Daughter of Empire

by Pamela Hicks

  The day of the wedding was like being part of a fairy tale. We got ready in Buckingham Palace and the atmosphere was a mixture of frenzy and calm as the professional dressers helped us prepare. As with every wedding there were several moments of panic before the bride was finally ready. As she was having her veil fitted, the tiara broke, so an aide had to be bundled into a taxi and sent across London to the jeweller’s. Furthermore, the princess wished to wear the pearls that her father had given her, but after a frantic search, someone remembered that they had been left on display with the other wedding presents at St James’s Palace. Her secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Charteris, was dispatched to retrieve them. Then, just as the bride was about to leave for Westminster Abbey, her bouquet could not be found, and once again there was a lot of rushing around until it was discovered – it had been popped in a cupboard where it would remain cool. Throughout this, the bride remained unflustered and calm.

  We travelled by car to Westminster Abbey as the crowd cheered its heart out. At the abbey, those close enough to the barriers were rewarded for their perseverance, as they were the first to see the bride emerge, resplendent in her beautiful dress and veil. Being one of the tallest, I was in the last pair of bridesmaids in the procession, with Princess Margaret and Princess Alexandra at the front to make sure that Princess Elizabeth’s veil was in place and the train unfurled before we set off down the aisle. In the rehearsal we had all been warned to veer to the right to avoid walking on the grave of the Unknown Warrior, but one of the little pages, Prince Michael of Kent, stepped right on it.

  As we processed slowly up the aisle, I could see Cousin Philip standing with his best man, David Milford Haven, another of our cousins. The bridegroom was so dashing that it made you realise why every girl in England seemed to think she was in love with him. The service was very moving, and as Princess Elizabeth and the newly created Duke of Edinburgh said their vows, the crowd outside could hear every word through the loudspeakers. When the veil was pulled back from Princess Elizabeth’s face, everyone could see the beauty of her peaches-and-cream complexion. Once the service was over, a fanfare of trumpets and a rousing organ voluntary accompanied our procession back down the aisle. We followed the newly married couple through the ecstatic crowds back to the palace, closely followed by the King and Queen and most of the royalty of Europe.

  ‘Baron’, Prince Philip’s friend Bill Nahum, had been chosen to take the photographs – much to the chagrin of Cecil Beaton – and when the bridesmaids were no longer needed, we sat down to watch the huge group being bossed around and the way in which different people responded. Freddie of Greece kept chatting to Juliana of the Netherlands irrespective of instructions; the long bird-of-paradise feathers on my mother’s hat obscured several people behind her and Grandmama – no fan of group photographs – positioned herself firmly on the edge of the group, leaving a little space between her and her neighbour, hoping she might be left out of the picture. I thought she looked particularly smart in the long black coat beautifully embroidered in white that my father had brought her from Kashmir. Princess Helena Victoria, known in the family as Thora, was in a wheelchair at the time and held her stick protectively against her as if she expected the young Prince Richard of Gloucester to do something sudden and unexpected to her. Grandmama, rather mockingly, always referred privately to Thora and her ancient sister Princess Marie Louise as ‘The Princesses of Nothing’, even though they were both granddaughters of Queen Victoria and had been princesses of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1917, when King George V had anglicized everyone’s titles, they hadn’t gained an English family name.

  After the photography session was over, we bridesmaids, the pages and the best man accompanied the bride and groom, the King and Queen and Queen Mary on to the balcony. We were met by an incredible sight: the police had been holding everyone back around the Victoria Memorial, but when we came out, they let them go and we could see – and hear – a sea of people surging forward. Every time the newly-weds waved, the volume of cheering increased. We were later told that while they were waiting the crowd had been singing ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’.

