A Most Unusual Memsahib

Some fierce looking Caucasians in tight fitting, full skirted black coats, belts bristling with weapons, elected to call on us that evening. When they felt sleepy, they just stretched themselves out on the floor. I lay down on the one and only bed, and my husband and Mr Speke arranged themselves on the floor each side of me, and we slept, my last thought being ‘What would my mother say if she could see me now!’

This is 21-year-old Catherine Macartney describing a night of her honeymoon. Three weeks earlier she had been quietly learning how to make cakes when her fiancé burst in, demanding they marry at once. So they did, and they set off immediately for Central Asia. She had never left home, let alone England, before. The verb ‘to travel’ could be parsed like this: I’m a traveller, you’re a tourist, he’s a tripper. Most of us, including me, are tourists, condemned to the soul-destroying procedures of modern journeys. Travellers don’t do the sheep-in-a-line bit, they make their own way. They hitch lifts from passing pilots or use the local bus or buy a camel. They don’t land briefly on the surface of other people’s lives but get right inside. Catherine Macartney was a traveller because she had to be, and she loved it. In 1898 she married George Macartney, the British Agent in Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan, and she spent the next seventeen years out there. She was observant and brave, and in 1931 wrote a most delightful memoir, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan. It doesn’t have the lyricism of Bruce Chatwin or the learning of Robert Byron but as a description of the life and travels of an Edwardian gentlewoman on the fringes of the Empire, it’s unbeatable. Her first journey to her new home took six weeks, travelling by boat, train, horse, on foot and finally in a carriage sent to help them over the last few miles by Macartney’s Russian rival in Kashgar. ‘I have never done such a funny journey before or since as that one from Samarkand to Andijan,’ she writes. ‘The train meandered along at about fifteen miles an hour, stopping whenever the engine felt so inclined. Passengers got out and picked flowers . . . till the engine shrieked . . . when we all scrambled back into our respective wagons.’ She had also never been on a horse before. After the first day she could hardly move for pain and had to be carried into the inn. But in a few days ‘I found myself enjoying the splendid scenery and forgetting I was on horseback.’ In those days Kashgar was a fly-blown, isolated oasis and still a major Silk Road hub. It was also the front line in the Great Game being played between Britain and Russia for control of the approaches to India. George Macartney’s official job was looking after the small British community; his unofficial job was to watch, and if necessary outmanoeuvre, Russian activity in the area. Catherine is very discreet about her husband and his work but George Macartney must have been a most unusual man. For a start he was half Chinese. His father had, according to his obituary, ‘married a Chinese lady during his residence in the Celestial Empire’. That was George’s mother, about whom nothing is known. He never mentioned her, even to his own children, and Catherine certainly doesn’t. George was taken back to Britain aged 8, and presumably never saw her again. Apart from three years in Bolshevik Russia, the posting in Kashgar was the only one he ever had. He was a boy of 20 when he arrived and he stayed for twenty-two years, half a lifetime. Catherine had to take over the running of Chini Bagh, the official residence of the British Consulate. Her upbringing was conventionally middle-class. She could bake cakes but managing five servants who spoke no English had not been on the curriculum. Meeting the Indian cook was the first shock. ‘He was breaking each egg into his dirty brown hand, letting the whites slide through his fingers into one bowl and putting the yolks in another.’ Unlike George who spoke many languages, she had only a little French. Kashgar was a racial melting-pot of Chinese, Russians, Cossacks, Indians, Afghans and Tibetans, but apart from the Swedish missionaries, no one spoke English. Ladies came to call, including Chinese women with their tiny bound feet, but all she could do was smile until her face ached. Homesick and lonely, with nothing to do, she soon became depressed. But Catherine was made of stern stuff, she was a Memsahib: so she snapped herself out of it, took over the cooking and started to have fun. Memsahibs have had a bad press – bossy, narrow-minded, intolerant. It’s not a fair description of Catherine. She does occasionally say things that grate – ‘There is a wonderful depth of real affection and love in these simple people’ – but mostly she is tolerant. She observes with pleasure the native Kashgaris’ colourful clothes and jewellery, beautiful hair (full of grease and fleas), and exotic dancing and music. She disapproves of the way the children are spoilt and are allowed to wander around half-naked, and the fatalism engendered by their religion appals her. As do their social arrangements. ‘Nearly all the men and women have venereal diseases,’ she remarks crisply, ‘and the children come into the world with that awful inheritance; and so long as the marriage laws are so slack, it can hardly be otherwise.’ But she doesn’t seem to think she has the right to intervene. I’ve reread this book many times. Catherine’s accounts of housekeeping in a remote outpost are fun, but it’s the journeys that hold me. This is how travelling ought to be, full of excitement and surprises, sudden dangers and strange encounters, not the dreary irritations of cancelled flights or delayed trains. Their three children were brought up to face the rigours of the road. The eldest, Eric, was born during leave in Britain. ‘We did all we could to harden him and accustom him to being out in all weathers; and we gave him only cold food. He throve on the treatment.’ In 1913 the governess had a nervous breakdown and had to be shipped back early, leaving Catherine to look after the children. On the final journey home 3-year-old Robin, entranced by the bright colour of a red-hot stove chimney, grabbed it and was badly burned. ‘Fortunately I had a rather wonderful remedy for burns and this I applied at once.’ Next day he was carried down the hill in a basket on the back of a Kirghiz nomad, gleefully waving his bandaged hands in the air. Today I rather think social services would have had Robin in care the moment he could be prised out of his basket. On they go, over vertiginous passes that give them altitude sickness. (‘Eric was put on the yak behind me, limp and almost unconscious. When we came to the rest house, about 1,000 feet down, he was suddenly violently sick and to our surprise and relief recovered completely.’). Flooded rivers have to be forded on the back of recalcitrant camels that terrify her and upset even the phlegmatic George. Other travellers have to be raced along dangerous roads to the next inn where a change of horses and a hot meal may be found. They pass through deserts and forests, empty stony landscapes, and meadows full of flowers. They sleep in people’s houses or small inns if they can find rooms, and once in a nomad’s tent. There is no time to be bored – there are rock falls to avoid and terrible sights to see: ‘A caravan of horses and men, the horses still standing but frozen to death. And there too were the vultures at their ghastly work, picking the skeletons clean.’ Catherine copes with such stoical understatement that sometimes you have to read a paragraph twice to realize what is happening. ‘We had one exciting experience today that came near to being a tragedy.’ The driver lost control of the horses pulling the luggage cart and they galloped down the hill and ‘only just missed smashing into the tarantass Eric and Nurse were in by a hair’s breadth. At the bottom of the hill three wheels flew off and they were brought to a standstill and no further damage was done. But these things upset one when one is not feeling over fit.’ My envy of Catherine and admiration for her are coloured with the melancholy knowledge that this world, and her way of seeing it, are now gone for ever. She reluctantly left Kashgar in 1914 when life there was already changing. She wasn’t sentimental and she deplored much about the old ways, but she was still sad to see them go. Some innovations were welcome, like glass windows and the wireless, but bicycles frightened the horses and the one motorcycle terrified everyone. Even the wonderful colourful clothes the many races in Kashgar had worn were being replaced. The Chinese were the first to take to Western dress ‘which made them look undignified and utterly ridiculous. It was more pathetic than comical to see men who would have been imposing and dignified in their beautiful silks making themselves look like scarecrows.’ When George retired in 1920 they settled in Jersey, which must have been a shock. Was she happy, I wonder? Did she miss the noise and crowds, colours and smells, wide skies and endless horizons? Did she long to climb mountains again and ride through pine-scented forests? I’ll never know. Kashgar is still a long way from anywhere, but now planes land every day, bringing tourists to view the markets, the ferocious desert and the encircling mountains. The British Consulate has become a restaurant and the Chini Bagh Hotel has been built in the garden. ‘It remains’, says the Lonely Planet guidebook, ‘the best all round choice. Dorms are clean with private bathrooms. Yuan for yuan the Chini Bagh is the best value in town.’ I am sure Catherine, whose generosity and hospitality were legendary, would be delighted.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © Amanda Theunissen 2009