Adela looked up. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, and then gulped.
‘Well?’ Wesley demanded. ‘Put us out of our misery. Are you in or not?’
A huge grin spread across her face. ‘Yes – yes – I’m in! I’m to start after half-term in March.’
‘Oh, my darling, well done!’ Clarrie cried above the noise of the baby.
Wesley jumped out of his seat and hugged her. ‘My clever girl! Let me see.’ He took the letter and read it. ‘By Jove, Clarissa, they say they’re looking forward to having her.’
‘Of course they are,’ Clarrie said, beaming, ‘and they’ll be lucky to have her. Oh, come and give me a hug!’
Adela went to her mother; it was an awkward hug with Harry in the middle. Within a couple of minutes Mohammed Din had returned with celebratory glasses of nimbu pani – Adela’s favourite lemon drink – and ginger biscuits. He smiled and congratulated her too.
‘Thank you, MD. I’ll miss you all, but I’m so excited about going.’
As the khansama handed round the drinks, Wesley gave a toast.
‘Although we don’t want you to leave us, Adela, your mother and I would rather have you a three-day train ride away in the Punjab than a three-week sea voyage away in England.’ He smiled. ‘No running away this time though,’ he warned. ‘Your mother and I won’t have you back a second time – you’ll just have to join the circus.’
‘Oh, Wesley!’ Clarrie chided. ‘Congratulations, dearest Adela.’ She smiled and raised a glass in one hand while clutching her son with the other. ‘You will always have a home here with us.’ Clarrie kissed the baby’s head. ‘Won’t she, Harry?’
Adela noticed the adoring look on her mother’s face as she spoke to the baby. Clarrie put down the drink. ‘Sorry, I’ll have to go and feed him.’
‘Little monster,’ said Wesley, but his expression was one of pride.
With a stab of envy, Adela watched her mother disappear to the bedroom, humming a tune to pacify Harry. She knew her parents would not miss her half as much now that they had Harry. It would never again be just the three of them, always four. Perhaps that was part of the reason why she was looking forward so much to a future in Simla. But what excited her the most was that she was being offered a fresh start in a school far away from her tormentors at St Ninian’s, with countless possibilities to act on a real stage. Adela could not wait.
St Mary’s College, Simla
June, 1935
Dear Cousin Jane
Thank you for the lovely homemade birthday card with fifteen cats on it! Airmail takes just over a week to get here now, so it arrived in plenty of time. You are very artistic, and cats are one of my favourite animals. I know you are always busy in the café, so it ’s kind of you to paint the picture in your spare time. I ’m sorry to hear that Aunt Olive is bad with her nerves again. Just as well you have a good manageress in Lexy. I think Lexy ’s idea of changing the name from Herbert ’s Tea Rooms to Herbert ’s Café is a good one – much more modern. I ’m sorry to hear that her friend Jared Belhaven has died though. Wasn ’t he some sort of cousin of ours?
Is Cousin George still courting the usherette at The Stoll? Uncle Jack must be doing really well if he’s taken over from Mr Milner in the running of the Tyneside Tea Company. Well done, Uncle Jack! Is that why you’ve moved to a bigger house? Send me a photo or do a drawing of it when you can.
My best friend, Prue, has been exhibiting at the Simla Art Show this month and I’m in a production of Saint Joan next week. We’re performing it in Davico’s Ballroom because it holds a much bigger audience than the school hall. I was hoping to be Saint Joan, but they gave the part to Deborah Halliday – I’m sure it was because she’s got blonde hair. But anyway I’m Brother Martin, a young priest who is kind to Joan at the end. At least I’ve got a part. Also I’m singing in the end-of-term concert. I’m so excited because Auntie Sophie and Uncle Rafi are coming to hear me. They’re visiting Dr Fatima (that’s Rafi’s sister), who works at the hospital and lives in a flat in Lakkar Bazaar so she can be near her work. She’s very beautiful for a doctor.
