by Michael Foss
This was only a sympathetic gesture, showing consideration for a populace teetering as ever on the brink of famine. For good as well as bad reasons, what was Indian was not owed to the British, and vice-versa. Now, more than ever, it was a puzzle to know where we stood.
My father left the hostel early. Before breakfast, he roused us, coming into the bedroom I shared with my brother without ceremony. A loud ‘Now, boys, up you get’ squeezed the last sweet drops of sleep out of us, and then he was gone, a smart lanky figure in long socks and roomy military shorts, drawing on a cigarette as he strode into the oven of another Punjab day. Like a ship running before a brisk wind he scudded beyond our horizon and was temporarily lost to us. I did not know where he went or what he did.
Abandoned at breakfast, we also were in a sense lost. The door to the roadway was open, to catch the slightest breeze. Strong slanting sunlight lanced through the haze of dust in the broad military highway outside. Sepoys on errands went by, looking bright but not so eager that they worked up a lather. Then an infantry platoon might come flying along, stepping out with a swing under an NCO’s unforgiving eye. All that world was ours to make what we could of it, doing as much each day as our invention and the merciful patience of India would allow.
‘Where’s Ma?’ I would ask my brother, reaching for another piece of cold toast in the Victorian gilt toastrack.
Yet again she had not been seen this early in the day. We did not need her, but it was as well to keep tabs on her whereabouts. She had not left my parents’ bedroom.
Soon after midday we took lunch almost on the run, in and out, unwashed and with dishevelled clothes, hardly daring to leave the scenes of the street – a donkey that kicked over a farmer’s cart, a dog maddened by heat and insects growling and tearing at its own rump, a line of women in saris carrying road-chips in head-baskets, a lorry-load of jolly soldiers giving us an impromptu and ironic salute. We begrudged the time away. This was better theatre than we had ever seen in England. Still munching we ran from the bare spaces of the hostel, away from dull echoes, and the slow tap of time passing.
Sometimes, as we fled from lunch, we would see Father returning for a short afternoon siesta. I still did not know him very well but it struck me that he often looked pulled down, walking with something less than his usual spring. He looked solemn, waving only a perfunctory salute at passing soldiers. Tucking his hat under his arm he made straight for his bedroom, shutting the door carefully behind him as if some delicate tracery of sound or structure might get broken.
At some later time, going by my parents’ door, I heard noises that made me stop. Something deep and confused was happening in there. I heard a rumble like stones in a heavy wooden box interspersed with bursts of rapid monotone pitching up towards the edge of hysteria or tears. Then a silence, too deep and too long. I wanted to knock but stopped my hand and went quickly away on tiptoe.
‘What’s the matter with them?’ I asked my brother. ‘Do you think they’re ill?’
My brother didn’t know. ‘Well, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ he suggested. Adults had peculiar metabolisms that left them victims to things we took in our stride. Besides, it was not our place to enquire. It was as much as we could do to make daily sense of the street-world outside. If there were something wrong close to home we would be told in good time. Instinctively, we turned from the threat of gloom. Slamming out of the hostel we rushed into the early evening where we could hear a regimental pipe band limbering up by the maidan with rapturous squeals.
My mother did not go out much. Perhaps the hostel was the coolest place, and in any case there was little she wanted to do in the cantonment. I would see her, still in her slippers, slumped in a big cane chair under the laborious fan, listlessly turning the pages of a long out-of-date Illustrated London News. When she came to the dining room she would hardly eat, pushing the dish aside with a wrinkling of the nose.
‘Oh this heat,’ she sighed, starting to rise then sinking back in a lump on her chair. In a while she headed back to her bedroom.
‘There you are,’ she would say in surprise when our paths crossed. ‘Are you all right?’ She looked at us quizzically, as if there were things she was struggling to understand, but she was not listening for an answer. Absentmindedly, she would put out a hand to smooth our hair or straighten our clothes. ‘Just look at you,’ she sighed again, ‘such a mess.’ Offended by a dirty nose she would make a pass at one of us with her hanky, but we were off and away before her hand could fall on us.
