The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  Anyway, the point was, he had “friends” in London. If John decided to join the cause, they would help him. Regardless, he hoped John would have a grand time. Calcutta wouldn’t be the same without him and Humphry.

  “Tell the chaps at home what a hero I am—all lies, but tell them, ‘cos I wanna be loved! Do I write balls? Well forgive me; I mean well but am so very very bourgeois.”

  Carritt’s elation dissipated quickly. Work was slow, weighty decisions were always being put off. Every official communication, even from adjacent offices, had to be routed through the Indian clerical staff left behind in sweltering Calcutta. And once the sun went down, it was as if a curtain had dropped. Darjeeling’s small lanes took on a sinister aspect and he began to wonder how much longer he could play his cat-and-mouse game with the DCP.

  The governor of Bengal had also begun to worry him. Formerly a hard-faced administrator of the Black and Tans in Ireland, Sir John Anderson had been brought in to govern Bengal with a similar ruthlessness. Carritt had sat in on a conference of senior district officers discussing what further measures might be taken against the nationalists. In the eight out of eleven provinces where Congress had prevailed, elected officials were already opening the jails and freeing their colleagues. In Bengal, where they had received only the largest block of votes, Governor Anderson was advocating the adoption of Nazi tactics and a return to wholesale arrests of union organizers and activists.

  Both Carritt and Reverend Scott had also been hearing rumors about changes in Communist Party leadership. It had been a relatively easy matter for Carritt to ask for a few days’ leave for a quick trip to Bombay. Back on Juhu Beach, he was meant to be looking out for his underground contact, but his eyes kept drifting toward the breaking waves. There was something truly hopeless in the sight of a fisherman casting his net, again and again, coming up empty every time.

  Finally, two sweaty figures rose up before him in the noonday sun. One was tall and thin, the other short and squat. Both looked left and right, as if they were checking traffic, before crossing toward him to settle in the dunes. The tall chap was Ajay Ghosh, a member of the CPI politburo. He had once organized armed raids, but while in jail he had been converted to propaganda work. Ghosh addressed Carritt by his code name, Bashir.

  Come meet Our Friend here, he said, indicating his tubby companion.

  A former terrorist being brought into the CPI fold, Carritt supposed, nodding.

  Such meetings followed a predictable course. He took notes to pass along to Ben Bradley, at the League Against Imperialism. He conveyed Bradley’s promises that cash for party work would be forthcoming. Generally, however, the funds disappeared en route or were never sent. Carritt had complained to London that it was impossible to carry out resolutions without funds, that P. C. Joshi was sitting on his arse. Furthermore, the disappearance of courier links because of arrests or someone being forced underground meant that no one knew where party leadership was at any given time. At one point Joshi had to hide out from Special Branch at his flat. And if they couldn’t keep tabs on each other, keeping channels open with Congress was impossible. They were more of a Divided Front than a Popular one.

  But neither of his companions was interested in rehashing party problems. Events in Europe were moving quickly, Our Friend began. He had proof that the Bengali firebrand Subhas Chandra Bose was in contact with Hitler and Mussolini, proof that the latter was funding him. The previous year, having failed to get Congress to take a more militant stand, Bose had launched his own mass protest against British rule and was kicked out of the party. His arrest brought Calcutta to a standstill. Released from prison in March, he was now using the example of Lenin’s exile in the kaiser’s Germany to justify his efforts to raise an army. This line was pitched squarely at radical Communist cadres and those on the left in Congress impatient with Gandhi’s quasi-religious nonviolent tactics. Should it come to war, some believed, neither nonviolence nor those newly elected Congress officials of the provincial ministries could protect them. For this reason alone, Bose posed a danger. There were elements in the Indian Army and the upper echelons of Indian society that might well opt to work with Hitler. The avenue to national liberation must not be through an alliance with the Fascists.

  It was dark by the time Ghosh’s companion stopped speaking.

  Carritt was ready with questions. Where did that leave the British Empire? How should the Communist Party of Great Britain respond? What did the Comintern have to say? What was the greater evil, imperialism or fascism? Weren’t they simply two faces of the same enemy? And what part was he to play? Neither man had any answers.

