The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  The most deadly snake was the krait, common in northern India. Small – seldom more than two feet in length – and an inconspicuous grey-brown colour, it is probably responsible for more deaths than any other snake in India. It is mostly nocturnal, said to kill in twenty minutes and is generally lethargic. As it lies in the dust unnoticed, anyone who goes barefoot is at risk, especially because as it is deaf it does not, like most other snakes, slither quickly out of the way if it gets a chance.

  Because it can only raise its head about a quarter of an inch, Europeans, who wear shoes and boots, are generally safe, unless it drops off the top of a door or curtain rod where it sometimes lies. A krait fell on the head of Betsy Macdonald’s (née Anderson) husband Tommy as he was opening the garage door of their bungalow in Bihar. ‘Luckily,’ wrote Betsy afterwards, ‘he was wearing his topi.’

  Perhaps because, instinctively, most people feel an atavistic fear of snakes that somehow connects with the depth of the subconscious, there was also a curious fascination with snake charmers. ‘The Sanp-wallah, or Snake People, are short, dark-skinned people with broad faces that suggest Dravidian ancestry, long hair in ringlets or pinned on top of the head and thick beards. Their snakes live in baskets, carried in yokes. Traditionally, they wear orange robes,’ wrote Evelyn Barrett, who witnessed their mysterious ability seemingly to call wild snakes to them.

  ‘In our compound, one patch of grass, fifteen feet by twelve feet, remained uncut. Before this, the men took up position, the elder retiring a few paces and dropping his load. Pacing up and down before the grass and scrutinising it carefully, the boy then raised his pipe and started to play.

  ‘He sauntered back and forth, never taking his eyes off the grass, as the beckoning notes rose and fell. A rustle was answered by a stirring in the music. Leaning forward, the charmer now played with urgency, a summons that seemed to strike and follow the rippling grass until, almost unnoticed, a small, dark snake lay writhing at his feet. When the music stopped it started whipping and hissing, but at the first notes of the pipe it flattened and calmed, coiling ever more closely until, at a sign from the boy, the older man stepped forward and seized it behind the head, flicking it, hissing, into a sack. A second snake was similarly dealt with.

  ‘Next came a cobra. It was writhing on the ground before anyone saw it leave the grass. As before, when the music stopped, the snake seemed to lose purpose, and started to writhe and hiss. As before, at the first notes it flattened and undulated towards the player. Then it ‘danced’. Facing the pipe, hood spread, it reared and swayed from side to side, while its forked tongue ceaselessly flickered. Holding the pipe to within an inch of its head, the charmer played the snake, drawing it to and fro as certainly as though it were attached to his pipe. Before disappearing into a sack, it was made to bite a leaf and we were shown the two viscous fang prints. Cobras are always found in pairs, so not until the second was disposed of was the performance concluded.

  ‘“Now,” said my husband, “get us a wild snake! These were doped.”

  ‘A ten-rupee note silenced expostulations. This time, both were taken aside, stripped and searched by my husband and another officer, before being allowed to continue the performance. Everyone was then ordered by the sanp-wallah to stand back and neither speak nor move.

  ‘As before, the boy paced before the grass, staring at it closely. The older man now stood up. After a deep salaam, with eyes closed and palms joined against his breast, he started rapidly intoning. I caught the words ‘Hazur’ (Presence) and ‘Mehtar’ (Prince) at each mention of which he salaamed. Gathering momentum his voice rose, to fall to desperate mutterings, the while his hands were lowered in supplication. Now the pipe was speaking, softly, calling, calling.

  ‘Suddenly the boy ceased his pacing and, half-crouching, played with frenzy at a point in the grass. Hissings followed. As these grew louder, the boy retreated in dancing, circling steps, always facing the grass and never for an instance ceasing to play. The older man now stepped aside. Next instant three feet of skewbald snake shot from the grass, and as quickly withdrew. The hissings now became frantic and the boy leapt as a snake flung itself, hissing and writhing, at his feet. It was about five feet long, coloured pink and sand, and in the wildest rage. Fresh hissings now broke out as a second and even longer snake broke from the grass. Anyone unfamiliar with snakes can have no idea of the lightning speed of a roused six-footer.

