d.      An Education in India

My first school at the age of five was the local railway school in Dhanbad, where my dad was stationed. I attended school mornings only. The dominant memory I have of this period is of fighting a boy on the street after school. A Gurkha railway security policeman broke up the fight. I chose the wrong opponent: the boy had two older brothers, one of whom was on the look-out for me for a while, and I took the precaution of avoiding him.

Bishop Cotton School in Nancoom, my first boarding school at the age of six, had both a boys' school and a girls' school. The primary division, in which I was placed, was part of the girls' school. The school was run by Church of England (C of E) nuns. The nun who taught my class did a lot of slapping as the just punishment for mistakes and a lot of handing out of holy pictures as the just punishment for correct work. I cannot remember earning slaps or holy pictures, nor can I remember wearing one of the tall, conical paper dunce caps the teacher had on a shelf in the classroom; but seeing heads with tall hats made a strong visual impression.

One punishment I received with three or four other boys of my age was unusual. The nun who did the punishing took us to her room, lowered the window blind - presumably to avoid being observed - told us to remove our shorts, which we did, and then sent a cane whistling on our bare legs. I can visualize the legs jumping about, the damn bed in the way. I do not know what this punishment was for, but it must have been for something considered serious, perhaps sexual, like small boys showing an interest in penises.

Some experiences not connected with school learning or discipline come to mind. Towards evening one day the school watched a red cloud approaching, pushed by strong winds. The cloud rained minute red spiders, in number like the sands of a beach. We held out our hands to catch them and in dozens they crawled over the backs of our hands. Since then I have believed the sky can rain fishes or frogs or whatever.

One absolutely brilliant scene I recall is of a field covered with bushes and the bushes covered in silver spiders' webs. Clinging to the threads of the webs were millions of droplets of dew and as the sun came up each drop sparkled, and each web was a marvellous filigree decoration.

The next year, 1930, I was sent to Oak Grove Junior School, in Jharipani, near the hill station, Mussoorie. I had an excellent teacher in Standards 1, 2  and 3, a Miss Shepherd. She gave her pupils a sound foundation. When I was an undergraduate at St. Xavier's College in Calcutta I met Miss Shepherd at a college function and expressed the respect I had carried for her through the years.

The boys' and girls' dormitories in the Junior School were separated by a landing at the top of a flight of stairs used by both dormitories. Some mornings there would be girls standing on the landing for the boys to see on their way down the stairs. The girls would be covered in discoloured sheets. This cruel exposure was the punishment for bed wetting.

I was always near the top of the class in those early years. Then came 1934 and my studies took a severe mauling. A week before I was to leave for boarding school I broke my left elbow. It turned out to be a complicated fracture and I was in and out of hospitals in Calcutta for some months. Between bouts in hospital I was supposed to attend the local railway school in Jhajha, but most days I played hooky. Eventually my dad beat me with a stick and put an end to my skipping school. I must say I had driven my dad to violence. I did not go to boarding school that year.

Back in Oak Grove Senior Boys' School the following year was an ordeal in many ways. Perhaps my father had informed the school of my attendance of the railway school in Jhajha and on the strength of that I was placed with my junior school classmates of two years before. Thus I missed Standard 4, which was the year Urdu, Algebra, Geometry and Science were introduced. Now I was permanently in the bottom half of the class. Oak Grove Senior Boys' School did no pampering, offered no make-up lessons. Boys had to sink or swim. This was carried out literally in swimming classes. Non-swimmers were thrown into the deep end of the pool, where they had to whistle for the rope held by a boy who stood beside the instructor on the deck. In the struggle to keep from drowning and to whistle, the learners managed to keep afloat and eventually began to swim. They were more successful than I was with Urdu and Algebra.

Moreover, I had suffered a lot of pain the year I was out - seven "gas" operations and two chloroform operations for my left elbow and  in addition, I had dislocated my right elbow and had it set without anaesthetic - and now I was thrust among boys with a year's Senior School experience, keen on keeping me down in the pecking order. The desire to make physical challenges had gone out of me and the presence of much bigger boys was intimidating. Besides, I had returned to school with a left elbow that had limited movement, which was a handicap in boxing and in most games. Boys who I had dominated in competitions in junior school now relished dominating me. I had been cowed, my confidence literally pale and subdued.

