FULL MARKS FOR TRYING Page 4

  Whether it was berries or paper that nearly killed Tessa, she recovered, thank heavens; I don’t know how I would have managed the first part of my life without her and Moira and their jokes and companionship. In Amsterdam there is a bridge over a canal built by two sisters who lived on opposite sides of the water but couldn’t bear to be separated – I understand that completely. Because of my siblings, when I was women’s editor of the Observer back in the 1970s, I once devoted my page to investigating the sisterly relationship – and discovered that not everyone feels as I do. We talked to lots of sisters, including Brigitte Bardot’s, Edith Piaf’s (half-sister) and Glenda Jackson’s (if we were doing the piece now we’d definitely be trying to question Pippa Middleton) – but best of all, we spoke to the famous Mitfords. First I asked Nancy, the eldest, about her relationship with the others, and she said, ‘Sisters stand between you and life’s misfortunes.’ Then I talked to Jessica, the youngest Mitford, living in the US. ‘What did Nancy say?’ she asked. I told her, and she said, ‘But Nancy WAS life’s misfortunes to the rest of us.’

  2

  As I have mentioned before, Tessa’s and my childhood in India was in two parts, with a break in the middle in 1945 when Mum returned to England with us, her three daughters (Moira never went back to India) – and that’s when we were photographed in our grandparents’ garden.

  There was a desperately urgent reason for us to go home then: Mum and Dad had left David, her son, our half-brother, at prep school in England in 1938 when he was ten, expecting to see him two years later. In those days, because of the time it took to travel, military people overseas had a long leave every second year, meaning that, heartbreaking though it was, a two-year separation was more or less normal – but the world war broke out in 1939 and it was not possible for Mum to get back. By 1945, when the fighting in Europe eventually came to an end, Mum had not seen David for SEVEN years and could not wait one more moment: our passages home were booked, despite the fact that the war with Japan continued and that Dad was in Burma and now about to be posted on to the Middle East.

  The saddest event of my childhood was losing my ayah at this time. For some reason (and who knows? maybe they were right) my parents thought that it would be better not to warn Ayah or me in advance that we were about to be separated for ever, so we only found out what was to happen the very morning it did – when the car came to take the family off to the station to begin our journey ‘home’, first to Bombay and then to England, leaving Ayah behind to return to Madras, never to be seen again. Compared to the pain and grief of Mum’s separation from David, the loss of my Ayah-Ma, as I called her, must have seemed fairly insignificant to everyone else, but to me it was a calamity.

  Ayah and I screamed as we were, literally, pulled apart; I can still hear the sound and feel the pain. We had been together for nearly six years: when I was very small I used to lie in the hammock made in her lap by the cotton sari stretched between her knees as she sat cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, while she fed me bits of chapatti dipped in honey. (Little did I know that life could only go downhill from then onwards.) Our parents were hands-on people, but Ayah-Ma had been my support and protector, my dark guardian angel; never bored or cross or critical, because in her eyes I was incapable of doing wrong. I remember her hands more than anything; small and strong, they were far more versatile than European ones: Ayah’s hands could curl round to form a watertight drinking bowl, or they could splash drops of water over you in the bath as efficiently as a shower, or they could become a cloth to wipe away tears or pinch the snot off the end of your nose; her wiry brown fingers could be tweezers, squeezing splinters, or they could be mangles, painfully scraping back and wringing out your hair after it had been washed – or, if she was comforting you, they could be as soft and soothing as a lullaby.

  The voyage home on a troopship called Monarch of Bermuda took just under three weeks and we children were bored and seasick – that smell of vomit combined with engine oil and stale cooking on an old boat turns my stomach to this day – but we must have felt OK occasionally because we got into serious trouble for eating all the chocolate in the emergency ration kits that we had to carry with us at all times, along with our life jackets, in case the ship was torpedoed. We were sent to Sunday School – anything to fill in the hours, I suppose – which we liked because the teacher illustrated Bible stories by moving cut-out felt figures around on a felt board. And there was a huge thrill when our ship passed through the Suez Canal and stopped at Port Said where it was invaded by rather scary conjurors called Gully Gully Men, who did magic tricks which mostly involved producing baby chicks out of your ears or the back of your neck.

