Once he’d finished his examination, Mother led the doctor and Father Picachy out into the garden to show them the bush that had been on fire, but to her astonishment she couldn’t find any sign of it. There wasn’t so much as a cinder on the ground or a singed leaf in sight.
‘I’m sure it was right here,’ she gestured. ‘I’m not a psychiatric case. I definitely saw a burning bush. The flames shot out and there was a very bright light and then I heard the voice.’
Everyone believed her and it became part of family lore that God had saved Dad from a stroke. It was proclaimed as a miracle. Father Picachy spread the word and soon the house was full of Jesuit priests, coming and going in their white robes, saying mass and being fed in the big dining room. The crucifix Dad had been holding was kissed and venerated, and placed on display in the hall with candles lit on either side of it.
Clara became even more pious and told me ever more ridiculous stories about Jesus taming lions so they would lie down with lambs, and saving newborn babies from tigers and snakes. I was given a children’s bible and several religious story books with pictures of Daniel in the lion’s den and David and Goliath and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. My whole life was centred around religion. It took over the family from that point on.
I had to kneel down every night to recite the Rosary before bedtime, which took fifteen whole minutes. My parents would recite one part, then I had to give the response and so it went on. Every Sunday Harold and I had to sit quietly through mass. We said grace before meals and prayers before bed, and the only stories we were told were religious ones. We were taught to offer everything we had and did to God, and to talk to God all the time. I didn’t rebel against this because I wanted to be good, I desperately wanted my parents to be pleased with me.
Both Mother and Dad were overwhelmed by the experience with the burning bush, our very own Family Miracle, and felt they had a debt to God that must be repaid. What better way than to offer Him their children?
My father said, ‘It’s not enough to be good, Adeline. I don’t want a good girl; I want a saint. You have to be perfect.’ That was fine, because I fully intended to be a saint and live on top of a pillar like Simeon Stylites.
Mother wanted me to be a nun. ‘Only good girls become nuns,’ she said. ‘You have to be especially good.’ So that’s what I’d do; I’d become a nun. She wanted Harold to become a priest as well. I wondered if I could be a nun and a saint at the same time, and Mother said yes, I could, so that was fine.
I wanted what they wanted. I was determined to become a nun and a saint, no matter what sacrifices I’d have to make, no matter how hard it was or how long it took. I decided then and there that’s what I was going to do with my life.
In 1947, with tensions between different religious groups escalating in India, Lord Mountbatten drew up a plan for Partition, creating the Muslim country of Pakistan and the predominantly Hindu country of India, and then the British governors pulled out altogether. With the whole region on the verge of civil war and the newly formed Indian government unable to cope, there was an unprecedented surge of migrants travelling around the country, and outbreaks of rioting and killing were rife.
Our household was like a microcosm of Partition because we had both Muslim and Hindu staff, and my parents got to the stage where they didn’t know who they could trust. I remember a riot in the tea gardens, when crowds came surging towards our bungalow waving sticks and shouting words I couldn’t understand but which sounded threatening. Clara shooed me into the nursery and closed the shutters, and I heard the sound of doors being locked and bolted. It was terrifying, even though Clara tried to distract me by opening the bird book.
Suddenly, the noise of the shouting abated a little and I heard my father’s voice ringing out. He’d gone out onto the steps to confront the mob and he was asking them to please go away, because they were frightening his family. I couldn’t make out the rest of his words but they worked at the time, because the crowd dispersed and we could unlock the doors again.
At night, we could see fires burning on the horizon and Mother and Dad would stand looking out, talking to each other in low, worried tones. And then I overheard one of the servants saying that Dad had woken during the previous night to find a shadowy figure by his bedside with a knife raised, about to kill him. His army training kicked in and he overpowered the would-be assassin, but I think that was the final straw for my parents and the decision was made that as the conflict approached we should go to England for a break until the situation settled down.
At first I was excited about the trip. I was told me we’d travel to Bombay and catch a steamship that would sail us across the ocean to the other side of the world. Dad showed me the distance from India to England in his atlas and I could see that it was a long, long way. He told me that King George lived in England, in a palace with guards outside who wore bearskin hats. I was curious, and quite content to be going, until I realised in horror that Clara wouldn’t be coming with us.
‘But I need Clara,’ I wailed to Mother. ‘I can’t go without her.’
‘Clara will be here when we get back,’ Mother told me distractedly, but then she wouldn’t answer when I asked how long that would be. She was upset about going and in no mood to comfort me.
I overheard her complaining to Dad, ‘You promised we would never go to England. You gave me your word.’ And he sighed, and told her it was only for a little while, that it wasn’t safe to stay.
‘Do you promise you won’t go and be an ayah for someone else?’ I nagged Clara. ‘Will you stay in this house so you’re here as soon as we get back?’
She promised she would, but she had tears in her eyes and she kept hugging me so tightly I thought she would crush the breath right out of me.
Leaving day came and it was agreed that Clara would travel with us as far as Bombay. Six hefty black wooden trunks with white crosses on top were loaded into a van; they said ‘CAPTAIN HARRIS’ on top in white capital letters. We had holdalls with our clothes for the journey, but all the furniture was being left behind. It was just a holiday and we would be coming back soon. Before we set off, Dad lined up all the servants—sixteen of them at the time—in front of the bungalow and he took a last photograph. They would stay and look after the house until we got back, Clara told me.
We were driven as far as the great Brahmaputra River, where we boarded a banana boat called the Swatti. It stunk of decaying fish, which was hung out to dry to create the speciality known as Bombay duck. There were goats tethered in the hold alongside huge crates of bananas. I liked to stand out on deck clinging to the railings, with Clara close behind clinging onto me, and we’d watch the busy commerce on the river. There were men fishing, women washing clothes, children splashing in the murky waters near the shore, and other boats of all different shapes and sizes carrying chickens, rice, squash, multicoloured bales of fabric, or groups of men carrying spades, on their way to work. At the age of just six, I’d never seen so much activity and I was spellbound.
We travelled down the Brahmaputra as far as we could until it met the Ganges and then sailed on to Calcutta, where we transferred to a train for an everlasting journey right across the breadth of India. Whole days were spent sitting on hard leather seats, peering out of the window at rice fields with hills in the distance. When we pulled into stations, men pushed food through the carriage windows, and if it looked edible, Dad would buy some and share it between us. At last we reached Bombay and made our way to the dock area, where a vast steamship called the SS Ormonde stood waiting. Its sheer size took my breath away. It was much bigger than our whole house in Beesakope, with different levels all piled up on each other and two enormous yellow