‘No one will want to marry me now!’
In the India of the Raj sudden death was a close neighbour. You could sit next to someone apparently healthy at dinner and hear the next day that he or she had died. Illness struck like lightning, often without warning, and in any social circle; and in that time before antibiotics it was often lethal. Charlotte Canning, the wife of the first Viceroy, who had arrived in India a fit and healthy woman, died in her husband’s arms soon after contracting malaria, aged only forty-four.
Desirée Hart, Personal Assistant to the Resident of Kashmir, stationed in Sialkot for the cold weather, woke up one morning to find herself so ill that she could not lift her head from the pillow to sip her early morning tea. The previous night, with a severe headache, she had acted as hostess to her boss whose wife was ill, forcing herself into the role. ‘Never had I been so popular, never so good at stimulating the conversation and making the party “go”.’ When the doctor came he took her temperature, looked at the thermometer in disbelief, then ordered an ambulance straightaway. She was so ill that she could hardly breathe or swallow sips of cooling drinks; her thick shoulder-length golden hair was cut off for the sake of coolness and she was prayed for on church parade.
Desirée was one of the lucky ones. Suddenly the fever broke, sweat poured from her, sponged away by nurses, and she fell into a deep, lengthy sleep, waking to find herself limp but hungry. She had been struck down overnight by a combination of scarlet fever and diphtheria, on top of which she had developed jaundice. Her illness had left her with hair fallen out and turned a dull mouse colour. ‘As for my face,’ she later wrote, ‘sunken eyes with dark shadows and hollow cheeks in a skin left yellow from jaundice and peeling from the scarlet fever. Oh how awful I look!’ she wailed. ‘No one will want to marry me now!’
She was wrong. During her convalescence the Resident’s brother-in-law, Stuart Battye, who had broken his leg playing polo, arrived on crutches to stay at the Residency while his leg mended. Together they sat in the garden under an old banyan tree, together they read the papers, played cracked old records on Stuart’s portable gramophone, together they were taken for stately drives for an hour every afternoon. In June that year Stuart turned up at the Residency in Srinagar on three weeks’ fishing leave. Very early one morning he took Desiree fishing, proposing to her in the car en route to the bank of the river.
When she enquired why he had not asked her to marry him when they were convalescing together instead of at 5.30 a.m. before fishing, he told her that it had all been carefully planned. ‘You were in no state to know your own mind then. It would not have been fair. As to this morning, if you’d said “yes”, fine. If you’d said “no” I’d still have had a whole day’s fishing to take my mind off it.’ He was, she told him happily, impossible.
To the Fishing Fleet girls, merrily dancing the night away at a Government House ball or in the clubhouse of a British cantonment, the idea of life-threatening illnesses striking out of the blue or other disasters might have seemed at best unlikely, at worst far-fetched. And for most, this was perfectly true. Marriage or a visit to someone who lived up country, however, might show a different picture. There were snakes, floods, riots, houses collapsing after the foundations had been eaten away by white ants, occasional panthers in the garden, rabies, earthquakes, landslides and inexplicable fevers.
‘I had not dreamed of danger and thought nothing about the journey through the jungle,’ records the journal of Henry Cook, civil servant in Company days, who recounts not only the death of his own wife and child but also of an early Fishing Fleet girl. ‘But about 12 days later one child was struck down with the jungle fever, then a second and a third. The nurse followed next and the infant had to be weaned suddenly; then it sickened and in a short time, died. My poor wife was the next victim, and after a few weeks she also succumbed to the disease. Everyone who had performed that night journey took fever. I lost an infant and my dear wife. A young lady, Miss Searle, had accompanied my wife and was staying with us . . . Her kindness and attention were beyond praise but, alas, she also was stricken down and died.’
‘Vyner and a Royal Fusilier buried this evening,’ wrote Violet Jacob on 2 August 1897. ‘I have heard enough of the Dead March lately, for they always strike up as they pass this house, the cemetery being not far off.’ A fortnight later her diary records: ‘We move in on Friday. Two funerals today; thank heaven I shall not see and hear them in the new place. This season of the year is dreadful in that way.’ Three weeks later, on 6 September: ‘Poor Cordray died at four this morning, quite young and leaving a young wife . . . Things are not very cheerful in the hospital but the unhealthy season ought to be over soon now . . .’.