Then we hardly saw her at all – a back disappearing behind a door, a head bowed over sewing or sock-darning, a silent profile turned away from her husband, a pale face waiting for our perfunctory goodnight kiss. Sometimes, looking up at a slight noise and expecting to see her, I discovered only an ancient servant shuffling the floor in heelless slippers with toes turned up like the prow of a boat.
My father’s face was becoming tight and stubborn. He parted and combed his dark hair with extreme care and his moustache was rigorously clipped. I was not anxious to be kissed by him, a reluctance that relieved both of us from a burdensome display of affection. We children hardly saw him, a state of affairs that seemed to suit us all. Conscientiously, he gave us our orders, as he would to his staff, and from time to time he came down on us hard for our rowdy and quarrelsome behaviour. That was as far as he wanted to go. He did not know, at the best of times, how to speak to children. Finding himself unavoidably in our company he would clear his throat, as if ready to make a general proposition on the weather or the state of the day, but then his voice would stall. He was saved by the routine of lighting another cigarette, or calling for another beer. Before picking up his book he would enquire politely, ‘Anything you boys want? Another squash? No? Well, run along then till supper time. Don’t be late. You know your mother expects you home.’
In a while long steps took him to his bedroom door. He reached slowly for the handle and opened the door a notch, saying quietly and apologetically, ‘It’s only me, dear.’ A little click covered the finality of his retreat. Silence.
‘Perhaps they’re both ill,’ said my brother.
*
‘I still can’t understand why he did that to me,’ my mother said rancorously, some years after my father’s death.
I was sitting with her in her little flat, under the eaves in her block of sheltered housing apartments. She had come to rest here; her own death was not far off.
In thickening winter light the great swell of the bells had just finished flooding into the room from the tower of Wells Cathedral. It was a moment for confidences. Nervously she pulled her spectacles on and off, impatiently discarding one pair of glasses, then rubbing at the smeared lens of another pair which was equally unsatisfactory. Her rheumy eye gazed over the winter muck of the farmyard next door and rested without pleasure on the saturated Mendip hills beyond. She was not reconciled to her memories.
‘What had I done to deserve it?’ she complained. ‘There I was in wartime England, alone for four years, scrimping and saving, worried to death by you two children – you were often little devils, you know – though of course it wasn’t your fault, you poor dears. And there he was, having the time of his life – he told me so – playing soldiers in Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, Basra, northern Persia. No fighting, he never saw a shot fired in anger. It seemed really like one long round of pleasure, and then I think what I was going through.’
A jolly, soldier’s life, sunny days, drinks in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel, a sympathetic ear from convenient young ladies (best to pass quickly over that bit), meals on the terrace of Lebanese restaurants by the gun-metal waters of the Mediterranean. Then purposeful plans to give some spice to the administrative day, a preparedness without any real danger, but still camping under stars (‘when sleeping on the ground,’ my father said sagely, ‘always dig a little pit for your hip’). Then dozing on long night drives without lights under the amazing blaze of the desert heavens, the endless divisional
columns rumbling like a distant earth tremor. Not needed for the 8th Army push in North Africa but sidetracked into cloak-and-dagger operations beyond the line of the Atrak river, towards Ashkhabad, helping Uncle Sam supply a depleted Russian army, the Yanks refusing to stir from their base-camp until the generator for their refrigerators was in place and the Coca-Cola well-cooled. Exciting games for big boys, and no one hurt. Rapid promotion too.
‘Oh, why did he treat me like that?’ my mother wailed, pain half a century old still in her voice. ‘On that journey back to India, when I met him on the ship I was so full of joy. Life could begin once more, he and I and you two boys, whom he did not know, together in India. I wanted it to be just the way it was before the war. Then he told me in Ambala, where I was not very well anyway, that he had put himself forward for the last of the fighting in Burma. It was with those Chindit ruffians, or whatever they were called, the final push against the Japanese. We had only been together for a few months and he was happy to abandon me again!’
