Golden Afternoon (7 page)

I could hear C. T. Allen's voice bellowing unintelligible instructions above a deafening clamour that sounded like a hundred tin cans being banged together, and my mind being full of the horrors that had befallen the British in Cawnpore barely seventy years ago, I thought for one wild moment that history was repeating itself and that we were being attacked by a hostile mob.

Leaping off my bed and into a cotton frock, I ran out into the verandah, to discover my parents and the Aliens, and what appeared to be the entire indoor and outdoor staff of the Retreat plus their families, rushing across the lawns, yelling and banging anything made of metal that they could lay their hands on: cooking-pots,
dekchi
lids, tin trays, buckets, empty cans, and the dinner gong had all been pressed into service, and the din was indescribable. I could see no sign of an enemy, until C. T. yelled at me to fetch something and bang on it and pointed up at the sky above the lake. It was only then that I noticed for the first time that the sun was no longer shining and the brilliant afternoon had clouded over. There was a storm coming up; a dust-storm by the look of it. “
Loc
usts!' yelled C. T., and ran on towards the lake.

A curious dry, whirring sound became audible even above the frenzied clamour of shouting and banging, and I realized suddenly that the dingy,
dun-coloured clouds that had blotted out the sun were not clouds at all but millions and billions of winged insects, a blanket of outsize grasshoppers darkening the sky in the manner of an approaching storm.

Strangely, considering the noise that they themselves were making, they didn't like the pandemonium we were raising, so the vast majority of them flew on, passing over our heads to settle on and decimate the croplands and orchards of some other, and less fortunate, cultivator who had failed to notice their approach and muster sufficient helpers to drive them off. But although the terrifying brown blanket, disliking the din we were raising, flew on, a small proportion of locusts, lured by C. T.'s green lawns, flowerbeds and well-stocked kitchen garden, broke ranks and alighted. And judging from the damage they did, the devastation that an entire swarm can cause must be horrific. They could not have been more than a tiny percentage of the awesome whole — possibly one in every thousand. Yet every tree, shrub and plant seemed to be covered with great armour-plated grasshoppers whose jaws crunched so noisily that you could hear them munching.

The servants stopped banging on their makeshift gongs and concentrated instead on killing the creatures with sticks, ably assisted by flocks of crows, kites, shrikes and other carrion birds who hovered and swooped overhead, gorging themselves on this rich banquet. Baskets and sacks were filled with corpses and carted away in the direction of the servants' quarters, presumably to be burned or buried, for though the Chinese consider roast locusts to be a delicacy, I don't think India really fancies them as food.

This was the first locust swarm I had ever seen, and it was a truly alarming sight — made even more alarming for me by C. T. casually describing it as a ‘small one'! What a really large one must be like I daren't think, for if our efforts to discourage it from landing had failed, there would not have been a leaf or a flower-petal, or a single ear of corn, in all C. T.'s green and flourishing acres. I have always believed that we ought not to meddle with the balance of nature, because every time we do we discover (invariably too late) that we have ended up with a worse problem on our plates, but I admit I can't see that the world would be worse off” without locusts. Or, for that matter, muggers — not the human ones, but the hideous, blunt-nosed, armour-plated crocodiles of the Indian rivers. Both give me the grue; and though I'm sure Sir David Attenborough could find something nice to say about them, me, I could do fine wanting
them, for I cannot see that either species has ever been of the slightest use to anyone.

We had several other friends in Cawnpore, among them the parents of a small girl, now grown-up. This was Gerry Ross, with whom Bets and I had acted in the children's plays which, during the First World War, had been staged at Simla's Gaiety Theatre by a Mrs Strettle, now Lady Strettle, who used to run the children's dancing classes.

Gerry had played the Rainbow King in a two-act dance-mime,
The Lost Colour
, and taken the part of Peter in
Peter Pan
, but we remembered her best for the fact that after having her head shaved in order to help her survive a severe attack of enteric fever — a treatment that seems to have been popular in those distant days — her beautiful, red-gold hair, hitherto straight, grew back in a riot of short, copper-coloured curls which were the envy of every little girl in Simla. Few of us will ever forget that dashing Rainbow King, clad in glittering gold leggings and short, belted tunic which exactly matched those glinting curls, and flourishing a sword upon the little stage of the Gaiety Theatre. Here she was once more, a decade later, a tall, slim and dashing young woman with a curly bronze head and enough poise and sophistication for six.

