India Remembered Read online

  In the day, Neola liked to ride on my shoulder or round the back of my neck. I’d be inclined to wander around my room, not realising that Neola was on the furniture about to jump onto me and I’d move away and there would be a little thump on the ground behind me as Neola missed his landing stage. They’re like dogs in that they love being in company and with people, but they’re like cats in that they do not accept discipline, so Neola and I did have quite a few rows but there was nothing you could do to chastise a mongoose. If you used two fingers you squashed him flat. There’d be a row and then he would bring a peace offering and I’d be sitting reading a book and suddenly he’d jump up on my lap with it. Of course it was something like a cockroach and I hadn’t the heart not to be very appreciative of the offering.

  My parrot and my mother’s dog were probably a nuisance for the servants who couldn’t find a lowly enough sweeper to clear up after them. As Vicereine my mother once had a big dinner party for about sixty people. She was all dressed up in her long dress and her long white gloves and her jewels when she noticed that her dog Mizzen had had an accident in the corner. She said to her bearer, ‘Oh look would you be kind, you see my dog has had an accident. Would you, could you, clear it up because I’m going in.’ It was perfectly apparent to her that he was not going to clear the mess up. He said ‘Lady Sahib, I will find someone.’ And nobody came and nobody came and nobody came. At least ten minutes went by. And of course they were unable to find somebody lowly enough to clear up a dog poo. My mother was so desperate that of course she got down on her knees and cleared it up herself.

  The ADCs gave me my parrot, which they then stole back to have in a treasure hunt. He was called Eustace because he was so useless. He was one of the objects of the treasure hunt which annoyed me so much when I discovered what they’d done. After the treasure hunt, knowing that I would be annoyed, they thought they’d console the parrot by giving him cherries dipped in Drambuie, because they were all tipsy by then. The parrot was so drunk, he fell off his perch. Poor useless Eustace.

  The mongoose was less of a problem because they are official pets – the only pets allowed in the jails. Nehru said he always had one when he was in prison and the wild ones would come in because they would be fed. As prisoners were allowed to keep mongooses in prison I think the staff assumed that even though we weren’t in prison, we were allowed to have a mongoose.

  After India

  I have been fortunate in that many of my Indian friends continue to visit London, where I can see them. I returned to India three or four times with my mother. On one of these visits my mother and I were alone with Panditji when Dr Martin Luther King and his wife came to dinner. Dr King eagerly questioned Panditji about Mahatma Gandhi and I remember him saying what he thought Gandhi would have done if he had been alive on a recent occasion. Panditji gently pointed out that Gandhi would have been pragmatic and that he would probably have acted differently, to meet the demands of a situation arising ten years on in time. Another time we dined alone with him and Eartha Kitt. I accompanied my father to the funeral of Panditji and then that of his successor, Shastri.

  My father returned to India several times in his capacity as First Sea Lord and then as Chief of the Defence Staff and was delighted to accompany the present Prince of Wales on his first visit. When my father became Governor-General after Partition and the ruling Princes had acceded to either India or Pakistan, he encouraged them to offer their services to the new Heads of Government. The Maharaja of Jaipur became Ambassador to Spain and then Rajpramukh of Rajastan.

  A couple of years after I married David Hicks in 1960, we went to stay with Panditji. We also stayed with Bob, the new young Maharana of Udaipur while Jackie Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill, were there. As a designer, David was inspired by the colours of India, the colonial architecture of Calcutta and Lutyens’ masterpiece, Viceroy’s House with its incredible Moghul Gardens.

  My daughter India first went there backpacking with her cousin Timothy. They visited Bangalore and I suggested she go and see V.P. Menon’s daughter, Menakshi. As she was saying goodbye, India asked if she would be seeing her in Delhi. Menakshi replied, ‘Why did your mother not come with you?’ India answered, ‘She told me that she was too busy and that she couldn’t leave my father.’ Menakshi said, ‘And you believed her? No, no your mother and I are snobs. She didn’t come for the same reason that I never go to Delhi. We lived there while history was being made. We lived incredible lives. We don’t want to spoil that memory.’

  Author’s Note

  This book has been created from my diaries and letters written in India, and from interviews and notes I have given or written since that time. I have also looked occasionally to my parents diaries to give a more three dimensional perspective on our time in India, as well as quoting once or twice from letters written to my sister Patricia. My father was a meticulous diary writer and note taker – the fact that he did so and encouraged us to do the same means that this book exists. Our family photograph albums also provide the wonderful captions to many of the pictures and are now kept in the Broadlands Collection at Southampton University. Many of those legends in his own hand are reproduced here in facsimile.

  Of course, when things got exciting it was difficult and sometimes impossible to keep the diary as up to date as it should have been, it is therefore, with grateful thanks, that I have on more than one occasion looked to the daily recordings of Alan Campbell-Johnson (Mission With Mountbatten, Atheneum, 1951) to remind me of the goings on at that time – especially during the period that we were travelling at the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948.

  Part I

  The Last Viceroy

  of India

  Chronology of Events

  20th March 1947 Mountbatten, Edwina and Pamela travel to India to take up residence in Viceroy’s House.

