SITTING IN THE MOUNTAINS, I REMEMBER THE SEA: TINSEL ON A vast field of water, and sunny white sheets billowing in the wind.
I remember a forest of nodding flowers and patches of red, yellow, green and blue light on a wall.
And I remember a little boy who ate a lot of kofta curry and was used to having his way.
My mother always said I was the most troublesome of all her children—an angel in front of strangers, and a stubborn little devil at home. Mothers often say that of their firstborn, who are inclined to look down on the competition, but mine did so with good reason.
Evidence of my stubborn nature must have emerged when I was three or four. Baby photos show me as something of a cherub, always smiling, chubby, charming, cheeky. Visitors wanted to fondle me (or so I was told); fond aunts longed to kiss me. All that fondling and kissing probably contributed to my sensual nature, improved upon by my beautiful chocolate-coloured ayah, who smothered me with kisses and treated me as though I had been born from her own womb. No wonder I became a spoilt brat—and spent half a lifetime compensating for the privilege.
I have a good visual memory, especially of my childhood. In fact, I’m continually surprising myself by what I can remember about my early childhood in Jamnagar: the rich yellow of Polson’s Butter; colourful tins of J.B. Mangharam’s biscuits, with cherubs and scenes from Indian mythology painted on them; drives in our maroon and black Hillman convertible; and postage stamps from the Solomon Islands—smoking volcanos and cockatoos with big showy crests.
We had a beautiful gramophone, a black, square box-like wonder, which was probably the first love of my life apart from my ayah. It was one of those wind-up affairs, and you had to change the needle from time to time. The turntable took only one 78 rpm record, so you couldn’t just relax and listen to an uninterrupted programme of music. You were kept busy all the time—changing records, changing needles and constantly winding the machine vigorously so that it wouldn’t fade away in the middle of a song.
I quite enjoyed the whole process, and would work my way through two boxes of records, ranging from my father’s opera favourites—arias from La Boh ème , Madame Butterfly and Tosca —to the lighter ballads of the currently popular tenors and baritones, like Nelson Eddy. On silent nights, when the lights are out and the hills are asleep, I shut my eyes and imagine I am in the veranda of one of our Jamnagar homes, and I can hear the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso singing Recondita Armonia and Questa O Quella …I did not understand what he was singing, but I liked the sound of those words and tried to sing along, much to my father’s amusement and delight.
There was also a selection of nursery rhymes put to music, bought especially for me, and including one which began: ‘Oh, what have you got for dinner, Mrs Bond?’ But this was not a question we asked our Mrs Bond, my mother. She did not have to worry about dinner because we had a khansama, a cook. His name was Osman, and he took care of all our meals. I was a fan of Osman’s, because he made the best mutton kofta curry in the world, and told me some very tall tales. Osman and Ayah were my first storytellers—her imagination subtler than his.
Had Osman put as much spice in his curries as he did in his stories, we would have been a household on fire. In the afternoons, when I was usually alone—even the ayah would be outside, talking to my sister’s nanny, or taking a nap—I would join Osman in the kitchen as he boiled or chopped or cleaned the meats and vegetables he would later cook for dinner.
A typical story session would go something like this:
‘You see this goat we have just slaughtered, baba? He reminds me of the great lion of Junagadh.’
‘Where’s Junagadh?’
‘Two days by foot from this very house, but you can get there in your motor-gaadi in five-six hours. I worked for the Nawab of Junagadh, who took me along when he went hunting, with ten elephants, twenty dogs and a shikar party of fifty–sixty men—he was a very rich nawab, he would get himself weighed in diamonds on his birthday and give them away to his begums…But I was telling you about the great lion. It needed two full-grown goats or one bull every day. It only ate male animals. And when it could not find goats or bulls, it hunted men. Women were safe.’
‘Did the lion come to hunt you?’
‘No. But it took my masalchi.’
‘What’s a masalchi?’
‘The boy who helped me prepare the meats and vegetables and washed all the dishes. We were part of the hunting party and sharing a small tent. The lion dragged him out by his soft white feet and carried him away. We found his bones in the morning. I beat my chest and cried all day, till all my tears had dried up. And I had to sleep alone the rest of the time we were in the camp. I lit a big fire outside my tent to keep the lion away—someone had told me lions are afraid of fire.’
‘Did it stay away, then?’
‘No, baba. Lions are not afraid of fire at all. The beast returned and walked around the fire and stuck its head in through the flap of the tent. I was still in mourning for my poor masalchi, and when I saw the lion which had eaten him up, I was very angry. I picked up the big iron tawa on which I was making rotis and hit the beast on its nose. The tawa was hotter than the fires of jahannum, and that son of Satan—’
‘What’s jahannum?’
‘It is where bad people go after they die and are roasted in big tandoors. Little boys who keep interrupting a story go there too.’
‘Sorry.’
‘So I struck the lion’s nose with my tawa and it let out a roar and fell backwards into the fire burning at the entrance, let out another roar, and fled into the jungle. We heard the beast roaring in agony all night!’
‘Did the nawab give you a reward?
‘No, baba. He was a rich badshah, but not a generous one. Not like our Jam Sahib…’
The ‘Jam Sahib’ was the ruler of Jamnagar State, his palace just a short walk from where we were staying. The state had a huge retinue of British and Irish advisers and professional people, from architects and accountants to pilots and mechanics. The Jam Sahib had a fleet of Rolls Royce cars—of all the princes of India, he had the largest number. There must have been about fifty, one of which, probably from the collection of his predecessor, was rumoured to have been painted a special pink to match the colour of a maharani’s slippers. Rolls Royce had provided the Jam Sahib with an automobile engineer-cum-mechanic from England to look after the cars and he lived in a posh house not far from the palace.
There was a banquet every week for these foreign professionals, and for visiting dignitaries, neighbouring princes, British officials, even famous cricketers—for Jamnagar was the home of Indian cricket. We were invited, and unless there was a good reason that kept us home, we would go—my father out of a sense of duty, my mother because she was bored at home, and I because the desserts were excellent.
But what were we doing in Jamnagar in the first place?
And here I will have to bore you with a little family history.
I am not one of those who look up their family trees in order to discover that a great-grandmother was related to the Czar of Russia and that a great-granduncle was probably Queen Victoria’s lover. I’m happy to accept that Grandfather Bond was a good soldier (he retired as drill sergeant) and that Grandfather Clerke (my mother’s father) helped in the making of solid railway carriages for the Northern Railway. The former had come from England with his regiment when he was seventeen. The latter was born in a place called Dera Ismael Khan, a frontier outpost, where his father was a clerk in the office of the Commissioner, a certain Mr Durand, who drew up the Durand Line between India (the part that is now Pakistan) and Afghanistan.
A foot soldier, Grandfather Bond was always route marching from one cantonment to another, with the result that his four children were all born in different places. My own dear father was born in the hot, dusty town of Shahjahanpur, on July 24, 1896. He was baptized in the same cantonment church where, some forty years previously, the assembly of worshippers had all been massacred at the outbreak of the 1857 rebellion. My father had two brothers, who did not distinguish themselves in any way; but he was a good student, well read, and after finishing school at the Sanawar Military School, he took a teacher’s training at Lovedale in the Nilgiris. He moved about the country a good deal, working at various jobs, including a stint as an assistant manager on a tea estate in Munnar, then Travancore-Cochin (now Kerala), and all the while he collected butterflies, stamps, picture postcards, the crests of Indian states, and anything else that was collectible. He used his teaching skills to land tutorial jobs in various princely states where, like E.M. Forster and J.R. Ackerley before him, he taught English, spoken and written, to the young royals before they were sent off to English public schools. He was working for the ruler of Alwar when he met my mother.
He had taken a month’s holiday, and was staying at a boarding-house in Mussoorie, the popular hill-station perched on a ridge above Dehradun. It was late summer in 1933, and he was thirty-six years old. My mother was eighteen, and undergoing a nurse’s training at Cottage Hospital, on the ramparts of Gun Hill, not far from her old school. They met, had a torrid affair, and very soon I was on my way.
If we are lucky, we love with both heart and body, and I like to think that my parents were lucky. Neither of them spoke of it as a courtship, however, and when I consider the short time they spent together before I was conceived, I wouldn’t call it a courtship, either. The season demanded passion, and they happened to find each other; so chance had a greater role to play in my birth than it does in others.
Passionate—and often short-lived—affairs were not unusual in Mussoorie; in fact, they were expected of visitors to this hill station. Shimla, the summer capital of British India, was usually teeming with officials and empire-builders and ambitious young civil servants. As was Nainital, capital of the United Provinces. But Mussoorie was non-official. It was where people came to live their private lives, far from the reproving eyes of their senior officers. Unlike Shimla, Mussoorie was also small, tucked away in a fold of the Himalaya, ideal for discreet affairs conducted over picnic baskets set down beneath the deodars.
But discretion wasn’t always required; if rules were broken and scandals erupted, the Queen of the Hills took things in its stride. As far back as 1884, a visiting reporter of the Calcutta Statesman , appalled by the ‘immoral tone of society up here’, recorded that ‘ladies and gentlemen after attending church proceeded to a drinking shop and there indulged freely in pegs, not one but many’, and that at a fancy bazaar ‘a lady stood up on a chair and offered her kisses to gentlemen at Rs 5 each.’
Mussoorie was at its merriest in the 1930s, when another lady stood up at a charity show and auctioned a single kiss, for which a gentleman paid Rs 300—probably the price of a little cottage in those days. It was the year my parents met. My mother told me later that my father had been friendly with her older sister, Emily, whom he had known for some years in Dehradun, where he was a frequent visitor. But things hadn’t worked out.
This rather complicated personal history, and the age difference between them, did not prevent my parents from becoming man and wife, although I have never come across a record of their marriage. But they certainly became Mr and Mrs Bond for my baptismal certificate; issued in Kasauli the following year, it gives everyone’s names in full: father, Aubrey Alexander Bond; mother, Edith Dorothy; infant son, Owen Ruskin Bond.
I discovered later that it was my father who chose the name Ruskin. Was it his secret wish that I should become a writer and painter like the famous Victorian John Ruskin? I never did find out. And Owen—the superfluous second name—was also his idea. Owen means ‘warrior’ in Welsh, so perhaps he wanted me to be both artist and soldier! Well, I did become an artist of a kind. But I am not, and never have been, a brave person. Foolhardy, yes, and certainly stubborn, but not brave. So it’s just as well that nobody ever bothered with Owen; the name was soon forgotten.
I’m not very sure why my mother went to Kasauli for the delivery and not to her mother in Dehradun. Discretion seems to me the only logical explanation. In any case, it was perhaps a sensible decision because Kasauli, a quiet little hill station close to Shimla, was a good place to have a baby, and my mother’s second sister was living there. Her husband, a doctor, worked in the Pasteur Institute. My father had studied for some years in the Sanawar Military School, a short distance away, and he had friends in Kasauli, including the local pastor, Reverend McKenzie. It was in his church that I was baptized. All among familiars.
Another of my father’s many hobbies was photography, and I still have the pictures he took with his Rolleicord camera of the infant Ruskin a few hours old, a day old, two days old, a month old, etc., in the arms of a nurse at the Military Hospital, or at home with my mother or aunt or Mrs McKenzie, the pastor’s wife. When I was a month old, we left Kasauli. There was nothing to keep us there. It was simply a good place in which to have a baby. And it was only now that my parents went to Dehra, to spend some time with my maternal grandparents.
My father had found employment with the ruler of Jamnagar, and he left a few weeks later. My mother and I stayed on in Dehradun for a few months before we joined him. I have a picture—taken, perhaps, in a Dehradun photo studio—of me in a pram, surrounded by flowers and bouquets. On the back is a little note: ‘With love & a big kiss from your wee son Owen’. It is in my mother’s handwriting, and addressed to my father. The affectionate tone is hard to miss; there’s a note of comfortable intimacy.
I also have a picture of my mother, a portrait photograph of hers reshot by my father in an arrangement of flowers, which he later hand-painted. So that first year must have been a time of domestic bliss and love. But I was too young to experience it.
In Jamnagar, also known as Navanagar, my father started a small palace school for the little prince and young princesses. There were at least five of them, or maybe more; but I remember three or four quite well.
Jamnagar was a little port town in the Kathiawar peninsula on the west coast of India. Small steamers plying across the Gulf of Kutch stopped there, and sometimes large Arab dhows, which made a lovely sight with their great white sails. This part of the country was full of small, independent states, all owing allegiance to the British crown but, for the most part, running their own affairs. Jamnagar was probably the best known of these states because it was, as I have said, the home of Indian cricket.
