I still have several odd lengths that I bought there and never made use of. One (which I made into curtains for the ‘Columbine and Harlequin’ room that was my bedroom during our stay in Persia) was so pretty that Sandy paid for it himself, so that he could keep it for curtaining the guest-room of whatever house he would be occupying next. I think it cost him the equivalent of one shilling and sixpence a yard. I lined the curtains with heavy unbleached linen, also bought in that bazaar, to make them hang better, and they should have lasted him for years, but for a sad accident that befell them not long afterwards. By a curious fluke, Mother and I happened to be spending a few nights with Sandy, this time in Peshawar, to which outpost of Empire he had been transferred following his stint in Persia, and where he was again in need of a bit of help with the furnishing …
Sandy had already hung the Basrah curtains in the guest-room that had been allotted to me in his Peshawar house. This was a small, bare room that appeared to have been tacked on to the bungalow as an afterthought, since it was on a different level to the rest of the house and had to be entered by way of two or three shallow steps. Facing these, on the far side of the room, was a door that led into a small, Indian-style bathroom and beside it, filling the rest of the space on that wall, were three windows set side by side, making one oblong one. The windows looked out on to a short gravel drive that led out, over a culvert, to one of Peshawar’s main side-roads. There was only one way of watering the public and private gardens that kept the city a green oasis in a largely barren land: an elaborate series of ditches that circled the cantonment area and threaded through it under a series of culverts. Once a week each section of these suburbs had its individual sluice opened, usually at night, so that anything that needed watering, lawns, flower-beds (Peshawar was famous for its roses), shade trees and gardens, was flooded to a depth of about three inches. This method is used in many arid countries, so I was familiar enough with it to recognize the sound of rushing water that awakened me out of a sound sleep on my second night in Peshawar.
Lying in the dark and listening to it, I got more and more irritated by the noise and began to work out what I would say in a snarky letter to the Municipality, complaining of being woken up by the uproar and being quite unable to get to sleep again.
I remember tossing and turning and pulling a pillow over my ears to shut out the maddening sound, and my imaginary letters of complaint grew more and more acidulated, until suddenly, after a good hour of this I lost my temper. After a brief angry struggle with my mosquito net, I swung my feet clear and jumped out of bed. To land in over a foot of cold water!
It gave me the shock of my life and I did one of the stupidest things I could have done in the circumstances. I groped under my sodden mosquito net and turned on the switch of my bedside light. One is always warned not to muck about with electricity when in a bath, and I was in one all right. Almost up to my knees. Luckily, I came to no harm. I realized that the roar of water that had been driving me crazy was coming from a point much nearer to me than the culvert. I waded across the room and opened the bathroom door. It was a mistake …
The room appeared to be full of water, and I had a lightning vision of a wall of water on which leaves of Bromo lavatory paper floated like lily-pads, before the whole thing fell on me like the Red Sea falling on the hosts of Egypt. It swept me across the room to end up on the steps, and I managed to crawl up them, soaked to the skin, get the door at the top of them opened and, again without pausing to think, turn on the lights.
My room opened into the hall, and there was less water here, only a few inches, just enough to launch Sandy’s treasured Persian carpets, which looked very pretty floating about on the surface of the flood. Sandy looked equally pretty when I banged on his bedroom door and he came paddling out wearing pale blue short-legged pyjamas, with his yellow hair all ruffled from sleep, just like Little Boy Blue. I remember telling him so. He was not amused. But fortunately, the sight of my duck-pond strewn with leaves of Bromo suddenly struck both of us as funny, and we spent the next half-hour in intermittent attacks of helpless giggling, which made it difficult to explain what had happened to Mother and Kadera and Sandy’s bearer, who shot out of different doors and found themselves splashing in shallow water.
