Back in the Day - Part III

Shipra Castledine

I left you all in the last chapter with a tantalising promise of some excitement. Well, all of us who have been brought up in tea can claim there was certainly excitement in our lives from time to time!

I will move on from a couple of years at Zurrantee T.E, where my father became a senior assistant very quickly, to his transfer to Baintgoorie T.E. where he was appointed the manager. So we moved into the Burra Bungalow. It was typical of the Burra Bungalows of its time. A chung bungalow, meaning a rambling home with a verandah all around the top floor and the bungalow was on stilts.

The logic behind the chung construction was twofold. One was to have some protection from wildlife, and the other to allow a lot of ventilation. But we did have some rooms under the bungalow. Our summer drawing room was downstairs as was a big guest bedroom and bathroom. Beautiful lawns with flower gardens of at least an acre surrounded the bungalow. In ensuing years my father became a proud grower of bigger and better multi-coloured dahlias. And our back garden had a substantial mali bari. I was given my own little patch in the mali bari and I clearly remember growing carrots, of course with a lot of help from the malis!

Dad’s senior assistant on Baintgoorie was Jack Thompson, a tall, rangy Britisher. Jack was a bachelor and he had a fondness for wildlife. There were many planters who enjoyed a shikar (a shoot) in those days. It was not illegal. A lot of the time they would kill wild boar and the bawarchis would cook it up into the most delicious dishes including wild boar pickle! My mouth is watering remembering the food.

One of the times Jack went on a shikar he found a leopard cub without its mother. He brought it back to his bungalow and looked after it. It became more like a pet and grew to adulthood at which point Jack kept it in a large cage at the end of his garden. As if this was not excitement enough another time Jack was on his rounds in the tea estate and he found a little Royal Bengal tiger cub in the tea bushes, no mother. He looked around for its mother’s footprint or any indication that she was likely to come back but there were no signs. So he took the cute little thing back to his bungalow and cared for it. Sometimes there were noises in the night and low growling which could have been the mother, but she never attempted retrieving the cub.

As the tiger cub started gaining adult proportions Jack realised that he could not let it roam free in his garden and certainly not inside his bungalow. He erected two sturdy wooden posts at two ends of his lawn, probably with approximately 500 yds between and he strung a thick chain across. He haltered the tiger cub with a ring and a chain that linked on to the one he had strung across the posts so the tiger was able to pad its way from one end to the other.  I used to visit Jack’s bungalow with Dad and we would sit on the verandah and watch this magnificent beast pad silently on its chain, across the lawn.

Jack did bring the tiger on to his verandah at times. I was there one day when he brought the tiger on its chain and this fully grown tiger was so playful and loving with Jack. He would roar playfully and gambol with Jack. I watched fascinated and astounded as the tiger jumped up and put his front paws on Jack’s shoulders and rubbed his face against Jack’s! And Jack had to turn away so he would not get sandpapered against the tiger’s face!

Another time I remember being in Jack’s bungalow with my uncle, Dad’s younger brother, who had also joined tea as an engineer. We were heading out of the bungalow in my uncle’s Plymouth station wagon when the tiger came bounding across and had enough reach to bounce on to the bonnet of the car! There was this wonder of nature with his face right in ours through the windscreen and its huge paws on the bonnet! Oh my God! I will never forget it.

The game ended one day when the tiger playfully managed to scratch Jack’s skin and drew blood. That was it. This was too dangerous. A wild tiger could turn into a man-eater if it tasted human blood. It was reported to the Forest Department that Jack had these animals - fully grown wildlife - in his bungalow. He had to give them both up. The leopard was transported to the zoo in Calcutta and the tiger was flown to a zoo in Canada, I think it was Vancouver. Jack was very sad but he accepted the actions that had to be taken. He missed his two big cats and never kept any again.

Baintgoorie T.E. was where all the rest of my life in tea was spent. Dad managed the garden very well. He learnt to manufacture good tea to the point when Baintgoorie T.E. came up fairly high in Duncan Tea Co. ranking. Then the time came for schooling. In those days there were no nursery or primary schools or any educational institution anywhere close. There was no choice but for us children to be sent to boarding school. Though it broke my parents’ hearts I was packed up and put into St Helen’s in Kurseong at the age of four and a half. A baby.

