Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  The deaths of over 380,000 British servicemen in the war, and the fact that women had gained experience in the workforce, opened more opportunities for women in the aftermath of the conflict. Metal Box had a reputation for sometimes promoting women but Helen observed that if they did, they paid them two-thirds of the salary of a man. She was not allowed to join the pension fund but she accepted this, along with other inequities, as women of the era had to. While she would always support greater opportunities for women, she viewed her personal career within the context of the day, which was far beyond her capacity to change.

  Helen lamented the broader implications of the loss of men to industry in a letter to Avril.

  Schools built after the war, as other buildings, are a shameful monument to get-rich-quick builders and indifferent school boards. Unfortunately, many of the kind of men who would have whipped things into shape after the War, were dead – like Eddie: he was management and he could go through a petrol installation like the wrath of God, and the men jumped to it.

  People do not realize that wars are fought, largely by management people, office folk, specialists in seeing things through, and by the unskilled or semiskilled. Tradesmen, like welders and electricians, are too precious to waste on a battlefield, but tradesmen are only as good as their supervisors make them be – and we were parlously short of supervisors after the war – I soon learned that when I worked for Broadcast Relay and for the Metal Box Company – in the latter, so many of their factories had lost their foremen, charge hands and specialists like tinsmiths and chemists.

  Helen continued to live at home because ‘nice girls’ did not live alone. There are many little indications that her relationship with her parents was improving: now she would describe herself as being her ‘father’s favourite’, while she occasionally confided in her mother, but generally she kept out of their way as much as possible. She contributed financially towards the household, and tried to save a little each month towards her old age. Her great dread was that as the ‘spinster daughter’ she would be trapped into looking after her parents in their old age, but she had little hope that she would find a husband now. She was twenty-six years old at the war’s end and scarred by her lost loves.

  All the same, Helen found the strength to start socializing. In the 1990s, she wrote to a Canadian friend describing her efforts to rejoin society.

  One thing I did in Liverpool after I lost Eddie in the battle of Caen in 1944, was to become a ‘joiner’. In this I was encouraged by Eddie’s best friend, John, who, at the age of eighty – very frail – is my only connection with my lost soldier. I belonged to the Phoenix gramophone club, I remember. About twenty of us used to listen to each other’s records and talks by those of us who were fairly musical. I became the Membership Secretary of the Anglo-Chinese Society, before Mao Tse-tung took over [in October 1949] – when it disintegrated. I had chosen the organizations to join very carefully, so that I met well-informed people. And it is not a bad way to wriggle back into society.

  In her novel Thursday’s Child, Helen described a club at which the many nationalities in the city of Liverpool after the war could meet and make friends with English people. There was a canteen, a library and a lounge; English classes were offered and dances were held. There are obvious autobiographical elements in the story of Peggie, a Lancashire lass who has lost a fiancé in the war and volunteers to help at British Council social events, where she meets men of different backgrounds and skin colours. ‘I knew very well how difficult it was for strangers to know English families, more especially so if the stranger’s skin was not white,’ she wrote, and she portrays Peggie as devoid of the racial prejudice that was widespread at the time.

  In fact, largely through her clubs, Helen received five proposals of marriage in those post-war years. ‘I was the kind of girl men proposed to – I was rarely propositioned. I turned them all down, because the pain inside was still too great.’ In more sardonic moments, Helen described herself as a ‘Jonah’, the nautical terminology for someone who brings bad luck to a ship. She felt her romantic prospects were doomed to failure.

  And then, one evening in March 1949, everything changed. A Chinese friend of Helen’s, Kun Huang, who was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Liverpool, brought an Indian friend of his, Avadh Bhatia, to the British Council meeting rooms. Helen struck up a conversation with Avadh, as she had with many other lonely foreign students over the previous year. Very quickly the conversation took an unexpected turn.

  Although obviously shy, Avadh asked: ‘Would you come to the pictures with me?’ When Helen hesitated, he added quickly, ‘You do not have to worry, because, of course, I shall marry you!’

  Avadh Bhatia was the son of a successful senior official of the Indian land administration. He had been brought up at the large family compound near Delhi with four brothers and a sister. Each of his brothers became successful professionals, but sadly one had passed away recently of a heart attack while walking in the Himalayas. The remaining brothers included a doctor, a lawyer and an expert in ceramics. Avadh’s passions were abstract mathematics and theoretical physics.

  He had been educated in good schools in both Hindi and English. He attended Lucknow University and then the University of Allahabad, where he worked towards his PhD in mathematics. He was an outstanding student at a good university, but a doctorate from a university in the West was essential to further his career. When the opportunity arose to work under Professor Herbert Fröhlich, a brilliant refugee from Germany, who was then at the University of Bristol, he jumped at it. He arrived in England in late September 1947. When Professor Fröhlich moved to become Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool in 1948, Avadh followed him.

