Coromandel Sea Change Read online

  To Oscar – Sir Owain Jenkins – my dear old ‘enemy’, who has done so much to help me

  ‘They come for the sea change,’ said Auntie Sanni and she might have added . . . ‘into something rich and strange.’

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction to Coromandel Sea change by Raffaella Barker

  List of Characters

  COROMANDEL SEA CHANGE

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Sunday–Monday: Midnight

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  SUMMER DIARY: THE HERBOGOWAN

  Acknowledgements

  My sincere thanks are due to: Alan Maclean for his guidance over the book; my editor, Hazel Orme, for her constant care and patience; Tigger Stack for her expert help on Indian affairs and beliefs, also Shahrukh Husain whose books and advice have been invaluable; to Sir Owain Jenkins for his contribution of precious tidbits and, as always, to Ena Logan Brown and Sheila Anderson who typed and retyped without flagging.

  R.G.

  Introduction

  I first read a novel by Rumer Godden when I was twelve. The book was The Greengage Summer, a story which perfectly describes both the misconceptions and the realities of adolescence – and which evokes a sense of place so strongly that I have only to read the title on my bookshelf now to be transported in my mind to the orchards and garden in France where the novel is set. I hold the children in the book as closely in my memories of childhood as I do my own friends and, like my friends, they helped me broaden my understanding of growing up.

  Like I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy, The Greengage Summer is a timeless story, to be reread with as much pleasure as the first time. I have found this to be the case when returning to other novels by Rumer Godden, and it is her gift that she can intrigue a teenager with stories ostensibly about girls growing up which, when revisited by an adult, are also satisfying at more complex levels.

  Rumer Godden had the ability to create a magical and vivid world and to people it with characters whose lives are visibly enriched by loving these places – and in doing this she has won her novels a loyal following. She has been highly praised for the subtlety of her characterization, and in particular her depiction of children; the young family in The Greengage Summer are humorous and arresting and very plausible. And she should also be remembered for her gift of interpreting the world through a voice that is both innocent and assured. Her life spanned most of the twentieth century, but her work remains timeless, retaining a quiet but constant humour which contributes significantly to its charm.

  Coromandel Sea Change is one of the most captivating books I have read. Its subject matter is both personal and political, yet it never for a moment becomes anything but the lightest and most entertaining story to read. Set on the Coromandel coast in India, the backdrop for the novel is an eccentric and bohemian hotel, Patna Hall, which is presided over by the motherly and wise figure of Auntie Sanni.

  Rumer Godden’s relationship with India began when she was a child, living there with her family. Born in Sussex in 1907, her father’s job with a steam-ship company kept the family in India and Rumer Godden returned to England to go to school only when she was twelve. Her love of India did not leave her, and she returned there after completing her education. Many of her novels reflect her knowledge of the culture and beliefs of the country, and Coromandel Sea Change is a significant example of this. Patna Hall offers an opportunity for many different aspects of Indian culture to be explored, with its guests ranging from diplomats to political campaigners, and both loyal Samuel and cocky, self-serving Kuku among the staff.

  Hotels work well for Rumer Godden, and I don’t mean any old hotel. A specific sort turns up frequently in her writing – the sort where people stay for weeks on end and return year after year. Godden uses that sense of continuity and permanence to colour the background and enhance the three-dimensional make-up of some of her characters. In Coromandel Sea Change the scene is set with a comic line-up of the hotel staff and arriving guests, which is supported by the entertaining yet loving depiction of post-colonial India.

  One suspects that Mary St John, like Cecilia in The Greengage Summer, has much of Godden’s own character in her. Mary is newly married to a pompous British diplomat; arriving at Patna Hall on honeymoon, she is delighted by southern India, the idiosyncratic charm of the hotel, and feels instantly at home with Auntie Sanni. Like other Godden heroines, Mary is young but self-assured. She begins to discover elements in her husband’s character that she cannot accept, and in reaction and as salve she becomes increasingly involved in the hotel and in the elections going on in the state.

  Rumer Godden is as subversively funny about politics and the hierarchy of power as she is penetrating about emotional relationships. There is something of Evelyn Waugh’s mordant wit in her creation of the procrastinating Dr Hari Coomeraswamy, plump leader of the Root and Flower party’s campaign and champion of the enigmatic and handsome Krishnan. Dr Coomeraswamy sails along on a cloud of his own hot air, buoyed by his belief in convention, which is punctured from time to time by Krishnan’s flouting of it. The political story offers light relief from the unhappy marriage at the centre of the narrative, and is an elegantly used device for exploring Rumer Godden’s great passion for India.

  Many writers are able to create a rich new world for their readers, a place to lose themselves in for the duration of the story, but Rumer Godden’s novels will stand the test of time not just for this quality, but more because she has done it so apparently effortlessly. This ease is what endears her work to every age group as her novels appear again for a new generation. Rumer Godden may depict a nostalgic world of never-ending summer and characters whose lives are played out light years from the frustrations and stresses of the twenty-first century, but her tone, her humour and her clear understanding of what it is to be young and passionate are qualities which all who come across the work will respond to. No one should limit his or her reading of Rumer Godden to just one novel. She offers too many treats and some precious and abiding memories.

