Читать книгу An Unconventional Love - Adeline Harris - Страница 8

In 1947, with tensions between different religious groups escalating in India, Lord Mountbatten drew up a plan for Partition, creating the Muslim country of Pakistan and the predominantly Hindu country of India, and then the British governors pulled out altogether. With the whole region on the verge of civil war and the newly formed Indian government unable to cope, there was an unprecedented surge of migrants travelling around the country, and outbreaks of rioting and killing were rife.

Our household was like a microcosm of Partition because we had both Muslim and Hindu staff, and my parents got to the stage where they didn’t know who they could trust. I remember a riot in the tea gardens, when crowds came surging towards our bungalow waving sticks and shouting words I couldn’t understand but which sounded threatening. Clara shooed me into the nursery and closed the shutters, and I heard the sound of doors being locked and bolted. It was terrifying, even though Clara tried to distract me by opening the bird book.

Suddenly, the noise of the shouting abated a little and I heard my father’s voice ringing out. He’d gone out onto the steps to confront the mob and he was asking them to please go away, because they were frightening his family. I couldn’t make out the rest of his words but they worked at the time, because the crowd dispersed and we could unlock the doors again.

At night, we could see fires burning on the horizon and Mother and Dad would stand looking out, talking to each other in low, worried tones. And then I overheard one of the servants saying that Dad had woken during the previous night to find a shadowy figure by his bedside with a knife raised, about to kill him. His army training kicked in and he overpowered the would-be assassin, but I think that was the final straw for my parents and the decision was made that as the conflict approached we should go to England for a break until the situation settled down.

At first I was excited about the trip. I was told me we’d travel to Bombay and catch a steamship that would sail us across the ocean to the other side of the world. Dad showed me the distance from India to England in his atlas and I could see that it was a long, long way. He told me that King George lived in England, in a palace with guards outside who wore bearskin hats. I was curious, and quite content to be going, until I realised in horror that Clara wouldn’t be coming with us.

‘But I need Clara,’ I wailed to Mother. ‘I can’t go without her.’

‘Clara will be here when we get back,’ Mother told me distractedly, but then she wouldn’t answer when I asked how long that would be. She was upset about going and in no mood to comfort me.

I overheard her complaining to Dad, ‘You promised we would never go to England. You gave me your word.’ And he sighed, and told her it was only for a little while, that it wasn’t safe to stay.

‘Do you promise you won’t go and be an ayah for someone else?’ I nagged Clara. ‘Will you stay in this house so you’re here as soon as we get back?’

She promised she would, but she had tears in her eyes and she kept hugging me so tightly I thought she would crush the breath right out of me.

Leaving day came and it was agreed that Clara would travel with us as far as Bombay. Six hefty black wooden trunks with white crosses on top were loaded into a van; they said ‘CAPTAIN HARRIS’ on top in white capital letters. We had holdalls with our clothes for the journey, but all the furniture was being left behind. It was just a holiday and we would be coming back soon. Before we set off, Dad lined up all the servants—sixteen of them at the time—in front of the bungalow and he took a last photograph. They would stay and look after the house until we got back, Clara told me.

We were driven as far as the great Brahmaputra River, where we boarded a banana boat called the Swatti. It stunk of decaying fish, which was hung out to dry to create the speciality known as Bombay duck. There were goats tethered in the hold alongside huge crates of bananas. I liked to stand out on deck clinging to the railings, with Clara close behind clinging onto me, and we’d watch the busy commerce on the river. There were men fishing, women washing clothes, children splashing in the murky waters near the shore, and other boats of all different shapes and sizes carrying chickens, rice, squash, multicoloured bales of fabric, or groups of men carrying spades, on their way to work. At the age of just six, I’d never seen so much activity and I was spellbound.

We travelled down the Brahmaputra as far as we could until it met the Ganges and then sailed on to Calcutta, where we transferred to a train for an everlasting journey right across the breadth of India. Whole days were spent sitting on hard leather seats, peering out of the window at rice fields with hills in the distance. When we pulled into stations, men pushed food through the carriage windows, and if it looked edible, Dad would buy some and share it between us. At last we reached Bombay and made our way to the dock area, where a vast steamship called the SS Ormonde stood waiting. Its sheer size took my breath away. It was much bigger than our whole house in Beesakope, with different levels all piled up on each other and two enormous yellow funnels on top. But then I turned to Clara and burst into tears.

‘Can’t I stay here with you?’ I pleaded. ‘Please. I’ll be good, I won’t be any trouble.’

‘Now, now, Adeline, behave yourself!’ Mother rebuked. After one last, almighty hug from Clara, Mother pulled me by the arm up the gangway and onto the Ormonde. I was crying so hard I couldn’t see where I was going.

