In giving up my job at the India Office Library I took back the pension contributions which had been transferred from Worcestershire, thinking it unlikely that I would ever work again. If our plan to start our family in India worked out, I expected to spend the rest of my life as a wife and mother.
I can well remember the excitement of leaving our flat in Roland Gardens, early that September morning, with all our cabin trunks and suitcases labelled and packed, to catch the train to Liverpool. There had been doubt right up to the last minute about whether we would go. The Indians and the Pakistanis had decided to start one of their periodic wars over Kashmir, so the Commonwealth Relations Office had waited before confirming that we should go. John’s sister, Rosamund, who had just come to London to start a job in the House of Commons Library and was taking over our flat, was hanging out of the kitchen window with tears streaming down her cheeks that morning to wave us good-bye. My parents came to Bootle to see us off and board the ship to have tea with us before we sailed. There was a party air about the whole occasion; my mother had bought a new hat but I think they were secretly wondering if they would ever see us again. They stayed the night in a hotel overlooking the Mersey and we went up on deck in the dark after we had sailed to look at the shore and imagine them watching the ship as it sailed past.
The sea journey to India was an unforgettable experience for someone who had never been further away from home than Italy. It divided two eras in my life and, as it turned out, our stay in India also crossed a watershed in the modern development of that country.
The RMS Caledonia had been built in 1923 to carry out to India officials of the Empire, tea planters, missionaries and businessmen whose lives were to be spent there. In 1965 it still did so, though we were the rather humbler substitutes for the Imperial officials. Underneath an awning at the stern of the ship a cast of traditional characters assembled at noon each day to drink their chota pegs. There were planters in knee-length khaki shorts, going back from leave to their lonely lives in the hills around Darjeeling or to Assam, businessmen and engineers and plant managers bound for Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and upcountry too. There were missionaries, lots of them, travelling on the bottom decks of the boat in much less grand conditions than we, but joining us in the evenings to watch films under the stars or to make up bridge fours, playing interminably in a smoky lounge. At Port Said the magic man, the goolie-goolie man, boarded the ship and travelled with us through the Suez Canal, with white chickens up his sleeves, making them and various rings and watches disappear and reappear, just as he had for forty years. But by 1969, when we returned from India, the Suez Canal was closed, the British businessmen and tea planters were leaving for ever and India had shifted the whole direction of her diplomacy and industrial development.
Looking back on it now, the journey was a constant wonder. We were young, just thirty, and amazed with the tremendous excitement of sailing slowly in a sort of time capsule to the Orient. There were breathtaking things to see – flying fish and shooting stars, the planet Jupiter over Africa, and as we sailed through the narrow passage of the Suez Canal, camels loping along beside the ship on the Sinai side, at the same level as the deck and almost close enough to touch. There was an immense storm over Arabia, the desert and hills visible for thirty miles and more, under the huge, prolonged flashes.
There were shocks too and the first of those came with our arrival at Port Said. We docked in the very early morning, and I awoke to feel flies walking over my face and to take in for the first time the smell of the Orient. We disembarked for the day into Port Said docks but the heat, the smell, the noise and the sheer aggression of the traders, soon forced us back to the safe haven of the ship. How feeble we were.
In fact the Caledonia was a tub, and had no air conditioning, but as we reached the Red Sea and the weather started to warm up, we slept out on the deck under the stars and wrote letters to our friends, so wet with perspiration that we feared they would never be deciphered. We thought it was all fantastic. In the fancy dress competition, got up very patriotically as the Lion and the Unicorn, we won a prize.
Aden brought further excitement – the troubles there were in full swing, the speaker of the legislative council had been shot a few days earlier by terrorists demanding independence and an explosion on shore greeted the ship as we sailed in. That didn’t stop us going ashore to bargain for watches and a camera at duty free prices but all the time I felt an uneasy sensation in the small of my back, wondering if anyone had a rifle trained on it. In fact the biggest excitement at Aden was the Caledonia’s fouling her anchor – round and round we went in the bay all afternoon as the crew tried to unwind it. We wondered if we would ever get to India.
At Bombay we were met by a superior-seeming person from the Deputy High Commissioner’s office, whose job it was to look after us and put us safely on the train for the twenty-four-hour journey to Delhi. I was taken aback by what seemed to me the immense luxury of his style of life – servants in cockaded hats and long sashes offering tea and whiskies in cut glass tumblers, in surroundings of opulent furnishings and oriental rugs. Having no experience of diplomatic life at all, I had never seen anything like it. Strangely contrasting with all this were his wife’s complaints about their living conditions – the shortage of hair lacquer, problems with the servants and the inconveniences of her apartment. All her conversation was complaints. I wrote rather laconically back to my mother, ‘People here are terribly fussy about their accommodation. I think it is all a pose to make people think they are used to something better at home. I bet most of them live in semis in Surbiton.’
We were further amazed on being presented with a hamper of provisions for the train journey. There was everything in there, whole chickens, pudding in a tin and the inevitable bottle of whisky, without which one seemed to be able to go nowhere in India. We were told that on no account were we to touch a morsel of food or drink offered to us on the train; that way, they said, lay instant death. Actually it was a wise warning to greenhorns like us, with our shipboard-cosseted stomachs. Quite a long time later, when we had been in India for some years and become much more cavalier, John landed himself with a nasty dose of worms through incautiously eating the food on the train.
