The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  She finally left for India – unusually, travelling quite alone. ‘I’d always looked forward more than anything else to going out to India, to my father. I adored him. I was so excited I could hardly believe it.’ Her father met her in Madras, where they stayed with friends of his, then journeyed by train to his coffee estate, seventy miles from Bangalore in upstate Mysore. It was a trip that led past plantations of sugar cane, banyan and fig trees, women in brilliant saris carrying brass pots on their heads and carts drawn by the creamy coloured bullocks of Mysore, with their backward-curving horns.

  Billy, slim, blonde and pretty, was always treated exactly like a boy by her father Ralph – her parents’ four eldest children, all boys, had died soon after birth. Her father had longed for a son, especially as he was a noted shot and wanted a son to carry on this tradition, so gave his favourite daughter her boy’s name. Soon after her arrival she was even given a small coffee estate, approximately an acre of bushes, of her own, ‘where I kept the proceeds. It was so happy and so exciting.’

  Ralph’s brilliance as a shot – he was so unfailingly successful that he would often go shooting with a professional skinner, in effect a taxidermist – was such that film-makers Robert and Frances Flaherty used him as the white hunter in their story Elephant Dance. There was plenty of jungle round about the estate; the sign of elephant jungle was when the milestones on the roads were painted black instead of white. ‘Elephants hate white ones and root them up,’ wrote Frances Flaherty later, describing how, if elephants made inroads on paddy fields, sometimes they were shot by the game preserve officer – who would aim at the earhole or the top of the trunk in front. Often, a deep trench would do the trick: ‘A four-foot wide trench is an insuperable obstacle to an elephant, which cannot step across it and cannot jump,’ she noted.

  With such a father, determined that in all respects his daughter would become the son he never had, Billy’s life was eventful – finally, too eventful. ‘We used to do the most amazing things. We used to go out on shikar [hunting] after tiger or wild pig or occasionally after bison. He was a good shot himself and he wanted me to be a good shot, so I thought I’d try. I hated killing things but I’d do anything for him and I became quite a good shot, with a shotgun or a rifle. We used to go right up into the jungles, and we used to beat, and if I did shoot anything Daddy was so proud of me that I felt I would do anything to please him.’

  The final test was to go after bison, known for their formidable size and power, into very deep jungle. ‘We were after a very special huge bison that was famous and the beaters spotted it, but I could not see it. Daddy could because he had wonderful knowledge of the jungles but I looked and looked and couldn’t see it – he wanted me and nobody else to kill it, you see. But I couldn’t see it and in the end we went on and it went. But there was a younger bison so I killed that instead and that was quite close to. He said to me afterwards “Weren’t you frightened?” And I said: “I’m never frightened with you.” He had no fear. There was great rejoicing among the beaters because they all had food for weeks.’

  For light entertainment, Billy would drive the seventy miles to Bangalore to dance in the club – her father taught her to drive in an old Ford car – usually staying with friends afterwards. ‘I loved dancing in Bangalore, the Highland Light Infantry were there and the Wiltshires, and I had some very pretty dresses I’d brought out with me so altogether it was a contrast to tiger drives in the jungle.’

  Inevitably, she got malaria. Sitting in a machan, motionless for hours as the slightest movement might alert the quarry, she could not even raise a finger to brush away a mosquito. The attacks got worse and worse, with only quinine for remedy, until eventually the doctor who treated her said she must go home or die. Her father came back with her on the ship and, before returning to India, bought her a little Austin Seven.

  It was through this car that she found romance. Driving herself to a dance in it when she was twenty-one, she arrived a little late and slipped quietly into her hosts’ house, where she stood by the huge fire in the hall. Suddenly in came the man she later married, who said: ‘Oh you’re late too.’ And from then on they danced the whole evening together. For Billy, as she said: ‘It really was love at first sight.’

