I was born in the British Military Hospital in a place called Ambala, about 125 miles north of Delhi. Ambala sits pretty much at the centre of the ancient Grand Trunk Road which crosses the widest, top part of the triangle of India, going 2,500 miles from the Bay of Bengal, through Bangladesh, India, and then Pakistan, to Afghanistan (or the other way round), and so it was a natural place for the British, in the nineteenth century, to set up an army base, or cantonment as they are known in India (pronounced cantoonment). My father, who was in the Indian Army (Dogra Regiment), was posted there with Mum at the time I arrived in the world – which was in November 1939. Since India became independent only eight years later, and there was a world war which separated couples in between, I must be among the last of the British Raj babies, along with a few others of my age, the best-known of whom are Joanna Lumley, who was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, because her dad (like mine) was in the army (a Gurkha of course), and Julie Christie, born in Assam, because her father was a tea planter. (In older generations, Spike Milligan and Vivien Leigh were born in India, and I was once assured that Elizabeth Taylor had been born in Calcutta, but when I looked it up it turned out her birthplace was nowhere more exotic than Hampstead Garden Suburb.)
The India that I feel I belong to no longer exists because it was the India of the last days of the British Raj and can only be glimpsed in photographs and films now, but then again, no place is the same as it was seventy-five years ago, and the all-white England we ‘Indian’ children felt so ill-at-ease in when we were brought home does not exist either, thank heavens. Curiously, though, no matter the changes, I have to say that for me those old Jesuits were right: I still feel nostalgic for the time and the country in which I spent my early years, and I still feel very much at home in India.
I should have grown up to be a spy because I learned recently that ‘Kim’ Philby, the notorious British double agent, was also born in Ambala, in 1912. He was actually called Harold Adrian Russell but nicknamed ‘Kim’ after the boy in Rudyard Kipling’s book of the same name, and the irony is that the Kim in the novel was also involved with the British Secret Services, being tasked with delivering a message to the Head of Intelligence – in Ambala of all places, of course. And weirdest of all, when reading his obituary not long ago, I discovered that Harry Chapman Pincher, the well-known British journalist who made a whole long career out of writing about spies, was also born in Ambala.
But I didn’t turn into a spy; I did something very slightly similar by becoming a journalist, and then marrying a diplomat – I call my husband AW – and in 1986 we were posted to India where I immediately felt as if I belonged (despite living in a hotel room for months) but where AW and our daughters took a while to settle down.
Later, long after we had left India and were posted to Syria, AW and I went back on a visit, partly because our daughter Hester was doing a gap year there, and partly so that AW, who is a Buddhist, could visit Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama has his base. We hired a battered old taxi in Delhi for the journey to Dharamsala and at one point our route actually took us through Ambala – where the driver fell asleep and we very nearly had a head-on collision with a lorry which would have been fatal. AW said my obituary would have read ‘Brigid Keenan, born in Ambala 1939, died in Ambala 1994’, and people would think I had never left the place in between.
My brother and sisters and I grew up aware that our family had been in India for a long time – at least four generations we were told – as railway engineers (my grandfather), army and customs (other grandfather), railway administration (great-grandfather), foresters (uncle), indigo planters (great-great-uncle). Furthest back, and most romantically, was a Frenchman, E. Dubus, apparently taken prisoner by the British in Bengal during the Napoleonic Wars, who was allowed to return to France for a year, on parole, in order to bring his silk-weaving business back to India from Lyons. He set up his factory, which was called Nakanda, in Bengal. I inherited a drawing he made of the building and in 2014 AW and I went – armed with a copy of the picture – to the once-French settlement of Chandernagore near Calcutta, and to various silk-weaving areas in the region trying, and failing, to find Nakanda. We came to the conclusion that perhaps it was in the part of Bengal which is now Bangladesh. We are still on the case. (What we have found, among Mum’s and Dad’s old family papers, is the marriage certificate of E. Dubus’s daughter Madeleine (my great-grandmother) to an Englishman, Walter Charles Lydiard – another silk manufacturer in Bengal – in 1872 in India.)
