Quartered Safe Out Here (22 page)

Calcutta is still my favourite city, probably because I haven't been there since 1945 and remember it as it looked to me then, which was something like a paradise market. Nowadays the name conjures up images of poverty, starvation, disease, and squalor, of Mother Theresa and that fine old retired British officer who runs his own field kitchen in the slums. It wasn't much better, I dare say, when I saw it in the twilight of the Raj, but I was there on seven days' leave, and as every holiday-maker knows, even in this enlightened age, you don't spend an eagerly-awaited vacation seeking out the plague-spots which exist within a mile of your hotel.

Not that you had to look far for them in “Cal”: the beggars displayed their sores and hideous deformities on the main streets, you could find corpses on the station platforms, and a tram-ride to Howrah would take you through slums and hovels populated by uncountable filthy multitudes who didn't so much live as swarm. One look would have convinced the most zealous reformer of the sheer impossibility of doing anything with that vast, proliferating Augean stable, and if you had been any time in India you were
hardened to it. There was something else, too, which if it did not transform the second city of Empire, lifted it at least a little from the depths. Everybody smiled.

That may be at the root of Britain's three-century love affair with India. Nowadays it is taught (usually by people who never saw the Raj) that our passion for the sub-continent was mere pride of possession, arrogant satisfaction of conquest, and lust of exploitation, leavened only by a missionary zeal to improve. No doubt those feelings existed, among some, but they don't account for the undying affection that so many of the island race felt for that wonderful country and its people. Nor do all its great marvels: the beauty of the land and its buildings, the endless variety of its customs and cultures, the wonder of its art and philosophy and ancient civilisation, the glory of its matchless regiments. They may inspire awe, even reverence, but they don't quite explain why thousands of soldiers and merchants and administrators and traders left their hearts there, to say nothing of their mortal remains. One can babble about the magic of India, and convey nothing: I can only say that when I look back at it my lasting memory is of smiling faces, laughter in the bazaar, tiny naked children grinning as they clamoured for buckshee—and it wasn't an act, for they still laughed and joked and play-acted if they didn't get it. There was a life, a spirit about India that was irrepressible, and it outweighed all the faults and miseries and cruelties and corruptions. That, I think, is why the British loved it, and some of us will never get it out of our systems, even in an age when
Indian and Pakistani immigration is about as welcome in Britain as the British were in India.

We must have been somewhere on the Rangoon road when we were told that we were to go on leave, and I have only mental snapshots of the journey: the long straight highway through the Rangoon suburbs, with their pleasant bungalows and green gardens looking as though there had never been a war; the Shwe Dagon pagoda gleaming in the moonlight—they said the Japs had stripped away its gold leaf, but it still shone for me; sleeping on a marble floor under the counter of “Honkers and Shankers” (the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building), which was the only billet available; reading
Gone with the Wind
in the stifling ’tween-decks of the troop transport, or staring overside at the flying fishes and the sinister weaving shapes of the sharks in the cobalt depths of the Bay of Bengal; running up between the chocolate and green banks of the muddy Hooghly river; driving past the imposing buildings and Victorian statuary of the great city; and the final arrival in the cool vaulted chambers of the Museum, with the beds set out among the glass display cases. If a museum seems an unlikely base for a furlough—well, you may keep the Beverly Wilshire and the Hotel du Cap and the Waldorf Astoria and the Savoy and even the Grand in Rome; I have been content (more or less) in all of them, but the Museum, Calcutta, is the only establishment to which I would give six stars and as many rosettes as you like.

No doubt my view was coloured by youth and the
bewilderment of change. After six months of chlorinated water and compo, baking and freezing by turns in the Dry Belt and being permanently sodden in the monsoon, feeling like a walking delicatessen for leeches and mosquitos and ticks, and with the occasional possibility of being killed—suddenly there was the peace and unimaginable luxury of a frame-and-rope native bed with a real pillow (no sheets in the British Army, though) beneath gently-stirring punkahs, and the certainty of sleep untroubled by stags or o.p.s or night attacks or yells of “Stand to!” Jap was five hundred miles away, and in his place there were bearers to keep the place tidy, and
dhobis
to launder our clothes, and
dersis
to make and mend, and downstairs a cool and airy canteen where they'd never heard of bully stew or K-rations and the service was supervised by amazing memsahibs who addressed the native staff and each other like gym mistresses thundering encouragement across the fields of Cheltenham. They were volunteers charged with the welfare and refreshment of the troops, and by God we were going to be well-fed and comfortable or they'd know the reason why.

