'A Grandfather's Tale: Memoirs being mainly concerned with service in the Indian Army and the Indian Political Service in India and the Persian Gulf from 1932-1947' [‎34r] (67/118)

Another far less serious case concerned one of my erstwhile instructors
at the Staff College. Under the Defence of India Rules it was an offence
to have electric light on after 11 p.m. This was in order to conserve fuel
for the Power Station as supplies were very short. Much to my amusement,
though I managed to keep a straight face, Colonel X proceeded to call his
girl friend to testify that his lights were NOT on at the time stated. He
was found NOT Guilty.
The Staff College Course had ended on the 10th January 19^3i ancl I then
got ten days leave during which we moved down the three miles to the Civil
Lines, and took over 50i Lytton Road; This was a post-earthquake corrug a ted
iron hut, but well-lined and insulated and we managed to make it very comfortably,
One of ray predecessors had been killed in the Quetta Earthquake of the 31st May
1935 * an^ tbe foundations of the old house were still visible in the garden.
All that remained of the original buildings was the stable which had survived
intact.
The District Offices and Courts had been rebuilt of concrete some years
before and formed a large two storied barrack of a building, but unfortunately
the central heating system, ordered from England, had been in a ship sunk on
the way out, and the only heating was by paraffin stoves or charcoal braziers.
My Court Room was large, and in winter just like a refrigerator, and as long
as the cold weather lasted I had to dispense justice huddled in a sheepskin
coat. Quetta was a city of about 100,000 inhabitants, of varied origins, and
I can remember trying one case in which my knowledge of Urdu, Gukhali, Pushtu
and English all came into play. I had a Court Clerk whose job it was to
record the evidence in Urdu, but I had to make my own record in English as
well as judging the truth or otherwise of what the witness was saying. It
all required immense concentration, time and patience, and at the end of a
long day in Court one had sympathy with Job.
Quetta-Pishin was a large District, stretching up to Chaman on the
Afghan Border, on the far side of the Khojak Pass, some ninety miles from
Quetta itself. In the other direction it was only about thiirty miles to the
Northern Border of Kalat State. There were roughly half a million people in
the District and I spent a great deal of time on tour, sometimes by station
wagon but as much as possible on horseback, sometimes riding as much as
forty miles a day. This enabled me to visit villages and levy posts which
had not been seen by a European for many years, if at all. In one levy post
I found the rifles so badly corroded that they would have burst if fired.
At least this showed something of the peacefulness of that particular area.
On one occasion I rode down the Border South from Chaman with a party
of levies and local tribesmen. The boundary was at the foot of the hills on
the British side and marked by cairns, the Afghan territory being a wide
plain which was almost desert. At one particular spot, at a re-entrant
into the hills, was a spring much prized by the sparse inhabitants of the
region and coveted by the Afghans, and from time to time the cairns would
mysteriously move during the night to support their claim to the water. A
night or two later the markers would be moved back by our people, and so
the game went on but I cannot recall that any bloodvwai? ever spilt. In
actual fact both parties were of the same tribe, but just happened to live
on differentfsides of the Border.