stories but I’ve realized that if I want to make sense of them there is a wider tale that follows an arc through the generations. You see, it started when I broke down after my father’s death. Suddenly I found myself taking stock of everything that had ever happened to me. I remembered the people and the things I had loved, or feared. I recalled my ancestors and my childhood. I lived through my wars again on the journey to recovery, in what the British combat photographer Don McCullin has described as the ‘peace process’. At first I wandered without purpose, but luckily I discovered Peter Davey’s diaries in the Zanzibar chest. Sometime later I tucked the papers under my arm and went to Arabia. There I followed the story page by page, mile by mile, and it provided me with a golden thread that guided me out of the labyrinth where I was lost. And for this reason I can’t speak of my own story without also telling you about Davey. In these pages I am going to take you to Africa and Arabia and a few other places besides, in different years and over centuries. Forgive me when it proves difficult to keep up, but you’ll just have to trust me. For now I want you to keep in mind a day in April 1947. We are in an emerald-green valley beneath the craggy peaks of high Arabia. The land has fallen silent but for the sound of birdsong and the gurgling of water in the cool mountain stream. Youth and innocence are dead. The broad-winged shadow of a vulture circles over three men. One body is that of an African, a sheikh’s slave, lying riddled with bullet wounds. Nearby sprawls the figure of Davey. The translucent bone haft of a silver jambiya dagger protrudes from his chest and blood soaks his khaki tunic. And standing over the two of them is my father.
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
