The Day of the Scorpion (8 page)

II

If English people in India could be said to live in (in the sense of belonging to) any particular town, the Laytons lived in Ranpur and Pankot. Ranpur was the permament cool weather station of Colonel Layton’s regiment, the 1st Pankot Rifles. Their hot weather station was in the hills of Pankot itself, a place to which the provincial government also moved during the summer. It was from the hills and valleys around Pankot that the regiment recruited its men: sturdy agriculturalists who had a martial tradition going back (it was said) to pre-Moghul times. Somewhere round about the
sixteenth century the hill people turned their backs on the old hill gods, embraced Islam and intermarried with their country’s Moghul conquerors. So far as the British were concerned they ranked as Muslims, although it might have been more accurate to describe them as polytheists. In the hill villages images of old local Hindu gods were still to be found. To these the women liked to make offerings – at sowing and harvest-times, when they were in love, when they were pregnant, after the birth of a son or the death of a husband. The men held aloof from such things, unless they were going a journey, when they made sure that a female relation left a bowl of curds and a chaplet of flowers at the local wayside shrine the day before.

The only mosque in the entire hill area was in Pankot itself. Many of the boys who made the trek from their village to Pankot to offer themselves as soldiers at the recruiting depot were unable to distinguish between the mosque, the Kali temple, and the Protestant and Catholic churches. They knew the names of Allah, and of their tribal gods, they accepted that Allah was all-knowing, all-seeing and all-merciful, more powerful than the gods of the hills; so powerful in fact that it was better not to involve him in everyday matters. When you died you would go to his abode. While you lived here on earth it was necessary to be honest, industrious and vigorous. If you lived a good life, did not drink or smoke, practised good husbandry, took wives, procreated, did not cheat or steal, kept your roof repaired, your family fed, then you would please Allah. To live such a life, however, it was necessary to please authority as well – to pay your taxes, to offer gifts of money to minor officials and of loyalty to senior ones, to propitiate the gods of the hills who, being less powerful than Allah, had both the time and the inclination to make things difficult for mortal man by withholding rain, sending too much, making the earth sour, turning male children into female children in your wife’s womb, poisoning your blood with sickness, filling the air with bad vapours. Since Allah was all-knowing obviously he understood this. To feed and flatter the hill gods was something you did to help in the business of making your life pleasant for Allah to look upon. All the same such things
were best left to the women, because women did not really understand about Allah: they did not need to. For a man it was different; Allah was a man: the perfect husbandman, the supreme warrior. He blessed ears of corn and strengthened your sword-arm. To die in battle, fighting his enemies, was the one sure way of going to Heaven. There were people living on the plains below the hills, and even in Pankot, who did not understand about Allah either. Such ignorance meant that their men were not much better than women. The white man, however, understood about Allah. In Pankot there were white men’s mosques. There was also Recruiting Officer Sahib’s
Daftar
, where a boy could go to become a sipahi, a soldier. The white man’s enemies were also Allah’s enemies. The white man called Allah God-Father, but he was the same Allah. They called the prophet Jesuschrist, not Mohammed; but then did not the same sky cover the whole world? In Pankot did it not cover the mosque, the Hindi temple, the two churches, the Governor’s summer residence, Flagstaff House and Recruiting Officer Sahib’s
Daftar
? To the boys coming in from the Pankot hills these places were all seats of mystery and authority. And of them all Recruiting Officer
Daftar
was the one they recognized as the most important in practical as well as mystical terms.

Not one of them made the journey from his hill or his valley to Pankot who was not forewarned of and rehearsed in the incalculable mysteries of the
Daftar
by an older male relation. To make the journey to the
Daftar was
the first test of manhood. To be rejected was thought by some to be a shame a boy could never recover from. In Pankot bazaar there were men – it was said – who begged or starved because they had been rejected and were afraid to go home. To be accepted was imperative if – having chanced one’s arm – one were ever again to look another man in the eye. And so they came, year after year, with stern faces (that in a moment could crack into a grin, because the Pankot people were of a happy disposition), blanket over shoulder, bare-foot, each – inevitably – wearing or bearing some token of an earlier family connection with the Pankot Rifles – a pair of carefully mended khaki shorts, a row of medals, a chit from an uncle who had risen to the rank of Havildar or Jemadar and who
begged the favour of offering his nephew in the service of the King-Emperor (whom they confused, vaguely, with the great Moghul and Allah) and gave, as reference, the name of an Englishman who more likely than not turned out to be retired, or dead, although not forgotten. The
Daftar
had a long memory.

