What's in the Pot?

Shortly after my father, Joseph Anthony Gerard Morrissey, passed away in 2009, I discovered three handwritten diary entries on loose A4 sheets. He had already typed up and published many other entries on a Slovakian website, which is unfortunately no longer online. 

I do not know who wrote these pages or how to trace the author, 

so I am sharing them here to finish what he started.

If you have any information about these entries or recognise who might have written them, 

please get in touch by leaving a message or sending an email.

Enjoy reading.

What's in the Pot?

My partner and I use on our ancient wood-burning range—probably contemporary with our three-hundred-plus-year-old cottage—my long-departed 'aunt's' cooking pot and two skillets, one large and one small. The latter still have their original, detachable teak handles. They are extremely weighty, being made of heavy-gauge cast iron.

At first sight, when I unpacked them from a cardboard box they were far too heavy for, my partner pooh-poohed them. Understandably so, as these utensils are emphatically not for your Aga-owning bourgeois with a compulsory range of colourful, enamelled cast-iron casserole pots. My aunt, if she had known of these expensive kitchen accoutrements, would have heartily despised them.  

My partner dismissed them because, apart from being extremely heavy (the large pot and skillet, even without their lids, are a two-handed job), they had an encrusted interior due to four generations of deposits from the soot, smoke, and ash of countless campfires. They were often buried deep in the embers of a dying campfire without their handles—partly to conserve firewood, but much more importantly, so as not to betray the camp to the watching Japanese by building up a fresh fire with its tell-tale plume of smoke.  

However, for our ancient wood-burning range, they proved ideal. I showed, much to her surprise, that they were very functional and non-stick by virtue of having been cleaned from first use without detergent—just boiling water, and then, while still hot, the interior smeared with oil. This rendered them non-stick: better than any Chinese-made, Teflon-coated, aluminium frying pan guaranteed to last three years, but not four generations.  

It was the sight of these ancient utensils quietly bubbling on the stove that inspired this diary, which is a homage to my aunt's memory and her remarkable life.  

My mother's family was born into the Indian Raj and had lived there for generations. I was the last member of the family to be born there, in 1941, up in the hill station of Simla with its incongruous mock-Tudor bungalows and neat English gardens (no shortage of gardeners and water-boys, then or now). It is at the end of a narrow-gauge mountain railway and boasts a convalescence and maternity hospital because its elevation above the hot, teeming, dusty plains far below ensured a quiet, cool peace for the memsahibs, their babies, young children, and convalescing walking wounded. Both my grandmother and mother were born there.  

When the Japanese—'Nips', as they were termed in those oh-so-politically-incorrect times—invaded Burma and approached India proper, the women and children of the Raj, including my mother and me, were evacuated by convoy via Cape Town to Britain, as Rommel was then threatening the Suez Canal.  

However, my aunt was left behind—literally behind—the Japanese lines in the jungles of Burma. A distant elder cousin of my mother had, during the last heydays of the Raj, done the then-unthinkable. He, a middle-aged bachelor and devoted servant of the Raj, fell in love and, what is worse, married a young and beautiful upper-caste Hindu girl. It was, my mother assured me, a mutual love-match.  

He married late because his young manhood was disrupted, as were uncounted millions, by the Great War. He served on the front lines throughout the four-year-long slaughter unscathed because he was simply too good a marksman to be hurled over the top into the Flanders quagmire, laced with barbed wire, to pointlessly perish. My mother lost three younger brothers who did pointlessly perish in that bloody mud bath.  

Because of his Indian big-game experience, he was an excellent sniper using his personal, long-obsolete 'Long Lee' Enfield rifle. It possessed an unmatched range and accuracy, as I well know, because I still own it. It is, as the name suggests, long. It is also heavy and cumbersome, and it kicks like a mule. But, by God, it's accurate—provided, and this is crucial, you have position and time. With a long First World War bayonet, it was unusable except in this specialist role. Hence the universal adoption by the then all-volunteer British and Empire armies of the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle, probably the finest bolt-action rifle ever produced.  

Like its cumbersome predecessor, it was beautifully engineered—in stark contrast to the current SA80 service rifle, which is the totally unsatisfactory product of financial engineering spewed up on the British Army by the Thatcher privatisation of the Royal Ordnance Factories. We have subsequently given over Rolls-Royce, British Rail, London Underground, banks, and the entire economy to financial engineers with utterly predictable consequences: a junk rifle, junk-engineered cars, a junk railway system, junk banks (the financial system even wrecked its own industry), and a junked economy. An HMG Titanic striking a continent-sized iceberg of toxic derivatives and sinking in an ocean of debt, captained by Prudence Brown, who has the chutzpah to congratulate himself for launching the lifeboats.  

