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The Townend Family Letters

Correspondence from the 1930s - 1940s between members of the Townend family
HPV + LJT Letters 1936 to 1938

1938 July

From LJT to Annette (undated)

29 Stanley Gds
W2

My darling Annette

Many times I have wondered how your journey was going and whether the people you are staying with seem nice. You were lucky not to be crossing the Channel last night, for there was such a gale blowing here in London that it must have been most unpleasant on the sea –

I slept admirably last night on Mrs. D’s mattress on the floor. She regards me as some sort of un-natural phenomenon for being able to repose myself on a hard bed! The weather turned bad in the night and we are not going to attempt Greenwich to-day, but will do my visit to Cook’s – See whether Marshall’s have a bit more of the linen of which my chair covers are made and then go to a cinema and spend a quiet evening at home –

All my meetings and arrangements have gone well to plan. I was delighted to see Professor Crew and we talked and talked! He has known Capel Curig all his life and goes there every now and again for a few days walking. He says he will most probably turn up there for a few days, while we are there, as, for various reasons, he cannot get away for a regular holiday this year. He was in London for a meeting of the Genetical Society, of which he has just been elected President – and brought me a message from P. Ruggles Gates who had also been at the meeting asking whether I could go to tea yesterday – so I rang him up and said “Yes” – if I might take Poppy too. It was rather fun. We went to his house in Woburn Sq. just by the new London University Buildings which I had never seen – His wife had had to go out to some Committee meeting – and he took us out to tea at the London University Club – just opposite the new main building – It was all rather interesting –

Poppy seems to be ready and I think wants me to put on my shoes and hat and go out – and so – for the moment, fare-well.

I hope you are comfortable and happy –

Best love
Mum

From HPV to family

Chinsura,
Bengal.
Friday, July 1st

My dear

This morning I got up at 5.15, 15 minutes earlier than I had said that I would. Mogul would not believe that I could by any means dress in less than three quarters of an hour, and provided tea which I had said not to bring because he reckoned that this would get me out of bed as soon as it arrived. The Collector of Birbhum (the district of which Suri is the headquarters) had arranged with a local zamindar to lend his car and I got to the station in it about three minutes before the train arrived and fifteen before it left: it was unfortunate that the second letter that I opened when I reached this house was an anonymous one alleging that the brother of the zamindar, with his support and approval, was oppressing the people in unpleasant ways.

The journey to Suri took from 10 till nearly four. The return journey from 7 till 1. Which is not fast for 80 miles. Train journeys. There is a big river now in partial flood and without a road bridge between the Grand Trunk Road and Suri; and even in the cold weather it is an adventure to go there by car, unless one makes a circuit of 150 miles through Bihar, the next province. I had the carriage to myself the whole way. Changed at Ondal, a junction in my old subdivision Asansol and one of the largest goods yards in the world (but a mean little station so far as passengers go), into a sort of Tootal train which shuttles up and down the branch line to Suri. Through country that I ought to know; for I toured all over it, by car and on occasion by horse, 22 years ago; pleasant rolling country with far more trees than most of Bengal and with bubbling streams at this time of year, all green too just now; in the hot weather it is all a dirty red with much dust. I recognised practically nothing and found that memory had telescoped distances. But it was interesting all the same. Some of the collieries that I knew (Asansol is the Bengal coal district) were deserted, worked out presumably. But with what infinite leisure the train moved and even more so waited at each station. The Collector a Muhammadan was waiting for me on the platform, treating the whole thing as an occasion for infinite mirth; but some Indians have the mannerism of laughing all the time. And so to the circuit house furnished newly only four months ago for the Governor’s visit. Good and clean furniture; but far too much of it. The place teemed with mosquitos; of at least five kinds, including anopheles; and including also what was much more annoying the very light kind which shares with the very black kind and the striped kind (all equally small and without buzz) the habit of getting under one’s table and biting during the day. There were also ants beyond number of different kinds; and a small frog which had a prior claim to the bathroom; and in addition there ran hastily across the corner of rooms at night an animal which at first I mistook for a great lizard, but it was a muskrat judging by its pointed nose; unlike others which I may have seen, this one followed Kipling and went round by the walls but it was not so timid as to refrain from coming through a room where I was moving about. Very much hotter than here. No electricity of course; the town has only 10,000 people in it; there were pull-punkhas and, though they seemed ineffective, one felt the difference when one moved away from them. I slept on the verandah; in a positive tumult of mosquito screams and the rustlings of bats and the movements of some small animal (which may have been a cat or may have been the muskrat) but rather well. There was a guard of 8 policemen (armed police) with a havildar (sergeant) and each morning I had to go outside and they presented arms to me. A message came in the first night from the havildar: two questions – should the sentries wear their boots or go barefoot? and should they obey the orders about challenging or stay chup? As without boots in the dark there is a risk of snakes and as to have sentries out and not allow them to do their work seems futile, I gave orders Boots and Challenges to their great content; but they did clump around most lustily all night on the gravel and there was a good deal of hearty challenging. However it made no odds. Where I have made an error was to approve a programme which provided for visitors from 8.30 onwards because this meant my getting up at a quarter to seven, 15 minutes early. The visitors fair broke me up. I had a continuous series of them from 8.30 till 1 o’clock the first morning; and it is exhausting to try to find out about and to sum up an endless series of Indians all of whom are on the make and all determined to deceive in some way. It was curious in view of Sir Nazimuddin’s anxiety that we should send Muhammadan officers to Muhammadan areas that I had three requests from Muhammadans, all to be kept confidential, to move Muhammadan officers; one of them explained that it was much better for Muhammadans if there were Hindu officers because then every one felt it a good act of a Muhammadan to complain about any bad work, whereas if it was a Muhammadan officer Muhammadans disapproved of any complaints against him and he hinted that the Muhammadan officers were not up to much good anyhow. I was an ass not to allow myself longer there; I set aside four days thinking that this would give me at least three days for work; I should have checked the trains, which did not fit in well and I should not have fixed up an appointment with the Congress men for tomorrow, so as to leave myself a margin for staying on longer. By the way Government have a conference of various people in Calcutta next week about future policy of the Irrigation Department; and it is interesting to note that they have not asked me to attend, although the only policy that they have got is the one I put up for them; so it looks rather as if they are abandoning the pretence that they are going on with it. I don’t know that I mind so much now; coming back to district work and meeting face to face the people for whom I have been working somehow takes away my enthusiasm; a sort of idea that if they are rotting they have asked for it and enjoy it.

Saturday. July 2nd, 1938

The Congress leaders from Calcutta did not turn up at all; three from this district arrived with Dr Jaffri an hour late, after waiting for the Calcutta men till then. Dr. Jaffri full of apologies. Maybe they had a motor breakdown, but maybe they simply didn’t come, which would be not un-Bengali-like. I did my tricks with none the less earnestness; like the American in Kipling giving demonstrations of his gun in the streets of Pretoria on the off-chance that someone worth while would take notice. ‘As a leading divorce lawyer he took no chances’; to wit, the less the chances of anything happening become the less I can neglect details which may have some effect. Anyhow I discoursed to them, mostly statistics, for close on three hours; and I doubt if any of them will ever again attack Government for having no data on the subject. Good stuff, though I say it; I had forgotten how much I had collected on the subject; and of course I didn’t attempt to give them more than an outline. Like Shagpat, I talked them into a swoon and so trimmed them. Except that there was probably no trimming. Probably indeed every word of it was wasted. There was this much benefit from it to me that I was dead beat at the end of it and also it was long after the hour at which I had been asked to drop in at the Bankim C. Chatterjee centenary show; and so I did not go but sent a letter of apology instead. I was not to make a speech or anything. It has been unsatisfactory day; for I spent most of the morning cross-examining Hartley and Holman about a lathi charge by the police on a crowd at Serampore during the procession in which Jagannath is taken in his car to visit his (?) mother-in-law. Lathi means bamboo quarter-staff; used in earnest it can kill a tiger – for some Sonthals brought us in a tiger once which they had killed in this way – but on this occasion people had merely been pushed with the lathis and two heads broken. The Bengali papers have come out with allegations of great brutality and Twynam, now Chief Secretary, rang me up last night about them. There are strong rumours that this Ministry will fall at the beginning of August and that Nazimuddin and Fazl Huq have fallen out over the choice of a new man to replace the minister who has been kicked out; and probably this petty incident has been picked upon as an admirable matter on which to attack the Government. Sheer waste of time. Besides I had to look through various notes for papers which I needed for the irrigation talk. And there were one or two letters to be dictated in a hurry and some files to be done. The morning was a hustle and this was the more annoying because I had thought that I had arranged rather well to have time for some thought about how to put the case best to the birds instead of having to improvise. My stenographer is getting on my nerves; but let me not think about it.

I have left the tale of my doings at Suri incomplete. Finished with the nonofficial visitors at one, I gobbled lunch and got to the office at two. Inspected till 4.30 then went back to the circuit house and did files while drinking a cup of tea till 5.15 when the Collector called to take me to tea at the club, one of those over-hearty and consciously friendly Bengali shows which one feels a pig for not enjoying; after it I watched them play tennis for a bit, which really means ‘listened to the Khan Bahadur talk politics’ until six thirty when I had to go into the Memorial hall and sit through a comic American film, specially brought up from Calcutta to entertain me; there was a real film to follow expected to take two hours but the Khan Bahadur with whom I was dining was firm about our going off at 7.30. Bath and change and the dinner at 8.30; and (no need to describe the dinner) bed at ll.15. This second night was really hot; no breeze; and I sweated myself to sleep. The next day was almost a duplicate of the first save that it was an oppressively hot morning so that I sweated my pyjamas into a limp rag sitting in them out on the verandah in the cool of the morning to drink tea and that finishing with my official visitors by 12.30 I read the paper till one. Inspection till five; then 20 minutes talk (official) with the Collector who was not altogether frank with me – but what Bengali is? – before I went back to the Circuit House to tea, then files, and the Pepys’ diary for half an hour before dinner and not long afterwards bed, after a few more files. In fact I overdid the work business at Suri and it is a Fool’s Trick to give so short a time to a visit. The Khan Bahadur who is the same as the Collector and the District Magistrate herein mentioned came to the station to see me off; but there was the less merit in it because he says he invariably gets up at 4.30. The dinner was enlivened by a Bengali gramophone playing shrilly in the next room. He told a tale of Reid’s coming out with him, armed with a police musket and eight cartridges, after leopard. He put two bullets into it and Reid eight; and when they examined the body they found that the eight bullets from the musket were all lying just under the skin; it is a pity that the animal did not get away to be shot by someone else, who would have had a shock when he came to have it skinned. The policeman Singh told the full tale of the shooting of the tiger at Serampore. There were over two hundred people round it in a ring at the end and four of them were so badly injured that two of them died. And is that an Irishism or merely an example from Pendlebury’s arithmetic? But probably you have never heard of that work. The skin had so many bullets in it that it was completely spoilt; mostly lethal bullets; and this fact pleased the Khan Bahadur immensely because he had been arguing that they were useless. Which reminds me that when I went out after that tiger at Asansol I had only lethal and stale at that.

The workmen are still in the upstairs office room with branch establishments all over the house and I am fed to the teeth with them. Why did we suggest burning off the paint? If new paint had been daubed over the old it would have lasted our time. And why did I not say that they could defer repairs till my successor arrived? I begin to think that I prefer dirt.

Sunday July 3rd.

If I like dirt there is enough of it just now; for the dust from the office room and verandah drifts under the doors into the bedroom and the drawing room beyond hope of keeping them clean. It has been a laborious Sunday for me since the personal assistant came in with a long written defence of the purchase of the beds and such, which I could scarcely refuse to look at, and then I had to go and have a drink at Stein’s who gathered the whole station there; one and a half hours, on top of which I had little Professor Mukherjee from Calcutta to discourse about the reasons why the congress oppose the idea that people should pay for irrigation. If I had known that he would stay on so long, I might have hesitated to fall in with his suggestion that it would be a good thing for him to have a discussion. He was here from 3 till 7.30; I gave him tea; and after all it was in a way reasonable that he should stay so long when he had come all this way out. He showed me his new book with a heap of ancient maps of Bengal in it; interesting. And he was distressed to find that some of my figures knocked to little bits conclusions that he had drawn by most laborious analysis from the Agricultural Department statistics; as I had been through them all with equal labour five years ago before I found that they were bunk, he had my sympathy; but I believe that the department have not the slightest idea that anyone will try to make any real use of their figures and publish them only because the Government of India ordered it years ago. By the time that the Professor left I had had my belly full of irrigation and such; yet I do think that if I could spare the time to work up the propaganda I could bring the people round to clamour for my schemes; only to do it on top of my work is perhaps a little much.

