The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  In August the wheels came off. Reports of rural peasants selling their children coincided with a cholera epidemic. On Cornwallis Street someone found a child’s corpse partially eaten by dogs. Vultures lined up on tree branches and rooftops to wait out those dying below them. Jackals were less patient. The burning ghats at the river’s edge were overwhelmed; corpses piled up like stacks of charred wood. According to the doms who worked the pyres, they burned easily. In the villages few had the strength to dig graves or cut wood, so the dead were cast adrift on the river, washing up downriver rubbery and whitened. The footpaths of South Calcutta were rendered impassable by shit. The smell of death was everywhere.

  On August 22, 1943, the first in a series of shocking photographs appeared in the Sunday Statesman accompanied by editorials slamming the government for inaction. The Statesman was edited by Englishmen and generally toed the line drawn by Calcutta’s merchant community, so this was a departure. The photographs, of skeletal mothers and their children mobbing a free kitchen, of a man laid out on a pavement on the precipice of death, caused a stir at the U.S. State Department. The following Sunday even more terrible images appeared. No statement was forthcoming from either the viceregal palace or Governor’s House. Finally, two weeks after the second batch of photographs appeared, the viceroy’s spokesperson suggested that Bengal’s distress was being “overdramatized.” And still famine had not been declared.

  In early October Linlithgow finally departed, filled with expansive regrets that he had been unable to convince India’s politicians to put aside their rivalries. Ten days later Shaheed announced Bengal was in the grip of “an unprecedented famine.” The city’s death toll was reaching eighteen hundred per week. The Statesman ran a new series of photographs, timed to coincide with the new viceroy’s arrival in the city. The famine had finally displaced the war in Europe on the paper’s front pages.

  The finger-pointing soon began. Following Amery’s lead the London papers ascribed the famine to the political incompetence of the provincial ministry, rising tensions between the Muslim and Hindu communities, and the greed of speculators eager to capitalize on the misery of their own people. It was also said that Calcutta’s wealthier citizens treated the proliferation of beggars as a civic nuisance. Linlithgow had been hesitant to interfere, it was held, not wanting to undermine the principle of regional autonomy. But he hadn’t hesitated to arrest twenty elected members of the Bengal Provincial Assembly. And the British governor of Bengal hadn’t hesitated to force the leader of the majority ministry out of office after he promised an investigation into the gang rape of dozens of women in three villages of Midnapore district by hundreds of police officers and soldiers. Such moves had cynically empowered Muslim League gangsters like Shaheed Suhrawardy. Shaheed used his access to relief supplies to consolidate his power.

  When the House of Commons finally met to discuss the famine in November, only fifty-three MPs attended. A member of the Bengal Assembly noted, “This knocks the bottom out of the old superstition that these 600 and odd men can govern India from 7,000 miles away. Is it not time that this Punch and Judy show was ended?”

  When the famine was reaching its end, one of the 43,600 American soldiers arriving in the city, the writer Howard Fast, asked the new host of the Parichay adda, a trade unionist, for his thoughts. At first the man was silent. Then he told him a story.

  One night the whining drone of women and cries of children for rice water came in through his window. He did not get up from the table where he and three fellow unionists were eating their one meal of the day. He asked Fast what he would have done.

  “I would have given the poor devils my dinner.”

  “We did not give them our dinner,” the trade unionist said. “And in the morning five dead bodies were on my doorstep, two women and three children.”

  Fast didn’t know what to say.

  “Those five would have died anyway, a day later, two days later,” the trade unionist went on. “And they will die like that until India is free. There is always a price put on freedom, and part of the price we pay is to stay alive.”

