Grandmother’s Footsteps

My grandmother lived to the age of 101, but for me what defined her most were the years she spent in India during the Second World War. As a child I plagued her with questions about this exotic interlude, made all the more remarkable by the air of quiet conventionality that she exuded in later life.

In the sitting-room of her small house in the town where I was born, her white hair carefully curled, she passed round biscuits and poured tea, stirring gently with a silver teaspoon as she asked me about school, then college, then university. It was hard to imagine that she had once been my age, and that two years later at the age of 28 she had boarded a ship headed east, and said goodbye to her family for the foreseeable future. She was born in the winter of 1914, just as the first war was beginning, to a family of prosperous farmers in Worcestershire. I had long assumed that it was the second war that had jolted her out of her provincial existence, but I was wrong. She told me that by the late 1930s she had already done her training as a nurse and in fact was planning to go west, to the prairies of the United States, where nurses were in short supply. She would have travelled between towns on horseback, dispensing medicine and bandages to grateful pioneer folk. ‘It all sounded terribly romantic!’ she said, smoothing the napkin on her lap. But then the war came, and immediately it was clear that she was needed elsewhere. The nurses on the troopship going east were unsure where they were headed, but when the news came through that Singapore had fallen they knew that India was their destination. India! The story of her time there was told in snippets. She had to be pressed to recall significant events, although she would occasionally mention, offhand, an anecdote about her experiences, through which I built up a vague timeline. The main facts of the matter were these. She had worked as a nurse in India for almost four years, in several locations including Assam, distinguishing herself as a hard worker in the most gruelling of conditions. Near the end of the war she had married my grandfather, a shy but evidently brave army officer, in Calcutta Cathedral. I tried to get her to tell me more, but she was reluctant to waste time talking about the past when there was gardening to be done, or church to attend, or one of the many causes she cared about to be supported. She was a flurry of activity, and she only really slowed down in the last two or three years of her life. When she died in January 2016, despite my sadness I felt two overwhelming and unexpected emotions. One was a feeling of ‘rightness’. A woman who had lived so well and so fully had left us at exactly the right time. She was still living in her own home; she was not ill; she was, so far as we knew, content. The end of her life was a better end than most people are granted. She was tired, and she had a cup of tea, and she went to sleep. The other feeling was an urge to continue what I had started, and learn more about her. My uncle had told me of a memoir by a woman called Angela Bolton who had nursed in India at the same time as Grandma. The Maturing Sun (1986) is not a long book or a work of great literature, but it is a compelling portrait of nursing life during the war. I found a second-hand copy and began to read. I was less than halfway through when, six months after she’d left us, Grandma strolled on to the page. This is where she appears for the first time, in Calcutta:

On leaving the Grand Hotel next morning I ran into Sister Copping, the rosy-cheeked, dark-haired girl from Yorkshire who had sung ‘Linden Lea’ on the Monarch of Bermuda. With her was the blonde, extremely shy Mary King, who I thought had the most beautiful face of all the women on the ship, yet who shrank from any social gathering.

Mary King was Grandma. I always thought that exclaiming ‘Oh!’ was something that only happened in books, but I actually did it, so amazed and moved was I by her sudden appearance. I felt for a moment that I had got her back. Then, as I carried on reading, she reappeared with increasing regularity. Mary King next pops up in Assam, where she and Angela Bolton worked in the same hospital for a few months. The duties of the Indian hospital servants are listed, and there they suddenly are, cutting the lawn ‘with a pair of scissors borrowed from Mary King’s sewing box’. So much comedy and mystery in that story! Did Grandma know they had ‘borrowed’ her scissors? I thought of how horrified she would have been if she had found me or my sister Daisy using a precious pair of sewing scissors to trim the grass. A little later the author finds herself working with Mary King in the midst of a cholera epidemic at the hospital. The ten patients entrusted to their care survive, and Angela observes:

The normally silent Mary King came to life over this traumatic episode, revealing depths of feeling that I for one had not known existed in her. Behind that calm face with its perfect features dwelt a personality that slept like a princesse lointaine, waiting to be awakened by the right circumstances or person into a joyous vitality. I hoped that I would be around to see it happen.

I had been prepared for Grandma to be mentioned only briefly in the book, or to be described unfavourably, but this kind and perceptive view of her personality made me feel quite affectionate towards Angela Bolton. Grandma could be frosty, I had always known that – the same shyness that my mother and I also suffer from and which is often mistaken for snobbishness or aloofness. Two pages later, ‘Mary King took her mysterious self to an unknown destination’ and I worried for a moment that that was the last of her. I had a feeling, though, that the author of the book would not let me down. Mary King’s last appearance comes in July 1945, when Angela travels to Calcutta to see a man called Teddy whom she loves but isn’t sure whether to marry. In the end Angela breaks it off with Teddy and goes out for a cheering dinner at the Grand Hotel with a fatherly brigadier:

While I was combing my hair and renewing my lipstick in the cloakroom halfway through the evening, who should enter but Mary King, back at the BMH, Calcutta, once more. She looked a different person from the retiring, self-effacing beauty with the detached expression I remembered; her sleepy blue eyes were wide and alert, and she greeted me with an enthusiasm I had never known before. It did not take me long to spot the cause of the transformation. I saw that she was wearing a diamond ring on her left hand. She told me that she had just become engaged and was at the Grand with her fiancé to celebrate. I was so pleased that I gave her a hug and a kiss, a thing I would never have dared to do in the past.

Angela’s story continues (for the record she lived happily ever after) but Grandma’s part in this tale is complete as she waltzes, one supposes, out of the cloakroom at the Grand Hotel, Calcutta, to rejoin my grandfather, who is waiting for her at a candlelit table. Ahead of them lie laughter and love. They will go trekking in the Himalayas on their honeymoon while the war is still on. After it’s over they’ll go back to England for the birth of their first child, my mother, before being posted to Germany and, later, Malaya. Grandma will raise five children in army houses and uncomplainingly uproot her family time and again. There will also be tragedy and despair – my grandfather, by this time a major in the SAS, will die in action in Borneo less than twenty years later, still in his early forties, and Grandma will have to pick up the fragments of her life. But she will rise from the ashes magnificently, never remarrying but loving her children and grandchildren fiercely, working hard to help the less fortunate at the Citizens Advice Bureau and the mental health charity Mind, and always taking pleasure in her garden. She will be respected and loved and will live a long and fulfilling life, eventually departing the world as gracefully as she had lived in it. But all that is to come. For now she is young and in love. The Maturing Sun provides a few glorious snapshots of Grandma’s time in India, and a glimpse of the experiences that shaped the rest of her life. I am infinitely grateful to Angela Bolton for including my grandmother in her own fascinating memoir. I cried while reading it, but laughed as well, recognizing Grandma in this portrayal – frosty, beautiful and loving. What a treat, so soon after losing her, to find her again.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 54 © Cecily Blench 2017