A Mongoose Surprise

by

In 1926 British India, the Adyar Club in Madras (Chennai) had an unusual resident.

Here’s yet another of Gladys’s funny experiences in 1920s India, seeing yet more things unfamiliar to her in America! First, a quick note:

Note: Subscribers to my Sell Your Nonfiction & Parenting by Faith blogs (with email addresses from my old blogs merging with my new this week) may wonder about these history-related posts! Future writing and parenting articles will post here at CrossConnectMedia.com. I hope you’ll also enjoy these quirky excerpts from my nonfiction book in progress based on near-100-year-old letters.

Now back to our Seattle gal, Gladys, and her adventures:

Gladys Gose Pearce, October, 1926

Adyar Club, founded in 1832, is our favorite club. We get to see old friends, new friends, and other people’s romances in the making. We love playing golf there on its mild course with the smooth grounds, kept in perfect condition as a laborer whisks them to perfection after each player departs.

After golf, I like to take a refreshing bath, change for dinner, and have time for a rubber of bridge on the veranda with a favorite drink. Twilight deepens, a brief sunset, short twilight, then it is night. Sometimes a tea and dance at the end of the day is pleasant.

At the club I saw a strange creature with a long tail dart across the veranda, followed by several small ones.

I found out it’s a mongoose, named Rikki – she’s quite privileged at the club, as she keeps snakes away. When she chose to have her young in the drawer where the club silverware was kept, out came the silverware so she’d feel welcome and stay.

In other letters written home to her mother in Walla Walla WA, Gladys described all kinds of creatures, including cobras, which mongooses were able to kill. I guess the trade-off in this situation was that kitchen sanitation was far less of a worry than poisonous snakes!

Indian Mongoose image by Bishnu Sarangi

Laurie Winslow Sargent is the author of Delight in Your Child's Design and The Power of Parent-Child Play, has contributed stories to a dozen other books, and has had articles in national magazines with 300,000 to one million readers. Radio interviews with Laurie have aired in 48 U.S. states and abroad. Her current nonfiction book in progress is based on 1920s to 1930s expat experiences of an American couple in British Raj India. She is also executor for the original manuscripts of Hayden Howard, award-winning 1960s author.

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Categories: 1920s, Adventures of Gladys, British Raj India

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4 thoughts on “A Mongoose Surprise”

  2. I love her writing style. She sounds like a dear and long-time friend, and a person likes her immediately.

    Also: I love that the silverware was removed from the drawer instead of Rikki and her brood.

    Reply

    • She (Gladys) would have loved your comment! She was an aspiring writer and a little sad to have never been published. She asked me to help her with that when I was too young to know best how. Now it is such an honor to be able to do that for her!

      I loved her personality when I knew her (my grandma) in her 60s through 90s. She was funny and loving. But finding the letters she wrote as woman in her 30s, when she was actually in India in the 1920’s, makes me wish I had been her friend then too! I think it a little amazing that I can identify so well with someone born 123 years ago!

      Thanks for your comment; I enjoy your own blog as well featuring vintage movies! I have a great story I will post soon about how she met a film crew from Universal on a steamship!

      Reply