‘Welcome to my rabbit hutch,’ said Iris. ‘It’s not very big, but I flatter myself that it’s quite colourful.’
She was an alert and well-preserved old lady: owlish and intelligent. Her grey hair was fashionably cut and her voice was attractively dry and husky. Iris’s family had been Cambridge dons and although she had broken out and married into the army, there was still something residually academic in her measured gaze.
She sat deep in an armchair in her over-heated flat in a sheltered housing complex off the M11. Outside, beyond the car park, you could see the pavements and housing estates of suburban Girton. But inside, a small fragment of another world had been faithfully recreated. All around, the bookshelves were full of the great Imperial classics—Todd, Kipling, Fanny Parkes and Emily Eden—some riddled with the boreholes of bookish white ants. On one wall hung a small oil of houseboats on the Dal Lake; on another, a print of the Mughal Emperor Muhammed Shah Rangilla in the Red Fort. Beside it was an old map of 1930s Delhi.
Somehow the pictures and the books—and especially the dusty, old-buckram, yellow-paged library-scent of the books—succeeded in giving the thoroughly modern flat a faint whiff of the Edwardian, a distant hint of the hill-station bungalow.
‘You must give my love to dear old Delhi,’ said Iris. ‘Ah! Even now when I close my eyes I see …’ For a minute she left the sentence incomplete, then: ‘Pots of chrysanthemums!’ she said quite suddenly. ‘Rows and rows of chrysanthemums in little red pots! That’s what I remember best. Those and the ruins: riding out through the bazaars and out into the country. The Qutab Minar and moonlight picnics in Hauz Khas—a place we all thought was madly romantic. The tombs everywhere all tumbling down and black buck and peacocks and monkeys … Is it still like that?’
‘Up to a point,’ I said.
‘Dear, dear, dear old Delhi,’ she said. ‘How I envy you living there.’
She smiled a contented smile and rearranged herself in the armchair.
‘So,’ I ventured. ‘You were born in Delhi?’
‘No, no, no.’ Iris closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘Certainly not. I was born in Simla in 1905 in a house called Newstead. It was immediately behind Snowdon, the Commander-in-Chief’s house. Curzon was then the Viceroy and Kitchener the Commander-in-Chief.’
Now she had mentioned Simla, I remembered that in the biography of Iris’s brother, the great Rab Butler, I had seen a sepia photograph of the two of them at a children’s party in the Simla Viceregal Lodge. In the image you could clearly see Iris’s plump little face peeping out from a Victorian cocoon of taffeta and white silk.
‘So you spent your childhood in Simla?’
‘No. I only spent the first five summers of my life in Simla,’ she said, correcting me again. ‘Then I was brought back to England. I went to school in a madhouse on the beach of Sandgate under the Folkestone cliffs. It was a sort of avant-garde Bedales-type place. Perfectly horrible. We were supposed to be a Greek Republic. We made our own rules, wore aesthetic uniforms and I don’t know what else.’
‘Did you miss India?’
‘I thought of nothing else. India was home.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘All I wanted was India, a horse of my own and a dashing cavalry escort. When my mother and I arrived back in Bombay we immediately caught the train up to Delhi. I remember vividly the joy of coming in the driveway and seeing all those rows and rows of chrysanthemums in their pots and thinking: "Ah! I’m back!"
‘Everything was as I remembered it. My father’s bearer, Gokhul, was a little fatter than before. He had been with my father since he was a boy and was now a rather grand figure: he used to walk around with a great brass badge on his front. Otherwise everything was unchanged.’
Iris spoke slowly and precisely as if making a mental effort to relay her memories with absolute accuracy.
‘It was … 1922, I suppose. The Government of India was in Delhi by that time, waiting for New Delhi to be completed. We were all living in the Civil Lines [of Old Delhi]. There was no Secretariat and all the Government offices were in Nissen huts. But the officials’ bungalows were all in beautiful gardens. You know how things grow in Delhi. The jacarandas …’
‘Had you come out to work?’ I asked.
‘No, no. My life was extremely frivolous. I had been very highbrow at school. No one ever talked about anything except Browning. But in Delhi people would have been horrified if they discovered you read poetry. The English in India were not a very cultured lot. The atmosphere was too giddy: it was all riding, picnics, clubs, dances, dashing young men and beautiful polo players …’ She smiled. ‘Looking back of course, the whole set-up was very odd. There was such snobbery. Everyone was graded off into sections. One would never have dreamt of going anywhere with someone from the Public Works Department …’ She blinked with mock horror.
‘The most snobbish event of all was the polo, though the Delhi Hunt was rather wonderful in its own way. All the Viceregal staff—who were usually rather interesting and attractive—came out in their Ratcatcher—black coats and so on: in Ooty everyone wore pink, but in Delhi it was only the whippers-in and the master who were allowed to. It was taken very seriously. The hounds—rather dapper ones—were imported from England. I used to get up before dawn and motor down to the Qutab Minar in my father’s T-model Ford. A syce would have been sent down the night before with the pony. Then, as soon as the sun rose, we would gallop about this dry countryside chasing after the jackals.
‘But much more worthwhile than hunting the poor old jackal was going hawking with Umer Hyat Khan of the Tiwana clan. I expect you know all about him. He was a big landowner from the Northern Punjab: rather like a Highland laird. Umer Hyat was a member of the first legislative assembly and whenever the Assembly was in session he would come down to Delhi with his horses, his hawks and his hounds … Before dawn we would canter over the Jumna by the Bridge of Boats. The horses were sent ahead. There were all these splendid tribesmen with hawks on their wrists and greyhounds straining on the leash. We rode out like a mediaeval company. When the hounds had stirred up the hares, the hawks were let fly.
‘After I had been in Delhi for a while I began to sober up a little. My father set me down at a table to learn Urdu with a bearded Munshi. Soon afterwards I met Sir John Thompson at a big dinner at Viceregal Lodge. He was Commissioner for Delhi and an old friend of my father. A very intelligent man: he could speak several Indian languages, understood Sanskrit and so on. He said to me: "What do you do with yourself all day?" and I replied: "I sleep late because I’ve been to a party then I go for a ride and …" He said, a little severely: "Has it never occurred to you to study Indian history?" I said "No" and he replied: "I’ll lend you a book on the history of Delhi. You read that and see if it doesn’t inspire you to look around"—which indeed it did.
‘From that moment onwards, wherever I went, I was poking my nose about, looking at the ruins. Most afternoons I used to ride down to the Purana Qila—I loved the Purana Qila—and sit at the top of the Sher Mandal thinking of poor old Humayun tripping down those stairs and killing himself. I always used to come down very carefully. Of course it was all so lonely then. Humayun’s Tomb was absolutely out in the blue. It was open land, strewn with tumbledown tombs and the rubble of ages. Beyond the plains were dotted with black buck and peacocks. You could ride anywhere …’
‘So this was all before Lutyens’s Delhi went up?’ I interrupted.
‘Well, I suppose the building was just about beginning.’
‘Did you ever meet the man himself?’
‘Who? Lutyens? Oh yes. He was a great friend of my parents.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Well, he was very taken with my mother. Because my father’s name was Monty, he used to call her Carlo. That was typical Lutyens. Always making these rather childish jokes.
‘He