FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (3 page)

We obviously didn't stay long in Ambala because six months later, on the next page of the album, in 1940, we are in Kasauli, where Dad had had his anti-rabies injections fifteen years before. I learn from Google that Kasauli is not only another army cantonment town, it is also a popular Indian holiday resort, so maybe we were just there on leave, because, on the following page, again only a few months later, we have moved to Jubbulpore (now called Jabalpur), an ancient town in central India with a large army cantonment and a strange history: it was chosen as the base of operations for Sir William Henry Sleeman, a British soldier and administrator, who, in the 1830s, suppressed the Thuggee cult in India. Thuggees (it's where our word ‘thug' comes from) had terrorised the country for six hundred years: they would befriend travellers and then, having gained their confidence, they would strangle them, steal their possessions and bury their bodies by the road. Thousands were killed in this way, and it was all done in the spirit of making a sacrifice to the god Kali. Jabalpur is also one of the places where, notoriously, Indian mutineers/freedom fighters were executed by cannon in 1857.

There are five pages in the album of me with Mum and Moira in Jabalpur in 1941 doing various things in our garden – sitting on a horse held by a
syce
, the Indian word for a groom (see the cover of this book), petting a small spotted deer that I have no recollection of at all and posing beside a beautiful vintage car (which was of course just a normal car in those days). Next thing, I am at a tea party far away from there in Kashmir, dressed as the White Rabbit from
Alice in Wonderland
. (The other day I visited my oldest friend, Sophie, who was born in India the year after me; we were going through her photo album and suddenly there was a picture of Sophie, aged two, at a party, also dressed as the White Rabbit – her costume looks uncannily like mine so we came to the conclusion that my mother must have passed it on to her mother.)

After Kashmir we are in the hill station of Nathia Gali (in what is now Pakistan) and for the first time since my christening – because it was wartime and he was always away – Dad is in the pictures with Moira and me, so he must have come home on leave. Then we seem to have passed briefly through a place called Kalabagh before moving to Peshawar (also now in Pakistan) because Dad was posted to the North-West Frontier, and that is where my younger sister Tessa was born in 1942. (Dad knew about all the secret military tunnels and fortifications in the hills around the Frontier, and when we were older we used to tease him by calling him Keenan of the Khyber.)

And then, suddenly, it is 1945, and we are photographed in the garden of our grandparents' house in England. I will explain that later.

I don't know why we moved seven times in four years but it's no wonder I have so many dim memories of travelling on Indian trains: of journeys that took days not hours, of being shepherded through the clamour and confusion at the stations, of the vendors crowding round with food or ingenious toys made of clay or wood and string (they still do, but the toys are all plastic these days), of the meals – ordered in advance at previous stations – that came with white cloths and napkins and were brought to our carriage by uniformed bearers (waiters). There was no air-conditioning then so big blocks of ice were heaved into the carriages and placed on the floor and we children would sit on them while they slowly melted. On one of these journeys Mum pulled the communication cord on the train – I was grown up enough by then to be terrified that she would be arrested and taken away. It happened when we were settling back in our carriage after a halt: Mum accidentally kicked her shoe out of the door and on to the track. There was no question of retrieving it because, by the time she realised what had happened, we had gathered speed and were out of the station and well on our way, so she grabbed the cord – and amazingly, the train grumbled to a stop with much screeching and grinding of brakes and wheels. There were signs all over the carriages warning of the penalties you faced if you pulled the cord unnecessarily, but though railway officials – the guard? the driver? – came and there were questions and explanations, someone found her shoe and our journey was resumed and, phew, Mum was not dragged away in chains.

I feared for her another time, later on, when the police came to our house because there had been a fight between our cook and the vegetable
wallah
. It turned out to have been all Mum's fault – she was writing letters home when the cook came to tell her that the vegetable
wallah
was at the door and Mum said, ‘Oh I could kill the vegetable man, he always comes at the wrong time.'

It was a Thomas à Becket situation – the cook went out to kill the veg man on Mum's behalf and a big fight ensued, and when the police came and arrested the cook he said he was only acting on his memsahib's instructions. The police interviewed the various people involved (not, obviously, in front of us children) and, once again, I was terrified Mum would be hauled off to prison, but to everyone's relief, it was all sorted out and neither Mum nor the cook nor the vegetable
wallah
were arrested.