A previous ruler, Ranjit Singhji, had played Test cricket for England, and with some distinction. His nephew, Duleep, had done the same but had given up playing due to a frail constitution. Promising young players, like Vinoo Mankad, were learning their cricket in Jamnagar. My father was no cricketer, but we dutifully attended most of the cricket matches which involved visiting teams from England or elsewhere; and I was taken along to these games as part of my parents’ social obligations. Everyone who mattered would be there—the Jam Sahib (in immaculate sherwanis and churidar pyjamas, when he wasn’t on the field himself) and his retinue, his family members and his European and Indian staff, visiting officials, neighbouring princes—and refreshments were constantly being passed around by bearers in smart white turbans.
I don’t remember much of the cricket—I was too small to appreciate a batsman’s technique or a bowler’s guile—but I do remember the refreshments, offered freely at the cricket matches and the birthday parties organized for the children of the royal family, to which all those working for the Jam Sahib would be invited.
‘Don’t eat too much,’ warned my mother, as I helped myself to gulab jamuns, jalebis, rasgullas and laddoos, all washed down with fizzy lemonade, those being the days before cola drinks came to India. But of course I always ate too much, and I would be sick when we got home and I was handed over to my ayah for further admonishment: ‘Too many laddoos, too many laddoos, how much baba eats!’ and she nicknamed me ‘Laddoo’ which gradually became ‘Ladla’ or Sweetheart.
I did not mind being Ayah’s Sweetheart. She was a very comfortable sort of woman, large and loving, and at the age of four or five I could appreciate her pillow-like structure, soft and yielding and smelling of spices, and my mother’s eau-de-cologne.
Eau-de-cologne was the scent of the day, there being nothing else in the shops except something called ‘Evening in Paris’ which (as I learnt later) was distilled in Aligarh and bottled in Bombay. In the depths of the bazaar you could also pick up little bottles of local perfume—heady stuff, distilled from roses or jasmine, guaranteed to linger on the user for weeks.
Ayah fancied a little eau-de-cologne from time to time, and I would smuggle the bottle out to her. After sprinkling it over her ample bosom and sturdy forearms, the bottle would be surreptitiously returned to my mother’s dressing table. Ayah loved me for this little service. ‘A friend for the sake of advantage,’ as Aristotle put it!
Came the day when my mother couldn’t help noticing the very low level of perfume in the bottle.
‘Who’s been using my eau-de-cologne?’ demanded mother bear.
‘I used it on the dog,’ I said quickly, already a good dissembler. ‘She was smelling horribly.’
Poor Beauty, our aging Alsatian, did smell a bit but not too badly. However, she was given a good bath in a Dettol solution, and sulked for weeks, not being fond of bathing.
My own baths took place in a large tin tub. I liked splashing around and flooding the bathroom, and my mother preferred to keep a distance, leaving poor Ayah to take the soaking. Sometimes my father joined me in the bathtub and we would sing sea-shanties together. Shanties were sailors’ songs, sung in unison while they were at work on the old sailing ships. My favourite was ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ And whenever this question was sung out by my father, I’d sing back: ‘Put him in a tub and wet him all over!’
These tub-baths with my father became something of a tradition, and continued for several years, until he was taken from me. He called them ‘rucktions’. I don’t find this word in the dictionary, so I presume he invented it. ‘Creating rucktions’! He enjoyed it as much as I did. Perhaps it took him back to his own childhood. He was usually a serious, quiet sort of person, but on those occasions he would be quite boyish and noisy—and because he was parent and playmate, he was ‘Daddy’ to me. That was what I always called him. Not ‘father’ or ‘Dad’ or ‘Papa’. My mother was ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’, but my father was always ‘Daddy’.
Another shanty we sang was ‘We’re bound for the Rio Grande’:
We’ve a jolly good ship, an’ a jolly good crew:
Awa—ay, Rio!
A jolly good mate an’ a good skipper too,
An’ we’re bound for Rio Grande!
Say goodbye to Polly, and goodbye to Sue
Awa—ay, Rio!
And you who are listenin’, it’s goodbye to you,
An’ we’re bound for Rio Grande!
I remember the words because we had them on one of our records. That, and ‘Five Down Below’ and the beautiful, haunting ‘Shenandoah’:
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you—
Away, you rolling river.
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you—
Away I’m bound to go…
The Jamnagar sea-front was only a twenty-minute drive from our bungalow, and some evenings we visited the little port called Rosi Bundar, which had a retired British naval officer, Mr Bourne, as port commander. My small hand in my father’s, we strolled up and down the pier, and I explored with him the harbour and beach, bringing back seashells and cowries of great variety. On one occasion, I brought home a small crab, which lived in a spare bathtub for several days. Osman kept asking if he could cook it, but I wouldn’t let him. I was very attached to the crab—for two or three days, I think, and then I forgot all about it. Finally, Ayah took pity on the poor creature and dropped it into a nearby well.
A small British steamer was often in port at Rosi Bundar, and my father and I would visit the captain, a good-natured Welshman who gave me chocolates, a great treat in those days, for Jamnagar was too small a place for Western confectionary shops. I was ready to go to sea with the captain, convinced that chocolates were only to be found on tramp steamers!
One day, Daddy took me for a trip in an Arab dhow. It was a fairly large ship, but it swung about tremendously, and I was quite terrified at first. We sailed down the coast for a couple of hours before being put ashore at one of the smaller ports. I was glad to be back on terra firma. I have always liked having my feet set firmly on the ground.
There was a small aerodrome at Jamnagar, and a couple of the younger royals, who were in their late twenties, liked going up in their two-seater Tiger Moths and performing stunts in the air. A smart young prince invited my mother to join him on one of these flights, and she took me along. Very reluctantly I squeezed into the cockpit beside her, and away we went! He looped the loop, and performed all sorts of aerial acrobatics in that flimsy four-winged contraption, while I screamed loud enough to frighten the gods (if they were listening). When finally we landed, I was heartily sick and quite determined never to get into a plane again.
A week later this same pilot, while showing off in a similar fashion, crashed his plane and was killed. On hitting the ground, the windshield had blown in and decapitated him.
We had at least three homes in Jamnagar. First there was a rambling old colonial mansion whose roof leaked every time it rained. After this—or maybe before—a wing of the old palace, which looked like a ruin from the outside but was cool and comfortable inside (though we had to share it with bats and bandicoots). Finally, we moved to the ‘Tennis Bungalow’, a converted sports complex, which was bright and airy and where we stayed the longest.
Jamnagar was where my habit of walking really began, because it was full of spacious palaces, lawns and gardens. By the time I was four, I was exploring much of this territory on my own. Although I was afraid of aeroplanes and sailing-ships, I was not troubled by birds, beasts or reptiles. The old walls around the palace grounds were infested with snakes of various descriptions, and I saw them often enough on the lawns or the driveway. Envious of their swift gliding movements, I tried crawling about on my belly at home but I wasn’t much good at it. Curious though I was, I knew instinctively that if I did not bother them or get in their way, the snakes would keep away and allow me to pass. They did not send me into a panic, as they did Ayah, who would scream ‘Saanp, saanp !’ and dash into the house, urging my father or the cook to come out and vanquish the reptile. The snakes seldom entered the house, as they had to climb a flight of steps in order to do so, and most snakes prefer not to exert themselves unduly. Unless, of course, there’s a frog or a fat rat in the offing, and then they can move with great speed in order to snap up their breakfast or dinner.
My father’s schoolroom and the Tennis Bungalow were located in the grounds of the old palace, which was largely uninhabited, and full of turrets, stairways and mysterious dark passages that I loved to explore. I climbed right to the top of the main tower one afternoon, and discovered a room with glass windows going right round it, and each square pane stained with a different colour. It became my favourite place for days, and I would climb up to look through different panes of glass at a red or yellow or rose-pink or indigo or parrot-green world. It was nice to be able to decide for oneself what colour the world should be! The room was always empty, and it stayed in my memory as a lonely and magical place. Some forty years later, I wrote a story about an ageing princess who had lost her mind and shut herself up in this room after she’d been prevented from marrying the palace gardener. I called it ‘The Room of Many Colours’.
I never saw a palace gardener, but if there was one, he must have believed in letting nature take its course. In the old palace grounds we were surrounded by a veritable jungle of a garden. Marigolds and cosmos grew rampant in the tall grass between shady trees. I loved walking among the white, light purple and magenta cosmos flowers, always friendly, nodding to me, inviting me closer. Unlike the roses, which seemed very snobbish to me, perhaps because their thorns prevented me from getting close. An old disused well was the home of countless pigeons, their soft cooing by day contrasting with the shrill cries of the brain-fever bird at night. ‘How very hot it’s getting!’ the bird seemed to say. And then, in a rising crescendo, ‘We feel it! We FEEL it! WE FEEL IT!’
Just beyond the palace grounds was the state farm. It had ducks and geese, hens and roosters (which tried valiantly to wake me up at dawn with their loud crowing but failed). My favourite birds were the turkeys, bred mainly for Christmas and New Year banquets, for it was only the Europeans in the state who really appreciated turkey meat. ‘Gobble, gobble, gobble!’ went the turkeys whenever I passed them. I liked their colourful plumage and naked wattled heads. They were always waiting to be fed. The ducks and geese roamed all over the place but the turkeys had a pen to themselves, as did the pigs—pink, plump, imported all the way from England.
A middle-aged Welsh couple, Mr and Mrs Jenkins, ran the farm for His Highness the Jam Sahib. I don’t think they had any children, and they seemed quite happy spending time with each other and the birds and animals, with books and magazines providing some variety. There would be stacks of Punch , Country Life and Picture Post lying about on their veranda. My reading skills were still rather limited, but I liked going through them for their pictures and cartoons. The lurid covers of Edgar Wallace mysteries also attracted me, but it would be a few years before I became an addict of mysteries and detective fiction.
I possessed only two books during those Jamnagar years—a big book of nursery rhymes, and a battered edition of Alice in Wonderland . It was by reading Alice (with help from my father) that I learnt to read, and my favourite characters were the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, poor Bill the Lizard, the Cheshire cat, and the philosophical caterpillar smoking his hookah. I could not really identify with Alice, who seemed a superior sort of person.
All this reading happened outside the classroom, because I wasn’t enrolled in a school. I did attend some of my father’s classes, but more as an observer and entirely at my own whim—whenever I felt like dropping in while I did my rounds of the gardens and the rambling old palace. Among the pupils were the four Jamnagar princesses—Manha, Jhanak, Ratna and Hathi. I would spend a lot of time standing in front of their desks and watch them pore over their readers, with the result that I developed the skill of reading things upside-down. Occasionally, I still read upside-down, when I need exercise for my eyes or when a book begins to get difficult and boring.
The two eldest princesses—who must have been nine or ten—were beautiful creatures, and I had a crush on them. Except that I wasn’t sure that they were girls. They were always dressed in bandgala jackets and trousers and kept their hair quite short. When my father told me they were girls, not boys, I found it all a bit confusing. I grew shy and couldn’t be as familiar with them as before, and naturally my infatuation with them grew stronger.
Hathi, the youngest princess, was closer to me in age and she was my playmate in that rather informal schoolroom. The little prince, the heir to the throne, not yet in school, sometimes came over to the bungalow to play with me. The sweet-natured son of the Jam Sahib’s secretary—a Bengali gentleman with a very plummy accent—was another playmate. And there was my sister Ellen, two years younger to me, whom I would push around the garden on a tricycle. She had been born with some difficulty and had suffered a forceps injury to the brain, which was to affect her development and result in her being almost an invalid for life. These companions and many others are still familiar faces in my father’s photographs. How beautiful we are as small children—innocent, untouched by corruption, our faces smooth and unlined—nothing to worry about except baths and hair-cuts and running out of cream biscuits.
My biggest worry was the monthly hair-cut. I hated it. When the barber appeared on the veranda steps, I would run for cover, and Ayah would have to chase me around the house until I was trapped by my mother, wrapped up in a bedsheet, and deposited in a high chair, still struggling and kicking. The barber was a mad-looking fellow who came armed with an unusually large pair of scissors. My tantrums would only make him nervous, and I’d end up looking like one of the mop-haired urchins in a Dandy or Beano comic.
