THE words were as crisp and clear as when they were cut 108 years ago, only the stone had deepened in colour with the passage of the years under the Indian Sun:
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY OF
EMILY GORE
DEARLY LOVED WIFE OF
SURGEON MAJOR H C GUINNESS MS
WHO DIED ON THE 15TH NOVR 1888
AFTER A LONG AND PAINFUL ILLNESS
AGED 37 YEARS
HER END WAS PEACE
Emily, my great grandmother, was the daughter of a gentleman clerk in the Land Court in Dublin. She died wracked with pain and fever between midnight and dawn that day in 1888, and was buried in the blistering heat of an Indian autumn before nightfall. The final line, I suspect, was an epitaph not just on the torment of months of illness, but also, in a way not intended by Harry Guinness, on her life as a memsahib in the British Raj.
Her grave, like others near it, is covered with fresh green weeds which have been kept carefully in check by the parishioners at Ahmednagar where she died. A scattering of orange and white flowers from the All Souls ceremonies a few days before still clung to the tomb stone with its Celtic cross.
To get to Ahmednagar, a military stronghold since the Mughal conquest of India, is nowadays more hazardous and difficult than it was when Emily took the train from Bombay in 1884, changed at Dhond, a little beyond the hill station at Poona, where Europeans brought their children to escape the searing heat of the plains during the summer, and travelled for a further two hours through rolling countryside.
"It can't be done," Indian officials helping to make arrangements assured me in Delhi and Bombay. The branch line was abolished years ago, and there is no airport - nearer than Poona (which has now reverted - to its old name of Pune). And the road between Bombay (now Mumbai) and Ahmednagar was a minefield of difficulties. Finally they relented and provided a car, a driver and a room for the night in the army guesthouse at Pune, and at six o'clock on a Saturday evening I was under way.
It was quickly clear why they had been so reluctant to let me go. It took two and a half hours to reach the Pune expressway, through an endless traffic jam in which cars and evil smelling motorised rickshaws, overloaded buses and heavy lorries, swarmed out of the city on both, sides of the street, leaving incoming traffic to thread its way as best it could against our relentless tide.
Around us were some of the worst slums in Asia - miles and miles of blighted streets with people living in cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, taking a meticulous bath, behind a low shelter, defecating, cooking over smoking fires, sprawling, chatting in the darkness of early evening, carrying their cans of water home balanced on their heads. Children and dogs underfoot everywhere.
Mr Prakash, my driver, pointed to the tall blocks of flats behind them. "They were built by Mr Rajiv Gandhi," he said. "He was a great man, very popular." But they were long ago swamped by the unstoppable movement of people leaving rural India to look for nonexistent work in the cities.
The Pune expressway was a little faster not much, until we broke away front Mumbai and started the climb up into the hills, the narrow road sweeping around chains of blind curves which revealed a succession of impressive glimpses of village lights far down in the valleys. Mr Prakash at this point seemed to go on to automatic pilot. He overtook slow moving buses and lorries with enviable confidence on the blindest of corners, always pulling in when his sixth sense told him that some hazard, like a car or a wandering cow, lay round the bend.
It took six hours to reach Pune, nevertheless, a distance of less than 200 kilometres.
"We did it fast," said Mr Prakash, as we drew up at the government guesthouse soon after midnight. There was a low bed and a light cover and a surrounding of mosquito nets, but not for long. Five hours later, as dawn came up, we were driving past the watchmen who spend their nights crouched by a fire outside the guesthouse taking turns to sleep in a tent, and heading for Ahmednagar 70 kilometres away.
The town was Harry Guinness's third and final posting in India. Twenty five years before, after training as a doctor at the Meath Hospital and College of Surgeons in Dublin, he joined the British army medical corps, then being reorganised after its gross deficiencies, had been exposed by the Crimean War. His career had been spent mainly in army hospitals in England. In 1874, with the rank of captain, he arrived in Athlone.
Where he met Emily Gore Ormsby is not known, but it was in Dublin probably, where she used to visit relatives. Her only surviving photograph shows a shy, timid girl, looking anxiously into the camera. Her father, Charles Montagu Ormsby, was known in the family as "a barrister from Liverpool". Both elements were true, though in the Victorian way the truth was very different. Yes, he trained as a barrister under the prodding of his strong minded wife, Ann Christian Hutchinson, a Kilkenny apothecary's daughter, and yes, in his last years, he lived in Liverpool.
Charles's problem, I think, was either a mild intellectual disorder or drink. Emily was the couple's ninth and last child, born in 1851, a year or two after Charles landed his first permanent job as a clerk in the newly established Land Court. He owed it to his younger brother Henry, who was making his name as one of the lions of the Dublin bar. But as he grew more eccentric or drunk
Charles became a nuisance, and, Henry, who was heading for a senior judgeship in Dublin, banished him to a lodging house in Liverpool with a small pension. There he died in 1876, the year after Harry was promoted to major and married Emily.
A couple of months after the wedding, she was on the boat to Harry's first posting in British India. By the time she reached Rangoon, at the end of the monsoon season, she was already pregnant, and faced the long river journey up the Irrawady and across unmade jungle roads in a springless buffalo cart to the frontier town of Tonghoo - a malarial hell hole where the only diversions, a historian has noted, were "sport and polo, and the race meetings organised by keen young subalterns". It was heaven for Harry, who loved horses. But it was no place for a woman.
Amy, my grandmother, was born the following May, four days before her parents first wedding anniversary. Four months later, Emily was pregnant again, this time with her only son, who was christened Arthur. But he died and was buried in Tonghoo. Eva, her next child, was born in the more comfortable station at Bangalore in south India in 1878, and Norah followed early in 1880. Four pregnancies in four and a half years of marriage.
Emily had two more children: Lily, born during a short but welcome posting in England in 1882, and Bee, during the summer break in the hill station at Poona in 1884. By now the family had moved to Ahmednagar, Emily's home for the last four years of her life.
Two stories survive of their stay there. Norah, aged four, was seized by the followers of a captive raja, and Harry called out the troops to rescue her. When they opened her clenched fist, they found a large ruby which Harry promptly returned, to the distress of later generations. Ahmednagar was regularly used as a gaol for political prisoners - Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, was held there in the early 1940s - and Norah's kidnapping was an attempt to secure the raja's release.
In the dreadful weeks before Emily died, she woke suddenly one night and saw in the half light a large cobra sliding across the floor towards her bed. She screamed and Harry rushed in, seized his sword and cut off the reptile's head at a stroke. There it lay for several minutes, its eyes open, its jaws working and its tongue flickering out, as horrified children and grandchildren heard with relish for years afterwards.
Poor Emily. Whether she loved Harry in any conventional sense is uncertain: she was 23 when she met him and already faced the dreary prospect of a lifetime of spinsterhood. She was lonely and homesick and oppressed by motherhood for most of her time in India, and must often have thought how different life might have been if she had married someone else.
The clearest proof is the inscription, in a defaced copy, of Tennyson's Enoch Arden, which she scribbled down soon after arriving in Ahmednagar. "This book it reads, "was given to me by a very dear friend in 1871, in England. It has been torn by children much to my sorrow." It may have been depression as much as the official cause, pernicious anaemia, that put her under that carefully chiselled gravestone so many miles from home.