by Eleanor Wood
It’s also meant that I’ve been incredibly lucky in the time I’ve had with my family. Just as my mum and I have grown up together, it’s given us both years with my nan and even great-grandmother that most people never had. My nan was fifty when I was born; Dolly was alive until I was twenty-one. How many people, at the age of thirty-six, are able to go on holiday with their grandmother? I know how lucky I am.
But I have broken the chain. No matter what I do now and what choices I make, I will never be a cool young mum. The idea of that is weird to me. Even if I do have children, I will be an older mother. I don’t really know what one of those looks like, how they are supposed to be.
Still, in my family, we are mistresses of reinvention. My mum’s life has never gone the way she thought it would. Not once. In these last few years, I have watched her incredible example as she has had to build everything back up from the ruins unexpectedly left around her.
Sometimes I feel like that’s what I’m doing every single day. I couldn’t do it without her and the other important women in my life, staunch examples all. While we’re in India, I think about this a lot. It’s a great privilege to be here with the older generation, but I still miss my mum every day. I’m thirty-six years old, and I miss my mum when I’m not with her. I don’t think I will ever outgrow just wanting my mum. I have no idea if that’s normal or not.
April 1948
Rose arrived in London by train – alone, at the age of nineteen – when the rest of the family were still in Scotland.
‘So courageous,’ Nan notes admiringly of her cool big sister. ‘Valiant. I don’t even know what the word is, really.’
Rose chuckles. ‘I suppose it was rather. I didn’t really think about it.’
She tells the story like it was no big deal. I have come to the conclusion that we start off brave, then dip in the middle and get scared of everything, then come full circle and start giving fewer fucks when we get older. I hope so, anyway.
Our family had considered themselves to be ‘from London’ during their Indian years, although they had never been in a city anything like London, and the place would have been overwhelmingly foreign to them.
Nan remembers jitterbugging with a glamorous British soldier at a dance at the Burt Institute in Lahore, not long before they had to leave the country.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked her.
‘London,’ she replied, trying to impress him – to this day, she’s not entirely sure why she said it. We’ve all said weird things out of nowhere to try and impress a boy.
‘Oh, so am I! Which area of London?’
She was so embarrassed, she excused herself and ran off. She’d had no idea that there were different areas of ‘London’.
On the other hand, Rose – always the adventurous older sister – arrived in the big city by herself and quickly managed to sort herself out a job and a flat.
Rose had always been independent. During the war, fresh out of school and still living at home in Pune, she joined the WACI (the Women’s Army Corps of India). She learned how to drive a truck, ended up becoming a sergeant and generally had the time of her life. When the war finished, she didn’t want to go back to her normal schedule of doing not much.
So, as soon as the war was over, she decided to leave home and move to Bombay. She moved into the YWCA and got herself a job as secretary to the director of British Insulated Callender’s Cables Limited.
When Dolly found out about this new job, she travelled to Bombay and paid the director a visit, explaining that she wasn’t thrilled about her daughter working for a living, so Rose was only permitted to accept the job if he could personally assure her that she would not take public transport to work by herself.
And that’s how Rose became the only secretary to have her own personal driver, to ferry her to and from work each day, as well as home for lunch. With her secretarial wages, she was able to afford a private single room at the YWCA, while most of the other girls shared, and her own personal servant.
Rose has always been an early and excellent example of ‘knowing your worth’. When I spend time with her I am often reminded of this – she politely and firmly speaks her mind at all times, with her friends, in restaurants and sometimes to strangers, who she just thinks are not being well mannered. She is staunchly magnificent.
Anyway, Rose had a great time being newly independent in Bombay, during an era when young women didn’t really live independently. She certainly did. She spent her weekends going to dances, and hanging out with boys at the Bombay Flying Club and the Breach Candy Club. The Breach Candy Club was a ‘Europeans-only’ club founded in the nineteenth century for swimming and sunbathing in an exclusive spa-like environment away from the hustle of real-life everyday Bombay. Rose remembers taking a boy there once, who was darker-skinned than her, and he was asked to show his passport and turned away when he couldn’t. She left with him.
Still, she had a great time and she wasn’t prepared to give it up when she had to move back to the UK. So, when she arrived in London, she got herself a secretarial job in the City. She says it wasn’t hard to do – after all, she had excellent qualifications and had already worked in a prestigious secretarial position back in India. I suspect, at the time, it wasn’t easy. Rose must have had to do some impressive hustling.
She was single-minded. She knew what she wanted. While Clara had become a nurse and Nan had dreamed of becoming a teacher, Rose knew that being the ‘right’ sort of secretary would mean she could get close to the kind of circles she wanted to be in. Rose was a very bright, beautiful young woman and she wanted to make the most of it.
Despite having to walk across the whole of London to work every day because she couldn’t afford the bus, it was definitely the life of glamour, or at least glamour-adjacent, that she craved – hanging out with powerful men and wearing little white gloves and hats to work every day. She had an aristocratic boss who she would have to help prepare for weekends at Balmoral with the Queen Mother. He would give her a pheasant every Christmas, which she would cook for the whole extended family on Boxing Day.