I had a number of bad habits, which included sucking my thumb. Nothing could cure me of this habit, with the result that by the time I was five or six I had buck-teeth. Over the years, the teeth have settled down a little, but I have never quite recovered from those early hair-cuts and my hair is apt to stand on end after a nap or a walk or any public appearance, rather like Stan Laurel’s. Just recently I have noticed a number of young men going about with mops of healthy hair standing on end, so it appears I am finally in fashion.
Sometimes, after a particularly traumatic encounter with the barber’s scissors, my father would take me to the small cinema in town, where English-language films were shown on special occasions. One of them, which I remember vividly, was Tarzan the Ape Man . Tarzan (champion swimmer Johnny Weissmuller dressed in a flapping mini skirt) spoke very little, but he dived off high cliffs into big rivers and swung beautifully from one tree to another with the help of conveniently placed vines and creepers. Back home, I tried swinging from my mother’s curtains, only to tear two of them to shreds. I was made to stitch them together again, something I did with considerable help from my ever-loving Ayah.
And here I must pause to tell you a little more about Ayah, my guardian angel, surrogate mother, friend and beloved all rolled into one and wrapped up in a white sari. My mother, young in years and younger at heart, was often away attending the lunch and tea get-togethers that the ladies of the royal household liked to organize, or she would accompany the younger royals on picnics and excursions. My father spent more time with me, but he would be at work through much of the day. I would be left in the care of the servants—all but the ayah provided by the Jamnagar State. I had no objection to the arrangement, because the servants indulged me. Most of all, Ayah.
She was probably from one of the fishing communities of Kathiawar or from the poorer Muslim families from the north of India who worked in Christian and Anglo-Indian households. She must have been in her thirties and was unusually large and broad-limbed for an Indian woman, and shaped like a papaya, expansive at the hips and thighs. I was told she had a family of her own but I never saw them, and she never spoke of them. She was the one I spent the most time with at home—she stayed all day, washing my clothes, giving me a bath and telling me stories in Hindustani about jinns and fairies and the snake transformed into a handsome prince by the loving touch of a beautiful princess.
Ayah had large, rough hands and I liked being soaped and scrubbed by her, enjoying the sensation of her hands moving over my back and tummy. She could also use those hands very effectively to deliver a few resounding slaps, because I really was a little devil. But her anger vanished as quickly as it came when she saw me break into tears. And then she would break down herself, and cover me with big, wet kisses and gather me into herself, pressing my face to her great warm breasts. To be hugged and kissed, and generally fussed over, is one of the joys of infancy and childhood. My mother was not a physically demonstrative person—the occasional peck on the cheek was enough emotion for her. But Ayah more than made up for it. She would kiss my navel and nuzzle my tummy and tell the other staff, ‘I want to eat him up! I want to eat him up!’
Ayah taught me many things. One of these was the eating of paan. I didn’t care for the taste—somewhat bitter, because of the betel nut and lime—but I was fascinated by the red juice, which Ayah would spit with great accuracy in different corners of the overgrown garden. When my parents were out, she would make me a miniature paan—I think she added a little sugar in it—and I would chew the paan and sit in the kitchen, gossiping with her and the cook. Before my parents came home, Ayah would rinse my mouth with warm water, and with her rough fingers she would scrub my teeth clean.
I was in love with Ayah—it was a child’s love for a mother, but it was also a sensual, physical love. I loved the smell of her skin and her paan-scented breath and her dazzling smile. She was in love with my soft white skin and bathed and dressed me with infinite tenderness, and defended me against everyone, including my parents.
If I swallowed an orange seed, Ayah would say an orange tree would grow inside me. Being an imaginative child, this rather worried me because orange trees, I was told, had thorns on them. I did not want to worry my parents unduly, so I took my problem to Mr Jenkins, who looked serious, thought about it for a few moments, then said: ‘Don’t worry, it will only be a small tree.’
Still worried, I consulted Osman, who laughed and said, ‘Your ayah is just a gapori, don’t listen to her.’
‘What’s a gapori?’ I asked.
‘One who makes up stories—and exaggerates. Go and tell her you’ve swallowed a bean.’
I did, and she said, ‘Oh, baba, now you’ll have a bean-stalk growing inside you!’
‘And there will be a giant living in it?’ I asked.
She burst into laughter, seeing I’d caught her out.
‘Osman says you’re a gapori,’ I told her. And she and Osman had a terrible fight. She chased him around the house and forgave him only when he said he meant she was a pari, a fairy, not a gapori.
Still, I think I learnt something about telling stories from Ayah, as I did from Osman, although I had no idea that I would become a gapori of sorts one day.
My parents quarrelled quite often. Partly it was due to the difference in age and temperament—which must have surfaced after the fire of passion had gone out. Of course, I did not understand this at the time. If they hadn’t felt that the brief Mussoorie entanglement had to end in something permanent, they might have been happier people.
There were frequent dinner and marriage parties in Jamnagar—there were many small states in Kathiawar and they were always intermarrying and visiting each other. Mummy would have liked to go. But Daddy preferred his stamp collection…
And a wonderful collection it was, with postage stamps from all over the world, neatly arranged in special albums—an album each for India, Britain, Australia, Ceylon, Zanzibar, and various island nations in the Pacific. Some were recent stamps, others rare issues from the past, and Daddy went about completing sets and mounting them in the handsome albums. Registered letters would arrive from the famous firm of Stanley Gibbons, enclosing samples or purchased items, and the Gibbons stamp catalogues would occupy pride of place on the bookshelf.
Often, of an evening, I would help my father sort through cigar boxes full of loose stamps, while in the background the Italian opera star Gigli would be singing one of his famous arias. Whenever the record finished, I would rush to the gramophone to change the needle and the record.
‘Put on something light, Ruskin,’ my mother would say. Only then would I realize she had been in the room all along. Perhaps Daddy hadn’t noticed her either.
‘Put on something light.’ But we did not have any fox-trots or rumbas. In my father’s collection, only Strauss waltzes came close to anything light. So she taught me to waltz—very clumsily, because it wasn’t her preferred style—and we would cavort around the veranda or small drawing-room, in step and in time to the entrancing, lilting Blue Danube , Roses of the South and Tales from the Vienna Woods .
Left alone with Ayah one day, I tried to teach her to waltz too, but she simply collapsed in hysterics on the veranda steps, squealing with laughter at having to indulge in such a barbaric rite.
‘Get up, get up,’ I said. ‘Get up and dance with me.’ But she refused and wouldn’t stop laughing, and annoyed, I called her ‘Ayah-papaya’ and then ran like a rabbit.
Later, I put her into a rhyme, which must have been my first literary effort, inspired no doubt by Dandy comics, a big book of nursery rhymes, and Mr Jenkins’ farm animals. It went something like this:
Gobble-gobble said the turkey,
Honk-honk said the goose.
Cluck-cluck said the little hen,
Squeak-squeak said the mouse.
Clang-clang went our motor-car,
Bang-bang went the wedding band.
Katar-katar went the porcupine,
Tootle-tootle went the train.
Nothing-nothing said the goldfish,
And the earthworm said the same.
Sleep tight, says Ayah-papaya,
And God protect my little baba.
Notice that most of my rhyming occurred at the beginning rather than at the end of my lines. Already, I was finding it more fun to do things in reverse. Like reading books upside-down, it’s a useful skill to have, especially when life begins to get difficult and boring.
‘Oh, Adolf
You’ve bitten off
Much more than you can chew,
Come on
Hold your hand out,
We’re all fed up with you…’
So sang Arthur Askey, the diminutive British music-hall comedian, shortly after the outbreak of World War II in 1939. My father had bought the record on one of his visits to Bombay, and I enjoyed listening to the jingle on our gramophone. ‘Big-hearted Arthur’ was of course referring to Adolf Hitler, the German dictator, who had overrun most of Europe with his jack-booted army.
Six years later, Hitler was to realize that he had indeed bitten off much more than he could chew. His army in tatters, he committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
But when we were in Jamnagar, the end of the war was not in sight, though of course we were insulated from it. I don’t remember hearing much about the war at home. It was many years later that I learnt of the horrors in Europe and East Asia, but also of the Jam Sahib’s contribution to the Allied war effort through a remarkable act of humanity. As Poland was invaded by German forces, he opened his doors to refugees from that helpless country. Several hundred children and women who had fled Poland in small ships that travelled from port to port and were denied entry by the authorities everywhere—including the British governor of Bombay—were brought to Rosi Bundar by the Jam Sahib. He put them up in a special camp in Balachadi, close to his summer palace, where they stayed till the end of the war.
The Jam Sahib was one of the few enlightened rulers in pre-independent India, and when Independence came he was wise enough to accept the derecognition of princely states with good grace. One of his neighbours, the eccentric Nawab of Junagadh, fled to Pakistan, taking with him scores of his favourite dogs—he’d kept a few hundred, but had to leave most behind. Fortunately the lions of the Junagadh forests were not affected by political upheavals, and today represent the only lions in existence on the Asian continent.
My father’s former employer, the Maharaja of Alwar, in Rajasthan, was another unusual ruler of that era. He kept a menagerie of beasts and would drive them all into an amphitheatre to see what they would do to each other. According to my mother, who lived very briefly in Alwar with Daddy, this maharaja modelled himself on the Roman emperor Nero and took a sadistic delight in watching various animals tear each other to pieces—a tiger mauling a buffalo, a bear wrestling with a python, a young leopard being crushed by an elephant.
This deranged king wanted a son; his wives kept presenting him with daughters. So disgusted was he at the birth of one more girl that he seized the infant and flung her out of a second-floor window. A sentry standing below saw a bundle hurtling towards him, put out his arms and caught the baby. The king was not a cricketer and did not applaud his guard’s dexterity; he had the man executed. But the girl survived and lived to be ninety.
These and other tales of the Indian Nero were passed on to me many years later. At the time, I was still in my mother’s womb. She and my father thought it best to avoid Alwar and head for safe and sensible Kasauli for my birth.
Strange things happened in some of India’s princely states in those far-off days.
But not in Jamnagar.
In Jamnagar the princes played cricket or flew aeroplanes. Sanity prevailed. There were turkeys for Christmas. Caruso sang his beautiful arias. We moved around in a Hillman provided by the Jam Sahib, with a driver. And I was pampered and indulged—by the royals, the neighbours and the servants.
But there were very few children for me to play with, except when the little prince sought me out, which was rare, or when the royal children had birthday parties. But there was always Ayah to fuss over me, Osman to tell me improbable stories, the Jenkins to lend me magazines and my father to take me for walks, so that, for several years to come, I was to feel more at ease with adults than with other children. Ellen was the only other child in the house, but the gods in their casual cruelty had decided that she would remain in a kind of limbo all her life, neither child nor adult, and unable to see or walk properly. We’d kept a nanny for her, which allowed us to pretend everything was all right and get on with our lives.
‘Ruskin does not play with me,’ she would complain to her nanny and I would push her around on her tricycle for some minutes and then run off into the garden, or climb up to the room of coloured windows.
Through it all, my parents’ quarrels became more frequent, and this broke the harmony of our life. There would be harsh words and blind, angry shouting. My mother would threaten to go away, or my father would threaten to send her away, and it was all a bit frightening. I felt helpless and insecure, and this feeling of insecurity was to become a part of my mental baggage for the rest of my life. In those early years, there was no one to turn to except Ayah, who laughed it off and said everything would be all right by morning, and she was usually right. Things would settle down soon enough and the usual routine of household life would take over. But not for very long.
Perhaps if there had been family or friends around, there might have been people to help my parents work through the problems between them. Or at least there would have been some distraction. The Jam Sahib preferred employing European people, not so much Anglo-Indians, and there were just a couple of Indians on his staff from outside the state. They were all usually older people, or professionals who preferred to keep to themselves. We had no family friends, and no one from my parents’ families would come so far down. I suppose it must have been very isolating for my mother. Unlike my father, she had no experience of living in far-off and humdrum places. She had spent very little time outside Dehradun and away from her large family and circle of friends, most of whom would have been Anglo-Indian.
Jamnagar wasn’t a place where a lot happened, and we rarely went out of town. The one excursion I can recall, but vaguely, was a road trip to the neighbouring state of Junagadh in our Hillman. My mother would tell me later about the ruler there—the nawab who kept hundreds of dogs, all with jewelled collars. He arranged elaborate public weddings for them, and when one of them died, he had it buried with full state honours. I don’t remember anything of this trip too well; not the dogs, nor the famed mosque with corkscrew towers, nor the lions of Gir. So it may have been an early excursion, when I was a baby. But my mother remembered it; one of the few good memories she had of our time in sleepy Jamnagar.