The kingfishers have shown up again; but no one ever before saw so many mynahs together. Mostly young; there was one learning to fly, probably from a book; for it fluttered from one spike to the next of the iron fence along the river front. Ridiculous. I cut deads off the flowers this morning with content for some time before the telephone started ringing and people came in. This job with its mixture of dull routine and incessant publicity is not an enviable one; but it beats me why Fawcus and such should be able to do the work of Commissioner on their heads so to say and to complain that they have not a full day’s work. Of course if I merely signed all the office notes, or better still signed them without even reading them, I might get along well enough. Professor Mukherjee said that the Maharaja (the Minister concerned) expressed himself very anxious to see this scheme go through; the silly pimplet! seeing that he has done everything possible to make it difficult to go ahead with it. Having this conference with on one there who knows anything about the subject is typical.

Monday July 4th 1938.

Yesterday was a very notable day, because I did not go and look at my humus pit. Today I had a look at it; both lots old and new still hot but not nearly so much grey fungus about as one would like to see. I suspect that there ought to have been more green stuff in it, but even now there is no luxuriance of jungle in the garden. Strange to reflect that since my wife went home I have made no attempt to go out of the garden in the evening except to functions like the picture-unveiling and to get something to read at the club. I have paid the servants today: I said to the driver that as he had had to spend nearly a week hanging about Calcutta I should give him kharaki; but he replied that the memsahib had mana-kar-diya-ed it and so he could not take it. My interpretation; I offered halting allowance and he said that it had been forbidden. Why? presumably because he has practically no work to do. Except to go to Bandal station and back for the Suri trip I have not been in the car since my return from Darjeeling.

I asked the contractor today how long it would be before the work on the house finished and he replied with satisfaction several months. A gloomy thought. Enough for this week. Tomorrow and the day after will be precisely the same as these last days; I shall be annoyed with my work, shall go and see the humus-heap and cut deads in the garden. Yes, I cut deads this evening and was wet through with the sweaty effort of it.

But I didn’t look at the humus heap today

(handwritten addition) After all I did not visit the humus heap! Many thanks for your letter. Your mother sent on your first from Heidelberg. Glad you like it. No time for a separate letter.
Much love
Dad


From HPV to LJT

Chinsura
July 4th Monday

My darling Joan

Last night I went off to bed at 9.30. Chiefly because having a windy indigestion, due perhaps to the tiring visit of Professor Mukherjee, I felt that to lie was better than to sit, and partly because the mosquitos were annoying. So I put my light out early too: and slept pretty well: woke at 5.30 feeling that I didn’t want more sleep, which is the first time for a long time that (whenever I woke) I felt otherwise than sorry to be getting up. However I did go to sleep again, with decision because I reflected how dead beat I had been these last two evenings after discoursing about my schemes: and I slept till 7.10. By lunchtime, having had two appeals, I felt tired again, though.

It was interesting to see how my graphs and figures knocked those congress men flat. Intensely hostile at first they gradually turned round, as I met every statement and argument with statistics detailed beyond their imaginings and explained that these were of course not enough. It doth make me mad to think that I have never had a chance of expounding things to any Ministers like this – or even to Secretaries. But considering that one lot had nearly three hours of it and the little Professor longer (though part of the time was given up to his exposition of his own ideas) I could scarcely expect Ministers to be so obliging. Actually I astonished myself by the detailed way in which I had worked up the subject. Usually the effect of my telling anyone about my schemes is to make me pleased and happy for a while: they seem so plausible that I forget how they have flopped. But on this occasion the recital has merely made me feel how futile it is to attempt anything: and I am dismayed to remember that I have practically undertaken to write propaganda about them.

Hartley has taken up golf. The Holmans say that he will be good. Holman is good and Mrs Holman goodish. I know that I ought to make the effort and start again: but it would with a vengeance be an effort, and I have not the stamina for it. Holman has borrowed the Bobby Jones Golf Book and is delighted with it: his wife says that he is playing at least 12 strokes worse, per round, on the strength of it.

A telephone message from the Calcutta telegraph office reached me at 10.30 yesterday morning to say that on Saturday a telegram has been received from Mingladhan (?) from Seagrim saying that he’d arrive on Thursday next instead of Sunday. I feel rather annoyed with him for waiting so long to telegraph because it is possible that on the strength of my letter to Catto the miserable Marklew gave up his Sunday morning to meeting the ship. I wrote to Catto, without comment.

Did I tell you that Rita had written about Ronald’s coming out to Calcutta. She has written also to Harry but I feel that I ought to do something: no ideas beyond the Latimers – and perhaps Mrs Rankin, though I dont know that the lad from what I saw of him would appreciate civilised conversation. And Kitty Jenkins.

A letter from you today. Good of you. Why do I store mine up till Thursday? perhaps because of the circular letter atmosphere about it – it would seem silly to send the complete letter to the children when you would already have had it, in bits, and passed it on to them, maybe.

There are boatmen hawling on the river. A pitch black night, but a breeze.

You tell of meeting Professor Crewe. You know, it is a nice thing about you that you have such confidence in people’s liking to see you. With good cause, of course. As for me, I should never dream of assuming that he would either remember me or want to see me: really – beyond a five minutes exchange of questions such as greeted me on the Darjeeling quarterdeck. I suppose Cape and ???Lowe are the two exceptions – and (strange to say) in a sort of way, John Vere Hodge. Yet I should never look this last up. – but they do like to see you: and the way in which they ask after you shows that their greetings are real. Why do I not make an effort to do something for the station? But beyond promising to go to next Sunday’s Christening, I haven’t run to anything.

I read through nearly the whole of Pepys’ in that abridged edition: how vivid he is and how eagerly I follow the fears and hopes about the threatened enquiry into the scandals of the administration of the navy and the 3 hour speech he made in defence of it to the House of Commons with all the compliments afterwards. It reminds me of the way in which people crowded round and congratulated me after my speeches about the Calcutta corporation: when it seemed for a while as if I might come to something. Perhaps with a little less bad temper and self will better things might have been.

Yes, I was the centre of the Darjeeling conference – the main conference. My schemes were not involved. It was the question of Government letter down officers to please politicians: at least that is what it became after I’d been speaking for 5 minutes, though before it had been what danger was there that people would refuse to pay their rents. I don’t wonder that the Ministers are not particularly keen to have me round when they are fiddling about with meetings to discuss this and that: because really I was damnably offensive in a way that they could not take hold of. Everyone says that they’ll be over thrown in August but I doubt it. 10 o’clock: I shall go to bed.

Tuesday July 5th

I had the light out by 10.30 and slept well but for waking up three or four times: and this morning I awoke, for the second day running, with the consciousness that I was rested. The verandah outside the bedroom was clear of mistris’ munching for the first time for some three weeks: and I had my morning tea out there instead of in the bedroom where the mosquitos always bit my ankles. It is a sweaty business doing exercises these days. I have not fixed things so that I can do them under the fan: preferring to keep back in a corner where there is less publicity. Rested or not, I dont seem able to get a real move on with my work. It would be a boon to be up to date. Symons is worrying about the Forest Committee. I also: the other way: becoming angry rather. They have passed no orders about preparation of materials for it. If they hurry it on, I think that I shall not protest but cause the Committee to write a report which will be all that the Ministers dont like: - but, alas, I can’t do that owing to conscience and such. This evening of a sudden I decided to do what for so many weeks I have talked of doing: and went to the Chinsura farm. The information given by S.N Roy II to MacPherson is false: there are no bhagchasis there: if there had been it would have dished all my figures and I should have felt a fool. Also the superintendent says that in spite of the rains starting early they are deficient: only 5 ½ inches last month: and it has not been possible to prepare the ground for the paddy. It has been too dry and hard. There is no propaganda for irrigation like a bad year’s rainfall: but I hope that the people do not lose their crop. It is too early to be alarmed.

A letter today from Kitty Jenkins, giving her address and saying that they hoped I’d stay with them. Kind.

The yellow flowers by the river – are they cosmos? or tilhaisa? – whatever they are, are curling up as if from blight. The roses have been eaten a good deal. And the leaves of some of the zinnia have curled up suspiciously. In no case could I find any insect or blight apparent. The little yellow things in the bed near the bottle khana have come out in masses of bloom: perhaps my deads-cutting has done some good. The tall yellow things in the hibiscus bed and in the bed by the servants’ garden and the drain have blossomed valiantly: having been de-deaded many times: the flowers are very small now and the things are really finished. The white woolly ball things have done well. And the gallandia which however are near their end. The coloured-leaved things in two beds have grown rather straggly – and many are withered. That Sandwich Island creeper is a nuisance: it climbs over the flowers in the bed near it. It seems to me that none of that bed (along the river) is doing as well as it should.

July 6th Wednesday

Another letter from you today from Doris’: enclosing Annette’s from Germany. I cant help feeling that if indeed the world is falling to pieces Annette is as well suited as most to making the best of it. I got behindhand today: having selected it as a suitable occasion (which it was not) to finish (which I did not) a long note about crop culling experiments – a rehash of what I was doing when the Science Congress was on. But what put me behindhand was an appeal (1 ¾ hours of pleaders): and an interesting discourse by the officer whom the D.L.R. put on to doing the soil classification and such in the new scheme area. He says that at first people were very hostile saying that they didn’t want taxes but that after the idea had been explained on the ground they all said “Why! thats quite fair” and gave all the information that was asked of them. Also he said that in about 50% of the villages they managed to collect the information that I suggested to the D.L.R some six weeks ago: if this is true, it is first class.

A squirrel visited me on the drawing room verandah at tea time. It was taking a short cut to the other side of the house. I threw it a piece of egg sandwich and it fled: but I suppose that it took the egg sandwich when I wasn’t looking for when I glanced up it had disappeared, and the squirrel was then gazing at me with intense interest through the bars. I threw another piece and thought when it had fled and returned again, this time to the foot of the pillar, some four foot nearer, that it had taken that too – but it hadn’t. It moved between the two pillars and gazed again: and finally made a wild dash along the ledge outside the verahdah as if in terror.

Whenever your letter arrives, I feel that this time I shall comment on it, but nothing ever comes of the impulse.

I’m sorry about the Everest disappointment though it was obvious that it must be so these several weeks past. I hope the Germans do better. Did I say that I’d been reading Banes? You know even from that their rashness is apparent – why do they leave camps without bedding in them behind the front climbers?

Much love
Your
Toto

Provident Fund account shows we have £2441-8-0. Year’s deposits £94-7-0 and the year’s interest £92-3-6.

From LJT to Annette

In the “Flying Scotsman”
En route for Edinburgh
July 5th 1938

My darling Annette

Writing in the train is not very easy, but several hours of quiet seem to offer such an opportunity to write a few of the letters for which it is so difficult to find time when one is paying a lot of short visits.

My time in London has been pleasantly filled with seeing people I wanted to see and doing things I wanted to do. Auntie Doris was given stalls for “Nine Sharp” – the revue at “The Little” which made us laugh till the tears poured down our cheeks – We went to the 5.30 house of “Mad About Music” on Sunday – and on Sat to “Robert’s Wife” – which I do think is an awfully good play Auntie Doris is just the same and as lovable as ever – Poor June who was to have sat for (I suppose) her entrance exam as a medical student this week, has had a breakdown due to nerves and aenemia and cant take the exam, but is down in the country with her great-aunt. Is’nt it awfully disappointing both for her and for her mother? Doris is afraid that June will never have the mental or physical stamina to be a doctor – It seems to me a tragedy, for that great ambition of hers was the thing I thought would keep her steady and straight.

Barbara Griffen has taken your address for she has great friends near Heidelberg – a sister and several brothers, whom she wants to put in touch with you – The trouble is that they have a dash of Jew blood in them – Barbara and her sister stayed with them last year, and said that except the fact that there were certain places they were not allowed to go in to they did not notice much inconvenience.

