Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read Online Free PDF Page B

up the mountain road to Ranikhet to greet the new baby. He was dark-red, wrinkled and froglike and he had tired Barbara out; I didn't think much of him, but I could tell Barbara that we had been given space on the troopship Empress of Scotland, due to sail from Bombay on September 8 for a British port, probably Liverpool. On my final evening in Ranikhet I took Barbara up to the ridge above the cantonment for a last look at the Himalayas. From west to east for 200 miles the horizon was a glittering wall of ice and snow, gold tinted in the low sun. The sun left the grass where we stood, and a cold wind shivered in the pines behind, but for half an hour yet those distant battlements shone in the afterglow, hanging in light above the darkness of earth.
    I returned to Delhi, where Barbara and the children soon joined me, and we started to pack and crate our belongings. Barbara, bending half naked over the packing cases, straightened up and muttered, 'We could manure a fair-sized strawberry patch with the mule and horse dung they left in the packing straw they sold us. And it's getting wet with our sweat. And now we could make condensed milk out of it, too.' She leaned forward and I saw that she was dripping her own milk into the packing case. 'Tell ayah to bring me Martin,' she said resignedly. Slowly, she got the job done, while in the Secretariat the problems fell thicker and faster and more urgently on my desk. The London Government wanted to set a date for transfer of power — but to whom? The political parties in India had not agreed, so to set a date for transfer was merely to set a date for chaos. Lord Wavell stated that this would cost a great many lives, and that he would not be responsible for carrying out such a policy. As the Government in England intended to do just that, they set about finding someone to replace him, who would do what they wanted.
    After a round of goodbyes, in a general atmosphere equally compounded of excitement, anxiety, fear, and hope, we took the train to Bombay. The heat was still appalling, both children cried all the way, and Martin suffered agonies from prickly heat. The heat and humidity increased while we waited two days in a small hotel near the docks. Finally we got on board. The Empress of Scotland was the same ship in which I had crossed the Pacific in 1938, only then she had been called the Empress of Japan. As a twenty-four-year-old bachelor, I had caroused and danced and sung in her from Hong Kong to Honolulu. Things were a little different now. Barbara, with Susan (two) and Martin (five weeks) in a basket, was allotted a first-class cabin on the main deck — but not alone. It had been designed to hold four berths. It now contained twelve bunks in two tiers, and was shared by eleven women and six children, plus four in baskets and cots. I left Barbara in a daze and found that I and three other colonels were sharing what had once been a single cabin on the boat deck.
    The voyage began, and it was not pleasant. The Red Sea was at its worst. In Barbara's Black Hole there was always one child crying, to keep everyone else awake. There was no place to wash linen or nappies. Meal times were cramped, the food appalling. Barbara's milk gave out, and we had to mix Martin's formula in crowded, stinking bathrooms and toilets. The decks were crowded with soldiers trying to get some fresh air, and recently married couples trying to make love under inadequate blankets. No one could actually view the action, not even Susan, who was often an interested spectator and usually tried to pull off the blanket for a better view of the strange activities below, but one could almost see the rivers of sweat running out underneath.
    Then a soldier on board went down with meningitis, and next day Susan complained of a headache. They put her in the sick bay and the doctor looked into her eye with an optoscope — the sign of meningitis is a red spot deep in the eye — while I took Barbara's hand. Susan's