Page 80 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

letters in total while I was at sea, this simply not being his forte). In it she stated
that one of her friends (one Vera Hayworth, a rather austere but elegant lady with
whom she and another friend had invested in a rental property in Brighton in
Sussex) was stationed in Calcutta with her husband, an executive with Imperial
Tobacco, and that I should see if I could contact her. Mother had given me her
phone number, so I decided to take the opportunity to see them and something of
this part of the world. Phoning, however, was not something that one undertook
lightly in West Bengal, for the connection, even once accomplished, could not
have been more jumbled and muddled if the other person were on the Moon. I
did, however, speak to a maid, and eventually found that Vera was that afternoon
at the Calcutta Golf Club. I therefore left the ship and found a convenient taxi,
which, I seem to recall, was a large black 1948 Austin. Although in terrible
condition, its engine seemed to work, and if none of the windows would go up or
down, this mattered little in light of the uncomfortable humidity.

The ride itself was an exercise in ingenuity. Though there were few cars
on the road, if the track over which we drove could be so termed, there was
an abundance of cows, harnessed to carts or otherwise free of any constraints,
elephants and bicycles, and, of course, what seemed to be many thousands of
pedestrians, all of whom obviously knew nothing of any rules for traffic or for
personal safety. I believe that we arrived at the Club without actually maiming
anything or anybody, but of this I cannot be certain.

The Club itself was splendid, with buildings redolent of the Empire at its
height. Although it called itself the Golf Club, it was in effect a club for all sports,
most notably cricket, which while India fielded a notable team at the time, had
achieved nowhere near the cult – and indeed betting – status achieved only a
few years later. I found Vera easily enough, and she expressed remarkably little
surprise at seeing me appear, though one could hardly imagine that many visitors
normally arrived at such a destination without some early warning. (The nations
of Pakistan – East and West – had been created in 1947, and the major shipping
traffic to the sub-continent, which largely comprised P&O and British India
(B.I.), the latter a part of the P&O group, had perforce reduced visits to India to
occasional stops in Bombay (later Mumbai), though the companies’ cargo ships
visited some ports with more frequency.)
We sat around the cricket ground enjoying a match for a good while, and I
took in the ambience of a fading way of life, not entirely dissimilar to the glimpse
of past imperial glories that I had earlier witnessed in Colombo. I was then invited
back to the Hayworth’s flat, which actually was rather austere, and had tea, ably
served, naturally, by a posse of servants. It was all very pleasant, at least as an
interlude, but it was not so difficult to see the shadows of the leisurely lifestyle

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