by Pamela Hicks
The state carriage finally crept into view, but neither it nor the bodyguard escort could come any closer without running people over. Eventually, my father stood up in the landau and saluted the flag. Panditji struggled over to them but this time it proved impossible to clear a passage for them. In his attempt to help, Panditji came so close to being crushed that my father hauled him on to the carriage hood, much to the delight of the crowd. He then rescued several women and children from being crushed by the horses’ hooves until, in addition to the uniformed attendant standing on the back, there were ten more people in the carriage along with my parents, with the new prime minister riding triumphantly on top.
That night we gave a dinner party for over one hundred people, and after dessert we all wandered out into the blissful cool of the night to watch the illuminations and fireworks from the magically lit Mughal Gardens. This was followed by a reception for two and a half thousand people – each one of whom was presented to my parents. The atmosphere was intoxicating, but eventually I had to go to bed, exhausted but exhilarated. The next day my mother and I went to see the prime minister raise the new Dominion flag over the Red Fort in Old Delhi. In the midst of this dramatic setting, and with the sound of 800,000 people cheering and singing, my father spoke. India, he said, should be allowed to have the ‘joy of Independence Day’ before it faced the misery of partition. They were prescient words. But for now, the joy lingered. My father’s plan had been fulfilled. India was now an independent country. It was extraordinary to think that I had witnessed the birth of two new nations and been present while history was in the making.
11
After all the ceremonies and parties we next flew to Bombay. This was my chance to meet the student leaders who, following independence, had been released from prison. They had previously been involved in protests, agitating for the end of British rule in India. I sat in my sitting room in Government House, waiting for my guests, tea at the ready. I was impressed that their leader, Dinkar Sakrikar, whose name had been given to me by Miss Lankaster, had accepted my invitation, and I wondered whether, if I had been imprisoned for my beliefs, I should have been willing to go to a meeting at the official residence of the government that had imprisoned me. I had a long time to think, and worry, about this because twenty minutes after our appointed time, there was still no sign of my guests. I called the ADC Room only to discover, to my absolute horror, that the police sentries had detained the students. These police happened to be the very same men who had arrested the students before they were sent to prison, however, and both groups had whiled away the time reminiscing, until the ADCs rang through and approved their entry.
Although I was better acclimatised and much more knowledgeable about Indian politics than I had been when my father first brokered the idea of me interacting with the students, I was nevertheless nervous that I might be faced with a disgruntled, confrontational group of former dissidents, and now it was about to happen, I was even more concerned. But I need not have worried one bit for I was met with smiling faces and much laughter about what had happened, and we talked easily over tea. Early the next morning we set off to see the institutions where they studied – the G. S. Medical College, Bombay University, and the J. J. School of Art. They drove me in a car flying the new Indian flag and introduced me to many of their friends. We rushed around excitedly, and it was fascinating, but there was not really time to talk as I had to be back at Government House to fly off with my parents at noon. I arrived back dripping with bouquets, garlands and presents, overcome by my welcome and their friendliness.
Back in Delhi, it wasn’t long before news came in that the now divided Punjab was in total crisis. My mother set off at once with Rajkumari Amrit Kaur – Gandhiji’s personal secretary had now become the new Minister for Health – to survey the region for herself. They found horrific scenes and mass hysteria, ‘the place of the dead’, as Muriel Watson, her personal assistant, described it to Panditji and my father on their return. But of course it didn’t end there. In the coming weeks my mother flew from one region to another, witnessing the atrocities at first hand. There were times when the reports were so terrible that I feared for her safety and even her life.
Millions of refugees were moving in opposite directions using the same roads. When a Hindu or Sikh had had his village burned and his family massacred by Muslims, or vice versa, they would be overcome by blind rage when they saw people they now considered to be their mortal enemies on the opposite side of the road. They would attack, then their inflamed co-religionists would join in, so fighting would break out among those who had previously been fleeing to safety. It was heartbreaking to think that for many years these people had lived peacefully as neighbours.
