In the time of the Raj, long before air conditioning had been invented, the hot weather was an appalling strain for Europeans unused to its intensity – the heat, the flies, the dampness, the general discomfort, the glare. It was dreaded by everyone; some felt the northern part of India (except the north-west, which did not get the monsoon rains), where the temperature rose to great heights, was the worst, others that the damp heat of Bengal or Karachi, where the humidity was often 90 per cent or more and clothes had to be changed several times a day, was intolerable.
‘This is the way the hot season begins,’ wrote Lady Dufferin. ‘Day by day the wind gets hotter and hotter till it scorches as though it came out of an oven. The sound of a strong wind on a warm day is very depressing – there is something unnatural about it.’
Those who could stayed indoors all day, venturing out only just before sundown. Windows were shut by 7.30 a.m., and large screens made from reeds were kept wetted and hung over windows to cool any breeze that came in. At night, sleeping on verandas under mosquito nets was common. Sometimes it was possible to eat outside. ‘We used to have dinner on the lawn – dining tables and chairs, drawing-room furniture and standard lamp were carted out there every evening,’ wrote Rosemary Redpath, then living in Indore State.
When the hot weather really took hold it was no good relying on the proverbial ‘good night’s sleep’ to repair the ravages of the day: the heat, the noises of the night and the discomfort saw to that. It was the season when frogs croaked, cicadas sawed away relentlessly and jackals howled, an ululating, almost human shriek that rose and fell around the horizons or nearer – the drains in cantonments or stations were favourites for dens – setting off the barking of the numerous pi-dogs (mangy, feral skulking beasts with no owner) that scavenged round every village.
The summer was the time of year when rabies was most prevalent and if your dog had been bitten by a rabid dog it was often put down at once. For humans too the hot weather was intensely debilitating: boils, eczema, infections and fevers were common. Prickly heat* was almost impossible to avoid and although not health-destroying, could be appallingly unpleasant. Lord Minto, who was Viceroy from 1905 to 1910, described one of the Madras judges, Sir Henry Gillin, discovered by a visitor ‘rolling on his own floor, roaring like a baited bull,’ so tormenting was it.
‘Sitting on thorns would be agreeable by comparison,’ wrote one young lieutenant, ‘the infliction in that case being local; now, not a square inch of your body but is tingling and smarting with shooting pains, till you begin to imagine that in your youth you must have swallowed a packet of needles, which now oppressed by heat are endeavouring to make their escape from your interior.’
As the temperature rose, so insect life increased. Lady Canning remarked that her dinner table in Calcutta ‘was covered in creatures as thickly as a drawer of them in a museum’. Sometimes floors seemed alive with beetles; Lady Canning described huge cockroaches (‘as big as mice’) in her bedroom, ‘some moving away, side by side, like pairs of coach horses’. Before the days of electric light, flying ants and bluebottles incinerated themselves in candles and lizards grew fat. Green flies piled up round the base of the kerosene lamps and there were moths everywhere.
Some of these creatures were not simply a nuisance but the cause of lesser or greater physical unpleasantness. Stinkbugs, the tiny black shield bugs with a horrible, penetrating odour, arrived in their thousands. One earwig-like insect, the blister-fly, which could settle on people without their being aware of it, left immediate large and painful blisters on the skin if crushed while removing it. ‘Some crept up gentlemen’s sleeves, others concealed themselves in a jungle of whisker,’ wrote one guest at a ball that had suffered an invasion of these insects. ‘One heard little else all evening but “Allow me, Sir, to take off this blister-fly that is disappearing into your neck-cloth” or “Permit me, Ma’am, to remove this one from your arm”.
‘This, however, did not stop the dancers and they polka’d and waltzed over countless myriads of insects that had been attracted by the white cloth on the floor, which was completely discoloured by their mangled bodies at the end of the evening.’
