FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  The awesome thing – the only thing, really – we knew about Grandpa’s long life in India as a railway engineer, before he came ‘home’ to Fleet, was that one day at work out in the countryside he was attacked by a leopard: it leapt on him as he walked through some long grass, sank its claws into his shoulders and used him as a springboard to launch itself on to the man behind him. Grandpa could never lift his arms up very high as a result of his injuries, but, so the story went, the other man died of his.

  All I ever knew about Granny’s life in India was that she taught her cook how to make a delicious dish of fish with finely sliced vegetables wrapped in parcels of greaseproof paper and baked in the oven. The cook seemed to grasp the idea and Granny decided to serve this at some posh dinner she was giving. To her horror, when the papillotes were brought in on a big platter she saw that the cook had taken a short cut – instead of snipping out squares of greaseproof paper as she had shown him, he had used sheets of lavatory paper (which was a bit like greaseproof in those days) and each little parcel had BRONCO stamped on it somewhere.

  I promised my father before he died that (with an exception which I will explain later) I wouldn’t read his letters to my mother, but I never promised not to read Mum’s to him, and so, recently, I dipped into the ones she wrote at this time – from mid-1945 to autumn 1946 – and learned of her fears for him, first in the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria and Palestine) and then back in India, and her concerns about us returning there, and her worries about money, and what would happen to us if and when we left India and returned to England for ever . . . I also discovered that Tessa and I were sent to dancing classes in Fleet, because in one letter Mum, who’d watched a lesson while waiting to take us home, writes, ‘Oh dear, Brigid is not exactly graceful, but you do have to give her full marks for trying, bless her.’

  As I explained earlier, Tessa and I had never been to school, but now, after the best part of a year and a half in Fleet with our grandparents, we were going back to India, and a governess had been hired to come with us. Moira, poor Moira, was to be left behind to go to boarding school; and David, who had already been separated from his family for so long, was to go to Sandhurst.

  The governess was called Miss Waller, which immediately became Swaller, and we came to love her indomitable, jolly-hockey-sticks, isn’t-life-a-huge-adventure character dearly. I can’t think of a single academic thing she taught us, but I did learn that one should always carry a book to read in case you get held up somewhere with nothing to do, plus a cardigan in case the weather changes, and you should try to keep a small notebook and pencil handy, as well as something to eat and drink in an emergency. These lessons have proved invaluable. I don’t mean to be smug, but our children were always the good ones on planes when they were small, thanks to my Swaller-inspired bag of activities, books, biscuits and drinks.

  3

  We returned to a turbulent India, but, as children, we were sheltered and our early days back in the country seemed peaceable, and I was happy to be there and not at all homesick for England. We lived for a short time in a boarding house or small hotel in a military town called Secunderabad which is next to Hyderabad in the centre of India. I don’t know why we were staying in a hotel, we had never lived in one before, but perhaps Brightlands, the house in Bolton Road whose address I wrote in every book, was being painted or cleaned up for us. Outside the hotel was a pile of builders’ sand and, when we were not having lessons or creating pompoms or doing French knitting with Swaller (her passion for making things never left me), Tessa and I spent every day perfectly happily climbing over it, picking out tiny shells which we collected in matchboxes. We were in the boarding house/hotel for Christmas 1946, all of us feeling glum because we were not in our own home (wherever that was meant to be) and Dad was, as always, away, so it was just Mum and Swaller, Tessa and me and NO TREE. Mum cut a huge Christmas tree out of stiff paper and painted it green with coloured decorations and pinned it to the wall but it wasn’t quite the same. Then, in the middle of our muted celebrations, there was a knock at the door and Dad appeared – he was in uniform and had somehow managed to get away from whatever he was doing, to be with us for a few hours. It was thrilling.

