It is April 1962. Delhi is hot but not yet humid. The bougainvillea trees are in bloom and the evenings are pleasant. Charles and Dip are packing up. Dip wonders what she will wear in the long winters in Europe. She doesn’t own trousers, or none she would want to be seen in. And what about shoes? Is there any sense in taking all these elegant open-toed sandals?
The next day at the airport the customs official studies the form. Finally, he looks up at Dip, without expression, and says, ‘You are wearing a ring.’
‘Yes. My engagement ring?’
‘It is not on the list. You want to take it out of the country, but, Madam, you have failed to declare it.’
‘I am sorry, please add it to the list.’
‘No, Madam. That is not possible. All undeclared valuables are confiscated. Madam, those are the rules.’
Dip feels a gentle hand on her arm. Pam, the Canadian Deputy High Commissioner and a friend who has come with them, says, ‘I will look after the ring.’
Fighting back tears, Dip slips off the ring. At the gate, Pam shakes Charles’s hand, wishes them well and hands Dip the ring.
I had always assumed from this story, Dip’s focus on the ring, that her family didn’t see them off.
‘No, no,’ Dip says, ‘the whole family came to the airport. They just couldn’t come as far with us as Pam. To start with, everyone had pleaded with us not to go abroad. I remember there being tears and Charles assuring my mother we would come back each year.’
Most of the stories Dip told us in childhood stripped out the difficult stuff. She told us she was ‘displaced’, but I don’t recall the emotion. Perhaps it was there but I just wasn’t hearing it.
‘What did you feel about leaving?’ I ask.
She thinks for a while. ‘More excitement than anything else. Excitement to be starting a new life with Charles. Although I was sad, of course. We were going to England, then to Mykonos for a honeymoon on our own, and then on to Germany.’
I assume the honeymoon was all that she hoped and ask her about Berlin instead.
‘My clearest memory was seeing falling snow for the first time. By then I was heavily pregnant and had to wear Charles’s trousers. I dragged him out and we walked through a wooded street in Dahlem where we lived. I was mesmerised watching snowflakes fall from the sky. I had seen snow on the ground in Simla, but this was different.’
All her life Dip had lived in an extended family household with servants managed by either her mother, sister or mother-in-law. So running a home was also something new. ‘Before moving to Berlin,’ she says, ‘I had never cooked a meal! Charles said it wasn’t a problem and he would teach me to cook.’ (I think sceptically of his post-Christmas fried turkey ‘risotto’.) ‘I suggested we have eggs and toast for supper, which Charles said would be fine, but I then realised I had no idea how long you cook an egg. I didn’t even know how to tell when water was boiling!’ (I picture the translucent white of the undercooked eggs. Yuk.) Buying chops was no solution apparently. ‘I walked straight out of the butcher’s. It was very hygienic, but I had never seen carcasses hanging like that.’
The greatest shock was childbirth. ‘I had no family around, my sisters were thousands of miles away and no one had ever told me what to expect.’ Her German gynaecologist assured her she wouldn’t feel a thing. ‘When the times comes,’ he said, ‘you can have an injection.’ Well, as many of us know, that isn’t quite how it works. So when labour began, Dip screamed the place down. The hospital, Haus Dahlem, was run by nuns. ‘One nun,’ Dip says ‘was so exasperated with me, she kept repeating, “Sei ruhig, sei ruhig!” [“Be quiet!”]’. That was the birth of my sister, Shirin. Dip was better prepared the next time and my birth had less of the “stürm und drang” (storm and stress).
I ask Dip how she managed with German. Charles spoke the language excellently. Dip spoke Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and better English than most native English speakers. But she had no German, so on arrival she enrolled herself in a class.
‘The great test of my language skills,’ she says, ‘was when I was confronted with German officialdom. Charles was on a trip and he had forgotten to pay a municipal bill or something, so a couple of bailiffs came and rang our bell. I said my husband was away and I knew nothing about that kind of thing. When Charles got back, he was furious, as he had paid the bill. He blasted them for coming to the house and bothering his foreign wife who couldn’t speak the language. They apologised profusely for their mistake. Then they added, “But Herr Wheeler, your wife speaks fluent German!”’