Violet put down most of the numerous but isolated deaths around her to enteric fever. Much worse, because of the speed with which it spread, was cholera; although eradicated in Britain by the twentieth century, it was endemic in India during the whole of the Raj (and after it). Almost more terrifying than its deadliness was the speed with which it struck; often it was only a few hours from the onset of the first symptoms to death. In Agra cemetery there is a monument to the memory of 146 men of the York and Lancaster Regiment who died within forty-eight hours of the appearance of cholera. During the First World War, in the state of Jodhpur cholera was so widespread that even the monkeys fell off the trees dying. Children were particularly vulnerable: all over India there are pathetic gravestones indicating a child’s death – sometimes several from the same family at once. Burial had to be immediate, certainly within twelve hours, because of the climate.
Cholera had originated in India, spreading from the Ganges delta across the world. Yet unlike in England, in India cholera was a disease of the rural poor rather than the urban slum. In its home country its virulence was greatly increased when there had been a famine – rather as the Black Death in England struck hardest against those whose immunity had been weakened through hunger caused by poor harvests. It is acutely infectious, with polluted water one of the main sources, so spreads quickly through tightly packed communities such as the barracks of British soldiers in India (in the 1880s the death rate among the families of British soldiers in India was three times that in Britain).
As the theory that it was an airborne disease persisted in India until the end of the nineteenth century,* one Army technique for dealing with it was, immediately on an outbreak, to march out of barracks against the wind, to higher ground, and camp there. If there were more cases, the process was repeated (with polluted water as a main cause, coupled with the fact that water flows downhill, this was often a partial success, although not because of ‘escaping the cholera miasma’, as the doctors believed).
Rabies, if not caught in time, invariably meant a horrible death – for animals as well as humans. As most cantonments were haunted by pi-dogs the fear of rabies was ever-present. Without immediate treatment, a person bitten by a rabid dog invariably dies, so anyone bitten by a dog suspected of incubating this disease had to undergo a course of painful injections to ensure their survival. (In India it is estimated that one person still dies of rabies every thirty minutes.) Before the Pasteur Institute was established at Kasauli in 1900, victims sometimes had to be rushed to Paris where the Pasteur Institute had been administering the vaccine since its discovery in 1885. Thus in military cantonments, the sight of a soldier on a motorbike, rifle slung over his back, in pursuit of a rabid pi-dog, was a familiar sight.
Fortunately, it was fairly easy to tell from a dog’s behaviour if it might be a risk.* If the animal appeared mad, aggressive or frothing at the mouth it almost certainly had rabies; when rabid, even a timid dog often bites rather than running away. Even before these symptoms appeared it was usually clear if a dog was ill. Sam Raschen, sharing a bungalow with three other subalterns in Rawalpindi, made great friends with their dogs, two of which were a couple of three-month-old Airedale puppies. ‘One of them, Titus, loved to play by worrying fiercely anything he could get his pin-sharp little teeth into – often my hands! One day Titus was visibly out of sorts, the next his owner announced that rabies was suspected, so the poor little chap had to be destroyed (an examination of his brain confirmed the diagnosis).’
None of those in the bungalow could be sure that they had not been scratched and then licked in romping with Titus, so they were sent off immediately for treatment. As well as remaining teetotal, they had to have two injections, deep into the stomach, every day for a fortnight. ‘Towards the end,’ wrote Raschen, ‘one felt like a walking pincushion. All the male patients stood in a queue, holding up the front of their shirts, rather undignified but little time was wasted.’ There was still time, however, to play a joke on the other poor sufferers. ‘The trick lay in arriving early to be at the front of the line, giving a dreadful grimace after receiving one’s jabs and muttering audibly about the shocking bluntness of the needles today.’
