PART IV

AFTERWARDS

CHAPTER 19

A KISS GOODBYE

THAT WAS IT, THEN: THE LARGEST EMPIRE THE WORLD HAD ever hosted was gone. At its peak soon after the First World War, the British Empire had claimed an area of well over 14 million square miles – more than six times the size of the Roman Empire – and 500 million people. Of those, 400 million had been Indian. The day after the Mountbattens left India, King George VI issued a proclamation formally dropping the title ‘Emperor of India’. The new Governor General, Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, wrote to Mountbatten, quoting a piece from the Manchester Guardian that said he ‘ended the long British rule of India not with a whimper but with an unmistakable bang’. Rajagopalachari added: ‘Now we here all know that it was not a bang but with a kiss you left us.’¹

Dickie and Edwina emerged from their plane back at Northolt looking exhausted, lined and rumpled. Edwina arrived back in Britain not, she felt, to a much-needed rest, but to a life of emptiness. ‘Idleness to Edwina was things not happening, and uneventfulness to her was sheer hell,’ one of her friends remembered. ‘You could see the pain on her face – adding to all those lines.’²

‘Life is lonely and empty and unreal’, Edwina wrote to Jawahar. Her husband dragged her to garden parties at Buckingham Palace – ‘a waste of time’, she thought, ‘but Dickie insists.’³ The pain of her absence was felt in India, too. Jawahar wrote to Edwina that he could still sense her ‘fragrance on the air’, and that he read and reread her letters. ‘I lose myself in dreamland, which is very unbecoming in a PM,’ he confessed. ‘But then I am only incidentally a PM.’⁴ To Dickie, too, he admitted a sense of loss. ‘It is extraordinary how the Mountbattens seemed to fill Delhi and without them there is a kind of vacuum’, he wrote. He had written ‘seem’, and added the ‘ed’ later.⁵

When Rajagopalachari had described the Mountbattens leaving India with a kiss rather than a bang, he had been writing literally. All over the world, newspapers printed a picture of him hugging Edwina as she left Delhi. He sent a cutting of it from the Madras Mail to Dickie. ‘The Madras folk must have frowned at this unorthodox posture,’ he noted with some amusement.⁶ Some British folk frowned, too: ‘Throughout the British world many an appetite for breakfast must have been ruined,’ opined the weekly Truth, describing the hug as a sign of ‘a lack of respect towards European women’.⁷ Dickie wrote in disgust about this ‘vile article’, noting angrily that ‘this is what one has to expect from the worst reactionary paper in England’.⁸

Not everyone was delighted to have the Mountbattens back. On 25 June, Attlee sounded out Churchill about whether he and his wife would be likely to accept invitations to a dinner for the Mountbattens. Churchill returned a snub.⁹ At a garden party of Anthony Eden’s, Mountbatten walked over to Churchill with arms outstretched. Churchill scowled, and transfixed him with a sausagey finger. ‘Dickie, stand there!’ he snapped. ‘What you did to us in India was like whipping your riding crop across my face!’ According to Mountbatten, the Conservative leader would not speak to him again for seven years, though from their letters Churchill’s reaction seems to have been less operatic.¹⁰ At the party, Churchill had asked a thorny question about the speed of arms transfers from India to Pakistan, but he accepted Mountbatten’s answer and wrote a warm letter afterwards.¹¹

Both Mountbattens were called upon to speak at the East India Association at the Imperial Institute about their time in India. ‘Dickie … told the story straightforwardly from his point of view, though naturally skating over Kashmir and Hyderabad,’ observed Leo Amery. ‘Then Edwina, looking very handsome and evidently speaking most effectively, though unfortunately I could catch very little of what she said.’¹² She began with a friendly crack at her husband: ‘I will confess he has always been my number one pin-up boy.’ But she finished on a tribute to Nehru: ‘My husband has referred to India’s magnificent Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and I would like to say what an inspiration he has been to all of us who have tried to help him in the past difficult months. He has been an inspiration to the doctors and nurses, to the welfare workers, and to the refugees themselves. I shall always remember the help and courage and the wise counsel he gave to me and to my colleagues at all times.’¹³ The contrast between the pin-up boy and the magnificent inspiration defined her relationships with the two men. With Dickie, she was in an affectionate, sexless companionship; with Jawahar, she had found something more profound and more passionate.