Each man received a brand-new suit of jungle green, starched and pressed, and on each the
dersis
sewed the shoulder-flash of the black cat arching its back, and we dug out our regimental badges and polished them and set them in our bush-hats, and we counted the thick wads of little blue notes—six months' back pay, even if it's only eighteen rupees a week, soon mounts up in a country where you buy and sell in
tinned fish and mangoes, and I didn't need to touch my brag winnings in Lloyd's—and we beamed at each other across the table in the tired, happy knowledge that we had nothing to do for seven days but loaf and spend time and money and gape contentedly at the real world again.

From what I read and television tells me, soldiers on leave have different priorities nowadays. It was with stunned disbelief that I read that U.S. forces in the Gulf were to receive “counselling” on how to “relate” to members of the opposite sex after a few months in the desert; the idea of G.I.s needing this kind of instruction must have convulsed their predecessors, and I'm sure it came as a shock to the present generation of the American military, too. But it shows how the modern official mind works, and what it expects servicemen to do when they are turned loose in the fleshpots.

Maybe sex is more important nowadays than it used to be. Or maybe we were a more restrained, inhibited, pious, and timid generation. But I was interested to note that Nine Section, who for months had been deprived of female society, and had remarked on the fact from time to time, showed no tendency to behave like Casanova gone berserk. They eyed what talent there was in the bars of Chowringhee, danced with abandon at the service clubs, and chatted up the Wrens, Waafs, ATS, and nurses, and that was about it, apparently. Parker was an exception; by his own admission it was on this leave that he contracted his umpteenth dose of Cupid's measles, and rolled off to the M.O.
almost as a matter of course—catching a social disease, incidentally, was not a military crime, but concealing it was. And it may well have been that the risk of infection was the great restrainer; there were no simple cures at that time, and that for clap was reputed to be excruciatingly painful; syphilis, which was rumoured to be incurable, was regarded much as AIDS is today. So, apart from the feeling, quite widespread in my generation, that illicit sex was a bad thing, frowned on by church, school, and family, there was considerable caution, and it was natural that Grandarse, solemnly regarding a coloured poster in the billet which showed two sultry houris smiling invitingly above the caption “Do you want it—we've got it”, should sigh heavily and observe: “Aye, weel, Ah'd sooner ’ev a pint anyways.” The Army propagandised unceasingly, with lectures, short-arm inspections, and terrifyingly explicit films; one poster, I remember, showed a statuesque blonde, surrounded by leering Japanese, with the caption: “Is this the face that loved a thousand Nips?” I wouldn't have thought that many of the light ladies of Calcutta had had the opportunity to bestow their favours on the Japanese, but there you are. Another discouragement, I should add, was that the average Indian and Eurasian prostitute was not notable for charm or beauty.

I'm not trying to pretend that my military generation were any saintlier than soldiers ever are. As a harassed orderly officer in North Africa I had to raid more brothels, endure the screaming protests of more furious harlots, and see more frustrated amorists into
the paddy-wagon, than I care to count, and I remember the blue and khaki queues outside the bawdy-houses of the Cairo Birkah, the more impatient customers already in their shirt-tails with their trousers neatly folded over their arms. Certainly a proportion of the services behaved like demented rabbits, but I would guess they were a minority.

Forster was an interesting case. On our first night in Calcutta he spruced himself up with Lifebuoy, flourished the prophylactic kit which he had drawn from the M.O.'s office, admired himself in the mirror, sketched out a programme of debauchery which would have frightened Caligula, and strode forth like Ferdinand the Bull. Three hours later he was back, full of gloating accounts of his sexual heroics, and unaware that in the interval Grandarse and I had been sitting three rows behind him in the Lighthouse cinema, watching Laurel and Hardy.

It sounds terribly tame, I suppose, but our chief occupations in those seven days consisted of eating and drinking to excess, wandering in the bazaars, drinking again, going to the cinema, riding in the tram-cars, or, if we felt expensive, in one of the coolie-drawn rickshaws, having yet another pint at Jimmy's Kitchen (the Bristol, where the sea captains went, and the big hotels frequented by the officers, were not for us), and best of all, simply strolling and surveying on one of the great streets of the world: Chowringhee.

