The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  Back in Delhi, the girls soon saw Roger again, when he came to their hotel with his sister Joan, who was staying at Umballa, 121 miles away, for the winter. ‘I saw him quite often,’ said Valerie, ‘but I reckoned he was Rosemary’s boyfriend and we didn’t believe in poaching. I got on very well with Joan, and several times went to stay with her in Umballa, which was great fun because it was a smaller station – just the Brigadier and his staff, some Gunners, one or two Indian regiments and at least one British regiment.’

  One day Valerie told Joan that she had originally come out to India to be a bridesmaid but that on the ship it had been disclosed to her that it had been all called off. ‘I’m getting married,’ said Joan. ‘Come and be bridesmaid to me.’ Her wedding was to be a few days before Valerie’s date for sailing home, so she agreed. ‘At that time I looked on Roger as a very nice chap but I certainly wasn’t sighing secretly over him,’ recalled Valerie. ‘We’d only met on three weekends when I’d been staying with Joan for a dance or something and he’d come to Umballa. Joan asked me to stay for the week before the wedding and Roger came up to Umballa to give Joan away. The night of the wedding we all went to see Joan and her new husband off on honeymoon on the Frontier Mail, which went through Umballa somewhere around midnight. Then we went back – and Roger asked me to marry him! I was dumbfounded. You see I liked him very much but I hadn’t thought of marrying him – I hadn’t thought of marrying anyone then actually.’

  In any case there seemed little chance of getting married. Roger was Adjutant in his regiment and he had agreed not to get married while he was Adjutant, because part of the job was looking after the young officers in the mess, which a married officer could not do. Nor did Valerie feel that she could leave her mother for another winter so didn’t see any prospect of coming back to India again. ‘So I told him I didn’t believe in long engagements. I said: “We can write to each other and then when you next come home on leave we can take another look at each other.” I made it quite clear that we weren’t tied in any way so if either of us met someone else, well, fine.’

  Valerie sailed for home in the spring of 1937 – again, on The Viceroy of India – expecting a long exchange of letters. But she had reckoned without Roger, who was determined not to let her slip through his grasp. A few days after arriving home she got a letter telling her that he had tackled his Colonel about getting married – he was, after all, twenty-nine, so at the age when marriage was permissible, and coming to the end of his adjutancy. The Colonel had said: ‘Well, I can’t spare you now [it was summer] but I’ll give you two months’ leave in the winter to go home and get married.’

  Hastily Valerie got friends she had known in India to write to her mother, who had never met Roger and knew nothing about him, to vouch for him in case her mother objected violently. She arranged the wedding and she met his parents, eliciting a splendid letter from her eighty-year-old future father-in-law to his eldest son in the Navy. ‘Last week Mrs Riley and Valerie visited us for two nights and contact seemed to lead to mutual approval. Valerie is a delightful girl, a good looker without being exactly beautiful, well set up and natural, without any cosmetics, which pleases me, and I judge enormously practical, both in her attainments and her outlook on life. I do not think Roger could have made a better choice …’.

  They married in November 1937 but only had a few days’ honeymoon because Roger’s leave was up and he had to return to his regiment. They travelled back to India on the same P&O ship, The Viceroy of India. As Valerie went up the gangway at Tilbury, with Roger behind her, the ship’s doctor was standing at the top.

  ‘Oh, how nice to see you again!’ he greeted her. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You took me out as part of the Fishing Fleet last year,’ she replied. ‘This year I’ve got my catch and I’m going back!’

  Up to the outbreak of the Second World War – and the virtual end of the Fishing Fleet – the sharply drawn borderline beyond which sexual intimacies were not permitted was maintained. Planter’s daughter Joan Henry, who had met Geoffrey Allen, the young man who would be her future husband, was even more restrained when it came to physical liberties. Her hospitable father often asked him to stay weekends for early morning duck flighting; and on one of these weekends Geoffrey tried to kiss his host’s pretty twenty-one-year-old daughter – but she turned away. ‘I knew that he meant more to me than a casual kiss,’ she wrote later, ‘and I wanted no part in what could become a frivolous affair.’

  In the late 1930s, seventeen-year-old Claudine Gratton’s private diary breathes a similar sexual innocence, as depicted in entries from May and June 1937. All that year, her diary is filled largely with a dizzying number of names of different young men – many of whom she thought she was in love with – and films or dancing.

