Golden Afternoon (48 page)

I never again made the mistake of trying to stop him drinking once he had ‘drink taken'. I merely left the party the minute I realized that I had ceased to be me and become just-one-of-those-present. And every time that happened Mike would arrive at 80/
I
next morning and go through the same hoops again: grovelling, apologizing, coaxing, swearing that if only I would forgive him that he'd never, ever … Oh dear! The truth was, of course, that he felt, at last, that he was his own man, and no one could make him do anything he didn't want to do, ever again. There used to be an old music-hall song in Tacklow's day that sums it up beautifully: ‘I'm twenty-one today! Twenty-one today! I've got the key of the door, never been twenty-one before! Father says' (in Mike's case, Mother) ‘I can do what I like, so shout “Hip-hip hooray” I'm a jolly good fellow, twenty-one today!' Yes, he was twenty-one and he was throwing his hat into the air and getting his teeth into freedom — and enjoying every single minute of it! Plenty of time ahead in which to sober down and start toeing the line.

The only thing that I find strange, having lived in a world that was still enormously influenced by Victorian values and morals, is the fact that in all my early love affairs, sex never even got a look in. Girls like myself just
didn't
. And that was that. Had I been asked to give an opinion based solely on my own experience, I would have gone on believing that this was the norm, and that only around one in fifty of my contemporaries had ever fallen by the wayside. However, I have since learned, with genuine surprise from popular novels, that the wholesale slaughter of young men during the 1914–18 war, and the harsh fact that when a girl saw her particular young man off to war she knew that her chances of ever seeing him again were small, had broken down the sex-barrier in Europe fairly sharply; and that from then on it became pretty shaky.

Well, maybe; but the Raj was still in many ways a backwater, left reasonably undisturbed by the winds and tides of change, and by and large the majority of its Fishing Fleet did
not
sleep around, and the ones who did were few and far between. But it was interesting to note that as soon as one of these dashing creatures lost her virginity, she couldn't
wait
to try to persuade her girlfriends to follow her example. A fact that suggests that the ‘fallen' longed to be back in a huddle with the cosy majority instead of knowing that they were still very much out on a limb
and considered to be ‘fast', the worst label you could slap on a young unmarried woman. I can remember one of these modern and emancipated young women, who had been prodding me about my love-life, saying in superior tones, ‘Do you mean to tell me that you haven't been put through your paces yet? For heaven's
sake
! — how
Victoria
!' And in restrospect I am inclined to sympathize with her. But I also feel enormously grateful for the fact that only one of the young men with whom I enjoyed a romantic flirtation let his feelings get out of hand and became a nuisance. Otherwise, it really was a case of ‘No sex please. We're British.' And only the other day, reminiscing about old times with someone who had in his rollicking youth been a handsome and dashing young heart-breaker, he said: ‘It was pretty difficult for young men like myself, you know. All of us bouncing with
joie de vivre
and raring to go, because where single girls were concerned, sex was definitely out. You lot just wouldn't play, and we knew it and didn't try it on. But grass widows were considered fair game, and there were always plenty of those around. Married women who had been sent up to the hills to escape the hot weather, and were left husbandless for weeks on end, had a field day. They used to mow us down in droves! Remember the one who was nicknamed “The Subaltern's Guide to Knowledge"? Yes, I bet you do! Well, that's how we coped with the situation; I don't know how you “nice” single girls managed.'

Nor do I, really; it certainly wasn't because we were frigid, so I can only suppose that fear of the possible consequences of sleeping around had been so deeply and successfully embedded in our subconscious that it had become more than strong enough to keep even something as powerful as the sex-urge in check. As for all that ‘Keeping myself pure for the “Right Man”; one alone to be my own, one alone to share my caresses' stuff, it was so much eyewash: icing-sugar on the cake. For you have to remember that in those days birth control was still pretty much in its infancy, and abortions were performed by sleazy back-street practitioners whose addresses were not easy to come by; nor, thank heaven, did young men setting out on a romantic date carry condoms in their pockets. The very idea would have been enough to take all the romance out of an evening. And oh, how romantic we were!

