A Fortunate Life (3 page)

He died before I was born, and I am very sorry never to have met him.

My mother, Lois, was the eighth child of Robert Hudson. She was striking rather than classically beautiful, had extraordinary grace (despite heavy bones), a strong face and a beautiful voice, because of which she was known by her father as Merle (thrush) and was at one time selected to be trained as an opera singer. One of my earliest childhood memories is of her singing around the house, especially Irish folk songs. Her favourite, which she sang with an almost unbearable poignancy, was ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’, which my daughter still sings to her children before sleep every night. But instead of training for the opera, my mother trained as a nurse at Belfast Royal Infirmary. I do not know why she went to India, but I think it was because she joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANCs), which provided nursing services to the armed forces, and was posted there. She met my father and married him on 3 November 1938 in Rawalpindi. The wedding was, to be frank, something of a surprise to the rest of my family.
My father had already been engaged no less than seven times, leading my grandfather, according to family legend, to bet a substantial sum with a friend that this engagement would go the way of all his previous ones. I think some of my rather snobby Ashdown aunts also took the view that my mother’s family was somewhat inferior, judging by their behaviour to her even to the end of her life, a fact which my mother, strong woman that she was, affected to either ignore or disdain.

My father was not a big man. He had a light, sinewy frame, a demeanour which gave off a constant sense of physical alertness and eyes from which a twinkle was never far away. His most powerful weapon was his charm, which I have seen bowl people over, especially women. He had, to put it euphemistically, a very active social life in India before he met my mother.

She told two stories on the subject of my father’s conquests before her, which, if not apocryphal, were probably somewhat exaggerated. The first was that, when they first started seeing each other seriously, my father suggested that she should go down to the local bazaar and visit a particular leather shop, where he had left the skin of a python that he had recently shot. She should, he said, ask the leather wallah
*
if he would make her up some shoes and a matching bag from it. She duly visited the shop and made her request. The leather wallah smiled knowingly and advised her, ‘Memsahib, this would not be possible.’ He then showed her all that remained of the skin. ‘A small purse, perhaps Memsahib, but the demand to date has been quite great!’ My Mother kept the tiny piece of skin, which she would later produce whenever she told the story, eventually giving it to my sister-in-law.

The second story concerns their wedding night, which was spent in a friend’s hill station bungalow where my father had stayed often before. On the following morning the
ayah
†
came in with a tray on which was a teapot and one cup. This she put down by my father’s side of the bed announcing, ‘Tea, Sahib.’ She then went round to my mother’s side of the bed, lifted the mosquito net, pulled back the bed clothes, slapped her on the bottom and declared, ‘Time for you to go home now, missy!’

Not long after they were married, the war came. My father, as a young Captain in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, commanded a small unit of pack mules. His troops, apparently to a man, volunteered to leave India and join the British Expeditionary Force in
France. They embarked for Europe on 10 December 1939 and were the first troops from India to go into action with the BEF. He was posted just south of Lille, where his unit was used primarily for ammunition supply near the front line. When the retreat to Dunkirk began he received orders to head for the coast. He turned his mules loose and marched his men to the sea, narrowly avoiding capture on several occasions. At one stage of the journey a staff officer told him that the order had gone out for British officers of Indian regiments to leave their men and make their way to the coast individually. My father refused and managed to get his men, without loss, onto the last ship to leave the Dunkirk mole and back to England. He was subsequently threatened with a court martial for disobeying an order, but the charge was wisely dropped, and the officer who gave the order was reprimanded instead.

My father used to joke that he was involved in both the great British retreats in the war (Dunkirk and the retreat through Burma to Imphal) and had a son after each of them. I was Dunkirk and my first brother, Richard, was Imphal. On the day of his return from Dunkirk he met my mother (who had followed him from India) in a Folkestone hotel, and nine months later I was born, the eldest of seven children, on 27 February 1941.

By this time they were back in India and in Delhi, where my father was serving in Army Headquarters. According to my Mother, the day before I was born, she accompanied my father on a snipe shoot over a local
geel
*
and was bitten by a rabid dog. She was rushed to hospital and given the standard treatment for rabies, a large injection direct into the stomach through the stomach wall. Whether this had any direct bearing on my birth in the Willingdon Nursing Home in New Delhi at 4.30 p.m. the following day, history does not relate.

Three months later, on 8 June, I was christened – at Christ Church in the hill station of Simla by the Reverend E. Claydon – with three names: Jeremy, John (after my father), Durham (the Victorian family name adopted by my upwardly mobile great-grandfather). My father came down to breakfast the day after my christening to be greeted by a puzzled and angry delegation of Indian soldiers from his regiment,
who protested loudly about the fact that he had called me Jeremy. ‘Sahib,’ they complained, ‘We are at war with the Jerries so it is very improper for you to call your first son after the enemy!’

Shortly afterwards my father was posted with his regiment to Burma, arriving just in time to begin the long retreat back to the borders of India. The fighting was bitter and the conditions terrible. My mother, distraught with worry, tried to get as close to the Indian/Burmese border as she could, so as to be nearby when he got out. To start with, I accompanied her, which meant staying down in the plains during the hot season, rather than going up into the hills as most Anglo-Indian families did. Somehow, around the age of two, I contracted serious tonsillitis and had to have my tonsils removed urgently. Apparently the nearest hospital was an Indian one, and at that stage in the war there was a severe shortage of anaesthetics, because they were desperately needed at the front. Indian hospitals, in consequence, were very short of supplies, and the one I was sent to had run out by the time I got there. So my tonsils were removed without the benefit of anaesthesia. I recall only something to do with masks and the salty taste of blood and, not so much pain, as terrible discomfort. My mother said that for the rest of my younger years I used to scream whenever I saw a nurse in uniform.

