The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  At the end of the summer of 1924 her mother decided to return to England to see the two boys and her sister Dorothy. Iris had to go too. Her father, worried because of the number of landslides owing to that year’s exceptionally heavy monsoon, suddenly broke down and wept at the last dinner with his wife and daughter. ‘It was when I saw tears on his face that I realised, with shock, what this parting meant – and that it was parting from mother and not from me that mattered. It was the first acute parting of my adult life, to be repeated with different individuals and in different places again and again, the penalty of empire.’

  She and her mother set off in a rail motor, an open coach with wheels that ran on the railway track. Iris found it less sick-making than the Hill Railway, called by Rab the ‘Little Ill Train’ because of its effects. With them in a basket went Phra, Iris’s Siamese cat, destined for a new home with friends in Bombay, as her father did not care for it. Only a few miles out of Simla they turned a corner to find the track obliterated by a landslide. There was no room in the tiny waiting room as the passengers of two earlier trains, brought to a halt by landslides, were jamming it. Fortunately the Butlers’ bearer, Gokal, who had gone ahead with the luggage, was safe and told them of a missionary who had tea equipment. The missionary proved a real good Samaritan, offering warm stockings and blankets and insisting they shared her carriage.

  ‘Then came the problem of Phra, the Siamese. Anguished cries came from her basket. “I must let her out. Where can I get some earth for her?” I asked. I took her to what had once been a flower bed by the platform.’ In two minutes Phra and Iris were soaked and the frightened cat bolted down the platform and leapt into the window of a carriage further down. Out of it burst an agitated Hindu gentleman crying: ‘Take that unclean animal away – she is prowling round the ashes of my mother!’ Iris plunged through the huddled crowd, managed to catch Phra and returned her to their carriage, where the missionary took charge, firmly telling Iris to shut the distraught animal in the bathroom (even in the tiny Simla trains first-class carriages had bathrooms). ‘She can make the best of the bare floor and we can wash it down through the hole!’

  Once the cat was shut in, Iris and her mother went to apologise to the Hindu family – who were very nice about Phra, and explained that the ashes were being taken down to be scattered on the Ganges. The delay caused by the landslides was such that the ship on which they were to travel to England, which had already waited a few hours, was now steaming out in the huge bay where they just managed to catch it, thanks to a special motor launch, chartered by Iris’s father by telegraph.

  While her mother went back to Hove to be near her sons, Iris stayed in a hostel in London, spending a lot of time on voluntary work for children. Then came the news that her father had been made Governor of the Central Provinces and Berar. What were the Central Provinces? wondered Iris, and went down to Hove to find out from her mother what this new life would be like. These provinces were full of jungles and tigers, said her mother.

  ‘But what about horses? And polo? And parties?’ asked Iris. ‘Oh, that will be a bit different,’ replied her mother. ‘More formal. You can be a great help as an extra ADC – we will only have two on the staff and of course a Private Secretary and Military Secretary. Tom Paterson and friend are coming as the former and he has suggested someone called Portal as an ADC.’

  Portal, always known as ‘Squire’, had, she later discovered, put in for the job because he wanted to shoot tiger in the Seeonee jungle made famous by Kipling. He was a cavalryman in the British Indian regiment the 2nd Royal Lancers, better known by its original name of Gardner’s Horse, as also was Tom Paterson; so perhaps, thought Iris, between them they might have a horse or two, although it seemed odd to her that anyone could leave the joys of cavalry soldiering to shoot tigers. She did not want to leave London for somewhere she did not like the sound of, so set out for India again in October 1925 in a deep sulk and on comparatively bad terms with her mother.

  Her father met them at Nagpur* station, complete with Military Secretary and ADC, Captain Portal. Although thirty-five to Iris’s twenty, his impact on her was immediate. ‘I was aware of a presage about the latter. Not love at first sight, just a presage that here was someone important.’