The Raj promptly excommunicated the couple and then pondered what to do with their wayward son, who had so besmirched it by marrying across the racial barrier. A discreet concubine was frowned upon—but a WIFE! Ye Protestant C of E Gods!  

After due deliberation, it was decided to exile the couple to the distant jungles of Burma, far from the censorious eye of the Raj. The British Raj, for all its class consciousness, did not—unlike the later, more modern Nazi and Communist empires—gas, shoot, or incarcerate in concentration camps all similar racial and class transgressors, real or imagined.

He was made an offer he could not refuse: Chief Inspector of His Majesty's Government's Burmese Hardwoods Inspectorate—chiefly mahogany, teak, and other more exotic and rare timber. The middle-aged, newly appointed Chief Inspector and his young wife took to the posting like ducks to water—or should I say, elephants to the jungle. Far from the disapproving Raj's glare, the Chief Inspector was the only white man in the entire inspectorate, covering virtually all of jungle Burma and consequently becoming Lord and Master of it in true Kiplingesque style.  

He made the utmost of it: setting up an imposing, impromptu 'court' complete with a retinue of male and female servants, children, hunters, a small platoon of native soldiers, and, most important of all, mahouts. The latter were all-important because the entire entourage incessantly travelled the extensive jungles of Burma on elephant back. There were, all told, an impressive twelve adult elephants with their half-dozen calves and two tuskers—an elder bull (the herd leader) and a younger bull being groomed for the role. There was also a small train of mules and donkeys tended by the women and children, horses being deemed not hardy enough for jungle travel. There was even a small herd of goats to provide milk and cheese and, if the hunters were unsuccessful, meat for the pot.  

This 'court' travelled the length and breadth of jungle Burma inspecting the valuable natural stands and plantations of hardwood, stamping out illegal logging, and lending its considerable man- and elephant-power to expedite big logging contracts—elephants being the powerful animal logging tractors of the time, especially when worked in teams. They acted as a travelling doctor dispensing basic medicine, setting broken bones, and instructing the court's native (but British-trained) midwife to help with jungle village births.  

My aunt's father also acted as an itinerant, unofficial magistrate, settling petty village disputes involving land and water rights, ownership of bull elephants, and such like. He greatly added to his reputation by refusing to be bribed, inevitably awarding his decision to the non-briber, widely publishing the bribers' names, and donating the bribe money to charity. Word soon got around the jungle telegraph, and people flocked to be judged by him, much to the displeasure of official local magistrates where there were any. All that those officials could do in their torpid and ineffective colonial administration in distant Rangoon was complain.  

How different from the post-war, post-colonial independent "socialist democracies' people's justice"! Bribes are expected—indeed demanded—by various corrupt military juntas and their myriad non-producing bureaucrats.

He further added to his legendary reputation by becoming adept at shooting rogue tigers that had turned to marauding village livestock and taking villagers. He had a cow elephant specially trained to remain silent and motionless in the presence of tigers. Elephants normally react extremely aggressively toward tigers, charging on sight or smell. Using his sniper skills, he picked off these very dangerous big cats who had lost all fear of man, instead of the 'Boche'—my aunt's archaic term for Germans, spoken not least because it aggravated my German-born father.  

He had a personal, regal howdah equipped with a gun nest, and would station his elephant beside a tree downwind of a tethered kid goat. The terrified bleating of the kid broadcasting through the warm, still jungle soon brought the tiger into the sights of the 'Long Lee' Enfield rifle. The ensuing imposing collection of tiger skins sent back to Rangoon were, alas, lost in the confusion and chaos of war and the turmoil of decolonisation.  

The young girl worshipped her father, 'Sahib' as he was inevitably called, because her mother died in jungle childbirth, the efforts of the midwife notwithstanding. The Sahib naturally could not bear parting from his daughter and only child. And to whom could he entrust her care? The families on both sides of the racial chasm would have disowned her, treating her as an untouchable in those politically incorrect times, and she was far too young for a distant boarding preparatory school.  

So he kept absolutely quiet about the death of his young wife and his daughter's birth, handing the baby over to a native wet-nurse—the wife of the chief—who had her own child and became a substitute mother. My aunt grew up with the other 'court' children, who were related at least linguistically to the Khmers. The entire court entourage was drawn from this indigenous jungle tribe, much used by the British as jungle rangers, trackers, and hunters—partly because of their differentiation from the majority of Burmese people, and mainly because of their intimate jungle knowledge. A classic case of imperial divide and rule, much practiced since Roman times. It has, of course, dire consequences for minorities when imperial rule fails.