The importance of the relationship to both Mountbattens is obvious from the correspondence between Jawahar and Dickie. On 3 July Jawahar, noting the seriousness of the situations in Kashmir and Hyderabad, warned Dickie that his proposed visit to Britain in September or October ‘might not come off’.¹⁴ Dickie responded with several feverish pages of cajoling, trying every tack from, ‘You will find the experience of getting out of India and looking at your country from the outside world an exhilarating experience’, to ‘You will require a measure of rest, or at all events a change in your very busy routine’, to reminding him of his ‘valuable contacts in London’, to joking that ‘Unless you can come away for a reasonable while, there must be something wrong with your organisation!’¹⁵

On receipt of Nehru’s letter, Mountbatten had fired off a suggestion to Attlee that they might meet with Cripps, Noel-Baker and Krishna Menon to discuss the situation. In a lapse of fair-mindedness, he omitted any Pakistani or even pro-Pakistan names from this list.¹⁶ Afterwards, he reported happily to Nehru that the letter sent to Liaquat had been ‘just about the strongest that has ever been sent’.¹⁷ He also noted that he was ‘doing what I can to keep Winston from making any statements about India, though this is not an easy one.’¹⁸ But the problems were not so readily fixed and, by 1 August, Nehru admitted to Mountbatten that India was ‘in open, though formally undeclared, war with Pakistan in Kashmir’.¹⁹ ‘How I wish I could still be with you in Delhi,’ replied Mountbatten.²⁰ At the end of a long letter to Jawahar, detailing all the things he had done to resolve the situation, Dickie noted that: ‘We all expect you over in October, and the sooner you can come in October, the more we can see of you, and no-one, neither the King, the Prime Minister, nor your late Governor-General, and certainly not his wife, would hear of your not coming, whatever the circumstances.’²¹

The circumstances changed quickly for, on 11 September 1948, Mohammad Ali Jinnah finally succumbed to his illness. He had been on his way to Karachi. Fatima remembered him speaking in delirium: ‘Kashmir … Give them … the right … to decide … Constitution … I will complete it … soon … Refugees … give them … all assistance … Pakistan.’²² According to his doctor, Jinnah saw Liaquat and told him that Pakistan was ‘the biggest blunder of my life’. Further yet, he declared: ‘If now I get an opportunity I will go to Delhi and tell Jawaharlal to forget about the follies of the past and become friends again.’²³ It is impossible to prove whether Jinnah actually said these words or not; either way, he was to have no further opportunity for a rapprochement. He was taken from the airport to the Governor General’s house in an ambulance, which broke down after four miles on a main road in the middle of a refugee settlement with traffic honking by. The heat sizzled, flies buzzing around the Quaid-e-Azam’s ashen face as Fatima attempted to fan them away. It was an hour before another ambulance could be found. Jinnah was taken back to Government House, where Fatima watched him sleep for about two hours. ‘Oh, Jin,’ she remembered thinking, ‘if they could pump out all my blood, and put it in you, so that you may live.’ He woke one final time and whispered to her ‘Fati, khuda hafiz.… la ilaha il Allah … Mohammad … rasul … Allah.’²⁴ His head slumped to the right. He had died with the confession of faith just past his lips.

