Here in this town, supposedly one of the hottest in India (sometimes the temperature was 43°C for several days running), at a time when flannel was worn next to the skin and no lady was considered dressed without corsets and petticoats, the small British community gave constant dinner parties, almost all of which had to have eight courses, with the correct wine for every course. As the only meat available locally was goat or chicken – supplemented occasionally by what was shot for the pot – one of the chief ingredients of these meals was the cook’s imagination, although for special occasions European food was sent up from Madras.
None of this entertaining, of course, could have happened without the servants who were an integral part of life in India. Buffer and link between the stranger and the vast land of his responsibility, their loyalty was a miracle of the Raj. ‘I sometimes wonder they do not cut off all our heads and say nothing about it,’ wrote Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, the Governor-General 1836–42.
The size of a bungalow was irrelevant to the number of servants employed. This conformed to a basic quota and consisted of: bearer (personal servant, also valet to the master of the household), khitmagar (butler), khansamah (cook), messalgie (pantry boy), bheestie (water carrier) and sweepter. For a ‘married’ bungalow, with children, nanny (ayah) and nursery boy would be added. A dhobi (laundry man) usually came from outside.
Outside were mali (gardener) and as many boys (chokras) as he could wangle. For anyone with horses there would be a jemadar-syce (head groom) and a syce per horse or (polo) pony. Finally there was the chowkidar (night watchman), ‘a stalwart who spent most of the night snoring in a corner of the veranda’. The bearer was the head servant, responsible for overseeing running the household, engaging other servants, paying wages and overseeing expenses and doing the bidding of his master. A good one was invaluable; a bad one could make life irritating, difficult and distracting.
Anne Wilson found herself with thirteen servants – including a groom, water carrier and milkman – but soon realised that supervision was needed. ‘One must look after the filter [on the water supply], see to the milk, the feeding of cow, sheep and poultry, the making of butter, bread and cakes, the careful trimming of the lamps, to the dusting of books, pictures, furniture, to the tinning of pots and pans, to the way the cook uses his dishes or his dusters.’
For Indians, domestic service carried no stigma but rather conferred status. Servants, like soldiers, were drawn from the highest strata of village society, their regular wage a wealth normally undreamt of. Like English servants in great houses, they reflected the standing of their employers; thus the bearer of a British cavalry colonel claimed higher wages and status than that of a British infantry colonel; to be in the Viceroy’s household was to be at the pinnacle. Entertaining also added prestige; Anne Wilson found that her servants invariably laid places for four even when she and her husband were alone ‘as if they were in a state of constant hospitable expectation’.
Memoir after memoir has described how one could come home after a drink or a swim at the club at 8.30, tell the cook that there would be six guests for dinner that night – and know that an excellent dinner would somehow be conjured up out of the kitchen’s hole-in-the-ground oven and handle-less saucepans.
Nor did it matter how basic the newlyweds’ silver or china cupboard was; what was needed would be borrowed from a nearby bungalow to maintain the honour of the household. Many a bride was surprised to see her newly acquired salt cellars or candlesticks appearing, without a word said, on the dinner table of her hosts. ‘The Brigadier’s pearl-handled fruit knives figured at our parties as regularly as our green coffee cups graced the Colonel’s table,’ wrote Evelyn Barrett. ‘Of course no one said anything.’
In the same way the gardener, whose first duty was to produce flowers, always managed this even when there were none growing in the garden. One story, perhaps apocryphal, tells of a man leaving for England who gave his gardener a reference that read: ‘This gardener has been with me fifteen years. I have no garden, I have never lacked flowers and he has never had a conviction.’
In England, just as children of the upper and middle classes often lived a life completely separate from their parents, going down brushed, combed and smartened up, to see them for an hour after tea, with their nurseries quite likely on a different floor, so servants, too, had their own quarters away from the rest of the family.
