Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (6 page)

We were all learning something — in Barbara's case, how to cook. As a girl she had never opened a can or boiled a kettle. A string of nannies and governesses had interposed their sometimes harsh protection between her and life, between her and her parents. Then there was India, and shoals of servants. Here our domestic staff consisted of a batman, a retired soldier called Bache who did a little more cleaning about the house than he was supposed to, but no cooking; and Kate, a lady whose vocation was house cleaning and avocation the care and feeding of stray dogs. She usually brought along five or six, in a little pushcart, when she came to work for us. (Since then her collection has gone up to thirty or forty; she appears regularly in the picture papers and has become a figure of national fame.) Kate didn't cook either, so Barbara bought a cook book and opened it at page 1. Reading aloud carefully, with interspersed oaths, she filled a pan with water, put it on the stove, and selected two eggs... As for me, I had done much open-air cooking in my time, but lacked finesse as a butler. Told to heat the plates for a formal meal, I put the best Indian Tree dinner plates in the oven... with the roast. They stood up until we started to wash them after the meal; then the bottom fell neatly out of each one.

If we looked only at each day, or out of the window, we were happy enough. Barbara had never quite recovered from the exhausting move so soon after Martin's birth. She was thin, anaemic and, in spite of our wishes and precautions, pregnant again — but happy because we were together and at peace. I was happy in my work. It was when we looked past the day, past Disraeli stalking Martin and Donk across the grass, that we were worried.

On first arrival in England, after an absence of seven years, we had felt like strangers in a foreign land. We had forgotten how to buy rail tickets, what to order in pubs, how to drive in the traffic, how to speak to shopkeepers and policemen. Now all that had come back, but still we did not feel at home. Our years in India — nine for Barbara and twelve for myself, plus five more as a child — had estranged our ways of thinking, or at least our capacity to accept. Neither of us is a drunkard, but we saw no reason why, if we wanted a drink at four o'clock in the afternoon and a man was willing to sell us one, he should not do so. In India it was none of the government's damned business when we chose to have a drink, but in England it was: pub hours were rigidly controlled under a regulation made in 1915 for a wartime situation and never since repealed. Then, all the shops in Camberley closed at 5 p.m. every day; on one afternoon a week they all closed at 1 p.m. This was not because the store owners wanted to close; it was the Early Closing law, and we disagreed with the spirit of that law. Surely the rights of working men and women assistants could be best protected by their unions, and by restrictions on individual working hours? And if a man chose to keep his own shop open all day and all night, what business was it of anyone else's?

These and similar practices had become foreign to us. Plenty of other Englishmen felt the same. The difference between them and us was that we were not prepared to grin and bear it. After the geographical space and freedom of India, I felt that I was in prison. The restrictions on foreign exchange hit us particularly hard, because we needed to get out of prison, and because travel was our greatest pleasure — almost the object of our lives. As some work for Rolls-Royces, or country houses, or mink coats, we worked to travel, and we would not for long allow ourselves to be deprived of that right. (Even with the restrictions in force, we managed, by extreme frugality, to use a brief spring vacation to walk a hundred miles across the
massif central
in France.)

The summer advanced. Drowsy bees hummed among the flowers outside the window. Frankie Weldon came to the seminar room in morning coat, spongebag trousers, and grey topper, and kept looking at his watch. No one seemed eager to prolong our useful discussion on the Opposed Crossing of a Major River. I closed the session early, after we had agreed that Frankie should share out among us the money we had saved him by imposing this delay on his visit to Ascot.

I went to London, with wife, father and mother to receive my D.S.O. from George VI, King of Great Britain, etc, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India... but that last not for much longer. He looked pale as he stood throughout the long ordeal, the endless file of men and women jerking forward, up, past. My turn came and I knew my family were wearing the same look of tearful and idiotic pride that I saw in myself when Susan cowed a foxhound twice her size or Martin first went solo across our lawn. The King smiled at me, a real smile (but God, he was tired) and murmured, 'Congratulations.' An equerry handed him the medal and he slipped it over the loop which another equerry had already pinned on to my tunic in the anteroom.