Slippers and shoes had to be shaken before being put on in case a scorpion had climbed inside. There were hornets that could give a powerful and painful sting, and would fly into rooms to build tiny clay nests on the legs of furniture, in which they laid a grub, fed by pushing caterpillars through the hole they had left. ‘We had to watch out when playing tennis as poisonous black bees hung in great clusters from the porch,’ wrote Betsy Anderson, a Fishing Fleet girl of 1923. ‘Directly they were seen moving we had to take refuge inside while the special bee men were fetched. They cleverly swept and shook them into sacks and carried them off to an unknown destination.’
Up to and including Lord Curzon’s time (1899–1905), jackals would howl in the shrubberies after emerging from their dens in the drains and stinking civet cats would climb to the roof of the house, occasionally entering the bedrooms – Mary Curzon once woke to find a civet cat drinking her bedside glass of milk.
In the hot, damp weather, with its extreme humidity, mould destroyed books and shoes or rotted dresses so that they hung in strips, white ants gnawed at the foundations of houses. These, properly called termites, could eat through a whole trunkful of clothes in a single night; the only wood that can withstand their ravages is teak, one reason for the prevalence of teak furniture in the Raj. (If spotted, through the grey powder deposits they left, paraffin poured over them was a sure killer.)
‘You seem to be going in for enormous temperatures up there judging from the Madras Mail reports,’ wrote Leslie Lavie to his fiancée in Secunderabad on 9 April 1896. ‘We have nothing like that degree of temperature here (96°F being our highest up to date) but the heat here has certainly been much greater than anything I ever felt in Secunderabad, I suppose from the fact that this is more or less a damp heat here.
‘The worst of these damp heat places is that one’s skin gets covered in prickly heat and all sorts of unpleasant-looking things, while a dry heat does not seem to have that effect at all. I thought I was too much of a veteran for prickly heat as I never got it in Secunderabad but I’ve got it everywhere now and in addition I’ve got that most irksome of all the minor ills that flesh is heir to – a stye in my eye. We’ve all had them in succession – Hudson, Searle, Storr and myself.’ Next day he told her that the four of them had been obliged to shut their house up to avoid the scorching wind that blew in. ‘The nights are as hot as the days and sleeping inside is unbearable. Storr and I sleep in the garden always, and are the cynosure of many a passer’s-by eye, in the morning.’
‘In hot weather sleep was a real problem,’ wrote Monica Campbell-Martin. ‘Punkah coolies would fall asleep and have to be woken, brilliant moonlight by which you could read a book roused dogs to bark, echoed in villages for miles around, jackals howled, night birds screeched and chattered, led by the brain-fever bird.’ Sleeping outside, under a mosquito net, was the only alleviation. People tried everything, from dining with a block of ice (harvested in the cold weather and buried in pits until needed) under the table to damping pillows, sheets and the screens across windows.
Those who could left for hill stations like Simla, Mussoorie, Darjeeling; Srinagar, Gulmarg and Sonmarg in Jammu and Kashmir; Manali, Naini Tal, Gangtok and Kalimpong in the east of India, and Munnar, Ootacamund (Ooty) and Mahabaleshwar. In practice, this meant the women and children, with the men escaping from the scalding heat of the plains for a brief week or two when they could. The exception was the bureaucratic heart of government, which rolled up to Simla, files and all, to make it the summer capital of the Raj.
Then came the monsoon – India’s climate is dominated by monsoons, strong, often violent winds that change direction with the season, blowing from cold to warm regions (because cold air takes up more space than warm air). They blow from the land towards the sea in winter, and from the sea towards land in the sum
mer. As a result, winters in the north, though hot, were dry (the Himalayas acted as a barrier to the north-east winds), with perhaps a little rain around Christmas, while the summer monsoons, roaring into the subcontinent from the south-west, loaded with moisture from the Indian Ocean, brought heavy rains from June to September. These torrential rainstorms can cause landslides, sweep away villages and flood thousands of square miles.
