FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (7 page)

For Tessa and me, most of this was way over our heads, though we knew about Indian independence because ‘
Jai Hind!
' (‘Victory to India!') was the catchword of the day: it was ‘
Jai Hind!
' when you met people, or passed them in the road; ‘
Jai Hind!
' on flags, on posters, in graffiti, on matchbox labels – and we were as excited about Indians getting their independence as they were. But every day, it seemed, events took place that upset my parents: one afternoon my father came home and told my mother that the Indian Army, as well as the Indian police force, were to be divided, with Muslim soldiers and policemen going to Pakistan and Hindus staying in India. My mother was appalled and bewildered; she didn't believe such a thing was possible: the world she was so familiar with was falling apart.

The old India hands – people like my parents who had been born there and lived there all their lives – were shocked at the very short amount of time Mountbatten had allocated to achieving the handover of power and a peaceful division of the country. They considered him spoilt and privileged, overambitious and lacking in knowledge about India, making fateful decisions without any real experience of the place. Dad referred to him as the Fairy Prince, and a joke undermining Lady Mountbatten went the rounds: in India Girl Guides were called Girl Guides, but for obvious reasons, the Brownies were called Bluebirds. The story was that Lady Mountbatten had opened a Guides rally, absent-mindedly saying: ‘It is wonderful to be with all of you young Guides and little Blackbirds today.' I have no idea if this is true or not.

My parents and their friends talked about the traumatic events that were happening all around us, and snippets of their conversations seared into my mind – for instance, in 1947 when two thousand tribesmen invaded Kashmir from Pakistan, I overheard the grown-ups discussing how, on their way into the valley, the marauders had raided a convent in Baramulla where they had raped the nuns and then pulled any gold teeth out of their mouths. I was utterly appalled: I didn't know what rape meant, but the idea of someone's teeth being pulled out with pliers was the worst thing imaginable, and it could obviously happen even to a white person like us, and even to a NUN if she were in the wrong place – what worried me was, were
we
in the wrong place?

By then our cosy family life in Secunderabad had come to an end because Dad had gone to serve with the Punjab Boundary Force, and the rest of us – Mum, Aunt Joan, Swaller, Tessa and me – were staying with Mum's Uncle George (always known as U.G.), a retired indigo planter who lived in a house called The Homestead in Kotagiri, a village in the Nilgiri Hills. Tessa and I liked it there; we kept out of his way because we were a bit scared of him, but he had two little dogs that we loved, and a passion-fruit vine growing over the front doorway from which we could help ourselves to the fruit at any time (passion fruit is my whole childhood in one taste). Once he told us a frightening story about friends of his who were out in an open horse-drawn trap just up the road from his house, when a leopard sprang right across it – from one side of the road to the other – snatching up their dachshund in its claws as it passed. It was a thrilling tale, but it left Tessa and me with a new thing to worry about that we hadn't thought of before: to the fear of snakes and tooth-pulling tribesmen from Pakistan we now had to add leopards – which apparently teemed in the rather-too-close forest around The Homestead. We were reading
The Jungle Book
at that time and it was completely alive to us because Mowgli's world, with Bagheera his leopard friend, Hathi the elephant and Shere Khan the tiger, was at the end of our garden; it was territory we knew – almost an extension of our own lives. The Little Black Sambo books were our other favourites: apart from Kipling's, they were the only children's stories in English that were relevant to us growing up in India, the only ones we could identify with – their heroes and heroines being Indian children, similar to the ones we saw every day, surviving terrifying adventures involving snakes, tigers, muggers (Indian crocodiles), mongooses, monkeys, bazaars, unkind grown-ups and big earthenware pots called
chatties
exactly like the ones which held water in our own kitchen. We didn't particularly notice that the children in the stories were black and of course we didn't know then that Sambo was a pejorative word.

