Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (4 page)

I went home warmed by the praise but tired and depressed. I could no longer float along like a piece of driftwood on the tides of these events. I had my family to think of, as well as my own goals and desires. Delhi was hot, sticky, and unpleasant. I had not seen my parents since June 1939, and they had never seen Barbara or Susan. The fate of the Gurkha Brigade had been thrown into the lap of the gods; or, rather worse than that, into the lap of the politicians. Soon after the Maharajah of Nepal allowed his Gurkha subjects to be enlisted into the Indian Army in 1819 he stipulated that only British officers should command them. If British officers were to be eased out of the Indian Army, that would be impossible. Yet the income from these men's pay and pensions (there were ten Gurkha regiments, each of two battalions) was vital to Nepal's economy. Would the future Government of India want to keep Gurkhas? Congress leaders had often branded them as mercenaries hired solely to suppress Indian freedom. Would the British Government transfer some of the regiments to the British Army, employing them perhaps in Singapore and Hong Kong? The Colonels of several regiments, headed by Gertie Tuker of the 2nd, were, I knew, already intriguing with Members of the British Parliament to ensure that
their
regiments should be chosen for this transfer. Should I try to do some intriguing on behalf of my regiment, the 4th? And if so, in which direction? Was it really in the interests of a Gurkha regiment, as opposed to that of its British officers, to become an appendage of the British Service? Whitehall knew nothing of Gurkhas, and could only teach them bad habits and unnatural attitudes.

I took a prearranged leave and went up to Ranikhet to assist at the birth of our baby. But doctors are fallible and babies have very little real notion of military punctuality. I spent ten days there while Barbara called her baby all kinds of unkind names and made every effort to deliver herself of it, but without success. Before I returned to Delhi we talked about our future. When my stint in Delhi was finished we had been looking forward to a job in the high mountains. I desperately wanted to work with men again, instead of with paper. One appointment I coveted above all, and Barbara had enthusiastically agreed: commandant of the Gilgit Scouts. But now when I talked of Gilgit she put her hand on my arm and said, 'Jack, I think you should try to get to England.' At first I fought against the idea, but the more I considered the facts the more clearly I saw that she was right. Big decisions were obviously about to be made, and they would be made in England, for Parliament and the India Office would remain supreme until India and Pakistan became Dominions, which was due to happen some time in 1948, two years hence. In England I would be in close touch with events and with people who could advise me. I decided to get a posting there if I could.

There were only two appointments in England for officers of the Indian Army, both of them fortunately of the right rank. One was at the War Office, the other as the Indian Army instructor at the Staff College, Camberley. Officers' postings and reports were in the hands of a general called the Military Secretary, who was responsible directly to the Chief. I had never approached M.S. in my life, for anything. I regarded myself as a professional, ready and able to do whatever was given me to do. I never volunteered and I never refused. But the time had come to assert myself, and I thanked God for the backlog of favourable reports that had accumulated in my file during the war, and for the rows of ribbons on my chest: plenty of other officers wanted to get to England. Then I went to the Military Secretary and asked to be given the Camberley job as soon as it fell vacant. Next day the general sent for me and told me the job was mine, starting in October.

He added with a smile, 'On the basis of your record, you could have had anything you wanted.'

Fine, I thought, thanking him as I went out, but what I wanted was the old life, leading to command of a battalion of my own regiment, mixed with spells with the Gilgit Scouts here and tours on the staff there. But all that was being taken firmly and finally out of my reach, to be as irrevocably lost as my first youth. I must find a new longing, a new love.

Martin was born while I was in London on a flying trip to take some Top-Secret-Super-Hush-Hush-Eyes-of-God-Only documents from the Auk to Lord Montgomery, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Four days later I was in a bus winding up the mountain road to Ranikhet to greet the new baby. He was dark-red, wrinkled and froglike and he had tired Barbara out; I didn't think much of him, but I could tell Barbara that we had been given space on the troopship
Empress of Scotland,
due to sail from Bombay on September 8 for a British port, probably Liverpool. On my final evening in Ranikhet I took Barbara up to the ridge above the cantonment for a last look at the Himalayas. From west to east for 200 miles the horizon was a glittering wall of ice and snow, gold tinted in the low sun. The sun left the grass where we stood, and a cold wind shivered in the pines behind, but for half an hour yet those distant battlements shone in the afterglow, hanging in light above the darkness of earth.

