A childhood in India in the days of the Raj

(A lady called Joyce, a friend of my father, gave me this account)

I was born near Madras, where my father was an official of the Imperial Bank of India. I was an only child, and there was no-one of my age living nearby, so when I once met another child I didn't know how to communicate or talk with her. We didn't mix socially with the Indians or Eurasians (mixed-race). Instead I had a pet goat, called Maggie.
     We lived in a large house belonging to the Bank, which had a garden (called a compound) and servants' quarters. There were five house servants and two gardeners I had an aya (nurse) and a Eurasian nanny, but my best friend was my father's peone (bearer), who was called Robert. He was very old, and was delegated to take me for walks. I remember that in the hot weather we went up to the hills for three weeks, and there for the first time I met children of my own age at the kindergarten.
   Our house was believed to be haunted. Even my father felt uneasy at times. There were poisonous snakes. Once we found a cobra on my mother's bed! She was in it at the time. My father called out "Don't move!", got his gun and shot it!

 I first came to England when I was 5, stayed for six months and then returned to India, where I nearly died of enteric fever. When I was 8 or 9 I was sent to school in England, at Hove in Sussex. I didn't see my parents again for three years; instead I was shuffled round between relatives and friends in the school holidays. That kind of arrangement was quite common. I loved England because I was in good health there, whereas I was always ill in India.
   The first school I went to in England was, I now realize, very strange. Because my parents' main priority was the state of my health, they liked its emphasis on life in the open air rather than on academic studies. After this I went to the Maynard School in Exeter, which was more traditional; and then three years later I was transferred to a day-school in Exmouth. By this time my father had retired from India, and my parents bought a house in Budleigh Salterton in Devon, where many other former Indian officials lived.

I left school at 16 and got married at 19, to an old family friend who was nine years older than me. He was a road engineer, and we spent our honeymoon in Germany, looking at Hitler's autobahns! Despite this, we had a very happy married life. We only visited India once, as tourists!

The Strange Guests, part 2

(The story so far: Betty Worthing, a chambermaid, has got to know a mysterious foreign couple, who call themselves Ilych and Nadezhda, staying at her hotel. Now another foreigner has tried to persuade her to intercept and hand over the couple’s letters. Betty is unsure what to do)

One morning Betty came down to the foyer of the hotel and found the place deserted, apart from one guest sitting in an armchair in a far corner reading a newspaper. Behind the deserted reception desk was the board with the letters waiting to be collected, including one with a foreign stamp. She stepped behind the desk and examined it. Yes: it must be for the couple in room 212! This was her chance!  Quickly she took the letter from the board and slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She was still undecided what to do next: whether to deliver the letter to room 212 or to pass it on to the stranger who had offered her money for such letters; but all that could come later!

    There were footsteps behind her. The guest had dropped his newspaper and risen from his chair, and was now looking at her intently. He was a shortish man, bearded, wearing a tweed suit.

   “I see you’ve picked up the letter for our Russian friends”, he said. He had a strong Scottish accent, and his voice was firm but not threatening.

   “Yes, sir”, Betty replied, since it was pointless to deny it. “I was just going to take it up to them, sir”, she added impulsively. She sensed that she was falling into a situation beyond her control. What on earth should she do now? Suddenly coming to a decision, she told the gentleman how she had been asked to intercept and pass on letters. “But I wasn’t going to do it, sir! And I was afraid if I didn’t take the letter, he might come and take it himself, now there’s no-one about”.

   “Are you with us, then?” he asked.

   “Oh yes, sir!” replied Betty emphatically. Now she was really committing herself; getting in deeper and deeper!

    “Good. I’ll go up there with you then. It’ll save me the trouble of waiting for one of them to come down”. He returned to his chair to pick up his coat and a large bag.

   

He let her lead the way up the stairs. At the end of the corridor he stopped. “Now, lassie, you go and knock on their door and tell them the Scotsman’s come with the pamphlets. I’ll bide here to make sure the coast’s clear”.

    Despite her fears, Betty could not help feeling a tremor of excitement as she knocked on the door. She really was in an adventure now! As usual, the door opened just a crack at first, but then Nadezhda recognised her.

    “If you please, miss: I’ve a letter for you”, Betty said, “and the Scotsman says he’s brought the pamphlets”.

    Nadezhda opened the door, and Betty signalled to her waiting companion to come in. He glanced down the stairs to check they were not being followed before walking to the room. He greeted Nadezhda and Ilych, and then produced a large pile of pamphlets from his bag. Betty noticed that they were printed in strange foreign letters. Ilych thumbed through one of them eagerly, purring to himself with pleasure as he did so.

