Danny and the Round the Bend Ski Club. (Part 1)
In recent Posts (#3101, p. 155, & #3107, p. 156), I've told of the establishment of the RAF Ski School in Kashmir at the war's end. Group had passed on my application, and now my number came up for the (second, I think) Course in mid December.
Authority for this detachment came with a very valuable "perk": first-class priority for air movement. With all the travelling going on, I would normally have had very little chance of getting on Transport Command's regular internal flights, and the trip up India from south to north might take me a week or more on rail. Now I would be at the front of every queue for the next plane. The RAF's generosity had limits. The priority was good only for the journey to Kashmir. You're on your own on the way back , chum !
I flew a VV up to Santa Cruz (Bombay) with a pilot to take it back. Air Movements honoured my priority, and I was on the next Dakota to Delhi. I spent the night there, and next morning (as they had nothing going where I wanted ), they put me on Indian National Airways (civil) up to the Frontier. This sounds very grand, but it was only a little Beechcraft "Expeditor", a small light twin with about seven seats (the Navy used them at Sulur). Never mind, it got up there all right and I landed in Rawalpindi, the very town where my father had been born, seventy years before, to an Army familily in the great days of Empire.
There the magic carpet signed off. Rawalpindi (then a RAF parachute school) flew into Srinagar weekly during the summer. But the snows had closed Srinagar until Spring. No helicopters in those days. The only way into Kashmir was by road. And the only vehicle for the trip was the local country bus. With considerable misgiving, a group of us squeezed ourselves and our kit into this ramshackle and malodorous contraption, and headed north into the mountains.
The road grew terrifying. Cut into the hillside, it was barely wide enough for one vehicle, with unguarded drops of hundreds of feet at the edge. Like many of the hill roads, it was "gated". This works like a single-track railway, except that it was a timed system. Northbound traffic is allowed through for two hours, say, then the last vehicle through carries a token and the Northbound gate is closed. When the token gets through to the other end, the Southbound gate is opened for two hours, and so on.
That journey (and the return) lived long in my nightmares. Every mile or so the gruesome remains of a truck or bus which had gone "over the khud" could be seen far down on the riverbed boulders below. The driver chose the most dangerous bends to let go the wheel to relight his "bidi". We died a hundred deaths. The hillmen on the bus were not in the least perturbed. We envied them their Asiatic fatalism.
It was not our destiny to perish that day. At last we reached Srinagar. A night in an Army Mess there, and we were ready for the final leg. Another retrograde step, now we were on ponies. No feat of horsemanship is implied. The ponies were led, it was about as exciting as a donkey ride on the sands. It can't have been far up to Gulmarg, * for I can only recall being in the saddle for two or three hours.
* Wiki tells me that it is 35 km. We must have been trucked for most of the distance, but I can't remember now.
It was December and very cold. We were two or three to a room, the only occupants of the wooden hotel buildings. During the day we were either on skis or in the Mess, keeping fairly warm. In the evenings each room got an allowance of a maund of firewood (82 pounds, the standard load for a porter). Our bearer would light the fire after tea, we'd huddle round the glow, swapping ski stories until the wood ran out. Then we had to bury ourselves under all the blankets and coats we could find, and shiver.
Goodnight all,
Danny42C
(It ain't half cold, Mum!).
Last edited by Danny42C; 29th Oct 2012 at 00:58.
Reason: Amplify Title.