Rumer
Godden was one of the most successful writers of her lifetime.
Several of her novels, including Black Narcissus and The
River, became successful films. But her best work is not fiction.
Her memoirs of India are drenched with light and colour
 |
| Godden in 1970 (Godfrey Argent/National Portrait Gallery) |
One
day in the mid-1920s, in the cool season, a British shooting-party
went to hunt in the country outside Delhi. They left at dawn, killed
things, then lunched with the ladies, who had driven out from Delhi
to meet them. The ladies dressed well. One, in her late teens, wore
“a pale pink dress and a hat to match that I thought pretty, white,
straw-brimmed with a chiffon crown patterned in pale colours.” They
ate curry puffs and game pie. As they did so, monkeys “peered down
at us from the branches. Suddenly, one of them let fall a stream of
shit on my precious hat.” Now she would be lucky all her life, a
friend told her. It is not clear why he thought being shat on by a
monkey would mean luck, good or bad; but in fact her life would bring
her plenty of both, as she would recall over 60 years later:
As
if the monkey had given me a benison, shaming and stinking as it was
– and ruining my hat – I have had extraordinarily good luck and
extraordinarily bad ...I sense now that it is not luck or in our
stars but the working of a pattern we cannot see yet have to trust, a
providence, in my case bringing ups and downs so unusual it has often
been difficult to believe they were happening.
Rumer
Godden would indeed have both good luck and bad, and would have
trouble in her personal life, with an unsatisfactory marriage, a
child who died in infancy, a miscarriage, and wartime destitution.
And yet she would also become one of the most successful novelists of
her lifetime, and her books would be filmed by, among others, Powell
and Pressburger, and Jean Renoir. But it is her life in India, and
her recounting of it, that has drawn me.
*
Rumer
Godden was born in December 1907; as it happens in Eastbourne, but
her family was in India, where her sister had been born a year or so
earlier. Her parents were part of that large long-gone white tribe of
India that ran what we now call the Raj, although they would not have
called it that; they would have called it the Indian Empire. (They
would not have called it British India, either; that then meant the
two-thirds or so of it that was under direct British rule, as opposed
to the Princely States.)
This
tribe was not homogenous. At its apex was the Indian Civil Service –
the so-called “heaven-born”. The military came second. Those
engaged in business or industry, known as the “box-wallahs”, came
next. One wonders if this caste system afforded the Indians a little
ironic amusement. Godden’s father was, one supposes, a box-wallah,
but he was one of some importance, managing the river steamer
services. He was stationed in Assam at the time of Godden’s birth
but later in the Bengali town of Narayangunj (Godden’s spelling; it
is now known as Narayanganj). The city lies on the Shitalakshaya
River, which is part of the same river system as the Brahmaputra; it
is only a few miles from Dacca. Today the district has a population
of about three million. A century ago it would have been a sleepier
place. But then, as now, it was an important centre for jute.
But
when the family moved from Assam to Bengal, neither Rumer nor her
older sister Jon went with them. In 1913 both had been exiled to
England, at age six and seven respectively. It was then the custom to
send the children “home”, to a country that often felt like
anything but home. The two girls found themselves in a large gloomy
aunt-filled house in Maida Vale. In 1966, in a memoir written jointly
with Jon, Two Under the Indian Sun, Godden would write:
In
India children are largely left to grow ...we had not really been
“brought up” before. It was a painful process, for us and the
Aunts. ...The Aunts were so truly noble and good, so noble and so
dedicated, but never, in all that tall dark house, was there a gleam
of laughter or enterprise or fun…
Rescue
came in the unlikely form of the First World War. The Goddens, afraid
that their daughters would be at risk from Zeppelin raids, decided to
recall them to India, and their paternal aunt Mary arrived to take
them there on the P&O liner Persia. In retrospect it seems an odd
decision. Although the Germans did mount air raids with both
Zeppelins and conventional aircraft and did kill about 1,400
civilians in Britain, largely in London, the U-boats were a much
bigger menace. Maybe that was not yet clear. The Goddens do not
mention that the Persia herself would be sent to the bottom
with great loss of life while sailing the same route a year later. For
the young Goddens, however, the voyage was a liberation. Their Aunt Mary took
one look at their heavy, unattractive clothes and as the ship began
to move, she snatched the ugly straw hats from their heads and tossed
them through the porthole. The young Goddens watched them sink slowly
amongst the bits of box and orange-peel as the Persia was
swung out into the Thames. “They were the last sight we had of
England,” they later recalled. “We were reprieved – for five
years.”
*
Rumer
Godden's sister Jon was also a successful novelist, though never as
well-known or as prolific as her sister. Two Under the
Indian Sun was a collaboration.
