j.        Personal

There have been upheavals in my life, as I suppose there have been in the lives of all. The first overwhelmed me when I was 7 and my two sisters were 4 1/2 and 3. It happened the year I started boarding school in Oak Grove. I had been in school a few months when a letter came from my mother saying she had left my father. The letter was pages long, in my mother's beautiful, round firm hand, blaming and accusing my father for all manner of things. At that age my limited reading skills made it difficult for me to follow my mother's complaints, which went mostly over my head.

I was distressed in a vague way that year at school, but not knowing exactly what had occurred at home, and being swept along with day-to-day school activities, it was only a dull realization of emptiness I had when I was taken to my Aunt Ruth's home instead of my own for the Christmas holidays.

My father had not written to me of the break-up while I was at school, nor can I recall his saying anything to me about it at my aunt's home, but I am sure he must have because he was that sort of man. My aunt lived in Madhupur, on the East Indian Railway (E.I.R.), about an hour's train journey from Asansol, a large town; where a brother of my father lived. I think my dad and I were on our way to visit this brother's family when I was hit with the full force of my mother's absence. From Madhupur the train went through Karmatar without stopping, but it did slow down. Karmatar was where my mother's family had their homestead. My father told me to stand by the carriage door and look out. There, at the homestead fence, stood my mother. We waved to each other. I think my father must have got word to her we would be passing through. While I was waving, my father read a book, or pretended to read, not looking at my mother, but keeping an eye on me. I was too upset and sad to consider what the feelings of my father and mother might be. The image of my lovely mother, separated from me by the road that ran between the railway tracks and the Homestead property, was a deep, unbearable pain.

Children cope with inward pain unseen and unheard, but they do need emotional support, and that was given to me and my sisters unfailingly by my father. After seven years, when my sisters needed adult feminine guidance in the home, my mother returned. My parents did not lead estranged lives, but my mother had little or no time for my father and there were some painful quarrels. At this time I felt keenly for my father and in a strange, surrealistic scenario, remained separated from my mother, though we lived in the same house as mother and son in one family.

Looking back, I consider I grew up mentally unstable, perhaps sick. I may be using my condition as an excuse for actions I took in later life, and for which I take sole responsibility. I did have a rejection complex and very little self-confidence, which showed in many ways and were intensified by other unrelated weaknesses of my personality. Anyway, I had just turned 24 when the next upheaval in my life occurred.

A driver's wife in the railway colony of Jhajha knew I had just completed a degree in education and asked my father if I would tutor her daughter. This was in 1947, after my year in Shillong. I had plenty of time, not having applied yet for a position in a school, but intending to do so. It was summer and my plan was to teach in an Anglo-Indian boarding school in the coming March, when the hill boarding schools opened. I had plenty of time most days. The lady, Mrs. Olive Cracknell, offered to pay me. I told her I would be pleased to do it and declined her offer of payment. Two hours every morning I did English Language, English Literature and some mathematics with the daughter, Mary, who was about 15 years of age. She had changed schools and was home during the change and wanted to be prepared for the next grade. Following sessions, the mother would ask me to stay for tea, which sometimes extended to staying for lunch.

Mrs. Cracknell and I had some lengthy chats. She showed an interest in my reading, which at that time was focussed on the novels of Thomas Hardy. Hardy was knocking my familiar world and its values to bits. In "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "Jude the Obscure" he depicted the suffering of women in cruel marriages. Mrs. Cracknell introduced the tale of her own marriage, which was as bad as anything in Hardy. By what degrees I do not know, she told me that her husband had lured her into leaving nurses' training and joining him in marriage in the comfortable home he had furnished for them.

A relative of Mr. Cracknell's, a station master, happened to see his nephew and a young girl alight from the train that had brought the pair on their romance. Ginger Cracknell told Olive to say they were married, but when the uncle asked, Olive told him what the situation was. The uncle took Olive to his home and she stayed there while marriage arrangements were made. After the marriage, for which Olive wore Ginger's uncle's felt hat, the newlyweds went to Cracknell's railway quarters, which turned out to be furnished in an impoverished manner. To consummate the marriage, she told me, Ginger chased her round the bed and forced her down. The worst of what she told me was that she submitted to her husband's love-making, even to the present, with a pillow over her face. All this was rather much for a young man. I conceived the idea about this time of becoming Olive's lover and rescuer. That she was already married, had two surviving children of five she had borne, and was 16 years older than I was, were impediments I brushed aside. Mine was a case of virulent presumption.

