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I was born in Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is now known, a beautiful and cultured city. This was the Calcutta of the late 1920s, a vibrant city bathed in a myriad colours after dark. The city welcomed migrants and people from distant lands with open arms, a quality it continues to enjoy to this day. Many Jewish families had come to Calcutta from Baghdad some 200 years earlier. There were two other Jewish communities in India, in Cochin and Mumbai, which had come some 2,000 years earlier. My great-grandmother left Syria some 200 years ago and travelled to India via Iraq, Persia, and Afghanistan to Multan. My grandmother, some time later, moved from Multan to Calcutta where my mother Carrie was born.
My parents were deeply religious people and maintained a strict Kosher regime at the table. I remember being scolded once for using the cutlery intended for milk dishes to eat a meat dish.
Our family used to attend our synagogue, the Bethel, on high holidays. We had four permanent benches in the synagogue which now lie unoccupied. We were reasonably well off; I remember a large house on Loudon street, two horse buggies, and two cars. My other brothers, Maurice, Eric, and I used to cycle to the Botanical Gardens and would sometimes catch the ferry from Prinsep Ghat to the pier at Botanical Gardens. We loved the great banyan tree there, wandered around the Jain temple, Victoria Memorial (rowing on the pond there), and played games on the maidan and in Fort William. We flew kites from the roof which was great fun, cutting and capturing rival kites. We enjoyed the buggy rides to the lakes and the rowing there. I remember saving our pocket money to buy cakes at Nahoums in New Market. One of our favourite places was the National Museum. We sat on Theebaw’s huge Burma teak throne which was returned to Burma by Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1947. We were fascinated by the Egyptian section and the sculptures down the ages.
There were many movie theatres in the city: Globe, New Empire, Metro, Regal, and the newly built Lighthouse. During our winter school holidays we saw many movies, including the Wizard of OZ, China Seas, Clark Gable's Gone with the Wind, and Mutiny on the Bounty. Matinee tickets in the mid-stalls then cost nine annas, and it stretched our pocket money to buy tickets.
My parents engaged a Hebrew teacher for us. My elder brother Maurice was diligent and proficient in the language, and today I greatly regret that I cut classes.
We played with brightly painted tops made of hard guava wood, sharpened their spikes to shatter those of the other boys. Yo-yos were the craze then and we learnt to perform many tricks with them.
In the late 1930s many Jewish refugees arrived in Calcutta, and my family helped to look after a few of them. My father ran his own business; he spoke very little about it, speaking instead of his earlier days in Gorakhpur. It appears he had an indigo plantation there and came to Calcutta when German synthetic dyes supplanted indigo.
My father met with an accident and was for a long time a patient at Presidency General Hospital. My mother was preoccupied with looking after him and could not cope. We boys, i.e. my elder brother Maurice, my younger brother Eric, and I, were all packed off to boarding school, Victoria, located some 6,000 feet up in the Darjeeling hills. We were sorry to leave home for boarding school, and hearing that the term extended to nine months, from March up to the end of November,s were apprehensive of what lay ahead.
Boarding School
The Darjeeling Mail train chugged along from Silliguri, puffing and panting up the steep gradients. It was 2 March 1932. A grinning. Nepalese boy sat on the bumper of the engine, throwing sand on the rails to prevent the wheels from slipping. The train criss-crossed the cart road, and progress was slow, painfully slow. Children ran alongside, whooping and laughing. They looked so different, Nepalese, Bhutia, and Lepcha, their faces wreathed in smiles. I gazed in awe at the snow-capped mountains; my first view of the mighty ranges of the Himalaya. We passed tea estates with manicured tea bushes, forests of teak, and the tall Cryptomaria japonica. The train stopped at every little station: places like Sukhna and the railway workshop complex at Tindharia. We steamed slowly into Kurseong to be met by bevies of young boys and girls jostling with one another to carry our luggage up the hill to our school: Victoria.
I got my first glimpse of the school nestling amidst the forests which was to be my second home for the next eight years. The building was imposing, built on a flat terrace some 250 yard long. Some 200 feet below it was another terrace scarped out of the hill, and this was where the cricket and hockey grounds were located. The athletics field had the distinction of having a 220-yard straight track. There were three houses, Mallory, Irvine, and Kellas, named after Everest heroes. Everest itself was not visible from the school but the Kanchenjunga massif was visible on a clear day. It was fascinating watching its hues at dawn, and especially at sunset glowing pink and deepening to deep red and purple.
