India Remembered

by India Hicks

  The England We Left Behind

  January 1947 in England brought eight weeks of snow and the coldest night ever recorded. There were eighteen-foot drifts in the north with cut-off villages having food supplies dropped in by parachute. There was a coal crisis and interminable power cuts throughout the country. It was terribly cold and dark everywhere. When the light was on it was so dim one could scarcely read. Going into large stores we found them to be in almost complete darkness except for a couple of candles. Enormous numbers of people were unemployed as industries closed down.

  We were still in the grip of austerity. Food was rationed and our meagre sweet ration was eaten in a flash. Kind-hearted American friends still sent food parcels containing delicious dried fruit and soup but no cooking fat or sugar, which was what we lacked most of all. India and Viceroy’s House were going to be very different from England. When we left for India my mother took her old Sealyham terrier, Mizzen, as she could not bear to leave him in case he died before our return. When we arrived at Viceroy’s House she asked if she could have some food for him. Breast of chicken arrived on a silver salver. My mother locked herself in the bathroom and ate it.

  Soon after it was announced that my father was to become Viceroy, we drove up to London in an Admiralty car. The roads were still terribly icy and when the driver braked in traffic we skidded sideways into an army trailer and rebounding, crashed into another. The car was too smashed to continue but luckily a London-bound bus pulled up behind us. We climbed aboard with my father muttering that he would be late for the PM at Downing Street, which I remember thrilled and delighted the curious passengers around us. I went with my parents to have tea with Queen Mary and the Duke of Gloucester at Marlborough House. She was always awe-inspiring but on this occasion she was amused to hear how indignant my grandmother was about my father taking on ‘the politicians’ dirty work’.

  My mother’s diary entry for 14th March records that they had ‘gala photos taken’ in which you can clearly see her orders and decorations: The Crown of India, Grand Cross of the Order of St. John, Grand Cross of the British Empire, Dame Commander of the Victorian Order and Honorary Doctor of Law.

  We gave a farewell cocktail party for seven hundred at the RAC, of which my father was President. It was a great success and justified my parents having rejected the Dorchester’s much reduced but still alarming quote of twenty-five shillings a head. My father’s Press Attaché, Alan Campbell-Johnson, records that ‘every celebrity in London was there.’ My mother, with characteristic delight at her ‘inclusive’ attitude to society, took pleasure in the fact that among the celebrities were ordinary people from their lives ‘including the caretakers at my office.’

  Thursday 20th March

  We drove down to Northolt, the Royal car bulging with bodies, dogs and packages and the whole fleet of cars preceded into the airport by a very dusty baby Austin! Daddy has got his famous York back which he toured all af SEAC in. Everyone came to see us off, an action which ought to be stopped by law.

  A Special Relationship

  India remained a magical place for both my parents. My father set up his South East Asia Headquarters in Faridkot House in New Delhi during the Second World War when he first took up his job as Supreme Allied Commander, so I had heard many family stories. But my main source of knowledge about India was provided by Rudyard Kipling and the photograph of Mahatma Gandhi wearing his dhoti and shawl, surrounded by cheering mill workers in Lancashire.

  My parents had met Pandit Nehru in 1946 when he had travelled to Malaya to meet the Indians living there. My father was Supreme Allied Commander and some of his staff warned him that there might be trouble and were against his meeting Nehru. One of his staff had already refused to provide transport for the visitor. When he heard this my father was furious. He drove with Pandit Nehru in his official car to the YMCA in Singapore, where the meeting was being held. My mother was already there with a group of Indian welfare workers. As she came forward to be introduced, a crowd of Panditji’s admirers swarmed in behind him and she was knocked off her feet. She crawled under a table from where Panditji rescued her.

  Towards the end of the fifteen months we spent in India the immediate attraction between my mother and Panditji blossomed into love. Nehru was a widower and his daughter, Mrs Gandhi, was still married with a husband to look after, and was not often around. He had sent his sister as ambassador to Moscow, and then to New York, and he didn’t see much of his second sister, who was in Bombay. If you are at the pinnacle of power you are alone; whatever you say to your colleagues is likely to be immediately broadcast, so you can’t talk to your political collaborators at all and you are lonely. She became his confidante. Nehru would never write to her until about two in the morning, when he had finished his work, and his letters were a fascinating diary of the creation of India. He would start with a charming opening paragraph, very touching and personal, and he would end affectionately. But the main part of the letters were a diary of everything he had been doing and the people he had seen, his hopes and fears, and, towards the end of this twelve-year correspondence, his disappointments and disillusion.

  My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru. He wrote to my sister in June 1948: ‘She and Jawarhalal [sic] are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way and Pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help. Mummy has been incredibly sweet lately and we’ve been such a happy family.’

