Family History

Both my parents were born in Evansganj, India. Three of my grandparents were born in the same area.

My mother’s father was born in Ireland. He ran away from the orphanage in Cork where he’d lived for as long as he could remember, and got work on a ship; but when he found he hated it, he deserted it at the first opportunity, which turned out to be in Bombay. Exactly how much of all his many stories were true and how much fantasy, no-one was ever really sure. They certainly couldn’t all have been completely true – there were too many contradictions between one story and another; but the books he said he’d stolen from a bookshop in Cork were real enough, and definitely Irish. Somehow he’d ended up in Evansganj, anyway, and married my grandmother.

Although all our earlier ancestry was English or Irish, my parents felt as though they belonged in India.

Dad got a job at the cement works. The cement works and the railway junction were the lifeblood of the town, indeed its whole reason for existing. Big brother Patrick was born a year before Indian independence, after which the family stayed on.

2nd & 3rd September 1948

My twin sister Philippa and I were born a year after independence, in the middle of the night. Dad always swore that I was born just before midnight and Pippa just after, so our birthdays are celebrated on consecutive days. He can’t really have known at all because there wasn’t a functional timepiece in the house, but what does it matter anyway?

Ayah said Mum and Dad couldn’t really tell Pippa and me apart for the first couple of years, and which of us was Pippa and which Penny varied from day to day. Ayah could tell us apart from very early on, but she didn’t dare to correct Dad. She thought Pippa was born first, and originally called Penny.

I didn’t hear those stories until I met Ayah in her old age, when I went back to India in that six month break. How Pippa laughs about it now!

Until we were about eleven, we were always regarded as identical twins, and genetically we probably are. I’m not sure how Ayah knew which of us was which when we were tiny, and she couldn’t tell me either. She said she just knew. A different twinkle in our eyes, or something. Apparently we went through all the early development stages together. We learnt to talk at the same time, and at first we had the same lisp. Then I started talking without a lisp. That’s when Dad started to be able to tell us apart, but only for a few months, because I started copying Pippa’s lisp for the devilment of it.

But from eleven onwards, I stayed pretty much the same shape and size, while Pippa didn’t. I’m still four foot eleven and skinny as a rake, despite a very healthy appetite. Pippa is five foot nine and jolly, to use her word. She’s been wearing bras ever since we were twelve; Mum got me a couple at the same time, but only because she didn’t want me to be upset about it. They languish unused at the back of my undies drawer to this day, and I’ve still never worn one. I just don’t need one.

Maybe I’d caught some infection or other, but if so my subsequent small size was its only noticeable symptom, and that wouldn’t have been particularly noticeable if it wasn’t for my having an identical twin. It certainly didn’t affect my general health or academic progress. I went on to university and an academic career, while Pippa left school at sixteen, worked in a shop for a while, and then married a young policeman and became a housewife.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. Pippa and Gareth have got a lovely family, and truth to tell I’m a little bit jealous. I love them and their children and grandchildren to bits. Little brother Michael, born the year after we came to England, has children as well, and Big brother Patrick has grandchildren too. I don’t see any of them nearly often enough.

Before I went back that first time, I only had a few disjointed memories of India. Now of course it’s hard to disentangle those fragmentary memories from more recent ones.

One occasion I do remember is when a stage hypnotist came to Evansganj. Being the extrovert that I was – Pippa would never have done this – I was up on stage offering to be a subject before Mum could stop me. I’d no idea what hypnotism was all about, but he called for volunteers, and I was there before his first audience plant could make it onto the stage. He had no choice but to try to hypnotize me. Maybe I wasn’t very co-operative, or maybe I’m not a very good hypnosis subject, or maybe he didn’t know the first thing about real hypnosis. I remember very clearly just thinking, What on Earth is this silly man trying to do?

I also remember how much the audience laughed. Most of them knew me well enough, and they’d probably spotted the strangers in the audience already before they went forward.

What I don’t remember about that occasion was whether everybody had paid already, or whether the poor fellow was relying on a collection. Most itinerant stage acts in India do rely on collections rather than an entrance fee, so he probably didn’t do very well in Evansganj. (The reason they do this is the disparity of wealth in India: an entrance fee is either too small to make much money out of the wealthier members of the audience, or too big to attract a respectable number to the show.)

I still tend to think of The Emperor’s New Clothes whenever anyone mentions hypnosis.

January 1956

The first period I remember really well was the trip coming from India to England the first time – nearly three weeks in a big steamship. We three kids all loved it, but I think I had the best time of all. I’d developed an interest in how things worked, and the ship’s chief engineer had noticed that and taken a shine to me. How the world has changed! Imagine today’s parents allowing a seven year old girl to spend most of her time alone with the ship’s engineer, down in the engine room or happily splashing around in the oily water below the bottom deck looking at bilge pumps and helping to clear their intakes! But I came to no harm and learnt a great deal.

Arriving in London in February was quite a shock, for our parents as much as for us kids I think. It was really cold. We were used to it being cold, occasionally even frosty, early on a winter’s morning in Evansganj, but snow was new to us, and the idea that it could stay cold all day was new too. But at least it was warm in the tenement in Whitechapel that we moved into.

Dad got a job as a bus driver. He said it was a bit of a comedown after being a shift foreman in Evansganj, but it was a lot better paid. Against that, the cost of living was a lot higher too. Overall he reckoned we were quite a lot better off, but whether he really believed that I don’t know. Maybe he just couldn’t come to terms with having made such a big mistake, if such it was. Dad drove buses from then until the day he retired, and seemed happy enough.

I remember being absolutely spellbound by the gas water heater over the kitchen sink. It was an Ascot – I can see its name written on it in my mind’s eye right now. For some reason it had a spherical end on the cranked pipe that delivered the water. I remember that very clearly, and have to this day not worked out why it had that spherical end. There was a similar device over the big cast iron bath in the bathroom, but it didn’t work. We had to carry hot water from the kitchen in a couple of big enamelled iron jugs, back and forth several times.

There were gas fires too. Dad didn’t like them. He said coal was much cheaper, but Mum liked them because they were cleaner and less trouble.

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