How much of each woman is in the
book is hard to tell, but the writing style does feel similar to
Rumer’s own later memoirs. In the second volume of her
autobiography, A House With Four Rooms,
she mentions the book but says little about its creation. Two
Under the Indian Sun is now out
of print in both the UK and the US, but is available from an
enterprising Indian publisher, Speaking Tiger. The book is one of the
best memoirs of childhood I have ever read. Thanks to the Zeppelins,
it records a childhood in India with their family instead of exile in
a draughty English boarding school smelling vaguely of cabbage, being
bullied for one’s accent and wearing a prickly, uncomfortable
uniform while dreaming of one’s parents and the warm, bright
colours of India. Arriving at Narayanganj:
We
saw roses and sweet peas, and flowers we had forgotten, hibiscus and
oleanders. Magenta bougainvilleas climbed to the top of tall trees.
Here was a new world of scent and colour, warm in the sunlight …
“Is this our garden?”
asked Jon, dazzled.
It
was not just a garden. The household was a huge establishment of
gardeners, grooms, dining-room attendants, sweeps, bearers and more.
According to the Goddens, this was not so much something the family
wanted, as a reflection of Indian perceptions of what was fitting –
and of what a given servant might nor might not do. A bearer’s caste allowed him to serve drinks, but not to wait at table because he
could not touch food cooked by those of other castes. Only the
sweeper could empty chamber-pots – but if a pet guinea-pig died, he
could not dispose of the corpse (“a boy of a special sect had to be
called in from the bazaar; he put on his best shirt of
marigold-coloured silk to do this grisly work”). How
much of this was true, it is hard to know – but the Goddens state
that their father was responsible for meeting the cost of this
household himself, although the Company paid for the house. So it is
hard to see why he would have had such a large household had he not
been constrained by custom to do so. It may however explain some
British expatriates in the Empire, who, in time, grew to know no
better:
Primrose
ideas take root with frightening ease; ...the big house and garden,
the ponies, the muslin dresses we changed into every afternoon, the
way [the staff] attended
us everywhere we went, the difference between us and the milling
thousands of Indians all around us, all added up to a princess
quality that would have dismayed Mam if she had ever seen it; but
Mam, in her simplicity, did not see it; in fact all our elders seemed
curiously blind – even more blind in the way, five years later,
they expected us to immediately adjust when we went back to England.
It
would be a rude awakening.
Yet
the children also faced dangers that would, in their words, “have
horrified parents living in England or America.” Malaria, dysentery
and dengue fever featured, as did having one’s tonsils taken out on
the dining-room table by a Welsh doctor who seems to have taken it
all in his stride, as did their parents. Neither were they really
shielded from the harshest aspects of life in India. In one powerful
chapter, titled simply Cain,
the sisters describe how they became exposed to the harshness of the
world: the beggar-boy in the bazaar who has been deliberately
deformed, so that he can beg; the endless lawsuits that drain the
servants of their wealth; the accidents in the jute mills and the
fires in the bazaar; and their household sweeper, who fathered a
child on his own daughter then beat her to death when she sought
solace with a kinder man. One year when they are in a hill station to
avoid the hot weather, trouble flares between Hindus and Muslims back
in Narayanganj. Their father meets one of his steamers arriving there
with Hindu pilgrims returning home; he warns them there is trouble
and they should not disembark, but they disregard his advice. They do
not reach their homes; passing through an apparently deserted street,
they are ambushed and knifed to death.
This
last incident is a reminder that Partition lay years in the future.
Naranganj was to become part of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It is
a Muslim country. But in 1914 millions of Hindus and Muslims alike
lived in places where they are no longer to be seen. Moreover the
vast Indian Empire stretched from the Khyber Pass to the borders of
Thailand (Burma was part of it until 1937, when it became a separate
territory). Within this huge area people could move freely, and did,
the more so as the railway network grew. One night in the bazaar:
A
couple of tall Kabulis, holding their long staffs, pushed
contemptuously through the crowd, which parted uneasily in front of
them; we knew that they were moneylenders, hated and feared, come
from the mountains of Afghanistan to collect the exorbitant interest
on their loans, but we could not help admiring their height and
swagger, their hooked noses and blue-black bobbed hair under the
huge floppy turbans, their loose white trousers and dark embroidered
waistcoats; among the slim white-clad Bengalis they looked as
decorative and as arrogant as a pair of peacocks among a flock of
sparrows.
I
wonder how many people know that Afghan moneylenders ventured as far
as Bangladesh a century ago. There is a sense in which our globalised
world has become smaller even as it has, for some, been knitted
together.
