The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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Home to Mama
MY FATHER’S ANCESTORS WERE Yorkshire farmers. My great-grandparent Hartleys, remembered chiefly for their habit of sitting up in bed together at home in the seaside town of Bridlington and arguing loudly over the morning newspapers, refused even to set foot outside Yorkshire. I sense the Hartleys’ love of home was as important to them as not meddling in the affairs of other peoples overseas. A Hartley was among those who initiated the debate on the abolition of slavery. And David Hartley, a staunch opponent of the American Revolutionary War and a friend of Benjamin Franklin, was Britain’s minister plenipotentiary and signed the Treaty of Paris in the autumn of 1783.
All this changed after Britain lost America and spread its empire in the East. My forebears were swept up in a saga that makes an exception of the Bridlington Hartleys. My mother has gathered our family history into a collection of haphazardly arranged scrapbooks. It is a chronicle of tragedy and conquest. Ours is a typical British story spanning generations, in which men, women and their children sank in ships on faraway oceans, succumbed to fevers in tropical bone yards and died in small wars, mutinies and rebellions fought across the crimson atlas of the British Empire. What survives of each of them in the albums may be only a picture, or an anecdote that fills a few lines. Whole lives are distilled to a single essence, like a well-cut gemstone. Commemorating the life of great-aunt ‘Horrible’ Hilda, and the love of her husband, is my mother’s ring of five Burma rubies. A big champagne diamond and other rings of opal used to set my grandmother off on yet more stories of Antipodean courtships.
As a boy I looked at the faces of my grandfathers and grandmothers, and in those eyes staring back at me through fading paint and sepia I observed a common determination. They were from a tribe absorbed by loyal duty, like my soldier forefather who, starving in the 1688—9 Catholic siege of Londonderry, held off eating his last tallow candle in order to use it to seal his military dispatches. We were indigo planters along the Ganges at the time of the Indian Mutiny. We fled for our lives down the river, but sailed into an ambush on the banks. In a hail of musket fire, the women and children threw themselves into the flood because they preferred to drown than be captured by their ‘inhuman enemies’. Between the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War, Britain fought twenty-nine small colonial wars from Ashanti to the Boxer Rebellion in China. My family fought and perished in a great many of them. One warrior sums up all of them. He was great-great-grandfather Colonel William Temple, who fought against the Maoris in New Zealand. In 1863, during the Waikato War on North Island, Temple won a Victoria Cross, the empire’s highest military decoration for courage. This was in recognition of his bravery while tending his wounded comrades under a hail of intense fire from the ramparts of Rangiriri Pa, a fort of the tattooed Maori rebels. Temple married the magnificent-looking Theodosia, daughter of Major-General T. R. Mould, governor of New Zealand, and she bore him twelve children. Much later, in India, my great-grandfather Gerhardt L’Honneur Sanders, who was to fight in the Boer War siege of Ladysmith, asked Temple’s permission to marry my great-grandmother Mabel. The ageing colonel, all braid and waxed moustaches, expressed his consent by declaring, ‘Better for her to be your widow than my unwed daughter!’
Our women certainly led hard lives. At Mabel’s wedding, her seventeen-year-old sister Ethel was one of the bridesmaids. Ethel caught the eye of the best man, another army officer named Beames. Beames was a friend of Rudyard Kipling, who based The Story of the Gadsbys, his 1899 Indian ‘tale without a plot’, on their courtship. They married and emigrated to Canada, where they became pioneers. Beames turned to drink, abandoning Ethel to raise three children in a remote log cabin. One of her sons grew up to become a sculptor and moved to the United States, where one of his commissions was a monument to the American Indian wars that stands in Washington. My grandfather Colonel Reginald Sanders proposed to my grandmother Eileen after meeting her on home leave at a piano recital before returning to duty in India. By the time her ship arrived in Bombay she had forgotten what he looked like. They met up somehow and married within hours. He took her into the hills to his new married-officer’s quarters, carried her across the threshold and proudly asked her what she thought of it. She burst into tears.
