As the theory that it was an airborne disease persisted in India until the end of the nineteenth century,* one Army technique for dealing with it was, immediately on an outbreak, to march out of barracks against the wind, to higher ground, and camp there. If there were more cases, the process was repeated (with polluted water as a main cause, coupled with the fact that water flows downhill, this was often a partial success, although not because of ‘escaping the cholera miasma’, as the doctors believed).
Rabies, if not caught in time, invariably meant a horrible death – for animals as well as humans. As most cantonments were haunted by pi-dogs the fear of rabies was ever-present. Without immediate treatment, a person bitten by a rabid dog invariably dies, so anyone bitten by a dog suspected of incubating this disease had to undergo a course of painful injections to ensure their survival. (In India it is estimated that one person still dies of rabies every thirty minutes.) Before the Pasteur Institute was established at Kasauli in 1900, victims sometimes had to be rushed to Paris where the Pasteur Institute had been administering the vaccine since its discovery in 1885. Thus in military cantonments, the sight of a soldier on a motorbike, rifle slung over his back, in pursuit of a rabid pi-dog, was a familiar sight.
Fortunately, it was fairly easy to tell from a dog’s behaviour if it might be a risk.* If the animal appeared mad, aggressive or frothing at the mouth it almost certainly had rabies; when rabid, even a timid dog often bites rather than running away. Even before these symptoms appeared it was usually clear if a dog was ill. Sam Raschen, sharing a bungalow with three other subalterns in Rawalpindi, made great friends with their dogs, two of which were a couple of three-month-old Airedale puppies. ‘One of them, Titus, loved to play by worrying fiercely anything he could get his pin-sharp little teeth into – often my hands! One day Titus was visibly out of sorts, the next his owner announced that rabies was suspected, so the poor little chap had to be destroyed (an examination of his brain confirmed the diagnosis).’
None of those in the bungalow could be sure that they had not been scratched and then licked in romping with Titus, so they were sent off immediately for treatment. As well as remaining teetotal, they had to have two injections, deep into the stomach, every day for a fortnight. ‘Towards the end,’ wrote Raschen, ‘one felt like a walking pincushion. All the male patients stood in a queue, holding up the front of their shirts, rather undignified but little time was wasted.’ There was still time, however, to play a joke on the other poor sufferers. ‘The trick lay in arriving early to be at the front of the line, giving a dreadful grimace after receiving one’s jabs and muttering audibly about the shocking bluntness of the needles today.’
‘It is awful the way dogs go mad in India,’ wrote Lilah Wingfield in December 1911. ‘Captain Mitford has lost three lately, through rabies. It is thought they get bitten by a mad jackal originally, then one dog bites another and so it goes on. Mr Palmer’s delicious smooth-coated black retriever which he had in camp at Delhi with him, started rabies a day or two before we left Pindi. He tied it up and had it carefully watched and at length the poor beast had to be shot.’
Between the mid-1880s and the early 1920s India was struck by a series of major epidemics. As well as malaria and cholera, both endemic, there was Spanish flu and bubonic plague.
For well over twenty years, plague was a major killer and caused an estimated ten million deaths. It spread from Bombay, where the death toll rose to 183,984 between 1896 and 1914. When the outbreak first began, it was not known in India that plague was spread by rat fleas – only in the twentieth century was one woman able to write grimly: ‘When a dead rat falls from the rafters of the roof, you know that bubonic plague has come to town.’ Instead, the city was scoured with sea water and carbolic. Drains were flushed out, disinfectant sprinkled in tenements and alleyways.
In 1897, to halt the spread of plague, the Government forbade fairs and pilgrimages, segregating suspected plague cases, examining and where necessary detaining travellers by road and rail to examine them, dividing queues at railway stations into male and female. But this fell foul of India’s caste system, whereby even a touch by a white person could pollute, while for women, accustomed to purdah and strict modesty, a public examination for swollen lymph glands was deeply offensive. The result was that many potential cases were smuggled out of the city, taking the plague with them.
