by Isla Blair
The greatest change was in Fiona. At night there’d be choking sounds from her bed, which she’d try to muffle with her pillow and when I asked her if she was crying, she always said no. But she was – a gulping sort of crying. I remember once I climbed into her bed and squeezed myself hard against her back to protect her from her crying self, to hug her away from the sad place she’d gone to and I’d feel those deep shuddering sobs, like the ones babies make, almost like hiccups. She didn’t want to worry or upset me, so she said there was nothing wrong – but I knew there was. Sometimes she would turn over and cuddle me, because I was her little sister and she’d hold me to her to protect me, but I’d still feel her thudding heart and her occasional hiccupping breath. She’d say, “It’s alright now,” and it was meant for me, to quiet me and send me to sleep. Then I’d go back to my own bed and the soft shuddering sobs would begin again. I’d notice her muffle them with her pillow and I’d stay silent and pretend to be asleep. If I spoke, she somehow felt that she’d failed in her sisterly duty to comfort and protect me. Yet it was she who needed the comfort. In the morning she would help me to dress if I was being slow, buckling my shoes and doing up the buttons of my cardigan. And I’d notice little white salty lines around her eyes and down her cheek and I’d realise they were dried-on tears. She would wash them away and get into her clothes, but I knew in the evening that followed, her tears would build up and spill into her pillow with the hiccupping sounds that she’d try to hide. They were a give-away and they broke my heart.
The reason, of course, was that everyone knew that the summer was coming to an end and we would have to go to school and our parents would go back to India, leaving us behind. Mummy’s mouth would tighten with little lines round it and she seemed to hold her breath a lot. Sometimes Fiona would cry during the day too, and so would Mummy, and Fiona would ask our parents, “Why, why have you got to go back to India? Stay here with us”.
And my father replied, “It’s difficult to get a job here now dear. There aren’t many jobs so soon after the war and I don’t really have any qualifications. The job in India is a good one and I need money to give you and Isla things and Mummy and for your school and everything. If I stayed here, the only job I would get would be as a postie in Auchtermuchty.”
This was meant to make her laugh, but it gave her the chance to put in her plea. “But I want you to be the postie in Auchtermuchty; I want you to be here with us. I don’t want you to go away. I can make the lunch; I can do lots of things. I can sew and sweep the house and make supper and everything.” And Daddy looked sad and said,
“You have to be a brave girl, Fiona, none of us want to be parted from each other, but that is the way things have to be. We all have to be brave. Besides, we are trusting you to look after Isla.”
And so Fiona’s responsibility for me was laid on her as a sort of oath; she was handed a torch and she took it very seriously.
Each day she would try to recover from her fear of the night before and for a while she would succeed and then the day and the thought of it ending would overwhelm her and her heart would beat and the panic would set in and she would breathe so much she would get dizzy and it would start all over again.
The anticipation of our parents’ departure was more agonizing than the event when it arrived. My anxiety took the form of defiance. I didn’t cry, I became fierce and difficult to control. One day I was sent to my room for being horrible to Mummy. I can’t remember how our quarrel started but I ended by saying, “How would you know? You’re not Ayah. You’re just my mother.”
Mummy made a gasping sound and put her hands to her face. Daddy said, “Isla, that was a really nasty thing to say. You know it was cruel and hurtful. Go to your room and think about how you have hurt Mummy’s feelings and then you can come back and say sorry.”
I was too hot and angry to be sorry, so I went to Fiona’s and my bedroom and slammed the door.
Still in a fury, I pulled the stiff window up, climbed out of it and thumped my way down the very busy main Ayr road. It was several minutes before my father checked on me in the bedroom to see if my tantrum had abated and I was ready to apologise, only to find the window open and the white net curtains blowing in the breeze – but I was nowhere to be seen. My father rushed out of the door and I was almost, but not quite, out of sight. He ran to catch up with me and after hugging me to him, he unleashed his relieved wrath on me. Daddy’s anger was always quiet; he would tell us off more in sorrow than in anger. He’d say how disappointed he was in us, which had the effect of quelling us; his disappointment was far more terrible than his anger. He rarely raised his voice, but on this occasion he did, telling me I was a naughty, naughty girl and he picked me up – kicking angry legs and screaming loudly– and carried me home.
