‘Where every Jack has someone else’s Jill’
The hill stations – the small towns and stations where the altitude gave welcome coolness in the summer months – were a refuge for wives, children, soldiers and others on a week or two’s leave, and Government officials, many of whom spent entire summers in one. What all of these hill stations shared was the tantalising prospect of an escape from the searing heat of the plains, where temperatures could remain at over 40oC for weeks at a stretch. Today we have air conditioning, electric fans and refrigerators; then, a dampened punkah and moistened reed mats hung over windows were the only relief.
These hill stations were essentially British in atmosphere and built within a timespan of around thirty years. Most were somewhere between 1,200 and 8,000 feet above sea level. There was more ‘Englishness’ in these small towns than in any other part of India, from the architecture (‘the bow windows really are windows, not doors,’ wrote Lady Wilson) to the climate that allowed the flowers of home – sweet peas, petunias, wisteria, wallflowers, phlox, lilac – to grow. Although the corrugated iron roofs, noisy under heavy rain and the feet of monkeys, did not look exactly homelike, at least they were pitched as at home – and effective against the monsoons.
The best known is undoubtedly Simla, the most purely British of Indian towns, with its buildings that range from Tudorbethan to neo-Gothic, some with elaborately carved and fretted eaves, others reminiscent of Swiss chalets. As the hill station for Calcutta, the seat of government until 1911, it was, from 1864, the summer capital of British India. It was also justly famous for love affairs and flirtations between married women whose husbands were working in the plains and the young officers and officials who constantly came up to Simla on leave. Immortalised by Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills, it was, as Lady Reading put it, a place ‘where every Jack has someone else’s Jill’. It was in Simla that Frank, the son of the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, caused shocked gossip by forming an ‘unfortunate attachment’ to a married woman he had met there.
‘The season blossomed and I became involved in a very gay life,’ wrote Bethea Field of her first visit to Simla as a young married woman in 1928. ‘I was young, attractive and had no lack of male escorts for balls, dances, cinemas and dinner parties. In the afternoons there were tennis games or picnics. I was lent horses to ride so that I could have my morning exercise and also ride down to Annandale for the races.
‘To keep up with it all I had to make my own dresses and spent many hours stitching – but material in the bazaar was cheap and I was slim enough to be easily fitted. My ayah helped by pinning seams and doing up the hems. There was a big summer crowd in Simla, summer headquarters for the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab. To add to all this, officers and civilians came on leave from the plains below. It was the Simla that Kipling had known and wrote about.
‘One of the most enchanting things were the rickshaw rides at night. It was as if one were travelling through the Milky Way because all the hillside from the mall to the lower bazaar was spangled with lights. Above was the dark, velvet sky with the real stars shining so big and close.’
Bethea was often taken to Peliti’s restaurant, which had a weekly dinner dance. In Rudyard Kipling’s time, she noted, it was the place, from morning coffee and gossip to late after-theatre supper parties. ‘One crossed a footbridge across a ravine with a cascading little torrent to reach it. The road just before the entrance is said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth – her feet turn backwards from her ankles, though she glares at the passers-by with pale eyes. The coolies speed up and pass the dreaded spot with shouts and extra thumping of their feet, relaxing only when they are safely past.
‘The rains come there in July and it can be most uncomfortable and wet. That past, there is a serene time when the sun appears again and with it the view to the plains below the hills. In the sunset they showed golden – and very welcoming.’
The amateur theatricals for which Simla was famous were considered a particular hazard to virtue, the more obvious temptations like the constant meeting with attractive members of the opposite sex and acting out scenes of passion with them heightened not only by the adrenaline rush of performance but also the holiday sense of liberation. ‘For a woman who is young, comely and gifted with a taste for acting, Simla is assuredly not the most innocuous place on God’s earth,’ wrote Maud Diver warningly; although most Simla romances ended when both parties had left to return to normal life.