Not afraid of facing the crisis head-on, my mother kept Panditji and Rajkumari informed of the terrible situation in the ever-expanding refugee camps. At one Muslim camp, she and her team intervened when they found a gang of Hindus and Sikhs trying to set fire to it and burn the inmates to death. The ADCs who travelled with her were amazed at her bravery and often found that she took them into situations that even they, as serving officers, were alarmed by. One of her major concerns was the abduction of Hindu and Sikh women in Bengal. There were hundreds of cases of women being raped and forced to become Muslim. My mother’s office went into overdrive, helped by the presence of the feisty, angry Punjabi refugee, Jaya Dalip Singh, the niece of Rajkumari.
Jaya was very bitter when she arrived, having come to Delhi with her wealthy family after they and their entire community lost their homes in Lucknow. Jaya, who was twenty-one, was initially in shock, her life having collapsed overnight. On arrival in Delhi she had turned her back on her family, spending her evenings in nightclubs, living what she termed ‘a fast and loose life’. In despair, her parents appealed to Rajkumari for help. ‘Send her to my friend Lady Mountbatten,’ Rajkumari told them. ‘She needs someone who can speak Punjabi when she visits the refugee camps. She will sort Jaya out.’ Jaya’s fate was sealed.
I liked Jaya, her energy and her plight touched me, and here, at last, was someone nearer my own age. She certainly needed someone to offload her frustrations on to and I was a willing listener. She had witnessed atrocities first hand and now possessed a wisdom that came from direct experience; while I was acutely aware of the problems that fuelled the country’s burgeoning crisis, I had been sheltered from the worst of it and would be unlikely ever to suffer in the way she had. Jaya was proud to be from the Punjab, having always considered herself Punjabi before Indian, and she was furious with my father because in all the discussions about independence, the countless meetings of committees and councils, no Punjabi representative had been in attendance, and therefore their land and their lives had been forfeited. ‘Congress believes that I should be happy that the Punjab has been sacrificed for the “freedom of India”,’ an impassioned Jaya told me. ‘Well, I am not!’
Jaya came to soften her views over time, and while I felt she condemned my father unjustly, I sat through her fiery monologues, listening quietly, and was rather relieved when, after a while, she came to adore not only my mother but my father as well.
It did appear that, since independence, the country was intent on self-destruction. Throughout India people were turning on their neighbours, and stories of massacre and murder were never far from anyone’s lips. While we were in Simla our treasurer’s son was killed as he returned from college in Delhi. His parents couldn’t be dissuaded from leaving immediately to try to recover his body, and they were murdered on the train down to Delhi. It was difficult to make sense of any of this destruction of life. Still in Simla, we gave a farewell dinner for Lord Ismay’s daughter Sarah and her soon-to-be-fiancé Wenty Beaumont, our ADC. They were on a train to Delhi the next day when a mob of Hindus stopped the train and killed all 150 Muslims on board, with the exception of Wenty’s bearer, whom Sarah had bravely hidden beneath her seat, cloaked by her skirt. When the mob burst in, Sarah swore that they were alone in the carria
ge.
Turmoil was engulfing the newly independent nation, the situation deteriorating with such frightening speed that Congress recalled my father from our brief holiday in Simla. They felt that his advice would be valuable. We travelled back in an open police car as our car was stuck somewhere between Lucknow and Delhi, leaving Jim Scott, one of the ADCs, with the headache of having to get eighty Muslim and 150 Hindu servants back to Delhi. Eventually it was decided to send them down to Ambala under an armed escort and then fly them home in groups. Our drivers were all Muslim so we were driven back by the ADCs. In our party was an ecstatic Leela Nand, who was bursting with pride now that he had two ‘Excellencies’ to look after as well as me.
