by Isla Blair
Prior to the Munnar/Cochin road being opened up, there was a ropeway that ran from top station to bottom station, Kottagudi in the foothills near Bodinayakanur, and tea was sent down to be transported by rail to Tuticorin and shipped from there to the UK. Rice and assorted goods would, in turn, come up. It was the most heinous offence to be caught riding on it. The punishment was instant dismissal. Fear of injury or death and subsequent costs to the company was the main reason for the rule. When asked about insurance and personal injury, there was no question of payment to individuals. The management and staff were insured so that the company could claim the compensation to cover the loss of service of any of their employees.
My father and two friends dared each other to travel from top station to bottom station, hideously dangerous – it was utter madness. They arrived, shaken and in one piece, but had to make the return journey (this time by car); the date was 1931, when my father was a foolhardy 23 years old. He was never found out.
Assistants were required to fulfil any request their manager made of them, however childish or unreasonable. Indeed, one night three young assistants (including Ian) were summoned to their manager’s bungalow and were there required to arm themselves with topees, an umbrella, a walking stick and a shooting stick respectively, and to enact the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace for the manager’s small daughter, instead of a bedtime story. They felt foolish, and the warm sweet sherry proffered by the manager’s wife didn’t make up for their humiliation, but they had to do it. It was a strange feudal existence.
Socially, and in sport, assistants had to turn out regardless of transport problems and return to their estates the same night. Cricket, tennis, squash, fishing and golf were the High Range sporting attractions and shikaar (shooting), which my father always hated. Rugby, though, was the top High Range sport and good rugby players were bought drinks, slapped on the back and generally thought of as “good eggs” and “top men”.
Ian’s brother, Roy, was a very good rugby player indeed. He played for Uddingston back in Scotland and stories of his sporting prowess spread to the High Range club through the newspapers and gossip and my grandfather’s proud boasts in the men’s bar at the Club. When Ian – shy, skinny and, frankly, hopeless at rugby – arrived in the district, the men shook his hand with real admiration and bought him pints of beer in the men’s bar. “Of course you’ll go immediately into the team, Ian. No trials for you.” My father’s protests were not heeded and his cry of, “No, that’s my brother Roy,” was not believed. People just accused him of being over-modest. His ineptitude was soon discovered on the first Saturday of the rugby season, which found his spindly legs not fast or nimble, sprawled almost constantly in the mud, with the opposing team trampling him into the hole he wished would open up for him. It took a long time in this macho world for him to recover any sort of dignity. However, his kind, gentle nature and his self-deprecating humour won round even the coldest shoulder, but it took time.
Loneliness for Ian and his colleagues became routine. Their lives consisted of estate work, organising the labour, bookkeeping and accounts, riding around the several hectares of tea, inspecting for blight or any other damage or infestation, Tamil classes, Tamil homework, Tamil exams and housekeeping discussions with “the Boy”. Breaks in routine were jaunts to the Club, Masonic meetings, gymkhanas, the odd game of Polo and very occasionally a dance or ball with visitors from another district.
One day in October, there was one such visit from planters and their families from Peermade, a hill station further down the Western Ghats. As my father had his bath with a tin jug to scoosh over him (no sponges as they were a lurking place for scorpions), shaved and Brylcreemed his hair, little did he know that his life would change forever, as a blonde young woman with the bluest of blue eyes looked at herself in the mirror and wondered if she’d “do”.
* * * * *
Beside the French windows that led from the ballroom to the verandah of the High Range Club, stood this young woman with the palest gold hair, paler than a field of corn, as pale as moonlight. Her eyes were round and that blue that is commonly seen in babies, but usually fades with adulthood. Her cheekbones were high, her wrists and ankles delicate and she was slim as a branch of willow.
