Joy never knew it, but her curtain-lecture had made up my mind for me, convincing me that I would rather spend the rest of my days on Joy’s dreaded ‘shelf’ than marry someone I was not in love with. I knew that Mother was going to be bitterly disappointed (it was a pity that Gordon wasn’t thirty years older; they would have made a perfect pair!). But he was not my cup of tea. I wanted something a good deal more stimulating, and if it didn’t look as though I was going to get it, well, what the hell? I knew now that I could always support myself with my paintbrush and pencil. (And so, incidentally, could Mother, whose watercolours were getting better and better every day, and selling very well.) I couldn’t see why Bill and Joy were so obsessed with the idea that the pair of us were going to be a ghastly and expensive burden on them one day. The effect of Joy’s lecture on the necessity of snapping up Gordon’s offer because ‘at my age, I’d never get another’ and would end up in some dim little bed-sit, was the opposite to what she had intended.
I gave Gordon a very final ‘no’ (courtesy of Bill and Joy, had they but known it), and he insisted that we ‘remain friends’. Which doesn’t often work, but in this case it did. Gordon went sadly off into the sunset, and that was that.
* * *
All I knew of Sialkot had been learnt from Sir John Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War, and Kaye and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, Vol. II. Which wasn’t a great deal. They included the usual account of incompetence on the part of elderly, top-ranking, British Army Officers, and the refusal of those who commanded Bengal Army regiments to believe that their sepoy troops were not loyal to the core. This resulted in eventual murder, mayhem and bitter disillusionment. None of the details have stuck, but I was fascinated to discover that the house put at the disposal of the Kashmir Resident in Sialkot dated well back into East India Company days, and was said to be haunted.
I asked Mrs Lang what it was haunted by, and she said vaguely that she ‘really didn’t know dear,’ except that it was something to do with the Mutiny year: ‘I expect someone was killed here, dear; but no one seems to know who it was, and we never use the room they say is haunted, because the servants don’t like to go in there, or the dogs either.’
Remembering the haunted room we had spent a night in at the Bower in Mashobra,1 and how alarming it had been, I was relieved to hear that since this one was never used (it was barely more than an alcove off the big drawing-room) it could never have been used as a bedroom. Anyway, it had no bathroom and no outer door, and the only entrance to it was through a door in the drawing-room, which was hidden by a wall-hanging in the form of a long Persian carpet that looked as though it was merely part of the décor. But I was interested to discover that, like the servants, the dogs, of which the Langs kept several, would not go near it after sundown.
There were two doors – in addition to the french windows on the garden side – into the drawing-room from inside the house, and during the daylight hours the dogs used both impartially. But once the sun had set, none of them would use the one nearest the Persian carpet unless they had to, and then only at a run. And none of them would go within yards of the hidden door. I tried several times to take one of them up to it, but they pulled back hard against their collars and growled and bristled, and stuck in their toes. Colonel Lang, watching, laughed and said, ‘It’s no use. They won’t go near it! I tried lugging them up to it when I first came here, but as I didn’t want to break their necks or get sharply bitten, I gave it up. They don’t seem to mind so much in the daytime.’ So next day I borrowed the key, pulled aside the wall-hanging and went in, calling up the dogs to go with me.
They came. Not reluctantly, but very suspiciously, conveying the impression, as dogs can, of walking on tip-toe, growling the while, very softly in the back of their throats. They made no attempt to retreat, but went forward and sniffed the angles of the wall and every inch of the floor. It was a bright, cloudless morning and the sun was pouring directly into the little room through window-panes that no one had cleaned on the inside for some considerable time, so that although the outer side was clean enough, the grime on this one was so thick that no one trying to peer in could see anything. I know, because I tried. As for the rest of the room, the whitewashed walls appeared to be fairly newly painted and the dust on the floor was not particularly thick. I presumed that someone – Colonel Lang? – who did not believe in ghosts had seen to it that the room was kept reasonably swept and tidy. The dogs obviously didn’t think much of it, for I saw the hairs lift along their backs. But I didn’t feel anything at all. Standing there in that bare, white, sun-flooded little room, it was difficult to believe that anything really bad could have happened in it, let alone something so dreadful that it had left its imprint there, to creep out and re-enact the horror at night.
I learned from Sir John’s History of the Sepoy Rising that because Sialkot had been stripped of British troops, who had been sent to other and supposedly more dangerous stations, many of those who had been left behind with few or no defences had been put to death, with the enthusiastic support of the criminals whom the Indian Regiments had released from the gaols, the riff-raff of the bazaars and – which is surprising – ‘the servants from the houses and the bungalows of the English’. I find this last surprising because when I was researching for my ‘Mutiny novel’, Shadow of the Moon, I found that this was far and away the exception rather than the rule, and that again and again the lives of the English had been saved, at great personal risk, by their servants. I can only suppose that the English in Sialkot came out badly in this respect, and had been harsh and unjust to their servants. Though there is another side to that coin, as anyone who has read Rudyard Kipling’s spine-chilling ghost story, ‘The Return of Imray’, will realize.