Two days after Jinnah’s death, India swooped on Hyderabad, the only contentious princely state other than Kashmir that still remained outside India or Pakistan. The Nizam appealed to the UN, but soon dropped his resistance. ‘There is still the most wide-spread misunderstanding over here about the action taken in Hyderabad,’ Mountbatten reported back to Rajagopalachari a week later, ‘since even quite intelligent people seem to regard it as an act of military aggression and conquest.’²⁵

‘So your wish is being fulfilled,’ Rajagopalachari teased Mountbatten on 5 October, ‘and Jawaharlalji is put into the plane & despatched to Broadlands!’²⁶ Nehru was officially received at Heathrow, but his first action after that was to go to the Mountbattens’ small flat: ‘it is a change from Govt House’, he wrote to Indira.²⁷ For Edwina, his midnight visit was ‘too lovely’.²⁸ The very next day, she drove him to Broadlands. Dickie tactfully ensured that he would be absent for much of the time at Dartmouth and at a ‘very boring’ Rotary Club dinner. ‘Edwina will be awaiting you’, he wrote to Jawahar.²⁹ The two of them, alone at last in the privacy of her estate, were able to talk, laugh and cry together, to embrace, and to press each other’s hands on walks by the river.³⁰ Even after Dickie turned up, the weekend was a great success, so much so that Jawahar changed his plans so that he might return the following weekend as well.³¹ The Mountbattens had always been comfortable with ménages-à-trois, and Jawahar was fitted in with their family life without difficulty – though he startled the servants by standing on his head when they brought him his grapefruit and cereal. ‘Funny fellow,’ boomed Dickie. ‘That explains why he sees the world upside down!’³² The days were filled with dinner parties, games on the lawn, riding in the grounds, card games and gossip.³³ ‘The Mountbatten family derived a lot of amusement from a letter Dickie received from a gentleman in Calcutta’, wrote Jawahar to Indira, ‘suggesting that in the interest of Indo-British friendship, Pamela should marry me!’³⁴

Even in London, Nehru spent much of his time in the company of Mountbatten, and more yet in that of his wife. There was a reception for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers in the underwriters’ room at Lloyd’s of London, at which the Mountbattens were greeted with a huge round of applause by the assembled guests. Photographs of the event in the Tatler showed a now familiar scene: Edwina pressed closely to Jawahar’s side and laughing with him, while Dickie hovered in the background.³⁵ He viewed this theoretical rival for his wife’s heart with a sort of proud affection. ‘He has literally taken, not only everyone that matters in England, but all the Commonwealth Representatives, by storm’, Dickie wrote to Rajagopalachari. ‘The King sat down and wrote me one of his rare letters after he had left saying that he wished me to know what a deep impression Jawaharlal had made on him and how much he liked him.’³⁶ Mountbatten had taken great care to make sure this came about, writing a letter to the King to introduce his ‘great friend Nehru’ and enclosing a full briefing on how the latter’s invasion of Hyderabad had liberated the grateful Nizam from the thrall of fanatics. ‘Don’t forget that whereas Jinnah lost no chance of insulting the Crown – Nehru has gone out of his way to be courteous about it,’ he ended, precisely inverting the truth.³⁷ The subject of all this effort had mixed feelings. ‘I am told I made a hit, from Buckingham Palace downwards’, Jawahar wrote to Indira. ‘I basked in all this praise and adulation. But at the same time I felt rather uncomfortable and somewhat out of place and counterfeit.’³⁸

Despite his lifelong insistence that Indian freedom demanded a total rejection of all ties to Britain, Jawahar was soon to agree to keep India in the Commonwealth. This controversial decision was widely described as the ‘Great Betrayal’ within India, and as ‘The most extraordinary volte-face my brother made’ by Nehru’s own sister, Betty Hutheesing. It was during talks with the Commonwealth Prime Ministers, she wrote, that Nehru became convinced that India should remain within the Britannic orbit. True, the Commonwealth provided links of trade and foreign policy; but ‘to this must be added the pull of his strong friendship with the Mountbattens’, Betty noted.³⁹ Once again, it seemed the Mountbattens had saved India for Britain.