  Some Fishing Fleet girls became ‘junglies’ through marriage – that is, they married one of the police, forestry or political officers or mining engineers, surveyors, railway engineers and geologists who lived in the remotest regions. For them it was a tough, outdoor life, with only the occasional sighting of a fellow European and the constant threat of accident or illness. Such things as hairdressers, books and radios were luxuries of distant civilisation. They travelled with their husbands through jungles and across mountains, through forests, tribal territories or deserts, by elephant, bullock cart, camel, horse or boat, living in camps for which all supplies, from medicine and stationery to unbreakable enamel plates, had to be brought by animal, usually the sure-footed mule.

  One of these girls, Olivia Hamilton, whose husband Arthur was an Assistant Divisional Forestry Officer, wore ‘up-country’ clothes for such trips: breeches, lace-up canvas gaiters and deerskin boots,* a tweed jacket and a topi – if a topi did not come off, its thickness made it a good head protector. They lived in these camps for weeks while Arthur, whose headquarters were in Lahore, surveyed vast tracts of forest. Olivia took to it as to the manner born.

  On arrival, Olivia’s first duty was to ‘turn over every stone all round the tent to see how many scorpions from underneath I could kill, before they got into our slippers or our beds’. Meanwhile the cook would be making his fire and sending a messenger to buy charcoal from the nearest settlement, before producing a meal (which could be pigeon or pheasant that one of the Hamiltons had shot).

  After supper, Arthur settled in his ‘office’ tent to write up reports on what he had seen that day while the enterprising Olivia would make flies for fishing from the feathers of the game birds they had shot (higher up, she would shoot and skin birds for their collector friends in Simla). ‘I sent them as far away as Kashmir sometimes and I once bought myself an evening dress on the proceeds.’ In the late evenings they would sit round the camp fire watching the flying squirrels scampering up one tree then floating across to another.

  Occasionally they shot the panthers and black bears that lived in the higher forests, especially if they had been harrying the villagers. The hill women reassured Olivia that bears would never attack a woman. ‘Just lift up your skirts and you’ll be all right,’ they told her. But she was not prepared to put this to the test.

  When, after months in the solitude of the Himalayan uplands, the Hamiltons finally returned to Simla, with its social life and its beautifully dressed women with well-coiffed heads and the latest gossip at their fingertips, they felt, as Olivia put it, ‘like hoboes’. Arthur had grown a shaggy beard in the jungle, which had to be shaved off, leaving his chin an anaemic white against his sunburnt face while Olivia’s hair, cropped short, was uneven and jagged and her clothes’ sense, after months in breeches, in need of revival.

  Camping could range from sophisticated and enjoyable, with home comforts prepared by efficient servants, to an endurance test with attendant horrors. Beatrix Scott, who went with her husband to Assam soon after their marriage in 1910, found that leeches were her worst nightmare – although sandflies, against which no mosquito net was proof, and a giant bluebottle-type insect that could sting through leather boots ran them pretty close.

  ‘They [the leeches] did not worry us much till we met them in the jungle in the rains. Then it seemed that every blade of grass, every leaf-tip, had its looping thread-like organism waiting to hurl itself at the passer-by. We always marched in single file. The first man gets few leeches; his passing just puts them on the qui vive. As far as possible, each man picked leeches off his own front and off the back of the man ahead of him; at intervals the front man went to the back.

  ‘In spite of all this, towards the end of the marc
h we were all dripping gore from the leeches that had escaped our vigilance and having gorged themselves had dropped off. They leave a tiny triangular hole from which the blood flows freely because of some substance injected by the animal that prevents coagulation. At the end of a march when we could remove our clothes we often picked a score of leeches off one another. To this day, my pet particular nightmare is that I am in a pit with leeches . . .’.

  The girl who married into this kind of life had to be tough, resourceful – and in good health. Up country there were few, or no, doctors or dentists. When in the 1920s Monica Campbell-Martin, living at Tisri where her husband worked in a mica mine, suffered from toothache it meant getting to the nearest railway station, thirteen miles from the house, then a twelve-hour train journey over the 500 miles to Calcutta, and staying there anything from a week to ten days because dental treatment often took that length of time; so that rail fare, hotel bill and incidental expenses added up almost to a month’s salary. Because of these costs, many junior officials or workers delayed treatment.