My year out of boarding school affected my schooling but not my education. This was the time I read the Books of Knowledge that were in my home, especially the History sections, and also whatever books of fiction that were around - we had the novels of Dumas, Scott and Dickens in twenty volume sets. It was the year I became a reader, the year I prepared myself unknowingly for a career based on a certain familiarity and pleasure in reading English literature. Education has a lot to do with learning; the teaching is incidental.

Oak Grove Senior Boys' School was a tough place. Some of the masters kept Malacca canes - the bendy ones - and used them freely. Failure to identify a city or a strait on a map at the front of the room earned one cut with the cane. There was drama among the boys while each one waited his turn: would the question be easy or difficult? It was a lottery, with negative reinforcement for the losers. To receive the cut, a boy would walk to the front of the room and bend over. Whack. He would then return to his seat rubbing his arse. Never any tears or whimperings. OG boys believed in being tough. OG put a layer of granite in its students.

The science lab was situated away from the main building, and on one side of it was a path leading down a slope to the school swimming pool. When the weather was right the Physical Training (PT) master, as he was called, would let his class go to the pool. There would be a race and the boys in the science lab found it hard not to look out the window to see which boy was in the lead. There was a standard penalty of one cut for looking out of the window. This master, a young, strapping fellow (no pun intended), was notorious for caning. I have seen him cane in succession 31 boys out of a class of 35; this for those who failed to achieve a pass mark in a difficult exam he had set. A stroke of a cane would leave a red welt which, with time, grew blue and yellow. In the dormitories boys would display their bums coloured like flags of various countries.

I had two humiliating personal experiences with the science master. In one I was to be caned with a number of others who had failed a test. When my turn came I told the master I had boils on my bottom. He ordered me to go to a room where equipment was kept next to the classroom and to lower my shorts. I had bandages put there by the school Nurse, which proved I was not making up an excuse. The second incident was a painful one. The students in the classroom sat in tiers. A boy in the row above mine was asked a question. While he was fumbling for the answer, another boy prompted him. An investigation to discover who had done the prompting was started. The teacher was sure it was a boy in my row who was the culprit. He asked me if I was the one, and I denied being to blame. Next he asked the boys in the row below mine to write on a piece of paper the name of the boy they considered to be to blame. Given the lead supplied by the enforcer up front, it was not surprising my name came up. I was brought down to the front of the class and was asked again if I had done the prompting, and again I said no. This, by the way, was the truth. He asked me six times to own up and each time I gave him the same answer. The master now gave me an ultimatum: either I owned up and took the caning now or I received a more severe caning later. I was given a few minutes outside the room by myself to make my choice. I reasoned I was to be caned anyway and decided to opt for a lesser caning. When I returned to the room with my fictitious admission of guilt, I was made to apologize to the class and received six hard strokes. It was the only time I had blood drawn in a caning.

Very occasionally canings turned droll. One boy in my class, knowing he was to be caned, put a swimsuit down the back of his shorts. This was an old-fashioned one piece swimsuit for males. When the cane struck, the sound was like that of a pillow being smacked. The master dived into the boy's shorts and got hold of part of the swimsuit. He pulled, the boy resisted, and the class roared with laughter.

Not all the masters were brutal, even the ones who caned regularly would have claimed they were training their students to be achievers and leaders. It was a relief to me, however, when in 1937, when I was 14, my parents told their three children their mother was going to take them to England. My father had applied for a loan from the railway to finance the trip and passages by ship were being arranged by Thomas Cook and Sons. Then came a bombshell. My father was refused the loan because he had stood surety for a fellow-driver's loan and that loan had not yet been repaid. Imagine how different the lives of my sisters and me would have been had the move to England materialized. World War II was just two years off.

My parents had withdrawn all three children from Oak Grove and they were now to be sent to different schools, my sisters to La Martiniere Girls' School in Lucknow and me to Victoria School in Kurseong.

I was in Victoria four years and in 1940 left with a Cambridge School Certificate. The only master who caned in Victoria was the Headmaster, and he punished for misbehaviour, never for school work.  The discipline there came more from individual conscience than outside coercion. It was a polite sort of school by comparison with Oak Grove. Horseplay and wild fighting, including bare-knuckle fighting, was forbidden. If two boys wanted to fight, they went to a school prefect and asked for the gloves, which were kept in a cupboard in the gym. There, with a referee in charge, the two boys boxed out their anger.

