Daughter of Empire

by Pamela Hicks

  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.

  The tent opened my eyes to the poverty and need of the local people, and from the first moment I walked into the overpoweringly hot, dank clinic, I was overwhelmed by the work. Crowds of people queued outside from morning until night, and we saw everything from cuts and bruises to smallpox and TB. The more serious cases we had to send on to the Delhi hospital, but we managed to treat a wide range ourselves, many more than the hospital’s outpatient departments. The male doctors were forbidden to examine Muslim women, so I would have to bury my head under their burkas and describe what I could see. There was no time to be shocked, though I found the riot-inflicted wounds made by the Sikhs’ short curved swords – their kirpans – horrific. A less arduous task was to dole out pills and potions prescribed by the doctors. One small boy walked miles on a regular basis to collect pills for his family, and I worried that he didn’t fully understand which were for what. Some of the young women were given coloured bead necklaces to demonstrate on which days of the month it was safe to have intercourse – a very elementary method of birth control. We were unsure of their effectiveness and suspected the necklaces ended up being worn as a pretty ornament.

  By the end of April, the unrest in the north-east of India resulted in intense rioting, towns and villages in the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) being pillaged and burned down. Hindu and Sikh refugees were streaming out of the area, and my parents decided they needed to see t
he scale of the problem for themselves. We flew up to Peshawar on the border of India and Afghanistan to be met by the governor of the NWFP, Sir Olaf Caroe. He told my father that a large, angry crowd of between sixty and one hundred thousand Muslim League Pathans had assembled in the town to meet the Viceroy with their demands. There was a rumour that they intended to kill him. Sir Olaf asked my parents not to go as he could not guarantee their safety, but they were not to be dissuaded – though I was firmly instructed to remain behind in Government House.

  My parents went on ahead and climbed up the embankment of the railway to look down on the chanting mob of thousands. Then my father took my mother’s hand and they picked their way over the steep rocky ground towards the crowd. Incredibly, the sight of a small white woman coming towards them – perhaps also because both my parents were wearing their jungle-green suits, green being the holy colour of the Pathans – seemed to quell their anger. My father saluted the people and suddenly the cries of ‘Pakistan Zindabad!’ (Long live Pakistan!) subsided. He had succeeded in turning a crisis into an opportunity, much to the relief of the governor and his staff. And positive news of this turnaround must have travelled ahead, for the next day we were able to drive up the Khyber Pass to the Afghani frontier to attend a jirga of three hundred chiefs of the Afridi tribe. The drive was the most extraordinary of my life – wherever I looked on the skyline there were men on crags with rifles slung over their shoulders. My father said that the Afridis asked more pertinent and demanding questions of him than had been posed at any press conference.

  On the third day of our trip, we flew to Rawalpindi in the Punjab and travelled on to survey the damage inflicted on the ransacked towns. Kahuta had been burned to the ground, and everyone we met told the most heart-rending stories of internecine violence that stood comparison with any of the worst atrocities of the Second World War. My father wrote that the visit to Kahuta brought home the ‘magnitude of the horrors’ of the unrest. This was one of only two trips that my father would be able to make to witness the problems at first hand before independence, but for my mother it was the first of many, and she would undertake such trips for the rest of her life. The next day she took me to visit the Sikh refugee camp at Wah, and I saw for myself what horrors and indignity the newly inflamed religious intolerance could do to former neighbours. Gangs of marauding Muslims had forcibly humiliated the Sikhs by shaving their heads, making them break one of their five sacred oaths. The weeping victims who fell to kiss my mother’s feet when we arrived, begging for help and showing us their scarred heads, were among the most distressing things I had ever seen. Later, we were to be deluged with equally dreadful stories from displaced Muslims, and I could see how people on each side were both victims and perpetrators.

  By the beginning of May, my father felt he had seen enough. There could be no further delay to independence. He sent Lord Ismay back to London to deliver the ‘Mountbatten Plan’ to the government. The brief hiatus after he left revealed the depths of my parents’ exhaustion. It was only a little more than two months since my mother had undergone a partial hysterectomy and, since we had arrived in India, she had not stopped. Likewise, my father had been working seventeen-hour days for over six weeks. When and if the British government approved his plans for the handover of power, my parents were going to need all the energy they could muster to see them through. I was relieved and grateful when it was decided we should have a few days off in Simla before the onslaught began.

  10

  Being up in the cool hills of Simla, more than seven thousand feet above sea level, amid fragrant woods of pine and deodar, was both relaxing and reinvigorating, and while my mother thought the house ‘hideous, bogus English Baronial. Hollywood’s idea of a Vice Regal Lodge’, I found it rather appealing, with its beautiful lawns and extraordinary views. I could feel my lungs filling with clean, fresh air as I began to unwind from the last few frenetic weeks. Taking afternoon tea with my parents on the lawn in front of the stunning arched veranda, looking down through the verdant, lush woods and watching little black monkeys jump across the trees, made me realise how much I was enjoying this time in India with them.