Aunt grew up as an untraveled jungle child à la Kipling's Mowgli, playing with the other court children under the protective elephants. Elephants may look clumsy to the casual Western observer, but in their natural habitat they are silent, deftly shouldering their bulk through the dark, dense green jungle mass. They never trampled on the children playing under them, and they kept every type of predator at bay, from tigers to snakes, looking after the children as they would their own calves. One of my aunt's first memories was being picked up by an elephant's trunk and presented to the Sahib, who was on another elephant's back, for inspection.  

When my aunt came of school age—some eight years or so—the Sahib interrupted this idyllic, Kiplingesque upbringing, sending her to a girls' boarding preparatory school in Rangoon. But the taint of mixed blood trailed her even to this imperial backwater, which, together with the petty constraints of a prim and proper colonial school, conspired to make her utterly miserable. After a number of very unhappy terms during which she learnt the Lord's Prayer, played rudimentary hockey, and became proficient in the three Rs, she returned for good to the carefree camp life where, in her own words, "she was a happy little queen, if a trifle wild."  

Her Sahib father did his best to continue her education: involving her in his paperwork, reading aloud to her (inevitably Kipling's entire works, the King James Bible every Sunday and religious holiday, plus Shakespeare). These volumes, many of them illustrated, were carried in a special zinc-lined trunk alongside the office materials necessary for reports and her school studies. It was zinc-lined to keep out the jungle damp and myriads of voracious, paper-loving bugs. This trunk doubled as a desk by having four folding legs on substantial brass hinges, with a brass piano hinge running the length of the lid—the whole contraption being made of teak.  

It was an imposing piece of furniture: the only executive desk—indeed, the only desk—in the jungle. When set up under a canvas awning with mosquito nets dropped down the sides and a hissing Tilley lamp suspended from the ridge pole after dark, the Empire's business was done. Reports were compiled and received, justice and basic medicines dispensed, and school exercises written and corrected. One of my aunt's duties was to keep a 'court diary', parts of which survived and were read out loud to me when she bivouacked out under a similar awning at the bottom of our orchard in all weathers, whenever the myriad stuffy rules and regulations of an English bourgeois household, religiously enforced by my German-born father, got too oppressive. Naturally, his open contempt—mutually reciprocated—for the poor relative living in his household greatly aggravated family matters.

Aunt read to me, as her father had done for her, the entire works of Kipling, the King James Bible on Sundays, and Shakespeare. Only Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Foxe's Book of Martyrs were missing from this Protestant repertoire. She had a quiet, deep, murmuring voice with a husky rasp to it from chain-smoking vile-smelling cheroots and quaffing copious amounts of cheap sherry. This oft-repeated scene—the rasping murmur merging with the creaking and rustling orchard shadows and the hissing crackle of the campfire, on which bubbled a pot (the pot of our title) of 'jungle stew'—made an indelible impression on me as a young boy.  

She entirely, in an absent-minded way, ignored my two younger sisters because, I surmise, they were female, and my mother because she was far too submissive to the Teutonic tyranny my cantankerous father established in his household. His children escaped this regime by being dispatched to distant boarding schools as soon as possible. Aunt escaped by retiring, when she was not bivouacking in the orchard, to her private fourth-storey, three-room attic flat where the servants once lived. From this 'jungle den', as we children called it, seeped strange and exotic smells: curry, cheroot smoke, and stale sherry, much to my father's disdain.  

I was the only member of the family who, on privileged occasions, was allowed inside. It was spartan in the extreme, containing only the trunk-desk (which doubled as a table), a folding canvas chair, a sleeping cot, a stand with a tin basin and water jug on top, and a porcelain potty underneath (no running water for the servants or the poor relation). A simple sideboard and wardrobe contained all her domestic possessions, and a cylindrical coke stove—antique at the time—was used for heating and cooking (the rest of the house had central heating). One of my duties during school holidays was to carry the coke hod, when it appeared at the top of the attic stairs, up from the bunker in the basement four flights below. A scrap of linoleum and threadbare curtains completed the inventory, apart from a huge, obsolete school-sized world map covering most of the sloping attic ceiling—obsolete because it was largely coloured Empire Red and titled The British Empire. Hanging from a roof beam (it was, after all, an attic) were a 'Long Lee' Enfield rifle, a razor-sharp machete, and a small, carved ivory elephant.  

The book-filled trunk-desk, awning, mosquito nets, poles, Tilley lamp, and folding canvas chairs were carried by two elephants. There was also a 'kitchen' elephant that, among other things, carried the pots and skillets. If you have an elephant, weighty cast-iron pots are not a problem.  

