India Remembered

by India Hicks

  The Governor’s Conference

  The Governors arrived at the conference from all over India to give their first-hand reports to my father of the situation on the ground. Their reports made depressing reading. They came from Bombay, Madras, Punjab, Sind, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, Assam, Central Province, the North Western Frontier – only the Governor of Bengal was missing through illness. Apart from Assam, whose report was comparatively benign, my father learned from Sir Evan Jenkins that the Punjab situation was critical; from Bengal’s report, that there was great agitation; and from Sir Olaf Caroe, who Campbell-Johnson recorded as ‘tense and tired’, that the NWFP was on the point of crisis.

  Monday 14th April

  Through the day Governors and their wives arrived to stay for conferences. The muddle over who an HE referred to was appalling and they were all very apt to try to swoop through doorways first! Some of them were really very sweet but two of the wives have already fought like cats and dogs much to everyone’s enjoyment.

  I went with Mummy to see the Allied Forces Canteen, Felicity used to work there sometimes and I am going to try to also.

  Mr Krishna Menon has sent me a signed copy of Pandit Nehru’s book The Discovery of India which is rather exciting.

  The conference started on the 15th my mother corralled the Governors’ wives into a conference of their own – with little exception she was shocked and disappointed in how little they knew or had been involved in the crisis.

  ‘Even the quieter provinces feel that we

  are sitting on the edge of a volcano.’

  Mountbatten’s report after the conference

  My parents had been brought up to have a very inclusive and international attitude to society which is why we found it easy to embrace Indian life so quickly. Not so with some others.

  Tuesday 15th April

  I went to the most extraordinary cocktail party given by Lady Tymms full of horrifying specimens and swarms of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ type who bombarded me with indignant demands as to why I hadn’t been out with hounds every morning since my arrival?!

  Wednesday 16th April

  …hauled back from swimming pool after lunch for a group photograph taken with the Governors and Governors’ wives, and all of us looking as silly as in any group photograph.

  Thursday 17th April

  The three Indian ADCs have arrived and seem very nice and quite unimpressed by the general turmoil!

  My mother, having appraised the house and the staff, now invested her attention in understanding and going about improving conditions where she could on the Estate.

  1st April: The Tibetan Mission at Viceroy’s House.

  16th April: All India Governors’ Conference – the Governors and their wives.

  Friday 18th April

  I went with Mummy to see the primary school on the Estate.

  Saturday 19th April

  It sounds very important but rather alarming being eighteen. I was thoroughly spoilt and given the most wonderful presents including a miniature Star of India from Daddy, very exciting and the only one in existence, and also a most extraordinary but rather intoxicating parrot by the ADCs.

  Sunday 20th April

  The most awful part of one’s time is spent in writing these wretched diaries. All of us, except Daddy, have it perpetually hanging over us and yet the moment one gives up one regrets it!

  Monday 21st April

  We gave a garden party for all those on the Viceregal establishment. We were about four hundred but that did not include any of the three hundred and fifty indoor servants or any of the PW-W [the Public Works Department], merely the various heads of the departments. There are something like seven thousand people living on the Estate connected with the Establishment.

  Tuesday 22nd April

  I went all round the Bodyguard with Paddy Massey and saw all the horses, the carriages, cattle, classrooms, and in fact the entire establishment and it really was fascinating. At the moment in its much reduced state, it consists of about one hundred and twenty men and sixty-three horses. They really are the most magnificent sight in their full regalia.

  Wednesday 23rd April

  I went with Mummy to see the Wavell Canteen which serves the troops passing through the railway station in transit. We also went to Auchinlock Auamgah which is the corresponding canteen for the Indian troops. Indians are theoretically provided for in both the Allied and Wavell Canteens but their pay is not sufficient to compete with centres for the other troops.

