Tipicidad Objetiva:

The uneasy anticipation of old age and death is replaced, in some cases, by the exiles’ imagination of ‘home’ as a location of memory, the home of their childhood. In ‘Return from Exile’, Richardson pictures the return ‘home’ as also a chronological turning back: on seeing the ‘bright cliffs’ of England, ‘I paced the swift bark’s bounding deck, light- hearted as a child; / And when among my native fields I wandered in the sun, / I felt as if my morn of life had only just begun.’60 _{For him and many}

others in the exile community, Britain is the location of their own child- hood, and the memories of ‘home’ are also memories of being a child. Eden makes the connection explicit when she describes the aftermath of a storm in Simla:

Such nice clear air, and altogether it feels English and exhilarating; and I think of you [her sister], and Eden Farm, and the Temple Walk, and Crouch Oak Lane, and the blue butterflies, and then the gravel- pit, and your reading ‘Corinne’ to me; and then the later days of Eastcombe and our parties there, with G. V. in his wonderful spirits, with all his wit, and all the charm about him; and all this because the air is English. I should like to go back to child- hood and youth again – there was great enjoyment in them.61

Vetch similarly invokes an association with youth as a central aspect of the nostalgically- conceived ‘native land’: ‘childhood’s blissful day, / Ere yet one pang from sorrow griev’d us’, before ‘Love betray’d – or friends deceiv’d us’.62

One of the central tenets of British Indian society was the idea that ‘home’ is a fit place for children, both morally and materially better suited to their development than the alien climate and culture of India. As Buettner’s study of Victorian and early twentieth- century sources demonstrates, medical and other advice literature advocated that the health of younger children, and the sexual and moral development of adolescents, required them to be returned to what a contemporary author describes as the ‘more bracing and healthy . . . atmosphere’ of Europe, and more specifically, England – ‘The child must be sent to England, or it will deteriorate physically and morally.’63 _{Britain is}

thought of as the natural location of childhood, as ‘J. P.’ indicates in

The Care of Infants in India: ‘few sights are more pleasing than to see

Exile

and British meteorology, into fat and happy English children’.64 _This

is not an uncomplicated notion, of course, as Roberts indicates when she remarks on how ‘gratifying’ exiles such as herself found ‘groups of healthy- looking, tidily dressed English children’ of British soldiers, who were able ‘to preserve their strength and vigour in a climate considered to be exceedingly detrimental to the juvenile classes of Europeans’.65 _But

whether Roberts was implicitly excluding her working- class compatriots from the category of ‘exile’, or distancing herself from contemporary ideas about the harmfulness of the Indian climate to children in general, her association of ‘home’ and childhood is a theme recurring throughout this literature.

Less obviously, the return ‘home’ also serves to prevent children and parents becoming alienated from one another, in the ways suggested by Roberts when she describes the effect on children of being looked after primarily by Indian servants, and learning their language rather than English: ‘In numerous instances, they cannot make themselves intelligible to their parents, it being no uncommon case to find the latter almost totally ignorant of the native dialect, while their children cannot converse in any other.’66 _{Paradoxically, the forced separation between}

child and parents involved in the child’s return ‘home’ is designed to bring them linguistically and in other ways closer together. In returning to Britain, the child re- enacts the parents’ own experience of childhood at ‘home’, while acquiring the linguistic, cultural and class attributes of their parents.

Poems such as Richardson’s ‘Consolations of Exile: or, An Exile’s Address to his Distant Children’ explore this process of bringing together in imagination the parent and child separated by distance: ‘Fair children! still, like phantoms of delight, / Ye haunt my soul on this strange distant shore’. By the final passages, absence has been suc- ceeded by an imagined reunion, as he first looks at his children’s painted images, and then invokes the fantasised location of ‘home’ as the space where he can see them directly:

Oh! then how sweet,

Dear Boys! upon remembered bliss to dwell, And here your pictured lineaments to greet; Till Fancy, bright Enchantress, shifts the scene To British ground, and musical as rills, Ye laugh and loiter in the meadows green, Or climb with joyous shouts the sunny hills!67

This unproblematic imaginative union of the sundered family on the ground of ‘home’ is not, however, the only take on the association of

Experiences of India

childhood with ‘home’ in these texts. Others suggest a more complex and darker set of memories and associations carried by exiles, or perhaps a process whereby the memory of the homeland becomes darker and more complex over the years spent away from it.

