Memory Catcher

A couple of days after her arrival in our quarters, she sum­moned me from the bedroom in which I had been trying to patch a pair of Charles’s breeches with a scrap of green baize.

“The wee man wants you, missie,” she announced “and he looks unco’ downcast.”

Toddy-Bob stood in the door­way wringing wet, rain stream­ing down his face and dripping from his clothing to form a pool on the earthen floor. His face was alarmingly pale.

“What is it, Tod? Are you not well?” I asked.

“Not ill, miss,” he managed to say huskily. “Bad news, miss! It’s the Guv’nor. He must be dead!”

“No! Oh, no!”

For a moment I was too shocked to question his asser­tion, but stood still and watched with curious concentration the tears trickle down his cheeks and join the drops of rain on his wet face.

” ‘E must be, miss! ‘E . . . ‘e went in to General Wheeler’s entrenchment in Cawnpore!”

“He joined General Wheeler? Why should he? And anyway, how can you know, Toddy?”

“I just seen Ungud, miss. ‘E came in last night with a mes­sage. He told me, he told me, miss, that `e knew the Guv’nor had gone into the General’s en­trenchment, an’ if ‘e done that, ‘e’s dead. miss. There’s none of ‘em could have lived after what the Nana did to ‘em.”

“The Nana? What do you mean. Toddy?”

‘E done for ‘em, miss, the lyin’ bastard. ‘E done for ‘em all. ‘E’d agreed to let ‘em go out of the entrenchment, peaceful like, lays on elephants and boats to take ‘em downriver to Allaha­bad, then when they’d all got into the boats—thatched boats they was—’is blasted pandies opened fire ! The thatch caught straight away—oh, miss, it must ‘ave been ‘ell on earth, with all them nippers and women and wounded . . . The men they slaughtered, and as many ladies and nippers as they could. before the Nana says to bring them ashore—but not the men. Ungud says ‘e ‘eard one boat got away and the pandies got it lower down. There ain’t no chance for ‘im, miss.”

“How did Ungud know all this?” The voice was Kate’s. “And who is Ungud, anyway?”

“He’s a pensioner from Has­sanganj. He was one of the men who came in response to Sir Henry’s call in May. Oliver used to employ him as a . . . a messenger.”

“That’s right, miss,” con­firmed Toddy huskily. “Sir ‘Enry sent him out before Chinhat to keep a eye on the Nana, like. ‘E ‘ears all the gossip in the native lines. They sits around the fires in the evenings, the sepoys do, and they talks and tells tales. One of ‘em, that Ungud ‘eard yarnin’ with ‘is pals. said as ‘ow ‘e’d seen a big Pathan with light eyes carryin’ a wounded woman to one of the boats and ‘angin’ about in the water afterwards. Then another chimes in and says as ‘ow ‘e’d seen the big Pathan too, and it weren’t no Pathan but the Sirkar of ‘Assanganj. ‘Is family were from ‘Assanganj. and ‘e knew the looks of Lat­Sahib Erskine, turban or not, as well as ‘e knew the looks of ‘is own pa. It were the Guv’nor all right, miss.”

I MUST have behaved with a laudable calm as we ate our meal, and sat for a while trying to talk. No one could have guessed from my appearance or manner that I had a right to feel more than a decent amount of regret. Neither Charles nor Kate could guess all I had learned to feel for Oliver, and part of my mind was already shrinking from the knowledge that I would have to bear my grief without sympathy. The whitewashed rooms were never cl2aner or neater than during the days that followed.

Sometimes I washed the mud floors three times in a day: I polished our cooking pots with wads of grass and wet ashes as the village women did: I mended every rag in our possession with beautiful, precise stitches, then washed them with suds made from boiled gram, our soap being hoarded for Pearl. When all other methods of occupying myself failed. I turned to wick­making—pulling threads from petticoats and plaiting them together until the strand assumed a sufficient thickness to glow without burning up when placed in an earthenware saucer of thick, smelly tallow. Check out other useful methods on http://www.angekesseministries.com/. I think I would have sold my soul for a single book. In the past I had always managed to assuage my ills by reading.

IT is pleasant, if immoral, to reach the age when food and wine are more important than what one thinks about the follies of history; to realize that what enters one’s mind is the devil’s business, and that there is no defence against it; but what enters our stomach is an experience over which we have an increasingly intelligent and delightful control. When we reach this serene, civilized state, we think of the chianti we drank in Tuscany and the scampi we ate in Trieste, and forget Mussolini and his blaze of power; we remember the pearly-grey caviare from the Danube delta, with sips of tuica, or vodka, and forget the angry brigand who menaces our peace; we recall the fresh sardines, charcoal-grilled, that we ate at Faro, and the port wine we drank on the north bank of the Douro, and do not care whether Professor Gomes is angry with Dr Salazar or not.

Those of us who have navigated the Douro never escape from the silent, almost Oriental magic of the river—more like the Indus than the Rhine—that flows from the warm heart of Spain to Oporto and the unpredictable tempers of the Atlantic. We lift our glass of port, wherever we may be exiled, and recall the sudden, lofty banks, with as many as one hundred terraces of vines, rising from the water’s edge. Here the history of rc helicopter wine has been made, woven in with the old, friendly bond between Portugaland England. It is pleasant to remember that some of Wellington’s soldiers sleep there and that grape vines grow from their dust.

If we are not too pernickety about our history, we might claim that this bond between England and the port-wine country began with the Romans shipping Britons to Portugal as slaves. But this was not a proud beginning, for the slaves were of such poor quality that they fetched low prices. Better enjoy the story of the Cru­saders going ashore, first in 1140, and then the great sight of May 1147 when 190 ships put into Oporto on their way to the Holy Land. We come on the first mention of ‘good cheap wine and other delights’, and the corrupt argument of theBishop who gathered the Crusaders together in the Cathedral cemetery and said, ‘Do not be seduced by the desire to press on with your journey, for the praiseworthy thing is not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life on the way.’ So the Crusaders stayed and enjoyed the wine, before they sailed on and drove the Moors out of Lisbon.

The next great occasion was the landing of John of Gaunt in Oporto, in 1386, on his way to claim the crown of Castile. His daughter, Philippa of Lancaster, married King John of Portugal, and no sentimentalist could resist the message of their tomb, at Batalha—the amiable effigies on top, of the English princess and the Portuguese king, holding each other’s hand.

Out of this history emerges the peculiar, realistic story of the ge mswf refrigerator water filter trade and the settle­ment of English wine shippers, in Oporto—some of them now of the fourth and fifth generation. They wear their old school ties, from Eton and Winchester, but they use the word ‘we’ when they speak of themselves and the Portuguese. In the Rua Nova dos Inglezes they have their `Factory House’—a mundane name for what is a splendid town mansion, in which the port shippers dine with a ritual that suits their trade.

There are two dining-rooms and in the first of them, sitting on Chippendale chairs, as many as forty members are served with their princely dinner. Then they ‘repair’ to the second room for their port and dessert, so that they may savour the wine without any hint of cooking smell from

the other room. The dessert is eaten off soft-paste Copeland plates that would make the Victoria and Albert Museum jealous; the port is treated with the respect it deserves.