A week later, Maj contracted puerperal fever and ten days later she was dead. To Sam, it seemed ‘as if the world had stopped and I had been flung off into space with nothing to which to cling’. He packed up their personal treasures, sold their furniture, left his job and sailed home on the City of Baroda for England. It was the roughest trip he had ever made and he had to look after a two-week-old baby – the kind woman who had offered to help him was incapacitated by seasickness.
He took the baby to his parents in Maidstone, Kent and, believing that he would easily find one, began to look for a job. With the press of those seeking work after the war, none seemed available so when after a few months his former firm, Ellerman, City and Hall, offered him his old position back, he took it, although it meant leaving behind his child, the living memento of his wife. But his story had a doubly happy ending.
Katherine (known as Kitty) Irwin, born in November 1888, was the seventh of eight children, and the fourth daughter. Her family, well known in Cumberland, lived in a large house, Justicetown, six miles from Carlisle. Although the family had fourteen indoor servants and a coachman in the gate lodge, and her father was a former High Sheriff of Cumberland, Kitty led a restricted life. Her eldest sister married young and the next two were sent to London to ‘do the Season’ but Kitty – with no independent means to support herself otherwise – perforce had to follow the Victorian custom whereby the youngest daughter was expected to stay at home and keep her mother company, helping her where necessary.
When her mother died and her eldest brother and his wife inherited the house, she had to leave. She had come into a little money and bought herself a flat in London’s Stanhope Gardens. She spent the war years in London, doing voluntary work making minor munitions such as gas masks. As a pretty woman, with lovely blue-green eyes, she had several boyfriends, but all were killed (two of her elder sisters were also widowed).
So she was delighted when she received an invitation from a married friend, Zinnia Patterson, to come and stay with her in Karachi. Kitty was such a bad sailor she chose to go overland to Venice, then on 4 November 1920 she sailed on the SS Innsbruck to Karachi, arriving in India on her thirty-second birthday. She spent six enjoyable months there with the Pattersons, then went to Kashmir on a round of visits, returning to Karachi on 6 November 1921.
Next day, at a dinner party, she met a young widower recently returned from England. It was, of course, Sam Raschen; and her impact on him was immediate. Later he wrote: ‘We had been at the same dinner party and were at the dance afterwards but were never formally introduced.* Her dance card was fully booked up but somehow I managed to arrange a dance with her. She told me she was returning home after spending some months in India and I discovered that she intended to call at our office to arrange her passage home.
‘In the office I gave strict instructions that Miss Irwin was to be brought in to me when she arrived at our Passenger Department.’
Kitty duly arrived. And in Sam’s words: ‘Then, instead of choosing her a cabin, I managed to persuade her to marry me.’*
5
‘Welcome to India’
Arrivals
For the Fishing Fleet, arriving in Bombay was extraordinarily exciting. There before them lay the vast landlocked harbour, the towers and flat roofs of the city, the tugs ready to tow, push and nudge their liner into her berth. Beyond was the country that to some of them was home – a home they had missed almost more than they had realised, its sights, sounds, and above all smells, bringing back the India they knew and loved. Where a girl arrived depended on where her family or friends lived or were stationed – Bombay for Rajputana and much of Central India, Calcutta for Bengal and the United Provinces, Madras for much of southern India.
‘Arriving in India then, and always, was dazzling and familiar,’ wrote Iris James (later Macfarlane), who had travelled out with her mother. ‘The smell of burnt gram and open drains, of sweat and spices, was carried in a warm breeze. The noise was deafening, the crowds jostled and shrieked but in the days of Empire we white women had paths cleared for us and my mother’s Dalmations.’
To newcomers it was a land so strange that the only way forward was acceptance. On the quay, towards which passengers looked anxiously for those who had come to meet them, humanity swirled, shouted, begged, pushed and swore in different incomprehensible languages and dialects. The brilliant colours of saris in shrill pinks, emerald green, orange or red gleamed against dark skins, men in white uniforms mingled with sellers of fruit, curry, sweetmeats and rolled-up leaves with red betel nuts inside – when the juice was spat out it looked like blood.
