The book The Henna Artist (by Alka Joshi) includes scenes set in the Indian palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur. That brings alive a 1920s invitation in my possession–from that maharaja to my American grandfather, J.K. Pearce.
This is an invitation to my grandfather from His Highness the Maharaja of Jaipur. The location and time: At Home (the palace) June 1st at 4 P.M. (most likely a year between 1923 and 1926.) The event was a Gymkhana (featuring races and competitions) on the Horse Show Lawn.
While this seems a huge departure from my recent blog posts on vintage sci-fi and Reawakened Worlds, it’s not quite the stretch you imagine. Yes, 1920s historical nonfiction and 1960s science fiction are different genres. But what they have in common is the past.
The connection between the two genres is an abundance of artifacts inherited from my own family. They surround me in my home office.
On one hand, I possess vintage science fiction manuscripts, author-agent letters, and magazines (Galaxy, IF, and others) with short stories written by my stepfather in the ’60s.
Yet I’m also surrounded by 1920s ephemera. That includes photos, film reels, diaries, letters, and unusual objects from my maternal grandparents’ time in British Raj India (1923-1933.)
Sometimes I can’t recall which time period I’m in, particularly 2024!
But back to how Grandpa met the Maharaja of Jaipur, and why a young American man from Washington State was in India to begin with…
Grandpa studied Forest Engineering at the University of Washington, then as an associate professor attended the Pacific Logging Conference. There he met a man who was working in the logging industry in India. That man encouraged my grandfather Ken (J. Kenneth Pearce) to apply for, take over, and expand his position.
So at about age 26, Ken was hired by government of India (then under control of the British.) He assumed a position of high authority in South India which he held for ten years. His job was to oversee elephant logging camps, introduce machine power into the camps, and help establish sawmills. At times he also functioned as a district magistrate.
In India, Ken he was called Sahib and Master Pearce, and Grandma Gladys was his Memsahib.
That felt awkward to them at times. There was great pressure for them to hire many servants. Yet both of my grandparents were highly industrious, hard-working people. They often simply wanted to do the work themselves.
Grandpa worked from sunup to sundown, often shoulder-to-shoulder with his Indian laborers (most who were ex-convicts.) Grandma sewed clothes for herself and Ken. As a physical education teacher, she was hired to evaluate physical education programs in schools in Madras and other cities.
As for the Maharaja of Jaipur–I believe this particular invitation was for just Ken, before Grandma Gladys sailed to marry him in 1926. Then Ken and Gladys lived in Tamil Nadu region until 1929, primarily in Madras (Chennai) and Ooty. (1930-1933 they lived in the Andaman Islands.)
Ken managed logging camps throughout South and Southwest India. The University of Washington archives hold artifacts related to the forestry work of J.K. Pearce in India. However, I hold all his personal mementos from that time and place, plus additional logging ephemera.
Grandma also met a maharaja: the Maharaja of Mysore, who had a summer palace in Ooty (the Fernhills Palace.)
Gladys wrote of a funny (or disconcerting?) event that took place on the palace lawn. Before moving to India, she had saved money from her job as a junior high physical education teacher. On the steamship ride over, during a stop in Asia, she bought her first set of pearls and treasured them.
At the palace, a young child (one of the princes) approached her bedecked with jewels. He pointed at her pearls and demanded to have them. As you can imagine, she clutched them, and gave him a firm “No.” She had worked too hard for those!
It’s always fun to throw a post into the wind, then see it blow across the world to another country and grab someone’s interest there. A bloggers dream, actually. Oh, the wonders of the internet!
A week ago, reporter Prutha Bhosle emailed me to request an interview about my book in progress on the adventures of Gladys in India. (She’d was intrigued by my post Adventures in the Attic.) We arranged for me to email her details, then we’d audio Skype. Scheduling the latter proved to be a bit tricky: my day is her night! With a 9 1/2 hour time difference, who would be doing the interview in pajamas? It did help that she was a night owl.
I thought hard about what details would be most relevant to people in her own city of Mumbai (Bombay, when it was part of British India). It seemed to me that Gladys and Ken’s 1926 jungle honeymoon adventures in Kerala India (near Mumbai) including the story One Less Crocodile would interest Prutha and her audience most.
