The Girl From the Tea Garden

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘All your troubles are my fault. I’m sorry,’ Flowers said.

  Adela swung round. The girl was studying her with sorrowful brown eyes.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Adela said.

  ‘I should just have drunk that ghastly stuff and got it over with.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t have. It’s not a tradition – just something Nina made up. We usually just make apple-pie beds and lock the new girls in the laundry room and pretend it’s haunted.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter – any tradition will do,’ Flowers said, shaking her head. ‘I just want to fit in here.’

  ‘There isn’t a part for you,’ Nina said callously. ‘It’s all about Queen Elizabeth the first and Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m Queen Bess and Margie’s going to be Queen Mary. We’ve already decided.’

  Adela looked up at them, stunned. They were standing over her desk, where she was struggling with equations, her jotter a patchwork of holes where she’d rubbed out her miscalculations. Everyone else had finished their prep and gone to the common room. Margie glanced away; even she looked sheepish.

  ‘That’s not fair!’ Adela protested. ‘You can’t just choose the best parts – it has to go to a vote.’

  ‘We’ve voted. After the hockey match. You weren’t there.’

  ‘I didn’t know—’

  ‘Well, now you do.’

  Adela was suddenly filled with rage at the injustice. She leapt up and grabbed Nina as she tried to walk away.

  ‘Why are you being so mean?’ she cried.

  Nina went rigid, as if her touch was contagious. ‘Get off me, or I’ll scream for help.’

  Adela let go. ‘Just tell me! Why can’t we all be friends?’

  Nina’s face puckered into a look of disgust. ‘You’re not like us; you never will be. You pretend to be British but you’re not.’

  ‘Of course I’m British. Just because I was born in India doesn’t make me Indian.’

  Nina gave a malicious little smile. ‘You don’t know, do you, Tea Leaf? I can’t believe no one’s told you.’

  ‘Told me what?’ Adela’s stomach knotted. The glint in Nina’s pale blue eyes was frightening.

  ‘You’re two annas short of a rupee – ask your mother.’ She leant forward and hissed, ‘And your father is a blackguard who jilted my mother at the altar, so I’ll never ever be friends with you!’

  With a toss of blonde ponytail, Nina turned her back on Adela. ‘Come on, Margie, we’ve got a rehearsal.’

  Adela, shaking with shock, watched them march from the room.

  That night Adela lay awake, tormented by Nina’s hurtful words. What did she mean by them? Two annas short of a rupee was an insult thrown at Eurasians – or Anglo-Indians, as mixed-race families, such as Flowers’, now called themselves – but she, Adela, had no Indian blood. The Robsons were British through and through, and her mother was the daughter of Jock Belhaven, English soldier turned tea planter. What incensed her even more, though, was the slur on her father’s character; he would never jilt anyone at the altar and he had only ever loved her mother. Auntie Tilly in Assam said it was well known among the tea planters how Wesley Robson adored his Clarissa and had even given up his career at the prestigious Oxford Tea Estates to run the remote tea garden in the Khassia Hills just to please the beautiful Clarrie Belhaven.

  The next day, tired out and short-tempered from lack of sleep, Adela confronted Margie in the washroom.

  ‘You don’t believe all this nonsense about my parents, do you? You’ve met them, Margie. You’ve always said how much you like them.’

  Her former friend looked uneasy. ‘I shouldn’t be speaking to you.’

  ‘Margie! Just tell me you don’t believe Nina.’

  Margie gave her a cool look. ‘I do believe Nina.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause I’ve heard Mrs Davidge say as much. She tells Nina everything.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Adela blocked her way. ‘Tell me. I have a right to know.’

  ‘Very well,’ Margie said. ‘Don’t say you didn’t ask for it. Mrs Davidge said she was engaged to your father, but he left her in the lurch and went off with a box-wallah’s half-caste daughter who’d been married before.’

  ‘Box-wallah’s half-caste . . . ?’ Adela felt winded.

  ‘Mrs Davidge said it turned out to be a lucky let-off ’cause she ended up with an officer in a prestigious Gurkha regiment and not stuck out in the sticks with a penniless tea planter.’