My father had a brief leave after escaping from Burma, as a result of which, in due time, I acquired a brother, Richard, of whom I have only a very dim memory of a frail, small child with wispy fair hair. For Richard did not live long. He contracted some kind of unidentified tropical fever and died at around eleven months, the first of no less than three children that my parents lost in their infancy or early adult years. I do not know how they bore these losses with such fortitude. But I do know that they affected them greatly, especially in their latter years, when both of them became attached to spiritualism which seemed to provide some kind of antidote to their grief. My mother’s last words on her deathbed were that she could ‘see all her little ones, gathered around her’. I remain perplexed as to why two entirely rational beings could believe in such things. But I do not begrudge it to them. For I know that I could not have coped at all if what happened to them as parents had happened to me. For, even as a brother, my siblings’ deaths have marked me, too. I often feel that my luck in life has been bought at the cost of my parents’ terrible trials and losses, and, even to this day, I dissolve into panic whenever one of my children or grandchildren falls ill.

Around the time of my brother Richard’s death, my mother moved back up to the Punjab. She spent much of her time in war work and, later, in nursing my father, who had returned from the victorious campaign in Burma terribly debilitated by illness and exhaustion. As a consequence much of my early upbringing fell to our Indian household, which consisted of an
ayah
, Aisha
,
a
sais
(or groom) called Hamid, a gardener whose name I have forgotten, and a father and son, Nur Mohamed and Eid Mohamed, who guarded the house and looked after our needs in my father’s absence. I loved them all dearly, and by the age of four understood the rhythms and symbols of Islamic life and spoke Hindi better than I did English. I am sure that my later apparent facility with languages comes from this early bilingual period of my life.

My father delighted in keeping strange and unusual pets, many of which he would bring back from his shooting expeditions in the jungle. We had snakes and (but not together) a tame mongoose, a small pigmy deer and a scaly anteater with a long trunk; at mealtimes the latter used to wander in and circumnavigate the room, hoovering up ants and termites from the skirting boards of our wooden bungalow with all the efficiency of a four-legged Dyson vacuum cleaner (and making a very similar sucking noise). But my favourite was a monkey who went by the very original name of: Monkey. He was a little older than me, but about the same size. We were inseparable companions. But what made our friendship even warmer was that we shared not only our lives, but also our chastisements. He would be beaten for some misdemeanour one day; me the next. This was the true cement of our fellow-feeling. Until one day Monkey was especially severely beaten for some sin and, in retribution (as I remember it), walked calmly over to a coffee table on which stood a blue Wedgwood bowl with nymphs dancing round it. This bowl was the last of my parents’ breakable wedding presents to have survived their many moves around India, and I knew it was my mother’s most valued possession because it was given pride of place whenever there was a dinner party, or drinks, or a bridge evening. And Monkey knew it, too. But it did not stop him. For he scooped the bowl up and ran out of the door and down our long front drive, with my mother and the gardener in hot pursuit. At the bottom of our drive, near the gate, there was a tall mango tree. Monkey, still grasping the bowl in one hand, scrambled up this at high speed. Once at the top he held out the bowl in one hand … and dropped it! And then, just at the very last moment, as the bowl passed his foot, the foot shot out
and caught it. Monkey continued to do this for half an hour (or so it seemed), with my mother and the gardener dashing backwards and forwards to position themselves beneath the bowl each time it threatened to fall, while trying vainly to entice him down between times. Finally, Monkey descended the tree, laid the bowl at the foot of the trunk and sauntered off, in carefree manner, back to the house. I swear that if monkeys could whistle he would have done so. He never got beaten again – which was bad news for me. And I have, ever since, felt myself somehow deficient for lack of prehensile toes.

In May 1945 my second brother, Tim, was born. And a year later, when the war in the Far East ended and it became clear to my parents that the days of the British in India were drawing to a close, it was decided that my mother should take my brother and me back to Northern Ireland, where she would set up home and wait for my father to return after the British hand-over in India was concluded. At the time we were living at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, so our journey to Bombay took us down the length of the Punjab and into India proper. Although the full-scale partition riots and ethnic massacres which accompanied the end of British rule did not really begin until a year later, in August 1946, there were, even at this time, a number of communal riots and mass killings. It must have been the aftermath of one of these – glimpsed from the folds of my mother’s skirts on our last journey across India to Bombay and the boat home – that formed the indelible childhood memory described in the Prologue. Whether the bodies I saw were those of Muslims killed by Hindus or the other way round, I do not know. Nor can I, with confidence, describe the detail of what I saw that day, for I fear this has become too distorted and exaggerated by childhood terrors and nightmares to be reliable. But smell is a more accurate hook for memory. A quarter of a century later the whole scene came flooding back in Technicolor when I next smelt that sickly sweet odour of putrefaction, this time from the long-dead bodies of our enemies on a riverbank after one of our actions in the Borneo war.