Didn't We Have a Lovely Time ... ?

Firstly my apologies - I have been absent from my computer and writing this, what would you call it, epic, memoir, blog, self obsessed confessional? My reasons are twofold and have absolutely nothing to do with tonight's main theme - but they need to be revealed: firstly my ongoing battle with the bitter black dog has been very hard of late and finally some stronger medication was prescribed - don't know how long it will take to work but my God, did I sleep - twelve hours at the last count. The other is far more selfish - I have been reading the most wonderful book, absorbing, enthralling and beautifully written. If my aspiration is now to write then to write a book like this would be a gift - certainly reading it was. And yes, here is the title: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Don't be put off if you tried and disliked the Poisonwood Bible - I loathed it and am so thrilled to have found this.I do realise that it must look a little odd to have these Amazon links but if you click on them I get a whole penny and we all know that from little acorns grow big oaks.

For those who are not sure - the story tells of young man's life in Mexico with the painter Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. The main part of story and the turning point for the young man comes when Trotsky arrives in Mexico City as a refugee and Rivera sends Shepherd to work for him.



Now to days out, although I must confess to a longing to write of the Aztecs and Maya and  surrealist painting and McCarthy but I can't - someone else has filled my head with all of that and those are her stories and words. These now, are mine.

A day in out in England is a day spent  in a strange town or forest or National Park or by the sea. We live in such a tiny island that most places are accessible for a day. Not so in Calcutta; a massive city where to drive from Tolllygunge to Ballygunge could take twenty minutes or three hours depending on traffic, the weather or the season. Days out in Calcutta (yes I know it is non PC - but I also know the entymology of the name and it comes from one of three villages Job Charnock  found as he sailed up the Hooghly - Cali Cat or Kali Ghat - but NOT Kolkatta!) were therefore events, planned or spontaneous they involved travel, the need for food and water and some knowledge of where you were going.

My days fell into three categories, Mum and Desmond, school and days when I was old enough to brave the world with just my friends for company. Mum and Des were certainly the most informative and exciting. We would drive into North Calcutta looking for old houses or gates - one such day he found the Marble Palace and made it famous and eternal through his sketch and article in The Statesman. Another time we had use of the municipal boat and sailed up river to look for old houses at Garden Reach: we got sidetracked to looking at the magnificent new temple at Dakineshwar and he spent the day drawing sadhus as they sat at water's edge, ash stained smoking chillums and very frightening until suddenly the face would crack into an enormous grin and the monster became a man of humour and humanity. I missed countless days from school but the excitement - to go along the Dum Dum road looking for Clive's house, finding the mess, with Bangladeshi refugees encamped on the sprung ballroom floor and then walking around  a ruin with him and his citing rose bushes as a sure sign that this was certainly where Clive must have lived. We never find any proof of that but it made us all laugh some fifteen later when a young descendant of Clive's was taken to the house with absolute certainty that this was the residence of Clive of India. Only because of the rose bushes!

School outings were varied - there were the traditional trips to the mint, the Metal Box factory and to see my friends Ule and Desrirees' father's computerised factory. We were always little strips of card punched with indecipherable holes and told this was our name and all our names would be be stored thus in the future. They became bookmarks, or gathered dust in a drawer. How could I know that now I can find my friends all over the world at the touch of a button or that plump Mr Sponner was in his own way, a revolutionary.

Other school outings were more interesting; my favourite always being to Kumar Tuli to see the statues being prepared for the pujas. My favourites, Durga and Sarawati, beautiful and learned, being crafted from the river clay that they would return to so that their souls could flow through the river to the sea and be taken into the air to return to their homes in the high mountains. Kali always frightened me - perhaps because  my most vivid memory of Kalighat was seeing a kid sacrificed, the blood spurting, the animal squealing. And then I read of the Mutiny and the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the Thugs and the phrase a goat for Kali, and I decided she probably didn't like English children as much as Durga and Saraswati who always smiled and looked beautiful. I was a child, what did I know? It was like a fairyland: a teasing promise of what was to come, Diwali and all the pujas and the lights and the excitement and the joy. For a child here this comes when the Christmas lights are turned on and lasts only briefly before it becomes tawdry and rather dull. Imagine days of different displays, different characters in the pandals and the sweets and the sheer joy of celebrating that is done nowhere so well as Calcutta. To look at some of these beauties go to http://www.kumartuli.com/photo_gallery.php

I am going to leave the last outings group for another day - I need to check on some names and places before I get hammered for getting them wrong - as I did the other day when I said we played Hearts in Puri - we didn't, as Harish and then Annabel both told me - it was Spades! Apparently there is a difference. C'est la guerre.

