'A Grandfather's Tale: Memoirs being mainly concerned with service in the Indian Army and the Indian Political Service in India and the Persian Gulf from 1932-1947' [‎34v] (68/118)

Dr. Ronald Holland accompanied me on this trip and held impromptu
surgeries wherever we stopped, and created an immense amount of good
will by his ministrations. Normally anyone requiring help would have
had to go several days' march to get it.
Some months after this I toured the Kakari Toba which is a high
plateau, about 8,000 ft. above sea level, on the Northern boundary of the
Quetta-Pishin District. This area had not been visited by a Political
officer for several years and I was able to persuade Sir Henry Holland,
Ronnie's father, to come with me. He was small and wiry, with a high
squeaky voice, and famous throughout the North of India, particularly in
Baluchistan, Kashmir and the North V/est Frontier as a Missionary Doctor
and Surgeon, and during his career probably performed more cataract
operations than any other doctor in the world. At that period both he
and Ronnie were at the Mission Hospital in Quetta and at the time of our
tour he was about sixty-five years old. He had not been on a horse for
several years, but we rode thirty miles a day, for over a week, and he
would then treat all manner of ailments and operate when necessary. To
my horror he called on me to act as anaesthetist, giving me a bottle of
chloroform in one hand and a pad of cotton wool in the other. Happily
none of our patients died, otherwise we might well have had our throats
cut. He was, however, immensely popular amongst the tribesmen and spoke
Pushtu perfectly, having been in the Quetta District for well over forty
years. He was also renowned for all the work he had done for Pathans and
others during the aftermath of the Quetta Earthquake in 1935* for which
he eventually received his knighthood.
In May 19^-3 I was kept very busy organizing the Tunis Victory
celebrations. There was a large parade of troops and all the other
Services and then, in the evening, a grand "Taraasha" on the Race Course
for which I was mainly responsible. This included fireworks, Tribal
Dances and Pipe Bands, and there were huge crowds of anything up to thirty
thousand people and they seemed to enjoy themselves and behaved remarkably
well.
About this time I wrote to my mother "I was amused to read in one of
the more serious English weekly papers of the '’scandalous" fact that certain
European internees in India were made to live in tin huts. Well, people of
our sort have been living in tin huts here ever since the Earthquake of
May 1935? and no one seems to be very perturbed about itl And our huts
are very much nicer than other places one has had to live in during the past
few years. It is a pity some of our more woolly M.Ps are not more careful
of their "facts ".' 5 One used to get a little peeved at the assumption by
certain politicians in England that we all lived in the lap of luxury while
the "lesser breeds" including internees, lived in abject squalor".
On the 22nd May 19^3 we had our first cricket match of the Season and
I kept wicket for Quetta Club v. the Staff College. The previous year I
had done so for the opposite side. I continued to play from time to time
but at the end of June, when playing for an Indian Army XI against a British
Army XI, only three balls before the end of the innings, I stopped a ball