Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  She was less shocked by the physical manifestations of poverty in India than most Westerners because she had seen, and experienced, many of them herself in the slums of Liverpool. In some ways, my mother was also very accepting of the broader social context of India and its inequalities and injustices. Perhaps having watched her own society being torn apart by Depression and then war, she felt she had no right, or need, to criticize another.

  Her plunge into poverty as a girl and her slow re-emergence as a young woman were fundamental to the arc of her life story but her years in India were equally important in shaping her future intellectual, spiritual and day-to-day life. It is not surprising that when she turned to writing she produced two novels set in India. As she told her young audience in Grande Prairie, ‘My books, The Moneylenders of Shahpur and Thursday’s Child, both contain descriptions of the countryside and the local customs. I used the background in the books, but I made up the stories – they are not my life.’

  My mother was frequently asked if Thursday’s Child was autobiographical. After all, it is a novel about a young Liverpool woman marrying an Indian man and going to live in India, written by a woman from Liverpool who went to India, married an Indian man and lived there for two years. There are clear differences between Peggie and Helen’s stories but many similarities, as well.

  As I delved into the details of this period of my parents’ lives, and reread Thursday’s Child, I enjoyed observing how my mother had used the broadest outline of her own dramatic experience to create a gentle love story with just a little of her own drama. It is very much a novel, but it is very much Helen’s novel too.

  Like many good stories, The Moneylenders of Shahpur is based on universal themes and human characteristics placed in a distinctive setting and context. It draws very directly on the university community at the edge of ‘Shahpur’, describing the village life and the physical environment that Helen experienced in Ahmedabad. Most interestingly, it draws on the particular diversity of Ahmedabad, with its sizeable and influential Jain community. The novel is clearly rooted in Helen’s experience, and has some very witty observations on village life, but is not directly connected to her personal life.

  Avadh had always intended his tenure in Ahmedabad to be limited, just a rung on the career ladder. At one point, he applied for a position in Delhi. Ultimately it was the draw of physics in the West that would tempt him, and wrench Helen away from her Indian home which, in just two years, she had grown to love very deeply.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I shut myself up in my minute flat with my husband’s old typewriter, and on the back of some of his old lecture notes, I drafted Thursday’s Child, to assuage the homesickness for India.

  In 1951, Avadh received an invitation to move to the University of Edinburgh to work with Professor Max Born, a Jewish German refugee and a brilliant physicist. Then nearly seventy years of age, Max Born had been a pioneer of quantum mechanics; the important breakthroughs he made during the 1920s would be rewarded with a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954. Born in Germany, he had moved to the UK in 1933 and had worked at the University of Edinburgh from 1936 onwards, attracting a number of brilliant young physicists to his department. It was a great honour for Avadh to be invited to join them. His old mentor Professor Fröhlich’s high opinion of Avadh had played a part, but by this stage he also had a growing body of research in his own right.

  When Avadh told Helen about the offer, she was torn. She had immersed herself in India and had grown to love its colour and vibrancy as well as the fascinating people she met. She had respected her husband’s desire to help contribute to scientific research in the country of his birth, and had been prepared for them to spend the rest of their lives there. While there would be some advantages to returning to Britain – not least that she would presumably not get ill so often – she had definite misgivings about the move. In the end, though, she wanted what was best for Avadh’s career and moving to Edinburgh was a great step forwards for him.

  Helen and Avadh found a flat on Torphichen Street, just a stone’s throw from majestic Edinburgh Castle. It was also only a few minutes’ walk from Princes Street, which became her favourite high street anywhere. However, she had not expected to find the culture to which she was transported so radically different from that of her English upbringing. In 1992, she described this in a lecture.

  Now Edinburgh, as you know, is the capital of Scotland; it is far from being English, despite our best unkind efforts in the past. My husband had the continuity of his physics and the company of a number of very brilliant young physicists drawn from many parts of the world, and he slid into his new life like a duck into water.

  The culture shock was for me so great that I felt more like a hen in deep water than a duck, as I reversed gears to become again an English woman – with an Indian name – in a Scottish city, which rightly did not like Sassenachs [English people] too much. I was shaky from much illness and very underweight.

  I had so sunk myself into Indian society and got so used to the quiet life in the semi-desert that I had a very hard battle to go into reverse. I remember teetering on the edge of Princes Street, too afraid to cross the road because of the traffic. After all, when you have been used to bullocks and camels, a stream of cars is quite terrifying. Finally, the police constable directing traffic came over to me and, when I explained, he helped me across. After that, I was less afraid.

  Avadh started work in Max Born’s department, but was soon to find that working with a physics genius had its price. The following anecdote about Born’s propensity to make computational errors is told in a book by a future colleague of Avadh’s called Anton Capri:

  In the 1940s [sic, actually early 1950s] when Bhatia and R. B. Dingle were post-doctoral fellows with Born, he gave them one of his manuscripts to review. These two young physicists checked his work and found several silly mistakes. The next day when Born asked them about the work they pointed out that they had found some mistakes. Much to their surprise, Born became quite angry and even threw chalk at them while declaring that they were not competent to understand his work. Naturally they were visibly distraught and doubted whether they had the necessary ability to do physics. The next day Born returned, apologized, and told them that they were right. Both young physicists went on to have brilliant careers.

