FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  My father arrived in the Punjab on 10 August 1947 to take up his peacekeeping duties for Lahore district, plus Ferozepur and Montgomery areas – all places that did not yet know whether they would be in India or Pakistan when the border was announced. He wrote to Mum on 13 August telling her how, on his first day, he had come upon the dead bodies of forty Muslim men, women and children lying in the road, slaughtered by Sikhs, and that ‘panic reigns everywhere’. From then on he wrote to her daily and in each new letter the horrors mounted – though he was at the same time clearly trying to protect her from the more terrible details.

  Dad hoped that things would improve when the border was defined – ‘We are longing for the Boundary to be announced and get it over . . .’ – but, if anything, when that happened it made the situation worse. In his own areas, Lahore district was divided between India and Pakistan; Ferozepur went to India (though 50 per cent of its inhabitants were Muslims who began to move out) and Montgomery went to Pakistan, though it had a similarly huge Hindu population who also began to move, in the opposite direction.

  Now more and more refugees – hundreds of thousands – were on the road. ‘I have about 8 lacks [800,000] refugees, both Muslim and Sikh/Hindu, passing through my districts and as they are going against each other there is grave danger of mass encounters en route,’ Dad wrote. ‘Our troops are fully extended and going all out to make sure this mass migration is coloured with as little blood as possible, yet a heavy toll is taken every time . . . You see, columns of a lack [100,000] are at least 8 miles long and usually one can spare only one platoon to do the job of escorting them. Crops, grass, etc are good cover, right up to the road, and the murderers come in with their swords and spears and do their killing before escort troops can come up . . .

  ‘You cannot realise what it looks like, seeing thousands of people go through here. Men, women and children, all with bundles or charpoys, bullock carts laden sky-high, tongas, handcarts, barrows, camels, buffaloes, cattle, goats, sheep, dogs, all miserable, all heavily laden, all with some tale of woe, all with very little to look forward to, most of them having left all or most of their most valuable possessions, human, animal or property, in some robber’s or murderer’s hands. My darling, I am glad you don’t know what these poor people go through . . . my heart bleeds for them.’

  A day or two later Dad wrote, ‘I have never felt the animosity between Muslims and Sikhs more in all my service in India . . .’ and he went on to lament the fast-growing communal hatred – particularly of the Sikhs for the Muslims – as being like ‘some foul loathsome disease . . . the lust to kill and burn, to destroy members of the hated other side and all they possess, be they the most innocent babes or harmless women. I shan’t go into what happens every day, everywhere, but I think the saddest thing are abductions of women – or they kill them or slash their breasts and kill their babies . . . It’s a Hitlerian campaign to eliminate as many child-bearers of the other side as possible. A lot of this I have not wanted to tell you before . . .’

  Every day Dad’s litany of death and misery continues: ‘The papers are quiet about it all, but there is butchery, arson, murder, rape and theft on a large scale of everything conceivable going on in the Punjab now – chiefly done by Sikhs. It never lets up . . . they have begun to produce implements of all kinds, pitchforks, spears, lances, daggers, swords, pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, automatic weapons and grenades.

  ‘Firing a village is a normal occurrence like having breakfast, murder is like having a cigarette, and on the long trails to the main roads, you see everything from headless corpses and maimed women and butchered children to smouldering bullock carts and other property, marking the way . . . I tell you, darling, it is just sheer hell, and I have never conceived of such sufferings as I have witnessed . . . I don’t think there is a parallel in history of two communities as numerous as these two (Muslims and Hindus) just going for each other hammer and tongs . . . We must hurry up and leave this country . . . The misery just makes one feel devastated and one’s thoughts are of God and one’s prayers are for mercy to suffering mankind.’

  At one point, Dad writes that the refugees all carried bedding – light quilts known as razais in India – which they let fall when attacked or collapsing from hunger, exhaustion or illness, so that in places the whole landscape was patterned with these colourful cotton bedcovers trodden into the dust, or later, the mud. Of all the horrors Dad describes, somehow the image of those thousands of abandoned quilts – and what they represent – is the one that I cannot shake from my mind.