Dip is smiling. She is entitled to feel pleased with herself. ‘Fleissig,’ she adds (the German for fluent), just in case I had missed it.
Germany in the early 1960s was a troubled place. Nearly two decades of Nazi rule and a catastrophic war cast a long, dark shadow.
On the morning of 13 August 1961, just under a year before Dip and Charles arrived, Berlin woke to find barbed-wire fences, six foot high, erected overnight dividing the Russian and western sectors of the city. Train services were cut and roads were blocked off. Distraught families found themselves on different sides of the new border, unable to meet. East German guards beat back protesters. Over the coming days, the fences were replaced by heavy concrete slabs. Buildings near the border in the east were cleared or destroyed, replaced by watchtowers, floodlights, dogs and patrols of armed soldiers. A sandy ‘death-strip’ now defaced the historic city centre. When Dip and Charles moved to Berlin, the trauma was fresh.
Charles and Dip lived in Kirschenallee. The British Governor of the Allied Military Prison at Spandau was their neighbour. At a small dinner party, Dip says, the conversation turned to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s number two until his flight to Britain in 1941. Hess was serving a life sentence in Spandau and was rumoured to be mad. An officer on guard duty at Spandau confided that after dark Hess would howl into the night like a wolf. One of the journalists present printed the story. His dinner invitations dried up. Dip explains, ‘That just wasn’t done.’
NATO and Warsaw Pact forces did not confront each other directly, but the arms race created a constant fear of war. Dip says she even questioned whether it was right to have children. In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world came very close to disaster. ‘I remember being scared out of my wits!’ says Dip. ‘We were sure it would end in armed conflict.’
In Berlin, many thought that by stationing missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev was testing Kennedy’s resolve as a prelude to taking over the city. ‘We were very, very nervous,’ Dip says, ‘because it was hard to imagine the Russians would back down this time. People remembered the Berlin Airlift when the Russians had blockaded the city. We knew they were capable of paralysing it.’
Dip then tells a story that has passed into family folklore about an incident in the early hours at the height of the crisis. ‘The British military began patrolling up and down our street, shouting “Red alert! Red alert!” I was very frightened, so Charles picked up the phone and called the UK military attaché who lived a few doors away. Charles wanted to complain. “Is that really necessary?” he asked. “It’s making my pregnant wife anxious.”’
On 26 October 1962, NATO apparently placed its B52 bombers on continuous alert and air-force personnel were recalled to their stations (the call, I read, was in fact ‘ready alert’). Twenty-three bombers were armed with nuclear warheads and orbited within striking distance of the Soviet Union. Dip treasures this tale, I surmise, because to shield her from discomfort Charles was willing to risk looking a fool. Such moments are never forgotten.
The Soviet climb-down, after thirteen anxious days, increased the young president’s prestige. The following summer he arrived in Berlin. Charles met him at Tempelhof airport, with a hundred other correspondents from all over the world. The president stayed for seven hours and had two messages to convey. The US was wholly committed to the defence of Berlin, and though the reunification of Germany would be difficult, it would eventually happen.
Huge crowds of West Berliners gathered that hot June day outside the Schöneberg Town Hall. There, President Kennedy told the expectant throng that ‘Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum”. Today, in the world of freedom,’ he declared to tumultuous applause, ‘the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.’
Later that year, when the trees were bare and Berliners buttoned up their overcoats against the wintry chill, Dip and Charles were dinner guests at the home of the Associated Press correspondent. ‘While we were eating,’ Dip tells me, ‘news came through that President Kennedy had been shot. There was a deathly hush. Then the men all leapt up to find out more and file their stories. We were just stunned.
‘Soon after, we became aware of something going on in the street outside, so we parted the curtains to have a look. A huge crowd of people with torches and lighted candles had gathered and were walking silently past the house.’ Dip explains: ‘Berliners were always worried about being gobbled up by the Russians. Kennedy’s speech had meant a great deal to them. They were walking to the square where he had spoken, to show their grief.’