  ‘To us horrified onlookers it was hardly possible to follow the movements of the snakes. Although we realised that both reptiles were frantic from fear, and were only trying to regain the shelter of the grass, the odds against the naked, prancing boy and his pipe seemed overwhelming. Again and again, the snakes were turned by a dancing toe. Gradually the hissings subsided, the thrashing bodies closed in ever-tightening coils until, for a second, one snake lay motionless at the foot of the charmer. On the instant it was snatched behind the head by the older man and flung, hissing, into a sack. Five minutes later the second snake was similarly dealt with. For no baksheesh on earth will a sanp-wallah kill a snake.

  ‘Streaming with sweat, chest heaving, the boy stood up. Physically and nervously he was exhausted. Throughout the performance not a word had been uttered. Now a babel of voices broke forth – flat, English voices, falling strangely on that Indian garden of scent and sun and secret, thrilling power. Only the sanp-wallah were apart, silently and methodically adjusting their garments and fastening the sacks.

  ‘Baksheesh to the extent of twenty rupees (about thirty shillings), to these people a fortune, seemed little enough for what we had witnessed.’

  Disease, avalanche, snakebite – Fishing Fleet girls who stayed in India were threatened by them all. But few could have had the experience of Olive Crofton, married to a District Officer and setting off by train from Central India in 1920. ‘There had been trouble on the railways lately with train thieves, including several murders,’ she wrote laconically; and at her husband’s instigation packed her revolver in her dressing case.

  Her carriage had a detachable chair, more comfortable than the ordinary seats, and while she sat reading in this, her back to the window, a reflection of something flickered on the glass of her spectacles. She turned round to see a large man, who had been crouching out of sight on the footboard, clambering through the window, a leaded stick in his right hand and a large knife in his belt.

  Luckily her dressing case was open on the bunk beside her. She reached in, picked up her revolver, released the safety catch and pointed it at him in one swift motion while saying in Urdu: ‘Do you want to be shot?’

  ‘An expression of utter horror came into his face as he threw himself backwards out of the window,’ she wrote later. ‘And the last I saw of him was rolling over and over like a shot rabbit down the high railway embankment.’ A woman who could coolly tackle an armed robber, one feels, could tackle anything.

  19

  ‘As I inspected ours I sighed a bit’

  The First Home

  In 1889 Anne Wilson, newly married to a Deputy Commissioner, wrote to a friend of her first impression of her new home in the Punjab: ‘Picture to yourself, then, a square one-storied flat-roofed house, with a pillared veranda at each side, nine rooms, three in a row, without an entrance hall or any passage, each room opening into the other as rooms do in an étage abroad, each room having one or two door-windows into the bargain, and then count how many doors or windows there must be – a blessing no doubt in the hot weather but not ornamental in the cold . . .

  ‘Every room looks as high as a country church, the roofs are of upholstered rafters, the doors are folding doors, bolted in the middle. If you wish to keep them shut, you must bolt them. If you wish to keep them open, you have to fix a wooden block in, behind the hinges. At present a white cotton, sheet-like curtain hangs from a wooden rod before each . . .’

  She went on to speak of the extraordinarily primitive kitchen arrangements – which, in the majority of bungalows, persisted into the twentiet
h century. There was no pantry, dresser, shelves, cupboards or even hot or cold running water – not even a proper kitchen, with a scullery or larder, let alone a plate rack for drying dishes. ‘The kitchen is a little dark room, with a board on the floor to hold the meat, two tumble-down brick “ranges” in one corner, a stone receptacle in another into which the water is thrown, which runs out through its hole in the wall into a sunk tub.

  ‘There are two shelves, on which are an array of pots, a hatchet, drainer, one or two tin spoons and some pudding and pate shapes.’ After the first shock, she was cheered to learn that a brick floor could be laid and a sink built while they were in camp, and anything in the way of tables or kitchen equipment could be ordered.