  Friday 25th April

  I went with Mummy to see the quarters of the families of the bodyguard officers and linesmen, the clinic and the dispensary. All the women were in purdah (which luckily got rid of all our procession!). Their homes are too beautifully kept and they really are lovely girls, several had their wedding dresses on for the occasion.

  The syces quarters are quite horrifying.

  I began to work at the Allied Forces Canteen which gets continuous mention in my diaries. But, encouraged by my parents, I also started to work at a makeshift tented clinic and dispensary and continued to visit schools and hospitals with my mother. The Clinic had been set up in Delhi to treat poor people and the villagers who either could not afford proper medical treatment or would not be persuaded to go near a proper hospital.

  We treated every kind of case from smallpox and TB – which of course, one could really only diagnose and then send on to hospital – to prickly heat, boils, and the usual eye, nose and throat troubles and cuts and bruises. There were always crowds of patients and although we really knew nothing of nursing it was extraordinary how much, and how quickly, one could pick things up in necessity. There were often some very gruesome sights but when one was actually treating someone it no longer seemed as horrible as one had imagined.

  28th April: Going to confront 100,000 militant Pathans advancing on Government House at Peshawar.

  Saturday 26th April

  I went on to the Allied Forces Canteen where I am working two evenings a week from five to seven. I do the milk shakes (eight flavours and very complicated!).

  Sunday 27th April

  I went to see Lady Shone about working in the clinic and dispensary she and Lady Smith and Mrs Thorat run to give free treatment to the Indians, both at the clinic and touring around the villages.

  Started packing for the short tour we are going on to the NWFP and the Punjab, as a result of the recent disturbances.

  We gave a quiet garden party for the students from the Lady Irwin College, the College of Nursing, the Lady Reading Health School and the Lady Hardinge Medical College. There were about six hundred girls and staff.

  Riots in the North West Frontier Province and the Punjab

  The trip to Peshawar was typical of my parents’ imperative need to organise and see for themselves, especially for my mother. For my father this was to be only one of two chances he would have to assess this volatile situation with his own eyes before the transfer of power. For my mother this was the first of endless trips.

  Monday 28th April

  We left in the York and flew to Peshawar, arriving at Government House just before lunch. Mummy and Daddy went immediately on arrival to see a crowd of Leaguers who had assembled from all over the Province to see them, and numbered between sixty and a hundred thousand. Today Daddy received about 179 telegrams, 760 letters and 2,340 postcards!

  The riots had been horrifically intense and my parents thought they must go to Peshawar, and of course I went too. But I wasn’t allowed to meet the crowd of angry Pathans that had accumulated once they had wind of their impending visit. I was made to sit in Government House. The Governor and indeed everyone was acutely aware of the fact that my parents could be killed. Alan Campbell-Johnson describes the scene: ‘Lady Mountbatten insisted on going with [her husband]. The crowd confronting us was certainly formidable. We climbed up the railway embankment... and looked down upon a vast concourse. There was much gesticulation… and a steady chant
of ‘Pakistan Zindabad.’ My father, unabashed and fearless, strode ahead.

  What these tribesmen saw was this small white woman holding her tall husband’s hand, luckily wearing jungle green, the Pathans’ holy colour. It was a terribly dramatic moment. There was no time for fear. My mother always said, ‘There’s no time for that darling!’, and ‘that’ covered fear, pain and even protection at some junctures. And at times she was experiencing incredible personal suffering. She had had a major operation only a few weeks before we left for India and she suffered badly from ‘neuralgia’ (exacerbated by plane flights), which I now realise must have been migraines. But she never complained at all – her diary records all of her missions with a few added comments like ‘feeling like death’ but it didn’t stop her.

  Indeed she did work herself to death ten years later. She had been told that if she kept up the hard work she would be dead within three months, and she died of heart failure in Borneo. She had forbidden her doctor to warn the family.

  29th April: Afridi Tribes’ last Viceregal Jirga, in the Khyber Pass.

