Black British (6 page)

PART II

The Old Convent School

CHAPTER 4

A HEALTHY PAIR OF LUNGS

A school bell rings and, like a ripe pod that explodes to scatter its seeds, the portals of the primary school burst open to emit a million miniscule bodies.

“It's morning tea time for class one students,” my companion explains as, like frisky puppies working off pent-up energy, schoolchildren toot and scoot around us. One little chap bowls straight into me. He's running so fast he can't stop. Big brown eyes look into mine, bewildered. He doesn't know what's happened or what he should do. But the compulsion to run and jump and skip is too strong so he speeds away and melts into a blur of navy shorts and white shirts with multiple arms and legs.

My companion smiles indulgently. “I attended that school until class five,” he says and turns to me with a silent enquiry.

I see his expression change as he realises I was born and grew up in a very different place. I think about my first day in school.

“I started school the year my mother went abroad,” I say.

As a young man my father trained and honed his professional skills during an eight-year stint in prewar England. My mother, like most people of her time, had seldom moved beyond the confines of Kanpur and Calcutta where her parents and siblings lived. So when her sister suggested a four-month trip travelling in England and Europe she jumped at the chance. Knowing all her daughters were at school she felt she had the freedom to go.

Winter days in Kanpur are a miracle. After the unforgiving heat of summer and the treacheries of the monsoon months, September is graceful, with gentle, long shadows cast by a molten sun. But it's winter days that are wondrous – a reminder that God truly loves us. The nights are cold with temperatures down to single figures but once the sun appears, the days warm up to a comfortable, comforting ambience, the sky enormous, flawless and a cobalt blue.

Mornings saw the usual bustle of chores that have to be completed for the efficient running of a house but as soon as we could we were outdoors under the garden umbrella. A patch of land to the east of the house that had been planted with trees to honour each birth in the family formed a wind-break that protected us from the icy squalls off the Himalaya Mountains. Once lunch, which was always outdoors, was done, and the servants retired for the afternoon, a still, resounding silence descended. The birds went home for siesta.

A tiny speck appeared on the horizon, which gradually became a yellow Piper Cub from the Kanpur Flying Club. Desultory progress brought it almost overhead, where it droned on for a few seconds before returning to its noiseless, lazy amble. There was all the time in the world.

Someone coughed.

Someone turned a page.

In a distant corner of my tiny world a stray dog barked. Time was eternal, horizons boundless and I'd be young forever.

It was a bitter shock to give up that golden time to attend school, to be contained in a cold classroom, a world limited by tough walls and sharp words, where my only link to my gentle life was a view through dusty windows.

I was familiar with the routine that got my sisters to school on time each day. I was also acquainted with many of the teachers as I'd often seen them at church. So when my big day arrived I dressed in my uniform and happily trotted alongside my mother for the seven-minute walk to school.

“This is your classroom,” my mother said. “The same one that Lorraine and Lily had when they started school. And here is your desk in the back row, near the window.”

I sat on the edge of my seat and looked around me. The Indian girls were dressed as I was, in school uniform, but looked so different from the way I did. They were smaller in stature than I, so from being the tiniest among the people I knew and having to look upwards, I was the tallest. I felt lanky, awkward and clumsy.

I had thick, short, unruly curls while their hair was oiled and neatly plaited into
chutias
. I was lighter skinned and altogether looked out of place. I didn't speak the local language of Hindi and none of them spoke a word of English so we couldn't communicate or make friends. I was bewildered. I felt abandoned.

It didn't help that a sea of solemn brown eyes collectively watched me with unblinking silence. I felt like a freak. At first I looked away because I knew it was rude to stare, but with time I straightened my spine, squared my shoulders and went in to bat. I stared back with equally solemn, equally brown but now hostile eyes.

Indian civilisation is older than the hills. Its people have developed long-term traits of tolerance, learning, understanding and non-violence. That they had been subjugated by repressive rulers for two centuries hadn't wiped out their innate gentleness. The more confident girls averted their eyes from my wordless aggression, while the timid quietly wept, giving me a sense of power that redoubled my fury.

Like most people who are frightened and bewildered I had become angry and took my bad temper out on the least powerful, the people who can't and won't retaliate. Inspiring the class to cry on the first day of school didn't endear me to anyone.

The following days saw no improvements. With her hands full of thirty-odd first-timers Mrs Saunders, the teacher, had no time or inclination to attend to me. To get maximum output, she ignored me to concentrate her efforts on the majority, teaching them the basics of the English language. I was lonely, isolated and powerless.

It was an English-medium school but since Hindi was the official language of India Hindi was taught as a second language. Those classes were worse. The teacher spoke no English so there was no platform of communication between us. During the first class I stared at her with stony silence until she turned her attention to the easier, more compliant students. Thereafter she made no attempt to engage with me, isolating me further.

That I wasn't learning anything went unnoticed because I could already read and write, courtesy of Lily and my mother. Like all younger sisters the world over, I followed my older sister everywhere and tried to do everything she did. When Lily had started school two years earlier, she would play-act her lessons for my benefit so sitting opposite her, I learnt too – my own version of the alphabet.