‘Don’t be such a baby. You’ll see Clara again soon enough,’ Mother snapped and gave me a slap, saying, ‘I don’t want to go either. It’s just one of those things.’

I found a place by the railings and peered down into the crowd until I could make out the figure of Clara, who was wearing a white sari. She waved and waved at me until her arm must have been ready to drop off, smiling at me with a big broad smile that showed her white teeth against her brown skin. The ship started to move and I burst into a fresh bout of uncontrollable crying, waving harder and harder as Clara’s figure got smaller, and I continued waving even after I couldn’t pick her out of the crowd any more. My Clara-ayah had gone and I was alone. I’d never been alone in India, where there were always lots of people around, but now we were departing for the unknown.

‘I’m going to have trouble with you,’ Mother said, giving me an odd look, with her eyes narrowed. ‘I know I will.’

When the land disappeared into the horizon and the only view was of choppy blue ocean, the four of us—Mother, Dad, Harold and me—went to find our cabin. Harold and I were to share a cramped, wood-panelled box of a room with two bunk beds and little else. By standing on the edge of the lower bed I could just see out through the single porthole but the view was water and sky as far as the eye could see. There was an adjoining loo, with a metal toilet and basin, which I thought was disgusting, although Mother commented that it was ‘immaculately clean’. A connecting door led through into a suite of rooms that she and Dad were to share but we weren’t allowed in there.

‘You can have the top bunk, Adeline,’ Dad told me. Once I might have found that exciting but on this particular day I was inconsolable.

‘There’s a special room on the upper deck for children to play,’ said Dad. ‘Shall I take you to find it while your mother unpacks?’

Harold and I trooped along the corridors behind him until we came to the room in question—a big empty space with a sandpit and quoits, where a woman sat in a chair to supervise a few young children.

‘I’m not staying here,’ I said, and told Dad I thought the other children were babies.

‘Don’t be rude, Adeline,’ he snapped, but he took us away soon after.

Harold and I had never spent so much time with our parents, and I think they found it very trying. How do you keep two young children occupied on a boat for six weeks? Dad used to read to us in English, to try and help us learn the language. I remember he read the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling and a collection of fairy stories called The Orange Fairy Book, but I didn’t understand much of them with my still only rudimentary grasp of the language.

‘You have to learn,’ he told me in exasperation. ‘You’ll be starting school once we’re settled, and no one will speak Hindi there.’

I stored away this piece of information. I had thought we were only going for a holiday, until the troubles passed. I’d been expecting to go to school in India on our return.

To make matters worse, Dad regarded my skinny little arms and made another announcement. ‘There’s a chance some nasty kids will try to bully you at school because you will seem different from them. I need to teach you to defend yourself. No child of mine is going be picked on.’ He held up a cushion from one of the chairs lining the deck. ‘Here. Punch this as hard as you can.’

I drew back my arm and punched the cushion with all my strength.

‘No, that’s terrible,’ Dad said. ‘Not like a windmill.’ He stood up to demonstrate. ‘Punch straight. You need to get your body weight behind the punch and step into it. Like this. Now you try again.’

I had another go and he snorted: ‘Hmph. We’ll have to work on that.’

Teatime came, and I was aghast to realise that Harold and I were expected to eat in our cabin. With all the rooms on that vast ship, why did we have to stay in our poky little box-like prison? The steward brought a tray with cucumber sandwiches, white iced cakes and scones, and I yearned for the Indian food we’d left behind—the golden curries that you scooped up in chapattis, the delicious rice and vegetable biryanis and the fish cooked in banana leaves. This English food seemed insipid and colourless and I only ate it because my stomach was growling with hunger.

After we’d finished, our parents dressed up, Mother in a full-length ballgown and Dad in a dinner jacket and black tie.

‘Going?’ I asked in English, suspicious.

‘We’re having dinner in the ship’s dining room. Make sure you two stay in the cabin and don’t make a noise.’

‘Adeline khana?’ I wanted to come too.

‘You can’t. It’s adults only. Besides, it’s your bedtime,’ Dad told us. We all said the Rosary together then they left, Mother’s skirts and clouds of perfume swishing behind her.

I felt deserted and missed Clara so badly that as soon as they had gone, I urged Harold ‘Challoo [come with me]!’ We crept out and wandered down the corridor in our pyjamas to a flight of stairs, then up the stairs to another deck. From there, we made our way out into the open, where we could see the starry skies above, and found some lifeboats covered in tarpaulins. We wandered and wandered and soon we were lost and couldn’t find our way back to the cabin any more.

‘Mummy!’ Harold started to cry.

