The Day of the Scorpion (9 page)

Sarah’s paternal grandmother, the first Mrs Layton, died in England of double pneumonia in 1907 after a bout of malarial fever six weeks after returning home to visit her son. Young Layton was then back at school, in his first term at Chillingborough. He went home to Surrey for the funeral and wrote a letter to his father in India saying he was sorry, and describing – with his grandfather’s help – the headstone that was going to be erected on his mother’s grave.

His father’s second wife was the widow of a major of the 1st Pankot Rifles who had died heroically on the North-West Frontier. Young Layton met her in the summer of 1909 when his father brought her home on long leave. He liked her. In a curious way she reminded him of his real mother – the one he’d had a picture of. She treated him as if he were already a man, which in a way he was, being fifteen, a promising classical scholar, not bad-looking and growing out of childish debility. He was still thin, but he had bones, and his voice had broken. He was startled by his resemblance to his father, and
flattered when his stepmother mentioned it. He had his father’s eyes, she said. She was well-fleshed, heavier than he, but she often made him offer her his arm and when he did so she leant on it. She made him feel gallant. She asked him to call her by her first name, Mabel – a name he had not liked but liked now.

To his father’s eventual question, ‘Well, John, what do you think of her?’ he could only say in fullness of heart, ‘Oh, she’s topping,’ and was amazed then when his father took his hand, as a woman might have done, and exerted a momentary pressure. They were lying on this occasion in his Surrey grandfather’s orchard under an apple tree whose fruits were suspended in the branches – midway between their summer green sour and their rosy autumn ripe.

‘What will it be, John,’ his father asked presently, ‘the administration or the army?’

‘Oh, the army,’ he said, thinking of his stepmother’s first dead hero husband. ‘The Pankot Rifles,’ and then half sat up as if to apologize. His father lay back – eyes closed, smiling. ‘I mean,’ young Layton continued, ‘if you agree, I’d like to, well, you know, not make capital out of your standing in the civil, but make a go of it on my own in something different. Do you mind?’

His father said, ‘Not in the least,’ then smiled more broadly and repeated: ‘Not in the very least.’

When young Layton returned to India in 1913 his father was member for finance on the provincial governor’s executive council. He and Mabel lived in a vast old bungalow in Ranpur. Layton stayed with them for a week and Mabel gave a dinner party for him at which he met the commanding officer of the 1st Pankot Rifles and the adjutant, and their wives. Before the guests arrived Mabel inspected him to make sure that the tailor in London had made his uniform correctly and that he was wearing it properly. It consisted of tight dark blue overalls that were strapped under the heels of Wellington boots, a white shirt with a stiff narrow winged collar, a narrow black silk bow-tie, a black silk cummerbund,
a waist-length jacket of dark green barathea frogged with black braid and clasped at the neck by a little silver chain. It was hot but not especially uncomfortable. He was proud to be wearing it and not put out when Mabel tapped his chest with her fan and said, ‘Let it wear you, then you’ll grow into it,’ and kissed him and raised her arm in the way a woman did in those days to command the support of a man she approved of.

A week later he joined his regiment in Ranpur (the month was October) and a week after that went up to the Pankot Hills to the depot where he was initiated into the lore of recruitment, initial training, and transportation back to Ranpur of men returning from leave in their villages. In October and November boys still came down from the hills to Pankot to present themselves at the
Daftar
, often accompanied by an elder brother who had come up with his battalion in April from Ranpur and later gone on leave. The recruiting season was also the leave seasn. 2/Lieut. John Layton sometimes sat with the senior subaltern in the
Daftar
, learning the technique of selection and rejection. At others he watched the boys drilling under the depot Subahdar-major, or took command of the morning and evening parades. Apart from the subaltern appointed as Recruiting Officer Sahib there were two other British officers permanently at Pankot, the depot commander and his adjutant. Layton lived with the senior subaltern in a bungalow near the golf course. His military duties took up little time, but he had social duties. Social duties included calling (by leaving his card) on European officials and civilians (usually retired) and their wives, in order of seniority. Pankot was never empty but in the winter there was an air about the place of almost cosy relaxation. Wherever he went in Pankot he was known as James Layton’s son and as Mabel’s stepson. He did not mind having no special identity of his own. Life, in its fullest sense, was a question of service. He had an idea that his real mother, from ill-health rather than any other cause, had not fully understood this. In Pankot she also was remembered but as someone who hadn’t been quite up to meeting the demands the country made on white people – certainly not
up to meeting them in the way her successor, Mabel Layton, met them.