The Mountbattens had spun out the end of their personal empire. Their interventions over Kashmir, Hyderabad and the Commonwealth were welcomed, and even solicited, by the Indian government. But they were still only in their forties, and could hardly spend the rest of their lives acting as India’s occasional agents in Britain. Shortly after Nehru’s departure from London, they returned to Malta, and Dickie to the command of a cruiser squadron. Having been the first gentleman among 400 million in India, he was now only thirteenth in precedence on a tiny island. Officers who had served under him a few years before at South East Asia Command, and in India, now stood senior to him. Moreover, there was no longer a war on; and peace deprived both Dickie and Edwina of their primary function, which had been to make war and to clean up after it, respectively.

Edwina had no more interest in pursuing a life of tedious naval wifedom than ever. Instead, she threw herself back into the only work available. Over the next few years, tours for her charities would take her around England and the Channel Islands, to Germany, Austria and Trieste on the continent, and around Africa. But, most often of all, they would take her to the east: to Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and Ceylon, always by way of Delhi.⁴⁰

Edwina and Jawahar wrote every day at first. Inevitably, this tailed off to once a week and finally once a fortnight, but the letters remained intimate until the end. Jawahar sent Edwina presents from wherever he was in the world: sugar from the United States (when it was rationed in Britain), cigarettes from Egypt, pressed ferns from Sikkim, a book of photographs of erotic sculptures from the Temple of the Sun in Orissa. ‘I must say they took my breath away for an instant’, he wrote. ‘There was no sense of shame or of hiding anything.’ Edwina replied that she had found the sculptures fascinating. ‘I am not interested in sex as sex’, she wrote. ‘There must be so much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and in its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority! Yet another treasured bond.’⁴¹

Whenever possible, they spent time with each other. Edwina went to India every year, a fact that did not escape criticism. In 1953, Nehru was forced to defend Lady Mountbatten in the Indian parliament when Communist Party members accused her of trying to manoeuvre him into committing India to a defence pact with the Middle East. A dramatic scene ensued, with Nehru shouting, ‘That’s a lie!’ and banging his fist on the table, while the Communists shouted, ‘No lie!’ back at him. The incident was struck from the official record, but made it into British newspapers.⁴²

‘It seems to me that the time has come when it should be pointed out to Edwina by one of Her Majesty’s Ministers that these visits of hers to the Indian capital do not further the general interests of the Commonwealth’, wrote the Queen’s Private Secretary to Churchill’s Private Secretary.⁴³If a minister ever did get up the courage to point this out to Edwina, it did not stop her. Once, at a reception for Commonwealth leaders in London, Jawahar upset the other delegates by spending all evening deep in conversation with Edwina and then conspicuously leaving with her.⁴⁴ On another occasion, when Jawahar and Edwina were staying together at Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, the Governor’s son was sent to summon the guests for dinner. Unwittingly, he opened the door of the Prime Minister’s suite, and was confronted by the sight of Jawahar and Edwina in an embrace. He tactfully retreated, and nothing was ever said about the incident.⁴⁵ These were the days of discretion in political life.

Though such stories were never made fully public, hints of them leaked out. An anti-Nehru party in Delhi began using the slogan, ‘Break open Rama’s heart, you will find Sita written on it; break open Nehru’s heart, you will find Lady Mountbatten written on it.’⁴⁶ Neither ever bothered refuting the rumours. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is best to ignore them as any argument about them feeds them or at any rate draws people’s attention to them’, Jawahar wrote to Dickie. Dickie himself had been fending off remarkably widespread speculation that he was planning a coup to install himself as King Louis of Britain, and somehow simultaneously lead a communist revolution. ‘Edwina has told me about the various rumours and stories about you,’ Jawahar added. ‘I was a little surprised as well as amused to learn of them.’ He advised him, too, to make no comment and let them go away.⁴⁷ Whenever he was in Britain for a conference or diplomatic visit, he would stay with Edwina at Broadlands. During these sojourns, Dickie would remove himself to their London address.

