The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  On receiving Michael’s telegram, John promptly wrote letters to Humphry and Sudhin begging them to tell him what he should do. To accept meant completely scrapping the plans he’d made for his upcoming furlough. He admitted he was already toying with the idea of going, but only on the condition that the time he spent there be counted as time on duty. He didn’t mention that contributing to a survey expedition by helping to map an uncharted territory would extend and strengthen Britain’s grip on the subcontinent. “I feel so useless and unable to help in ways which come easily to you, Richard, and Wystan,” he wrote Humphry, as if asking to be forgiven. Richard was their code name for Carritt. Humphry never bothered with it.

  Like Sudhin, Humphry didn’t entirely grasp what John did out in the field but he told John he had the technical know-how an independent India would find useful. He also had the stamina to overcome the physical hardships his work entailed. The one thing he lacked was self-confidence and an expedition to the Karakoram wouldn’t provide him a sense of what he had to contribute. Europe or America would.

  Sudhin also chimed in. It would be a terrible pity if John sacrificed his leave for this. Hadn’t he been slaving away at just that sort of work all this time? Shouldn’t he be thinking of resting rather than introducing more exhaustion and hardship into his life? Russia, England, or America would be more pleasant and welcoming destinations for his expertise than the glorious Karakoram. And if he went, what would he do when he came back? Would there be time for him to make a start on his book? Finally, it was a grave mistake to let his fantasies of personal failure loom so large. And how could he possibly insist he was unloved and a fraud with friends like Humphry and Susobhan? Were they more gullible than the common run of man? Was he?

  “I know it is unpardonably cheeky to say all this, but you will please remember in extenuation that I am a slightly older man and have made such a dreadful mess of so many things that my opinion as to what is failure and what not should, at least, be worth a moment’s consideration?”

  Sudhin Datta’s grasp of what failure and greatness entailed paled beside John Auden’s. And he couldn’t well tell him what this invitation meant without giving away just how grandiose his ambitions were. Either Shipton or Tilman would be chosen to lead the 1938 Everest expedition. One of them would decide the roster. More than writing any book, more than joining any cause, he wanted his shot at that mountain.

  While John was off in the Garhwal, Carritt and House had gone out one Saturday night, returning at 4:00 a.m. to the chummery Humphry now shared with John. Fully soused or, as Humphry put it, “bottled up to the eyelids,” they announced their arrival by crashing the car into the fence and shouting drunkenly in the company of two women of uncertain reputation. The missionaries who lived in the flat above had been rudely awakened.

  On another evening, this time with Reverend Scott, both “politicals” had been sober as death when they left around midnight. Though Madrid was still hanging on, the war in Spain had reached a breaking point, and Carritt was worried about his brothers. Later that same night, while preparing for bed Humphry and his visiting wife found themselves with “midnight buttock stirrings.” After a quietly serious excavation of “all the usual pleasure purlieus and crannies,” there ensued, Humphry explained in great detail to John, a prolonged, energetic, and deeply rewarding fuck. The crashing and rattling of the bed had again woken up their god-fearing neighbors. A letter of eviction arrived the next morning. Humphry’s antisocial behavior made his continued residence impossible. There was a feeling in the residency, the letter said, that he thought himself superior. This was undoubtedly true, he admitted.

  It was too bad, really, he wrote John, because the Amherst Street place was such an excellent setup. Sudhin, Hiren-da, and Minnie Bonnerjee, a new addition to adda and wicked fun, had been coming to his parties to smoke, drink, and argue about politics. When Humphry told Hiren-da that the real objection to Mrs. Simpson was not that she was a divorcée but that she circulated in the social milieu of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, thereby raising the specter of a “Churchill Mosley right wing Press Fascist King’s Party,” Hiren-da got very excited. The adda was now abuzz with anticipation of a Churchill–Hitler pact. An alliance between the arch-imperialist anti-Communist Royalist and the arch-Fascist anti-Communist made perfect sense, they agreed.

  John was disappointed to lose their chummery but in an unusually chipper mood, he composed a homily:

  We’ll hear how Humphry fell

  To the lowest pits of hell

  Was ever a Devil’s proselyte

  More sudden in his appetite?

