Officers were also required to provide themselves with an elaborate outfit. Thus, the list recommended in the _East India Voyage_ gives, among other necessary items, "72 calico shirts; 60 pairs of stockings; 18 pairs of drawers; 24 pairs of gloves; and 20 pairs of trousers"; together with uniform, saddlery, and camp equipment; and such odds and ends as "60 lbs. of wax candles and several bottles of ink." Nothing, however, about red-tape.
A helpful hint furnished by Miss Roberts was that "A lady on ship-board, spruced up for the Park or the Opera, would only be an object of ridicule to her experienced companions. Frippery which would be discarded in England is often useful in India. Members of my sex," she adds, "who have to study economy, can always secure bargains by acquiring at small cost items of fashion which, while outmoded in London, will be new enough by the time they reach Calcutta."
A lady with such sound views on managing the domestic budget as Miss Emma Roberts should not have remained long in single blessedness.
Those were not the days of ocean greyhounds, covering the distance between England and India in a couple of weeks. Nor was there then any Suez Canal route to shorten the long miles that had to be traversed. Thus, when Lola and her spouse embarked from England in an East Indiaman, the voyage took nearly five months to accomplish, with calls at Madeira, St. Helena, and the Cape, before the welcome cry, "Land Ahead!" was heard and anchor was dropped at Calcutta.
Lola's first acquaintance with India's coral strand had been made as a child of five. Now she was returning as a married woman. Yet she was scarcely eighteen. She did not stop in Calcutta long, for her husband's regiment was in the Punjaub, and a peremptory message from the brigadier required him to rejoin as soon as possible. It was at Kurnaul (as it was then spelled) that Lola began her experience of garrison life. Among the other officers she met there was a young subaltern of the Bengal Artillery, who, in the years to come, was to make a name for himself as "Lawrence of Lucknow."
The year 1838 was, for both the Company's troops and the Queen's Army, an eventful one where India was concerned. During the spring Lord Auckland, the newly-appointed Governor-General, hatched the foolish and ill-conceived policy which led to the first Afghan war. His idea (so far as he had one) was, with the help of Brown Bess and British bayonets, to replace Dost Muhammed, who had sat on the throne there for twenty years without giving any real trouble, by an incompetent upstart of his own nomination, Shah Shuja.