In 1898, so bad was the plague in the city and district of Poona that 1,200 British troops were employed for months searching out ‘plague’ houses, so that these could be disinfected or destroyed. ‘When a case was detected, the family was removed to a special camp, after being thoroughly washed in a strong solution of perchloride of mercury,’ wrote General Sir Henry Beauvoir De Lisle.* After this, the house was disinfected and whitewashed; later still, when it was considered safe, the survivors could return. What made the job difficult was that, to avoid being sent to the camp, the inhabitants of a house where someone had died of the plague that night often buried the body under the house’s floor; unless detected, the infection remained through plague fleas.
Unlike most of the other diseases, plague was transmitted in the cold weather, when people huddled together for warmth, with outbreaks peaking in the spring and summer. Doctors who treated it were known as plague sahibs. ‘Driving through the district it is easy to tell the villages where the plague is really bad,’ wrote Margaret Munson, who had come out in the Fishing Fleet to marry a man in the Indian Medical Service. ‘The houses are empty and along the roads nearby are huts of grass and wood built by those afraid to remain in infected villages.’ IMS doctors had a mobile dispensary camp, travelling ten to twelve miles a day by bullock cart, doing small operations such as cataracts, with local anaesthetic and careful sterilisation of their instruments between operations.
During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–8, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died, and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people perished. The main reason was the British insistence on Indian farmers growing jute or cotton – to facilitate trade – rather than food crops such as rice and wheat. In times of shortage, this policy was catastrophic.
Smallpox was another killer: between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths. And after the First World War came Spanish flu, the pandemic that lasted from March 1918 to June 1920 and killed up to fifty million people worldwide. In India it accounted for between ten and seventeen million deaths.
By the 1930s children could be inoculated against smallpox, cholera and plague, but dysentery and diphtheria (which accounted for over two thousand deaths a year in Britain) still carried off many.
When in 1898 Sir Ronald Ross, working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calutta, finally proved that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, as many precautions as possible were taken against their bites, from mosquito nets to the wearing (by women) of light boots under their evening dresses in ‘mosquito-ey’ areas. Even so, malaria was so common that most people treated it as almost unavoidable. ‘We took five grains of quinine and five grains of aspirin every six hours until the fever broke,’ wrote Monica Campbell-Martin. ‘The rapid drop from a high temperature to one that was well below normal brought the body out in such a heavy sweat that the bed sheets were wringing wet. Once the fever had broken people were supposed to remain in bed for twenty-four hours and take things easy.’
Sometimes malaria arrived in epidemic form. Joan Henry, newly married to sugar plantation manager Geoffrey Allen, was one of the few who never caught malaria, although 500 died around them in Pandaul village, and Geoffrey suffered for a week each month with repeated attacks, with the typical very high temperature, shivering, vomiting, headaches and pains. During the times he was on his feet he brought in squads of low-caste Hindus to burn the corpses – the villagers themselves were so weak from malaria that they were throwing these into the nearby water supply. It was only this s
wift action that prevented a cholera outbreak from contaminated water.
Along with malaria, dengue fever, still endemic in more than one hundred countries, was another disease transmitted by mosquitoes. Although most people survived, it was a truly painful experience, involving anything from bleeding gums, pain behind the eyes, red palms and feet to a high temperature, as described by this sufferer:
‘One morning in July I woke up barely able to move. Every bone in my body felt as though it were being crushed in a vice, with hot knives stabbing into my brain. Wrenching myself out of bed, I went to the bathroom and vomited what felt like everything in my system.
‘Over the next couple of days my body temperature became extremely erratic; one minute I would be drenched in sweat, burning up; the next I would be screaming for blankets, desperate to stop chills so extreme and rapid in onset that it felt as if I had plunged into icy water.
‘The pain hammering my bones and joints was the hardest to bear; the disease lives up to its nickname of breakbone fever. Nausea and vomiting left me unable to contemplate the tiniest morsel of food while the bone pain robbed me of sleep so that I became extremely weak . . . there is little doctors can do except control symptoms, so I was put on a saline drip . . .’.
