vi.                The War

In 1939 I was 16 and a member of the school cadet corps. We changed from marching in fours to marching in threes. The best parts for cadets were firing 303' s at the rifle range and bayonet practice on stuffed dummies. The worst part was putting on puttees, but that went out with forming fours. We were getting ready for war.

Three years later two friends of mine, Micky Blake and Johnny Bryant, and I all ex- Victoria School students and at that time students at St.Xavier's College, walked into a recruitment office in Fort William, Calcutta and came away with enlistment applications. These had to be signed by a parent or legal guardian after being filled out. My form did not get very far: my dad would not sign them. This was an unexpected response from him; after all, his father had been a bandmaster in a British regiment. My guess would be that the British in India had turned him off. He advised me to get my B.A., and that was what I did. Micky joined the Royal Indian Air Force and became a pilot, Johnny joined the Army and was commissioned in the 8th Gurkha Rifles.

Johnny's story is both sad and unusual. As a boy in Victoria he had been extraordinarily quiet; as a young man, first at university and then as a military officer he continued to be very shy. On Park Street, Calcutta, not at all far from St. Xavier's, lived a girl who would cycle past the college gates and who had taken Johnny's eye. He would ask either Micky or me, and sometimes both, to walk with him past the girl's house, hoping for a glimpse of her. He followed her at a discreet distance into cinemas and into the ice cream shop on Park Street. He knew the girl's name -Joan Oakley- but never did he try to meet her or speak to her.

Johnny was away for several months while he was in training and after he joined a regiment, but he would spend part of all his leaves in Calcutta. By this time Micky was in the Air Force, so it was I who accompanied Johnny on his "courting" of Joan. I suggested he write to her, but he said she might be under age and should her parents object and write to his commanding officer, he would be disgraced. When Johnny's posting took him to Hoshiarpur for training in jungle warfare and to Ceylon for advanced training in the same, it became my friendly obligation to give Johnny news of Joan, consisting wholly of when and where I had seen her.

John was in jungle training because he had volunteered to be one of a company to be dropped by parachute in Japanese held territory in Burma. It was while he was in Ceylon that I saw a notice of marriage of Joan Oakley to a RAF boy. I sent him the cutting. His reply amazed me: not his Joan Oakley, but someone of the same name.

In Calcutta, from Ceylon, and prior to his airlift, Johnny behaved exactly as he had before with me in tow, he walked past Joan's house and looked for her on the familiar city streets. There was no sign of her. I last saw Johnny walking in his Gurkha uniform away from St. Xavier's College, his chaplis (sandals) crunching the gravelled path in the College.

Then came the awful news, again a notice in "The Statesman", that Johnny had been killed in action. Not long after, I dreamed of Johnny. He told me had had been shot in the throat, a symbol to me no doubt of Johnny's silent ways.

Another shock of the same kind was the news that David Greenhorn, a boy who had been in Victoria with me, had been killed in a plane crash while flying a fighter plane. David was a gifted athlete in school and a fearless adventurer. It was hard to accept his brief candle had been brutally dashed out, his boyish grin utterly changed.

The war left a guilt mark on me. When I thought of the boys and teachers and thousands of Anglo-Indian men and women who went to war, and when I was in England and realized how many lives there had been ended and families had been separated, I felt ashamed I had made no sacrifice. Europe and the horrors of Nazism had never been a preoccupation of mine; had I joined up in 1942 when I sought to enlist, it would have been for life-style, not for patriotism.

My uncle's regiment the X / 26 Baluch arrived at Howrah railway station to take up duties in Alipore, Calcutta. Uncle Harold Reeves, then a major, prided himself on his British appearance. He took pains to live up to his appearance.

On the station happened to be my cousin Derek Calistan. Derek's mother, my mother's eldest sister, was very dark and her husband, Joe, was even darker. Derek took after his parents in complexion. On seeing Harold Reeves, who was of course Derek's uncle too, Derek went up to him and greeted his uncle with a kiss on the cheek. Uncle Harold was furious and mortified, and could not show it. When he got home he ranted about bloody Anglo-Indians who kissed, and threw in an unkind word for his starched khaki shorts, which had fridged him on the five-mile march to Alipore. "Bloody ball crushers" went with bloody Anglo-Indians. This account, too, came to me from my entertaining, story-telling Aunt Annie, Harold Reeves' wife.

It's an ill wind that blows no one good. The war brought American G. I.'s to Calcutta and the G.I's. brought Dookia.  Dookia had been our bhisti (water carrier) in Jhajha. When he left working for us and lit out for the big city, I never thought I would see him again. Walking on Chowringhee, the street of the best restaurants and hotels, I ran into Dookia, who greeted me with a warm smile. We met outside the Grand Hotel, which was a pick-up and drop-off point for G.I's. Dookia was better dressed than he had been in his bhisti days. He told me he was making good money off the Americans and he asked me if I wanted to take a meal with him. Where he would have taken me I have no idea; however, I explained I had somewhere to go and could not stop. I might say it was most unusual for a servant to ask his Anglo-Indian boss-sahib to dinner. The word "dookia" means pain or trouble, and it was probably given to Dookia because his birth had been difficult for his mother. It had somehow suited Dookia in Jhajha, where he was a loner, having come from a far and unknown place. There appeared to be none of his jat (caste) in Jhajha. He had shown a cheerful nature, in spite of his name, and that side of his disposition had flourished in Calcutta.