Olive left her husband and she and I took lodgings in Calcutta. We both found work and we lived together, joined some months later by Mary. Olive's son, Robert, was in the navy and at sea.

Did the difficulties I had had with my mother have any part in these events? I think they did. One story of Olive's that hit me very hard was of the forced separation she endured from her children. She had left Cracknell after yet another quarrel and had gone up to Oak Grove School to see her children. The school staff informed her that by her husband's order she was not permitted to meet her children. Two staff members escorted her off the school premises. A mother deprived in that manner touched the nerve of my own childhood deprivation.

Olive and I had been together 1 1/2 years when we emigrated to England. She was with me in the journey from Calcutta to Bombay, of which I wrote earlier. Before I left for Calcutta with Olive I talked to my father. He did not criticize me, nor did he advise me to reconsider my plans. He was disappointed. There was no approval of what I was doing, though he did express some anger at Mr. Cracknell's treatment, past and present, of Olive, as narrated by me and as told me by Olive. My mother remained silent on the subject of Olive. The years I had spent with my father, the years both my parents had paid for my education and seen to my needs should have put an obligation on me; but I was too intent on setting the world right for Olive and myself.

My life, including my romantic life, was by no means limited to upheavals. I was close and happy with my father and sisters and painfully ambivalent with my mother. At Victoria, I had a girl friend in Dow Hill, Edna Bennett, with whom I still correspond. We met at school dances. After leaving school I had a girl friend in Jhajha, and I look back at that friendship as a time of grace. Marie Hill was a gentle and affectionate girl. Her mother, though, upset me when she accused me of causing her little son's nightmares by the harmless stories I told him, and I decided I could not expose myself to such hurtful and unfeeling accusations. Marie married a railwayman, a widower, soon after. In Shillong I tried unsuccessfully to be the boy friend of an Anglo-Assamese girl named Narayani (Nara) Hendique. Her father was the Director of Agriculture for Assam and I think the Hendiques, if they considered me at all, thought my family unsuitable. Nara married the A.D.C. to the Governor of Assam. I was recovering from my disappointment over Nara when I met Olive Cracknell.

My closest attachments, as might be expected from my boarding school experience, were with boys. My best friends were Allan Browne and Lawrie Newbould from Victoria School, where we were in the same "gang" and willingly shared all our possessions, especially food treats, and chummed together constantly. At St. Xavier's College my friends were Mick Blake, John Bryant, Gilbert Young-Western, and Eardley Snell. The first three joined the Armed Forces during the war and by doing so more or less temporarily severed the friendships. Eardley and I remained friends until I was preoccupied with Olive Cracknell. In Shillong my friend was Malcolm Peterson, with whom I corresponded until I left India for England. I was fortunate in renewing all but two of these friendships in later years: Young-Western went I know not where; Bryant was killed in action against the Japanese. Peterson contacted me in England through the Red Cross, who had a finding persons service; Blake and Browne, both from Australia, met me in Canada.; Newbould and Snell lived near Toronto, where I was living, the first in St. Thomas, Ontario and the second in Detroit, Michigan. Friendships going back more than sixty years are gifts.

The friend I valued most was Mick Blake, who was a year ahead of me at Victoria School and at St.Xavier’s College. He used foul language but he was the most moral boy I knew, totally committed to fair play and decency. And he had courage and was good at games, with exquisite timing and extraordinary reflexes. He was awarded the Sword of Honour at the Air Force Academy and went on to gain a Vir Chakra in the Indian Air Force. To my great delight we began a correspondence when he emigrated to Australia and we have met twice on Mick’s visits to Canada. Hearing from him by email remains one of my joys.

Besides, through my memberships in the alumni associations of Victoria and Oak Grove students, I keep up with news of the schools and of boys who were with me in school. On the walls in the room in which I am writing there is a professional drawing of Victoria School, a photograph of the Victoria Senior School in 1939, the year before I left, and the painting of a locomotive outside a roundhouse. It could be my Dad on the footplate. On a shelf in my bedroom closet is a paper bag containing Karmatar mutti (mud), which I brought back from one of my visits to the Homestead, and I have asked my wife to place it in my grave ("dust to dust").