Enchanted Evening (33 page)

Prisoners were only kept here for a month, after which they were given a small plot of land and the instruments needed to farm it. The idea of the settlement was that it would eventually be colonized by the criminals (as was Australia!) and turned into flourishing tea-gardens, coffee plantations and saw-mills. Lifers were encouraged to bring their families out, at the Government's expense, and every able-bodied man or woman in the islands had a job. The servants in Government House, and in every other official's house, were all convicted murderers. And the only nuisance about that was that ever since a Governor's wife had been murdered by her cook, no European woman was allowed to go outside her house without an armed guard (an Indian policeman, or a
jawan
) walking behind them. The rule was made more irritating by the fact that anyone who ever met the murdered lady was convinced that she had asked for it, and richly deserved her sticky end. In fact a strong plea for clemency was put in on behalf of the wretched cook, who had to be hanged, since the law of the penal colony laid down that a lifer who committed a second murder automatically earned the death sentence.

My parents having been friends of the then incumbent of Government House, Calcutta, Mother had written to him to ask if he would see that I was met and put up for the night, and seen off safely on the SS
Maharajah
. So when the train fetched up in Calcutta, there, waiting for me on the platform, were no fewer than three charming ADCs, armed with a letter from His Excellency to say he deeply regretted that he had been called away on urgent business, but that ‘the boys' would look after me and see me safely aboard.

Well, that was fine as far as I was concerned, and ‘the boys' did me proud. They took me off to lunch at Firpos, whisked me out to bathe and to have tea at the Tollygunge Club, and having brought me back to change into evening dress, took me out to dine and dance at the Saturday Club.

I had imagined that they would add another couple of girls to the party that evening, but no. It was still just me and the chaps. And since they danced with me in turn, I danced every dance. It was also a very hot night – Calcutta is always hot and muggy – and I had had an exceptionally energetic day. So that when my three ADCs, who took a dim view of the fact that in those days (and on the whole, in these too) I didn't drink any form of alcohol, suddenly produced, at a late hour of night, a long glass of something ice-cold and fizzy, full of slices of fruit and cucumber and lumps of lovely ice, I looked at it with some suspicion and said, probably crossly, that I'd already told them at least a dozen times that I wasn't being a prude about alcohol, I just did not
like
it.

‘Oh, this isn't alcohol,' chorused those young so-and-so's. ‘It's only Pimm's. You
must
have had a Pimm's before? It's only a sort of cup with a lot of lemonade and the juice of various fruits – that's all. You'll love it.'

I took a cautious sip, and they were right – I loved it. Just the thing for a hot night and with all that dancing. In the intervals between the next two dances I finished it, and when they asked me if I'd like another, I said I certainly would. By the time the band had packed it in and the dance was over, I had had at least three of those lethal drinks. Possibly four. I only remember that I had a wonderful evening, made more enjoyable by the envious looks I got from other and less popular girls, who couldn't understand why I should have
three
young men all to myself.

I arrived back at Government House in the best of spirits, and I remember mounting that long flight of marble stairs and looking down at those three young fiends who were standing in the hall below and staring rather anxiously up at me. I waved a cheerful hand, and one of them said a bit nervously: ‘I think it would be a good idea if you took a couple of aspirins.'

‘
Aspirins?
What on earth do I want aspirins for? I'm feeling fine!' I replied gaily. I fell into bed and was asleep almost before I could get my clothes off, but when I woke up, I wanted to die. I don't think I have ever felt so ghastly in my life, and if it hadn't been for the Government House
ayah
, who clucked over me in distress, managed to get me dressed and packed for me, I would never have caught that ship. The
ayah
helped me down those stairs, to where there were at least six if not nine ADCs waiting for me in the hall (their numbers seemed to double and treble and occasionally shrink into three), and I remember saying: ‘You
beasts
! You horrid lousy little
rats
– don't you
dare
speak to me!!' They didn't. They got me down to the docks and helped me up the gangway and into my cabin, where I fell on to my berth and passed out cold.