The main recruiting season extended from the beginning of April until the end of September and coincided with the civil and military retreat from the plains to the hills which – in the old days – brought to Pankot not only the Governor, his administrators, their clerks and their files from Ranpur but detachments of the Pankot Rifles and the Ranpur Regiment from Ranpur.

From April to September Pankot lived a full social life. One met the same people as in Ranpur but in different, more delightful surroundings. Receptions at the Governor’s summer residence (built in the Swiss Gothic style, with a preponderance of wood, instead of as in Ranpur in stone and stucco in Anglo-Indian palladian with a preponderance of colonnaded veranda) were less magnificent but no less formal. The important clubs had Pankot duplicates (wood again, instead of stone) and there was the Pankot Club itself which subalterns and junior civilians preferred because there you met all the girls recently out from home who might turn out good for a lark.

Pankot was a place to let off steam in. It was thoroughly English. The air was crisp, the trees coniferous. India, real India, lay below. To the north – defining the meeting point of heaven and earth, distantly, was the impressive jagged line of the Himalaya (usually invisible behind cloud, but occasionally revealed, like the word of God). Summer in Pankot was hotter than summer in England, but the mornings and the nights were cool and the rains fell with nothing like the fury they fell with in the plains. Winter, during the hours between sun-up and sunset, was like an English spring.

As hill stations went Pankot ranked as one of the second class. It attracted almost no tourists and few leave-takers
(who preferred Darjeeling, Naini Tal and Kashmir). There was a rail connection from Ranpur, narrow gauge and single track. The journey took eight hours up and six hours down. There was also a road which was used by the Indian bus and by the military who sent soldiers of the Pankot Rifles and the Ranpur Regiment up and down by lorry. In places road and rail converged, passed under or over one another or marched parallel. The ascent was slow. Embankments gave way to cuttings. Signs of habitation became fewer. The characters of villages changed. There were fewer water-buffalo, more white-humped cattle; many more goats. Rocky out-crops appeared; and then the road began to wind into the foothills, a dusty coil connecting the parched plain to the green-clad heights. Sound was muffled, amplified, thrown back – depending on the formation of hill-face, precipice, re-entry. There was a scent of timber.

Pankot was built upon three hills and their conjoint valley. The railway ended against a rocky face that the road found its way round, through a tunnel of trees, up, over the top and down into the enclosed vale – grassed acres scattered with hutments that bore the unmistakable signs of military occupation. Here, mists gathered in the evening and the early morning. Out of such mists, a mile ahead, emerged the Indo-Tyrolean architecture of the Pankot Bazaar – a V-shaped township of three-storey wooden buildings with fretted overhanging verandas above open-fronted shops where they sold embroidered shawls, beaten silver, filigree wooden boxes inlaid with brass lotus designs. There were Indian coffee shops, fortune-tellers, the local branch of the Imperial Bank of India, a garage, a bicycle shop, the Hindu Hotel, the Muslim Hotel. At the tip of the V the buses halted. Here there were ponies and tongas for hire, even a taxi or two. This was the favourite place of pedlars and itinerant Holy men and small boys in rags and moth-eaten fur caps who competed with each other to shine the visitors’ shoes. There was a smell of petrol, horse manure, cattle dung, incense and sandalwood, of spicy food being cooked in the open over charcoal fires. The shop signs were in English and in the vernacular in both the Nagari and the Arabic scripts. Here, too, were the Kali temple and the mosque. In the centre of the
square formed by the lower tip of the V, the temple and the mosque, stood a phallic stone monolith, erected in 1925, a memorial to the soldiers of the Pankot Rifles who had given their lives in the Great War. In November it received a wreath of poppies, offerings of ghi, buttermilk and flowers.

