The Empire of Tea by MacFarlane Alan & Iris Macfarlane

Author:MacFarlane Alan & Iris Macfarlane [MACFARLANE, ALAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, BUS070120, NAT026000, SOC055000
ISBN: 9781468306019
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

I live with a young chap Burt who is manager of this garden (there are ten different gardens on the estate). I will live with him till I know the language a little (very little will do) and know about the planting which is very simple, and then I will be sent to a garden as manager, they want one just now one of the assistants having died of fever 2 months ago. Burt is a very nice chap, a London fellow, he is only 19 and six foot 3.

The pair of them were ‘quite contented and I am very jolly and like the life very much,’ he wrote, even though he had already had fever on the boat and was to take the place of someone who had died of it. ‘I suffered most awfully from mosquitoes the first two days I was on board,’ he wrote, not knowing of the link between the mosquitoes and the fever. ‘My curtains were not put up properly and my face, hands and feet were in an awful mess for a good long time afterwards, if the bites were scratched they fester and get into great sores, one of the civil service fellows up here has his arm cut off near the shoulder owing to mosquitoes, his arm festered and mortified … I got over mine pretty well but I have great big marks on my hands where the brutes have bitten me.’

As to practicalities, ‘this place is very heavy on boots but on nothing else, we wear white trousers a shirt and jacket (no collar) and gaiters and big boots, in the wet weather we have to wear jack boots to prevent the leeches from getting in your boots.’ The weather got very wet indeed: ‘next month the rains begin and it rains without stopping for 5 months all the country is under water for about a foot in depth and the mud is awful, the heat is dreadful too at that time.’

On the bright side, although the servant he had engaged in Calcutta never turned up, ‘I have a very good little chap who does everything and waits at table, looks after my clothes … cuts tobacco and would put on all my clothes for me if I let him but all nigger servants do that.’ There were unexpected events. ‘I was surprised one day, I saw two coolies dragging a dead coolie over the ground by the heels, I asked Burt what they were going to do he said they would take it about a quarter of a mile into the jungle and leave it there and the jackals would have it away before morning.’

In a letter to his sister on 4 April Alick talked more about the coolies.

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