Lady Canning wrote of a hurricane during her first May in Calcutta. ‘The house shook, windows crashed and smashed, shutters were blown here and there. In my bedroom the windows had been left open and though the shutters were shut, the rain came in horizontally and drenched everything, even on the far side of the room, and left it ankle-deep in water, which rushed down the stairs in a cataract.’ Her shoes turned ‘furry with mildew’ in a day, her husband’s dispatch boxes looked ‘white and fungus’y’. Crickets, grasshoppers, huge black beetles and cockroaches appeared everywhere, so much so that the wine glasses on the dinner table had to have lids to cover them.
‘The chota bursat (little rains) may arrive ahead of the real monsoon,’ wrote Monica Campbell-Martin in Bihar. ‘You think the monsoon has arrived, because rain has fallen for a few hours. Your burning skin is relieved, your prickly heat is eased, but only for a short time. All over again, the days grow hotter, and back you go to where you started, steadily dripping. Once again the clouds pile up in thunderous beauty. You breathe air that is a dank and heavy substance, almost tangible. Around you everything is still. Every living thing seems waiting. Each night after each burning day seems waiting, too, in deathly quiet.
‘Suddenly, with a crash, the sky disintegrates in a vast avalanche of water. It rains for about three and a half months with intervals of hours, or of a few days, until the cold weather. There is no gentle season of the falling leaf. There is no spring. There is the cold weather, the hot weather, and the rains. On the Northwest Frontier there is not even a monsoon. When the rains fall everywhere else, on the Frontier it grows hotter and hotter.’
That year the monsoon, which had swept up the Bay of Bengal, broke on 14 June, and the streets were flooded on and off until the cold weather, which began at the end of October. By Christmas Monica needed a blanket on her bed.
In the Punjab there were often dust storms, ‘upheaving, whirling and carrying everything before them,’ said Anne Wilson, on a camping tour of duty with her husband, a Deputy Commissioner. The Wilsons were on horseback for that day’s march, when suddenly they saw a dust storm on the horizon. ‘The air had become warningly cold. We cantered as hard as we could but in spite of our pace we were overtaken by the storm; darkness that could be felt enveloped us; straw, dust and leaves whizzed past us, thunder rolled, hail beat on our faces.’
As her frightened horse began to plunge, her husband dismounted to hold it still and quiet it, whereupon his own horse tore itself free and galloped away into the darkness. After the dust storm had passed they made their way in heavy rain to the camp, which their servants had taken the precaution of pitching on high ground, with mounds of earth heaped up protectively against the outer wall of the tents. Even so, in the morning they were surrounded by a lake and had to organise the digging of channels to carry the water away.
In Calcutta, the monsoon eased off from September on. ‘By the end of that month a collection of coolies could be seen replanting the tennis courts everywhere, with a grass that “ran” like strawberry runners,’ commented twenty-one-year-old Marian Atkins in 1931. ‘So by November 1st we were playing on a perfectly level, entirely covered, good hard grass court! The sight screens were of hessian dyed with indigo so were almost navy blue – they were first class courts. The Saturday club had hard courts lighted – I emphasise this as it was a new concept and enabled the “box wallahs” to get exercise after office hours. The Club also had a few squash courts and a new swimming bath – all in the middle of built-up Calcutta.’
In Simla, Lady Dufferin was writing joyfully on 3 September 1885: ‘It is true the monsoon is really over. Oh! It is a comfort; you can’t think now tired one gets of the gloom and the everlasting drip, and the impossibility of settling beforehand to do anything out of doors.’
7
‘Parties, parties, parties’
The Social Whirl
Apart from her sola topi and an open mind, the Fishing Fleet Girl’s most important accessory was her calling card. Without it, she was a non-person, socially invisible.
‘The first thing my aunt did when I arrived was to have some cards printed for me and then take me round to all her friends and to Government House to leave cards,’ Katherine Welford told me. ‘This ensured an invitation to dinner. And all the young men would call on my aunt and leave their cards and then she would invite them to dinner parties. And then they would ask me out dancing. I met hundreds of them. It was lovely.’
Violet Hanson, who had come to India to stay with her aunt in Malabar Hill – one of the best quarters of Bombay – was familiar with the practice of calling from staying with her grandmother, who would summon her carriage and drive round to various ladies’ houses.