Later, he explained to me why he was so angry. Not only had I been hurtful to Mummy, but the road was full of cars and one could have knocked me over, or I could have got lost somewhere in Prestwick and he wouldn’t know where to find me. He said all this in his quiet, reasoned voice and I felt rotten that I’d given him such a fright. Even Fiona told me off for being thoughtless and impulsive and I felt chastened. I went to find Mummy, who was in the sitting room blowing her nose on a handkerchief. I rushed to her. “I’m very, very sorry Mummy. I didn’t mean it. Mummy, Mummy…” I started that hiccupping crying that Fiona did. She hugged me and said we were friends again and that everything was alright.
The car was loaded up with our black trunks that had our names written on them in white gloss paint. We put on our stiff new school uniforms of maroon and blue with the St Maray’s badge on the gym slip and on the beret. Granny Jessie pulled the beret on for me and said, “This child needs her hair cutting.” She had a way of talking about me as if I weren’t there. She kissed me goodbye and then gave me a big hug, I think she was trying not to cry. She saw Mummy start to cry and her mouth tightened as if to hold her tears in. Then it was Grandad’s turn. He brushed my cheek with his cheek; he smelt of hair oil and cigarettes. Granny bustled us into the car and gave us a small paper bag with barley sugar to share on the journey to prevent car-sickness. Sweets were still rationed at that time.
Fiona waved out of the window and I knelt up on the back seat and watched them, still waving, becoming smaller and smaller, until the car rounded a corner.
* * * * *
The September day was sunny, a bit hazy with the ever present midges dancing in the air above the scattered sheep in the fields that bordered the long drive that led to Kilbryde Castle, St Maray’s School.
All the way there I sat behind Mummy with my arms about her neck, inhaling her scent and feeling her warmth against my cheek. I had a pain in my stomach from all the butterflies that flew about in a tumult there and my heart was beating so fast it made me feel sick. Mummy held my arms in her hands that trembled and all the time Fiona sat behind Daddy, looking straight ahead of her. Her mouth was tight and her eyes were dry and dark.
Fiona and Isla “Going Out Day” St Maray’s
The castle loomed in front of us through the trees, from a distance rather forbidding, dark red stone with towers and turrets and crenellations. Daddy said, “Here we are, girls.”
And here it was. The moment that we had hoped would never come. We got out of the car and pulled up our blue socks, already escaping from the bands of elastic that held them up. Fiona took my hand, we stood still for a second and then, in our too-big school uniforms, we walked up the front steps of our new school.
FOUR
Love Walked In
As Fiona and I walked forward into our new lives, our parents had to turn away and walk back to theirs. It was a good one, the Indian life. There were servants, polo matches, tennis and cocktail parties, the climate was clement – not the soggy heat of the plains, or the bitter cold of Scottish winters. The privileged life they led as a middle class couple was that led by Edwardian aristocracy, but it came at a price. What did my mother feel as she climbed back into the car? She told
me later that she had become adept at holding on to her tears, but that she let them flow that day as she and my father drove away from Kilbryde Castle down the rhododendron drive, back through the midges and past the sheep, my father listening helplessly to her shuddering sobs. Fiona and I were too young to take on the burden of their apprehension and grief; at the time, we were too busy with our own. Can you ever be completely happy separated from those you hold most dear and are responsible for – especially when they seem so small and defenseless with round, frightened eyes and tight, brave smiles? You continue aching for their presence, their nearness, for weeks, months after parting. Or am I projecting my feelings onto them? And, after all, they did have each other. If they weren’t wholly complete without their daughters, they were deeply content as a couple.
