‘As I inspected ours I sighed a bit’
In 1889 Anne Wilson, newly married to a Deputy Commissioner, wrote to a friend of her first impression of her new home in the Punjab: ‘Picture to yourself, then, a square one-storied flat-roofed house, with a pillared veranda at each side, nine rooms, three in a row, without an entrance hall or any passage, each room opening into the other as rooms do in an étage abroad, each room having one or two door-windows into the bargain, and then count how many doors or windows there must be – a blessing no doubt in the hot weather but not ornamental in the cold . . .
‘Every room looks as high as a country church, the roofs are of upholstered rafters, the doors are folding doors, bolted in the middle. If you wish to keep them shut, you must bolt them. If you wish to keep them open, you have to fix a wooden block in, behind the hinges. At present a white cotton, sheet-like curtain hangs from a wooden rod before each . . .’
She went on to speak of the extraordinarily primitive kitchen arrangements – which, in the majority of bungalows, persisted into the twentieth century. There was no pantry, dresser, shelves, cupboards or even hot or cold running water – not even a proper kitchen, with a scullery or larder, let alone a plate rack for drying dishes. ‘The kitchen is a little dark room, with a board on the floor to hold the meat, two tumble-down brick “ranges” in one corner, a stone receptacle in another into which the water is thrown, which runs out through its hole in the wall into a sunk tub.
‘There are two shelves, on which are an array of pots, a hatchet, drainer, one or two tin spoons and some pudding and pate shapes.’ After the first shock, she was cheered to learn that a brick floor could be laid and a sink built while they were in camp, and anything in the way of tables or kitchen equipment could be ordered.
Furniture was sparse, usually left or sold by the previous resident. Single beds, pushed into the centre of the room to avoid any creature that might crawl down the walls, were the rule because the nights were so hot. Bungalows were always whitewashed; wallpaper would have been eaten by white ants. To soften the appearance of these high bare walls the authors of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook recommended a painted band around the base of the wall, with patterns around the top. Floors were often of beaten mud – termites loved wood – covered with grass or bamboo matting. Until electricity arrived during the twentieth century, light came from paraffin or coconut oil lamps and candles.
‘As I inspected ours I sighed a bit,’ wrote newly wed Fishing Fleet girl Cecile Stanley Clarke, on arrival at their first home – her husband Henry’s regiment was stationed in the Fort at Calcutta. ‘The furniture consisted of two single beds covered in mosquito nets, two rather battered little tables, a couple of chairs and a kind of cupboard. The drawing-room had a table, a sofa – very hard Victorian horse-hair type – two armchairs of the same vintage, and six brown flowerpot stands on long legs.’ These latter, she continued mournfully, were beloved of the Indian contractors, ‘and as no one saw eye to eye with them the junior subalterns were generally landed with the lot . . . our dining room had a table, with a blotchy kind of surface (only colonels’ and majors’ wives had ones with a high polish), six chairs, and a kind of sideboard affair.’
Violet Hanson found the same dilapidated bareness awaiting her when she and her husband returned from honeymoon to the Indian Cavalry School at Sauga, where her husband was to take the Cavalry course – obligatory for all Indian cavalry officers.
‘Sauga was a very old military station and the bungalows were of the most primitive kind. They were furnished by the Public Works Department with a minimum of functional furniture: the usual wooden and cane chairs, iron beds with mosquito netting, dining table and chairs, and a chest of drawers for dressing tables. The floors were bare with rush matting covering them and we got some material from the bazaar for curtains.
‘The ceilings were nothing but ceiling cloths, which were much-patched cotton material stretched beneath the rafters of the roof. These cloths hung fairly slackly and a colony of various little creatures lived under the roof. Looking up, you could see the imprint of their little feet running from side to side over the ceiling cloth and hear squeaks and rustling. A colony of bats lived in one corner of my bedroom, with a separate entrance hole, so that they would emerge at night to fly about the room. When my husband was dining in the Mess (as he had to do at least once a week) I would have my dinner in bed, under the relative safety of the mosquito netting.’
As Violet sat in bed eating she would see muskrats, harmless little creatures but with a strong smell that gave them their name, scuttling round the sides of the room by the skirting boards. Less pleasant were other, bolder rats which ran across the room ‘sometimes over my feet while I was dressing. There were insects of all kinds, of course, and lizards on the wall, that ate the spiders and flies.’
Occasionally a bungalow would have a justified reputation as ‘queer’. Before she married, Cecile Stanley Clarke and her mother stayed in one, rented for them by Cecile’s brother-in-law Hubert Gough. It had been the old Madras Regiment’s mess in Indian Mutiny times and, thought Cecile, there was a ‘something’ that still lingered. Later, at 12.30 one night, it manifested itself. Here is Cecile’s account:
‘“Mamma, I can hear something!”
‘“Go to sleep,” she replied, lighting our bedside light; but not before I had seen the most horrible yellow face pressed against the window.
. . . ‘“I saw something.” I continued, with chattering teeth.
‘“Rubbish,” she replied, though with not much conviction.
‘I got up and ran to the window – nothing to be seen.
‘“You must have dreamt it,” said Mama, but I hadn’t and I can see the face now, grinning hideously at me.