I did not do well at St Helen’s. Very soon after I was admitted I contracted typhoid and was very sick. Mum came and took me out of the school and I was admitted to the Planters’ Hospital in Darjeeling. Mum stayed at the Planters’ Club and was with me all the time. They treated me over the days and I did recover. But my parents did not send me back to St Helen’s; they put me into Loreto Convent, Darjeeling.

 Then began an enjoyable part of my life. I thrived in Loreto Convent. Mum would visit once a month and bring goodies with her. I will never forget the huge home baked chocolate biscuits she would bring in a large biscuit tin, in the shape of the suits of cards. Clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds! And she would take me out for the day and the nuns allowed me to invite one friend. We would visit the Botanical Gardens at times and then Mum would bring out a picnic basket of a sumptuous lunch. She was very good at doing a goose roast so we would have that with homemade mayonnaise, bread and butter and other sides which I can’t remember!

Mum told me later that the parents would talk about their poor little children having to suffer boarding school and then she would visit the school and us ‘poor children’ would appear all nice and plump and with red, healthy cheeks!! Not such ‘poor children’! I loved boarding school as I had so many friends. Being an only child this was a great environment for me. My love of movies that has lasted through my life came from watching a movie every Saturday in school. We would sit on carpets in this great big hall with a huge screen. The projector was at end of the hall opposite the screen. I remember a time when a few of us got punished for something and the punishment was the worst one we could think of. No movie that Saturday! How miserable were we. But Mother Francis Clare sat the movie out with us and made the time fun!! We loved her. 

We also had to go to mass as Loreto Convent was a catholic school. I remember not liking this part of school at all but we were all taught to be obedient, good children and so we went. I will forever remember the long walk we did all around Darjeeling town at Easter, dressed in our raincoats and gumboots and how the tops of the gumboots would chafe against the skin of my calves, drawing blood. Little did I know that this early introduction to the church and Catholicism would manifest itself in my later life as something familiar and meaningful and that it would result in a journey that did not end but begin with my getting baptised into the faith. And it has been the deepest chapter in my life.

As the years went by in my Dad’s career as manager of Baintgoorie TE the political scene began changing in West Bengal. The left front government came in and the unions started rearing their heads in the tea plantations.

Labour was their target and labour started getting more and more volatile as they learnt ways of getting their ‘rights’. Dad had skills he did not know about and he kept Baintgoorie peaceful when other tea estates were facing strikes and violent disruptions. A lot of tea planters were friendly with the army who were based all around us as we lived in sensitive border areas - mainly near China. Dad would have one of his close friends bring in an army contingent who would patrol through the garden seemingly just as an exercise which it was, but it was also to serve as the connections Dad had that he could call on. But the tension and stress of continuously managing the situation took its toll. Dad was ‘gheraoed’ in his office a couple of times. By this time he had done eight years at Baintgoorie:  in itself a long tenure. He requested Duncans to transfer him to a less stressful garden but they did not want to move him knowing the tea estate would descend into anarchy.

Also Mum and Dad had thought things over and wanted to have me with them. They had already decided that Mum would move to the city (Calcutta) so I could live at home and go to a day school. This move was made at the end of 1966 and I was admitted to Loreto House, Calcutta. Dad continued his post for a couple of years then resigned and joined us.

This is not the end of the chapters of my story. There is so much to write about.

Next part to come…!

 

MEET THE WRITER:

'My name is Shipra Castledine nee Shipra Bose (Bunty). My parents were Sudhin and Gouri Bose. I am a tea 'baba' of the 1950-s era. I spent a part of my life growing up in the Dooars and another large part of my life married to a tea planter's son the Late KK Roy son of PK and Geeta Roy of Rungamuttee TE in the Dooars. I continued to be in the tea industry for many years as KK was a tea broker till he passed away in 1998.' Read more stories by Shipra here: https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/search/label/Shipra%20Castledine

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