The train journey to Delhi was a trip back into biblical times, enjoyed by us from the comfort of the leather-covered seats of the Air-Conditioned Class. Already we felt many social layers away from the people we saw walking along the platforms or squatting on the station benches, their sandals neatly arranged on the platform beneath each owner.
When we arrived in Delhi in the autumn of 1965 it was only eighteen years after Independence. Signs of British influence and past domination were everywhere. One of the guests at our ‘welcome’ lunch in one of the big bungalows in the High Commission compound was the last British Chief Justice of the Punjab, still in place, as was, at that time a British Chief Administrator in Madras, both having elected to stay in the Indian Civil Service at Independence in 1947. After lunch our prospective bank manager, the elegant Mr Wroe of the Chartered Bank, a regular sahib, took us out in his car into the countryside and stopped by the well-kept towpath of a large canal where there was a wooden building. He said nothing. We walked in. No key. It was as though time had stopped still. The darkwood furniture, with its chintz covers lay undisturbed. There were mildewed-looking English novels of the 1920s in a glass-fronted bookcase. A big fan hung from the ceiling, the string for the punka wallah to pull as he fanned the sahib, still dangling down. The lodge was one of ten or so on the 270-mile canal, in which canal superintendents had stayed each night on their tours of inspection. Perhaps they still did, for there was no dust. Mr Wroe meant it as a kind of elegy on the order of the Raj, and indeed it was a strangely impressive tribute to some such thing, and perhaps also to the honesty of the Indians, for there had been no vandalism or robbery.
In New Delhi, statues of British Governor-Generals still stood on their plinths at the intersections of the major roads,
which were still called by British names. The largest and grandest colonial-style bungalows were lived in by British and American diplomats, businessmen and military officers and most of the bathrooms contained lavatories and wash basins by Shanks and Thomas Crapper, their brass pipes sometimes polished to a brilliant shine. The dignified Bearers in their splendid turbans and smartly pressed uniforms had been trained by the British and knew how to make a pink gin and how to cook jam roly-poly and bread-and-butter pudding. Any attempt to modernise their menus was met with gentle but firm resistance.
But India was changing fast and by the time we left, in 1969, that era with its recall of the Raj had ended. The British were out of favour. The statues were being pulled down and replaced by local heroes and the roads were being renamed. Mingled with a certain sadness at seeing the statue of King George V being pulled from beneath his canopy on Rajpath, there was a certain understanding among the British community of the justice of these proceedings – the British had simply stayed too long and won too much. Our boss, an old India hand, said that he had been told, on applying for the Indian Civil Service in 1937, that we had ten years and must then get out.
And so the Anglo-Indian community, some still clinging to their solar topees, left for Australia and Canada, able to take very little with them, their possessions often looted, the most pathetic victims of the prevailing anti-British feelings. Mrs Gandhi, the Minister of Information when we arrived, was the genius behind these events and became Prime Minister before we left. She was no friend of the British, nor for that matter the Americans; her sights were set on the Soviet Union and as the British left, colonies of Russians moved in.
At the time we arrived, Delhi was in an uneasy mood. The north east routes to Assam and Sikkim had been closed three years before in a brush war with China; the north west routes similarly in the war with Pakistan, which was just flickering out after the biggest tank battles since the Second World War. Delhi itself, and even more the towns and villages in the Himalayan foothills, were full of Tibetan refugees, selling rough metal artefacts, all of which purported to be antique silver and lapis lazuli and many of which undoubtedly were. Some of the windows in the government buildings were crisscrossed with sticky tape to prevent shattering during air raids – an eerie flashback to my war-time childhood. On our first visit to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, there was an alert. Sirens wailed and aeroplanes screamed overhead, something I never thought to hear again, though as far as we could see no bombs fell.
Shortly after our arrival, we were sent on a familiarisation course for newly arrived diplomats in Indian history and culture, at Delhi University. The course was dominated by Americans who had the largest representation in the country, apart from the Soviet Union whose diplomats did not attend the course (no doubt they had a separate one). I found it surprisingly hostile and uncomfortable. The Indian academics were noticeably anti-West and pro-Soviet and their presentation of Indian history did not defer at all to our feelings. We had been equipped by the High Commission with a paper of useful rejoinders. Our paper said: ‘After the Amritsar massacre, General Dyer was court-marshalled and dismissed from the Army.’ Sure enough, the Indian version was that he had been fêted at tea parties by Imperialist ladies. Perhaps he had; it all depends what you chose to emphasise. Our particular difficulty, apart from our colonial past, stemmed from the fact that Mr Wilson was believed to have blamed India for the declaration of war with Pakistan. Actually, he had also criticised Pakistan, but the Indian press had not reported that. The Americans did not escape unscathed. They came under a lot of criticism at that time for their heavy bombing raids in Vietnam.
