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I went to Bombay and married May Walker whose father had been Lord Provost of Aberdeen on the same day as she arrived. As my dental plate had given me such mental depression I took a week in Bombay before she arrived and an American dentist made a bridge and I wore it on the day before getting married. One end of the bridge was fixed on one of the side incisor teeth and it was not exactly correct in length and its pull on the root gave me a pain that I bore somehow for eight months until I had it removed by an English dentist in Calcutta and a plate put in, to be followed during ensuing years by a series of plates made on my leaves home. To be gay was hard under this affliction. May must have felt bored until young Mrs. Shakespear came in place of Mrs. Vickers while I was in office. She came with me touring but not being able to understand what was going on must have made many a day seem dull. She stood up to it well but all British wives in India or many of them in the Districts have no companionship or very little and a bare minimum of household duties. She used to collect butterflies with me, her only relaxation. One night she sat up with me on a raised platform on a tree branch near a village over the corpse of a cow killed by a tiger but the tiger did not return to eat more of the flesh and we climbed down during the night protecting ourselves by flashing a torch. |