  ‘M[ummy] asked me why I always asked R[ichard] to everything and we had a bit of a discussion. He is so adorable I can’t help asking him to everything!!!’ Two days later: ‘He drove me to his house, showed me his horses, and kissed and squeezed me goodnight. The darling. We had a long talk trying to arrange parties for Bangalore. I want to see him lots more before I go,’ followed mournfully by ‘My last dance with R. He was simply wonderful. We lay out in the garden. He went to sleep. He’s not feeling well. He won’t eat (because of me). We kissed each other goodbye. I cried. He is going to Simla. I don’t suppose I shall see him again for a long time.’ Three weeks later, another man was ‘adorable’. On 4 March it was Eddie, in April Richard again, then a new admirer called Pooky. ‘At about 2 a.m. started home. Eddie and I in back of Humber. He held my hand and kissed me etc. Poor Eddie!! Dropped them all home, got into bed at about 4.15.’

  Back in Poona the brisk switch around of affections continued. ‘Met Richard, the darling. He hasn’t changed a bit, thank God. Swimming, dinner, then swimming again. He kissed me several times in the [swimming] bath. Oh, the angel. We had dinner, danced, then went home, and sat and talked.’ Next day she saw Richard again. ‘He was so simply adorable I wish he was never going to leave me. Kissed him goodbye, took him to the station, and rushed home, miserable.’ But by December: ‘Thought a lot of darling Pooky, wish he’d marry me.’ The next day reads: ‘Up late, cried for P. I do love him so. Can’t last long without him.’

  During the Raj, marriage between Englishmen and Indian girls, however beautiful or well-born the latter, was frowned upon. Long gone were the days when Edward Sellon, who arrived in India in 1834 as a sixteen-year-old cadet, could write enthusiastically: ‘I now commenced a regular course of fucking with native women.’* In those days, no one – either English or Indian – frowned on the eager young white man for keeping an Indian mistress or visiting Indian prostitutes, many of whom were more akin to the cultivated, sophisticated Greek hetaira than to the drabs who then thronged London streets.

  But as more and more European women arrived in India, to become the wives of the men who governed it, so the old laissez-faire attitude disappeared. Husbands might work alongside or with Indians, but for most of these women, whose lives revolved around their homes, Indians were servants. Miscegenation was proscribed and the almost obsessional attitude to ‘keeping up standards’ extended to preserving the purity of a European bloodline.

  With Indian women and young English girls out of bounds, any affairs had become the prerogative of the married. In the Raj there were often massive barriers to extra-marital love, from the contemporary attitude to marriage – lifelong and unbreakable – and the difficulties of keeping any affair secret in a town or cantonment where everyone knew everyone, to the effects, possibly fatal, on career or profession. In a lonely or isolated setting, illicit love could cause anything from scandal to mayhem; in a closed society such as a regiment, often stationed in distant cantonment for several years, an affair with a brother officer’s wife and the consequent disruption to close working relationships was the cardinal sin.

  Of course it happened from time to time, but any such affair needed more than the usual cloak o
f secrecy. ‘I love you, my dear,’ wrote ‘Pat’, a young man in the 1/5th Gurkha Rifles in April 1937. ‘Don’t take this as a passionate outcry (though sometimes it is like that towards you) but as a clear statement of fact put out or prompted by every fibre of my being . . . I am glad that you came up in this room glad that I kissed you in front of this very fireplace. You mean more than life itself to me. For ever and ever, Your own Pat.’

  ‘Pat’ went on sending letters to his married lover, and even claimed a photograph from her. But when the affair ended, he informed her of this abruptly and from a distance; when he wrote to her tersely in the spring of 1938, what misery she felt had to be kept strictly to herself if she was not to ruin several lives. ‘Just a letter to tell you that I am going to marry a girl called Sibyl Rouse, who is in Peshawar. It all happened very suddenly and both of us just fell completely, so there it is. The Regiment have given their blessing and I am crazily happy.’

  Another obstacle to the seduction of the Fishing Fleet girl was the same as that at home: the likelihood that she would seldom be alone. ‘Hoped to go out to a hunt with Michael tomorrow but Mummy as usual butted in and she is coming too,’ wrote a disappointed Claudine Gratton on 1 January 1937. Next day she got up early so that her admirer could take her to the meet but ‘Mummy came too, to chaperone me’.

