A coup, and a departure

Sudanese dictator Omar el-Bashir has fallen. I was in Sudan when he staged his own coup. Some memories of the days after he seized power, nearly 30 years ago

Sudanese dictator Omar el-Bashir has fallen, deposed by his own army. As I write (April 14 2019), it’s not yet clear how events will play out. What looks like an attempt to hold on to power by the army appears to have failed, or at least to have been strongly opposed.

Bashir (US Navy/Jesse  Awalt)

Sudan has disposed of dictators before. In 1985 Jaafar Nimeiry, who had himself come to power through a coup, was peacefully deposed and the country underwent a transition to democracy. The latter lasted only a few years before crumpling under the stress of the civil war in the south, and a declining economy. On June 30 1989 el-Bashir, then a 45-year-old colonel, seized power.

At the time I was a development volunteer for Sudan’s Refugee Settlement Administration in Showak, a small town about seven hours’ drive from Khartoum near the Eritrean border. I later wrote my own account of what happened in the days that followed. It went into my book on my time in Sudan, Even the Dead Are Coming. Like all ‘on-the-ground’ accounts of an event, it lacks perspective; I saw only what I saw. But here it is, for what it is worth. I have made some edits so that it can stand alone, but otherwise it is much as I wrote it a year or so after the coup.

I

ONE morning halfway through June 1989 my colleague Ali and I went to Gedaref. Ali had some business to do there, and so had I; I wanted to try and persuade the UNHCR office in the city to open their files on refugee protection cases for the third issue of the magazine I was publishing for the Administration.

At nine, we went to the house of the head of our Gedaref office, Ismail Ibrahim, who had kindly invited us for breakfast. (Work in a Sudanese office starts at 7.30am, and breakfast is taken between 9.00 and 10.00.) We walked through the industrial souk, or montega, towards the house. The montega was a riot of unguarded welding machinery, rotting cars waiting to be spliced together, and piles of nuts and bolts all over the ground. Among the montega’s more fun features were large drainage shafts about two feet square, sunk into the middle of the busiest pedestrian thoroughfares. There were no rails or covers of any sort on these, and a pond of black, oily water could be seen about three feet down. That morning I nearly fell down one, much to Ismail’s amusement. In fact he was the culprit as he had distracted my attention by telling me the results of the European elections in Britain, which he had heard on World Service that morning. The Conservatives, he was telling me, had taken an almighty pasting. Had I gone down the drainage-shaft, I should at least have died happy.

Politics was also discussed at breakfast. A friend of Ismail’s, an Army officer, ate with us; he was reading from the front page of one of the daily newspapers. It seemed that 17 senior officers had been arrested and charged after a failed coup plot against the government of Sadiq el-Mahdi had been discovered the day before. There was much speculation as to exactly what was going on.

What was? In the light of what happened not long after, it would be fascinating to know. Perhaps it was a feint, designed by the perpetrators of the later, real, plot, to lull Sadiq into a false sense of security. Or possibly the later coup was sparked off by a wish to rescue the 17, as much as anything else. In any case, after the arrests, no-one really expected further trouble that month. It was not on my mind at all.

About two weeks later, on the night of June 30 several of us gathered over a bowl of punch in the compound. The base for this punch was industrial aragi, the local arak; the taste (which was rough) was disguised by karkadee, an infusion of hibiscus, with lashings of sugar. It was Thursday night; as no-one was working on Friday, that being the Moslem sabbath, this was the night at the pub. It rained heavily. There was much thunder and lightning, and we took shelter in Simon’s hut. The dog Shaggy joined us; an unpopular move, as she stank horribly. At about nine, the electricity went off. This was unusual; it had done so far less that year. At about midnight I decided that I had had enough, and dashed through the heavy rods of rain to my own hut, where I balanced my torch on a shelf and got ready for bed. As often happened during the rains, it was cool. I had a good night’s sleep.

I awoke on the morning of July 1 to find the sun shining cleanly; it was hot, of course, but there was a freshness, as the rain in the night had evaporated and cooled the air a bit. Ian was just outside my hut, working on one of the motorbikes.

“Did you hear, there’s been a coup or something,” he grunted.

“Oh,” I said. Then: “Would you like some tea?”

