With her father now back in India and the boys settled in school, Sheila and her mother embarked on a shopping spree for the gaieties ahead in Madras. The first priority was evening dresses for balls and parties; Sheila’s two favourites were a dress in red taffeta and a wonderful confection of white velvet and chiffon, which Glad said would be perfect for balls at Government House. Arriving in India in September 1929, with six stylish dresses apiece, they were soon known as the most fashionably dressed women in South India.
Sheila, young, beautiful and, as one of that season’s intake of Fishing Fleet girls, a novelty, soon had a wonderful time. She was plunged straight into the heart of Madras society: Glad and Hinkie were enormously popular and famous for their parties, often giving dinners for thirty people. They were also close friends of the previous Governor of Madras, Lord Willingdon,* and Lady Willingdon, a closeness that continued with the advent of the new Governor, so Sheila, along with her parents, was invited to all the events at Government House. Such was the protocol, with its immediate downgrading of everyone in ‘trade’, that those in Government service, like Hinkie, went in through a private entrance for banquets and parties; those in ‘commerce’ had a different door.
The Hingstons’ closeness to the Government House circle meant that Sheila quickly got to know all the ADCs, one of whom taught her to ride on the enormous Madras Guards troop horses – there was a riding school at Government House. She took to it – a skill that would later stand her in good stead.
Her social diary was packed. She dined and danced at the Adyar Club and strolled on its lawns sloping down to the river, played golf and tennis, was taken rowing on the river, went to the races and spent evenings at friends’ dinner parties. Another boyfriend taught her how to drive and there was also one of British India’s favourite recreations, amateur theatricals.
Her family owned a house in Ootacamund, the hill station for Madras – her mother had bought it with the proceeds of the sale of a tea plantation – so when the hot weather began in July Sheila and her mother moved there, with her father arriving for the occasional week when he could manage to get away. It was here, in Ooty, that Sheila’s fate was decided.
Ooty was extremely social. Sheila hunted, played golf and went to parties in the Maharaja of Mysore’s house (where musical chairs was a popular game), at the club, with its parquet floors, rosewood furniture and ballroom bedecked with tiger, leopard and bear skins and the heads of bison, deer and sambur, and at Government House, where the uniformed Government House band would play. There, one evening, at a hunt ball, she spotted a tall and handsome man leaning against the bar chatting to friends. His appearance attracted her at once. ‘He’s bound to be married,’ she thought to herself pessimistically. ‘All the nice ones are.’
Later that week she saw the good-looking stranger, again, once more with a crowd of friends, at the Golf Club, on the outskirts of Ooty. Here, because everyone knew everyone, she was introduced to him and discovered that his name was George Reade but that he was universally known as Jerry – and that he was a bachelor. She wondered if she would see him again; with luck, yes, as Ooty was a social place and their paths had already crossed twice.
Shortly afterwards a high-ranking friend in the ICS gave a party at the Ooty Club where seating at dinner was arranged by the simple method of putting papers with all the men’s names in a hat, each woman drawing one out. Luck was now definitely on Sheila’s side: out of all the scraps of paper in the hat, her mother had drawn the one with Jerry’s name on it, and did not need much persuasion to swap it for the one her daughter was holding.
Sheila, at the age where first love strikes hard and fast, found Jerry just as fascinating as a partner for the evening as she had thought him at first glance. He was a tea planter on the Stanmore Estate in the Annamallais (the Elephant Hills) and older than her by eleven years. Although women found him attractive he was very much a man’s man, with interests that were mainly sporting – hunting, shooting and fishing. The outdoor life in the Annamallais suited him down to the ground.
These hills were still a wild, untamed area, a paradise for both naturalists and keen shots. As their name denotes, there were elephants. Bison herds often roamed the swamps in the tea fields – frequently scaring the tea coolies on their way to morning muster at 6.30 – and there were periodic visits by herds of wild pigs. There were no jackals as these were kept away by the packs of wild red dogs. Of the smaller animals, porcupines were a pest, but good to eat. In the teak forests below lived the Indian sloth bear, tigers, panthers, huge herds of spotted deer, monkeys, mongooses and squirrels, civet cats, tiger cats and panther cats. Birds abounded, from the grey Junglefowl (ancestor of our domestic poultry) to bulbuls, giant black serpent eagles, kites, kestrels, harriers and their chief prey, pigeons of different sorts.
