The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  They were being fired upon. It was a time when there was fighting with Afghanistan and they were fairly close to the frontier. They ran back, her father to collect his revolver, Jim to alert their Gurkha guard, the others to shelter in the house. From inside, Bethea could see Jim standing on the front steps, his revolver in his hand. Round him were grouped the six Gurkhas, with their NCO beside Jim. All was quiet until they heard a tremendous tramping, which sounded nearer and nearer.

  ‘What can two men with revolvers plus six men and their rifles do to repulse a horde?’ thought Bethea desperately. ‘We were in a possibly hostile region, we were at war with Afghanistan and the nearest British troops were thirty miles away with a rough ride and high hills between us. I thought it was the end.’

  In the near-dark she saw that the men coming up to the drive and into the open space in front of the house carried lanterns. They were all tall, with high turbans and baggy trousers of white cotton. Most of them were bearded and they carried the strangest assortment of weapons. Some had ancient muzzle-loading guns, others large curved swords. There were men carrying lances and boys with sticks.

  The Europeans stood tensely on the front steps until one man, unarmed, walked up to Jim and bowed, holding both hands beneath his face. ‘Sahib, we have come to save you and your lady folk,’ he said.

  Jim slipped his revolver into his holster and stepped down. They shook hands – the man was the chief of the village elders – and Jim expressed his gratitude. The men left and everyone tried to settle down. Bethea’s shock at the attempted massacre was such that her period not only arrived that night a fortnight early but so heavily that she thought she was suffering a haemorrhage.

  A message was got to the nearest British soldiers and the family was evacuated, her father to surgery on his arm at the nearest hospital and everyone else to Quetta, apart from Jim, who remained in Mastung as the guest of the headman to sort out the reasons for the attack.

  It later transpired that the night of the attack a detachment of the Mekran Levy Corps were due to march south to their headquarters in Mekran. Three of them and a new recruit, aged sixteen or seventeen, lagged behind and hid in the gully just about under the apple tree in which Bethea was sitting. They had their British-issue rifles and six rounds each, also their camels, tethered nearby. They knew that Afghanistan had declared war and they may also have thought that the British, after the long struggle in Europe, were weak and vulnerable. As they later confessed, they decided to deliver a blow themselves by killing the Resident – but mistook Bethea’s tall father for the Resident, Colonel Ramsay.

  At dawn a posse of village men, led by the headman, set out to track them. Since camels leave a distinctive spoor and much of the ground was sandy and impressionable, they were easily followed, caught at their next camping ground and arrested. After trial by the local court of justice, they were condemned to death and hanged – except for the youth, who was given a long prison sentence.

  Back in Quetta, Bethea discovered that Arthur Williams, though a temporary Major in the Supply and Transport Unit of the Indian Army, had not been demobilised; instead, he had been re-enlisted to staff headquarters in Quetta. As her father had now been made the Cantonment Magistrate in Quetta, the family soon had their own house and a natural entrée to all the social activities of Quetta.

  The delighted Bethea was quickly caught up in these, playing tennis with a girlfriend at the club in the afternoons and going to dances there or at various regimental messes in the evenings. It was the life she had dreamed of, especially now that there was romance in the offing – Arthur Williams, though not a dancing man, constantly kept his eye on her from the bar.

  The more she knew him the more she liked him. As well as being tall – 6 feet 2 inches – and good-looking, with thick brown hair, warm brown eyes and a dimple in his left cheek, he was clever and had great charm. Born in September 1890, he had won scholarships to Winchester, Marlborough and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Classics and became a great friend of ‘Cis’ Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, so that he often stayed at Downing Street. Like many of the cleverest Oxbridge graduates, he joined the ICS, who would not release him to the Army when he wanted to volunteer at the outbreak of war. Instead, a month later, he sailed for India.

  Soon after they had encountered each other again, Arthur took Bethea out for a picnic in his car. They returned engaged – subject to parental consent, as she was still only nineteen. The wedding had to take place quickly, because the ICS wanted him back. As Arthur’s first posting, as Assistant Deputy Commissioner in Berhampore, in the Musshidalad district, was about 200 km from Calcutta, they were married from the house of her Aunt Sybil, who had a large house there.

  Before the wedding Bethea arrived to stay with Aunt Sybil, who took her off to the dressmaker to choose a wedding dress and going-away outfit. As it was only just after the war the dress, of white satin, was short and instead of a veil she wore a white satin hat under which her long red-gold hair had to be pinned up. The cake came from Firpo, Calcutta’s smartest restaurant and confectioner.

  Even today, brides often feel nervousness and tension as their wedding day approaches. Bethea had an added reason for apprehension. In common with most other girls of her generation, her sexual ignorance was total. ‘I had shied away from the “facts of life” even though I was highly sexed,’ she wrote. ‘I could have learnt a lot from my school friends but I shut my ears. I preferred to look at it all with the eyes of romance and ignore the sordid details. So when my mother gave me a talk and told me “you won’t like it at first” I was seized with fear and spent almost sleepless nights.’