Richard and Christopher (somebody) have gone off for two or three days in the latters boat. They have rigged up a tarpaulin cover and equipped themselves with Li-Los – and Peg says the whole concern is a most Heath Robinson sort of affair –

Richard writes that he spent an amusing evening with Mr. Legros on Wed. He is definitely a person who says what comes in to his head with more freedom than most, and bears distinct traces of his French Blood, if not actually in his accent, certainly in his phraseology. They seem to have got on very well to-gether and R. has arranged to go sailing with him for a fortnight.

I spent a good part of Friday with Magda Elliot and her eldest daughter, Marion, who is, I think, some six months younger than you are. She is working at some Domestic Economy College and both in looks and manners is a perfect babe. Magda herself, has somehow retained a strange sort of innocence. She was asking about plays or films that would be suitable for a young girl, which made me laugh and I told her that I should be much more likely to ask your advice on such a matter than to censor what you were going to see –

I cant help feeling that drawing a veil over the many things in the world that are unpleasant and undesirable is an impossible attitude in the way that we live our lives now. If young women are going to travel about and live on their own, they must know what is going on around them so that forewarned, they may avoid dangers or at least meet them with their eyes open – I expect Peg’s free and easy conversation which I am sure often shocks Aunt, has been a valuable education for you – Have you, by the way, ever made yourself acquainted with the elements of human physiology, especially with regard to the mechanism for the propogation of the species? If you hav’nt, I should do so - Its well set forth in one of the chapters of Wells and Huxley “Science of Life” which you will find on Joey’s bookshelves. Its all very cleverly designed and it seems beyond the grasp of ones mind to realize how it can have evolved from a single cell, bringing with it all that vast and powerful range of feelings and emotions which are broadly related to sex and reach up in one way or another to the highest aesthetic and religious conceptions

I have wandered a long way from my “news from London” – but its just as well to write or say these things when they come into your head.

We are just passing Durham, with its magnificent Cathedral standing superbly on top of its hill –

My plans changed slightly, oweing to the fact that Magda wanted to stay a few more days in London, so I am not staying at Newcastle but going straight through to Edinburgh –

The Himalayan dinner went off reasonably well – Barbara and I thought we could have arranged the tables better, and I think a short film or some lantern slides would have helped after dinner. However it was good fun and I especially enjoyed seeing G B Gourlay again. He lunched with me on Saturday – Hope this wont be too difficult to read – and I also hope that you are enjoying yourself.

Best love
Mum

From HPV to Family

Chinsurah.
Bengal.
Friday. July 8th.

My dear

Today is notable for the departure of the workmen from the upstairs “office”: there remains no more to be done there now than the painting of the doorframe between that room and this – the drawing room. I always type the circular letter here, seated in the wicker-seated armchair under the fan in the middle of the carpet, with the typewriter poised on the small oval table off which it tries continuously to slip. There is a strong though fitful breeze blowing and it makes a softly roaring noise in the fan. Over all is the body-odour smell though faint which comes (I hope) from the paper-works. It occurs to me that we all go about self-consciously not telling each other; but our never meeting proves this to be untrue. I suppose that I ought to make an effort and go over to the club; but it is so gloomy and so hot that when I do go I say a little prayer of thankfulness to find the place empty and clear out at once.

Yesterday also was notable. I went to the Jagannath car procession at Serampore, second in fame only to that at Puri itself. Duty took me, not a spirit of enquiry. It was in its way pleasant. All the fun of the fair was the general feeling of it; a much gayer crowd than any other that I have seen in Bengal, because there were so many upcountry jutemill workers with their women in bright colours. The car is four stories high; with little towers at the corners and verandahs in between on each side and on each story. It is pyramidal. On top is a dome surmounted by a flag. Painted mostly red and yellow in what ought to be cheerful colours; but they look P.W.D.-ish. Strange, the whole thing is made of iron; by an English firm. The reason for this is that the owners of a rival car set fire to the predecessor of this car in order to do the owners of it out of the offerings made at the time of the procession; the iron was a precaution against a repetition of this, and by a fortunate coincidence the rival car was destroyed by fire soon after this one was ready and was not re-built because funds were lacking. It has I think twelve wheels but half of them are inside; four on each axle. When we arrived at 3:15 (the show was to start at 3:30) the car which is eighteen or twenty feet square was blocking the Grand Trunk road, though there was just room for a car to creep past on the side; it had been standing there for eight days, they said. After a long delay disreputable looking cooli-like men came carrying a shapeless heavy bundle wrapped in an old table cloth as it seemed and tying ropes round in a clumsy manner hauled it and pushed it to the top of the car. Then follow a bigger and more shapeless bundle which it was more difficult to get up but they managed it in the way ants do; the bundles looked like armchairs swathed by an amateur house-mover, but they were Jagannath and his wife. An undignified performance for a god on his festival day. But it was all right when they had been unpacked and placed under the little dome to see everything and to be seen. Two of the shebaits (which in a sort of a way means priests but not quite; their most important attribute is to collect any cash that is going in connection with the worship of the god) took their seats facing the remaining two corners and after a confab with the police the show started. All the time there was a shower of pice at and into the car and walking up and down on each story were a crowd of small boys and youths picking up the pice and putting them into flowerpot-like vessels or old rags. All beaming and showing no annoyance when the coins hit them plunk. One old bird, another shebait, took four in quick succession on his stomach and didn’t even blink. He came along earlier and garlanded me and tied a bit of red rag round my topi; this rag takes the place of a bit of the rope which pulls the car. Coins often missed or bounced back, for people were throwing them from a distance; and it was noticeable that no one attempted to pinch one of them. Not that the crowd was particularly honest for several pickpockets were arrested; a record number in fact and all were much pleased. Any one pulls who likes. The ropes, there are two, are about six inches thick and are said to be half a mile long, but are not: they are also said to be a quarter of a mile long but didn’t look it. Hundreds pulled. There was a man with a whistle to give the signal; and when he blew everyone on the car except the two gods held on and beat on gongs and drums and blew conch-shells according to choice and all the crowd yelled and the brake was held off the ground with wisps of rope by six people crouched in front of the car on the bottom story, four feet off the ground. Attached to the front of the car on two long steel springs so that they leapt up and down most gallantly were two outsize rocking horses, one white and one Reckitts Blue. Above them (a lizard has just come across the floor to investigate me) a life size wooden coach man dressed in red and gold; he had a flat chaprassi’s hat such as you see in old Bengal pictures, and two of the shebaits had a quarrel as to the correct angle at which it should be worn, very serious. The car moved slow at first and then came away with a rush; and then for fear that it would overrun the pullers (and me too for I walked in the clear space in front magnificent in garlands and the bit of red rag) the whistle blew for a stop and no one payed the least attention and then two police fired off their muskets and the six men let go the brake which was a huge baulk of timber (it fell into the road and the wheels came up dunt against it and the whole car staggered and stopped) and at the same moment the two ropes were loosed so that the pullers nearly fell on their noses. As soon as the car stopped everyone threw pice again and some threw bunches of bananas; and it can be no joke being hit by a great bunch of bananas thrown from twenty feet away. With a pause for investigation into a disturbance (a shop fell down because too many of the crowd pushed against it) the performance was repeated; and it went on for nearly four hours. I stayed an hour and a half. One of the Deputy Magistrates came up and said that tea had been arranged and I went with Hartley onto the top of a dispensary which had been rigged up as a grand stand with a thatched roof as if for a wedding and they gave us a swagger tea provided by the Barnagore Hotel; needless to say when I was wondering if they had sent round the hat for the funds it turned out that the local excise shop man had provided the tea and a cotton mill near by had prepared the stand; but it is no use kicking against that sort of thing; the only thing to remember is to be firm against doing anything in return for illegal gratifications of this sort. It was a business getting back to the car which I had had parked in a side road; we fetched a circuit by some unsavoury lanes and came out beyond the crowd. The return journey was rather amusing, through the holiday crowd. By the way the Bratachari plus Scoutmaster with the toothy grin turned up in the middle of the crowd. He was quite shocked at the suggestion that he had brought his scouts and denied it; But, he added, I have brought my Bratacharis – and as they are precisely the same boys this pleased me much.

Sunday June 10th 1938

At intervals when the car stopped, the coolies tore pieces off the ends of the ropes that had touched it and tied them round their heads. On either side of the car and behind it men walked carrying ladders slung on ropes to serve as barriers against the crowd coming too near and falling under the wheels. On the way home I passed other cars of the same sort but only 15 or 20 feet high or less (one only some six feet, very humble) and these pleased me much more because there were bunches of small girls hanging on to them enjoying it a lot. The bearer whom I took with me to see the show and left there – he feels that honour was reflected on him by my jasmine garlands – I do not know why the paper suddenly crinkled up thus in the typewriter and got torn like that.
The bearer says that the small cars are not the real thing because they belong to the Arya Samaj, a reformed sect and therefore heretical to the good Hindu. When you go to see a rath festival you have to stay till you have seen three pulls and then you can go; I must have seen six or so but I was staying on the off-chance of a riot. Hartley and the policeman returned at about nine o’clock.

Yesterday my morning was cut up by visitors to my annoyance which I hope was not manifest. The Collector of Burdwan came in to lunch. A Bengali names Sarkar, unnecessarily small and slight, and with extremely regular and almost beautiful features. He took up my afternoon till 4.30 discussing difficulties. A sensitive sort of bird to whom many things will be difficult, I fear. He tells me that the Circuit house at Burdwan is extremely dark and hot, without lights and fans and invites me to stay with him when I go there next week; I have already refused an invitation from the Maharaja because I have 5 appeals relating to his zemindari to hear a few days afterwards and I do not want to stay with Sarkar; first because I shall be inspecting his office and secondly because to eat semi-Bengali semi-European food for a week will upset me. But I have to accept.

In the evening I went to dinner with the Fairlies, at the Mill beyond the golf course by the river. Hartley was there and two very pleasant young assistants, one of whom had a most charming smile. The Fairlies very friendly and hospitable. I hope they didn’t mind; when she suggested Monopoly after dinner I asked if she didn’t mind my crying off because I had to go home fairly early and they merely sat instead; to Hartley’s relief afterwards expressed. He is thin. To bed at 11.50 with a headache which was due to my working with some fury after Sarkar’s departure till it was time to go out.

A letter came in yesterday ordering me to Calcutta on Monday to attend an air-raid defence meeting; bunkum, to fix it in a hurry on a day when all the Commissioners as Government ought to know are writing their fortnightly confidential reports. It is annoying not to have notice too because I had appeals fixed for tomorrow and it will be rough luck on the parties if the news that they have to be postponed does not reach them in time to prevent their coming here for them from other districts. In consequence I spent the whole of this morning writing the confidential report. A man, a Babu, tried to tempt me with a picture that he had himself painted of a camel in Egypt very cheap but I did not fall for it; and what is more I did not become bad tempered with him.

Letters came in from my wife and Rosemary; thank them. Enclosed Alice’s saying that she remembered the incident of the centipede at Gib. And at once I had a picture of a group of urchins in a sort of alley behind the house in South (would it be South) Street in Halifax trying to persuade Charlie Macdonald (?) to ask grandmother to give enough money to buy us ice-cream. I was a hanger-on; a hopeful one. There was no success; but no one had really expected it. Ned??? Boys probably. This afternoon to resume, there was the christening; such a good and cheerful baby; nice looking too. It was a sweaty performance because there was no punkah near the font. A lot of Police from Calcutta there and some E.B. Railway people. Many of them went off and stood under the punkah in the body of the church a good way from the font and shut off by the pillars from the service but I should despise to do a thing like that. Afterwards a tea on the verandah and christening cake too rich to eat and a glass of fizz to drink the baby’s health, to my dismay on top of tea; and the party remained till 8.20. I have accepted an invitation to an afternoon reception at the Chandernagore Residency on Thursday, perhaps. I rang up Harry and arranged to have an early dinner with them tomorrow. They have both been laid up with flu but are better. The Calcutta visitors at the christening commented that I looked remarkably fit; and I believe that I do. Today I went out and looked at the humus heap. The mali has turned the older lot for the second time; it looks good stuff but perhaps naturally after the turn is hardly more than warm. This dry spell comparatively has bucked up the flowers; I see that Lanchester says leaf curl may be expected at this time rather giving the impression that it is due to damp; so it is no wonder that I found no blight.