Apart from the break in 1945 when we went back to England for a time, my family stayed in India until 1948, a year after Independence, when we, like all the other British who'd lived there, had to pack up and go ‘home'. Hollow laughter here as ‘home' was the place we children knew least in the world, though people in India talked about it a lot in a yearning way: there were cherished ‘letters from home', longed-for ‘news from home', and there were those who, excitingly, had come from ‘home' or were going ‘home'. We thought ‘home' must be something like heaven.

Until recently, I had no idea when in 1948 we left India, but then I discovered a site on the internet (
www.passengerlists.co.uk
) which specialises in obscure ships' passenger lists, and it tracked down the Keenan family on SS
Franconia
, sailing from Bombay for Liverpool in June that year. From a photocopy of the document I found that my mother, who seemed old to us, was only forty when we came home, and that almost everyone on board our ship – more than a thousand people – belonged to British families exactly like ours; not necessarily army folk, of course, but missionaries, office workers, tea planters, a dressmaker, telephonists, typists, engineers and nurses as well. They had nearly all written ‘India' or ‘Pakistan' in the column headed Country of Last
Permanent
Residence (my italics) and that made me feel sad because it represented so much upheaval, parting and heartbreak . . . I also discovered lately (from the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia) that there are perhaps two
million
British graves in India – of those whose names would never be on any returning ships' passenger lists.

One of our own addresses in India seems to be etched on my brain, probably because I was at that age – seven? – when I wrote it obsessively in all my books: Brightlands, 219A Bolton Road, Secunderabad, Deccan, India, The World, The Universe. Not long ago, on another return visit to India, AW and I were on a train going to Delhi and met a charming young Indian woman with a BlackBerry and she somehow looked it up – the street names are Indianised these days, of course, but she managed to find it – and discovered that our bungalow, Brightlands, is now a venue for wedding receptions.

What took a good few of our ancestors to India (along with very many other young men in a similar situation) was being poor in Ireland and joining the British Army which, apart from the Guinness Brewery, was one of the main employers there. (Roddy Doyle once described this as the great unspoken secret in Ireland.) And so, ironically, colonised Irishmen became part of the colonisation of India. Kipling chose to give two of his most famous characters this background: Terence Mulvaney, an irreverent troublemaking soldier who comes into many short stories, and, of course, Kim himself, whose real name in the book was Kimball O'Hara – the orphan child of an impoverished Irish soldier serving in India, and his wife.

I thought I'd been told that my Keenan great-grandfather married his wife in the cathedral in Bangalore, so a few years ago, when I first decided to investigate my family in India, I wrote to the Archbishop of Bangalore to ask if anyone there could look for the marriage certificate. He kindly went through the records and found not my great-grandfather's, but four
other
marriages at the end of the nineteenth century involving Keenan girls from our family – with a British Army corporal, two sergeants and a drum-major. One of them, Bridget, was my great-aunt (why she spelled her name in the English and not the Irish way I don't know).

By the time I was born our family had risen in rank, and our life in India, and indeed the lives of all the British officers who served in the Indian Army in the last days of the Raj, was perfectly described by Paul Scott in his novel
The Jewel in the Crown
. We didn't actually have a Hari Kumar-type illicit love affair and trauma in our midst, but I often think that had my sisters and I been born fifteen or twenty years earlier, any of us might have been Daphne Manners or Sarah Layton and created scandal and drama by falling in love with an Indian, a ‘native'.

We children always took the Indian side in any argument or disagreement with the staff in the house, and I used to be upset that the store cupboard in the kitchen containing tea and coffee, sugar and flour, was kept locked and that Mum doled out what was needed, and that Dad sometimes marked the whisky bottle so he'd know if someone had swigged a secret tot – though I found it incredibly clever that he used to turn the bottle upside down and
then
mark it so that the secret sign would not be where a person would expect it.

Our grandfather, we were told, had a foolproof method for detecting which of his servants had stolen something. If anything important went missing, he would summon all the staff and give them each a straw or a taper of the same length, and tell them that overnight the straw belonging to the thief would grow an inch. The next day he would summon them again – and find one straw
shortened
by an inch – which belonged, of course, to the culprit. I used to wonder about this, because you could probably only do it once.