  So there existed a happy three-some based on firm understanding on all sides. This letter was written I suppose because their relationship had deepened the month before, in May, when we had gone to the retreat at Mashobra and my parents, and indeed Panditji, found themselves able at last to relax a little for a few days. Everyone had been too busy to work on friendships until that point, but I think it was that trip that was really special for us all. Nehru referred to this in a letter to my mother written much later, in March 1957:

  Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you did also) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another, I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery. We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other’s eyes without fear or embarrassment.

  The relationship remained platonic but it was a deep love. And although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death. They met about twice a year. She would include a visit to India in her overseas tours on behalf of the St. John Ambulance Brigade and the Save the Children Fund. From the beginning she would continue to oversee the work of rehabilitation and relief which she had set up for the refugees uprooted by Partition.

  Panditji would come to London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conferences. He would always come down to Broadlands, our house in Hampshire, for a weekend. We kept a little grey mare for him so that he could come out riding with us.

  My mother was on an overseas tour in 1960 and had just left India, carrying out a heavy programme of inspections and engagements in Borneo, when her heart gave out and she died in her sleep aged fifty-eight. A packet of letters from Panditji was found by her bedside. In her will she left the whole collection of letters to my father. A suitcase was crammed full of them. My father was almost certain that there would be nothing in the letters to wound him. However, a tiny doubt caused him to ask me to read the letters first. I was happy to be able to reassure him. They were remarkable letters but contained nothing to hurt him.

  On my mother’s death, the two Houses of the Indian Parliament stood in silence in her memory and a frigate from the Indian Navy attended her funeral at sea off Portsmouth. They cast a wreath of marigolds into the ocean on behalf of the Prime Minister, Nehru.

  For me, Pandit Nehru was a very special person. I felt a tremendous warmth towards him from the first time I met him. The w
hole time we spent in India was no more than sixteen months: very short, but it seemed like a lifetime, and if you had asked me whom I loved most after my father and mother, or my sister, undoubtedly it was Panditji. I called him ‘Mamu’, which means ‘Uncle’. I remember that Panditji frequently used the expression ‘All manner of things’ – he said it to such an extent that we used to tease him about it. My father also felt a real affection for him.

  The Need for Speed

  There has been criticism after the event about the speed of the transfer of power. To all the leaders struggling to solve the problems at the time, this speed was essential. My father became Viceroy on 23rd March 1947 with the date for the transfer given as June 1948. It seemed a very short time for so much to be resolved. In fact, it soon became clear that it must happen much sooner.

  India had long wanted self-government. The First World War had weakened the power of the British in India, and Gandhi’s arrival from South Africa and his subsequent and effective advocacy of non-violent civil disobedience greatly strengthened the (Hindu) Indian National Congress, founded in 1888, which in 1929 declared itself for the complete independence of India. The Hindus, dominant in trade in the towns and cities, took better advantage of British rule than the oppressed Muslims, but Britain had not helped the situation, exploiting the divide between Hindus and Muslims by giving the Muslims their own electorates and encouraging their very different culture and history. The idea of a separate Muslim sovereign entity arose in 1933, complete with a proposed name, Pakistan, and was adopted by the Muslim League, founded in 1906. Differences and difficulties multiplied.

  As the Second World War threatened to engulf India in 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, was sent out on a mission to offer Gandhi self-governing dominion status for India after the war, in return for support for the British war effort. He was turned down flat: Gandhi wanted independence now, or not at all, and the result was the Quit India movement.

  Muslim frustration broke into violence on Direct Action Day, 16th August 1946, when after three days of dreadful slaughter 20,000 Muslims and Hindus lay dead in the streets of Calcutta. It was the signal to the Muslim leader Jinnah that India must be either divided, or destroyed, and the signal to Prime Minister Atlee in Britain that independence could no longer be postponed. He needed a new Viceroy to see it through.

  Lord Wavell, the current Viceroy, was a good man and well respected, but he was not held in affection, nor in confidence. He was also hamstrung by the government in not being allowed to talk to Gandhi, around whom so much revolved. He had been unable to secure cooperation from the Muslim League and had no solution to the problem other than his ‘Operation Madhouse’, a phased and complete withdrawal of British civil and military personnel. Attlee realised that a new man, a different personality, was required – and that man should be my father. He had in fact been proposed previously, by Leo Amery in 1942, and in 1945 he had written to my mother, from Karachi, to tell her, ‘You would make the world’s ideal Vicereine.’ In 1946 Krishna Menon had put his name forward as a Viceroy acceptable to Congress and Atlee perceived him as ‘an extremely lively, exciting personality.’ He had ‘an extraordinary faculty for getting on with all kinds of people,’ and was also ‘blessed with a very unusual wife.’

  Bodies in the Calcutta streets after the riots following the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day in August 1946.

  A popular hero, a liberal, and perhaps best of all, the King-Emperor’s cousin, my father was dispatched to India to oversee the granting of independence no later than June 1948.