Dad himself was born in Bangalore in 1902; we were always urging him to write down his memoirs for us but he only managed about half a dozen pages scrawled on the backs of envelopes or on already-used scrap paper, briefly telling how, soon after he was born, his family moved to Burma where his father worked for Customs and Excise; how they moved back to Bangalore in 1912 so their five children could go to school (nowhere suitable in Rangoon); how his father volunteered for the army in the First World War and was posted to Basra in Iraq (Dad’s mother stayed in Bangalore with the children); and how Dad went to England when he was seventeen, swotted like mad at an army crammer and got into Sandhurst, after which he returned to serve in the Indian Army. (His parents eventually resumed their old life in Burma.)
My father lists these bare facts, but he writes a little more about two other, obviously rather traumatic and therefore memorable, events in his life. One was being bitten by a rabid dog when he was a young soldier of twenty-three, and having to go to the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli, ‘in the hills’ (as people referred to the Himalayas), and endure two injections with a huge needle into his stomach, one on each side of his navel, every day for fourteen days. The other was how his grandfather, an elderly widower who had retired from the Great Indian Peninsula Railway to the Nilgiri Hills in south-western India, married the nurse who cared for him in hospital there when he developed pneumonia. She was called Mrs White. Dad went to stay with the newlyweds when he was in the Nilgiri Hills himself, convalescing from the rabies injections, but after that the family don’t seem to have heard much from them again, and when the old man died a couple of years later, he left everything to his new wife. This must have been a bitter blow to the family: Dad wrote that his grandfather had a ‘fat’ pension, and he’d been impressed by what he saw on his visit to them. ‘He [the grandfather] had acquired some acres of Shola forest which he cleared and turned into a very pleasant estate with a fully furnished and well-built house, servants’ quarters, outbuildings, full staff and a motor car with driver.’ Not a single penny – or perhaps I should say rupee – of all this was passed to Dad’s family. Mrs White was never forgotten by the Keenans . . . An odd postscript to the story is that this grandfather and my mother’s grandfather are buried practically side by side in the Christian cemetery of Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills: they did not know each other in their lifetimes, but two generations later their descendants married, and they themselves ended up neighbours in death.
Since Dad never got round to the memoirs, I can only follow our progress round India via the family photograph albums, and I see from the pictures taken at my christening in Ambala that, aside from the fact that I was a truly hideous baby, we lived in a rather pleasant, colonial-style white bungalow with a deep veranda enclosed by arches. There seems to be someone called Nanny in these pictures, but she never appears again, and I never heard her talked about. My half-brother David – eleven years older than me (his father was Mum’s first husband who died not long after David was born) – was at school in England so she was not there for him; perhaps she looked after my sister Moira, who was seven when I was born, or maybe she was just taken on as a maternity nurse for my own first few weeks.
We obviously didn’t stay long in Ambala because six months later, on the next page of the album, in 1940, we are in Kasauli, where Dad had had his anti-rabies injections fifteen years before. I learn from Google that Kasauli is not only another army cantonment town, it is also a popular Indian holiday resort, so maybe we were
just there on leave, because, on the following page, again only a few months later, we have moved to Jubbulpore (now called Jabalpur), an ancient town in central India with a large army cantonment and a strange history: it was chosen as the base of operations for Sir William Henry Sleeman, a British soldier and administrator, who, in the 1830s, suppressed the Thuggee cult in India. Thuggees (it’s where our word ‘thug’ comes from) had terrorised the country for six hundred years: they would befriend travellers and then, having gained their confidence, they would strangle them, steal their possessions and bury their bodies by the road. Thousands were killed in this way, and it was all done in the spirit of making a sacrifice to the god Kali. Jabalpur is also one of the places where, notoriously, Indian mutineers/freedom fighters were executed by cannon in 1857.