  The wedding, on 12 December 1919, in Calcutta Cathedral – ‘enormous for so small a gathering’ – went well. Back at the flat the food was laid out, the cake on the centre table, and the champagne was opened. Next day the couple left for Berhampore. As for those initial fears, according to family legend, Bethea quickly got over them – and, later, spent a considerable time proving this.

  17

  ‘Colonels must marry’

  Marriage

  Marriage in the Raj generally involved an approach quite different from the home-grown variety. As Kipling had pointed out, ‘[marriage] in India does not concern the individual but the Government he serves’. Even a girl’s wedding day was often different from what she might have expected. Lucy Hardy – who had become engaged to her future husband Harry Grant, an officer in the Royal Artillery, when she went out to India in the 1904 Fishing Fleet on a year’s visit, staying first with her brother and then with friends – could hardly have had a more disconcerting introduction to married life: with a wedding in an isolated spot threatened nightly by marauders from over the border and, on the day itself, a drive behind a runaway horse that could easily have resulted in a fatal accident.

  Harry, not yet of the seniority in the Army and therefore of the financial standing to support a wife, had circumvented this obstacle by successfully applying for the post of Assistant or Second Officer with the Kashmir State Mountain Artillery, a job which carried good pay but which was not entirely wife-friendly. Meanwhile, Lucy waited at home until he could afford to send for her. When the vital cable came, she sailed for India in February 1904, and went up to Attock, close to the borders of Afghanistan and Kashmir, where her brother Willie was quartered in the old Fort. Here, with Willie, she stayed. Although Lucy had arrived in March, she and Harry could not get married until 5 April, as not until then was the nearest chaplain available – it was thirty-seven years since a wedding had taken place in the church there.

  By this time it had become very hot, especially at night, as the windows of the Fort had to be kept closed on account of cross-border marauders, who lived on the opposite bank of the swift-flowing river. ‘I often watched them crossing the river on inflated bullock skins,’ wrote Lucy. ‘They used to walk up some distance, straddle the skins and launch out into the rapid current, swimming with arms and legs till they fetched up lowe
r down on our side.’

  On her wedding day, hot as usual, she dressed with care. ‘I had a very pretty white crêpe de Chine day dress gathered round the hips, a full skirt with a flounce at the hem, and a white tulle hat with a spray of real orange blossom from the garden.’ Her brother, elegant in blue and gold full dress, was to escort her to the church, perched on a steep hill above the Fort. For this short journey he had ordered a tonga in which they planned to leave as soon as they saw her bridegroom and his best man arrive at the church door.

  But the moment they stepped into the tonga the pony bolted for its stable in the bazaar and no effort of the driver could stop it hurtling along the stony track, a hair-raising ride as they narrowly missed the large boulders at each side. Finally, arriving at its stable, it stopped. There was nothing for it but to walk to the church. ‘I bundled up my long skirt and then we walked back nearly a mile in the heat, both of us dripping with sweat and on my part all of a tremble! We staggered up to the church porch where they had been all amazed at our non-appearance. They got me a chair and a glass of water and I rested till I had recovered a little, and then we were married. There was only the chaplain, a sergeant who acted as verger and witness, our two selves, Willie and the best man –six people in all.’ Unsurprisingly, Lucy’s was the last marriage to take place at that church.

  Quite apart from physical aspects such as the differences in housekeeping, climate, surroundings and so forth, there were various social and psychological factors peculiar to marriage in the Raj, many imposed by the ‘rules’ integral to service in the Empire.

  Whereas in England a man, provided he could support a wife and family, could marry virtually whenever he chose, those who worked for the Raj – and many of those employed on plantations or in businesses – were forbidden marriage for the first years of their service. For the ICS, who usually joined a year or so after university, this in practice meant until around the age thirty. The alternative was to leave the ICS or, if permission was grudgingly granted, suffer some form of financial penalty. For soldiers, as the informal rule had it, ‘subalterns cannot marry, captains may marry, majors should marry and colonels must marry’. Even so, everyone who wanted to do so had to seek his commanding officer’s permission; if this was refused (almost invariably, in the case of any officer below the rank of captain) he had either to remain single or send in his papers (i.e., leave the regiment). When Henry and Margery Hall married in the 1930s Henry – who was in the Foreign and Political Department – had to get special permission from the Viceroy to marry, nor did he get the marriage allowance (only given at ‘marriageable’ age). The Halls lived as cheaply as they could on Henry’s pay of about £15 a week, rationing themselves to one bottle of whisky a month and joining only one club – that with the best library.

  Towards the end of the Raj the ban on marrying before thirty was less stringent, but as one young man wrote: ‘A young married officer found it rather a struggle to furnish a house. When you were senior enough to be allocated a furnished residence most of the essentials were provided by the Public Works Department . . . I remember that my wife had to use a packing case as a dressing table and a wire stretched across a corner of the room as a wardrobe. We had camp beds and small mosquito nets tied to tiny frames fixed on the ends of the beds. We could buy beautifully made furniture from the district jail, constructed to my own design by long-term prisoners. But I had to calculate my monthly budget carefully before I ordered anything and we used to estimate a large round of drinks after tennis at the club to be worth a chair that we badly needed.’