  We had been on our feet for a long time, so it was a relief to sit down to the wedding breakfast, a splendid banquet of fish and partridge, ice cream and cake for 150 people. After the couple had changed and were ready to leave, we hurried through the palace courtyard to shower them with rose petals. Princess Elizabeth was delighted to discover that Susan, her favourite corgi, had been hidden under a rug in her carriage so that she could join them for their honeymoon at Broadlands; this was particularly poignant for my family as we weren’t going to get a chance to go back there before we returned to India. I could only imagine the excitement of the staff as they awaited the royal couple’s arrival. Before they left, Philip gave each of the bridesmaids a silver powder compact. Mine had two bands of gold with an E and a P surmounted by coronets and two bands of gold decoration with six dark blue sapphires running down the centre.

  Towards the end of the evening, the bridesmaids went out to dine and dance at a party hosted by David Milford Haven. I hoped – in vain – that Prince Michael of Bourbon-Parma would be there, as he had been by far the most handsome young man at the reception. David was good looking too but he was older and far more sophisticated than us – his girlfriend at the time was the stunning Swedish model Anita Ekberg – and it was clear he found us dull and prim, for he kept leaping out of his seat and darting over to talk to a dazzling girl at the next table. The girls seated on either side of him looked furious.

  The wedding and the attendant celebrations were now over and in no time at all we had to leave England. ‘Lovely to be home,’ my father wrote in his diary once we were back in India. We were still laughing at Queen Mary’s reaction to the piece of specially woven white cotton that we had brought from Gandhiji for Princess Elizabeth and Philip. When the gift was displayed, Queen Mary was horrified to discover what she took to be ‘a loin cloth’. For us, there was now a sense of familiarity to life in Delhi, and a sense of belonging. And so it was that we vowed to make the most of our remaining, precious time in India.

  13

  On our return it was clear that the post-partition crisis was far from over. Now that he was Governor-General – a merely decorative title – my father decided to reinforce the message of independence by leaving the new government to its business and honouring the tradition of visiting the Princely States. It was to be an arduous undertaking by my parents and the ADCs. My father was a stickler for precision and such a tour was demanding on his staff – they had to ensure protocol was observed, that all schedules ran to time, and no one was offended. This was no easy task.

  Our party now always contained extra guests because my parents, thinking that we would have plenty of time to entertain them, had extended invitations to their friends. Sadly, this proved not to be the case, and the friends were often dragged along in our retinue or left pretty much to their own devices until we returned. As I was reminded each morning on our ride, my father was delighted that Yola was to be our first visitor, accompanied by another friend, Kay Norton. She had once found her bearer looking through a keyhole into her room. When reprimanded he replied, quite obviously, ‘But if I don’t, how do I know when to go in?’

  They would accompany us to the much-anticipated silver jubilee celebrations of His Highness the Maharaja of Jaipur. This week-long celebration promised to be a magnificent affair, but we were worried by the continuing riots in the Punjab. The European guests invited to the jubilee were woefully ignorant of the situation in the north and my father was extremely irritated by the glamorous Princess Peggy d’Arenberg and her friend Rosita de Rosière, who arrived from Paris with a personal hairdresser. He thought this very bad form when there were starving and displaced Indians all around.

  My parents were already friends with the Jaipur family. The maharaja was an international polo player and had often played in England, and they kept a house in London. I had got to kno
w them in Delhi as his son Bubbles was the commandant of the bodyguard. I was surprised that Ayesha, although Jai’s constant companion in Delhi as ‘Third Her Highness in Jaipur’, was very much the junior hostess to ‘Second Her Highness’, Jo Didi. I was also surprised to discover that although Jai was only in his mid-thirties, he had three wives (one of whom had died a couple of years earlier), five children (two of whom were older than me) and had been ruler of his state for a quarter of a century.

  This was the first time I had visited Jai’s palaces. He lived in the private apartments of the huge City Palace, some of which had already been turned into a museum. There seemed to be palaces all over the place – we stayed in the enormous Rambagh Palace, and on a ride on the back of an elephant to the Amber Fort, we saw three more palaces hidden in the steep defile below.