Sometimes there were more serious scandals. Just after the 1914–18 war a Mr King, who disliked dancing but was happy for his wife to attend balls, became suspicious of the way she always arrived home late from dances and in the company of his best friend, a cavalry officer. Once, when they were all staying in the same hotel for a party, he had a few drinks, picked up a poker and burst into the friend’s hotel room to find the couple in bed. He flattened his friend with the poker and called in the other guests to witness what he had done and why. Knowing what the fallout would be, all three fled Simla. The cavalry officer was sent to a department called Remounts, which led Sir Harcourt Butler (shortly to become Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) to believe that the Army had a sense of humour.
When Simla first caught the eye of Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1828,* he wrote: ‘Simla is only four days’ march from Loodianah,* is easy of access, and proves a very agreeable refuge from the burning plains of Hindoostaun.’ In 1864 it was officially declared the summer capital of India by the Viceroy, Sir John Lawrence, the first to move the administration the 1,000 odd miles from Calcutta to Simla and back again despite the difficulties of the journey (when the Government moved to New Delhi, the journey was cut to 250 miles). This annual spring migration of the whole of central government, files and all, took place first by train across the Ganges plain and then by bullock cart up through forests of oak, deodar and rhododendron until, finally, it arrived at this small town 7,000 feet above sea level.
What gave Simla its pre-eminent place among hill towns was, of course, the presence of the Viceroy. However far from home, however long a British subject had been away, he or she never forgot that in the person of the Viceroy was the representative of their Sovereign – and for those who served the Empire, the Sovereign was the living embodiment of the ethos that sustained them. No one, therefore, thought it odd that the Viceroy was one of only three people allowed to use first a carriage and then a car in Simla; everyone else had to use a tonga or rickshaw. The Viceroy was in residence from April until October, as were also countless officials.
Ruby Madden, who arrived in Simla on 12 March 1903, at the tail end of one of Simla’s cold and snowy winters, found it freezing. ‘Everything is run on English lines because of the cold,’ she noted. When she went for a walk with Claude, the husband of her friend Jeanie, ‘[I] hitched up my skirt and with leather boots, coat, furs, muff and red cap was ready to face the elements. My goodness it was cold and fresh. Simla is very empty now but it fills up in April.’ Later there would be rain – sometimes as much as six inches in two days – and thick white mists, soaking the petticoats and heavy dresses of the women who went out in this weather.
Ruby took her exercise later in the day. ‘Breakfast is nominally ten o’clock but can be ordered any time. Lunch 2.15 then drift about until it’s time to go out at six o’clock when we take our exercise and return glowing, to eat a huge tea at seven o’clock beside a deodar log fire, which gives out a delicious scent, and curtains drawn. Afterwards dress very much at your leisure for dinner at eight or nine, more often at nine. We don’t often finish coffee until ten o’clock and any time after that we go to bed where I sleep under four blankets, an eiderdown, rezai [padded Indian quilt], hot water bottle, flannel nighty and have a big log fire as well and then just feel comfy.’
Days of serious rain were a drawback, but for the temporary inhabitants of this little hill town, newly released from the miseries of hot weather, the quest for enjoyment was paramount. A description of the determined relish with which the British of the late-Victorian Raj threw themselves into the gaieties of Simla is given by Henry Stewart Cunningham* in his 1875 novel The Chronicles of Dustypore (its heroine, Maud, is a Fishing Fleet girl).
‘Nothing damps their ardour – not even the Himalayan rain, which effectually damps everything else. There is a ball, for instance, at the Club House; it is raining cataracts, and has been doing so for twenty hours. The mountain paths are knee-deep in mud, and swept by many a turgid torrent rattling from above. Great masses of thunder-cloud come looming up, rumbling, crashing and blazing upon a sodden, reeking world. The night is black as Tartarus, save when the frequent flashes light it up with a momentary glare.
