Where the Clocks Chime Twice

by Alec Waugh

  During that next half week we did all the tourist things: motoring to Negombo through groves of coconuts to its curving stretch of sand; eating an elaborate fish lunch of seer—the local delicacy—prawns and crabs and lobster in successive courses; haggling at Ramsammay’s over silks and curios; watching from the terrace of Mount Lavinia the sun go down into the sea, wondering whether at the final moment before immersion the flicker of the emerald ray would be vouchsafed us, trying to identify the Southern Cross while the Colombo lighthouse—the only lighthouse in the world to be built in the main street of a city—flashed and faded above the palm trees; driving back through the cinnamon gardens to dinner at the Galle Face.

  I could not have had a gayer or cosier companion. Her charm was wholly independent of the fact that she was Sinhalese. She wore a sari and her face was brown, otherwise I might quite as well have been with a French, an Australian, or Danish girl. Her individuality did not depend on her being Sinhalese rather than Hungarian, but on being a distinctive and fascinating person in herself. She explained to me the intricate caste system by which, had she married a Urawe, her brothers-in-law might have divorced her sisters and her father committed suicide upon her doorstep. But her own immediate and pressing problem could not have been more universal. Her husband was paying court to another lady, but she was a Roman Catholic and her parents would not allow her to divorce him.

  There are very few chips on very few shoulders in Ceylon. It is this that makes personal and public relations there so pleasant. Not that there are not still discriminations. Up-country clubs for instance limit their membership to Europeans, and for the time being that is a wise precaution. Awkward situations can very easily arise.

  I was dining, for instance, in Colombo with an English girl, the Sinhalese girl to whom I have referred, and an Indian officer. It was a gala night. We were in evening dress. Half-way through the dinner the Indian, very much to my surprise, lit up a pipe. Photographs of Stanley Baldwin and J. B. Priestley had possibly made him feel that he was being British. For three-quarters of an hour he smoked undisturbed, then a waiter from another table informed him that pipes were not allowed. I called the head waiter over. No, he assured me, pipes could not be smoked before twelve o’clock. As a non-smoker myself, I could see every reason for such a rule. But as the host I was annoyed; I resented having a guest, particularly an Indian guest, embarrassed. Moreover, I had a strong suspicion that the waiter had been sent across by an English party who objected to seeing an English girl dancing with an Indian. Clearly there was nothing I could do, for the moment anyhow. But if anyone else tries to smoke a pipe, I thought …

  For the next hour I kept careful watch, my eyes moving from one table to the next; finally in a far corner of the room I saw a youngish military-looking man with a small brushed-back moustache produce a pipe and lay a tobacco pouch upon the table. My heart bounded. ‘Now,’ I thought. I waited, voraciously, ready to pounce the moment a match was struck.

  I waited, but in vain. It was close upon eleven when he took out his pipe, but when the band finally packed away its instruments he had not even begun to fill the bowl. Rarely have I felt more cheated. He played with that pipe, he polished it, rolling it first in the palm of his hand, then against his nose. I had never suspected that anyone could find so many things to do with a pipe, and still not smoke it for a full ninety minutes.

  In retrospect I recognise it for what it is, a ridiculous and amusing incident. But it was a situation that contained all the same a measure of social dynamite. If he had lit up, I should have made my protest. Suppose it had then transpired, as well it might, that there was no rule against pipe smoking before midnight; at any rate, for Pukka Sahibs. It might have been exceedingly uncomfortable.

  There is certainly a lot to be said for the next few years at least in being cautious about mixed clubs. It is easy enough for people of the same race to misunderstand each other late at night after several hours of drinking, and it does not particularly matter if they do. They can make it up next day. But a squabble in public between a man with a dark face and a man with a white face can have unfortunate repercussions.