‘It is awful the way dogs go mad in India,’ wrote Lilah Wingfield in December 1911. ‘Captain Mitford has lost three lately, through rabies. It is thought they get bitten by a mad jackal originally, then one dog bites another and so it goes on. Mr Palmer’s delicious smooth-coated black retriever which he had in camp at Delhi with him, started rabies a day or two before we left Pindi. He tied it up and had it carefully watched and at length the poor beast had to be shot.’
Between the mid-1880s and the early 1920s India was struck by a series of major epidemics. As well as malaria and cholera, both endemic, there was Spanish flu and bubonic plague.
For well over twenty years, plague was a major killer and caused an estimated ten million deaths. It spread from Bombay, where the death toll rose to 183,984 between 1896 and 1914. When the outbreak first began, it was not known in India that plague was spread by rat fleas – only in the twentieth century was one woman able to write grimly: ‘When a dead rat falls from the rafters of the roof, you know that bubonic plague has come to town.’ Instead, the city was scoured with sea water and carbolic. Drains were flushed out, disinfectant sprinkled in tenements and alleyways.
In 1897, to halt the spread of plague, the Government forbade fairs and pilgrimages, segregating suspected plague cases, examining and where necessary detaining travellers by road and rail to examine them, dividing queues at railway stations into male and female. But this fell foul of India’s caste system, whereby even a touch by a white person could pollute, while for women, accustomed to purdah and strict modesty, a public examination for swollen lymph glands was deeply offensive. The result was that many potential cases were smuggled out of the city, taking the plague with them.
In 1898, so bad was the plague in the city and district of Poona that 1,200 British troops were employed for months searching out ‘plague’ houses, so that these could be disinfected or destroyed. ‘When a case was detected, the family was removed to a special camp, after being thoroughly washed in a strong solution of perchloride of mercury,’ wrote General Sir Henry Beauvoir De Lisle.* After this, the house was disinfected and whitewashed; later still, when it was considered safe, the survivors could return. What made the job difficult was that, to avoid being sent to the camp, the inhabitants of a house where someone had died of the plague that night often buried the body under the house’s floor; unless detected, the infection remained through plague fleas.
Unlike most of the other diseases, plague was transmitted in the cold weather, when people huddled together for warmth, with outbreaks peaking in the spring and summer. Doctors who treated it were known as plague sahibs. ‘Driving through the district it is easy to tell the villages where the plague is really bad,’ wrote Margaret Munson, who had come out in the Fishing Fleet to marry a man in the Indian Medical Service. ‘The houses are empty and along the roads nearby are huts of grass and wood built by those afraid to remain in infected villages.’ IMS doctors had a mobile dispensary camp, travelling ten to twelve miles a day by bullock cart, doing small operations such as cataracts, with local anaesthetic and careful sterilisation of their instruments between operations.
During the British Raj, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–8, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died, and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people perished. The main reason was the British insistence on Indian farmers growing jute or cotton – to facilitate trade – rather than food crops such as rice and wheat. In times of shortage, this policy was catastrophic.
Smallpox was another killer: between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths. And after the First World War came Spanish flu, the pandemic that lasted from March 1918 to June 1920 and killed up to fifty million people worldwide. In India it accounted for between ten and seventeen million deaths.
By the 1930s children could be inoculated against smallpox, cholera and plague, but dysentery and diphtheria (which accounted for over two thousand deaths a year in Britain) still carried off many.
When in 1898 Sir Ronald Ross, working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calutta, finally proved that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, as many precautions as possible were taken against their bites, from mosquito nets to the wearing (by women) of light boots under their evening dresses in ‘mosquito-ey’ areas. Even so, malaria was so common that most people treated it as almost unavoidable. ‘We took five grains of quinine and five grains of aspirin every six hours until the fever broke,’ wrote Monica Campbell-Martin. ‘The rapid drop from a high temperature to one that was well below normal brought the body out in such a heavy sweat that the bed sheets were wringing wet. Once the fever had broken people were supposed to remain in bed for twenty-four hours and take things easy.’