My own memories are of an almost idyllic time, except for the arguments between my parents, when I would look for Ayah, or go out to roam in the garden. There, the cosmos flowers were always happy to see me, but a koel would keep wanting to know who I was. The fights at home sometimes drove me out at night as well. I would sit on the veranda steps, reluctant to go any further into the darkness, but after a while I began to enjoy the rustling sounds in the garden, and the soft hooting of the owls.
And there was of course that wonderful gramophone and its box of records. I could always turn to it when I felt lonely or unhappy or just bored. Wind it up, change the needle, place the record on the turntable—and the room would be filled with the wonderful voice of Chaliapin singing ‘The Song of the Volga Boatman’; or Gigli singing ‘Santa Lucia’; or dear old Gracie Fields singing ‘Over the Garden Wall’. There were about fifty records in the box, and I’d played them all hundreds of times; they’d become real friends and companions.
So that when my father said he’d joined the Royal Air Force and that we’d be leaving Jamnagar, the first thing I asked was, ‘Daddy, will we be taking the gramophone with us?’
‘Let’s see,’ he said. ‘We can always get another one.’
‘No, I want this one,’ I insisted. ‘We can’t leave it behind.’
And so it was agreed that the gramophone would come with us.
‘And what about Ayah?’ I asked ‘Will she come too?’
‘You’re too big for an ayah now,’ he said. ‘And while I’m away you’ll be in Dehradun with your mother and Granny—you won’t be needing an ayah. And besides, your Ayah’s home is here in Jamnagar. She has a husband and grown-up children. She can’t leave them all behind.’
‘Well, can’t she bring them too?’
‘Your Granny’s house isn’t big enough for so many people. And sometimes your cousins will be staying there too.’ The cousins he referred to were the children of my mother’s four older sisters, my aunts Beryl, Enid, Emily and Gwen—the former two from my grandfather’s first wife. So far I hadn’t seen any of them.
So what did I take with me when we left Jamnagar? The gramophone, of course, although this (fortunately for me, as it turned out) was to stay with my father in Delhi. A couple of books, including the battered old copy of Alice . And a pile of comic papers given to me as a parting present by Mr Jenkins.
Unlike most Indian railway stations, the Jamnagar station was a small one, minus the milling crowds that were to be a feature of future railway journeys. We had a compartment to ourselves.
Interesting food items were offered to us from the open window, but I was warned not to eat any of these mouth-watering concoctions. Only a month previously a family friend had got on to the train in Calcutta, hale and hearty, and two days later his corpse had been carried out of the compartment upon its arrival in Delhi. Cholera could take you away within twelve hours. The food served at the station restaurants was usually safe, but somewhat bland and uninteresting. But we had brought plenty of chicken and turkey sandwiches along (courtesy Mrs Jenkins) and a large basket of fruit (courtesy the palace) and a tiffin carrier full of my favourite kofta curry (courtesy Osman).
We were seen off by the palace secretary, and by Mr and Mrs Jenkins, and of course my beloved Ayah who shed copious tears and begged to be taken along.
But the guard’s whistle blew, the steam engine gave a snort, and the train moved slowly out of the station. And I never saw Jamnagar or Ayah again.
It took almost three days to travel by train from Jamnagar to Dehradun, the lovely garden town in the shadow of the great Himalaya mountains that was to become central to my life. In those days, India was perhaps the best place to undertake a train journey—for train travel at its best is all about romance; about the great outdoors, where anything can happen.
The trains were not as crowded then as they are today, and provided no one got sick, a long journey was something of an extended picnic, with halts at quaint little stations, railway meals in abundance brought by waiters in smart uniforms, an ever-changing landscape, bridges over mighty rivers and khuds, forests and farmlands, everything sun-drenched. The air was crisp and unpolluted—and we let it rush in, for those were the days before sealed windows and air-conditioning—except when dust storms swept across the vast plains. Bottled drinks were a rarity, the occasional lemonade or ‘Vimto’ being the only aerated drink. We made our own orange juice or lime juice and took it with us.
As we approached Dehradun that winter of 1940–41, I woke up early one morning and looked out of the open window at dense forests of sal and sheesham; here and there a forest glade or a stream of clear water—quite different from the muddied waters of the streams and rivers we had crossed the previous day. As we passed over a largish river—my father told me it was the Song River—we saw a herd of elephants bathing. And as I turned my head to look at the gentle giants till they were out of sight, we entered the Doon valley, where fields of flowering mustard stretched away to the foothills.
When we reached Dehradun station, we were soot-covered and wilting. Coolies appeared to take our luggage, Daddy haggled with them, but not too much, and by the time we had walked out of the station, Dehra’s bracing winter climate had already revived us.
We took a tonga and creaked and clip-clopped pleasantly along quiet roads. Scarlet poinsettia leaves and trailing bougainvillea adorned the garden walls, and in the compounds grew mango, litchi, guava, papaya and lemon trees that Daddy pointed out to me throughout our tonga ride. The tonga driver deposited us at the gate of my maternal grandparents’ home, and delivered us—father, mother and two children aged six and four—to a future that none of us had imagined. It was the last time the family would be together.
DEHRADUN WAS A SMALL TOWN SPREAD BETWEEN THE Ganga and Yamuna rivers, and nestling in a valley between the Himalayan foothills and the sub-tropical Siwalik range. Today it’s a mini-city with a population exceeding ten lakhs, but seventy-five years ago the population hovered around 40,000 souls—Hindu traders and Muslim artisans from the cities of the plains; poor hill people seeking a better living; Gurkha soldiers and their families; a small but thriving Anglo-Indian community; even a few British officials who had retired in the valley. It was a popular retirement place for people from the army, railways and police—land was affordable, the roads were relatively clean and never crowded, there were trees all around, and the weather was temperate. The summer months were hot but not too oppressive. The winter months were quite pleasant, although in January a cold wind from the Tibetan plateau could get into your bones. The monsoon rains arrived with a flourish late June, celebrated Lord Krishna’s birthday in August, and slipped quietly away in September.
Though it was formally known as Dehradun, as it is even today, in the 1940s and ’50s everyone called it Dehra, and this intimate name suited the town well. It was small and green, somewhat laidback, easy-going; fond of gossip, but tolerant of human foibles. A place of bicycles and pony-drawn tongas—there were very few cars and hardly any buses. Some army jeeps took over the roads briefly during World War II, but after the war it was quiet again. You could walk almost anywhere, at any time of the year, night or day, without any risk of being run over.
Grandfather Clerke had built a small bungalow on Old Survey Road in 1900, the year the first train came puffing into Dehra, and had settled there in 1905. It was a typical railwayman’s bungalow, very basic, tidy and compact, with verandas front and back, and a kitchen separate from the main building. The only distinctive thing about it was that instead of the customary red bricks, Grandfather had used the smooth rounded stones from a local riverbed. Through my childhood this was the only home that gave me some feeling of permanence, even if I wasn’t entirely happy here.
To me, it was always ‘Granny’s house’, because Grandfather had died the year I was born, and all those stories I was to write about him one day were made up by me or based on hearsay. I have often wished I had known him; from the stories I heard about him, he appeared to be a gently eccentric man—he would disguise himself as a vegetable vendor or a juggler and wander around in the bazaars. He was also in the habit of bringing home unusual pets—owls, frogs, chameleons and, on one occasion, a hyena, which chewed up the boots in the house and had to be released back into the forest very quickly.
After he died, Granny ran the house with her meagre pension of forty or fifty rupees and the sale of fruit from the small mango and litchi orchard at the back of the house. She also received a regular rent from a tenant, Miss Kellner, an elderly disabled lady who would become one of my early friends some three years later.
Granny lived alone, with a black pariah dog called Crazy, but her married daughters and a happily vagrant son (Uncle Ken) would come to stay in the house now and then. She wasn’t a typical granny; I made her more homely in my stories. She was heavy-set, heavy-jowled, and a stern woman, not given to expressing emotion. She preferred her own company; in the evenings, even if there were others in the house, she sat by herself playing patience, a card game which does not require another player.
She didn’t seem to like small boys—or it was small boys with buck teeth that she did not like. ‘Little boys should speak only when spoken to,’ was one of her maxims, and I was discouraged from joining in the conversation at the dining table. I was also discouraged from taking ‘second helpings’ of any dish, with the result that I made sure my first helping was large enough.
Her disapproval did not extend to my cousins, whom she always praised in my presence, and I think her discomfort with me may have been due to the fact that she was not sure if I was legitimate or not. Being of strict Victorian and evangelical upbringing, she would have been horrified at the thought of harbouring a bastard child in her home. My parents’ marriage had been sudden and unexpected. Why had my mother married an older man? And why had they gone to Kasauli for my arrival? I did not understand any of this at the time, and I felt a little bewildered and resentful. I suppose she did love me, to the extent that she could love anyone and show it, but I was used to being the centre of attention, and now I was expected to make myself invisible. Sometimes I looked around for my mother, wanting to ask her if we could live somewhere else, but I rarely found her in the house. She was always going away somewhere, returning late at night.
Already, I was missing my father, who was posted in New Delhi, at Air Headquarters. He was over forty when he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF); he may have bluffed his age, or maybe one could enlist in one’s forties during the war. He had been given the rank of Pilot Officer and was working in the Codes and Cyphers section. He must have been good at his job, because he was soon a Flying Officer. But it was to be about a year before I would see him again.
An old photograph of Granny’s house shows a strange-looking object hanging on the veranda wall. There is no other decoration on that wall, and I can’t help feeling it was placed there to terrorise me. This was an enema can with a rubber tube ending in a metal nozzle. It was Granny’s remedy for a variety of children’s ailments, ranging from constipation to indigestion to bad behaviour. A solution of soapy water—good old Lifebuoy soap—was poured into the can, the nozzle and the tube were then inserted into the victim’s rectum, and the solution would be allowed to travel up one’s lower intestine. After several minutes of this torture, the tube would be removed, and a little later the ravished victim would be rushing to the nearest bathroom to relieve the pressure.
I say ‘victim’ rather than patient, because I could not help feeling that my ultra-critical grandmother always singled me out for the enema cure. Even if I was suffering from diarrhoea, I would get the enema. ‘This will clean you out,’ Granny would say. ‘Down with your knickers!’ My modesty outraged, I would have to submit to the indignity of having this nozzle shoved up my backside at least once a month. My cousin Edith was exempted from this treatment, either because she was a girl or because she was never constipated.
My fear of the enema resulted in an aversion to being touched by anyone except my parents, and this aversion lasted until my prep school days in Shimla, when I was quite pleasantly cured of it in the rowdy public baths.
To escape Granny’s enemas, and her stern orders to behave like ‘a well-bred young gentleman’, I looked for a place where I could hide, and I found it in an old banyan tree behind the house. Its large, spreading branches hung to the ground and took root again, and they were covered with thick green leaves. Here, I was very well concealed, and I would sit propped up against the bole of the tree, to read a comic, or watch the world below, on the road outside the compound wall: An English sahib in a sun helmet. A memsahib holding a colourful sun-umbrella (many European women had a horror of the Indian sun turning them so brown that they would be mistaken for an ‘India-born’ White). A lady in a sari with a basket of papayas balanced on her head. A man with a little hand-drum, and a monkey dressed in a red frilled dress and a baby’s bonnet sitting on his shoulder.
The banyan tree was populated with little animals, birds and insects. The smaller leaves, still pink and almost translucent, would be visited by delicate butterflies, bushy-tailed squirrels, and red-headed parakeets. One day, climbing up the tree, I was startled by a giant yellow beak poised above my head. I backed away onto the closest branch, fearing an attack. I recognized the bird from my father’s postage stamps, where it was strange but small, and a resident of faraway Botswana or Kenya. I hadn’t expected to run into it on a friendly banyan tree in Dehra! But the hornbill, relaxing in a great hole in the tree trunk, did not move and looked at me in a rather bored way, drowsily opening and shutting its eyes. After some time, I lost my fear and climbed past it in search of a comfortable branch.
If Granny saw me when I had just emerged from my hideaway, I would be sent off for a bath. I had to learn to bathe myself. Gone were the soft hands of my Jamnagar Ayah; gone were the days of playing ‘rucktions’ in the bathtub with my father; or of lingering in the bath to float a paper boat or create soap bubbles. Into the hot water I went—no matter how hot!—and out again in two minutes flat. If I took any longer, Granny would walk in grim-faced, speaking not a word, and give me a good, rough scrub down. And if the soap got in my eyes, well then, it served me right for not shutting them properly.
