The Vanished World

by

I read the various news stories about the latest Islamic-inspired mass murder in India with a mixture of odd emotions. One of them being ‘Oh dear, radical Muslims again, behaving in that manner which we have come to expect,’ the second being a degree of sadness for a place and a time that I have never been a part of, but am sort-of-acquainted with, and the third being straight-out nostalgia for a vanished world. Or several vanishing worlds. I was moved to take down and re-read a murder mystery from the collection in the hallway segment of the home library – M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kashmir.*

The mystery is set in the mountains in the first chapters, and then in a garrison town on the plains, and finally on Kashmir’s Lake Dal, all described most lovingly by a writer who knew them well, eight or nine decades ago. It takes place in 1947, as the British were packing up to leave India for good and all. M. M. “Mollie” Kaye’s family had served the so-called ‘Raj’ for generations; father to son, to son, to mother, to daughter, serving and doing their bit, spending their lives there, in various capacities. Military, missionary, civil service, the railway network, overseas banking, industry, trade – generations and decades spent in the Far East in various capacities.

But by 1947, the ‘Raj’ was simply closing up shop; grievously wounded by the late war and the horrible post-atomic world, the establishment was packing up and going home, leaving India and the soon-to-be-separate Pakistan to their own devices, for which the best of the British hoped well, but weren’t holding their breath on it. The various garrisons, clubs, schools, amusements and institutions which catered to or supported the British establishment in India faced an uncertain future, if they weren’t closing down entirely. The novel touches on this soon-to-be-vanished world, which once seemed monolithic and unchanging, but which turned out to be ephemeral. In almost no time at all, the largest part left was either in the history books or living in the memories of those diminishing few who had lived in it.

I can only think that one of the reasons that I felt such a strong sense of affinity was that I also was a resident in an ephemeral world – the network of overseas American bases where I lived and worked in the 1980s and early ’90s. Sondrestrom AB closed; the concrete barracks building that I lived in is now a B&B, hosting those with a taste for remote adventuring. Hellenikon AB closed, and the base buildings demolished to create the main venue for the 2004 Summer Olympics … but the facilities were abandoned and looted of useful materials before another decade passed. The American side of Zaragoza AB reverted entirely to the Spanish Air Force, as did Torrejon AB, near to Madrid. The bases are still there – but the American units are all but gone. The base at Adana/Incirlik in Turkey, hugely favored in my day as a wonderful shopping venue and a great place to serve an accompanied tour with your family, is presently anything but a safe tour. Now it’s an unaccompanied tour, and if I read the military media correctly, only absolutely essential functions are present there now. No more shopping excursions organized by the spouses’ clubs to purchase rugs, brass, art, jewelry and oriental antiques. Just about every one of the American bases in Germany closed up or downsized radically. The American military presence in Europe slowly began contracting after the fall of the Berlin Wall – which makes sense, really, but for military members who spent much of their adult lives there (or child dependents who went to US schools overseas) there is a sense of loss, knowing that those establishments are no longer there.

Only the memories remain, photographs, and souvenir mementos. The matter of memory, though, brings me around to M.M. Kaye; she had a good relationship with her parents, who seem to have been interesting and talented people, who had fascinating careers, and shared their memories of the prime of their lives at Britain’s peak in the late 19th Century. In turn, she put the incidents of their lives into a memoir – so the memories are not entirely lost. This reminds me again of a conversation with another writer of historical fiction: suppose, we reasoned (we were about the same age, with parents born around 1930) that one of our parents at the age of ten or twelve, spoke to the oldest person that they knew then, who told them stories of their lives. So that person would have been born between 1850-1860, with memories of the American Civil War, and the aftermath, the Lincoln assassination, the wild post-war West, of wagon trains, Indian wars and Jesse James. Now, we speculated – suppose that person, born in 1850 0r 1860 – at the age of ten or twelve, spoke to and listened to stories told by the oldest person that they knew – say around 1865. That senior citizen would have been born perhaps in 1775, and might have had childhood recollections of the Revolution, of seeing General Washington and his rebel army marching past, heard tales of the original Boston Tea Party, heard the bells announcing the Declaration of Independence.

It was an interesting thought – that even as we might seem distant from historical events of the recent past, perhaps we are really only three or four lives removed from distant history.

Comment as you wish.

*The mystery itself is fair enough – the eventual reveal of the murderer as a deep-cover Soviet agent is quite startling, because that well-drawn character has been near-front and center for most of the book. From a plotting standpoint, I would have liked to have seen a few more scattered hints of Communist sympathies on that character’s part. As another character commented, “The life of the party … but no one ever suspected which Party!”

13 thoughts on “The Vanished World”

  1. My younger brother was also in the AF, stationed in Germany in the early ’90’s. Unlike most Americans, his unit and base was composed of personnel from most of the NATO AF’s. One of the stories he told me was of a Luftwaffe Colonel pointing out to some other Germans that the Americans stationed in Germany were spending a Billion or so dollars a year in the local economy and that they’d feel the difference when we left.

    On your second point, my grandmother told of dancing with Frank James at a wedding as a young girl.

  2. *chuckle*
    One of my local friends from Athens told me in a letter, that after the base at Hellenikon closed. someone went and added to the graffiti on a building that faced what had been the front gate. The graffiti had read for years – “Yankee go home!”
    The additional graffiti read…
    “And take us with you!”

  3. I wonder when somebody will write a novel set in Kabul of 2021 right before the collapse, perhaps with the opening chapters a young person laughing at an elder who tells scary stories of the old days of the Taliban…. “but Father, those days are in the past and will never return.”

  4. My mother remembered her great grandfather who, every Armistice Day, put on his Confederate uniform and marched in a parade with his fellow soldiers.

  5. I remember an anecdote in a Reader’s Digest from long ago:

    During World War II, a young lad won a contest and as a prize got to attend an Independence Day celebration with a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic (Civil War.) During their talk, the lad told the veteran that there was no way he could understand how honored he felt at the chance to talk to him.

    The veteran smiled and told him that he actually understood perfectly. It seems that when he was a boy he had won the chance to have a similar talk with a veteran of the American Revolution.

    That’s how long our Nation has existed, three long lifetimes. Puts things in perspective.

  7. My father was born in 1934 in the middle of the North Dakota prairie. He told me that when he was a kid, he knew old men who still spoke primarily Norwegian among themselves. They were probably in their fifties or sixties, meaning they were the children of the first immigrants from Norway. My paternal grandfather died in 1960, ten years before I was born, so my paternal great-grandfather was probably born in Norway, got on a steamship in Oslo, and waved to his family, knowing he’d never see them again, to cross an ocean and then half a continent to live in a house made of sod and scrape a farm out of the bare earth.

    It makes me think I should never be impatient about anything ever again.

  9. There was an Adam-12 episode with a scene involving a found adult–an old man who remembered the Wild West, and had grown up in Deadwood.

  10. I (and my son) have a tangential connection to the Raj. My mother’s father was a Lutheran pastor, and worked as a teacher and missionary in south-east India during the 1920s. My mother was born there in 1924 (she and my father had us late in life) and lived there until she was about 9. She often talked about going ‘up into the hills’ during the summers to get out of the heat of the coastal plain, and attended a British ex-pat school until the family moved back to northwest Illinois. We were probably the only family in our north Iowa farm town that regularly used curry as a spice :) I still get a wave of nastolgia, and maybe a little homesick, when walking into an Indian restaurant.

  11. Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928) is the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler (born 1853), the grandson of John Tyler (born 1790; 10th President of the US), and the great-grandson of John Tyler Sr. (born 1747).

    Four generations – 278 years. Only possible in the male line, though.

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