In 1941 I entered St. Xavier's College in Calcutta, which was an affiliate of the University of Calcutta, which had the distinction of having more students than any other university in the world. Does that sound impressive? It should not: universities are to be judged by quality not quantity. I left St. Xavier's in 1946 with an English Honours Degree and the following year I qualified as a teacher by taking a degree in education. Some of the examinations at university level were hilarious. I wrote the Intermediate examinations at Islamia College, Calcutta. At a desk alongside me was a student who cheated with an open textbook in his lap. When he finished consulting his source, he placed the book on the floor and pushed it with an audible shove towards a wall. The invigilator came round at the sound, saw nothing and said nothing. The cheater in that exam was an exception.

The papers for the B.A. degree were written in a huge hall at the University Senate House in Calcutta. Steps the length of the building led up to lofty Corinthian columns, and beyond them was a line of double doors which must have been 15 feet in height. The hall had a very high ceiling and hung on the walls were portraits of university dignitaries, such as chancellors. These portraits, in keeping with the dimensions and grandeur of the place, were in huge gilt frames. The most striking aspect of the hall was its resident pigeons. They numbered at least a couple of dozen and they filled the air with billing and cooing and with their flutter, as they flapped loudly from one side of the hall to another, sometimes in flights of four or six. Moreover, there were drips several feet in length of pigeon droppings on the pictures of the robed figures in the portraits, giving them an absurd appearance.

Six hundred candidates wrote examinations in that hall, each provided with a light wooden desk. I noticed a pair of insect feelers in the hole meant for an inkwell in mydesk. I banged the desk on the floor and something like twenty cockroaches fell out and scurried away in every direction. I was given another desk. During one session there was a sound like a sharp clap near me. It was a pigeon dropping which had come down like a bomb on the paper a student was writing on. He held up his booklet. The blob had splattered half a page. An invigilator came to him and what he said was, "That's good luck." At another session those huge doors were thrown open and a crowd stood in an entrance yelling slogans of protest. I believe they were unhappy with the university over something. That examination was extended by almost half an hour.

It was in St. Edmund's College, Shillong that the most unusual incident occurred. The paper being written was difficult and a candidate went up to the invigilator, who was the professor who taught that subject, and was told by the professor how to answer a question. Soon a queue formed of students asking for help, which was readily given. After the examination the professor explained to me the reason for his behaviour. It went like this. These candidates are not college students. They are nearly all married men with families. They are experienced and successful teachers, who have been selected by their school boards and given sabbaticals. The theories taught in the course and examined in the paper are really of minor consequence. Also, passing or failing will make a big difference to the careers of these men (there were no women). I agreed with all the professor stated, but I wondered what would happen in schools where the teachers permitted or encouraged cheating at examinations.

One recollection connected with the examinations I wrote in the Senate House gives me much pleasure. A group of us from St.Xavier's on their way to an examination flagged down a taxi on Park Street. The driver told us we were one too many; if he took all of us he risked a fine. I volunteered to wait for another taxi. This would cost me somewhat more because I would have to pay the whole fare instead of paying only a share. That turned out to be the least of my worries. Time went by and still no vacant taxi appeared. By the time I did enter a taxi, I knew I was going to be late for the examination. I explained the situation to the driver and asked him to step on the gas, which he did. In front of the Senate House I produced a ten rupee note. The fare was a little less than two rupees. The driver could not make change. Normally he would have gone to a shop and changed the ten rupee note, but there was no time. "Never mind, sahib", said this man too poor to make change for ten rupees, "You go on. If you should come across my taxi pay me the money then." That has remained in my mind as a gesture of Indian kindness.

Among the group that had gone in the taxi were two priests. One of them must have had qualms of conscience; he made sure to tell me he had not begun writing his paper until I entered the examination hall. This priest took the gold medal for standing first among the Honours English candidates that year. I was pleased to have made a small and obscure contribution to the success of St. Xavier's.

It turned out that apart from the practice teaching I had to do as a requirement for the Degree in education, I never did a day's teaching in a school in India. Instead, I went to work for an English firm, with its Head Office in Feltham, Middlesex, England and whose Calcutta Office served India and the Far East. It was a much better paying job than that of a teacher, but I hardly needed an education for it. My father was disgusted: he called the job "chaprassi" (peon) work.

I did get an education in India. I learned to find my own compromise in attitude to both English and Indian.