Granny decided to serve this at some posh dinner she was giving. To her horror, when the
papillotes
were brought in on a big platter she saw that the cook had taken a short cut â instead of snipping out squares of greaseproof paper as she had shown him, he had used sheets of lavatory paper (which was a bit like greaseproof in those days) and each little parcel had BRONCO stamped on it somewhere.
I promised my father before he died that (with an exception which I will explain later) I wouldnât read his letters to my mother, but I never promised not to read Mumâs to him, and so, recently, I dipped into the ones she wrote at this time â from mid-1945 to autumn 1946 â and learned of her fears for him, first in the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria and Palestine) and then back in India, and her concerns about us returning there, and her worries about money, and what would happen to us if and when we left India and returned to England for ever . . . I also discovered that Tessa and I were sent to dancing classes in Fleet, because in one letter Mum, whoâd watched a lesson while waiting to take us home, writes, âOh dear, Brigid is not exactly graceful, but you do have to give her full marks for trying, bless her.â
As I explained earlier, Tessa and I had never been to school, but now, after the best part of a year and a half in Fleet with our grandparents, we were going back to India, and a governess had been hired to come with us. Moira, poor Moira, was to be left behind to go to boarding school; and David, who had already been separated from his family for so long, was to go to Sandhurst.
The governess was called Miss Waller, which immediately became Swaller, and we came to love her indomitable, jolly-hockey-sticks, isnât-life-a-huge-adventure character dearly. I canât think of a single academic thing she taught us, but I did learn that one should always carry a book to read in case you get held up somewhere with nothing to do, plus a cardigan in case the weather changes, and you should try to keep a small notebook and pencil handy, as well as something to eat and drink in an emergency. These lessons have proved invaluable. I donât mean to be smug, but our children were always the good ones on planes when they were small, thanks to my Swaller-inspired bag of activities, books, biscuits and drinks.
3
We returned to a turbulent India, but, as children, we were sheltered and our early days back in the country seemed peaceable, and I was happy to be there and not at all homesick for England. We lived for a short time in a boarding house or small hotel in a military town called Secunderabad which is next to Hyderabad in the centre of India. I donât know why we were staying in a hotel, we had never lived in one before, but perhaps Brightlands, the house in Bolton Road whose address I wrote in every book, was being painted or cleaned up for us. Outside the hotel was a pile of buildersâ sand and, when we were not having lessons or creating pompoms or doing French knitting with Swaller (her passion for making things never left me), Tessa and I spent every day perfectly happily climbing over it, picking out tiny shells which we collected in matchboxes. We were in the boarding house/hotel for Christmas 1946, all of us feeling glum because we were not in our own home (wherever that was meant to be) and Dad was, as always, away, so it was just Mum and Swaller, Tessa and me and NO TREE. Mum cut a huge Christmas tree out of stiff paper and painted it green with coloured decorations and pinned it to the wall but it wasnât quite the same. Then, in the middle of our muted celebrations, there was a knock at the door and Dad appeared â he was in uniform and had somehow managed to get away from whatever he was doing, to be with us for a few hours. It was thrilling.
Soon we moved to 219A Bolton Road in Secunderabad, Dad was with us at last, my grandmother came on
papillotes
were brought in on a big platter she saw that the cook had taken a short cut â instead of snipping out squares of greaseproof paper as she had shown him, he had used sheets of lavatory paper (which was a bit like greaseproof in those days) and each little parcel had BRONCO stamped on it somewhere.
I promised my father before he died that (with an exception which I will explain later) I wouldnât read his letters to my mother, but I never promised not to read Mumâs to him, and so, recently, I dipped into the ones she wrote at this time â from mid-1945 to autumn 1946 â and learned of her fears for him, first in the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria and Palestine) and then back in India, and her concerns about us returning there, and her worries about money, and what would happen to us if and when we left India and returned to England for ever . . . I also discovered that Tessa and I were sent to dancing classes in Fleet, because in one letter Mum, whoâd watched a lesson while waiting to take us home, writes, âOh dear, Brigid is not exactly graceful, but you do have to give her full marks for trying, bless her.â
As I explained earlier, Tessa and I had never been to school, but now, after the best part of a year and a half in Fleet with our grandparents, we were going back to India, and a governess had been hired to come with us. Moira, poor Moira, was to be left behind to go to boarding school; and David, who had already been separated from his family for so long, was to go to Sandhurst.
The governess was called Miss Waller, which immediately became Swaller, and we came to love her indomitable, jolly-hockey-sticks, isnât-life-a-huge-adventure character dearly. I canât think of a single academic thing she taught us, but I did learn that one should always carry a book to read in case you get held up somewhere with nothing to do, plus a cardigan in case the weather changes, and you should try to keep a small notebook and pencil handy, as well as something to eat and drink in an emergency. These lessons have proved invaluable. I donât mean to be smug, but our children were always the good ones on planes when they were small, thanks to my Swaller-inspired bag of activities, books, biscuits and drinks.
3
We returned to a turbulent India, but, as children, we were sheltered and our early days back in the country seemed peaceable, and I was happy to be there and not at all homesick for England. We lived for a short time in a boarding house or small hotel in a military town called Secunderabad which is next to Hyderabad in the centre of India. I donât know why we were staying in a hotel, we had never lived in one before, but perhaps Brightlands, the house in Bolton Road whose address I wrote in every book, was being painted or cleaned up for us. Outside the hotel was a pile of buildersâ sand and, when we were not having lessons or creating pompoms or doing French knitting with Swaller (her passion for making things never left me), Tessa and I spent every day perfectly happily climbing over it, picking out tiny shells which we collected in matchboxes. We were in the boarding house/hotel for Christmas 1946, all of us feeling glum because we were not in our own home (wherever that was meant to be) and Dad was, as always, away, so it was just Mum and Swaller, Tessa and me and NO TREE. Mum cut a huge Christmas tree out of stiff paper and painted it green with coloured decorations and pinned it to the wall but it wasnât quite the same. Then, in the middle of our muted celebrations, there was a knock at the door and Dad appeared â he was in uniform and had somehow managed to get away from whatever he was doing, to be with us for a few hours. It was thrilling.
Soon we moved to 219A Bolton Road in Secunderabad, Dad was with us at last, my grandmother came on
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