There are five pages in the album of me with Mum and Moira in Jabalpur in 1941 doing various things in our garden – sitting on a horse held by a syce, the Indian word for a groom (see the cover of this book), petting a small spotted deer that I have no recollection of at all and posing beside a beautiful vintage car (which was of course just a normal car in those days). Next thing, I am at a tea party far away from there in Kashmir, dressed as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. (The other day I visited my oldest friend, Sophie, who was born in India the year after me; we were going through her photo album and suddenly there was a picture of Sophie, aged two, at a party, also dressed as the White Rabbit – her costume looks uncannily like mine so we came to the conclusion that my mother must have passed it on to her mother.)
After Kashmir we are in the hill station of Nathia Gali (in what is now Pakistan) and for the first time since my christening – because it was wartime and he was always away – Dad is in the pictures with Moira and me, so he must have come home on leave. Then we seem to have passed briefly through a place called Kalabagh before moving to Peshawar (also now in Pakistan) because Dad was posted to the North-West Frontier, and that is where my younger sister Tessa was born in 1942. (Dad knew about all the secret military tunnels and fortifications in the hills around the Frontier, and when we were older we used to tease him by calling him Keenan of the Khyber.)
And then, suddenly, it is 1945, and we are photographed in the garden of our grandparents’ house in England. I will explain that later.
I don’t know why we moved seven times in four years but it’s no wonder I have so many dim memories of travelling on Indian trains: of journeys that took days not hours, of being shepherded through the clamour and confusion at the stations, of the vendors crowding round with food or ingenious toys made of clay or wood and string (they still do, but the toys are all plastic these days), of the meals – ordered in advance at previous stations – that came with white cloths and napkins and were brought to our carriage by uniformed bearers (waiters). There was no air-conditioning then so big blocks of ice were heaved into the carriages and placed on the floor and we children would sit on them while they slowly melted. On one of these journeys Mum pulled the communication cord on the train – I was grown up enough by then to be terrified that she would be arrested and taken away. It happened when we were settling back in our carriage after a halt: Mum accidentally kicked her shoe out of the door and on to the track. There was no question of retrieving it because, by the time she realised what had happened, we had gathered speed and were out of the station and well on our way, so she grabbed the cord – and amazingly, the train grumbled to a stop with much screeching and grinding of brakes and wheels. There were signs all over the carriages warning of the penalties you faced if you pulled the cord unnecessarily, but though railway officials – the guard? the driver? – came and there were questions and explanations, someone found her shoe and our journey was resumed and, phew, Mum was not dragged away in chains.
I feared for her another time, later on, when the police came to our house because there had been a fight between our cook and the vegetable wallah. It turned out to have been all Mum’s fault – she was writing letters home when the cook came to tell her that the vegetable wallah was at the door and Mum said, ‘Oh I could kill the vegetable man, he always comes at the wrong time.’
It was a Thomas à Becket situation – the cook went out to kill the veg man on Mum’s behalf and a big fight ensued, and when the police came and arrested the cook he said he was only acting on his memsahib’s instructions. The police interviewed the various people involved (not, obviously, in front of us children) and, once again, I was terrified Mum would be hauled off to prison, but to everyone’s relief, it was all sorted out and neither Mum nor the cook nor the vegetable wallah were arrested.
Apart from the break in 1945 when we went back to England for a time, my family stayed in India until 1948, a year after Independence, when we, like all the other British who’d lived there, had to pack up and go ‘home’. Hollow laughter here as ‘home’ was the place we children knew least in the world, though people in India talked about it a lot in a yearning way: there were cherished ‘letters from home’, longed-for ‘news from home’, and there were those who, excitingly, had come from ‘home’ or were going ‘home’. We thought ‘home’ must be something like heaven.