  Nor was it simply a question of existing on meagre funds. In the tight-knit community of an officers’ mess, a glaring discrepancy in the ability to pay your way caused embarrassment all round. ‘James Hodding is coming out in May after marrying in April,’ wrote Lieutenant Leslie Lavie of a brother officer of the 20th Madras Native Infantry. ‘Goodness only knows how he is going to live, when I have qualms, and very strong ones, and my case is much better than his. The Major was angry about my engagement and he is very much so about his, and with even more reason; paupers in the Regiment succeed in annoying everyone and poor old Hodding! Though he is always ready to join in everything, he absolutely won’t be able to afford himself a peg much less join the Regiment in giving anybody else one.’

  For anyone who did marry early – or for many on the bottom rungs of the ladder – money was a perennial worry. There were the basic expenses such as the cost of educating children, of keeping them healthy by sending them, their mother and several servants to the hills in the hot weather and the expense of a doctor if, as almost always, one of them became ill. ‘We had to weigh up how ill a child was before calling the doctor because of his heavy fees,’ said Viola Bayley.

  Over and above that was something that at home was less pressing: the need – to put it in modem terms – to keep up with the Joneses and, in a country where the ethos of display was a sign of elitism, to be seen to be doing so. For in British society in India there was none of the anonymity that could be preserved at home even in close-knit circles: under the glare of the Indian sun and the gaze of Indian servants everything was high-visibility, everything had to conform to certain standards of protocol and custom. If you were in a cavalry regiment, it was important to have good polo ponies; for everyone, entertaining was expected and reciprocal dinner parties could not be skimped; and a man was expected to stand his round in mess or club. Only in camp or up country was a simpler life possible.

  Often, too, in Raj marriages there was an element of clinging together, like the babes in the wood. For many Raj children, childhood and adolescence were times of misery and separation. Sent home to be educated in English schools, they might see their father only once or twice during these years and their mother little more. ‘When my mother went back to India my brothers went as boarders to Berkhamstead School and I to a school in Watford,’ wrote Iris James. ‘I was six, and I remember on the first evening sitting by the window of the common room with the laurels in the rain outside tapping against the glass, night and aloneness of a kind so desolating that all other separations take me back to it . . .’.

  Some children were lucky enough to stay with loving aunts, cousins or grandparents and for these, if cousins and friends were also around, life was the most normal. Others less fortunate were lodged in boarding houses that catered specifically for Raj children, with unloving relations to whom children were merely a nuisance to be tolerated, or simply left at school all year. One little boy, aged six, was sent to a Dame school where the boys were not allowed to drink anything after 5.30 p.m. in case they wet their beds – suffering from thirst, they got round this by drinking their bathwater. Iris and her brothers, sent to the vicarage at Potten End (run as a home for Raj children), spent as much time as they could on the moor behind the house, eating imaginary meals ‘to try and fill the gap left by the sparse vicarage fare’. When not on the moor the shy Iris ‘spent a lot of time planning how not to be seen going in and out of the lavatory, which was a shed in the garden. The shame of being seen using this was not to be borne.’

  Thus the idea of a home – the home they never had – was something to which these young people clung tenaciously; and a husband or wife, the one person always there for them, was the emotional equivalent. Iris James, sent home at six and brought out to India again at sixteen and a half with the express purpose of finding a husband, realised by the time she was almost eighteen that the only way to escape her difficult home life was through marriage (‘at seventeen and a half I began seriously to size up my escorts’). The man she fell in love with and married, always known simply as ‘Mac’, was another Raj child, left at school in Scotland at the age of twelve and sent out to plant tea at nineteen. ‘Now he was twenty-three and I was eighteen and we both felt needed, loved, settled.’ Perhaps, too, this feeling of having at last ‘come home’ was the reason why so many Raj brides were undaunted by the difficulties or dangers, either physical or psychological, often f
aced in India.

  Lack of occupation was one. Servants took care of every domestic chore. Even the ordinary excitement of making a first home together was lacking when you knew that in two or three years you might be posted somewhere completely different, with a fresh lot of furniture to rent or buy. With no libraries or radios, cultural entertainment was far down on the list; here the girl with an interest like photography or painting was lucky. Many of the more spirited would accompany their husbands on tour or camping, making the most of the sights and sounds of the jungle. For birdwatchers, India was a paradise – golden orioles that flashed through tree tops, long-beaked bee eaters, weaver birds that made loofah-like nests, pigeons, hoopoes striped in orange, black and white, the crests on their heads opening and shutting like small black fans, bright green parakeets, minah birds that mimicked everything from the songs of other birds to household noises.

  One of the main hazards of married life was loneliness. Girls who married a man whose work was in the mofussil – anywhere up country or well away from cities, towns, stations or cantonments – were often miles from their nearest neighbour, with their social highlight a weekly visit to the club, with its leather chairs, month-old newspapers and, if enough people came, a Saturday night dance. Planters, policemen, forestry experts, missionaries, young ICS men and, often, doctors, many of whom travelled almost constantly to treat outbreaks of infectious diseases as they occurred, often led lives of great isolation – one reason why most of them were anxious to marry and gain the companionship of a wife and family – but they at least had their work.