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,
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