FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (6 page)

We had two white mice which Tessa and I decided to keep in a doll's house we'd been lent to play with (I think Grandpa had made it for our cousins Jinny and Prue). Of course they instantly escaped and were never seen again. Granny was cross and said they would mate with their wild relatives and create a mouse problem.

We spent some of our leisure time (I suppose it was the equivalent of modern children playing computer games) listening to ‘Teddy Bears' Picnic' and the story of Sparky and his magic piano on the gramophone. The Sparky story was particularly brilliant because it came on three 78 records which were stacked on to the spindle of the gramophone all together, and then, miraculously, dropped down on to the turntable in order, one by one, at which point the arm holding the needle swung over
all by itself
to play them. It seemed like the cutting edge of technology for us – well, I suppose it
was
the cutting edge of technology then. Incidentally, Sparky was a little boy whose piano suddenly came alive and played itself – all Sparky had to do was run his fingers over the keys and the piano would produce a perfect performance of whatever he had announced he would play. Only Sparky knew this secret, everyone else believed he was a child prodigy, and he became famous for his playing, but he also became spoiled and rude and unpleasant, until one terrible day – at Carnegie Hall, in the middle of a concert – the piano tells Sparky that it will no longer play for him and the frantic boy bashes the keys crying, ‘Play, piano, play' . . . and it all turns out to have been a dream. I mention this because all through my career I have often thought of Sparky – whenever I have managed to write something that I am particularly pleased with, I wonder, secretly, if my typewriter/computer did it for me.

Our new-found seventeen-year-old brother David was dazzling: handsome and funny and sweet to us; we hero-worshipped him when he came home on holiday from boarding school. He'd built a wooden shack, Ivy Cottage it was called, by the stream at the bottom of my grandparents' garden and we spent most of the time there, or in our rather taciturn grandfather's tool shed where he let us ‘help' make jigsaws with his fretsaw. (Later, after we returned to India, Grandpa, most unexpectedly, sent us a series of thrilling stories he'd written about the adventures of a girl called Briditia – a combination of Brigid and Patricia, my sister Tessa's real name. They were illustrated by my cousins Jinny and Prue. I am always meaning to try and get them printed for my grandchildren.)

In the end we became fond of our aunt and our grandmother, who was a bit scatty – she once saw a group of her friends chatting away in the high street in Fleet. As she passed them, she smacked one of them on the bum, saying: ‘Gossip! Gossip! Gossip!'  The women turned round in surprise, and to her horror Granny saw they were total strangers.

Not long ago, Fleet was nominated as
a
) one of the best places to live in Britain and
b
) the town where more sex toys are sold than anywhere else – are
a
) and
b
) related? one wonders. In our day, presumably because of its nearness to Aldershot – which used to be known as ‘Home of the British Army' – Fleet was stuffed with retired Indian Army families like ours who, thankfully, wouldn't have known a sex toy from a plate of kedgeree – though, to be fair, I don't think the toys had yet been invented in the 1940s.

The only notable thing about Fleet then was that there was a genuine
patisserie
shop, run by a real Frenchwoman called Madame Max (how/why/when did she come to dreary old Fleet? I wish I knew her story). Bread rationing in England was introduced while we were there, in 1946, and you could only buy the meagre amounts of bread (or cakes, I suppose) that you had coupons for in your ration book; when he was at home Granny used to send David up to Madame Max pretending he'd lost the coupons to try and wheedle some extra treats – he was always sent back empty-handed.

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 current 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.