AFTER FATHER BECAME a Labour MP in 1945, Sir Stafford Cripps chose him to be his personal assistant in the Cabinet Mission to India, the purpose of which was to secure that country’s peaceful transition to independence.
Almost immediately the British delegation was involved in a series of meetings with Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s fame by this time was such that the popular songwriter Cole Porter had included him in his musical paean ‘You’re the Top’, along with the Nile and Napoleon brandy. The prospect of negotiating with a living legend fazed even Father. Usually he employed a dictatorial attitude towards anyone with whom he had dealings. But he at once behaved towards Gandhi with a mixture of politeness and sincere veneration. The old sage in his turn regarded the portly, owl-eyed young Englishman as the equivalent of a renegade but redeemable young nephew.
Father soon discovered that Gandhi harboured complex feelings towards the British. He had some of the temperament of that eminent Victorian General Gordon, who in the words of Lytton Strachey possessed ‘in the depths of his soul intertwining contradictions’. As a political leader he desired to sway the Indian multitudes with his patriotism, once telling Father that before the British came, there were no famines in India and that they were entirely the fault of the English. Father asked for an explanation.
‘Every village used to keep a granary for emergencies in case there was a harvest failure. Then the British built the railways. If there was a shortage of food in one part, the trains could rush food to it from distant places. So the villages gave up keeping their granaries full.’ Gandhi beat his hairless chest in faux exasperation. ‘When a really big harvest failure came, over huge areas there was nothing for the railways to bring, so the people starved because the village granaries were empty.’
According to Father, he was so ready to demonstrate that all Indian ills were the fault of the British that it was surprising that he loved them. And Gandhi did, genuinely. At least Father said so.
Seldom was a personality so veiled with paradox. Gandhi could be as haughty as a chieftain, as honest as a peasant or as guileful and teasing as a fairground gypsy. He was alive to the nuances of statesmanship and the skilful management of delicate situations, but his childlike humour often got the better of him. On one occasion Gandhi was playing hard to get and refused to come to Delhi to see Father and the British. At length he relented but added the proviso that he would stay in the sweepers’ quarters in Delhi. The sweepers were Untouchables, so low in social status that they were beneath the Hindu caste system. Alarm at housing Gandhi in foetid slums, in which disease-ridden unfortunates were heaped on top of one another, abated when it emerged that Gandhi’s friend, a multi-millionaire industrialist named Birla, had taken over Gandhi’s accommodation problems. In a few days a large area of the sweepers’ quarters was fumigated, painted, supplied with running water, and modern drainage. And what of the sweepers, you ask? The poor wretches were tossed out onto the streets.
Father first met Gandhi in the Viceroy’s house. The man before him was small and completely hairless; as slippery-shiny as a betel-nut. He had a strangely high-pitched laugh that went hee-hee. His brain teemed with wheezes. When the Cabinet Mission refused to rule out some form of state of Pakistan, Gandhi advised the British to depart India at once, leaving her to her fate. For a time he refused to take part in further talks. Then, suddenly, he changed his mind. He would meet the Cabinet Mission at their house on the Viceroy’s estate at six o’clock in the morning. When Gandhi arrived, he at once squatted on a sofa in the drawing room, wearing only a loin-cloth. His face was as rigid as an Aztec mask. The British began to speak. Gandhi failed to answer. They spoke some more. But still, despite their intense irritation at having been awoken so early in the morning, Gandhi declined to respond. After a while, he scribbled a note and handed it to Father to read to the distinguished gentlemen who had travelled six thousand miles to see him. The note said, ‘This is my day of silence. But please go on talking.’
Symbolic gestures are thought useful by many politicians as a shorthand way of identifying with the populace and indicating to them a stance which it is hoped will induce trust. Churchill had a V-sign; Margaret Thatcher her handbags. But Gandhi outdid them all. As part of his campaign for Indian independence he sought support from the masses by demonstrating that he felt and suffered just as they did. Reaching places to address them in vast numbers was most easily done by rail. In those days third-class travel in India was very cheap and exceedingly nasty. There was no air-conditioning, the seats were wooden, rickety and filthy. The tiny carriages were filled six times over with passengers standing on the running boards clinging to anything they could hold, often someone else’s arms or legs. The smell was as high as the temperature.
To show that he was one of the people, Gandhi insisted on travelling third class. But how could the British allow this frail old man, clad only in a sliver of cloth, to be squashed, possibly to death, in a third-class carriage?
