Daughter of Empire (15 page)

Before the onslaught of work began, my mother and I went to Tughlakabad, one of the seven cities of Delhi, then the Old Fort, and the Walled City, where we climbed to the top of Qutub Minar, the
astonishingly tall red and buff sandstone tower. Our last stop was at the Jumping Wells, where, in return for some coins, boys jumped down sixty feet into a very shallow man-made pool. We succumbed
to the little hands that pulled at us for annas but immediately wished we hadn’t because they ran away laughing and somersaulting into the water below in such a cavalier fashion it was hard
to believe the jump would not be fatal. Moments later, however, we were surrounded again and we beat a hasty retreat to the car.

The heat was fearful, and something I found great difficulty in getting used to. We had left the coldest English winter on record and within a few weeks found ourselves in the midst of the
hottest weather Delhi had experienced for seventy-five years. We soon moved to the summer bedrooms on the north side of the house as it was impossible to live permanently on the south side. The
Viceroy, family and staff usually moved out to the cool hills of Simla during the summer, along with the rest of the British, but this year there was no time to lose, so we had to remain in the
furnace.

My father and I soon established a routine of riding together every morning at 6.30 a.m. on the ridge above Delhi. On the first morning, when we arrived at the stables, an entire cavalcade of
ADCs and police met us. We set off at a gallop and the ground was so rough and hard that I feared the horses would be lamed. After that, my father said he would take only two policemen and none of
the ADCs. My mother seldom rode with us but on our return we ate breakfast together and then meetings began in earnest. My father’s study was the epicentre of activity, his staff waiting for
him to begin the day’s work.

There were four aides-de-camp and they worked a duty rota: ADC1 was attached to ‘His Ex’; ADC2 was for ‘Her Ex’ (a pretty cushy job until my mother came along); ADC3
looked after guests and the Viceroy’s daughter on special occasions; and ADC4 had a day off (until the pace of work became frantic). Their responsibilities were arduous and involved endless
research, implementation of protocol and organisation of the diary. My father, a stickler for detail, made their lives even busier. At large luncheon or dinner parties, the ADCs were supposed to
memorise the names and titles of the guests and present them to Their Exes. I admired how efficient they were at this – not at all easy when there were over one hundred people in the room.
For lunches and dinners they had to ensure that the seating plan respected the order of precedence and the complex hierarchies of the princes, whose position in the rigid pecking order was marked
by the number of guns’ salute they should be accorded, twenty-one guns being the highest and nine the lowest. They worked in the ‘ADC Room’, which invariably became the Cocktail
Room at sundown, and they could also entertain their own guests in the Tiger Room. The men were all in their twenties, and the life and soul of any good party. To begin with, I was rather in awe of
them and the glamorous young women who partied with them and whose hearts they frequently broke.

Before we had flown to India, my father had already worked out that if he was to hit the ground running, he would need to meet the four most important people behind the opposing political ideas
and persuade them to cooperate with each other. This was his Operation Seduction; my father’s charm offensive would give way to pragmatic strategies for movement and solution. And so it
began, within a couple of days of arriving, with a visit from ‘The Father of the Nation’, Mahatma Gandhi. The servants fell to the floor in ecstatic obeisance when they saw him, and a
crowd of his followers remained outside the gates for the entire duration of his visit. I was thrilled to be introduced before the meeting began. I remembered the iconic photographs of him wearing
his dhoti and sandals, surrounded by cheering mill workers, during his visit to Lancashire in 1931, but I was unprepared for how fragile he appeared just sixteen years later.

The visit was a success and many photographs were taken. As Gandhi was now so frail – and without one of his great-nieces, his usual ‘crutch’ – he automatically put his
hand on my mother’s shoulder to steady himself as they crossed the threshold of my father’s study. This delighted my mother and the photographers but sadly caused disgust and outrage
when the photos were published in the British press. The general consensus seemed to be that his ‘black’ Indian hand should not have been allowed to rest upon the ‘white’
shoulder of the Vicereine.