According to Sir John, in Sialkot ‘From sunrise to sunset’ the work of murder ‘went on bravely’. Everything that could not be carried off was destroyed or defaced, with one ‘strange and unaccountable exception’ – the Christian church and chapel. Strange indeed, since the monuments in that church are to men killed in the battle of Sobraom, which was a resounding victory for the forces of ‘John Company’.
No one knows why the church and the chapel escaped destruction. But I was told that when the Mutiny broke out in Sialkot, among the many who were killed there were the family who lived in the house that was now the Residency, and that their bodies were buried under the big peepul tree that still grows in the compound. Also that a mother and her young children, attempting to escape the killers, were cornered and butchered ‘with great cruelty’ in that little room off the Residency drawing-room – and that it is they who are said to return to it by night, hoping to hide there. I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know that something or someone is there at night. And whatever it is, the dogs are afraid of it.
* * *
In spite of its Mutiny reputation, I thought Sialkot was one of the pleasantest cantonments in India. Day after day the weather was crisp and cold and cloudless, and every morning and evening one could see the Kashmir snows, orchid or vividly pink, lying along the horizon. At midday they were diamond white and glittering against a white winter sky, and among the trees in every garden, bougainvillaea hung in brilliant masses. Beyond the city the crop-lands were green with winter wheat, and though I do not ride, I would take my paintbox with me any morning that there was a meet for a jackal hunt or a paperchase and, when the riders set off, get down to work with my brush, surrounded by an interested and most complimentary audience of children: ‘Waa! That is the tree in thy father’s field, Mustafa – look, the Memsahib has drawn it to the life – and there are the mountains!’ One’s audience had a habit of identifying everything one painted with cries of admiration.
Sialkot was full of men who would shortly be leaving for the Front – Middle East or elsewhere – from regiments such as the 14th/20th Hussars. It was difficult not to wonder for how many of them this would be the last Christmas they would see. But nobody spoke of war, perhaps because all o
f us thought of little else.
So many of the cheerful young men whom I dined and danced with that Christmas went off to war and never came back. But they stay alive and high-spirited in my memory, dancing until the small hours in the Club ballroom that Joan and I helped to decorate; galloping wildly to and fro on the polo ground while we cheered from the spectactor seats; setting off in a frosty dawn on a paperchase; pulling crackers or taking presents off the Christmas tree. Singing silly songs around the Club piano at three o’clock in the morning, and carols in that candlelit East India Company church. Among its many historic memorials is one that was raised to the memory of a Brigadier John Pennycuick, who ‘entered the army as an ensign in the 78th Regiment, fought in fifteen general engagements, and after a service of 43 years, fell at the head of his Brigade at the Battle of Chillianwala, 13th January 1849. And his son Alexander, an ensign in HM 24th Regiment, who fell in the same engagement while defending the body of his father, aged seventeen.’
This is the church that Sir John Kaye says was, for some inexplicable reason, spared the looting and vandalism that befell the rest of the Sialkot cantonment, and, as far as I know, that memorial is still there together with the other plaques and monuments.
* * *
Having seen the New Year in with a final party at the Sialkot Club, I boarded the train to Delhi. There I was to spend several weeks working on murals on the walls of the many pre-fabs hastily erected for the use of troops on leave, or men convalescing from wounds, as well as a hospital in the new (and hideous) cantonment that had been built a few miles beyond the then limits of New Delhi, on a stark and barren ridge of exceedingly stony and unattractive ground. I remember dear Aud Wrench gazing long and thoughtfully at the enormity of those acres of raw, red-brick buildings, shaking her head and saying sadly, ‘Oh well, only God can make a tree!’ Nowadays I expect the whole place has mellowed, as New Delhi did, and has become a pleasant leafy suburb. Or merely been absorbed into the nearest portion of the city and become a part of it.
Bill, having achieved his exchange from the Gunners to the Department of Supply and Transport, was installed with his family in a bungalow in New Delhi, and Mother and I got our first look at her first grand-daughter and my first niece. Suzan, then around six months old, was already a young woman with a will of her own, and Joy warned us that we mustn’t walk in on her too suddenly, because ‘Suzi didn’t like strangers’.
She had a starched English nanny, which impressed me; though remembering my own childhood I felt sorry for her. The nanny too told me to be careful how I approached her small charge, and the fact that Auntie Mollie had come to see her was duly broken to her gently by both. But these precautions did me no good. My niece, the prettiest little dot you ever saw corralled in a playpen, stopped playing with whatever toy had her attention and stared at me from under small, scowling brows for what seemed like a good two minutes before deciding that no, she didn’t like strangers, especially this one! Opening a minute pink mouth to its widest extent, she proceeded to howl the house down. Joy swooped her up into a motherly embrace and eventually, defeated, handed her little darling over to Nanny, who whisked her away, still howling lustily, into the night-nursery. My tactful brother said, ‘Oh, well, you know what they say, Moll: “Children and dogs, they always know; can’t fool a child, can’t fool a dog!”’ and laughed as though he thought his daughter’s reception of me was a tremendous joke. Anyone who has been blackballed by a baby will know just how I felt.
