The Faraway Drums (41 page)

Then 1914 came and the faraway drums were heard only too distinctly. I did go home then, to Boston; and Clive, recalled to duty, went first to Mesopotamia, then to Egypt and finally to France. Karim Singh went with him; he had spent the three years at Serog with us, bringing his family there. I hate to admit it even to myself, but I think both he and Clive were glad when they were able to escape from Serog and the tranquillity there.

Farnol’s Horse, along with several other cavalry regiments, was held in reserve for the Battle of the Somme. Clive and another officer were attached to an infantry regiment, the Royal Fusiliers, for “ground experience” as their orders stated. They went into action on 1 July 1916, and the experience remained with Clive for the rest of his life. Karim Singh was killed and Clive, wounded in the knee, spent the day in a shell-hole and watched men die like wildflowers scythed down in a grey, grassless meadow. Sixty thousand men were killed or wounded that one day and that was the end of the glory of war.

Clive was invalided back to Blighty, as they called England. I managed to cross the Atlantic, travelling as a newspaper correspondent going to cover the war work of British women, and was re-united with Clive. He never went back to the front and we stayed in England for the rest of the war.

His leg improved, but for the rest of his life he had a slight limp. He made no protest when I suggested we should come to America and try to settle here. We did settle, first in Virginia, then in
Kentucky,
and he was happy till the day he died. He became a trainer of thoroughbreds and some of you may remember that he trained two Kentucky Derby winners. More people will remember the horses that won, but I know whom I remember.

We went back to India twice, in 1925 and 1937. We did not go in 1947 when India and Pakistan finally became independent nations. Clive for years had believed they must have their independence but he did not like the way it was finally done. He wept when he read of what the Hindus and Muslims did to each other in those first few months: the blood-bath came, but it was not the British who died.

Clive died in 1961, two days after the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy as President. We were invited to the ceremony, as we had been to every Democratic Inauguration from President Roosevelt’s onwards: it pays to have a ward boss for a father. I sat there that cold January day and thought of another celebration in another land: there was pride and celebration there under the grey Washington sky, but there was no glory, not as I remembered the Durbar of long ago. I never attempt to argue when my grandchildren tell me, in the patient tones that the polite young use when speaking to the blinkered elderly, that there is no place in today’s world for Empire. I know they are right because my head, which is not as soft as they sometimes imagine, tells me so. But in that same head are memories of what I saw. I can never tell them the thrill I once felt when I looked up at a tall man in a splendid uniform on a tall black charger and cried, “Oh God, it must never come to an end!”

Clive caught a chill at that Inauguration and died two days later and the light went out of my life.

So now I’m putting down the last words of these memoirs. We are at the beginning of another war in Vietnam; another Empire, the French, fell there and now, for reasons which escape me (or perhaps I’m too old to care to fathom them out), we are becoming involved. Intelligent ears will probably always hear the sound of faraway drums, Cain is still loose in the world. All I can do is pray for my grandchildren and their children. In the meantime I put on my hat each day, still a lady from the neck up, and go out into the life I still lead; and if a man smiles and recognizes me, even though he be a stranger, I see Clive and smile back. For as Toodles Ryan, Honey Fitz’s philosophical adviser, once said: memories are the dreams of the old.

End of extract from memoirs.

II

Bridget O’Brady Farnol died in Roanoke, Virginia, on 22 May 1966, aged 80, one month after the publication of her memoirs. She would have been ironically amused at the number of copies her book sold: 1911.

THE
END

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Scobie Malone Series

Dragons at the Party

Now and Then, Amen

Babylon South

Murder Song

Pride’s Harvest

Dark Summer

Bleak Spring

Autumn Maze

Winter Chill

Five-Ring Circus

Dilemma

The Bear Pit

Yesterday’s Shadow

The Easy Sin

Standalone Novels

The City of Fading Light

Spearfield’s Daughter

The Faraway Drums