I was told about two old English ladies who now lived in the mountains above Simla. They had moved to the hills in the sixties, I was told, but before then they had spent their working lives in Delhi. If I wanted reminiscences of Imperial Delhi, said my informer, then Phyllis and Edith Haxby were exactly what I was looking for. In the event, when I flew up to see them, the two old ladies produced few Delhi memories. But their attitudes gave a sad insight into the fate of those Britons who not so long ago had dominated Raj Delhi, and who had opted to stay on in India after the Empire which created them had dissolved.
Their house had once been quite grand—a rambling half-timbered affair with a wide veranda and cusped Swiss gables. But the Haxbys’ estate had clearly fallen on hard times. A lint of withered spiders’ webs hung from the beams of the veranda. Only thin, peeling strips of burnt sienna indicated that the house had ever been painted. A tangle of thorns had overcome the near-side of the building and docks and ragwort grew from between the paving stones of the path.
At first I thought no one was at home. But after ten minutes of knocking on doors and peering through windows, I was rewarded with the sight of one of the sisters hobbling across her sitting-room. She undid the multiple bolts of the door and slumped down in one of the wickerwork chairs of the veranda.
‘And who are you?’ she asked.
I explained, and to make conversation complimented her on the view from her front door.
‘It may be beautiful to you,’ she said abruptly. ‘But it’s not beautiful to us. We want to go back home.’
Phyllis Haxby was a frail old woman with mottled brown skin and thin, toothpick legs. Her tweed skirt was extravagantly darned and her thick brown stockings were shredded with a jigsaw of tears and ladders.
‘We want to sell up,’ she continued. ‘We’ve been through a very bad time. There are prostitutes living all over the place, making life hell for us. They say we’re English and shouldn’t be here. After seventy-eight years!’
Phyllis grunted angrily and began rapping on the front door with her stick: ‘Edith! Edith! There’s a boy here to see us. Says he’s British. He wants to know about Delhi.’
Then she turned around and began talking to me in a stage whisper: ‘She had a fall today. The prostitutes put dope down the chimney. It makes her want to sleep. She fell on the fender—bleeding from eight a.m. until after lunch. They’re trying to drive us out, you see.’
‘It’s not just dope down the chimney,’ said Edith, who had at this point appeared at the door. ‘They come through the floorboards at night.’
‘Through the floorboards? Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘Of course I’m sure. When we’re asleep they put stuff in our eyes to make us go blind. Every day my sight gets a little worse. You’ve no idea what we’ve gone through.’
‘You know something,’ said Phyllis, leaning forward towards me and continuing to speak in her conspiratorial stage whisper. ‘They’re all Jews. All of ’em. They’re as fair as lilies but they wear these brown masks to pass off as natives. They’ve been persecuting us for twenty years.’
‘Thirty years, Phyllis.’
‘Since Partition, in fact.’
‘But we’re not going to give in, are we, darling? We’re not going to cut and run.’
At this point the drizzle which had followed me to the bungalow turned into a downpour. The water dripped through the roof of the veranda and we decided to move inside. From the sitting-room I could see the half-lit bedroom. To one side of the bed was an upturned chest of drawers, on the other an inverted ironing board.
‘That’s to stop the Jewish prostitutes from coming in through the floorboards,’ said Phyllis, seeing where I was looking.
‘But they still come down the chimney,’ said Edith.
‘Oh—they’ll do anything to drive us out. They’ve even started to watch us bathe. They peer through the window as if we were some sort of ha’penny peep show.’
We arranged ourselves around a table and Phyllis poured the tea.
‘Just look at my hands shake,’ she said.
‘It’s the prostitutes’ dope,’ said Edith.
‘Makes me shake like a Quaker and dribble like a dog. I used to be hale and hearty, too.’
‘Very hale and hearty, my sister. Those prostitutes should be shot on sight.’
The two sisters fussed around with their teacups, trying to spoon in the sugar and the powdered milk before their shakes sprinkled the stuff over the table. At length, when this was achieved and they had relaxed, I turned the conversation towards their memories of Delhi in the old days.
‘Oh it was such fun. We were young and blond and had admirers. The Delhi season lasted from October until March. At night we went to dances and drank champagne—real champagne—and by day we would sit outside and watch the soldiers riding past, four abreast. Those were the days.’
‘But my God have things changed. Imagine—I now do my own sweeping …’
‘… and the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry. Us—Colonel’s daughters.’
‘Our father was the Colonel of the 23rd Punjabis. I told the grocery boy last week. The Twenty-Thirds! He couldn’t believe such people lived in such … in such …’
‘Simplicity,’ said Edith.
‘Exactly,’ said Phyllis. ‘Simplicity. You know, Mr Dalrymple, you people today can have no idea what India was like before. It was … just like England.’
‘Shut up, darling! The prostitutes—they’ll report us. They’ve got microphones. Speak softly.’
‘I will not. The wickedness! Tell them to go to the devil.’
The two sisters sipped angrily at their tea. They were silent for a second, and I again tried to turn the conversation back towards Delhi.
‘Did you ever meet Lutyens?’ I asked.
Phyllis wasn’t listening: ‘And you know the worst thing. Those Jewish prostitutes. They tried to …’
‘Don’t Phyllis.’
‘I will. You can’t gag a Haxby of Haxby. They tried to put us in a madhouse. We went out for a walk and they started to drag us down the road. And I said: "This isn’t the way home."’
‘Damn cheek. A colonel’s daughter.’
‘The warders were very nice to us. We stayed there for two weeks. Then a young police officer came and said: "Who put you here?" He went to the I.G.—the Inspector General—and by four o’clock we were back here. The I.G. ordered us to be brought home. All the other inmates were very jealous.’
‘I’ll say.’
‘Imagine putting two elderly people in a madhouse. Those prostitutes—they’re from Baghdad, you see. They were able to do it because they
