Bonzer Words!: A Dead Man
Derek Smith tells of his grandfather who worked on the railways in India - a man presumed by his family to have died.
Derek writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
This is the story my father told me about his father when it was too late to ask him any questions. It began with a faded, browning newspaper cutting. The Bombay Times 'Interview With 'Dead' Man was the headline.
'From our special correspondent, Lonvala, January 31 1937. Yesterday I motored up the Western Gats to Lonvala, a deserted hill station seventy-five miles from Bombay to spend an intriguing hour in the company of a 'dead man'. Horace Smith is a ghaut driver for the GIP railway. He stands five feet four inches and has a fair complexion, hazel eyes and brown hair. He is fifty-eight years old. I found him deploring in sound military language the impudence of half a dozen English papers that had been pestering him with cables asking whether he was dead.
'Horace Smith was born in Ashby, a small English village, in the 1880’s. After attending the local 'Blue and Green Coat' School until he was eleven he then worked as an errand boy, pit boy, farm hand and box maker. He was only nineteen when he left home to join the Army. The boredom of marching up and down various parade grounds in Army barracks around England was relieved when he was posted to India some years later. But marching around Indian dirt parade grounds proved just as boring. In 1908 he bought a discharge for twenty-five pounds.
He took a job with the India's first established railway The Greater Indian Peninsular first as a firemen then a driver. The GIP runs from the natural port of Bombay through the thick forests of the Deccan, over the Western Ghat Mountains and through cotton growing regions over a thousand miles to Calcutta. Indians were not allowed to drive trains then only the British could be held responsible for such important work. The work was not hard but never boring and he was paid sufficient to allow his family to live in a large bungalow in one of the Hill Stations.
They had local servants—a nanny for the children, a cook and a punka wallah. This last was usually a small boy whose only task was to pull the strings of the giant ceiling fans for, although it was much cooler in the hill stations, it was still a stifling heat. He had no contact with his family after 1907 but nearing retirement thirty years later he felt a need to see them. Unsure of there location he wrote to the village parish priest about finding them'.
A second faded cutting, this one from The Leicester Mercury continues the story. The article is an interview with Horace’s stepsisters still leaving in Ashby. It spoke of his stepmother’s hope that 'one day she would see her son Horace walk up the yard or hear good news of him'. She had died before ever hearing from him. His sisters were anxious to get in touch with him more so now since they had believed him dead. His name along with those of his brothers was inscribed on the War Memorial in the village square. One sister had even kept in hope the few letters he had written to the family after joining the Army. The priest had located the sisters by posting a notice on the church door.
Horace Smith eventually retired and left his life in India and returned home to England. What he thought when he saw his name among the honoured dead along with all three of his brothers we never found out. I only knew him as a frail old, grey haired man in an easy chair a hand rolled cigarette smouldering in his hand.
© Derek Smith