The school term was nine months long; too long. We got a short break in October for the Puja holidays, and, then there was a long break of three months, December through February, between terms. I have mixed feelings regarding my schooldays. On the plus side, the teachers were mostly English, some competent, some not. It was fortunate that I was able to top my form year after year, winning most of the prizes. Our day began with physical training. Games were compulsory; I played cricket, hockey, rugby, football, and a little tennis. I managed to graduate from the fifth eleven to the first eleven in hockey. I joined the cadet wing of the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles (NBMR), a territorial army unit and looked forward to the weekly parades and the opportunity to participate in the musketry practice. We trained on the Lee Enfield rifle and the Lewis gun. I was part of the team that won the Baker Musketry shield for three consecutive years, from 1937 to 1939. The practice sessions were difficult: 100, 300, and 600 yards. My exposure to the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles made me yearn to join the army. On the negative side, there was an undercurrent of anti-semitism in school. Two of the staff did little to conceal their feelings. Some of the boys too shared these sentiments and sometimes this led to blows, but I was fortunately able to hold my own. surprisingly, I found the Anglican Chaplain G.B. Elliot to be the most sympathetic and supportive. He often invited me to his quarters for afternoon tea and introduced me to Western classical music; Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and Elgar formed part of his collection. He never ever spoke to me about religion. He offered me toffees with the words ‘Jackie have one'. He later became chaplain of the prestigious Saint Paul's Cathedral in Calcutta and did much to vitalize the Anglican community in the city. I will always cherish his kindness and compassion.
The school was set amidst virgin forests, and we were allowed the freedom to roam the forests. I got to love the forested hills and valleys, the lichens, the ferns, and the gushing jhoras (mountain streams). Throughout my school years my buddy was Desmond Doig, and together we explored the forests and scrambled up the jhoras right up to their source. We often descended from the school, which was at an elevation of some 6000 feet, to the Balasan river and Kettle valley some 4000 feet below. On one of our treks we ran into a portly, cassocked figure, bamboo staff in hand. It was Father Prior of the Oxford Mission, rambling down the narrow forest trails singing 'Roll pumpkin, roll pumpkin, I've biscuits and cherries, the stones I throw out thus'. He had no cherries but offered biscuits to us famished boys.
As I mentioned, we got a break of fifteen days for the Puja holidays. In 1938, Doig and I approached Sir Basil Gould, the British resident in Sikkim based at Sikkim House, for a permit to go into the Chumbi Valley in Tibet. Sir Basil was most courteous, invited us for lunch, and wished us a happy journey. I wonder whether school kids today would be so received at Sikkim House, the present Raj Bhawan. We crossed groups of yaks moving to new grazing areas, and surprisingly an elderly missionary lady trudging along, staff in hand, wearing a sola topee with veil, who gave us some churpi (yak milk toffee). We returned via Jelap la along the Younghusband trail.
Many years later, in 1943 during the war, I had to travel to the Arakan from Delhi. The train was absolutely packed. Walking down the platform I saw a man in Sikkimese attire outside a four-berth compartment. My luck was in. Sir Basil Gould was travelling to Calcutta. I explained my predicament and he offered me the other lower berth. He then had a wire sent to Mughal Sarai station for a special dinner He then autographed his Tibetan Word Book for me, which regrettably I subsequently lost. Gould was indeed a gentleman diplomat, and administrator.
I appeared for the senior Cambridge school certificate in 1938, topped in the country, and was awarded a scholarship. I spent a year of college at Victoria in 1939, moving in 1940 to Saint Xavier's College, Calcutta. I was thrilled to be back in Calcutta, the city of my birth. Jews from Iraq had migrated to the city around 1780; fleeing persecution they were well accepted there, prospered, and contributed much to society and charity. Jews in India never encountered any anti-semetism from Indians.
Calcutta is a city I love. As kids we wandered and cycled almost everywhere, even up to Chandernagore which was then very French. I had a school friend there, the son of a defrocked catholic priest.
War clouds were looming. I was appalled at the Nazi invasions and atrocities. Jewish refugees began arriving in Calcutta in large numbers, and my family helped in whatever manner they could. I then made up my mind to go and fight, influenced by the writings of the war poets, especially A.E. Housman, Julian Grenfell, Siegfried Sasson, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Herbert Read. My parents were however keen that I should continue studying for the master's degree. I kept my own counsel till my orders to join the army were received.
Incidentally, both my brothers were also subsequently to get involved in the war. In 1942, Maurice was commissioned in 2 Punjab and served in Burma throughout the war. After the war, he was demobilized in England, where he held a responsible position in the law courts. Eric joined the air force towards the end of the war and thereafter he too moved to England and joined an industrial unit in a technical capacity.