Sometimes I go and visit the sick with her and help make the patients cups of tea. Mrs Hogg (‘The Fluff’, as Prue calls her) thought it would be a good idea if I did some volunteering work, so I do that on Saturdays after classes. Sometimes Prue comes with me, and Dr Fatima says we are very useful, especially on the purdah wards, where the women can’t be seen by male doctors or any male staff at all. Dr Fatima also goes into the hills and takes her travelling clinic to very remote places. Maybe next year I might go too.
The town is filling up with visitors. The Delhi government lot have been here since the middle of April, but now there are army and civilian wives escaping the heat of the plains, and young single officers on leave – some of them very handsome! You wouldn’t believe the amount of flirting that goes on, and there are dinner dances and entertainment almost every night. I see the partygoers passing below the bungalow in rickshaws dressed up to the nines in satin and sequins (the men in white mess kit or tails) and they often wake me up on their return, laughing their heads off or singing. The lights of the rickshaw lamps bump up and down in the dark like fireflies as the rickshaw-wallahs pull their passengers up the slope. It looks so romantic. It makes me think of Sam Jackman. I still wonder a lot about what happened to him. Perhaps Auntie Sophie will have news of him.
I can’t wait till I’m allowed to go to parties – real grown-up ones – where I’ll have a dance card filled with the names of young men dying to dance with me! Aunt Fluffy says I have to wait till I’m seventeen. Although she does hold dinner parties that I’m allowed to be at, the guests are usually pretty old and talk a lot of politics, but she often has Indians to dinner, like Dr Fatima, who isn’t in purdah, or Indian Army officers that Colonel Hogg used to know. There’s a really jolly Sikh officer called Sundar Singh who used to be with Rafi in the Lahore Horse. He’s here on some survey. He’s had a sad life, as his wife died in childbirth, and he doesn’t get to see his son much as he’s being brought up by Sundar’s sister near Pindi, but he’s full of fun and always telling jokes and I think he’s a bit smitten with Dr Fatima – though I don’t think Sikhs are allowed to marry Moslems, which is a bit of a pity, as he makes her laugh, which is quite hard work because she is a serious sort.
I’m allowed to go to the pictures. Last week Sundar took Aunt Fluffy, Dr Fatima and me to see The Merry Widow. It was wonderful and I’ve been pretending I’m a Maxime’s dancer and practising steps ever since. Aunt Fluffy complains that I make more noise upstairs than the monkeys on the roof!
Write to me soon and tell me how you are. Give my love to Aunt Olive and I hope she cheers up soon.
Your loving cousin, Adela
(Alias Jeanette MacDonald!)
Briar Rose Cottage, Simla
July 1936
Dear Cousin Jane
Sorry this is such a belated thank you for your lovely birthday card with the sixteen dragonflies – they really are that brightly coloured here – shimmering green and blue and red. I’ve been so busy with the end-of-term play (She Stoops to Conquer – I got the part of Constance, which I think is a more interesting one than leading lady, Kate) as well as helping out at the Gaiety Theatre – Aunt Fluffy complains that since the school holidays started I practically live backstage and that she might as well send round all my meals.
But guess what? I’ve got a part in the musical No, No, Nanette dancing and singing in the chorus!! I’m so thrilled I could burst. I especially love ‘Tea for Two’, as it reminds me of singing it in the car with Daddy at the top of our voices. Prue is helping behind the scenes painting stage scenery. It’s much easier doing that at the Gaiety than at school because they have a clever system of painting the canvas over two floors with a slit between the two, where the backcloth can be wound up and down on a roll, so Prue is often upstairs painting away. You can always tell it’s her because she has a very loud whistle and whistles along
to all the songs, which sometimes annoys the lead actors, but makes me smile and dance even harder. Prue left school this term and is staying up for the season, then will be joining her parents in Jubbulpore (her father works at the Gun Carriage Factory). I’ll miss her terribly, but at least we’ve got till the cold season together.
I won’t be going home this summer because I’m involved in the musical, and now the monsoon has come there’s been bad flooding on the way up to Shillong, so the family are a bit marooned at Belgooree. But as I wrote in a previous letter, I’m glad I got home for the Easter holidays, and all seemed well.