  According to many accounts of the famine, an estimated one hundred thousand destitute flocked to Calcutta in search of food. Sudhin would later write that when Air Raid Precautions bomb shelters were taken over by the starving, they were turned into relief kitchens. It was characteristic of him not to mention that he was instrumental in this, as by then he was director of ARP. Then there is this. In the wake of the uproar over the Statesman’s photographs, the dying began to be forcibly removed from the streets. On the insistence of the governor of Bengal, an ordinance—the Bengal Destitute Persons (Repatriation and Relief)—was passed in late October. Under this Orwellian “improvement scheme,” forty-three thousand “sick destitutes” were packed into vans and driven back to the countryside to die outside public view. To evade patrols, the starving often died hiding in stairwells. After the war Sudhin would tell Louis MacNeice that the famished often found their way into the stairwells of the apartment building on Russell Street where he had a new flat.

  Sudhin left no account of the Bengal famine. Many years later he would sit at a desk in Chicago trying to write the story of his life, the story of the city he both hated and loved. He left his Chicago fellowship midway, never having progressed in his writing beyond his childhood. And just as his delicacy barred him from speaking of the reasons for his despair, pride stopped him from writing about what Calcutta went through during those years. Nobility and shame conspired to silence him. Sudhin would tell Louis that at the famine’s peak two thousand dead were removed from the streets every day, but not what it was like to be greeted each morning with loudspeakers on trucks crisscrossing the city, calling for people to clear the dead from their doorsteps.

  It is inconceivable that Sudhin regarded the dying as a civic nuisance. Imagine him instead in his navy blue ARP uniform, stopping in the stairwell with a plate of rice for its tenants. In that brief moment of proximity and intimacy, there would be an exchange of some sort, a nod or greeting. Or they would simply smell the food and he would smell them. And then Sudhin would continue on his way, backing his car smartly out of the drive, a smile covering his face like a mask.

  Shipments of grain and rice began to arrive in 1944 but the death toll continued to rise. Station platforms in the countryside remained crowded with the starving. A bumper rice crop came in but in many villages no one was left to harvest it; skeletons littered the paddy fields of Chittagong, Midnapore, and Mymensingh districts. The new viceroy kept up a drumbeat for more grain shipments, but the War Cabinet decided that eighteen Australian ships laden with wheat should bypass a starving Bengal to enhance the stockpiles awaiting the liberation of the Greeks and the Yugoslavs. For these men it went without saying that some lives were worth more than others. An estimated 3.5 million Bengalis died of starvation, typhoid, cholera, malaria, and dysentery, possibly far more. They were the truly vanquished, sacrificed by design and willed indifference.

  Was it a coincidence that in the midst of the famine England’s debt to India had reached £800 million? Until mid-1943, the repatriation of India’s long-term debt to England had kept sterling balances in check, but after that the debt exploded. Churchill demanded to know why India couldn’t be charged the equivalent for having been saved from the Japanese (as if India had been stoutly defended instead of violently policed). But India paid for its own defense, Amery explained. By then England had extracted more from India than he ever imagined possible; even Linlithgow had judged India to be at the breaking point. While J. M. Keynes was telling Churchill the Crown might repudiate England’s debt or arrive at some scaled-down sum after the war, Churchill was telling Amery to inform India he would reserve the right to renege. Perhaps Churchill feared that to honor such a debt might one day oblige the Crown to acknowledge that England owed something of its survival to India. He needn’t have worried.

  Instead, in one of his arias, Churchill warned that India was threate
ning England with starvation. The British workingman would be reduced to rags, enslaved to filthy-rich Indian mill owners, he roared, were the deficit in sterling balances to be honored. In November 1943, on the eve of another meeting on grain shipments, Churchill’s minister of food had suggested that after the war India might “spend her huge hoards of sterling on buying food and thus increase the population still more.” “They breed like rabbits,” Churchill echoed, complaining to his private secretary that Indians were “a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.” If RAF Bomber Command could have spared the bombers, he said he would have happily done to India what he’d done to Hamburg.

  This was power in the shadow of its end.