Nearly half a century earlier, my father’s parents, Andrew and Sara Blair-Hill, had suffered the same anguished partings and separations which were part of the assumption of the Raj. It was something everyone accepted – sending your children “home” was a duty you owed to them and to the Empire. We cannot conceive of it now. People, especially in continental Europe, find the notion of sending children to boarding school bewildering, even barbaric, but it would be fruitless and foolish to impose modern day expectations of parenting on the past.
Andrew Blair-Hill arrived in the High Range in 1894, but it wasn’t until eleven years later that he returned on furlough to Blairgowrie to collect his young bride Sara and bring her on the long and hazardous journey to the hills he had made his home. It took courage and fortitude to face the unknown as Sara did. Her life, she knew, would not only be rigorous and spartan, but very different from the cosy, comfortable world of Blairgowrie.
There was no running water, of course, nor electricity; there were few of the comforts of home and she spent her time “making do”. There was no doctor in the district and certainly no antibiotics. She had to learn at least the basics of the local language; she had to learn to ride a horse, the only means of transport. Her horse, Lustre, was given to her as a wedding present and she grew to depend on him for her independence and for companionship.
In 1907 she gave birth to her first born boy, Roy. A local midwife administered to her and for a time was concerned that Sara was losing too much blood. She was urged to drink a brackish brew of roots and herbs and quite soon the bleeding stopped. Sara never knew what was in this mixture, or if the bleeding would have stopped anyway. It was indelicate to discuss childbirth or “women’s matters”. She engaged an ayah to help her care for the small mewling creature that tugged at her heart.
Andrew, with Sara on Lustre, and the syce
The sunlit days were spent in playing with him, singing, rocking him, protecting him from the ever-present Indian hazards: infections of every kind, scorpions, snakes and bandicoots (rats the size of small dogs, intelligent and fierce). She held him close in the monsoon months, making sure his blankets were dry, that the damp did not penetrate his clothes; she held him aloft from the leeches and sang to him over the howls of the jackals and the far away bugling of elephants.
James Finlay’s company records are kept in Glasgow University – letters between the manager in India and the Head office in Glasgow in the early years of the twentieth century. There are comments, sometimes very personal ones, about my grandparents, where they complain of them being profligate by wanting an advance for trips home (always denied). And a complaint about my grandfather being, “Too much married, with one child coming fast upon the others’ heels.”
Sara, as a young bride, kept a journal – not detailed, just jottings of daily happenings, but through it you can hear her wonder at my father’s birth, fourteen months after Roy, on November 18th 1909, and her love for both her boys. She wrote of dresses to be mended or altered by the tailor, fetes to be arranged at the club, dinner dances and Masonic meetings, lists of duties for the servants. She pressed flowers, kept little notes and calling cards and baby curls wrapped in muslin at the back of her journal and I suspect it was for no eyes but hers. On her death, it was found by my uncle Roy’s wife Doris and it became a family treasure, not of any real value, of course, but precious to us because it let us have a glimpse of this stoical woman’s life. On Aunt Doris’s death, it vanished.
Chokra, Ian, Roy, Sara and Andrew
My father, Ian Baxter, was born in the same bungalow at Top Station where Roy had been delivered, with the same attendant midwife, this time with little fuss and a mercifully short labour. Sara related in her diary that, to her, her sleeping son looked perfect. He was creamy pale with tiny ears and a cupid mouth – he looked like “a small cherub that has just climbed out of a painting.” The two little boys soon became inseparable. They were carried in dhoolis by doting servants, they ran in and out of the canna lilies, they chased dragon flies and tried to teach a myna bird to talk. They wore large topees in the sun and long rubber coats in the monsoon rain – they were her babies. Roy was five and Ian just three and a half when she had to give them up.
“But why? Why? Wait until they are a little older. I cannot be parted from them now.”
The rows ensued each evening while the little boys slept in the bedroom at the back of the bungalow.