We sipped imitation champagne and held hands under the tablecloth while somewhere on the far side of the room some would-be Bing Crosby — or possibly the great man himself on a record — moaned tunefully about moonlight and roses bringing memories of you, or some other
top-of-the-pops. And when we danced to the sweet melodies of George and Ira Gershwin, Buddy de Silva, or a new young composer called Noël Coward, it was cheek-to-cheek, and we really did feel, as we clung together and swung around together on those crowded ballroom floors, that the
words
of the songs we danced to were true — ‘Heaven, I'm in heaven'
^*
… We didn't really
need
all that panting, sweating and struggling together among the sheets which nowadays, according to our cinema and TV screens, is regarded as the inevitable — and boringly familiar — ending to every good party; preceded, I gather, by the baldly unromantic question ‘Your place or mine?'
Ugh!

That Delhi interlude was not a very happy one for me. But it ended at last. To be followed by a halcyon period, another of the wonderful slices of my life that, like the NBN, is marked with a white stone.

It was no surprise to me that after Mike had seen Mother's photographs of the Ganges trips, and heard her stories, and Tacklow's, of the trips they had made in the past, he had set his heart on doing the same. For I too had been fascinated by those snapshots, and had always resented the fact that there was a strict rule, originally formed and thereafter firmly enforced by Sir Charles Cleveland, that under no circumstances whatever were any children permitted to join the party. I would have given anything to be included in one. And now I was going to be.

Sir Charles had been dead for some years now. He had died of cancer and was, I believe, one of the first humans to have a cancer treated by that comparatively new discovery of Madame Curie's, which she called ‘X-rays'. As far as I remember, a fragment of radium had been enclosed in a small metal container and implanted in Sir Charles's body, in the hope that it would burn away the cancer. It didn't. It merely killed him in what must have been an agonizing manner. Tacklow said that it had only been an experiment, and that Sir Charles, who had never been afraid of anything, had volunteered to play guinea-pig, knowing what he was in for if it didn't work. Which sounds so like him. Dear Sir Charles! He was a great man in every sense of the word. Kashmera, his
shikari
, was, however, still very much alive, as were several of the men who had been recruited for those previous Ganges trips; and these, together with Mahdoo and Kadera and the English-speaking down-country bearer who was shared by Mike and Colonel Henslow, made up our crew.

I can't remember whether we drove or went by train to Gujrowla. By train, I imagine; because we would not be coming back that way. But I do remember how heart-warming it was to see again the old iron railway bridge that spanned the great river at Gujrowla looking exactly the same as it did in the days when we used to transfer there into small river craft, to cross to the far bank where carts would be waiting for us to take us
inland to whatever shooting-camp had been laid on for the Christmas holidays.

Kashmera had made all the arrangements for this trip, as he used to do for Sir Charles and Buckie, Tacklow and Mother; and the two big wooden boats lay waiting for us under the shadow of the bridge. These boats were typical of the kind that had carried the river traffic for centuries before steam and trains were even dreamt of, let alone invented, and their design had not altered for hundreds of years. They were clumsy, flat-bottomed craft, fashioned entirely from wood in a manner that would surely have been familiar to Noah.

The larger one, which took the crew and the tents in which we would camp, plus all the necessary provisions, was sketchily enclosed at one end by a wooden deck under which gear could be stored and, I presume, members of the crew could shelter from the sun. That is, if they had no objection to being packed like sardines, for I see from a snapshot in Mother's photograph album that on this occasion we carried no fewer than
thirteen
in the ‘staff' boat. This inflated number was because the boats were carried down-river by the current and needed very little in the way of steering, beyond the occasional hand on the clumsy wooden rudder, or a touch from one of the even clumsier oars that all such boats carried. But on reaching its journey's end — in our case Narora — the boats must return to base against the current; and the only way was by manpower. A team of coolies hauled the boats up-river by means of heavy hemp ropes, singing as they plodded forward, in the manner made famous by the Volga boatmen. Two men could easily have brought one of the boats down-river, but it needed a team of at least eight to drag them back to the point from which they had started.