No doubt if I could see it now I'd be disillusioned, but in my memory it makes Piccadilly and the Via
Veneto and the Champs-Elysées and Rodeo Drive and Princes Street and Broadway look like ordinary streets with undistinguished shops. Chowringhee was Bond Street and Change Alley and the Arabian Nights all in one, with a touch of Park Lane to one side where the broad
Maidan
with its trees and distant buildings was separated from the street itself by the clanging tramway line. The roadway was crowded with every kind of vehicle imaginable, from limousines and the famous taxis driven by bearded burly Sikhs to bicycles and horse-drawn carriages and the flying two-person tongas with their long shafts between which the lean brown tonga-wallahs, naked but for loincloths, raced along, clanking their tiny bells; at speed they would leave the ground, being borne along by the impetus of the high-wheeled vehicle before hitting the tarmac again with their bare soles, covering the ground in giant strides to become airborne again.

But Chowringhee pavement, on the built-up side of the wide road, was where the excitement and enchantment were. There, it seemed, you could meet every race and type in India, and every uniform of the Allies in the Orient: beggars and generals, fakirs and merchants, memsahibs and pan-spitting layabouts, massive native policemen with their metal-shod staves and American fliers with their hats tilted back and the inevitable pack of Camels in their breast-pockets, a Naval officer in brilliant white with his sword on one hand and his bride on the other hurrying through a laughing crowd from their hotel, and a wild man with hair to his waist
and his near-naked body smeared with paint and ashes pushing across their path as he stared ahead with empty eyes, sacred white cows with garlands ambling along (to whom you gave way) and red-capped military policemen with cold nasty expressions (to whom, being Fourteenth Army and knowing it, you did not). I never saw anyone lying on a bed of nails on Chowringhee, but I did see a snake-charmer, a rope-trick practitioner, and a Bhil knife-thrower who cut the ace of diamonds out of a playing card with four knives thrown simultaneously, two from either hand.

The shops and booths and canopied stalls of the pavement would have taken a lifetime to examine, for they seemed to be packed with everything of East and West, crowded in among the larger buildings and hotels and cafés. You might pass a great pillared entrance with broad steps guarded by splendidlyaccoutred Sikhs standing like statues, and next to it a tiny booth dispensing chapattis and curries to a jostling pack of babus, with limbless mendicants crawling among their feet, and beyond that a bookstall where complete sets of Scott and Dickens and Hardy and Jeffery Farnol stood shoulder to shoulder in immaculate rows with Milton and Shakespeare and Burns and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edgar Rice Burroughs, with a prim little Eurasian clerk at the receipt of custom, his lips moving as he solved the
Times of India
crossword and lashed out with his cane at any beggars who touched his stool. And then an ivory shop, where you could watch the workmen carving those amazing
ball-within-a-ball ornaments and intricately-decorated tusks and perfect little Taj Mahals that would fit under a thimble, and a leather boutique that would have shamed Cordoba, where they would trace your foot on a piece of paper and build a shoe around it, all within an hour, for ten rupees (and they lasted me as many years), and the little Tiger Cinema with its wickerwork armchairs and a twenty-foot coloured cut-out of Betty Grable in
Pin-Up Girl
above its marquee, and a tattooist where Wedge, the lunatic, had a cobra imprinted on his arm, coiled round from wrist to elbow, with a scroll saying “Mother”, and the swinging doors of the Nip Inn, packed to capacity with beer-soaked servicemen, and white-helmeted American M.P.s parked outside in their jeep, swinging their truncheons and waiting and hoping, and if you turned the corner you were in Hogg Market, that great clamorous emporium with its quiet corners where nothing was bought without being haggled for, and within a few minutes you had acquired, without quite understanding how, a silver cigarette case beautifully enamelled with peacocks and a map of India with all the names misspelled, for another ten chips, and a beautiful razor-edged kukri for eight (or twelve, depending on who won the toss, you or the grinning bandit of a stall-holder), and a roll of silk, and had your photograph taken under a sign reading “Karsh of Calcutta” (“Please to hold still, sahib, you are moving extremely and the result will be oll fuzzee and unsatisfactoree!”), and been shaved by a squatting
nappy-wallah
who used
no lather but your own sweat and left your skin like glass.