Mrs Lackersteen
Elizabeth's aunt: about thirty-five, handsome in a contourless way, with a sighing discontented voice and a genius for saying the decisive thing by hint. She runs the marriage market of Kyauktada single-handed.
Her niece married and off the household books within the year. Her own summary of the case, delivered on Elizabeth's first evening: 'I'm sure if I were a young girl I'd marry anybody, literally anybody.'
The book
At a glance
- Elizabeth's aunt; wife of Tom Lackersteen
- About thirty-five
- The Civil List, the Tatler, and letters from home about girls who failed to marry
- A rickshaw imported from Rangoon
- Hints, sighs, and long stories about other people
- From chapter 2 to the last page
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMrs Lackersteen is a woman of about thirty-five, handsome in a contourless, elongated way, like a fashion plate, with a sighing discontented voice, a hand Orwell compares to a newt's, a face he compares to a meditative snake's, and what he later calls delicate, saurian hands. She has imported a rickshaw from Rangoon because she is unequal to the quarter-mile walk between her house and the club; it is the only wheeled vehicle in Kyauktada apart from the bullock carts and Mr Macgregor's car. In the jungle she endures dripping tents, mosquitoes and tinned food rather than leave her husband alone, and makes up for it by complaining over trifles when they are back in headquarters.
Her opinions arrive in the form of nostalgia. Servants are getting shocking; there is no authority over the natives any more, with all these dreadful Reforms and the insolence they learn from the newspapers; a butler once cost twelve rupees a month and loved them like a dog. She has a burra sahib at Mandalay whose prophecy she likes to repeat: one day the British will simply leave, and when the natives come begging them to stay they will be told they have had their chance — and what a lesson that will teach them.
She is also frightened, and U Po Kyin knows exactly where. The words sedition, Nationalism, rebellion and Home Rule convey one picture to her and one only, and it is a picture of herself being raped by a procession of coolies. It keeps her awake at night sometimes. One anonymous letter is enough to turn her against Dr Veraswami for good.
The plot she actually drives is her niece's. She writes the letter that brings Elizabeth out, having calculated that a girl with any looks will marry within a year; she decides Flory will do until she reads the Civil List and finds the words 'The Honourable' in front of Verrall's name; she then dislikes Flory and listens with pleasure to Ellis's tales about him. Almost nothing of this is ever said outright. A great deal of her conversation is carried on by hint, though she generally contrives to make her meaning reasonably clear.
How the book draws them
- How the book draws herAbout thirty-five, and handsome in a contourless, elongated way, like a fashion plate: tall, long and flat rather than curved, with a delicate triangular face and a slender hand. The skin is sun-scorched, and Verrall, who has seen only her face, writes her off as one of the usual scraggy old boiling-fowls of an Indian station. At the club dance she wears red and looks, the book says, handsome and serpentine.
- The voiceSighing and discontented at the club, high-pitched and plaintive when she calls from indoors, and saccharine at twenty yards when there is a young man on the maidan.
- The Civil ListThe Debrett of Burma, which tells you the exact income of every official, and a source of inexhaustible interest to her. She is adding up a Conservator of Forests' pay and allowances when it occurs to her to look up the new police officer, and finds two words that startle her almost out of her wits.
- The rickshawImported from Rangoon for a quarter-mile walk. When the rickshaw-man pretends to be ill again she suggests to her husband that a good thrashing would bring him to his senses.
- The poor, poor dear girlHer chosen instrument. A girl who came out, refused a policeman, a forest officer and men in timber firms because she wanted the I.C.S., and is now a lady help at home on fifteen shillings a week. Elizabeth is expected to draw the moral without being told it.
- Black beetlesThe second version, deployed when Verrall has failed to propose for three weeks: the same poor dear girl, now a kitchen maid under a bullying cook, in a kitchen where the beetles are simply beyond belief. She pauses to let them sink in and returns to them more than once that evening.
- The accentOn the evening she expects a lieutenant the Honourable at the club, her accent grows more aristocratic with every word she utters, and she asks quite distinctly who is for a 'rubbah'. The others wonder privately what the devil is the matter with her.
- The short cutHaving failed for a week to get within speaking distance of Verrall, she plunges into the grass of the maidan on the pretext of a short cut and takes a bee-line for him. Either woman would have died on the rack rather than admit she was doing anything else. Both have to go straight home and change their stockings.
- Managing her husbandShe governs him by the only possible method, never letting him out of her sight for more than an hour or two — a policy adopted after she came back from a fortnight away a day early and found him drunk between two naked Burmese girls. She sends him back to camp alone anyway, once Verrall arrives.
- In the riotLooping about in a long chair like a hysterical snake and out-screaming the crowd, until Ellis suggests that somebody choke the bloody hag. She has not forgotten it afterwards, and gets her knife into him properly.