Helen Bannerman, the author of these now-controversial books, became a bit of a hero to me later in life when I discovered a little about her. She was born in Edinburgh in the middle of the nineteenth century when women were not yet permitted to attend university in Scotland, but could study and take examinations externally; in this way she became one of the very first women to gain an LLA (Lady Literate in the Arts) degree. She married a doctor in the Indian Medical Service and spent thirty years with him in India, helping local people, and when their four children were born, she wrote the books for them. She had long since died by the time the backlash over Little Black Sambo began years ago, but her son, Robert, wrote in a letter to
The Times
, ‘My mother would not have published the book had she dreamt for a moment that even one small boy would have been made unhappy . . .' Her grandson is the distinguished physicist Sir Tom Kibble, who is one of the co-discoverers of the Higgs boson.

When we returned to England, Little Black Sambo and his fellow characters remained precious because they reminded us of India, but the books that then resonated with us were
The Secret Garden
and
A Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because they were about Indian-born girls being unhappy back in their own country. Later, like every other teenager, I imagine (did
any
girls want to be Meg or Amy?), I identified with Jo in
Little Women
because she was the odd one out, though it annoyed me for ages that she married the Professor and not Laurie – but then I fell in love with
The Scarlet Pimpernel
so I didn't really care any more.

From grown-ups' conversations we gathered that Dad, far away in Punjab, was not particularly happy, but we had no real idea of what he was doing; it was only after we grew up that he ever spoke to us about it, or that we learned of the horrors which came with the partition of India – and it was only after our parents had died that Tessa found the big envelope of letters that Dad wrote to Mum at this grim time (and which I never promised not to read because we didn't know they existed). But the unbelievably terrible events he witnessed then, and his powerlessness to improve the situation, changed him – and it altered the course of our lives – so I will try and explain.

By Indian Independence Day, with some exceptions (including Dad), the 60,000 British soldiers who had served in the army in India had either left, or were confined to barracks as they prepared to leave, while the remaining bulk of the Indian Army was divided up (as I explained earlier), with Hindu soldiers staying put and their Muslim counterparts leaving to form the new Pakistan Army. The same thing happened with the Indian police force: British members were sent home to England while the rest of the force was split, with the Muslims going off to Pakistan. All this created a huge vacuum in India: there was no strong, neutral peacekeeping authority left to control the new border between India and Pakistan (which ran alongside the Sikh heartland) as millions of people with two fundamentally different religions began to cross it in opposite directions. And to add to the tension, the actual path of the border line itself was not announced until two days
after
Independence so those who lived along it did not know, literally, whether they belonged to India or Pakistan.

Realising there might be problems ahead, Mountbatten set up the Punjab Boundary Force of about 17,000 soldiers and local police, which came into being two weeks or so before Independence, to try to keep the peace in this explosive situation – but there were not enough men or resources allocated (members of the PBF, as it was known, called themselves the Poor Bloody Fools), and it could not do the job expected of it. Hindus, particularly the Sikhs, whose territory the Muslim refugees had to cross to reach Pakistan, started attacking and slaughtering departing Muslims and Muslims in Pakistan did vice versa. What made it infinitely worse was that, though most of the population had no weapons, the Sikhs were armed with three-foot-long swords called
kirpans
which could not be taken from them as they are a religious symbol. The ensuing massacres were known as the Bloodbath: it is believed that a million people died.

My father arrived in the Punjab on 10 August 1947 to take up his peacekeeping duties for Lahore district, plus Ferozepur and Montgomery areas – all places that did not yet know whether they would be in India or Pakistan when the border was announced. He wrote to Mum on 13 August telling her how, on his first day, he had come upon the dead bodies of forty Muslim men, women and children lying in the road, slaughtered by Sikhs, and that ‘panic reigns everywhere'. From then on he wrote to her daily and in each new letter the horrors mounted – though he was at the same time clearly trying to protect her from the more terrible details.