  God above knows all you do

  From Amherst Street to Timbuctoo

  From Heaven’s walls He can see

  Into the darkest lavatory

  Let this be an awful warning

  To boys and girls on Sunday morning

  The blessed blood, though wine perhaps,

  Does only good to holy chaps

  Soon after Humphry found a new flat De Sahib, the Englishman from the adda who was a suspected Special Branch informant, dropped by Hiren-da’s house to chat. Insisting that he and Humphry had been at school together, he proceeded to inquire about Professor House’s doings. This gave Humphry an idea. He would immortalize De Sahib, along with the watchers who had been following him all year, in a book titled I Spy with My Little Eye and dedicate it to John and Sudhin. Humphry’s time in Calcutta was nearly up.

  Humphry’s new landlord was a judge of the High Court, half Muslim, one-quarter Italian, one-quarter Austrian, and, like John, a Marlburian. Unfortunately, those pan-chewing men with wiggling eyebrows were once again squatting outside his door. Leaving behind his ancient jalopy, Humphry was walking all over the city now, stopping to talk with all and sundry in fluent Bengali. His watchers could scarcely keep pace.

  “Jesus what a town!” he wrote John.

  Undersecretary’s Office, Writers’ Building,

  Dalhousie Square, Calcutta, March 1937

  With the grim news out of Spain, Carritt’s mind had not been entirely on his work, either for His Excellency the Governor or the Communist underground. His brothers’ brigade had been through hell; he was waiting to hear if they had survived. Some days Carritt could convince himself that for every life lost in Spain, one hundred new recruits to the cause were won. But on bad days he thought he should become a rare bird egg collector and pretend he didn’t know any better. It was on such a day that he was approached by the deputy commissioner of police (Intelligence Branch) of Calcutta.

  “Carritt, old boy. I’m worried. Am I in trouble for not producing results? Are they likely to push me out of the IB into some God forsaken up-country dung-hill with my wife and young babies? For God’s sake, old man, tell me what they are saying.”

  Carritt turned to the DCP and replied offhandedly.

  “I’ve heard nothing. No complaints about your reports, all quiet as usual. I doubt the Chief even reads them. Don’t worry.”

  Carritt had been reading Wystan’s articles; it was good, effective stuff. He appreciated what Wystan had to say about the role men like them were to play in the coming struggle. That it was no good pretending they were workers, or Indians for that matter. Really, everything Wystan wrote made sense. The present crisis wasn’t simply about the expansionist aims of Germany and Italy. No, what was happening was precisely what Marx had foretold: the international working class in arms. It wasn’t going to be 1914 again.

  For one thing Indians had suffered the full crop of terror, imprisonment, shootings, massacres, and vicious exploitation. Two decades of unceasing struggle, all crushed by the brutal imperialist hand. Late as it was, the Indians were beginning to grasp things. Carritt had once feared that the nationalist movement would simply make way for a “babu raj.” Instead, the movement was passing from the hands of the petit bourgeois to the workers and peasants. Glassblowers, tea workers, hand carters, dockhands, Chinese cobblers and sailors, hawkers, sweet sh
op assistants, printers, and workers in the rope, saloon, tobacco, and hosiery industries were all organizing. Even ordnance factory workers had a union and the Calcutta police were agitating for a salary increase. However many files they opened, Special Branch couldn’t keep pace.

  The deputy commissioner of police was still talking.

  “For weeks we haven’t laid our hands on a single bastard. How do they slip away? There’s something about it all. It’s a game of Blind Man’s Buff, and I am the poor blind buffer in the middle. They spin me around and I just get hold of a suspect and he disappears into thin air whilst I go on spinning round and round.”

  Carritt finally turned to the poor sod, suddenly appreciating the irony that the DCP was venting his frustration to the very man who had tied his blindfold. The DCP was earnest, hardworking, and more intelligent than most of his colleagues at Writers’ Building. To get rid of him, Carritt suggested it might be the handiwork of a foreign agent. The man left his office transfixed by the thought that deeper and darker forces than he could possibly imagine were at work.