You asked about my brother because I forgot to tell you last time. Harry had grown so much since Christmas – he’s going to be tall like Daddy and he’s got the same dark wavy hair that won’t lie down even when it’s brushed. He’s speaking now but he chooses not to say very much – at least not to humans – but he talks to Scout like a best friend and I think he would sleep with the dog on the veranda if he was allowed to! He’ll be three in three months’ time. Harry hums a lot and he loves building towers with wooden bricks and then knocking them down. Ayah Mimi is forever searching for bricks under the furniture. The best day of the holiday was going riding with Daddy and Mother over to Um Shirpi for a picnic and a swim, while Ayah looked after Harry. It was like old times. Daddy said that next year he might take me hunting in the jungle around Gulgat with Rafi and the Raja. That would be so much fun! Mother didn’t like the idea, but Daddy laughed and said that I would be a match for any tiger!
They have leopards in the forests here. I saw one late at night when I was returning with Dr Fatima from the clinic near Kufri. It walked right across the path in the moonlight in front of our ponies. It stopped and stared at us with big yellow eyes and twitched its tail, then bounded off into the trees again. Luckily the ponies and the baggage mule didn’t get spooked or bolt for their lives, but I had my heart in my mouth, I can tell you!
I love going into the hills with Dr Fatima – it gives me a chance to ride properly and not just promenade around The Ridge and Jakko Hill like the richer girls at school, who have riding lessons. Sometimes Sundar Singh gives us a lift in his old open-top Chevrolet, but Dr Fatima doesn’t like to be beholden to him. She can be very stubborn for someone so shy – well, not shy exactly, but very reserved about her feelings. She says I’m far too open with mine!
I like going to visit the hill people. They are friendly and welcoming and they live very tough lives – the men are employed as coolies in the town, so the women do all the work in the fields and look after the families while they are away. They look old very quickly, though the young women are beautiful (except for those with pockmarks from smallpox), with rings in their noses and colourful clothes. They sing and laugh and tease us for not being married. You should see them dressed up for the native Sipi Fair in May, weighed down with necklaces and earrings of silver and bright jewels and the most enormous hoops in their noses – you could practically skip with them! Aunt Fluffy doesn’t approve of the Sipi Fair because she says some of the young girls are sold off as brides like at a cattle market, but she doesn’t stop me going because it’s a fun day out and I like seeing the hill people letting their hair down, as they lead such hard lives the rest of the year.
At the hill clinics Dr Fatima performs small operations and gives out medicines. There are some terrible accidents – children with burns from falling into fires or women who have cut themselves chopping wood, and their wounds have gone septic before they can be treated. Sometimes Dr Fatima can get them sent to hospital in time, but not always.
One time a young woman came in carrying a baby who had been mauled by a dog. The baby was screaming and the mother was weeping. Dr Fatima treated the wounds and we sat up all night with the baby and you could tell she was in great pain crying in her mother’s arms. In the morning she seemed more calm, but later that day she went into a fit and died. The dog must have been rabid. We were there when they cremated her little body and put the ashes into the river. I couldn’t stop crying, until Dr Fatima told me not to be so emotional, as it didn’t help. But I know that she sometimes cries quietly at night from all the sorrow she sees. She wants to make everyone better; that’s her mission in life.
Sometimes Tibetans come to the clinics at Kufri and Theog. They walk all the way from Tibet through the high mountain passes to sell jewellery and homespun cloth in the Indian towns, carrying everything on sturdy yaks, which are like shaggy oxen. They are the gentlest people I’ve met – they smile a lot and their faces are creased and weathered by the fierce mountain sun. If they can’t pay, Dr Fatima accepts a few apples or a bracelet of a couple of beads on a leather strap.
There are some missionaries at Narkanda who grow apples – the orchards were planted in the 1920s – and it gives the hill people something to sell at market. I haven’t been up that far yet, but Dr Fatima promises she’ll take me soon. The monsoons have come now and the days are very misty and wet, so I prefer to be here in Simla, working at the theatre.