Several times in the 1950s Edwina threatened divorce. Each time, Dickie responded with tolerant dignity which melted her heart and brought her back. ‘I’ve never attempted to stop you or hold you and I never shall’, he wrote; ‘I’m not that selfish.’⁴⁸ The Mountbattens achieved a sort of harmony and mutual affection. It was to her husband Edwina entrusted her love letters from Jawahar in 1952. Following a haemorrhage, she had to undergo dangerous surgery. She presented Dickie with a sealed letter before the doctor gave her the anaesthetic, telling him where they were. ‘You will realize that they are a mixture of typical Jawaha [sic] letters, full of interest and facts and really historic documents’, she had written. ‘Some of them have no “personal” remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, though you yourself will realize the strange relationship – most of it spiritual – which exists between us. J. has obviously meant a very great deal in my life in these last years and I think I in his. Our meetings have been rare and always fleeting but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other.’⁴⁹

It was an odd sort of confession, and not an apology. Edwina pulled through the operation, but Dickie opened the letter. ‘I’m glad you realize that I know and have always understood the very special relationship between Jawaha and you – made the easier by my fondness and admiration for him and by the remarkably lucky fact that among my many defects God did not add jealousy in any shape or form’, he wrote to her. ‘That is why I’ve always made your visits to each other easy and been faintly hurt when at times … you didn’t take me into your confidence right away.’⁵⁰Dickie remained, as he had always been, utterly besotted with Edwina. If he had to compromise on, or even facilitate, her relationships with others in order to keep her, that was better than losing her entirely.

In Delhi, Nehru moved into a grander house, Teen Murti Bhavan (Three Statues House), the former villa of the British Commander-in-Chief. He felt lost in it, though Indira and Padmaja Naidu stayed with him and helped make it his own.⁵¹ He went on long and arduous tours of India, to the consternation of his family and friends.⁵² On a tour of Maharashtra, Jawahar travelled over 200 miles every day; Padmaja went with him, and rested while he made speeches and attended meetings. He had particularly looked forward to seeing the old fort at Ahmednagar, in which he had been imprisoned for almost three years. He arrived to find his nostalgia thwarted. There was a plaque on the wall of a room in which he had not stayed, commemorating his internment in it. He pointed out this error, and was met with indignation. ‘I was told that they had done this on the best authority!’ he wrote to Indira. ‘Indeed they were reluctant to accept my evidence!’⁵³ In the garden, he was confronted by a pomegranate tree with another plaque claiming falsely that the tree had been planted by him.

Yet he persisted in his tours. Nehru was at his happiest whenever he was in the centre of a crowd of ordinary people. The bigger the crowd, the happier he was; if it became unruly and broke through police cordons, he enjoyed it all the more. If it threatened danger, he would create a distraction by leaping into the fight. Nehru’s security men were required less often to protect him from the crowd, than to protect it from him. His bodyguard G.K. Handoo ‘had to wrestle with him on many occasions to stop him from jumping into the crowd’, remembered his security chief. ‘Held fast by Handoo’s arms, Pandit Nehru would glare at him, but soon he would break into a smile and enquire if anyone had been injured.’⁵⁴

Dickie’s and Jawahar’s correspondence continued, always following the same pattern. Nehru occasionally brought up his frustration over Kashmir; Mountbatten tried to persuade him to start training up younger politicians to replace the ageing veterans of the freedom fight who still dominated Congress. The latter issue had bothered Mountbatten since before independence. At the end of July 1947, he had told Nehru that his candidates for the Indian cabinet were too old and he should include some new blood, ‘otherwise I fear Congress really will be finished within a year.’⁵⁵ Five years later, he was still pushing the same line, warning Nehru that he ‘might slip on a banana-peel one day’ and no successor would have been primed.⁵⁶