He was careful to take plenty of exercise. He rode and played tennis and at weekends went for long walks by himself; but solitariness, to Layton, was attractive only in prospect. He found the lonely hillpaths disturbing.

The house in which his father and Mabel lived during the summer was shut up. He looked forward to 1914 and hoped he would not have the bad luck to be left in Ranpur. He would have liked to spend at least one hot weather in Pankot while his father and Mabel were on station. By 1915 he would probably be on the North-West Frontier, because the 1st Pankots had not been there since 1907, the year Mabel’s husband was killed and his own mother died in England. He also looked forward to the time – still further in the future because peace-time promotion was slow – when as senior subaltern he would live for a whole year in Pankot in charge of recruitment. Perhaps by then his father would have retired and come to live in Pankot permanently. Some people said that India was ruinous to familial devotion, because of the long periods when children were separated from their parents. Some people even tried the experiment of educating their children at special schools in India, but that didn’t work very well. The children were marked, for life, as of the country. So far as young Layton was concerned, the years in England had only served to strengthen his devotion to his father, his stepmother, and the country they served.

In November he returned to Ranpur. He did not see Pankot again until the summer of 1919. In the hot weather of 1914 he was, as he had expected, left behind in Ranpur. By the time his parents came back from the hills war had been declared on Germany. In 1915 the 1st Pankots moved to Dehra Dun and then to Poona. There was some uncertainty about what role they were to play, and where, but eventually they were brigaded and sailed for Suez. They were in action in Mesopotamia. Subahdar Muzzafir Khan Bahadur was awarded a posthumous VC. The Colonel collected a DSO and two
officers, one of them Layton, collected MCs. In 1918, somewhat depleted, they went to Palestine and in 1919 sailed back to India, where their return to Ranpur was temporarily held up because their arrival coincided with civil unrest in the Punjab, the consequence (according to the Indians) of the Rowlatt Acts which were intended to enable the Government of India (in spite of the 1917 declaration of Dominion status as its long-term political aim) to continue to exercise in peace-time certain war-time measures under the Defence of India Rules for the protection of the realm against subversion. These means included imprisonment of Indians without trial. According to the English the disturbances were simply a disagreeable sign of the times, proof that the war had ruined people’s sense of values and let reds and radicals – white as well as black – get above themselves.

But the action of General Dyer in April in Amritsar in the Jallianwallah Bagh, where he personally led a detachment of Gurkhas who fired on an unarmed crowd of civilians who were defying his order not to hold a public meeting, killing several hundred and wounding upwards of a thousand, nipped the anticipated revolution nicely in the bud and in May the 1st Pankots left the staging camp where they had been halted and held in reserve, in case further troops were needed to act in aid of the civil power, and continued their journey home.

Pankot gave the regiment an official welcome – a full-dress military parade attended by the Governor and members of his council and by the General Officer commanding in Ranpur, Lieut.-General Muir. Subahdar Muzzafir Khan Bahadur’s seven-year-old son and his widow (an unidentifiable figure dressed overall in a black
burkha
that made her look like an effigy) were presented to the Governor and the General (the widow through the medium of those officers’ wives) and the son received his father’s medal from the Governor. The officers who had been decorated stood on the saluting platform with the Governor and the General while the battalion marched past with fife and drum, followed by the 1st Ranpurs (second-in-command, Major A. V. Reid, DSO, MC) who had also seen service in the Middle East but had returned home sooner, and the scratch war-time Pankot
battalions, soon to be disbanded. The rear was brought up, proudly, by the 4/5 Pankot Rifles who were destined to live on and go down to Maypore and make it their permanent cool weather station.

Young Layton, as was his due, stood with the other decorated officers on the saluting platform.