I returned to Delhi, where Barbara and the children soon joined me, and we started to pack and crate our belongings. Barbara, bending half naked over the packing cases, straightened up and muttered, 'We could manure a fair-sized strawberry patch with the mule and horse dung they left in the packing straw they sold us. And it's getting wet with our sweat. And now we could make condensed milk out of it, too.' She leaned forward and I saw that she was dripping her own milk into the packing case. 'Tell ayah to bring me Martin,' she said resignedly. Slowly, she got the job done, while in the Secretariat the problems fell thicker and faster and more urgently on my desk. The London Government wanted to set a date for transfer of power — but to whom? The political parties in India had not agreed, so to set a date for transfer was merely to set a date for chaos. Lord Wavell stated that this would cost a great many lives, and that he would not be responsible for carrying out such a policy. As the Government in England intended to do just that, they set about finding someone to replace him, who would do what they wanted.

After a round of goodbyes, in a general atmosphere equally compounded of excitement, anxiety, fear, and hope, we took the train to Bombay. The heat was still appalling, both children cried all the way, and Martin suffered agonies from prickly heat. The heat and humidity increased while we waited two days in a small hotel near the docks. Finally we got on board. The
Empress of Scotland
was the same ship in which I had crossed the Pacific in 1938, only then she had been called the
Empress of Japan.
As a twenty-four-year-old bachelor, I had caroused and danced and sung in her from Hong Kong to Honolulu. Things were a little different now. Barbara, with Susan (two) and Martin (five weeks) in a basket, was allotted a first-class cabin on the main deck — but not alone. It had been designed to hold four berths. It now contained twelve bunks in two tiers, and was shared by eleven women and six children, plus four in baskets and cots. I left Barbara in a daze and found that I and three other colonels were sharing what had once been a single cabin on the boat deck.

The voyage began, and it was not pleasant. The Red Sea was at its worst. In Barbara's Black Hole there was always one child crying, to keep everyone else awake. There was no place to wash linen or nappies. Meal times were cramped, the food appalling. Barbara's milk gave out, and we had to mix Martin's formula in crowded, stinking bathrooms and toilets. The decks were crowded with soldiers trying to get some fresh air, and recently married couples trying to make love under inadequate blankets. No one could actually view the action, not even Susan, who was often an interested spectator and usually tried to pull off the blanket for a better view of the strange activities below, but one could almost see the rivers of sweat running out underneath.

Then a soldier on board went down with meningitis, and next day Susan complained of a headache. They put her in the sick bay and the doctor looked into her eye with an optoscope — the sign of meningitis is a red spot deep in the eye — while I took Barbara's hand. Susan's temperature climbed to 106 degrees that evening, and held there all night. Barbara and I spent the hours on deck, walking and waiting. Next day Susan was normal, and the day after she was bounding all over another ward, which she was sharing with five soldiers, to everyone's delight.

We had no time to talk of the distant future, let alone the immediate coming time when we would have to live with Barbara's mother until accommodation was allotted to us in Camberley. The days passed in stoically borne misery, and then suddenly, there ahead in the west was a great square white patch. It was the water catchment area of Gibraltar. Gradually the Rock took form round it, and the East lay behind us.

Here and here did I help England: how can England help me? — say
I paraphrased again.

I had the answer three days later. It was raining and a yellowish fog hung over the Mersey. Behind our stern a wave of dirty yellow water curled off towards the muddy shore. At the dock the train was a long way down the pier, there was no one to help us carry our baggage, and about three hand-trolleys between a thousand of us. I made five trips with the kit we had to take with us. God knew when, or where, we would see the heavy baggage in the hold.