The first glimpse of the other great seaport, Calcutta, where Minnie Wood arrived in 1857, was very different. Her little sailing ship passed through the mangrove swamps of the Ganges delta, with jungle running down to the edge of the various tributaries; next came the large, well-kept riverside villas of rich European merchants and officials; then, round the final bend, Calcutta itself, with its packed, busy harbour, scarlet-coated soldiers on the ramparts and, amid the crowd of coolies, bullock carts, camels and traders, crinolined Englishwomen and men in top hats awaiting the arrival of friends.
The colour, the light, the heat and above all the teeming mass of people could be almost too much to bear. ‘I honestly confess that the overwhelming crowds of people frightened me,’ wrote Anne Wilson in 1895 of her arrival in India. ‘What were we in the land, I thought, but a handful of Europeans at the best, and what was there to prevent those myriads from falling upon and obliterating us, as if we had never existed?’ As there were never more than 300,000 Britons in India, amid an indigenous population of 250 million, her apprehension was understandable.
Sometimes those whose destination was Calcutta, by the time of the Raj the capital of India and its main port, travelled overland from Bombay; sometimes they approached through the Hooghly River and green jungle. Wherever they arrived, Fishing Fleet girls were met, by parents, friends or, for some, the bearer (personal servant) of their hosts. For Desirée Hart this was the servant of the Resident of Kashmir’s wife. ‘At last I was cleared by the doctors and immigration officials and descended the gangway clutching my small luggage to find myself surrounded by hordes of beggars showing stumps where hands and feet should have been,’ she wrote. ‘Many were children with fly-encrusted eyes, others were so lacking in limbs that they propelled their truncated bodies on roughly made trollies . . . I began to despair of ever getting to the station until my salvation appeared.
‘“Shut up, be off with you,” I heard an authoritative voice declaim and saw the crowd part by the exit to allow through a tall fierce-looking Indian. How he picked me out from the crowd I never knew.
‘“Miss-Sahib?” he enquired haughtily.
‘I nodded suspiciously and he handed me a large buff envelope embossed with a gold coat-of-arms, then raised his right hand, palm inwards towards his pugri, bowing his head at the same time in one graceful movement.
‘“Welcome to India,” I read in the letter from Lady Fraser. “My personal bearer, Dost Mahommed, will escort you on the journey. He speaks adequate English and you can trust him with your life.” . . . in no time my status was transformed from buffeted nonentity to veritable princess.’
After the port of entry – Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta, Madras, Rangoon – came the rail journey, often of several days, to station or cantonment. So long were these train journeys that when Lord Ripon travelled from Bombay to Simla to be installed as Viceroy in the summer of 1880 his chaplain was depressed to learn that there were coffins in readiness at every station along the line in case a passenger succumbed to one of India’s fatal illnesses en route.
The first sight of the station could be unnerving, with its jostling, thronging crowds and loud cries. Sweetmeat sellers, their sticky sweets swarming with flies, thrust their wares at you, fruit sellers offered plates of ‘jolly decent fruit!’; there were sellers of flower garlands, curries, water from sheepskin bags. Long lines of
sleeping men, shrouded in white, waited for their train, their wives squatting patiently beside them. And when the train came, few Europeans could have survived the general scramble to climb aboard, friends pushing each other through windows, families colonising every spare inch, with makeshift bedding and cooking arrangements in corridors.
For those who had been born in India, even if they had left it as a small child, residual memory held back the shock of the new. ‘The Gateway of India was as familiar as the bustling crowds, the poverty and wealth, the squalor and the splendour of Bombay, even the smells,’ wrote Richard Slater, who had left India as a baby, to return to it to take up his first posting in the ICS. ‘The green upholstered compartment of the Frontier Mail in which I headed for the Punjab, so unlike anything in the experience of the traveller back home, was not unexpected, any more than the white incandescence of midday over the endless plain as we rattled north, the wallowing buffaloes, the toy villages barely distinguishable from the mud from which they were made, the Persian wheels, the temples and the mosques . . .’.