‘“Golly! I don’t like this at all”, I said.
‘There was a veranda running round just outside our bedroom. I opened the doors and went out to have a look round. The moonlight was making great shadows and the stars seemed so near that I felt I could stretch out a hand and pluck one from the sky.
‘“Chowkidar,” I called. “Have you seen anyone?”
‘“Banshee,” replied the man, with no hesitation at all.
‘“I don’t like this,” I said. “Let’s go back to Dorset tomorrow.”
‘I went to the great cupboard and hunted round for the little bottle of holy water I had been given for just such an emergency, then went round the room flipping it about. “That will keep them out of here, anyway,” I said, climbing back into bed and pulling the sheets over my head. Mama kept the light on and read a book.
‘When I told Hubert about it the next morning he just laughed. Not so my sister Mary. “You are right,” she said. “There is something funny about this bungalow; it has been empty for years, because of course no one would take it as it is haunted.” She and I made such a fuss that in the end Hubert had a police guard put on the two staircases that led up to our veranda.
‘Night after night, just as we were having dinner, we would hear footsteps pattering about above our heads. “Banshees,” we would yell, and all rush up and have a ghost hunt, but we never saw anything. Our police guards put sand on the floors and strands of cotton across the veranda, the footsteps continued but the feet left no marks, nor was the cotton broken.’
The sound of clanking was what woke Fishing Fleet girl Violet Field on her first night of married life on her husband’s station in the Punjab. She asked her new husband, Jim Acheson, what the noise was, to be told that it was made by the chains worn by the gardeners working in their garden. They were all prisoners from the local prison, he explained. Violet would have none of this. ‘No one will wear chains in my garden!’ she said. After that, every day the prisoners would come, have their chains struck off, work in the garden and then undergo a rigorous head count before being chained up again to go back to gaol.
For Ruth Barton and her husband Pete their garden brought glamour. After arriving in Bombay they went straight to Secunderabad in the Deccan where her husband’s battalion of the Rajputana Rifles was stationed. Here they dined outside, their table under a gold mohur tree in the garden, shaped like an open umbrella. In mid-March it was brilliant with scarlet blossoms against its bare branches. They hung a light in the tree so that all the insects hovered round it, and little owls swooped down and feasted on the insects. Then came feathery leaves and then more scarlet flowers. On clear nights they slept in the garden, well away from the heat-soaked walls of the bungalow, where a ‘blessed coolness rose with the dew and the fragrance of tobacco flowers and night-scented stock filled the air’.
Some things were permitted that would be frowned on at home – in India, for example, it was quite permissible for young ladies to have a chota peg as a sundowner (indeed, it was medically advised), whereas in England a young woman downing whisky would have been very mal vu.
But the importance of keeping up standards was felt strongly. ‘You seem to think, dearie, that it’s only people who come from out of the way places who get untidy or careless in their appearance,’ wrote Leslie Lavie to his fiancée Flossie in March 1896. ‘I can name numbers of people in Secunderabad who seem to have no scruples about white petticoats . . . I’m sure you would never get like that, degenerating as the climate of Vizianagram is. I like, or should I think like, ladies of my household to wear sort of light tea gowns during the day in India, than which nothing is more becoming; instead of which you generally see, if you surprise anybody suddenly, some very old and untidy costume.’
Fifteen years later, in a paper she read to young women planning marriage, Florence Evans, wife of Joseph Evans in the Royal Corps of Armourers, made the same thing clear: ‘It has been particularly impressed upon me that this paper would not be complete if I did not mention curl pins,’ she wrote. ‘These I am led to understand are particularly disliked by the male sex, therefore they should be carefully laid aside before the return of the men; not only this but we should be neatly dressed in our house to please our husbands as well as others.’
Even in small stations like the little railway outpost of Arkonam, where Hilda Bourne lived with her husband Jim, formality reigned. Jim, who first went to India as a civil engineer for a railway company, did so well that he was soon responsible for the Nilgiri Railway (one of India’s famous Hill Railways) that linked the fashionable hill station of Ootacamund to the main system. Hilda and Jim had been childhood sweethearts, and she joined the Fishing Fleet of autumn 1903 with her wedding cake in her luggage. They married in Bombay a week after her arrival, settling down in a company bungalow in Arkonam, almost 660 miles distant, soon after their honeymoon.
Here in this town, supposedly one of the hottest in India (sometimes the temperature was 43°C for several days running), at a time when flannel was worn next to the skin and no lady was considered dressed without corsets and petticoats, the small British community gave constant dinner parties, almost all of which had to have eight courses, with the correct wine for every course. As the only meat available locally was goat or chicken – supplemented occasionally by what was shot for the pot – one of the chief ingredients of these meals was the cook’s imagination, although for special occasions European food was sent up from Madras.
None of this entertaining, of course, could have happened without the servants who were an integral part of life in India. Buffer and link between the stranger and the vast land of his responsibility, their loyalty was a miracle of the Raj. ‘I sometimes wonder they do not cut off all our heads and say nothing about it,’ wrote Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, the Governor-General 1836–42.