Sometimes malaria arrived in epidemic form. Joan Henry, newly married to sugar plantation manager Geoffrey Allen, was one of the few who never caught malaria, although 500 died around them in Pandaul village, and Geoffrey suffered for a week each month with repeated attacks, with the typical very high temperature, shivering, vomiting, headaches and pains. During the times he was on his feet he brought in squads of low-caste Hindus to burn the corpses – the villagers themselves were so weak from malaria that they were throwing these into the nearby water supply. It was only this swift action that prevented a cholera outbreak from contaminated water.
Along with malaria, dengue fever, still endemic in more than one hundred countries, was another disease transmitted by mosquitoes. Although most people survived, it was a truly painful experience, involving anything from bleeding gums, pain behind the eyes, red palms and feet to a high temperature, as described by this sufferer:
‘One morning in July I woke up barely able to move. Every bone in my body felt as though it were being crushed in a vice, with hot knives stabbing into my brain. Wrenching myself out of bed, I went to the bathroom and vomited what felt like everything in my system.
‘Over the next couple of days my body temperature became extremely erratic; one minute I would be drenched in sweat, burning up; the next I would be screaming for blankets, desperate to stop chills so extreme and rapid in onset that it felt as if I had plunged into icy water.
‘The pain hammering my bones and joints was the hardest to bear; the disease lives up to its nickname of breakbone fever. Nausea and vomiting left me unable to contemplate the tiniest morsel of food while the bone pain robbed me of sleep so that I became extremely weak . . . there is little doctors can do except control symptoms, so I was put on a saline drip . . .’.
In the damp heat of the hot weather, skin infections could be a problem. One particularly nasty one, supposedly transmitted by the bite of tiny, almost invisible sand flies, was known as ‘Delhi boils’, a self-explanatory term. These began as itching red spots on exposed skin such as the face, hands, feet, elbows, ankles; for men, left in the plains while women and children sought the coolness of the hills, a common place was the back of the neck.
Disease was not the only peril faced by the Fishing Fleet girl. Throughout the duration of the Raj there were outbreaks of fighting and sporadic rioting, with almost constant battling of one kind or another along the North-West frontier, then as now such engagements almost a hobby among those warlike people. ‘There is fighting at Malakund, which saw a number of the soldiers depart,’ wrote Lady Elisabeth Bruce in 1897. ‘One man, a major, had a Pathan servant who asked him very earnestly if he was not going to the front to fight. “Why?” said the officer. “Because I long to go too, that I may get a shot at my father-in-law,” said his servant.’ Later she heard news of another outbreak on the frontier, near Peshawar, and as the month progressed half her father’s soldier ADCs left for the front.
Women, of course, did not fight – but natural disasters were no respecters of gender.
On tour in Gilgit, Rosemary Redpath and her Political Officer husband Alexander sometimes heard ‘the familiar crackle which heralded the arrival of boulders and rubble from high up on the mountainside’. On those occasions there was little time for the Redpaths, travelling along a narrow track with a sheer precipice on one side, to decide whether to gallop ahead, stay put, or turn on the proverbial sixpence and retreat.
Once, halted for a midday meal, they heard a loud crack and on looking up saw ‘enormous rocks the size of houses virtually standing out in mid-air thousands of feet above us. We all took to our heels leaving, I regret to say, horses and baggage ponies tethered where they were.’ Luckily the avalanche was diverted by a couloir, leaving the Redpaths – and their horses – in the clear as it thundered to the bottom of the valley.
In Bihar, on 15 January 1934, Monica Campbell-Martin heard a noise like the rushing of an express train, then the walls of her bungalow started to ripple as if made of cloth and she rushed into the garden. ‘The hills, the mountains, the trees, all were dipping and swerving. A hill disappeared like a scenic backdrop as I looked at it. Hundreds of birds flew by, screeching their terror.’
Joan Henry had a similar experience, in the same Bihar earthquake. At 2.13 in the afternoon as she was resting on her bed she heard a rumbling that at first sounded like the wind that heralded the monsoon. As the noise grew louder, the first shock waves hit. ‘My bed rocked and I leapt off and tore out of my room, but it was difficult to run as the floor behaved like a roller coaster, up one moment and down the next.’