Like so much in India, train travel for the servants of the Raj managed to combine luxury with hardship. Trains were extremely comfortable owing to the broad gauge of the rolling stock (most were around 5 feet 6 inches), and the absence of corridors meant first-class carriages (routine for Europeans) were more like sitting rooms, with fans, leather sofas and private bathrooms attached. The attention of your personal servant (who travelled in the scrum of an adjacent third-class carriage), who brought you tea, soda water or hot water for washing, meant that you did not have to deal with luggage, food or any other arrangements.
Everyone travelled with a bedding roll, with which your servant made up your bunk at night. Another piece of travel equipment was a leather-covered enamel basin that doubled as a sponge bag. The cupboard-like bathroom at the side of the carriage had room for a thunderbox and an overhead pipe from which dripped a thin flow of water, a form of primitive shower.
‘We took a train up India for two days and nights,’ wrote Iris James. ‘Of course, we had a carriage to ourselves, and in the evenings unrolled our “bisters” – canvas sausages that held our bedding, with pockets at each end for towels and a chamber pot. The dust rolled in clouds through the open windows and the studded leather seats grew slimy under our sweating thighs. At stations men handed in trays with teapots, and plates of bread covered with rancid butter, and little green bananas.’ Their destination was Naini Tal, a hill station 6,560 feet above sea level in the Kumaon Hills.
There were no restaurant cars but stops of about an hour were made at suitable times at wayside stations. Here British travellers would proceed to the station restaurant, where a meal was provided. Usually this consisted of stringy curried chicken and a caramel custard as dessert. If it were evening, when you returned to your carriage you would find your bedding laid out and everything ready for the night.
Fishing Fleet girl Bethea Field crossed India from west to east when she journeyed the 1,500 miles from Quetta to Calcutta to meet her fiancé, leaving Quetta one late afternoon in December 1919.
‘Sleep was often disturbed from a stop at some big station. The clamour was unbelievable and nobody could have slept through it or the garish lights. The Indian would-be passengers ran in all directions and shouted to each other as they ran. The sweet sellers, the water sellers, the tea sellers, all announcing their wares at the tops of their voices. Here and there a khaki-clad policeman with his lathi* prepared to restore order should the crowd become too turbulent. The guard would walk up and down the platform near the train, shouting out the name of the stations. Indians have the most powerful larynxes and no amount of shouting seems to exhaust them.’
Apart from the stations, Bethea would also often wake up when the train was about to cross one of the many long bridges, as its rhythm would change from the steady double jolt of the train going over the sleepers laid on ballast to a hollow, booming sound. The pace slowed and she felt a frisson of tension. ‘The bridges were magnificently built but there was always the chance that some pier had been undermined. In December, the dry season, the great rivers were trickles between sand banks but I remember once crossing the Jumna in the rains when the brown floodwaters, crested with creamy waves, almost reached the sleepers of the bridge.
‘In the dawn one saw small boys with little sticks driving the cattle, who had been herded during the night in the small village enclosures surrounded by thorn barricades, out into the fields to graze the day away. They shouted and whacked as the still-sleepy cattle and goats stumbled along. Dim figures emerged from the thatched huts. Women drew water from the village well and took it to the men who gargled and spat and rinsed their faces before girding themselves in their loin clothes and tying their big turbans in preparation for the day’s toil in the fields. The dogs came out and barked at the crows – the innumerable carrion crows of India.
‘Through the United Provinces it was all fertile, the fields green with the young crops, mango plantations in between and on the hillocks the animals grazed. Villages were frequent, the huts hung with pumpkin vines growing over the thatch. Sometimes, more distant, there was a small town with whitewashed houses and a Hindu temple or a mosque with minaret. The grand trunk road mostly ran alongside the railway, carrying its traffic of horse-drawn vehicles and the occasional motorcar or lorry. We arrived at Howrah station, Calcutta at 6.30 in the morning.’
Some carried travel comforts to extremes. Sixty servants were thought necessary to look after Lord Reading, Viceroy from 1921 to 1926, when he, Lady Reading, their assistants and their guest Edwina Ashley paid a three-day visit to the Maharaja of Alwar, a state known as one of the hottest parts of India (here India’s highest-ever temperature, 50.6°C, was recorded on 10 May 1956). They travelled in the Viceroy’s personal narrow gauge train; on arrival they were met by a fleet of Rolls-Royces; four lorries for the luggage and an omnibus for the servants.
