Back to the Hill
Kurseong, up in the Himalayan foothill, the school surrounded by forests. One day a little boy appeared at the door of my quarters. He did not speak. He stood there holding a plant of forest orchids. I gave him some money for them.
Some days later he appeared again and stood there in my doorway, still without words but with even more orchids.
“Stay there!” I said
I got out my paints and proceeded to paint him- his patient little baby face, his hands holding the flowers. “Nepali boy with Orchids”
I finished the picture and paid him well.
Later he was coming with other Nepali boys excitedly pointing out to them where, popped on a bookcase against the wall, was the portrait of himself. This gave me other little boys to study.
They had their other little enterprises. One was to sell stag-beetles to the small Anglo-Indian boys in the school. I did a painting of a squatting boy with a fine specimen of a stag-beetle crawling over his hands while four others, squatting or stooped around him watched, their heads forming a group in the upper centre of the picture; “Boys with Stag-beetle”
Whilst I was in this school the examiner of the Trinity College of Music came to test some candidates. He was with his wife. Hearing the headmistress mention my name she asked to see me urgently. I was invited to take after lunch coffee at the Head’s house. The lady introduced herself as the head of a school of mural-painting in South London. Then she gave me warning to the effect that if I stayed in India I would get nowhere. People were out to ‘down’ me. She told me how she had been shown a catalogue of a previous Calcutta Academy exhibition and coming across my picture of “Coolies through Ferns” the page was hurriedly passed over with ‘You do not want to see that. Look at some of our Indian painter’. But she insisted she wanted to see that picture and then noted my name.
This warning did not deter me from submitting works for the following Academy (1949). I entered “Boys with Stag-beetle” and “Merry-go-Round”. The latter was a small picture I had done whilst in Calcutta when its first Fun-Fair was introduced at Eden Gardens (?)
I had gone to pick up subject ideas. I saw a Beauty! A round-about with horses and other animals, which as a rule usually whirled around children, in this case it was swirling around a heavy load of rotund Marwaries and their equally rounded wives. Both pictures were sold. “Stag Beetle” to the widow of an Englishman who had been the foremost doctor in Calcutta in the days of the British Raj, “Merry-go-Round” to the Maharajah of Burdwan.
I did another picture whilst teaching in that school that year. Sugar was rationed. My servant was always returning with less that I was entitled to or paid for; she blamed the shop-keeper. My frustration went into a picture. It was of a fat shopkeeper, a smug smile of self-satisfaction on his face, holding up the scales (the un-sophisticated ones then used in such village shops), his little finger was surreptitiously pressing down on the side holding the sugar as the emaciated customer facing him, his backbone showing sharply through his shirt, was intent on putting the money in the vendor’s outstretched hand. “The Merchant”
The Headmistress said the governors were paying me less than my qualifications and experience warranted.
“If they ask you to return next year, ask for a higher pay grade” she advised.
I was going down to the plains for the long winter holidays; There the holidays were long in winter rather than in summer thus saving the children from the cold. I was asked by the governors to return the next year but I was given no holiday pay. I sent them a letter saying I would return if either they gave me holiday pay or raised my pay grade. I had no reply and the holidays were nearing their end. They said they had lost my letter. I wrote again. They replied it would take them time to consider it. Would I go back and take up the post. They would give me their decision later. I said I would go back, not to begin teaching, but to wait for their decision. It never came. I spent several months as the paying guest of another teacher.
I used this time to do portrait heads of Nepali women in water colour. They were the servants of the school and the teachers. Never have I come across such willing models. They each took an invitation to ‘sit’ as if I had proclaimed them ‘beauty queen of the hills’. They sat with lively, smiling faces. I did the face of only one man. He was handsome. The excursive in Nepali portraits stood me in good stead when I came to do pictures of the hill people without the aid of models.