An Unconventional Love

At the time Percy and Emily met, my mother was thirty years old and for the last seven years had been engaged to a man who owned cotton factories in Lancashire. She saw him when he came out to India on business and for some reason accepted his promises that he would marry her as soon as the time was right. What they were waiting for, I have no idea! However, when she met my father the attraction was instant and they were married within seven weeks, in 1941, the year before I was born. Engaged for seven years, then married in seven weeks. Just imagine!

Countess Adeline had died in 1938, but the Reverend Harris’s reaction to the marriage was sheer outrage. He and the rest of the Harris family would not accept that Percy had married an ‘Anglo-Indian’, who they assumed would be dark-skinned and would produce brown children. They wanted nothing to do with it. To add insult to injury, my mother was a Catholic and before the wedding it was agreed that my father would convert to Catholicism. It wasn’t such a huge step in ideological terms from High Anglican to Catholic, and at the age of forty-one, he was ready to settle down. While Mother was drafting a ‘Dear John’ letter to her cotton factory fiancé, Dad was busy learning the catechism, and the wedding took place after a whirlwind courtship. It was a war wedding, while Dad was on a week’s leave from his posting, so there were no frills, nothing elaborate, but they were a handsome couple and happiness radiates out from the wedding photographs.

The effect was an instantaneous rift in the Harris family. Percy had sullied the family’s reputation. The Reverend Harris refused to meet his bride or send any wedding presents or congratulations. He felt bitterly let down by his only son, in whom he had placed all his hopes. Percy might have liked to bring his bride home and introduce her to his family but it was made clear that they wouldn’t be welcome. It didn’t matter especially at the time, because neither Mother nor Dad had any intention of leaving India and coming back to England.

‘I will never go to England,’ Mother told him repeatedly during the seven-week courtship. ‘You will never get me to England. You can marry me and we can have children but we stay here in India and the children grow up here. This is my land, my country, my home.’

That suited Dad just fine. He thought India the most beautiful, wonderful land and he promised her that he wanted to stay there too. They set up home on his plantation in Beesakope and there was just time for Mother to get pregnant with me before Dad went back to the fighting. He fought in the crucial battles of Kohima and Imphal, at which the Japanese offensive into India was halted, and was promoted to the rank of major before the war’s end. While he was a captain he wore three pips on his shoulder, but once he became a major those pips were replaced by a crown. As a toddler, this made a big impression on me. When he lifted me up, I’d always fiddle with that crown, trying to pull it off.

In 1945, Dad came back to Assam to give his wife her second child. Mother was never a maternal person, but out of duty she produced a boy and a girl for him. One of each. It’s what you did in those days.

The cornerstone of Mother’s life was her religion. As a girl, she had attended the Loreto Convent in Darjeeling, where Mother Teresa was a novice. She could have opted for convent life but instead she segued into teacher training, encouraged by the nuns. She and her sister Muriel and their cousin, a priest called Father Lawrence Picachy, remained friendly with Mother Teresa, partly because they had Armenian connections who were close to her Armenian family, and partly because Father Picachy acted as one of Mother Teresa’s spiritual guides.

I never met Mother Teresa, but I remember Father Picachy coming to visit us, wearing long white robes with a big sash round the middle. He was a large man, much darker-skinned than my mother, and there was a holy air about him, a kind of untoucha-bility. In 1969 he would become Archbishop of Calcutta, then in 1976 he was made a Cardinal, but back when I knew him as a recently ordained priest, he already had something of the aura of religious greatness.

When he came to visit, my brother Harold and I would be dressed in our best clothes and told to stand in the hall with our hands behind our backs as this stern, bespectacled man glanced in our direction, nodded, and walked past. I think once or twice he patted me on the head, but that was it. He’d disappear into the drawing room with Mother and Dad, while we were led back to the nursery. We didn’t eat meals with the grown-ups. They were in the dining room, while we had our tea in the nursery. We had to knock and wait for permission before entering a room, and many times that permission wasn’t granted. I would have liked to chat to him—I already had a well-deserved reputation as a chatterbox—but Mother had made it clear that that would be frowned upon. ‘Seen but not heard,’ she urged, putting a finger to her lips.

I was always being silenced as a child. My instinct was to chat to everyone who came to the house—the doctor, the priest, the beggars, or Mother and Dad’s British friends. ‘I’ve got new shoes,’ I’d tell them in Hindi, or, ‘I drew a picture of an elephant’; anything that was on my mind, I’d say.

Dad was a poetry fan with a quote for every occasion and he’d often recite: ‘I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river; for men may come and men may go but Adeline goes on for ever.’

