Tag Archives: 1926

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A Story About a Love Story

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How Adventures in the Attic led to an India news story, about a 1920s American romance & a jungle honeymoon

Last Sunday in India, a Mid-Day news article published details about Gladys’s Jungle Diaries after a reporter there discovered this blog.

It’s always fun to throw a post into the wind, then see it blow across the world to another country and grab someone’s interest there. A bloggers dream, actually. Oh, the wonders of the internet!

A week ago, reporter Prutha Bhosle emailed me to request an interview about my book in progress on the adventures of Gladys in India. (She’d was intrigued by my post Adventures in the Attic.) We arranged for me to email her details, then we’d audio Skype. Scheduling the latter proved to be a bit tricky: my day is her night! With a 9 1/2 hour time difference, who would be doing the interview in pajamas? It did help that she was a night owl.

I thought hard about what details would be most relevant to people in her own city of Mumbai (Bombay, when it was part of British India). It seemed to me that Gladys and Ken’s 1926 jungle honeymoon adventures in Kerala India (near Mumbai) including the story One Less Crocodile would interest Prutha and her audience most.

But it turned out that Prutha was especially intrigued with how near-100-year-old original handwritten letters unfolded a love story:

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One Less Crocodile

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This 1926 jungle story is from the diary of Gladys Gose Pearce, a Seattle woman who lived with spouse Ken in India during the British Raj era.

Photo by Robert Zunikoff

October, 1926

Kerala, SW India

Dear Diary,

Not long after we arrived, while on our honeymoon, Ken and I were told that in a nearby temple pool was a mugger crocodile the villagers hoped we would shoot.

Early one morning we were led to the pool, where we hid in the high bank above.

There was no sign of the crocodile at that quiet scene; indeed it was hard to believe one existed. A man came to bathe and pray. He waded out into water waist deep, and when he finished his ceremonies he cupped some water in his hand to drink. Then women came to wash their clothing. They pounded their wet garments on a flat stone, dipped them repeatedly in the pool then spread their clean garments on bushes to dry. Others came to bathe their children.

As the sun grew higher in the sky, our shade diminished and our own clothes grew sticky with perspiration. The ants found us – black ants, red ones, little and big, crawling toward us and biting us if we failed to detect their advance.

At last our vigil was rewarded. A long snout and two bulging eyes rose slowly to the surface. Ken motioned me to shoot. I shook my head. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The waters of the pool were threshed to a froth, and then as they subsided we saw they were stained red with the blood of the mugger.

To read more fun stories, click HERE or the Jungle Diaries tab!

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ALSO, feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts these posts provoke, and I’ll try to respond. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Let me know what country you are from, and if you also have a blog.

Laurie

[Excerpt from Tigers, White Gloves and Cradles, coming soon. Copyright 2020, Laurie Winslow Sargent]

This post is from a collection of diary entrees and letters written in the 1920s by Gladys Gose Pearce, an American expat. Her husband J. Kenneth Pearce (Ken), a logging engineer from Seattle WA, worked in British Raj India for ten years. After a jungle honeymoon touring elephant lumber camps, the couple lived in Ooty, Madras, and the Andaman Islands.