The partition of India was decided on, and agreed to by all parties — with glee by the Muslim League and with sorrow by the Congress. Soon the terms to be offered to British officers of the Indian services, when India and Pakistan became self-governing Dominions, were published; and that would be on August 15, this year of 1947, as Lord Mountbatten had speeded up the processes of disengagement. I studied the proposals very carefully, for in them lay the key to our future. As far as concerned me, they offered three choices. First, I could transfer from the Indian to the British service, in my present rank and seniority, but at British rates of pay (they were lower than ours). Second, I could do the same, but serve with one of the four regiments of Gurkhas being transferred to the British Army, for service in the Far East; this would retain my Indian Army rates of pay. Third, I could retire with a pension proportionate to my length of service, plus a 'loss of career' gratuity. The idea of this latter was to enable us to train for or finance some new career, in place of the one that we had been suddenly deprived of.

I thought of the British Army. They would not welcome such as me, for they were already overfull of officers of my seniority. And how could Aldershot, Suez, Nairobi, and the rainswept Ruhr — the places where most of the British Army was stationed — replace the Himalayan home of my regiment in Bakloh? What could satisfy my longings for the wild, high jungles of upper Burma or the raw challenge of the North West Frontier? Nostalgia for Kulu, Spiti, and Kashmir dimmed my eyes. I forced myself back to the subject. The Gurkha collectively (there is, of course, no such person) had his faults, as I had mine; but he knew mine and I knew his. The British soldier, collectively (again, there is no such entity) had his virtues, and I had been proud to have many under my command — but we had not shared those long years. We were friends, but strangers, in spite of our common blood. And the British Army would not employ me much with troops in any case, for my greatest value to it would be as a staff officer. No, I could not contemplate the British Service with enthusiasm, and without enthusiasm the military life is a wasteland.

The transferred Gurkhas, then? They were to be stationed in Malaya, of which I knew nothing except that it was hot and damp. To Barbara and me bliss is mountain water, snow above, and a wind from the peaks in the evening. Then, the children would soon be reaching an age when they would suffer in health and education if they were not sent back to England. But — and this was the two-centuries old dilemma of the Indian Service family — if Barbara went with them, our new-discovered domesticity would be ruined, whereas if we sent them off alone to live with grandmothers and aunts (as had happened to Kipling, Saki, George Orwell, and me, among several hundred thousand others) it was they who might be ruined.

Then there was the matter of the particular regiments that had been chosen for transfer. The wire-pulling and influence-peddling which started before I left India, had continued ever since, in the War Office and Parliament. From Camberley I had written to General Slim, then Commandant of the Imperial Defence College, and an ex-Gurkha (6th and 7th), setting out a proposal that no regiments should be transferred as such. We should set up a new Gurkha Rifle Corps, with a single crest and entity, holding all the battle honours of the old regiments. We should fill it with Volunteers from the present regiments, or, if it seemed preferable, transfer whole battalions but give them new numbers in the new corps so that, say, the 1st Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles would become the 6th Battalion, Gurkha Rifle Corps. The Corps should later expand to contain its own artillery, signals, engineer and supply units. We should train and educate many more Gurkhas to hold the King's Commission.

This plan was administratively sounder than the old-fashioned one adopted, and would have made the Malaya Gurkhas acceptable to many officers and men who had no wish to become too closely associated with the peculiarities of, say, the 2nd Goorkhas (one of the regiments eventually transferred). Bill Slim wrote back sympathetically to my ideas, but the business was already beyond his reach, the transfers already under way.

My regiment, the 4th, was not transferred, and I thought, if they don't want the 4th, they won't get me. To hell with them. I was bitter at the time, foolishly so. I should have thanked our stars that we were not chosen. The regiments that stayed with India have expanded and flourished, in their own Himalayas. The ones that went to the British Army served faithfully in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Borneo and as a reward are now about to be disbanded. Some would say that they have been sold down the river; but who would agree with such harsh language, except perhaps the rulers of the five hundred or so Indian States whose 'perpetual' treaties with Britain became as meaningful as so much confetti when Lord Mountbatten took the bridge of the
Indian Empire
and ran up his famous signal:
England expects that every man this day will run like hell.