It wasn’t anything to do with the Municipality after all. It was the pipe that brought the cold water into my bathroom – the hot was still carried in kerosene tins. It had broken somewhere near the ceiling, and if only I hadn’t been sure that it was water intended for the garden, I could have stopped it – or rather, got Kadera and Co. to do so – almost as soon as it started. As it was, it left a horrid high water-mark on the wall of my bedroom and a worse one on the Basrah curtains. It didn’t do much good to the furniture or Sandy’s carpets, either. Sandy gave me the stained remains of those charming curtains, and I cut off the stained halves and kept the rest for years, using them for short windows and cushion covers and things like that. But to get back to Iran/Iraq …
* * *
The return journey from Basrah to Khorramshah was always by river in the Consular launch, probably because the prospect of another humiliating delay at the Iranian frontier, and the production of yet another seven photographs apiece, was too much. Instead, we took to the water and went home far quicker than we had come by land, as the Shatt-el-Arab raced towards the sea. Mother used to take surreptitious pencil notes, for Iran at that time was paranoid on the subject of spies, and any foreigner taking photographs or sketching was instantly suspected of making maps for sinister reasons. Not that there was anything much to sketch or photograph, except for groves of date palms wherever there was a village and endless miles of desert and wonderful sunsets.
The useful thing, to me, about that stay in Persia/Iran, was that it gave me hours and hours of leisure, which I filled most usefully – once the muralling of Sandy’s house was finished2 – by writing the murder story that Fudge and I had concocted on the stormy afternoon in the Andamans, marooned on the tiny island of Ross. I had meant to write it before, but there had never seemed to be enough time. Now there was all the time in the world. I borrowed an office table and chair from Sandy, bought several students’ pads, a handful of pencils and a couple of rubbers from a shop in Abadan, and shut myself away in my starry-ceilinged bedroom for the best part of every day until I managed to get Strange Island, the title I gave to my second whodunnit and (if you count a couple of Potter Pinner books and The Ordinary Princess) my fifth book.
I knocked off work for a brief interval in order to fulfil a promise that I would paint some frivolous murals on the walls of the Khorramshah Club’s lounge and dining-room for Christmas. Since these rooms were often used for parties and the occasional dance, the silly winter-sporting figures that skied and tobogganed round the room were only intended to be temporary, and the plan had been to repaint them once the New Year’s partying was over. But the Committee must have got attached to those light-hearted creatures frolicking around their rooms, for many years later, while talking to a war correspondent who had been covering the Iraq–Iran war, I learned that the only house left standing when the Iraqi forces had finished pounding Khorramshah with the heavy guns was the one with the figures of skiers painted on its walls. After all those years … and they were only painted with poster-paint on to whitewash! Everything else, including the palm trees, had gone and nothing else was recognizable. I had seen photographs of the devastation on television newsreels, and could not believe that this was once a place I had lived in, and that somewhere underneath those piles of blackened rubble were the remains of my starry-ceilinged room and that flirtatious Columbine.
I managed to finish the second draft of my Andaman story, and to meet a jewel of a woman who not only offered to type it for me in return for one of my pictures, but could actually read my writing!
9
Raja Santosh Road, Calcutta
Chapter 31
I don’t remember anything about our departure from Iran, or the return trip down
the Persian Gulf to Bombay where, upon landing, the first thing I did was to post off a copy of Strange Island to the publishers. That done, I returned to the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Mother and I had tea and sat around talking and making plans until it was time to leave for the station, where Mother and Kadera saw me on to a train for Calcutta before catching the night mail to Delhi themselves, where Mother was to retrieve the Beetle – on loan to Joy for the past few months – so that they could drive the rest of the way back to Srinagar.
Mother had suggested that I go back with her to Delhi, breaking the long journey by spending a night or two with Bill and Joy and taking a Calcutta train from there. But since all I had ever seen of the south, or of the east coasts of India, was that drive to Bangalore and Mysore, a few weeks in Ootacamund and that short and crowded week of the Mysore wedding (I didn’t count Hyderabad as the south), I couldn’t resist the chance to see more. In those days one could buy a ticket on a through train from Bombay to Calcutta, via Bangalore to Madras, and from there along the eastern shores of India, touching at such towns as Vizagapatam and Calinapatam, and Cuttack in Orissa.