  Raffaella Barker

  List of Characters

  Auntie Sanni

  Miss Sanni to her servants, owner of Patna Hall

  Colonel McIndoe

  her husband

  Staff at Patna Hall

  Samuel

  butler and major domo

  Hannah

  his wife, housekeeper

  Kuku

  the young hotel manager

  Thambi

  lifeguard on the beach and general guard

  Moses

  lifeguards on the beach

  Somu

  Ganga

  the wine waiter

  Mustafa

  waiters

  Abdul

  Ahmed

  Alfredo

  the Goanese cook

  houseboys, sweepers, a washerman, gardeners, etc.

  For the election

  Gopal Rau

  candidate for the Patriotism Party

  Mrs Padmina Retty

  candidate for the People’s Shelter Party

  Krishnan Bhanj

  candidate for the Root and Flower Party

  Dr Hari Coomaraswamy

  leader of the Root and Flower Party’s campaign

  Mr Srinivasan

  his aide

  Sharma

  their young District Agent

  Ravil

  young party workers

  Anil

  the disciples

  other young men and women
of the Root and Flower Party campaign

  Guests at Patna Hall this week

  Sir John and Lady (Alicia) Fisher

  Mrs Olga Manning

  Professor Aaron

  leader of the International Association of Art, Technology and Culture

  Professor Ellen Webster

  lecturer to the group

  Mrs van den Mar

  leader of eighteen American lady archaeologists, professional and amateur

  Mrs Glover

  archaeologists

  Mrs Schlumberger

  Dr Julia Lovat

  Miss Pritt

  Mr Menzies

  Blaise St John Browne

  on honeymoon

  Mary Browne

  Others

  Kanu

  a small fisherboy

  Shyama

  Thambi’s wife

  Chief Inspector Anand

  police officer

  Krishna

  gods and goddesses

  Radha

  Lakshmi

  Animals

  Slippers

  a donkey

  Birdie

  an elephant

  Udata

  a squirrel

  Christabel

  Auntie Sanni’s mynah bird

  Time

  any time

  Saturday

  Saturday was change-over day at Patna Hall.

  ‘Two hundred sheets,’ shouted the vanna – the old washerman was close to weeping. ‘Two hundred pillowcases and the towels. That is too much.’

  ‘It is because of the election.’ Auntie Sanni was unmoved. ‘So many people coming and going besides our own guests.’

  Usually guests, as Auntie Sanni liked to call them, stayed at least a week or ten days, two weeks sometimes three, even three months like Mrs Manning. Sheets were changed three times a week and always, of course, when a guest came or went but now, ‘Too many,’ wailed the vanna.

  ‘It is for the good of your country.’ Hannah, the Madrassi housekeeper, was always a reconciler; she also happened to be a strong partisan for the new and hopeful Root and Flower Party. ‘Don’t you care for your country?’

  ‘I care that I can’t wash two hundred sheets.’

  ‘A contract is a contract.’ Auntie Sanni was unrelenting. ‘It does not say how many or how little. Take them and go.’

  ‘And none of your ironing without washing them first,’ sharp little Kuku put in.

  ‘Wash them yourself,’ said the vanna and left the bundles lying on the floor.

  The three women in the linen room took no notice. They knew, as the vanna knew, that there were many vannas in Shantipur, even more in the port of Ghandara four kilometres away, all with swarming families, all poor; not one of them would let a contract with Patna Hall be taken from him. ‘He will soon be back,’ Hannah prophesied.

  The linen room at Patna Hall was in a small cloistered courtyard built at the side of the main house for administrative offices and linen room, store rooms, a pantry or confectioner’s room where Patna Hall’s own specialist puddings and desserts were made with, nowadays, a refrigerating room. These were to be expected but Auntie Sanni’s office was part business, part conservatory, part menagerie. The convolvulus blue of morning glory tumbled over the window, pots of canna lilies and hibiscus stood in corners; tame birds, cockateels and mynahs, flew round the room. One mynah, Christabel, had learned to call Kuku so cleverly that Kuku never knew if it were Christabel or Auntie Sanni. There were doves; bright green parakeets flew in from the garden and mingled with them all – often they perched on Auntie Sanni’s desk, watching her fearlessly, their scarlet-topped heads on one side. It was not only birds: two cats, tabbies, slept stretched on a mat in the sun; a brown spotted goat was tethered outside while her kids wandered in and out, one white, one brown as if the colours had been divided. ‘But don’t let the monkeys in,’ Hannah had warned Kuku, ‘they take too many things.’

  The monkeys were small, brown and wild; their brown faces and bright eyes peered from the trees. They ran across the courtyard on all fours, their tails lifted their small skinny hands quickly into anything – ‘and everything,’ said Hannah – and always, all through rooms and cloister, the soft Indian sea breeze blew bringing the sound of the waves crashing on the beach below.