The isolation did not worry Jerry. The odd bursts of gaiety at Ooty were enough for him. The previous year his sister Joan had been a member of the Fishing Fleet, coming out to stay with him, and they had had a week in Ooty to the delight of their mother, who must have wondered if Joan would find a mate on Ooty’s lively social circuit. ‘I can’t tell you how glad we are that you may get a chance of seeing such a lovely hill station and enjoying the parties of a Hunt week & Government House Ball,’ she wrote to Joan. ‘It is all thrilling. I quite know what you feel about clothes for such an auspicious occasion and we will do the best we can. The sales will be on the 1st week in July and I shall go up for a browse round. What do you think of a gold colour? It always suited you, or a flowered chiffon? You could not go in a black frock to the G.H. Ball, I think.’
At home in Sussex the two daughters of a family friend who lived nearby were both keen on Jerry and, although he rather liked the younger one, serious thoughts of marriage had not yet entered his head. Now he had met Sheila he wanted to see more of her but, as the Annamallais were a hundred miles away from Ooty across the plain, his visits were necessarily few.
After Glad returned to England to be with the boys, Sheila moved into an hotel in Ooty. Jerry came over from Stanmore as often as he could to see her and they used to hunt together. One of his friends said he could never remember seeing Jerry off a horse and in horse-mad Jerry’s eyes it was a huge mark in Sheila’s favour that she went so well to hounds.
In other ways he was not always the romantic lover of a young woman’s dreams. In true Raj male style,* he would visit his beloved hounds before going on to see Sheila; when she remonstrated at the order of his priorities, he would simply remark gently that he loved them both very much but in different ways. And when he first wrote to her when she returned to Madras, he would dictate his letters to his clerk, who would type them up for signature. ‘Dear Sheila,’ these cheerful little notes would begin, ending ‘Yours ever’.
By March 1931 hints of his feelings began to trickle out. ‘You were just in time with that letter! I was beginning to think that you didn’t like me any more. Probably quite true, too …’. And on 29 March: ‘Morning Sheila dear, Thank you so much for your letter. I wasn’t ticking you off in the least, I only wanted to know if I still had your “luv”. I can well believe Madras is sweltering, even up here at 4,000 feet the heat is too – – for words and everyone is getting very short-tempered as a result. The sooner we get some rain the better it will be for all concerned. We have had to stop polo as the ground is like steel.’
Throughout April and early May Jerry’s focus was entirely on hunting, but the letters continued. ‘I hear you have just started hunting,’ on 27 April. And on 2 May: ‘Do you know Ireland well? I’m fixing up to put in 10 days in November at a place called Kilcreene Lodge, Kilkenny, where one can hunt 6 days a week with the Kilkenny, Waterford, Carlow, Tipperary or Kildare. I’ve never hunted in Ireland before, and have always wanted to have a “go” at their banks and stone walls, but this is the first time that opportunity has offered. I imagine that it must be quite different from hunting in England, and I have no doubt but that I shall be up-ended in som
e of their ditches before the finish. Cheerio, old girl, don’t go and overtire yourself with these rehearsals. Thine …’.
After his next visit to Ooty, feelings for Sheila rather than horses or hounds crept in. ‘It was lovely seeing you again, Sheila, and still lovelier to think that I shall see you again so shortly,’ he wrote on 15 May. This next visit was the pivotal one; and his letter showed that they had reached an understanding (Sheila said later that he had never actually proposed but simply assumed they would get married). ‘My Darling,’ he wrote after leaving her. ‘This is hell! I came down the ghat yesterday in such a temper that I could hardly speak and woke up this morning in a worse one if anything. Thank God, it is only for a fairly short time, otherwise I don’t think I could stand it.’