‘The road is steep, rough, and not too safe. A false step might send you several thousand feet down the precipice into the valley below. Will all this prevent Jones the Collector and Brown the Policeman and Smith of the Irregular Cavalry putting their respective ladies into palanquins, mounting their ponies like men, and finding their way, through field and flood, to the scene of dissipation? Each will ensconce himself in a panoply of indiarubber, and require a great deal of peeling before becoming presentable in a ballroom; but each will get himself peeled, and dance till four o’clock. The ladies will emerge from their palanquins as fresh and bright and ambrosial as lace and tarlatan can make them . . . Is this the race which proclaims itself inadept at amusements, and which, historians gravely assure us, loves to take its very pleasures sadly?’
The town itself spread about three and a half miles from east to west and about two and a half from north to south, with all the houses on a narrow plateau which ran east to west, with some spurs projecting from it, from which descended rough slopes for about a thousand feet.
It was not a particularly beautiful town: Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi, once said that if Simla had been built by monkeys, one would have said: ‘What clever monkeys! They must be shot in case they do it again.’ But its views were spectacular: glorious sunsets and range upon range of mountains, beyond which (in the words of Lady Irwin) ‘you can see the plain 120 miles away, pale cobalt blue and pinky mauve seared with silver bands, which are the rivers in flood’.
Annandale, famous first for archery contests and later for croquet, was a flat oval stadium at the foot of one of the slopes that descended from the plateau. Viceregal Lodge, huge, ostentatious and as modern as the Viceroy who built it, Lord Dufferin, could make it, stood at the west end of the plateau on Observatory Hill, with the town hall and church two miles away at the east end. Above the trees rose its towers and cupolas, made of greyish stone; inside were rooms sumptuously decorated by Maples of London. The hall was the full height of the house, its central feature a grand teak staircase that spiralled up three floors; in the hall everything was of teak, walnut or deodar, carved and moulded. The big drawing room was furnished in gold and brown silks, the ballroom decorated a lighter shade of yellow, the state dining room hung with Spanish leather in rich, dark colours.
There were large white-tiled modern basement kitchens, a huge wine cellar; there was electric light – the Vicereine, Hariot Dufferin, found this such a pleasure that she went round touching the on-off buttons from time to time – running hot and cold water in the bathrooms and an indoor tennis court. Outbuildings provided accommodation for the Viceroy’s personal bodyguard and the household band. There was even a shed near the entrance where the gun for firing salutes was kept. In Curzon’s day forty gardeners looked after the spacious ground with a squad of ten men whose sole duty was, to keep away the bold, thieving, chattering, monkeys that were the bane of everyone’s life, Monkeys raided all the gardens in Simla, chasing each other over the red corrugated iron roofs, shrieking and clattering, stripping fruit trees and darting into houses to grab anything small or glittering, such as a silver spoon or snuff box, that caught their eye.
Viceregal Lodge was a place to impress – the tallest building on the highest spot, home to the most elevated in the country. Curzon, possibly India’s greatest Viceroy and one for whom an image of magnificence was all-important (‘it certainly needs no trained psychologist’s eye to diagnose him at a glance as a man who would prefer to be mounted on an elephant rather than a donkey,’ remarked Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter of one of his friends), loved Simla and entertained here freely. A typical festivity was a dinner dance at Viceregal Lodge in July 1901, with seventy to dine plus eighty in afterwards to dance (and everyone out by midnight) and around fifteen spare men so that all the women were able to dance; there were levées, a garden party, a Drawing Room, official dinners for 120 every Thursday, and innumerable smaller dinner and luncheon parties.
Lord Kitchener, Curzon’s great rival and later enemy, lived almost more splendidly, with the difference that he managed to get the Government of England to pay for most of his alterations and extravagances. In Snowdon, his Simla residence, the great hall was panelled in walnut; in his new library the ceiling was a copy of the one at Hatfield. For ceilings in less visible parts of the house, he used papier mâché, composed largely of great masses of military files pounded into pulp by his two ADCs.