  Carritt had entirely forgotten their exchange by the time word of a Moscow agent on the loose began percolating through Intelligence Branch reports. He asked Reverend Scott what he knew. Had the Comintern sent someone to keep an eye on them? Chief Secretary P. C. Joshi asked around but his contacts, too, were mystified. They decided to sit back and see what else IB came up with. Weeks passed.

  Then suddenly the Moscow agent appeared, in the flesh, right on the streets of Ballygunj! According to the new reports, he was a tall, thin, sallow creature with an enormous head, sporting a shabby topee and dressed in a dhoti so inexpertly tied it threatened to unravel. The watcher who reported the sighting said he had been seen in the company of Muzzafar Ahmed. Though everyone knew the union leader was at that moment serving a jail sentence, the IB lapped it up. Informants were popping up everywhere, swearing they had seen him, here, there, all over the city.

  Finally, a report crossed Carritt’s desk in which it was suggested that the Moscow agent might be a lecturer at Calcutta University named Humphry House.

  The first newspaper John Auden saw on getting back from the Garhwal had virtually the same headline as the one he’d seen before he left; Madrid was on the verge of falling. With only three weeks in town before leaving to join Shipton, Tilman, and Spender in Srinagar, he didn’t bother to shave his beard before showing up at the Tolly for Sunday lunch. Carritt, too, was preparing for the twice-yearly Darjeeling retreat that preceded and followed the monsoons. And as Humphry’s Hopkins book was being well received in London, he was in a fine fettle. He took the news that Special Branch was on to him in stride.

  “What does a Moscow agent wear?” he asked Carritt. He wanted to look the part. When he proposed a toast to his international celebrity, Carritt had to remind him his name had appeared in only one confidential police report.

  “Nonsense, old boy; absolute nonsense. The police force is a public service and recognition by it is therefore essentially public. Moreover, they have me down as an appointed agent of an international body, the Comintern, thereby granting me international status.”

  After Carritt left for Darjeeling and John for the Karakoram, Humphry unexpectedly secured a berth on an earlier boat. He spent his last night in Calcutta drinking with Sudhin Datta and Shahid Suhrawardy. When he left them to finish his packing, he wasn’t at all surprised to find a subinspector waiting for him on the veranda. The man welcomed him in, apologizing for his intrusion as he did so. No sooner had Humphry lit the lamp than the man’s eyes went straight to his bookshelves.

  There were two types of police officers, Humphry had once explained to Carritt. The first were bullyboys who liked a good lathi, either to tap you on the shoulder or poke you in the balls. Then there was the cringing sort who told you how much they hated their jobs but, what to do? His guest was of the latter sort, so unctuous that, forgetting himself, Humphry offered him a peg. The man declined, citing his Hindu beliefs, but begged him not to deprive himself of his vital sustenance. The subinspector began by saying how saddened he was by the news that Humphry was leaving. On behalf of everyone at Special Branch he wanted to convey their most sincere love and affection. Humphry, in turn, promised he would never forget them. After several rounds of this, the officer turned to Humphry’s bookshelf.

  “You are a literary man, Professor? Yes, I can see you have many books.”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say I am a literary sort of man…. Do you read many books, Inspector?”

  “Not books, not books … I read many … reports.”

  “Ah yes, of course. Reports. These reports must be very interesting, a very interesting field of Literature. I would myself like to read your reports—some time.”

  Humphry pulled out some books that the subinspector’s eye seemed particularly drawn to and passed them over. In anticipation of this visit, he had dolled up A Christmas Carol with a cover of The Coming Struggle for Power. Northanger Abbey cross-dressed as Orwell’s banned book on the mill workers of Lancashire, The Road to Wigan Pier. Other Victorian worthies masqueraded as main selections from the Left Book Club. The man glanced at them distractedly, not quite sure what was going on. Then Humphry took down Selections from the Writings of Karl Marx, holding it reverently with both hands, like an offering.

  “This may be of special interest to you. It is an exceedingly valuable book. Please have a look at the inscription.” Humphry opened the page and moved alongside the subinspector. He had written it himself.