The moment marriage was agreed between them, Jerry wrote to Hinkie. ‘I wrote to your father this morning (I send a copy for what it’s worth).’ I didn’t say much as it seemed to me there was nothing much to be said beyond a straightforward statement of facts, and am quite sure that he didn’t want to be burdened with the vapourings of someone who is violently in love. . . . The social life up here is nearly as bad as at Ooty. I appear to be dining out five nights this week. But it keeps me from brooding which is something.’
However, passion did not prevent him giving news of the pack. ‘Hounds are all fit and they killed the hunt before last. All love, sweetheart.’
On 12 June he was able to write joyously: ‘My darling – we’re off. I had the most awfully nice letter from your fond father. No one could have asked for a nicer letter or a fairer one . . . Sheila darling, I could dance for joy. I must admit that whilst waiting for his reply I felt rather as if waiting for the starter’s flag to drop in a steeplechase at home on a bitterly cold March afternoon when the clouds are about 100 ft up, it’s raining, one’s saddle is damp, the reins are slippery, one’s teeth are chattering, one’s clad to all intents and purposes in a bathing dress and the first fence looks ten feet high and as black as Erebus. However the flag has dropped, and we’ve landed over the first fence, galloping, and with six inches to spare. Forrard on, and the devil take the hindmost.’
Deeply in love as he was, Jerry was aware that the life on his isolated tea plantation that suited him so well might not be to the taste of a nineteen-year-old girl who had only left England a year earlier and who was accustomed to the rich social life in the best circles of Madras and Ooty. ‘God knows what you will think of this Club on a Saturday night,’ he wrote. ‘Still, one has one’s own friends and doesn’t bother about the rest. All love, sweetheart mine, your very loving, Jerry.’
Sheila had better see for herself, he thought, and preferably when things were at their worst, so that she would know what she would be in for. So he invited her up to the Annamallais, in the height of the monsoon, when four inches of rain a day* fell out of the sky. She stayed, of course, with married friends of his, as anything else would have been unthinkable, even for an engaged couple, in those days of chaperonage.
It was a brave move: not only the beauty of the landscape but the inevitability of a solitary life would be laid before her. Sheila grasped this at once, thinking to herself: ‘How on earth am I going to stick this? What am I going to do all day?’ She nearly broke off the engagement but her passionate love for Jerry swayed the balance. With the optimism of youth and the stoicism of a daughter of the Raj she thought that if she ‘gritted her teeth’ it would be all right.
The next step was for Jerry to meet her father – her mother was still in England. Hinkie gave the young couple a big engagement party in Madras, partly as a test for Sheila’s hitherto unknown fiancé; Hinkie believed that you could always tell a man’s true colours when he was drunk. In pursuance of this theory he plied Jerry with drink all evening but at about two in the morning he took Sheila to one side to say: ‘I’m giving up. He simply gets politer and more charming the more I give him to drink.’
Sheila and Jerry had cabled Glad in England when they got engaged. Glad smartly cabled back, with the warning: ‘Do be careful.’ From the perspective of many years of marriage, she knew how lonely her daughter would be in the Annamallais, miles from anywhere, when the first intoxication of passion had worn off. Sheila, now twenty, was a very young bride, used to a social life with people of her own age and tastes – and Jerry’s life was bound up in hunting, shooting, fishing and his work as a tea planter, with its long hours out of doors and away from his house. But Sheila’s mind was made up.
Both Sheila and Jerry were anxious to marry in England so that both families could be present. It was only on the ship, found Sheila, that she and Jerry really got to know each other. As in many Raj courtships, especially where distance was involved, they had only met comparatively few times, a dozen at most; and, difficult as it is, perhaps, for us to realise now, when they were courting they were always surrounded by others – at parties, at the club, in the hunting field. Among strangers on the ship, they could be together undisturbed.
Their wedding took place on 14 January 1932 at the beautiful Nash church of All Souls, Langham Place, with a reception at the nearby Langham Hotel, London’s first grand hotel, made famous by – among others – Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Anna Neagle and (a few years later) Wallis Simpson. Sheila was an all-white bride, from her satin dress with train and bouquet of white carnations and lilies of the valley to the orange blossom that held her white lace veil in place. Even here, with the bride an ethereal vision, hunting had its place, in the two little figures in hunting clothes mounted on bay horses, representing bride and groom, on top of the wedding cake.