But what Dickie and Jawahar wrote about, more than anything else, was Edwina. They sent each other proud news of her achievements, and updates on her activities, overwork and health. ‘Edwina has been overworking as usual’, wrote Dickie to Jawahar, ‘and has had a cold but won’t give in. She needs a rest but will never take one as we both know.’⁵⁷ Jawahar noted: ‘The only way, apparently, for her to get some rest is to come to India. So I hope she will do so this winter.’⁵⁸

She came almost every winter, often for several weeks. Dickie once went with her, in 1956. Every other time, he left them to each other, writing to Jawahar that he was ‘delighted’ that Edwina was visiting him on her way to Singapore, and adding: ‘Don’t let her go visiting, inspecting, speechifying, and doing her usual round of activities. She has overworked a great deal and really needs a rest.’⁵⁹ On one occasion, Edwina was due to visit Jawahar in Delhi but collapsed shortly before in Malta, and almost had to call the trip off on doctors’ orders. She concealed the extent of her illness, but Dickie gave her a bland letter to take to Jawahar about politics, and inside hid a five-page update on her condition. Edwina had been desperate to go, for Jawahar had promised her a visit to the Ajanta Caves, a series of 2000-year-old Buddhist retreats carved out of a mountainside in the Deccan. The caves are filled with jewel-like frescoes, revealing ancient Buddhist India to have been a place of extraordinary richness, imagination and sensuality. ‘How beautiful are the painted Bodhisattvas and the women of Ajanta!’ Jawahar had written after first seeing them in the 1930s. ‘One looks at those lovely and graceful figures almost with pain. They have a dreamlike quality, far removed from the vulgarity and cheapness of the life we see.’⁶⁰ Edwina only agreed to postpone her trip after Jawahar had sent her a telegram promising not to go to the caves without her. They finally went together in 1957, Edwina describing it as ‘an enormous thrill’.⁶¹

The two men in Edwina’s life were open with each other about their feelings. Dickie always emphasized that he would rather that Edwina ‘should really get fit again and take things easy for as long as she likes’ rather than hurrying back to him. Jawahar wrote forlornly to Dickie of ‘a certain emptiness’ that struck him whenever Edwina left.⁶²

Mountbatten had written very properly to the King in April 1949 that, now he had returned to active service in the Navy, it would no longer be possible for him to advise Nehru: ‘there is obviously no question of my taking part in any discussions’, he wrote. ‘I am sure you will agree that this is right.’⁶³ He was unable to stick to this rule. Both Mountbattens often met with government and opposition politicians on Nehru’s behalf, to ‘put the position of India’.⁶⁴

Edwina’s politics caused increasing friction with the British government. She was criticized in the media and in the Admiralty for allowing the communist Yugoslav leader, Tito, to entertain her in 1952. The oft-married Tito had invited her to lunch at his villa, and she had been charmed by his ‘fine physique, good looks and vital personality’.⁶⁵ The Admiralty warned the Mountbattens that they were close to the line, prompting Dickie to write an aggrieved letter to Churchill. ‘You know how strongly I feel that no serving officer should involve himself in politics in any way’, he wrote.⁶⁶ Yet the archives reveal that he continued actively to advise Nehru throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s, after he became Chief of Defence Staff for the British government. On matters of foreign policy – Goa, Kashmir, China – the two wrote often.⁶⁷ As a serving officer in the British Navy, it was injudicious of Mountbatten to advise the Prime Minister of another dominion; to set about selling him arms, on the other hand, was downright reckless. When Nehru stayed with the Mountbattens in 1955, Dickie suggested that he might buy the Gnat, an aircraft manufactured by Follands, and that he could transfer production of it to India. A factory was set up in Bangalore, with parts supplied from England. Gnats would be used extensively in the 1965 war with Pakistan.⁶⁸

On 20 November 1949, Princess Elizabeth had flown to Malta to join her husband at the Mountbattens’ villa. It was the beginning of a decade of close association between the Mountbattens and the Edinburghs, as the royal couple were then known. ‘I always feel most bogus in this kind of circle’, Edwina wrote to Jawahar. Then again, Dickie flourished in it.⁶⁹