A neighbour's children (M.Robbins)

II

FRIENDS IN Khartoum were closer to events. As one, an Englishman, explained:

I don’t know how your coup went... It was rather bizarre for me. I had gone to bed, as usual, in the front yard, completely sober, and about three in the morning was woken by a tremendous rumbling sound which at first I thought might represent the effects of a particularly badly-made fish stew concocted earlier. I rapidly realized, however, that the sound...was in fact caused by the passing of a number of tanks in the street...I attempted to get up to have a closer recce but was...restrained by my mosquito-net in which, in my haste, I got tangled up (James Bond never used a mosquito-net and now I know why). I got to the wall in time to see a British-made Ferret scout car bringing up the rear. It did cross my mind that it might be a coup but it seemed a bit of a cliche to be doing it that way so I put it down to some Sudanese tank commander... going to visit his relatives...

He went back to sleep.

Information on World Service the next morning was perfunctory. A Brigadier Omar el-Beshir had broadcast on Radio Omdurman, it was reported; the government of Sadiq, he said, had “beggared the people and made their lives miserable”. I have to say that this was true. There was a suggestion that the new military government intended to end the war in the south, then in truce, as quickly as possible. Several senior politicians, including Dr Hassen Turabi of the National Islamic Front and Osman Mirghani of the Democratic Unionist Party, were known to be under arrest.

The Prime Minister himself was reported by the BBC as having been seen being driven from the palace in the early hours, but over the next few weeks it became clear that he had evaded arrest and was missing. (Like Nimeiry before him, he spent some years in exile but eventually returned.) The BBC’s correspondent in Khartoum, who was Sudanese, was later arrested himself by the new regime.

Savage travel restrictions were slapped in place straight away. It became extremely difficult for a foreign national to go anywhere. The Sudanese themselves found it difficult. The day after the coup Hassen Osman, the head of the Administration – a very senior figure, and a powerful man in the region – attempted to reach Khartoum for an urgent meeting. He spent 11 hours arguing his way through the checkpoints before he reached the capital. There had always been a small number of checkpoints on the road, but now there were many, and some of the new ones between Medani and Khartoum itself were manned by paratroopers. Other measures depended on who found himself in charge in a given place. In Kassala, the Army announced that, henceforth, the number of vehicles run by aid agencies would be strictly limited, and some were appropriated. Most were later returned, often with huge mileages racked up; the Forestry Department in Kassala lost one when the Army crashed it, and left it where they’d wrecked it.

House searches began. Europeans appeared to be exempt from this (although apparently not in Port Sudan). However, the searches were methodical and comprehensive, and anyone holding stocks of liquor panicked. I was approached in the street by an Ethiopian refugee who wanted to sell a consignment of Melotti gin at half-price; I thought it safer to decline. In fact, the Army were probably looking for hoarded commodities rather than contraband; it soon became clear that in the Eastern Region, their priority was to try and make foodstuffs and other goods available at the “official” prices. These were set by the state, but everyone had long ignored them. In Khartoum, a curfew was introduced that ran from sundown to sunrise; later this was pushed back by three hours. Extra police-posts in the city ensured that this was strictly enforced.

In Showak, I was puzzled. Why had the Army staged a coup in a country, and at a time, when power was a poisoned chalice? I did not at the time think it political; the Islamist complexion of the new government was not apparent until later. Indeed, Dr Turabi, the Islamist leader, was then in prison with all the other politicians. And the Army appeared to want to end the war in the south, rather than prosecute it with renewed vigour; the truce remained in place for the moment, and there still seemed a good chance that it would become permanent.

I accepted that the Army simply wanted, as Omer el-Bashir had said in his initial broadcast, to end corruption and the black market and let people eat. For the moment, indeed, his priority seemed to be exactly that. It was soon announced that everything would be sold at the official price, and lists of these prices were posted by order at every shop. The reductions were dramatic; goods were listed at the level fixed by the State under the old regime, figures which had hitherto simply been ignored. Cigarettes were cut by over 50%. Bread sank to about 15 piastres a loaf; only in Khartoum had I ever seen it on sale that cheaply, and that had been nearly two years earlier. Sugar, a sensitive commodity in a sweet-toothed country, was henceforth also to sell at its official price - that was, S (Sudanese pounds) 1.30 a kilo instead of the S9 it had been commanding. Before long the shops shut, having nothing left that people wished to buy; or, if they still had it, not being willing to sell it at such a loss.