Delhi was a maelstrom. There was a stabbing on the estate soon after we returned and I could not go to the clinic or the canteen without an armed guard, which naturally I did not do as they were needed elsewhere. Anyway, now that a curfew had been imposed, the clinic, which had been looking after two hundred people a day, had very few patients and the canteen was almost empty. The streets were littered with fires and corpses and the ADCs began to find the job of ADC2 the most challenging, as my mother, undeterred by snipers, would get them to help her pick up any corpse she passed in the street and take it to the infirmary. My father had told her that she must have an armed escort but initially she refused, for the same reasons that I had. There was no question of her staying at home, however. She did change her mind after her vehicle was followed by a car full of what she described as ‘the most terrifying ruffians with guns sticking out everywhere’. My father was delighted to know his orders, that armed plainclothes policemen should shadow his wife, had been carried out.
I remained astounded by my mother’s stamina and bravery. Before a visit to the Punjab the governor telephoned to say it must be cancelled because there was no way he could guarantee her safety, but she insisted on going. The ADC reported that even before landing they could see an enormous crowd below, and when they descended from the plane it was apparent that this was an angry gathering of Sikhs, shouting war cries and brandishing kirpans. Assessing the situation, my mother forbade her aides to follow and walked towards the crowd. As she approached, half a dozen of the leaders detached themselves from the mob and moved towards her. The ADCs saw nothing but anger and danger. My mother, however, simply held out her arms towards the leaders, who, to everyone’s astonishment, sheathed their weapons and held their arms out too. It was an extraordinary moment, which the ADCs could later only describe to us as one in which love overcame anger. The leaders and my mother hugged and then she moved into the crowd, quickly followed by the ADCs. Her new friends then escorted her to the refugee camp and she was able to do the work she had come to do. There was no question of her being afraid or considering herself brave. She had a job to do and she got on with doing it.
Back in Delhi, the hospitals were woefully vulnerable to attack, and my mother tore around, trying to procure them guards and fuel. Moreover, there was now also the problem of food shortages. Shops were shut, supplies could not get through, and the labourers who produced the food had taken flight. We set up a rationing centre on the estate to feed the 5,000 residents and the 5,000 refugees we had taken in. By the middle of September, it was calculated that the remaining stores of food would last only one more week.
The only good news was that in Calcutta Gandhiji’s presence had prevented the terrible rioting that might otherwise have happened there. My father said he alone had accomplished what an army brigade might not have been able to do. When he felt it was time to leave, Gandhiji returned to Delhi, and my father immediately went to talk to him about how best to contain the chaos in the capital. A sort of war room had been set up in the Governor-General’s House. Lieutenant General ‘Pete’ Rees came down to head up what became known as the Military Emergency Staff, who were to work out of ‘the Map Room’. I was drafted in as his PA, typing notes and lists, sending messages, as well as taking and making telephone calls for the general. This would have been quite straightforward, had the telephones worked reliably, but they seemed to be forever ringing when you were unable to answer them. And as soon as you were asked to place an urgent call, you would pick up the receiver and find that the line was dead. Most of the telephone operators had left the city. We worked in the Map Room from nine until six, seven days a week.
When cholera broke out in the refugee camps in Amritsar in the middle of September, my parents flew off with Panditji, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and a delegation of representatives to survey the movement of refugees in the Punjab. Jaya went with them as a translator and later told me just how appalled they all were by what they saw, by the sheer numbers of homeless people, and the vast scale of the displacement. Jaya was impressed by my parents’ ability to act fairly and speedily and recounted to me how my mother was mobbed wherever she went – it was well known among the refugees that soon after a visit from Lady Mountbatten, help would be close at hand.
The chaos continued throughout October. We were working twelve-hour days, living on bully beef and Spam, under martial law. In the midst of the mayhem, with the country fragmenting around us, it didn’t take much to be persuaded by the ADCs that I should join them in seeking a little light relief in a makeshift nightclub set up in the house of an older, rather dashing Indian officer, Brigadier ‘Kipper’ Cariappa. This was my first taste of nightclubbing and I loved it. Kipper had set up a room for dancing, a room for sitting out, and a bar. We were all high on a blitz spirit. Until, that is, Panditji heard about our ‘club’ and had it closed down immediately.