Gerry had spent a day with us at the Retreat, boating and picnicking on the lake, and when the time came for us to leave Cawnpore, her parents suggested that ours should let Bets and me stay on for a few days in their bungalow while Tacklow and Mother went on ahead to look for accommodation for us in Delhi. Their offer was gratefully accepted by my parents, and Bets and I found ourselves spending another week in Cawnpore, this time in a brick-built bungalow not unlike an official Rest House, which stood in an almost treeless compound on a flat, dusty and featureless plain; an unattractive place after the green and picturesque charms of the Retreat. But the starkness of the Rosses' bungalow somehow managed to fit the situation, for I remember living through the week that we spent there in a state of continuous embarrassment, from which I could not wait to escape. I had never had a very high opinion of my charms (brother Bill had seen to that!), but never before had I felt so gauche, plain and socially inadequate.

Gerry, who like my beautiful and beloved ‘best friend' from my childhood days in Simla, Marjorie (‘Bargie') Slater, was a few years my senior, had blossomed into an outstandingly attractive and sophisticated
young woman, though she lacked Bargie's sweetness. Enviably sure of herself, she was the very model of a Raj débutante, a ‘Week Queen' — which was a term given to girls who were invited as though by right to the many ‘weeks' of the cold weather season. Lahore Week, Meerut Week, Horse Show Week in Delhi, and the many other ‘weeks' that featured racing, polo and point-to-points and included a plethora of dinners and dances as well as the usual complement of white-tie and fancy-dress balls that were graced by all the prettiest and most popular girls in India: the ‘Week Queens', in fact.

Gerry's poise and confidence made me feel appallingly gauche by contrast, while my sense of my own inferiority was considerably increased by the fact that each evening of my stay, though I was graciously invited to help her choose which of her many ravishing evening dresses she would wear that night, and to watch her do her hair and make up her face prior to being fetched by one or other of an enviably large number of admiring young men, it was never once suggested that, as a house guest, I might be asked to accompany her. Gerry explained that the various parties had been arranged, and invitations to them accepted, long ago, and that no hostess (or host either) could be expected to welcome an extra and partnerless girl at the last moment. I saw her point. But all the same, I felt a bit like Cinderella minus a fairy godmother.

Someone with a better figure and more self-confidence might have written this off as fear of a rival. But as one who possessed neither, I knew only too well that far from regarding me as a possible rival, Gerry considered me much too dull to inflict on her lively friends. Still, I did think she might have
tried
to include me in just one party, and I remember that week as long, dull, and sadly deflating.

But our Miss Ross had obviously decided that left to myself I would be a non-starter in the social stakes; and possibly for the sake of old times, she took it upon herself to give me a few pointers for my own good. Which considering the circumstances was very kind of her. In a lengthy lecture, delivered in the course of a long afternoon spent lying under the mosquito-net in her bedroom, she went to a lot of trouble to ‘put me in the picture'; warning me what to expect when I reached Delhi, and telling me how I should behave.

According to Gerry, India was no longer the happy hunting-ground for spinsters in search of a mate that it had once been. The 1914–18 war had killed hundreds of thousands of young men, leaving an estimated
3 million ‘surplus' British women who would never find husbands; and the annual trickle of Fishing Fleet girls had, in consequence, swelled to a flood. Each year every India-bound passenger ship brought more and more unmarried young women out eastward, and where men had once outnumbered women by at least five to one, the figures were now reversed. It was, therefore, up to any girl who wanted to have a good time, let alone find a husband, to keep her wits about her.