Robert Cotton Money makes it clear in his letters to his parents and sister that nostalgia, memories of ‘home’ and family, and fond thoughts of England took up a considerable amount of his mind during his absence. In the correspondence published as Journal of a Tour in Persia, his main focus is, naturally, on the sights and experiences of the journey; but these are interspersed with episodes of longing for ‘home’:

The many, many a summer day like that which I had spent in England came to my recollection. The sweet faces of those who shared these pleasures flitted across me. I fixed my eyes on one little cloud, which, as Milton beautifully says, ‘turned forth its silver lining on the sky,’ and tried to people it with those whom I love so much. I tried to make it my home. . . . Sweet, sweet hours! but sweeter will they be when we meet again. How sweet after such a separation!68

The combination of pastoral – the summer day, the cloud – the invoca- tion of absent loved ones, the anticipation of a later reunion, even the quotation of Milton may all be said to represent attempts to recreate a version of ‘home’ in exile, and to maintain by the correspondence in which this experience is described a connection and a relationship between the writers and the absent recipient of the letter. Money’s sense of what ‘home’ might be also extends beyond the personal. In the course of his observations on Persia, he pauses several times to draw unflattering comparisons with ‘our dear native land’, as when describing an attractive pastoral landscape blighted by ‘innumerable musquitoes’, which oblige him to ‘pitch my tent in a yard attached to a miserable and dirty hovel’.69 _{Here as elsewhere, the landscape, customs and inhabit-}

ants of Persia are implicitly compared to an English ideal. In the poem ‘Stanzas written at the Rain Ghat’, the irreplaceable aspects of England are explicitly listed: they include a vision of the pastoral in ‘summer beds of green’, the ‘jewel month of May’, and ‘peasant cottages’; but also a ‘lion- maned strength’, and a history that includes the ‘shout of Freedom’s jubilees / For full a thousand years’.70

When Money addresses the topic of a personal memory of England directly, as in the poem ‘Thoughts of Home in India’, a different vision becomes apparent. Even as the structure of the following stanza, for instance, sets the homeland – ‘ours’ – above all those the poet has seen on his travels, the overwhelming impression for the reader is the richness and colour of these other lands:

Exile O’er golden river’d lands I’ve run,

Lap- full of fruits and flowers,

Like scenes before the Fall, but none – None half so sweet as ours.

At ‘home’, by contrast, the river has become a ‘distant wintry waterfall / Half icicled and dumb’; and the robin ‘piping for a crumb’ is an image of want and neediness as well as a cliché of the English countryside. Although the poem locates ‘childhood’s happy dream’ in England, the specific elements of these memories of childhood are edgy and at least ambiguous – such as the ‘ghostly story’ told ‘to scare the little flock’.71

The same or a similar memory of a ghost story appears in a poem written by Robert’s brother David Money at around the same time. ‘Domum, Domum, Dulce Domum’ – or ‘home, home, joyous home’ – expands on Robert’s brief mention of storytelling with a catalogue of horrors that belies the poem’s title:

How some poor donkey or a post Was taken for a fearful ghost –

How ’neath some tree was always heard The sound of that mysterious bird, Whose cry at midnight rises shrill, And clear, and loud, foreboding ill, And how the ominous sound had scared All . . .

We heard of sudden- sinking floors, Of frightful noises, and trap- doors, Of heavy nightmares, and of screams In restless after- supper dreams; How highwaymen were seen about Drear Shooter’s Hill, and such like places – How murders always were found out, Though time had swept away the traces! The forest lodge – the bloody bed – And underneath a shaggy head Just peeping out; – the lonely inn – The landlord with a murderous grin – The sleeping draught . . .72

This is clearly an evocation of childhood excitement and the thrill of sensation, and also an account of the shared experience of heightened emotion and the individual’s role in a larger audience – all aspects of the lost ‘home’ that might be considered particularly appealing to a writer now distanced from that community. The line ‘murders always were found out’ gestures towards the crime narrative’s role of reinstating

Experiences of India

order and security. At the same time, the overall effect of the lines is to highlight the unreliability of the familiar and domestic: the donkey taken for a ghost, the ‘ominous sound’ of a bird, the floor no longer solid but sinking at a footstep. Places of apparent safety – the forest lodge, the bed, the inn – become locations of fear and death. While the poem insists that ‘happy too were summer days’, the writer chooses to dwell instead on an anecdote of winter, where a carefree childhood memory of skating is underlaid with the ‘Crack! crack! crack!’ of ice, again an evocative image of ‘home’ as a space of danger unrealised by the child whose memories are being shared.73