In the midst of all this devastation, I wondered whether we would be able to get away to the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip in November. As a representative of Prince Philip’s family, I had been asked to be a bridesmaid – I was lucky that Patricia was already married, otherwise I might have missed out on the privilege. Amid the turbulence of India, the wedding seemed somewhat unreal to me, another world, but I was hoping we would manage to leave the troubles behind us for a short time.
The princess had sent me a sweet letter about the bridesmaids’ dresses and the ball the night before the wedding. I had managed to get to the durzi in Connaught Circus to have a dress made up from some sari material. I feared we would not be able to leave India, however, as there seemed to be no end to the violence. And indeed, at the end of October, when NWFP tribesmen marched upon Srinagar and Indian troops were sent in to face them, I realised there would be no chance of getting away. My parents agreed that it would be madness for us to leave for England at such a time of trouble. But Panditji thought differently and persuaded them, saying that we should go in order not to draw attention to the Kashmir crisis. And so, on 9 November, in spite of our great anxiety, we flew to London for ten days.
12
The last national celebration, the Victory Parade only a year before, was triumphant but not light-hearted. The Royal Wedding was to be a moment for the country to rejoice, the first opportunity in years to see so many foreign royals on British soil, after the bleak years of separation that had kept them apart. Unsurprisingly, then, people began to stake out positions along the route in the days before the wedding, and even the promise of rain did nothing to put off the campers intent on glimpsing the heir to the throne on her wedding day.
My seven co-bridesmaids had attended several fittings for their dresses over a period of many weeks. There was only time for me to have two, but the expertise of the designer, Norman Hartnell, and his team meant that the dress fitted perfectly. Our white dresses had an ethereal beauty – tight waisted with full skirts of many layers of tulle, over white satin petticoats. As they were sleeveless, tulle fichus were draped over our shoulders and fastened with a large satin bow at the front of the bodice. These were edged with a series of star-shaped lily heads created from seed pearls and crystal beads. Our skirts were also sprinkled with the same design, echoing, as we would discover, the pattern covering the bride’s tulle train. The fine handiwork in
the dresses was set off perfectly by delicate tiaras of silver orange blossom and ears of corn. We wore long white gloves, fastened by a row of half a dozen little pearl buttons, so that we could release our hands when it came to eating. I was over the moon to have such a beautiful dress.
During the reception and ball before the wedding, the royal visitors gathered together, the atmosphere one of great excitement as kings and queens, princes and princesses who hadn’t seen each other for six years were reunited. So many had been displaced by the war, including high-spirited Queen Frederika of Greece, known as Freddie, who had been exiled to South Africa; Queen Ena, estranged wife of my philandering godfather King Alfonso, who had been in Italy and Switzerland since the 1930s; and King Michael of Romania, who had been crowned king aged five, then exiled to England, and had only just returned to Romania (where a month later he was forced to abdicate at gunpoint by Stalin-backed communists).
I was delighted to see Uncle Gustav and Aunt Louise, my father’s sister, and to catch up on family news. I didn’t know this at the time but was told later that, during one of the balls, Prince George of Denmark asked Aunt Alice whether she might put a word in for him as my suitor. My father, always one to know his mind, said a firm ‘no’, as he believed I was too young and needed to see a bit more of the world before settling down. It was a privilege for us to be in the company of the legendary King Haakon of Norway. He was deeply revered by his countrymen as a war hero, a symbol of his people’s resistance, for when the Germans overran Norway, he would not collaborate but remained defiantly in his palace and rode out on his white horse through the streets of Oslo every day. Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands caused a stir, remarking that ‘Everyone’s jewellery is so dirty’, which may or may not have been the case; to me it was just remarkable that all those royal jewels had survived the war. Most pieces had only just come out of storage for the occasion. It was typical of Princess Juliana to say such a thing, for she was very practical and down to earth. When she had been in exile in Canada, her friends and neighbours had noted that she lived happily as one of them without airs or graces. Interestingly, her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, had been an important symbol of Dutch resistance and had brought her government to London. Churchill had described Queen Wilhelmina as the only real man in all the governments-in-exile in London. She was soon to abdicate in favour of her plain-speaking daughter.