Caroline

Although I was born in London on Boxing Day 1936,I am really a relic of the Raj. Indian connexions, mainly on my mother’s side, go back to the 1840s. This means that for my first 8 years, up to the end of WW2, I lived the life of a little princess.

What did this privilege involve? First of all no household tasks, everything was done by the servants.There were always two Chuprassies on the front verandah waiting to run messages or errands, while the Dirzi sat cross legged on the side verandah with his sewing machine ready for making or  mending as they were needed. When we went to the seaside each chota memsahib had a fisherman specially detailed to keep her safe and amused. They built us, not sandcastles, but Hindu temples, and taught us how to surf.   My sister and I, however, were not allowed to give orders to the servants, and had to make our own beds. Something not required of other English children.

Second, I did not go to school. Although my older sister went to boarding school for English children, snobbery and racism meant that I could not attend a school where there might be Indians, so I was taught at home and the system was random. My father, Johnny, taught me to read largely with Robinson Crusoe. I remember very vividly coming upon the open book one day and realising that I could decipher the text. Johnny also taught me arithmetic, but his writing was so bad, and  I dared not admir that I could not read his figures so the sums were always wrong and I think that eventually the project was abandoned. History largely reflected my mother, Anne’s, current enthusiasms. There was a good deal about the Seljuk Kingdom of Rhum and the Ottoman invasions. She had been at the Slade School of Art, and this meant plenty of Botticelli and Michelangelo. I preferred Botticelli.  Neither parent was sporty, so there were long walks, which I hated, and never any ball games. For company there were other Civil Service children and we would be farmed in turn round the different families. Every garden had a slit trench dug in it from which we were supposed to repel the Japanese , (we were not far from the Bay of Bengal). Could we have held them off for 30 seconds, or would it only have been 15? In any case the need did not arise, but they were wonderful to play in.

Johnny and Anne were bookish and talkative. Johnny understood when he went out in 1929 that independence was both inevitable and desirable. They were certainly not left wing, but more liberal than most of the other English living in Cuttack.  Their marriage was rocky and Johnny  actually started divorce proceedings in 1940. Anne was in England at the time, but, after Dunkirk decided that  reconciliation with a husband in safe, protected, employment in India was a good idea, so we sailed out round the Cape of Good Hope. Wartime restrictions meant she could not tell him when and how we were travelling so our sudden arrival off the night mail was something of a shock.

Thirdly, travel. Every hot weather we went up to Naini Tal in the Himalayas where my sister was at school and stayed for about three months. Johnny’s work kept him in the plains.

 First off was the overnight train to Calcutta. There Anne stayed for a couple of days shopping at the Army and Navy Stores. I was bored by the shopping, but awed by the plumbing. Back home we only had the thunder box. Then it was Calcutta to Lucknow. We travelled in a  private coach with its own basin and loo. Air conditioning was a huge block of ice in one corner of the carriage which melted and was duly replaced. At night the bearer, Hakim, made up the bunks with our own sheets and pillows. Next morning we woke up crossing the Ganges at Varanasi, and at Lucknow there was a longish wait for the Punjab Mail.  This was Anne’s moment to teach some Empire history. We piled into a tonga and drove to  the Residency, still riddled with bullet holes, where the British had been holed up during the siege of 1857 – soldiers,their wives, children, servants and loyal sepoys. It was very atmospheric, but I was always terrified of missing the next train and indeed we  once reached the station to find the Punjab mail with steam up waiting impatiently for us to get safely aboard. The hill station,Naini Tal, was amazing. Fewer germs to fear, more freedom and wonderful picnics against a backdrop of Trisul, Nanda Devi and Nanga Parbat.

The day after VE Day Anne booked our passage home. Johnny had to stay on until independence. This meant school. Anne had got us into St Paul’s. My sister Susan into the senior school and me into the Junior, tho’ it was a close run thing with the headmistress saying to Anne, “Some children can’t help being backward” I was just nine years old.

It was all a bit of a shock. I soon noticed girls putting up their hands and asking, “Can I be excused?”. I thought they were just taking a break from the lesson, but came the day when I was desperate. What did a person do? I  put up my hand and asked, “Can I go to the bathroom?”. “We don’t use words like THAT, Caroline, we say, can I be excused?”  Afterwards the class crowded round me and asked if I had ever been to school before, “No” I said, “Oh, that’s why you’re so queer”. To their great credit they did not tease but showed me what I ought to be doing.

St Paul’s was tops for teaching, zero for pastoral care. They told my sister, who later got a two one at Cambridge, “Isn’t it time you went down to the Labour Exchange”. “A” level was not taught because we were all expected to go to Oxbridge and if you were not a sure thing it was delicately indicated that you ought to leave. My friends were all failures in this way. Two became novelists – one also a quangeroo, one founded a publishing company and one ranked highly in Offcom.  I got out early after only one term in the 6^th form.  Once, twenty years later, I went back to a gathering and talked to my former Classics mistress. When told that I  I taught in a primary school her comment was, “Oh well, you’re young enough to change that.” Next she asked after children, “Kate is hoping to go to Clare” “My dear that is a very hard college to get into, I will write and tell you about some easier ones”.  I never bothered to let her know that Kate got a scholarship.

At twenty I married Robin and joined him in Germany where he was the lowest grade of Lecturer at Muenster University. This put paid to my half finished training as a solicitor. Moving to York two years later we wanted a house and a family, so Kate arrived. Two years after this we had Jonathan and then discovered that our genes were incompatible. He only lived for two weeks.  Eleven months later Susannah was born and lived for just a month. It was cystic fibrosis of a rather virulent kind.

At this stage Robin, who had decided on school teaching, moved to Nottingham High School where the next baby was stillborn. It was a tricky situation, but we decided to have one more go and meanwhile, to hedge our bets, I would go to the Technical College and do “A” Level. I sat the exams at eight months pregnant, (wonderful to  sit down for three hours at a time and not be interrupted) and we were rewarded with Olivia. Three years later Nottingham Polytechnic was one of the first to offer Teacher Training for mature students, and I got a place.

It was a very left wing training, there were no exams, our work had comments, but never grades and when you wrote an essay it was, “Remember it will be marked by a Marxist”. The three Rs were old hat, we were to give the children new experiences. A good deal of this I agreed with.

WE has been promised a fourth year to do a Bed, but then a new college principal arrived who said that degrees were elitist and should not be taught.  Somehow the staff crammed the course in among their other commitments and Notting University would award the degree, though we were not allowed in their library or any of their facilities. When the exams came it was,”surprise, surprise” we were not told what papers we were taking until we turned them over and started writing.

When I graduated I was told, “with your accent you will never get far”.

That’s my education. I taught in Infant Schools for 22 years, nine of them as a head and consider myself extremely lucky.