  Dances were another matter. Here there was a certain amount of licensed flirtation, with specially arranged darkened nooks and crannies for young men to take the girls on whom they had their eye for a little longed-for privacy. These kalajuggahs, or dark places, were sought after and, sometimes, fought over. ‘Before dances the young subalterns used to rush around and borrow things like curtains and heaven knows what else to make something called a kalajuggah – a dark place,’ wrote Grace Nori. ‘They all used to have their own to which they used to take their best partners and to which no one else was allowed to go.’ Other ‘dark places’ could be a sofa for two pushed into a dimly lit corner, an area screened by potted palms on secluded verandas, or even one of the club’s attics.

  Magdalene (‘Magda’) McDowell, who went out to India in 1906, got engaged in one of these ‘dark places’ while at the regimental club ball of the Jat Lancers in Bareilly. ‘All the officers were in full mess kit,’ she wrote later. ‘The whole building was picked out by tiny oil lamps and lanterns hung in the trees. It looked like fairyland and there I met Ralph [Hammersley-Smith] again. Between dances one didn’t return to a chaperone, but went into one of the cleverly and prettily arranged kalajuggahs where you and your partner sat among or under palm branches and chatted. Here we got engaged.’

  Ruby Madden had little time for them. At a fancy dress ball in Bombay in early 1912, she talked in a robustly dismissive tone of being ‘initiated into the mysteries of Kala Jugga, which means little sitting-out places made of trellis work and palm leaves, so you can see out and not be seen. “Nothing but traps for spiders,” I said. I was invited into one but said that I preferred the open with great emphasis. I think it is an extraordinary idea.’

  But in a hill station, with its floating, changing population, human nature fought back. As on shipboard, lightning romances might spring up between grass widows whose husbands were working in the plains and officers or administrators who had snatched a few weeks’ leave in the cool of the hills, with Simla in particular known as a centre of gossip, flirtation and intrigue. Ruby Madden, whose judgements were nothing if not crisp, wrote to her mother of an early morning ride she had taken. ‘Mrs Crowe was there with her own young man,’ she told Lady Madden. ‘Everyone sports an “own young man”. And she has such a dull little husband I suppose it’s necessary for her to have a change now and then.’

  11

  ‘It would be a pleasure to be in his harem, I thought’

  Maharajas

  For sheer magnificence there was little to touch the splendour of the maharajas. Their palaces, their clothes, their jewels, their retinues, the gold and silver trappings of their state elephants, the largesse they showered on fortunate guests, seemed to sum up everything that was meant by the phrase ‘the gorgeous East’. It was not surprising that some Fishing Fleet girls, given the chance, found them irresistible.

  There was little to touch the lavishness and generosity of their hospitality. As the daughter of the Resident of Neemuch, Betsey Anderson made several visits to native states with her parents.

  ‘We watched jugglers, musicians, dancers and the private individual armies of the Princes in all manner of unique uniforms. The halls in which banquets were held were stupendous pillared rooms, some with colourful scenes depicting the ancient days and former rulers, others with magnificent embroidered hangings, fine lattice screens, cut-glass chandeliers and mirrors making a dazzling effect. For the diners, long tables were laid with spotless white cloths laden with gold and silver plate, immense bowls of fruit, cleverly festooned with exotic flowers.

  ‘We would be seated before the Maharaja appeared, surrounded by his courtiers. They were all resplendently dressed, their long coats looking like cloths of gold. Each one would wear different headgear according to his caste and these creations would have made any milliner proud, adorned as they were with fabulous jewels and feathers.’ Afterwards guests were entertained with dancing girls.

  For those lucky enough to be invited to stay in a maharaja’s palace, it was an unforgettable experience. Often the first stage was a train journey, to be met by one of their host’s cars (the Maharaja of Mysore had fifty-two Rolls-Royces). ‘It was dusk when the train pulled into Ratlam,’ wrote Evelyn Barrett, who with her husband had been invited to stay for Christmas with the Nawab of Jaora in 1935. ‘Followed a drive through the jungle. Great trees hung like lace against the stars. Once twin points of light became a stare of green. “Wolf!” said Ali Khan [the Nawab’s son]. Then the jungle broke and before us lay a green river full of stars. On the far side lights twinkled.