The Sahib's personal elephant—the tiger-trained one—had its own regal howdah. The removable gun nest could be replaced by a camera nest upon which rested a Zeiss Ikonta, a bellows plate camera that could take photo plates of jungle flora and fauna, including shot tigers and back-up photos for reports. (There was a developing tent and equipment carried by another elephant.) The elephant was, as mentioned, trained to remain motionless, which was essential for a slow gun and an even slower camera. The camera mount could be replaced by a lap desk on which notes and draft reports were written while on the move. My aunt had her own wickerwork chair—upsized when required—made from jungle rattan. Just try sitting at a stationary school desk in uniform at boarding school after that elevated perch upon an elephant's back, wading through the waters and traversing the hills of jungle Burma!  

Aunt drew an incredible, Kiplingesque picture of the elephant cavalcade, trailed by mules, donkeys, and the odd jungle pet, with a raucous parrot happily squawking overhead as they snaked along trails from one obscure village to another via natural and plantation stands of hardwoods—now long logged without replacement, leaving severe environmental consequences. The regal howdah, with its rifle rack, camera, lap desk, porous clay water bottles (porous so that the water and occupants could be cooled by evaporation), and a zinc-lined lunch box, was her mobile home. It sure beats prams and pushchairs.  

In due course, the very intermittent delivery and dispatch of telegrams—the sole direct contact with senior colonial officialdom—was supplemented by a wireless, as radio was then called. However, the Sahib carefully ensured that the clumsy, primitive contraption was never fully operational: not difficult given its design and natural jungle hazards, not least of which was damp. The wireless paraphernalia required its own elephant burdened with a bulky transmitter and receiver, a kerosene generator with spare cans of fuel, a back-up pedal generator (literally a bicycle without wheels), a cumbersome battery, a box of spare valves, and a tall extending aerial that required a high tree atop a prominent hill to function.  

Aunt lovingly detailed all this to me beside the orchard fire because she was not only his beloved child, but his secretary and radio operator. She learnt to transmit and receive Morse, pedal the cycle generator, and generally act as a PA. So the Sahib, radio notwithstanding, remained out of day-to-day contact, sending telegrams and reports and receiving instructions by courier to and from the nearest jungle outpost.

But on the Empire's periphery, such postal and telegraphic services were few and far between. The Sahib's meticulous reports detailed not only the hardwoods, but the general state of HMG's jungle: its natives, waters, flora, and fauna. I am convinced that they lie filed away and unread in a long-forgotten cupboard in some dusty Rangoon office, slowly mouldering away. I would love to have them. They are the last detailed snapshots of a way of life on the jungle fringes of what was then the world's greatest empire—a world that has long since vanished, as Kipling foretold. Aunt could not recall any action ever being taken on these extensive reports.  

The odd telegram and spasmodic radio contact remained his sole connection to the torpid imperial administration until the sudden eruption of the Second World War destroyed this Kiplingesque existence forever. Hardwoods no longer concerned the Raj—if they ever did—being replaced by frantic concerns about what the Japanese were doing in its long-neglected backyard.  

The Raj, immediately forgiving and forgetting the Sahib's transgressions, peremptorily ordered him to set up an intelligence network. Who better than he to report on the rapidly moving Japanese columns storming through the jungle toward India proper? He was already behind enemy lines with an extensive network of contacts, a small army of trackers and hunters with an inimitable knowledge of the terrain, and a suddenly no-longer-cranky radio. The excommunicated exile metamorphosed into a valued official in the right place at the right time.

The Japanese were aware that there was a spy behind their lines. They must have had radio intercepts and informers; though jungle people are naturally inconspicuous, a group of that size could not remain secret forever—especially as the Sahib refused to downsize his court, let alone disband it, regarding them as his responsibility in true colonial paternalistic fashion. Nor could he send his unknown daughter through enemy lines to far-distant India. So he kept her and the court with him as if nothing untoward had happened.

The inevitable occurred. The Sahib was captured, betrayed almost certainly by an informer. The Japanese ignored the court entourage, who promptly vanished back into the jungle together with my dark-skinned aunt. The white man and his wireless occupied their entire malevolent attention. The last my aunt heard of her father were his distant screams as his captors began 'interrogating' him.

A tracker later reported that his naked, badly mutilated corpse was hanging upside down from a tree. The wireless and elephant were missing. The court could have handed the spy's daughter over, but instead treated her as one of their own, moving silently through the jungle and evading the Japanese for the rest of the war. They also evaded the incoming British Chindit columns driving the Japanese back under the eccentric but brilliant command of General Orde Wingate.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the court handed my aunt over to a bemused incoming British administration, together with an elderly cow elephant, an obsolete 'Long Lee' Enfield rifle, an equally obsolete bellows plate camera, a zinc-lined trunk-desk containing a tattered library, a machete, a pot, and two skillets, before vanishing back into the jungle for good.  

