When we first came out the dinners were rather appalling; too early in the afternoons, generally between five and six o’clock. Thirty guests, one attendant at least behind every chair. Two to the Burra Sahibs, the great people. Stray assistants at the sideboards besides, a military band, a glare of light, the repast handsomely served on silver or plated ware, but of a rather heavy kind as far as the meats went, rounds of beef, saddles of mutton, boiled and roast turkey, pickled pork, one or two hams, fishes and soups, of course, and a second course of sweet things and small birds, but from the first the table was filled up with a number of little plates containing dried fruits, confectionery, sugar plums, and such like. A good deal of wine, good wine, was drunk and some brandy pawnee, but the bitter beer, well frothed up and cold as saltpetre could make it, was the favourite beverage, especially with the ladies. It was well that in the great houses where these great banquets were given the dining halls were of such large dimensions, so open to the air, and the servants so well trained they were never heard. Their bare feet made no sound on the matting, they never spoke, they were machines divining wants, and supplying them magically.
I hear that this cumbrous style of entertainment has been modified of late years among those who were not obliged to give official dinners. My father never adopted much this fashion. His dinners were to sixteen or eighteen people, a small assemblage in that large hall—four small joints only, nicely dressed entrées took the places of the beef and the salt pork—the little plates of comfits were dispensed with, so was the military band. The wines excellent, the coolness without a punkah quite pleasant. After dinner small round tables were scattered about with tea and coffee, and additional guests arrived to enliven the evening. Our parties were thought very agreeable, and the style was, I believe, copied—all but the entrées. Our Portuguese cook and my old French book created them and we did not parade our knowledge. Lord Clare afterwards thoroughly reformed the dinner table and, of course, was imitated—even by the few who had laughed at my father.
The balls were the prettiest assemblies possible, the women so young, most of them so pretty, their dresses so light, their air so happy. The men to suite, many of them in such brilliant uniforms, the numerous rooms large and well lighted, open to the cool Verandahs; excellent music, and grades enough to satisfy vanity. To a stranger there could be nothing more striking than a large ball at Government house, not the house in the Fort, but at Parell, a sort of small palace in fine grounds about four or five miles from the town. There is a very large tank in these grounds, round which on one particular day in the year, occasionally at other times, fireworks are exhibited, such fireworks as we have no idea of in this quarter of the Globe, truly magnificent and truly startling, they cannot be described, only wondered at.
The Governour in my time was the well known Sir John Malcolm, a fine soldierly looking man, coarse in mind and manners, but kind and very hospitable. His wife, with whom he did not live happily, had not come out with him. His married daughter, Lady Campbell, did the honours for a while, but, poor thing, went mad and had to be sent home. She died within a year or two, never recovering her senses. Her husband was very silly. Major Burrowes was an A. de C. and private Secretary, very popular and very agreeable. We afterwards knew him at Cheltenham, a widower with three children, as agreeable as ever, not in despair at having lost a very aerified wife, plain and cross too.
The Commander in Chief was Sir Thomas Bradford,7 celebrated for his admirable management of the Commissariat during the latter part of the Peninsular war; a very gentlemanly person, liked by those he took a fancy to, disliked by all under his command, and quite a despot in his family, but ruled in his turn by his very odd wife, a confirmed invalid and a very fanciful one. She had been married before to a Colonel Ainslie, and had a son and a daughter of that name with her, aspects of pity to every one. The son, Captain Ainslie, was one of the A. de Camps, and did not fare much worse than the rest of the Staff. The daughter was very hardly dealt with: shabbily dressed, seldom allowed to accept any invitation, nor to speak to any one while driving in the low phaeton with her mother. She was like the Princess in the faery tale, tormented from morning till night. When dressed for a party, a rare pleasure, would be sent to bed; when some grand occasion required a fresh toilette, none was forthcoming, some old faded dress was selected. She was allowed to make no acquaintance, therefore passed the long day alone. If she did get to a dance, she did not have to converse with her partners, who all moved in the melancholy quadrille as if they too were enduring punishment. Major Jameson made us feel quite sorry for her; he was the private Secretary and a favourite, but he could only pity. The single recreation the poor girl had was the evening drive. The little carriage with the four inside was always to be seen among the crowd wherever we congregated, two of the suite as outsiders. The General bowing stiffly but abundantly, the ladies motionless for they knew so few.