The journey took three nights and the best part of four days as we chugged and puffed and loitered down one side of India and up the other, and I spent most of my waking hours with my nose glued to a window, gazing, fascinated, at the countryside we were passing through. Most of the towns were disappointingly shoddy. But the scenery was a delight. There were hills and plains, high lands and low, rivers and waterways and groves of coconut palms, hibiscus and flowering trees, alluring glimpses of silver sand and a glassy sea coloured emerald and turquoise and ultramarine, pale jade in the shallows and fringed with chalk-white foam.
Forty years later, almost to the day, I made the same journey in reverse, from Calcutta to Bombay, only this time by air. It took about forty minutes, and I could see nothing below but a map, mainly light brown, splashed here and there with pale green. As we neared Bombay I saw a curious, shadowy smudge on the map and realized that it must be the ghats, that deep and entrancing crack in the earth’s surface that almost all trains from Bombay must pass through. And, looking down on that smudge, I thought what a lot modern airborne tourists must miss.
Mark you, those train journeys had their drawbacks, and mine to Calcutta was no exception. The carriage was hot and gritty, and became more so every hour. And as we got further and further south, a majority of the people on the platform and in the third class carriage spoke Tamil or Telagu, and I found that I could not talk to them except in sign language and scrambled Hindustani.
Fortunately the food posed no problems, because at any stop where there is not a railway restaurant there are always one or two licensed vendors of local dishes which in general are far nicer than the imitation English dishes served in the platform restaurants or the dining-cars on trains. And since I could identify most of the food on offer (largely vegetarian and always served up on a banana leaf) I only had to point. Which brings me to the main drawback of long-haul train journeys: your fellow passengers …
This must always be a toss-up if one is travelling alone, and this time I had the bad luck to find myself cooped up in a two-berth sleeper with one of those women who, like Nancy Mitford’s ‘Uncle Matthew’, hated ‘Abroad’ – which in their case seems to begin half-way across the English Channel. This poor creature was a rabid example of the type. I’ve never been able to understand why on earth they do it – marry someone in Foreign Service, I mean.
This tedious woman gasped with horror at the very idea of eating gobi bharwan, or dahi aloo1 – or even chuppattis and plain rice! – from a ‘common food vendor’ on a station platform. I mustn’t dream of touching it or I’d get terrible stomach trouble, even cholera! I tried to explain that I’d been self-inoculated against bazaar food since the days when Bets and I used to steal handfuls of roast chunna from the food shops in Simla’s Lucker Bazaar, or be given jellabies, hot and crunchy and oozing with honey, by some kind-hearted shopkeeper. But my carriage companion would have none of it. ‘Bazaar’ food was poison, and that was all there was to it.
She herself had come prepared with enough packaged and sterilized food, bottled water and pasteurized milk, to feed an army for a week; and she had brought with her a spoilt and exceedingly badly behaved eighteen-month-old daughter who howled, screamed and whined practically non-stop, threw her sterilized food about and paid not the slightest attention to her mother’s repeated threats to smack baby if baby didn’t stop doing so. Baby knew darn well that mother wouldn’t do anything of the sort. And so did mother. So I don’t know why she bothered. Was I glad to lose them at Howrah! But apart from their company, and the dust and the grit, it was a memorable journey. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
It was great to see Bets again. She had been waiting for me on the platform, and as she drove me across Howrah bridge and through the busy streets to her flat in a suburb of the city, she filled me in with all her news since she had left Lucknow. WHP had been turned down for the Army, it having been discovered in the course of his medical that he had only one kidney. Bets was reticent on the subject of her home life, just telling me that young Richard, now approaching his third birthday, could, though looking like one of the heavenly choir, invent some of the most disastrous ways of amusing himself that she had ever conceived of. His usual excuse being: ‘You never told me not to!’
Bets said that unfortunately her imagination came nowhere near covering the variety of things that she had ‘not thought’ of telling her angel-child not to do. Once, finding a saw that workmen had left unguarded, he had tried to saw off the legs of the dining-room table in order to bring it down to a more accessible height.