There were hazards, Dip says, in being a non-British wife. One day Charles was summoned to the office of the British Consul General. The official asked whether Charles had considered arranging for his wife to become a British national. Charles knew, and told the Consul General, that Dip was happy being Indian. The Consul General nodded sympathetically but his message was blunt: were civilians to be evacuated from Berlin, as a non-Brit she would regrettably find herself ‘at the back of the queue’. In the event there was no evacuation, but as a precaution Dip got a British passport. ‘The Brits had no problem allowing dual nationality,’ she tells me, ‘but I was devastated to discover later that the Indians didn’t permit it. So that’s how and why I gave up being an Indian.’
Dip seems to have (inadvertently) renounced her nationality at about the time when in India an era was ending. Nehru, who had dedicated his life to building the Indian Republic, was losing his grip.
In September 1962 the Chinese crossed the McMahon Line, but viewing the incident as a skirmish, the Indian government took little action in response. Some weeks later, when the Chinese poured over the border, Indian troops were unprepared and overwhelmed. Ill equipped, they suffered terribly in the Himalayan snow. After a month or so, the Chinese unilaterally announced a ceasefire and withdrew from much of the territory they had captured. For India the war was a disaster. Nehru felt betrayed and fell ill.
He never recovered his health and died on 27 May 1964.
In 1965, Charles was posted to Washington DC. I was a baby and Shirin was a toddler.
We crossed the Atlantic together as a family and arrived in a country convulsed by conflict. To halt the spread of global communism, thousands of young men were drafted to fight in Vietnam and died in a hot, distant jungle. On the streets, back home, the Afro-American population (called negros back then) was up in arms.
Dip remembers the Los Angeles riots being Charles’s first big story. August 1965 was a sweltering summer. Watts was one of the poorest neighbourhoods, worst hit by the violence. Against a backdrop of burnt-out cars and shops, Charles reported that people on the streets there were ‘not lamenting their poverty’ so much as ‘bursting to talk about police brutality’.
Brutality, Charles observed, included more than being clubbed with a truncheon (‘for which the negro has no redress’). ‘Brutality,’ Charles told his listeners, ‘is about being called a “nigger”, is having one’s home invaded by policemen without a warrant, it is an attitude of contempt.’ The BBC received numerous calls from viewers asking why its correspondent was speaking to rioters. ‘Well, if people are rioting,’ Charles reasoned, ‘don’t we want to know why?’ To their credit, Dip says, the bosses backed him up.
Charles began as number two and, during an eight-year stint, became the BBC’s Chief Correspondent in North America. For our family, Washington life was very congenial. We had a big house in the north-west of the city and safe space outside to play. We had azaleas, a cherry tree and neighbours who welcomed us to the neighbourhood with home-baked blueberry pie. By then, Dip was on top of being what Americans call a ‘homemaker’. Charles bought her a car and she began, she tells me, to ‘spread her wings’.
In 1966 the Duke of Edinburgh planned to tour the US to raise money for a children’s charity and talk up British exports. When Charles said he would be following the royal tour to California, Dip announced that she too would travel to the Golden State. The plan was not to tag along. The trip would be her own. Dip planned a route and, with my sister, then aged three, she crossed the United States in double-decker trains. Of course, Dip would have pined for the baby left behind, but it was an adventure. ‘My American friends thought it extraordinarily brave, but everywhere we went people were kind. It was cumbersome carrying cases, but people helped us in and out of the trains.’
After the trip, things were different at home. Dip found herself scanning the bookshelves and realising they were full of political books. ‘They were books that appealed to Charles but I didn’t care for.’ This was, I can see, a seminal moment, a moment of self-realisation. ‘Do you know what I did?’ she asks. ‘I cut out a form from a newspaper and joined a book club. I was thrilled when my first book arrived – a biography of Tolstoy.’ Leo Tolstoy was a great hero of Gandhi’s, as a pacifist and social reformer. Dip loved Tolstoy for something else – his psychological insights and the rich inner lives of his unconventional literary characters.
Dip enrolled at the American University to learn Russian. She relished the challenge and soaked up all that she could. (In later life, she would exhort me to ‘go looking for learning’.)
In Washington, Charles and Dip had interesting friends. Aged eight, I decided Jenonne Walker was the coolest woman I was ever likely to meet. She lived in a beautiful Georgetown house, with no sign of a husband or child, and had been an analyst at the CIA before moving to the State Department. Through my parents, I invited her to be my godmother, since when it has only got better. In the 1990s she was Clinton’s ambassador in Prague where I visited her in the historic Petschok Palace. She was once big in arms control, so on a family trip to the Air and Space Museum on Constitution Avenue, she showed my children ‘her missiles’ – intermediate- and short-range ballistic missiles, with a range of up to 3,400 miles.