  Ceylon received its independence in the spring of 1948, and accepted membership of the British Commonwealth after four and a half centuries of European domination. Each conqueror conferred certain benefits: the legacy of the Portuguese occupation is religious mainly. They converted the upper-class Sinhalese— the Karawas—to Christianity. The last census showed that there were half a million Christians in the island of whom ninety per cent, were Catholics: the Dutch legacy was mainly architectural and legislative. They built law courts, churches, and public offices; they established the Roman-Dutch Code by which the island is still administered, and until recently the Burghers—the class of Dutch extraction—held a practical monopoly of the clerical work in most public departments. The Portuguese and Dutch influence was limited to the coast-line. The British developed the resources of the interior. Portuguese, Dutch, and British, they each gave something to the island.

  Ceylon’s real debt to Europe lies in this, however—that European intervention called a halt to the civil strife that would in time have destroyed Sinhalese civilisation altogether. By maintaining the status quo, by limiting the southern movement of the Tamils, Ceylon was given an opportunity to acquire a sense of homogeneity, so that Hindus, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists can now think of themselves as Ceylonese.

  For a hundred and thirty years while practically every country in the world has known internal strife, Ceylon has moved slowly towards independence. Little in the news, it has been happy, as happiness was understood by the Greek philosopher who envied the people that had no history. There was a national movement but no riots. There was little contention and no bloodshed. Universal adult suffrage was established twenty years ago, and from that point on the country was virtually administered by the Ceylonese themselves. During my visit the previous Governor was Governor-General; the present Governor-General is an Englishman; but almost certainly, in a few years’ time, the King’s representative in Ceylon will be a person of the country.

  It is doubtless this absence of strife over so long a period that has created such a friendly atmosphere in Ceylon. Everyone seems happy there. People smile at you in the streets and on railway platforms. Everyone is polite, without being servile. It was the first thing that the West Indian cricketers noticed when they came down after their tour in India. They had never, they said, seen before so many smiling faces.

  The problems that lie ahead of Ceylon as a young and independent nation in a harassed world are formidable. But the auspices are very fair. I am very sure that I was not by any means the only Englishman who felt, in the confident and light-hearted atmosphere of those Independence Day celebrations, much as you feel the first time you see your daughter wearing a long dress. Difficulties lie ahead but, taking a long view, you can ignore them. For someone so basically started right, things must in the end turn out well.

  2. The City of the Caliphs

  The General atmosphere in Ceylon had been so amicable and so harmonious that it was difficult to think of it in terms of a seceded section of the British Raj, but three days out of Seychelles, half-way to India, an incident took place that vividly underscored for me the changed position of the English in the East. Bombay, a radiogram informed us, had gone dry.

  It had been dry, legally, three months earlier when I had paused there on my way from Lebanon. You could only order a drink in a hotel if you possessed a liquor permit. But it was not difficult to obtain such permits. Your doctor certified that you were a ‘drink addict’, whose health would be injured by a lack of alcohol, and with this certificate you could purchase so much whisky that temperate persons were in danger of becoming alcoholics through the natural human impulse to order, and subsequently consume, up to the limits of their permit. Now only genuine invalids were to be allowed this licence. That radiogram sounded like the death-knell of the British Raj. No more whisky and sodas in th
e Bombay Yacht Club. It was an incident that could not fail to make an Englishman ponder dubiously the fate and future of the Empire in a way that no Englishman of my generation could ever have foreseen that he would ponder it.

  When I was visiting the Windward Islands in the late autumn of 1938, a Royal Commission under Lord Moyne’s chairmanship was touring the West Indies to recommend the kind of rehabilitation that a singularly depressed area appeared to need. Its report and findings reached Whitehall in the early summer of 1940. At an hour when only twenty miles of water separated England from a victorious enemy, when the War Office and the Admiralty were feverishly organising coast defences, and training and arming the recruits to man them; when the Ministry of Labour was summoning to the factories every man not needed for the trenches, a few yards along Whitehall the Colonial Office was calmly deliberating the amount of money that should be devoted to the needs of the West Indian islanders. They finally decided to allocate a million pounds. In the course of the next few months the decision was implemented, and when I returned to the West Indies in the spring of 1948 it was to find a million pounds’ worth of welfare projects in operation.