  Dad saw the notorious refugee trains – both Muslim and Hindu – which arrived at their destinations full of dead passengers; he saw camps where there was almost nothing to sustain the refugees and where many hundreds of dead were left behind each time a group moved on; he saw the suffering increase a hundred times over when September rains caused floods and even more chaos and death – but the betrayal by the rajah of a Sikh state called Faridkot is the event that seems to have disturbed him most; it is the one he talked about to Tessa and me. In particular he mentioned to us several times seeing a baby that had had its throat cut but was still alive, trying to crawl into shade – it obviously haunted him, but we never understood why this child affected him more than all the hundreds of others.

  On 27 August Dad wrote that he had been to see the Rajah of Faridkot to discuss, and organise, the orderly departure of the 60–70,000-strong Muslim community in his state. Dad had not been impressed by the rajah: ‘He is a child in many ways. He giggles, talks about his armoured cars . . . Two hours of him was enough.’ But he had come to an agreement with him that he must hold the refugees for ten days until everything was ready for them, and ‘that we expected the roads and railway not to be molested . . . all in a most diplomatic way of course’.

  The rajah had agreed the route that the refugees would take out of his state: they would travel towards the north gate where Dad would have a battalion standing by to protect them once they crossed the border (the Punjab Boundary Force was not allowed to operate within the independent Sikh states), but when the time came the rajah sent them out on a different road, west, to the neighbouring state of Muktsar, where there was no protection.

  Dad seems to have discovered this on what he described as his worst day. He was touring the area with Colonel Sant Singh, an Indian officer, when in Muktsar they came upon a refugee column, miles long, that had been attacked by Sikhs hiding in the elephant grass at the side of the road. ‘I saw and counted 300 murdered men, women and children and about the same number of wounded, mostly so badly cut across the neck that the head wobbled; and the most brutal attacks on women and children,’ he wrote on 7 September. ‘We picked up about twenty children from two weeks old to about two years who had had parents and relatives blotted out. I cannot tell what a massacre it was . . .’

  ‘But worse was to come. In Faridkot State near our border we met the sick, injured, aged, maimed, dead, who could not move. There were 140 women in labour, many had miscarriages; babies sucking breasts of their dead mothers, many corpses – for cholera had broken out. Darling, I hope never to see such poor exhausted people suffer so much ever again . . . I am afraid it affects me very much.’

  It is not absolutely clear that the dead and wounded Dad saw in Muktsar were from Faridkot, but it seems so because, though he does not say what he did next in his letter to Mum, he told Tessa and me that he was so distraught and full of rage that he drove straight to Faridkot and stormed into the rajah’s palace with his revolver in his hand, intending to shoot him – but the rajah pleaded for his life and said he had only allowed his people to attack the refugees because they thought he was pro-Muslim and he had to prove he wasn’t.

  Shortly after the Faridkot affair, Dad reported that a colleague, Brigadier Wheeler, had resigned. ‘He said he could not be a party to the policy of wholesale murder of Muslims by India . . . General Pete Rees (the commander of the PBF) asked me what my feelings were and I said: “As
long as I could help relieve the suffering of these unfortunates I would stay and do my best . . .” ’ By now, though, Dad too had abandoned any idea of staying on in India or Pakistan and was planning to leave himself: ‘The PBF experience has made practically every single British officer cancel any option he may have made to serve on . . .’

  The Punjab Boundary Force only existed for about a month – during which time, Dad wrote, a BBC reporter visited the region and, having seen what the force was required to do and the area they had to cover, commented that General Rees should have had at his disposal five times the number of troops he’d been allocated. At midnight on 31 August, the PBF, which had worked neutrally on both sides of the border, was disbanded, and instead India and Pakistan assumed responsibility for the security of their own refugees.