Granny was a strong woman, and once in her grip there was no escape. In a faded old photo she appears to be a foot taller than Grandfather, who stands possessively beside her, rather like a hunter who has trapped a large tiger or gorilla and brought it back alive. I think Grandfather liked well-built women. His first wife had been a Boer from South Africa, who had trekked across the African Veldt, braving Zulu spears and British bullets (on separate occasions), finally ending up in India in a camp for Boer prisoners-of-war. Or so the story went.
This first wife had been Cousin Edith’s grandmother. No wonder Edith was a tomboy—a year older than me, bigger and heavier, and always spoiling for a fight. On one occasion we had a wrestling match in the garden, flattening Granny’s nasturtiums in the process. Being a boy, I was blamed for the damage, much to Edith’s delight. I don’t know what happened to her when she grew up. Most of our relatives left India before Independence, and I was too young to try and keep in touch with them, even if I’d wanted to. But if Cousin Edith became a lady wrestler, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
There was to be no respite from stern dominating women.
‘He’s six years old,’ said grandmother. ‘Time he went to school.’
‘I already know how to read and write,’ I protested. ‘Daddy says I know more than boys who go to school.’ I didn’t like Granny’s home very much, but it was still familiar territory. I didn’t want to go to a strange place.
But Granny felt that I needed the discipline and ‘character building’ that only a boarding-school could provide. My mother did not disagree. And so I was incarcerated—the right word for that experience—in a small convent school at Hampton Court in Mussoorie, the Convent of Jesus and Mary. My mother came to drop me off, and I kicked and screamed and made a terrible scene but quietened down when I realized my tantrum wasn’t going to make her change her mind.
I hated that school from the first day. And I was still hating it a year and a half later, when I left. I was lonely, a misfit, unused to the company of hordes of shouting, screaming boys and girls, all of whom seemed unhappy. And the nuns were nothing like the soft and motherly Kerala nuns who are the most visible today. They were Irish and very strait-laced. Remote and unsympathetic. I suppose they made you tough, but whatever the merits of a no-nonsense upbringing, no child benefits from the absence of affection, and there was none in that school. There was no imagination, either. The nuns never told us poor children a story or sang a song that wasn’t about service and suffering.
The daily chapel services seemed endless, and I felt sickened by the cloying odour of frankincense and myrrh every Sunday, when a visiting priest sermonized in Latin. Neither of my parents were overly religious. My mother had no interest in religion. My father wasn’t an agnostic, but like most Church of England people, he wasn’t fanatical about his faith. I was never taken to church every Sunday by my parents, or even by Granny, and the only religious tract that had come my way—a proselytizing text called Little Henry and His Bearer , gifted by a distant aunt—I hadn’t enjoyed reading. But the nuns at the convent were determined to save our little souls. It is likely that they put me off religion. And I’ve never missed the comforts of organized faith. I’m an agnostic—you need something higher than religion and I prefer trees and mountains. I’m not against religion—I’m not against anything, really. To each his own. If their religious ritual makes people happy, let them have it, by all means. I’m just happy being a pagan…
But I’ve digressed. To return to the nuns. We had to bathe in our underwear, and do it quickly, presumably so that the nuns would not be distracted by the sight of our underdeveloped sex. I had started taking piano lessons, inspired by the songs I had heard on our gramophone. The nun who was teaching me turned out to be a perfectionist who would cane me over the knuckles whenever I hit the wrong note, and that was the end of my interest in the piano.
The food at the convent was awful—boiled stringy mutton with the cheapest available vegetable, usually pumpkin. The dormitory was overcrowded; the toilets at a distance. There were no books to read other than prayer books. How I longed for a Dandy comic! However, twice in a year we were taken to the pictures. Reverend Mother must have been a fan of Errol Flynn, because we were taken to see two films featuring that swashbuckling hero. One was called They Died with Their Boots On , in which he played General Custer, who goes to war against the Red Indians and gets scalped for his trouble. The other was The Charge of the Light Brigade , in which, as a British cavalryman, he takes on the Russian big guns and gets blown away.
My boredom and restlessness at school were relieved by the arrival of colourful picture postcards from my father, who never failed to write to me. He would send me cards from Lawson Wood’s ‘Gran’pop’ series, featuring an ape who attended cocktail parties, went up in hot-air balloons and danced in the rain. Together with these postcards came messages from Daddy that there were books and toys waiting for me when I came home. And mid-way through that horrible year he obtained a few days’ leave and came up to see me. I stayed with him in a local boarding-house; but I don’t remember my mother coming up from Dehra to stay with us. He took me to the pictures (George Formby for a change; he was a funny man who played a ukulele, a sort of banjo) and bought me dozens of comics. I urged him to take me out of that wretched school and keep me with him. This he promised to do as soon as it could be arranged.
My father made a couple of visits to Dehra after these holidays, when I was back in the convent, and while I’m not sure if he stayed in Granny’s house, he and my mother did meet. I think the marriage was failing and they were trying to see if it could be saved. One day I received a letter from my mother announcing the birth of my baby brother William in Dehradun.
At the convent school, I finally made friends with a boy named Buster Jones, who disliked the place as much as I did. Together we made plans to run away, and to that end we began saving up biscuits, slices of bread, rusks and other edibles that could sustain us on our flight to freedom. These bits and pieces were hoarded away in our lockers, but were soon discovered, and as punishment we were made to stand all day outside Reverend Mother’s office. But we continued to make plans for our escape, although neither of us had any idea where we would go.
My father was now being posted in different war sectors, and my winter holidays were once again spent in Dehradun, under Granny’s supervision. My mother was often out. She had felt stifled in Jamnagar, with its limited social life, and she was happier in Dehradun, which was more cosmopolitan and lively. There were parties and picnics and she would go to these with her friends. Sometimes, she would also take me along. There were visits to the local cinema, to see Eddie Cantor (my mother’s favourite comedian) in Roman Scandals, and Laurel and Hardy (my favourite comedians) in Great Guns . There were picnics at Rajpur, and a Christmas party and a birthday party for Cousin Edith. Who would have thought there was a World War going on? Or that the country was in the throes of the Quit India movement, and that the sun would soon be setting on the British Empire?
Granny did not take much interest in parties and picnics, but Aunt Enid (Edith’s mother) was a party and picnic person, and you could not keep her away from them, especially if there were any men around. She had an eye on Mr H, a local photographer and second-hand car dealer, and something of a playboy. He didn’t have the looks of a playboy, but he had the temperament. He came in a new car every other day and never seemed to have any work to do, except arranging tickets for the latest movies and finding new places to visit for a bit of fun. A man with the imagination to match his appetite for parties and games can be attractive to a certain kind of person. Aunt Enid was one such person.
But Mr H was more interested in my mother, who was both younger and prettier than Enid, and soon enough she began to go out with him. After that, I was never with her alone—picnics or the pictures, Mr H was always with us, and usually they would forget I was with them. One afternoon I left them sitting on the banks of the Eastern Canal and wandered off, finally making my way back home. I think I’d expected my mother to be alarmed and come looking for me, but she hadn’t noticed. When she returned late in the evening, she had nothing to say.
There was some tension between Aunt Enid and my mother because of Mr H, but it blew over. In later years, I remember my mother saying that Enid would pursue anyone in pants, but this may just have been sisterly affection. Clement Town, on the outskirts of Dehra, had been turned into a ‘Rest Camp’ or recreation zone for British and American soldiers who had been on active service in Burma and the Eastern front. Aunt Enid lost no time in pursuing the soldiery, haunting the clubs and cafes where they gathered in the evenings. My mother, already engaged in her affair with Mr H, would have frequented these places to enjoy the music and spend a few hours in lively company. Enid’s interests were more serious. But she was in her thirties, a little too old for the game.
A girl who lived down the road, ‘Vi’ or Viola Melville, had greater success, announcing her engagement to a good-looking young English corporal from the East End of London. The Melvilles were an affluent Anglo-Indian family (not ‘poor whites’ like the rest of us), and the marriage was a good affair—a well-attended church ceremony followed by a grand reception at Tara Hall, the Melville family residence. I was appointed a ‘page-boy’ and was dressed up in my Sunday best, my duty being to fling handfuls of confetti on the young couple and the guests, something that I did with such gusto that the confetti soon ran out.
‘Vi’ was a pretty girl, some twelve years older than me, always friendly and full of fun. Soon after marriage she and her soldier husband left for dear old ‘Blighty’, and I did not expect to see her again. Strangely enough, our paths were to cross several times in the years ahead—in London, Delhi and Dehradun, again—and on the each occasion she had a different husband. She liked men, but they never seemed to come up to her expectations.
Over a year passed, and I was fretting for the company of my father. Picnics organized by local photographers or off-duty soldiers were not sufficient distraction from the misery of the school where I was imprisoned for all but three or four months of the year. And in any case, the picnics were not organized for me. Granny’s enemas and her stern, unsmiling persona only added to my discontent.
I am probably being unfair to my grandmother, who I am sure had a heart of gold. Her own children—three daughters (my mother being the youngest), two stepdaughters (one of them being Enid), and a stepson, Ken (who lazed around doing nothing)—had pretty well done their own thing, so she couldn’t have been very strict with them; though it is likely that the late Mr Clerke, my grandfather, may have been the lenient one. From all accounts he was a fairly easy-going person—although he was probably a bit helpless, saddled with six children. He was sixty-eight when he died, and by that time all his children were married, so he probably felt he had done his duty by them. For some mysterious reason (I never learnt why) Ken’s marriage did not last very long.
After the winter break, I was back at school, watched over by the unsmiling nuns. But events were moving swiftly down in the Doon valley. News of wartime frolics and of the affair with Mr H had reached my father in Delhi. In the middle of the school term, much to my surprise, I was taken out of the convent by my mother, and instead of taking me home she took me straight to the Dehradun station.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.
‘Your father wants you to spend some time with him,’ she said.
And I was put on the night train to Delhi with a small steel trunk. Someone must have accompanied me on the journey—I was barely eight years old—but I can’t remember my travelling companion. I only remember that I was met at the Old Delhi railway station by my father, and that he was in his RAF summer uniform, khaki shirt and knee-length shorts and a blue cap, already promoted to Flying Officer.
He took me to the office of the station superintendent, Fred Clark, an uncle on my mother’s side, who took us to his bungalow next to the station for breakfast. It was here that I gathered from the conversation over eggs, toast and tea that my parents had separated. My mother would stay on in Dehra with my baby brother, William. I would be in the custody of my father—which pleased me, of course. And Ellen, the cross my parents had to bear, would be sent to live with our other Granny, my father’s seventy-five-year-old mother, in Calcutta.
The life of a small child is dependent almost entirely on the lives of his or her parents. When a marriage breaks up, the children are often pulled in different directions and there is very little they can do about it. I had no quarrel with my mother; but I was drawn to my father instinctively. No one stood between us. No interloper, no rival for his affections. The bond formed during those early years in Jamnagar was as strong as ever—and would only grow stronger in the coming months, a brief period that was probably the happiest of my childhood.
TO BEGIN WITH, THERE WAS THIS LITTLE TWO-ROOM BRICK hutment in the wilderness near Humayun’s Tomb. There was an entire line of them, built some distance from one another and separated by trimmed hedges; temporary and very functional abodes designed for serving officers and their families. The area is now a busy and sought-after part of Delhi, but in 1942 it was a scrub jungle where black buck and nilgai roamed freely.
Daddy went to work at nine and came back around six. On Sundays, and sometimes Saturdays, he was free. His office was in Air Headquarters in South Block which was attached to a wing of the Viceroy’s palatial residence, later Rashtrapati Bhawan. His work in Codes and Cyphers was very secretive and mysterious, and if he broke any important enemy codes, he didn’t tell me.
In winter he wore his navy blue RAF uniform; in summer, khaki. He always looked dapper and smart—he was a good-looking man, short and spry, with a boyish charm. I envied that uniform, and often posed in his caps and braided hats, and insisted on being photographed in them. And what’s a uniform without salutes? I saw my father’s juniors salute him and I saw him salute his senior officers and soon I was clicking my heels and saluting everyone in sight!