  29th April: Inspecting riot devastation in Kahutal accompanied byJenkins, the Governor of the Punjab.

  I wrote to my friend Mary about this trip: ‘We had five days in the North West Frontier and the Punjab touring round the refugee camps and burnt-out villages, but we were able to go up the Khyber Pass that leads into Afghanistan. The tribesmen of the Afridi and the other tribes up there really are remarkable looking people but rather alarming in habits. Complete tribal law prevails in the territory and comes under no Government jurisdiction.’ At the local jirga [an assembly of village elders] my father said that he was asked far more difficult questions than at any press conference. The Alfidis were so astute and really put him on the spot.

  Tuesday 29th April

  We drove up the Khyber Pass to within view of the frontier of Afghanistan. It really was thrilling and not at all disappointing, but complete with men perched on crags on the skyline with revolvers and rifles slung all over them and wearing pyjamad uniforms. Then there was a Jirga of three hundred chiefs of the Afridis at Landi Kotal. After lunch we flew to Rawalpindi in the Punjab. We went to see Kahutal, one of the typical small towns which have now been completely burned down and destroyed by the Muslims, and the surviving Sikhs and Hindus have now fled. The tales they tell compare with the worst atrocities of the War.

  ‘Until I went to Kahutal I had not appreciated

  the magnitude of the horrors that are going on.’

  Louis Mountbatten, April 1947

  Wednesday 30th April

  Mummy and I left at six-thirty this morning to visit the refugee camp at Wah where over eight thousand Sikhs have now taken refuge, the remaining survivors of the Hindu population of the sacked villages. They have been through undeniably ghastly experiences. They have nothing to do all day but bemoan their fate. Our visit provoked mass weeping and wailing, with people kissing Mummy’s feet and showing all their scars, or their shaven heads, which of course to a Sikh means the breaking of one of the sacred five K’s through the weakness of his spirit [a terrible dishonour for a Sikh]. All sides exaggerate, it is almost impossible to judge clearly.

  I returned to Delhi with Daddy.

  Mummy stays on two more days to visit Lahore, Tonk and Amritsar.

  Brief Respite:

  May 1947

  By the beginning of May we had been in New Delhi for a little over a month and every minute of the day had been filled – with assessments of the situation; conferences with Governors and Indian leaders; journeying to the riot grounds of the North West; accompanying my parents on endless tours of schools, hospitals and exhibitions; not to mention the normal ‘Viceregal workload’ of entertaining both international and domestic visitors who had nothing to do with the machinations of the political moment. I was also working at the canteen and the dispensary. My father had achieved in six weeks what had not been achieved in previous Viceregal tenures – a plan which offered the British an exit from India, and he had broken the deadlock between the major Indian political leaders. Pug Ismay was dispatched to London with the plan and we realised that we were all very tired.

  A treat for Mizzen. The kitmagar does not approve.

  Thursday 1st May

  There was one of the usual lunch parties of about twenty but as Mummy was away I had to act as hostess which was rather alarming.

  Friday 2nd May

  We saw the Governor of Bengal, who has been staying here to see Daddy off. He is extremely ill with Bengal rot [and hence was not able to attend the Governor’s Conference the previous month].

  I went to meet Mummy at the airport as she had come back early having been unable to land at Multaan owing to bad visibility. She had been very ill on the trip with bad neuralgia and general upset, and as Daddy also is only just recovering from a bad go of Delhi belly it has been decided to spend next week in Simla which should be rather fun. However, as with almost everything the move is causing terrible headaches in organisation.

  The truth was that my parents were exhausted. After so much work my father had dispatched Ismay to London to see the Cabinet with the proposed Mountbatten Plan for the transfer of power. He had been working to 1am (later in crises) and reading until 2 or 3am. We would then ride at 6.30am each morning before it got too hot – as this was one of the only chances to spend family time together and it also gave my father a chance to let off some steam. But this hard scheduling was beginning to take its toll. My father wrote in a letter dated 2nd May, to my sister Patricia: ‘After averaging 17 hours a day for 6 weeks I’m just about worn out and must recuperate before meetings have to start on Pug’s return.’ It was also getting unbelievably hot.