Outside ‘the lawn was like a billowing sea, great waves instead of flat grass. Two cars, parked outside the garage, were rolling backwards and forwards in unison, partners in a formal dance – brakes were often forgotten in such a flat area. As I gazed at them, the ground under my feet cracked open, splits appeared around me, and out of these spouted high gushes of hot liquid, a muddy mixture.’ The garden was left under a mixture of mud, sand and water but the Henry household was safe. They, and those nearby, were lucky: the quake, which measured 8.5 on the Richter scale, killed something like 30,000 people and caused immense structural damage, with collapsed buildings, railway lines twisted like writhing snakes, bridges broken and flooding.
Much later the same year there was a meeting in Patna, attended by the Governor and involving the most senior men in the province to discuss what was to be done in the aftermath of the earthquake. Here one of the ADCs decided to tell a funny story he had heard about a lady who had been caught in her bath when the quake struck. She had rushed out of the bathroom dripping wet, clutching only a small towel, and shouting in her poor Hindi a sentence which translated as ‘Five rupees a look!’ None of the laughs the young man had hoped for materialised; instead there was a frozen silence, broken by the District Commissioner (the top ICS man in the district) saying in a frigid voice: ‘That was my wife.’
There was not such a happy ending for Edward Wakefield of the Indian Medical Service. He survived the Quetta earthquake of 1 May 1935, in which between 30,000 and 60,000 people died, but it killed one of his two small daughters. Two days later, camping in the Residency gardens, he wrote to his mother-in-law; first telling her that his wife Lalage had survived, he described the events of that terrible night, when they had gone to bed about 12.35 (the earthquake occurred at 3.02 a.m.).
‘I was woken up, in pitch blackness, by an indescribable roar of noise. I had time, so Lal tells me, to say “My God, what’s that?” before the crash came; but to me it seemed that I had hardly woken from a deep sleep and, alarmed, had half turned towards Lal, when the whole world collapsed on me. Everything tumbled on me – beams, rafters, bricks, mortar – from above and from both sides. I was surprised, when all this falling of the house had stopped, to find myself alive. I called to Lal, but she could only groan in reply . . . there was a big beam across her back, that hurt her frightfully, and she could not move. I then struggled desperately to move but could not manage to. My head was wedged between two rafters and the beam that was across Lal’s back was also across my thighs. My legs and body were covered deep with bricks and plaster.’
The only part of his body that Edward Wakefield could move was his right hand With it, he tried to remove what bits of bricks and plaster he could touch. But soon he realised that to do this would be dangerous, as when some plaster was dislodged it almost filled the small breathing space that was left to him. Somehow he managed to breathe, though not freely, and working away very gently and cautiously with his one hand, he managed to release most of his arm. Now, better able to use his hand, he could clear a space by his wife’s head so that she could breathe more easily.
‘Meanwhile, I heard Nurse, from a great distance it seemed, shout for help, and I also heard Bold One crying; but no sound from Imogen. After I had found it quite impossible to free myself or help Lal, I simply lay still, as did Lal, and we waited. Eventually (after about ten minutes) I heard sounds of people moving; I shouted but got no reply. Nurse also shouted and it seemed that people answered her shouts.
‘After that, things are confused in my mind. I remember feeling relief at the thought that Bold One had got away with Nurse, though how I knew they had been pulled out I cannot say; perhaps the fact that Nurse’s shouts for help had stopped and men’s voices were heard made me deduce that they had escaped.’
He shouted again for Ghulam Mohammad, their bearer, and eventually a voice replied from what seemed to the barely conscious Edward an infinite distance. Then, as he later recalled, the worst period of all followed: he could not move at all, he was in pitch darkness and Lalage was silent, in great pain and possibly dying. The rescuers were making no headway, as they had no light and no tools to dig with and could only guess where the Wakefields were lying. After what seemed hours, they managed to clear away the bricks and plaster above the couple, and at last got to the beam lying across them. They tried to move it – and failed. They tried again, and again failed. And, to Edward’s despair, they said it could not be moved. All this was still in the threatening dark. Time passed, and he began to feel that the rescuers had begun to give up hope of getting them out. ‘I had that last horror of feeling that Lal and I could not even kill ourselves.’