  The fellowship awarded to Avadh did not pay enough for them both to live on, so Helen decided to look for a job of her own in Edinburgh.

  Packaging there was none, so I became the secretary of a Scottish chemical engineer. I did not enjoy the people or the job, even when he raised my salary. But Edinburgh is a fine 18th-century city, and I enjoyed walking around it and comparing it with Liverpool’s 19th-century buildings. And I have retained this interest in habitat ever since.

  I worked for Imperial Chemicals there and learned a lot about the inner machinations of very big business. Of course, oil companies had taught me a lot and so had the packaging industry – but huge international cartels in the chemical industry taught me who really ruled the world.

  Post-doctoral fellow appointments are limited in duration and Avadh’s was no exception. Helen was just having their trunks repaired for a return to India in 1953 when the Canadian National Research Council sent a representative to Edinburgh and asked Avadh if he would consider working in Ottawa. Once again, it looked like a very good opportunity for Avadh to build his research career, and he accepted.

  On the sea voyage to Canada, Helen was very ill with flu. Her health was already fragile from all the diseases she had caught in India, so when they arrived in Ottawa, Avadh did not want her to work. However, she found little to occupy her without a job since the city was almost impossibly tiny and unsophisticated for a national capital: ‘Ottawa in those days was not the emporium of culture it is today. It still had wooden sidewalks; and diplomats were sent there to recover from nervous breakdowns they suffered while serving in Moscow and Washington. The life for educated women was so empty and vapid that
I could not face it.’

  To occupy her time, she turned to the pursuit she had often talked about over the years but never got around to: writing. Her only previous experience was the two short magazine articles she had written back in Liverpool, but sitting at home in a strange country, she said she created characters for her first book ‘from a desperate need to have someone to talk to, someone to tell about her gnawing homesickness and her fear of this enormous new country’.

  Alien There Is None (later published as Thursday’s Child) quickly took shape during 1953 and 1954. In the first draft Helen had to write all the letter ‘e’s in by hand because that typewriter key had broken but she invested some money to retype a clean final version: ‘I had the letter E replaced on the typewriter, at what seemed great expense in those days, and I splurged on a quire of decent typing paper. I plodded through a neat copy.’

  Meanwhile, disillusioned with a research post in Ottawa that was not all that had been promised Avadh began to search for another position within a year of their arrival.

  We had an offer from the University of Alberta. Now was the moment of decision. I was pregnant. What was our baby to be? An Indian – because there was a job waiting for my husband in India. An Englishman – Avadh could have a job in England if he wanted it. Or a Canadian in the tiny prairie town of Edmonton, just beginning to expand in the oil boom.

  Avadh was also offered a position with the Ford Motor Company near Detroit but wisely chose to steer clear of the corporate world, which would not have suited him. After much soul-searching, my parents chose Edmonton because it offered Avadh a secure position as a professor. In the summer of 1955 my mother packed their trunks once more and they set off by rail for the three-day train journey west from Ottawa to Edmonton. By this time she was eight months pregnant.

  Mum often described to me her impressions of this journey, on which the rugged forests of Northern Ontario seemed to go on forever. The only people she saw from the window were Canadian Natives dressed in traditional garb, waving to the train as it lumbered by. ‘I have never been so frightened of what was to become of me as I was on that journey,’ she told me. She felt a glimmer of hope when the train pulled in to the large limestone station in Winnipeg: perhaps they were going to reach civilization after all? But Edmonton was still a day’s travel away and when they arrived, she was doubtless near despair.

  My parents moved into a rented house on the university campus. Fortunately it was just 200 metres from the biggest and best hospital in the province of Alberta, where I was born on a snowy late September day a few weeks after their arrival. I could just as easily have been born in three other countries but, as the dice rolled, I was to be an Edmontonian and Canadian.

  *

  In 1955, Edmonton, the capital city of the province of Alberta, was not exactly a ‘tiny prairie town’ but a modest-sized city of about 225,000 people. It had grown rapidly during the twentieth century from what was originally a small settlement outside a fort built for fur trading in 1795. The city had long been a centre for meat processing and a gateway to northern Canada but, since 1947, it had boomed because of the discovery of oil nearby. Since almost nothing was more than fifty years old it had a newness that was either refreshing, or raw and unwelcoming, depending on your point of view.

  To his eternal credit, Alexander Rutherford, the first premier of the province of Alberta, had in 1906 established a university just across the beautiful wooded parkland of the North Saskatchewan River valley from the brand-new Legislature. By the mid 1950s, the university was growing rapidly and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union added impetus to the need for scientists, especially physicists.

  Despite his self-doubts and physical frailty, for my father, the university was a peaceful place where he could teach and think and generate research. The inevitable academic politics were relatively tame compared to those in India, the intellectual freedom was enviable and the salary was a living wage, just. My father’s early academic colleagues there had unusually deep Canadian roots in Nova Scotia, Ontario and Montreal, in some cases dating back to the eighteenth century in a country that was otherwise full of recent immigrants. While East Indians were almost non-existent on campus – or anywhere else in Alberta (or most of Canada) – for the most part, academic respect and commonality trumped any inclinations toward discrimination. My father got on with his work, protected from the outside world by the university and by my mother.