In the damp heat of the hot weather, skin infections could be a problem. One particularly nasty one, supposedly transmitted by the bite of tiny, almost invisible sand flies, was known as ‘Delhi boils’, a self-explanatory term. These began as itching red spots on exposed skin such as the face, hands, feet, elbows, ankles; for men, left in the plains while women and children sought the coolness of the hills, a common place was the back of the neck.
Disease was not the only peril faced by the Fishing Fleet girl. Throughout the duration of the Raj there were outbreaks of fighting and sporadic rioting, with almost constant battling of one kind or another along the North-West frontier, then as now such engagements almost a hobby among those warlike people. ‘There is fighting at Malakund, which saw a number of the soldiers depart,’ wrote Lady Elisabeth Bruce in 1897. ‘One man, a major, had a Pathan servant who asked him very earnestly if he was not going to the front to fight. “Why?” said the officer. “Because I long to go too, that I may get a shot at my father-in-law,” said his servant.’ Later she heard news of another outbreak on the frontier, near Peshawar, and as the month progressed half her father’s soldier ADCs left for the front.
Women, of course, did not fight – but natural disasters were no respecters of gender.
On tour in Gilgit, Rosemary Redpath and her Political Officer husband Alexander sometimes heard ‘the familiar crackle which heralded the arrival of boulders and rubble from high up on the mountainside’. On those occasions there was little time for the Redpaths, travelling along a narrow track with a sheer precipice on one side, to decide whether to gallop ahead, stay put, or turn on the proverbial sixpence and retreat.
Once, halted for a midday meal, they heard a loud crack and on looking up saw ‘enormous rocks the size of houses virtually standing out in mid-air thousands of feet above us. We all took to our heels leaving, I regret to say, horses and baggage ponies tethered where they were.’ Luckily the avalanche was diverted by a couloir, leaving the Redpaths – and their horses – in the clear as it thundered to the bottom of the valley.
In Bihar, on 15 January 1934, Monica Campbell-Martin heard a noise like the rushing of an express train, then the walls of her bungalow started to ripple as if made of cloth and she rushed into the garden. ‘The hills, the mountains, the trees, all were dipping and swerving. A hill disappeared like a scenic backdrop as I looked at it. Hundreds of birds flew by, screeching their terror.’
Joan Henry had a similar experience, in the same Bihar earthquake. At 2.13 in the afternoon as she was resting on her bed she heard a rumbling that at first sounded like the wind that heralded the monsoon. As the noise grew louder, the first shock waves hit. ‘My bed rocked and I leapt off and tore out of my room, but it was difficult to run as the floor behaved like a roller coaster, up one moment and down the next.’
Outside ‘the lawn was like a billowing sea, great waves instead of flat grass. Two cars, parked outside the garage, were rolling backwards and forwards in unison, partners in a formal dance – brakes were often forgotten in such a flat area. As I gazed at them, the ground under my feet cracked open, splits appeared around me, and out of these spouted high gushes of hot liquid, a muddy mixture.’ The garden was left under a mixture of mud, sand and water but the Henry household was safe. They, and those nearby, were lucky: the quake, which measured 8.5 on the Richter scale, killed something like 30,000 people and caused immense structural damage, with collapsed buildings, railway lines twisted like writhing snakes, bridges broken and flooding.
Much later the same year there was a meeting in Patna, attended by the Governor and involving the most senior men in the province to discuss what was to be done in the aftermath of the earthquake. Here one of the ADCs decided to tell a funny story he had heard about a lady who had been caught in her bath when the quake struck. She had rushed out of the bathroom dripping wet, clutching only a small towel, and shouting in her poor Hindi a sentence which translated as ‘Five rupees a look!’ None of the laughs the young man had hoped for materialised; instead there was a frozen silence, broken by the District Commissioner (the top ICS man in the district) saying in a frigid voice: ‘That was my wife.’
There was not such a happy ending for Edward Wakefield of the Indian Medical Service. He survived the Quetta earthquake of 1 May 1935, in which between 30,000 and 60,000 people died, but it killed one of his two small daughters. Two days later, camping in the Residency gardens, he wrote to his mother-in-law; first telling her that his wife Lalage had survived, he described the events of that terrible night, when they had gone to bed about 12.35 (the earthquake occurred at 3.02 a.m.).