During their Washington days, Jenonne says, Dip and Charles gave the best dinner parties in town. She argued seriously with Charles only once when he kept insisting she should resign over the Vietnam War (now excused as a rare occasion when he had had too much to drink). Dip, she says, ‘was not just Charles’s “plus one”. She was articulate, vivacious, and on the Washington dinner party circuit she was a popular guest in her own right. She easily held her own discussing the political issues of the day. She was beautiful and she could puncture pomposity with a few smiling words.’
I love hearing my mother being praised, but as Jenonne and I talk, a disturbing memory intrudes. In my mind’s eye I see shiny, white, squeaky spheres floating on the surface of a thick brown liquid. It is Dip’s signature dish that she used to serve at their parties – prawn and egg curry. Unforgettable. Unforgivable, if you are not fond of eggs.
It was 4 April 1968, 6.01 p.m. On the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, a bullet entered Dr King’s cheek and travelled down his spine. An hour later he was dead.
At the moment James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King Jr, Charles was on a press plane bound for Honolulu, accompanying the president, Lyndon Johnson, on peace talks to end the Vietnam War.
The following day, Charles reported, the president struggled ‘to convince the negro community that it wasn’t white America that had killed Dr King but a single killer’. He did what he could ‘to show that white America cared’. He lowered the flags to half-mast and proclaimed a national day of mourning. All this he did on television. But, at that moment, Charles said, the people he needed to reach weren’t watching television. Some of them, only five blocks from the White House, were rioting and looting television sets.
‘As I record this,’ Charles continued, ‘the President is in the White House basement situation room, usually the nerve centre in foreign crises like Cuba and the Arab/Israeli war. Outside, infantry are stationed in the White House gardens, there are tanks in New Hampshire Avenue and a machine-gun nest on Capitol Hill. Washington is now quieting down. But the fires are still burning.’
While Washington was under curfew, Charles was out filming. After finishing the job, he had trouble finding a cab, so he rang Dip. ‘He wanted me to pick him up. I was petrified, but he gave me very specific instructions, which I followed. He said I should put on a sari, bring my British passport and come in the beat-up Chevy. The streets were deserted and I got to him safely. Then we drove home.’
‘So,’ I say to Dip, ‘you were in Delhi when Gandhi was shot, in Berlin you felt the reverberations of JFK’s shooting, and then Martin Luther King was shot when you lived in Washington. That’s quite a tally of political assassinations.’
‘Yes, and there was also Bobby [Robert] Kennedy.’
The night King was shot, Bobby Kennedy had to tell a mainly black crowd that a white man had killed Dr King. Like Nehru before him, he counselled against hatred, bitterness and revenge, and pleaded for love, wisdom and compassion towards others – ideals to which Gandhi and King had dedicated their lives. Less than two months later, Bobby Kennedy was also shot and killed by an assassin.
After leaving India in 1962, Dip returned on only three occasions.
In 1963 she took her first child, Shirin, to meet the family. I came on the next trip, five years later, aged nearly four. Our photograph album shows a good time – plenty of smiles, swimming and playing with cousins. A man with a flute gets his monkey, dressed in a grubby little skirt, to dance on the lawn. Shirin says that later it scratched her.
The photograph on the cover of this book was taken during that trip, in the garden at Golf Links. Dip and Charles stand at the back with Dip’s brother Priti, and her sisters Amarjit and Anup. I sit on Papa-ji’s knee and Shirin is on Bei-ji’s. Sadly, I have no actual memory of either grandparent, of talking to them, hugging them or knowing them.
Shirin and I share one hazy memory of standing in the prayer room in Amarjit’s house before an image of Guru Nanak near the canopied Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. Cousins had taken us in and told us to cup our hands and pray to God for money. Coins then fell into our palms!
