off the sea and dazzling the eyes. Clarrie had to squint and shade her eyes to catch the last glimpse of land as they juddered out into open sea. The teeming dockside with its chattering food sellers and cooking smells receded all too fast. India, the only home she had ever known, or ever wanted, vanished beyond her grasp. Yet it was dark and the stars were littering the sky before either she or the silent Olive could bear to leave their post by the railings and retreat inside.

  CHAPTER 6

  Stepping off the train in the early morning into the echoing Central Station at Newcastle, Clarrie felt Olive’s grip on her arm tighten like a vice. Everyone seemed to know where they were going in the cavernous building, summoning porters and rushing about with no time to spare for the strangely dressed young women in their bright woollen shawls and sola topis tied on with scarves.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Clarrie said. ‘Cousin Jared promised he’d be here to meet us.’

  They stood by their small trunk, arm in arm, waiting nervously for someone to claim them. They had sat up all night and were tired and hungry. As the platform cleared, Clarrie saw a man beckoning them from the barrier. She caught her breath. For an instant it could have been Jo
ck, with the same bald head, long face and wiry frame. He stood with his hands on his hips too, in that impatient way of her father’s. But the resemblance was fleeting. This man had enormous bushy sideburns that almost met in a beard and a potbelly that strained at the buttons of his brown waistcoat.

  ‘Haway, lasses!’ he bellowed. ‘If it’s Jared Belhaven you’re after, then I’m your man.’

  Clarrie saw that their cousin had no intention of paying to get on to the platform to help them. She bent to pick up one end of the trunk with one hand and Olive’s violin with the other.

  ‘Come on, Olive, grab the other end. It’s not far.’

  Her sister said nothing. But then she had hardly spoken during the whole of the long sea voyage, most of which she had spent confined to their cabin being seasick. As they struggled to the barrier with their luggage, a cheerful young porter hurried to help and tipped the trunk on to his trolley. He said something in a friendly fashion that Clarrie did not understand.

  Jared greeted them with an awkward handshake. ‘Jock’s daughters, eh? Sorry ‘bout yer father. Sad business.’ He looked them over with undisguised curiosity. ‘Well, which one’s which?’

  ‘I’m Clarissa — but Father always called me Clarrie. And this is Olive,’ Clarrie said.

  He smiled at Olive and pinched her cheek. ‘You’re a Belhaven all right — the spit of your father.’ He added, less certainly, ‘And Clarrie, you must look like your mother. I heard she was a bit Indian.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clarrie said, blushing. ‘Half English, half Assamese.’

  He gave her an odd look. ‘Well, can’t be helped.’ Turning, he led them towards the entrance. ‘Got the rolley waiting outside,’ he told them mysteriously.

  The rolley turned out to be a flat cart, pulled by a stout black pony. Jared ordered the porter to load the trunk on to the back. The boy stood whistling and waiting to be tipped. As Jared was ignoring him, Clarrie fished out one of her few remaining coins, a silver sixpence, and gave it to him. The boy’s eyes widened in astonishment.