  It was hard not to feel it was their show now.

  But if his fight was no longer in India, where was it?

  CHAPTER 11

  In the Ice Mountains

  Woyil Bridge, outside Srinagar,

  Kashmir, May 5, 1937

  The sound of hobnailed boots on the Rawalpindi platform woke Michael Spender from a deep sleep in the station waiting room. After four days and four nights on the train from Darjeeling, Angtharkay, Sen Tensing, and Ang Tensing from the 1935 Everest reconnaissance had finally arrived, a day overdue, accompanied by four new smiling faces. Wearing pyjama trousers with tweed jackets, windproofs with flannels, the seven Sherpas made a theatrical entrance. The sleepy crowd on the platform couldn’t stop staring. John Auden, who had seen them off from Howrah station in Calcutta, would follow in a few days.

  Eight hours later, at the border of the princely state of Kashmir, they ran into problems. Somewhere along the way the Nazis had acquired the belief that the Himalaya were the true homeland of the Aryans. Three years before, ten German climbers had died in a reckless try for the summit of Nanga Parbat and now a German mountaineer named Karl Wien intended to reclaim German honor. Nanga Parbat was Germany’s mountain of destiny and Wien had insisted that while his expedition was under way, no other expeditions be in the field. As with Germany’s other territorial claims, British officials down the line were making every effort to keep Hitler happy. Eric Shipton’s permit application was refused. After an entire day was wasted haggling, the impasse was eventually breached by Shipton’s bold assertion that they were not really on an expedition. In a narrow sense, this was true. They were there not as mountain climbers but as surveyors; the summit of K2 was their fixed point, not their destination.

  Later, over dinner at the Srinagar Club, the subject of The Ascent of F6 arose. Shipton had seen the play, and the idea of a race to seize a summit on the contested border of a prize colony reminded him of all he hated about the massive, siege-style Everest expeditions. Bill Tilman, who wouldn’t have been found dead in a West End theater, much less a Group Theatre production, expressed his opinion that music hall humor was demeaning to women. An awkward silence fell over the table. Shipton changed the subject. On a walk later that night, he aired his irritation to Michael; Tilman, who had spent the entire sea journey in his cabin and had vowed to walk all the way to the Baltoro Glacier in short pants, was becoming a feminist crank. Thereafter Michael assigned Tilman the code name of F6 in his journal.

  A letter from Granny awaited him in Srinagar: she was pleased to report that Erica and the new baby were getting by perfectly well on no allowance whatsoever—just as she would have had to had she remained in Germany. Fearful that England might contest Italy’s colonial claims, Granny wanted to know whether Michael had seen any sign that Indian sepoys were leaving for Abyssinia. The German people wouldn’t now be starving and enslaved, she wrote, if they hadn’t been robbed of their colonies. One of her German relations had said that and she wondered what Michael thought. Finally, she wanted to know if he had heard anything of the German expedition to Nanga Parbat.

  While the English party was accommodated on the lawns of the residence of Sir Peter and Lady Clutterbuck, the Germans were staying on houseboats that lined the shores of the Jhelum River. Michael, who went to visit Karl Wien to practice his German, was briefly taken with the idea o
f living on a leaky houseboat for two shillings and six pence a day. Three shillings, if a woman was thrown in. “The lotus flower floats and blooms on those lakes as an enduring symbol of reposeful life,” Francis Younghusband had written in one houseboat’s guest book after his epic journey from Peking to Kashmir, exactly fifty years before. Younghusband was the last man to have visited the area they intended to survey.

  The nineteen-day, 275-mile journey north began the next day. On John Auden’s arrival, they left wheeled civilization behind at the Soyil Bridge, enjoying a lavish picnic with the Clutterbucks before crossing. At the point of departure, Michael suffered a moment of panic. Shipton was jumpy, too, certain he’d forgotten something. He confessed to Michael that he really hated climbing mountains and deeply disliked being above the tree line. He was already praying for the moment they would return.