But even in the luxurious, white and gold viceregal train on the way to the hills from Delhi the door handles were too hot to touch and, as Lilah Wingfield had noted ten years earlier: ‘It is a bore not to be able to drink any water from now on and the boiled or condensed milk one has in one’s tea or coffee is very nasty.’ The dust and the smutty debris of the coal-fired locomotives penetrated everywhere, in spite of the three layers of glass, wire gauze and slatted Venetian blinds against extreme sunlight on the windows of the carriages. ‘We had clean clothes twice a day and our pillowcases and sheets were just black,’ wrote one woman after three nights and several changes; and often it was difficult to take enough (safe) water to satisfy.
Most people, like Lilah, travelled in the cooler weather. In the heat it was not so much travel as an endurance test. ‘The drill was to set out with a wet towel round the head,’ wrote Humphrey Trevelyan in May 1936, about to leave the baking heat of Gwalior for a few weeks in Poona. ‘Keep the windows of the car tight shut against the scorching wind, get in the burning hot train with a large block of ice, eighty pounds of it, in a container between the seats, dip a towel in the ice water and tie it under the fan, shut the windows and shutters, dip your own towel in the ice water and tie it round your head again, lie down and hope that you would still be alive the other end.’
Desirée Hart was lucky enough to enjoy an air-conditioned carriage until Delhi, after which she was settled into a small ladies-only compartment in a train that had been waiting in a siding all day under the blazing sun. To render it tolerable a slab of ice was placed in a flat tin on the floor under a whirring fan. At first, the air was deliciously fresh but inevitably the ice began to melt and Desirée spent much of the time trying to keep her feet out of the growing pool of water, as a film of red dust that had percolated through the closed windows gradually covered both her and the carriage.
When Jean Hilary left Calcutta to travel to Sialkot the journey came as a shock. Her father Henry Hilary had first come to Calcutta in 1903, and ten years later had become Chief Executive of the
Calcutta Port Trust. When the 1914 war broke out he had returned to England to fight for his country and was killed in action near Arras in June 1917, aged forty-one. He had been involved in plans to build a new dock for the port, finally opened in 1929. His widow had been invited to the opening but, with two boys still at school in England, she sent her twenty-two-year-old daughter Jean to represent her. Jean, Fishing Fleet material par excellence, had constantly to reassure her mother that she was not going to marry one of the many men who proposed to her. ‘Don’t imagine anything will happen as I definitely don’t care enough, and find other men much too amusing,’ she wrote home of one luckless suitor.
Because by the first week of April she was beginning to find the heat of Calcutta oppressive she accepted the invitation of another admirer to stay (suitably chaperoned) in Sialkot. The friends with whom she had been staying in Calcutta sent their bearer with her as escort. ‘This journey is being pretty good hell and my only consolation is that I am travelling alone,’ she wrote in one of her weekly letters to her mother. ‘Most of the day I have been just lying on the bed, with only a petticoat on (no stockings) and a dressing gown to throw over me at the stations. All the windows and jalousies are up and it’s fearful – one simply can’t bear to be touching anything for long as it’s red hot. It’s quite impossible to touch any part of one’s own body with any other part. I have lemonade and soda water brought to me at every stop as one has to drink it at once or it’s hot. I am now having tea consisting of petit beurre biscuits and fizzy lemonade. I am just full of eau gaseuse.
‘Simon the bearer is good and kind, comes along at each station and stays with my things while I eat. I paid thirteen rupees eleven annas for his ticket and twelve rupees ten annas for mine, and I have to pay him a return second class, as he goes back alone. Reggie got all the tickets for me and sent his bearer down with my baggage. I have a bottle of Evian for my teeth and have not forgotten soap or Bromo [toilet] paper! I have some good books to read which are saving my life as it’s too hot to sleep.’ But arrival at Sialkot did not bring the longed-for relief from the heat; soon afterwards, Jean was writing: ‘I can’t imagine why I left Calcutta because it was getting hot – it’s hotter here and none of the facilities for coping with it. Each bungalow has [only] one fan and some have none, and it’s turned off periodically during the day to save the current.’
The Fishing Fleet Page 9