Children at Abuda, 1989 (M.Robbins)

I assumed that, this being Sudan, the goods would simply be kept below the counter and sold to known customers for whatever they were willing to pay. But I was wrong. A few days after the coup, I was sitting in my office when two policemen accompanied by an army officer entered the shop opposite. Beyond the purple shutters I saw the three talking to the shopkeeper, checking the shelves as they did so. The four men then left together, and the shutters were drawn shut, although it was early in the day. This happened to all the shopkeepers. Many simply remained closed; our local grocer Beshir, for example. Commodities became scarce. After a few days, a little sugar became available. It had been seized by the Army on the day of the coup. They had checked someone’s warehouse and found some 2,000 bags that had been corruptly diverted from local cooperatives before the coup. Some of this was now sold from the police station at the official price, and everyone waited in line to receive a bag each; it was soon gone. Simon joined the queue with everyone else under the blazing sun, and came back with a kilo in his hand; he waved it around triumphantly. But it was the last we would see for a while. Brewing operations came to a halt. There was barely enough for our tea.

Cigarettes were nowhere to be seen in the shops. The boys who had sold them from blue plywood boxes in the souk were rounded up and chucked off the streets. Ethiopian Nyalas, which were illicit imports and had never really been legal, were now available at extraordinary prices if you knew someone who had hidden his stock; after 10 days those prices spiralled to S40, five or six times the fatuous official price for legal cigarettes, of which there were none. I had a new office-boy; he was excellent at finding cigarettes, and went trotting down to the souk for me to interview shopkeepers known to his family. He nearly always returned with something. He and an elder boy had the market sewn up. We let them keep the change, and I think they did very nicely. But two weeks after the coup, these supplies also dried up. Soon afterwards, the office-boy disappeared as well. He was often ill and Ali had taken him to see Dr Mekki, who advised him to go to hospital in Gedaref. It seemed he had fallen sick because he and his family were now up at three every morning to queue for bread.

Why the chaos? Other parts of the country were not so badly affected. I heard later that the military commander who had taken control of the region had not been tough enough for the Young Turks of his regiment, and had been disposed of in his turn. His usurpers then decided to take tougher action against the black marketeers. They hit other targets as well. One day I hitched a lift over to the UN compound with Barrie Potter, a British colleague who was also a friend. On the way back, we followed the main road into the town centre through the red-light district. The road there was blocked by a large green lorry, surrounded by troops. Women were being herded out of the huts opposite and onto the back of the lorry, carrying what possessions they had; occasionally a cassette-player, or a bundle or two. They seemed to enter the lorry without fuss, but were heavily guarded.

I mentioned this to a colleague in the office when we got back. He said he doubted if the whores would come to any harm. “Perhaps the army at Girba is having a party,” he said with a grin. Then the grin was replaced by a frown.

“You know what all this means for us,” he said quietly. “We will have 20 years of this before we try democracy again. Another 20 bloody years.”

I nodded. It was just over two weeks after the coup.

I crossed the courtyard and mounted the stairs to Hassen’s office. His secretary smiled and stood to greet me. I asked her politely if he was busy; I knew that he did not appreciate being disturbed when he was. “Yes, he’s there. Go in, Mike,” she said. I did so. I rarely went there, for it was the holy of holies. Although spacious, it was plainly furnished. There were a couple of extra chairs, more ashtrays than usual and, for some reason, imitation flowers in a vase on a desk. Otherwise, it looked much the same as any other office in Showak, complete with flat-topped grey-steel desk. Hassen was sitting behind it, writing. He greeted me politely. “Sit down,” he said; he looked as completely in control as he had ever been.

“I want to know whether I’m going to print another issue of the magazine,” I said. (This was a publicity tool for the Administration; it had been my main work in Showak.) “I didn’t ask earlier because I doubted if you’d know yet. And I thought you might have other things on your mind.”

“Well, yes, I have.” He smiled slightly. “No, you cannot print another magazine. Under the new publications law it would be a capital offence.”

