India Dark

by Kirsty Murray

  It was from Eliza Finton. Or should I say, Eliza Percival. The photo was of her wedding and the man she had married was Mr Arthur.

  The words on the card were few: Dear Poesy, I thought you would like to know that, at last, we are truly happy ever after. Yours, Lizzie.

  I don’t know how Lizzie found me. She hadn’t been in touch with her own sisters in years. There were rumours that after living in Pondicherry for some months, she and Mr Arthur had fled to London to escape their debts. But then Fred Kreutz told me he’d seen them walking down a street in San Francisco during the war years.

  We all grew up and became other people. Tilly signed on with J. C. Williamson for a while but then she married one of her stagedoor Johnnies – a wealthy Toorak businessman. Ruby teamed up with Tempe and Clarissa again and the three of them took to the vaudeville circuit, singing as the Trixiebelle Sisters. They signed up with an agent to tour the East, but in Singapore Ruby ran away with a ship’s captain. Freddie and Max changed their name to King and went to America where they worked with the director Mack Sennett in his Keystone Kops comedies. Max came home after the war but Freddie stayed in Hollywood to become a star of silent films.

  Some of the other girls became dancers at the Tivoli and little Daisy Watts outgrew her lisp and became a star. I took my daughter to see her every year in the pantomimes at the Princess Theatre.

  I never returned to the stage. After the scandal, neither Mumma nor Yada wanted me near a theatre. I went to the Continuation School, became a teacher and grew to love my work. When I had my first class in a little country schoolroom, the children laughed with delight when I sang them ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’, but I never missed the stage. I only missed Charlie.

  Within weeks of coming back to Melbourne, Charlie and Lionel sailed for America with Mrs Essie. The Percivals’ reputation was in tatters and they would never show their faces in Australia again. Mrs Essie toured a smaller version of the Company that included Charlie, Lionel, Lo and Eddie. They travelled up and down the west coast of the United States until the war broke out and the troupe began to drift apart.

  Lionel came home and signed up with the Australian Infantry. He was nineteen years old when he sailed to France. He died at Ypres. I saw his name on the lists of the fallen on the same day that we discovered Chooky had died on the Western Front.

  I grew terrified that Charlie had died too. I tried to find him. I wrote to Mrs Essie but she said he had disappeared. I could find no one in Melbourne who knew what had become of Charlie.

  When I married, I never told my husband about my early career on the stage. It was a box that I placed a lid upon and never opened until Eliza sent me her photo. I wrote to her. I couldn’t help myself. It was a long and difficult letter. I told her I was married too and that I had a little daughter named Elsie. Elsie Charlotte Brookes. Charlotte was for Charlie.

  Lizzie wrote back. A polite, brief note. She had seen Charlie in Shanghai. He was working as a magician, travelling with a White Russian theatre troupe. He was about to travel deep into China and then south, to India.

  When my husband came home from work that night I told him everything, and I wept while he held me tenderly. I wept with longing for India, for the darkness, for a stolen kiss beneath a banyan tree. I wept for a girlhood lost to me too soon.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is based on a true story. I hope, through fiction, that I have come as close to the truth as is possible but as Poesy says, there was more to the story than one person could ever tell. Percival’s Lilliputian Opera Company is based on a real theatre troupe (Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company) that successfully toured the world from the 1880s. Drawing from court records and newspaper reports, this novel is a reconstruction of their last, disastrous tour.

  The basic facts of the events that led to the demise of the Pollard’s company are indisputable. In July 1909 Arthur Pollard boarded the steam ship Gracchus at Port Melbourne. In his charge were 29 children aged between seven and eighteen years of age who had been trained to sing and dance popular music-hall hits of the era. It was to be the beginning of a two-year world tour. Eight months later, in February 1910, the tour ended in scandal when the children walked out on their manager at the close of a performance in Madras and refused to travel any further with him. In the months that followed, the children attempted to earn their fares back to Australia while complicated legal proceedings raged in the High Court of Madras.

  Although the names of the players have been changed, each fictional character is based on a member of the 1909 troupe. The locations and physical settings I describe correspond with the troupe’s itinerary and where it was not possible to determine exactly what happened I based the events on plausible constructs. Historical and political events mentioned in the novel from the employment of children in the match factories through to the Alipore bombing were the backdrop of the lives of the child performers.

  Annie Besant, who is featured in a number of places in the story, was a prominent political activist, writer and orator of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She was also President of the Theosophical Society, based in Madras, and a staunch advocate of Indian Home Rule. It is more than likely that many of the children were aware of her presence in India, and Besant’s comments on truth in the lecture Poesy attends are a direct excerpt from an actual public event.

  In writing India Dark I have attempted to detail the known facts of the case and flesh the story out to make the children’s experiences as vivid and true to life as possible. What can never be known is what was in the hearts and minds of the young people caught in an impossible situation.