Daddy was always up early, making our breakfast, beating up the cream to make my favourite white butter. After breakfast he would be off, and I’d be left to my own devices for the rest of the day. The first couple of days, I walked across to a neighbouring hutment to lunch with an English family my father knew, but their boisterous, bullying boys took a dislike to me, and I took a dislike to them, and Daddy arranged for a khansama to come for an hour around noon and make me lunch.
There were some comics to read and a large postcard collection to go through. And there was the old gramophone, and the old records—I don’t think my father had time to buy any new ones. But I did not mind; the gramophone was a great companion, filling the room with the glorious sounds of operatic arias and duets. Daddy had told me to be careful with the records and store them flat, otherwise they could assume weird shapes in the heat and become unplayable.
That first summer in Delhi is etched clearly in my memory. I had never been in so hot a place, and I remember those scorching winds of June—the loo, the ‘evil’ dust-laden wind from the deserts of Baluchistan and Rajasthan which is now rarely experienced in Delhi. But it took me only a few days to get used to the heat. The bhisti, or water-carrier, came around ten or eleven, delivering fresh water from his goat-skin bag. There were no taps in the hut, so he filled the tub and a large drum and splashed water on the khus, a reed matting that hung across the front door. This had a wonderful cooling effect, which didn’t last more than half an hour, but I loved the tender, refreshing fragrance of the khus and the smell of damp earth outside, where the water had spilt. It would be many years before air-conditioning came to Delhi. We had a small table-fan in the hutment, but as yet no electricity.
The cool of the rooms attracted various creatures, and I had to look out for scorpions and centipedes, which sometimes took shelter in shoes or empty mugs or the clothes’ basket. One morning I opened the lid of the gramophone to find a large scorpion asleep on the turn table. I yelled for help, but there was no one around. So I shut the gramophone lid with a bang, and did not open it until my father got back in the evening. By that time the scorpion had mysteriously disappeared.
There were geckos, wall lizards, which sometimes fell on the table or on the floor with a soft thwack. At night, numerous jackals set up an endless series of wails, but they did not venture into the houses; unlike the wild cats, who came at any time of day or night, foraging for food. Sometimes they hissed and growled at me, but cats did not frighten me and I hissed and growled right back.
Despite all this wildlife in and around the hutment, I was quite happy to be on my own, a king of the castle, confident that my father would be home at six, ready to talk to me or take me out or bring out his stamp collection. Albums and boxes of stamps would be spread out on the dining-table, and by the light of a kerosene lamp we would discuss new issues, or the rarity of old ones, often referring to the prized Stanley Gibbons catalogue to see if a set was complete.
Only once did he ask me about my mother. Did she take me out sometimes? And who were her friends?
‘There’s a letter from Enid,’ he said.
Apparently Aunt Enid, in a fit of jealousy, had written to him giving details of picnics, dance parties, the ever-present Mr H, soldiers in search of pleasure, and everyone including my mother having a good time while he, poor breadwinner, was struggling with codes and cyphers in the heat and dust of New Delhi. Not to mention the responsibility of looking after a growing boy.
Much of this was true, of course, and I couldn’t really keep it from my father; nor did I wish to. Fairly or unfairly, I was on his side.
On Sundays we went on walks or little excursions in and around Delhi. Humayun’s Tomb was close by; a handsome edifice that rose gracefully above the surrounding wilderness of babul and keekar trees, a testament to human enterprise, even if it had served as the burial place for many kings, queens and princes. The Purana Qila, or Old Fort, was not too far away. Here my father showed me the steps to the library and observatory that was a favourite haunt of Emperor Humayun.
‘He’d been waiting to see Venus the evening he died,’ he told me.
‘How did he die?’ I asked.
‘They say he was going down the steps in a hurry and he tripped and fell to his death. He fractured his skull.’
It was an eerie, winding staircase, dark and forbidding. I could well imagine someone tumbling down those steps.
Sometimes we went further afield, to the Red Fort and its pavilions overlooking the sluggish but as yet unpolluted river.
‘If there be a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this.’
So said the inscription on the wall of one of the Mughal emperors’ pavilions. Being tired and hungry after trudging around the ramparts of this massive citadel, I did not find it paradise enough, and was only too happy to retreat to the refreshment rooms at the Old Delhi railway station. Here we felt quite at home with Uncle Fred, the station superintendent, one of my father’s few friends.
The refreshment rooms were on an upper floor of the station, free from the din of the railway platforms, the shunting of engines, the whistle of the guards, the shouts of the coolies and that cacophony of sound which was (and still is) a feature of large Indian railway stations. The food was limited fare but nevertheless acceptable to a ‘growing boy’—chicken or mutton cutlets (Railway Cutlets, they were called), a mutton or vegetable curry, pillau or rice, and a flavourless blancmange or custard pudding. I ate the cutlets and curry, but left the pudding. Refrigeration was in its early days, and ice-creams were a rarity.
Back home, we kept our drinking water cool in a surahi, an earthen vessel which was kept in a shady spot. There was also a dolie, a small cupboard with a wire-mesh front in which fruit, vegetables and kitchen supplies could be stored. The legs of the dolie were kept in saucers of water to prevent ants from getting in. Even so, some of them managed to get across to feast on their favourite foods—sugar cubes, bananas, cream rolls—anything sweet and sticky. You could keep out snakes, rats, lizards and bats, but you couldn’t do much about the ants. They were constantly on the march, heading resolutely in the direction of their objective. They were like a German Panzer regiment, disciplined, unwavering.
Those Panzer regiments had the upper hand in faraway Europe. The war was going badly for Britain and its allies. All of Europe was in German hands, Singapore and Malaya had fallen to the Japanese. The road to India through Burma was full of refugees—Indians, Europeans, Eurasians. British ships were being sunk, British aircraft outnumbered. In India, demands for Independence grew stronger by the day. A sense of crisis prevailed in New Delhi.
I wasn’t concerned with the war. My world was my father, and it was when he fell ill and had to be hospitalized that I had my first moments of anxiety. This was one of the earliest of his periodic bouts of malaria. He was in hospital for three or four days. The neighbours kept an eye on me during the day and the bhisti’s son stayed with me at night. He was my age, or maybe a year or two older, a quiet boy, his skin burnt a dark brown, dressed in a vest of coarse cotton and khaki shorts that were too large for him. He slept in the kitchen, a silent companion. Two little boys, an outcaste and a half-orphan, giving each other company and support…It must have left an impression on me, because out of that experience grew my first story, ‘The Untouchable’, published some ten years later in The Illustrated Weekly .
Daddy returned from hospital, not fully recovered; he looked weak and was eating poorly. I think he had taken an early discharge because he wasn’t sure how I would cope on my own. He stayed home for a few days, to rest and get his strength back, and unable to do anything else for him, I would play his favourite records on the gramophone to cheer him up. He was still running a slight fever, and it was strange to lie beside him through the hot afternoons on a perspiration-soaked bed, listening to Caruso sing Che Gelida Manina —
Your tiny hand is frozen,
Let me warm it into life.
I did not understand death, but I began to fear that I would lose my father somehow. To my relief, he recovered completely in a few days, and all my fears were wiped away. It was as if he had never been unwell.
After a few months, we gave up the hutment. It had been meant for family use, and I was the only indication of a family. Daddy’s superiors were always wanting to know why my mother wasn’t around to look after me. So he rented rooms on Atul Grove Road, a quiet cul-de-sac off Curzon Road (now Kasturba Gandhi Marg), very close to Connaught Place, which was then the commercial and professional hub of New Delhi.
On one side of the road were half-a-dozen bungalows occupied by officials of the telegraph department, and my father had taken the rooms on rent from one of the residents. On the other side of the road stood the offices of the department, flanked by the humbler quarters of the lower rungs of the department’s employees—peons, cleaners, chowkidars and their families—and there was an open ground, well-grassed, in front of the building where the children would play in the evenings.
Among them was Joseph, the son of one of the resident officials—a dark, skinny boy from southern India, well-mannered, smiling, eager to be friends. We met quite casually. There was a letter-box, one of those red pillar-boxes, at the end of the road, and I came out of the house to post a couple of letters for my father. A boy of about my age also crossed the road to post a letter, and thrust his hand into the opening at the same time as I did. We had to hold hands in order to facilitate a smooth release.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the boy. ‘I’m Joseph.’
‘I’m Ruskin.’
‘Which school do you go to?’
‘I don’t go to school,’ I said.
‘Lucky chap!’
It was the beginning of a gentle friendship that lasted through the long summer of 1942 and the winter that followed.
After six in the evening it was possible to run around a little, play football on the open ground, have a wrestling-match with Joseph. Wrestling with Joseph was always great fun. Being much heavier than him, I generally got the upper hand, but he would never give up—he would wriggle out from under me and lock me in some intricate arm or leg hold, and I would have to use all my superior weight to break free and sit on top of him. The children from the department’s quarters would watch these bouts with great interest, cheering whenever Joseph got the better of me—for, being fair-skinned and the son of a British officer, I was identified with the colonial oppressors—but no one interfered; they knew instinctively that we were two friends engaged in an intimate trial of skill and strength.
It was the year of the Quit India movement, but it was also the third year of World War II, and New Delhi was full of uniformed British and American officers and soldiers, and they were catered to by the cinema halls, restaurants and nightclubs in and around Connaught Place. Their presence didn’t seem to make any difference to the way life went on in this part of the city. Children played their games as before; the roads were full of bicycles with men in mill-made dhotis, pyjamas or knee-length khaki shorts going to work; the occasional car honked, just to be heard, because there was never anyone in its way; the reasonably-off dined at Kwality in Connaught Place and the well-off at Gaylord’s, and nobody bothered if the poor had enough to eat.
The war was far away—in Burma and Malaya—but air-raids were expected, Calcutta having already received a few bombs from Japanese planes. Trenches were dug all over the capital, and our little lane was honoured with a deep trench, about fifteen feet in length, with steps cut into the sides for those who couldn’t jump into it. Delhi did not experience any air-raids, but the children had a great time in the trenches; and when the monsoon rains arrived, and they filled up with water, they became extremely popular as bathing-pools, where the boys could swim and splash about with great abandon.
Connaught Place was just a ten-minute walk from Atul Grove, and my father was always quite ready to take me around this posh shopping centre, stopping at bookshops where I would sometimes buy a colourful comic paper, or at record shops where we would buy a record. We walked around in a leisurely fashion, because the circle wasn’t crowded then; you could cross the road without having to look left or right. There were just a couple of buses and a few private cars. The preferred mode of transport, if you couldn’t ride a bicycle, was a tonga.
At least once a week, Daddy took me to the cinema—in those war years the halls were flooded with the latest British and American movies. He would return from Air Headquarters in the evening and say, ‘Let’s go to the pictures,’ and we’d be off to the Regal or Rivoli or Odeon or Plaza, the four cinema halls in Connaught Place. In the course of the year I must have seen some forty films, all in the company of my father. Early Disney classics—Bambi , Dumbo , Fantasia (an experiment with classical music); the pretty Olympic ice-skating champion Sonja Henie in Sun Valley Serenade ; Nelson Eddy singing the song of the Volga boatmen in Balalaika ; James Cagney belting out the title song in Yankee Doodle Dandy ; and Carmen Miranda doing the rumba or the samba in Down Argentine Way .
Comedies were my favourites—the madcap adventures of Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, George Formby, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers…And sometimes we’d venture further afield, to the old Ritz at Kashmere Gate, to see Sabu in the Thief of Baghdad or Cobra Woman . These Arabian Nights-type entertainments were popular in the old city.
These cinema halls still exist, although three of the four in Connaught Place have been turned into multiplexes and I gather the last remaining single-screen hall, the Regal, will soon undergo a similar transformation. But at least they survive, even if the drama is lost. The old Ritz is crumbling away; it was much older than the New Delhi cinemas, showing silent films when my father was a boy. I won’t be surprised if it is pulled down one of these days, but I don’t want to be told if it is.
Daddy’s first love was of course his stamp collection. There was a trunk full of albums. He told me it was a valuable collection, and that it would be mine some day. I was encouraged to collect too, and I had my own small album, most of it filled with stamps from Greece. I don’t know why I chose Greece—I was probably attracted by the Greek gods and heroes depicted on the stamps—and my father seemed to have an unending supply of Greek stamps which he did not want.
Daddy’s few friends and acquaintances were also stamp collectors. I remember accompanying him into Rankin’s, a large drapery shop in the outer circle of Connaught Place, where he would have his RAF uniforms tailored. Instead of having himself measured for a uniform, he ended up sitting across from Mr Rankin at the latter’s large office desk, talking about stamps, discussing irregularities in design, rare printing errors, forgeries, overprints, rarities from the Solomon Islands or Papua-New Guinea, valuable collections that had vanished, countries that had vanished!