  Margie pushed past and left Adela gaping after her.

  Adela hardly ever cried, but that day she ran off to the spinney and howled behind the thick trunk of a pine tree. Crouching down, she eventually forced herself to be calm. She refused to believe Margie’s poisonous words. Surely a grown woman like Mrs Davidge wouldn’t say such malicious things, let alone admit them to her daughter’s friend. She had glimpsed Nina’s mother at speech day: a thin woman dressed in a fashionably belted frock and a large straw hat with matching ribbon over a neat blonde perm. She had hung on to the arm of a much older man wearing a military-style topee and an array of medals, presumably Nina’s father. Henrietta she was called; Adela had heard her being introduced. She had looked so sophisticated that Adela had felt a guilty stab of relief that her own mother had not felt well enough to travel the bumpy two hours by car from Belgooree. She would have worn one of her ancient tea dresses and an old-fashioned hat, the kind that no one had worn since before the Great War.

  But Auntie Tilly had travelled all the way from the Oxford Tea Estates with gruff Uncle James, and her adored father had come from Belgooree looking handsome in a white linen suit and brown fedora hat. Adela had felt so proud marching up on stage to receive a small silver cup for singing.

  Had her father and Nina’s mother spoken to each other that day? Auntie Tilly had demanded to be shown around her schoolhouse, so Adela hadn’t been with her father all of the time. It made her feel strange inside to think her father might have had feelings for another woman. She knew that her mother had been married before; she had run a tea room in Newcastle and named it Herbert’s after her first husband. Adela’s parents had made no secret of that. But these other hurtful accusations were a different matter.

  Suddenly she had an overwhelming urge to run away, to escape the cattiness of Nina and her followers and the strictures of boarding school. She longed for home, for her mother’s fussing attention and her father’s companionship.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  Adela looked up to see Flowers peering anxiously at her. Adela rubbed her eyes.

  ‘I hate it here,’ she admitted. ‘The only thing I was looking forward to was being in the inter-house play competition, and now I’m not even in that. Nina has said horrible things about my parents, and now Margie and all the other girls hate me.’

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ said Flowers, squatting down beside her. ‘I think you’re the nicest girl in the class – in the whole house. I’ll never forget the way you stuck up for me.’

  Adela’s eyes watered again. ‘Thank you.’ She slipped an arm around the girl’s bony shoulders.

  Flowers said, ‘I thought St Ninian’s would be like the Chalet School in those novels Daddy used to bring me back from the library – all girls together and having adventures. But it’s nothing like that, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know – I’ve never read them – but it doesn’t sound like St Ninian’s. It was all right when Margie was my best friend, I suppose, but I’ve always preferred playing with boys. My cousin Jamie was the best fun – till he got sent back home to school.’

  ‘To England?’

  ‘Yes. Durham, in the north of England. Not that I’ve ever been there.’

  Flowers looked at her with dark, solemn eyes. ‘I’ll be your best friend if you like. I’m not pretty like Margie and I’m not a boy—’

  Adela snorted with sudden laughter. ‘No, I can see you’re not a boy.’

  Flowers giggled and sucked her hair. Adela con
sidered the idea. Flowers was not as timid as she looked; she had fought back when the girls had tried to force her to drink Nina’s potion. And she had come out here to find her even though she must know that speaking to her, Adela, would make her more unpopular with Nina and the others. Flowers had a quiet strength and an innate kindness. Adela was growing fond of the railway girl.

  ‘Can you sing and dance?’ Adela asked.

  Flowers smiled. ‘Mummy says I’m her little nightingale, and I went to ballet classes in Sreemangal.’

  ‘Good.’ Adela stood up. ‘We’re going to enter our own act in the inter-house competitions. There’s nothing to say we can’t.’

  Flowers gaped at her. ‘But what will the others say?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Adela said with a grin, pulling the skinny girl to her feet. ‘All that matters is that we get on that stage and show them they haven’t beaten us.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Hello, sir.’ Sam Jackman gripped Dr Black in a firm handshake. Sam’s handsome, expressive face grinned with pleasure under a battered green porkpie hat that sat at a jaunty angle far back on his head.

