Fragrant Flower

Author’s Note

The controversy over the Regimental Band was a burning problem in Hong Kong in 1880. The descriptions of the poisoning of the bread and the way the thieves used the storm-water drains are authentic.

An exhaustive report on the origin and characteristics of Chinese slavery and domestic servitude in Hong Kong was reviewed in a debate in the House of Lords on June 21st, 1880.

It was stated that the Attorney General had been wrong in his exposition of the law, but that, on the other hand, the Chief Justice had rushed into wild exaggerations.

Sir John Pope-Hennessy was the first Governor of Hong Kong who treated the Chinese as partners. He took the first steps to translate into reality the ideal of non-discrimination between the races which had appeared on the Governor’s instructions in 1886 and in British Colonial Policy much earlier.

In this enlightened policy he was in advance of his time but he was, however, a poor administrator and an impossible man to work with. He quarrelled with all his officials and was distrusted by the Colonial Office.

He left Hong Kong in March, 1882 for the Governorship of Mauritius where again he aroused intense hostility. He had the right ideas but went about them in the wrong way.

This book is dedicated to my friends in Hong Kong, and especially to George Wright Nooth, for many years Deputy Chief of Police, who showed me the New Territories and took me to the Red Chinese border.

To the Mandarin Hotel, which in my opinion is not only the most glamorous in the world but also has the best service, and to their sweet, delightful Assistant to the General Manager, Miss Kai-Yin Lo, who introduced me to her charming family and the superlative Chinese food one finds only in a private house.

“Fragrant Flower” - 1880

“There, Miss Azalea, I’ve finished the Master’s sandwiches and now I’ll see if I can find Burrows to take them along to him.”

“Do not worry, Mrs. Burrows,” Azalea replied. “I will take them. Sit down and rest your legs.”

“I don’t mind telling you, Miss Azalea, my legs feels as if they don’t belong to me and me back’s broken in two places.”

“Do sit down!” Azalea begged. “It has been too much for you!”

That, she knew, was the truth, but it would have been useless to tell her aunt so.

It seemed to Azalea real cruelty to have made an aged couple like the Burrows undertake a party that her uncle, General Sir Frederick Osmund, and his wife were giving before they left England.

The Burrows were now very old and had served the General’s father until his death. Then they had lived in the house in Hampstead as caretakers, and Azalea was sure they had not expected to be required to go on working at their age.

But the General, with his wife, twin daughters and his niece, had moved into Battlesdon House for two months before leaving for Hong Kong.

Although a number of extra servants had been engaged, it was the Butler, Burrows, who coped with cheap, untrained footmen in the front of the house, while Mrs. Burrows, who was nearly eighty, did the cooking.

Used to Indian servants who obeyed their slightest wish and cost very little either in wages or food, Lady Osmund had made no effort to adjust herself to English conditions. When the General had been at Camberley it had been easier, because he had soldier-servants who attended to him, and wives from the married quarters who were only too glad to earn some extra money.

But in London, because Lady Osmund was cheeseparing when it came to wages, they could engage only the youngest and most inexperienced girls who, as Mrs. Burrows said over and over again, were more trouble than help.

It had been inevitable, Azalea thought when the party was proposed, that she, who had made out the lists and sent out the invitations, should be relegated to the kitchen.

“Mrs. Burrows will never manage, Aunt Emily,” she had said to Lady Osmund. “The new kitchen maid is really half-witted and I think the scullery maid should be in an asylum.”

“The two daily women will come and help with the washing up,” Lady Osmund replied.

“There is all the cooking for the dinner party and for the supper later at the Ball,” Azalea pointed out.

There was a pause. Then, with an unpleasant look in her eyes which Azalea knew only too well, Lady Osmund said,

“As you are so anxious about Mrs. Burrows, I am sure you would wish to help her, Azalea.”

After a short silence Azalea asked in a small voice,

“You do not wish me to be – present at the – Ball, Aunt Emily?”

“I consider it quite unnecessary for you to appear on such an occasion,” Lady Osmund replied. “I thought your uncle had made it clear to you what your position in this house should be, and you will continue to keep your place, Azalea, after we reach Hong Kong.”

Azalea did not reply, but she was conscious of a sense of shock that her aunt should express her dislike so forcibly. After two years’ experience she had come to expect the treatment she received, but it still had the power to hurt her. Nevertheless she bit back the protest which came to her lips for the simple reason that she had been afraid, or rather terrified, when she learnt of her uncle’s appointment to Hong Kong, that they would not take her with them.

She longed with a yearning that was inexpressible to be in the East again, to feel the sunshine, to hear the soft singsong voices, to smell on the air the fragrance of the flowers and spices, dust and wood smoke – most of all to know that she was no longer shivering from the cold of England.

Hong Kong would not be the same as India, but it was East of Suez, and as such was permeated in Azalea’s mind with the golden glow of a sunlit Paradise.

It seemed more like a century than only two years ago that she had been sent home from India, stunned into an inarticulate misery at her father’s death and the events which followed it.

She had been so happy with him, looking after him after her mother’s death, acting as hostess for him in the Army bungalows he was allotted in the various parts of the country in which the Regiment was stationed.

When they had gone to the North-West Provinces Azalea had been thrilled, even though it meant her father often had to leave her alone for months on end when he was serving on the Frontier and there was trouble amongst the tribesmen.

When things were quiet she was able to accompany him. But when, as so often happened, women were excluded and sent back to a safe base, she was still content because she was with soldier-servants who had served her father and mother for many years.