  The festivities began with a grand parade for the Festival of Dussehra, when Hindus mark the triumph of good over evil. We watched men in turbans and courtly dress carrying huge ceremonial horns and magnificently bedecked elephants process slowly past us in the palace courtyard. It was a shock to see Jai sacrifice a goat, dip his fingers into little bowls of its blood, then, with a flicking movement, bless a long line of elaborately dressed horses, oxen and elephants as each was brought to him. When the celebrations moved to the Palace Hall, my parents were placed in positions of honour just to the left of Jai, who sat on a great throne made of pure silver. There he received a long procession of nobles who had arrived to pay homage, kept cool as they waited by the ministrations of servants with huge plumed fans. It was a world away from the civil war that was rapidly becoming imminent five hundred miles to the north of Kashmir.

  A couple of days into the celebrations my father invested Jai as Grand Commander of the Star of India in the City Palace, and I found myself seated next to the old Maharaja of Kapurthala. It was a relief to be able to talk to him – when I had first met him, soon after our arrival, it had been very awkward as he kept asking me if I had been able to do any sightseeing. I had only been to the Qutub Minar tower with my mother, but I didn’t like to mention it because his young, sixth wife had just committed suicide by jumping from it. This time I was not so tongue-tied.

  We returned to Delhi after six wonderful days – my father in cheerful mood as Jai had organised for him to play in a polo match at which he was reunited with Rao Raja Hanut Singh, the very man who had taught him to play in Jodhpur in 1921. I was particularly excited about returning as Patricia and John were coming to stay. Sadly they didn’t bring their baby as it would have been too unsettling for him. Apparently they noticed a great difference in me, and remarked on how serious I had become since swapping my life as an English schoolgirl for that of the Last Viceroy of India’s daughter. I came in for a lot of teasing and was nicknamed ‘Lady Earnestine’.

  At the final gathering of the Chamber of Princes, my father tried his best to see that the princes were left as secure as possible within the new dominions. He felt strongly that they needed to understand they were responsible for their own destiny. With this in mind he advised them to take up any opportunity that presented itself, and many did find their feet in the new political landscape: Jai became ambassador to Spain, Patiala became the chief minister in Patiala state and the new Maharaja of Kashmir, Tiger, enjoyed a brilliant career in India. And while some never recovered from the shock of their changed circumstances, others found themselves on unexpected journeys. Several years later, my father was very surprised to see the young Rao Raja of Bundi – a seventeen-gun-salute prince and Second World War hero, awarded an MC in Burma – standing behind the president of India’s chair at a banquet as the president’s ADC. My father’s ADCs had always sat down to eat with us. Bundi asked to see him afterwards and my father feared he was going to complain. He was very surprised when Bundi merely wanted to express his gratitude to my father for having encouraged him to offer the president his services.

  Meanwhile, as violence continued to sweep through the country, Gandhiji was about to fast again ‘unto death’, or until the Muslim and Hindu leaders promised to make peace. The numbers of dead were rising and millions of people had been forced to flee their homes. The situation was the very antithesis of what Gandhiji stood for, and he felt India had learned nothing from all the years he had spent teaching non-violence and brotherhood. His silent protests had been very effective in the past, and this time he was showing his distress that Congress was withholding partition payments from Pakistan by way of sanction, again vowing to continue his fast until it relented.

  It was decided we would all still travel to Bikaner as part of my father’s tour, but that as a mark of respect for the fast there would be no state banquet. A party of twenty-eight, we stayed with the maharaja, and were presented with a sixty-page programme for the days ahead. The entry for Lagoon Terrace read: ‘The Master of the Household will take the necessary steps to ensure that the crows and other birds are not allowed to settle on trees on the Lagoon Terrace for at least a week beforehand and special care must be taken about this on the day of the lunch.’ It was, though, a particularly enjoyable visit as my father had known the maharaja for many years. They had first met when they were children, later at the coronation of King George V, and then when my father served on the staff of the Prince of Wales for his visit to India in 1921.