  ‘So kind of you, dear boy, to collect me from the station,’ said Norman Black, delighted to see the son of his old friend Jackman, the steamship captain. The lad had grown into a tall, athletic young man, yet his boyish looks made him look younger than his mid-twenties, as did the mischievous hazel eyes, creased in a smile.

  ‘Delighted to do so,’ Sam said, seizing the missionary’s battered case from the wiry porter who carried it on his head, then tipping the man in thanks. ‘And I’m looking forward to showing off my Kodak cine camera. I think it’s a great idea to film the work of the school.’

  ‘Well, the footage you sent me of river life was so very good,’ enthused Norman, ‘that I thought it would be an excellent way to help my sister fundraise for St Ninian’s. She needs donations to cover the bursaries of the disadvantaged girls she takes in.’

  Sam smiled. ‘A worthy cause,’ he said, thinking how the kind doctor had helped him with his own school fees.

  Sam strode ahead, leading his old mentor to a dusty motor car – an ancient open-topped tourer that he’d won in a drunken card game from a tea planter in Gawhatty, but there was no need to tell that to the good doctor.

  Sam’s pet monkey jumped up and down in the driver’s seat, hooting the horn.

  ‘Nelson still going strong, I see?’ Norman’s deep-set eyes and craggy face looked amused.

  ‘This is Nelson the Third,’ Sam introduced the monkey. ‘Nelson One died of old age, and Nelson Two ran off with a young female half his age.’

  The monkey screeched in excitement, trying to grab the missionary’s dark homburg hat from his head. Sam told him off in colourful Hindustani, and the monkey leapt on to his master’s shoulder and clutched him by the ears.

  With a loud bang from the exhaust, they set off up the winding road to St Ninian’s, chatting loudly over the rattle and grinding gears of the labouring car. Sam hadn’t seen Dr Black for over seven years – the missionary had been back in Scotland for five of those and in Southern India the past two – but he would always be grateful for the man’s kindness. Norman Black had taken an interest in his welfare since the time his mother had deserted him at the age of seven, separating from his father and disappearing back to Britain without him.

  It’s me and the heat of Assam she can’t stand, his father had told him, not you, lad. But it had tipped his world upside down like an earthquake.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that your father died,’ Norman shouted over the straining engine. ‘Was it very sudden?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam admitted, feeling a familiar pang of loss. ‘It was just a normal start to the day. We’d had breakfast on the boat and were watching the sunrise. Father said he was feeling dizzy and went off to sit in the wheelhouse for a minute. Nelson the Third found him. His heart just gave out.’

  Norman patted his shoulder in sympathy. ‘Then there was nothing you could have done for him, so stop feeling guilty.’

  Sam gave him a grateful look. The missionary’s knack of reading his mind was uncanny. Two and half years on, Sam was still blaming himself for not checking on his father sooner. He had been too wrapped up in gazing at the dazzling golden sunrise.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sam.

  Norman changed the subject, describing his recent travels and making Sam laugh, like old times.

  Norman Black, who had often crossed the Brahmaputra River on the Jackmans’ ferry Cullercoats on trips to remote tea planters’ families to administer medicine and a dose of salvation, had always been a favourite of Sam’s. The man had never treated him like a nuisance in the way other grown-ups had. Deeply hurt at his mother’s rejection of him, Sam had often been difficult and over-boisterous, but Black had been patient with him and made Sam feel special.

  It was thanks to the doctor’s generosity that Sam, aged ten, had been given a good education. Black paid for him to go to The Lawrence School, near Simla, in the Western Himalayas – a three-day journey from home – where Sam had been happy. He had baulked at the military discipline, but developed a passion for tennis and cricket and revelled in his studies and the chance to learn about agriculture. He had helped out at a local dairy and went to lectures in Simla on crop rotation and forestry. He would dearly have loved to have sat the civil service exams and joined the government department of agriculture, but at sixteen, having gained his School Certificate, his father had called him back to help on the ferry.

  ‘I miss you, lad,’ Jackman had said. ‘You can do farming when I’m dead and gone.’