Tuesday July 12th. 1938.

Yesterday I was in Calcutta and stayed for dinner with H.D. and Winsome. Hence no letter writing then. I have been cheated out of my letter-writing this evening, for Stein came in and I asked him to have potluck mostly because I knew that otherwise I should not get dinner till 8.45 at earliest. I went into Calcutta with the hood down and my little hat (not a topi) and it was extremely pleasant except when we had to wait at a level crossing, and there I realised that it was hot and headachey. Dropped in on Idris Matthews to ask if he could let me have the Lantana plants which I failed to get last time that I was in because I couldn’t remember the name, and found him very pleased because he has had a rash again which he says is allergic like asthma. He had been following a diet which he had read about in the Scientific American – mostly mutton and bread, and a complete abstinence from anything not in the diet for four days; what pleased him most was that it hadn’t worked. Then he went to Norrie who prescribed some drug or other like ephedrine which he and other doctors had previously said was dangerous, and also insisted on calcium. So Matthews says that I ought to be eating calcium. And probably I should. The meeting suddenly fixed so far as Harold Graham and I were concerned (two days’ notice whereas the others got three weeks) resolved itself into a discussion between the Brigadier and the two of us. It was over in an hour. Then Sir Nazimuddin wanted to know about the strikes and Twynam to know about this and that; and I harangued the Under-secretary about the futile way in which Secret papers are acknowledged (so as to give everyone the utmost trouble) and discoursed for a time to P.D.Martyn about the Police Regulations which are not very much more advanced than when I left them, and had a word with Walter Jenkins. Then to the Club, buying on the way envelopes and a new ribbon for this machine, and ordering Professor Mukherji’s book; there I caught the Education Secretary and talked some shop and after a little went back to the Secretariat and spent two hours with MacPherson, going in detail through my draft of the rules under the Development Act which Haldar had sat upon so long (and by the way I am to have Haldar as District Magistrate of Bankura soon!). It was good of MacPherson to take the trouble; though it saved him from a lot of mistakes into which through inexperience of rule-making he had been thrusting himself. Although he had written to say that many of them had been declared wrong by the lawyers, there were few that had to be changed and most of those were unimportant anyhow. Then I went shopping. Picked up my suit case after repairs (for it had burst at one corner on the Darjeeling trip) bought jam and cheese at the Army and Navy and had a hair cut. At the Jap’s. As soon as I put my nose into that place they run and wash the combs; so my outburst of 18 months ago was not without effect. Next tea; exhausted. And therefore I sat till seven, which meant sitting half an hour only because my tea was more than late, and then went to H.D.’s. Have I said that they are both fit again? after the flu. But Winsome has lost all she gained in the slimming line and looks flabby and has decided to take Charlotte up to Darjeeling at the beginning of next month. H.D. will be in Darjeeling for the Poojahs. But though he looked a bit fine-drawn, he was full of vim and stories about the Congress ministers at Patna where he had been to negotiate or rather to tick them off. Both of them and everyone else said how well I looked and so I do; but that didn’t prevent me from being twisted up with belly ache half the night – which is the immediate result of doing a little too much. The driver for Rs. 5 procured me a great piece of plate glass for my writing table; about half the price Idris paid – but the driver insisted that he must have it cheap because it was for his own use. I told him that the Chinsurah bill for repairs to the car was high and he has rowed with them till they reduced it by a third. Now I shall stop for the week. I have not tested the heat of the humus heaps for some days; what a falling off


From HPV to LJT

Chinsura
July 13th 1938

My dearest

The enclosure explains itself. I found another letter waiting for you when I reached home from Calcutta last night. About your visit to Edinburgh and Professor Crewe. Nice of him: and for you. Making new interests. When I read your letter, I thought that I should be inspired to write to you in fine style but now all is flat. It is a nuisance that I write at the end of the day, for, most nights, I am pretty well tired out. There is a judgment waiting to be written all this last week. Of course it is my own silly fault: if I hadn’t given up a day and a half to the disquisition on crop cutting I might have been nearly up to date. But if I never do anything but the dull routine part of the work, I shall go melancholy mad: and it would have been a pity to waste the admirable thoughts that I have evolved. It is a good scheme, but has the awkward feature that no real results are obtained unless the work is done for 15 or 20 years on end: and this would never be – in this province. Of course if I had not been called down to Calcutta, I might have had more chance of being up to date: and if they couldn’t bombard me with requests for immediate reports (which means “essays”) on subjects such as “Should 2 Commissioners out of 5 be abolished?” and “What will happen if Government do this or that bit of damned folly?” or – but enough.

I ate too much at Winsome’s: without thinking what I was doing I finished off rather a large helping of rather tough meat. And I have been much oppressed with wind since. After lunch today I lay down flat on my back for 35 minutes and may have dozed off: but I felt much disinclined to tackle files. Nazimuddin kept me talking nearly half an hour on Monday: he is obviously worried – as I should be if I had his colleagues: we talked mostly about strikes but he said that he hoped I was working for my schemes. MacPherson was far more reasonable than I’ve ever known him: but perhaps the fact that I showed him at once where his first comments had missed the point helped: making him realise that there might be more in the thing than he had thought. Curious how few of them visualise themselves as actually doing the job when they consider rules about how to do it.

The rains have set in again. The P.W.D. are repairing the river wall and have set up sheer legs in the garden bed above it. I have cut off all but six feet of the two yellow flowered trees in the front drive. The shrubs previously cut have bushed out nicely. Bunches of mosquito larvae in your little tank: the bearer swears that he oiled it yesterday when I told him to – and he went there with oil today. I didn’t check whether he actually applied it properly.

I shall not write any more
Bless you, my darling
Your Toto

From LJT to Annette

c/o Mrs Hamilton
Dunaivon
Rhu
Dumbartonshire
July 15th

My darling Annette

Your most interesting letter of July 10th was waiting for me when I arrived here yesterday. Your description of Frau Hirschel’s household is intriguing. Poor woman! I feel sorry for her having to cope with a young woman like Jean – I feel sorry for Jean too, if she is saddled with a temperament anything like your description of her makes me believe. Its the sort of temperament that is always leading its victim and people who become closely connected with her, into unhappiness – When I read what you say of her, I think of Judy Lewin. Like you, I like an amicable life. I hate quarrels and do not believe them to be profitable to anyone. If one feels strongly enough about a thing to disagree with others about it, one can generally do so with decency and respect if one takes the trouble – Quarreling shows a certain lack of balance and an inability to appreciate the other person’s point of view – Its a comfort to a parent, who, of course, must to a certain degree feel responsible for his or her offspring, at any rate till they are well into the twenties, to be able to feel, as I do of you, that you have sufficient force of character and balance, to rub shoulders with all sorts of people, without being influenced to your detriment. I do not feel that you will be bismerched by Jean’s conversation. We could all talk on those sort of lines if we wanted to, but luckily most of us don’t and I think most of us do preserve some feeling of the sanctity of the most intimate human relations and that they are the heart or core of life –

I’m glad you have read “The Science of Life” It must have taken a little digesting at thirteen and it was somewhat of a tour de force to get through it.

My visit to Edinburgh has been a very interesting one – and lived in two curiously contrasting worlds. Helen Johnston belongs to that very large body of comfortably off widows and spinsters who seem to form quite a large part of Edinburgh’s present population and most of whom live in what I should think, must be pleasant boredom – Helen herself has broken loose to this extent, that she is an ardent socialist, homeopath and devotee of peace at any price, but though her flat is full of the “Left Book Club” books and though she has read masses of literature, she does’nt seem to do anything with her knowledge and beliefs. Were I in her position, with money and no ties and a whole crowd of ideas, I’d be out working for some cause or other long before I’d read a tithe of what she has done.

Well, my contrasted world was the Crew household, where I spent a few days also. Mrs. Crew was away in France – The daughter-in-law was there, charmingly pretty, with a completely empty uncultivated mind – The atmosphere was created by Professor Crew – living strenuously in his world of scientific and intellectual adventure. Longing to have half a dozen lives with which to accomplish some part of what he wants to get done, - immensely stimulating and inspiring. He had t go to Aberdeen on Friday, for some meeting of the Agricultural Research Institute, and I went with him for the sake of the drive – We left Edinburgh at 9.30 am and did not get back till nearly 11 p.m, driving through wonderful scenery and talking almost all the time – We had another splendid drive on Sunday afternoon wandering all round the Pentlands and out to the coast, and having tea at one Inn and dinner at another and still talking!! We spent a long afternoon going over his Institute of Genetics which was enthrallingly interesting to me – and did I suddenly find myself with no ties or no jobs to do, I think I should like to go and work there. There’s a sense of newness and adventure about it which appeals to me enormously –

Yesterday I cam across here and am very happy to be with Helen Hamilton again. Its nice to think that it will not be so very long now before we meet in Wales –

My love to you
Mum

From HPV to family

Chinsura,
Bengal.
July 18th. 1938.

My dear Joan (name handwritten, rest of letter typed)

Yesterday was the taking of the Bastille anniversary, celebrated with illuminations, fireworks and entertainments by the French: among whom our friend the Barons – the Administrator of Chandernagore and his wife. A message reached me through Hartley who had seen Baron somewhere that it would be wise to defer arrival till half an hour or longer after the time fixed which was 6 p.m. about. So I arrived at a quarter to seven. The whole house was lit up and full of people mostly French Bengalis. The trees in the compound and along the riverbank were full of coloured lights and there was bunting everywhere. Crowds of onlookers thronged the road. There were some Calcutta people there already and Idris who was at the buffet talking to (I think) Madame Le Franc – but why can I never remember names or the faces belonging to the faces? Baron pressed a glass of fizz upon me; I drank to his health and to the Republic, and he left me to discourse. The rest of our Chinsura folk turned up rather later; also some from Barrackpore among whom there was young Wooler who went over the Lhanyak La with us; and I must have that name wrong. He was full of talk about that trip, having no other subject on which to converse with me and he got most of his facts wrong, although he appreciated the reasonableness of my remark that I did not think it fair to suggest to anyone a trip in the hills with me. His thoughts are turned to ski-ing at Christmas-time some year; not this. Later there appeared the Countess Podovitz (if that is the name and rank) with her usual expression of intense worry. Also Costello who mouched about; but I suppose that I mouched about too. They pressed upon me a cocktail made of Roses, which was a depressing sort of drink. And we went up onto the roof to see the fireworks which went off with unnecessarily loud bangs. Young Wooler remarked that I must be far fitter than I had been for I did not flinch or wink or twitch a muscle at the sudden noises: and the comment was true. But I should have done all these things if the fireworks had gone off while I was working; I became desperate this morning and afternoon with the noise of hammering, when the workmen were replacing a beam in the roof of the passage. As we came down through that bedroom with its more windows than wall effect and its pleasant furniture Matthews murmured “I ought to have some frogs to put in that bed?” referring to the treatment given by the French airwoman to the famous bed of Dupleix in that house, and added “what on earth can I put in it?” I grunted “A visiting card.” and went off down the stairs; and this futile jest was greeted with great approbation by some little Frenchmen behind. Soon after eight, by which time I had begun to tire, I made an attempt to depart with Idris whom I had asked to dinner; but we were restrained as if by force for Madame Baron declared that of course we were to eat there. Soon afterwards she said to go along into the buffet where everything would be spread out: but it wasn’t; there had been some sort of misunderstanding and the khitmatgars brought plates with viands on them two by two from somewhere in the background. So though there was plenty of stuff it was not easy to procure. Soup for example did not come our way. I didn’t make much of a meal because I funked it. You know I have been split with bellyache ever since the Calcutta trip and so have to be careful; and the provender provided was a salad mostly of green beans which would have destroyed me as I know from experience and a charcuterie, mince loaf sort of thing, very rich and with lumps of a liverish taste in it. After that miscellaneous sweet cakes. I had worked pretty hard (all this week I have plugged away at it, and always masses more work come or comes rolling in) and had stood about for a long time; and felt jaded. So I cannot say that I enjoyed the rest of the evening so much as the beginning. At ten I took my leave and then found that a tyre was punctured. A large nail through it. However I got back here at a quarter to eleven. Mogul wanted me to have dinner then and in a way I felt that I needed it; but I was too tired and feared going to bed on top of food; so I accepted some soup and then went to bed with a couple of aspirins. Decidedly I am not a good goer-out.