Eventually the rescuers (a sweeper, a driver and another man from their compound, and a prisoner from the lock-up behind the house) tried approaching the trapped couple from a different direction. At last they got Edward and Lalage’s heads free and after that he was able to show them how to get Lalage out. First they cleared all rubble away from the upper part of her body and legs, then took some of the strain of the beam off her and drew her out by the shoulders. It was another ten minutes before Edward was pulled out in his turn and just as he found himself on the drive in front of their house, up came the Superintendent of Police with reinforcements to help – a party of the West Yorkshire Regiment who had come from their cantonment. The end was a tragedy.
‘It was still too dark to see much but the parties kept at work with the help of hurricane lanterns and, from the servants’ quarters, bodies, dead or alive, were continually being extracted. The party looking for Imogen worked for two and a half hours before they came on one of her feet, and then I did not look any more but waited near by.’
Although among Europeans death by snakebite was comparatively rare, to the Western mind one of the greatest terrors of India was snakes. As a consequence, some British would sleep with a revolver by their side in case of a snake’s sudden appearance in bedroom or bathroom. Again, snakes were largely a peril of the hot weather (in the cold, they hibernate). In March, as the heat began, frogs would seek the cool, damp quietness of bathrooms, with their convenient drainage hole entrance, and snakes, scenting prey, would follow them. As snakes love long grass, bungalow compounds in regimental cantonments were inspected to see that grass was cut short.
The most deadly snake was the krait, common in northern India. Small – seldom more than two feet in length – and an inconspicuous grey-brown colour, it is probably responsible for more deaths than any other snake in India. It is mostly nocturnal, said to kill in twenty minutes and is generally lethargic. As it lies in the dust unnoticed, anyone who goes barefoot is at risk, especially because as it is deaf it does not, like most other snakes, slither quickly out of the way if it gets a chance.
Because it can only raise its head about a quarter of an inch, Europeans, who wear shoes and boots, are generally safe, unless it drops off the top of a door or curtain rod where it sometimes lies. A krait fell on the head of Betsy Macdonald’s (née Anderson) husband Tommy as he was opening the garage door of their bungalow in Bihar. ‘Luckily,’ wrote Betsy afterwards, ‘he was wearing his topi.’
Perhaps because, instinctively, most people feel an atavistic fear of snakes that somehow connects with the depth of the subconscious, there was also a curious fascination with snake charmers. ‘The Sanp-wallah, or Snake People, are short, dark-skinned people with broad faces that suggest Dravidian ancestry, long hair in ringlets or pinned on top of the head and thick beards. Their snakes live in baskets, carried in yokes. Traditionally, they wear orange robes,’ wrote Evelyn Barrett, who witnessed their mysterious ability seemingly to call wild snakes to them.
‘In our compound, one patch of grass, fifteen feet by twelve feet, remained uncut. Before this, the men took up position, the elder retiring a few paces and dropping his load. Pacing up and down before the grass and scrutinising it carefully, the boy then raised his pipe and started to play.
‘He sauntered back and forth, never taking his eyes off the grass, as the beckoning notes rose and fell. A rustle was answered by a stirring in the music. Leaning forward, the charmer now played with urgency, a summons that seemed to strike and follow the rippling grass until, almost unnoticed, a small, dark snake lay writhing at his feet. When the music stopped it started whipping and hissing, but at the first notes of the pipe it flattened and calmed, coiling ever more closely until, at a sign from the boy, the older man stepped forward and seized it behind the head, flicking it, hissing, into a sack. A second snake was similarly dealt with.
