Birthdays and Bibelots

Today, 15th August would have been my grandmother's hundredth birthday. It would also have been Desmond's but how old I do not know. Ninety, I have discovered since starting to write this. That was one his enduring mysteries, how old , where from: how and who developed that prodigious talent?

His birthday was always a great celebration even if the exact years were never mentioned or glossed over. I do remember helping my mother prepare his fortieth birthday card: a giant cardboard heart made into an advent card hiding hair dye and pep pills for the aging man. He of course took the pills and had to be admitted to Woodlands by my father for palpitations. Yet again my mother had to hang her head in shame as she was wrathfully told off. Only those who knew both of them would have seen her shoulders shaking with hidden laughter as she ruefully apologised for her thoughtlessness. An apology that had to be repeated when the hair dye turned Desla's hair a gentle shade of rosy pink! She did get the icy anger for that one.

It always seemed that he arrived fully formed as a young journalist after the war. But how? He had been Gurkha officer and fought with them up the spine of Italy. He had been at Monte Cassino. We knew that because he had an enduring and deep love of the Gurkhas and would at the drop of a hat dance through the night to Nepali songs sung by small, fierce soldiers far from their homelands. I suspect he would have entertained Ms Lumley royally in Khatmandhu and, whilst applauding her intentions, would have loved the inherent comedy of her "Ayo Ghurkhali!" quasi royal visit to Nepal.

We knew about the war, not from him, but another friend, another doctor, Maurice Shellim who had also been a part of that force. He must have been very young for I cannot imagine him as much older than my parents and my mother was only just 18 when the war ended.

We know that he and his dear friend Frank Baines came to work at the Statesman in 46/47. They had a rooftop flat on the paper's building and set about learning their craft.

My mother and I discovered Frank Baines and his childhood in Cornwall but apart from the odd throwaway comment about ruins in Delhi and the ghosts of Lucknow Desmond's childhood was almost non-existent. 

So, how do you arrive at this man my mother met in the early 60s, a Renaissance man, gifted, charming, erudite, witty and to all intents and purposes the product of a superb education and a typical specimen of a European in love with the East and despairing of the West. That  much was true. Desmond's visits to his brother and sister in Sidcup would have him returning with joy to the urban sprawl and chaos of Calcutta, A suburban life of nine to five would never have been his choice.

One of the things I have found about this 'interweb' is that no-one can truly hide or wander away to reinvent themselves anymore. We can all steal someone else's identity but we cannot be lost. We leave a trail that it is all too readily available at the click of the right button on the right search engine. An ex-colleague and friend of mine, so fiercely Luddite that I had to teach the IT elements demanded of his English classroom  by the Natioanl Curriculum, swore that the pen would be his only instrument and a stamp the only way to reach him now endures the misery of his email being readily available to all who know the school that he works at. Annonymity is a luxury of a bygone era.

Fifteen years ago when I achieved that pinnacle of success, my very own Mac and internet connection (Tesco - free) my first search was for anything on Desmond Doig. Very little came back and what there was seemed primarily concerned with his links ot Mother Theresa and Ed Hillary. Contrast that with today and a search on Amazon.com.


Mother Teresa: Her People and Her Work 
Look Back in Wonder 
In the Kingdom of the Gods
My kind of Kathmandu: 
High in the Thin Cold Air 1ST Edition 
Biography - Doig, Desmond (1921-1983): An article from: Contemporary AuthorsSikkim - Text by Desmond Doig and Jean Perrin 
Once Upon a Time Many Moons Ago (About 1898)

He is no longer a half forgotten hero but a expert on all things related to his beloved mountains. Much of this is due to his, and my, dear friend Dubby Bhagat who has worked tirelessly to see that his legacy is there for the world to find. Type his name into Google and you will find many more than the two or three entries I found some ten years after his death. 56,100 to be exact.


Maybe now then there is a chance to see where he came from and how all was achieved. Still not so easy, the flip bio on most article repeats what we already knew; father an officer in the British indian Army, mother Irish, grew up in and around army camps in Briitish India. His father died when he was quite young and yet the mother and the children seemed to stay in India: why? Between the wars was a not a time that women independently chose to live alone in India with a number of children. We don't know. I do know that Desmond's mother has a chorten 'high in the thin cold air' and that it also marks some form of memorial to him more fitting than the lost grave in the British graveyard in Kathmandhu.


So many questions and so few answers - how are we made into the people we are? What influences us, drives us and teaches us to be the adults and humans  of today. I still do not know about Desla: I suspect his mother to have been rather like my own, following the charm of the East with zest, living life to the full and making sure her children saw all life not simply some narrow view of it. I do know who helped shape me, this wonderful man, my second father, my Daddy Des.

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