In my mind's eye my handsome father (black hair, blue eyes, very Irish-looking – with an Irish temper to match) is always dressed in stiffly ironed knee-length khaki shorts, with a shiny leather Sam Browne belt and long socks. He had a moustache (I've always loved men with moustaches as a consequence, I suppose) and when we were growing up Dad used to say, ‘Kissing a man without a moustache is like eating a hard-boiled egg without salt' – but AW had a moustache when I married him, and when he shaved it off I didn't notice for more than a month.

The mental picture I have of my mother then is very 1940s (not surprising because it
was
the 1940s): she has streaky light-brown hair rolled up away from her face like a Hollywood film star of the time, and she is sitting at a dressing table (people don't seem to have dressing tables any more, the same way they don't use tea sets) wearing a robe in some floppy material, and leaning forward – either to wipe Pond's Cold Cream off her face with a wodge of cotton wool, or to stroke bright red lipstick on to her big smiley mouth stretched open for this purpose in an O. Mum had pretty hands with tapering fingers – I got Dad's wrinkled stubby ones in the DNA lottery, as well as a husky croak instead of her lovely singing voice. She played the piano, and used to entertain us with Kipling's poems set to music, or mournful Irish ballads. Her favourite was about an emigrant who is leaving Ireland for the United States but his girlfriend hasn't turned up to say goodbye. ‘Oh Kathleen Mavourneen, my sad tears are falling/To think that from Erin and thee I must part.'  Then there was another about a child who has a nightmare that her father will be killed in a mining accident: ‘So tell your mates of my dreams, Daddy/For sure as the stars that shine/Something is going to happen today/So Daddy, don't go down the mine.' And yet another about a dying child: ‘Will I be an angel, Mother? An angel in the sky?' Sometimes Dad used to sing to Mum, always one of two songs – ‘If  You Were the Only Girl in the World' and ‘Lady Be Good' – and though he'd fling his arms out in a jokey dramatic way, we knew that he meant every single word.

Like Dad, Mum was born and mostly raised in India until she was a teenager when she was sent to a convent in Ipswich where, she told us, the girls had to wear thin cotton shifts in the bath in case they themselves, or – worse – any other girl, saw their bodies. It was at this convent that my mother overheard the most popular girl in the school complaining to her pals that too many people wanted to be in their group. ‘We've got to draw the line somewhere,' the girl said, ‘so we'll draw it at Maisie Moss' (my mum).

When she was a child in Madras (now Chennai) Mum's father kept a pet monkey – a big gibbon called Jacko which had the run of the house. Mum was scared stiff of him, but she loved telling us how he once snatched my grandmother's cut-glass butter dish off the breakfast table and then climbed the tallest tree in the garden with it, licking the butter. Granny made everyone stand round the tree holding out sheets so that when Jacko finished his feast, got bored and dropped the dish, it would fall into the stretched-out cotton and wouldn't break; Jacko seemed to understand what was up, Mum said, and took hours revelling in the attention before he let the dish go. I don't remember what exactly happened in the end, but it must have fallen safely into the sheets because it was always on
our
breakfast table in India, inspiring Mum to tell the story.

Mum's first husband died (of septicaemia) when she was just twenty-one after only a year of marriage, and her younger brother Dick had joined the International Brigade and gone to fight in the Civil War in Spain where he had disappeared (the family lived in desperate hope that news of him would come one day), but she was unbowed: glamorous and clever and fun and full of laughter, and in those days she was up for anything. Before she became pregnant with me, for instance, she went all the way back to England from India by bus with six-year-old Moira, my sister, so that she could buy a quilted coat in Damascus en route (it was in the dressing-up box for years). In the modern world she would have had a good job – I always imagine she might have been at the BBC or on a newspaper, but she could have been a teacher too; as it was, she wrote a couple of children's books for Tessa and me, and ran a small nursery school at home in England (until we moved, when she had to close it again); she painted well, designed and stitched beautiful needlepoint tapestries, was an excellent dressmaker, worked as a guide for NADFAS (National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies), played bridge and was very good at making all our temporary houses look nice, with no money. I adored her and Dad, and will always miss them and be grateful to them for passing on their energy and enthusiasm for life. Mum used Chanel No. 5 – it was her annual birthday/Christmas present from Dad – and I still have the spray bottle that was on her dressing table when she died. I don't allow myself to smell it because it makes her loss too painful, even now, more than twenty years on.