  Meanwhile, the British public was informed that in anticipation of Europe’s liberation, their chocolate rations would be cut.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Boy Falling Out of the Sky

  30 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park, London,

  Boxing Day, December 26, 1943

  For twenty months Michael Spender had flown restlessly between airfields. He reviewed covers, briefed pilots, and sent them back out. He kept his eyes on the entire theater; a view captured in an unending series of filmstrips, unwound, cut, and enlarged into five-by-five-inch prints. He was so focused on tiny changes to the industrial and military infrastructure of Nazi-occupied Europe that he had no time to reflect. He stayed up so many nights his face took on a deathly pallor. An old case of malaria flared up. His hair became more salt than pepper. His cornflower-blue eyes turned gray, acquiring the same hunted look as his mother’s had during the Great War.

  Was that a camouflaged battleship? What might a fake haystack hide? By studying the wake of a cruising vessel Michael could calculate its speed and direction so that Bomber Command might find it again. If he needed a closer view there was a risky flying maneuver called dicing. A Spitfire would dive down through cloud cover, photograph obliquely, and zoom back up before fighter planes could be scrambled. Reconnaissance planes had perfected nighttime photography, with a lead aircraft flying low and dropping flash bombs. The photographs they took provided the next installment in the game of ships, submarines, armies, and aircraft moving like chess pieces over a vast board of land and water.

  There was always a flap when a ship he’d been keeping his eye on suddenly vanished. The disappearance of the Bismarck became a “permanent super-flap.” There had been a panic about the battleship getting loose in the Atlantic, as the Admiral Scheer, Admiral Hipper, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau had. RAF St. Eval reconnaissance aircraft flew out, scanning for a sight of the Bismarck in shipyards and docks in and around Brest, the German-occupied Channel ports, and even the Atlantic, while planes from Wick scoured the vast North Sea, from Statlandet in the Shetland Narrows on down the Norwegian coast. There was shouting over bad telephone connections and no rest for anyone until the Bismarck was sighted and sunk.

  Under the press of work, spit and polish fell by the wayside; Michael didn’t always bathe. His imperious voice carried over everyone’s desks. He was brusque with new arrivals, treating them like pieces of luggage. He made no secret of his belief that half of the unit’s personnel were useless. He kept three kittens at RAF Benson in South Oxfordshire, oblivious to a fuming group captain who would bat at them with a rolled-up newspaper. He played classical music on the rec room’s piano. Long nights never made up for absences. He was often caught out.

  However exasperating Michael found official ineptitude, he always held out hope that once the promised reorganization of his unit got under way, the final acronym settled upon, and the civilian nucleus of Harold “One-Eyed” Hemming’s Aircraft Operating Company fully absorbed into RAF Medmenham, all inefficiencies would be discovered and all the idiots removed. When a new commanding officer arrived, he thought that time had come. But the man understood nothing! Red tape doubled the time it took to write reports. Michael railed at the way certain men acquired large RAF contracts. Though their unit remained short of skilled personnel, his former squadron leader, a man with more experience interpreting than anyone, was put on a list of officers “for disposal.”

  After that, Michael spent as little time as possible at Benson. St. Eval was only marginally better. It was under constant bombardment, as if the Germans knew exactly what went on there. Wick, on the northeast coast of Scotland, was more congenial. To get there from St. Eval, Michael would fly up the Welsh coast. From the cockpit he could look across the Minch to see the Hebrides looking something like the map Nancy had done for Louis’s book. Once, the pilot ceded him the controls and cavalierly fell asleep.

  Fraternizing between civilian officers and RAF pilots was frowned upon. Michael ignored this; he was as bewitched by them as he had been by the Eskimo, Sherpas, and Baltis. After six pints of local ale they would lose their reserve and describe to him what it was like to fly over the North Sea. He eavesdropped on their arguments over whether Blenheims could be rolled and marveled at the rituals with which they appeased the gremlins inhabiting their aircraft. These machines were so delicate, he once explained to Stephen, they couldn’t help acting up. When they hooted at his affection for the humble and slow Moth, he flushed like a girl. It was a Wick pilot who finally found the Bismarck, a tiny kayak shape hidden in the filigree of one of over a thousand Norwegian fjords.