Delhi itself seemed unchanged by the war. But in the Secretariat buildings security had been tightened and unidentified strangers could not go far without being challenged. However, a friend of mine escorted me to the right office, where I handed in another bunch of black and white drawings and was asked if I could paint scenery. I imagine the official had camouflage in mind, for when I suggested that I might be able to brighten up some of the pre-fab buildings he said that sort of thing wasn’t in his line, and directed me elsewhere. After spending some time in another office, I arrived back at the bungalow to be told by Mother that I’d had a caller, who, after waiting for the best part of half an hour, had got tired of waiting and left. ‘Guess who?’ she said. Believe it or not, it was Clive, the chap who had ‘tossed me aside like a soiled glove’. Mother told me that Joy’s nanny had been most impressed by him. ‘Ooh, what a lovely young man!’ she had said. ‘Is he your daughter’s young man? If he is, she’s a lucky girl!’ Shows he must have had something! But, oh, how wonderful to find that I honestly couldn’t care less that I’d missed seeing him. Or if I never saw him again. We left for Kashmir on the following day in the best of spirits.
Chapter 35
Spring that year had been everything one expects of spring in Kashmir. The days were blue and sunny and the long line of the snows, seen through a mist of apple-blossom and reflected in the river and the lakes, was a page straight out of the Elizabethan poets – or the Americans who write the lyrics for the composers of popular love songs.
Mother and I spent a lot of our time out sketching, and I sent off what was to be the last batch of black-and-white illustrations to New Delhi, the propaganda people having found someone in the office who could do them, and decided that it was a great deal easier – and saved a lot of time and postage – to get the work done on the spot instead of at long range. I was not sorry to be done with having to hunt up photographs from old magazines when it came to having to draw weapons of war. But no sooner was I done with that job than the WVS1 landed me with another: selecting and buying material for curtains, cushions and slip-covers for the countless windows, chairs and sofas in those aforementioned pre-fabs. They were urgently needed for the convalescent and wounded, and as recreation centres for soldiery on leave.
It was never very pleasant to go jaunting down to the plains during the hot weather, but this time I had the ill luck to hit a heatwave. We set out for Rawalpindi in an outsize Army lorry, my Punjabi driver and I, hoping to do the trip in record time, since the damage caused by the winter rains would have been repaired by now, and the monsoon had not yet broken.
The Srinagar–’Pindi road was looking its best and my driver handled that clumsy vehicle a treat, so that I soon stopped clutching the edge of my seat and shutting my eyes (my usual practice on that scary road) and did not have to resort to brandy or sea-sickness pills. The driver was a chatty individual, and I learned all about his family and his home town and his plans for the future. We were on excellent terms by the time we reached Garhi and paused in its small bazaar to buy fruit.
I slept a lot of the way after that, and didn’t wake up until we stopped at Domel to pay the toll and have a cursory look taken at our luggage. But it wasn’t until we reached Kohala, where another toll is demanded and one crosses the suspension bridge that takes one out of Kashmir and into British India, that the hot weather first made itself felt in a wave of muggy heat that made the valley feel like the steam-room in a Turkish bath. Luckily, from there the road climbs fairly steadily until it reaches Sunny Bank, from where a branch road some two miles long takes one up to Murree, while the main road dips down again towards the plains and the town and cantonments of Rawalpindi.
Once again, as we took the ‘Pindi road, the heat met us like the blast from a furnace, and the air became hotter and hotter as we left the hills behind us and met the rocky levels where the trees give way to bushes and thorn-scrub and tufts of dry grass. Behind us the dust of our passage fumed up in a dense cloud that poured in between cracks and crannies of the truck, and though we shut every window, we could no more prevent the dust-clouds raised by approaching vehicles from half-smothering us than they could avoid being smothered by ours.
Fortunately, by this time it was nearing sundown and there was hardly any traffic on the ‘Pindi–Murree road; which was a blessing. I suppose the heatwave, now in its third or fourth day and proving itself a killer, had driven people off the roads until after sunset. My driver’s khaki uniform was dark with sweat; as was my own, made of
grey muzri, a cotton material that is about the cheapest cloth obtainable in the bazaars (our higher echelon were all for saving money). Many of our better-heeled members preferred to provide their own uniforms, but people like myself accepted the ones on issue with gratitude. Which, on this occasion, proved a godsend, for had I been wearing a smarter and more expensive version of the uniform instead of a muzri one, I would probably have come down with a bad case of heat-rash or a lethal one of heat-stroke.
My driver pulled to the side of the road and once again requested permission to relieve himself, and as I too could do with the same, we descended, and disappeared behind the nearest bit of cover – of which there was plenty. When I came back to the lorry, without thinking I put my hand on the bonnet – and very nearly scorched my palm off. I swear you could have fried a steak on that metal, and I regretted that I could not take off my uniform and spread it over the bonnet, where it would have dried in under two minutes. However, since I had nothing under it except a pair of panties and a bra, I abandoned the idea and crawled reluctantly back into my seat – my uniform sticking to me as though I had been taking a dip in a swimming-pool full of glue.