She shared a flat in Kensington with a model; she probably could have been one herself if she’d wanted. Her outfits at that time were breathtaking – I would kill to have looked like that, while at the same time cannot possibly even imagine having to do the work that must have gone into it. She had a great figure and the 1950s look suited her perfectly. Plus, the hair-dos, the corsetry, the impeccable make-up, the uncomfortable shoes!
She didn’t just look incredible. She made friends, and went to dances, and also had an interesting job at a time when that wasn’t necessarily the norm for a girl like her. She was self-sufficient when she could have got away with not being, which is a great example to me – I try to think of it when I’m really sick of adulting, and want to curl up in a ball and cry for my mum instead of paying the gas bill. She went out of her way to be independent and she made the most of it.
Basically, she was truly staunch.
Present Day
While Nan and Rose are not the most mobile, they are both blessed with an intrepid spirit that never fails to impress me. Fortunately, Ann is blessed with a getting-shit-done spirit that none of the rest of us has, even though we enjoy talking about our grand plans a lot.
Ann was the only one of us to bring a guidebook, and she has made a list of all the places she would like to see, and a schedule for the best way to go about it. She sits over breakfast each day, marking pages in the guidebook and making lists. As we get to know them, our friends at the hotel get involved and make suggestions.
And so begins a routine whereby we alternate days: one day staying local and having a bit of a rest, one day going off on an adventure. A few times our excursions had to be cancelled or postponed at the last minute, due to tiredness or low-level illness, but we did really well in getting out to see the area. We would hire a driver for the day and stick Rose’s wheelchair in the back in case she needed it.
; During the complex negotiations with drivers, as always, I’m glad Ann is there. We walk into the village and find the taxi rank, where all the drivers hang out. Ann tells them where we want to go and I try my best not to agree enthusiastically with the first convoluted plan they come up with. I keep quiet while Ann gets her map out and organizes a detailed schedule. I’m just there to keep her company while walking into the village, really.
We’ll then go and pick up Nan and Rose from the hotel. The taxis we get vary wildly when it comes to model, size, air conditioning and driver friendliness.
I’m always in the middle seat and Nan constantly elbows me in the side. I try to take deep breaths and remember that she’s had double knee surgery that probably makes this much more uncomfortable for her than it is for me. Rose always sits in the front and chats with the driver, and also bears the brunt of the terror of driving on the roads in India. From the front seat, she gets to see the mopeds, cows, rickety vans and buses with people hanging out on the roof coming right at us.
As well as travelling to all of the nearby towns and cities, we pore through the guidebook for all sorts of oddities that we are excited to visit.
We all love the Menezes Braganza Pereira House in Chandor. Nobody that we asked about it at the hotel had ever heard of it, but it’s strange and full of stories. My favourite sort of experience.
When we arrive, at first we can’t find it. When we do, we’re still not sure we’re in the right place. It’s a Portuguese-style house in a small village, built in the seventeenth century. It’s big but not huge, and is now divided into an east wing and a west wing. Different branches of the family took over each half.
We read that guided tours of the house are available, but they don’t seem to be very well organized. We ring the doorbell and meet Mrs Braganza, who lives in the west wing and claims to be the twelfth generation to occupy the house. She asks us for a donation, and sticks it in the pocket of her dress, before padding off in her slippers and expecting us to follow behind.
It’s hard to tell how old Mrs Braganza is, but if I had to guess, based on first impressions I’d say somewhere around 150–200 years old. She seems ancient, even compared to the collective age of our little group. She’s wearing a lovely fitted, patterned blue dress that looks straight out of the 1950s, and I covet it deeply. She’s a chic old lady, with a stern manner. Even Rose follows behind her obediently.
She shows us a lot of family photographs and seems a bit sniffy about Mrs Pereira, her distant cousin who lives next door, who she implies is from a less smart branch of the family. I love these little glimpses of family rivalry and bitchiness. They make me feel at home.
She gives us the grand tour, showing us all of her treasures along the way. Some of these are truly stunning old Venetian glass mirrors and chandeliers, but she seems just as proud of her snow globes and some old beer mats that somebody from Germany gave her. It’s genuinely bizarre. We are not permitted to take photographs, and Ann gets in trouble for getting bored and wandering off.
Mrs Braganza reverently shows us the tiny private chapel, which even feels somewhat holy to a semi-heathen like me. Apparently, there’s a fingernail of Saint Francis Xavier in there. We leave Nan alone for a few minutes to have a good pray.
By the time we move into the second half of the house, we’re kind of over it. The east wing is pretty much the same but not as good, and Mrs Pereira is terrifying. We try to get round as quickly as possible, but she refuses to allow it and insists on showing us every little thing. She also seems fairly antagonistic towards her relative/housemate/neighbour. This sort of thing amuses me no end, particularly in older people, where somehow the pettiness is even funnier.