Apparently, at the end of the trip Bei-ji prepared and wrapped up stuffed paranthas for us to eat on the journey back home. Dip was reluctant to take them, saying she didn’t want to look like a villager. Charles, so the tale goes, gratefully accepted the offering. The story echoes a refrain I used to hear from some older family members, that Charles – whom they all loved and admired – was, in many ways, ‘more Indian’ than Dip. The implication being he was more open and welcoming. His temperament was more easy-going than hers and his relationship with India, and the family, was inevitably simpler.
Shortly after that trip to India, Bei-ji was suddenly taken ill and died after a short time. Dip says that her parents never showed affection in public, but after losing Bei-ji Papa-ji would wake up in the night and howl for her.
Our next and last trip to India as a family was three years later, in 1972. Anup’s husband Jagtar had died unexpectedly from a heart attack and everyone was devastated. Their bedroom in Cuffe Parade was cleared and a white sheet covered the floor. Prayers (the kirtan) were held over a number of days. I remember standing in a circle of family members, hands cupped to receive the parshad, a blessing from the Guru in the form of an oily sweet mixture of flour, ghee, water and gur (raw sugar).
I ask Dip why the hoped-for annual trips never came about. In those days, she says, we didn’t have much money for flights and there were competing demands. Summer holidays in Washington were long, humid and hot. India would bring no respite, so as a family we went to England.
After Charles’s brother died, he was an only child. His parents lived in a cottage in Dormansland, a village near East Grinstead in Sussex. To me the place was quintessentially English. There was a garden gate, an affectionate Golden Labrador called Kim, a dresser stacked with blue and white china, rice pudding, a close-cropped, lush green lawn and a fruit cage where Grandpa grew raspberries, gooseberries and redcurrants. In the early evening we watched The Magic Roundabout on telly, drinking Ribena. When we kissed our grandmother, Nana, goodnight her powdered cheeks felt soft and smooth.
From the late 1960s Charles appeared regularly on the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News (as it was then), reporting the twists and turns of American politics. Every so often, Dip would receive a crackly phone call from England. ‘Tell the boy to cut his hair!’ her father-in-law would bellow.
On ‘home leave’, Dip says, Charles was constantly fêted. The neighbours would come over for sherry and form a tight cluster around him. ‘Charles Senior was my staunch supporter,’ she confides. ‘He would try to lure a group away by saying, “You won’t believe what my daughter-in-law is doing. She is learning Russian.” They would feign interest for a moment or two, then turn back to the celebrity guest. I loved your grandfather for that!’
Dip developed a close bond with her father-in-law. A story I’ve heard since childhood sums up what she felt. After dinner Dip and Charles Senior would dry the dishes together in the kitchen while Charles and his mother talked in the drawing room. One evening, Dip was drying a champagne glass and it broke in her hand. ‘I was horrified,’ she says, ‘but your grandfather didn’t rebuke me or show irritation. He just showed me how to dry it without twisting the delicate stem. Beneath his gruff exterior he was a kind, gentle soul.’
In 1968 Charles and Dip bought The Garden Cottage in West Sussex, a half-hour drive from East Grinstead. It was then a clap-board shed set in a couple of acres of land. It had been an outhouse for a large Elizabethan house, which was divided into plots and sold off at auction. We turned the shed into a dwelling and planted a garden. Charles Senior brought seedlings and cuttings from his own garden and strode about with a trug.
Sometimes during our summer breaks we visited London. Once this involved a trip to the Tower. I could list the US presidents and all fifty-two states (plus their capitals), but had a shaky grasp of English history. Still, I was excited to see the Crown Jewels.
It was a popular attraction. The queue was long, but we moved forward steadily. As we approached the exhibits, Dip leant in to examine the purple velvet and platinum, jewel-encrusted crown. A large gem in the middle caught the light. To my horror, Dip raised her head, pointed and exclaimed, ‘They stole that from us! It’s ours!’
From a shadowy corner of the room, a uniformed steward glided towards us. ‘Move along now,’ he drawled smoothly. The crowd was supposed to be in constant motion, filing deferentially past the display. So what was my mother thinking? What was this embarrassing woman on about? Who stole what, when? I agreed with the steward – we had to get her out. Fast.
I now know what she was on about. For centuries the Koh-i-Noor diamond was the Indian subcontinent’s most valuable and sought-after jewel. When the East India Company annexed the Punjab in 1849, the young Maharaja Duleep Singh was forced to hand over the Koh-i-Noor to Queen Victoria. And here it is. In the Queen Mother’s Crown.