The arms of the V mounted quite steeply, reaching up into the hills behind the bazaar. The right-hand fork from War Memorial Square was the less steep, but it led finally to the majestic heights dominated by the Governor’s summer residence. The left-hand fork led more abruptly to a lower area where rich Indians and minor princes owned chalet-style houses (a few of which had ‘Mahal’ in their names, to denote that they were palaces). This was an area the generality of the English had little knowledge of. To them Pankot was properly reached by taking the right-hand fork. Here were the clubs, the administrative quarters, the golf course, the bungalows and houses of seasonal occupation; most of them hidden by pines, marked by roadside posts at drive-entrances. And yet there was no feeling of enclosure. The road, at every turn, gave views. There were English people who said they were reminded of the Surrey hills near Caterham. Upon retirement from the civil or the military some of them came to Pankot – not to die (although they did – and were buried in the churchyard of St John’s – C of E – or St Edward’s – RC) but to enjoy their remaining years in a place that was peculiarly Indian but very much their own, and where servants were cheap, and English flowers could be grown (sometimes spectacularly) in the gardens, and life take on the serenity of fulfilment, of duty done without the depression of going home wondering what it had been done for.

It was in Pankot that Sarah Layton’s childhood memories of India were chiefly centred. She and Susan were born there (in 1921 and 1922 respectively). Their christening was recorded in the parish register of St John’s Church (Sarah in March, an Aries, and Susan in November, a Scorpio). The register also recorded the marriage in 1920 of their father John Frederick William Layton (Lieutenant, 1st Pankot Rifles, son of James William Layton, ICS) to their mother Mildred Rose Muir, daughter of Howard Campbell Muir –
Lieut.-General (GS). Neither James William Layton nor General Muir was laid to rest in the churchyard of St John, Pankot, but there were headstones there that celebrated both names, those of General Muir’s unmarried aunt and James Layton’s great-aunt – the former dead of fever, aged nineteen, the latter in childbirth, aged twenty-three.

Sarah and Susan’s father, John Layton, was in Pankot for the second time in his life in 1913. He was then nineteen years old, newly returned from Chillingborough and Sandhurst. His choice of a military instead of a civil career was his own but his choice of regiment had been dictated by a sense of family connection. To begin with, Pankot had lain within his civilian father’s first district. Layton had no personal recollection of the place. He had spent one summer there with his parents as a child of three, when his father was working at the secretariat in Ranpur and went up to Pankot with the provincial government when it took its annual breather in the hills. Afterwards the Laytons went down to Mayapore where Mr James Layton had been appointed assistant commissioner and joint magistrate. A later appointment still, as acting deputy commissioner took the Laytons down to Dibrapur and when that job was finished young John Layton was eight and due to go home to England to school. His parents, taking their long leave, accompanied him. During school holidays he lived with his paternal grandfather in Surrey. His parents returned to India. Shortly after their return Mr James Layton was appointed Deputy Commissioner for the Pankot District. During his tour of office there he made a name for himself with the people of the hills. He had certain eccentricities which endeared him to them. He used to escape from his office and his staff and his wife and ride ten or twenty miles on his pony between sun-up and sunset to talk to the villagers.

In India, as a child, young John Layton was inclined to be sickly. He inherited his mother’s constitution. Even in England his health gave some cause for anxiety. There had been a plan, indeed a promise, that in the long summer holiday of 1907 when he was thirteen he would spend a month in Pankot with his parents. His England-based grandfather advised against it and suggested that instead his
parents should take long leave and come to England. Only Mrs Layton was able to make the journey.

Sick before she set out (the ill-effects of life in places like Mayapore and Dibrapur had become too deep-rooted for the healthier climate of Pankot to have made much difference) she was sick when she reached home. She was not the mother young Layton remembered. In later life he found it difficult to recall the conflicting emotions the sight of her actually aroused in him. As he said to his daughter Sarah (in a rare moment of confidence – rare but perhaps not unexpected because Sarah was her father’s daughter while Susan was her mother’s), ‘I suppose I was disappointed. My mother looked old in the wrong sort of way. Well, I mean like someone on the stage made up for it. When she died it was like part of an act. I felt my real mother was still in Pankot, thousands of miles away, and this one was a feeble impostor – so when father married again and came back to England with his new wife Mabel in 1909 she was more real to me than my own mother had been. Why am I telling you this?’