  Avadh was kept busy with his research and thesis and spent his evenings alone, until his friend Kun Huang invited him along to the British Council meeting. Peggie in Thursday’s Child meets an Indian man called Ajit in exactly the same circumstances and describes him thus:

  He was dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy grey trousers; his white shirt made his skin look very dark but his features were clear-cut and delicate; both in expression and outline his face reminded me of a Saint in an old Indian painting; his hands also, as they invited me to eat and drink, used the gestures portrayed in the same paintings.

  When Avadh asked her out, Helen agreed to the cinema invitation, although politely declined the marriage proposal. Their time was limited because Helen had her demanding job at Metal Box and many duties at home, while Avadh had his research, but they met up whenever they could. Despite both being shy or reticent in their own ways, they discovered very quickly that they could talk to each other on a wide range of subjects and in a depth they had never experienced before. Importantly, they both had diverse interests and an extensive knowledge of, and appreciation for, history and culture.

  In Thursday’s Child, Ajit introduces Peggie to a world that sounds exotic and far outside her own experience:

  He told me about the squirrels that lived in the neem trees in the garden of his home in Delhi, and of the lizards that always made a home in the window curtains, no matter how frequently they were shaken out. I shivered at the idea of lizards in the house, but he said they were harmless creatures with yellow bodies and sparkling eyes, and they kept the room free from insects.

  It was less than two years since India had gained independence from British rule, after almost three decades of nationalist struggle, led by the charismatic figure of Mahatma Gandhi. The country had been divided by Partition into the separate dominions of Pakistan and India, ostensibly as a way to give Muslims a homeland. Far from being a peaceable transition, there had been bloody religious riots in which as many as a million people had died, and strife continued between Muslims remaining in India and Hindus. Avadh came from a Hindu family, and he had been caught up directly in the violence in 1947 when a train on which he was travelling was attacked by a Muslim mob. His life was saved by a quick-thinking Muslim passenge
r who hid him from the attackers.

  Despite having radically different backgrounds, religions and upbringings, Helen and Avadh were of similar social classes, something that was of much more importance in the 1940s and 50s than it is now. Helen was very clear that she was upper-middle-class, despite the terrible poverty she had endured from the age of eleven, while Avadh came from a sophisticated and well-educated Indian family.

  This might go some way to explain the connection they found with each other but, more fundamentally, they were quickly and deeply in love. Avadh’s immediate proposal was funny in hindsight, but came from a visceral conviction that Helen was the girl for him and it was meant genuinely to assure her that his intentions were honourable.

  Unfortunately, there were two complications.

  First, Avadh was nearing the end of his PhD studies at the University of Liverpool and was due to return to India later that year to take up a post at the newly established Gujarat University in Ahmedabad. Many more Indian universities and technical colleges were being founded in the newly independent country and existing ones were expanding rapidly. An intelligent theoretical physicist, particularly one trained at a good English university under a renowned German professor (so influential that he would later be nominated for the Nobel Prize), had excellent prospects in India.

  Secondly, Avadh was already married – a fact I know he would have told my mother very early on, as he was impeccably honest.

  Although the actual ceremony came later, his marriage to Kashi had been arranged when he was a teenager. Her father was a friend of Avadh’s father and lived in Kashmir, far away from Avadh’s family home near Delhi. Avadh and Kashi belonged to the same caste but had different upbringings – hers in the countryside, his in the city – and no interests in common. Attitudes to marriage were quite different in Indian society in the 1940s, with no expectation of romantic love, but unfortunately, it was clear right from the start that Avadh and Kashi were fundamentally incompatible. They simply didn’t get along. The fact that Avadh had chosen to spend two years in England without his wife was just one indication of the estrangement. He had left India in September 1947, not realizing that his wife was pregnant and did not meet his son, Vijay – my half-brother – until he returned to India in December 1949.

  Avadh did not want to return to Kashi. Even his limited exposure to English society had broadened his outlook further and made him desperate to escape his unhappy arranged marriage. I doubt he had considered the possibility of falling in love with an Englishwoman, never mind marrying one. He was simply depressed and immersing himself in his work. Although she was instantly attracted to Avadh, Helen was a realist. I imagine that, at first, she decided to enjoy spending time with this wonderful man in the full knowledge that their friendship must inevitably be temporary.

  As they walked along the breezy seafront at Hoylake, near Helen’s grandmother’s house, or the Dee Estuary near West Kirby, they talked. And talked. Helen told him about her childhood, although at that stage she probably did not share all the details of her difficult family life. She talked about Edith and her grandmother and all she had learnt from them, and then about their plunge into poverty in Liverpool. She told him how she had slowly pulled herself up by going to night school. She told him about the war and Harry and Eddie. He listened to the stories about her past with acceptance if not full understanding, and he was interested in the woman who had emerged from all that hardship. What he saw was a pretty, still-young woman who was well-read, knowledgeable and very intelligent. It was little wonder she had such a responsible job.

  Helen listened to Avadh as well. She found a quietly spoken, sensitive man who valued her for herself. He was also highly intelligent, committed to his work and determined to make a difference when he went back to his newly independent country. He was very unhappy about his marriage but his innate goodness shone through. As the miles unfolded Helen decided that she could trust him.

