‘Don’t be such a baby. You’ll see Clara again soon enough,’ Mother snapped and gave me a slap, saying, ‘I don’t want to go either. It’s just one of those things.’
I found a place by the railings and peered down into the crowd until I could make out the figure of Clara, who was wearing a white sari. She waved and waved at me until her arm must have been ready to drop off, smiling at me with a big broad smile that showed her white teeth against her brown skin. The ship started to move and I burst into a fresh bout of uncontrollable crying, waving harder and harder as Clara’s figure got smaller, and I continued waving even after I couldn’t pick her out of the crowd any more. My Clara-ayah had gone and I was alone. I’d never been alone in India, where there were always lots of people around, but now we were departing for the unknown.
‘I’m going to have trouble with you,’ Mother said, giving me an odd look, with her eyes narrowed. ‘I know I will.’
When the land disappeared into the horizon and the only view was of choppy blue ocean, the four of us—Mother, Dad, Harold and me—went to find our cabin. Harold and I were to share a cramped, wood-panelled box of a room with two bunk beds and little else. By standing on the edge of the lower bed I could just see out through the single porthole but the view was water and sky as far as the eye could see. There was an adjoining loo, with a metal toilet and basin, which I thought was disgusting, although Mother commented that it was ‘immaculately clean’. A connecting door led through into a suite of rooms that she and Dad were to share but we weren’t allowed in there.
‘You can have the top bunk, Adeline,’ Dad told me. Once I might have found that exciting but on this particular day I was inconsolable.
‘There’s a special room on the upper deck for children to play,’ said Dad. ‘Shall I take you to find it while your mother unpacks?’
Harold and I trooped along the corridors behind him until we came to the room in question—a big empty space with a sandpit and quoits, where a woman sat in a chair to supervise a few young children.
‘I’m not staying here,’ I said, and told Dad I thought the other children were babies.
‘Don’t be rude, Adeline,’ he snapped, but he took us away soon after.
Harold and I had never spent so much time with our parents, and I think they found it very trying. How do you keep two young children occupied on a boat for six weeks? Dad used to read to us in English, to try and help us learn the language. I remember he read the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling and a collection of fairy stories called The Orange Fairy Book, but I didn’t understand much of them with my still only rudimentary grasp of the language.
‘You have to learn,’ he told me in exasperation. ‘You’ll be starting school once we’re settled, and no one will speak Hindi there.’
I stored away this piece of information. I had thought we were only going for a holiday, until the troubles passed. I’d been expecting to go to school in India on our return.
To make matters worse, Dad regarded my skinny little arms and made another announcement. ‘There’s a chance some nasty kids will try to bully you at school because you will seem different from them. I need to teach you to defend yourself. No child of mine is going be picked on.’ He held up a cushion from one of the chairs lining the deck. ‘Here. Punch this as hard as you can.’
I drew back my arm and punched the cushion with all my strength.
‘No, that’s terrible,’ Dad said. ‘Not like a windmill.’ He stood up to demonstrate. ‘Punch straight. You need to get your body weight behind the punch and step into it. Like this. Now you try again.’
I had another go and he snorted: ‘Hmph. We’ll have to work on that.’
Teatime came, and I was aghast to realise that Harold and I were expected to eat in our cabin. With all the rooms on that vast ship, why did we have to stay in our poky little box-like prison? The steward brought a tray with cucumber sandwiches, white iced cakes and scones, and I yearned for the Indian food we’d left behind—the golden curries that you scooped up in chapattis, the delicious rice and vegetable biryanis and the fish cooked in banana leaves. This English food seemed insipid and colourless and I only ate it because my stomach was growling with hunger.
After we’d finished, our parents dressed up, Mother in a full-length ballgown and Dad in a dinner jacket and black tie.
‘Going?’ I asked in English, suspicious.
‘We’re having dinner in the ship’s dining room. Make sure you two stay in the cabin and don’t make a noise.’
‘Adeline khana?’ I wanted to come too.
‘You can’t. It’s adults only. Besides, it’s your bedtime,’ Dad told us. We all said the Rosary together then they left, Mother’s skirts and clouds of perfume swishing behind her.
I felt deserted and missed Clara so badly that as soon as they had gone, I urged Harold ‘Challoo [come with me]!’ We crept out and wandered down the corridor in our pyjamas to a flight of stairs, then up the stairs to another deck. From there, we made our way out into the open, where we could see the starry skies above, and found some lifeboats covered in tarpaulins. We wandered and wandered and soon we were lost and couldn’t find our way back to the cabin any more.
‘Mummy!’ Harold started to cry.
‘Chokra baby [silly baby],’ I told him impatiently. I was cross with Mother. Not only had she taken me away from my beloved Clara, but she had gone off for dinner without us. I forced my brother to squeeze into a little space behind one of the lifeboats and we hid there, listening to the sound of the ship’s engines and the distant voices wafting up from the dining room below.
As darkness fell, we must have fallen asleep, because we were wakened by one of the ship’s stewards, wearing a shiny white jacket, who seemed very relieved to see us.
‘Here you are!’ he cried. ‘We thought you had fallen overboard. Everyone is out looking for you.’
He marched us back down to the cabin, where Mother and Dad were torn between relief that we were alive and fury that we had wandered off when we’d been told specifically not to.
‘What were you thinking of? Your little brother could have been killed!’
Dad put me over his lap and spanked me, but I didn’t cry. I was consumed with sadness at being taken away from India, away from Clara, and that’s all I could think about. I still wanted to be a good girl, wanted to be a saint, but the trauma of the separation seemed to bring out a streak of mischief in me, an undercurrent of naughtiness.
The very next night when Mother and Dad went off for dinner, I waited until their footsteps disappeared then I grabbed Harold’s hand and dragged him off to do more exploring in our nightclothes. Once again there was a search party and this time I heard cries of ‘Child overboard, child overboard’ and saw the mayhem I had created, with sailors rushing around looking for us.
‘What are we going to do with you?’ Mother shrieked. ‘You’ll have us put off the ship at the next port.’
On the third night, I tried to do the same again, sneaking out of the cabin door as soon as my parents went off to the dining room, but this time they had laid a trap for me. Dad was waiting at one end of the corridor and a steward at the other, and I was caught and bundled back to the cabin in disgrace.
‘She’s going to keep trying this. What can we do?’ Dad asked.
‘If you like, we could get some medicine to make her sleep,’ the steward suggested.
Dad agreed that was a good idea. The ship’s doctor was sent for and he prescribed a little bottle of