  As we neared Liverpool, our mother’s excitement at the thought of her reunion with David (and with her own parents) had infected us all, but life has a way of kicking you in the teeth at moments like these, and our homecoming was a cruel, crushing disappointment. Because the war with Japan was still in full swing then, no one was allowed to mention the names of ships, or dates and times of sailings, for fear of encouraging torpedo attacks. Our parents had had to communicate our arrival details to the family in England in some sort of code, and the code they chose had to do with Grandpa’s birthday: we were arriving six days after it or three days before it, something like that. I don’t know what went wrong but somehow our relatives failed to decipher the message correctly and that meant there were no beaming faces and arms stretched out to welcome Mum and us girls at the docks in Liverpool: no one was there at all. Miserably, we caught the train to Liverpool Street station in London, but there was no one there either. We crossed London to Waterloo to catch the train to Fleet (where my grandparents and David lived) – there was no one at Waterloo, and worst of all, no one at Fleet station when we arrived, and no one at home when we got there except for our slightly bemused grandfather and our four-year-old cousin Simon. All the other relatives had gone to meet us at the wrong time in Liverpool, so poor Mum had to wait several more long hours before the welcoming party of David and our grandmother and aunt and cousins turned up, just as tired and frustrated as we were.

  We spent eighteen months in England living with our grandparents in their Edwardian redbrick house in Fleet. It was called Landour and when I grew older I felt quite ashamed of this (as well as of our tubular metal gate which was made in the shape of a sunburst) because it was obviously Our Land backwards. I only discovered later that it was not that at all – Landour is a small town in India named long ago, presumably by Welsh ex-pats, after the town of Llanddowror. (But the gate remained a gate with a sunburst on it.)

  My grandparents had spent most of their lives in India – he as a railway engineer – but they originally came from Ireland and I didn’t know until recently that they made the decision to retire to Hampshire and not to Dublin because of Irish politics. Three of my four grandparents were Catholics, but my mother’s father came from an Anglo-Irish Protestant family and during the Irish Troubles they were targeted – in fact his cousin’s house in Dublin was burned to the ground. Grandpa decided to take no risks and settled in Fleet where there was a good bridge club. (Perhaps he was right to be fearful: when, in the Fifties, we went back to Ireland on holiday in a car with GB plates, we had clods of earth thrown at us.)

  It was a sad household when we arrived because my Aunt Thea, who lived there too with her children, had lost her husband almost exactly one year before, in the war in Burma: he had been killed in the very last days of the Battle of Kohima, and our young cousins Jinny and Prue and Simon now had no father.

  Everything about England was an unpleasant shock to us ‘Indian’ children with our funny accents and sallow faces: here at ‘home’ in just-post-war, still-rationed, grey, suffering Britain, our new relatives did not seem to be particularly thrilled to see us, and were quite strict. I was aware that they thought we were thoroughly spoiled, and what’s more, unlike them, we had escaped the miseries of the war in England. I cried for India and for Ayah-Ma.


  We especially dreaded the meals – in India we had eaten delicious rice and dhal, and vegetable curry, and something called egg cutlet (or a variation of it, vegetable cutlet – they both still exist in India), and we had tasty snacks like pakoras, and sugar cane to chew, and we feasted on papaya and passion fruit and lychees and guavas and Alphonso mangoes (we used to dry the hairy seeds in the sun to make dolls’ heads: you scraped the fibres off one side of the mango seed and then drew a face on this bald bit, leaving the furry part to be the ‘hair’).

  We were used to delectable Indian sweets made of boiled-down milk and flavoured with cardamom: burfi, gulab jamun or, different but equally delicious, jalebi (deep-fried spirals of crispy batter soaked in syrup) – all the stuff of impossible dreams in England where sugar, milk, butter, eggs and flour were rationed.

