a visit from England, and so did our glamorous young Aunt Joan who was on her way back to England from Australia where she had been a Wren radiographer in the war (rumour had it that she had bunked off without being properly discharged so could be arrested for desertion at any time). Aunt Joan was much younger than Mum, and she had boyfriends and sang us âLili Marleneâ and âDonât Fence Me Inâ and we saw her as Glamour personified.
Tessa and I had our lessons with Swaller and played in the fountain in the garden (always on the alert for snakes), but the highlight of our days was going swimming at the Club where I spent weeks quivering on the sodden coir matting of the high diving board, plucking up courage to jump â luckily, the day I did, someone was there with a camera. I prided myself on being able to open my eyes underwater and one day I was asked to look for a gold earring which a wealthy young Indian woman had lost in the pool. I found it, and triumphantly presented it to her, and she gave me some sweets which was a bit disappointing as I had thought she would give me the earring â or some other jewel at least. I was always over-optimistic . . . (Years later I found a diamond ring in a flowerbed in our garden in England. It was man-sized and rather ugly but it became my most treasured possession â until there was some kind of crisis in the world and the priest in church told us we must give our most precious possession to charity; I gave the ring. My mother told her friend Eileen what I had done, and when Eileen died, she left me a beautiful Georgian diamond ring. It was stolen by my cleaning lady in London.)
These were happy days. In the early evenings we sat with Mum and Dad in cane chairs on the lawn, while they smoked cigarettes (which came in tins in India, not packets) and had whiskies and sodas, and weâd beg them to let us have a mynah bird or a monkey. We pleaded so hard that in the end they did agree that a monkey could be brought to meet us to see how we all got on, but it didnât seem to like Tessa, so it was taken away again. One evening they had friends for drinks and when I announced that there had been a lady making cow-dung pats in our garden that day, everyone burst out laughing and I didnât know why. I was puzzled and slightly hurt about this for years until I grew up and realised that everyone was obsessed by class in those days, and so the idea of a âladyâ making cow-dung pats was hilarious to them.
Mum always had some project in hand: painting the flowering trees of India, embroidering a map of her journey home by bus, smocking cotton dresses for us which meant her ironing on the transfers of dots you had to follow for this. She and Dad were full of curiosity and there was nothing they liked more than an outing. Whenever they were together, sooner or later there would be expeditions to temples, forts or ruins of some sort. We loved the excitement of the trips â setting out in the cool of early dawn when the sky was the palest blue â but the cultural side of them was rather wasted on Tessa and me. All I can remember of Golconda, near Hyderabad, one of the greatest fortresses in India, was whining about the long walk up the hill to get to it, and at the famous caves of Ellora and Ajanta, while the grown-ups looked reverently at the carvings and paintings illuminated by light reflected into the dark interiors by a man holding a mirror, Tessa and I spent the whole time quarrelling and being shouted at by Dad.
One excursion ended with horror: we had gone to look at the dam at Pocharam where a huge reservoir supplied (probably still supplies) the water for the town of Pune. We walked along the mighty dam and looked down, and far below we saw that some men were splashing about in the water, while people on the bank were running up and down, shouting and gesticulating. Dad started bellowing down instructions. At
Tessa and I had our lessons with Swaller and played in the fountain in the garden (always on the alert for snakes), but the highlight of our days was going swimming at the Club where I spent weeks quivering on the sodden coir matting of the high diving board, plucking up courage to jump â luckily, the day I did, someone was there with a camera. I prided myself on being able to open my eyes underwater and one day I was asked to look for a gold earring which a wealthy young Indian woman had lost in the pool. I found it, and triumphantly presented it to her, and she gave me some sweets which was a bit disappointing as I had thought she would give me the earring â or some other jewel at least. I was always over-optimistic . . . (Years later I found a diamond ring in a flowerbed in our garden in England. It was man-sized and rather ugly but it became my most treasured possession â until there was some kind of crisis in the world and the priest in church told us we must give our most precious possession to charity; I gave the ring. My mother told her friend Eileen what I had done, and when Eileen died, she left me a beautiful Georgian diamond ring. It was stolen by my cleaning lady in London.)
These were happy days. In the early evenings we sat with Mum and Dad in cane chairs on the lawn, while they smoked cigarettes (which came in tins in India, not packets) and had whiskies and sodas, and weâd beg them to let us have a mynah bird or a monkey. We pleaded so hard that in the end they did agree that a monkey could be brought to meet us to see how we all got on, but it didnât seem to like Tessa, so it was taken away again. One evening they had friends for drinks and when I announced that there had been a lady making cow-dung pats in our garden that day, everyone burst out laughing and I didnât know why. I was puzzled and slightly hurt about this for years until I grew up and realised that everyone was obsessed by class in those days, and so the idea of a âladyâ making cow-dung pats was hilarious to them.
Mum always had some project in hand: painting the flowering trees of India, embroidering a map of her journey home by bus, smocking cotton dresses for us which meant her ironing on the transfers of dots you had to follow for this. She and Dad were full of curiosity and there was nothing they liked more than an outing. Whenever they were together, sooner or later there would be expeditions to temples, forts or ruins of some sort. We loved the excitement of the trips â setting out in the cool of early dawn when the sky was the palest blue â but the cultural side of them was rather wasted on Tessa and me. All I can remember of Golconda, near Hyderabad, one of the greatest fortresses in India, was whining about the long walk up the hill to get to it, and at the famous caves of Ellora and Ajanta, while the grown-ups looked reverently at the carvings and paintings illuminated by light reflected into the dark interiors by a man holding a mirror, Tessa and I spent the whole time quarrelling and being shouted at by Dad.
One excursion ended with horror: we had gone to look at the dam at Pocharam where a huge reservoir supplied (probably still supplies) the water for the town of Pune. We walked along the mighty dam and looked down, and far below we saw that some men were splashing about in the water, while people on the bank were running up and down, shouting and gesticulating. Dad started bellowing down instructions. At
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