This is the only episode I remember when Dip showed overt allegiance to the place she was from. (She had no interest in cricket, so would never have cheered Sachin Tendulkar.) Mostly, as far as I could tell, she parcelled up India (in fact pretty much all of her life before we were born) and kept it closeted away.
I thought little of them at the time, but habits she held on to were telling. She wouldn’t pass us, or allow us to pass her, scissors or knives for fear it would ‘sever our relations’. They had to be put down on a surface. And before any trip Dip would take off her shoes, grasp our hands and say a Punjabi prayer under her breath. A prayer to keep us safe. When finished, she would touch the floor and then our foreheads. I had no idea what it meant other than a delay setting off.
And the sari, I see now, was very important. Out of the house, she always wore a sari. A sari comprises six yards of cloth. It takes time to tie and gets in the way. But it was key, she tells me, to her sense of self. ‘Wearing a sari, I felt confident. I felt myself. I never forgot who I was or where I came from and I was encouraged in that by Charles,’ she says. ‘He was very enamoured of my wearing one. When we were going out he would always say, “You are the best-dressed woman in the whole country.” He was so proud of me.’
We left America in 1973.
Our last night we spent with Jenonne. That afternoon, she says, Dip went to the hairdressers. Unpinned, her smooth black hair reached to her waist. Mostly she put it up into a bun, but it was an effort to handle. So she decided to cut it. I don’t think observing the edicts of the Khalsa concerned Dip much. Growing up I knew Sikhs wore a metal bangle signifying a union with God (the kara) and left their hair uncut (kesh). But I knew nothing of the remaining five ks: the kanga (wooden comb), kacheri (shorts worn under clothes for modesty) and the kirpan (small sword, signifying courage and self-defence).
Nonetheless, for Dip, cutting her hair was still a thing. And she tells me she was relieved that the distance, an ocean or two, spared her from family recrimination.
Charles was sorry to leave the Watergate story, but after Britain joined the European Economic Community the BBC thought ‘their star foreign correspondent’, as Jenonne puts it, should be in Brussels.
The SS France sailed us to Europe. I was eight and boarded the luxurious liner in awe. I tore around in excitement, got lost and had to be escorted back to the cabin. Dip won the table-tennis competition. I won at Bingo, but shyness turned me mute and I would have missed my $20 prize if Shirin hadn’t shouted ‘Bingo!’ for me.
Dip tells me she cried when we docked in Southampton. ‘On all previous trips, Charles Senior was there at the airport to welcome and fetch us. After he died, in 1972, England didn’t feel like home any more. I felt displaced once again. For so many years,’ she says, ‘I felt like he held a protective umbrella over me.’
Dip’s own father, Papa-ji, died two years after that. I remember nothing about this event – neither its happening nor anyone’s reaction to it. Dip never spoke of it, to me, to Shirin or to anyone else as far as we know. When Grandpa died, Dip and Charles went to England, leaving Shirin and me to stay with some friends. I remember that well.
The coming few years were, I think now, a very low point in Dip’s life. Brussels was a socially conservative, parochial place. Charles was the BBC’s Chief Europe Correspondent, but he covered the referendum on membership from London. In order to start the school year on time, we went ahead to Brussels with Dip. She is still indignant about a trip to the bank. ‘After filling in a form the clerk turned to me and said, “Mrs Wheeler, may I now see the letter from your husband?” Can you believe it: a woman needed permission from her spouse to open an account?’
After Britain confirmed its membership of the EEC, the Brussels story was flat. There was plenty else to report in Europe. One by one dictatorships fell – the military junta in Greece, General Franco in Spain. Portugal had a ‘carnation revolution’, a coup that removed an authoritarian government and ushered in democracy. This meant Charles travelled a lot while Dip stayed in Brussels holding the fort. Her cooking repertoire expanded. Mushroom vol-au-vents were a favourite. Prawn cocktail was for special occasions. There was also ‘fish dish’ (a secret recipe I will take to the grave) and stew (standard ingredients, but unfailingly tasty). Even so, Dip struggled in Brussels. It felt like a place without soul and she felt alone.