  Dad once showed me a tapeworm cyst (cooked and dead) under the skin of some pork in our kitchen in India, but there was no friction at meals except one day when Dad imitated me grabbing the cheese biscuits off the tray when they were handed round, giving all of us a fright, especially Mario, our bearer who was holding the tray. If anything, we were told not to eat too much, not to be greedy (hence the lesson about not grabbing the biscuits). Dad used to tell us about someone called the Rajah of Marmdote (we never knew if he was real or made up) who had Eating Disease which meant he could not resist food. Knowing this, his subjects used to line his driveway as he passed by, all smacking their lips over delicious-looking snacks. ‘Give me a bite of that,’ the rajah would plead. ‘Oh please let me taste – just a tiny mouthful, I beg you . . .’ But his subjects would hold the food away until he offered them huge bribes, and so they all grew rich and happy and the rajah grew very plump.

  Now, here in England, there was nothing nice to eat because of the war and rationing, and our meals seemed to be meat that was gristle and fat, and fish with flabby white skin on one side and even worse flabby grey skin on the other, and we were told to eat it all up and not make a fuss, and certainly not leave anything on our plates. One dish is lodged in my memory: plaice fillets – flabby skin on – rolled and secured with a toothpick, in glutinous white sauce made with margarine and flavoured with Marmite. Simon missed an outing to London Zoo because he refused to eat his fish; he was made to sit in front of it for days, I seem to remember, but he never gave in. Tessa became a vegetarian as soon as she grew up.

  The other horror was that in those days greens seemed to be full of caterpillars and slugs, and even though our mothers used to put the leaves to soak in the sink in salty water to get them out, you could still find them dead in your food or, with salad, walking round your plate. Only the other day AW and I were talking about the awfulness of just-post-war meals; remembering tinned whale meat and greasy Spam fritters set us off thinking how lucky children are now with delicious junk food – oven chips, pizzas, burgers, fish fingers, ketchup, etc. – and with lettuce and broccoli sold in plastic bags with not a slug or maggot or caterpillar in sight.

  In Fleet the concept of actually looking forward to a meal was beyond our imagining, though, to be fair, Tessa and I did love our aunt’s ‘porridge pudding’ made of oats mixed with raw apple, raisins, sugar and milk. (I realise now that she’d invented muesli without knowing it.) And we liked being dosed with a tonic called Parrish’s Food – it was pinky-red and slightly sharp to taste and you had to drink it with a straw (which seemed very sophisticated to us) because otherwise the iron in it stained your teeth black. Come to think of it, we were always being fed with ‘tonics’ in those days – slimy white stuff called Scott’s Emulsion, as well as cod liver oil and malt; and grown-ups seem to have been obsessed by constipation as well, because we were always being asked if we’d done ‘big jobs’ as it was called then, which felt intrusive and embarrassing even at our young ages, and if we hadn’t, we’d be dosed with Syrup of Figs. I never gave my own children any of these things.

  When we got colds we were made to sit at the kitchen table with a towel over our heads, breathing up the steam from a bowl of hot water laced with Friar’s Balsam, which was so boring and uncomfortable we dreaded it. A much cosier memory of being ill is of Mum beside the bed, vigorously shaking the thermometer down, then examining it, and shaking it down again before putting it under our tongues – I still think of this ritual as one of the most comforting of childhood: someone was in charge and would make you better. (Mercury thermometers gave us lots of other pleasure: if they broke you could pour the big drop of cold shiny mercury into a cup and play with it, breaking it into hundreds of tiny droplets which could then be made to join up into one again.)

  After the skimpy outfits we’d worn in India, getting dressed in England seemed a huge effort, with knickers (two pairs: thin white ones under another, thicker, usually coloured, pair), vests, socks, shirts, skirts, jumpers, cardigans, overcoats/raincoats and scarves, plus Clarks sandals that had to be buckled. A girl called Renee was employed, part-time, to look after us and take us for walks but she used to arrange to meet her friends and would chatter to them for hours while we just stood there, cold and bored to death. We couldn’t really complain, though, because our cousins were so much worse off than us, not having their father any more. And, in any case, overriding all the bad and sad things about England was the fact that we had our new family to play with: there were endless thrilling games of Kick-a-Peg (or Forty Forty as it seems to be known now), and I think I had more fun than perhaps at any time since, with Simon and Tessa, pretending that the small mats that were placed in front of the doors in our grandparents’ hallway were ships – we each had one – and that the Edwardian tiled floor was a sea full of sharks. And we played Robin Hood – which was less fun for me as being a bit podgy I was always given the part of Friar Tuck while Simon was Robin, and Tessa (who was/is very pretty) was Maid Marian and got to wear the glittery sequin jacket from the dressing-up box. I ached to wear it but was never allowed to play Maid Marian. (Tessa confessed the other day that she still has it.) Tessa and I had never been friends with a boy before; oddly, though we were all very young and lived together in Landour, we were never bathed together or saw each other naked – I once bribed Simon to show me his willie, not in a rude way, but in the nature of scientific research.