The size of a bungalow was irrelevant to the number of servants employed. This conformed to a basic quota and consisted of: bearer (personal servant, also valet to the master of the household), khitmagar (butler), khansamah (cook), messalgie (pantry boy), bheestie (water carrier) and sweepter. For a ‘married’ bungalow, with children, nanny (ayah) and nursery boy would be added. A dhobi (laundry man) usually came from outside.
Outside were mali (gardener) and as many boys (chokras) as he could wangle. For anyone with horses there would be a jemadar-syce (head groom) and a syce per horse or (polo) pony. Finally there was the chowkidar (night watchman), ‘a stalwart who spent most of the night snoring in a corner of the veranda’. The bearer was the head servant, responsible for overseeing running the household, engaging other servants, paying wages and overseeing expenses and doing the bidding of his master. A good one was invaluable; a bad one could make life irritating, difficult and distracting.
Anne Wilson found herself with thirteen servants – including a groom, water carrier and milkman – but soon realised that supervision was needed. ‘One must look after the filter [on the water supply], see to the milk, the feeding of cow, sheep and poultry, the making of butter, bread and cakes, the careful trimming of the lamps, to the dusting of books, pictures, furniture, to the tinning of pots and pans, to the way the cook uses his dishes or his dusters.’
For Indians, domestic service carried no stigma but rather conferred status. Servants, like soldiers, were drawn from the highest strata of village society, their regular wage a wealth normally undreamt of. Like English servants in great houses, they reflected the standing of their employers; thus the bearer of a British cavalry colonel claimed higher wages and status than that of a British infantry colonel; to be in the Viceroy’s household was to be at the pinnacle. Entertaining also added prestige; Anne Wilson found that her servants invariably laid places for four even when she and her husband were alone ‘as if they were in a state of constant hospitable expectation’.
Memoir after memoir has described how one could come home after a drink or a swim at the club at 8.30, tell the cook that there would be six guests for dinner that night – and know that an excellent dinner would somehow be conjured up out of the kitchen’s hole-in-the-ground oven and handle-less saucepans.
Nor did it matter how basic the newlyweds’ silver or china cupboard was; what was needed would be borrowed from a nearby bungalow to maintain the honour of the household. Many a bride was surprised to see her newly acquired salt cellars or candlesticks appearing, without a word said, on the dinner table of her hosts. ‘The Brigadier’s pearl-handled fruit knives figured at our parties as regularly as our green coffee cups graced the Colonel’s table,’ wrote Evelyn Barrett. ‘Of course no one said anything.’
In the same way the gardener, whose first duty was to produce flowers, always managed this even when there were none growing in the garden. One story, perhaps apocryphal, tells of a man leaving for England who gave his gardener a reference that read: ‘This gardener has been with me fifteen years. I have no garden, I have never lacked flowers and he has never had a conviction.’
In England, just as children of the upper and middle classes often lived a life completely separate from their parents, going down brushed, combed and smartened up, to see them for an hour after tea, with their nurseries quite likely on a different floor, so servants, too, had their own quarters away from the rest of the family.
But in India, living in a bungalow, where rooms often opened out of one another, there was far less separation; and the servants, who did not knock and walked noiselessly on bare feet, could often be in a room before anyone was aware of their presence. The bearers would be in attendance all day long; others would wait at table, another might be waiting on the veranda for orders. Although their dwellings were completely separate, nevertheless they managed to know everything that was going on in the bungalow, from a surreptitious love affair to ill-health and the beginning of a pregnancy; next to her husband, the sweeper, who emptied the thunderboxes, had the most intimate knowledge of a woman’s bodily functions.
Hygiene meant full-time vigilance, from boiling water and milk, washing all fruit and vegetables in water sterilized with permanganate of potash, lining meat safes with mosquito netting to deter flies and pouring paraffin and boiling water down the cracks in the floors to keep away white ants, to filtering water. This was done by setting three large jars one above the other in a frame, with holes in the bases of the top two. In the top jar was put a mixture of gravel and charcoal, through which the water ran into the second jar, in which there was clean sand, which also took away the flavour of the charcoal. A further refinement was putting some minute pieces of sponge in the holes in the base of the second jar. The result was water so purified that if it came from a natural source it was fit to drink, though any from a well or stream near a village still had to be boiled.
Betsy Macdonald, who had married the owner of an up-country sugar factory in Bihar, had to rely on her husband to give the orders until she had learnt sufficient of the language. She managed to get a decent kitchen built; her next struggle was with the dhobi. Although the clothes and tea towels he brought back each evening were spotlessly white and impeccably washed and ironed, she suspected he had been using a lot of bleach and laying them out in the sun, which would soon rot them.
‘I followed him one day and to my horror my worst fears were confirmed as I was led to the buffalo pool. Everything and everybody washed there – dogs, buffaloes, children and villagers. It intrigued me how they changed their clothes in the water and came out of the murky pond looking cleaner . . . [but] I did not relish the idea of our washing being done there and then slapped to shreds on the rocks.’ She put an end to it, telling the man he could use as much hot water as he liked at the bungalow, and giving him a packet of Lux. He took to this arrangement, soon extolling the merits of ‘Lukkus sahopu’.