  Yet when his father had died over two years ago, Sam had continued as before, steering the ship just as his father had done. He would probably be negotiating the sandbars and swirling currents of the mighty Brahmaputra till he was as old and grey as Norman Black.

  They pulled up in front of the iron gates of St Ninian’s, and Nelson jumped on the horn. The frantic hooting brought the gatekeeper rushing to open up. On the far side a row of uniformed girls were lined up, ready to greet their distinguished visitor.

  Norman got out and spoke to each of them in turn – there were half a dozen youngsters – and they bobbed in a little curtsy as he shook their hands.

  ‘Just like royalty,’ Sam teased.

  ‘You drive on while I walk up with the pupils to the school hall,’ said Black.

  ‘They can jump in the back,’ Sam offered. ‘Come on, girls, hop on.’

  After a moment’s hesitation the tallest girl, a slim blonde with a saucy blue-eyed look, slipped into the seat behind Sam, and the others scrambled in after her. The two who couldn’t squeeze on the back seat perched on top of the boot at the back.

  Sam grinned. ‘Hold on tight,’ he said. They arrived at the main entrance in a cacophony of hooting and giggles that brought Gertrude Black hurrying out to greet them with scolding words that belied her obvious delight in seeing her older brother.

  ‘Goodness, what a noise! Mr Jackman, so kind of you to bring Dr Black. Just leave the case – one of the staff will bring it in. Girls, get back to your houses at once and prepare for inspection. Norman, dear, it’s so very good to see you.’

  Sam reached into the boot for his camera and bag full of film canisters.

  Turning to go, the blonde girl gasped. ‘Is that for making films?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sam said, smiling. ‘I’m going to record life at the school.’

  ‘And the drama competition?’

  He winked. ‘I’ll make film stars of you all.’

  She returned the smile, and the others squealed in excitement, which set Nelson screeching. Miss Black clapped her hands for order.

  ‘To your houses, girls! That includes you, Nina Davidge.’ She gave the tall blonde girl a warning glare.

  The girl stood her ground. ‘Shall I show Mr Jackman around the school, miss?’

  ‘No, thank you, Nina. I shall be doing that after lunch.’

  Nelson took that moment
to swing down from the car and scamper towards the girls. Nina shrieked as the monkey grabbed her school tunic. Sam lunged forward and pulled Nelson away. Nina and the other pupils fled with screams and giggles.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Gertrude. ‘I don’t know what’s got into them today. My girls are not usually so unruly.’

  ‘No, I apologise for Nelson’s ungentlemanly behaviour,’ Sam said, putting Nelson on his lead and keeping a tight rein.

  ‘Perhaps, dear sister.’ Norman said with a laugh. ‘I shouldn’t have brought such a handsome young man into their midst. But maybe they will all perform their plays twice as well for the camera.’

  ‘And he’s got gorgeous hazel-brown eyes,’ Nina told her enthralled classmates, ‘and a wicked smile. He’s some sort of film director. Absolutely divine – apart from his horrid little monkey that smells of the bazaar.’

  Adela listened from across the room; even though most of the girls were speaking to her again (including Margie when Nina was out of earshot), she was no longer part of the gang. She and Flowers kept each other company and had been secretly practising their routines in Miss Bensham’s linen room. The house mother must have felt sorry for them because she was allowing them to use her wind-up gramophone and had added their mystery act on to the programme. They were going to perform a slapstick imitation of Charlie Chaplin that turned into them throwing off their hats and blazers and dancing the Charleston, a more old-fashioned dance than they had wanted, but Miss Bensham’s record collection was limited.

  Nina was still going on about the good-looking film-maker who had brought Dr Black.

  ‘I’ve never heard of a film director with a monkey,’ Adela chimed in. ‘Can’t be anyone famous.’

  ‘Nobody asked you, Tea Leaf,’ Nina snapped. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t concern you, since you’re not in our play.’ She turned to the others. ‘And I could tell he liked me – he gave me a wink!’

  ‘And directors don’t do their own filming,’ Adela persisted. ‘If he didn’t bring a cameraman with him, then he’s not a proper director, is he?’