No one knew what to do with this strange, dark-skinned young woman with an Anglo-Norman name who spoke an archaic, Kiplingesque, King James Bible English with a smattering of even more archaic Shakespearean terms, and who was fluent in obscure native dialects. She could handle an elderly cow elephant with ease, competently shoot and maintain an ancient rifle and plate camera, operate a wireless transmitter, understand Morse code, and deftly wield a machete. One of her tricks was to get me to toss an apple toward her, which she would slash in mid-air with her machete while I tried to catch the two halves. She read my school reports closely and noted the phrase: "a useful bat and bowler, but tends to fumble in fielding." Alas, my fielding, despite her innovative training, remains fumbling. All of these esoteric accomplishments were unaccompanied by any passport, birth certificate, or, as my father later acidly pointed out, table manners.

Gradually the facts were ascertained, and Aunt and her few belongings—minus the elephant—made their way back to my mother's family in India. My father was too far away and too busy setting up a new West German government in Bonn to object. So Aunt became 'Aunty' and remained so for the rest of her short life.

She died in her early 40s; no one knew her exact age. Her colonial passport gave her age as 42 and listed my mother's Anglicised Norman name, which my father insisted on taking upon marriage to shed his German ancestry, at least on paper. Her premature death occurred because her wasted body harboured various tropical ailments that had undermined her health. I am also convinced that after I left for university, her extreme isolation hastened her end. Of course, bivouacking out in all weathers, chain-smoking cheroots, sipping cheap sherry, and enduring my father's open hostility all contributed.

Only the immediate family—my father excepted—attended her funeral. She is buried in a small Home Counties Church of England graveyard, accompanied by a small, exquisitely carved ivory elephant carrying an ebony howdah and mahout: the only valuable artefact she bequeathed me among her meagre belongings. On impulse, I placed it in her grave so that she would have an elephant to take her on her final journey. A soul has no weight, so even a miniature elephant can bear the burden.

The next time you see a common but ancient household utensil on an obscure shelf at the back of some dirty cellar, do not idly toss it out in a fit of housecleaning. It will have generations of domestic and political history behind it. My aunt's pots—one of which is quietly bubbling on our range as I write—contain so much more than venison goulash. They contain four generations of history from the most turbulent times the world has witnessed.

They were smelted and cast somewhere in Britain when it was the world's workshop, then crated and shipped eastwards to India through the newly opened Suez Canal on one of those new-fangled steamships. Purchased by my mother's family's distant cousins when Gladstone or Disraeli was Prime Minister, they passed in due course to the newly wedded Raj son and his Indian wife as he was packed off to a glorious jungle exile.

Travelling the length and breadth of jungle Burma, these pots witnessed the swift rise of the Land of the Rising Sun and its even swifter setting in a fiery nuclear sunset—man's all-too-successful attempt to mimic the fusion process of the sun itself. Then came the long fade-out of the British Indian Empire, with its bloody, sectarian Hindu and Muslim birth-pang wars between India and Pakistan.

Then, in the company of my aunt, my mother, and myself, they were reshipped back through Suez to an impoverished, post-war Britain. My mother and I flew out on a wartime Sunderland flying boat converted to civilian use by the simple expedient of replacing the depth-charge racks with rattan cane furniture, replacing the RAF insignia with BOAC logos. I was, alas, far too young to recall this epic flight, which took several overnight stopovers via Gibraltar, Alexandria, and Aden. This form of travel is now as obsolete as my aunt's elephant journeys.

Used over campfires in a Home Counties orchard, the pots were bequeathed to me along with a non-functioning bellows plate camera, a functioning rifle, a portable trunk-desk, a razor-sharp machete, a carved miniature ivory elephant, and indelible, poignant memories of a woman who had only three loves in her short life: her Sahib father, her nephew, and an elderly cow elephant—"a spinster like me," she would bitterly chuckle.

In my possession, the pots have witnessed the rise of the American and Soviet Empires and the improbable implosion of the latter—hence their presence with me in Slovakia, an ex-province of the Soviet Empire, that political Tyrannosaurus Rex that armed itself into extinction.

As these pots, unlike those political regimes, are indestructible and will be passed on, I wonder what the future holds for them and if there will be a diarist to record it. Will they witness global warming and nuclear war? The former a certainty, the latter very likely—especially if we keep electing such people to high office.