After the course was over, political and international affairs did not figure much in my thinking for some time, as I rapidly became submerged in the role of diplomatic wife. My first letters home were all about cocktail parties and dinners and Scottish dancing on Burns’ Night, with sixteen haggis flown in by BOAC. I spent quite a lot of time at first improving our flat, but I did not think much of the Indian workmen sent round by the Ministry of Works detachment at the High Commission. They were all long-standing employees with large families whom nobody wanted to sack in spite of their incompetence. So I painted the walls myself, which amazed our white-uniformed, turbaned Bearer, Nunkhu Ram, who did not think that was at all a suitable occupation for the memsahib.
Every day Nunkhu Ram and I went through a wonderful ritual, the household accounts. He would list in an exercise book his purchases of the previous day and what they had cost. The trouble was, he wrote it all down in Hindi, because although he could speak some English, he could not write any, and he also used the old currency of annas and pice. I think there were four annas to the rupee and sixteen pice to the anna, but the mathematics involved was far too much for me and I just took his word for it and gave him what he suggested. I still have his account book, with his Hindi and my English translation beside it.
In December, as forecast in the Post Report, it started to get cold. Anxious not to ‘expose shoulders covered in goose pimples’, I had a fire lit in the grate in our sitting room but clouds of smoke billowed out so Nunkhu Ram summoned a chimney sweep. ‘We had the chimney sweep today,’ I wrote home. ‘Two men came. One sat cross legged in the hearth, holding a piece of blue-and-white spotted material over the grate ostensibly to stop the soot flying all over the room, while the other went up on the roof and dropped down the chimney a heavy weight on a rope. They then hauled it up and dropped it down again, and finally in a stroke of genius, the man at the bottom untied the weight and tied to the rope a great bunch of leafy twigs, like a sort of green bouquet, which was hauled up by the man on the roof. Some soot came down so it must have been partially effective, but I think they would have done better with a brush.’ The chimney went on smoking.
I also spent quite a lot of time at first making clothes, an odd thing to do in India, where the tailors are so good. I reported to my mother that I thought my clothes were as good as most people’s, except for a lack of long dresses. However, by the time we had been there a year, I had given up painting and dressmaking and was bemoaning the fact that I was too busy, exactly the same phenomenon that I experienced after I had been retired for a year. I have obviously learned nothing in thirty years about how to relax. Maybe as a consequence of my father’s work ethic, I did not then, and I don’t now, feel entirely comfortable unless I am busy and playing a part in whatever is going on.
I started looking round for something to do not long after we arrived. I went one day with some of the High Commission wives who helped in an orphanage in Old Delhi, thinking to offer my services, but I am ashamed to say that I could not cope with it. I found the sight of the babies lying in rows in their cots, hardly ever changed or picked up, and the young children, many very traumatised and banging their heads and rocking, more than I could deal with. Instead I joined a scheme to teach English to some of the girls who taught the children in the village schools. I used to drive early in the morning several miles out of Delhi to Pipavit, a village of mud houses, where the small children were taught sitting on the earth floor of a compound shaded by trees. I loved those drives, before the sun was properly up, while it was still comparatively cool and the smell of wood smoke and dust hung in the air. The teachers were delighted to see us and the village women welcomed us and showed us their babies while the teachers interpreted as they told us about their lives and problems, which were many. My Hindi never reached conversational standard in spite of lessons from a well-intentioned gentleman who came to our flat each Tuesday evening – though I did learn that the word for ‘today’ is the same as the word for ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. I can also remember how to say in Hindi, ‘Please get in my taxi, Memsahib,’ though surely that ought not to have been my side of the conversation.
The village visiting came to an end when one of the teachers got married and the other left. We were invited to the wedding, which I found a profoundly sad affair. The girl who was getting married came from a very mod
est family and she was not particularly handsome, but she was charming, sensitive and intelligent. Her marriage was, of course, arranged, and I believe she had not seen her husband until he arrived with his friends at the wedding, riding on a white horse in traditional fashion. He was awful, presumably the best her parents could get for her. He was loud and vulgar, as well as late, which I gathered was a protest about some aspect of the arrangements, possibly the dowry. I felt desperately sorry for her. She must have thought he was as ghastly as I did. I never saw her again, but I have often thought about her since, and wondered how she got on.
I was also at various times teaching English to the children of the Sudanese Ambassador, coaching an English girl who was trying to get into Roedean, and teaching Latin to a ferociously intelligent American boy. In my spare time from all that, I helped out at the Servants’ Clinic in the High Commission compound. I was effectively the dispenser. The doctor, a venerable old Sikh with a long white beard, would say, ‘Twenty four green pills, third bottle along,’ and I’d pop them in an envelope, or ‘bottle linctus,’ which meant I was to fill up a little bottle of some brown substance from the big one. Many of the children suffered from hideous sores which the doctor called ‘monsoon sores’, which I had to paint with gentian violet. It didn’t seem to do very much good as they were always there again the following week with their ‘monsoon sores’ even bigger and looking more frightening than ever, having turned bright purple from the gentian violet. The clinic could get rather gruesome, but as far as I was concerned it was nothing like so awful as the orphanage.
Open Secret Page 8