One last image - Diamond Harbour - a great day out! River, mud, empty. We went there a lot - I have no real idea why.

Coincidences

When I was small my mother had a box that went everywhere with us. It was a black wood with an ivory inlay. Not very big and not very valuable but she treasured it. The other treasure that moved everywhere that we did was a large wing backed chair. Whenever Desmond came to visit he would sit in it with a strangely proprietorial air.

Two simple pieces of furniture that  were inextricably linked to our time in India, and in the case of the chair, what happened next.

At the end of Red Road, that glorious straight piece of tarmac that bisected the Maidan stood a tall pillar like monument. Twice a year the area around would become a giant open air mosque where the city's Muslims would come to pray after Ramadan and Id. It was named the Ochterlony monument and was a rather ugly relic of some forgotten man of the raj. Except -

Bear with me because this gets a little complicated. My grandfather was left a rather nice Edwardian house in Church Crookham in Hampshire. He left the police force and moved there with his four children, my sister Jane and his wife. This was a genteel part of Hampshire where virtuous virgins lived out their life of spinsterhood and waited at home for their male relations to send them letters that allowed a small vicarious look at another life. Two such were the Ochterlony sisters who lived next door. Their brother the very same of the monument at the end of Red Road. He was long dead and they were very old themselves. There house was full of treasures sent back from India, Benares Brass, carved elephants and a black wood box inlaid with ivory. They gave it to my mother. I don't know why. This was at least seven or eight years before I was born. she must have had even then, a passion for the East and perhaps in her they recognised the adventurous that they lacked. Whatever was meant by the gift she treasured it.

One morning, not long after we had arrived in Calcutta she took me, along the Red Road, to the monument. And she explained about the two old ladies and their gift to her. This is such a vivid memory of my mother standing there looking this really rather boring Victorian obelisk, and saying, "Perhaps it was meant." I like to think so - that there is some thread in time that binds us all together and what we call coincidence is really fate, karma, kismet.

The second treasure lends itself to supporting this theory.

Just after the WW2 Desmond and a fellow Gurkha officer joined the Statesman as reporters and were given a flat on top  of the paper's offices. His friend was a very nervous. highly intelligent man called Frank Baines. Frank was tall and he could not find a chair that fitted his long limbs. As is customary in Calcutta he had one made. Frank's chair. Big and wing backed. After he left another mutual friend had it his flat and when he left my mother bought it much to Desmond's disgust. The joke was that whoever survived the other would get the chair. Some fifteen years later it arrived in a crate in England along with a black wooden box inlaid with ivory.

Frank had left India long before my mother got there and all we knew of him was that he  was a talented writer who had some very serious emotional and mental problems. I do remember Desmond coming to see Mum, terribly upset because Frank had committed suicide in London. Other than he was supposedly and award winning author we really knew very little about him.

Years past and we struggled to put down roots in the Hampshire soil. Mum sat in the chair and would talk of Desla and home and truly how horrid this England was. And then we went on holiday to Cornwall. Please try and understand that for me this was very much a foreign country. I knew a bit abut London and the corner of North East Hampshire that we and my grandparents lived in. But the rest of the UK to me was alien. My sister, who by now was living in Kuwait with her husband Mike, asked if we go with the girls on a proper seaside holiday. So we did. I drove the 254 miles down through Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon and finally the length of Cornwall until we turned of a bleak moorland road and followed the lane down. Rather like my epiphany as a child, I knew this place. A magical bay with a  harbour and picture postcard cottage spilling down to the sea. Coverack - at the edge of England, beside the shining sea.

From that first holiday it became our Kalimpong in the UK. At every opportunity Mum and I would down and stay. Eventually, madly, impulsively she and my father bought a cottage revamped from the remains of the staff quarters of a grand Edwardian hotel on a headland high above the village. At every opportunity we would go down and stay. Eventually I took it on, bought out my sister's share and for a brief, glorious moment in time we called it home.

During this time we became friendly with a book dealer who would have a sale in the church every Thursday. Mum asked her if there books with a history of the area. "Oh yes," she replied, "the famous one. Frank Baines. Look Towards the Sea." Not at all sure that this could be the same man my mother asked her to try and get it. She did and it was indeed Frank Baines.

His father had bought a small estate near Coveracklimbed that he found it impossible to find one that was comfortable. And so large wing backed armchairs were a feature of life at Trenoweth.

That silken thread had yet again entwined with our memories, had led us to a sanctuary that allowed us to call, albeit briefly, a small part of this strange land home,