  Gervas Portal was one of a family of brilliant brothers by whom, because of his wit and sense of humour, he was called Buzz (‘there he goes again, buzzing about with his jokes’). He was tall, thin and good-looking, with great charm and ease of manner, and very attractive to women. Delicate as a child, he had been educated at Malvern because of its supposed health benefits while his brothers went to Eton. He was commissioned into the Berkshire Regiment and fought at Gallipoli, where his friends were all killed around him and he himself had been recommended for the Victoria Cross – but with no officer present the recommendation did not go through.

  Later, in the search for adventure and because he was a brilliant horseman who loved riding, he joined Gardner’s Horse and almost on arrival was asked if he would like to go and be an ADC to the Governor of the Central Provinces. As he also had a somewhat shamefaced desire to shoot tiger, he accepted at once.

  In contrast to the bubbling excitement and joy of the first return to India two years earlier, Iris felt flat and unexcited when she arrived this second time. From the start, everything felt dreary and disappointing. The journey from Bombay along a new and different route had been depressing, over endless miles of flat cotton and sugar cane country and, to Iris, even the air seemed dead and stale in contrast to that of the north. After the crisp efficiency of Delhi and Simla, the ragged salute given by the escort of police welcoming His Excellency and family was deeply unimpressive.

  What she did not then realise was that her father had been appointed to this seeming backwater by the Viceroy, Lord Reading, for the express purpose of implementing the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, which were to introduce self-governing institutions to India as part of the gradual evolution towards independence.

  Government House in Nagpur, from its buildings, which she thought insignificant and uninspired, to its environs and appurtenances, was a shock after the panoply and efficiency of the viceregal and other gubernatorial palaces Iris had seen. The furniture was in a sorry state, with sinister-looking stains on the backs of the chairs, probably caused by sweat; the kitchen was a place of horror and the official cars could only be persuaded to start when two hefty men whacked them with spanners – any broken parts were tied up with sock suspenders. In the garden the flowers were drooping (‘rows of dusty zinnias’), but there were some fine trees and, in the middle of the lawn, a handsome eighteenth-century gun on a plinth.

  Gradually Iris’s spirits improved. At Christmas the family went camping – pleasurably and luxuriously. The tents were pitched in a grove of teak trees on a small hill beside a river, beyond which thick forest clothed a low range of hills. Each spacious tent had its own bathroom; the family met for meals under an awning and after dinner, wrapped in rugs against the cold, sat round a huge bonfire.

  The servants’ encampment was in a nearby grove, where the huge shapes of the elephants swayed at their pickets and the police ponies were hobbled well away from them (horses do not like elephants). Every evening after the day’s shooting the elephants came up to the Butlers’ camp to salaam and be given chapattis rolled round a big lump of unrefined sugar by Iris and her parents. ‘Then the mahouts, sitting on the elephants’ heads, called for a salute and up would go the trunks with a loud “Hurrumph!”, and so to bed.’

  What Iris noticed was how carefully shooting was regulated.* The decimation of the jungles came later and was due to a combination of factors: poaching, appropriation of land for grazing by domestic cattle, and the destruction of large tracts of jungle through the spread of industrialisation. ‘Anyone then wanting to shoot rented a block from the Forest Department,’ wrote Iris, ‘and the game in it was strictly rationed: a tiger or two was allowed, one good Chital stag, one sambhur perhaps as well. Even if
they were shot in the first few days, no more were allowed. The Forest Officers kept a close watch and in those days the forest guards, all Indian, were not corruptible by Europeans or fellow Indians. Poaching was almost unknown, although in the most remote and dense jungles the aboriginal tribes had regular battues when all game was driven into nets and killed with bows and arrows. They did this to feed themselves but their inroads made no more difference to the tiger population than a farmer’s rabbit shoot made to rabbits in the days before myxomatosis.’