  Mum had her hands full caring for a colicky newborn through the depths of winter in a place where temperatures fell to -30°C (22°F) and snow was piled high through a long winter. Her isolation as a new mother was compounded by the loneliness of being a recent immigrant. She missed the boisterous and busy streets of Liverpool, the vibrant and colourful outdoor life of India and, in retrospect, the refinement of Edinburgh. Casual social contact was both rare and difficult in a cold climate and a more reserved and private society.

  English immigrants were in an odd position in Alberta. The English were the source of the dominant culture in Ontario, Canada’s Maritime Provinces and on the west coast of British Columbia, but on the prairies they had a tendency to be curiously marginalized, especially if they were perceived as being ‘upper class’.

  Canadian government policy had explicitly favoured ‘stalwart peasant’ immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, who would develop the agricultural economy of the prairies, over British immigrants who would be more likely to congregate in cities. I remember my mother returning from a department store in tears because a clerk had made fun of her accent and use of Anglicisms.

  My mother was not alone in this. She spoke in reverential tones about a book written by a University of Alberta professor entitled No Englishman Need Apply. It was clear she was relieved that someone had addressed this normally taboo subject. A summary in a more recent book entitled Invisible Immigrants, by Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson, explains the phenomenon further:

  Postwar English immigrants believed they were moving to a familiar British country. Instead, like other immigrants, they found they had to deal with separation from home and family while adapting to a new country, a new landscape, and a new culture. Although English immigrants did not appear visibly different from their new neighbours, as soon as they spoke they were immediately identified as ‘foreign’.

  For my mother, her capacity to adapt may simply have been exhausted by that point.

  Western Canada was a far more difficult place to get used to than any other place I had ever faced. Absolutely nothing that we believed in or cared for fitted in. We had simply seen and experienced so much that when we opened our mouths, we found we could not explain what was obvious to us, to our colleagues and neighbours. Of course, nowadays, Albertan city dwellers are about as sophisticated as anyone would find anywhere. But we were the first of a flood of people from East and West, who brought our expertise and added it to a basically rural experience.

  I was oblivious to the significance of this at the time but it perpetuated a key theme of Mum’s life story: that of the outsider, stuck behind invisible boundaries. As she described in Twopence to Cross the Mersey, she had been an upper-middle-class girl thrown into the slums of Liverpool. Once she married my father, she was an Englishwoman in India, shortly after its hard-won independence from Britain. For almost two years she was a Sassenach in Edinburgh and now she was an immigrant in Canada. Later in life she was very aware that she was an English writer whose readers were primarily English but, since 1952, she had only lived in the United Kingdom for two years.

  No wonder she often felt lonely.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wherever we went, our child went with us. He spent a lot of time sitting on my lap to see what I did and how I did it. I’m very close to Robert. I’m so glad I had him.

  After two years living on the university campus, we moved into a small bungalow with a mustard-yellow stucco exterior. The street was lined on both sides with beautiful elm trees, whic
h gave it an old-world charm. The house itself had been built during the Depression and, while it was very basic, it had a few flourishes of craftsmanship in some of the carpentry and metal work. Textured brass door handles, French doors with multiple panes of glass, stylish hot-water radiators, and a built-in wooden desk suggested that those builders had worked on more grandiose projects in wealthier times.

  ‘The front garden was so overgrown when we first saw it that we didn’t think there was a house there. But when we saw it, we leapt at it,’ my mother told me. She loved that house until the neighbourhood succumbed to high-rise developers in the mid 1960s, and we moved on.

  After I got through the colicky baby years, as a toddler I frequently woke at night with cramps in my legs. One of my earliest memories, from when I must have been about three, is of my mother carrying me into the kitchen in the dead of night. She sat me on the kitchen counter for a moment, probably planning to heat some towels to wrap around my legs, then all of a sudden she collapsed in a faint. I was terrified to see her lying on the floor but Mum was used to pushing herself through extreme fatigue so she recovered quickly and got up to retrieve me before I came to any harm.

  She always worried that I would waken Dad at night. He could not be disturbed because he desperately needed his sleep. Although he was productive in his research, and was taking to teaching well, he pushed himself hard in an effort to earn the respect of his colleagues and the university administration in this foreign land. He also suffered from frail health as a result of a tropical disease he’d had in his youth (likely typhoid) and an ulcer that would plague him for years before it was diagnosed and treated effectively.

  Mum had no time for further writing in these years but she began to send Alien There Is None to potential publishers. Her story of an Englishwoman who marries an Indian man and moves to India had a similar experience to many other first novels: it collected a growing pile of rejection slips. This was frustrating in itself but the process was exacerbated by the distance from Edmonton to London, which meant it took a long time to get a response and the cost of the postage was high. Helen sought help from a friend of a friend in the book business who read the manuscript and sent back a critique, at the same time suggesting some publishers she might try next. In October 1957 Helen wrote to her: