Cobra in the Bath
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COBRA IN THE BATH
COBRA IN THE BATH
Adventures in Less Travelled Lands
Miles Morland
To Georgia, for whom the adventure never ended
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
‘Ulysses’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Contents
PART I: Cobra in the Bath
1Cobra in the Bath
2India
3Welcome to England
4Dakota to Tehran
5Mahmoudieh and the Great Kanat Disaster
6A Persian Education
7Trouble on Ferdozeh Boulevard
8Midnight in Meshed
9I Set Fire to Rustumobad
10Cars and Boats and Trains and Planes
11On the Argonaut
12Baghdad Days
PART II: The Door Closes
13Locked Up in Berkshire
14Let Out in Oxford
PART III: The Grown-Up World
15On the Beach in Greece
16My Brilliant Career
17Gassed in Washington, Married in London
18The Garden Shed
19No Dinner in Bucharest
PART IV: I Buy a Motorbike
20Transit to Turkey
21The Great Ghana Trade
22Man Has Accident in Muscat
23Beirut
24Blood in the New York Gutters
25Starting Again
26Ambushed in Abyssinia
27Return from the Madagascan Tomb
28Georgie’s Last Adventure
29Breakfast in Baghdad
30Doing the Hand Flap
31Vroom Vroom
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
PART I
COBRA IN THE BATH
1
Cobra in the Bath
There is a cobra in the bath. It is coiled round the big square plughole that drains through the wall into the garden; it has slithered up there looking for shade in the heat of the Delhi afternoon. Its head wavers up to look at the small freckly English boy who has come into the bathroom and disturbed its sleep. For a very short time boy and snake look at each other motionless.
Then with a scream so loud that it starts the crows from the dunghill, the boy runs from the room, slamming the door behind him. ‘Cobra, cobra. Cobra in bath,’ he cries. Turmoil. Ma comes running; the ayah comes clucking out of the boys’ bedroom; brother Michael comes running and, close behind, one-legged stepfather JRC comes clippity-hop on his crutch with the twelve-bore under the crutch-free arm. The lodger sidles round the door wearing his usual shifty leer, and flocks of white-pyjamaed servants materialise looking concerned. They are concerned not for the safety of the small sobbing boy but for the snake. Cobras are sacred animals; its death could bring down a mountain of bad luck on the household.
Ma throws open the door to the bathroom and marches in. The small boy hangs back trembling. JRC stuffs two cartridges into the twelve-bore and hops clip-clack past into the room, gun a-cock. The ayah clucks, the white pyjamaed servants chatter and strain forward. No cobra. It is gone, off to join the crows in the shade by the dunghill, where its mate lives and where it will not be disturbed by small boys coming to use the thunderbox in the middle of the afternoon.
I am the small boy. I was four at the time. I can picture the scene in all its intensity today but I have to admit that I cannot really remember it. I have heard the Cobra in the Bath story so many times that each part of the story is rich with detail but, try as I can, I cannot conjure up the real memory.
That is my Indian childhood: a collection of vivid mental snapshots, shot with heat, colour, light, tumult and the smell of spice. Which snapshots are real and which only seem real because of my mother’s story-telling abilities is hard to say. The memories jostle and jumble for mind-room in no particular order, and the things I cannot remember, like the cobra in the bath, seem as real as the things like the duck shoot, the car rolling over and the crow that stole my cake, which I know I can remember.
2
India
We left India – Ma, my father, brother Michael and I – in 1946 to return to the chill world of post-war England. Grey the only colour there. No light or heat. I was two; Michael was just five. My parents’ marriage was all but over by then; they were returning to England with the prospect of divorce, but we travelled back as a family. In 1946 there were no berths on ships returning to England for civilians travelling by themselves.