They could not, obviously. So whenever Gandhi notified the authorities that he intended to take a rail journey they had to lay on a special train. This had three third-class compartments, as clean, shiny and pristine as a Mayfair debutante. In the middle of one Gandhi sat with two or three close companions. In the other two the rest of his entourage rode in some comfort. At the stops en route, the enormous crowds, impressed by this apparently spartan mode of transport, cheered him to the skies. At the end of the long journey, say from Calcutta to Madras, Gandhi would turn to his secretary. ‘Now, you must find out the third-class fare and send it to the British government. We mustn’t be beholden to them for anything.’ So the Indian Railways, in return for a train journey costing nearly a thousand pounds, would receive a few rupees and acknowledge their receipt as full and final settlement.
Nor was Gandhi averse to a little duplicity in frightening British governments with prolonged political fasts. He sometimes proclaimed they would ‘fast unto death’ unless he won a satisfactory concession. Suffering would come first; glory after. He would go for weeks without eating and the government would grow more scared every day. Father once asked him whether his fasts were not a dangerous risk. The British after all might not always respond in time.
‘Oh, no,’ he said, with a smile like a basking snake. ‘I really fast for health reasons and feel much better afterwards. I always have a little orange juice every day. I can last indefinitely.’ He glanced down at his lean and gleaming body, glowing like polished wood. Then he looked at Father, already plump though only twenty-eight. ‘I think you could do with some fasts yourself,’ he said, and emitted his high-pitched ‘hee, hee’. It might be said that Gandhi pioneered for westerners the process nowadays known as ‘detoxification’.
Decades later, in the 1980s, Sir Richard Attenborough made his film about Gandhi, which won an Oscar. Father was exercised when he heard about it, saying, ‘We must go and see it at once.’ Accordingly, we set off for a cinema in Notting Hill Gate. Father settled himself into his red plush seat with a sigh of anticipation.
‘Now you’ll see the events that your old dad was a part of,’ he said.
This jubilation was short-lived. The part of Gandhi was played by the British actor, Ben Kingsley. After about half an hour father asked in a bemused voice, ‘But where’s Gandhi?’ One was at a loss to understand.
The figure of Kingsley in a white loin-cloth dominated the screen. ‘But there’s Gandhi.’ Father stared. He flushed darkly. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said with shuddering horror. ‘I don’t believe it.’
The couple in front of us had turned their heads and were struggling between contradictory feelings of irritation and curiosity. With the dawning consternation felt by a commander when he loses control of an infantryman I observed Father struggling to his feet. ‘That man can’t play Gandhi,’ he cried out. ‘His chest is covered with thick black hair. Gandhi’s chest was utterly smooth.’
Stern counsels prevailed upon him to sit down, but he jerked up abruptly when the action on the screen moved to Amritsar, where General Dyer had, according to Attenborough, deliberately massacred a crowd of peaceful Indian civilians. It would be an understatement to say that Father didn’t approve of this interpretation of events. As the British guns mowed down cowering women and children he could be restrained no longer.
He began to roar, ‘What utter rubbish. Lies, lies, anti-British lies. That fellow Attenborough ought to be shot! It never happened like that. I should know. I know India. I was bloody well there.’
By this time the audience had become less interested in the film than in Father and his furious outbursts. Then a Pakistani gentleman of considerable years called out from two rows behind us, ‘Are you Woodrow Wyatt? I read about your time in India in your autobiography. Jolly good stuff.’
‘I should think so,’ returned Father, who was gruntled by this sign of public acclamation. Thence began an animated conversation about Partition which eventually continued on the street when a number of patrons complained of the distraction.
A few months later Father was at one of those London cocktail parties frequented by shiny media sorts, when somebody observed, ‘Oh, there’s old Attenborough.’
Father wheeled around. He gnashed his teeth. In a trice he had his victim by the arm.
‘So you’re Attenborough.’
Attenborough could not deny it.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Well what you said was absolute balderdash,’ said Father, warming to his theme. ‘I know far more about the subject than you do.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Attenborough politely, the hard set of his jaw belying the affability of his smile. But once Father started, there was no surcease.
‘All that aggression – complete nonsense. It wasn’t like that. And as for the hairy chest, an utter bloody fabrication. There wasn’t a hair on it.’
Attenborough could bear this onslaught no longer. He raised his eyebrows derisively.
‘I’m terribly sorry, but there is a great deal of hair growth of a very thick variety.’ This was followed by the mysterious addendum, ‘Especially in the winter months.’
It was only afterwards that father was informed that he had been addressing the wrong Attenborough. Not Richard at all, but his brother David, the eminent naturalist.