*
It
was usual for British families to decamp to the hills in the hot
weather, heading for hill stations such as Ootacamund, Darjeeling and
Simla. Every few years, of course, a man would have home leave, but
the First World War prevented this. One summer – it seems to have
been 1917 or 1918 – the Godden’s father took a long leave in
Kashmir instead, hoping to hunt. The family took a houseboat at
Srinagar and later, when the weather was hotter, embarked on a trek
into the mountains, where their father fished for mahseer and hunted
bears. The children were left largely to their own devices. They were
told not to go too far away, but of course they did. “We went deep
into the sweet-smelling woods, following woodcutters’ paths or
paths made by animals, losing ourselves and knowing a few moments’
panic… Once we saw what we thought was a huge grey dog slipping
away from us between the trees…”
 |
| Darjeeling in the 1990s (M.Robbins) |
Their
father confirmed that it must have been a wolf. Today they have been
hunted to extinction and when I lived in the Himalayas in the 1990s,
I was told that an epidemic of destructive wild boars then troubling
the country was a consequence. The boars now had no natural
predators. A century ago wolves would have been quite usual in
the Himalayas. The bears, however, are still there. That summer, the
Goddens’ father shot three. It is a cruel pursuit perhaps, but
no-one would have objected to it at the time. “Each dead bear, its
feet tied to a pole, its huge head lolling, was carried back to camp
by rejoicing villagers whose crops it had often raided,” the
Goddens wrote.
These
summer retreats involved long journeys; it is a long way from
Narayanganj to Kashmir, and indeed to other hill stations, and the
family would spend days in a compartment on a train, washing and
cooking as best they could. The vastness of the country affects them:
...In
the brief Indian twilight ...a curious sadness would fall on us, when
we all ...grew still. Then the compartment seemed suddenly small, the
train infinitesimal as it travelled over the vast Indian plain. ...A
palm tree stood out against the sky where one star, the evening star,
showed. A fire flickered in a lonely village that, in a moment or
two, was lost to sight…
Reading
this, I was reminded of a bus journey I took from Siliguri to the
Bhutanese border at Jaigaon many years ago. It
was a cool afternoon in November. As the countryside slipped by, the
sun began to sink, and the landscape was transformed. I enjoyed
everything: the long grass catching the light and the shadow, the
quiet shacks by the roadside, sleepy village shops, sparkling village
ponds, lush bright fields, palm fronds, boys playing cricket and
laughing. A man wheeling his bicycle slowly back from the fields. A
path winding away from the road and disappearing, between trees, to
nowhere. Orange lorries, white cars, a thin young man with glasses
riding on top of a truck’s green tarpaulin, a train standing in the
middle of the fields, birds by the Brahmaputra. Then dusk, a round
red sun above green-yellow fields, and darkness, and Jaigaon with
flickering lights in the main street, food stalls, rickshaws, chaos,
slowly ambling crowds with white shirts that shone in the darkness.
In India you can lose yourself in a journey.
*
Two
Under the Indian Sun is
an outstanding memoir of childhood. But as the First World War ended,
the sisters were entering their teens; stresses and strains developed
between them, not least because Jon was the glamorous one and got all
the male attention. (This rivalry would be the theme of Rumer
Godden’s later novel The
River,
which would be filmed with great success by Jean Renoir.) In any
case, the war had given them a reprieve; now, in
1920,
they would be returned to England to be educated, as was the normal
way. “It was a grey chill rainy spring morning when the ship
berthed at Plymouth. Everything was grey, wet, colourless ...We
travelled third on the train to London. “Then in England do we
travel third-class?”
Two
Under the Indian Sun ends
there. But Rumer Godden’s strange and brilliant life was just
beginning. For five years she attended schools and college in
England, not always with happy results, but was lucky enough to meet
a teacher who recognised her writing ability and urged her to develop
it. She also acquired an interest in dance and took classes, but her
progress was slowed by a childhood injury. She recounts this period
in the first volume or her autobiography, A
Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (the
words are adapted from a passage in Ecclesiastes). It
includes an account of a sojourn in France that would give rise,
years later, to one of Godden’s most successful novels, The
Greengage Summer –
which also became a film; it was, it turns out, barely fiction at
all.
In
October 1925 Godden’s
older sister Jon
returned
to India and, overcome with nostalgia, she decided to go too. But she
had changed; Naranganj seemed dull and ugly, and the garden
and busy river that had fascinated her as a child no longer did.
Unsettled, perhaps, she embarked on an abortive engagement that she
quickly broke, leaving her guilty and restless. Now
19, she began for the first time to question the British presence on
the subcontinent.
She
had
read A
Passage to India and it
shocked her. “Were
we, the English in India, really like ...those righteous, insensitive
characters?” Godden
blamed her father for telling them nothing of India, or Indian life,
in their youth. In A
Time to Dance,
written decades later in old age, she acknowledged that this was
unjust. Her father was well-liked by his large staff and his boat
captains, and spoke Hindi and Bengali, and some Assamese.
He
found her work in an agricultural research establishment in Dacca,
but
not long afterwards most of the family, including Godden herself,
returned to England and remained there until the autumn of 1929.
During this period she trained as a dance teacher, and on her return
to India set up a small dance school in
Calcutta.
The
British community did not approve (“In
Calcutta’s then almost closed society, ‘nice girls’ did not
work or try to earn their living. There were women doctors, school
inspectors, matrons of hospitals, missionaries, but they did not rank
as ‘society’…”).