The story of how I was born I have heard so many times that I can picture it in the finest detail. It was December 1943. My father, a lieutenant commander at that time in the Royal Indian Navy, was commanding a destroyer whose home port was Vizagapatam, a naval base halfway down the right-hand side of India. The year 1943 saw Henry Morland RIN, or Bunny as he was universally known, pacing the bridge of his destroyer as he quartered the Bay of Bengal in search of marauding Hun or Jap. Why my father was called Bunny I never thought to ask. In retrospect it seems a strange name for an athletic six-foot naval officer. After my parents divorced, hungry for detail of my father’s war, I asked Ma if he had destroyed anything in his destroyer.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a submarine.’
‘Good for Daddy. Did he get a medal?’
To a small boy in the 1940s, medals were important.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was an English submarine.’
‘Oh no. What happened?’
‘Well,’ said Ma, ‘no one ever really found out. His boat dropped some depth charges on a submarine, and not long after bits and pieces came floating up. When they reported this back to Vizag, they were told that no one knew anything about German or Japanese submarines in the area but an English one had gone missing.’
‘Oh. Poor Daddy. What did they do to him?’
‘Nothing. They never proved anything, and as it was the middle of the war they didn’t see much point in making a fuss. Everyone was far too worried that they were going to wake up to find hordes of Japs raping their womenfolk and bayoneting the ayah. Old Buns was never much good as an active sailor. Much better on land. What he enjoyed was gallivanting around at cocktail parties in Bombay being aide-de-camp to an admiral and looking glamorous in his white uniform. He was frightfully good at that. It came as a nasty shock to him when the war broke out and he had to go and do something.’
Whether the alleged sinking was before or after my birth I do not know. My father was home, presumably on leave, at the time of my birth. The family album shows a photograph of him at the christening in the glamorous white uniform and standing on the Doric-columned steps of the Raj church in Vizag. The dozen or so people in the christening party have cheery smiles on their faces, none more so than my mother. This is peculiar as she has always insisted that she was extremely ill both while carrying me and at the time of my birth. She was suffering, she said, from various tropical diseases, none of which were susceptible to diagnosis by Vizag’s only European doctor, Hamish, who had delivered me a few days before the christening.
Everyone in the picture looks happy but brother Michael, then almost three. He, also wearing a white uniform, is lurking in front of the smiling godparents. It looks as if he is hiding something behind his back, possibly concealing a murder weapon for use against his newly arrived younger brother as soon as the ayah’s attention could be distracted.
I was born at home. Ma had had Michael almost three years earlier in Karachi Hospital.
‘I wasn’t going through that nonsense all over again. You’ve never seen such a place. And in any case Vizag didn’t have a proper hospital.’ Ma had great confidence in Hamish as a doctor despite his inability to diagnose her illnesses. That was lucky as otherwise the nearest European doctor was in Madras, some 400 miles away. There were no European midwives in Vizag either; they had been sent off to be nurses in military hospitals. The thought of having an Indian doctor to assist at the birth did not appeal to my mother. ‘I wasn’t going to have some Indian makee-learn poking around in my bits and pieces thank you very much. Anyhow, it wasn’t necessary because Hamish was one of the best doctors I came across in India, and we had him sitting on our doorstep in Vizag. Well, he was a jolly good doctor until he had had a couple. He did like his drink.’
He was not quite on the doorstep. He lived the other side of Vizag. When my mother finally went into labour, on the evening of 18 December, a servant was dispatched to find Dr Hamish. He returned an hour later. No doctor. Things were becoming more urgent by now. ‘Buns was flapping around being completely useless so I sent him off to find Hamish. Hours went by. Finally just as you were about to pop out, Buns and Hamish appeared together. I’m sure they had stopped off for a couple on the way. They arrived at about exactly the same time as you. Anyhow, Hamish took charge, got you cleaned up and Buns took care of the drinks. God knows what we were drinking. Indian whisky probably. We had quite a party. Hamish must have stayed all night. We were all completely pie-eyed in the morning.’