In the new dining room he added he entertained lavishly. ‘We were forty at six tables, the centre one all gold plate and on the sideboard five gold vases,’ wrote one young woman. ‘We began with iced soup, just stiff enough to spoon comfortably, with little dots of truffles; next fillets of fish with mushrooms and prawns; then filets de boeuf a la banquantine. A mousse de canetons, followed by quails, constituted the fourth and fifth courses. The sixth was a dream of a fruit compote with cream ices. Then cheese and biscuits and the 8th course was a sumptuous dessert of peaches, apricots, mangoes and prunes just softened with a dash of brandy.’
The Retreat, the Viceroy’s weekend cottage, at Mashobra, was to the north-east of Simla, about six miles from Viceregal Lodge and 600 feet higher. Curzon, an indefatigable worker, sent out a stream of orders, reports, diplomatic messages and proposed reforms even from Naldera, a tented camp seventeen miles from Simla where he and Mary Curzon would withdraw for a respite from official duties, where Mary could rest and Curzon could work out of doors. It was at Naldera in 1903 that Mary conceived her third child, christened Alexandra Naldera, after her godmother Queen Alexandra and the place of which Mary had such idyllic memories.
Twenty years later the Vicereine, Lady Reading, who had categorised Simla as ‘a hotbed of flirtations and more,’ was also seeking peace and quiet away from Simla. The Readings’ retreat was Mashobra, surrounded by forests of oak, deodar, pine, maple, horse chestnut and rhododendron, the haunt of monkeys, baboons, barking deer and the occasional leopard. In 1921 Mashobra, unlike Viceregal Lodge, had no electric light, and water was still brought to the house in skins. In May 1923 Lady Reading was writing of ‘irises in bloom, hundreds of coloured butterflies, and mules laden with food’. But no Viceroy was ever off duty. ‘Every few hours,’ she added, ‘a tall bodyguard in scarlet and gold uniform on a black horse appears, carrying dispatches, letters and telegrams.’
Because it housed the whole bureaucracy of government for so many months of the year, Simla was sometimes known as ‘the abode of the little tin gods’. There was plenty to keep them entertained. At nearby Annandale there were races and archery competitions; there were gymkhanas, dog shows, croquet, hunting, football, golf, the immensely popular amateur dramatics and of course club life. There were dances, concerts, polo matches, picnics and a plethora of dinner parties, all opportunities for constantly meeting the fancied member of the opposite sex in public – so much so that Maud Diver wrote that the two greatest dangers facing a woman in India were military men away from their wives, and amateur theatricals. All in all, it was a place known for its social life although at the same time protocol, especially in matters of precedence, was rigorously maintained, with the social strata as clearly delineated as ever.
Some of the most enjoyable parties were those given by The Most Hospitable Order of Knights of the Black Heart, a society founded in Simla in 1891, in abeyance in the 1914 war and revived in 1920. The motto of the Order was: ‘He is no so . . . as he is Black’ and everyone speculated on the missing word – naturally, the Knights (always bachelors or grass widowers) were forbidden to disclose it. This secret word was said to be kept in the heart-shaped lockets that Knights wore round their necks when in their Revels’ ‘uniform’ – evening dress with knee breeches and black silk stockings, a knee-length scarlet cloak with a black heart over the left breast and a red band round the right knee. The Knights, chosen by their fellows, were an exclusive society and could not be ‘living in open matrimony’.
‘The dancing started with “The Lancers”,’ noted Bethea Williams. ‘Each Black Heart chose, or was assigned, a Lady Partner. I was never in that category but it was fun to watch them. The ladies were chosen firstly by their rank – the Viceroy’s wife, then the Commander-in-Chief’s wife, the wife of the Governor of the Punjab and so on until it trickled down to the last few most glamorous ones. There were eight couples and the dance was very seriously performed. After that it was a “free for all” and I did not lack partners. The “Black Hearts” were so limited in number that it was a coveted honour to be invited to join them – and an expensive honour because their parties were unstinting as to wines and food and the best band Simla could produce. That year it was the dance band of the Black Watch regiment, stationed in Delhi. The supper board was loaded – smoked salmon and boar’s head especially ordered from England.’
