‘Is this where you live?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you feel funny being underground?’
Madame Bobé replied in French, which was a problem because Harold and I only spoke Hindi and a limited number of English words.
‘We’ve asked Madame Bobé to teach you French,’ Dad told us, glancing quickly around the room, before they hurried off to retrace his student days around the sights of the capital.
Madame Bobé settled herself in a chair in the corner, looking stern, as she let us get on with exploring the toys. She indicated that we were allowed to play with them one at a time while she focused on her needlepoint. She may have been called a governess but she made precious little attempt to teach us anything.
Before long, my brother wanted to go to the toilet and he used the word we had always used: ‘Number.’ We said ‘nina’ when we wanted a wee-wee and ‘number’ for a number two.
Madame Bobé thought he was saying ‘number’ in English and that he wanted her to teach us numbers so she began to count: ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre…’
‘No, number!’ he insisted urgently. ‘Number!’
And she began again: ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre…’
I tried to help by speaking very clearly: ‘Number.’
‘Un, deux, trois…’
Finally Harold started crying as the inevitable happened and he dirtied his pants. I think she realised then.
Mother and Dad picked us up at five o’clock and we had another Tube journey back to the hotel for high tea and a cutlery lesson, followed by the Rosary before bedtime. I wasn’t very impressed with my first day in London.
‘When can we go to see the King?’ I asked, and they both laughed and didn’t answer me.
Harold and I weren’t supposed to talk at mealtimes; we were supposed to eat our food in silence. I felt a bit sick so I just played with my tea and listened to Mother and Dad’s conversations about the places they had been that day. It was through this that my English began to improve until I could understand most things they said.
Harold and I never did get to see the sights ourselves. The only place we were taken was to the Brompton Oratory for mass on Sundays. I was impressed by the stained glass and the great big dome but would much rather have accompanied Mother and Dad on their sightseeing tours than be stuck indoors with Madame Bobé. She didn’t once take us out of her flat. We sat, day after day, bored out of our skulls while she fiddled away at her needlepoint.
My nagging headaches lasted for two or three weeks, and I frequently felt nauseous, but I thought it was because of the horrible, stodgy English food. There was also a kind of dizziness, a disorientation that I couldn’t put my finger on.
‘I don’t like England because it makes you have headaches all the time,’ I told Mother one day.
‘What kind of headaches?’
‘Sore ones. And I feel sick as well.’
Mother called out a doctor but he could find nothing wrong with me, and they put it down to homesickness and a bit of play-acting. It wasn’t, though. My symptoms were very real.
It was only many years later, while talking to a doctor, that I realised I went through morphine withdrawal at the age of six during that stay in London. Such a thing wasn’t even considered in those days, when morphine-based medicines were freely available over the counter in chemists’, but that’s what it must have been.
Chapter Five Clumber Cottage, Felixstowe
We were in London for a couple of months, and then Dad announced that we were going to spend the summer at the seaside. We packed our bags, said ‘Au revoir’ to Madame Bobé and took another long taxi ride all the way to Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast. I was excited because I’d never had a beach holiday before and it sounded like a good thing. I’d seen storybooks in which children made sandcastles and played in the water and I was looking forward to that. The headaches had eased by then, the weather had improved and Dad seemed more cheerful.
‘This is the area where I grew up,’ he told us as we crossed the river from Essex into Suffolk. ‘This is proper English countryside. Look! A green and pleasant land.’
We peered out at the fields and hedgerows and had to admit it was a lot prettier than London, although to me it still wasn’t a patch on the view from our plantation house in Beesakope. We checked in to a boarding house called Clumber Cottage, and from our room we could see a glint of blue sea, covered in dancing spangles. Harold and I clamoured for a walk down to the beach before tea and Dad agreed, letting us take off our shoes and run along the sand, and even paddle in the chilly waves.
I saw some people swimming in the water and pestered Mother to let us go in as well, but she was reluctant. Nice Catholic girls didn’t expose their legs to the world, she said. Modesty is a virtue, she said. Nevertheless we went shopping the next morning and she bought me an oversized ruched khaki-green swim-suit which I could wear pulled down to my knees so that only my lower legs would be exposed. That was the compromise. I had to be as modest as I could and make sure I kept it pulled down at all times, in return for which I was allowed to go in the water.
At first I was a little bit frightened of the waves, which could push you over if you weren’t paying attention, and I didn’t like the slimy seaweed, but Dad came in with me and held my hand and started giving me swimming lessons. Within a few weeks I’d got over my fear of the unfamiliar water and got the hang of swimming, albeit it with a frantic kind of doggy paddle.
The boarding house believed in stuffing its guests with food and our days were structured around the frequent meals they served. Breakfast at nine then down to the beach for half an hour before it was time to head back for elevenses; beach for an hour then lunch then beach for another hour then tea; maybe a wander in the gardens at the seafront, then high tea, then Rosary then supper then bed: six meals daily.
Some days, Dad wasn’t there and Mother decided that she couldn’t cope with my brother and me on her own so she took me to the Jesus and Mary Convent in the town, where the nuns looked after me for a few hours. They were very kind, giving me colouring books and pencils to keep me occupied, but I would much rather have been on the beach and I felt sad that I was locked indoors while Harold was having a nice time with her somewhere.
When Dad was around, he usually took us to the beach. As he led us back up to Clumber Cottage, we followed a military routine. ‘Stand front, shoulder to shoulder, port hands,’ he would say. We would show him our hands. ‘Dirty. Spit on them.’ So we did. ‘Face inspection. Port face.’ We’d present our faces for his approval. ‘Dirty. Spit on this.’ He’d hold out his handkerchief and we would spit on it and wipe our faces before we were allowed to move on.
One day we were late coming up for lunch and Dad urged me: ‘Run, run! No time to spit!’ I charged along the pavement and up the path and burst in the door of the boarding house just as the owner emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray of bowls filled to the brim with piping-hot Brown Windsor soup. I crashed into him, the whole lot went down me and I collapsed screaming as it scalded my face and chest.
I was rushed off to hospital in Ipswich where I was made to lie in a darkened room with cool, damp cloths over my burns and a shade over my eyes. Every now and again, nurses came in and changed the cloths for fresh ones. I was kept there overnight and it must have been horrible for Mother and Dad, who kept saying prayers and lighting holy candles by my bedside, worried that