  Nothing better illustrated the complications of our new life than my father’s conversation with Douglas Currie, his Military Secretary. When he had told him of his intention to take a short break at Viceregal Lodge the following week, Douglas held up his hands, saying that this would be ‘totally impossible to organise in less than a month’. When my father replied that there would be only five in our party – he intended to invite Pandit Nehru and Krishna Menon to stay for a few days – and we would therefore need only a skeleton staff, Douglas had still looked perturbed. When my father then suggested that he just book us into a hotel to save any to-do, Douglas was so shocked that within a few hours the whole viceregal staff had gone into overdrive, rising to every challenge to enable the impossible to happen, the result of which was that now we were here, three people, waiting for two guests, attended by 180 servants. ‘If this is what Douglas calls a skeleton staff, then no wonder we are in a mess,’ remarked my father.

  We settled into a routine: while my father attended to his papers during the day, my mother and I explored the surrounding hillsides, chatting as we walked, and then in the evening the three of us walked down into the town. My mother had banned us from taking the viceregal rickshaws after our first ride, regarding this as utterly degrading for the rickshaw coolies, and mortified at the idea of riding in a vehicle pulled by human beings. The viceregal coolies in their smart uniforms were bewildered. Once in town, we mingled with members of the British Colony, shopping along ‘The Mall’, and most delightfully for me we went to a performance of the famous Simla Amateur Dramatic Club. It was a well-earned contrast from the whirl of our lives in Delhi.

  After a few days Pandit Nehru arrived. He was such an interesting and amusing companion, so at ease with us and eager for us to be at ease with him, and like everyone else we were soon calling him Panditji. Soon afterwards Krishna Menon arrived. He was a long-standing friend of Pandit Nehru and acted as his special representative. He had also been Labour councillor for the London Borough of St Pancras for several years. The following day Panditji gave us a yoga demonstration, finishing with a flourish. ‘And this’, he said, standing on his head and beaming at us upside down, ‘is how I attempt to solve India’s problems every morning.’ Within seconds of being up the right way, he had all four of us in different yoga positions on the floor. ‘You see, Pammy,’ he advised, ‘you will find that yoga is good for all manner of things.’ I noticed that he used that phrase ‘all manner of things’ so much that it wasn’t long before I nicknamed him ‘AMOT’, which didn’t appear to irk Panditji. My father disapproved, however, so I dropped it. It was good to get to know Krishna Menon better. He had kindly sent me a copy of Nehru’s book The Discovery of India, keen for me to familiarise myself with Nehru’s wisdom. Krishna looked alarmingly like Mephistopheles and had that Indian way of telling you exactly what he thought without, as the English were apt to do, hiding his true feelings for the sake of manners. He and Nehru spent most of the small hours of the night in furious political discussion.

  In a flash, our time in the hills was over and my mother flew off on a tour of inspection of the riot areas while my father and I returned to Delhi, which felt like a furnace from the moment we landed. The heat in the shade was 113°F, in the sun anything up to 150°. But we returned to good news – Lord Ismay’s visit to London had yielded a positive response and so, on my mother’s return, my parents left for London for discussions regarding my father’s proposals. Meanwhile the founder of the Caravan of India – a non-denominational, non-political youth organisation actively involved in welfare work – had asked me to open their summer bazaar and funfair. While I was perfectly happy to be involved, I was absolutely stiff with fear at the prospect of making my first speech in public. When the day came, I arrived having had little sleep, and feeling hot and bothered in my white gloves and li
ttle white hat. I took a deep breath, tried to conjure up the most useful tips on public speaking from Miss Faunce and launched into my speech. My mouth was dry and my heart was thumping, I forgot huge chunks of it and I probably sounded a little too relieved as I hurtled to the end, but as soon as I said ‘. . . and so I pronounce this bazaar officially open’, there was much kind applause. I looked at the encouraging faces around me as I cut the ribbon and breathed a sigh of relief: my first, most terrifying speaking engagement was over.

  While my parents were in England, the senior governor, Sir John Colville, governor of Bombay, came to stand in for my father. He and his wife took me to a party given by Panditji. I was honoured to find myself seated next to our host, and as he was keen to hear my experiences of India so far, I told him how much I had learned from his book. He asked me whether I had read his Glimpses of World History or the book of letters he had written for his daughter Indira when she was a child, but as they were both unobtainable, I had to say that I hadn’t. A couple of days later a parcel arrived containing both books and a note: ‘Do not think that you must read through the 900-odd pages of the History, that is enough to depress any person. If and when you are in the mood for it, you can just dip in where you like.’ I was so touched and proud that he had thought to send the books to me.

  My parents returned at the end of May, now proud grandparents. They told me that Lilibet and Cousin Philip were soon to announce their engagement and they were going to ask me to be a bridesmaid. But, most importantly, they said that both Attlee’s cabinet and Churchill’s Opposition had approved the ‘Mountbatten Plan’.