  One night the mess loudspeaker announced that a Spitfire and a Blenheim carrying a pilot Michael was fond of had failed to return. The mess fell into a helpless silence. Airmen, like the Eskimo, were filled with superstitions. They shared the Eskimo’s reluctance to talk of the dead. And when, three hours overdue, the Spitfire miraculously reported in, a tide of elation surged through camp, leaving his friend’s Blenheim entirely forgotten. Four nights later eight aircraft, out on minor missions, went missing. And so it went.

  It had felt dishonorable to be living a charmed life among men who were almost certain to be killed. If he could have wangled a seat, Michael might have been relieved of the shame that assaulted him whenever a plane failed to return. When his name went up on the unit roll of honor as “Mentioned in Despatches” he was mortified to find himself listed alongside pilots who had won Distinguished Flying Crosses.

  In the second winter of the war Michael lay in his sleeping bag on a hard airman’s bed and thought of Nancy. She had rung him up one day, inviting him for coffee. In the course of their conversation he’d asked her to explain why the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force girls at the factory should be so ready to give him their all when he really only needed two-thirds. She had laughed at him. He persisted; he really wanted to know what he was missing. This made her laugh even more. After having quite a lot to drink, they found themselves kissing madly in his parked car.

  Now, he wondered: Were the pipes still frozen and if so where was Nancy taking her baths? When the Thames overflowed its banks, when water streamed down the walls at Benson and mushrooms sprouted in the barrack’s dark corners, he recalled her love of baths. When spring failed to arrive by Easter, when he’d grown tired of a life that had him living with her in patches instead of all the time, the thought of her warmed him. He found it strange that the simple thought of another person could light him up like a stove. And when the wireless reported bombs falling heavily on London he put aside his pocket stereoscope to write her a letter:

  “Do lie low, my love…. p.s. You took my pajamas.”

  At Station 49 in Camden Town, Nancy also had a pallet and a sleeping bag. She would answer Michael’s letters in the middle of the night sitting by the phone waiting for an ambulance call. Around her drivers and attendants lay snoring on stretchers. That first winter she had found her way back to Upper Park Road, house number 30, first floor. She had hung curtains and sewn a new bedspread for the double bed in the corner of the living room. When Juliet and Miranda visited from her mother’s they were impressed by her newfound patience and domesticity.

  If, on the phone with Michael, Nancy spoke in an Old Testament voice he would k
now that the girl who spelled casualty with a K in the ambulance station’s incident book was listening. She wrote him of arriving home one afternoon and remembering there was snow in the back garden. She’d fired up the stove and flung open the window to paint the view for two hours with her coat on. There were lunches with Bill (an official war artist) and dates with Stephen and Louis. But if the weather deteriorated, she would cancel on any one of them at the drop of a hat. Michael could only work when the skies were clear.

  Throughout the long winter and spring of 1941 she had sketched Michael reading the newspaper, sketched him leaning over a sink washing his face. She drew his shoes. A drawing showed him at work, one hand grasping his jaw, thumb in cheek, a pencil laced in his fingers.

  It was up to Michael. She could always be found, no? With a little vision our hero might arrange a meeting, yes? Would that not be a treat? And in reply, Michael Spender’s arms reached out and closed around her. She drew their bodies clasped together like hands in supplication. And when they parted, she to her station and he to his airfields, their letters kept up their conversation. When the summer of 1941 finally arrived, Michael wished he could stop the war for a week so they could spend more than a night together.

  And then, in late summer, the war had stopped for him. Thinking the notice he’d received must be a clerical error, he’d gone from office to office to sort things out. Finally, the assistant director (photo intelligence) informed him his services were no longer needed. Michael turned to his commanding officer, who consulted the director of intelligence. Would it affect operations if Michael Spender left the service? the DI had asked. “Definitely yes,” his CO had replied. Michael should remain in his post while his application for an honorary commission, intended for the handful of civilians the RAF deemed critical for the war effort, proceeded.