“Sara, dear, I will not get furlough for another five years. By that time Roy will be ten and Ian eight and a half. Do you think it is fair to them to deprive them of an education, of being members of British society? They are British boys.”
“Then why did we come here? Why have my boys at all, if they are to be pulled away from me. I cannot be without them. Supposing it is years and years before we see them again? My own children will be strangers to me. No, no, I cannot do this.”
But she did. Money was saved for all four of them to travel Home, where the boys were left with Aunt Ann.
I watch my granddaughter Edie, aged three and a half, and see her feeling hurt and her lip tremble when someone pushes her away, or she is excluded from a game. My heart aches for her when she runs after “big girls” who cannot be bothered with her; but when she falls, someone picks her up, kisses the hurt forehead or knee and brushes away her tears, distracts her from her distress. Who, I wonder, did Sara’s little boys run to when sad, frightened or lonely? Of course, I was not there to hear her conversations, nor was I privy to her thoughts, so I have imagined them in a voice I do not believe was too different from hers.
Sara and Andrew made the desolate return journey to the High Range, up the rocky road to their bungalow at Top Station.
The silence hit her with a force. No whoops of childish delight, no squabbling little brothers that she needed to separate. They were gone; the joy of her heart, the light that shone in her life was thousands of miles away. But Sara did not give way to self-pity. She pushed her fervent yearning deep down inside her and tried to live the life expected of a Memsahib. She became involved with the activities of the Club.
The High Range Club was an institution that combined the Munnar Club and the Gymkhana Club and was started in 1909. In 1913, Andrew was in charge of catering and my grandmother Sara seems to have been the first of many wives who served as honourable manageress. Before she left for Scotland she had written a letter to the chairman of the club, Mr Cole:
‘Dear Mr Cole
‘I believe there is a meeting of the Club Committee this afternoon. I would like to take an interest in the Club when we return from home. I will be quite willing to take up the work thoroughly and do all I can to make things comfortable, keep things nice at the Club.
‘If you care to mention this at the meeting this afternoon you might do so.
Yours sincerely,
Sara Blair–Hill’
Nothing unusual in the letter, but it touches me profoundly – because that was just before she was to deliver her two baby boys Home. No wonder she wanted to fill her time with club duties.
Andrew became a mason and joined Lodge Heather. There were meetings once a month and an annual Masonic dinner. He enjoyed the masculine company in
this man’s world. He missed his boys, but the tea estate kept him busy with little time for regret or to feel much sense of loss. It was Sara who had to fill the long lonely days. Her horse Lustre, though ageing, was her friend and confidante. She would lean on his neck, her pent up tears flowing and whisper her longing to him, “Oh my boys, I miss my boys, Lustre,” and he would whinny in reply and she felt comforted. She made no mention of her sadness to Andrew. What would be the point? “You knew that this was the way of it when you married me Sara.”
They sat on the verandah in the evening just before night snuffed out the day, he with his whisky and soda, Sara with her gin and lime and the boys’ absence sat between them.
Letters were sent home every week taking about three weeks to arrive in Blairgowrie, where they would be read aloud by Aunt Ann to Roy and Ian, who sat with wide eyes remembering their parents. But gradually the faces faded and they just became names, Mamma and Papa.
After the first year of separation, Ian asked his older brother,
“Roy, who are Mamma and Papa?”
“They are our parents, you remember. Papa smoked cigars and Mamma smelt of roses, remember?”
Ian wanted to remember, wanted to cling to the fading shadow of them but very soon they were gone. Roy would tell us this tale with a smile. “Wasn’t your father a funny boy?”
He did not seem funny to me, just a sad, lonely, bewildered little boy and the vision of him haunts me still. Life must have been so strange for him, so young, so vulnerable in the care of the formidable Aunt Ann.
Miss Ann Stewart, my grandmother Sara’s spinster sister, was round and of quite astonishingly unprepossessing aspect. In fact she was, to put it bluntly, very ugly. I remarked on it once and was reprimanded with a strong, “Shush!”