  It was an urgent task. The conflagrations had spread to Bihar and East Bengal. Punjab was ready to ignite at any time. And of course, there was nothing to counteract this growing force: the Indian Civil Service had ceased recruiting since the beginning of the Second World War and the British troops were all going home. There was no way that an inflammable situation could be controlled. All the Indian political leaders told my father that the handover must take place as soon as possible and this was a view corroborated by the Governors at the Governors’ Conference in Delhi in April and backed by Lord Ismay, my father’s Chief-of-Staff. The state of uncertainty was unbearable and a terrific feeling of urgency prevailed. Dominion Status was proposed as a solution to give both countries support within the Commonwealth. At the start of June, after the announcement that the plan for Partition had been accepted, there was an enormous press conference and in answer to the all-important question, my father replied that the Transfer of Power would take place on the 15th August 1947. This would be ten months earlier than the original deadline but it was necessary if there was any hope of avoiding civil war.

  With Panditji at Palam airport.

  My India

  My crucial late teenage years were spent in India, so the times when I sat with my peers in earnest discussion about important things in our lives and generally gossiped, chatted and giggled, was with a group of Indian girlfriends which included Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists. There seemed to be no divisions. We were just young girls enjoying life and each other’s company.

  Many of my friends were students at the Lady Irwin College, an all-female establishment which later became part of the University. Only occasionally was I brought up short by the unexpected. Once we were discussing what we would do when we were twenty-one and one girl said ‘Oh, but I will be dead.’ So we said, ‘What do you mean?’ – we were all eighteen or nineteen at the time – and she said, ‘Well, they cast my horoscope when I was born, and then they would never let me see it, never. The one thing I wanted to see was my horoscope, and it was put away in my father’s study. One day I found it when they were all out, and I read that I will die when I am twenty-one.’

  Throughout the politically heavy days there were plenty of welcome distractions in the form of animals which had always played a great part in our lives.

  As I described in a rare letter home to my friend Mary:

  It really is such fun out here seeing all the birds and animals, the little green parrots and the ridiculous little crested hoopoes, and the bullocks and jackals and camels. We have a baby mongoose as a pet. He is very sweet and tame and they make extremely good pets as they love company and although timid are hopelessly inquisitive so that they are great fun.

  In the garden at Broadlands with my parents and our mongoose, Neola.

  There were always lots of monkeys up at Viceregal Lodge in Simla. They looked very sweet with their little black faces and when it was the season for every female to have a baby with her they looked perfectly charming. Of course they were as naughty as any monkey and they stole everything.

  We’d been given a baby mongoose which we called Neola, rather unimaginatively I’m afraid, as it merely means ‘mongoose’. Neola grew fast but as he’d been removed from his mother, my father thought it necessary that we fill her place and he was very distressed to find that Neola did not know how to crack his own egg. He loved eating eggs but whenever he tried to bite the shell of the egg of course it snapped out of his jaws and he was very frustrated. My father remembered from Rudyard Kipling’s Riki Tikki Tavi, what a mongoose is supposed to do. On the floor, you take the egg in your front paws and, with your back legs apart, take it near a rock or a door or wall and throw the egg against this hard thing, whereby it shatters and you can then eat your egg. We didn’t quite know how to get this through to Neola. My father said, ‘well it’s perfectly easy.’ He got down on the floor and he demonstrated. He’d got his legs apart and had thrown the egg against the wall when a Chaprassi (messenger) came in with a message and saw his Excellency the Viceroy on the floor, forcing me to hold the mongoose so that it could see what was happening.

  Sadly Neola never understood that lesson. He didn’t really need to because the kitchens would provide fried eggs which we never were able to eat because as you raised your knife and fork there was a flurry of grey fur and a little weight on your lap for an instant as your
egg disappeared. My father used to get so infuriated at never getting his fried egg that he would order the kitmagar not to put the fried egg down on the plate until he had his knife and fork at the ready and then he’d say ‘go’ and he still lost his egg every time. If it was boiled eggs and we had managed for some strange reason to actually eat our egg and there was a little left at the bottom in the shell, again there would be a flurry and Neola would arrive and grab the shell. But of course by grabbing the shell the bottom bit was in his mouth and the top bit was like a helmet covering his head so that he was blinded and ran round the room bumping into all the furniture.

  My pony, Picolette.

  Then there was the trouble of house-training the mongoose. My father said, ‘Well I think we start him the way you do with a dog. If there’s no chance of putting him where he should go, have some newspaper down and he can learn to go on the newspaper.’ That worked very well. His puddles were very scrupulously done on newspaper. Unfortunately, early on, he did find papers on my father’s desk which he used. They happened to be death warrants waiting to be signed.

  Neola started by sleeping with me in my bed. But he was very small and he was alarmed if he thought I was going to turn over. So he bit very sharp needle teeth into my toes every time there was any sign of my moving. I reckoned that I’d really prefer a good night’s sleep so eventually he was placed to sleep in a sort of special box and run we had made for him.