Free Out of India by Michael Foss Page A

learnt to take comfort from it. The daily blows and insults became easier to withstand. They were seen, most perversely, as marks of status. In the battles of the playground, in the everlasting boyhood contests between Cowboys and Indians, between Authority and Defiance, I knew instinctively which side I was destined to be on. For was I not, both by birth and present circumstance, a person separated out, a natural ‘Indian’?
    To be different becomes a source of secret pride.
    *
    I did not understand much about prayer, though we were only too often on our knees. But I knew well enough what it was to beg. We all learnt how to do that. Roused into the sombre shadows of another shoddy morning we begged for a few more moments of sleep. In timid voices we asked for an extra slice of bread and a spoonful of jam. Hopping from foot to foot we shot up our hands for leave to go to the lavatory. In the winter, denied permission to wear gloves and forbidden to put our hands in our pockets, we tucked frozen hands into our armpits. Indoors, we tried to thaw out by sitting on the hot radiators, though this too was not permitted for fear of getting piles. Often reduced to tears, we would hold out ashamed hands for a handkerchief. As we sniffled and wiped our eyes our creased and anxious little faces appealed for more kindness and fewer slaps. And of course we continually begged, either in the confessional or under a nun’s basilisk gaze, for forgiveness of our many sins.
    There was so much to ask for. In fact, all my obstructive, morose and violent behaviour was a petition begging for my release.
    Then that release came suddenly, for reasons that were hidden to me. In summer towards the end of the war ourfamily moved from Oxford to the south Dorset coast. This move indicated, I suppose, an easing of our money worries. My father, a professional soldier with plenty of pre-war experience, had risen rapidly in wartime, and his pay went up with his rank. For me, quitting the low-lying Thames river-valley that was so intimately connected with the fever-haunted, almost hallucinatory oppression of the convent was only another mysterious shift of fate.
    Now even the weather seemed kinder – the bracing sea airs, the dash of spray off the breaking waves, the sun glinting like hide and seek between driven clouds. A new mood settled on my mother, one of almost dangerous complacence. Her walk had a swing to it, as if she were now on her way with some purpose. She shed her dowdy suit – the appropriate wear for the Foreign Office – and took to flowery summer frocks with sandals on her feet. Her hair, once closely pinned up, was now looser and often wind-blown. She smiled, lingered in company, and forgot to annoy us with her fidgeting and her nervous fears for our safety. In her own estimation she deserved a rest (could not the whole of England say that also?).
    She took a room in a small hotel in Uplyme and prepared to bring her life back in line with her own sense of normality. For her, that meant being wife and mother. No matter that her husband was fighting a war two thousand miles away and her children were shut up in a boarding school. She regarded these circumstances as somehow unreal, having to do with a shadow-life of wartime, whereas her real life, modelled on her past days in India, lay in the return to India. No longer burdened with the drudgery of office work, for which she was almost wholly unsuited, she could now devote herself to the thought of the future. There was much domestic business to take in hand. Most of our family goods had gone to the bottom of the sea in 1940. Her little world of household effects had to be re-gathered, packed and stored.
    Then it was necessary to recuperate her health and her looks and her good humour. She relaxed. No need to get up quite so early in the morning. No need to join the bus queue, to jostle with crowds for a hasty lunchtime sandwich, to tread pavements homewards to the stark suburban room,