Ma maintained that I spent the first year of my life grubbing around naked on Vizag beach. Because I never wore any clothes I am reputed to have grown fur all over my body by the time we left Vizag halfway through 1944. The photographs of this period in the album do not bear this out. In most, it is true, I am naked and grubbing around on the beach, but in some I am wearing what must have been my favourite, and possibly only, article of clothing, a pair of white dungarees decorated with pictures of Scottie dogs. There is no evidence of fur. The only exceptional thing about me was that I was almost globular. I must have needed chocks to prevent me rolling down the beach. This may have been caused by my diet. My mother’s undiagnosed tropical diseases meant that she was unable to breastfeed me. The shops of Vizag, five years into the war, lacked any kind of artificial milk or other items of what Westerners consider appropriate baby food. Consequently I was brought up, said Ma, on ground-up chicken food from the bazaar. Judging by my size and girth aged one, it made a fine diet.
Later in 1944 we moved from Vizag to Madras, as a result of my father being posted there by the navy. My parents quickly made friends in wartime Madras. One, Daphne Economou, wrote an evocative memoir of growing up called Saturday’s Child. She remembers this story from war-time Madras.
Apart from the military men, couples and families arrived from the north, and Madras became a hub of social activity. There were the Morlands, Bunny and Susan, with their two red-headed little boys, Michael and Miles. They were a sensational couple to look at and were labelled ‘great fun’, a phrase that echoed the false gaiety of that precarious time. Everybody knew it was now or never, the foxtrot was all the rage and the song was ‘Anything Goes’. Nobody I have ever known looked as elegant in a morning coat and grey top hat as Bunny, but it was Susan with her delightful exuberance who made all the difference.
The arrival of Susan became one of the Madras legends. Bunny had come ahead and Susan wired that she was setting out from somewhere up north with the two boys, two bearers, two wolfhounds and fifteen trunks. At the appointed day and hour, Bunny went to the station to meet his family. The train arrived, but there was no sign of Susan, the boys, the bearers, the wolfhounds or the trunks. Bunny was in a frenzy of anxiety and began to receive condolences, like a bereaved widower.
There had been a series of dacoit [bandit] episodes on trains, with lurid tales of cut throats and slaughtered children. Wires were sent to every stationmaster along the line, but no one had seen the Morland family, until a few days later, when they all arrived totally unscathed. The story according to Susan was that there was this young officer travelling down to Madras on the same train to join his regiment. ‘Bound to be killed, poor chap. So why not give him a last happy fling . . .?’ They had all got off at some nameless station and spent a couple of blissful days and nights, boys, bearers, wolfhounds, trunks and all . . .
That was Susan. She could have had any one of the husbands she wanted, including my father, but she never broke up a marriage. She had something called ‘panache’.
I have often wondered what the state of my parents’ marriage was when we left Vizag. I never heard my father’s side of the story; the little pieces of evidence all come from my mother, and she was, for her, unusually vague. It was in Madras that Ma met Johnny Caldwell, the one-legged Scotsman with the shotgun, the man who was later to be her second husband. JRC, for Johnny was universally known in the family by his initials, was in India working for J & P Coats, the Paisley textile firm whose thread was sold in every corner of the British empire. JRC, perhaps because of his dour, God-fearing, Lowland Scots background, was the very opposite of dour and God-fearing. He sang, he flirted, he played the piano, he told long jokes of wonderful complexity, and – despite the wooden crutch, an ever-present necessity as he had lost his left leg to a bone disease when he was three – he danced, shot and played tennis, quite an accomplishment for a man with a crutch tucked Long-John-Silver-style into his left armpit.
He was an inspired mechanic, and his particular love was to drive fast cars at high speed, again an achievement for a man with only one foot to share between three pedals. He had spent time in South Africa as a young man and claimed to have held the Cape Town to Durban road record. He was a master of the clutchless gear-change, a manoeuvre that required perfect timing, but from time to time the clutch was essential, and JRC would dive beneath the dashboard while changing down at 60 mph and depress the clutch pedal with his left hand while changing gear with his right. The steering wheel would be directed meanwhile by his right, surviving, thigh.