This morning I had no desire to get up and I spent quite a fair proportion of the time allotted for physical jerks in lying on the floor and gazing at the ceiling; there is no doubt that until one’s bones begin to ache the floor is the most restful place to lie on. A rush all day. Too many callers and too many files. Trouble also among the domestics. First, a complaint from the mail that the Rs 12 boy doesn’t come at six as he ought to but rolls up at his own time; secondly news that the mesalchi or scullion has fever and the doctor Babu says that he cannot work for some days; and thirdly news, brought by his son, that the cook is ill and the symptoms sound very like cholera, of which of course there is a lot about though less than there was. It appears that a doctor has been called in to see him. He lives somewhere in the town and so there is no reason to suppose that the compound will be infected; but Mogul has announced that he will see to all precautions being taken. It is 9.45 and I shall go to bed. I felt very benevolent towards the French and their Bastille and such and meditated on the reversals of fate that then doctrines of liberty spread like mad across Europe and now doctrines of slavery are so spreading with equal violence are being received with equal enthusiasm.

Saturday July 16th. 1938

I was asleep by 10.30, I should think, for I put out the light at 10.15; and this morning I was more rested than I have been lately. But I utilised this new energy in doing a lot of work, hoping to get up to date; doing fairly well till about four o’clock when fresh dollops came in. If there were not so many appeals to hear, I might manage it on Monday; but they will do me down. The noise of the workmen in the passage by the clerk’s room is fierce; I’d have a quieter time in a boiler shop. But the pile-driving on the river bank with its heave-ho chanting has been finished. I haven’t looked to see what they have done to the river wall; but the tides are running so high now that it as well that they have finished what was to be done. There are floods in north and central Bengal with destruction of crops and general gloom. Here the break in the rains (for nothing came of the showers on Wednesday and Thursday which we hailed as the beginning of more real rain) – here the break in the rains threatens disaster because the fields have been too hard to plough; another fortnight like this and there will be a real bad harvest which on top of this year’s low prices would be a disaster. Hartley came in this evening and took tea. He says that malaria is terribly bad: a year like this, with heavy rain to fill the pools and then dry weather to prevent them being washed out, just suits the mosquitoes. But the news of the cook is goodish; cholera symptoms stopped, though he is as weak as if he had been ill for a month, says the report. It is a strange thing that at Chandernagore the lamps across the river are not frogs-eyes distance apart; I pointed this out to Idris who said that they were really but that they had all doubled. This I mention because Hartley tells me that the others did not start coming away till twelve and then they went into the Hotel de Paris and danced. I was well out of it. The second half of the humus heap which I visited this evening has no heat in it at all. I wonder what went wrong at the turning of it; the process ought to have made it heat up again finely. Idris sent far less of the Lantana than he promised or than was desired; I wish that he had left me to see to it but one cannot refuse his offers of kindnesses. I shall not try to get more of it, all the same.

Sunday July 17th 1938.

Today is the Frogs’ day with a vengeance. The rain has pelted down, not continuously but in long showers. The water pours in streams into the passage outside the bedroom - through the roof; it is leaking down the wall of the drawing room below the place where they have done repairs to it, where the bitumen came through before, and the dressing room of which they have started repairing the roof ight as well not have a roof at all for all the difference it makes to the rain coming in, almost - for there would have been two inches of water on the floor if it had been quite true. Those two foot deep gutters round the guestroom end of the house are badly designed; other drains enter them at right angles and when they are running full as they did today hold up the water in them. Where by the office-window they turn at right angles, the water simply overflowed all over the cement paving of the terrace and all over the lawn. The gravel path acts as a drain in spite of that deep trench alongside it and the gravel is like soft mud. There was a portrait unveiling today; at the Chinsurah Club, a football club. When I went out to it at 5:25 the weather was fair; it certainly didn’t look or feel like rain; but before I reached the house where the show was to be, it was drenching; water an inch deep in the lanes through which I had to go and pouring in spouts right across them from roof-gutters. They had obviously gone to great pains to get the place nicely done up; with the shamiana (a flat-topped marquee sort of tent) coloured hangings, ferns, a carpet and rows of chairs. There were ten inches of water lying in the bulging top of the shamiana and three on the ground inside; and the whole show had been shifted and huddled into a six-foot verandah. The strange thing about the unveiling is that no one knew anything about the Raja man who was thus honoured; he has an independent state somewhere in the Panjab and for no known reason suddenly sent a donation to the club; there is a suspicious silence about the amount and I can’t help wondering whether he did not merely send the cost of the entertainment and his photo with a request that it might be unveiled. These facts I did not know till I got there and they gave me material for a speech which would have been over-zealous if we had just received one of the Rockfeller donations; but in that rain when everything possible had gone wrong I had to show some warmth. It rained all through the little entertainment and after; I gave up hope of its stopping and came home through it, chiefly because I was sopped to the knees and did not want to risk fever. The mesalchi by the way is still bad with fever; it comes on every second day with violence; there is obviously a general feeling that I might send medicine more efficacious that that from the dispensary, but when the doctor there is treating him, I cannot very well butt in. The cook is better and wants to come back in two days’ time: I have refused consent till he is really well again.

Going to bed early is a wise act though I wonder whether this weariness is not liver. I woke much rested, and if only I had not woken up so often during the night might have been completely so. Firmly I did no work today, no real work. I read the newspaper after breakfast, went round the compound and found a boiling mass of mosquito-larvae behing the north-east corner of the servants quarters, where I also found a stench of the first order, and worked off some letters – sending out cheques and such; I have not even tried to do last month’s accounts yet. After that I did do an agreeable snootle; went through the figures re outturn of paddy from the Chinsura farm, struck averages for each type of land and made a very pleasing graph in three colours. It was interesting to discover that with five more years’ figures than originally the differences in the yield of different types of land had almost evened themselves out (thus to some extent confuting my conclusions) though this is probably due in a great degree to irrigation on the two supposedly inferior types. Also with more years’ results the average for the yield of the supposedly best land has come down, which more than offsets the effects of the said partial confutation. This rain is very satisfactory although it is most depressing weather; for it makes it look as if the failure of harvest will be avoided.

Monday July 18th

There is however no rain today. I went back to my figures about paddy and found that the Babu who sent them to me had made two mistakes, one of the grossest an error of copying apparently (so gross that I ought to have spotted it at sight) and the other less but yet a mistake – and this goes back to the figures sent me at Christmas time and printed at the end of my pamphlet. One can never be safe with figures collected in this country. Three appeals this morning which lasted from 11.15 till 1.45. But they will be simple to write judgments on. I ought to have done them this afternoon but was fagged and did things that were easy such as the figures about paddy.

The workmen have taken off the doors between the bedroom and this little office room which looks quite well by the way – they have matched the colour of the drawing room walls quite successfully – and there is now a clear view through from the bathroom to the other side of the river. The effect is to make the whole house seem lighter and cooler, though I cannot say that I really like the publicity of it. I haven’t been to see what they are doing downstairs but to judge by the noise it is something grand. Yesterday afternoon when I was feeling weary and abject and could not lie down in the bedroom because the workmen were dealing with both doors and it was clearly best to let them finish, I demanded of myself what practical solution my sensible wife would have enjoined upon me and gave her best on it; to wit, I lay down in the spare room. It was as a change not unpleasant to lie on a soft mattress. Whether I dozed or not I don’t know; anyhow if I did I did not dream. But after lying like that for an hour I felt nerved to face the portrait and the speeches. Mine was a tour de force; when I arrived drenched I found the Government Pleader and demanded of him an account of the hero of the day because “I hadn’t been given a brief”; he had no idea but we collected the information that no one knew anything about him save that he had sent a donation; and out of this I extracted some moral thoughts of the most edifying about the generosity of kings, anonymous generosity and in particular the spontaneous tribute of distant Panjab to the new athleticism of Bengal, proving (1) the unity of new India and (2) the equality of the Bengalis with the virile provinces. The Government Pleader said that having heard several of my speeches at such shows he was amazed at my ingenuity in improvising variants upon old themes; and in fact I felt like Pycroft – Lord knows I’m not proud Hinch but when it comes to digging out in the fancy line . . . . what next? something about sometimes thinking that he could single-handed give de Rougemont points in a race round the fleet? but how did (if it did) the word “copperbottomed” come in?

This afternoon I dedeaded flowers; they have suffered from the rain; but it is amazing how the yellow things struggle on. Where the water poured down off the lawn onto the sunk bed, the ground has been torn up and there are two great holes just inside the river-wall in this bed where the water has cut its way down and through the wall into the river. The ants are busy as I found to my cost; they have bitten me in all sorts of places, including under the arm and on the tip of the elbow, both of which places feel as if they had large lumps on them but have not. A very high tide. The water within four feet of the bougainvilla bower. Somewhat sadly I went to see the humus and was agreeably surprised to find that there was no water now in the pit. The second of the heaps in it after being turned for the first time has not heated up again. Too wet maybe. And both have sat down unduly so that I doubt whether any aeration is going on. The squirrels are very busy today, defying everything; their angry chattering seems to have gone on without pause. Nothing ever seen more disconsolate than the young calf yesterday when it found itself standing tied in four inches of water where a few moments before there had been grass. The strange thing about the rain was that the frogs made no noise in honour of it. I had expected to be deafened.

Wednesday July 20th 1938

This day I have had visitors. Two or three days ago when the telephone was worse than usual and when I was particularly rushed, I was much worried by someone trying to get through to me on it from Calcutta. There was a noise like a train in a tunnel when the connection was put through to Calcutta, or perhaps when it was put through to Barrackpore, the second exchange through which messages to Calcutta have to pass; but at last I found out that the Edgley family were taking turns to howl messages through to me. They failed; but in the afternoon after a mistri had fiddled with the phone for several hours, Joan Edgely succeeded in getting me to understand that they wanted to come out to tea on Friday. I explained that I should be away but, unable to leave well alone, asked if they could not come on Wednesday instead. And they accepted, announcing that they’d be seven in all and (as I understood) that they would bring cakes from Calcutta. I wonder what the real message was for it clearly was not that; at least they didn’t bring any cake. Luckily I had told Mogul to have a cake made and there were also scones and sandwiches; and had they brought their own cakes, they would have been superfluous. Their idea was to show their friends (?Macdonell), the father mother and brother of the red-haired girl (the mother rather like Mrs Fawcus in her inconsequent manner of talking) to see Bandal church; but they arrived here three quarters of an hour later than they had said, having started that amount late from Calcutta, they remarked at 5.30 that of course they had to be in Calcutta by 6.30. So they compromised by going off at once to see the Hooghly Church and left, after being here barely an hour, to race back to Calcutta. Edgley didn’t come. Mrs. E who was delighted to have had messages about the meeting with her son – and I am ashamed to say that I had forgotten (if ever I had realised) that there was any such messages – and says that the Baron, her husband, has a recurrence of that skin trouble and cannot wear a coat; I asked if he could manage a shirt and she replied that he would be better if he didn’t; so I told her to dress him in a dhoti. He is going home on the 11th., as he can do being in the High Court. The servants ran the little tea very well. Curious; neither the father nor the son made the least attempt to pass cakes or sandwiches or tea-cups. All the family except the red-haired girl abjured milk and took an inch of tea in a cup filled up with water.

It would happen. The wash-out in the flower-bed was precisely where we had put in the Bougainvilla cutting; the mali rescued it and we are now trying a place a little further along. He had the old crepe-flower bush out this morning. Rough luck on the ants which had a well established nest among the roots. Which reminds me that one of the difficulties of detecting deads in the dusk is that butterflies will settle on them and make me thing them bright flowers. A caterpillar on the lily things near the river wall (spider lilies?) was so handsome and so gay that I spared him from the destruction which should have been meted out to him. There are quite a lot of gladioli out; indeed one way and another there are a good many flowers out – I haven’t mentioned the zinnias which are flowering well now though many are twisted up and decayed – but the strange thing is that prolific yellow things are doing well under certain bushes though elsewhere almost finished and the gaillardia seem in some places to be barely starting though elsewhere over. The place along the drain where the tithonia was to have been is solid brick; I have told the mali to prepare the ground on the other side of the fence instead.