  Housekeeping meant borrowing a car once a fortnight to drive the eight miles to the local bazaar, returning with live chickens, kid meat, vegetables and eggs. Dry goods came from Calcutta every two or three months. There was little to do and boredom was often acute – there was no tennis, no golf, they had no radio, and there was no library near. Besides themselves, there was only one other European, her husband’s assistant.

  They kept in touch with the outside world by mail – the office was also a post office, where stamps were available; the mail was sent off by a mail runner, the mailbag slung over his shoulder on a stick, to the next village thirty miles away; it was a condition of his employment that he did not walk but trotted. When they moved house it was by bullock cart, which went at about two miles an hour – the carts were a series of flat boards between two enormous wheels.

  Viola Bayley had no previous connection with India and went to join her husband Vernon, in the Frontier Constabulary, which had the job of keeping order between British India and the Tribal Territories. For a girl who had been ‘brought up in the security of a small Sussex town, it was a fairly traumatic experience to start married life in Hangu, a tiny link on the road that led from Peshawar to Kohat and Bannu and finally to the Khyber Pass’.

  In Hangu, two armed constables accompanied her and her new husband when they first walked out together, ‘which was not conducive to the pleasure of a honeymoon stroll’. But their garden, its irrigation channels made by prisoners from the local gaol (always full) brought in by armed guard, was a delight. ‘Our violet bed stretched the length of our garden and scented the whole air.’ The backdrop was equally beautiful. ‘All along the valley there were orchards pink with peach blossom and carpeted with small iris. There were lady’s finger tulips and blue ixiolerion. There were oleanders flowering in the dry waterbeds . . . Hoopoes pecked at grubs on our lawn and bulbuls sang. It was so idyllic I could hardly believe that the menace of the hot weather would soon be upon us.’

  When Betsy Anderson married Tommy Macdonald, their first home was on a sugar plantation in Bihar. Tommy was the third generation of Macdonalds to live and work there on what had originally been an indigo plantation; when indigo cropping came to an end his father had the machinery for a sugar factory shipped out from Glasgow to Calcutta, then to the plantation by barge, rail and bullock cart. Betsy was kept busy learning the language, to be able to ask the cook such questions as: ‘How did you manage to use six dozen eggs yesterday when we had chicken and rice pudding?’

  Although several miles from their nearest neighbours, she was never frightened, even when Tommy had to be away for a night. ‘The only creepy sound was the beating of the tom-toms from the villages [that supplied the native labour for the factory]. When alone, I would lie awake, imagining that they were sending strange messages to each other, like stories of Red Indians. The noise of the jackals was scary and always gave me the shivers, their yells were horrible and unearthly, rising to a crescendo and ending in ghastly screams.’

  Their bungalow – or rather the trees in their garden, including a huge and ancient banyan – was home to a number of langurs, big grey monkeys with long arms and prehensile tails, who from time to time featured in an extraordinary and inexplicable episode.

  Fun though the langurs were to watch, especially when teaching their babies to jump, hang and swing from the rope-like branches of the banyan tree, they were very destructive, uprooting plants, ripping branches of favourite shrubs, running along the marble veranda and stealing what they could from the house if they found an open window. As the hot weather approached their behaviour got worse and eventually the ‘monkey man’ had to be called.

  On payment of his fee he would stand beneath the banyan, the chosen centre of monkey life, calling to them. Soon afterwards the Macdonalds would see them, jumping one by one from tree to tree and then disappearing into the sugar cane fields. After every visit of the monkey man, the garden was empty of langurs for some time.

  Some Fishing Fleet girls were lucky enough to enjoy what is best described as ‘grand camping’, as the guest of someone reasonably senior. Honor Penrose, who went out to India in 1913, toured with her friends the Cassels in the Terai, at the foot of the Himalayas. En route Seton Cassel, Commissioner for that area, visited villages, if any, talked to the headman, heard complaints, inspected crops, roads, bridges and much else beside. Their retinue went ahead, taking baggage, food, cooking utensils, tents, and finding a site near – but not too near – the next village on the Commissioner’s itinerary.