I would sit there patiently, listening or pretending to listen to all this philatelic philosophy, but quietly watching the flow of customers as they entered and left the premises—smart ladies wearing outlandish hats (some with feathers in them), English gentleman in dress-suits (with bow-ties), American soldiers in well-pressed trousers, British soldiers in knee-length khaki shorts, maharajas in achkans and churidar pyjamas, maharanis in expensive, richly embroidered saris, Indians in European dress (those in Indian dress must have been elsewhere), and shop assistants in purple jackets. It was people who interested me more than stamps.
And stamp-collectors were people too. Like the young American lieutenant who came over to our flat one evening to look at Daddy’s collection. My father had invited him to dinner, and had prepared for the occasion by investing in a bottle of red wine. I had never seen my father drink alcohol, although I had seen plenty of it at some of Mr H’s parties in Dehradun.
‘What’s that for?’ I asked, indicating the bottle.
‘For our guest,’ said Daddy. ‘He’s an American,’ as though that explained it.
Our part-time khansama prepared a mulligatawny soup, pork chops and a chocolate blancmange.
The young lieutenant arrived on time and presented my astonished father with a bottle of Irish whisky.
‘I don’t really drink,’ said Daddy. ‘But if you don’t care for wine, I’ll open the whisky for you.’
He poured two drinks but these were soon forgotten. And there they were, three hours later, going through my father’s precious albums—an album for Great Britain stamps, another for Empire stamps, another for stamps from Greece, as well as miscellaneous albums for stamps from all corners of the world. I had never before seen Daddy sell any of his stamps, but either our visitor was very persuasive, or Daddy was in need of some ready cash, because by the time our visitor left, we had sold him stamps worth about three thousand rupees—a lot of money in those days.
After that, I began to respect stamps. Especially when, the next day, Daddy bought me a dart board, a bagatelle board and a set of dominoes from a part of the proceeds. We also went to Wenger’s, the popular bakery and confectionery, where I consumed a number of patties, pastries and meringues.
Daddy suffered from periodic bouts of malaria throughout that time in Delhi, and they came on without any warning; high fever, fits of shivering, sometimes delirium. A few days of rest and treatment with quinine would bring about a recovery. But on one occasion in Atul Grove the attack was so severe that he had to be confined for two weeks at the military hospital out at Palam.
I was on my own for that entire fortnight. Although I missed my father terribly, I did not feel abandoned in any way. I was sure he would soon be home. The D’Souzas, the Goan couple who had sub-let their flat to us, were very kind and had me over to tea every afternoon. Our khansama turned up every day to give me lunch and early dinner. He also kept tea or cocoa for me in a thermos flask. I made my own breakfast—there was plenty of bread, Polson’s butter, and Mangaram’s apple or guava jam. For company, I had the gramophone, some books and comic papers, and Joseph when he was back from school. He would stay with me all afternoon. We would play dominoes and darts or read comics, and sometimes go to sleep together on my bed.
‘Won’t you ever go to school?’ Joseph would ask me.
I assured him I wouldn’t.
‘How will you make a living?’
‘I’ll help my father with his stamp collection. It’s very valuable.’
I said this with complete conviction. We get used to happiness very quickly, more so when we are children. I believed that Daddy and I would always be together. I would be his best friend, his trusted assistant in stamp collection, and nothing would ever change, nothing would come between us.
All his stamp albums were kept in a large wooden trunk, and the key to the trunk was kept in an empty flower vase on the dressing table. I was so in awe of those beautifully maintained albums, that I did not dare open the trunk to look at them in my father’s absence. I waited patiently for the day when he would be back with me again.
One day, kind Mr D’Souza volunteered to take me to the hospital to see Daddy, a two-hour tonga ride that ended in disappointment. No visitors, we were told; it was wartime. So we had to be content with standing on the lawns, staring up at the third floor where, we were told, my father shared the ward with other patients stricken with malaria.
‘He must be somewhere up there,’ said Mr D’Souza pointing to a wing of the third floor where a nurse hovered near a window. This wasn’t very satisfying so we went back to our tonga and returned at a slow trot to Atul Grove. I missed my lunch, but made up for it by finishing Mr D’Souza’s supply of bread.
Mr D’Souza said I could sleep in their spare room while my father was in hospital, but I insisted on staying in my own part of the house. The months spent in the hutment had given me plenty of practice in staying on my own, and I was already getting used to the idea of having a room of my own.
I wasn’t afraid of being alone at night. Lights off, I would lie awake on my cot, gazing through the little window at the shadows of the two street lights and the occasional beam of a car’s headlights. In the distance, dogs would bark—not at intruders, but simply out of habit. Sometimes jackals bayed or a night-bird would honk in the neem tree. The window had a protective wire netting, so I could keep it open, and moths, mosquitoes and other flying bugs would collide with the netting and fall to the ground outside. It was the start of the monsoon, and thousands of flying ants would circle the streetlights, all on a merry suicide mission; in the morning the sparrows and other insectivores would feast on the remains.
The night held no terrors for me. I was never afraid of the dark, and till today I see the night as a friend, giving me the privacy that I find so hard to find by day. Starlight, moonlight, early dawn, all have a special loveliness about them.
Of course I bolted the doors and windows. Humans were unpredictable. But, in spite of the of the war and occasional disturbances on the streets, New Delhi was a safer place in the 1940s than it is in the twenty-first century when we are told there are no mysteries left and nobody is a stranger.
Daddy returned from hospital looking wan and tired, but this time he returned very quickly to robust health, thanks largely to the acquisition of several sets of attractive postage stamps from the Pitcairn Islands and Fiji. That stamp collection kept him going!
And he had news for me.
‘I’ve found a good school for you in Shimla,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it there.’
‘But I like it here,’ I protested. ‘Why do you want to send me away to school again? I can read and write. You’ve taught me how to do sums.’
‘But I can’t teach you physics and chemistry. Besides, another hot summer in Delhi won’t be good for you. You’ve lost your pink cheeks and your eyes look yellow.’
‘So do yours.’
‘In my case it’s due to the quinine I have to take. But seriously, it’s high time you went to school again. Everyone says I spoil you. You’ve had over a year’s holiday!’
‘Another year won’t make any difference. If you like, I can go to school in Delhi, along with Joseph.’
‘The problem is, I may be transferred soon. This war is going on for longer than anyone thought. I may be sent to Karachi or Calcutta, or even North Africa.’
‘Why can’t I come with you?’ I asked.
‘I won’t be allowed to keep you with me, son. I’ll have to share digs with other officers. In Delhi, I can make my own arrangements, but not when I’m sent to other postings.’
And so it came about that I was to resume my interrupted school career.
Daddy took a fortnight’s leave, Uncle Fred put us on the night train to Kalka, and we were off to Shimla, the summer capital of India.
It had all happened very suddenly, and I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to Joseph.
But I haven’t forgotten him. Some friends—their eyes, their touch, their words—cannot be erased from our memory.
RAM ADVANI, THE FAMOUS BOOKSELLER OF LUCKNOW, TOLD ME once that he remembered the day my father brought me to the school office for admission. Ram was the bursar at Bishop Cotton School; a young man in his very early twenties who had landed the job because he was good at cricket. The headmaster was Canon Sinker, a High Church cleric, widely respected. There were some reservations about my admission. It was already mid-term, and how would I keep up with the rest of the class? Why had I missed school for a year, and where was my mother? My father explained the situation. Mrs Sinker, who was present, intervened. ‘You must admit him, George,’ she admonished her husband. ‘You can see he’s a bright boy. And his father’s on active service.’ Daddy’s uniform obviously helped.
I was admitted to the preparatory school, in Chhota Shimla, some distance from the senior school; but I did not have to join immediately, as the school was having a mid-term break and my father had a few weeks’ leave in hand. I’d seen the junior boys when we were walking to the school office, past the playing field. My father had pointed them out to me, saying they looked like a happy bunch and I would enjoy their company. And they did look happier than the inhibited lot at the Mussoorie convent. Some of them were chasing each other, playing a game of some kind, while others ran around with butterfly nets. A few sat quietly, reading comics. I had also enjoyed the journey to Shimla in a railcar, which had glided smoothly up and round the gradient, slipping through the 103 tunnels; and then we’d had a substantial lunch in one of Shimla’s many first-rate restaurants. So I was already feeling less apprehensive about going back to school.
Shimla in the early summer of 1943 was a happening place. The Viceroy was in town, hobnobbing with various Indian leaders, all anxious to see the Viceroy and his countrymen quitting India at the earliest possible moment. But the war was still dragging on, even though America had now thrown its weight into the fray. Germany had got itself into a tight corner, with no way out, having repeated Napoleon’s blunder of invading Russia and that too in mid-winter. But in the Pacific, Japanese resistance was fierce, with kamikaze pilots crashing their planes on to the decks of American aircraft carriers. And they still held most of mainland Asia.
And so Shimla’s Mall Road shone with uniforms of the various services, as well as the liveried staff of the Viceregal Lodge, families on holiday, schoolboys in caps and ties, and monkeys on the slopes of Jakhoo Hill.
We stayed in a place called Craig Dhu, a hostel for officers situated on Elysium Hill, one of Shimla’s seven hills. Daddy had to share a room with a British officer of a similar rank. But what was I doing there, the officer wanted to know. These were supposed to be bachelors’ quarters, off limits for children. More explanations followed. The officer was sympathetic; he had a small son in Southampton whom he hadn’t seen in two years. He gave me a chocolate Mars bar and we were friends.
There was sugar rationing at the time, and a shortage of eggs. Even so, Davico’s, the most popular restaurant on the Mall, made some great pastries, cakes and meringues, and it wasn’t far from where we were staying. There were no cars in town, only ponies and rickshaws, and we took quite a few rickshaw rides, sustained by pastries, oranges and ‘curry puffs’.
Whatever happened to curry puffs? These were dainty little savouries filled with curried chicken or mutton. I suppose they are called something else now. For several years they were my favourite snack, until they suddenly disappeared, defeated by greasy samosas.
On one memorable rickshaw ride Daddy recounted Kipling’s ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’—an eerie little tale set in Shimla of the 1890s: a rickshaw with its occupant, a beautiful and much sought-after Englishwoman, had plunged off the road in a monsoon mist, falling into a deep ravine and killing the passenger and the rickshaw-men. Her spectre, together with those of the rickshaw-pullers, was frequently seen by one of her besotted admirers, who was eventually driven mad by the apparition.
I wasn’t quite satisfied with the tale.
‘They were ghosts, I suppose,’ I remember saying.
‘Yes,’ said Daddy. ‘The lady was a ghost and so were the rickshaw-pullers. Some people are said to become ghosts after violent deaths.’
‘But he kept seeing the rickshaw too,’ I objected. ‘How could the rickshaw become a ghost? It’s not a living thing.’
Daddy had to agree. He told me that his mother kept an old rocking-chair in which her mother had passed away. Sometimes, at night, the chair would rock, but only when Granny was seen to be sitting in it.
‘Did you ever sit in the rocking-chair?’
‘No,’ said Daddy. ‘I was afraid of Granny.’
‘Must have been like Dehra Granny,’ I said and Daddy laughed and ruffled my hair.
We went to the pictures. Shimla had three cinemas—the Regal, the Rivoli, and the Ritz. I liked the Rivoli best. It was down in a shady glade, part of the old Blessington Hotel. A small flat patch of land there was used as an ice-skating rink in the winter. Tall deodars surrounded the glade.
One afternoon we climbed to the top of Jakhoo Hill, Shimla’s highest hill, to see the Hanuman temple, and on the way the monkeys stole all our pies and pastries.
Then it was time to join school.
‘Well, there’s only five months of the year left,’ said Daddy reassuringly. ‘Come November, you’ll be with me in Delhi again.’ And he promised me cinemas, bookshops, ice-creams and comics.
I was well spoilt by my father.
They were a rowdy but a friendly lot at the prep school, and I certainly had more fun there than I did at the senior school later on. Although the school had its own conventions, being modelled on English private schools—the tradition of calling other students only by their last name; the system of prefects, canings and compulsory sports—there was an air of informality about prep school. We had yet to be turned into the polished and Spartan English public school types that were being turned out every year by Bishop Cotton—the ‘Eton of the East’, as it was called in better days.
