‘Chewrees boht sundar hai [bangles very beautiful],’ I sang as I ran up the road, thinking about how I would show them to Mother at four o’clock and tell her what all the colours were. I kept shaking my hand to make that jangly sound, and watching the way the iridescent glass sparkled in the sunlight. I was paying too much attention to them and too little to the road, because suddenly, I tripped over. As luck or unluck would have it, we were on the only stretch of concrete along the whole route, the rest being dirt track, and when I fell I heard my glass bangles breaking before I felt the sharp pain in my arm.
Clara rushed to pick me up. ‘Ay, ay, ay. Om mane padme hum.’ (This was a Buddhist chant she often used.) When I looked down, every single chewree had shattered into tiny pieces, and most of those were embedded in my arm. Blood was oozing from the wounds. I cried huge tears, not because it hurt but because of the loss of my beautiful jewellery.
That afternoon, the doctor came up to the house and sat patiently extracting the tiny splinters of glass from my wounds with a pair of tweezers, while I sobbed without let-up. I think Mother was pleased the chewrees were broken because I heard her telling Clara they were ‘too Indian’.
I must have been accident-prone at that age because not long after, I swallowed a prune complete with stone and it stuck in my throat. Clara’s thumping and banging on my back had no effect. I was coughing and choking and gasping for breath and finally she had to call for a car and take me to the local hospital, where a doctor reached into my mouth with long forceps and extracted the stone. Poor old Clara-ayah! I certainly kept her on her toes.
She may have had her hands full with me, constantly chattering by her side, but there was usually extra help on hand because we had lots of servants at the house: a khansamah and masalchi to make the meals and bearers to bring them to the table, dhobees to wash the clothes and sweepers to dust the rooms. When my father went out riding, a syce brought his horse, ready groomed and saddled, and when he brought it back, caked in dust and sweat, someone else brushed it down, fed and watered it. There were cars and chauffeurs, gardeners and a night watchman. When my parents had a dinner party, all Mother had to do was tell the servants what menu she wanted and write the invitations. I would creep out of the playroom and peer round a corner at all the glamorous women in their jewels and bright colours, accompanied by their smart-suited husbands, but they spoke English so I had no idea what they were saying. Life was one long holiday for that ex-pat set in mid-1940s India. They only had to clap their hands and yell ‘Pannee wallah!’ and within seconds a jug of sparkling, ice-cold water would be brought on a silver tray.
It was a strange life for a child, though. I had a whole suite of rooms to myself: a bedroom, a bathroom and a playroom, complete with paper and pencils and books and coloured wooden blocks. I didn’t have many toys, but I played imagination games with Tumbi and Arico. We would imitate mummies and daddies, doctors and nurses, even cowboys and Indians (the other kind of Indians, the ones who wore feathered headdresses). They liked my books. I liked the mud hut where they lived at the bottom of the garden. Sometimes I would slip away to the servants’ huts for a taste of their sweet chai made with condensed milk.
I especially liked my bird book, with pictures of the local birds. Clara would point to the pictures and say ‘This is Polly Parrot, this is Jack Daw, this is a…this one is a yellow bird.’ She couldn’t read the English words, but that never stopped her hazarding her own identifications. There was a beautifully illustrated flower book as well, and I’d make her go through it telling me the names over and over again, and not caring if she said ‘That’s the pointy red flower,’ instead of its proper name.
When I was three my brother Harold was born, and right from the start he was treated like a precious creature. I must have been jealous of him with his kitten-like crying and pink screwed-up face, because the day after his birth, I went to Mother and said, ‘Horrible little thing he is, and I’m going to poke his eyes out.’
‘You will grow to love him,’ she told me sternly, and I did—eventually.
He had his own ayah, a woman called Gracie whom I didn’t like, and his own suite of rooms. Clara and I didn’t have anything to do with him when he was tiny, and that suited me just fine.
I was constantly being told by my mother and father that I was ‘a most troublesome child’. Once I stole an apple from a fruit bowl that was sitting on the dining-room table. It was filled to the brim with grapes and oranges and bananas and apples and I didn’t think one would be missed, but I was spotted and all hell broke loose. Dad was the disciplinarian, very formal, very strict, and for him right was right and wrong was wrong, with no grey areas in between.
‘That was stealing, Adeline,’ he told me. ‘Stealing is always wrong. You must understand that. Come here.’ He pulled me towards him, bent me over his knee and spanked me hard until I was screaming and crying—more in chagrin than in pain, it has to be said. From then on, whenever I’d done anything wrong, I’d be sent to my bed to wait for him. I’d hear the footsteps coming down the corridor and I’d lie there knowing I was about to get spanked. Sure enough, he’d come in and put me over his knee and give me a good wallop. When I was three, he’d just come back from fighting in the war against the Japanese and he believed in a rigid, army-style discipline in the household. He was a no-nonsense parent.
Dad was also responsible for teaching me the Rosary, and he drummed it into me till I could have repeated it backwards if necessary. He would start—‘Hail Mary, Full of Grace’ or ‘Our Father Who Art in Heaven’—and I would have to carry on from wherever he left off. There were three parts—the Joyful, the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries—and I had to learn the prayers in Latin, a gabbled set of sounds that I spouted parrot-fashion without understanding any of it. By the age of four, I was word-perfect and proud. I liked the grandeur of the words. They made me feel clever and important.
I didn’t understand much when I went to mass, because the service was all in Latin. The sermon was in English and I didn’t understand that either. My understanding of religion at that stage came mainly from Clara’s stories of Jesus, and from Dad’s stories about the saints and their good works. My favourite saint was Simeon Stylites, who lived for thirty-seven years on top of a pillar. He started off by building himself a platform on stilts, just as our bungalow was on stilts, but much higher. People used to send food and water up to him, but after a while he decided he wasn’t quite high enough and he asked his followers to build him an even higher perch. The people built one so high that they could hardly see the top; they couldn’t make out the shape of Simeon, sitting on the tiny platform, but they kept sending up his food and water on ropes and he lived there for years and years, close to God.
I used to fantasise about living like that from a very young age. Clara could send up my food, and I would send down my wee-wee in a little bucket. I had it all planned. There would be no scary wild animals up there, but birds would hop onto my platform to visit and angels would take care of me and I could sit in peace and talk to Jesus. It would be calm and happy, and that’s the life I wanted. Long before the Family Miracle, which happened when I was five, I had made up my mind to be a saint.
Chapter Two The Family Miracle
I was named Adeline after my Viennese grand-mother, Countess Adeline Antonie Bohuslaw. She left Austria in 1895 and came to Suffolk as a refugee, where she met my grandfather, the Reverend Harold Augustus Harris, who was rector of Thorndon parish