Worse,
dance schools had a reputation because they were run by Eurasians –
people of mixed race who found themselves in a difficult position in
India. A British man who married one would be asked to resign from
the civil service or his company. Godden worked with and taught
Eurasians and also
employed a troupe of dancers from that background; she found
herself ostracised as a result. “I quickly learned who my real
friends were,” she wrote nearly 60 years later. This
anti-Eurasian prejudice was to figure in one of her earliest books,
The
Lady and the Unicorn,
and in a much later one,
The
Dark Horse.
Godden
had other problems besides ostracism. She became pregnant by a
British stockbroker in Calcutta, Laurence Foster, and they married –
there were few alternatives in 1934. The child, a boy, was born
prematurely and died four days later. Meanwhile
the marriage proved unfortunate. They
were not always unhappy and had two other
children, both daughters.
But
Foster proved feckless. Quite early on they had to leave a pleasant
apartment in Calcutta because he had simply not bothered to pay the
rent. A keen sportsman, he spent heavily on playing golf when on
leave in England, although their finances were stretched. Then the
second daughter proved delicate at birth and had to be nursed
carefully for some months at a family home in Cornwall. It
did not help that Godden still felt uneasy about the British in
India, about the worsening political situation and the poverty that
she saw all around her in Calcutta; and unlike her father, who at
least genuinely liked and understood India and its people and spoke
two of their languages, Foster and his friends cared little for such
matters:
...The
fight for independence was growing and, with it, terrorism especially
among the young. ...A young polceman friend was stabbed in the back
by students as he was playing rugger with them; a girl at University
going up to get her prize
– ironically for English – from the Governor tried to shoot him
in the face. Yet I could not help sympathising with them. Who would
not want, I thought, to be free? “Idiots. They’re far better off
under the British,” said Laurence and his friends.
This
alienation, for Godden, went deeper. She talks, in A
Time to Dance,
of the concept of darshan
- the travelling to, and contemplation of, a holy or miraculous place
or person – she cites Gandhi or Kanchenjunga – not to photograph
or physically record, but simply to let it seep into one’s soul.
Foster lacked this side to his nature and so did his companions. “It
slowly dawned on me that not only did they not know, they seemed
unable to feel any sense of wonder, ecstasy or awe,” she
wrote. That
Godden was different – that darshan did exist for her – would
later become clear in one of the strangest and least-known books she
ever wrote. But that lay several years in the future.
*
Meanwhile the monkey-shit seesaw also
went the other way. Godden’s
career as a writer was beginning.
Shortly
after the marriage to
Foster,
Godden had had
a
novel accepted for the first time (it was Chinese
Puzzle).
In
1938, on her way home to deliver her second daughter, and not feeling
social, she decided to turn in at the same time as her older
daughter, Jane, which was six o’clock; and, while Jane slept, her
mother wrote. On arrival at Tilbury 18 days later she had the draft
of a novel. Her father was sceptical.
“Fa,
I’m writing a book about nuns.”
“Don’t,”
said Fa. “No-one will read it.”
But
Black
Narcissus
has
never been out of print.
According
to Godden’s own account in A
Time to Dance,
the book’s genesis went back to when she was 18 and visiting
Shillong, a
then fairly remote town at over 5,000ft (about 1,500m) that was then
in Assam (the state’s borders have since changed). The story took
root on
a picnic to a deserted cantonment in the mountains:
I
wandered away from the others and going down a steep little path came
upon a grave; it was marked only by a small headstone in the shape of
a cross with a name, ‘Sister...’ and two dates; she had died when
she was only 23. No-one could tell me anything about her; no other
graves were near, no sign of any mission, but the villagers had made
her grave a shrine…
Although
far from the only novel Godden would write set in India, it is still
much her best-known. Published in January 1939, it passed largely
unnoticed at first but as the weeks went by it attracted increasing
critical attention. In
1946 it was to be filmed by Powell and Pressburger, no less, starring
Deborah Kerr. Godden did not like the film version but viewers
disagreed, and still do; it has become something of a classic period
piece, with
its seething sexual tensions in an isolated community of Anglican
nuns, high in the Himalayas. The book also remains popular. But
in 1939 its success took its author by surprise. Godden,
who by some oversight had not even been told it was published,
wandered into Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road to find a table piled
high with copies.
But
the monkey was about to shit again.
*
Godden
had planned to fly back to India in the autumn of 1939 but the flight
was cancelled. But as the war situation worsened, it became clear
that the children would be safer in India, where her husband still
was. “If you are to go at all, you must go now,” Godden’s
father told her. In June 1940 she embarked on the Strathallan
with her two infant daughters and a much-loved Swiss-Italian nanny.
