Golden Afternoon (5 page)

From Lucknow we went to Cawnpore, the
Pioneer
duly reporting that Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye, Miss Kaye and Miss Dorothy (
sic
) Kaye had left Government House. (My sister was christened Dorothy Elizabeth, but no one has ever called her by either of those names. She has always been ‘Bets', just as I have always been known to my nearest and dearest as ‘Mouse', which I would have said was a most unsuitable name. But then there is no accounting for nicknames: one is given them in an idle moment, and they stick.)

In Cawnpore we stayed with yet another family friend, Charlie Allen, — ‘C. T.' Allen — whose father, Sir George, owned, among other things, the
Pioneer
newspaper, and had given a young cub reporter named Rudyard Kipling a job on its staff back in 1887. We had stayed with the Allens before; but in England. Freechase, their beautiful house in Sussex, contained something that I would have given almost anything in the world to possess, the original plaster relief of ‘The Jat' — one of the illustrations that Lockwood Kipling had done for his son Rudyard's famous novel,
Kim
. Rudyard had given it to Charlie's brother George, who had become a great friend of his, and I used to sit and stare at it enviously.

These two brothers had a fascinating history, and I have always hoped that someone — preferably C. T.'s grandson, another Charles Allen
^*
— would start work on one. Their grandfather had gone out to India in the heyday of the East India Company in the hope of making his fortune there. His first step in this direction was to hawk beer and soft drinks off
a barrow to the British and Indian Army troops who were besieging Delhi in the summer of the Black Year. This enterprise obviously paid off handsomely, and he eventually ended up a millionaire tycoon, owning a tannery and a handful of cotton mills and this and that. He had two sons, and Tacklow always said that it was an indictment of the public school system that when he died his eldest son, George — who, having been born before he made his pile, was educated at a board school
^*
— had taken over and built up his father's holding into a thriving empire that included a couple of major newspapers.

This remarkable character — the original ‘rough diamond' — was, it seems, not only successful but also an exceptionally likeable man. Everyone liked him. And Kipling was no exception. I don't know whether he married or not, but if he did there were no children, for when he died he handed on the Allen empire to his much younger brother Charlie, who, born after their father had struck it rich, had been sent to Eton. C. T. (who, like that well-known television tycoon ‘J. R.', was seldom, if ever, referred to except by his initials) had loads of charm but not a grain of business sense, and he managed to blue the Allen fortune in record time. But he was still riding high when he entertained us in Cawnpore in the autumn of 1927.

The Allen house, the Retreat, was one of the most attractive houses I have ever stayed in, a huge, rambling, East-India-Company-style bungalow with a thatched roof and wide verandahs from which flights of stone steps led down to a garden of sloping lawns and colourful, scented flowerbeds, and a vast, meandering lake full of shadowy creeks and shady backwaters where herons and wild duck nested. The banks were thick with palms and flowering trees, and the lake was patched with lotus and water-lilies and alive with butterflies and birds, and there was a graceful, Indian-style pavilion on a small green island. It was a beautiful, peaceful and enchanted place which we spent hours exploring, drifting around in a punt.

Mornings at the Retreat began with a clamour of birdsong; doves and pigeons, hoopoes and parrots, crows, mynahs, blue-jays and
sat-bhai
, saluting the day in joyful chorus. At around seven o'clock a bearer would appear with
chota-hazri
— literally ‘small breakfast' — without which no Indian day would be complete. This consisted of tea and toast and
whatever fruits were in season: papaya when available, bananas (of which there were always at least half a dozen varieties to choose from), oranges, lychees and mangoes. After that, bathed in a tin tub and having dressed, one went out into the cool, glittering morning to walk through the gardens and along the lakeside, sniffing the flowers and watching the birds and squirrels.

Sometimes we would be taken out shopping in the bazaars, but always we were back again at the bungalow by eleven o'clock for ‘brunch', the main meal of the day. This was a curious mixture of breakfast and lunch that was served on the verandah, and consisted of porridge for those who fancied it, and Grape-nuts or Shredded Wheat for those who didn't; fruit juice and coffee, bacon and eggs, and at least one Indian dish, such as curry and rice,
jhal-frazi
or chicken
pilau
, plus some pudding or other to end with. The earlier part of the afternoon was generally occupied by a siesta, and after tea on the lawn we would go out, as in Lucknow, to see the sights of the city.

And here, once again, we were back in the Mutiny; for Cawnpore was the scene of one of the great tragedies of that terrible period, a crime that shocked India almost as deeply as it shocked the British. For almost sixty years later, when I was a child in Delhi, listening pop-eyed and riveted to tales of the ‘Black Year', I was told by a Muslim resident of that walled city a tale that had been current there for many years. How the head
maulvi
of the
Jumma Masjid
had nailed a manifesto on to the main door of that great mosque, denouncing the massacre of the captive
Angrezi
women and their children in the
Bibi-ghur
, and calling upon the Faithful to lay down their arms and return to their homes, since God could no longer be on their side because of the ‘Sin of Cawnpore'. I used that tale when I wrote
Shadow of the Moon.

The story of Cawnpore would have differed very little from half a dozen other Mutiny stories, had it not been for the fact that the victims of the final horror of that terrible summer were all women and young children. Over 200 of them — all that were left of the ‘more than 1,000' Europeans who had survived a horrendous twenty-one-day siege, followed by an even more horrific massacre in the shallows of the Ganges.