JRC must have been a welcome butterfly in the starched and sharply creased white-drill world of wartime colonial India. Thanks to his one leg, he was one European in Madras who was not going to be sent off to be killed in Burma. Taddy Dyson, the daughter of one of Ma’s best friends in Madras, remembers him as a frequent and entertaining visitor to the Dyson household, where it is probable that he met Ma, this despite the efforts of Dr Dyson to ban Ma from his household on the grounds that she was ‘the most dangerous woman in India’.
By 1946 my father had left the navy, and the most dangerous woman in India was back in England, their marriage ended.
3
Welcome to England
Immediately after our return Ma, all but penniless, found a job as a barmaid in a small pub in Bungay in Suffolk. This did not last long. The pub let out rooms and was a clandestine trysting place for homosexuals in the days when homosexuality, far from being a cause for celebration, got you five years’ hard labour. It was not the principle of homosexuality that worried Ma, who was a broad-minded woman, but the fact that one of her duties was to make the beds. ‘You wouldn’t believe the disgusting mess the sheets were in after a night of bugger-boys playing around with each other. I simply couldn’t stomach it.’
Ma left her job and with some financial help from her father bought a tiny cottage in Tollesbury, a little village above the marshes on the Blackwater estuary in Essex. Bunny, now living by himself in London, would come down for weekends in between job-hunting. For a time he had a job as a travelling salesman for Heinz. Ma was living on ten pounds a week from her father.
Our house in Tollesbury was called Broadgate, though its gate was the only broad thing about it, the house itself being scarcely wider than a caravan. It was the middle of a terrace of three. It had two bedrooms upstairs and a living room and kitchen downstairs. The bath was in the kitchen with a wooden platform that folded down on top of it to form the ki
tchen counter.
Tollesbury was an oyster village. It sat on a channel on the south side of the Blackwater estuary in Essex. The River Blackwater was where the prized Colchester oysters came from. Tollesbury harbour itself was a network of small creeks winding their way between salt marshes. On big tides the Tollesbury creeks were all but joined in a sheet of grey-green water which overflowed the banks and submerged the scrubby sea heather. At low tide the water drained away to leave behind a thick clinging ooze of shiny black mud. To put a boot in the mud was to lose it; your foot came out but the boot remained behind.
Lennox Leavett, neighbour, oyster man and part-time poacher, became a family friend. One evening he came into our tiny kitchen and pulled a newly shot hare from somewhere inside his coat; this was eagerly received by Ma in those meat-scarce days of rationing. He asked if Michael and I would like to go out on the oyster boats next morning. I did not sleep at all that night I was so excited. Next morning at five Michael and I bicycled down the long hill from the village in the cold pre-dawn dark to catch the tide. Lennox was standing on the hard beside a small wooden dinghy with the other four crewmen. Beyond, I could just see the dark shape of the oyster smack swinging to its mooring in the main channel.
‘Come on, lads. Oysters ain’t waiting.’
I was lifted into the dinghy as Lennox pushed it down the slip, while the other crew members climbed on board, not easy to do with thigh-length waders, even though they were rolled down to the knees. We wobbled in the overloaded dinghy, the crew sitting on the thwarts, Michael and I perched on knees and water slopping over the sides while Lennox stood in the stern sculling us forward with a single oar lodged in the U-shaped rowlock cut in the sternboard.
Helped by a hand above and a push below, I flopped over the side rail on to the deck of the smack and caught the sharp scent of seaweed, shellfish, caulking tar and hempen rope. Someone ducked into the doghouse, lit a small lantern and set to priming the donkey engine. After a cough or two, the diesel kicked into life with the same boogh, boogh, boogh sound that still wakes you in Mediterranean fishing ports from Ibiza to Ios as the fishing fleet puts out to sea.