As
with so much in A
Time to Dance,
the voyage is made
wonderfully vivid,
although Godden was writing nearly half a century later. There is a
knack here for resurrecting those details that bring her memories
alive, and discarding
those that do not. This
time, everyone was very conscious of the danger the ship was in, and
Godden recalls that the passengers – mostly women, often with
children – were frightened and frequently sought solace
in the bar, or with one of the stewards.
They were not wrong; like the Persia,
the Strathallan
would also be sunk
some time later
(again,
Godden
does not mention this).
They
spend “an
uneasy week” in
Mombasa;
“There
are two cruisers and other battleships in the harbour and the Italian
planes come over every night, attacked fiercely by ack-ack fire.”
Yet
as always she is conscious of beauty, sneaking on deck at night when
she can to see the phosphorescence in the water as she stands in the
bow.
The
journey ended with an apparently happy reunion in Calcutta. Over the
next few months Godden’s husband seemed more settled than he had
been, and harder-working. Then one night in June 1941 he came home
and announced that he was in the army; asked whether by choice, he
did not say. Somewhat surprised, Godden saw him off to training camp
at Bangalore, only to return to the house and find lines of tradesmen
waiting with bills and writs. Foster, left in charge of the family
finances, had not paid the bills. Instead he had gambled on the
Stock Exchange, had lost, and had used the firm’s money to recoup
his losses and had lost that too. Godden
resolved to pay off his debts. The earnings from Black
Narcissus
were gone, and so was her husband.
As
luck would have it, Godden had already arranged to borrow an isolated
bungalow in the Himalayas for the hot weather. A few weeks later she,
her children and the few remaining staff headed for the hills, and
instead of returning for the cool weather, she remained there. The
result was a
strange and little-known
book, Rungli-Rungliot.
*
One
December day in 1993 a friend and
I travelled
by bus from Jaigaon on the Bengal plain to Kalimpong in the mountains
and then across to Darjeeling. It
is never cool on the plain, even in winter, and besides the bus had a
quite enormous stereo. In that year the big Bollywood hit was Khal
Nayak
(The Villain), a melodrama that included a dance number, Choli
Ke Peeche Kya Hai,
noted for its suggestive lyrics. (The
title, roughly translated, means “What’s beneath my blouse.”
There was dancing to match.)
I rather liked it but found it palled somewhat when heard for the
tenth time in
one
day. As the driver fiddled with the volume control, my friend
suggested we go on the roof. We scrambled up the ladder at the back
of the bus and perched on the rack with the luggage; it is a good way
to travel in hot climates.
The
bus wound its way past Siliguri and into the mountains towards
Kalimpong. We climbed; the air grew cooler, the country around us
greener; and after some time we crossed the Coronation Bridge, a
large prewar single-span bridge across the powerful River Teesta,
which lay many hundreds of feet below us in a gorge. At this time of
year, it was a startling
bright cobalt blue. The river was visible for less than a minute, but
the
sight was not one to forget. Later the bus wound its way along the
narrow road that clings to the contours between Kalimpong and
Darjeeling, passing close to Tiger Hill, the vantage point from which
one admires sunrise on distant Kanchenjunga – again, not something
one forgets if one has seen it, which to my delight I have.
Somewhere
between Kalimpong and Tiger Hill, we will have passed a small village
with a police post. This was
Rangli-Rangliot.
Rungli-Rungliot,
as Godden spells it, means “Thus far and no farther”, and was the
phrase spoken – she
says –
by a Buddhist monk at some point in the past to stop the flooded
waters of the Teesta reaching the hilltops and drowning all and
sundry. (Godden states that the words are in Paharia, but it is not
clear which language she meant by that word;
it can refer to several dialects and even to Nepali.) She arrived
there
in the summer of 1941, broke, without her husband but with two
children, the Italian-Swiss nanny, her husband’s Sikkimese bearer
and his family and one or two servants, for all of whom she was
responsible.
Later
in the war she would publish her
short book, Rungli-Rungliot,
based on the diaries she kept, and it was republished shortly after
the war, but
then forgotten until, like Two
Under the Indian Sun,
it was put out in a new edition in India by Speaking Tiger. The book
includes charming illustrations by Tontyn Hopman, a Dutch artist
stranded in India by the war who became a friend of Godden’s a year
or two later (and who died as recently as 2016, at
the age of 102).
Rungli-Rungliot
is a curious book. Godden’s other autobiographical work is marked
by its clear, straightforward prose; it dazzles by the clarity and
quality of her memories, not by tricks of presentation, and seems
effortless although there is, in fact, not a word out of place.