  The episode is typical of the way in which the average Englishman of my generation felt about the Empire; typical because it exemplifies the unquestioning belief we felt in the Empire’s future. London was being bombed. Germany held the Channel ports, but it was inconceivable not only to the mandarins of Whitehall but to evacuees such as myself from Dunkirk and Boulogne that a time could ever come when the Union Jack would not fly over Delhi, Colombo, Singapore, Rangoon. If I were asked to define the essential difference between the England to which I was born and the England which my sons are now inheriting, I would suggest that it lay in a loss of certainty and security based upon the power and prestige of the Empire.

  When I went to boarding-school at the age of nine in the autumn of 1907, one-sixth of the map which hung over the mantelpiece was painted red. In terms of that map my education was conducted. My parents had sent me to that school to fit me to make—as a soldier, doctor, civil servant, engineer—my individual contribution to the Empire’s work. The exams I passed in class, the caps I won upon the field, would decide the nature and dimensions of that contribution. Provided that I adjusted myself to the pattern, no real misfortune could befall me. We were brought up, all of us, to a belief in complete security.

  This present generation of the Atomic Age, when the Empire has become a Commonwealth, and a phrase like ‘safe as the Bank of England’ has little meaning, can scarcely be expected to have that feeling, but in those of us who were groomed for World War I, that faith has managed to survive.

  Its survival is, indeed, responsible for the ingenuity which has found a series of formulas by which both the Irish and the Indians can have their cake and eat it, with Irishmen retaining the priviledges of Britons and Nehru taking his place among Dominion statesmen. The English who negotiated those compromises had so ingrained a belief in the permanence of the Empire that they could make the terms of membership infinitely elastic. Maybe their certainty was justified. In one sense the Empire has disintegrated since World War II: Ireland and Burma have seceded; India is a Republic; Ceylon is a Dominion. Malaya is heaven knows what. But in another and perhaps a broader sense, although George VI can no longer sign himself R.I., the British Commonwealth of Nations stands upon a firmer foundation than the Empire of 1919. There is a greater resilience, a greater inner strength; less danger of revolt, no smouldering resentment; there is no compunction, no straining at controls. The Commonwealth is more compact than the Empire was. Several territories, indeed, that came under British rule in that long Imperial summer had actually no right to be painted red; Baghdad, for which I was now bound, being a case in point.

  An American tourist making a world tour in 1925 might have seen no particular difference between the system under which Iraq, India, and the Malay States were governed. He would have found the same atmosphere of parade, of stiff saluting sentries, of cricket and starched evening shirts, of country clubs to which the nationals of the country were not admitted; yet the status of Iraq was actually quite different from that of India, with a difference that exemplifies the flexibility of the British Raj even at a time when it seemed to be most bound by protocol.

  Iraq was never a British colony for all that the Union Jack was flying there. It was a protectorate handed to Britain by a League of Nations mandate. Britain took it over as a backward area with the firm and declared intention of liquidating her responsibilities as soon as possible; maintaining it, admittedly, as a sphere of influence, but of leaving the Iraqis to run their own show as soon lis they were capable of doing so.

  That time was adjudged to have come in 1931; Britain then resigned her mandate, obtained Iraq’s admission to the League of Nations, and arranged a treaty by which she retained control of an airport near Baghdad and obtained permission in event of war to land troops at Basra in the Persian Gulf. The treaty was only superseded in the spring of 1941 because a Nazi-inspired coup d’etat against the Regent and an attack upon the British air-station at Habbaniyah necessitated, as an exigence of war, the investment of the country by British troops with the British Ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, about the most loved and trusted Briton the Arabs have ever honoured, established as the controlling influence in Government.

  Myself, I was posted to Baghdad as a captain in Military Intelligence in September 1942 when the Persia-Iraq Command was formed as a protection against a German drive southwards through the Caucasus.