Next summer I ’ll be leaving school – I refuse to stay on any longer than I have to. It ’s not that I don ’t like St Mary ’s, but I ’m not in the least bit academic and I want to get out into the world. What do you think I should do? What ’s it like now that you are working at Herbert ’s Café? I ’m not sure I am cut out to join the family business. I don ’t really want to go back to Belgooree and work in tea like my parents. I know Daddy would like me to, but Mother understands that I want more excitement from life. She often talks about her childhood at Belgooree with Aunt Olive. It ’s strange how your mother has no real memory of it because according to my mother, Aunt Olive was about fifteen when she left, which is just a bit younger than me. I couldn ’t possibly forget India if I ’d had to leave at that age.
I hope the excursion to the seaside is a tonic for both your parents – it sounds like they work very hard. How is Cousin George’s romance going with the telephonist?
Please send me a photo of you all at the seaside.
Your loving cousin, Adela.
PS Aunt Fluffy says I can go to the after-show dance at the finish of the musical in August even though I’m not yet seventeen. It’s going to be at The Chalet (it’s part of the United Services Club) and they are famous for putting on really good parties!
PPS. Have you fallen in love yet, Jane? I still think often of Sam, even though I’ll probably never see him again. I can’t really explain why he’s still on my mind, as I haven’t seen him since I was thirteen – but it’s more than just about good looks when you fall in love, isn’t it? I adore everything about him.
CHAPTER 5
Simla, June 1937
Adela hurried out of the back of the Gaiety Theatre still caked in stage make-up and ran up the Mall. The military band at the bandstand was packing up; she gave a wave as she dashed past, unable to keep the grin from her face. It was her seventeenth birthday and tonight she was coming out in Simla society. Fluffy Hogg, who had become her surrogate mother these past three years, was hosting a small supper party: Dr Fatima; Sundar Singh; Prue, who was back in Simla with her mother for the summer season; school rival Deborah Halliday, because she was good fun; and Boz, a lanky Scots friend of Sophie and Rafi’s from the Forest Service who was posted to Simla and was bringing along his young assistant, Guy Fellows, who was considered one of the best catches in Simla that season.
Guy had fair good looks, had rowed for Cambridge and was full of understated charm. Both Prue and Deborah were amazed and excited that The Fluff had managed to secure such a guest for Adela’s birthday meal. Afterwards they were joining a larger party under the wing of one of Fluffy’s retired friends, Colonel Baxter, and going dancing to the Full Moon Dance at Davico’s Ballroom. Adela had been firm with her friends that she expected to get Guy’s name on her dance card before they did.
Fluffy had paid for a local tailor to copy a dress that the actress Vivien Leigh had been wearing in a magazine. Adela and Deborah – they
were always competing for the same parts in school plays and town shows – had sighed over it backstage. Adela had torn out the page, taken it back to Briar Rose Cottage and pinned it to her bedroom wall. She had been thrilled when her guardian had suggested having a copy made. The photo was black and white, so they had no idea of the original colour, but Adela chose dusky pink. It was full-skirted and made of crêpe de chine, with a pinched waist and a strappy bodice that showed off Adela’s trim, curvy figure. She loved the way it swished from her hips when she moved.
‘Auntie, I’m back!’ she called as she ran up the veranda steps, throwing off her jacket and kicking off her shoes as she went. Mrs Hogg was dressed in an old-fashioned floor-length green gown with long sleeves that was already making her perspire in the warm June evening.
‘Quick sticks, young lady,’ Fluffy ordered. ‘Our guests will be here in twenty minutes. And you can’t be seen with your face painted like Columbine.’
‘You look gorgeous.’ Adela kissed her, leaving a smudge of red lipstick on the older woman’s warm cheek. ‘I’ll be ready in ten.’
She scrubbed herself down quickly in the bathroom, removing the make-up, and pulled on the new dress. She squirted on perfume that her parents had sent. Fluffy came in to help her pin up her hair. On a whim Adela plucked a cream-coloured rose from the bowl of flowers by the window and stuck it in her dark hair.
‘What do you think, Auntie?’
Fluffy appeared lost for words. When she spoke, her voice was shaky.
‘You’re a beautiful young woman, and I’m very proud to be showing you off to the world tonight. I wish your parents could be here—’
Adela rushed and hugged her. ‘Stop it, you’ll make me cry. I’ll be seeing them soon enough – just two more weeks of school and then it’s all over, unless I can find a job here.’
The Girl From the Tea Garden Page 8