Rungli-Rungliot,
written much earlier, has a less sure touch and can even seem
overwritten. It is still memorable. Climbing
slowly
northward into the mountains on the narrow-gauge railway that runs to
Darjeeling:
We
crept along at the edge of the Teesta River, up the valley, and the
river looked as if it might flood again; it was wide and deep and
incredibly swift, neither green nor grey in the rain swell but
celadon, between low banks of grey-white stones all made smooth by
the water. After the rains, in the winter, the river would be blue;
first a chalky blue and then a blue with a grape-green tinge from the
ice water. It is a dangerous cruel river, as cruel as it is
beautiful, and the hill people say it has to take a life a year.
 |
| A Tontyn Hopman illustration for Rungli-Rungliot |
Godden’s
retreat is not at Rangli-Rangliot itself but in a so-called
“out-bungalow” some miles away, where one of the tea-planters
would be stationed and would live when, as she put it, not drinking
or hunting. She refers to the place as Chinglam. Like
Rangli-Rangliot, this is a real place, eccentrically spelled; in A
Time to Dance she uses the correct spelling, Jinglam. It is
isolated; it can be reached by car but via a vertiginous road on
which one had to strain in first gear. An expedition to Darjeeling,
for mail or shopping, is an undertaking. Yet Jinglam is, it seems,
its own reward – a place of staggering beauty, with the valley
falling away steeply thousands of feet in front. The Swiss nanny,
Giovanna, takes to yodelling; the sound “rings right across the
valley” and before long the workers in the tea-plantation start to
do it too. Behind the house there is a high saddle from which
Godden and her children can see the eternal snows of Kanchenjunga.
When tiring of this they can come back to a warm and welcoming
bungalow. “The oil lamps I bought from the Thieves Bazaar in
Calcutta are a success. ...The lamps are Victorian and they are
beautifully shaped, gilt, and they give a soft adequate light.”
The planters are mostly gone to war, but the head planter remains and
is kind and popular. A keen naturalist, he “has shot everything
[but] is as avid to shoot everything again …I went to tea with him
and he had a python in his chicken-run. It was a full-sized python
but there was no need to be afraid ...because it was anchored in the
middle by a deer that it had eaten, which was progressing, by degrees
of slow digestion, towards its tail.”
There
are few other Europeans around, but there are of course her staff.
(“The cook was very turbulent, and left partly because he was
turbulent and partly because he had foot-rot.”) And there are
plenty of visitors; pedlars, wandering Lepchas from Sikkim and people
from the plains and two Bhutias (Bhutan is quite close by). She
presents the latter as wild and savage people. I wonder if they were;
the Bhutanese are rather civilised. But in 1941 they would have had
little contact with outsiders. In fact Rungli-Rungliot,
brief though it is, is a haunting snapshot of a quite recent past.
But it is also the account of an idyll, in one of the most beautiful
places on earth, suspended between the bright blue of the Teesta
river and the eternal snows of Kanchenjunga, bathed in the soft light
of a Victorian oil lamp or the sparkling air of a crystal winter’s
morning.
Rungli-Rungliot
drips with darshan.
Yet it is leavened with wit and it never cloys. It is mostly
forgotten now, but Godden would write over 40 years later that this
book had brought her more letters than anything else she had written.
*
Jinglam
was an idyll, but early in 1942 Godden left. She doesn’t say why in
either book, but implies that she had to. According to her
biographer, Anne Chisholm (Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life), this was not the case; it was her own
decision, but the reasons for it are not quite clear. At any rate,
Godden now found she headed what was described, in wartime India, as
an ‘abandoned family’. This was less dramatic than it seemed,
meaning simply the dependants of someone who was normally based in
India and was serving for now in the Army, which had thus become
responsible for her. She was told to choose somewhere in the Indian
Empire to which she would be relocated, and would remain for the
duration under the protection of the Provost Marshall (the head of
the military police). She chose Kashmir, thinking it to have a good
climate; clearly the long summer in the mountains described in Two
Under the Indian Sun was not forgotten. She also felt that its
location in the far west of the Empire would be safer. This was not
fanciful. The Japanese would soon overrun Burma and would push west
into India proper, and would eventually be only a few hundred miles
from Jinglam. They would not be repulsed until 1944.
 |
| Kanchenjunga at dawn; Darjeeling below (M. Robbins) |
In
March 1942 Godden arrived in Kashmir with her children – a move
recorded in A Time to Dance as one she and the children made
on their own; in fact, Chisholm says that Laurence Foster was with
her and took leave to try and settle the family. (In general, the
marriage does not seem to have broken up quite so finally and quickly
as Godden would later suggest.) In any case, Godden was reminded that
she had not been to Kashmir in winter:
Surely
it is as Russia must once have been, coming across frozen marshlands
into this land of winter, such winter, strangling the country with
ice, snow, frost and mist ...The road runs straight, through avenues
of tall bare poplar trees; along it peasants shuffle in rags, thin
shawls and straw sandals and the light tongas move as silently as
sleighs, except for the horses’ bells.
Srinagar
is a ten-hour drive from Rawalpindi:
We
arrived in Srinagar itself at last daylight, driving past handsome
carved fronts of rich men’s houses rising out of the rottenness of
the lanes around them; beside the Jhelum river is the huge palace of
the Maharajah, built of white stone in that city of wood, with fluted
pillars, columns and long glassed windows; on the few occasions the
Maharajah visits his State, the people float roses down the river to
greet him. ...The women’s cotton robes are filthy but the colours
are blended by the very filth, dull blue and muted green, a prune
colour or purple; they wear white veils and not one silver earring
but bunches of them hanging either side of the face.
