A letter from the hills, by Edith Marlowe
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1879, a young Englishwoman living in India describes to her mother the journey from the plains to a hill station, a mountain town where British families spent the hot season.
Dearest Mamma, We are arrived, all of us, the children, Ayah, the dog, eleven trunks and myself, and I am sitting by a fire, which after the plains seems as wonderful as a fire in a fairy tale. In Lucknow when we left, the thermometer stood at one hundred and twelve in the shade of the verandah, and the very walls were hot to the hand. Here I have a shawl round my shoulders and the window is grey with mist.
The railway brought us as far as the foot of the hills, and from there we went on in a tonga, which is a sort of low two-wheeled cart drawn by a pair of ponies that are changed every five miles. I had been told it was the most frightening drive in India, and I can well believe it. The road goes up the mountain in loops like a dropped ribbon, never wider than the cart and a little more, and on the outer side there is no wall, no fence, nothing whatever between one’s wheel and the valley two thousand feet below. The driver blows a horn at every corner and takes them all at a gallop. I held Harry so tightly that he complained afterwards of bruises, and I believe I prayed aloud, though Ayah says I was only counting.
And yet, Mamma, the beauty of it. As we climbed, the dusty plain sank behind us into a brown haze, and the air turned first cool and then sweet, and the hillsides came out in rhododendron trees, actual trees, covered in flowers as red as a soldier’s coat. At one turn the clouds parted and I saw the snows, far off across the valleys, a whole line of white mountains floating in the sky with nothing beneath them. I made the driver stop. He did so, very kindly, though I think he thought me mad.
The last three miles are too steep for wheels, and we were carried up in chairs on poles by men of the hills, four to each chair. I did not like it. They are slight men and they went up the stone steps of the path at a steady trot, barely breathing hard, while I sat above them in my bonnet like a parcel. I tried to walk part of the way and was at once out of breath, which made the men laugh, not unkindly. I gave them what I could at the top, and it was not enough.
The station itself is the strangest thing of all. It is a little England stuck upon a mountain: a church with a spire, a bandstand, a library, ladies in Paris hats leaving cards on one another, and roses in every garden. Mrs Corbett has already asked me to join the amateur theatricals. I came seven hundred miles to find Cheltenham in the clouds, and I am not sure whether to laugh or to be homesick. Your loving daughter, Edith
“The writer is delighted by everything she experiences on her journey to the hills.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.