Violet
Ian caught his breath. Where had this vision sprung from? Was he dreaming? Who was she? She seemed to belong more to the world he saw on the silver screen on the third Friday of every month in the small cinema in Munnar town. But she looked artless; she had a shy way of casting down her eyes when someone addressed her, her small hands held together, lightly clasped, as if she had been told not to fidget. She wore a light coral lipstick, but no other makeup, and her dress was a cream coloured silk with English flowers on it – poppies, daisies, cornflowers – and caught in the middle by a small belt, accentuating her tiny waist.
This was Violet Barbara Jamieson Skeoch, but she was known as Violet Patterson; her stepfather’s name was bestowed on her without ever being asked if she approved and she became one of the Patterson Girls, along with her sister Ailsa, 13 months her junior. A small part of her minded that her real father, the handsome, blond young man, brutally injured in mind and body in 1918 just before the War to end all Wars came to an end, had been airbrushed from her life. His death had been long and lingering and Violet’s memory of him was contained only in a small sepia photograph taken in a stuffy studio in Ayr. She would look at it in secret; it was deemed impolite and ungrateful that she should have thoughts of her real father when her new stepfather had given her a home and security and a new life in India, as he swept his new bride, Jessie, my grandmother, away from the drab greyness of her life in Prestwick, where she’d been trying to support her two small girls. Because her first husband lived, gibbering and in pain and in nearly every respect dead, except that his heart still beat it’s pitiful beat, she received no pension of any kind.
Violet’s loyalty to her mother made her swallow the distaste she felt at losing her real name Skeoch, which was, after all, a more interesting name than Patterson. But she was introduced as Violet Patterson and given the initials VP. It was a secret pleasure when she looked at her passport, “Violet Skeoch”, hanging on secretly to that identity, that part of herself that was Charles Skeoch’s daughter, the father she so very much resembled, but never knew.
As Ian watched her, Violet’s eyes were cast down as she fiddled with the clasp of her watch, given to her as a 21st birthday present. Her blonde hair framed her head like a halo. Something caught in his throat; he seemed unable to move. On enquiring who she was, the reply, “One of the Patterson Girls. Hands off, old man – one of them is engaged to Patrick Leahy and he is 6’ 5” and a rugby player.”
Ian was dashed. Here was the loveliest woman he had ever seen and she belonged to someone else. Of course she did. No one as beautiful could still be free. Men would be falling over themselves to sit at her feet. Anyway, what hope could he have? He wasn’t good at much, not sport (memories of the dreadful rugby day flashed before him), he wasn’t rich or clever. What on earth could he offer such a prize? What he had, of course, was gentleness, warmth, humour, kindness and a quiet strength. Violet’s eyes had taken him in already; this slim, dark haired, good looking young man, with eyes that looked at her steadily and never really left her. It was unsettling to be so regarded and his gaze pulled her eyes to him in response. Of course, she didn’t know of the muddle about it being supposed she was the one engaged to Patrick.
He asked her to dance and once she had consulted her dance programme, she agreed gladly with a shy smile. I loved to hear my father relate the story of their meeting and that first dance which he told with a secret smile and a faraway look in his eyes. I made him tell it again and again and it became my favourite fairy tale. He said, “She felt tiny and fragile. It was as if I held a shaft of sunlight in my arms. The band was playing Gershwin’s ‘Love Walked In’ and it became our own special song.” He’d draw on his pipe, look embarrassed,
cough and laugh. Theirs was an instant falling in love, although Violet pretended to be cooler than she felt. It was part of the rules, the ritual of courtship. But Ian proposed and Violet accepted. He brought a choice of diamond rings for her to choose from as an engagement ring and with an unerring eye she chose the most expensive – a large solitaire on a bridge of little diamonds. Ian’s diet became even more frugal and treats to himself became non-existent.
Violet and Ian were married on 10th May 1940 at Peermade Church. Violet wore a heavy silk dress, long, cut on the bias and with a train, and a seemingly endless veil with a headdress of pearls to keep it in place. Theirs was probably one of the happiest unions I’ve known.