There were also wives and mothers of other officers in the Regiment ready to take pity on what they thought was her loneliness.

Azalea did not say so because she was too tactful, but in fact she was never lonely.

She loved India – she loved everything about it, and her days seemed to be full with all she wanted to learn, the lessons she arranged for herself with various different teachers, and self-imposed tasks she performed in whichever bungalow she and her father occupied.

She had, of course, met her father’s much older and most distinguished brother, General Sir Frederick, on various occasions, and she had thought both him and his wife to be stiff and pompous.

It was only later that she was to learn how little they had in common. She found that her uncle’s character and personality in no way resembled her adored father’s.

Derek Osmund had always been gay and carefree except as far as his Regimental duties were concerned.

He enjoyed life and he made everyone around him enjoy it too, and yet there was nothing raffish about his gaiety. He was a great humanitarian, and Azalea could not remember a time when he had not been concerned with the sufferings of some unfortunate family.

Often when he returned from the parade-ground there would be half-a-dozen Indians waiting for him, some with cuts and bruises, others with eye complaints, festering sores or a sick baby.

He had little medical training, but his sympathy, his understanding and the manner in which he laughed at their fears and gave them new hope for the future sent them away happy as no doctor was able to do.

“He made it all such fun!” Azalea would often remind herself.

It was something her mother had said over and over again in the years when they had all been together.

“Papa has a holiday,” she would say to Azalea. “Now we can have some fun together! What about a picnic?”

Then they would all three ride off to picnic beside a river, on the top of a hill, or in some ancient cave which would turn out to be part of the history of India.

Looking back on her childhood, Azalea would feel there had never been a day when the sun was not shining, never a night when she had not gone to sleep with a smile on her lips.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, had come disaster!

“How could it happen? Oh, God, how could You let it happen?” Azalea had cried wildly into the night on the ship which carried her away from India to the cold and what seemed to her the impenetrable darkness of England. Even now she could hardly believe that it was not part of some terrible nightmare and she would not wake to find the two years she had spent with her uncle and aunt had just been a part of her imagination.

But it was true – true that her father was dead, and that living in her uncle’s house she was treated like a pariah! She was despised, disliked and humiliated in every possible way because the General would never forgive his younger brother for the way in which he had died.

“Papa was right! He was absolutely right!” Azalea would say to herself.

Sometimes she would long to scream the same words at her uncle as he sat at the end of the table looking incredibly self-satisfied, and yet speaking to her in tones that she told herself she would not have used to a dog.

She learnt what she must expect in the future when they arrived back in England and her uncle talked to her in his Study.

The journey home had been an inexpressible torture of misery and physical discomfort.

It was November and the storm in the Bay of Biscay left most people on board ship prostrate.

But it was not the buffeting of the wind or the pitching and tossing of the ship which Azalea minded, but the fact that she was so cold.

In the years she had lived in India she had become acclimatised to the excessive heat, and perhaps the Russian blood in her veins had prevented her from finding the hot, stifling air of the plains as exhausting as did the pure-bred English. Her mother had been of Russian origin and born in India which, Azalea learnt, was another sin for which she must be punished because her uncle did not care for foreigners and despised Anglo-Indians.

There was, however, little of her mother’s dark-eyed beauty and exquisite bone structure to be seen when Azalea, thin to the point of ugliness, stood in front of her uncle and thought that her teeth must chatter aloud because the Study was so cold.

Her unhappiness at her father’s death had prevented her eating enough on board ship, her eyes were swollen from weeping, and her dark hair, which in India had seemed to glow with strange lights, was lank and lifeless.

She looked miserable and immature, and her appearance did nothing to soften the hardness of her uncle’s eyes, or the note of dislike she could hear so clearly in his voice.

“You and I, Azalea,” he said, “are both aware that your father’s reprehensible and shameless behaviour could have brought disgrace upon our family name.”

“Papa did what was right!” Azalea murmured.

“Right?” the General ejaculated with a sound like a pistol-shot. “Right to kill a superior officer – to murder him?”

“You know that Papa did not mean to kill the Colonel,” Azalea said defensively, “it was an accident! But he did try to prevent the Colonel, who was quite mad, from brutally ill-treating a woman.”

“A native!” the General said contemptuously. “Doubtless she deserved the beating the Colonel was giving her.”

“She was not the first woman he had treated in such a way,” Azalea retorted. “Everyone knew of the Colonel’s perverted cruelty.”

Her voice vibrated with the horror of what she remembered.

But how could she explain to this stern, granite-like figure in front of her what it had meant to hear a woman’s screams ringing out from the Colonel’s bungalow, her shrieks turning the soft, dark loveliness of the night into something hideous and bestial?

Derek Osmund had stood it for some time. Then, as the screams seemed to grow more insistent, he had jumped to his feet.

“Dammit all!” he exclaimed. “This cannot go on! It is intolerable! That girl is little more than a child and the daughter of our
dhirzi.
”

It was then Azalea had realised who was screaming. She was a girl of perhaps thirteen who came with her father, who was a tailor, to work on the veranda of the bungalow, assisting him with his stitching and cutting.

She was almost as experienced as he was in making up a gown in under twenty-four hours, mending an officer’s uniform, or fashioning a new shirt.

Azalea had often talked with the girl, thinking how pretty she was with her long dark eyelashes and gentle eyes. She always pulled her sari across her face whenever a man approached, but the Colonel, even though he was usually the worse for drink, must have seen the delicacy of that oval face and the sweetly curved breasts which the sari could not conceal.