Lady Bradford knew nobody for she never visited, and never appeared at the dinners at home. She had been a beautiful woman, now broken down long before her time by asthma and the madeira she took to relieve it. She never dressed but in a close cap and wrapper. When she took her evening drive she put over the close cap a coarse straw cottage bonnet, and over the wrapper a cloke and she held in her hand a little parasol the size of a plate, which she crooked down by a bend or a joint in the stick, not at the time fashionable. She kept this always up between her and the sun, however low he had sunk, and then between her and the moon or the stars. Poor woman, she had left her Bradford children at home, and was always longing for her letters from those in charge of them. The severe training of her Ainslie children did not turn out well. They both married some years after into the same family. Lord Gray’s of Kinfauns in Perthshire. Captain Ainslie married the youngest daughter, Jane, was an unkind husband and turned out dissipated. His sister married the Master of Gray and very nearly ruined him, between expensive dress and gambling. Lady Bradford died at St Helena on her passage home; she did not live to see those little children so beloved. Her devoted husband preserved her body in spirits, and, not properly watching the cask, it was tapped by the sailors, many of whom died from the effects of the poison. I ought to have liked her; she was very fond of me. She delighted in the old Scotch ballads, particularly the Jacobite airs, which I sang to her without musick as she lay half reclining on a sofa in the verandah. She used to ‘borrow me of my mother’; that is what she called these short visits and Major Jameson said she really did enjoy this simple musick.
Sir Charles Malcolm, the Governor’s brother, was in command of the Navy, a merry, pleasant, rather handsome sailor. No others of the men in high places were any way remarkable, all pleasant enough to meet. To say the truth, I did not take much to the Civilians; the elderly ones were pompous, the younger ones ‘upsetting,’ looking so absurdly down upon the military, who really were many of them infinitely superiour to them. Mr Bax was an intelligent man, Mr Anderson a clever man; both were kind and cousinly. James Dewar, the brother of our old companion David Dewar, though no great lawyer, was very much to be liked, as was the Advocate Depute, Mr Bridgeman, whose unfortunate Christian name, ‘Orlando,’ was an unfailing source of fun to Aunt Caroline.
Frequently we were enlivened by chance arrivals; passengers to and from other seaports used to touch at Bombay. In this way we had a peep of Charles Marjoribanks, who was going home for his baronetcy—too late—for he died and George Gordon Glentomie, John Peter Cumming, Archie Arbuthnot, and others, the scene was ever varying.
1. A cabin near the stern, reserved for officers and cabin passengers to use as a dining room.
2. Sir Edward Blakeney (1778−1868), later Field Marshall (and C. in C. of troops in Ireland 1836−55 when the married E.G. met him often) married Maria Gardiner.
3. The best-remembered poem of the Dumfriesshire poet, Allan Cunningham (1784−1842).
4. Bunder is a harbour, hence a boat for short journeys; ghat is Anglo-Indian for hindi landing stage.
&nbs
p; 5. A litter, usually for one, consisting of a large box with wooden shutters, carried on poles by 4 or 6 men.