  Furniture was sparse, usually left or sold by the previous resident. Single beds, pushed into the centre of the room to avoid any creature that might crawl down the walls, were the rule because the nights were so hot. Bungalows were always whitewashed; wallpaper would have been eaten by white ants. To soften the appearance of these high bare walls the authors of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook recommended a painted band around the base of the wall, with patterns around the top. Floors were often of beaten mud – termites loved wood – covered with grass or bamboo matting. Until electricity arrived during the twentieth century, light came from paraffin or coconut oil lamps and candles.

  ‘As I inspected ours I sighed a bit,’ wrote newly wed Fishing Fleet girl Cecile Stanley Clarke, on arrival at their first home – her husband Henry’s regiment was stationed in the Fort at Calcutta. ‘The furniture consisted of two single beds covered in mosquito nets, two rather battered little tables, a couple of chairs and a kind of cupboard. The drawing-room had a table, a sofa – very hard Victorian horse-hair type – two armchairs of the same vintage, and six brown flowerpot stands on long legs.’ These latter, she continued mournfully, were beloved of the Indian contractors, ‘and as no one saw eye to eye with them the junior subalterns were generally landed with the lot . . . our dining room had a table, with a blotchy kind of surface (only colonels’ and majors’ wives had ones with a high polish), six chairs, and a kind of sideboard affair.’

  Violet Hanson found the same dilapidated bareness awaiting her when she and her husband returned from honeymoon to the Indian Cavalry School at Sauga, where her husband was to take the Cavalry course – obligatory for all Indian cavalry officers.

  ‘Sauga was a very old military station and the bungalows were of the most primitive kind. They were furnished by the Public Works Department with a minimum of functional furniture: the usual wooden and cane chairs, iron beds with mosquito netting, dining table and chairs, and a chest of drawers for dressing tables. The floors were bare with rush matting covering them and we got some material from the bazaar for curtains.

  ‘The ceilings were nothing but ceiling cloths, which were much-patched cotton material stretched beneath the rafters of the roof. These cloths hung fairly slackly and a colony of various little creatures lived under the roof. Looking up, you could see the imprint of their little feet running from side to side over the ceiling cloth and hear squeaks and rustling. A colony of bats lived in one corner of my bedroom, with a separate entrance hole, so that they would emerge at night to fly about the room. When my husband was dining in the Mess (as he had to do at least once a week) I would have my dinner in bed, under the relative safety of the mosquito netting.’

  As Violet sat in bed eating she would see muskrats, harmless little creatures but with a strong smell that gave them their name, scuttling round the sides of the room by the skirting boards. Less pleasant were other, bolder rats which ran across the room ‘sometimes over my feet while I was dressing. There were insects of all kinds, of course, and lizards on the wall, that ate the spiders and flies.’

  Occasionally a bungalow would have a justified reputation as ‘queer’. Before she married, Cecile Stanley Clarke and her mother stayed in one, rented for them by Cecile’s brother-in-law Hubert Gough. It had been the old Madras Regiment’s mess in Indian Mutiny times and, thought Cecile, there was a ‘something’ that still lingered. Later, at 12.30 one night, it manifested itself. Here is Cecile’s account:

  ‘“Mamma, I can hear something!”

  ‘“Go to sleep,” she replied, lighting our bedside light; but not before I had seen the most horrible yellow face pressed against the window.

  . . . ‘“I saw something.” I continued, with chattering teeth.

  ‘“Rubbish,” she replied, though with not much conviction.

  ‘I got up and ran to the window – nothing to be seen.

  ‘“You must have dreamt it,” said Mama, but I hadn’t and I can see the face now, grinning hideously at me.

  ‘“Golly! I don’t like this at all”, I said.

  ‘There was a veranda running round just outside our bedroom. I opened the doors and went out to have a look round. The moonlight was making great shadows and the stars seemed so near that I felt I could stretch out a hand and pluck one from the sky.

  ‘“Chowkidar,” I called. “Have you seen anyone?”