‘I remember thinking,’ he told Sarah, ‘that there was something wrong, something that meant all this pomp wasn’t what we wanted, and that something irretrievable had been lost. Innocence I suppose. Perhaps I felt this only because father was dead, the war had been a mess and I’d done nothing to deserve my MC, or because Mabel was crying. Well, it was all splendid enough, I suppose.’

Layton’s father had died unexpectedly in 1917 after a short illness caused by an abscess on the liver – the end result of a long-standing amoebic infection which had never been properly diagnosed or treated.

He died in the Minto Hospital in Ranpur and was buried in the churchyard of St Luke’s. If he had lived another year, Mabel said, he would have got his KCIE. Since his death Mabel had altered, her stepson thought. There had always been a hard streak in her. Without it her gaiety would have seemed shallow. Now the gaiety had gone and the hard streak emerged when it was least expected: in private rather than in public. She cried at the ceremonial parade. But when she took her stepson to St Luke’s to show him his father’s grave her behaviour was off-hand. She seemed to have lost the knack, or the will, to make people feel at home in her company.

A year later, after her stepson’s marriage to Mildred Muir and after there had been a committee of inquiry into the massacre in the Jallianwallah Bagh, a report by the Indian National Congress, a debate in the House of Commons on the findings of the Army Council, and General Dyer had been retired on half-pay (disgraced, whereas twelve months before he had been hailed as the saviour of India and was still thought of as such by all right-thinking people), Mabel Layton surprised everybody by refusing to identify herself
with the ladies of Pankot and Ranpur who busied themselves collecting money for the General Dyer fund. These ladies had misinterpreted the tears at the ceremonial parade and the stony face over tea and coffee for patriotism of the most exemplary kind, and were shocked when by refusing either to contribute or help to collect money that would keep the wolf from the old General’s door she appeared in an entirely different light: widow of a soldier who had died for the empire, widow – for a second time – of a civilian whose work for the empire had killed him, stepmother of a young officer who had fought for his country gallantly, step-mother-in-law of the second daughter of General Muir, but who was, it seemed, nevertheless insensible to the true nature of what the men in her life (including her father, who had been an admiral) had stood or still stood for.

When the total sum collected for General Dyer was heard to have reached the substantial fee of £26,000 the ladies of Pankot and Ranpur felt vindicated, justified. But Mabel Layton’s comment was ‘Twenty-six thousand? Well, now, how many unarmed Indians died in the Jallianwallah Bagh? Two hundred? Three hundred? There seems to be some uncertainty, but let’s say two hundred and sixty. That’s one hundred pounds a piece. So we know the current price for a dead brown,’ and sent a cheque for £100 to the fund the Indians were raising for the families of Jallianwallah victims. But only young Layton and the Indian to whom she entrusted the money knew this.

‘I’m keeping it dark for your sake,’ Mabel told him, but with an edge in her voice that made it sound as if she felt he had personally driven her to secrecy. ‘People would misunderstand. They usually do. You have a career to think of. You can’t have a stepmother who seems to be going native, which is the last thing I’d do. I hate the damned country now anyway. It’s taken two husbands from me. To me it’s not a question of choosing between poor old Dyer and the bloody browns. The choice was made for me when we took the country over and got the idea we did so for its own sake instead of ours. Dyer can look after himself, but according to the rules the browns can’t because looking after them is what we get paid for. And if it’s
really
necessary every so often to
shoot some of them down like ninepins for their own good the least we can do is admit it, just say Hard Luck to the chap who shoots too many, and see to it that the women and children who lost their menfolk, or the children who lost their parents don’t starve. There were kids who got shot too, weren’t there, at Amritsar? What do we owe them?’

She paid the £100 to one Sir Ahmed Akbar Ali Kasim, a wealthy Ranpur Muslim, one of her late husband’s Indian colleagues on the provincial governor’s executive council, whose son Mohammed Ali had already shown brilliance in his chosen profession, the law, and was inspired that year of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre to join the Congress Party whose aim in that same year and for the same bloody reasons and under M. K. Gandhi’s leadership was reversed from independence by peaceful co-operation to independence as soon as possible by non co-operation.