  Soon we moved to 219A Bolton Road in Secunderabad, Dad was with us at last, my grandmother came on a visit from England, and so did our glamorous young Aunt Joan who was on her way back to England from Australia where she had been a Wren radiographer in the war (rumour had it that she had bunked off without being properly discharged so could be arrested for desertion at any time). Aunt Joan was much younger than Mum, and she had boyfriends and sang us ‘Lili Marlene’ and ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ and we saw her as Glamour personified.

  Tessa and I had our lessons with Swaller and played in the fountain in the garden (always on the alert for snakes), but the highlight of our days was going swimming at the Club where I spent weeks quivering on the sodden coir matting of the high diving board, plucking up courage to jump – luckily, the day I did, someone was there with a camera. I prided myself on being able to open my eyes underwater and one day I was asked to look for a gold earring which a wealthy young Indian woman had lost in the pool. I found it, and triumphantly presented it to her, and she gave me some sweets which was a bit disappointing as I had thought she would give me the earring – or some other jewel at least. I was always over-optimistic . . . (Years later I found a diamond ring in a flowerbed in our garden in England. It was man-sized and rather ugly but it became my most treasured possession – until there was some kind of crisis in the world and the priest in church told us we must give our most precious possession to charity; I gave the ring. My mother told her friend Eileen what I had done, and when Eileen died, she left me a beautiful Georgian diamond ring. It was stolen by my cleaning lady in London.)

  These were happy days. In the early evenings we sat with Mum and Dad in cane chairs on the lawn, while they smoked cigarettes (which came in tins in India, not packets) and had whiskies and sodas, and we’d beg them to let us have a mynah bird or a monkey. We pleaded so hard that in the end they did agree that a monkey could be brought to meet us to see how we all got on, but it didn’t seem to like Tessa, so it was taken away again. One evening they had friends for drinks and when I announced that there had been a lady making cow-dung pats in our garden that day, everyone burst out laughing and I didn’t know why. I was puzzled and slightly hurt about this for years until I grew up and realised that everyone was obsessed by class in those days, and so the idea of a ‘lady’ making cow-dung pats was hilarious to them.

  Mum always had some project in hand: painting the flowering trees of India, embroidering a map of her journey home by bus, smocking cotton dresses for us which meant her ironing on the transfers of dots you had to follow for this. She and Dad were full of curiosity and there was nothing they liked more than an outing. Whenever they were together, sooner or later there would be expeditions to temples, forts or ruins of some sort. We loved the excitement of the trips – setting out in the cool of early dawn when the sky was the palest blue – but the cultural side of them was rather wasted on Tessa and me. All I can remember of Golconda, near Hyderabad, one of the greatest fortresses in India, was whining about the long walk up the hill to get to it, and at the famous caves of Ellora and Ajanta, while the grown-ups looked reverently at the carvings and paintings illuminated by light reflected into the dark interiors by a man holding a mirror, Tessa and I spent the whole time quarrelling and being shouted at by Dad.

  One excursion ended with horror: we had gone to look at the dam at Pocharam where a huge reservoir supplied (probably still supplies) the water for the town of Pune. We walked along the mighty dam and looked down, and far below we saw that some men were splashing about in the water, while people on the bank were running up and down, shouting and gesticulating. Dad started bellowing down instructions. At first we thought the flap was because swimming there was not allowed, but then we understood what was happening – the men were caught in a curre
nt and were being sucked towards a giant pipe, presumably the one that took the water to the town. We were hurried away and later told they had been saved, but from what Tessa and I remember we are not convinced that was true.

  Soon the profound political changes that were taking place in India began touching even us children’s lives though of course we didn’t understand what was making everyone so worried and uneasy.

  The British prime minister, Clement Atlee, had announced in February 1947 (a couple of months after we’d got back there) that India was to become independent of the British who had ruled it for some two hundred years. Lord Mountbatten, a British statesman with connections to the royal family, was appointed Viceroy of India with the task of organising Indian independence, and, as well, implementing a controversial plan: the partition of India into two countries, a new one called Pakistan to be a homeland for Muslims, alongside a slightly reduced India.

