“May I correct a small linguistic error in the extremely interesting article, appearing in our May issue, contributed by Sarvashri Ghorpade, Verghese and Mallik ?At the top of page 3 occur words which show the authors to have relied on the basic rule of Latin that “nouns ending in –a are feminine.” Actually, there are exceptions to this rule” eg: ‘nauta’ (or ‘navita’) meaning a sailor, ‘poeta’ meaning a (male or female) poet, and ‘agricola’ meaning a farmer (always in Roman days, a male). ‘Monticola’ is evidently analogous with ‘agricola’ and simply means ‘a chap who lives on a mountain’, NOT a ‘mountain maid’. There is no form ‘agricolus’ or ‘monticolus’.Whether the authors of the Latin language devised these exceptions for the fun of tripping up future generations of schoolboys (as they have often done) I cannot say; but I am sure they would have felt proud to have snared such birds as Ghorpade sandurensis and his two companions.
Thomas Gay”
It sounds just like him.
I also came across the memoirs [2] of John Percival Waterfield (who in 1966 became the Head of Chancery at the High Commission in Delhi) which speak of him in less than flattering terms:
I also came across the memoirs [2] of John Percival Waterfield (who in 1966 became the Head of Chancery at the High Commission in Delhi) which speak of him in less than flattering terms:
Tom, who is still alive as I write, in India, aged 92, was the son of Edward Hope Waterfield, referred to above, known as Odo, and my grandfather William’s second surviving son.
We never saw Tom, who lived somewhere near Bombay, when we were in India from 1966-69. He had deserted his English wife, Barbara, and children, in Cambridge in order to settle near Bombay, living in Indian style, after his retirement from the Indian Civil Service on Partition or soon after. I just remember once seeing him going for a swim in the sea at Dawlish, when I was a boy, and I was staying also at the Clint, his mother’s house. In India I did not feel I had anything sufficiently in common with him to seek him out, and it would not have been easy as it was a long way and we were very fully occupied at the High Commission in Delhi, where I was Head of Chancery or ‘chief of staff’ to John Freeman. … Mrs Pandit, a great Indian lady and distinguished politician, Pandit Nehru’s sister, spoke to us in Delhi most warmly of Tom. I had know Mrs Pandit when she came to Moscow in 1948 as India’s first Ambassador and, as her people knew little or no Russian, and had no experience of entertaining in Moscow, I remember that I helped in, and in fact organized, her first big diplomatic party. Her then First Secretary, to whom I did not warm, was one T N Kaul whom I found again as the ‘Secretary’ or top official of the Department of External Affairs in Delhi in 1966. Though surprisingly affable to me then, I still did not warm to him, and his attitude to British interests was, if not hostile, certainly equivocal. Despite my unenthusiastic views of Tom Waterfield, I have been much impressed and touched by some verses he wrote about his father (Odo) after the latter’s early death which my cousin Ruth Bell, Tom’s younger sister, found and sent to me (or Mary) comparatively recently. I think they are well worth reproducing here if I can find them, which I have not yet done. We have always had close relations if on my part with good-natured laughter at her foibles with Ruth, whose husband Ian Bell was in the Foreign Service at much the same time as myself, having started in the Consular Service.
After his death, I came across several accounts of him that were not entirely pleasant but somehow they didn’t make an iota of difference to me. I knew him when he was an old man, perhaps by then, he’d mellowed considerably although I can’t be sure. What I do know is that I cared about and respected the gentleman I knew to be.
Sources:
[1] Newsletter For Birdwatchers July 1974 Volume 14 (7):10 http://www.indiabirds.com/PDFFiles/PDF/nandi.pdf
[2] http://www.tamburlane.co.uk/resources/JPW_MEMS.PDF
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