by Pamela Hicks
At last, on 20 March 1947, my parents and I drove down to Northolt in a royal car bulging with bodies, bags and dogs, closely followed by a bunch of well-wishers. We posed for the press in front of the old York aircraft, and as the flashlights popped and I looked over to my waving sister, I thought back to the photographers at JFK when I had left New York and how all that now seemed like a lifetime ago.
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The cabin of the York was not pressurised, and as the plane bucked and fell among the air pockets, I was dreadfully sick. Landing in Delhi, my first impression was of heat and haze. I had only a few moments to pull myself together, put on my hat and gloves and hope that I looked presentable for the waiting photographers. My parents left the plane first and I followed, reeling slightly into the heat and wondering if I should risk making my white gloves grubby by wiping the dust off my face before I shook hands with the great many people awaiting us.
I went ahead with the staff in the cars and as we arrived at Viceroy’s House, the sight of the dismounted members of the bodyguard on each of the wide imposing steps took my breath away. They were all Sikhs, tall, handsome, bearded men, resplendent in their black and gold turbans, scarlet uniforms with white breeches and shiny black thigh boots. I curtsied to Lord and Lady Wavell and was introduced to their daughter Felicity, then watched as my parents arrived in a state landau escorted by the mounted Viceregal Bodyguard.
As was traditional, we had only one evening with the Wavells before they departed. I could do little but listen as Felicity brought me all her files then began: ‘The Viceroy’s House compound houses five hundred and fifty-five domestic servants, drivers, gardeners, electricians and grooms together with their families, so the compound holds around five thousand in total and we have a school and you will have to be the chief visitor for the school. And there is a clinic . . .’ Furthermore, I was to succeed Felicity as the president of the Lady Noyce School for the Deaf and Dumb, which taught about seventy children aged between six and eighteen, who, without the protection of the school, would be unwanted and helpless. More files were banged down in front of me. It transpired that Felicity also worked part time at a canteen for the Allied forces. ‘But’, she said, ‘that’s all fairly straightforward so I’m sure you can work that one out for yourself.’ I could only smile politely. Felicity, in her twenties and recently married, seemed well equipped to cope with all these responsibilities, but I wasn’t sure about any of it. Fresh out of school, not yet eighteen, with no training or skills beyond typing and speedwriting, I felt somewhat out of my depth. And she hadn’t even mentioned all the student leaders who were about to be released from prison whom my father wanted me to contact.
India was on high alert, tense and fractious. The tragic violence of three days of rioting that followed Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 had left over twenty thousand dead on the streets of Calcutta, Muslim and Hindu alike. The background was complex. India had long wanted self-government. Ever since British rule had weakened during the First World War, and following his return from South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi had convinced much of the population to push for independence through non-violent disobedience, which had, until now, been very effective. The Muslim League had been agitating for a sovereign state for all Muslims – to be called Pakistan – since 1933. The British had been loath to lose India, but during the Second World War they had been forced to go begging to the country for help. In 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps had been sent with an offer to Gandhi: Britain would grant India the status of a self-governing dominion after the war if India were to support the Allied effort. Gandhi had refused – it was immediate independence or nothing – and stalemate ensued. Meanwhile, his Quit India Campaign was gaining momentum, and with India’s rising expectations came mounting tensions, culminating in the riots, following which Mr Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, strengthened his calls for the creation of Pakistan. Churchill had forbidden Lord Wavell even to talk to Gandhi, so his influence had been severely limited. After the riots, Attlee decided that independence could no longer be postponed but he needed a new Viceroy to see it through. According to the prime minister, my father was the right man: ‘an extremely lively, exciting personality’ with ‘an extraordinary faculty for getting on with all kinds of people . . . blessed with a very unusual wife’.
So, unlike any other incoming viceregal family, we were not there to uphold the laws and traditions of the Empire but to dismantle them. The swearing-in ceremony was short but impressive. It took place in the Durbar Hall, and my parents processed in to the flash of photographers’ bulbs as if they were film stars – which they could have been as they looked so handsome together, my father in white full dress naval uniform and my mother in a long slim white dress. The new Viceroy and Vicereine took their places on the thrones but immediately seemed to be dwarfed by the surrounding pageantry and architecture. I sat watching, amazed to think that only four days before we had been bustling about the freezing, grey streets of a post-war London in the grip of austerity. I recalled Yola’s story about my mother’s encounter at a ball in the 1930s with a fortune-teller who told her: ‘One day you will be sitting on a throne, not an ordinary throne but a real throne nonetheless.’ At the time, my mother had dismissed this as ‘absolute bunkum’.