    “Very good, very good!” he said at last, “I shall arrange for these to be sent into Russia. But tell me: why did you bring the chambermaid up with you? Is she to be trusted?”

   The Scotsman briefly recounted what Betty had told him. The two foreign guests were silent for a while, then Ilych asked her to describe the stranger who had asked her to pass on the letters. “But I wouldn’t do it, sir!” said Betty, “I didn’t like him!”

   Nadeszda still looked distrustful, but Ilych chuckled, pinched Betty on the cheek and called her “a true proletarian heroine”. Betty had no idea what this meant, but gathered that it was intended as a compliment.

    Ilych then sighed. “So they have found us!” he said. “So we must be moving on again; Nadezhda and me. I think we must leave England. Now, child, you may tell your police spy we have gone, and you do not know where. Because, of course, you do not know! Do not tell him this until next week: give us time to get away. We shall take these pamphlets, but I shall give you one. You cannot read Russian, but one day you may learn. I shall write my name on it in your alphabet, so that you will remember me”.

    He picked up his pen and on the first page of the pamphlet wrote very carefully: Vladimir Ilych Lenin. 

My Father Remembers His Childhood

When I was two years old, my family moved to Hartlepool, where my father worked as a marine engineer and shipping inspector. I was the youngest of seven children, so apart from Ruth, who was five years older than me, my brothers and sisters had left home by the time I was growing up, and I only saw them occasionally.

Hartlepool is still well-known throughout the north-east as “the town where they hung the monkey” (see note at end). We rented a big semi-detached house on the main Stockton road, with the trams running outside the front door. I remember it as always being very dirty. We could sit in the garden and watch the smuts from the Seaton steelworks falling around us. Sometimes the night sky would glow as the slag was tipped. Ruth and I discovered that if we rubbed our hands on the trees and then wiped them on our faces, we became completely black; which did not please Mother. One night an enormous dump of tens of thousands of wooden pit-props near the railway caught fire. The flames were so bright that you could read a book by their light, and the intense heat buckled the rail track.
We didn’t often go to the seaside, although there was a good beach quite close. The sea was always cold, and I don’t remember ever bathing in it with any degree of pleasure. Further up the coast, at Black Hall Rocks, you could find coal dust washed up on the beach from an undersea seam, and the unemployed men would come to rake it up and take it home in sacks. We preferred to have picnics up on the moors at Hobhole, where I could go fishing from the footbridge. Once, when I was about 8 or 9, I proudly told Mother that I had caught two cod and five kippers
.
Father was only able to take us on longer outings on Bank Holidays. For three or four summers we stayed in a farmhouse in Kildale, up in the Cleveland hills. This was a very traditional little settlement, with a pub, a church, a local squire, and even a village idiot. The farm was run by a family called Tait: a husband and wife with a son and daughter in their 20s. This was a period of severe depression in farming, and the Taits must have been very poor. They had no motor-vehicle, and just one horse to provide all the pulling-power. It was a dairy farm, and they had their own creamery, which I remember as being the only clean part of the farm. We once bought local cheese (though I think it was from another farmer) which weighed 14 pounds! The farm had no gas or electricity, water came from a spring into a trough, and the only lavatory was a hole in the ground in an outbuilding. We enjoyed our time at the farm, though I suspect Mother would have preferred something more sophisticated.

When I was about ten, Father bought me a second-hand bicycle for £3.10/-. He took me on cycling tours, stopping for bed and breakfast overnight; up Teesdale or Weardale; to Richmond or Barnard Castle. Later I went for rides with a school friend: once we did a day’s run to Whitby and back, which must have been about 80 miles.

When I was 13 I went away to boarding school, where I became a close friend of Francis Crick, who later won the Nobel prize for his work in the discovery of DNA. Then, three years later, Father retired and moved to Bexhill in Sussex, and we never returned to the north-east.

Footnote:
Hartlepool is known throughout the north-east as “the town where they hung the monkey”. The story goes that during the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked off the coast, and the only survivor to be washed ashore alive was the captain’s pet monkey, which had been dressed in a little military uniform. The people of Hartlepool had never set eyes on a Frenchman, and they assumed the monkey must be a French soldier, so they hanged it! Hartlepool still takes a perverse pleasure in the story of their stupidity: to this day, the mascot of the town’s football team is called “H’Angus the Monkey”

(My father died recently, at the age of 93)