  There was an early morning shoot of the famous imperial sandgrouse. Thirty thousand birds flew over our heads. They were difficult to shoot, flying very fast and swerving in all directions. That evening we gathered in the Durbar Hall of Lallgarh Palace where my father invested the maharajah with the Grand Cross of the Star of India. The assembled nobles and courtiers looked magnificent in their red and yellow Durbar dress.

  The next day, a review of the Bikaner State Army included a trot past of the Camel Corps and a gallop past of the Durbar Lancers. The Bijey Battery on parade served with great distinction in my father’s Burma Campaign in the Second World War and also fought in the battles of Kohima and Imphal.

  We then visited the fort where we saw regalia given to the Bikaner rulers by Moghal Emperors and were shown beautifully illuminated Sanskrit and Urdu manuscripts.

  Immediately we arrived back in Dehli, my parents went to see Gandhi at Birla House and found him very weak but not without his desire to tease. ‘It takes a fast to bring you to me,’ he reproached them with a smile. Five days after he began his fast, Congress relented and paid over the money to Pakistan. Gandhiji had remained characteristically composed both during his fast and after a bomb exploded in his garden two days later.

  There are no words to express the shock, that moment of horror, when two weeks later, as I was listening to the wireless in my room, having returned from a visit with my parents to the Central States, it was announced that Gandhiji had been assassinated. At first I could not believe what I was hearing but the gravity of the announcer’s voice was unmistakable, and as the tears poured down my cheeks I felt as if I had lost a member of my family. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole of India came to a complete standstill, everyone stunned by the death of the Father of the Nation.

  In the chaotic hours that followed, it was not clear who had been the assassin. When my father arrived at Birla House, someone in the crowd shouted, ‘A Muslim did it!’ My father had to think quickly, for such an unfounded rumour could incite civil war. ‘You fool!’ he shouted back. ‘It was a Hindu!’ He was proved right, the assassin a Hindu fanatic from the RSS Party. Inside the building my father found the country’s leaders in silent reverence, lost in their distress at the death of their mentor and friend. Nehru had somehow to pull himself together to make a broadcast to the nation that afternoon. The simplicity of his words, ‘The light has gone out’, summed up our collective feelings perfectly.

  In keeping with the Hindu custom to cremate a body as soon as possible after death, Gandhiji’s funeral was arranged for the next day. His body had been laid on the balcony at Birla House and in death he seemed so tiny and frail, his h
ead resting peacefully on a cushion of flowers. At first I couldn’t work out why he didn’t look like himself, then I realised that his glasses had been removed. His body was carried down to the funeral carriage and covered with the new Indian national flag. Everywhere the crowds pressed in, trying to touch him, and it was a while before the procession was able to start. The Mahatma’s last journey, accompanied by large crowds of his fellow countrymen, was to take him to the Raj Ghat, the burning ground six miles away on the banks of the holy River Jumna. At the head of the procession, next to the bier, Nehru led the people, a slow, solemn journey on foot.

  We went ahead by car, followed by the Indian governors. At the Raj Ghat we pushed our way through the enormous gathering to a low platform in front of the funeral pyre. In the distance we could see the slow approach of the cortège, followed by hundreds of thousands of mourners. My father, realising that the sheer pressure of such an emotional crowd might push all those in the front ranks on to the pyre, rushed up and down instructing the ambassadors, governors and assorted VIPs to sit cross-legged on the ground. In a highly charged atmosphere, Gandhiji’s body was placed on the funeral pyre. After he was anointed with sacred oils and showered with ghee, Gandhiji’s son lit the pyre. It was horrific to see his beloved body engulfed by flames, but strangely the atmosphere of intense sorrow soon changed to one of joy as people in the crowd pressed forward to throw flowers. Momentarily, the new feeling of elation changed to shock as several village women screamed hysterically and tried to hurl themselves into the flames to commit suttee, but mercifully they were stopped before they could harm themselves. As the fire consumed Gandhiji’s body, the air became filled with cries of ‘Gandhi is immortal!’