  ‘Some days there were no villages and mounting the elephants we dived into the jungle alert for wild animals, or shooting for the pot an occasional jungle mirghi [wild hen],’ recorded Honor. ‘This being the dry season, the grass and fallen leaves were dry as tinder and would crackle at a touch, yet these elephants with their enormous feet wove their way in and out of the trees, soundlessly, like phantoms in a dream. Another wonder was how the mahouts kept their sense of direction. We might turn and twist north, south east or west looking for game yet, always in time, we arrived at the next camp.’ Whenever they arrived, their tents had been put up by the servants, there was water for a bath and a delicious dinner was ready.

  Somewhat on the same lines was the self-sufficiency needed in a remote station like Gilgit, virtually cut off from the outside world by heavy snows from late September until the following spring. After spending the summer in Gulmarg, Lucy Hardy and her husband Harry Grant set off one September in the early 1900s for this distant outpost of the Empire, where Harry was stationed with his Mountain Artillery Battery. To survive in Gilgit, in a valley in the Karakoram range, meant not only organising almost a year’s supplies of essential stores but also provisions for themselves and their servants on the long and arduous journey.

  ‘We had to collect servants willing to go – cook, ayah, sweeper, dhobi, syces etc, and supply them with a warm outfit each and blankets. Then H bought me a pony and sidesaddle. Then we got a dandy for ayah and baby son, and a well-made dhoolie for Charles [her older son, aged two], it was carried by two men on a long bamboo pole which ran through iron rings on top. It had reed curtains and being on four short legs made a very cosy bed at night.

  ‘All our permanent supplies – tea, coffee, tinned milk, biscuits, baby food and so forth – had to be sent off during the summer as the passes are only open for pony transport from May to September.’ Harry had already acquired a flock of twenty-four sheep, looked after by the Indian officers of the Battery along with their own goats but, as Lucy later said disgustedly, they were so small and skinny that ‘the leg only gave the two of us one roast and one made-up dinner’.

  The road to Gilgit with a caravanserai of babies, coolies, equipment and food for the journey was long and arduous. ‘Fifteen miles a day doesn’t sound a long ride but when one has to walk it up, up, up and down, down, down on very rough paths – and day after day – it is very tiring. The road is supp
osed to be nine foot [wide] and no parapet of course, not much width when meeting strings of pack animals coming down to the valley.’ They crossed over the 14,100-feet Komri Pass, and broke the twenty-six-mile journey on to where they halted for the summer in two tents so freezing that Lucy, who kept her baby son warm by clasping him to her all night, could not sleep for a cold-headache.

  Ruttu was a rough plateau 10,000 feet up surrounded by hills, one of which provided summer grazing from May to September for the Battery mules, looked after there by sepoys who built their own lines. For their British officer, they had also added two new rooms to an existing hut, into which Lucy subsided with thankfulness for a month and cheerfully made the best of, mud floors and all. ‘Our sitting room, when decked with cretonne covers and cushions, muslin curtains, jars of wildflowers etc, looked quite civilised.’ The dining room in the old hut had a table and chairs, some numdahs on the floor and an improvised sideboard made of boxes with a cloth over it.

  Her husband was busy with the Battery all day; during the evenings he would take his gun and they would wander after game or explore. Sometimes they ate snow trout from the nearby river; occasionally the sepoys managed to get them a few eggs and fowls from villages in the neighbouring nullahs. ‘After a month, the mules having eaten all available grass, the battery prepared to march for Bunji for winter quarters but a bungalow in Gilgit thirty-seven miles further on had been allotted to us as the doctor had his quarters there and we thought it wiser for the sake of the two babies to be near him.’

  Little had changed twenty-five years later when Fishing Fleet girl Leila Phillips set off for Gilgit in the autumn of 1929 with her friends Captain and Mrs Lloyd – he was being sent to Gilgit on duty. There were just a few more British officers stationed there, about half a dozen by now, with their families. Stores still had to be ordered in April so that they would arrive before the passes were snowed-up but now they came on mules, which could carry packs of up to 80lbs hung on each side.