“I should've known,” my mother complained over the years. “You were far too quiet! That in itself should've alerted me!”

But it took a rowdy battle between Lily and myself to alert her to something being amiss.

“That's
gutchar-mutchar
. You're scribbling!” accused Lily with the smug satisfaction of her school-learnt knowledge.

“It's not!” I screamed with futile fury. “That's ‘D'. That's ‘E'.
You
told me.”

Recourse to a higher authority had only one consequence.

“The hardest part,” my mother recounted grimly, “was persuading you that you'd got it wrong, that your alphabets were upside down and back to front. Then you pestered me to teach you. Pestered and pestered and pestered until it was easier to give in.”

And so started home tutoring that I ab-so-lut-ely loved. “That child's exceptionally bright,” Uncle Hugh told my father one day after my lessons began. “This morning she read
Little Red Riding Hood
from Lily's schoolbook. But she had the book upside down and was reciting from memory.”

That's how quickly family legend can be born. An insignificant, insipid,
commonplace
incident that could easily be missed is blown out of all proportion, distorted and embellished with each repetition, until it becomes a prophecy that has the power to support or beleaguer a person for the rest of their lives. I have a lot for which to thank that childhood fable.

I also loved the rhythm of poetry and played along when Lily acted (and re-enacted)
Johnny-Head-In-Air
¹
, staggering up and down the driveway, craning our necks to look at the sky. Lily particularly liked the part where Johnny trips over a dog.

“Bump! Dump!” she quoted dramatically as she threw herself forward with a Thump. Our dogs were pretty hopeless at their allotted job of guarding the property but had highly tuned survival instincts and were nowhere to be found when Lily went on her acting spree.

But I was. As little sisters always are.

It was my role to crawl across her path at the crucial moment when Lily could fall on me yelling gleefully, “Dog and Johnny in a
lump
.”

Somehow the roles were never reversed. I never got to play Johnny and fall on her. Democracy is not a strong point in sibling games. Thank goodness it didn't take long before I, like the dogs, learnt my lesson of survival and became adept at rolling out of the way in the nick of time.

By the time I started school I could write a printed script and do simple addition and subtraction using an outdated calendar that had become one of my toys. I also knew all the poems and stories in
Radiant Reader
I, most of which I could recite from memory.

So for my first three months in school I learnt nothing and did nothing, simply existed in a silent world of bewildered misery.

Then my mother left for Europe.

It had been a normal day, one like any other. And like any normal day, my release from prison found me prancing around the front lawn with Reg at my side. After charging up the front steps onto the verandah I flung myself into a chair and between breaths yelled, “Mummy.”

No answer.

“Mummy.” This time injecting a hint of demand into my voice.

When there was still no answer I put my heart and soul into one almighty bellow. “MUMMY!”

“She's not here. Remember she told you she was going to England?” My father had come onto the verandah so I shot to my feet, my brow furrowed while I stared at him thinking, “You're never home at this hour of the day.”

And that was my first inkling that my world had changed – drastically changed.

“Mummy's gone to England. She'll be back in three months.”

I didn't believe him. Mummy hadn't gone anywhere.
My

mummy certainly didn't go off and leave me behind.

I stared at him for a further few seconds then dodged around his legs and raced into the house.

I looked for her everywhere – in all my secret hiding places. I wandered down dark, dank passageways that led nowhere, peered under the stairs and searched the enclosed back verandah that was only used for storage. Desperation paralyses coherent thinking, so I even looked in places where I knew intuitively she wouldn't fit, like under my father's desk and among the plants behind the upright piano.

I couldn't find her and like many a child who's left to amuse herself for hours on end, I knew every shadow and shade of the monstrosity that was my dearly loved home. If I couldn't find her, she wasn't there.

To comfort me, my father explained that she had gone far away to England and lifted me onto a chair so I could see a big, coloured picture on the wall. He pointed to where England was in relation to Kanpur. But that didn't make sense. In the picture England was only a few inches away so it couldn't be
that
far. Why couldn't she come home and go back tomorrow when I was at school?

By bedtime it was clear she wasn't going to materialise.

Breakfast the next morning was a sombre affair. I didn't cry. Tears were frowned on in our household. We were expected to be strong and tough. I also knew that Lorraine and Lily missed our mother too but since I was the baby I was allowed to
demonstrate
that I missed her more. Sensing this elevated status and knowing I had to make the most of it because it wouldn't last, I reverted to baby ways, to a time when life was a lot more secure and mothers didn't vanish without warning. I wouldn't eat until Lorraine and Lily took turns to feed me fingers of toast like my mother had done a few years earlier.

School was another matter. I screamed as soon as I was left there. Having a healthy pair of lungs, I made a lot of noise. I shrieked louder if anyone came near me. Initially my classmates were bemused; then some became so frightened they howled in sympathy while others moaned softly with a horrible keening sound that entered your ears, threatened to stay forever and flavour every sound you heard thereafter. Some lost control of their bladders and the stench was soon intolerable. Others – it only takes one and children will follow – raced out of the classroom and ran up and down the passageway, crying hysterically all the time.