Nine o'clock, ten o'clock, eleven... The train waited. There was no food or drink on board, or on the dock. Susan slept on one seat, Barbara was crouched over Martin, who was at last dozing off in his basket at Susan's feet. I examined the floor. It hadn't been washed for a couple of months, or perhaps years. It was midnight, still raining, the dock deserted. The imperialists had come Home, in my case after five generations.

I got the message and, mentally folding my medals, my rank, and my beautiful record away into a trunk, went to sleep on the floor.

Chapter Two

The Staff College, Camberley, is one of those innumerable institutions at which army officers go to school. In earlier days it used to be the only wellspring of military wisdom, but by 1946 there were two other colleges above it — the Joint Services Staff College, and the Imperial Defence College. Our role as instructors at Camberley therefore didn't have quite the cachet it had had when Monty, Slim, and Haig had preceded us, but it was traditionally important, and prestigious enough. We were all majors bearing the local and unpaid rank of lieutenant-colonel, and were known singly and collectively as the Directing Staff, or D.S.

The institution itself was a large ivy-covered building on Crown lands at Camberley, just off the London-Southampton road, thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner. The Royal Military College, Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, was on the same grounds, a mile or so through the woods. It is a country of lakes, small streams, pine and fir forests standing on windswept sandy soil, and open heath criss-crossed by the straight traces of Roman roads. Windsor Castle is not far to the north and other institutions close by. A proper soldier could spend his entire life within a ten-mile radius of Camberley. He would be born there while his father was a student at the Staff College; after education at one of the innumerable prep schools in the district he would go to Wellington, thence to Sandhurst, join a regiment in Aldershot, attend the Staff College, return to Aldershot, retire to Fleet, and end in the Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Broadmoor.

Bachelors, both students and D.S., lived in the main building. Married students found lodging where they could, in the town or nearby; married D.S. were allotted quarters. Ours was No. 17, one of a number of long wooden shacks which had been put up by the Canadian Army as hospital wards in the First War, and condemned as unfit for human habitation immediately afterwards. In the manner of all 'temporary' things their grip on life was much stronger than those designed for eternity. They were still going strong in October, 1946, twenty-seven years after their condemnation, when I arrived to get No. 17 ready for the family. A long passage ran down one side, all rooms opening off it except the kitchen, which had been built on to the other side. The place badly needed painting, and the little patch of garden was full of weeds. Barbara and the children stayed thirty miles away with her mother while I lived in the mess, attended classes 'under instruction', and shopped for furniture.

Everyone in England seemed to have decided to celebrate peace by getting rid of their old furniture. An amazing amount was on sale for amazingly low prices. I attended local auctions two or three times a week, and came back with iron beds at 30 cents each (but the mattresses cost $4 each, to my disgust), a circular walnut dining table for $12, a huge mahogany sideboard beautifully made, all the shelves and drawers lined with green baize, for $4.50, chairs of every shape and size for a few cents, and for little more scraps of stair carpeting which I tacked down the passage and in strategic sites such as the lavatory and under the desk ($8) in my study. The most I paid anywhere was $84 for a complete bedroom suite.

By early December the family was able to move in, and we prepared for the children's first Christmas in England. We bought a Christmas tree, a few cheap presents, and a lot of candles. We propped the tree upright with bricks in the living-room, stuck live guttering candles among the branches and hung paper lanterns over all. It was a lovely scene, and highly perilous, but the door was propped open, a bucket of water stood to hand, and we were determined that Susan and Martin should see a lighted Christmas tree even if the house burned down. When all was ready Barbara brought Martin in in her arms, and Susan crept in on tip-toe. If Martin felt anything, he made no intelligible comment, but Susan's eyes grew and grew, and she thought the tree was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Looking at her then, I thought she was.

The house painters arrived, a gang of German prisoners of war started to dig up the garden, and a severe cold spell struck southern England. We survived with only the usual quota of burst pipes, and saw a most unusual and beautiful sight. The day before the cold front hit Camberley the painters had given the outer wall of the passage its first coat of paint. Next morning the paint had frozen into marvellous crystal patterns. We told the painters to leave that wall untouched, and so it was preserved, the only graceful thing about the unlovely building, all the time we were there.