‘Chokra baby [silly baby],’ I told him impatiently. I was cross with Mother. Not only had she taken me away from my beloved Clara, but she had gone off for dinner without us. I forced my brother to squeeze into a little space behind one of the lifeboats and we hid there, listening to the sound of the ship’s engines and the distant voices wafting up from the dining room below.

As darkness fell, we must have fallen asleep, because we were wakened by one of the ship’s stewards, wearing a shiny white jacket, who seemed very relieved to see us.

‘Here you are!’ he cried. ‘We thought you had fallen overboard. Everyone is out looking for you.’

He marched us back down to the cabin, where Mother and Dad were torn between relief that we were alive and fury that we had wandered off when we’d been told specifically not to.

‘What were you thinking of? Your little brother could have been killed!’

Dad put me over his lap and spanked me, but I didn’t cry. I was consumed with sadness at being taken away from India, away from Clara, and that’s all I could think about. I still wanted to be a good girl, wanted to be a saint, but the trauma of the separation seemed to bring out a streak of mischief in me, an undercurrent of naughtiness.

The very next night when Mother and Dad went off for dinner, I waited until their footsteps disappeared then I grabbed Harold’s hand and dragged him off to do more exploring in our nightclothes. Once again there was a search party and this time I heard cries of ‘Child overboard, child overboard’ and saw the mayhem I had created, with sailors rushing around looking for us.

‘What are we going to do with you?’ Mother shrieked. ‘You’ll have us put off the ship at the next port.’

On the third night, I tried to do the same again, sneaking out of the cabin door as soon as my parents went off to the dining room, but this time they had laid a trap for me. Dad was waiting at one end of the corridor and a steward at the other, and I was caught and bundled back to the cabin in disgrace.

‘She’s going to keep trying this. What can we do?’ Dad asked.

‘If you like, we could get some medicine to make her sleep,’ the steward suggested.

Dad agreed that was a good idea. The ship’s doctor was sent for and he prescribed a little bottle of morphine, from which I was to be given a couple of teaspoons every night. As soon as I swallowed them there was a warm feeling in my tummy and a fuzziness in my head that made me feel a little less sad. I still cried myself to sleep, wishing I was in Clara’s arms, and I still slipped out on unauthorised exploration trips a few more times, but on the whole I began to settle down.

We became friendly with the woman in the cabin next to ours, who had two sons a little older than me. She didn’t go to the dining room for dinner in the evenings, so she suggested that I might like to go in and play with her and her boys while my parents were away. Harold was usually asleep, because he was only three, but I went next door and played cards or snakes and ladders or soldiers until Mother and Dad came to collect me, to give me my morphine and put me to bed.

The days were spent walking the decks, listening to Dad reading stories, or doing my punching practice. Every night we said the Rosary before Mother and Dad went to dinner and on Sundays we attended mass in the ship’s chapel. Time dragged, and I had too much opportunity to miss Clara and wonder when I would ever see her again, and to worry about this horrible-sounding new school with nasty children who would bully me.

The Ormonde pulled into port several times. In Aden we disembarked and Mother bought some leather handbags from a skinny, jet-black man in a multicoloured cotton shirt on the docks. We sailed up the Suez Canal to Port Said, where all the ex-pats who weren’t planning on going back threw their topees in the water because they wouldn’t need them in the colder climate. Across the Mediterranean we went, stopping in Malta and then Gibraltar, but most of the time the only view was of seemingly endless sea. It was gradually getting colder and knitted sweaters and little woollen coats were produced for Harold and me to wear. I’d never seen such garments before and found the wool itchy against my skin, but I needed them, especially in the chill of the evenings and early mornings.

It was April 1949 when we arrived at Tilbury Dock, Essex. We stood up on deck to watch as the land came into sight. The day was bitterly cold, misty and grey and we could see no trees, no grass, no flowers, just bare concrete. My mother burst into tears.

‘Darling, you told me England was a beautiful country,’ she rebuked Dad. ‘Look at this! It’s drab and grey and you promised it would be green.’

‘England is a safe haven,’ he said. ‘Give it a chance. It’s the best country in the world. You’ll love it when you get used to it.’

‘I never wanted to come here. I told you over and over again. You promised me.’

‘Remember the burning bush,’ Dad said. ‘The voice told you that you would leave India. It’s meant to be.’

That didn’t comfort her, though. If anything, she cried even harder.

Harold and I stood looking from one to the other of our parents, and wondering what we could expect of this new land. A light rain started to fall from the sky—spitty, silly rain, not proper rain like in a monsoon—and we all felt miserable as the ship honked to announce its arrival and edged its way slowly into port.