*   *   *

The Andaman Islands are at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal, a long way off the coast of Burma and with very little between them and the Antarctic. The little
Maharajah
, chugging down those limitless wastes of sea, took a full three days to reach the only reasonable harbour in the Andamans – Port Blair.

Knocked out by that great-grandmother of all hangovers, I did not stir from my minute cabin, which fortunately contained all mod cons, for the entire three days of the voyage. Those horrid ADCs had obviously explained the situation to the Captain and the ship's doctor, for dry biscuits and various soothing drinks were delivered at intervals by a sympathetic little Goanese steward. But it was not until dawn on the third morning that I awoke without feeling that my head had been replaced by a red-hot cannonball, and that I was never going to eat or be able to see straight for the rest of my life.

I was aware that the ship was no longer moving, and I crawled out of my bunk and went out on to the deck, to find that we were at anchor in the middle of a wide harbour ringed by white sands, green hills and coconut palms, with, to seaward, a scattering of little coral islands that looked like a flight of brilliant blue-green butterflies taking wing across that enormous expanse of mirror-smooth ocean.

The nearest of these islands was a tiny affair, topped by a large sprawling two-storey house surrounded by flowering trees, with, lower down, glimpses of other roofs and gardens embedded in lush greenery. This island had a long jetty to which a single boat, obviously a ferry, was moored, and a small white-painted launch flying a Union Jack had just left it and was making its way towards us. ‘That'll be the Government House launch,' said the Captain, appearing out of nowhere. ‘They'll be coming to take you off. Hadn't you better get dressed?'

Well, yes, I'd better, for there, standing up in the prow of the rapidly approaching launch, was Fudge, waving her arms in a wild semaphore of welcome.

*   *   *

The next few months were among the happiest I have ever spent. There are few people who have the luck to live for weeks on end on a coral island, in great luxury, with nothing to do but laze and swim, paint and go fishing. To wake, morning after morning, to see sunlight dancing across the high, white walls of a huge, airy bedroom, as the palms and the gold-mohur trees, and the masses of flowering creepers in the garden swayed in a cool sea breeze. To hear the fluting and chattering of innumerable exotic birds and the lovely, monotonous music of the surf that washed the beaches of the little island. To stretch out one's arms under the mist of the mosquito net and think, ‘Now what shall I do today?'

No wonder Tacklow's old friend, the one who had been Chief Commissioner of the Andamans many years ago, had managed to wangle extension after extension to a job that was looked upon by more ambitious members of the ICS and the F and P as a dead end. The old boy had fallen in love with the Andamans, and did not give a toot about trying to get himself moved to a grander post.

In point of fact, VIPs never included the Andamans in any of their tours, and so didn't know what they were missing. It had been tried once, when an undistinguished Viceroy by the name of Lord Mayo decided he'd like to take a look at the islands. The poor man became the only Viceroy ever to have been successfully assassinated. He was murdered by a Pathan ‘trustee' – a lifer, who had managed to convince the local police that, apart from the fact that he had sliced the head off someone in his careless youth, there wasn't a blot on his character, and who had become one of the Viceroy's guards.

There is an interesting story attached to this. Lord Mayo had been spending the day at the hot-weather Government House on top of Mount Harriet – the highest point in the hillsides that overlook Port Blair. The party broke up rather too late in the evening, and it was dark by the time they reached the jetty at the foot of Mount Harriet, where a steam-launch waited to take the Viceregal party back across the bay to Ross – the little island that is crowned by Government House and is the administrative centre of Port Blair. The convict guard that lined the jetty had been given torches, and it was by the light of those torches that the Pathan tribesman who had been transported for a blood-feud murder (in his eyes a legitimate killing) leapt out of the darkness and stabbed Lord Mayo. The Viceroy fell from the jetty into the mud below, where he died in the arms of the young doctor who had been attached to the party as H.E.'s personal physician, and who had leapt down into the mud to do what he could for the dying man.