But in India, living in a bungalow, where rooms often opened out of one another, there was far less separation; and the servants, who did not knock and walked noiselessly on bare feet, could often be in a room before anyone was aware of their presence. The bearers would be in attendance all day long; others would wait at table, another might be waiting on the veranda for orders. Although their dwellings were completely separate, nevertheless they managed to know everything that was going on in the bungalow, from a surreptitious love affair to ill-health and the beginning of a pregnancy; next to her husband, the sweeper, who emptied the thunderboxes, had the most intimate knowledge of a woman’s bodily functions.
Hygiene meant full-time vigilance, from boiling water and milk, washing all fruit and vegetables in water sterilized with permanganate of potash, lining meat safes with mosquito netting to deter flies and pouring paraffin and boiling water down the cracks in the floors to keep away white ants, to filtering water. This was done by setting three large jars one above the other in a frame, with holes in the bases of the top two. In the top jar was put a mixture of gravel and charcoal, through which the water ran into the second jar, in which there was clean sand, which also took away the flavour of the charcoal. A further refinement was putting some minute pieces of sponge in the holes in the base of the second jar. The result was water so purified that if it came from a natural source it was fit to drink, though any from a well or stream near a village still had to be boiled.
Betsy Macdonald, who had married the owner of an up-country sugar factory in Bihar, had to rely on her husband to give the orders until she had learnt sufficient of the language. She managed to get a decent kitchen built; her next struggle was with the dhobi. Although the clothes and tea towels he brought back each evening were spotlessly white and impeccably washed and ironed, she suspected he had been using a lot of bleach and laying them out in the sun, which would soon rot them.
‘I followed him one day and to my horror my worst fears were confirmed as I was led to the buffalo pool. Everything and everybody washed there – dogs, buffaloes, children and villagers. It intrigued me how they changed their clothes in the water and came out of the murky pond looking cleaner . . . [but] I did not relish the idea of our washing being done there and then slapped to shreds on the rocks.’ She put an end to it, telling the man he could use as much hot water as he liked at the bungalow, and giving him a packet of Lux. He took to this arrangement, soon extolling the merits of ‘Lukkus sahopu’.
20
‘But what about horses? And polo? And parties?’
Iris Butler
Iris Butler was a quintessential daughter of the Raj. Her father’s career was in India, much of her childhood was spent as an ‘Empire orphan’ and it was as a Fishing Fleet girl that she returned to India – and marriage to an Indian Army cavalry officer. Like so many governors’ daughters, her choice fell on a man serving as ADC to her father.
Her family on either side was profoundly linked to India. She herself was born in Simla on 15 June 1905, the daughter of Montagu Butler, who had passed into the Indian Civil Service in 1896, and, after being knighted, was Governor of the Central Provinces 1925–33. Her mother, Ann Smith, was the daughter of a Scottish Presbyterian family with Indian connections stretching back over three generations. Her mother’s elder brother, James Dunlop-Smith, was Secretary to the Viceroy; her grandfather had gone to India at the age of twenty-one to teach at Doveton College, Calcutta, a school for Eurasian boys, but soon gave this up to become editor of The Friend of India, the forerunner of India’s leading English-language news
paper The Statesman. The husband of another aunt, on her father’s side this time, was the Legal Member of the Viceroy’s Council; her father’s elder brother, Harcourt Butler,* was Foreign and Political Secretary to the Government of India.
In 1911, aged six, Iris, her sister Dorothy and her brothers Austen and Jock were brought back to England by their mother in order to undergo an English education, staying first with an aunt in Cambridge. That July, in a letter to her husband, their mother Ann summed up the terrible dilemma that faced most Raj wives (and, incidentally, the priority given to boys in those days): ‘I can’t stand a year again [of separation]. And yet I can’t stand being away from the boys . . . still it is far and desperately worse for you, who are without either half.’
For Iris, England was a profound shock, both culturally and emotionally. ‘I stood in the window of the dining room of that tall, dark house and looked out at rain falling.’ Everyday living brought her face to face with other unwelcome facts. ‘One had to get used to sharing a bathroom; indeed, I have never got used to it. Naturally in 1911 there were very few houses with more than one bathroom. My grandfather Smith when he returned from India at the end of the nineteenth century found this so intolerable that he made himself an extra one for his exclusive use in his house in Edinburgh.’
