Out of India (3 page)

Along the deck a fat little boy, bigger than my brother and just old enough to start to form some cloudy notion of the ultimate danger, had changed from subdued snivels to raucous hiccups of fright. My brother was being settled into the chair when an exasperated sailor, unnerved by these squalls, grabbed the fat kid and thrust him onto the lap of my much smaller brother. Then down they went, my brother's pinched face peeping from behind the enveloping suet of puppy fat. My mother and I followed, her arms tight about me.

The last passenger came unsteadily down the rope ladder and a voice cried, ‘Leave off there, this boat's full now.' Oars were hovering above the surface of the sea and the lifeboat was kicked away from the scales of the rusty hull. Out from the shelter of the ship we sat on the swell, waiting for a signal from above that all was clear to pull away from the drowning ironwork of the stricken ship. On a bench in the lifeboat my brother and I crouched under the lee of my mother's body, her arms hugging around our shoulders. My brother looked at the plump brat still trying to ride his
hiccups and whispered with tears in his own voice, ‘He sat on me and burst my boiler.'

*

A brilliant night, out under the stars. Mythological wonders of gods and heroes were written on the palimpsest of the sky; I looked up with eyes new to this creation and felt instinctively the power of that divine writing that had suggested such a persuasive mystery to Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Polynesians, even to those weird blue men tending the ancient boulders of Stonehenge. The cold nip of the night gave a polish to the air, making those lights of heaven sparkle. We were alone now. The ship had gone, a quiet demise, slipping almost unnoticed into the confraternity of the deep. We held position according to the wheeling arms of the Plough and the certainty of the Pole Star. Somewhere not far to the south was Donegal or the coast of Northern Ireland. If we pulled steadily towards the east Glasgow awaited us. The rowers put their backs into the oars. There was nothing else to do.

Men had ranged themselves along the wooden benches, two or three to each oar, depending on their age and strength. The lifeboat was heavy and clumsy with high sides, deliberately overbuilt to stand the punishment of the ocean, and it was not easy to row. The hands on the oars were willing but soft, inexperienced. The oars were long, heavy, with rough wooden handles. They struck the water at an awkward angle, and the knack of getting them in and out smoothly with a steady rhythm was hard to learn. After a while no one spoke. A bearded man vested in the authority of a navy-blue jacket with brass buttons took the tiller. Women and children were scattered on the benches towards the inside of the boat, fitting in wherever there was a space. The rowers had begun briskly but soon grew weary. Shoulders slumped, breath came thickly from open mouths, a dew of sweat dampened foreheads even in the
night chill. Sore hands began to blister. The breeze was freshening, dragging frayed strips of cloud over the flying moon. When the moon was hidden, the oar-strokes no longer glittered in a spray of white foam but went in and out amid surly dark swirls.

Our little family group sat facing forward, cramped for space but glad to huddle together for warmth and security. My brother's back came within the ambit of one of the oarsmen's swing. Every so often, on a hard pull, the end of the oar jerked into my brother's body. A creak of the oarlock and then the blow – a painful time-keeping. It was not easy to shift position without disrupting the work of the boat, and my brother did not complain. He was older than I and felt his standing, particularly in the absence of our father. He would not acknowledge his bruises, and this was no time for the indulgence of tears. At first, I sat on my mother's lap, hugged against the rough stuff of her coat. In front of me I watched the prow circle against the starry sky. The long swell under the rising breeze was causing the lifeboat to yaw and pitch a little, a mild but unsteady motion.

The fusty smell of my mother's coat was in my nose. I felt constricted. I was gulping, I couldn't get enough air, a rising warmth pushed against a plug of soft matter in my throat. My eyes were out of kilter, the horizon was upending itself, faces shifted alarmingly. I needed more room. Seeing my condition my mother led me down the boat, stumbling over the ribs, to the clear space in the stern around the helmsman. On each side of him a little bench curved around the contour of the boat just below the gunwale. We sat on one of these benches, close to the helmsman, but I could not prevent the welling up of my young life inside me. Fright, cold, puzzlement, misery, ignorance, the loneliness of a small mite on the vast unfeeling breast of the sea, they all gripped me. I began to gasp. Now I knew where I was, raw and almost unlicked,
and for the first time I sensed my human incapacity. My eyes were misted, my stomach churned and heaved.