When the colonial peoples had been conquered, we were the rulers, the civil servants, the collectors, the engineers, the planters. We added to the store of scientific knowledge and indulged our national obsession with the classification of nature. Professor James Sanders was a principal of Calcutta University, who died of fever on the ship home in 1871 and is buried in Gibraltar. Douglas Sanders discovered new butterfly species in the hills inland from Chittagong, and his lepidoptera collections can be found in the British Museum. Great-grandfather James Wise worked for the Crown Agents on Cecil Rhodes’s unrealized dream of the Cape-to-Cairo railway.
We fed the Great War and the Second World War too. Great-grandfather Pickard was a shipping magnate who lost his fortune to German U-boats. Great-uncle Bertram was an Indian civil servant, but he died in Flanders. Uncle Alfred Hartley fought at Jutland. Uncle Percy Hartley died in Mesopotamia. Yet another uncle survived the dysentery of that same campaign because, he believed, he had put his trust in a talisman given to him by an Arab friend. In the Second World War another one sank in the Hood. Uncle Mike was in Burma. Uncle Norman crashed his Spitfire fighter aircraft and was crippled for life. Noel was a member of the forces that liberated Belsen. Another was a POW of the Japanese and worked on the Burma railway.
In time, the peoples my ancestors ruled won us over to their ways and their nations became more of a home to us than England. Long before the hippies went in search of gurus, my great-uncle Claude acquired a Sikh master in India and founded a society in England to promote his teachings. My grandfather Colonel Sanders devoted forty years of his life to the 48th Dogras, Rajput regiment, and fought alongside his soldiers in the Northwest Frontier, in Aden and Palestine during the Great War, and finally against the Japanese. In photographs he appears in jodhpurs, always with a pipe sticking out of his mouth and a perfectly clipped moustache, painting a watercolour of distant hills, or standing, rifle in hand, with the ‘mugger’ crocodile he has just shot. When Grandpa retired from the Dogras in 1947, at India’s independence, he was bereft.
My mother loved India more than anywhere else. She was born in 1925 while my grandparents were on a shopping trip to Lahore. She spent the first week of her life wrapped in cotton wool. Her earliest memories are of waking up at dawn under a tree of blossoms in the garden, in which the family took refuge during an earthquake; of a house on a river, where at night, beyond the garden, jackals howled; eating chapattis in the ayah’s quarters; the sight that made her sad of Indians doubled up under the weight of the huge blocks of ice they carried to the European clubs, and of large, cool rooms with fans and cool drinks, regimental displays and wide, green lawns. Even after half a century in Africa, my mother still said, ‘Africa is nothing compared to India.’
As a boy I asked my mother why our great-grandpas and our great-grannies from families of Yorkshire farmers and Scottish doctors felt the need to leave home and travel all over the world.
‘Oh, to get out of the rain, dear,’ Mother replied.
After several centuries, our British Empire came to an end. Most of my tribe returned to where they had once come from. As a child I used to meet my British relatives on visits in England. We all loved ancient Aunt Connie, who had been married once but recalled little about her husband because it had been so long since he was killed in the First World War. Connie lived with Aunt Vi, a spinster and self-sufficiency enthusiast who kept sheep, a pack of Chihuahuas and fermented raspberry wine in bottles that exploded in her corridors. But most of the rosy-cheeked cousins I met at weddings and funerals were as strange to me as the country of Britain itself.
My parents were almost the only family members I knew who refused to go back to England. We who had been in India, the Far East, the Antipodes, the Americas and the South Sea islands stayed on where we had made our last landfall, in East Africa. Once the colonial rulers, our status was now simply that of an appendix to history: powerless, few in number, and, most of all, extremely happy to remain in exile.
Britain was known as ‘home’, yet for us it was a distant island, where after all these years it was still raining. It was almost entirely through BBC radio that we kept in touch with an idea of England, which was cleansed by the frequencies of short wave and my parents’ vaguely