If a grass widower’s wife returned to him he could attend functions in his Black Heart uniform but the red knee band was replaced by white and there was no collar badge because he had ‘lost his Heart’. Any one knight could veto any item on their agenda or guest on their list. Their parties, three times in the season, were known as the best; one of them was always fancy dress. They also featured the kalajuggah, though with the proviso that while a couple who disappeared into one must be left alone, they also had to reappear for the next dance, thus putting paid to any serious dalliance.
The frantic gaiety of the Simla Season paused only for official mourning. Lucy Hardy, who had spent her first few months in Umballa, where her brother was stationed (‘there were only two or three other girls there besides myself’), went up to Simla in May with a friend, sharing rooms in a hotel until her husband came on leave. ‘Owing to the death of Queen Victoria [in January 1901], there were no big entertainments in Simla,’ she wrote disappointedly, ‘and Lady Curzon had gone home but Lord C gave some small dances to which we went – but as mourning had to be worn I had to appear in a black organdie gown over silk which had done much dinner duty at Umballa, instead of my best gown of white brocade with puff sleeves and trimmings of blue velvet!’
Many Bengal Europeans not in Government or official service went to Darjeeling, a favourite hill station since the days of the East India Company, then a four-day journey from Calcutta. In the twentieth century the Darjeeling Mail sped northwards as spectacular sunsets were reflected in the sheets of water that spread over green rice fields. At the end of the line, Siliguri, travellers changed to the Darjeeling Hill Railway, climbing round steep bends to the little town with its steep-roofed houses with carved and fretted woodwork and balconies. Built on hills and just under 8,000 feet above sea level, Darjeeling gave visitors plenty of involuntary exercise. Even so, ‘I advise any intending visitor to the hills to take plenty of warm woollen underclothing,’ wrote one traveller.
Rumer Godden, who lived for a time in a bungalow on a hill near Darjeeling, loved the landscape around it, with the pink earthen walls of the farmhouses, the orange groves, banana trees and pineapple bushes, its brilliant butterflies – black, red, yellow and blue – its streams, pools and waterfalls. Of one she wrote: ‘In the crevices of the waterfall we find begonias, small ones, crisp, with heavy leaves, in colour and crispness each petal is like a delicate pink shell.’
For the Madras Presidency, the usual hill station was Ootacamund (known as ‘snooty Ooty’) in the Nilgiri Hills, about 8,000 feet above sea level. A popular way of reaching it was by overnight journey to the foothills, then by driving up by a road notable both for its scenery and its hairpin bends. It was perhaps the most English of them all. It was in the Ooty Club, where the game caught on, that the rules of snooker, invented by the future Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain, then a subaltern in the 11th Foot stationed at Jubbulpore, are hung in the billiards room; it was at the Ooty Club that the Ooty Hunt met, the hunt servants and some of the field wearing pink coats but hunting jackal instead of foxes. At Naini Tal – a popular place for honeymoons – there was yachting on the lake.
Poona, a name so indelibly connected with British India that it has passed into the vocabulary of comedians to delineate certain types and experiences, was a mid-weather station for the Bombay Government, which spent four months of the year there. Only a night’s journey from Bombay, its situation 2,000 feet up in the Western Ghats meant it was pleasant for most of the year, though the hot weather season was spent in the hill station of Mahabaleshwar, on the banks of Lake Venna, 4,500 feet high.
On the edge of the great Deccan plateau, Poona was the headquarters of Southern Army Command – a kind of Aldershot of the East – and also a great racing centre; in the early twentieth century Victor Sassoon kept racing stables there, and the Aga Khan owned a palace. Tan tracks, soft and sandy with a dressing of bark, ran beside most road for the benefit of horses and ponies; cork trees, with their stephanotis-like blossoms and scarlet-blooming acacias, with long pods that rattled after flowering, were planted along the sides.
Here, as well as snakes and panthers lurking in the jungle nearby, thrushes and blackbirds sang and the strawberry beds were famous. In the two large public gardens fluttered huge black and turquoise butterflies. There was also golfing, though on brown rather than green grass when the sun had dried up the links.