  Auntie Sanni – Miss Sanni to her staff and servants – was called Auntie because, in Eurasian parlance, that is the title given to any grown-up female whether she has nephews and nieces or not. Auntie Sanni had none by blood but, over the years, had acquired many – Auntie of the universe would have fitted her. She dominated the linen room as she dominated Patna Hall. ‘Why?’ Kuku often wondered. To her Auntie Sanni was only an unattractive massive old woman, nobody knew how old. ‘No shape to her at all,’ said Kuku, looking at her in one of her usual cotton dresses like a tent reaching to her feet, its voluminous folds patterned with blue flowers; Auntie Sanni called them her ‘Mother Hubbards’ from the garments missionaries used to hand out to the natives. On her feet were country-made sandals. Auntie Sanni’s face looked young because of her head of short curls like a child’s, their red still auburn. Her skin was true Eurasian, the pale yellow brown of old ivory against which her eyes looked curiously light, sea-colour eyes, now green, now blue, set wide, again like a child’s but Hannah, even Kuku, could have told that Auntie Sanni was no child.

  Hannah, almost her bondswoman, began piling the bundles tidily together, her silver bangles slipping up and down her arms. Hannah liked everything to be tidy, clean, exact, as did her husband, Samuel. They, for Auntie Sanni, were the twin pillars of Patna Hall.

  Hannah was a big woman – though not beside Auntie Sanni. Kuku, when she was with them, looked wand slim, quick and brilliant as a kingfisher in her electric blue sari with its lurex border. Hannah had eyed that sari. ‘Muslin for morning is nice,’ she had said, ‘and practical.’

  ‘This, too, is practical,’ Kuku had retorted. ‘It is drip dry.’

  Hannah herself wore a crisp white sari edged with red and an old-fashioned red bodice high in the neck, her scant grey hair pinned into a knob. In spite of this simplicity she was laden with silver jewellery: bangles; the lobes of her ears hung down with the weight of earrings; she had finger rings and toe rings on her gnarled bare feet; everyone knew where Hannah was by the sound of clinking. Kuku’s choli stopped in a curve under breasts that were young and full, it left her midriff bare, supple and brown; her hair which could have made the usual graceful coil was instead frizzed into a mane that reached her shoulders; she had a flower over her left ear. ‘Miss Sanni, why let her go about so?’ Hannah often said to Auntie Sanni. ‘That hair! Those nails! And a sari should be muslin, silk or gauze,’ and Auntie Sanni always answered, ‘I don’t think Kuku has saris like that.’

  Kuku was an orphan, brought up in St Perpetua’s Home in Madras. ‘St Perpetua’s, very good,’ Hannah had always maintained. She and Samuel were English-speaking Thomist Christians. ‘St Thomas, apostle, came to Madras and is buried there,’ they said. Kuku, though, was now proudly agnostic. No one knew what Auntie Sanni believed; perhaps all religions met in her as they met peaceably in Patna Hall; the gardeners were Brahmins, the sweeper women, untouchables, the waiters all Muslim while the head bearer, Colonel McIndoe’s personal servant from Nepal, was a Buddhist. Nothing seemed to disturb any of them and, ‘Yes, St Perpetua’s is very good,’ Auntie Sanni endorsed Hannah. ‘It gives all its girls an excellent education and trains them for work but I don’t think they get many saris.’

  Kuku had been trained in hotel management. ‘I didn’t have to be trained,’ said Auntie Sanni. ‘I knew.’

  Auntie Sanni’s grandfather had started the hotel in the eighteen nineties but the house was older than that, ‘Built by some nabob of the East India Company in the eighteenth century to catch the sea breezes,’ she had told Kuku.

  ‘Could they have come so far without cars or the railway?’

  ‘Far f
rom Calcutta but there were plenty of East India Company men in Madras. They would have had horses and palanquins.’

  ‘What are palanquins?’ asked Kuku.

  ‘My grandfather made a fortune out of indigo in Bihar,’ Auntie Sanni would tell the guests. ‘That’s why the hotel is called Patna Hall. Patna is the capital of Bihar.’ She herself had never seen the acres of the leafy flowering shrub that brought such riches as, processed – ‘My grandfather had his own factory’ – the flowers turned from olive to orange and finally to the intense blue of indigo. ‘All sailors’ livery used to be dyed with it, all blue cloth until chemical dyes became rife.’ ‘Rife’ as Auntie Sanni said it was a dirty word. ‘My grandfather got out just in time. They were lovely colours, indigo, madder, sepia, those greens and turmeric yellows,’ she said softly. ‘It is seldom nowadays that you get colours like that.’

  Patna Hall was the only substantial house on that stretch of the Coromandel coast; its stucco, as befitted the property of an indigo planter, was painted blue, now faded to paleness; it rose three storeys high to a parapeted roof. The porticoed entrance faced inwards towards the village of Shantipur with its palms and simile trees, their cotton flowers scarlet; behind them low hills, where coffee grew, cut off the horizon. There were servants’ quarters, the courtyard offices, a gatehouse, a large vegetable garden, a small farm and poultry yard, even a private cemetery.