She joined various groups to try to learn French and meet people and was instrumental in setting up an English-language ‘help-line’ for suffers of abuse or depression. ‘I learnt so much – about a woman’s lot and human nature,’ she says. ‘There were so many lonely wives. They would follow their husbands to Brussels, uprooting themselves and their children. When a husband went off to work, he was surrounded by colleagues, but the wife was left to sink or swim. Many felt isolated and turned to drink. Some would say, “I haven’t been out for an evening for weeks.” “Why not?” we’d ask. “I don’t know how to get a babysitter here.” So our group organised lists of helpful information. But mostly we manned the phones and listened to them talk.’
Dip didn’t turn to drink, but she shared a sense of isolation. In the US she was part of Charles’s world. They experienced together the political drama and protests. But in Brussels, apart from being a mother, she wasn’t sure how she fitted in.
My parents had met Jack Altman when he was Reuters’ correspondent in Berlin. He became Shirin’s godfather and used to come to Brussels from Paris where he was based. He loved talking to Dip – about books, people and life. Ironically, as the News Editor of Playboy magazine, he introduced Dip to the ‘women’s liberation’ movement with a copy of Germaine Greer’s ground-breaking work, The Female Eunuch.
Maybe, I think now, this sowed the seeds for ‘Ketchupgate’. What happened was this. The four of us – my parents, my sister and I – had finished supper but were still at the table. Someone (I’d guess it was Shirin) suggested that each of us say what we were good at. At Dip’s turn, Charles turned to her and offered, ‘You are good at cleaning the lavatory.’ It was a joke, but she didn’t like it. It felt demeaning. She told him to take it back, but he brushed her off, laughing.
Suddenly, she is standing over him.
‘You’d better take that back or I’ll pour ketchup over your head.’ Ha, ha, we think. Good gag, but she would never do it. Charles shares this view and chortles, ‘Do, if it will please your tiny mind.’
Plop. A sticky gloop has landed on his scalp. A portion travels slowly down his forehead. His luminous grey hair is now shocking red. Shirin and I watch in admiration and disbelief. Dip says she was as surprised as the rest of us: ‘I didn’t know I had it in me!’
Growing up, I didn’t really try to understand my mother, but I could see she was impressive. She had grace and authority. She had views that she expressed, forcefully at times. But it felt like she carried a burden.
I remember a transatlantic flight in the 1970s. After the aircraft door was slammed shut, I turned to my mother. She sat with her eyes closed, pressing an ice-pack to her forehead. Her breathing was odd, gasping and quick. I held her hand. This panic attack, her fear of being shut in, was my first inkling that at times she found it difficult to cope.
As a family we enjoyed going to the theatre together, though Ibsen and Chekhov were an issue. My father and I found them gloomy and too intense. Dip and Shirin called us Philistines and savoured performances of The Wild Duck and The Cherry Orchard that we simply endured. As the years went by though, Dip’s phobia in enclosed spaces intensified and these outings became an ordeal for her. Before she entered a gallery or theatre, we would recce the exits and convince her we knew a quick and easy route out.
Her claustrophobia was debilitating and a point came when she was no longer willing to fly. It was impossible, she said, to travel to India. In any event, she argued, since her parents died there was no longer a reason to go. People she wanted to see, she said, would come and see her.
Family from India did visit. Many were enjoyable occasions. Others were not so straightforward. Some visitors came out of duty, she said, but she questioned the point. Without domestic help, preparing and clearing up meals was (largely) down to her. Over time, her pleasure in guests became marred, I feel, by perfectionism and an unwillingness to delegate domestic tasks. She wanted control of the kitchen – no one else could do the job properly – but she resented the role. I understand that. She had standards to maintain, but wanted something more to show for her time on this earth.
To relieve domestic monotony, Dip had enrolled with the Open University. She worked hard at her essays and summer school (despite my complaints) and graduated with a degree in Experimental Psychology. She had plans to go on, become an educational psychologist, and find a job. But there was a snag. The training, she discovered, involved undergoing analysis herself. That wasn’t on. She had sealed up the past and had no intention of letting in light. So she chose a different career that also helped others – a researcher at Amnesty International – but left her carefully crafted equilibrium undisturbed.