Nor were we half-starved convent children overseen by super-clean nuns. We were quite a scruffy lot, as I remember. We fought, we played in the dust, made a lot of noise, made friendships, got into trouble, played pranks on the teachers and had spectacular pillow wars that would result in a storm of cotton and feathers in the dormitories.
And I lost my aversion to physical intimacy—the sad affliction that was the result of Granny’s enemas. Unlike in the Mussoorie convent, we didn’t have to bathe in tubs and keep our underwear on—in fact, we weren’t allowed to; we had to shower together in the nude, and we got used to each other’s bodies, to seeing and touching each other. We were eight- to twelve-year-olds, our bodies and minds being changed by puberty, so sexual adventures were natural. But it was more inquisitive and innocent inquiry than anything else. There were no passionate affairs, and no exploitation that I can recall. It was guiltless fun that many of us outgrew and some of us accepted as part of our human experience.
The exploits of comic-book and sports heroes were much higher on our list of priorities than sex and romance. Our heroes were fighter pilots, swashbuckling pirates and buccaneers, football stars like Sir Stanley Matthews—the ‘Wizard of Dribble’—and boxing champions like Joe Louis. The Biggles books, featuring the daredevil pilot James Bigglesworth, were a bit of a rage in those years, and when word went round that my father was in the RAF, the boys began to look at me with new respect. I made the most of it and asked my father to wear his uniform when he came to see me.
‘Does he fly bombers?’ the boys would ask me.
‘All the time,’ I’d lie and make up stories about his exploits in the skies!
But I had competition. Young Abbot claimed that he had shot a tiger with his father’s 12-bore shotgun. We believed him and were all in awe of him.
I remember other boys from my first term. Bimal Mirchandani had the skinniest legs in the school and was called ‘Bambi’, after the little gazelle in the Disney film (he became a good wrestler when he was older). Kellnar was taking a course in body-building but was defeated by the fact that he had a very long neck and splayed feet; we called him Donald Duck. Mehta Junior was a sleepwalker who caused a sensation by sleepwalking off the dormitory roof and falling into the headmaster’s flower bed without any damage to himself.
Some of the boys were unusually gifted. One of my classmates (I forget his name) was writing a novel—a detective story—on toilet paper. Due to the wartime paper shortage, he was using those little thin sheets that came in flat packets instead of toilet rolls. We were not allowed toilet rolls because the boys frequently used them to make streamers across the dormitory or in the corridors.
I had not, as yet, taken up writing—that was still two or three years distant—but my interest in acting and cinema prompted me to produce a one-act drama in which I played a demented serial-killer inspired by the film The Brighton Strangler , which was running at the Rivoli. The script was simple. All I had to do was strangle several victims (played by my class fellows), who would scream, choke, gurgle or beg for mercy as they perished at my hands. Alfred Hitchcock would have approved. But Mr Priestley, the prep school head, did not, and I was reprimanded and told to use my talents for something more wholesome.
Our drama teacher, Miss Khanna, decided I would make a great Humpty Dumpty in the school pantomime, and an elaborate costume was designed for me, consisting of a large egg made from cardboard into which I was fitted. All I had to do was fall off a wall at the appropriate moment, and the cardboard egg would shatter, leaving me to the mercy of ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ (my classmates, eager to lay their hands on me). I fell off the wall with precision, but the cardboard egg refused to break up, and I found myself bouncing around the stage entrapped in my costume. Naturally, this brought the house down, and I was a great hit.
All this mayhem was possible only because Mr Priestley, our headmaster, was more interested in his violin than in his wards. He might have had ambitions of becoming another Jascha Heifetz or Fritz Kreisler, the great violinists. It was impossible for us to judge the quality of his playing, but he practiced early morning, late afternoon, and sometimes late at night—in his rooms, or in his office, or in the school hall, where he was accompanied on the piano by his wife, a lady with very large breasts that the boys called ‘nutcrackers’. We had of course grown used to this background music through most of the day; indeed, we welcomed it, because we knew that if the headmaster was wrapped up in one of his violin solos, we could get up to mischief of one kind or another.
School discipline was usually left in the hands of Mr Murtough, a sporting type, good at games, who also taught geography. I had learnt a fair amount of geography from Daddy’s stamp collection and had no difficulty in topping the class in this subject. My one-and-half-year absence from school had not been a disadvantage. I had read more books than my classmates, and my writing skills were fairly well developed. I was promoted to a higher class, which meant that I hadn’t really lost any school time.
The other male teacher I remember was Mr Oliver, a dark, brooding man, who was followed around by a pet dachshund. Mr Oliver kept to himself—he did not mix with the boys or other staff members, and it was said that he had been disappointed in love. This may have been so. Middle-aged men who have been unlucky in love often end up sharing their lives with pet dogs. Spinsters keep cats, bachelors keep dogs, or so it is said. Mr Oliver lavished his affections on his dachshund—an unfriendly dog who disliked the boys and frequently nipped us on the calves or ankles. He—Mr Oliver, not the dachshund—taught us elementary mathematics, which may also have been a cause for his depression.
We called the dachshund Hitler. In Europe, the real Hitler was still ranting, waving his arms about, threatening to take over the world as demagogues are wont to do; but he had shot his bolt and retribution was fast catching up with him. Strange, how the human race can elevate the vilest of men to positions of all-powerful tyranny and then take an equal pleasure in dragging them down into the dust. Even good men can be destroyed if they excite the envy of their fellows.
That first year in prep school passed quickly. Since I had joined the school midway through the term, it was just a five-month session for me. Now I had my father and the winter holidays to look forward to—new gramophone records, stamps, comics, milk-shakes, the cinemas—all the things that the world’s more fortunate children look forward to when the end-of-term holidays approach.
And there he was, waiting for me on the platform, as the overnight train from Kalka steamed into the Old Delhi station. He was in his uniform, looking as smart as I could have wished him to be. Anyone who has grown up with a father in one of the services will know the feeling of pride that comes from seeing a parent—who might otherwise be a little on the tubby side, or shorter than the average, or balding a little—transformed by a uniform into someone of heroic proportions. A boy can visualize himself decked out as Batman or Superman, or a girl as Wonder Woman, but we know it to be make-believe. A dark blue RAF uniform and a braided cap are the real thing.
Delhi’s best cinemas and music shops were of course still there, the only difference being that I was now much closer to them, Daddy having taken a flat in Scindia House, a large apartment building opposite the outer ring of Connaught Place.
Right opposite Scindia House, across the road, was the Milk Bar run by the Keventer’s Dairy farms. It took me only a few minutes to cross the road and partake of a strawberry or vanilla or chocolate milkshake. My ever-indulgent father never denied me these little luxuries. In all the time I was with him, he never spoke a harsh word to me or scolded me for a misdemeanour. And I think I appreciated this, because although at times I was mischievous elsewhere, I was always on my best behaviour in his company—knowing, with the practicality of childhood, that I had only to ask him for something—a toy, a comic, a record, a particular sweet dish—and I would get it. He did spoil me, in the best possible way, and as a result I have grown old indulging other people’s children.
The war wasn’t yet over, but the tide was beginning to turn in favour of the Allies, and many among the British, especially those in the military and the services, were seeing signs that sooner rather than later peace would return. And it was becoming clear that the British would have to make some kind of retreat from India, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’. Daddy, like the vast majority of other British and Anglo-Indian residents of India, was making preparations towards that end. As he saw it, there would be no future for us in an independent India. I was too young to have any opinion of my own about this.
In Scindia House there were no other children. But I got on famously with the other residents, especially the domestic helps—maidservants, ayahs, cooks, chowkidars, sweepers—a trait I had acquired during our Jamnagar days, when my ayah had made so much fuss over me. I was addressed as ‘Baba’ and was known to all as ‘Bond-sahib ka bachcha’. During the day, while Daddy was at work, I would gossip with this motley crew and follow them around, learning something about their lives and their struggle to survive. Because of my innocence and curiosity, they indulged my whims—allowing me to help peel potatoes or shell peas, push the odd pram, fill buckets, water plants—or rather, over-water them—and, as a result, get in everyone’s way. In India, humble working people will indulge small children, brightening up their days, and I took full advantage of this indulgence.
At this time, my principal ambition was to be a tap-dancer. This was the result of seeing too many Hollywood musicals, in particular those featuring the marvellous tap-dancer Eleanor Powell, pretty and vivacious, who danced her way through such films as Lady Be Good , Ship Ahoy and Broadway Melody —all showing at some time or another in New Delhi’s cinemas. I would come home and go through my own tap-dance routine in the corridors of Scindia House, much to the amusement of the domestics and any residents who might be passing. I kept an exercise book in which I listed all the films I had seen, along with their casts, and I suppose this qualified as my first literary effort. There was nothing literary about it, although it did help to sharpen my memory. It also turned me into a ‘list’ person, and in later years I was to develop the habit (probably quite useless) of listing the books I had read, or cricket players who had represented India or other countries, or (much later) the wild flowers I had discovered growing on the hillsides.
My dear father gave me all his time, but even so, I was left to my own devices for long periods while he was away at work, and I am surprised that I did not discover books until much later. I expect the distractions of Connaught Place were too much for me. But the winter holidays passed quickly, and early in March I was sharing a crowded compartment with a bunch of noisy boys in the Kalka-Shimla mountain train, as it chugged slowly up the steep hillsides and through those hundred and more tunnels.
During my second year in the prep school, there was to be no visit from my father. He and his unit were being moved about from place to place; first Karachi, then Calcutta. But he wrote to me regularly and sent me beautiful postcards, some of which I managed to keep. Besides the humorous ‘Gran’ pop’ postcards, there were cards with famous trains or ships, or butterflies or pheasants or water-birds, or the Crown Jewels. There were also some unusual subjects, such as ‘First Lady Cyclist’, or ‘Boy with a Dancing Bear.’ I kept them all carefully. Like my father, I was becoming a collector.
And I was finally beginning to read books. Our ‘library’ consisted of a cupboard full of books chosen at random or left behind by departing teachers. Bound volumes of the Boys’ Own Paper failed to excite me. Enid Blyton was far too bland for my tastes. But I discovered a set of Edgar Wallace thrillers, and proceeded to consume The Crimson Circle , The Double and other mysteries, to be followed by further mayhem in the Bulldog Drummond series of crime thrillers, and topped up with the exploits of ‘Saint’—Simon Templar—Leslie Charteris’s swashbuckling hero, portrayed so effectively in films by the suave George Sanders. Not many people know that the author Leslie Charteris was half-Chinese; he was always given out as a blue-blooded Englishman. In those days, authors were ‘invisible’ and did not lead public lives; they frequently assumed aliases. Ellery Queen was two people; John Dickson Carr was also Carter Brown; Sexton Blake was a whole series of writers.
I had gone straight into adult literature without the benefit of ‘children’s books’, apart from Alice, and my beloved comic papers. And I had begun with crime thrillers and detective stories—genres that will keep me entertained to the end of my days. It would be a year or two before I entered the world of Dickens, Stevenson and J.B. Priestley. Crime preceded the classics!
And meanwhile there was another Priestley to contend with—our venerable, violin-playing headmaster (no relation of the author’s, I’m glad to say). This gentleman and his wife took little or no interest in the children, delegating all work and responsibility to their teaching staff and others. They had no children of their own and didn’t particularly like us, except the few upper-class English boys, to whom they were outrageously partial. Mrs Priestley would sometimes show a little interest in us, favouring us with the flat of her hairbrush on our posteriors for misdemeanours real and imagined.
But I had no major complaints and was beginning to enjoy the school. My father wrote regularly from Calcutta, where he was now posted and living in his family home with his mother and my sister Ellen. In a long letter he wrote me on 20 August, 1944, he told me that he was recovering from yet another attack of malaria. He said he had to wear glasses for reading now, but Ellen didn’t need glasses anymore and was getting better at holding a pencil and tried to draw dragons and elephants and tigers and wolves. He was looking forward to having me in Calcutta for the Christmas holidays and taking me to New Market, which he said was full of bookshops.
I was just sitting down to write him a reply, when one of my friends came up to me and said, ‘Mr Murtough wants to see you. I think it’s serious.’
Had I broken some silly rule? Should I have been studying instead of writing letters home? Had my stack of comic papers been discovered?
But no. Mr Murtough took me aside, led me down the path towards the school gate, asked me to sit down on a bench under the deodars, sat down beside me, and proceeded to tell me—as gently as he could, poor man—that my father was no more. God had taken him, he said. God had needed him more than I did.