This morning I was within measurable distance of being almost up to date. But an appeal went on for over two hours and there will be an enormous judgment to write. And three more appeals came in plus two appeals from dismissed clerks which do not have to heard but which give more trouble perhaps than the formal things; and above all tomorrow I go to Burdwan where all my work will be cut up by visitors, about fifty of them to judge by other places. I have to make an effort to do a good deal of touring, first because I ought to have visited all the districts before this, secondly because I don’t like doing it and thirdly because so much of my time in the cold weather will be taken up with the tours and meetings of the forest committee.

Typing this extra page to the circular means that the individual family members for the sixth or seventh week running get no separate letters

Bless you all!

Much love
Toto

Notice from Readers Digest Association Pleasantville N.Y. U.S.A. that subscription expires in Sept and to send 12/-. To save postage, will you see to this? Reference No T.703618

(Handwritten addition at end of copy to Annette) I haven’t had any letters from you since you went to Germany: so I suppose they go by sea. That is why I have not sent you the Readers Digest. The air mail fee would be more than the paper cost. I am glad you decided against that crosseyed man. Well, if your pal can only keep ?one gutter??? Running she is purer than some
Much love Dad


From HPV to LJT

Chinsura
July 18th. 1938 Monday.

My dearest,

Your letter of July 7/11th reached me this morning. The one which told of your visit to Aberdeen and to the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, with the identifying of the primulas; I am glad that this was a success for it would have damped my spirits if you had reported your finds to have been dismissed as commonplace. The whole letter was good reading, vivid; I believe that anything dashed off without selfconsciousness, not being mere babble, makes good reading; which is why one can drift along through diaries with interest although there is really nothing to them.

Just as I was sending off the letters to the mail on Thursday, there came in a letter from Peter Lombart, which told how on June 4th at the post office, when sitting on a chair and leaning over to put her purse on the table, she had a heavy fall owing to the chair “coming down”; apparently she couldn’t be got home and has had to stay, in bed, with her niece at the postoffice (in her room and bed) ever since, unable to put her left foot to the ground. She had only the week before settled the doctor’s bill for his last lot of visits. He has had to come every day; said no bones broken or displaced and that she would be up and about in a week or so; but now he says that “rheumatism has set in”. She is most depressed. And so I wrote to the Eastern Trust Co to send her fifty dollars and to the Imperial Bank to send them that amount. She went on to discuss the centipede which she remembered well. Her part in the event was to keep us all safe together when we had had such a scare, and father and the Scripture Reader, Mr Lambert who disliked me so much because I was such a little liar (?like John somewhat) and because I disliked him – and who afterwards misappropriated the money or part of it fetched by the sale of the furniture when we left Gibraltar – these two captured the centipede and put it in a bottle. She says that we had been playing under the verandah and not on it. And Mr Lambert walked into the kitchen and took her special cup that was sent from Dublin two years before and which she used at every meal and before she knew anything they had scooped up the centipede in it and put it alive in a bottle of brandy. “I was so mad” she says “I took my cup and dashed it in pieces against the rocks.” She says that I was then 3 ½ or 4 years old. I should not have repeated all this in my letter to you, for childish memories are of interest only to those who share them; it should have gone to Parp. But I wrote to Parp some weeks ago and do not feel moved to start again. My mind has of a sudden closed and there is nothing of interest to write at the moment.

July 19th Tuesday

Not that my mind is in a better state than it was. A pleasant surprise this morning. Another letter from you. I have not been sending Annette the Literary Digest, at least I have sent her one only since you left, because it didn’t seem worth while sending it by air at a cost probably equal to what you could buy it for in England, and I reckoned that its three weeks’ voyage to England would end about the time that she would be leaving Germany. So I addressed the last one to you and shall send to you also the one just received back from Lossing. Whom by the way I have scarcely seen for a month. Except that Hartley who is now touring in Arambagh and Stein come in now and then to talk shop I never see anyone in fact. By the time that I have bathed after footling around in the garden it is nearer half past seven than seven and then there is the feeling that it will probably rain and that even if it does not I shall get my trousers muddy going over to the Club and also the probability that no one will be there and the certainty that it will be hot and by no means cheerful – and so I do not go. I do not care to ask whether I should go if it were possible to get to the club door by car; probably not; it is curious how I have renounced going in the car since I renounced driving it. I should not now dream of going for a run round for pleasure. You enquire whether I am cheerful. The answer is probably No. At times I am not positively gloomy. But if I stop to think the complete futility of all that I try to do hits me a kick. You are wrong in supposing that the Darjeeling discussion will have done the least good. Those Ministers are not to be moved by any argument. There was at the moment a certain satisfaction in having coughed up things which others would have liked to say but could not: and the governor probably felt a certain satisfaction in my having rubbed in unpleasant truths which he could not – but the Ministers simply cannot now change their policy; their party would not stick it. I suppose all that I have done is to make it rather less likely that they will taken up any of my schemes; but there is nothing in it really because they were in no case likely to do so. I have been raining since I had tea; at least it started after I had been perhaps ten minutes in the garden; I didn’t go out till six; so I have been pottering about in the house which stinks of burning paint rather badly because they have been burning it off the door frame of the bedroom door. And perhaps having had nothing to take my mind off work has left me jaded. The prospect of going to Burdwan in a very damping one, I must admit - - - this staying in districts where are none but Bengalis makes the touring a glum business; there is no relaxation about it. Except the doctors here and in Midnapore, the policemen here, in Howrah, in Bankura and in Midnapore and Hartley here there are no European officers at the headquarters of any district of this division. However as is well known the European character of the administration is being preserved, because there was a pledge to the house of Commons that this would be so. At Asansol there is a European S.D.O. whose wife had a baby the other day (it lived only a couple of hours) and a European police Assistant. All the other subdivisions are completely Indian.

A letter arrived today for you from Mrs Powell Williams asking if you would befriend the daughter of a friend of hers, now in Calcutta. “She has only been married about three years. She was a very plain girl when I knew her but may have improved since. She seemed quite nice.” Somehow I feel daunted; I cannot picture Winsome taking to a description of that sort and anyhow Winsome will be off to Darjeeling very soon. In fact in spite of having copied a bit of the letter I shall sent it on to you and do nothing about it. I opened the Ross Institute Report. There are some interesting bits in it; but it says that the complete air-conditioned unit for sleeping in will cost from 150 to 200 pounds, which makes the whole thing sound nonsense for only the most bara of bara sahibs would be able to run to it. Not that it matters to me. Yet I do feel aggrieved about it.

If I thus continue never to write you personal letters I shall quite a stranger by the time we meet. However, I love you, my darling
Your
Herbert Patrick Victor.

From LJT to Annette

Glebe House,
Kettleshulme,
Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire.
Whaley Bridge 129

July 23rd. 1938

My darling Annette

I really intended to have a letter waiting to greet you at Highways to-day – but taking advantage of a fine day yesterday, we seized the opportunity to go for a long days tramp over the high moores and did not get home till after the post had gone from the village – I thought of you at intervals through the day and imagined you in Cologn Cathedral while I was perched on a Derbyshire hill-top.

There are two or three things I would like you to remember for me and bring to Wales if possible –

1) A walking stick. There is a cherry-wood one of mine in the umbrella stand
2) The little “Wild Flower Book for the pocket” which is, I think, in the playroom bookshelf
3) If you have the time and there is space in any of the luggage, would you open my green cabin trunk, (which I think I left under Rosemary’s bed.) and two of the corners of the tray you will find boxes of powder – one ordinary “Rachel” tint and the other sunburn. It might be as well to bring both, as we shall probably get very sunburnt.

We shall meet so soon – I wont attempt to give you any news.

My love to Aunt and thanks for her letter – also love to the Macgills if they are still at Highways

Best love
Mum

From HPV to family

Chinsura,
Bengal.
Tuesday July 26th. 1938.

(handwritten at top of letter) As the letter is well under the ounce I can send this spare for nix and do so

My dear

This week as I presume all the family will be gathered together in Wales by the time that this arrives I shall not write the carbon copies for the three younglings and shall thus save that great strain to the nervous system that follows the effort to control all the sheets of flimsy paper under the electric fan.

I am back from Burdwan. It seems weeks since I left here – last Thursday really. The reason is that from the time that I arrived till the time that I left I had not a moment to myself so to speak; there was half an hour on Monday evening after I got back from a tea party given by the District Board but I was too tired then to do anything, even read. On two days out of the five I did not even look at the paper and on another I merely glanced at the headings. This was partly due to my staying with Sarkar and having to devote time to politeness, e.g. after dinner each evening, but we did not get up from dinner till nearly ten. In spite of my forebodings that the food would be semi-inedible as it used to be in the Roys’ house, neither English nor Bengali, it was excellent English cooking; but I imagine that he had given orders for special meals, for there were a great many courses. What made the meals long was that there were endless waits between courses; probably due to anxiety in the Bottle Khana or pantry. He had laid in huge stores. Cakes at tea enough for ten with toast and two kinds of sandwiches enough for six more. Five or six different types of toffee and chocolates for dessert, apparently at least half a pound of each. Two kinds of Mangos, apples, grapes, bananas and pineapples for dessert at breakfast and at lunch. Further though he is a teetotaller and though ten days ago he had no drinks in the house, for he had apologised to Stein who went round to call on him while staying in Burdwan for not being able to give him any but soft drinks, he had laid in two dozen beer, whiskey, vermouth of three kinds (two varieties of French), sherry, port, gin, bitters of two kinds, and three liqueurs. Such a pity. I wonder if I disappointed him by not taking any of these – except on the last night when he had a dinner party and I took a sherry. I told him that he ought not to provide so lavishly and he said that he had not, but that he had given orders to his servants to get anything necessary; probably he had sent someone to Calcutta, because he had four kinds of vegetables passed at each appropriate meal – the same four. A lonely little man; youngish and keen to have exercise and society; but the other officials are all on the old side and two have purdah families, so none will play tennis or even go to the Club which is quite a cheerful place now with its electric lights and fans or would be if it were not so deserted. He says that it is difficult for an Indian I.C.S. officer, because if he mixes with any but officials then there are allegations of favouritism and undue influence. So in the evening he moons about.