Dad hoped that things would improve when the border was defined – ‘We are longing for the Boundary to be announced and get it over . . .' – but, if anything, when that happened it made the situation worse. In his own areas, Lahore district was divided between India and Pakistan; Ferozepur went to India (though 50 per cent of its inhabitants were Muslims who began to move out) and Montgomery went to Pakistan, though it had a similarly huge Hindu population who also began to move, in the opposite direction.

Now more and more refugees – hundreds of thousands – were on the road. ‘I have about 8 lacks [800,000] refugees, both Muslim and Sikh/Hindu, passing through my districts and as they are going against each other there is grave danger of mass encounters en route,' Dad wrote. ‘Our troops are fully extended and going all out to make sure this mass migration is coloured with as little blood as possible, yet a heavy toll is taken every time . . . You see, columns of a lack [100,000] are at least 8 miles long and usually one can spare only one platoon to do the job of escorting them. Crops, grass, etc are good cover, right up to the road, and the murderers come in with their swords and spears and do their killing before escort troops can come up . . .

‘You cannot realise what it looks like, seeing thousands of people go through here. Men, women and children, all with bundles or
charpoys
, bullock carts laden sky-high, tongas, handcarts, barrows, camels, buffaloes, cattle, goats, sheep, dogs, all miserable, all heavily laden, all with some tale of woe, all with very little to look forward to, most of them having left all or most of their most valuable possessions, human, animal or property, in some robber's or murderer's hands. My darling, I am glad you don't know what these poor people go through . . . my heart bleeds for them.'

A day or two later Dad wrote, ‘I have never felt the animosity between Muslims and Sikhs more in all my service in India . . .' and he went on to lament the fast-growing communal hatred – particularly of the Sikhs for the Muslims – as being like ‘some foul loathsome disease . . . the lust to kill and burn, to destroy members of the hated other side and all they possess, be they the most innocent babes or harmless women. I shan't go into what happens every day, everywhere, but I think the saddest thing are abductions of women – or they kill them or slash their breasts and kill their babies . . . It's a Hitlerian campaign to eliminate as many child-bearers of the other side as possible. A lot of this I have not wanted to tell you before . . .'

Every day Dad's litany of death and misery continues: ‘The papers are quiet about it all, but there is butchery, arson, murder, rape and theft on a large scale of everything conceivable going on in the Punjab now – chiefly done by Sikhs. It never lets up . . . they have begun to produce implements of all kinds, pitchforks, spears, lances, daggers, swords, pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, automatic weapons and grenades.

‘Firing a village is a normal occurrence like having breakfast, murder is like having a cigarette, and on the long trails to the main roads, you see everything from headless corpses and maimed women and butchered children to smouldering bullock carts and other property, marking the way . . . I tell you, darling, it is just sheer hell, and I have never conceived of such sufferings as I have witnessed . . . I don't think there is a parallel in history of two communities as numerous as these two (Muslims and Hindus) just going for each other hammer and tongs . . . We must hurry up and leave this country . . . The misery just makes one feel devastated and one's thoughts are of God and one's prayers are for mercy to suffering mankind.'

At one point, Dad writes that the refugees all carried bedding – light quilts known as
razais
in India – which they let fall when attacked or collapsing from hunger, exhaustion or illness, so that in places the whole landscape was patterned with these colourful cotton bedcovers trodden into the dust, or later, the mud. Of all the horrors Dad describes, somehow the image of those thousands of abandoned quilts – and what they represent – is the one that I cannot shake from my mind.

Dad saw the notorious refugee trains – both Muslim and Hindu – which arrived at their destinations full of dead passengers; he saw camps where there was almost nothing to sustain the refugees and where many hundreds of dead were left behind each time a group moved on; he saw the suffering increase a hundred times over when September rains caused floods and even more chaos and death – but the betrayal by the rajah of a Sikh state called Faridkot is the event that seems to have disturbed him most; it is the one he talked about to Tessa and me. In particular he mentioned to us several times seeing a baby that had had its throat cut but was still alive, trying to crawl into shade – it obviously haunted him, but we never understood why this child affected him more than all the hundreds of others.