  Dad continued his work more or less seamlessly, as he had told General Rees he would, but now under the authority of the Indian Governor of East Punjab. Every day the situation worsened as the whole region suffered unprecedented rainfall: rivers burst their banks, roads were swept away, refugee camps inundated. ‘I could not sleep last night thinking of the plight of lacks (hundreds of thousands) of refugees out in the open without fires to cook food, flooded out . . . God have mercy on them: they are suffering terribly. We have 80,000 here in Jullundur and babies etc, the old etc.’

  On 22 September three new train massacres took place – two of Muslim passengers, one of non-Muslims – and 300 women and children were abducted from one of the Muslim trains. Dad wrote severely to Mum, who was desperate to be with him and had obviously made the suggestion she should bring us all up, ‘For all our sakes don’t be foolish . . . my earnest advice to you is STAY PUT. It is just asking for trouble, five women and girls travelling together by rail, unescorted. However much I’d love you to be here I’d rather you delayed your arrival . . .’

  Like many others, Dad worried that all India and Pakistan would explode when the refugees from both sides finally reached their destinations and told their appalling stories. ‘Has U.G. got a gun/revolver?’ he asked in the same letter. ‘Tell him, without the servants noticing it, to keep it safe and handy . . .’

  Mum listened to the advice not to travel; she did not move us and, mercifully, all India did not blow up as people had feared, and two months later, towards the end of the year, by which time most of the millions of refugees had either reached their new homelands or been murdered or abducted, Dad was no longer needed in East Punjab and rejoined us all in Kotagiri.

  By now his decision not to stay on with the Indian Army (or with the Pakistan Army which had also approached him) was definite. We were going home, but first Dad had one last posting, as Poona Sub-Area Commander. I don’t know why he took this on – perhaps it was a question of having to serve out notice?

  Our farewell to the Nilgiri Hills was, to me, the most thrilling adventure ever: an elephant ride through the jungle at night. Tessa was considered too young to go, so she was sent off to stay with her friend Poochie. (After that, whenever you questioned some extraordinary and unlikely claim made by Tessa – e.g., ‘When did you ride on a hippopotamus?’ – she would say smugly, ‘I did it at Poochie’s house.’)

  I was included on the safari, though, and was scared stiff but bursting with excitement. Our elephants (we were on three, going single file) made their way through the forest just as dawn was breaking; no one spoke, but the mahouts guiding the great animals silently indicated where we should look, and we saw wild elephants, monkeys, deer, bison and wild boar. I sometimes wonder now if I dreamed the whole thing.

  In Poona, Dad had the temporary rank of major-general and we lived in Flagstaff House, a low two-storey colonial building with bedrooms off a long veranda on the first floor. It was next door to an identical house which belonged to the senior general (in charge of the whole Indian Southern Command) and there, one shocking night, he was stabbed by an intruder. Tessa and I were woken up by shouting and running and confusion. Then next day, secretly thrilled, we crept into the garden when no one was looking to see the general’s blood on the gate and on the path where he had collapsed in pursuit of his attacker. He survived, which was quite disappointing to us children actually, and it turned out his assailant was not some gallant Indian freedom fighter, but his gardener – which in a way is more interesting: what could have happened between the two of them that incited the gardener to risk everything to kill his employer? Or perhaps the gardener was a freedom fighter . . . we never discovered.

  We were in our house in Poona on 30 January 1948 when the news came that Mahatma Gandhi had been murdered in Delhi. (Dad was always baffled as to how this information could have travelled so fast because Gandhi’s death was not announced on the radio for some time after it happened.) We overheard Dad telling Mum that the general had just said, ‘If Gandhi has been killed by a Britisher, we will all be dead by suppertime, and if he’s been killed by someone from Poona, this city is going to go up in flames.’

  We didn’t have to wait very long to hear our fate – an hour or so; I was scared, but not THAT scared; perhaps I just couldn’t imagine it. Luckily for us, Gandhi had not been killed by a Britisher, but he had been killed by someone from Poona, and that evening the city did go up in flames. Dad drove through it all in an armoured car, and came across Swaller bicycling casually along amidst the uproar, and sent her home.