Before I left on Thursday I made a tremendous effort to clear up files and so far succeeded that I had only six and the judgment to do when I left. Fondly, I took these with me hoping to be able to work them off; I have brought them back untouched. I left at three fifteen and took an hour and three quarters. The Grand Trunk road at the start is very narrow and there are bullock carts by the dozen to slow one up. Afterwards it is wider but has a lot of sharp kinks with dogs cattle or babies just round each of them and to go really fast is impossible. By the time I arrived I was a bit tired after my file-chasing and the trip; but tea finished Sarkar proposed that we should go out in the car, saying that it was his only real relaxation, so I went. We went along the Grand Trunk Road and round the Dilkusha Gardens; I had forgotten what a splendid vista there is down the long tank which leads off from the moat, as the Maharaja calls it. Thence we went to the club, which I found interesting, recalling memories. And thence to the race course which Sarkar had never discovered and which is in practically the same state as when I used to ride round it in 1912, over-grown with jungle but with the actual course traversable. There have been changes in the town; the police have moved a mile and a half out and the west side of the Grand Trunk road near the Railway station which used to be open is now partly covered with squalid buildings. The whole town always dirty is now abominably so; the result of self-Government. Near the Banka River, where there used to be only a jungly garden and a large deserted house there is now a south Calcutta style clutter of Babu residences. The Banka itself looked as if in flood; but it is only the water of the Damodar Canal running to waste down it; there is scarcity of rain and the planting out of the crops is delayed badly, but the people are not taking the Canal water because they hope that if they do not Government will again put the rate down, though meanwhile they are complaining bitterly. Some are said to want to take the water but the Congress men are threatening anyone who does so with vague and therefore terrible results. It rained on us as we returned and after a bath and a wait due to delay we had dinner; ten minutes after it ended I pleaded fatigue and went to bed. Sarkar had got everything very nice bedspread, mats, and slips on the toilet table and bed-table. Very little furniture; he had said that he was camping. The bed was admirably not sagged and I slept quite well to my astonishment, and arose without difficulty at 6.45, because breakfast was to be at eight. Next day I was sufficiently curious to see what sort of bed it was; a wooden plank-bed. The visitors were due to arrive at 8.30 and there were to be, I think, eighteen; twenty-seven came, all at 8.15 so to speak for some few did come a bit later. I have not got that callousness that enables one to let people wait and there was the feeling of working off the visitors against time. If I had thought of it I should have asked Sarkar in advance to see that they came at different times spread over the morning. I got rid of my last at 12.20 and did some files until one. After lunch I went to the office and inspected till 4.10 when I dashed back to the house and changed in time to get to the palace by 4.30 to tea with the Maharaja. It was quite amusing; he talks well on such matters as old-time Lieutenant Governors and the doings of ancient or modern I.C.S. Practically no shop. His two sons were there. I tried to leave soon after six but he insisted on my staying and it was after seven when I came away. It is quiet clear that he has his knife into Bijoy and Mani Lal these days; he mentioned that the Burdwan Arambagh road was aligned to run through their lands and that a lot of it had been acquired; which is true, but I chose that alignment myself and did not know whose land it was! I doubt if Bijoy would deliberately run a ramp of that sort, though he would not protest when I had suggested that the road should be there. On my return, a short talk with Sarkar and then bath dinner short talk and bed, as before. Mosquitoes not bad; no howling or roaring in the roof these days as when I lived there; probably the electric light at -/8/- annas the unit by the way has done the trick; but there were mosquitoes prowling about and malaria is unusually bad this year. The bearer confided to me that the cook’s wife and little son had terrible malaria with large spleens and said that the Sahib ought to see about it; since he had the atebrin he feels himself to be an expert on the disease. Today soon after his return he came to me and said that his brother in law had brought a wife up here to be treated with the same medicine that the bearer himself had had because his cure had been so good; and he asked for a letter to the hospital about her. I gave it and he went off saying that he was going to make the bunderbust; it was only afterwards that the thought came to me that it might be a repetition of the pan-seller incident, and it was a pretext for adding to the number of inhabitants in the compound.

The second day at Burdwan was like the first except that the visitors were non-officials and took more of my time. A good deal of backbiting against one another and insinuations against officials; I ended the morning rather disgusted. At the office inspecting hard from soon after two till 6.15. Sarkar suggested another drive and took me about three miles west along the G.T. Road to see the branch canal. It is not very large but an impressive amount of water was rushing down it; I looked on it rather sourly because it was all going to waste and because so many of my callers had talked futility about it. A magnificent red sky. Ominous because it meant no rain or merely showers-. We hurried back eventually to change and go out to the Maharaja’s for dinner. Maharaja, two sons, the Master of the Household or some such title (a Punjabi of about the Maharaja’s age, rather a pleasant man), the doctor, and two railway officers besides our two selves. The Maharaja spoke once to each of the three, twice to Sarkar and the rest of the time to me, thus marking our respective ranks. Of course some of his talk was to the table in General; Viceroys I have know. He has little good to say about Sir John Anderson by the way; a lot at the tea and a little at the dinner he suggested that Sir John thought only of Sir John, that he lacked real statesmanship and that he was a rotten bad judge of men. All of which is perhaps true without making him other than a great Governor; and I grinned to think that he had after all chosen me so that the criticism was scarcely tactful. The Maharaja and I sat in a stately way in the gallery afterwards and the others were led off to play billiards; so it was after 10.40 that I got away. Then bed – and for that matter bed now.

Wednesday July 28th.

Let me tell you a thing, while it is in my mind from having just walked from the bedroom to the drawing room in the dark almost. That is, Sarkar keeps the lights in his verandah and in most of his rooms burning the whole evening because he says that the house is otherwise so gloomy that it gives him the glooms or rather creeps. It is probably a better and a cheaper tonic than taking to drink. It is rather a gloomy house with trees close up to it behind and wide verandahs darkening the rooms which are the darker owing to their being curtains on every possible door. In the office room where I saw my visitors I couldn’t see to read at all with the curtains down during the morning even.

On Sunday breakfast was late. I wonder whether he had it earlier than he liked on my account. It was on other days at eight which meant my getting up earlier than I am accustomed to. When he suggested eight as the proper hour I accepted it cheerfully because Indians usually are far earlier risers than we; and it is possible that having suggested 8.30 as a suitable hour for the visitors he revised his day to agree with it. Anyhow we were late and took a long time over it. It must have been over five minutes between finishing with toast and getting fruit plates. So I was behindhand when I started out to see the Jail. Interesting in this respect only that every second day every prisoner is given 5 grains of quinine (but surely I have already written about this?) and there is not a single malaria case in the Jail except for three men who got it the day they arrived – which proves that they had been infected a week before they came. This was interesting because that Dr Lal of the Tropical Hygiene Institute who was at Mahalanobis’ garden party and talked so big, if indeed his name was Lal, had been very emphatic about the futility of that sort of treatment. Talking about which I may say here out of its place that the Executive Engineer Irrigation Department who came to dinner on the Monday had fever heavy upon him and insisted that it must be flu because shortly before he had finished a course of that new Italian remedy M3 about which the Italian Consul General Giuriati made such a fuss allsinging-alldancing. He is ill, as I heard at Chinsura from Madam Lefranc (? – the same? As last week’s) but what the ailment was I forget; tummy probably. Talking of which, though it has no connection except that it brought it (fine English) to my mind, did I report two weeks ago that the E.I.R. had sent Rs 3¼8¼ (Oh Oh Oh Everything goes wrong on this blinking machine tonight Trying again I write Rs 3/8/- successfully) and apologies for the red ants in the carriage? I feel rather as if I had taken something from a child – the correct quotation is in My Son’s Wife – but I shall not pursue the argument.

From the Jail to the hospital. I was an hour there and in the Medical school attached to it. As a Mofussal hospital rather good but starved for funds for upkeep. Lots of Surgical cases, some really complicated; and the vast majority almost skeletons. Kapur the Civil Surgeon (a Panjabi of very self confident not to say overbearing kind) says that it was not the disease so much as persistent under feeding that caused it. We almost ran round with halts every now and then because I had an appointment at 11 with the Maharaj Kumar. I was in time for it by a little chiefly owing to the lucky chance if it is chance that my watch has been fast ever since I last was in Calcutta. His father had told me that he wanted the youth to talk to me. It was chiefly about the Damodar Canal rate which he said that the Maharaja wished to see reduced so as to put an end to the agitation. I told him that it was tosh and set to deluging him with figures. He bore up under it fairly well merely saying in a plaintive way that if Government had all that stuff why on earth had they kept it back from the Committee which discussed the rates, of which he had been a member. I told him why, not for publication. He stayed till nearly one. Now the interesting thing is that he did not tell me that the previous day the Maharaja at a meeting had proposed and passed a resolution that the rates ought to be reduced. So there is a new scuttle started. Incidentally the Congress Calcutta leader who was to have been brought by Jaffri to see me that Saturday has made a speech praising the Damodar Canal People and their resistance to oppression, which means that the Congress are opposing any new schemes. On the other hand the D.L.R has sent me the report on the revenue survey of the Hooghly-Howrah irrigation scheme area which is full of snappy stuff. Digression; it is an interesting fact that all these digressions give an impression that my Sunday was one of infinite leisure whereas I was on the strain the whole time. I went to office after lunch to do inspections and stayed till 6.15. So did Sarkar, though I had told him on no account to do so; I had not had him sitting by me the whole time as some inspecting officers like to do. This was the day when I had – no, it wasn’t. By the time we finished tea it was time to bath and change for dinner. I was dead beat, but read the newspaper for a bit before going off to bed.

Monday was to have been a full day in office; but the Maharaja sent his Manager to discuss grievances like debt settlement Boards (Holland and little Nullick are mucking all that work up with a vengeance) and when I got rid of him and was just starting for office in Rolled Mani Lal; also. He knew that I had arranged to get down to things in office because I had told him so when I wrote to say that I couldn’t inspect his office that morning; but he said that out of friendship he had to come; and it was nearly twelve before I got to office. Immediately after lunch as on every other day I went back there but I didn’t cover much ground, having struck some stuff that had to be done thoroughly if at all. At 4.30 Man Lal’s tea at the Distreict Board office, very well done and quite amusing. At 6 return to the house and then my holiday period till 7.30 when I dressed for dinner; but I was too tired to do anything. The dinner was solemn. Civil Surgeon, Judge (N.K. Basu’s brother but not nearly as amusing maybe because he had just got up from an attack of fever), Policeman and Irrigation Engineer already mentioned. Not too gay. Touring in France; Cathedrals: shop: malaria and quinine on which they all had theories except the Civil Surgeon who knew, emphatically. Luck. They went soon after 10.30. It was a long time before I got off to sleep. But I woke early on Tuesday with the feeling that I was to be released that day, since a little more of that intensive work would have reduced me to screeching. However I was not yet done with it since before I had finished breakfast which was very late the Secretary of the Landowners Association had come to see me with grievances. I got away by ten fifteen and here by twelve after quite a pleasant run with not too much heavy rain and quite a lot of sun. I say “quite a lot” quite a lot, I notice when typing.

Since I have been back I have worked furiously. That fortnightly report to start with, and much else; but I seem no nearer to doing the judgment or the old files. Now I stop. Much love.


From HPV to LJT

Wednesday July 27th

Just a line my darling to give you my love and to show a little personal interest I have hammered away on that machine till my eyeballs are twittering so to speak and I have nothing to tell you.

Except that Man Lal produced a photo of myself and Moberly. What a kid I look in it! But on second thoughts why send it home? for it is of no real interest.

Barnil has written to me about humus: with final words about it outside on the envelope! There has been heavy rain here while I have been away and the humus is too wet. The cannas have begun. The zinnias now doing well. The gaillardias in the front garden (river side) flourishing. Sun flowers and little copper flowers, by the cannas, making a show. (Hurrah for my de-deading) All the chrysanthemums are now on the roof of the colonnade to the servants gardens. The mali demands seeds already. The Frigidaire is working again: a man came to put it right while I was away. The bearer has made no attempt to keep the lady (age 25) in the compound: she is with her husband at the Paper Mill: the medicine prescribed for her is Easton syrup but they are making a blood test ?Kobe again. The river reached nearly to the top of the bank this evening: and masses of water hyacinth have been cast up.

Two letters from you reached me on Monday night, sent on from here to Burdwan. The one which you said you had to send off from Rhu to catch the Sunday mail must have missed it: but no harm. Excellent letters too: thank you for them.

No need to pretend that I haven’t been over-working: for I have. It is the Forest Committee to come that makes it urgent for me to put in inspections now. I meant to take a day off this week: but when?

Much love sweetheart
Your
Toto


From HPV to family

Chinsura,
July 29th 1938
Friday.

My dear

It has become apparent that I have struck a patch of real weariness. Too many files and no relaxation for days on end. This morning I overslept myself by three quarters of an hour which may prove to have been a help. What would really be so would be to clear off that overdue judgment, the inspection notes and the long pending files. And I ought to have done a good deal of them today; only I couldn’t buckle down to it and spent a lot of time footling with the papers – also there were interruptions. One from a Settlement Sub-deputy who has been working on this revenue survey for my Hooghly Howrah Irrigation scheme; he is being transferred and so I gave time to him; it turns out that it is as I suspected and they have compiled certain figures in a manner which entirely misrepresents the facts. I am becoming rather cunning about certain aspects of statistics. By George, as Dr. Bentley, says in moments of real emotion, “By George! Those fellows!” and I say it too; to wit, the Ministers. Apart from the Reafforestation Committee which they have just announced without having answered any of the conundrums which I put to them, they have announced four other committees to investigate this and that (including some method of putting up the price of rice, Heaven help them! - a world-market commodity, when they have no power to impose tariffs) all large and all with mostly Members of the Legislative on them. A device for serving out handsome Travelling Allowance to as many such members as possible; twelve rupees a day halting allowance to men who won’t spend a fifth of that on their living expenses and who do not earn a quarter of it. A ramp of the most transparent and likely to be successful, for the Assembly meets next week and there will be a vote of confidence or otherwise before many days are out unless the opposition play for safety and await an auspicious moment. However that’s enough of such matters. Had I not started aside on it, I should have said that having exhausted my book at 9.15 last night and feeling too vacant to open any other (old and previously read it would have been of course) I summoned energy and snootled; in other words I worked out the yield of paddy per acre reported during the last ten years from his so-called Agricultural Farm by M.M. Sing Roy, probably some relation of Bijoy’s and the big noise in Agricultural matters in these parts; the result was interesting – he had remarked in a letter that in this district the average was 27 maunds in an average year; and his own farm never once attained to that figure during the ten years although one of them was the best year known during a generation. His average was under 15 ½ maunds; which is the more pleasing to me because five years ago I worked out the figure of 5.15 for this area. Like Jurgen I feel myself a vastly clever fellow, though for different reasons. Which reminds me that I attempted to write to Doris this evening and gave it up for sheer lack of something to say. So far this day. The weather is fine with showers and if it continues thus things will be bad for the poor.