Suddenly I leant forward and vomited accurately into the lap of the helmsman. He hardly flinched but kept tired eyes straining into the night.

*

Biological life is one thing. We date our being from conception or birth. But except in dreams or drugs what do we know of our infant days, our weaning, our first stumbles onto two legs, our shouts of naked emotion turning by degrees into speech? Full life – full self-awareness – starts with the first memory. I know that moment exactly. I confirmed it at the City of London Library at the Guildhall, searching through the shipping registers of Lloyd's of London. I read there what I already knew, that when reality caught me and opened my eyes to perception I was hand-in-hand with catastrophe and sudden violence:

‘L
ISTEN, CHILDREN,’ SAID the voice, trying to be cheerful, ‘who’s going to be the first to see a ship?’ It was a poor game but we took it up eagerly, glad, in our anxiety, to be diverted. The mind finds a narcotic in its own patterns of activity – in
this
preoccupation we swerve away from
that
fear. A clump of darkness, the shadow of a cloud, a moon-bright slick on a wave, one by one such queer shapes gave a fillip to our childish imagination. But no ship came. Then we grew weary and subsided into uneasy dozing, keeled over against adults, starting awake at the pitch of the boat or the ruffle of the wind.

At dawn, a watery sun peered blearily over the far hump of the ocean. For several hours we had been rowing through seas more cheerless than dangerous. The calm weather was holding. The unwieldy oars scratched along the water, ticking off the slow passage of time. In the lifeboat, heads were drooping, on the edge of sleep or nodding vaguely to a dejected rhythm. So no one saw the pale flush of the day’s first meagre light pick out the lines of a freighter far ahead steaming very slowly across our bows. Then the adults saw it and a low noise went around the boat, not jubilant or excited, but as if taking satisfaction in a favourable toss of the coin. How quickly it had been accepted, in this Britain of 1940, that an autumnal night in an open boat on the North Atlantic was
merely the ill luck of war, to be expected and endured. For the time being the good citizen had abandoned the habitual cry of self-interest, the demand to be heard first and often. We were learning that there was a kind of peace in unaccustomed humility.

The rowers rested on their oars, craning awkward looks over the shoulder. They saw the freighter alter course and begin to grow bulky in their line of sight, huge and grey. Then they could afford to smile wearily and paddle a little, sagging on the benches, fatigue mixed with relief giving them a fatuous or spaced-out look.

The freighter had been tiptoeing carefully past the U-boats towards Glasgow. The radio had reported the sinkings in our convoy and so the freighter was not surprised to find lifeboats adrift on the night seas. The crew had already picked up other survivors and had weather eyes open for more boats in need of rescue. Now it was our turn. The big ship hove to, and we slopped about in the thick gloom of its hull. High above us, along the deck-rail, were rows of whitish faces, as dim as dinner plates in a dusty old-fashioned dresser. No one waved or shouted. In a minute or so a dark-faced lascar shook out a coil of rope and hurled it into the bow so that we could tie up and bring the lifeboat alongside the sloping gangway suspended against the side of the ship. We began a laborious disembarkation, a painful exit blotting out the memory of how smartly we had jumped for our lives into the boat. We had been wrung out by too much emotion. This was no more than a domestic event, a homecoming of weary travellers that required neither banners nor trumpets.

And in this flat atmosphere somehow it did not startle me that I should find my father waiting for us as we stepped from gangway to deck. What is a homecoming without the father of the house? His lifeboat had been picked up a good hour before us. I do not remember that
he hugged us, but I think he gave my brother and myself a manly shake of our little hands.

But we were fretful and demanding, wanting some recognition of the magnitude of our childhood adventure. Grizzling, wiping tired eyes with the back of a sleeve, shivering not so much from cold but in the after-shock of sea and misery, we went moaning and complaining to a gaunt, functional lobby where we could rest under an old coat or blanket, prone on the floor or huddled in crooked shapes on one of the few armchairs.