Banned from chatting, I started making faces to attract attention. I pulled down the corners of my mouth like a turtle, or stretched my lips wide with my eyes narrowed to slits, and I was very talented at crossing my eyes. Some guests would laugh, others would gasp, and Mother would be cross but at least it always got a reaction.

When I was five years old, there was an incident that would change our family and the way we lived our lives for ever, and Father Picachy was part of it. It began when my father was bitten by a rabid dog. The doctor had to cycle over every day to give him anti-rabies injections in his stomach. I didn’t see this, of course, but I remember watching the doctor coming up the path and screwing up my nose to think of how painful an injection in the stomach must be.

Whether it was the injections or something else altogether, I don’t know, but one day my father collapsed, showing all the signs of a stroke. First he felt numbness in his legs, then Mother and Father Picachy realised that the left side of his face had collapsed and he couldn’t speak or move his left arm. There was no telephone on the plantation so a servant boy was dispatched to fetch the doctor. Father Picachy sat comforting him but Mother was distraught and couldn’t contain herself. She told us later that she ran out into the tea gardens to watch anxiously for the doctor.

Suddenly, there was a piercing light and one of the tea bushes in her path burst into flames. She stopped in fright, and as she stood there she heard a voice speaking to her. ‘I will take you out of India,’ it said. ‘Go back now. He is cured.’

The voice was so calm and sure that she turned and hurried back to the house. When she got there she found her husband sitting up and talking to Father Picachy. His face had returned to its normal configuration, and he could move his left arm again.

‘I saw a burning bush!’ she cried. ‘I saw the flames and I stood thinking of Moses, and a voice told me he would be cured.’

Father Picachy had his own extraordinary story to tell. ‘Just after you left, I placed a crucifix in Percy’s hand and instantly he seemed to recover.’

They realised these occurrences—the bush, the crucifix and Dad’s recovery—must have been simultaneous, and knelt to pray and give thanks. The doctor arrived and expressed his astonishment at the patient’s rapid recovery from such ominous symptoms. He said it sounded as though Dad had had a stroke and was lucky to have come through it so well, but still he referred him to hospital for further tests.

Once he’d finished his examination, Mother led the doctor and Father Picachy out into the garden to show them the bush that had been on fire, but to her astonishment she couldn’t find any sign of it. There wasn’t so much as a cinder on the ground or a singed leaf in sight.

‘I’m sure it was right here,’ she gestured. ‘I’m not a psychiatric case. I definitely saw a burning bush. The flames shot out and there was a very bright light and then I heard the voice.’

Everyone believed her and it became part of family lore that God had saved Dad from a stroke. It was proclaimed as a miracle. Father Picachy spread the word and soon the house was full of Jesuit priests, coming and going in their white robes, saying mass and being fed in the big dining room. The crucifix Dad had been holding was kissed and venerated, and placed on display in the hall with candles lit on either side of it.

Clara became even more pious and told me ever more ridiculous stories about Jesus taming lions so they would lie down with lambs, and saving newborn babies from tigers and snakes. I was given a children’s bible and several religious story books with pictures of Daniel in the lion’s den and David and Goliath and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. My whole life was centred around religion. It took over the family from that point on.

I had to kneel down every night to recite the Rosary before bedtime, which took fifteen whole minutes. My parents would recite one part, then I had to give the response and so it went on. Every Sunday Harold and I had to sit quietly through mass. We said grace before meals and prayers before bed, and the only stories we were told were religious ones. We were taught to offer everything we had and did to God, and to talk to God all the time. I didn’t rebel against this because I wanted to be good, I desperately wanted my parents to be pleased with me.

Both Mother and Dad were overwhelmed by the experience with the burning bush, our very own Family Miracle, and felt they had a debt to God that must be repaid. What better way than to offer Him their children?

My father said, ‘It’s not enough to be good, Adeline. I don’t want a good girl; I want a saint. You have to be perfect.’ That was fine, because I fully intended to be a saint and live on top of a pillar like Simeon Stylites.

Mother wanted me to be a nun. ‘Only good girls become nuns,’ she said. ‘You have to be especially good.’ So that’s what I’d do; I’d become a nun. She wanted Harold to become a priest as well. I wondered if I could be a nun and a saint at the same time, and Mother said yes, I could, so that was fine.

I wanted what they wanted. I was determined to become a nun and a saint, no matter what sacrifices I’d have to make, no matter how hard it was or how long it took. I decided then and there that’s what I was going to do with my life.

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