  Iris was twenty, and finding life difficult. She had asked her father to give her some sort of work connected with child welfare and he had put her on one of her mother’s voluntary committees. ‘I dare say I spoke too loud. My parents told me to keep quiet as I was the most junior person on the committee and I left in a huff.’ By this time Squire had fallen in love with her, but he was sixteen years older than her and a committed regimental soldier who at thirty-six had been a bachelor for a long time. Then, with the question of marriage still hanging in the air, he returned to his regiment in Poona. With the man she was finding increasingly attractive gone and no work, a tedious vista of days seemed to stretch before Iris. ‘There seemed no purpose in anything I was doing,’ she thought drearily.

  Then came an invitation to the Poona ‘Week’ from a friend of her mother’s, a dashing widow who had remarried. As her new husband had got a divorce in order to marry her, Montagu Butler did not wish his young daughter to go and stay with her and the tempting invitation seemed out of reach. Fortunately the new Viceroy, Lord Irwin, came to stay at Nagpur, before going on to Poona. And when the Viceroy suggested that Iris could travel with the viceregal party even her father could not refuse him.

  At Poona Iris’s hostess met her with a flow of words that clearly indicated that she thought her duty was to fix Iris up with a suitable – i.e. rich or with good prospects – husband. ‘That man Portal has been round but I discouraged him,’ she said. ‘He is not an ambitious soldier and he has no money. I have a dinner party tonight for you and have asked a brilliant young ICS man who will certainly be a Governor one day and also a very rich gunner. His father owns Monkey Brand soap.’ The ICS man, noted Iris dryly, turned out to be married and the Monkey Brand Gunner looked like the monkey on his soap packets.

  Next day Squire Portal came round and asked them all to a dinner dance at the Club of Western India that night – the club allowed women in once a month only. He was not on her hostess’s dinner list, and Iris was of course chaperoned, so courtship chances would be few. Squire did not intend to waste them. That evening, during the last dance, he proposed to Iris and she accepted. The following morning she wired the news of her engagement to her parents and her father wired back sweetly: ‘Much too good for you.’

  They were married in Nagpur in early 1927. As befitted the Governor’s daughter, it was a grand wedding, with a large tented encampment for guests; one of her father’s old friends from the north, Bahadur Khan, travelled for four days to be present. A minor but important hiccup was caused by the Bishop of Nagpur, who married them. The Bishop, who had spent most of his life in the jungle as a missionary to the Gonds (the ancient tribal peoples of Central India), was not used to soldiers and refused to allow Squire to wear a ‘lungee’ (the regulation parade dress turban worn by all Indian cavalry) in church. Both Iris and Squire found it impossible to get him to understand that the Indian officers from the regiment, some of whom had come from as far away as Poona, would be horrified and shocked at what they would regard as an indecency – a bare head in uniform.

  All appeals left the Bishop unmoved. Finally Monty Butler said to Iris: ‘I shouldn’t argue with the Bishop if I were you – he’s an amateur boxing champion.’ The only solution was to have Squire’s orderly lurking in the porch: as the bridal couple emerged he sprang forward and planted the lungee – askew – on the bridegroom’s head so that at least he did not appear in public improperly dressed. As a lungi constructed off the head hardly ever holds together, this made the reception, cake-cutting and speech an anxious business.

  Iris had had her own problem. As she left Government House in her bridal finery with her father, he pressed into her hands what she later described as ‘a tightly packed bunch of vegetation packed into a ham frill’, telling her that it was her bridal bouquet. ‘I can’t walk up the aisle with this,’ said Iris, nearly in tears. ‘You must,’ answered her father. ‘It has been prepared and presented by the Agricultural Department of the Central Province.’ Such a provenance weighed not at all with Iris; recalling that there was a large white ostrich feather fan in the display of wedding presents, she dashed off and snatched it up, with a defiant glare at her father. As any further argument would have made them late, she got her way.

  The honeymoon too had its bumps – ups and downs that could only have happened to a Raj bride. They went to the Seeonee district jungles, taking with them as provisions only a cured ham and the remains of their wedding cake – Squire was a very good shot and assumed he could provide for the pot. It was not at all as described in The Jungle Book, and there was no sign of the Council Rock – although the villagers’ cattle, driven out to graze on the edge of the settlements, were guarded by small boys like Mowgli. Squire had no luck with game, as beating to one gun did not work and he felt he could not shoot either doves or peahens on the ground. He did not like women shots but eventually shortages meant that Iris was pressed into service with a 20-bore she had been lent.