Sunday July 31st 1938

Nothing written yesterday. It was in a sense a notable day, for I did a thing unparalleled. I went in to Calcutta and saw a movy. Through sheer disgust and because I knew that if I stayed here I should work all the afternoon, as indeed why should I not seeing that Saturday afternoon is not a holiday outside Calcutta? First I rang up Hal but he is in Darjeeling; then abandoning hope of finding anyone to go with (the more so because I was determined to get back to dinner and be off early to bed, so that it was a three o’clock show or nothing – not to mention that I had a meeting at 1 and didn’t get off after lunch till well past two) I had a solitary trip and a solitary show. The New Empire had my patronage, because there was Ginger Rogers there to whom I do not object while the Metro was showing Lawrence and Hardy to whom on the whole I do (if only because there is or was a man who sells calculating machines or something at the U.S. Club, a war member, who resembles one of them) and I was only a quarter of an hour or so late. Not a bad show. I missed any singing or dancing item that there was in the first half luckily; but had to sit through the King in Paris on the New Empire News and immediately afterwards the King in Paris in colours and not very good colours either; with the same commentary to both and many of the same pictures but the commentary was attached to different pictures mostly – that very tedious would-be funny commentator with the tiresome trick of trying to work up to a climax by talking quicker and louder. I find I am beginning to regard the dear Queen with much the same feelings that I have towards My Stenographer, when the movie commentators and the papers keep on talking about her gracious smile her beauty and her smart clothes; it may be all right for the papers to do it but it is tomfoolery for the movie men to do so when the pictures simultaneously provide evidence that they are romancing and clumsily at that. The film was the Vivacious Lady (after a Donald Duck and his Ostrich which made us all laugh but had few new things in it), and I expected it to be singing and dancing; but it was a rather amusing though outrageously improbable comedy. The was that nice looking lad if I may call him so who played the bashful lover in ?Mixed Marriages or some such (William Powell and Myrna Loy – a bad film with a knockabout finish) and I liked him because his voice and manner of speaking reminded me of young Loomis the Ocean Racer; Ginger Rogers is really acting as she never did with whoever it was who dances and whom I like for his nimble feet. The first time I think that I have seen a film with no one in it who resembled any of my acquaintenances. Afterwards I had tea at the Club and then a haircut – two combs washed this time. And I started back at about 6.45. After dinner I found that office had worked out the averages for the Singh Roy farm with the addition of those for 9131 which had been missing before; average 15.96. And I sat down and wrote a letter about it. It was still fairly early when I came upstairs, intending to write, but I realised that it would be an effort and I went to bed.

The reason for going to Calcutta, or rather for taking an afternoon off (what a liar I was when small! when I put the second r in rather, I remember how my first morning at Close’s school at Camberley which afterwards became Irving’s, I spelt father “farther” and when pulled up explained that I thought farther meaning further was the word intended, which I hadn’t and which was greeted with open disbelief by the other pupils, two only at that time) the reason for having an afternoon off was that the night before I realised that I had the once familiar fear that if I went to bed I should not be able to go to sleep for ages, the result of lying awake the two previous nights. I routed out the tin of Sedobril or whatever that French sleeping-soup-stuff was called which must have been hanging about for two or three years now and mixed a tumbler full; I don’t know that it had any effect but I didn’t lie awake long. It seemed to have kept all right barring that a lot of it had melted. In the morning I over-slept by half an hour. This morning though I got off to sleep last night fairly soon I overslept by nearly an hour, and I hadn’t woken more than twice either. So I postponed breakfast by half an hour and did only five minutes exercises. It will therefore not surprise you to hear that perversely I worked at the rainfall graphs for a great part of the morning; but it was purely mechanical work, inking in the lines and painting bits red.

Pause at that stage for dinner. I have just come up again and have as near as might be fallen headlong on the drawing room floor, having forgotten that it was so slippery. It has been thundering hard and raining a little. This morning it was pelting. The rain has ceased to come through the roof of the passage but instead has deluged the stairs, luckily the servants’ side which is now adorned with a bath-tub. Also the kitchen roof now leaks because they had had a shot at mending the roof of the godown next to it. But there is not enough rain yet for the crops. In north Bengal there has been so much that the crops are threatened with destruction. These days have been notable for very high tides. The water came just above the step under the Bougainvillea arbour and left some water hyacinth stranded. Masses of the stuff come down the river these days, probably flooded out of the Nadia district where the rivers are up. Today I set the malis on to moving it off the bank on to a new humus heap which the mali has prepared of his own accord near the vegetable garden; making the mistake of leaving no passage for the air to get in underneath but he can put that right because there is a bamboo lattice underneath and it is only a matter of making a sort of flu down to it. On my way into Calcutta yesterday I noticed that the whole country was awash almost, with the river within some three or four feet of the road level. It looked rather fine with no mud showing. (The base of the trunk of the date palm near where we had the humus heap was a couple of feet under water.) On the way back I considered how strange to anyone unused to India would be the row of behinds sticking out into the roadway near bustees where people find the tar macadam more comfortable to sit upon than the damp earth floor of the huts. In the light of the headlamps they looked sill-like even to me.

I slept this afternoon again for an hour. Decidedly I should be topsides of any weariness before long at this rate; but there are rows and stacks of files waiting for me and tomorrow I have to hear no less than five appeals. I wish that I had the time to go down and harangue the Ministers and harass MacPherson and the new D.L.R. (Carter) about the schemes.

Monday August 1st.

At that moment in came Stein to tell me about the decision that he must go to Suri to inquire into the ear pulling nose rubbing alleged against the Superintendent of Police; his caning the boy who threw a stone at the car was apparently justified for a child in the car missed being seriously injured – incidentally the boy’s father explained that he could not “resist the impulse” which is thought by Bengalis to be an adequate excuse. But it is typical of an Indian Officer having beaten a boy to have a case run against him as well; it was when the father went to the police station that the rubbing and pulling took place; both sides speak to its happening but the father says that he was made to do it and the Sub-Inspector of Police says that the father came and did it of his own accord by way of showing how sincere his grief was so as to get the case against the boy dropped. Either case is equally probable. As the S.P. is a Hindu it is probable that the people who are raising a noise will not press the matter for they are Hindus too. Stein is annoyed; because the S.P. has apparently done this sort of thing before and because a Muhammadan Assistant S.P. at Serampore recently beat a bus conductor and I had to speak to Nazimuddin about it to prevent the lad getting into real trouble; I spoke because he had owned up at once when questioned which is more than many Indians would have done . . . . . Stein once here stayed; talking largely about being stung for two years income tax. Under legal advice some few years ago he bought a house in England so that the children might have a fixed home and made it over to them in trust so that he would not be liable for income tax as having a house in England. He stayed there when he was on leave and now is faced with a demand for income tax for the year when he was on leave and also for the previous year on account of the house. No reason given; he was wondering whether his lawyers had been wrong but I imagine that the new income tax Act which was announced as being aimed at tax-dodgers would be the explanation. But is this of any interest? No.

I slept fairly well though I woke up a lot and this morning thanks to my watch having gained ten minutes was up before seven. I actually was dressed in time to spend 15 minutes writing to Parp about humus. But will the letter ever be finished? might it not be said that this noble fragment is designed on a scale too large for accomplishment in one lifetime, like Steinitz’ book on Chess openings? Yes, it might. But whether truly I do not care to ask. The five appeals resolved themselves into three speeches and an argument; the argument was between myself and a pleader who came off best, but gained no credit in my eyes therefore because if he had been clear in his speech to start with there would not have been an argument. The whole thing took two and three quarter hours and was severly technical; now they have sent round 18 volumes of High Court rulings referred to by the pleaders and to be looked at before I write – each the size of the Konkeye, but I have to read only two to ten pages in each. Suddenly it occurred to me today that though I cannot learn by direct inquiry what were the types of land in the Singh Roy farm I can deduce it by having the record of the different types of paddy which were grown examined carefully. Different types appertain to high and low land. Now this pleases me quite a lot, for I have a tortuous mind and like ingenuity for its own sake; besides if it works it will be a check on the classification of lands made by the Settlement Department men and may thus be of use against bribery. The Rai Sahib who attended the physical jerks display, iron-bending, coconut smashing, balancing on the bobbin etc, with the shaved head and the big stick came in to talk about my “impost” or by interpretation compost alias humus. Irrationally I was pleased by this, though as regards his own efforts I gather that not much will come of them. Let me also say that the sunflowers have given a profusion of bloom and are still not over; the cock’s-comb has bloomed a lot but very leggy and I take no interest in it; the zinnia by the river has almost succumbed to the flooding it had when the bed was so largely washed out; the yellow things which have given me so much occupation dead-cutting are over except for four bushes two of which will probably be pulled up as soon as the mali happens to notice them. All the cannas after their transplantation are now more or less in bloom again but with varying success. The small straggly copper things by the cannon have been flowering freely; cutting deads off them is like catching fleas on a dog, for they are small and elusive, partly because I do not tackle them till it is almost dark. The plants that I suspect of being yellow cosmos have not done much except bush but are showing more flower now. The butterflies still make a good show on certain plants, bushes rather, and I observed today again with deep satisfaction my beautiful caterpillar on the lily things along the river-fence; so long as it eats only the lilies it earns its keep by its bright colouring, for I suspect them of being spider lilies. The mali demands seeds; but Lancaster had not sent any and the box bears the injunction Plant after second week of August. I have written to ask Lancaster about them and about its being time to plant. Ahead of programme the vegetable garden has been dug up. There are 1000 cabbage seedlings by the look of the seed bed. Great indignation on the part of the mali because the servants have been stealing the pomolos. As there must be 100 on the tree and the number I consume is very limited, I do not share his feelings; but my indignation was even greater than his when I found that he had been led by his zeal for his profits (since undoubtedly he means to sell then in the bazaar) to put a lock on the gate into the garden and thus delay my tour round on Sunday. We took the damaged pinion from the lawn mower into Calcutta on Saturday because the driver said that he knew where a new one could be bought; but the blighter was merely relying on going to Leslies, although I had told him that it had closed down months ago. So the machine is still out of action and the chur kantas are growing rapidly all over the lawn. One way and another I have done a lot of work today. Letter from Rosemary yesterday and from my wife today; one from Annette on Saturday. To all of whom thanks.

Tuesday August 2nd.

I slept all night till six and then again till 6.45. Which is a satisfaction. A good deal of work today but nothing to show for it. I read through the 18 High Court rulings. With what cleverness and persistence the judges pervert the obvious meanings of Acts to what they would have made law if they had been the law-makers. In this particular case I can’t help feeling that they have gone far out of their way to twist a simple thing into complexity. There was a clause in the Act (one of 1825) to say that any case not covered by its specific terms should be decided by common sense and equity; but instead the judges have twisted the terms to cover difficulties obviously never contemplated by the law-maker and thus spoilt them for their original purposes.

No interruptions all day. Seeing a group on the club tennis court I went over there after working in the garden (I had forgotten to mention that all the white and ?magenta bobble things have been doing fine and so have the dhobi flowers of both sorts) and found all the police – Stein, Holman and Mrs. And the lad Carman. Apparently there was a lot of rain today. The whole place is sopping; but I hadn’t noticed it except occasionally.

And that is that: because I hadn’t the energy for more
Much love
Toto