The etiquette of calling had been firmly established in English nineteenth-century life, as a means of keeping in touch with a wide circle of social equals, of establishing oneself in society, or of rising in it (if one’s call was accepted), for these small rectangles of pasteboard could keep social aspirants at a distance until they could be assessed as suitable – or not. In the Raj, this complicated ritual had been refined down into the simple matter of dropping a card in a box. When Olive Douglas paid calls in 1913 she went out with a list in her hand and asked the servant who answered at the first house for the ‘bokkus’ (the wooden box into which calling cards were dropped). As she wrote: ‘If the lady is not receiving he brings out a wooden box with the inscription “Mrs X not at home”, you drop in your cards and drive on to the next bungalow . . . If she is receiving, he comes out with her salaams and you go in for a few minutes but that doesn’t often happen. The funny thing is one may have hundreds of people on one’s visiting list and not know half of them by sight, because of the convenient system of the not-at-home box.’
It was exactly the same for men, especially for the numerous bachelors if they wanted any kind of life away from the confines of club or chummery. Sam Raschen recorded, also in 1913: ‘Armed with a carefully prepared geographical list of names and with a box of cards, one set off in one’s best suit and a gharry [horse-drawn cab], driving from bungalow to bungalow dropping cards into the box hung outside every door. In due course the calls were returned by the husbands of the ladies called on; cards with your name written on were placed in the racks provided for the purpose at the Sind Club or the Gymkhana. It may sound very formal, but it served its purpose of drawing attention to a newcomer’s arrival, and an invitation to a dinner party, picnic or tennis soon followed.’
If a family was temporarily leaving the area, perhaps to go to the hills, they wrote ‘P.P.C.’ (pour prendre congé) on their cards when they called, as a reminder that they would soon be back.
By the late 1920s calling was just as necessary but even more of a hollow ritual, with not even a pretence that the caller might be asked in. ‘One of my first duties after arriving at Lyallpur* had been to pay a round of social calls,’ wrote Edward Wakefield. ‘I was given a list of thirty or forty names and told to leave my visiting card in the little black tin box that I would find attached to a board at the entrance to each bungalow. Each box had painted on it in white letters the words “Not at Home”. Conscientiously, on a bicycle, I did the tedious round, gradually working through the list.’
When he left out one because he could not find the bungalow, its indignant owner wrote to Wakefield’s superior, the Deputy Commissioner, declining an invitation to dinner at which Wakefield would be present: ‘as he has not had the courtesy to call on us we would prefer not to meet him.’ The matter was rectified by the speedy dropping in of a card. To avoid this kind of gaffe, people would
keep little leather booklets, like diaries, entitled ‘Register of Calls’, headed ‘Date and Calls Received’ on one page and on the opposite, facing page, ‘Date and Calls Made’.
Equally imperative was the ceremony of signing the Book, kept either in the house of the Divisional Commander or near the gate of a Governor’s residence, if you wished to be included in any of the top-level invitations. So vital was this considered that Katherine Welford, invited with her aunt and uncle to dinner at Government House, found herself tracked down during the day of the dinner by a flustered ADC, who told her reprovingly: ‘You’re supposed to be dining with us tonight but you haven’t signed the Book!’ She had to be driven immediately to Government House in her uncle’s car to sign the Book and then dash back home to change for the dinner, returning to Government House an hour or so later.
‘It’s surprising how touchy people are about this whole business of calling,’ reflected Margaret Martyn. ‘They compare notes to see if so-and-so has called on you and not yet on them, and vice versa, and Mrs A won’t invite young Mr X for dinner or drinks – he’s so uncouth, has been here a week and hasn’t called yet.’
Nor was distance considered an obstacle. In 1920 Fishing Fleet girl Bethea Field was a new bride and the wife of the most senior Government official in the district, which meant that cards were left on her first ‘and then I had to return them. Some of the nearer ones I could do on foot but those further away I had to post. My callers left their cards on the way to the Club but I had no means of going the fifteen miles or so to return them. Even so, there were whisperings that I was “slack”.’
The Fishing Fleet Page 11