Until recently, I had no idea when in 1948 we left India, but then I discovered a site on the internet (www.passengerlists.co.uk) which specialises in obscure ships’ passenger lists, and it tracked down the Keenan family on SS Franconia, sailing from Bombay for Liverpool in June that year. From a photocopy of the document I found that my mother, who seemed old to us, was only forty when we came home, and that almost everyone on board our ship – more than a thousand people – belonged to British families exactly like ours; not necessarily army folk, of course, but missionaries, office workers, tea planters, a dressmaker, telephonists, typists, engineers and nurses as well. They had nearly all written ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ in the column headed Country of Last Permanent Residence (my italics) and that made me feel sad because it represented so much upheaval, parting and heartbreak . . . I also discovered lately (from the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia) that there are perhaps two million British graves in India – of those whose names would never be on any returning ships’ passenger lists.
One of our own addresses in India seems to be etched on my brain, probably because I was at that age – seven? – when I wrote it obsessively in all my books: Brightlands, 219A Bolton Road, Secunderabad, Deccan, India, The World, The Universe. Not long ago, on another return visit to India, AW and I were on a train going to Delhi and met a charming young Indian woman with a BlackBerry and she somehow looked it up – the street names are Indianised these days, of course, but she managed to find it – and discovered that our bungalow, Brightlands, is now a venue for wedding receptions.
What took a good few of our ancestors to India (along with very many other young men in a similar situation) was being poor in Ireland and joining the British Army which, apart from the Guinness Brewery, was one of the main employers there. (Roddy Doyle once described this as the great unspoken secret in Ireland.) And so, ironically, colonised Irishmen became part of the colonisation of India. Kipling chose to give two of his most famous characters this background: Terence Mulvaney, an irreverent troublemaking soldier who comes into many short stories, and, of course, Kim himself, whose real name in the book was Kimball O’Hara – the orphan child of an impoverished Irish soldier serving in India, and his wife.
I thought I’d been told that my Keenan great-grandfather married his wife in the cathedral in Bangalore, so a few years ago, when I first decided to investigate my family in India, I wrote to the Archbishop of Bangalore to ask if anyone there could look for the marriage certificate. He kindly went through the records and found not my great-grandfather’s, but four other marriages at the end of the nineteenth century involving Keenan girls from our family – with a British Army corporal, two sergeants and a drum-major. One of them, Bridget, was my great-aunt (why she spelled her name in the English and not the Irish way I don’t know).
; By the time I was born our family had risen in rank, and our life in India, and indeed the lives of all the British officers who served in the Indian Army in the last days of the Raj, was perfectly described by Paul Scott in his novel The Jewel in the Crown. We didn’t actually have a Hari Kumar-type illicit love affair and trauma in our midst, but I often think that had my sisters and I been born fifteen or twenty years earlier, any of us might have been Daphne Manners or Sarah Layton and created scandal and drama by falling in love with an Indian, a ‘native’.
We children always took the Indian side in any argument or disagreement with the staff in the house, and I used to be upset that the store cupboard in the kitchen containing tea and coffee, sugar and flour, was kept locked and that Mum doled out what was needed, and that Dad sometimes marked the whisky bottle so he’d know if someone had swigged a secret tot – though I found it incredibly clever that he used to turn the bottle upside down and then mark it so that the secret sign would not be where a person would expect it.
Our grandfather, we were told, had a foolproof method for detecting which of his servants had stolen something. If anything important went missing, he would summon all the staff and give them each a straw or a taper of the same length, and tell them that overnight the straw belonging to the thief would grow an inch. The next day he would summon them again – and find one straw shortened by an inch – which belonged, of course, to the culprit. I used to wonder about this, because you could probably only do it once.
In my mind’s eye my handsome father (black hair, blue eyes, very Irish-looking – with an Irish temper to match) is always dressed in stiffly ironed knee-length khaki shorts, with a shiny leather Sam Browne belt and long socks. He had a moustache (I’ve always loved men with moustaches as a consequence, I suppose) and when we were growing up Dad used to say, ‘Kissing a man without a moustache is like eating a hard-boiled egg without salt’ – but AW had a moustache when I married him, and when he shaved it off I didn’t notice for more than a month.
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