But it turned out that Prutha was especially intrigued with how near-100-year-old original handwritten letters unfolded a love story:
How a vintage suitcase, overflowing with 1920s-1930s jungle honeymoon adventures, birthed a book.
This photo includes invitations from the Maharaja of Jaipur and The Governor & Viscountess Goschen; a love letter from Ken; and letters home to Walla Walla from Gladys in Port Blair, Andaman Islands.
UPDATE! This blog post led to a Mid Day News story on May 31, 2020, by Prutha Bhosle:American Author Traces Her Ancestors Love Story Through Letters ~ A North Carolina-based author relies on a trunk full of letters from 1920s India and Google Earth to reconstruct a love story of her ancestors for an upcoming book~ Mid Day is called “India’s most engaging newspaper” with a reported 25 million page views per month. How exciting is that?!
A Discovery of near-100-year-old Letters
My eyes adjusted to the dim walk-up attic, sun spilling through cracks between beams. I was surrounded by yet more to purge or make agonizing decisions about. But this time I was on a hunt for one battered, square, beige suitcase — about 1930s vintage. I spied it and dragged it into better light. Heavy.
I smiled at the name Winslow, scrawled in fancy letters in black marker. I’d written that myself, back when as a teen in the 70’s I thought that old suitcase “cool”. I’d claimed it to store my stuff, including an old peace-sign necklace and a mood ring. It had since been emptied, then refilled, several times.
A stuck-on yellow note had Pearce Papers scribbled on it. I knew the suitcase was stuffed to the gills with musty documents given to Mom when her parents (Gladys Gose Pearce and J. Kenneth Pearce) passed away. However, I’d never looked at the papers closely.
A belt was wrapped tightly around the suitcase, which was fit to burst with a weak old lock. Sure enough, when I pulled hard to uncinch the belt, the lid popped open.
Poof. Dust flew out; I sneezed. My curiosity would have to duke it out with my allergies.
I pulled out handfuls of sepia-toned photos, faded newspaper articles, and certificates. I sneezed again.
Then I found a bundle of letters, tied with a string. The top one was postmarked 1926, from India. My heart beat a little faster.
It was addressed to Thomas and Mrs. Gose, Walla Walla, Wash, USA. It struck me that that letter had traveled across the world to a small town where everyone seemed to know Thomas – no street address was needed, and no zip code.
It’s a little miraculous that the letters are in my attic. They had been moved from at least five different homes in three states before finally landing in my house, nearly a hundred years later. It’s a testament to the Pearce hoarding instincts, often criticized but in this moment appreciated.
I gently untied the string and pulled out that first letter. “Dear Mother and Father….” And after reading a few paragraphs, I shouted, “There you are!”
By “you” I meant Gladys — her zip, her personality, her wit and humor. Although she had graduated from high school way back in 1915, then college in 1919, I was instantly whisked back in time as I read her words.
I could now see her, hear her, as a young woman.
Jungle Honeymoon
Prior to finding the letters, I’d wrestled with something our family called ‘the book’: typed pages bound together with a black cover, which Gladys had titled Jungle Honeymoon. Gladys, an aspiring writer, had written it in midlife in the 1960s among other stories and poems. (In the 1990s she’d asked me to help her get published and be her co-author, but at that time I was still a budding writer myself.)
The settings in Jungle Honeymoon were fascinating. Gladys described the aristocracy of the British Raj era in the 1920s and 1930s, elephant-powered logging camps, and the convict colony in the Andaman Islands.
And oh, the stories! One described how local villagers begged Grandpa Ken to shoot a tiger that had eaten their family members. I also read about that and other exciting tales in newspaper articles about the couple after they returned to America. (There are also archived documents at the University of Washington about Grandpa’s work in India.)
While growing up, I recall Grandma Gladys telling me stories over English Breakfast tea, poured from a flowered turquoise Chinese tea set, served British-style with sugar and cream. She and the teenage me wore silk Japanese kimonos she’d bought during her steamship travels. I remember trying to avoid dipping the giant square sleeves in my tea.
Later in life, armed with an enormous VHS camera, I videotaped Grandpa Ken describing how that tiger could have done him in: he’d only had one shot in his rifle. I’m glad he won — not the tiger, or I wouldn’t be here, nor my kids nor grand-babies.