These
quotes are from letters that Godden wrote at the time and later
included in the later parts of A Time to Dance; often they
were to her sisters. However, it is not just these snapshots from the
time that are vivid; the book lacks the strangeness of
Rungli-Rungliot and the prose is straightforward and
undramatic, and yet its author, in her 80s when it was published,
seems to be sitting with you, not writing but speaking, a little
steam rising from her tea, her eyes on you one minute and then
focused elsewhere as some long-ago joy or misery comes to her. One
wonders why she took so long to write A Time to Dance, but
perhaps she did not want to recall everything yet felt unable to
write it without doing so. Her wartime life was very harsh. In
Srinagar she, her children and their adored Swiss-Italian nanny,
Giovanna, were quartered in two rooms in a bad hotel, surrounded by
other wives of officers who had formed a small world to which Godden
could not adjust. Worse, the hotel was insanitary and the entire
family got dysentery, one child got typhoid and the youngest and
weakest had a contagious disease that forced them all to move out. At
length Godden herself contracted jaundice. She had little money but
knew that somehow she had to find somewhere. Then she remembered a
house she had seen from a great distance, across the lake, lost among
the trees high on a mountainside.
It
was built of pink-grey stone with a wooden verandah and a roof of
wooden shingles. ...I stood and looked. ...I was taking ‘darshan’
except that I knew at once I would not, simply, look and go away.
...I have had
several cherished houses; always, by circumstance not by desire, I
have had to leave them but never have I loved a house as I loved Dove
House.
Godden
moved in with her daughters as soon as she could. She writes in A
Time to Dance that she should have liked to stay there for ever.
It seems to have been a place of astonishing beauty. In a letter at
the end of May 1943 she describes dusk in the mountains, the lights
slowly appearing around the lake below, and from the garden comes “a
gust of sweetness, the scent of flowers. Tonight I am grateful from
my head to the soles of my feet ...for living here, for being allowed
to live here.”
But
Godden was to stay there for less than two years. The monkey curse
struck again in June 1944, when a servant poisoned her and the
children in an apparent murder attempt. Exactly what happened is not
clear. In A Time to Dance Godden states that she met an
accomplished British woman, a painter, by the name of Olwen, and
eventually agreed that they would share Dove Cottage and the cost of
running it; Godden was as short of money as ever. Bit by bit Olwen’s
servants displaced her own and Olwen’s bearer recruited a new cook,
Salim, a man who, Godden wrote, never seemed quite as he should be.
Both Godden and Olwen became very unwell, and it was clear that
Godden, at least, was being fed drugs of some sort; she was to
remember walking around the grounds wearing a Norman Hartnell
ballgown. At length the Provost Marshall appeared at the house,
removed both women, forbad them to return and arrested Salim who,
unbeknownst to either woman, had a past record of making himself
indispensable to English ladies and relieving them of their
belongings. Charges were brought against Salim but it became plain
that the court would not convict, and that the women might face
counter-charges for slander. Advised to leave Kashmir, Godden slipped
away, leaving Olwen to face the music – something of which she
admitted she was not proud; Olwen, she said, did not forgive her.
That
last part, it seems, was true; according to Chisholm, Olwen – whose
real name was Helen Arberry – did feel that she had been treated
badly. They never met again. Other parts of the incident may not have
been quite as Godden wrote them. In particular, Chisholm’s account,
which draws on Godden’s own letters from the time, suggests that
the cook Godden calls Salim (his real name was Siddika) had not been
recruited by Arberry’s bearer as Godden wrote later, but had been
employed by Godden herself before Arberry moved in.
In
the early 1950s Godden wrote a fictionalised account, a novel called
Kingfishers Catch Fire, in which some at least of the episode
is very true to life; a headstrong young widow and mother, Sophie,
becomes badly ill in Srinagar and is cared for with her children by
the Mission next to the graveyard, and then, in spring, largely
recovered, she insists against local advice on taking a hillside
cottage away from the town. This is very much what Godden did. Once
in the cottage, Sophie fails to understand the dynamics of the nearby
village, and causes trouble between the local peasants. She also
wilfully refuses to understand her young daughter’s fear of the
local children, which turn out to be all too well-founded. Her life
in the cottage ends badly, as she is poisoned by her cook.
Is
this how Godden herself saw this episode? Probably not. Neither her
own books nor Chisholm’s fine biography suggest that Godden was prone to
self-criticism of this sort. One could ask why she
wrote Kingfishers Catch Fire if not in expiation; but that one
is easy to answer – writers never waste good material. What
Kingfishers is, though, is a good novel. Chisholm rates it
very high, suggesting that, as a portrait of the British in India, it
ranks alongside A Passage to India and The Jewel in the
Crown. This is high praise, and is based in part on the way
Chisholm feels the book respects the locals themselves. In fact, I am
not sure it does; I thought Godden’s depiction of the villagers had
quite dated and imperial overtones.