  ‘Crossing the river, and bypassing the moonlit palace with its forest of guest-tents, we drove through gates guarded by sentries to a white house standing in a garden. Light poured from the open doorway where servants, in the colours of His Highness the Nawab of Jaora, stood waiting. Five minutes later we were doing justice to a delicious dinner, served with iced champagne in a bucket. Beside each of our places was a printed programme of fixtures for the next ten days, with a list of numbered cars, and the names of the guests allocated to each one.

  ‘Next morning we went hunting. The Meet was at 7.00 a.m. at the palace, His Highness maintained his own pack of hounds, some bred by himself, but most imported from England. The Hunt staff were beautifully turned out and mounted. All wore scarlet, as did H.H. and the Princes. The going was black cotton soil, varied by ridges of rock and sand. A troop of cavalry, armed with spears in the event of flushing out wolf or panther, followed at a distance. We had excellent sport, killing three jack, but the most vivid memory of that morning was great Sarus cranes, crimson crowns glistening above mists, stalking in the cotton fields, and of their melodious, clanking calls.’

  The days that followed were a succession of hunts, shoots and polo, with golf and squash thrown in. In the mornings guests were expected to amuse themselves. At noon, followed by a servant bearing aloft, on a long silver handle, a huge, silver-fringed pink umbrella, H.H. would emerge from the palace. Shaded by the umbrella, he would descend the steps between kneeling rows of those who had received audience, to greet his guests assembled by the waiting cars. The evening before a shoot, one of the princes would wander unobtrusively among guests, ascertaining that everyone was equipped with gun or rifle and, if not, inviting selection from some of HH’s beautiful weapons.

  ‘On these outings it was my privilege to drive with HH,’ wrote Evelyn. ‘For shooting he wore a Norfolk jacket, a striped silk shirt, the neckband looped with a string of pearls and fastened with a Woolworth gold safety pin, cotton jodhpurs and brown boots. The ubiquitous diamond stud completed the outfit. In the dashboard of the car was a recess containi
ng cigarettes and sample-size bottles of Coty’s scent. Before lighting up, a cigarette would be probed with a scent stopper and the resultant cloud of Chypre and Abdullah luxuriously inhaled.’

  Evelyn found herself forgetting that her hosts were of a different race and creed from herself. One day, riding alongside a little wood, Ali Khan remarked, ‘We never shoot that wood because of my great-uncle.’

  ‘Your great-uncle?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a jinn. He lives there, in the form of a white blackbuck.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him?’

  ‘Oh yes, but it is not good to see him, so we will ride on.’

  Once there was an escorted visit to the harem, guarded by enormous eunuchs, where Evelyn was received by the youngest wife, aged fourteen and already a mother. Later in the visit, Evelyn asked the Nawab:

  ‘Do your wives never get envious of these wonderful parties?’

  For answer H.H. raised an arm so that the light fell on an embroidered sleeve. ‘Beautiful, is it not?’ he asked. It was an exquisite design of leaves and flowers, worked in gold and silver thread. ‘The work of my youngest wife,’ remarked H.H. complacently. ‘The only one who gives trouble. Such a garment takes six months to make. When she gets restive I merely ask for another coat.’ He grinned. ‘She is doing one now!’

  Even the route that led to the princely domains could be glamorous. Here is Violet Jacob, writing from Mho at the beginning of December 1896 of the drive to the great ball given by the Maharaja of Indore at his palace, the Lal Bagh. She was accompanied by her husband, Captain Arthur Jacob of the 20th Hussars, resplendent in his full dress uniform of blue with crimson busby-bag and yellow plume.

  ‘In the evening we started for the Lal Bagh, four miles off . . . It is difficult to give you an idea of that drive, as you have never seen an Indian city. There were three miles of lights. We drove through a blazing road, so bright that surrounding objects were as distinct as in the day. On right and left, at the height of a man’s head, was a double row of lights on parallel wires about eight inches apart. Behind this in many places small trees were hung with paper lanterns with another row of lights under the boughs; this sent up a great glare into the blue-black sky and made the whole skyful of stars look like steel. In the smoke that hung round the houses, many of which were carved about the windows, some buildings stood out dark and some light.