By all accounts, my grandfather was a stern man, the kind of rector who carried a shotgun round with him ready to shoot at small boys who were stealing apples from his orchard. Percy certainly had a strict upbringing, making his way through Woodbridge public school, then studying engineering at Cambridge before deciding to become a tea planter in India—a respectable and lucrative occupation at the time. The plantation he established in Beesakope sold tea to Brooke Bond and his prospects were very good. When the Second World War broke out, he signed up and, because of his education, went straight into the British army at officer level.
So far, so traditional in his life choices, but my father was soon to make a decision that would rip his family in two. He met my mother, Emily Watscoe-Pyne, when his regiment was invited to a party at Vice-Regal Lodge in Simla, where she lived in its grand confines with her uncle Sir Cyril Martin, a High Court judge. Dark of hair but pale of skin, she was the daughter of a Danish father and an Armenian mother, and had been born and brought up in India.
At the time Percy and Emily met, my mother was thirty years old and for the last seven years had been engaged to a man who owned cotton factories in Lancashire. She saw him when he came out to India on business and for some reason accepted his promises that he would marry her as soon as the time was right. What they were waiting for, I have no idea! However, when she met my father the attraction was instant and they were married within seven weeks, in 1941, the year before I was born. Engaged for seven years, then married in seven weeks. Just imagine!
Countess Adeline had died in 1938, but the Reverend Harris’s reaction to the marriage was sheer outrage. He and the rest of the Harris family would not accept that Percy had married an ‘Anglo-Indian’, who they assumed would be dark-skinned and would produce brown children. They wanted nothing to do with it. To add insult to injury, my mother was a Catholic and before the wedding it was agreed that my father would convert to Catholicism. It wasn’t such a huge step in ideological terms from High Anglican to Catholic, and at the age of forty-one, he was ready to settle down. While Mother was drafting a ‘Dear John’ letter to her cotton factory fiancé, Dad was busy learning the catechism, and the wedding took place after a whirlwind courtship. It was a war wedding, while Dad was on a week’s leave from his posting, so there were no frills, nothing elaborate, but they were a handsome couple and happiness radiates out from the wedding photographs.
The effect was an instantaneous rift in the Harris family. Percy had sullied the family’s reputation. The Reverend Harris refused to meet his bride or send any wedding presents or congratulations. He felt bitterly let down by his only son, in whom he had placed all his hopes. Percy might have liked to bring his bride home and introduce her to his family but it was made clear that they wouldn’t be welcome. It didn’t matter especially at the time, because neither Mother nor Dad had any intention of leaving India and coming back to England.
‘I will never go to England,’ Mother told him repeatedly during the seven-week courtship. ‘You will never get me to England. You can marry me and we can have children but we stay here in India and the children grow up here. This is my land, my country, my home.’
That suited Dad just fine. He thought India the most beautiful, wonderful land and he promised her that he wanted to stay there too. They set up home on his plantation in Beesakope and there was just time for Mother to get pregnant with me before Dad went back to the fighting. He fought in the crucial battles of Kohima and Imphal, at which the Japanese offensive into India was halted, and was promoted to the rank of major before the war’s end. While he was a captain he wore three pips on his shoulder, but once he became a major those pips were replaced by a crown. As a toddler, this made a big impression on me. When he lifted me up, I’d always fiddle with that crown, trying to pull it off.
In 1945, Dad came back to Assam to give his wife her second child. Mother was never a maternal person, but out of duty she produced a boy and a girl for him. One of each. It’s what you did in those days.
The cornerstone of Mother’s life was her religion. As a girl, she had attended the Loreto Convent in Darjeeling, where Mother Teresa was a novice. She could have opted for convent life but instead she segued into teacher training, encouraged by the nuns. She and her sister Muriel and their cousin, a priest called Father Lawrence Picachy, remained friendly with Mother Teresa, partly because they had Armenian connections who were close to her Armenian family, and partly because Father Picachy acted as one of Mother Teresa’s spiritual guides.
I never met Mother Teresa, but I remember Father Picachy coming to visit us, wearing long white robes with a big sash round the middle. He was a large man, much darker-skinned than my mother, and there was a holy air about him, a kind of untoucha-bility. In 1969 he would become Archbishop of Calcutta, then in 1976 he was made a Cardinal, but back when I knew him as a recently ordained priest, he already had something of the aura of religious greatness.
When he came to visit, my brother Harold and I would be dressed in our best clothes and told to stand in the hall with our hands behind our backs as this stern, bespectacled man glanced in our direction, nodded, and walked past. I think once or twice he patted me on the head, but that was it. He’d disappear into the drawing room with Mother and Dad, while we were led back to the nursery. We didn’t eat meals with the grown-ups. They were in the dining room, while we had our tea in the nursery. We had to knock and wait for permission before entering a room, and many times that permission wasn’t granted. I would have liked to chat to him—I already had a well-deserved reputation as a chatterbox—but Mother had made it clear that that would be frowned upon. ‘Seen but not heard,’ she urged, putting a finger to her lips.
I was always being silenced as a child. My instinct was to chat to everyone who came to the house—the doctor, the priest, the beggars, or Mother and Dad’s British friends. ‘I’ve got new shoes,’ I’d tell them in Hindi, or, ‘I drew a picture of an elephant’; anything that was on my mind, I’d say.
Dad was a poetry fan with a quote for every occasion and he’d often recite: ‘I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river; for men may come and men may go but Adeline goes on for ever.’
Banned from chatting, I started making faces to attract attention. I pulled down the corners of my mouth like a turtle, or stretched my lips wide with my eyes narrowed to slits, and I was very talented at crossing my eyes. Some guests would laugh, others would gasp, and Mother would be cross but at least it always got a reaction.
When I was five years old, there was an incident that would change our family and the way we lived our lives for ever, and Father Picachy was part of it. It began when my father was bitten by a rabid dog. The doctor had to cycle over every day to give him anti-rabies injections in his stomach. I didn’t see this, of course, but I remember watching the doctor coming up the path and screwing up my nose to think of how painful an injection in the stomach must be.
Whether it was the injections or something else altogether, I don’t know, but one day my father collapsed, showing all the signs of a stroke. First he felt numbness in his legs, then Mother and Father Picachy realised that the left side of his face had collapsed and he couldn’t speak or move his left arm. There was no telephone on the plantation so a servant boy was dispatched to fetch the doctor. Father Picachy sat comforting him but Mother was distraught and couldn’t contain herself. She told us later that she ran out into the tea gardens to watch anxiously for the doctor.
Suddenly, there was a piercing light and one of the tea bushes in her path burst into flames. She stopped in fright, and as she stood there she heard a voice speaking to her. ‘I will take you out of India,’ it said. ‘Go back now. He is cured.’
The voice was so calm and sure that she turned and hurried back to the house. When she got there she found her husband sitting up and talking to Father Picachy. His face had returned to its normal configuration, and he could move his left arm again.
‘I saw a burning bush!’ she cried. ‘I saw the flames and I stood thinking of Moses, and a voice told me he would be cured.’
Father Picachy had his own extraordinary story to tell. ‘Just after you left, I placed a crucifix in Percy’s hand and instantly he seemed to recover.’
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