Golden Afternoon Read Online Free PDF Page B

clue where it is going to land.
    However, this did not let me off the hook, and those tennis sessions proved a blood-curdling embarrassment to me — made all the worse by whichever ADC had been unlucky enough to draw me as a partner apologizing to me for what were plainly my mistakes … ‘Sorry, partner — I should have taken that one — not your fault/etc., etc. Oh dear! His Excellency’s ADCs gallantly took it in turns to partner me; and Bets (no Helen Wills, but a more than adequate player) and her partner invariably defeated me and mine.
    The only redeeming features of the visit were, as far as I was concerned, the obligatory sightseeing tours that were laid on for guests at Government House. For this was beautiful, garish, decadent Lucknow, the city that Kipling described as being ‘the centre of all idleness, intrigue and luxury’. Here, memories of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 were still green — so much so that there was still an old retired soldier attached to the staff in charge of the ruins of the old Residency, a white-whiskered veteran who seventy years previously had, as a drummer-boy, actually served there during the famous siege; while among the caretakers was an ancient, white-bearded Indian who had been a mere
chokra
(boy) in the service of the
Sahib-log
during that fateful summer, and who remembered the arrival of General Havelock’s relief force — the one that had been meant to raise the siege, but which had ended up joining the beleaguered garrison and standing siege themselves.
    The years had been kind to these ancient gentlemen, both the English one and the Indian. The one-time drummer-boy (who could not have been more than ten years old at the time of the Mutiny) still wore the scarlet coat of Victoria’s army with, proudly pinned upon it, the campaign medals of a past century. His particular charge was the cemetery in which so many of the besieged British, including Sir Henry Lawrence, were buried, and he told me, in a hoarse aside, that in fact the cemetery, in addition to being heavily shelled during the siege, was subsequently dug up and desecrated after the remnants of the original garrison, together with the force that had hoped to relieve them, were forced to withdraw from Lucknow under cover of darkness and retreat to Cawnpore. This meant that when, almost a year later, Lucknow was finally retaken by the British, no one really had the least idea who had been buried where, or to whom the scattered bones and skulls had once belonged. So most ofthe Mutiny gravestones I had seen were no more than guesswork, and highly unlikely to match the remains of the men and women who were buried under them; a gruesome detail that I was to verify a good many years later when I was doing the research for
Shadow of the Moon.
    I had been told tales of the ‘Black Year’ ever since I was a small child in Old Delhi, so I was fascinated to come across relics of it here. Although by this time I had of course read Sir John Kaye’s account of that rising,
The History of the Sepoy War
, it did not include the full story of Lucknow because he had got no further than the relief of Delhi when he died, leaving his readers with the fate of the besieged Residency in Lucknow still unknown. * I wandered all over the ruined Residency, trying to picture it as it must have looked when the old man with the white beard, who had elected to stay within the defences and continue to serve the
Sahib-log
, had been young, and the ex-drummer-boy, now acting as custodian of the cemetery, had been a ten-year-old fighting alongside other schoolboys inside these bullet-riddled and shell-shattered ruins. For the pupils of La Martinière, the only school (it survives today) that can boast of a battle honour, had taken refuge in the Residency and stood siege there, fighting and dying beside their house and form masters.
    Ten years earlier there had been many citizens of Delhi who could