The tour of our new home, Viceroy’s House, took over two hours to complete. Our bedrooms and private sitting rooms were so far from the dining room that you had to allow ten minutes to get there. I soon realised that the house, Luytens’ masterpiece, was like a hotel in which you might never see the other guests who were staying. In fact Patricia had warned me of this as she had visited my father while he was staying there during the war. She had had great fun with the ADCs, and they had asked her whether she wanted to stay on for a bit. When she said that the Viceroy hadn’t invited her, they told her not to worry, he would never know.
But even if you were unlikely to come across other guests, you were never exactly alone as there were so many servants milling around, with their precise tasks and roles. All the staff were male and all wore the headgear denoting their rank, as well as the Viceroy’s personal badge on their chests. I soon learned to distinguish between them: the bearers were the personal servants who wore dark blue in winter and white in summer, always with white turbans; kitmagars waited at table; abdars were the butlers and wine waiters (at dinner parties I loved to watch the head abdar raise his hands to either side of his turban as a signal for the serving of the meal to begin); the chaprasis ran messages and looked after the offices; the syces looked after our horses; the dhobis did the laundry; the Mughs from South India did the cooking, and I was surprised to discover there was a chicken cleaner who did nothing other than prepare chickens for cooking. Small boys in spotless white uniforms and caps acted as ballboys at the tennis courts and there was a whole team of drivers to service and chauffeur the viceregal cars. A position on the viceregal domestic staff ran in families and was highly prized, with periods of service ranging from fifteen to thirty-five years or more, and the service was faultless. My father, who would write himself memos and leave them on the floor of his study so that he would be sure to see them, was utterly thwarted by the efficiency of the servants, who would instantly throw away anything so untidy. Apart from a large number of outdoor gardeners there were twenty-five indoor gardeners to attend to the flower arrangements.
I had never had a lady’s maid, let alone a man, to look after me, but I inherited Leela Nand, Felicity’s bearer. When he said matter-of-factly: ‘Last lady much taller,’ my heart sank. But then he smiled and his eyes danced and I saw in that instant that there was hope for us. He was charming, as wrinkled and brown as a walnut, and it became clear as he bounded around the room with such energy and enthusiasm that walking was not an option for him. Everything he did was accompanied by giggles, sudden sulks or even disturbing outbursts of tears. He wasn’t always talkative, but when he did start, it would be a long while before he finished. My height was apparently not my only shortcoming. A couple
of days later I was desperately searching for something that he had secreted in the most unlikely of places and he asked me whether I was going to box his ears. When I looked surprised and said: ‘No, of course not, Leela Nand,’ he seemed quite affronted. ‘Viceroy’s daughter should,’ he said. After a few days, however, we began to understand each other, and within a few weeks, the delightful and ever-present Leela Nand had become the most familiar element of my new life in India.
Leela Nand sewed beautifully and all my clothes were mended whether they needed to be or not. His special pride was darning. One morning he showed me the heel of a white tennis sock. I gazed at it with what I hoped passed for an expression of profound admiration, then I chose my words with care. ‘That’s beautiful work, Leela Nand. It must have taken you hours to do.’ I paused, and then with mounting courage continued: ‘But don’t you think it might have been better if you had used white cotton instead of red?’ He looked at me, troubled by my stupidity, and said, very gently: ‘But no one could have seen it if I had done it in white.’
They were all great characters. My father’s Muslim bearer, Wahid Beg, was an avid reader. He had been taught to read English and he read everything there was to read, including the telephone directory. As this took a while, and my father often came into the room to find him sitting cross-legged on the floor, completely absorbed in a list of local names and addresses, Wahid Beg was always careful to put a marker in place before closing the book.
On the first evening after the Wavell party had left my mother took me sightseeing to Humayun’s tomb, a sixteenth-century red sandstone Mughal mausoleum. She pointed out how much things had changed since she had become engaged to my father at the Viceregal Lodge in 1922. In the intervening years, New Delhi had been designed and built together with Viceroy’s House, where we now lived, eight miles from Old Delhi. The contrast between the widely spaced houses and government buildings, arches and parks of New Delhi and the noise, colour and diversity of Old Delhi, crowded with bullock carts, holy cows, horse-drawn tongas and thousands of bicycles that brought traffic to a near-standstill, could not have been greater. For the first time too I was witnessing the vastly contrasting scales of poverty and wealth in this country – the grandeur of the Viceroy’s household somewhat alarming in its extravagance.
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.