  In June that year Mountbatten announced that all these extraordinary changes would be achieved by mid-August: that on 14 August 1947, Pakistan would celebrate its creation and independence, while the next day, 15 August, the new India would celebrate its own autonomy. This meant that there were only two months in which to work out where to draw the border – nearly 2,000 miles long – between India and Pakistan; two months to prepare for a massive exchange of populations when twelve million men, women and children would move countries: Muslims from India to the newly formed Pakistan; and Hindus, living in what was about to become Pakistan, to India. There were only two months for the British to hand over the vast subcontinent and prepare for their departure; two months to reorganise every single aspect of the administration of India, from the government departments, to the railways, to the police and the army.

  For Tessa and me, most of this was way over our heads, though we knew about Indian independence because ‘Jai Hind!’ (‘Victory to India!’) was the catchword of the day: it was ‘Jai Hind!’ when you met people, or passed them in the road; ‘Jai Hind!’ on flags, on posters, in graffiti, on matchbox labels – and we were as excited about Indians getting their independence as they were. But every day, it seemed, events took place that upset my parents: one afternoon my father came home and told my mother that the Indian Army, as well as the Indian police force, were to be divided, with Muslim soldiers and policemen going to Pakistan and Hindus staying in India. My mother was appalled and bewildered; she didn’t believe such a thing was possible: the world she was so familiar with was falling apart.

  The old India hands – people like my parents who had been born there and lived there all their lives – were shocked at the very short amount of time Mountbatten had allocated to achieving the handover of power and a peaceful division of the country. They considered him spoilt and privileged, overambitious and lacking in knowledge about India, making fateful decisions without any real experience of the place. Dad referred to him as the Fairy Prince, and a joke undermining Lady Mountbatten went the rounds: in India Girl Guides were called Girl Guides, but for obvious reasons, the Brownies were called Bluebirds. The story was that Lady Mountbatten had opened a Guides rally, absent-mindedly saying: ‘It is wonderful to be with all of you young Guides and little Blackbirds today.’ I have no idea if this is true or not.

  My parents and their friends talked about the traumatic events that were happening all around us, and snippets of their conversations seared into my mind – for instance, in 1947 when two thousand tribesmen invaded Kashmir from Pakistan, I overheard the grown-ups discussing how, on their way into the valley, the marauders had raided a convent in Baramulla where they had raped the nuns and then pulled any gold teeth out of their mouths. I was utterly appalled: I didn’t know what rape meant, but the idea of someone’s teeth being pulled out with pliers was the worst thing imaginable, and it could obviously happen even to a white person like us, and even to a NUN if she were in the wrong place – what worried me was, were we in the wrong place?

  By then our cosy family life in Secunderabad had come to an end because Dad had gone to serve with the Punjab Boundary Force, and the rest of us – Mum, Aunt Joan, Swaller, Tessa and me – were staying with Mum’s Uncle George (always known as U.G.), a retired indigo planter who lived in a house called The Homestead in Kotagiri, a village in the Nilgiri Hills. Tessa and I liked it there; we kept out of his way because we were a bit scared of him, but he had two little dogs that we loved, and a passion-fruit vine growing over the front doorway from which we could help ourselves to the fruit at any time (passion fruit is my whole childhood in one taste). Once he told us a frightening story about friends of his who were out in an open horse-drawn trap just up the road from his house, when a leopard sprang right across it – from one side of the road to the other – snatching up their dachshund in its claws as it passed. It was a thrilling tale, but it left Tessa and me with a new thing to worry about that we hadn’t thought of before: to the fear of snakes and tooth-pulling tribesmen from Pakistan we now had to add leopards – which apparently teemed in the rather-too-close forest around The Homestead. We were reading The Jungle Book at that time and it was completely alive to us because Mowgli’s world, with Bagheera his leopard friend, Hathi the elephant and Shere Khan the tiger, was at the end of our garden; it was territory we knew – almost an extension of our own lives. The Little Black Sambo books were our other favourites: apart from Kipling’s, they were the only children’s stories in English that were relevant to us growing up in India, the only ones we could identify with – their heroes and heroines being Indian children, similar to the ones we saw every day, surviving terrifying adventures involving snakes, tigers, muggers (Indian crocodiles), mongooses, monkeys, bazaars, unkind grown-ups and big earthenware pots called chatties exactly like the ones which held water in our own kitchen. We didn’t particularly notice that the children in the stories were black and of course we didn’t know then that Sambo was a pejorative word.