First and foremost it was essential that she acquire a beau to partner her at dances — any beau (I gathered that almost anything in trousers would do) — because unattached girls were always a liability. This meant that one had to corral a male who could dance. And one need not, to begin with, be too fussy — unless, of course, one was outstandingly pretty or the daughter of a well-heeled father who held an important post in the Government, in which case one could pick and choose, since ambitious young men would be only too anxious to take one out and about. However, since that plainly did not apply to me, Gerry advised me to keep my sights low and start by ensnaring some Indian Infantry subaltern, or even a junior
box-wallah
(a term for those in trade, who, according to Gerry, came at the bottom of the social scale except in places like Calcutta and Bombay).

Once you had managed to corral a steady beau you would be invited to all sorts of parties that you would never have been asked to as an unattached spinster; for although hostesses considered a spare man to be an asset to any party, they regarded an extra girl as a disaster. But once safely in circulation you could, with luck, pick up something better — graduate from a
box-wallah
or an Indian Foot subaltern to someone in a British regiment or in the Indian Cavalry; and from there, who knows? … To the British Cavalry or one of the Viceroy's ADCs, or even to a member of the ICS — the Heaven-born, no less! It was up to you. The world of Jane Austen and Becky Sharpe had not, as I had supposed, disappeared along with Queen Victoria and her beloved Albert, but was still with us; very much alive and flourishing like the green bay tree in this outpost of Empire.

Gerry was kind enough to give me endless tips on how to outsmart other girls and ensure that my dance-programme
^*
was filled. All this would, I feel sure, have proved invaluable to me if only I hadn't lacked
the nerve to put them into practice. The lecture ended with a solemn warning: I must never, but
never!
emphasized Gerry, neglect to discard the early and socially less important admirers who had acted as stepping-stones to higher things, once their usefulness was over and I had ‘made the grade'.

‘I can see that sounds pretty shocking to you,' said Gerry, ‘and that you think I'm being horridly hard-hearted. But believe me, it's the only sensible thing to do. If you mean to get on, you simply
cannot
afford to lumber yourself with useless and unimportant friends. Just harden your heart and drop them as soon as possible. If you've played your cards right, you'll find it easy enough to drop the riff-raff. One
has
to be ruthless!'

I can still see myself on that hot afternoon, wearing the regulation ‘siesta dress' of bra and camiknickers (who remembers those?) and sitting hunched up and pop-eyed with horror on Gerry's bed under the misty folds of her mosquito-net; being instructed on how to attract men and become a social success by this enchanting and wildly successful ‘Week Queen'. And I remember, too, how my heart sank down and down as I listened, because I knew only too well that I lacked the nerve to do or say any of the things that Gerry insisted were vitally necessary and
must
be done. I was, after all, the granddaughter of a devout Scottish missionary, and I was shocked to the core of my ignorant, innocent and prudish ‘play-up-and-play-the-game' soul, by almost everything that Gerry had said. I had never dreamed that the search for ‘love and laughter and happy-ever-after' could turn out to be such a harshly competitive affair; or that the pursuit of happiness entailed quite so much quick thinking and sharp practice. I knew I wasn't up to it and that I had better face the bleak fact that I was destined to be a wallflower at dances and end up unwed and unwanted in some home for destitute spinsters.

All in all, it was a profoundly depressing visit. Despite the efforts of Mrs Pankhurst and her valiant crew of suffragettes, we were still in the dear, dead days when marriage was not only fashionable, but also romantic; and we were great ones for Romance — ‘Happiness, and I guess, all those things we've always pined for.' How else could one live happily ever after unless one married (see Cinderella & Co.), when boy-meets-girl or vice versa was the theme of almost every novel, play and pop-song ever written?
Of course
I wanted to get married! But not if it entailed setting my cap at some pimply-faced and presumably gullible youth, for the purpose of using him as a first step towards getting invited to parties
where I might meet someone more worthwhile — who would in turn introduce me to something even better; and so on, up the ladder, towards the Prince Charming class, ruthlessly kicking away each rung as I mounted to the next.

The result of Gerry's pep-talk was that I left Cawnpore in a distinctly subdued frame of mind, and with my morale once more in flinders. But one look at Delhi Central as the train drew in did wonders for my drooping spirits, for it looked exactly the same as it had on the sad day when I had last seen it. And suddenly it was as though all those grey, intervening years of exile were no more than a brief dream from which I had just awoken. Nothing had changed!