Bets was certainly busy, WHP was in the office for the best part of every day, and she had Richard, and lots of friends, and plenty of work to keep her occupied. Her mornings, and more often than not her late afternoons as well, were taken up doing pastel portraits. Hal Bevan-Petman, who was at one time – as I once read in one of those lavishly illustrated monthly American art magazines – ‘unquestionably one of the finest pastel artists of our generation’, was a great friend of our family’s and, though he had refused to teach Bets, he had for some time allowed her to sit behind him while he was doing one of his pastel portraits (provided she didn’t make a sound and his sitter didn’t object) and watch how he did it.
Bets had found those sessions invaluable, for she had picked up any number of tips, and her own pastel portraits improved mightily. She became what she referred to as ‘the poor man’s Bevan-Petman’ and, though she could not command the prices for her portraits that Hal could, she did very well, and orders poured in. There always seemed to be a sitter in the room she used as a studio.
Calcutta, in the hey-day of the East India Company, when magnificent Palladian-style mansions were being built every day and the Park Street Cemetery was little more than a third full, must have been a magnificent city. It was still fairly impressive when I first saw it in the autumn of 1927, though its main street, Chrowringee, was beginning to look pretty tatty.
As for the slums that had crept up behind its prosperous façade, the less said about them the better. But its zoo and its public gardens, the leafy suburbs where the rich Indians and prosperous Sahib-log lived, and its two golf clubs – the Royal, and the one at Tolleygunge (which, together with a racecourse, a club-house, complete with ballroom, billiard rooms and an indoor swimming-pool, lay a mile or two beyond the outskirts of the city), not to mention the pleasant ‘Saturday Club’ – had few equals East of Suez.
I had thought Calcutta a splendid city on that wonderful day when I found myself back in the beloved land of my birth and childhood. Every yard of the city – every inch, if it came to that! – the squalor as well as the glamour, had spelled ‘home’ to me. But now, seeing it again after another and even longer gap of years, it seemed far more crowded. There seemed to be twice, or even three times as many people on the streets and in the bazaars as I remembered. In all
other aspects, the city seemed unchanged.
WHP and Bets had a large ground-floor flat in a two-storeyed block of flats surrounded by green lawns and flower-beds that were walled in by trees. The flat immediately above us was occupied by an American businessman and his wife. I didn’t see much of him, since he left for his office early and came back late. But Louise Rankin was not only a charmer, but a cook who could have beaten Escoffier at his own game. Cooking was her hobby, and her husband avoided as many invitations as he possibly could, on the grounds that he could see no reason for ‘dressing up in his soup-and-fish’ to eat indifferent meals in other people’s houses, when the best cooking in Calcutta was right here in his own house! This excuse was regarded as fully acceptable by both friends and acquaintances.
Louise’s contribution to the local war effort was An American Cookbook for India, dedicated ‘to housewives in India’, while its profits went to the Indian Red Cross Society and the St John’s Ambulance Association, India. It was an invaluable book and must have made a packet for the charities she named, since it sold out almost at once and had to be reprinted in a hurry. I managed to acquire a first edition, and so did Bets, who would soon be driving ambulances for St John’s herself, and both of us bought extra copies to give as presents to ‘memsahibs’ newly arrived in India and unfamiliar with the ways of Indian cooks and kitchen-matters.
The few months I spent in Calcutta were among the most hectic that I can remember of my India days. I had barely arrived in the place when who should drop in to greet me but one of my best Delhi friends, dear Marcia Mariden, and before I knew where I was I found myself roped in to help with a monster fête in aid of something or other to do with the war. I’ve forgotten what, there were so many of them: the Red Cross; St John’s; Buying-another-Spitfire, or another Bomber; Help for the Wounded or help towards acquiring more weapons of destruction, which sounds silly looking back on it, but was the best that many of us could do at the time. I was put down to help with an art stall, and asked to contribute a few large and gaudy poster-sized pictures to be auctioned at the conclusion of the fête. I painted half a dozen ‘Cocktail Girls’, in the style of the ‘Petty Girl’ pin-ups, on large sheets of three-ply wood. Cocktails and cocktail parties were a great feature of the 1920s and 30s, and a clutch of Calcutta businessmen bid against each other to acquire the ‘Cocktail Girls’ in the interests of patriotism, and because they thought it would be amusing to hang them up in the private bars of their own houses.