  We wanted to go to Viceregal Lodge in Simla in the Himalayas for just a few days. My father said to Colonel Douglas Currie (the military secretary who was responsible for the movements of the household), ‘I’ve decided that Her Ex and Pammy and I are going to go up to Viceregal Lodge and we’ll only have two guests. That’ll be Pandit Nehru and Krishna Menon I think.’ And Douglas said ‘I’m awfully sorry but it’s out of the question. It would take me at least a month of organising for you to go up there.’ My father said ‘Well Douglas look, we’re not going to give any garden parties. We’re not going to give any formal dinners. We need a skeleton staff. Really it is just the five of us.’ So Douglas said, ‘Well even so your Excellency, I mean, if you knew the amount of work that goes into it.’ My father said, ‘Oh well Douglas, very well, don’t worry. Book us into a hotel.’ But we did go within a week. And when we arrived, I think my father asked what ‘the skeleton staff ’ we brought with us amounted to and I’ve never forgotten the answer: it was 180.

  Daddy invited Nehru and Krishna Menon to come and stay with us – as relaxed guests for walking expeditions.

  Saturday 3rd May

  …there was a big lunch party… then on to the Canteen.

  Sunday 4th May

  Daddy was not feeling too well so Mummy and Peter [Murphy] and I had lunch alone at the pool.

  Peter was one of my father’s oldest friends, they met while at Cambridge university. He was an excellent pianist, a marvellous raconteur and he had a brilliant brain.

  Monday 5th May

  I went to the Clinic for the first time. One really does see the most gruesome cases but when one is really face to face with them they never seem as horrible as one would have imagined… They are all so pathetically grateful. They treat cases that really no one who is not completely qualified ought to touch, but one is willing to take the risk when one knows that there is almost no hope of getting any other help. I saw my first case of smallpox on a baby who was brought in.

  Viceregal Lodge, Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas.

  Tuesday 6th May

  After lunch we all left for Simla, flying to Ambala (a horrible bumpy trip) and then four hours up the mountains to Simla which is about 7,000 feet up.

  Viceregal Lodge is a sort of Scottish baronia
l manor or castle spoilt by thousands of little additions like statues and stone doves, but really quite comfortable and well done-up with some lovely state rooms.

  My mother wrote in her diary, ‘House hideous. Bogus English Baronial. Hollywood’s idea of Vice Regal Lodge.’ I had no idea what it would look like. It was very large, albeit dwarfed by Viceroy’s House in Delhi. The décor was really rich. The rooms weren’t as large and as lavish as those at Viceroy’s House. Of course it was not cosy. But it was beautiful and had lovely lawns. And you could play croquet and the strange things that we never actually found we had time to do. We saw much more of the British colony than one would have done in Delhi because lots of them had retired up there, or they were the wives and families who had escaped the heat.

  But it was lovely to be there. You drove up through the mountains. Half-way up, the air begins to get fresh, and by the time you’re right up at 7,000 feet, it’s marvellously cool. And life is transformed.

  Another thing my mother very much disapproved of was, of course, the Vice Regal rickshaws. They had uniformed runners, and my mother could not bear the thought of riding in a vehicle that was pulled by human beings. She was mortified. I think we had one ride with her before she said she was never getting into ‘that thing again’. Of course this came as a great disappointment to the rickshaw coolies!

  Wednesday 7th May

  The air here is wonderful and one really does feel so energetic and well.

  The scenery is quite lovely… We went for a walk through the woods. It is alright going down but one forgets that one has got to come up again and the paths are really terribly steep.

  We all got terribly sunburned since although it is quite cold compared with Delhi the mountain sun is very strong.