In the ancient city of Poona, once the capital of the Mahratta kingdom, narrow streets were flanked by the bazaar stalls – the fruit sellers, cloth merchants, jewellers, sellers of sweet, syrupy drinks and deep-fried savouries. Bullock carts jostled against the tide of walkers; the tall brick houses of the rich stood side by side with the hovels of the poor; in side lanes embroidered white pillow-cases hung from balconies – the sign that a prostitute awaited within.
The Poona Season lasted four months and began in June, with the arrival of the Governor and his officials. All who could came up from Bombay for weekends or rented bungalows there to avoid the monsoon. Newcomers were warned not to do too much and above all not to eat too many of the delicious mangoes for which the town was famous or they would get ‘Poonaitis’ (a euphemism for diarrhoea).
The centre of Poona life was the Gymkhana, to which the ladies drove soon after tea, the men after work. There was croquet and tennis, the women playing in white divided skirts and Aertex shirts, the men in white flannels and crisp white shirts with sleeves rolled up; others would sit, chat and sew (knitting did not come in until the war) and listen to the military band parading up and down on the lawn, playing the latest tunes from England. There was a small playground for children with a couple of swings and a seesaw. Outside the clubhouse was ‘the beach’ – an area covered with Alderney shingle.* On this shingle were set up small tables with chairs so that the younger set could sit around, sip their drinks, munch toasted nuts and flirt in the dim lighting of a few Japanese lanterns with candles.
On most evenings there were ‘flannel dances’ that lasted an hour or two, until everyone went off to dinner somewhere. The life was relentlessly unintellectual: when Iris Portal (née Butler) lived there in the late 1920, she noticed that very few of the unmarried officers called on them for the customary pre-lunch drinks on Sunday, as they did on the other married officers. Puzzled, as she knew how popular her husband was, and anxious, she asked a friendly young subaltern the reason. He looked embarrassed, then finally blurted out: ‘Well – it’s got about that you read poetry.’
For anyone stationed in the districts or provinces of the North-West Frontier, the usual destination was Kashmir. Robin Mallinson, whose father was in the 17th Dogra Regiment of the Indian Army, based at Jullundur in the Punjab, spent the winter in the plains and went up with his family to the hills in the summer. Some families went so often that they bought – as far as the property laws allowed – instead of rented. In Kashmir, as it was an autonomous state with a maharaja, the British were not allowed to own property. The loophole came via the water with which Kashmir is so plentifully supplied. Its capital, Srinagar, 5,000 feet high, is surrounded by lakes – and there was no law against owning a boat. Consequently, the British could buy and own houseboats – and many did (others often rented one). Usually these were on the biggest lake, the Dal Lake.
Joan Henry, after returning from her English education, was sent up to Srinagar by her widowed planter father for the hot weather in 1934. His bearer accompanied her for the three days and two nights it took to get across India. In Srinagar she stayed as a paying guest in the houseboat of an Army officer’s widow, on the River Jhelum. It was one of three, one behind the other, moored to the river bank, carved inside and out – on the furniture, on the boat itself – with flowers, foliage and intricate designs (these never included animals or people as the carvers, being strict Muslims, would have considered it idolatrous). The first boat held sitting and dining rooms, the next bedrooms and bathrooms, the last the servants’ quarters.
‘In the summer, people would move up to Gulmarg, about 9,000 feet above sea level. From one side of it you looked across the marg, or meadow, to the chalets, known as huts; from the other side, you could look across the Vale of Kashmir towards Nanga Parbat, 26,000 feet high, almost 90 miles away,’ recalled Robin Mallinson.