  A month later, on 28 February, Swaller and Tessa and I were taken by Mum and Dad to the Farewell to British Troops parade in Bombay: the departure of the very last British soldiers from India. We found the programme for the event among Dad’s things after he died; the introduction says: ‘In September 1754 two Companies of the 39th Foot, which later became the Dorsetshire Regiment, landed at Madras . . . the first soldiers of the British Regular Army to set foot in India. Today, nearly 200 years later . . . the lst Bn The Somerset Light Infantry, the last British battalion remaining in India, is leaving Bombay for England.’

  This parade was the potent, visible end to the British Raj, and though I was only eight years old, I was aware that we were watching history, and that everyone around me was feeling emotional as we saw the last British soldiers march off the parade ground, through the Gateway of India, and straight on to launches that took them to their ship – but that didn’t stop me eating the rice grains that had been stuck on my forehead (and on everyone else’s) as a ceremonial gesture on arrival, and getting into trouble with Dad for disrespect.

  Our final move in India was from Flagstaff House in Poona to Colaba transit camp in Bombay to wait for the ship that was to take us home for ever and ever. When we had returned to England in 1945, our transit camp had been Deolali – the place in which, over the years, so many British soldiers went mad from boredom, or heat, or venereal disease, that ‘doolally’ became another word for crazy in English. I got muddled about these camps and when, later, I went to school in England I shocked my teachers by telling them I had lived in two different concentration camps, rather than transit camps.

  There must have been some kind of public pool or tank at Colaba because I was bullied by a much older English boy who ducked me and held me underwater until I thought I would drown. I was terrified of him but too scared to tell anyone. And then – I can’t imagine how it ever came into our conversation – I mentioned to him that I had eaten an acorn when I’d been in England, and he said, ‘You know what that means, don’t you? Any child who eats an acorn will die before they are twelve.’ I worried about this for four years, only really relaxing when I was twelve and one day old.

  I have no idea how long we had to wait in Colaba for our ship home, and did we have our servants and their families with us there, or did they come specially to say goodbye at the end? I know they were on the dockside waving and crying – just as we were – when our ship sailed away from Bombay because we looked back on this later, with anguish. My father, who was always short of money, had most unusually made ‘an investment’ before we left India: he bought Moira and Tessa and me
each a thick gold bracelet that was to be our inheritance (almost everything else our family owned had to be left behind in India – and Dad’s parents’ home in Burma had been burned down by the Japanese Army). These were packed away in one of our NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE trunks and it was only when they were unpacked in Fleet that Dad discovered the bracelets had disappeared. Apparently it would have been almost impossible for them to have been stolen on the ship, so we could only suppose that one, or maybe all, of those weeping figures on the dockside, getting smaller and smaller as our ship moved away, was actually secretly pleased at our departure. It was almost the worst thing about our leaving India.

  No one ever feels any sympathy for those who are dispossessed of other people’s possessions, i.e., the men and women who lived and served in the colonies and who had to go home when Independence came, whether it was from India, Indonesia, Algeria, West Africa or somewhere else. But I do, because I remember the heartache and the home-sickness for the land we’d left. After five generations or more of my family’s life and service in India, the only thing to show for it all now, in our daughters’ lives, are a couple of Hindi words that have taken hold: nanga panga, meaning naked, and kutchcha for unfinished or shoddy, and the lullaby that Ayah-Ma used to sing to me that I in turn sang to my girls when they were babies, and that they now sing to their children. But I can still count to ten and recite ‘Little Miss Muffet’ in Hindustani (after a fashion), and remember words for things that were part of life when I was a child but have become obsolete now, such as chilamchee, for a travelling shaving kit with bowl, or chaplee for sandals which had a wrapover front, and whenever I taste passion fruit or hear crows cawing or the sound of sweeping, I am transported back to heat and sun and happy days.