We slept, ate hard biscuits and drank weak tea, then dozed again while the freighter headed for Glasgow. As we entered the docks at nightfall we kids were still fractious and bickering, making a grievance of our new safety, paying out for lost security with a litany of whines. Our mother was overwhelmed, as so often, and then exhausted to the point of tears. That she should have to endure this, after all that
she
had been through. She washed her hands of us, with resentful looks towards her husband, implying the need for a father’s firm hand. The provocation of his family was as much as my father could bear at the best of times. He hoped to be above the sordid fray of family disputes. In India, there had always been an ayah to scoop us up out of the sahib’s wrath, to feed us sweetmeats and a taste of
pan
in the servants’ cubbyhole behind the kitchen.

‘Now, boys,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you know better than to annoy your mother.’

He hoped that would be enough, but of course it hardly ever was, and he was reduced to the indignity of having to issue threats and smacks at random. It was sad the effort he had to make to knock us about, and I think we felt for him, for we redoubled our noise and not all the laments were for ourselves. We felt the suffering of our parents.

After all, what did our family have left? We stood in an ill-assorted jumble of clothes. Our trunks, our cases, all
our household effects, a favourite teddy bear and the other inconsequential toys of childhood were even then settling into the silt of the North Atlantic. We had become refugees in our own land, a place to which we were barely connected, bearing odd garments like the stigma of our dispossession. My father, tall and slim and a bit of a dandy in his dress, had been given a flat-top cap in a cheerful tweed, the chummy sort of cap of beer-stained working-class pubs in the industrial north of England. We trudged out of the ship onto a raw dock surrounded by the spires of cranes. My brother and I were dragging our feet, trying to put our sullenness into words.

‘What an awful hat,’ said my brother gloomily, behind our father’s back.

‘Horrible,’ I replied.

No one was paying attention. We plodded on through a battered perimeter gate to confront the city of Glasgow and the unknown land beyond. An elderly sentry with a .303 Lee-Enfield rifle from the time of the Great War carefully closed the gate after us.

*

‘Whose bairns are these?’ the old man said again, crinkling his eyes and squeezing a little rheumy water out at the corners.

The thin old lady with the ramrod-straight back looked up from polishing boots and replied sharply, ‘Why, Tom, you know they’re Fred’s, of course.’ And she added with a severe glance towards the pale young woman sewing on the other side of the fire. ‘And
she’s
his wife.’

My grandmother would not mention my mother’s name, if she could avoid it. My mother was Irish and ‘Roman’ while my grandmother was a strict Wesleyan Methodist. My anxious mother, always so worried and unsure and willing to help, was classed among the ranks of the Scarlet Women.

My grandfather nodded peacefully, crumbling a biscuit
into his cup of tea. Reassured once more as to the provenance of the little strangers who had burst so surprisingly into the tranquil life of his retirement, he continued to pass us titbits of broken biscuit under the cover of the heavy tablecloth, where my grandmother could not see it.

Soon after the sinking of the
City of Simla
, my father had been sent back to India by plane. But there was no longer any escape for families. Now ships were too dangerous, and planes too valuable for the brutalities of war to be used for the sake of families. By default, having nowhere else to go, we trailed out of Glasgow heading for my father’s home village in Lincolnshire, most subterranean and glum of English counties.

We came to a brick cottage on a quiet road at the end of the village. The house was very small, a parlour at the front, a kitchen and scullery at the back with a cold-water tap and an eternal chill rising from the stone flags of the floor. In the corner a cupboard door led straight onto the stairs, bare deal planks in a dark enclosure of lath and plaster leading to the two little bedrooms above. There was no bathroom. A zinc tub hung under the lean-to outside the back door. On bath nights it was carried into the kitchen to be filled with scalding water from the big black kettle on the hob. The lavatory was in an outhouse at the bottom of the garden, a single seat above the ordure pit in a dusty wooden hut that doubled as a shed for storage of tools, garden implements, oddments and junk.