Nearly ten years were spent in the sun and in the monsoon rain content in each other’s company, watching with joy and pride as their girls grew into their own separate and unique personalities. They didn’t look too far into the future, but of course the future soon pulled them into an unsettling and sorrowful present; the inevitable parting from their children as they handed them into the care of strangers. This was what was expected – it was the price you paid for the Indian life.
I can imagine my father holding his wife when the pain of parting from their daughters was too much to bear alone. He understood and shared her grief; they were part of each other, but they felt things, of course, in their different ways. As the P&O Chusan pulled out of Tilbury Docks, Violet wept as Ian’s arm encircled her shoulders. There was no one to wave to on the quay, no handkerchiefs fluttering goodbye, but every movement of the ship took her further from us, her babies.
Violet and Ian on the day of their engagement 1939
She ate the smoked salmon and gazed at the stars, watched the flying fish and listened to the band with a heart inside her chest that seemed to have gone numb. She was lucky, she knew, to be travelling in a first class cabin with all the attendant luxury but she kept wondering what her daughters were doing, how they were feeling, if they were hurting. Her lip got stiffer and she tightened her mouth to hold in any escaping sighs, for she knew she must endure this heartache, as it was what was expected of her; she was a daughter of the Raj, after all.
And so on up the winding ghat road, back through the pepper vines, the lemon-scented grass, through the tea and to the bungalow – our bungalow. It was empty now of children; the silence fell on her ears and her heart and she clenched her fists against the pain of it. Ayah had moved on to the Cook family, so she no longer smelt the familiar coconut hair oil or jasmine.
She went into the bedroom Fiona and I had shared. The servants had put abandoned toys on our counterpaned beds and she saw one brown leather sandal. Whose? Too small for Fiona – it was mine. As she picked it up, she saw the imprint of toe marks, with the big toe longer than the others – yes, it was mine. She steeled herself to win through this grief, much like my grandmother Sara had years before. She stood up, pulled her shoulders back, ran a hand through her hair and went to find Boy, to go through the housekeeping list and restock the larder.
FIVE
A Tiger’s Wedding
The lights from the candles filled the room, blotting out any other light. They were reflected in the long windows, shining off the polished shutters; there seemed to be a hundred cakes with six candles on each of them – six hundred candles and voices raised, singing for ME. “Happy birthday, dear Isla – happy birthday to you.” My chin felt tight and painful and my throat was swollen as if I couldn’t get enough air, my eyes pricked. But I didn’t cry. Not crying was my brave boast now, for weeks and weeks.
I hadn’t cried when my parents rounded the corner in their little Austin car, engulfed, shrouded from sight by rhododendron bushes, only a little puff of dust, the last view of them. I hadn’t cried when Alexandra showed me my bed and said I was allowed to put a bear or a doll on top of the counterpane. “You need your own sheets, blankets, eiderdown – have you got them? Have they got name tapes on them?” They had. But my name stitched in red looked a bit silly now. Just a week ago, I was so pleased and proud – Isla Blair-Hill seemed a good name, important, and now it just looked as if I’d made it up.
But it was my birthday. I was six and I was no longer a little girl. I was a big girl who did not cry. Other people would be hurt by my tears and so I learned not to spill them. I seemed to taste them in my mouth instead, salty, a little bitter, accompanied by that slight pain, as if my tongue had been paralysed and my jaw and chin just ached and ached.
People were clapping and laughing and I was being urged to cut the cake. More applause. Then, it was announced that everyone should make a wish for me with their first mouthful and then they could make a wish for themselves. Only with hindsight did I notice people gulp the first bite of rather squishy sponge and jam with too much icing, move on swiftly to the second mouthful which they relished, eyes closed – wishing and wishing.