  Helen Bannerman, the author of these now-controversial books, became a bit of a hero to me later in life when I discovered a little about her. She was born in Edinburgh in the middle of the nineteenth century when women were not yet permitted to attend university in Scotland, but could study and take examinations externally; in this way she became one of the very first women to gain an LLA (Lady Literate in the Arts) degree. She married a doctor in the Indian Medical Service and spent thirty years with him in India, helping local people, and when their four children were born, she wrote the books for them. She had long since died by the time the backlash over Little Black Sambo began years ago, but her son, Robert, wrote in a letter to The Times, ‘My mother would not have published the book had she dreamt for a moment that even one small boy would have been made unhappy . . .’ Her grandson is the distinguished physicist Sir Tom Kibble, who is one of the co-discoverers of the Higgs boson.

  When we returned to England, Little Black Sambo and his fellow characters remained precious because they reminded us of India, but the books that then resonated with us were The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because they were about Indian-born girls being unhappy back in their own country. Later, like every other teenager, I imagine (did any girls want to be Meg or Amy?), I identified with Jo in Little Women because she was the odd one out, though it annoyed me for ages that she married the Professor and not Laurie – but then I fell in love with The Scarlet Pimpernel so I didn’t really care any more.

  From grown-ups’ conversations we gathered that Dad, far away in Punjab, was not particularly happy, but we had no real idea of what he was doing; it was only after we grew up that he ever spoke to us about it, or that we learned of the horrors which came with the partition of India – and it was only after our parents had died that Tessa found the big envelope of letters that Dad wrote to Mum at this grim time (and which I never promised not to read because we didn’t know they existed). But the unbelievably terrible events he witnessed then, and his powerlessness to improve the situation, changed him – and it altered the course o
f our lives – so I will try and explain.

  By Indian Independence Day, with some exceptions (including Dad), the 60,000 British soldiers who had served in the army in India had either left, or were confined to barracks as they prepared to leave, while the remaining bulk of the Indian Army was divided up (as I explained earlier), with Hindu soldiers staying put and their Muslim counterparts leaving to form the new Pakistan Army. The same thing happened with the Indian police force: British members were sent home to England while the rest of the force was split, with the Muslims going off to Pakistan. All this created a huge vacuum in India: there was no strong, neutral peacekeeping authority left to control the new border between India and Pakistan (which ran alongside the Sikh heartland) as millions of people with two fundamentally different religions began to cross it in opposite directions. And to add to the tension, the actual path of the border line itself was not announced until two days after Independence so those who lived along it did not know, literally, whether they belonged to India or Pakistan.

  Realising there might be problems ahead, Mountbatten set up the Punjab Boundary Force of about 17,000 soldiers and local police, which came into being two weeks or so before Independence, to try to keep the peace in this explosive situation – but there were not enough men or resources allocated (members of the PBF, as it was known, called themselves the Poor Bloody Fools), and it could not do the job expected of it. Hindus, particularly the Sikhs, whose territory the Muslim refugees had to cross to reach Pakistan, started attacking and slaughtering departing Muslims and Muslims in Pakistan did vice versa. What made it infinitely worse was that, though most of the population had no weapons, the Sikhs were armed with three-foot-long swords called kirpans which could not be taken from them as they are a religious symbol. The ensuing massacres were known as the Bloodbath: it is believed that a million people died.