He could not admit it but as a soldier he felt unfulfilled, and in truth a little ashamed also. He was a professional with twenty years’ service and he had seen no enemy action. It was not a case of heroism but almost a dereliction of duty. When he was sunning himself in the desert he knew only too well that many poor conscripts, reluctant and fearful warriors, had their laggard steps wiped out by death. War is a drug to some, a test to others. Under either case, however you looked at it, my father felt he had not had the advantage of the time. He wanted to know what he might do when the adrenalin rushed, and the spiteful bullets snickered about his ears, and the big demented shells plastered earth and gore on the living and dead, and the unwary suddenly plunged terrified faces into any patch of stones or litter only to discover later that they had soiled their breeches.
Sleepy India was all very well, and there were easy satisfactions to be gained in peacetime soldiering. But a flying moment, which appeared suddenly of overwhelming importance, was waiting to be grabbed. Now or never. My father wondered if a woman – a family – had the right to stand between himself and this moment of self-revelation, a last chance to test himself to the farthest depths of his professional being, his manhood. It seemed to him to be a reasonable question to put, though it was never answered since he was not needed in Burma.
‘He made me furious,’ said my mother. ‘Utterly wretched too. I had suffered so much. I couldn’t believe what this foolish man was saying. I was not well and I had to rest. He made me cry into my pillow. Such cruelty! He stood there at the end of the bed, as if he were suggesting … well, no more than a visit to the weekend gymkhana. I wanted to throw something at him – a shoe or something – but I was too upset and weak. I thought that we were going to be so happy. I thought, all through the war, if only I can get back to India. And now this. I didn’t want him near me, not to touch me. Oh, I was so sick and so weak. All I wanted to do then was sleep, sleep. The doctor came but what use was he? What use are they ever?’
Soon after these events in Ambala, in about the third month of her pregnancy, my mother miscarried.
EIGHT
Interrupted Lessons
IN THE MORNING, in the wide bright dusty streets, sometimes we rode and sometimes we pushed our bicycles. It was easy going – almost no traffic to worry us – and if we were early we had time to practise the day’s poem. This time, the words tripped along nicely:
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky.
It seemed a cheerful incantation, but in the present circumstance I could make little sense of it. In this country, I saw a tangle of bushes, thorn, tamarind, acacia, palm, with dust-devils and too much distance in between. Somewhere over there, it was true, flowed a big river. The town of Ferozepore had been founded on the old high bank of the Sutlej, one of the five watery fingers of the Punjab. But the reaches of that Himalayan run-off did not invite cosy reflection. The spirit of the water was unreliable, a thing only temporarily contained, moody amid snags and currents, shifting in a blink from bland to ugly.
On the verandah of the school bungalow the teacher, a Scotswoman in a long skirt and with two ropes of hair coiled in Valkyrie-fashion about her ears, greeted us formally. Each day, before lessons began, we had a group-recitation. We jumped up eagerly and formed into a double line, vying with each other to catch the teacher’s eye, piping in high strident voices:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers ‘’Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.’
We chanted this with enthusiasm while a dragon’s breath of wind scoured the shores of the Sutlej.
The next poem to be learnt was ‘The Daffodils’. It was, said our teacher rolling her ‘r’s, ‘a grand wee poem for all of us in a foreign land.’