6. An eighteenth-century term for a dress maker.
7. Sir Thomas Bradfield (1777−1853) had served with the Portuguese forces in the Peninsular War, not the Commissariat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
1828−1829
We had landed in February and were fairly established in the Retreat by the middle of March. Early in April the hot weather began, encreasing day by day in intensity till the first week in June, exhausting me so completely that, but for the better beer, I never could have dragged my failing powers through it. Mr Norris fairly knocked up and had to depart suddenly for the Neilgherries, a bit of good fortune for us, as Mr Gardiner, who had been acting in the Commissariat, was promoted to act for Mr Norris as one of the secretaries to Government; he got also the loan of Mr Norris’s very pretty and very cool house on the top of one of the hills near us, Prospect Lodge. This was very pleasant for Mary and me, through having no palanquins, either of us, and walking being impossible, we could not very often meet. Halfway down this hill, at the Hermitage, lived Sir Charles Chambers, a brother Judge of the Supreme Court, a heavy man, related to the Charles Grants, married to a common place wife from Glen Urquhart. At the foot of this hill was Colonel Goodfellow, who commanded the Engineers, with a daughter who played admirably on the pianoforte, and just across our tank lived a Major Griffith, who had charge of the Artillery stores, from which he made most useful presents to Miss Goodfellow and to me. I got a sweeping brush, emery powder, paper of all sorts, ink etc. And besides this he gave us most delightful musick. He was most musick mad; he had organised an excellent Band of stringed instruments, most of them Portuguese, under the direction of the Artillery Bandmaster, and whether they played in his own Compound, or in our fine hall, or better still, from boats on the tank, it was really charming to listen to the well selected and well ‘interpreted,’ that’s the term! good classick musick.
There was one great draw back to our Retreat. The hill which rose at the end of our garden between us and the sea had on its summit the Parsee burying place, a sloping building with a grating over a deep hollow, on which grating were laid the dead bodies of the Parsees; there they lay till devoured by vultures; the bones then dropt through. The condition of the deceased in the new state, or purgatory, into which death has introduced him, is determined by the pan of the corpse first attacked by the vultures. An eye ensures happiness, any part of the head is comforting; an arm I suppose is useless as one was dropt in our shrubbery. The vulture is a disgusting bird with its long neck bare of feathers; the first time I saw one seated on my window sill I was really horrified.
The heat encreased, no air by day or by night. We lay on mats with no covering, not even a sheet, as little clothing as possible in the day and all loose, no bands or belts or collars, exertion of any kind exhausting, occupation too fatiguing, even thinking nearly impossible; and the thermometer was not high—94 or 96; it was the moisture of the climate that overcame us; it was completely enervating, and its effect on the skin most thoroughly disgreeable. It was the approach of the Monsoon. Most people left Bombay at this time in search of a drier atmosphere at Poonah or elsewhere. Luckily, this extreme heat did not last long.
The opening of the monsoon is one of the grandest phenomena in nature. About a week or two before the outbreak clouds began to gather over a sky that had been hitherto without relief. Day by day the gloom thickened; at last the storm broke. We were going to sit down to luncheon when a feeling of suffocation, a distant rumbling, a sudden darkness, made us all sensible of some unusual change approaching. The servants rushed to the Venetians and closed one side of the hall, with the utmost expedition, the side next the storm; yet they could not save us altogether—from the wind they did, a wind, suddenly rising, burst from the plain with a violence which overwhelmed every opposing object, and while the gust lasted we could hear nothing else, not a step, nor a voice, nor a sound of any kind. It did no harm to our well secured apartment, but it brought with it a shower, a tempest rather, of sand, so fine, so impalpable, that it entered like the air through every crevice, covered the floor, the seats, the tables with a red dust which well nigh choked us. This was succeeded by a lull almost awful in its intensity, and then the first thunder growled; at a vast distance it seemed to rumble, then, strengthening, it broke suddenly right over the house with a power that was overwhelming; flash after flash of lightning glared, it was more, far more, than a gleam; then rain, such as is only known in the tropicks, poured down in flakes with the din of a cataract. On came the thunder; again and again it shook the house, rolling round in its fearful might as if the annihilation of the world were its dreadful aim.