Missing Pieces
One problem I found with Jungle Honeymoon is that the funny Gladys I knew was missing. In her attempt to write as she thought an author should, her words hadn’t revealed her personality adequately. Or perhaps her words were a bit stiff because too much time had passed since her immersion in her experiences. (She came home from India in 1933 and worked on Jungle Honeymoon in the 1960s.) Since her essays needed heavy editing, I considered turning them into a work of fiction based on real life, to get more personal voice back into the stories.
Hence, my discovery of her letters was monumental. There she was: real, raw, right in the midst of those experiences! Conversational, using contractions the way people actually talk. And not wasting an ounce of precious paper space on letters that would take weeks by steamship to get home to Mother. And I found more than just letters: wedding invitations from royalty and photos that now make the words in Gladys’ letters truly come alive.
The Birth of a New Book
At long last, I found a way for Gladys and me to coauthor a book about her her experiences. In our final book (to be published soon) you will travel vicariously along with us, alternating between her perspective in the 1920s and ’30s and my own in 2020. Now nearly a century has passed since Gladys was a young woman in India, and in the meantime new technology allows us to dig deep and richly see what she experienced in a far more advanced way than we could have, had she and I partnered in this in the 1990s.
For example, with tools like Google Earth and YouTube, together we can all pretend we are in 1920s India. Research is literally at my fingertips. While reading about a royal wedding Gladys and Ken attended, within seconds I pulled up photos from that wedding via Google. I could visualize my grandparents there, in that very room in the photos. On YouTube I can listen to music they listened to, or watch a silent film seconds after reading a 1930s letter about a “new film” Gladys recommended her mother see.
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ALSO, feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts these posts provoke, and I’ll try to respond. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Let me know what country you are from, and if you also have a blog.
Today, I (Laurie) in 2020 had the delight of Skyping with my daughter and grand-babies. In this modern age of motherhood and grandmotherhood, I can see them instantly. I can even capture video or screenshots of them while we video-chat! My oldest granddaughter, 2 1/2 years old, is so accustomed to this she is mystified when we have a regular phone call. “Grandmama? Grandmama? I can’t see you!”
But nearly a century ago, news from Gladys to her mother about her babies took ages to arrive. Letters and photos traveled via very long, slow steamships from India to America.
She and her husband Ken, a forestry expert from Seattle, were living at Ootacamund Hill Station among British officers (and occasional royalty) during the British Raj era.
Gladys, who loved to write, used sweet prose to describe her newborn:
Braemar, Ootacamund Hill Station
7 May, 1929
Dear Mother and Dad,
I’ve just tucked Pamela, now seven weeks old, in her little bed. She is a fascinating little miss. The last I saw, she had both little hands flying back and forth and she was agoo-ing for all she was worth. Not a whimper when I left and the light went off. Her little bed is alongside ours so I know what she is doing.
She is getting so plump — little dimples in her elbows and back and one below her little mouth at one corner. The other day, three children came to see her and she cooed and “talked” to them in the cunningest way I’ve ever seen. Babies seem to speak to other children in a language we do not understand.
Pamela as yet refuses to let us know what color her hair is, and whether it is to be straight or curly. Her first hair was brown and decidedly straight. Now her little head is covered with a fine down that at times looks yellow and at other times brown with auburn lights.
She has very keen eyes. When she awakens they just shine and she reminds me of a little bird. Her mouth is an adorable rosebud and she is just finding her tongue and loves making gurgling noises, and then looks so surprised and delighted. She is now placing the direction from which sounds come, like approaching footsteps. Most gratifying of all, she knows me.
The monsoon has come early. We have heavy rain every afternoon and evening. Tonight it simply pelted down. There was some hail in it.
There are beautiful walks out from Braemar. Now the rain has settled the dust, it is nicer than ever. Sunday home mail brought by the last ship was a tremendous success: I got 11 letters. I scarcely know where to begin answering them.
I am knitting a pull-on teddy bear suit for baby for travel. Pamela sends a kiss to each of her grandparents, and says tell you she will be coming home to you soon for home leave. I also send love and much of it.
Your daughter, Gladys
From Laurie: Isn’t it funny that teddy bear outfits are still considered cute on babies? My own grand-babies have a few sweater hoods with bear ears!
