You can
go home again
Jeremy Lewis
THE GOLDEN ORIOLE: CHILDHOOD, FAMILY AND FRIENDS IN INDIA by Raleigh Trevelyan
Secker & Warburg, £16.95
As a child who was brought up in India between the wars, sent back to England to boarding school at a tender age, and farmed out among relations in the holidays (`It's your turn to have Raleigh for Christ- mas'), Raleigh Trevelyan tells us that 'I often feel that I belong to a tribe that is becoming extinct.' Fired by an understand- able anxiety to revisit in middle age the scenes of his childhood, and bearing in mind G. M. Trevelyan's earlier suggestion that he should write about the family's activities in India, he returned to India or rather Pakistan — for the first time in 1977, in the company of his fellow- publisher, John Guest, a Spanish friend, and a much-needed supply of vodka, which they downed in the privacy of their hotel rooms, diluted with mango juice. Over the next seven years he made four further trips to various parts of the sub-continent: the result is an engaging if over-long mixture of autobiography, family history and travel which also provides an inevitably impress- ionistic overview of English attitudes to India from the late 18th century to the present day.
Trevelyan was born in the Andaman Islands, smack in the middle of the Bay of Bengal; the islands formed a penal settle- ment, and each one of the Burmese family servants was a convicted murderer. Although he revisited the Andamans on the third of his journeys, he did so from interest rather than nostalgia, since the family moved on when Raleigh was about six months old. His true nostalgia is re-
served for Gilgit, in the mountains of northern Kashmir, where his taciturn, gingerish father, Walter, was sent in 1929 as military adviser to the Maharajah of Kashmir — taking with him his stylish wife Olive (who, Raleigh later learned, was loved by and in love with an older officer), the six-year-old Raleigh, and his younger brother, John. To reach Gilgit then in- volved days of trekking over snowbound, vertiginous passes: once there, the family found itself part of a tiny colony of Europeans, Raleigh busying himself with the Gilgit Wolf Cubs while his parents failing, alas, to behave like empire-builders from the pages of Punch — normally ate dinner in their dressing-gowns rather than in full evening dress. They returned to England in 1935: Raleigh remembers his Gilgit childhood as a paradise lost, and his adult longing to 'ride again up through those pine forests, stay in those musty rest-houses made of logs, and after dark hear the panthers purring like sawmills outside' is touchingly realised as he finds the family bungalow — now occupied by a Pakistani officer — much as he remembers it from 50 years before, and hears once again the golden oriole whistling from its familiar tree.
Sad to say, Raleigh Trevelyan's later journeys through other parts of India assume a rather rambling, bufferish quali- ty, as he travels with a group of elderly American tourists ('game old things') or old India hands like Monty Flash or the blue-blazered Ted Blessington and his wife Scottie ('What fun!'), or books into a houseboat in Kashmir where their host was `a glamorous Omar Sharif character called Mohammed', or does battle with recalcit- rant hotel-keepers (`And yes, our bill at the Circuit Bungalow was only 11 rupees'), or evokes the spirit of place in a manner more suited to a gushing postcard home than the author of The Fortress, Treve- lyan's magnificent, harrowing account of his experiences at Anzio as a 20-year-old subaltern (`Ah those Goan evenings at Prainha under the half moon. Chinese lanterns hung beneath the coconut palms, and the gentle swish of waves. And those prawns . . .').
Help is at hand, however, via earlier generations of Trevelyans, whose Indian experiences are nimbly interwoven with those of the narrator and his family. Most impressive of these was the bewhiskered, eagle-featured figure of Charles Trevelyan, who married Macaulay's sister Hannah, and is best remembered (unflatteringly) in relation to the Irish Famine, and for the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the civil service. A high-minded liberal of the most infuriating kind, he combined an arrogant, priggish sense of personal and national destiny with a hatred of corruption and inefficiency, a very Victorian interest in drains, and a disruptive belief in the freedom of the press and in the importance of treating Indians as equals both in person and before the law. Like his son, George Otto — the father of G.M. — he noted with dismay the sharp deterioration of English attitudes towards the Indians after the Mutiny; not surprisingly, he proved a contentious and uncompromising figure as Governor of Madras and, later, as the Finance Member of the Supreme Council of India. Some 90 years later, in the early 1940s we find another liberal-minded Trevelyan, Humphrey, as the Political Agent in Udaipur: the palace in which he lived had five tennis courts, and the Indian nobles and officials who attended the Tuesday tennis parties came carrying a racquet in one hand and a sword in the other.
Raleigh Trevelyan makes excellent use of family letters and papers, including lurid accounts of the siege of Cawnpore and the subsequent slaughter, and of the equally horrific Amritsar Massacre some 70 years later. Perhaps the most intriguing para- graph of all is concealed in a footnote, in which he wonders whether the surname of Virginia Woolf s hard-living great- grandfather, Jim Pattie (more widely known as Jemmy Blazes) may not have been an anglicisation of Patel. Could it be, one wonders that unclaimed cousins of the queen of Bloomsbury are even now open- ing newsagents shops in Leicester or Moss Side? Charles Trevelyan, one suspects, would heartily approve.
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