I was not that surprised. I suggested that I travel to Khartoum to see my field director, Ibrahim el-Bagir, who might have other work for me.

Hassen was still smiling. He knew that I was only two or three months from completing my posting, and would probably just leave the country from Khartoum. That was my intention. “Yes, go to Khartoum,” he said. He thought for a moment, and added: “When you get home, write about Sudan, about refugees, about what you have seen here.”

I promised I would. I have.

I stood and we shook hands, and then I left the office. I never saw him again; a few days later I did leave Showak, and Hassen was removed from his post before the end of the year.

Khartoum was full of rumours as usual. The Acropole Hotel seemed to have new staff on duty. I was warned to be careful what I said in the lobby. But there were plenty of cigarettes. I sent 200 back to Showak. And there was food. We had had nothing to eat in Showak since the coup but thin stews made mostly from okra, and even before that our diet had been getting worse. Ibrahim El-Bagir quickly scotched any notions of my remaining in Sudan. We did not discuss it in detail. He did not say so, but I think he felt that the nature of my work before the coup made it more sensible for me to leave the country. So I went to stay with friends in Khartoum Three, as I had on a previous visit a few months earlier; they were congenial company. I set about saying my goodbyes.

My compound neighbour from Showak, Ian, arrived in Khartoum a week or so later, having completed his own posting. He was not leaving Sudan permanently, but would have a holiday in Britain before returning to start a new job. In the early hours of August 8, we went to the airport with one of Imbrahim’s drivers. The curfew was being rigorously enforced; there was a checkpoint every 300 yards, and the night-passes for both the car and its occupants were scrutinised with great care. In the airport we went through the usual scrum, fighting to keep our place in the check-in queue; in the departure lounge we stepped over the recumbent forms of over a hundred young men who were waiting for a SudanAir flight to Tripoli, delayed for 24 hours. Finally we trudged across the apron and underneath the nose of the Tristar, then up the gangway, past the Royal Mail crest emblazoned on the fuselage. When the aircraft lifted off into the dawn, I felt a sense of relief.

But my mood changed as the aircraft wheeled around above the Mogren, the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, to pick up its course for Aswan. For, as I looked down along the wing, I could see the red-roofed villas set in verdant gardens ringed with date-palms, nestling beside the silver-blue expanse of the Nile. For a moment, I fancied I could see oxen and feluccas, but I think we were too high for that.

III

Gedaref, 1989 (M.Robbins)

SUDAN was not Ethiopia. There were no week-old corpses swinging from the lamp-posts of Khartoum, as there were under Mengistu Haile Mariam. But the military government of Omer Beshir continued to prosecute the war; it also adhered to the principles of Shari’a, Islamic law, which had in part perpetuated that war. And it dealt harshly with those who opposed these objectives.

It was not obvious when I left Sudan that any of this would happen. Indeed, the new government had suggested that the question of Shari’a should be subjected to a referendum. On the face of it, this was reasonable. But human-rights groups outside the country argued that, regardless of their feelings, people would not have voted against Shari’a because they would feel instinctively that this would be a vote against Islam. It may be that the government, knowing this, put the idea of a referendum forward in order to secure the continuation of Shari’a law before revealing its own true colours. To the Western mind, a vote against Shari’a is not a vote against religion, simply a vote against imposing it on others. But it would be unreasonable to expect the Sudanese to feel that way. I can confirm this; staff at the Showak workshop told British volunteers that they could not vote against Shari’a, yet added that they actually thought it should be repealed. In any case, the referendum never took place; in the end the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), as it called itself, resorted to more direct methods. Some flavour of these in the months after the coup can be had from the following testimony given to Africa Watch soon afterwards, in 1990:

The atmosphere in Khartoum is extremely tense. Everyone fears arrest and no-one knows who will be next. The most frightening new development is the mysterious new security agency, with its secret houses. …Information is gradually coming out about these ‘safe houses’ but not enough to paint a complete picture… [They include] the Bar Association club. Other known ‘safe houses’ include the Central Bank Employees Club, also located on Baladiya Street, and the Journalists’ Club on Mek Nimir Street. The choice of these clubs is not accidental, but is intended as a humiliation for the groups who have tried to resist the junta. As a sort of extra humiliation, the military have apparently written ‘Human Rights Chamber’ on the door of the room at the Bar Association club where they beat people up.