  “To my good friend, Humphry House from D … R … Deputy Commissioner of Police (IB) Calcutta.”

  A copy of I Spy with My Little Eye eventually found its way to Isaiah Berlin at Oxford. Isaiah Berlin had always taken an unhealthy interest in all Humphry’s doings. But the idea that Humphry’s letters and packages were being opened and he was being followed by the secret police struck Berlin as fantastic and wildly paranoid.

  “I tremble to think,” Berlin wrote Stephen Spender, “what, with his natural rankness of mind … must have happened to [Humphry] in the congenial society of a lot of inferior Mulk Anands.” Mulk Raj Anand was the one Indian writer of note in London; the idea there might be others, in India no less, was inconceivable.

  A Boardinghouse in Darjeeling, Bengal,

  late July 1937

  Carritt had first visited Darjeeling on compassionate leave after the assassination of yet another Midnapore DO. Sometime during the night of his arrival his manservant had awakened him, pointing excitedly to the window. Coming out from under his mosquito net Carritt saw the light of a ghostly form floating in the sky. It looked like a massive white breast topped with a rosy nipple: Kanchenjunga.

  Six years later, the hill station was little changed. His landlady had greeted his arrival with a chatty explosion of relief that he wasn’t an Anglo-Indian but a proper Englishman. She went on to explain that as long as men like him kept the Indians divided, they could all remain in India and make money. Of course, Indians didn’t really smell, she whispered, sotto voce, especially respectable ones. “But it pays to pretend they do.”

  Carritt retired to his tiny room with a bottle of whiskey. He had been dreading this Darjeeling interlude, his letter to John Auden began, but he now realized this was just what he needed. He wanted the letter to catch John on his return from the Karakoram, before he left for England. Perhaps he was slightly drunk. No. He was quite clearly drunk, but he wouldn’t let that stop him from getting to the point. After a long aside about a drunken encounter with a red pillar box of His Majesty’s Postal Service, and another about having caught “the last train out of the desert of barren desires” and some indecipherable scribbles, Carritt stopped himself.

  “Where was I going?”

  He began again. He was coming out of the woods now. The pillar boxes were still there but he had learned to treat them with respect.

  He forgot where he was going with that.

  This didn’t mean all lone
liness and pain were gone, not at all. But he could no longer find it in himself to say that life was meaningless or to ask himself why he bothered. That was the refuge of all those Englishmen who had been having such a good time only to bump painfully against that pillar box. As he imagined John had.

  “I want to help you catch this train John.”

  If John could just take a look at the faces of his traveling companions, take in the tawdry decorations of the imperial carriage, he would see. They had both been pawns in the empire game; the Secretary of State for India had appealed to their vanity by offering them a shot at adventure and moral greatness. Humphry’s book had diagnosed them both. “The Lakes are a training ground for ambition,” he had written; “they breed ideals.” Carritt had joined the ICS, John the GSI with those ideals and ambitions only to find themselves radicalized by the fear of becoming pukka sahibs instead. Maybe his own work for the Communist underground arose from a similar assumption of lofty superiority, as Humphry said, or even a lust for power. What did it matter? His party work remained the one thing he was sure of.

  John might not have Humphry’s self-confidence, Carritt wrote, but he did have a need to say things worth being said. He was by far the nicest of them. But he was trapped by his enchantment with the mountains, and could not see what was coming.

  Was he sounding like a beastly ICS wallah, taking an interest in his Jat?

  The truth was, if Humphry hadn’t been there when he received the news of his brother’s death after the battle of Brunete in Spain, he wouldn’t have tided over the last month with any grace at all. The one thing Carritt was grateful for was that he’d given away no hint of his grief to the bloody fascists at Government House. He was proud of that. But as soon as he was alone he couldn’t think of his brother without tears starting. He was crying now.

  “Do you ever cry?” Carritt wasn’t ashamed to admit that he did, all too easily, really, and at all kinds of silly things. Certain poems, jazz tunes, when people try to be sympathetic, things like that. Wildest of all, he wept at the sight of a woman’s breasts. What could that mean? Did he ever think about dying and what it was like? Did he think it was better to know or not know when death was coming?