Where Kingfishers Catch Fire
is an undoubted success, however, is in its vivid portrait of a woman who has
misunderstood her Indian neighbours in a hundred different ways,
while also offending against the conventions of her own community;
the latter is fiercely critical of her decision to move to an
isolated location amongst people she does not understand. In this
sense, the book is true to life. Mollie Kaye – better known as M.M.
Kaye, the author of The Far Pavilions – was in Kashmir
herself at the time; they do not seem to have known each other well,
though they did become friends in later life. Kaye was later
to remember that the British community had thought the move was
unwise and that no-one was very surprised that Godden had had
trouble. It was even suggested that no-one had really tried to poison
Godden and Arberry at all though on that score, at least, Godden –
and the Provost Marshal, and the Kashmiri police – seem to have had
no doubts.
Whatever
really happened at Dove Cottage, it cast a long shadow over Godden,
and she was still nervous of entering Kashmir when she returned with
the BBC Bookmark crew in the 1990s, not long before she died.
According to Chisholm (who accompanied her to India), Godden demanded
assurances from the Kashmiri authorities that she would not be
subject to any proceedings if she returned, and she was not willing
to revisit Dove Cottage. Yet her description of her life there in A
Time to Dance suggests a beauty so profound that it seems to have
transfixed her even as she wrote of it 40 years later.
*
That
beauty must have sustained Godden as she left India via a stinking,
diseased transit camp near Bombay in the summer of 1945 – a
difficult time that she describes in her second volume of
autobiography, A
House With Four Rooms.
She
was not finished with India; her
sisters were still there, and
she
would return soon after independence, in November 1949, with the
distinguished French film director Jean Renoir, to make his
much-loved
film of her novel The
River,
for which she wrote the screenplay.
Her
last visit
to India was with the Bookmark
team
in 1994 at the age of 86. But she was not to live there
again. She
spent the rest of her life in Britain, in Sussex and later in
Dumfriesshire,
producing more than 60 books, including some highly successful ones for children. A number of her novels were filmed, and several,
notably Coromandel
Sea Change
and In
This House of Brede,
were highly successful. She continued to write until the end of her
life and her
last novel – Cromartie
vs. the God Shiva –
was published as late as 1997.
Rumer
Godden died
in November 1998 at the age of 90. One of Britain’s most successful
ever novelists, she is probably less read now, but still has a
following and in time, like J.B. Priestley, she will be rediscovered
as a quintessential English writer. In fact the rediscovery is under
way; a number of her novels have now been republished by Virago. For
me, however, it always will be her vision of India that astonishes
and delights; the clear-eyed but loving childhood memoir in Two
Under the Indian Sun,
and
the thoughtful beauty of A
Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. The
latter is written with the clarity of old age and filled with people
who were already long dead but to her very much alive. It is a book
that sometimes comes quite close to perfection.
 |
| The train to Darjeeling (M.Robbins) |
And
there is the mystical, forgotten Rungli-Rungliot.
I read it a year ago, in December 2017. I took it with
me when I reported to a hospital in New York for a heart procedure
that I knew might not work. (It did.) As I left the house in the
early hours, I remembered that I should take a book; there is a lot
of waiting to do in hospitals. Rungli-Rungliot had just
arrived, and I slipped it into my bag and felt it bumping against my
hip as I walked through the pre-dawn streets. Later that morning,
checked in, monitored and waiting in my cubicle, I reached for the
book. I came to Godden’s description of her climb to Darjeeling on
the narrow-gauge railway from Siliguri on the Bengal plain. Sitting
in a cubicle in a New York hospital, frightened of what lay ahead, I
let my mind wander back to the journeys I had made to Darjeeling
myself, over 20 years earlier. There was the one via Kalimpong and
past Rangli-Rangliot itself, across the Coronation Bridge, the Teesta
river a glacial blue many hundreds of feet below. There was another
when we climbed by road, slowly, in the wake of round, stately
Hindustan Ambassador saloons in green and grey, packed with Indian
families.
Once,
we rode the train. The engine, painted bright blue, had a plate that
proclaimed its date of birth in Britain: 1877. It may have hauled
Godden and her family upwards, through Ghoom and Tung, past hamlets
of clapboard and corrugated-iron roofs, just as it took me on a
sunlit afternoon in 1992, the deep green of the Himalayan foothills
all round us. An Indian guard clapped me on the shoulder. “Your
great-grandfather built this,” he said. There was another
passenger, an elderly Englishman in a sports-jacket. The late
sunlight bounced around the carriage and lit his face, and he was
smiling with what looked like wonder, and I knew that he had been
here before, a long time ago.
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