*
Had it not been for the similarity of the heat, and the bleached white light lying like hot drops of mercury on the eyelids, the municipality of Ferozepore – town and cantonment – promised to be easier on the body and the temper than Ambala. The town (Firozpur in the new orthography) owed its foundation and later development to two short but happy moments five hundred years apart. Firoz Shah had established it, in the middle of the fourteenth century. This Turkic ruler of the Delhi Sultanate had combined the indolence and savage unpredictability of oriental despotism with an artistic sense that yearned for the memorial of palaces and mosques and tombs, and for the more immediate gratification of gardens and arbours and fountains and the quiet plangency of the sarod and the stealthy tinkle of the dancing-girl’s bells. For a few years, under the able administration of a Brahmin minister, the reign of Firoz cast a brief benevolence over the Punjab, and generations of peasants and townsmen saluted the memory of the old king (or, in reality, the memory of his minister Makbul).
The good times did not last. Makbul died and Firoz degenerated to a scandal of unhinged senility and impotent rage. Old days of misery returned and Ferozepore began to crumble and rot by the Sutlej, dwindling over centuries to a squalor of dogs and cow-dung amid a grandeur of ruins. From this state of near extinction it was rescued, in the mid-nineteenth century, by Sir Henry Lawrence, energetic soldier and loyal booster of British interests, who saw the advantage of the town’s position and imprinted commercial enterprise, Victorian amplitude and bourgeois respectability on the old town-plan, adding broad tree-lined streets, substantial houses for business, a factory or two, and a wide circular promenade around the walls. This walk was lined with the villas and the gardens of men grown prosperous in the affairs of the East India Company. The military cantonment tacked on by the Raj after the shock of the Mutiny and the withering away of the Company did little to spoil this town that at least shook hands with the ideals of two very different civilizations.
But not a whisper of this long, embattled history reached us. I had to learn about it at a much later time. Miss McWhatshername instructed us in Faith, Duty and Deportment, with reading and writing and simple number-work, to which was added as an extra burnish the glory of ‘Great Poems’. Sometimes, after lessons, we were shown the rudiments of Scottish country dancing.
Like all the British of the Raj, adult or child, I was a part of two worlds. I and my kind lived on India, not in it. One world – the superstructure of our lives provided by the Raj – was manifest, too plain to be missed by even the greatest dunderhead. The facts of this history supported us every moment of the day, in our houses waking and sleeping, in school, at work, in leisure and entertainment. We knew with an ingrained knowledge what the order of life should be and what was the limit of the permissible. At night, after the last drinks were cleared away, and the Indian bearer had dimmed the lights, emptied the ashtrays, plumped the cushions and given the silverware a final buff, he pulled the door closed softly, leaving us to rest in the cocoon of our contentment while he retreated into the limbo of the servants’ quarters,
in the shadowland of Indian India.
This other world, this shadowland, was a place for our averted eyes, almost secret – if not a dirty secret, at least a slightly disreputable tale, hardly mentioned in decent company. Of course, our elders knew that they could not escape the native world – it was the burden of most of their complaints. Struck by the same sun, we all trod the same parched earth under the wheeling kite’s omniscient eye. The carrion crows lined up on the wall, giving their heads an ironic tilt as they took their usual opportunistic view, saw no more advantage in one of us than in another. The land, the climate, the day, the moments of existence belonged to all of us. But the two worlds moved, as it were, on parallel tracks, intimately close but separated by the indestructible veil of our histories. Our rules for living were not their rules.
This veil was less a problem for children than for adults. We could slip under it. Bicycling to school, gathering our little white tribe under the eye of our Rhinemaiden, struggling with her unlikely accent, wondering why the Scots Border country of Wallace and Bruce should be dear to our hearts too, counting the crowned heads of English monarchs on the wall-chart in the schoolroom (puzzling, Christ-like images, with soft brown beards, pale skin and doleful eyes), then embarking on yet another Lakeland journey from the Lyrical Ballads, we began each day strictly reined in by the expectations of our kind. And in the afternoons we swam in the clear blue pool of the Gymkhana Club, sipped lemonade, sat on the lawn in the lee of the big umbrellas while a regimental band of brown faces, immaculately smart, struck up the ritual tunes of our colonial music – popular pieces from Gilbert and Sullivan.