‘Next came a cobra. It was writhing on the ground before anyone saw it leave the grass. As before, when the music stopped, the snake seemed to lose purpose, and started to writhe and hiss. As before, at the first notes it flattened and undulated towards the player. Then it ‘danced’. Facing the pipe, hood spread, it reared and swayed from side to side, while its forked tongue ceaselessly flickered. Holding the pipe to within an inch of its head, the charmer played the snake, drawing it to and fro as certainly as though it were attached to his pipe. Before disappearing into a sack, it was made to bite a leaf and we were shown the two viscous fang prints. Cobras are always found in pairs, so not until the second was disposed of was the performance concluded.
‘“Now,” said my husband, “get us a wild snake! These were doped.”
‘A ten-rupee note silenced expostulations. This time, both were taken aside, stripped and searched by my husband and another officer, before being allowed to continue the performance. Everyone was then ordered by the sanp-wallah to stand back and neither speak nor move.
‘As before, the boy paced before the grass, staring at it closely. The older man now stood up. After a deep salaam, with eyes closed and palms joined against his breast, he started rapidly intoning. I caught the words ‘Hazur’ (Presence) and ‘Mehtar’ (Prince) at each mention of which he salaamed. Gathering momentum his voice rose, to fall to desperate mutterings, the while his hands were lowered in supplication. Now the pipe was speaking, softly, calling, calling.
‘Suddenly the boy ceased his pacing and, half-crouching, played with frenzy at a point in the grass. Hissings followed. As these grew louder, the boy retreated in dancing, circling steps, always facing the grass and never for an instance ceasing to play. The older man now stepped aside. Next instant three feet of skewbald snake shot from the grass, and as quickly withdrew. The hissings now became frantic and the boy leapt as a snake flung itself, hissing and writhing, at his feet. It was about five feet long, coloured pink and sand, and in the wildest rage. Fresh hissings now broke out as a second and even longer snake broke from the grass. Anyone unfamiliar with snakes can have no idea of the lightning speed of a roused six-footer.
‘To us horrified onlookers it was hardly possible to follow the movements of the snakes. Although we realised that both reptiles were frantic from fear, and were only trying to regain the shelter of the grass, the odds against the naked, prancing boy and his pipe seemed overwhelming. Again and again, the snakes were turned by a dancing toe. Gradually the hissings subsided, the thrashing bodies closed in ever-tightening coils until, for a second, one snake lay motionless at the foot of the charmer. On the instant it was snatched behind the head by the older man and flung, hissing, into a sack. Five minutes later the second snake was similarly dealt with. For no baksheesh on earth will a sanp-wallah kill a snake.
‘Streaming with sweat, chest heaving, the boy stood up. Physically and nervously he was exhausted. Throughout the performance not a word had been uttered. Now a babel of voices broke forth – flat, English voices, falling strangely on that Indian garden of scent and sun and secret, thrilling power. Only the sanp-wallah were apart, silently and methodically adjusting their garments and fastening the sacks.
‘Baksheesh to the extent of twenty rupees (about thirty shillings), to these people a fortune, seemed little enough for what we had witnessed.’
Disease, avalanche, snakebite – Fishing Fleet girls who stayed in India were threatened by them all. But few could have had the experience of Olive Crofton, married to a District Officer and setting off by train from Central India in 1920. ‘There had been trouble on the railways lately with train thieves, including several murders,’ she wrote laconically; and at her husband’s instigation packed her revolver in her dressing case.
Her carriage had a detachable chair, more comfortable than the ordinary seats, and while she sat reading in this, her back to the window, a reflection of something flickered on the glass of her spectacles. She turned round to see a large man, who had been crouching out of sight on the footboard, clambering through the window, a leaded stick in his right hand and a large knife in his belt.
Luckily her dressing case was open on the bunk beside her. She reached in, picked up her revolver, released the safety catch and pointed it at him in one swift motion while saying in Urdu: ‘Do you want to be shot?’
‘An expression of utter horror came into his face as he threw himself backwards out of the window,’ she wrote later. ‘And the last I saw of him was rolling over and over like a shot rabbit down the high railway embankment.’ A woman who could coolly tackle an armed robber, one feels, could tackle anything.