When I see and hear some of the anti-British tump that is being dished out today by
son-et-lumière
shows at Delhi's Red Fort, or in pamphlets sold in her bazaars, written by agitators still whipping that long dead horse, the Raj, and inciting racial hatred by retelling the tale of ‘Hodson's brutal and unnecessary shooting of the unarmed sons of the King of Delhi',
^*
I am reminded that no mention is ever made of another hapless fifty or so non-combatants, of whom all but six were women and children whose menfolk had been killed on that fateful June day when Delhi rose against ‘John Company's' rule; and who, after being held captive for nearly three weeks in the fetid darkness of a stifling dungeon below the palace in that same Red Fort, were eventually dragged up into the glaring sunlight, to be butchered in an open courtyard by men armed with swords, bayonets and sabres, for the entertainment of a gaping, jostling crowd of onlookers …

The bodies were left there all day to provide the citizens of Delhi with a free raree show. And in the evening they were piled on carts by men of the lowest caste, untouchables who are the disposers of rubbish and filth, and taken to the river-bank to be flung one by one into the placid Jumna. ‘Food for the crocodiles and the mud-turtles, the jackals and the scavenger birds: and a sign and a warning to a hundred villages as the
bodies drifted with the slow stream, to be stranded on sandbars and burning-
ghats
and fish-traps, or caught in the eddies that washed the walls of fortified towns.'
^*

That story is
not
popular with the pamphleteers. Nor (though we still hear a lot about Amritsar and General Dyer) do we hear much about the fate of the Cawnpore garrison, whose numbers were roughly estimated as ‘well above a thousand souls' (a figure that included their families, but not the scores of panic-stricken civilians who had flocked in from outlying stations to take refuge in General Wheeler's pitifully inadequate entrenchments). Incredibly, the garrison stood siege there for twenty-one days, under continual fire and appalling daily losses, until eventually, driven by lack of food and almost no water, they were forced to accept the terms of surrender offered by the ‘Nana Sahib' — Dundu Pant, Rajah of Bithor — now being written up as a heroic freedom fighter. The terms had included a solemn promise to send the remnants of the garrison in
budgerows
(large eight-oared river-boats with thatched roofs) down-river to Allahabad, and the ragged, starving survivors gave up their weapons, ammunition and treasure and, carrying their wounded on mattresses, managed to drag themselves down to the mile-distant river and on to the waiting boats. But it had been a trap.

No sooner were they all aboard than a signal was blown by a bugler and immediately the boatmen set fire to the thatched roofs and, jumping into the river, waded ashore, allowing Dundu Pant's soldiery to open fire from either bank on the helpless passengers. The wounded and too weak burned to death, and of those who were not drowned or shot in the river but managed to struggle ashore, the men were immediately killed and the women and children herded into carts and taken away to be imprisoned in the
Bibi-ghur
(women's house),
^†
where they were later joined by other wretched captives, of whom it is said that ‘only four or five' were men.

As for the 200 or so women and children who had survived the horrors of the siege and the massacre of the boats, they had just fifteen more
days to live. For when, barely more than a fortnight later, Dundu Pant heard the guns of the relief force firing within earshot of Cawnpore, he turned like a mad dog on the helpless prisoners and ordered his sepoys to open fire on them. When, to their eternal credit and the fury of the Nana Sahib, they refused, he ordered butchers to be brought in from the town's abattoirs; men who, armed with sharpened swords and the knives and cleavers of their trade, set about butchering the close-packed mass of dazed and starving women and children.

It had taken all day to kill them; and according to the onlookers, when the butchers' weapons became blunted they were handed out through the windows to be re-sharpened or replaced by fresh ones. With the morning the avid crowds were back again in force, this time to watch the mangled bodies dragged out and thrown into a nearby well. Not all of them were dead, and one small boy who had lain all night, frozen with terror under the bodies of the dead, ran screaming round the well until one of the onlookers caught him by the legs and, swinging him against the rim, so that his head cracked on the stone, tossed him in. That savage mass-murder successfully accomplished, Dundu Pant marshalled 5,000 of his fighting men and marched out to meet the Company's army …

They were only narrowly defeated. But when their leader realized that the battle was lost, he took to his heels and fled into the
Terai
,
^*
leaving his followers to face the music. His parting act before he fled was to order his guards to kill a Mrs Carter and her new-born infant. Which was done, despite the frantic protests of his wives and women, who had taken in and given refuge to the pregnant mother, whose baby had recently been born in the women's quarters of his palace. Not a man to look back upon with pride as a national hero, I would have thought.

By now the thunder of Havelock's guns could be heard firing on the outskirts of the city. So when the last corpse was flung into the well, onlookers and perpetrators alike took to their heels without making the slightest effort to cap the well or to clear away the gruesome evidence of the butchery that had taken place in the
Bibi-ghur.

The stench of that charnel-house, and the sight of those appalling wounds and silent gaping mouths and sightless eyes that stared up from the well at the men who had arrived too late, provoked an explosion of
rage and hatred among Havelock's men, and marked an ugly turning-point in the campaign. For from that day forward men of the British regiments, who had felt no particular animosity to the mutineers and had always got on well with the sepoys, turned into vicious killers intent on revenge. They went into battle shouting as their war-cry: ‘
Remember Cawnpore! Remember Cawnpore!
' And they remembered Cawnpore and killed without mercy and hanged without mercy, condemning a man as often as not for the colour of his skin as from any proof of guilt.

The atrocities committed in revenge for those who were so brutally slaughtered at Cawnpore were as unforgivable as the deeds which prompted it. And, as ever, it was the innocent who suffered most. Countless Indians, many of them blameless, died violent deaths at the hands of infuriated soldiers who, blinded by the red fog of rage, forgot that they were, technically at least, Christians whose Bible states categorically that “‘Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, “I will repay."' They preferred to take the matter into their own hands — and did so. The results have been collected in detail in a book entitled
The Other Side of the Medal
, which does not make pretty reading.