The drill was that our boat, which was not so heavily loaded, went on ahead, to be followed at a more leisurely pace by the boat carrying the crew and the tents and all the rest of the clobber. Only Kashmera and one of his friends, and Kadera if he should feel like doing so, came on the first boat. Our object (or rather, Mike's and Colonel Henslow's) was to shoot mugger — the man-eating crocodile of the Indian rivers. I suppose a day will soon come when even these horrid murderers will become an ‘endangered species' and people like the long-vanished
Sahib-log
will be accused of ‘wantonly killing this poor, harmless animal to the point of extinction'. Bet you! But in the twenties the rivers swarmed with muggers, whose annual toll of villagers, men, women and children,
snatched as they filled their water-pots, bathed, washed their garments, watered their cattle or just paddled and played on the wet sands at the river's edge, was horrific. Every ford had its resident murderer, and so did every village; and those who lived and made their livelihood on the banks of the Ganges, boatmen and fishermen, paid the heaviest price.

I never felt any sympathy for the mugger. (Or for a snake or a spider either, though that is only because they give me the creeps, and not for any sensible reason!) But I wouldn't be sorry to hear that muggers were no more, and I shall never forget the excitement of floating silently down that enormous, winding river and wondering what one would see round the next bend. If, as happened fairly often, there was a basking mugger or
garial
— the long-snouted, fish-eating crocodile that is hated by all Ganges fishermen, who blame it for poor catches — lying out in the hot sand near the water's edge, Kashmera would let our boat drift gently into shallow water until it grounded, and study the creature through binoculars to see if it was a large enough specimen to shoot. Or if it was a mugger at all. For a basking mugger, even a large one, is never very easy to spot, since not only are they almost invisible once the silt that coats them has dried to the exact shade of the sandbanks around them, but they take good care to lie at the precise angle at which a water-borne log or similar piece of flotsam, drifting down on the current, would lie when it was stranded. Many a careless calf or goat, coming down to drink, has been deceived by this ruse!

A baby mugger or
garial
was, except on one occasion, left to get on with it. But if Kashmera approved, either Mike or Colonel Henslow, depending on which of them had shot the last one or particularly wanted this one, would jump ashore and, with Kashmera in attendance, stalk the creature by whichever route or direction Kashmera advised. This usually necessitated a long, hot, inch-by-inch crawl over acres of the fine silver sand that lies on either side of India's rivers and affords very little cover beyond the occasional tuft of coarse grass or ragged clumps of casuarina.

Only when Kashmera confirmed that the Sahib under his charge had reached a position where he had the best chances of hitting his target, would he whisper, ‘
Maro, Sahib
' and the hot, silent stillness of the day would be broken to bits by the reverberating crash of a rifle shot and a sudden, violent ripple of movement all along the river, as the quarry, together with scores of mud turtles who had been basking in the sand along the river's edge — almost invisible, as was the mugger, by reason
of the silt that coated them — simultaneously flipped up and plopped into the water with the speed of light, while an astonishing number of birds — most of them hitherto unnoticed — abruptly took to the air: the white egrets that we used to call ‘Dobi birds', which had been dozing above their reflections in the shallows, and are an integral part of any Indian river, and a variety of small brown birds such as sandpipers which had been resting in the scant shade of casuarina scrub.

The mugger too, unless hit in a really vulnerable spot, can more often than not get away — and live. For it only needs one swipe of that powerful armour-plated tail to land the creature back in his own element, and muggers, like cats, would appear to have nine lives. If the stalk
was
successful, the corpse was marked with a small flag fastened to a stick driven into the sand, and left for the second boat to collect on its way down-river in our wake. We would stop and go ashore to have a delicious picnic lunch prepared by Mahdoo, and drift on in the afternoon until we found a really attractive place in which to camp, where we would stop and wait for the cookboat to catch up with us. Kashmera and one or two of his assistants would skin the muggers and/or
garials
that had been shot that day and rub salt into the skins, which were then pegged out to dry so that they could be in a fair condition for the Cawnpore tanneries to turn into suitcases, handbags, attaché cases, shoes or whatever.