Political prisoners were not the only victims of the new state. Human-rights violations on a more general scale began early. While I was still in Khartoum in August 1989, Ethiopian refugees were told to report to the security offices, where a number of them were arrested and deported to points outside the capital. These were refugees holding permits to live and work in Khartoum, not illegals. In November 1990, the authorities started to deport displaced southerners (who were Sudanese citizens) as well, dumping them in open country to the south. The combination of the civil disorder that followed, and Sudan’s apparent support for Iraq during the Kuwait crisis, finally persuaded Ibrahim El-Bagir to remove the remaining volunteers from Sudan that month. After many years, the VSO programme in Sudan was closed.

But things were much worse in the south, where the army deployed what were called Popular Defence Forces containing numbers of fundamentalist volunteers. Amnesty International reported that in October/November 1989 at least 44 villagers had been killed by pro-government militias in Keiga Alkhel, northwest of Kadugli; this was probably just the tip of the iceberg. However, there were also reports of massacres not connected with the war. Both Amnesty International and Africa Watch stated that the murder of an Arabic-speaking farmer by Shilluk labourers in White Nile province at the end of 1989 provoked, within three hours, a bloodbath in which by the Government’s own admission 191 Shilluk were killed. (Amnesty International quoted reports that 500 people died.) Arrests were made, but by mid-1990 no charges had been brought. All of this happened within a year or so of the coup; the conflict in Darfur was yet to come.

IV

NOT LONG before the coup I went to the great lake at Khashm el-Girba. Ali and I were researching the income-generating potential of the cooperatives movement, which the Government encouraged. The official at Showak whose task it was to promote this was badly overworked, but despite this he took us to see some of the projects in which he was involved. He was justly proud of what had been achieved. For example, there was a successful fish-farm near Girba, and we went to inspect it. The project had worked, and now help was being extended to the fishermen who were working around the lake, in the hope that their catch could be more widely sold. It was a valuable source of protein.

So we went to see them, too. Four of us crossed the dam in a Toyota Twin-Cab, and then peeled right towards the forest that lined the shore of the lake. It was a black rim on the horizon, and to reach it we had to travel over several kilometres of open plain. The rains had just begun, and the plain was not yet covered in grass; but a little moisture had softened the earth’s crust and the soil crumbled a little under the wheels, making them hiss as we sped along.

We entered the wood quite suddenly, and I gasped, for the grass grew thickly beneath the trees, which were themselves richly clothed in leaves. I felt I wasn’t in a desert land any more, but in parkland by an English country house. Yet there was a difference; here, the vegetation, fed by underground water from the reservoir, was so lush and vivid that it almost hurt to look at it. And in the gaps between the trees it was possible to see a sky so blue against the lurid green of the grass that the day has etched itself upon my memory.

The woods were not empty. Rashaida tents, like carpets strung across poles, and camels could be seen; but the human occupants of the tents were hidden. We passed them quietly and continued down to the shore of the lake, finding our fishermen with difficulty. They had no tent or other shelter, but seemed no less happy for that. They made do with an anquarayb (string bed), a few pots and pans, a bright yellow plastic abrique (a spouted can used for ablutions), and their nets. They slung these last into the back of the Twin-Cab; it was high noon and they would catch little, but they were keen to show us what they could do. They waded into the water off a shallow beach. One held the shore end of the net; the other swam out a hundred yards or so, and dragged the other end of the net round in a great arc before returning to the beach. It was, as I have said, noon; even so they caught a Nile carp for us and gave it to us as a gift. Ali took it home and got the cook to prepare it in the mess-building where he lived.

At one o’clock we made our way back out through the wood, climbing up and down the hummocks in the earth with care, anxious not to get stuck on the damp earth. We emerged onto the plain below a sky that brought to mind the great vaulted dome of a cathedral. For some reason I found myself thinking of a far-off time and place where other fishermen had left their nets to follow the son of a carpenter.

Even the Dead Are Coming is available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Flipkart, Google Play, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, Waterstones and other online retailers. The paperback can be ordered from bookshops with the ISBN 978-0578035697.

The monkey's benison: Rumer Godden and imperial India

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.