  24th March Swearing-in of the new Viceroy. Mountbatten begins his informal meetings with all the key players in India, including Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah.

  15th – 16th April Governors’ Conference at Viceroy’s House.

  28th April Mountbatten and Edwina confront the Muslim League demonstration during a visit to Peshawar.

  30th April – 2nd May Edwina tours riot areas and refugee camps.

  3rd May Mountbattens visit The Retreat at Mashobra, Simla.

  14th May Mountbattens return to Delhi.

  18th May Mountbatten flies to London for discussions with the Government and Opposition, following Nehru’s rejection of the original Plan.

  1st June Mountbatten back from London.

  2nd June Conference at Viceroy’s House to determine the details of the Plan.

  3rd June Agreement reached by all parties and administrative consequences discussed. Announcement made on All India Radio.

  4th June Press conference indicating 15th August as date for transfer of power: the countdown begins.

  18th July Parliament pass the Indian Independence Act.

  25th July Mountbatten tries to persuade the Chamber of Princes to accede to India or Pakistan before Partition.

  14th August Independence ceremony takes place in Karachi, Pakistan with Mountbattens present, who then fly back to Delhi for the Indian independence ceremonies. Just before midnight Mountbatten formally invited to act as India’s first Governor-General.

  First Impressions:

  March 1947

  ‘Of course, to arrive and to live in a house like

  Viceroy’s House. In a way it was completely the end

  of one’s small family circle and private life.’

  (From an interview with the author by the Nehru Memorial Museum.)

  2nd March 1947: With the Viceroy and Lady Wavell watching my parents arrive in a horse-drawn carriage escorted by the Bodyguard.

  Arrival in Delhi

  My first impression was of heat and jumble. I had to concentrate on being good – hat uncomfortable, ditto gloves. In those days, wherever you were flying in the heat, you would get these a
ir pockets and there was no pressurisation in the cabin. So, if you got bad weather you would bump and drop, and if you were me you were sick. But, as you got out of the plane, with a dozen photographers waiting, you were not allowed to look green. It was really the concentration of trying to do what one was supposed to be doing and to be where one was supposed to be and how hot one’s little white gloves were and how the hat was so uncomfortable. One had no real sense of the excitement of actually having arrived in India; it was all worry, worry, worry and the dust, and had the dust covered one’s face, and if so, should one get one’s handkerchief out?

  Saturday 22nd March

  We arrived at Karachi in the morning to be met with terrific guards of honour and numerous people tearing round… We flew on and had a very bumpy trip and landed at Delhi feeling quite frightful. Met HE and Her Ex, saw Mummy and Daddy arrive complete with carriage and had dinner with Felicity and her husband and brother.

  22nd March: Standing to attention as the National Anthem plays on our arrival.

  On arrival I remember the dismounted Sikh Bodyguard in turbans on each step of that enormous flight of very, very wide, imposing steps up to the house. All the Sikhs in their turbans looked magnificent with their lances and the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers playing. Of course, having to curtsey to the Viceroy and Vicereine on arrival at the top wasn’t difficult because, at that time, most of one’s relations needed curtseys anyway, but one always had to worry that one did it properly.

  We only had one evening to discuss matters with the Wavells, the outgoing Viceroy and Vicereine. Felicity Wavell brought me all her files and told me, ‘the Viceroy’s House compound has 555 servants, so, with their families, there will be several thousand, and we have a school, and you will have to be the chief visitor for the school. And there is a clinic… Oh, it has a whole community and the office of the Vicereine hardly has time to do that, so it will be your duty.’ So one really did find oneself in at the deep end.

  My mother’s Quaker friends in London had advised us who we should contact. They had done a lot of work in India, particularly when the leaders were put into prison. My mother was keen to meet all of the influential women in India. I was given the names of all the student leaders who were in prison at that moment, but who were about to be released. When we were in Bombay or Calcutta, I would have to make contact with them.

  Sunday 23rd March

  We went to the airfield and saw all the Wavell party off. It must have been a great wrench for everyone to suddenly be forced to change over like that.

  22nd March: The Viceroy’s Bodyguard.

  22nd March: Entering Viceroy’s House. Bodyguard drawn up after escorting us.

  The Swearing-in Ceremony

  ‘The film cameras whirred and the flash-bulbs

  went off for the first time in the confines of the

  Durbar Hall.’ Alan Campbell-Johnson

  My mother’s dress had been made in England. And my father wore the full dress white naval uniform. They both looked like film stars – very, very handsome, both of them. Of course there was no hairdresser so my mother had to do all of that kind of thing herself.

  Monday 24th March

  The numerous arguments as to what was fitting resulted in Daddy wearing full dress whites and Mummy a simple, long white dress with decorations but no jewellery. It will take a lot of getting used to seeing them sitting on thrones and dropping curtseys to them etc, but it can’t be nearly as trying as it is for them, but after looking slightly glazed to begin with they seem to be bearing up quite well.

  Alan Campbell-Johnson describes the scene:

  ‘...trumpets from the roof acting as a shattering prelude...