Gulmarg is remembered lyrically by most of those who went there. Its beauty was staggering – faintly Swiss but without the picture-postcard element: forests scented with pine and snow water, snowy peaks, icy streams beside which grew gentians and primulas, wide expanses of grass and over all a faint hint of danger. Leopards’ Valley, known for its golf course, was so named because there dogs had been snatched by leopards as their owners played golf. A dog that slept on the veranda of one of the wooden huts might be taken at night by a panther that had crept into the garden; a troop of red baboons might suddenly descend the mountainside; the unwary walker could face a confrontation with a black bear, in spring just emerging from its hibernation and prepared to attack anything that looked threatening. The best defence was to stand completely still, as the bear’s sight was appalling, and hope that the beast would move away. There were no cars, lorries or trucks in Gulmarg; one walked, or rode the local ponies known as tats, but there was a club, an hotel, a bazaar and several golf courses.
It was the great place for young families but there was also plenty of life in the club, with dancing to tunes like Me and My Shadow, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby – or at dinner parties to which people rode on their tats with evening dresses hitched up. There were wonderful walks, fishing for snow trout in the Ferozpur river and – by the 1920s – skiing higher up. Best of all, perhaps, were the rides round the Outer Circular Road, with its pine woods and maidenhair fern, or up to Khilanmarg, a long slope of open, grassy ground where the snow line cuts off the forests, where you could look down on Gulmarg and the Kashmir valley with, possibly, a glimpse of K2, the second highest mountain in the world.
Mary Lloyd, whose father was in the Rajputana Rifles based in Rajasthan, went up to Kashmir every summer, her family always renting the same hut in Gulmarg. ‘We would travel first by train from wherever Daddy had been posted to and then take the long, tiring and sick-inducing car or truck journey up to Kashmir. When I say “sick”, I mean sick, and without exception we were sick. The smell of petrol and the whining of the engine as it struggled up the mountain roads round hairpin bend after hairpin bend is with me to this day. I clearly remember being sick on our lunchtime sandwiches and once on the cat’s basket.
‘Eventually, after a long, long day we would arrive in the beautiful cool fresh air of Kashmir. The lakes and the snow-capped mountains surrounding us were heaven after the searing heat we had left. We would sometimes stay a day or two in Srinagar with Aunt Emmie Walton, Grandad’s sister-in-law, whose whole life had been connected with India. As a child during the Mutiny she had sheltered with her parents, who were planters, in the Calcutta Fort. She much later married Grandad’s eldest brother Charles, who was also sheltering there with his mother (our great-grandmother) whilst his father was riding to relieve the garrison in the famous Relief of Lucknow. She lived in a house called Hopewell after the first boat that took the Waltons to India. It was opposite the Kashmir Nursing Home where we were all born.’
After Srinagar, the Lloyds would embark on the last lap of their journey to their beloved Gulmarg. First they would go by car up through the tall poplar trees to Tanmarg – no cars went further than this point. Here all the ponymen were gathered, each one standing by his pony, and they would each select a pony for the summer. Once chosen, they would ride their ponies up to Gulmarg, two or three miles uphill, with each pony man holding on to his pony’s tail to pull himself up and encouraging the pony from behind. Up they went through steep paths winding through the pine trees, with piles of snow still lying about. ‘The smell of the shrubs in flower, the pines and the fallen snow was intoxicating. We were always so excited to be back. Our luggage was carried up by coolies – masses of coolies.
‘Our hut, Hut 102A, was the highest hut at one end of a valley, surrounded by forest and with a fantastic view straight down Leopards’ Valley, with its streams and paths, and the towering snow-covered mountains beyond. There were flowers everywhere – primulas, pale purple irises, rhododendrons – you could grow anything. We grew poppies, forget-me-nots, a big bank of daisies. Lots of the places where the hill people lived had roofs covered in mud with irises growing on them. Always the air was scented, with pines, melting snow, viburnum.’
The Lloyds always went up earlier than most people, at the end of March or the beginning of April, which meant that there was still plenty of snow about – and quite a lot of bears. Because Gulmarg was so high it took several days to acclimatise but soon the children would be tobogganing on tin trays. ‘One of our favourite tricks,’ recalled Mary, ‘was just as someone got started, to shout “Bear!”, hoping to terrify the tobogganer – who of course was unable to stand still and hope to avoid attention.