I toyed with the idea of claiming my Indian citizenship. Since I was born in Calcutta I would be a citizen of the new Dominion by birth, and could simply demand to stay on, as an Indian instead of an Englishman. Many of the Anglo-Indians (of mixed race) were doing just that. How could they keep me out? I didn't think they could. After a time of cautious probing to see whether I really had cast in my lot with India, I would probably be fully accepted, even by the politicians. But...
was
I Indian?
Could
I cast in my lot with India? Kashmir beckoned; the rivers of Assam rolled by, smiling; the flame-of-the-forest stippled the forests of the Vindhya Hills; Hindustani and Gurkhali were comfortable in my mouth, and the Nagri script to my pen. I
knew
India. I was happy there. But... but... We talked hours, day after day, late into the night. Barbara said at last, 'Darling, the truth is you're not Indian, whatever your passport might say. I don't think either of us can make ourselves Indians. It's nothing to do with colour, it's a way of thinking, a self-recognition. Sooner or later the ugly dachshund has to make up his mind that he is not a dachshund at all but a great Dane.'

I agreed glumly. I was not Indian. I was having great difficulty in seeing myself as English. So what was I?

If the British Army, the British Gurkhas and the Indian Army were all out, only one course was left: retirement, an end to my whole military way of life. But this was the bleakest prospect of all. I was a commander and a staff officer, with no special skills that the civilian world seemed to recognize as such. I could co-ordinate the work of engineers, scientists, shippers, pilots, caterers, financiers — but, myself, I could not build a bridge, split an atom, load a ship, fly a plane, bulk-buy food, or run a bank. What could I actually
do?
Well, I could light a fire in the rain. And read a topographical map: I was probably the best map reader between Wolverhampton and East Grinstead. I could write appreciations...

The word gave me an idea. An 'appreciation of the situation' is the way an army officer is trained to tackle every problem. First, he decides what precisely is his object. Then he considers all the factors affecting the attainment of the object. Then he draws up the various courses open to him, and to the enemy, with their pros and cons. Finally he chooses one of the courses as the best possible, and works out his plan from it. My writing system was a sort of appreciation, and with reason. It worked. With practice, it worked fast. Surely I could apply this tool to our problems? Barbara and I would make a joint effort of it. It was a pity that Susan and Martin weren't old enough to join the syndicate: but their future would have to be included when we came to define our 'object'.

But August came upon us and the Staff College went off
en masse
for its annual battlefield tour, when coherent thought was impossible. We were supposed to study the lessons from actual battles, on the ground, but as I was in charge of administering a group from headquarters in Paris, all I studied was the menus of a couple of excellent bistros in Montmartre, and where to get the best view of the models going and coming at Christian Dior in their astounding New Look clothes. On August 15 we returned to England. It was very hot, all sixty of us had hangovers, and the cross-channel steamer was crowded with civilian tourists. We sent wedges of officers into the jampacked bar to bring out drinks for all — any drinks. The civilians must have thought the war was back with them. I saw one school-mistressy young woman edging up behind Robin Rose-Price with the obvious intention of asking him who we were and what we were doing. At that moment, Robin — who was in the Welsh Guards and therefore technically did not recognize that there was anyone else present except other Guardees — said in a weary but penetrating voice, 'I feel like a used French letter.' Everyone within earshot jumped visibly: the young lady turned scarlet and backed off violently. Soon we were surrounded by a sanitary cordon several feet wide, and could drink in peace.

I suddenly remembered the date: August 15th. Hari Badhwar, Dhargalkar, Hissam el Effendi and Mohammed Sadiq were in our group. I found them, and shouted 'Dominion Day!' They nodded.