  She was installed in a hide near a waterhole where peafowl came to drink. No peahen came and after a while darkness fell. Hyenas began to call, one to the right and one to the left. ‘I knew they were hyenas but their cry is so eerie and baleful it froze the blood,’ wrote Iris, ‘then I heard monkeys chattering – not whooping. That meant they were seriously alarmed and warning each other of something.’

  She listened but heard nothing. Soon came lights and trampling through the trees and Squire appeared with the forest ranger, some villagers and his big-game rifle. ‘You’ll have a long walk back,’ he whispered. ‘A tiger has killed a young village buffalo about three hundred yards behind you so we must make a detour.’

  Soon afterwards she developed a high temperature and a large swelling on the back of her neck, later diagnosed as Indian tick fever, picked up during her time in the hide. The doctor whom Squire managed to summon from fifty miles away arrived drunk and could think of nothing bar prescribing quinine – to which she was allergic. When the fever finally wore itself out, she had to spend the rest of the honeymoon travelling in a small bullock cart instead of on foot.

  In their subsequent life, Iris and Gervas both followed the familiar Raj pattern, with their two daughters both sent home as children, just as Iris had been. When Gervas was appointed Commanding Officer of the Governor’s Bodyguard in Bombay, Iris was able to immerse herself in the welfare work she had always wanted to do, among the young soldiers’ wives and their families. Gervas was a keen and popular regimental soldier and his subsequent postings took them, as with most Raj families, around the subcontinent – to Poona, Bombay, Hyderabad and Bihar.

  During the Second World War, while Gervas was first in Basra, then Cairo and subsequently Burma, Iris helped as an auxiliary nurse at the Salvation Army hospital in Ahmednagar and in the military hospital in Ranchi, before finally leaving India in 1943, her ship dodging U-boats on the way back. Gervas was demobbed in 1946; when he returned to England the couple settled in Norfolk, where they often had Indian friends to stay in their freezing house. Gervas died in 1961 and Iris, who became a biographer,* in 2002. Of her time in India she wrote: ‘When I returned to England for the last time in 1943, I was in a state of mind similar to bereavement.’

  21

  ‘Just lift up your skirts and you’ll be all right’

  Up Country

  The destination of some Fishing Fleet girls was the mofussil, often in a remote area where there was no other British family.

  For the Fishing Fleet girl
plunged into such a life when she married, the experience could be harsh, even traumatic. Gone were the warm, jasmine-scented nights under which she had strolled with an admirer on the smooth lawns of the club, huge stars lighting up a velvet sky to the sound of dance music from a regimental band – the India of glamour and romance about which she had heard and was experiencing.

  Instead, there were habits, difficulties, attitudes and even perils unheard of in the London street or quiet English country village in which she had been brought up. She could be a hundred miles from the nearest doctor, in which case she had to keep a well-stocked medicine chest and know how to deal with everything from malaria to snake bite (cut the puncture marks, suck and spit out the poison, rub in permanganate of potash crystals, tie a tourniquet and then pray).

  For girls like ‘Billy’ Fremlin, who had been brought up on a plantation, the isolation of a ‘jungly’ life was no deterrent.

  Billy had been educated in England, arriving back in India in 1924 at the age of seventeen to stay with her father, having survived the last ravages of the Spanish flu pandemic. ‘I very nearly didn’t go out. At school we all had the most appalling flu, it was killing everybody off like flies, several members of our staff died, people were dropping dead in the streets with it. Kay and I had it together, we were really very ill, and Mummy came to see us. She thought we were being starved so she got special food for us. I got thinner than ever, I was always just exactly like a beanpole but then I went absolutely down to nothing. Then I had rheumatic fever and that put me back. I was off a whole two terms with it so I was never allowed to learn Latin which I wanted to do.’