Gandhi had never before taken a meal at Viceroy’s House so it was an honour when he came back the next day, bringing with him his breakfast of goat’s curds; it was a great concession
for him to be seen eating with the Viceroy. He offered some of the curds to my father, who politely tried to refuse, but Gandhi, with a mischievous smile, insisted. My father said later that it was
the most unappetising green porridge that he had ever tasted.

After Gandhi came his protégé, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Congress Party. I had already heard about him from my parents, who had met him previously. In 1946 he had travelled
to Malaya to meet the Indian community, and my father, the Supreme Allied Commander at the time, had been warned by his staff that there might be trouble and that he should not meet Nehru. One of
the staff had already refused to provide a car for him, and this so infuriated my father that he took Nehru in his official car to the YMCA in Singapore, where the meeting was being held. My mother
was already there with a group of Indian welfare workers, and as she came forward to be introduced, a crowd of Nehru’s admirers swarmed in behind him, knocking her off her feet. She crawled
under the table, from where Nehru rescued her.

Given that Nehru’s heroic rescue of her was one of her favourite stories, I was worried I might be disappointed by him in the flesh. But, if anything, I was more impressed by him in real
life – not only by his beautiful speaking voice and impeccable dress, a white buttoned-down tunic with the famous Nehru collar, jodhpurs and a rosebud in his buttonhole, but also by his
warmth and charm, which enveloped me from our first handshake. Watching him interact with others, I could see that he reacted to things instantly, was quick to laugh or make you laugh, and always
interested in what you had to say. I realised that both Gandhi and Nehru were the most extraordinary people I had ever met.

My father then met Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Nehru’s colleague and also a disciple of Gandhi, who had worked with him in 1922 to organise civil disobedience, rising through the ranks to
become a respected leader. He was the perfect antidote to Nehru’s idealism, for when his colleague went off on a passionate tangent, Patel would remind him: ‘Don’t go ahead of the
people so far, come back to take them with you.’ He was tough and pragmatic but willing to listen, and my father formed a good working relationship with him. Not so with the icy and immovable
Mr Jinnah, president of the All-India Muslim League. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims were at breaking point, and not since the idea for a separate Muslim sovereign entity had been mooted had
the situation been more acute. The violence following the recent Direct Action Day in August 1946 that had led to the deaths of more than twenty thousand Muslims and Hindus was the signal to Mr
Jinnah that India must either be divided or destroyed. He was an extremely sophisticated man, spoke perfect English, and was attired in an immaculate suit, as opposed to the other leaders, who wore
national dress. At their very first meeting my father felt his charm offensive fail – something that had never happened to him before. Things got off to a bad start at the photo-shoot. Mr
Jinnah had prepared a joke – assuming that my mother would be placed between the two men for the photo. When asked to pose he said: ‘Ah – a rose between two thorns.’
Unfortunately it was he who was placed in the middle of the composition.

As the day progressed, the going got tougher. I was not at the dinner at which my mother and father tried to get acquainted with Mr Jinnah and his sister, Fatima, but their inability to crack
the Quaid-e-Azam’s (Great Leader’s) hard exterior affected my father deeply, and he could talk of little else for days afterwards. It was obvious from the very first that Mr Jinnah was
going to make a smooth transition to independence impossible.

It became perfectly apparent once my father had met all four leaders, and taken on board their views, that there was no way they were going to be able to keep the peace while this impasse
remained, and it was vital to transfer power as quickly as possible so that the various leaders could make their own decisions. He reasoned that if they were still in waiting nothing would be done
because everything needed their approval, but if they were in power themselves, decisions could be taken more quickly.

At about this time, Lord Ismay, Chief of the Viceroy’s Staff, made his first presentation to my father. His message was hard to ignore: ‘The situation is everywhere electric . . .
the mine may go up at any moment. If we do not make up our minds in the next two months . . . there will be pandemonium.’ When my father then convened a conference for the state governors,
their diagnosis was the same. With the exception of Assam, all states reported that, in my father’s words, ‘they were sitting on the edge of a volcano’. They corroborated the
Indian political leaders’ view that the handover of power must happen as soon as possible. My mother organised her own mini-conference with the governors’ wives, as she hoped to take
stock of their views and find out how they might help. She was taken aback to discover how little they knew about the situation.