  As the bird flies, the distance between Askole, the southernmost outpost before the uplift of the Great Karakoram, and the Upper Yarkand River, near the unmarked border of Chinese Turkestan, was about seventy miles. But here even birds ran into trouble. In the course of the expedition they would come across countless bird skeletons. Not being greatly learned in ornithology, Shipton supposed they were some sort of duck. One had legs as long as his arm. Some still had their plumage. Had the ancestors of these birds established this migratory path before the high ranges existed, trapping them into flying over a frigid and inhospitable terrain? There had to be an easier way, Shipton thought. For the surveyors there wasn’t.

  The area of their proposed survey was divided into two unequal parts, bisected by the Shaksgam River. The Shaksgam ran east to west and drained the Karakoram’s northern watershed. Sandwiched between the Shaksgam River and the Upper Yarkand River on the border of Chinese Turkestan was the Aghil Range. In 1926 Kenneth Mason, the director of the Survey of India and president of the Himalayan Club, had mapped the region just east of the area Shipton had his eye on. Michael’s map would eventually join up with Mason’s, encompass the route of Younghusband’s final marches from Turkestan to Kashmir, and extend as far west as they could get before running out of food and fuel.

  By crossing the Shaksgam River, climbing and passing over the Aghil Range and descending to the Upper Yarkand, they would be extending the northernmost borders of India, not with an invading army, but with a subtense bar. Auden and Spender would lead separate parties of Baltis and Sherpas in radial journeys outward, methodically triangulating. Tilman and Shipton would be given the highest stations to do their part and get in some climbing. Periodically, Spender would collect all their work on plane table sheets from which he would later work up a final map.

  The exact location of the pass over the Aghil Range that Younghusband crossed was of abiding interest to the Foreign and Political Department, the ministry responsible for India’s border security. Younghusband had explored the northern passes leading into India, those through which an invasion might conceivably take place. After fixing the position of Sir Francis’s Aghil Pass, surveying the far side of the Aghil range, the parties would join up and return south. Shipton scoffed at the idea that an incursion into this delicate border region might be dangerous. The chief bogey was to finish with the Aghil Range and recross the Shaksgam before the summer floods swelled it to the point where it became impassable, stranding them in no-man’s-land.

  At the heart of Shipton’s proposed survey were some of the largest glaciers outside the Arctic Circle. Not far from where they hoped to establish their supply dump was a confluence of immense glacial streams—the K2, the Sarpo Laggo, the Skyang, and the Crevasse Glaciers. This would be their first Base Camp. Younghusband had named this spot Sughet Jangal, maintaining that he had found evidence here of an ancient caravan route between Turkestan and India.

  To get to the Shaksgam River, they had first to reach the Sarpo Laggo Glacier. Younghusband had crossed the East Muztagh Pass from the glacier, but an Italian explorer had seen another, more easily accessed one at the head of one of the side valleys leading off the Trango Glacier on the southern edge of the Karakoram. When they reached there Shipton and Auden went off to see which of the two to try. Sighting the twin summits of the toothy Muztagh Tower, itself over 7,000 meters high, Shipton made a guess where each was. The tangle of huge rock precipices and surreal-looking granite spires might have put him off, but the fun of crossing a new pass trumped the sure thing of the East Muztagh.

  To support themselves for three and a half months, the expedition required the services of nearly a hundred local porters, in large part Muslim Baltis from Askole. These men would ferry one and a half tons of food and supplies over the yet-to-be-found pass to the supply dump at Sughet Jangal, and then return home. After that there would be no runners bringing letters from Granny and no dated issues of the Spectator bearing news of Hitler’s mischief.

  The Baltis were dubious. Even if they succeeded in crossing the pass and dumping their loads, they feared they would find themselves trapped on the glacier, unable to return. Nonetheless, Shipton prevailed upon them and after a great deal of wrangling all were assembled and loaded. It was at this moment that Tilman and Sen Tensing suffered malarial relapses. Rather than see their food supply disappear, John volunteered to stay back with them while Michael and Shipton accompanied the rope gang and their loads over the promised pass. When the fevers lifted they would follow.

  In Shipton and Tilman’s zeal to strip the party down to the essentials, however, quinine supplies had been jettisoned, as well as sticking plasters and most of John’s geological equipment. Shipton had initially considered his rock hammer and ungainly Mannlicher-Schonauer hunting rifle unnecessary but was voted down. Michael only just managed to hang on to his coffee but had to bind up his blisters with a handkerchief.