  ‘“Banshee,” replied the man, with no hesitation at all.

  ‘“I don’t like this,” I said. “Let’s go back to Dorset tomorrow.”

  ‘I went to the great cupboard and hunted round for the little bottle of holy water I had been given for just such an emergency, then went round the room flipping it about. “That will keep them out of here, anyway,” I said, climbing back into bed and pulling the sheets over my head. Mama kept the light on and read a book.

  ‘When I told Hubert about it the next morning he just laughed. Not so my sister Mary. “You are right,” she said. “There is something funny about this bungalow; it has been empty for years, because of course no one would take it as it is haunted.” She and I made such a fuss that in the end Hubert had a police guard put on the two staircases that led up to our veranda.

  ‘Night after night, just as we were having dinner, we would hear footsteps pattering about above our heads. “Banshees,” we would yell, and all rush up and have a ghost hunt, but we never saw anything. Our police guards put sand on the floors and strands of cotton across the veranda, the footsteps continued but the feet left no marks, nor was the cotton broken.’

  The sound of clanking was what woke Fishing Fleet girl Violet Field on her first night of married life on her husband’s station in the Punjab. She asked her new husband, Jim Acheson, what the noise was, to be told that it was made by the chains worn by the gardeners working in their garden. They were all prisoners from the local prison, he explained. Violet would have none of this. ‘No one will wear chains in my garden!’ she said. After that, every day the prisoners would come, have their chains struck off, work in the garden and then undergo a rigorous head count before being chained up again to go back to gaol.

  For Ruth Barton and her husband Pete their garden brought glamour. After arriving in Bombay they went straight to Secunderabad in the Deccan where her husband’s battalion of the Rajputana Rifles was stationed. Here they dined outside, their table under a gold mohur tree in the garden, shaped like an open umbrella. In mid-March it was brilliant with scarlet blossoms against its bare branches. They hung a light in the tree so that all the insects hovered round it, and little owls swooped down and feasted on the insects. Then came feathery leaves and then more scarlet flowers. On clear nights they slept in the garden, well away from the heat-soaked walls of the bungalow, where a ‘blessed coolness rose with the dew and the fragrance of tobacco flowers and night-scented stock filled the air’.

  Some things were permitted that would be frowned on at home – in India, for example, it was quite permissible for young ladies to have a chota peg as a sundowner (indeed, it was medically advised), whereas in England a young woman downing whisky would have been very mal vu.

  But the importance of keeping up standards was felt strongly. ‘You seem to think, dearie, that it’s only people who come from out of the way places who get untidy or careless in the
ir appearance,’ wrote Leslie Lavie to his fiancée Flossie in March 1896. ‘I can name numbers of people in Secunderabad who seem to have no scruples about white petticoats . . . I’m sure you would never get like that, degenerating as the climate of Vizianagram is. I like, or should I think like, ladies of my household to wear sort of light tea gowns during the day in India, than which nothing is more becoming; instead of which you generally see, if you surprise anybody suddenly, some very old and untidy costume.’

  Fifteen years later, in a paper she read to young women planning marriage, Florence Evans, wife of Joseph Evans in the Royal Corps of Armourers, made the same thing clear: ‘It has been particularly impressed upon me that this paper would not be complete if I did not mention curl pins,’ she wrote. ‘These I am led to understand are particularly disliked by the male sex, therefore they should be carefully laid aside before the return of the men; not only this but we should be neatly dressed in our house to please our husbands as well as others.’

  Even in small stations like the little railway outpost of Arkonam, where Hilda Bourne lived with her husband Jim, formality reigned. Jim, who first went to India as a civil engineer for a railway company, did so well that he was soon responsible for the Nilgiri Railway (one of India’s famous Hill Railways) that linked the fashionable hill station of Ootacamund to the main system. Hilda and Jim had been childhood sweethearts, and she joined the Fishing Fleet of autumn 1903 with her wedding cake in her luggage. They married in Bombay a week after her arrival, settling down in a company bungalow in Arkonam, almost 660 miles distant, soon after their honeymoon.