Worse was to come. When Iris was eleven she suffered the fate common to almost all Raj children – years of separation from her parents. Her mother, wretched at being away from her husband for so long and her children now safely in boarding schools, left for India. First, in October 1916, she came to say goodbye to Iris. For this special occasion, at evening service in the school hall, Iris was allowed to sit beside her mother, in the place reserved for visitors. When they turned to kneel against their chairs for prayers the little girl was overcome by weeping. ‘I heard my tears plop on to the hymn sheet and thought in a detached way: “I have read about the sound of tears falling – so it really happens.”’
After this, parental contact was limited to letters. Many of the other girls at her school were also ‘orphans of the Empire’, so there was always great excitement on the day when the mail from India arrived. ‘We would come together, asking: “Have you had your Mail?” I remember rather despising a girl whose father was a Madras civilian, for I had been inoculated with the snobbery of the Punjab.’
At seventeen, Iris left school and was presented at Court. Rules had been relaxed a trifle since the 1914–18 war: although veils and feathers had made a return, trains were modified in length, bouquets could be dispensed with and the colour of the presentation dress was now optional – though most debutantes still stuck to white (if only because this expensive garment could later be converted into a wedding dress).
‘Coming out’ – that is, doing the London Season as an adult – was an ordeal. In 1922 girls still ‘put up’ their long hair* and were expected to leap from the persona of shy boarding-school miss into full grown-up mode overnight, to have mastered what Edith Sitwell called ‘the heavy art of light conversation’ and to have smartened up their appearance. Here Iris found herself at a disadvantage. ‘My mother bought my clothes with an eye to cost rather than fashion; I had no idea what to do with my hair or nails and certainly not my face. In any case there was little time between leaving school in July and embarking on SS Olympia of the Anchor Line at Glasgow in October.
‘Life on that ancient coal-burning hulk seemed to me the height of sophistication. As soon as we were past Port Said we slept on deck and were woken at 5.00 a.m. by lascars swabbing the decks. Sleeping under tropical stars became very much part of my life as time went on and I have never forgotten the wonder and beauty of it. We ate at long tables with “fiddles” put on in rough weather . . . and at Aden we were all ordered ashore for coaling to take place. Every door and port hole was sealed and an unending procession of little black emaciated figures toiled up the gang planks bowed down each under his sack of coal. It was a scene from Conrad and I never made a voyage like it again.’
‘When we went ashore at Bombay there was Gokal, my father’s bearer, impassive on the docks amid the yelling coolies and the rattle of anchors and cranes. He had originally been sent to my father by Uncle Harcourt, the elder brother, when father first landed in India as a “griffin” in the Indian Civil Service. He could never wait at table or go anywhere near our food as he was so high caste. One of my mother’s first injunctions to me when I rejoined the household was never to disturb Gokal or ask him for anything between the hours of two and five pm as he needed that time to go through the ritual of his main meal and its attendant purification.’
Iris and her mother travelled north from the coast on the Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian Railway, watching from the window as the panorama of India rolled out against a red and gold sunset. Slow trains of bullock carts wandered towards tiny villages where evening cooking fires twinkled and smoked, and mist rose to the height of a man’s shoulder. Their destination was Delhi, where her father was now working, as Secretary in the Department of Education, Health and Lands in the Government of India. This meant living in Delhi during the cold weather and departing for Simla with the rest of the Government of India when the hot weather began. The Government offices were then housed largely in what might later have been described as Nissen huts – everything had been moved up from Calcutta just before the 1914–18 war and this had delayed the building of the new city. But the Delhi of those days had many fine old trees and bungalows, the Butlers’ bungalow stood among them, back to back with the Commander-in-Chief’s.