By the time we’ve done the full rounds, we’re quite glad to get out. We don’t manage to escape before Mrs Pereira passes us a wooden box and instructs us to put a further donation inside. Outside, Chandor itself is lovely. It’s one of my favourite little towns, with its pretty church complete with Braganza mausoleum and market stalls selling pottery.
We visit a few towns and cities of varying sizes during the course of our travels. We go to Old Goa, which once had a larger population than London and was known as ‘the Rome of the East’. It still has some magnificent churches. Despite all the impressive architecture and religious relics, the thing that gets me most is a wall of Mother Teresa quotes at the Basilica of Bom Jesus do Monte, which makes me tear up with pure emotion. It says:
Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do …
But how much love we put in that action.
Not all of us can do great things,
But we can do small things with great love.
God has not called me to be successful …
He called me to be faithful.
If you judge people you have no time to love them.
Spread love everywhere you go.
Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.
What can you do to promote world peace?
Go home and love your family.
I suspect it’s the sort of thing I would usually eye with scepticism, but something about it on that day speaks to me deeply. I guess I ruin the spiritual element of it, though, because pretty much the first thing I do is – obviously – Instagram the shit out of it.
We visit a lot of churches. There’s one I especially like in Panaji, which is the capital of Goa. Panaji is a nice city where I feel very at home, although we have the one overpriced and disappointing touristy lunch of our whole trip there. However, my favourite town is Margao. It’s not far from us and it’s just an ordinary medium-sized town. Its ordinariness is exactly what I like about it. We walk around the narrow, congested streets, which have no pavement and a hundred mopeds zooming towards you at any one time. My favourite part is a dusty junction called Times Square, which has precisely nothing in common with its namesake in New York.
There is really nothing to see there, and no particular reason to hang around. However, we go into the spice market, which is a covered market much like the bazaar in Istanbul or the medina in Marrakech, only a lot smaller and not in any way ornate or beautiful. It is in a shabby, grey-coloured building and stretches for miles.
Inside, it is cramped, crowded and boiling hot. There are dozens of stalls crammed in, basically just trestle tables with plastic awnings. The walkways in between are them so narrow you have to walk in hunched single file. It is like an ordinary fruit and veg market at home, but inside a vast labyrinth that smells strongly of delicious spices and is hotter than the actual sun. I absolutely love it.
There is nothing touristy to buy here. As well as spices there are general groceries, ladoos and all sorts of other sweets, and household goods. There’s the odd clothes stall, but they all seem to be selling the sort of clothes you could buy on a market stall in London: polyester dresses and football shirts, a lot of cheap knickers.
I’ve got sweat pouring down my back and I’m getting elbowed on all sides, but I am at my happiest. I love pretending I live in a place I’m visiting and this is definitely the closest I’ve got here. Nan is chatting to the shopkeepers in Urdu and Rose is stocking up on all the spices she needs for her legendary curry recipe. They even rediscover some (to my taste) revolting Indian sweets that they used to eat as children and have never tasted again until today.
It’s so hot and labyrinthine, we physically can’t stay in there too long, which is a shame as I would otherwise happily have wandered around all day. It is admittedly a relief to get outside. By the time we get out, we all look as if we have been in a sauna.
I browse some renegade roadside stalls while the others go and sit on a bench in the little municipal gardens while we wait for our taxi driver to pick us up. I buy a little beaded bracelet from a lady and her husband. A couple of weeks later, I run into the husband when we go to the touristy Anjuna market in northern Goa. He recognizes me instantly and greets me like an old friend.
‘Of course I recognize you. You bought the bracelet
from my wife. You were the one white girl in Margao market!’
This so delights me, and I’m not sure if he realizes how much he has made my day.
Present Day
In the hotel and in restaurants – pretty much everywhere we go – the four of us are the only group of women here on our own. We stand out a mile (for various reasons, I suppose) and I can see that people are confused by us. They can’t quite work out the relationships.
Because I am by far the youngest, with a bunch of elders and clearly no husband or children, people seem to assume I’m a lot younger than I am. They must think I am an extremely haggard teenager. They also seem to think it’s OK to approach us in a way that I don’t think they would if we had a man with us. I find this deeply annoying. Nan and Rose do not. They just love any excuse to have a chat.
‘This must be a tremendous morale boost for you, darling!’ Nan exclaims frequently, when yet another creepy dude approaches us.
I mean:
a) Feminism, and
b) I’m not that in need of a morale boost and I don’t care for the implication that I am, thank you.
‘I like your smile!’ is shouted at me a lot.
You know how a lot of people have the problem of ‘bitchy resting face’? I have the opposite issue. This is a problem everywhere I go, but never more so than in India. I have an overly friendly face and people often take this as licence to approach me, and then refuse to go away. There is something about me that apparently screams ‘please bother me’.
The catcalling etiquette here is baffling. Bizarre things get shouted at me in the street, and men frequently make slightly threatening sort of clicky-hissy noises at me while not making eye contact. However, there is also a certain level of deference, by which men don’t look at me directly and will ask my grandmother and aunts’ permission to address me.