The political meetings took place alongside the social occasions that my parents organised. Their insistence that the Viceroy’s House should be seen as open and inclusive meant that we
hosted two garden parties, three or four lunches for about thirty people and two or three large dinners – at which my father insisted that half the guests must be Indian – each week. I
was shocked as I overheard two guests say how ‘monstrous’ it was that ‘all these filthy Indians’ should have been invited, and when I told my father later, he was so
incensed that he told the Military Secretary that if he ever heard anyone making a racist remark they should be asked to leave immediately.

As if the constant socialising at Viceroy’s House wasn’t enough of a whirlwind – new invitations arrived every day – there was a stream of cocktail parties for those
going home. Though that wasn’t always as clear as it might seem. On one occasion I set off for a goodbye party for the Scots Fusiliers, who, by the time I arrived, had been told they would be
staying on. Pandit Nehru’s gatherings were the most enjoyable. If the party was small, we would eat Indian food, though it took me a couple of tries to master the art of eating elegantly with
my right hand. If it was large, there was often Indian dancing, sometimes a classical display, at other times one of the hundreds of different folk dances from around India.

I enjoyed meeting the Indian girls from Lady Irwin College. They were in their late teens, intelligent, amusing, and their conversation was thought provoking. We would have great discussions
about politics and religion, and though they were a mix of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians we got along famously. We were all examining the beliefs we had been brought up with and,
while their attitudes were enquiring, they were not combative and we had many impassioned debates. My parents had brought me up to be without prejudice and I was finally finding my voice. Through
the friendship these girls offered, I realised that I was ‘coming out’ in a way that would never have been possible as a debutante in London. I was delighted to celebrate my eighteenth
birthday with them and other guests at a surprise party arranged by my parents at the palatial swimming pool. As I looked around at the white colonnades, my friends dancing beneath a sky full of
stars, it felt so very far from the birthday a year before, which I’d spent alone at Broadlands with Grandmama.

It was not long before my mother turned her attention to the running of the house and the estate. Leaving no detail unexamined, she grilled the poor comptroller on management practice down to
every last bit of expenditure. Within a week she had moved on to the servants’ quarters, and by the end of April, she had been through everything. I accompanied her on many of her tours
through the entire compound, including the stables, the primary school and the dispensary, and I marvelled at her ability to forge through the heat of the day, impervious to physical hardship. I
wasn’t as robust, and on one particular tour of the bodyguards’ quarters I felt so faint after two hours in the harsh sun that to my great shame I had to sit down while my mother
carried on. I was beginning to admire her more and more.

Now that my father and I had acquired new, well-mannered ponies and had cut our escort to two armed bodyguards, we could talk as we took our early-morning ride. And it became clear as we rode
along the dirt track of the Ridge, scattering the peacocks in our path, that I had now replaced my sister as my father’s confidante. While this was purely the result of circumstance, my
father, ever the extrovert, proceeded to share all his thoughts with me. As he did so, the significance of Bunny and Yola’s place in my parents’ lives became blindingly clear to me and
I understood their situation with a new clarity. I felt so thankful that my father had resisted the temptation to divorce my mother and had kept the family together by including two people who
brightened Patricia’s and my own life.

Once I had found my feet and my mother and I had done all we could to reorganise the house, I started work in the Allied Forces Canteen, making milkshakes for the troops. It wasn’t exactly
difficult, although it took me a while to get to grips with the eight flavours and sometimes I felt we drank more than we sold. The canteen was meant to be for the Indian soldiers too, but in
reality their pay was no match for the prices so they tended to go elsewhere. I felt this was terribly unfair but didn’t protest as I was told that they preferred to be served by Indian
staff. As this job took up only two evenings a week, my mother sent me to see Lady Shone, the high commissioner’s wife. She ran a clinic and dispensary in a huge tent outside Delhi for people
from the surrounding villages. I would be most welcome in the mornings, Lady Shone said, beaming, as there was a permanent shortage of doctors and staff. And that was it. No more training or advice
given; I would learn all I needed to know on the job. It was lucky that I had started Hindustani lessons with Mr Krishnan Lal, though my spirits were dampened when he told me it would take a year
to learn the grammar. By my calculation, I would just about be speaking the language when the time came to leave for home.