Fortunately for Iris, she had grown up beautiful, and quickly began to have a good time. She went out hawking with one of her father’s Indian friends, Sir Oomer Hyat Khan, head of the Tiwana clan from the northern Punjab. ‘Father had spent his earliest days in India among them. Sir Oomer came to Delhi to attend Meetings of the Council of State and he brought with him his horses, hounds and hawks and a collection of wild feudatory retainers. We met at dawn; across the Jumna on the Meerut road and set off just as the sun rose, riding in medieval cavalcade, Sir Oomer with favourite hawk on wrist, others carried by followers who held the Afghan hounds on leashes. These hounds put up hares and goshawks were flown at the same time, turning the hares into the jaws of the hounds. Smaller falcons and merlins were flown at black partridge and quails. It was exhilarating and romantic in the diamond air of a winter morning. The retainers all looked like hawks themselves. As the sun became hotter we paused in some shady grove and chatted amicably over coffee and curry puffs.’
As an unmarried daughter of a father based at Government headquarters Iris was automatically included in invitations to official functions and meals. ‘It never occurred to me to refuse. I would not have been allowed to – nor would I have been allowed to find such functions dull.’ The dinners and lunches were formal, with a printed plan; every woman was told in advance the name of the man who would ‘take her in’ to dinner. The niceties of conversation – right up to the fish course, then to the left – were observed, as were the curtseys at Viceregal Lodge.
In Simla, where Iris spent two summers, life was one long party. ‘I never thought of anything but amusing myself It was excessively gay.’ Night after night she went to dances, usually riding with her skirt hitched up above her waist as a rickshaw (one with a mackintosh cover) was deemed too extravagant unless there was one of the regular Simla downpours. Her record was twenty-six nights running of dancing, ‘after which I fell asleep at one of my mother’s official dinners when sitting next to a very woolly old judge, for which I was afterwards severely reprimanded.’
She was taken up by a vivid and eccentric character called Edward Buck, known to everyone as Bucky, Reuter’s agent with the Government of India and an old friend of her parents. As children Rab and Iris had played with his daughter Lorna. Now that Iris was grown up, Bucky asked her to his weekend parties at his large and lovely house some way out in the mountains, in wild, secluded surroundings with a view straight on to the snows. His weeke
nd house parties conformed to the social ruling that a young girl must never be entertained alone with a man but only in a party with a married woman as chaperone – but his chaperones were the giddiest and most lively of the young Simla matrons.
‘I have no doubt that there were distinctly Edwardian antics after lights were out,’ wrote Iris later. ‘But to seduce young girls simply was not done. In that enclosed society it would have provoked extreme embarrassment, even disaster, for all concerned. So I rode out to Bucky’s house with some bright youth and wandered among the deodars with him. We gossiped and played bridge by huge log fires in the evening and early in the morning before dawn the whole house party would assemble on a massive divan in a bay window looking on the snows to watch the sunrise. We came in dressing gowns, with much giggling and chatter. Bucky would supervise benignly, saying: “Now you know the rule of the house, a blanket between each of you.” I had no idea what he meant!’
When Bucky took Iris to a dinner party with a famous lawyer called Eardley Wilmot he told her not to tell her father; the man was Eurasian, and the social barrier between Europeans and those with Indian blood was such that Bucky knew Iris would have got into trouble at home. Only a few years later she was to feel horrified at this (‘It is shaming to admit that I would not have been allowed to mix socially with Eurasians at that period’), but at the time she took it for granted. She sat between two Indian guests and drank liberally of the champagne that she was not allowed at home.
‘I accepted it as part of a splendid adventure, and did not analyse the social aspects for I was intent on my own life, this glorious freedom from cold, grey school and cold, grey England. The next dance, the next gymkhana, whether Captain So-and-so would ask me to dance the at Viceregal Lodge, were in the forefront of my thinking; also the extraordinary beauty around me in Delhi – the tombs, the gardens where we went for moonlight picnics, the gallop past of a Horse Battery in the New Year Parade – and in Simla the snow line of the Himalayas, the dark deodars marching up the mountain side.’
The Fishing Fleet Page 31