A blow by blow description of the incident – the torch light on the wet mud and the wetter blood, the panic and the turmoil – was given me by the son of that doctor, who in his turn had heard it described, in lurid detail, by his father. The doctor's son was General Sir Philip Christianson, Bart (plus a string of initials), a child of that doctor's old age. Poor Mayo, who had gone to the Andamans to try to better the administration of jails and penal settlements, was murdered on the evening of 24 January 1872. Well over a hundred years ago. ‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?' – Well, almost. Fascinating isn't it?
1

In the 1930s there were only about fifteen or sixteen Europeans on the Andamans (not counting a small detachment of British troops under the command of a junior captain, since these came and went and were not fixtures) – such as the Swedes who ran the saw-mill, and a couple of Scandinavians who had a coconut plantation, and so on. Unfortunately they all knew each other too well, with the result that the majority were not on speaking terms with each other. This made entertaining very difficult for poor Lady Cosgrave, who found it extremely tricky to plot out the place-names at Government House dinner parties without seating two implacable enemies side by side.

The house had been built in the nineteenth century at a time when the Raj was involved in hostilities with Burma. When the Empire builders had succeeded in grabbing Burma, they found themselves lumbered with an enormous number of Burmese prisoners of war, and no idea what to do with them, until some bright colonist had the brilliant idea of shipping the majority of them to the Andamans, where they would appear to have settled down very comfortably.

Among them were a good many members of King Thebaw's court: including a number of court artists and carvers. Why such persons should have been lumped together with prisoners of war I can't think, unless some artistically minded general thought they might be usefully employed tishing up Government House and the Club. Which they did most successfully. I only wish I could have seen their work before some tiresome Chief Commissioner's wife decided that the big drawing-room would look brighter and lighter if its walls and ceiling were smothered in white gloss-paint, thus almost obliterating the beautiful free-hand carvings that depicted hunting scenes, in which weird animals of every shape and description were pursued by men armed with spears or bows and arrows through the lush foliage of fantastic forests that could only have existed in the artists' minds. It's a pity that woman wasn't bopped on the head by one or other of the convicts whose work she did her best to ruin.

Fortunately, there was a beautiful carved wooden screen between the dining-room and the upper hall of Government House, untouched by paint, and so skilfully done that both sides were perfect, the one that faced the dining-room being an accurate back-view of the one that faced the upper hall. The newel-post of the stairway that led up from the lower hall was carved into the likeness of some Burmese demon's head, and was always referred to as ‘Hindenburg', and the club-house, which had been built so near the shore of the tiny island that in windy weather the spray would rattle against its windows with the sound of handfuls of pebbles hurled against the glass, possessed a double-sided screen that was even better than the one in Government House.

I thought the house with its wide, glassed-in verandahs and its wonderful views was near perfect. Yet I hated it. For if ever a house was haunted, that one was. And with reason. When you remember that every single one of the servants who worked in it was only there because he had murdered somebody, it would not be too surprising if the place harboured a few vengeful ghosts. And there were things that one could not explain about that house. It had only two doors on the first floor, the one that shut off the master-bedroom from the hall, and the one that shut off the main guest-room. My room, and Fudge's, had short swing doors of the type that one sees in bars. They did not lock, and lying in bed one could see the legs of anyone who passed as far as their knees.

Each bedroom had its own bathroom, plus proper doors for modesty's sake, and all the bathrooms could be reached from the outside by staircases leading down from them, at the foot of which, by night, a member of the Indian Police (recruited on the mainland, not from a jail!) stood guard under an arc-lamp, the lights being switched on every day at dusk, and turned off at dawn. Fudge's room and my own were connected by an open archway that had a curtain across it. And every room in the place had a big white ceiling fan that was hardly ever still, for the Andamans are not all that far off the equator.