  Uli Biafo Pass, 12,600 feet,

  Greater Karakoram, May 29, 1937

  The Darjeeling Sherpas took pride in their reputation as mountain men. However hard the work, it was nothing like tea plantation labor or pulling rickshaws up and down the slopes of Darjeeling. The mountains recalled for them the summer days of their youth when they herded the family yaks to high pastures. They had all been young boys when they first heard about the effort to climb Chomolungma. It wasn’t long before they knew the details of every Everest expedition. Secondhand accounts of Mallory and Irvine, Dr. Kellas, and General Bruce had all been passed down. The chilingna were an endless source of fascination, with their strange clothes and large, heavy boots.

  They regarded the Baltis, at that moment intent on mending their paboo slippers with bradawls, twine, and goatskin, more warily. Baltis were neither Hindus like the Gurkhas nor Buddhists like themselves. No one knew what they believed or why they couldn’t eat meat they hadn’t butchered. So that first evening the Sherpas kept to themselves, occupied with the usual camp tasks. Ang Tensing had found and killed seven fleas in Michael’s sleeping bag. Lhakpa Tensing, one of the new faces from Darjeeling, was sneaking a rock into Nukku’s pack. Sherpas never grew tired of this prank and as Nukku, another newby, was a bit slow he was often a target. A dinner of curried goat was being prepared; Angtharkay had a heavy hand with the chili powder and had to be watched.

  Regarding this domestic scene Michael couldn’t help but wonder how things were at home. Unlike the journal he kept on the 1935 reconnaissance, it had taken only a single page to get from Victoria Station, where Erica, Granny, and his sister Christine had seen him off, to the Kashmir border. There was no mention of his infant son. There was no worry over Erica’s fate in his absence. It was as if he expected the baby would keep her company, absolving him of any further concern. But now a touch of homesickness came over him.

  It was the end of May. The trees would soon be coming into leaf. Erica would be getting out their summer clothes. Had anyone gone to visit her in the little thatched cottage Granny had bought them in Essex? Had the strawberries come in? Had she managed to put away some jars of spring rhubarb? He wondered now if he should have renounced marriage, as the others
here had, before taking up this life. Adding to his introspection was the fact that while crossing another river he had fallen into a hole and nearly drowned. Yet his first panicked thought was not of Erica or his son but of his ice ax, which he only just managed to save.

  After dinner the Baltis formed a ring around the fire and began singing. The Sherpas watched silently. As the night wore on the Baltis grew more and more ecstatic, clapping their hands, slightly off beat, one man after another breaking away to dance in the middle, drawing from a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire. Michael’s sense of contentment was only slightly darkened by apprehension of what awaited them all in the morning.

  They set off at 8:00 a.m. in bright sunshine. By noon a light snow began falling and a cold wind picked up. The moment they stopped at the snout of the Trango the flurries became a snowstorm and within minutes transformed their camp into a scene off a Christmas card. By six a cup of water froze solid in half an hour. Of course the Baltis were unhappy. A few of them were barefoot. There was no dancing around a fire that night and no tents to crawl into. Some staged strikes in the hopes of getting a blanket. Was this an omen of what awaited them? Even inside his tent Michael felt like a block of ice. At daybreak he lifted his tent flap and saw no sign of anyone. The Baltis had absconded, taking all their supplies.

  But what he’d taken for snow-covered boulders turned out to be Baltis under blankets. Still, two loads of firewood were gone. Within an hour the Baltis had thawed sufficiently to get up, grab their sixty-pound loads, and begin their way up the moraine. After an hour Shipton called a halt. The sun was fierce on the newly fallen snow, the men didn’t have dark glasses, and their paboos gave them no traction. Furthermore, the side valley he had chosen made a turn and Shipton couldn’t be certain they were heading toward the pass. He and Michael started for a ridge to get a quick look. They ended up slogging their way in thigh-deep snow for what turned out to be hours. Michael fell out in exhaustion, but Shipton continued on to confirm what they feared. They had taken the wrong valley and wasted an entire day. The Baltis would have to spend another night in the open.