The Fishing Fleet by Anne de Courcy

Author:Anne de Courcy
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T07:00:00+00:00

14

‘Where every Jack has someone else’s Jill’

The Hills

The hill stations – the small towns and stations where the altitude gave welcome coolness in the summer months – were a refuge for wives, children, soldiers and others on a week or two’s leave, and Government officials, many of whom spent entire summers in one. What all of these hill stations shared was the tantalising prospect of an escape from the searing heat of the plains, where temperatures could remain at over 40oC for weeks at a stretch. Today we have air conditioning, electric fans and refrigerators; then, a dampened punkah and moistened reed mats hung over windows were the only relief.

These hill stations were essentially British in atmosphere and built within a timespan of around thirty years. Most were somewhere between 1,200 and 8,000 feet above sea level. There was more ‘Englishness’ in these small towns than in any other part of India, from the architecture (‘the bow windows really are windows, not doors,’ wrote Lady Wilson) to the climate that allowed the flowers of home – sweet peas, petunias, wisteria, wallflowers, phlox, lilac – to grow. Although the corrugated iron roofs, noisy under heavy rain and the feet of monkeys, did not look exactly homelike, at least they were pitched as at home – and effective against the monsoons.

The best known is undoubtedly Simla, the most purely British of Indian towns, with its buildings that range from Tudorbethan to neo-Gothic, some with elaborately carved and fretted eaves, others reminiscent of Swiss chalets. As the hill station for Calcutta, the seat of government until 1911, it was, from 1864, the summer capital of British India. It was also justly famous for love affairs and flirtations between married women whose husbands were working in the plains and the young officers and officials who constantly came up to Simla on leave. Immortalised by Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills, it was, as Lady Reading put it, a place ‘where every Jack has someone else’s Jill’. It was in Simla that Frank, the son of the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, caused shocked gossip by forming an ‘unfortunate attachment’ to a married woman he had met there.

‘The season blossomed and I became involved in a very gay life,’ wrote Bethea Field of her first visit to Simla as a young married woman in 1928. ‘I was young, attractive and had no lack of male escorts for balls, dances, cinemas and dinner parties. In the afternoons there were tennis games or picnics. I was lent horses to ride so that I could have my morning exercise and also ride down to Annandale for the races.

‘To keep up with it all I had to make my own dresses and spent many hours stitching – but material in the bazaar was cheap and I was slim enough to be easily fitted. My ayah helped by pinning seams and doing up the hems. There was a big summer crowd in Simla, summer headquarters for the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab.

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