‘Mostly we would do lessons in the morning, go out for a ride or a walk in the afternoon and then have tea at a friend’s house or a tea party at home. Sometimes we would have a picnic by a stream or play on the children’s golf course. When we needed milk a man would come from the bazaar and milk the cow in front of my mother. She would make him roll his sleeves up because they had a trick of hiding water in their sleeves and diluting the milk with it. But even when the milking had been done in front of us we still boiled it, and all our water. We spent almost half the year in Gulmarg – we would leave in September. And how sad we were when we did.’
Jean Hilary found life in the Srinagar of May 1929 so delightful that she did not even reach Gulmarg, cancelling her planned visit there. She wrote ecstatically to her mother about the drive up to Srinagar. ‘The last thirty-five miles of road here is through an avenue of silver poplars and on either side are fields of purple and white irises and every now and again a field of scarlet poppies. All the marshland is cultivated, in tiers, and it looks like a patchwork quilt. I’ve never seen anything to equal the colours of the birds, which fly about everywhere – green, yellow, red, blue and scarlet. Of course, we saw snow-capped mountains, with the sun on them, as soon as we left Muri, where we spent the night. It all looks quite like Switzerland, even the wooden huts of the villages. We followed the Jhelum the whole way.’
That first impression was soon superseded by an unaccustomed fit of the glooms. After being feted during the previous months in Calcutta (‘I think I have realised what an awful power I have over the opposite sex’), life with her hosts, an older married couple, in their houseboat on the Dal Lake saw her dolefully bemoaning her lack of social life. ‘I do rather want someone young to do things with, come to the Club with me, and get to know people. I don’t know how I ever shall this way, it’s all so scattered and vague. I wandered about the Club yesterday, watching the tennis tournament, and choosing books from the Library. I don’t think there are many men there, as the soldiers who come up usually go off fishing and shooting.
‘I am quite put off the Club and the young men here. All the decent ones only come up to shoot or fish or later on for the polo. Good regiments don’t care about their young men “poodlefaking” on the river.’
Suddenly everything changed. She met a pretty young married woman with an attractive husband and some good-looking male friends. Quickly she found herself at the heart of a young and gay circle (‘our men are the nicest and best-looking here’) determined to enjoy themselves. There were picnics, expeditions, bathing for hours from a raft in the lake (‘my new blue bathing suit is the most decent thing ever – a one-piece garment but it has kicks underneath’) and daily visits to the club, now a favourite haunt. Sometimes there were ukelele bathing parties, on other days they floated across the lake in shikaras,* gramophone playing the hits of the moment; and every evening she dined out and danced. There was dinner at the Residency with twenty young people, the Resident and his wife being out for the evening, and musical chairs and sardines (‘in the dark!’) afterwards. ‘I just go about bursting with the fun of it all,’ she wrote happily to her mother.
She was, however, determined in one respect. ‘I hope you won’t worry,’ she reassured her widowed mother, ‘that I will be meeting nice regimental people and falling in love with them. It would be too awful to marry a soldier and come to some of these stations out here. Just as well my heart is quite intact – it is all too devastating.’
Jean and her companions, young, healthy and attractive, cramming every moment of the day with the pleasures of companionship, surroundings of exquisite beauty and the enjoyable frisson of sexual tension, exemplified the Raj at play. Hill stations meant holidays, with all that holidays promised in the way of carefree relaxation and romance, away from the all-seeing eyes that surrounded India’s rulers in the plains.
Or, as John Masters so memorably wrote: ‘Perhaps it was the mountain air that caused so many of the women to cast away their inhibitions. Perhaps the friendly unfamiliar wood fires burning on the hearths warmed their blood and made them think with fervour of romps on tiger skin divans. Perhaps it was moonlight and bulbuls – or perhaps it was human nature . . . the fact was that hill stations presented an unusual picture of a race that was supposed to be frigid.’