Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey by John Masters

gave me much help and promised his government's blessing and co-operation. When I thought that organizationally, speaking I was ready to go ahead I stopped and summarized the position. If it were to work, each party must number at least fifteen, and no more than twenty; I would have to take at least two such parties per year; the cost per person, for a six-week round trip from New York, all inclusive, (including drinks), would be $2,950.
    With this in hand, I felt infinitely better about emigrating. My Himalayan Holiday plan felt as comforting as Dick Whittington's bundle on the end of a stick: it contained something to wrap myself in. In the more material sense my bundle also contained the £300 (then $1,200) a year pension I would be awarded, and my loss-of-career gratuity.
    This loss-of-career gratuity was the only instance I ever came across of a government department — any department, any government — being both generous and sensible in a financial arrangment with its servants. It worked like this: if an officer was twenty and had really not started his Indian Army career, he got nothing, for he had lost nothing. If he was fifty and had earned his full pension, he got nothing, for he had had his career. Between these two ends the sum allotted rose to a peak of about £3,500 for an officer caught at seventeen years service, and about thirty-seven years of age. With fourteen years service, and aged thirty-three, I got £3,000. Others planned to use their gratuities to buy a farm, or a share in a business, to study law or medicine, to take courses in accountancy, or in how to be secretary of a golf club (a favourite, this). I proposed to gamble with mine, that is, bet my gratuity that we could make a living and a home in America before it ran out. Barbara agreed, and I felt even better. The clouds and doubts were rising. We felt uplifted and ennobled.
    Why a reasonably normal couple should feel so close to heroic at the idea of venturing into the world with an assured income of 300 pounds a year, and 3,000 pounds in cash, is hard to explain. But it was so. We were nonchalant in the face of floods, earthquakes, cobras, and leopards under the bed. Ice, snow, long marches, heat and hostile natives did not bother us. We had lived happily and raised children without electricity, gas or plumbing, surrounded by lethal diseases. But Barbara had been brought up to inherited money (lost in the Hatry crash of 1929) and I on an adequate government pension. Our lack of fear of just about everything else was counterbalanced by real terror at even the shadow of insecurity.
    Chestnuts lay under the trees and the brown misty softness of late English autumn thickened the air. Blue smoke from the gardeners' bonfires drifted across the lake. In the ivy-covered building, behind the coat of arms there — an owl astride crossed swords and the motto Tam Marte quam Minerva — we of the D.S. began grading the students and making our recommendations about the line of staff or command duty to which each would probably be best suited. The last exercises were piled up in our racks, the last war games filled rooms and corridors with maps, cables, telephones, and simulated radio sets. We prepared Allenby Hall for the last cloth model demonstrations, and coloured ribbons representing radio channels filled its earth and sky with complicated brilliance. I was presented with my engraved silver owl, the mark that I had instructed at the Staff College.
    A fellow D.S. came up to me in the morning coffee break. 'I hear you're going to America, Jack?'
    'Yes.'
    'Well, my wife has invented a brassiere that she thinks might have a market there...'
    I stared at him. We began to laugh. We arranged to meet for cocktails at his house that night. There Barbara and I learned the mysteries of the brassiere.
    His wife was a friend of a leading British gynaecologist. With him, she had been studying the problems of women's breasts after lactation, and of over-heavy