  Mountbatten himself looked superb with the dark-blue ribbon of Knight of the Garter and the overwhelming array of orders and decorations across his chest... Lady Mountbatten... was the epitome of grace, with her new order of the Crown of India, besides all her war medals and other decorations, on her dress. The red-and-gold thrones were set in bold relief by the lighting concealed in the rich red velvet hangings.’

  This reminds me of a nice piece of romantic family history. In the 1930s, my mother and a friend of my parents, Yola Letellier, were in Paris at a big ball. One of the attractions was a fortune teller who was the rage of Paris. Every chic person wanted to have their fortune told, except for my mother who thought it was nonsense. But, Yola was very insistent and said, ‘No, no, no, Edwina, you must, you must, everybody’s having it done.’ In fact, it would have been rude not to agree, so they both giggled their way over to her. But when she had her fortune told my mother knew it had to be nonsense because the woman said to her, ‘I see you sitting on a throne, but it’s not an ordinary throne, there’s something strange about it, but you are sitting on a throne nonetheless…’

  24th March: Processing out of Durbar Hall after the swearing-in ceremony.

  24th March: Seated on the Thrones in the Durbar Hall in Viceroy’s House.

  Official portrait of my mother as Vicereine.

  The House

  I described Viceroy’s House in those first diary entries in India as ‘absolutely immense, presumably quite impressive just to come and see and go away again, but a complete headache to live in and it seems to have been built for the express purpose of losing people in’. It was enormous with high ceilings: it took ten minutes to walk from your bedroom to the dining room – by bicycle was often quicker.

  My mother set out immediately to understand everything about the house, the estate and the servants at a rate which astonished the Comptroller. No detail was left unexamined or unquestioned: the timing and cost of meals, the state of the servants’ quarters, the condition of the linen and plate, the management of the house, the gardens, the stables, the school, the clinic, and I would most often accompany her:

  Tuesday 25th March

  I went on a tour of the house with Mummy which entailed walking for well over two hours!

  Our present rooms are very nice and we hope to keep them until they become really too hot when we shall have to move over to the other side. Thursday 27th March

  Although the house is so immense, the accommodation is completely inadequate as the entire plan seems to make no sense whatever but just consists of vast corridors leading nowhere. There is a lovely swimming pool though and we bathed yesterday and had lunch out there today.

  Viceroy’s House viewed from the Moghul Gardens.

  I soon became aware that Viceroy’s House was like a hotel in which you hardly ever saw any other guests who might be staying there – and there were often guests. My sister Patricia had accompanied my father in 1946 when she was in the Wrens, and had been asked to stay on by the ADCs. When she had protested that she had not been invited by the Viceroy she was told that the house was so big that no one would ever bump into her!

  Later in the 1960s I accompanied my father on a visit to India and we stayed in what was now President’s House. As we were saying goodbye to our host, the King and Queen of Afghanistan and their party also arrived to say farewell. They too had been staying in the house for a week, but we had not even known they were there.

  The house was ‘not exactly cosy’, as I described it in a letter to a friend: ‘I was continuously getting hopelessly lost, and swarms of servants and endless cocktail parties and people to meals and the terrible Walkie-Talkie system by which people are brought up to talk to one when one hasn’t a clue as to who they are, and the moment the conversation gets beyond the weather preliminaries they are removed and one has to start all over again with another unknown body, but luckily even the etiquette is generally relieved by being faintly ridiculous and amusing!’ If you did not bump into your guests or family you were never alone: ‘one can’t exactly take a book and find a quiet corner as there just isn’t such a thing and swarms of people are liable to appear from behind every bush! Even with the very reduced staff, if one includes all the people in the estate plus their families there are five thousand attache
d to the house!!’

  State Dining Room.

  Durbar Hall.

  The Servants

  When Felicity Wavell told me that as the Viceroy’s daughter I would inherit her bearer – Lila Nand – I was horrified, I hadn’t even had a lady’s maid, let alone a male.

  Tuesday 25th March

  I have been given Felicity’s bearer, Lila Nand, who is quite charming and very good but at the moment it is harder to get used to telling someone what to do than do it oneself, but apparently the latter is out of the question.

  Lila Nand was initially extremely disappointed with me, but trained me quite well. He kept on saying, ‘Oh, of course one of previous Viceroy’s daughters, she much better, she beat me.’ When I protested, ‘Lila Nand I’m not going to beat you,’ he simply said ‘Oh,Viceroy daughter should!’

  We did get on very well but the most tragic thing happened when we left; about three months before our departure his son died – he was only a small boy of about seven. Lila Nand also had a little girl of about ten and a sweet wife. He was naturally distraught and so I was trying to comfort him, with all of my eighteen years experience, saying things like, ‘Lila Nand, you and your wife will probably have another baby and maybe it will be a boy and you’ve got this lovely little girl and you’re young…’ He couldn’t have been more than forty. ‘You know, you will have all your married life ahead of you.’ ‘No, no, no Miss Sahib, I die, I die.’ When we left I was worried and really very fond of him, so back in England I sent a message out asking how Lila Nand was and the answer came back from his brother, Amla Nand, ‘Oh Lila Nand, he died.’ He had been in perfect health, but he was so distraught he had turned his face to the wall and willed himself dead.