‘I was woken up, in pitch blackness, by an indescribable roar of noise. I had time, so Lal tells me, to say “My God, what’s that?” before the crash came; but to me it seemed that I had hardly woken from a deep sleep and, alarmed, had half turned towards Lal, when the whole world collapsed on me. Everything tumbled on me – beams, rafters, bricks, mortar – from above and from both sides. I was surprised, when all this falling of the house had stopped, to find myself alive. I called to Lal, but she could only groan in reply . . . there was a big beam across her back, that hurt her frightfully, and she could not move. I then struggled desperately to move but could not manage to. My head was wedged between two rafters and the beam that was across Lal’s back was also across my thighs. My legs and body were covered deep with bricks and plaster.’
The only part of his body that Edward Wakefield could move was his right hand With it, he tried to remove what bits of bricks and plaster he could touch. But soon he realised that to do this would be dangerous, as when some plaster was dislodged it almost filled the small breathing space that was left to him. Somehow he managed to breathe, though not freely, and working away very gently and cautiously with his one hand, he managed to release most of his arm. Now, better able to use his hand, he could clear a space by his wife’s head so that she could breathe more easily.
‘Meanwhile, I heard Nurse, from a great distance it seemed, shout for help, and I also heard Bold One crying; but no sound from Imogen. After I had found it quite impossible to free myself or help Lal, I simply lay still, as did Lal, and we waited. Eventually (after about ten minutes) I heard sounds of people moving; I shouted but got no reply. Nurse also shouted and it seemed that people answered her shouts.
‘After that, things are confused in my mind. I remember feeling relief at the thought that Bold One had got away with Nurse, though how I knew they had been pulled out I cannot say; perhaps the fact that Nurse’s shouts for help had stopped and men’s voices were heard made me deduce that they had escaped.’
He shouted again for Ghulam Mohammad, their bearer, and eventually a voice replied from what seemed to the barely conscious Edward an inf
inite distance. Then, as he later recalled, the worst period of all followed: he could not move at all, he was in pitch darkness and Lalage was silent, in great pain and possibly dying. The rescuers were making no headway, as they had no light and no tools to dig with and could only guess where the Wakefields were lying. After what seemed hours, they managed to clear away the bricks and plaster above the couple, and at last got to the beam lying across them. They tried to move it – and failed. They tried again, and again failed. And, to Edward’s despair, they said it could not be moved. All this was still in the threatening dark. Time passed, and he began to feel that the rescuers had begun to give up hope of getting them out. ‘I had that last horror of feeling that Lal and I could not even kill ourselves.’
Eventually the rescuers (a sweeper, a driver and another man from their compound, and a prisoner from the lock-up behind the house) tried approaching the trapped couple from a different direction. At last they got Edward and Lalage’s heads free and after that he was able to show them how to get Lalage out. First they cleared all rubble away from the upper part of her body and legs, then took some of the strain of the beam off her and drew her out by the shoulders. It was another ten minutes before Edward was pulled out in his turn and just as he found himself on the drive in front of their house, up came the Superintendent of Police with reinforcements to help – a party of the West Yorkshire Regiment who had come from their cantonment. The end was a tragedy.
‘It was still too dark to see much but the parties kept at work with the help of hurricane lanterns and, from the servants’ quarters, bodies, dead or alive, were continually being extracted. The party looking for Imogen worked for two and a half hours before they came on one of her feet, and then I did not look any more but waited near by.’
Although among Europeans death by snakebite was comparatively rare, to the Western mind one of the greatest terrors of India was snakes. As a consequence, some British would sleep with a revolver by their side in case of a snake’s sudden appearance in bedroom or bathroom. Again, snakes were largely a peril of the hot weather (in the cold, they hibernate). In March, as the heat began, frogs would seek the cool, damp quietness of bathrooms, with their convenient drainage hole entrance, and snakes, scenting prey, would follow them. As snakes love long grass, bungalow compounds in regimental cantonments were inspected to see that grass was cut short.
The Fishing Fleet Page 29