My Mother and I were as pale as two spectres. In my life, neither before nor since, I never felt so thoroughly appalled. It lasted about two hours, after which a heavy rain set in, falling dully and equally hour upon hour until about tiffin time the following day, when we had a second thunder storm, less terrifick, however, than the first, or less to us from having had that sample. After this the heavy rain continued unceasingly for 48 hours, making such a noise it deafened us, completely, we could hear no other sound, and creating darkness and a chill damp feel equally oppressive. The roads were soon like streams, the plain a lake, the tanks overflowing. No Europeans stirred out. A party collected at the Shiltons for tiffin only, remained at this bungalow during those three first violent days—only such natives stirred beyond the shelter of a house as could not avoid going out on business, and they were dressed for the deluge in oilskin coverings that enveloped the whole person, face and all, out of which they saw thro‘ two glass eyes inserted at the proper place, the most hideous masquerade, but absolutely necessary. The first desperate week over, the rain fell less constantly and less heavily. We even got a drive sometimes, as it was occasionally fair for an hour or more but all thro’ the rains, which lasted near 4 months, the weather was extremely disagreeable in Bombay, hot, chilly, airless, relaxing, every thing wet we touched. Pans of fire had to be placed in the rooms frequently. All our clothes had to be dried on cane skreens made like boxes, or large cases, within which were the same pans of fire, and still the damp clung to us; yet it was never an unhealthy season.
Up the country the rain was much lighter, more like showery weather at home up at Poonah and beyond. People enjoyed the freshness extremely, while we at the sea side were steaming like the pipes of a factory. The last week rivalled the first very nearly, the Monsoon departing, as it came, in a storm of thunder.
I was glad to see cloudless skies again. October was, however, a melancholy month; pools of stagnant water, decaying vegetation, unpleasant smells, and sickness, such sickness. Now was the time that small white tents filled every space upon the esplanade; the little crazy bungalows that had been hurriedly removed at the first threatening of the rains were now being leisurely replaced, and amongst them and around them was an encampment of the sick from the upcountry stations come down for advice, or for a change, or their furlough to England. The Doctors had busy times moving about in gigs or palanquins doing their best to save the invalids. One of the busiest of these was our Scotch friend, Doctor Eckford. We saw a great deal of him, for we had got very intimate. I had been very ill, an attack of liver, and he was very kindly attentive to me, and had taken quite a fancy to me, on account, I believe, of the leaf I brought him out of his Wife’s pocket book. But really, old as I was, I was quite in fashion—a second season of celebrity, a coming out again! Like my father, I have all my life looked 10 years younger than my age; nobody guessed me at 30, and being handsome, lively, obliging and a great man’s daughter, I reigned in good earnest over many a better queen! than myself. Of course every eligible was to be married to me, not only that but every body was busy marrying me. ‘Now, don’t mind them, Eliza, my dear,’ said uncle Edward very early in my Indian career; ‘don’t fix yet, wait for Smith, my friend Smith; he’ll be sure to be down here ne
xt season, and he’s just the very man I have fixed on for you.’ Then my Aunt, ‘I don’t mind your not liking old so and so and that tiresome this, and that ill humoured that, I had rather you married Colonel Smith than any body.’ Then my cousins, ‘Oh you will so like Colonel Smith, Eliza, every one likes Colonel Smith, he will make such a kind husband, he is so kind to his horses.’ ‘My goodness, Miss Grant,’ said Mrs Norris, ‘is it possible you have refused—the best match in the Presidency—will certainly be in Council. Who do you mean to marry, pray.’ (Every body must marry, they can’t help it here.) ‘I am waiting,’ said 1, ‘for Colonel Smith.’ Great laughing this caused, of course, none laughing more than the intending Bride, to whom this Colonel Smith was no more than a bit of fun, just as likely to be her husband as her most particular admirer, a great fat Parsee.
One morning I was sitting at work; the cooler weather had restored us our needles and I was employing mine for Mary’s expected baby, early in November, my Mother lying on the sofa reading, when the Chobdar in waiting announced Colonel Smith. It is customary for all new arrivals to call on the Burra Sahibs. He entered, and in spite of all the nonsense we had amused outselves with, we liked him. ‘Well,’ said Mary, on hearing who had called, ‘will he do?’ ‘Better than any of your upsetting Civilians,’ answered I, ‘a million of times, I never liked the Military at home and here I don’t like the Civilians. Colonel Smith is the most gentlemanly man I have seen in India.’ Mary and Mr Gardiner laughed and neither they nor I thought more about him.
Memoirs of a Highland Lady Page 67