  As hard-working as they both were, and despite the losses and troubles on their minds, they had fun too. Avadh possessed a gentle sense of humour and an ability to make Helen see the funny side of life. He enjoyed light entertainment as an escape from the intellectual rigour of physics and Helen was happy to accompany him to comedy films such as A Kiss in the Dark starring David Niven. She would have been tickled pink by Avadh’s uninhibited reaction to the humour. They also went to plays, such as Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Liverpool Playhouse, where many well known actors and actresses performed.

  My mother was human. As she got to know Avadh better her feelings for him grew. He was very determined in matters that were important to him and at that point, two things were important: physics and Helen. When Avadh explained that Hindus were allowed to take more than one wife and asked if she would be willing to marry him, Helen began to realize that there might be a chance for them to be together if she travelled out to India with him.

  In the precious months they had left before Avadh must return to India, at least twice they took a train from Lime Street Station a couple of hours north to the Lake District. There they could walk to their heart’s content along the footpaths up the stunning hills and through the beautiful valleys beside deep blue lakes and into welcoming villages. They stayed in a bed and breakfast owned by a woman called Mrs Penny, where roses grew over the walls and a noisy Spaniel barked in the lane. They were alone in paradise, a long way from the past. It was on one of those trips that Avadh proposed again formally. This time Helen said yes.

  It was a big decision: to leave her homeland, her family and her job, in order to travel to a foreign country and become someone’s second wife while the other was still alive, and while there was a child of that marriage. I know she would never have dreamt of breaking up a marriage that had any chance of success, but she had seen first-hand how miserable Avadh was at the thought of returning to Kashi. He had no intention of living with her again, but would have buried himself in his work and become a hermit. So no matter what Helen did, the marriage was over, to all intents and purposes.

  How did she rationalize what she was about to do? There is no simple answer. Divorce had long been a taboo, something that brought shame on families, but attitudes in the UK were gradually changing. A.P. Herbert’s best-selling satirical novel Holy Deadlock, published in 1934, had done much to open up the debate about divorce. After Herbert was elected to Parliament he initiated and helped to pass new divorce legislation in 1937. On a personal level, Helen had seen and experienced so much that had shaken her faith in traditions and institutions. She saw the shambles of her parents’ marriage and, looking back as an adult, realized that there had been some pretty wild behavior amongst her parents’ friends and associates in the old days before they moved to Liverpool. The poverty and turmoil she had experienced, and the loss of her two fiancés contributed to a feeling that she owed little allegiance to the conventions or institutions of English society. Finally, she trusted Avadh totally and believed him when he said she would be accepted in Indian society.

  Helen introduced Avadh to her parents, no doubt with some trepidation. I’m sure she did not tell them that he was already married but racist attitudes were the norm in British society, so they could have objected to the colour of his skin. Her mother’s snobbishness when introduced to Eddie did not augur well but, in fact, the meeting seems to have gone remarkably smoothly: both my grandparents recognized that Avadh was a well-brought-up, civilized and extremely intelligent man. They were pleased to see Helen so happy.

  In the end, I think the decision to marry Avadh was quite an easy one for her. First and foremost, it was very clear that they were deeply in love and had found a strength and depth of bond that neither had experienced before or ever expected to find. Second, Helen had suffered so much heartbreak in the past that she couldn’t voluntarily pass up this chance at happiness. She was thirty years old, which was considered well past the normal ‘marriageable’ age for women, so this could be her last opportunity. Moreove
r, life in post-war England was pretty bleak, with strict rationing still in place, so a fresh start in a faraway country, while scary in some respects, was a risk worth taking.

  Once Helen had decided, there was never any indication that she waivered in her commitment to be with Avadh, no matter what. Of course, she couldn’t tell anyone in Liverpool the whole story but she would only need to keep the secret for a few weeks before she would be gone from England, perhaps forever.

  They planned that Avadh would go to India first, in December 1949. He would find a flat and a servant and establish himself in his new research laboratory before Helen joined him a fortnight later.

  The more challenging hurdles were, first, for Avadh to break the news to his father and brothers that he planned to leave Kashi for good. They almost certainly knew that the marriage was unhappy but in a close, well-respected Indian family, even a progressive one, a positive reaction was hardly assured. And the news that Avadh would be bringing an English bride-to-be was likely to test the mettle of even the most patient and understanding Indian parents and influential older brothers, not to speak of crotchety uncles. English women did not have a great reputation in India at the time. In Thursday’s Child, Helen writes about Ajit’s father’s reaction to his marriage to Peggie:

  ‘I know English women,’ he shouted. ‘I have seen them – painted, loud-mouthed, immodest. They bare their shoulders and legs so that any sweeper can goggle at their charms. They take all from their husbands and give nothing.’

  Might this have reflected Avadh’s family’s initial sentiments? He must have been more worried about it than he let on to Helen at first.

  And then there was the matter of Kashi and her parents. Avadh believed that Kashi was equally unhappy in their marriage and would accept that there was no future for them together. A financial settlement would have to be negotiated between the families and arrangements made for the child’s care, but these did not seem insurmountable problems.