  I went there in the completest ignorance of what I should expect. I pictured it ‘the moon dim city of delight’ in terms of Basil Dean’s production of Hassan. ‘Is not Baghdad the beautiful, oh stay!’ Well, it is anything but that. The bright-tiled many-gardened capital of Haroun-al-Rashid’s empire was sacked by Mongol hordes in the middle of the thirteenth century. Its palaces were burnt, its canals destroyed. All was desolate. Three centuries later the Turks absorbed it, but Istanbul was far away. Communications were at the mercy of tribesmen from the hills. It was over three hundred years before the Turks found themselves, after the Crimean War, rich and powerful enough to assert authority, to attempt to restore the dignity, importance, and prestige of the old city of the Caliphs. But even then communications were a problem.

  To-day no city of my acquaintance makes a worse first impression. Whether you arrive by air from Cairo, by train from Istanbul, or cross the desert by convoy from Damascus, that first impression is the same. Heat and glare beat up at you from a mud-caked road down whose centre runs a low hedge of oleanders, their pale-pink blossoms drooping and discoloured under a film of dust. On either side of you are drab one-storied villas. On one side a large ceremonial arch, the entrance to a projected park, stands on the edge of a wilderness of small garden plots and discarded vehicles, symbols of abandoned enterprise. A cluster of dingy cafés is crowded with long-skirted Arabs, their heads wrapped in long black-and-white handkerchiefs. They are seated on rectangular wooden settees, sipping at their coffee while a radio deafeningly blares out either a scream of oratory or one of those cacophonous Oriental dance tunes that always seem about to reach a rhythm but never do. Everything is shabby; there is a complete absence of bright colours.

  From the broad and sluggish Tigris rises a cloying smell of drains as your car swings to the right into the town’s main thoroughfare, Al Rashid Street. Cut originally by the Germans for military purposes during World War I, through a labyrinth of narrow streets, it runs from the north gate to the south, lined by a succession of one-roomed, one-windowed, tastelessly decorated shops, interrupted every twenty yards or so by a café or hotel, a cinema or an ampler store. The pavements are flanked by pillars, under a roof, which imprisons the air and renders it more pungent. The roadway is thronged with all manner of decrepit vehicles. Along the pavement small boys propel laden donkeys. Old, bent men shuffle at a kind of trot under the weight of brushwood and incongruous articles of furniture that they carry
knotted upon their backs. Arabs in long-skirted robes move with sedate tread, telling their yellow beads. Westernised government officials in ill-cut European clothes are briskly hurrying to their offices. Voices are raised. Horns are honking. The thermometer stands, in the shade, at no degrees. Over it all hangs an indescribably mingled smell of drains and unwashed bodies and heavily seasoned foods. I refuse to believe that any main street in the world can, in terms of dirt and smell, of heat and noise, compare with Al Rashid Street, Baghdad. And it is here in this street that the city’s hotels are set. The short-term visitor will wrinkle his nose distastefully as he unpacks his luggage, and decide to make his visit brief.

  At a first appraisal there is everything to be said against Iraq. The hot season lasts from the middle of April to the end of October. The shade temperature during that period rarely drops below ioo degrees. At times it will top 120 degrees. After mid-June there are no flies; the heat has killed them. Little rain falls between late March and mid-November. The only change from the sequence of cloudless days is an occasional dust storm.

  There is no escape from the heat during the summer months. East, west, north, south, whichever way you go, it is the same. There is no hill-station. There is no equivalent for the Londoner’s week-end. There is no getting to the sea’. Week after week, month after month, you swelter in the plains. It is not surprising that tempers get frayed before summer ends. Nor is the winter particularly pleasant. The houses and offices are constructed against heat, not cold. Draughts blow under ill-fitting doors and through sun-warped window-frames. Half an hour of rain reduces the countryside to a swamp; the roads become impassable; in town you can hardly keep your feet on the greasy pavements. Climatically, the only periods which a tourist would consider possible are the six weeks of the spring and the six weeks of the autumn. Yet even so I would be quite glad to relive the three years I spent there.