The newlyweds went back to India by ship and Sheila settled down to her new life on the tea plantation; home leave, which they always tried to coincide with the hunting season, was only every four years. For the first few years there was no electricity or running water; sanitation was by thunderbox or outside privies (‘long drops’), water was brought by the water carrier and heated in two-gallon drums over wood fires for the evening bath and lighting was by oil lamps and candles. Most basic supplies came from the estate bazaar; tinned food could be ordered from Madras city but was so expensive that it was only an occasional luxury. There were plenty of small chickens and the butcher killed a sheep every week; fish, though, was unobtainable and no one ever ate pig or cow. Yet even though alone, they still changed for dinner every night – Jerry in a dinner jacket and Sheila in evening dress – because, as she later told her daughter: ‘It was felt that one must keep up standards and not let oneself go native.’
At first Sheila would ride round the tea gardens with Jerry, but as he settled back into the demands of his work and former life the lack of occupation that had worried her during her engagement made itself felt. ‘There was absolutely nothing to do,’ she later told her daughter. ‘Nothing.’ The Annamallais were breathtakingly beautiful, the climate excellent – rather that of a ski resort when the sun is out – but for a young bride one vital essential was missing: other people.
She longed for a friend but the nearest white woman lived five miles away. Often, desperate for companionship, Sheila would walk the five miles through the tea plantations to see her and then walk back. She took up tapestry work but it occupied only so much of the day; she asked Jerry ‘Can I have a piano?’ but gave up the idea when he replied, astonished, ‘Whatever for?’ There was an awful moment when he forgot her twenty-first birthday – ‘he was very thoughtful but it just slipped his mind on the day and I didn’t like to remind him,’ she said later. Instead, she got unhappily on a horse and rode the fifteen miles to the house of great friends, the Ireland-Joneses. ‘You poor thing,’ said Mrs Ireland-Jones. ‘We must celebrate.’ All she had to hand was a tin of pears, a luxury from Madras, which they opened and ate.
But Sheila was a true daughter of the Raj, brave and uncomplaining – grumbling, she thought, was boring and tedious. Instead, she simply got on with things. As the years passed, life became a bit more social. When the Anamallais Club was founded
the Reades would go there and play tennis, and Sheila would sometimes play golf (Jerry did not play); and on Saturday nights they would visit it regularly, as did everyone within reach. On short leaves they would go hunting together in Ooty, Sheila riding side-saddle (she normally rode astride), which gave a firmer seat. ‘She went like the wind,’ said Jerry proudly.
Sheila’s eldest daughter, Diana, was born in the spring of 1933. India did not really suit her. As a small child she had boils under her arms and her legs were always swathed in bandages because every time she was bitten by an insect the bite would turn septic. Hinkie, by now one of the most senior and respected physicians in the subcontinent, told Sheila that that his granddaughter would never be really well in India and would be much better off in England, with its temperate climate and almost total freedom from biting insects. This brought the familiar Raj dilemma sharply into focus several years earlier than expected: to go to England with her child – or to stay India with Jerry.
Staying with Jerry won; and the bandaging continued until their next home leave, in 1939, when Diana was to go to school, as a boarder at St George’s, Ascot – a Raj child, like her mother and grandmother before her. Sheila’s wretchedness at leaving her six-year-old daughter was tempered by the fact that Jerry’s sister Joan, who had been teaching at Heathfield, was now at St George’s and so would be able to keep an eye on Diana, and that Diana would be able to spend her holidays staying with Joan and her grandfather in Sussex.
But while all of them were in England war was declared. Sheila and Jerry had to return when their leave was over and, as Sheila wrote later: ‘It was the worst day of my life leaving Diana behind and not knowing when I would see her again.’ As they left during the first months of war – known as the ‘phoney war’ – when leaflets rather than bombs were being dropped over Germany, there was no way of knowing that the war would last six long years.
The Fishing Fleet Page 35