We all sat down and as the cake was cut up, Maureen Cameron, a big girl who was on the point of her exams and leaving, started singing. She had a sweet, clear voice, “Westering home with a song in the air,” and she ended the chorus with, “Isla, my heart, my own one.” She was singing to me about me. I didn’t know anyone else called Isla, so who could it be? Perhaps this dark, cold, rather forbidding place was not so bad after all, if someone who didn’t know me loved me enough to sing about me and call me her “own one”. I didn’t know that the “Islay” she was singing about was an island. I wanted so much to be noticed and liked and here was someone who did both; Maureen Cameron became the focus of all my longings and missings. I kept hoping she smelt of lilies of the valley. But she didn’t and she never looked at me again.
And this was a strange place. It seemed so dark and so cold and you seemed to get told off for things you didn’t know were wrong – and punished without explanation. It was all so different from Munnar. Ayah would scold you, but she told you why. “No, Missy, don’t put the pencil in the light socket. It will frizzle you all up and then you’ll die.”
I stopped doing it, because I didn’t want to die – and Sunderaj would tell me not to prod the ants’ nest, because they would get cross and bite me. There was a reason. But Munnar was sunny and smelled of warm, sunshiny things – limes, crushed marigolds, wood smoke and pine trees. The garden was tall with canna lilies and poppies and brightly coloured flowers and bright green birds that made a lot of noise and swooped and darted in and out of the trees. Even the crows sounded warm and friendly in my memory. Of course, there were the monsoon days, but I didn’t think of those, not now in this dark place called Scotland. The best days were those of a “tiger’s wedding” – sunshine and showers and great big arching rainbows. You felt you could stretch out your hands and pull the colours out of the sky, wash your face in them, taste them and paint them all over your body.
In Munnar Ayah would rub me all over with almond oil before our nightly goosle and she would say, “Run around Missy, run around.” And we did, naked and giggling, unselfconscious, warm in the sunny evening light.
But now, in Scotland, we had to have our baths with Matron soaping us. She couldn’t really see us, as the windows were painted black inside and out, so she would pour water over our heads and didn’t know when we got soap in our eyes and noses and were choking. No one explained about the blackened windows, but later I realised it was so we couldn’t see each other or ourselves. We were Presbyterians and someone called John Knox said that we were the source of sin. But why were we the source of sin? What had we done?
Equally bewildering was dressing and undressing in bed. Why? I found it hard and I was slow, as I kept putting my legs through my vest or my liberty bodice. I’d only just learnt how to button shirts and now I had to do it without looking. I wasn’t the only girl to turn up to morning assembly with things done up all wrong. And ties? Well, it took me ages to learn about ties. Once I learnt, of course, I couldn’t stop and put ties on everything: teddy bears, bottles, vases, even the anthracite scuttle in Form I. I didn’t understand why we just couldn’t
get out of bed and put our clothes on and no-one explained.
I began to notice what I’d not known before – COLD. In India there was often heat and even in the monsoon months when the Cardamom Hills were shrouded in mist or sheets of rain, it was not cold. Sometimes your books, clothes and toys would grow a delicate bluish skin of mould from the damp – but there were log fires and hot baths and warm towels. It wasn’t cold.
Here in Dunblane, the cold ate into your bones and held you fast. My fingers and toes swelled into red chilblains. We wore fingerless gloves in prep and watched as our breath crystallised into little splinters on the air. Bedtime was worst. There was one hot water bottle that was passed around the dormitory and it was just your bad luck if your turn came last when the bottle was cold.
Because I was newest at school and the youngest I was usually last. But I didn’t mind, really. I put my face on it in the dark and it wobbled a bit. It felt like lying on Ayah’s soft chest when she told me one of her stories about Jesus or the goddess Letchmi, or just called me her Missy Baba; I imagined that her soft arms were round me huggling me and her kisses brushed my hair as she smoothed it back from my face. I wanted Ayah so much, I got a pain in my chest from wanting her and tears started leaking from my eyes onto the rubbery hot water bottle that of course wasn’t Ayah at all. I remembered my promise not to cry and I brushed the salty drops away with my pyjama sleeve. The hot water bottle was quite cold now anyway and I pushed it away onto the floor.