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1 Jan 58 John Port Louis, Mauritius Mother ______________________________________________________________________________________________
Port Louis
January 1st /58
The Compliments of the season to you all.
I do not know any more appropriate way of commencing a letter to you, My dear Mother, than by wishing our whole family collectively a pleasant Christmas and a happy new year.
Unfortunately altho’ I express my sentiments on new year’s day, you will not receive this my letter until the welcome (or unwelcome) stranger has already run a part of his appointed course. For my own part, I reverence those fixed days!! – for then it is that my Father’s favourite toast ‘Absent friends’ rises in all its full force before me and right well do I feel, that at that very time, altho’ bodily we are thousands of miles apart, still for that moment at least, our minds are in communion, just as much as if we had chosen our pet star like our friends in the old legend did just before their separation (if we had done that and I had been left to choose my favourite, it would have been rather a failure as my old friend in the night watchings in the trenches was the Plough, or Ursa Major, and that is not visible here). Still why should fixed days !! call forth sad recollections. Is it because many who have spent them in pleasure with us have been taken away from amongst us. I think that the hope of meeting again ought to make us look forward with pleasure for after all, hope is the greatest of all joys. How rarely are our anticipations realised.
Jany 5th
What nonsense I find I scribbled the other day. I was half in mind to tear it up, but no. As I have written it, it may go and be laughed at.
We spent a very merry altho’ a very hot Christmas here, thermometer about 90 and during the night down to about 82º and here we are in the commencement of a new year so that I write myself (I hope) one year nearer seeing you all again than I did before. I do not know when you will get this letter as the Mail Company has smashed and no vessel is gone up to bring down the 10th Decr mail, so that we shall not get any more news till the 10th Feby thus losing this month’s mail altogether. However I believe the Government here are going to make some arrangements for the future. We used to have one mail a month, which brought down from Aden the two fortnightly mails from England, which said mails were left at Aden by the steamer on its way from Suez to Calcutta. What we want to do is to get the Australian steamers to run to Suez every fortnight instead of every month and for them to call here instead of at Point de Galle in Ceylon and then establish a branch line from here to the Cape of Good Hope for the mails etc. Any company managing that would get from this Government and from the Bourbon Government together a subsidy of about £20,000 a year and by joining all three places into one route, we might, as I said, have a mail every fortnight instead of every month which is a long time to wait for news from home. The last time I wrote to you I had only just time to send off a few hasty lines by a steamer that was going up to Kurrachee * so I do not know when you will get it, but I hope before this, otherwise you would not hear from me for two months and you might think it was carelessness on my part whereas, as I wrote to you just now, no steamers went to Aden with mails this month.
Our right wing, so a letter to the Governor said, is ordered back and another regiment is coming to replace the 33rd, but when? I suppose we shall stop here for about five years and then go to Hong Kong unless there is a disturbance at the Cape, in which case we should be sent there and after a few years here, I would sooner go to the Cape than to Hong Kong.
I bought a horse a few days since for which I paid £60. It sounds a very long price but nothing with four strong legs is to be picked up under that price. Two days after I had bought it, out came an order from home that I was to provide myself with a horse & would be allowed forage. But here they give me a forage allowance of £3 a month, while the feeding costs me £4. However as I bought him before any news of this forage allowance came out, I consider myself £3 a month better off, instead of £1 worse.
You must let me know what money of mine you have from dividends, as I should like it still to be invested in Bank shares, for as I often have said, I will not marry until I have a private income. I must save until I can get sufficient to keep a lady on, altho’ I might fairly expect that she should bring enough to keep herself on. How would you like to hear that I had taken to myself a spouse.
There are lots of young ladies waiting here for somebody to ask them, but now that sugar is down, there are not such large fortunes to be picked up now as existed in the imagination of some sanguine people here. When sugar was fifty per cent dearer than it is now and it has only fallen within the past two months from its high estate.
Jany 8th
I am so bothered during the first part of the month with Mess accounts, for I am Mess president and mess caterer, which is a most troublesome and thankless office that I scarcely have time to sit down and write letters and in addition to the Mess, my Company accounts have all to be made up and inspected by a person who does not understand them and makes difficulties and finds fault.
My horse continues to give me great satisfaction and I am more and more pleased with him every day. When I wrote to you last, it was from Mr Brennan’s house in a quarter of the island called Savanne. * One of his wards was married the day that I wrote and in the evening Mr Brennan gave a ball to her friends. She was a woman of color and so were her friends. However the chance of a dance was not to be lost so I was to be seen the whole evening whirling round the room with darkies. My dress coat suffered rather as they, to make themselves appear as white as possible, powder their faces and all this came off on the lapel of my best dress coat. The worst of it all was that they were not satisfied with powdering once, but they kept on retiring and putting on more about every hour. I could not help laughing when I thought how ridiculous I must have looked and how amused you all would have been at home if you had seen me performing. However it pleased Brennon who was ‘mine host’ and did not do any harm.
I met some very pleasant agreeable men down there who are glad to know the military, making our acquaintances as it were on trust, feeling sure that they will meet with gentlemen. There was one gentleman at whose house I spent several days who could not speak a word of English and I held the most entertaining conversations with him, talking for hours together. So you see I am improving in my French. I am thinking of taking French lessons, but am afraid that my time is so little my own that I could not make appointments for any particular times. However, after the mail leaves and when I have got over some lectures I am going to give next week – on the Improvements in Small Arms since the time when Cain first shewed the necessity that exists for killing ones fellow creatures.
Poor Peter seems to be in the depths of despair to judge from a letter I received from him by the last mail. He complains bitterly about not receiving letters from home. I think he has tried his best to get something to do. At least he left here with the intention of leaving no stone unturned in his search for employment, but circumstances have worked against him. I hope he will call here on his way to England as I should like to see him and cheer him up. Perhaps too I might, as I said before, find something for him to do instead of letting him go home without accomplishing what he wanted.
It is so hot! My writing costume, in which I have been scribbling away since five o’clock this morning (and it is now twelve) with the exception of breakfast and orderly room, where I was buttoned up in the orthodox British uniform suitable for all climates, is a flannel shirt, flannel trousers and slippers. It is too hot to wear anything else. It is intensely hot. The heat pours down on our heads as if it were molten lead, and not a breath of air. Our quarters are lofty, spacious rooms, but we have no appliances for cooling them, such as punkahs and those sort of things which they have in India. The worst is, they say that the heat is nothing as yet but we shall feel it by and bye.
Your little namesake is very well except for boils in the face which every body suffers from at this season of the year, though not always in the face.
I really am so hot. I can write no more, but send my best love to my Father and all at home & remain ever
Your affectionate Son
J Wimburn Laurie
4th K.O. Regt
Jany 9th /58
* Kurrachee - Karachi, Pakistan
* Savanne – a scenic and unspoilt district at the south of the island