The box came from the East, its surfaces were intricately carved, and it had a pungent smell of patchouli

The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 55

Travelling on Indian buses needed a strong stomach. With their American chassis, these vehicles possessed a wooden body fashioned by a local carpenter and painted in garish colours with pictures of fierce Indian gods, temples, tigers, or cows. Beside the driver was one first class seat and behind it was a row of second class seats which consisted of a padded bench with a wooden back rest and five inches of knee room. Behind this row were two to three more wooden benches with three inches of knee room and no backrest. Storage for wood, rice and kerosene was at the back where the driver’s assistant crouched.

The Sikh driver arrived to start the journey 30 minutes after the advertised time for departure and the journey was interminable; passengers were forever boarding and alighting. The bus stopped more than once for fuel and had to halt for inspection at octroi posts, points on the road where heavy vehicles paid a toll.

Uncomfortable

Hopefully Angus found a front seat, as a perch with three or five inches of leg room would have been very uncomfortable. Whatever niche he was allotted, he may well have seen the funny side of the experience as he watched the driver negotiate the precipitous bends on the road with one hand on the rubber bulb of his horn and with the other changed gear, steered the bus and operated the brake.

Accompanying these feats, the driver also freewheeled downhill and replenished the radiator, which had boiled dry, with water.

Possibly Angus treated himself to a night or two at Nedou’s hotel in the centre of Srinagar, then a favourite place for officers on shikar. Architect Adam Nedou from Dubrovnik arrived in India during the last quarter of the 19th Century to construct a palace for the Maharajah of Gujarat.

In 1880 he opened his first of a chain of hotels in Lahore. Eight years later he established one at Gulmarg in Kashmir and another in Srinagar. Forty years after Angus made his trip to Kashmir, a guide book stated that the hotel was ‘a little decrepitlooking’.

The hotel exists today but after the ravages of civil war in Kashmir, it suffers from neglect, much like other heritage buildings from the heyday of the British Raj.

Most probably, the young adjutant stayed in a private house, as the only photograph I found of his shooting expedition shows him in tweed jacket and plus fours.

My uncle stands by a large deciduous tree and an exotic shrub with cascading blooms in the garden of a diplomat and his wife, Sir Peter and Lady Clutterbuck, who welcomed travellers to the Himalayas and young men on shikar. In 1937 Clutterbuck and his wife ‘kindly and generously entertained’ a party of explorers before they set off on expedition to the Shaksgam Valley.

In like manner, Angus prepared for his four-week expedition to the beautiful Sind Valley north of Srinagar. Acting as agent, a Srinagar merchant arranged everything for him: a shikari (a local big game hunter who served as a guide) and coolies from a nearby Kashmiri village.

Discovered

The agent also obtained a licence so that his client could shoot in a valley between Kashmir and Ladakh, and supplied camping equipment and ponies for the first stage of the trek. These merchants owned large shops in the centre of the city where they sold rugs, pashmina shawls, and carved wooden boxes.

Daisy had a box measuring 30 square inches and 30 inches high. It came from the East, its surfaces were intricately carved, and it had a pungent smell of patchouli. The box, now in my younger sister Elisabeth’s possession, was discovered after my grandmother’s death at the back of a cupboard under the stairs at Ballure.

Its top opened to reveal a row of small compartments, each with its own lid and a circular ivory handle. Was this Angus’s souvenir from a shop flanking Srinagar’s Jhelum river and brought back to the UK by an obliging officer or his wife?

Kashmir rose in Angus’s imagination as a far-off magical dream, especially when he was sweating in Secunderabad. Like the Deccan, the country was an independent Muslim principality, and its different customs and traditions must have appealed to Angus after travelling through British India, which was official and dull with snobbish colonials throwing their weight around.

In topography, this province was as different to Hyderabad, as the Argyllshire countryside is to the fields of the English Home Counties. Angus was aware of Kashmir’s beauty.

The young adjutant had seen pictures, even railway posters, of the famous houseboats on the Dal Lake in Srinagar and of the wonderful Mughal gardens. This hidden valley, 10,000 feet up in the Himalayas, had a transcendent, watery beauty. That was why Srinagar, with a river flowing through its ancient streets and the lake on its north side, was called the Venice of the East.

There was also something instinctive about choosing this region. Like a migratory bird, Angus was accustomed to making journeys from north to south and south to north.

Since he was a boy he’d travelled from Kintyre to the south of England for study or work but had always returned home to the north for rest and freedom. Likewise, India’s north meant empty spaces, solitude, and quiet.

Limited

The two-month Kashmir holiday was a high point in Angus’s short life. In his two-page letter to my mum, written in a small, neat hand indistinguishable from the script of his commanding officer, Hector Greenfield, he describes his prospective leave. “The wild flowers are marvellous in May and June, I believe; iris and all sorts of lovely flowers and apricot trees in full blossom. I imagine it will be rather like Switzerland in summer.”

After departing from Srinagar, Angus set off with only his retinue for company. Officers were unable to go on holiday together. Because of their limited number in India, they had to stagger their leaves. Angus’s caravan consisted of 10 ponies, which carried the tents and stores, two shikaris, a cook and his helper, called the ‘tiffin coolie’.

Although they took food, Angus shot for the pot and let his shikari attend to other matters, like selecting where they camped each night. In the late 1930s the un-metalled road up the Sind Valley was beautiful.