  We had two white mice which Tessa and I decided to keep in a doll’s house we’d been lent to play with (I think Grandpa had made it for our cousins Jinny and Prue). Of course they instantly escaped and were never seen again. Granny was cross and said they would mate with their wild relatives and create a mouse problem.

  We spent some of our leisure time (I suppose it was the equivalent of modern children playing computer games) listening to ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and the story of Sparky and his magic piano on the gramophone. The Sparky story was particularly brilliant because it came on three 78 records which were stacked on to the spindle of the gramophone all together, and then, miraculously, dropped down on to the turntable in order, one by one, at which point the arm holding the needle swung over all by itself to play them. It seemed like the cutting edge of technology for us – well, I suppose it was the cutting edge of technology then. Incidentally, Sparky was a little boy whose piano suddenly came alive and played itself – all Sparky had to do was run his fingers over the keys and the piano would produce a perfect performance of whatever he had announced he would play. Only Sparky knew this secret, everyone else believed he was a child prodigy, and he became famous for his playing, but he also became spoiled and rude and unpleasant, until one terrible day – at Carnegie Hall, in the middle of a concert – the piano tells Sparky that it will no longer play for him and the frantic boy bashes the keys crying, ‘Play, piano, play’ . . . and it all turns out to have been a dream. I mention this because all through my career I have often thought of Sparky – whenever I have managed to write something that I am particularly pleased with, I wonder, secretly, if my typewriter/computer did it for me.

  Our new-found seventeen-year-old brother David was dazzling: handsome and fun
ny and sweet to us; we hero-worshipped him when he came home on holiday from boarding school. He’d built a wooden shack, Ivy Cottage it was called, by the stream at the bottom of my grandparents’ garden and we spent most of the time there, or in our rather taciturn grandfather’s tool shed where he let us ‘help’ make jigsaws with his fretsaw. (Later, after we returned to India, Grandpa, most unexpectedly, sent us a series of thrilling stories he’d written about the adventures of a girl called Briditia – a combination of Brigid and Patricia, my sister Tessa’s real name. They were illustrated by my cousins Jinny and Prue. I am always meaning to try and get them printed for my grandchildren.)

  In the end we became fond of our aunt and our grandmother, who was a bit scatty – she once saw a group of her friends chatting away in the high street in Fleet. As she passed them, she smacked one of them on the bum, saying: ‘Gossip! Gossip! Gossip!’ The women turned round in surprise, and to her horror Granny saw they were total strangers.

  Not long ago, Fleet was nominated as a) one of the best places to live in Britain and b) the town where more sex toys are sold than anywhere else – are a) and b) related? one wonders. In our day, presumably because of its nearness to Aldershot – which used to be known as ‘Home of the British Army’ – Fleet was stuffed with retired Indian Army families like ours who, thankfully, wouldn’t have known a sex toy from a plate of kedgeree – though, to be fair, I don’t think the toys had yet been invented in the 1940s.

  The only notable thing about Fleet then was that there was a genuine patisserie shop, run by a real Frenchwoman called Madame Max (how/why/when did she come to dreary old Fleet? I wish I knew her story). Bread rationing in England was introduced while we were there, in 1946, and you could only buy the meagre amounts of bread (or cakes, I suppose) that you had coupons for in your ration book; when he was at home Granny used to send David up to Madame Max pretending he’d lost the coupons to try and wheedle some extra treats – he was always sent back empty-handed.