  ANGLO-INDIAN WORDS

  almirah a word commonly used in Anglo-Indian households for a cupboard

  ankus a goad used on elephants

  anna (Indian currency pre-1957), a coin worth 1/16 th of a rupee

  ayah an Indian nanny or nursemaid

  babu Originally a Hindu gentleman (especially a Bengali one), but used in a pejorative way by the English

  boxwallah an Indian or European businessman or shopkeeper

  chota hazri light breakfast

  chamcha a stooge

  dhobi a washerman or laundryman

  dhoti an Indian loincloth

  fakir a poor Muslim or Hindu monk or ascetic

  gharry a cart or carriage

  ghat a path or stairs leading down to the river; also a quay for a ferry

  howdah a chair or framed seat carried on the back of an elephant

  khitmungar a male servant who waited at tables

  lascar a native soldier or East Indian sailor

  nabob a wealthy person

  nowker (also spelt nokar or naukar) a domestic servant

  pice (Indian currency pre-1957) a copper coin worth ¼ of an anna

  puja any religious rite in Hinduism

  punkah a large swinging fan made of cloth suspended on a frame from the ceiling and worked by a rope pulled by a punkah-wallah

  rupee standard monetary unit of Anglo-Indian currency

  sadhu a Hindu holy man

  swadeshi nationalist political movement

  tiffin a light snack

  toady bacha a sycophant or bootlicker, literally a ‘toad-eater’

  topee a hat commonly worn by Anglo-Indians, especially a pith hat or sun helmet

  vakil a barrister

  Wodeyar the famous royal dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Mysore for over 500 years, from 1399 to 1947

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In 2001, while researching an earlier novel, Bridie’s Fire, I interviewed Australian theatre historian, Peter Freund. At the end of our interview, Peter pulled open a drawer and took out an essay he had written about the demise of Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company. ‘I’m not a novelist,’ he said. ‘But someone should write a novel for kids about what happened to these children.’ I am deeply indebted to Peter for presenting me with that challenge.

  Historical fiction requires time, patience and, if it i
s to have any integrity, the generous input of many people. I could not have written India Dark without the support and assistance of organisations and individuals in Australia, India and Indonesia.

  I am grateful to the Australia Council, which provided me with a New Work grant that funded the initial period of researching and writing this novel.

  I’m also indebted to the State Library of Victoria for offering me a Creative Fellowship that gave me time and space to read, dream, research, and draw a thousand threads together. Thank you to Dianne Reilly, Juliet O’Conor and Dominique Dunstan of the State Library of Victoria, for their support during my Creative Fellowship and for facilitating access to the collections.

  In addition to the resources of the SLV, I was fortunate to gain access to material in the Performing Arts Museum collections (Melbourne), the Nehru Memorial Library (Delhi), the Tamil Nadu Archives (Chennai), and the British Library (London).

  I’m very grateful to the many historians whose work underpinned much of my research, but especially Peter Downes, whose history ‘The Pollards’ was invaluable and whose generosity in sharing his research was pivotal to making sense of this story.

  Asialink, in conjunction with the Australia-India Council, funded my residency at the University of Madras in South India. Their support was crucial in providing me with an opportunity to discover India for myself and retrace the route that the children had taken in 1909–1910.

  I had never been to India prior to tackling this story and had spent no more than a few days in South-East Asia. The geography of India and South-East Asia is now firmly etched in my consciousness. I am very grateful to the many people who helped me understand the rich, complex history of the region.

  In India, Mridula (Mitty) Syed showed me boundless hospitality and was always ready to help solve any problem I encountered, large or small. At the University of Madras in Chennai, South India, where I was privileged to be writer-in-residence for three months, I am grateful to Eugenie Pinto, Dr C. T. Indra and Supala Pandiarajan for their assistance.

  The historian and journalist Subbiah Muthiah kindly endured several interviews during which I besieged him with questions. His extensive writings on the history of Madras /Chennai were pivotal in helping me imaginatively visit India in 1910.

  For their enthusiasm and friendship, and for offering me other windows into India, I’d like to thank Professor Pankaj Singh and Neelima Kanwar of the University of Himachal Pradesh, Meenakshi Francis, Anto Thomas, Anushka Ravishankar, Anita Roy, Maina Bhagat, Sonya Boylan, Anthony Ellis and Narender Kumar. For assistance in accessing original court records I am grateful to Mr Jose John of King & Partridge, Advocates and Notaries in Chennai.

  Also, many thanks to Janet de Neefe for introducing me to Indonesia and always being so welcoming.

  The extract that Poesy recites to herself on page 93 is from Mary Coleridge’s poem ‘Unity’.

  Thank you to Sarah Brenan, Rosalind Price, Kate Constable, Penni Russon, Kabita Dhara and Jocelyn Ainslie, for their feedback on the incredibly convoluted drafts of the novel. And a million thanks to Ken Harper, who has shared the highs and lows of every stage of this book and is the travelling companion of my dreams.