Life in India '48
It was inevitable that we should have to move away from our lovely Bungalow as there was too much hassle with the village life of Juhu. It was a great pity as we had found a wonderful Montessorri School for the children . They were taught practical things , like tieing their shoe laces, as well as picking up the language so quickly and they loved it but ,sadly, we moved to Bombay.
We soon found a boarding house in Woodhouse Rd. right in the centre of the city. We had a large,ground floor room . The big block was run by an ex-army Major Grey and his Anglo-Indian friend, Miss Woods. Life there was certainly entertaining. The children were spoiled completely by the staff who, like all Indians, love all children. If I scolded Peter for something, one of the servants would get between me and him, saying "Don't beat him, Sahib; beat me instead" ; I would come back from the airport to find the pair of them squatting, Indian fashion, outside the building, on the pavement with the "Paperwallah" with his comics spread all over, reading to their heart's content.
There was a lift shaft running up the centre of the building and one day, entering the place, I saw what looked like a leg of lamb going up on a piece of rope. I ran up the stairs and found one of the bearers, on the third floor, pulling away. The explanation was that meat had to be purchased direct from the abattoirs at Bandra so each family would send their bearer who would get together with the others and purchase one good cut and the others , inferior ones. The one good cut was going the rounds of the apartments ,to be shown to the Memsahib and the cook would get the blame for the result of cooking the inferior ones,
We found evidence of rats in our larder,so I purchgased a trap. The only type that you could purchase was the cage type. One day I heard the trap go and called the bearer to take it outside and kill the rat. I found him in the garden with the trap open and the rat gone. "But Sahib, it could be my Ancestor" he protested. I told him what I would do to his Ancestor if I found him in the larder again. I was not popular !
I had bought a car very cheaply. It was a lovely 1939 Packard Convertible, a real Hollywood film star's car. It was a beautiful green and
had white side wall tyres, unfortunately not all four. Petrol was still strictly rationed and we had to rely on the surreptitious siphoning from the underwing drain valves of the Air India Dakotas. With our two children waving happily at everyone from the back seat we would drive, like royalty, to Breach Kandy, which even though the Brirish had left India for good, earlier in the year, was still very exclusive. There we would sit on the lush lawns and have our tea and sandwiches, being very careful as the kitehawks would swoop and snatch them from out of your hand as you were putting them in your mouth.. It was there that I bumped in to one of my old friends, Ralph Hollis and his wife, Pam. He had trained with me in the States in 1941 and I had not met him since. He was flying for Decca Airlines who were based at Hyderabad which was trying to maintain it's independence from the new India.
Several notorious people were involved with supplying arms to Hyderabad, gun running in fact. I met one of the pilots involved, at one of the bars in Bombay. He was an ex Aer Lingus, giant of a man, and told me that he had called in at Karachi to refuel a converted Lancaster on his way to Hyderabad with "medical supplies". Karachi was, of course, the Capital of the new state of Pakistan and was violently opposed to the breakaway state of Hyderabad. On takeoff, he told me, the Lancaster was so heavily loaded that it failed to get off the ground and slid on it's belly, crashing through the perimeter fence. In his own words "The trouble was all those medical supplies burst loose and there we were , the three of us, sitting among machine guns and rifles." They scrambled free and stopped a bus that was coming along, and made their way to Karachi docks and were on an England bound freigher less than three hours after crashing their aeroplane. I met the same chap later when I was on the Berlin Air Lift. He was flying for the same firm as me, Flight Refuelling ,and told me that he had qualified as a Dentist on getting back to Ireland. Tragically he was killed when returning to Tarrant Rushton, as a passenger in the only accident that the firm had when the aircraft hit a hillside in the vicinity of Tarrant.