When King George VI died in 1952, Elizabeth became Queen. Quick off the mark as ever, Dickie held a dinner party at Broadlands only days after his cousin’s death. He called for champagne, to celebrate the fact that the ‘House of Mountbatten’ now reigned. Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover was among the guests; he reported the anecdote to the late King’s mother, Queen Mary, and it precipitated an explosive reaction. Winston Churchill had returned to office as Prime Minister the previous year. His Private Secretary was summoned, and sent back to his master with explicit instructions to reverse this coup d’état.⁷⁰ The secretary remembered that Philip argued not for the name Mountbatten, but for Edinburgh, after his dukedom.⁷¹ Neither option appealed to Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the royal household, nor the cabinet. The last of these august bodies came down hard in favour of a reversion to the unadorned Windsor.

Faced with such trenchant opposition, the twenty-five-year-old Queen Elizabeth II issued a royal proclamation on 4 April declaring that she and her descendants would indeed continue to bear the name of Windsor. Quotes attributed to Philip on receipt of this news range from the petulant (‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children’), to the anguished (‘I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba’), to the bitterly angry (‘All they wanted was my sperm. I’m nothing but a fucking sperm factory to them’).⁷² Each boils down to the same point. ‘What the devil does that damned fool Edinburgh think that the family name has got to do with him,’ Queen Mary remarked shortly afterwards, proving him right.⁷³

Elizabeth’s coronation the following year brought Nehru back to London. He stayed at Claridge’s, where Nehru’s aide, eager to ensure that the trip went smoothly, took the liberty of sending the prime ministerial pyjamas to the hotel laundry service. When Nehru found out, he rebuked the aide. ‘Do you know that the laundry service in this hotel costs more than the price of the clothes?’ he scolded. He proceeded to wash his own clothes in the hotel sink, and even to iron his achkan neatly afterwards.⁷⁴ It was one among many economies which, when compared to the spendthrift young Jawahar of his Cambridge days, indicate that Gandhi’s influence was not without its benefits. Nehru travelled on commercial flights rather than private jets, and took buses rather than chauffeur-driven cars.⁷⁵ He was intolerant of any fuss or ceremony. On 1 June, he had been invited to a pre-coronation party at Buckingham Palace. A long list of protocol instructions arrived, detailing when to arrive, what to wear, how to shake hands, how to back away from the Queen after shaking hands, and so on. ‘I am not going to do any of this,’ remarked Jawahar. ‘Let those who want to shake hands with the Queen do so. I can’t do it.’⁷⁶

He took Indira to the party but, as usual, ended up with Edwina. Things went off badly. The pair of them got into a fight with Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, over the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Lyttelton commented on the rebellion’s ‘terrible savagery’, to which Edwina rejoined: ‘On both sides.’ Jawahar added curtly that the British would achieve nothing by shooting Africans. Lyttelton was outraged at both of them. ‘I am thinking of sending Edwina the photographs of some of the atrocities so she cannot repeat her disgraceful remarks’, he wrote to Churchill.⁷⁷ Churchill promised to take it up with the Queen, and shortly afterwards tried to block Edwina from accompanying her husband on an official visit to Turkey. Dickie reassured him that Edwina denied making the Mau Mau remarks, and that in any case she had already accepted the Turkish invitation. Reluctantly, Churchill allowed her to go, and in fact it would be Dickie who would get into trouble with him on the trip, for inviting a controversial journalist aboard the HMS Surprise.⁷⁸

When Nehru emerged from Buckingham Palace with Indira in tow, he saw Churchill waiting for his car, and went to greet him. Afterwards, Churchill said to Indira, ‘I didn’t expect it. This man whom I have jailed so many times has conquered hate. He acts without a trace of rancour.’⁷⁹Indira noticed that there were tears in Churchill’s eyes as he spoke.

The defrosting of relations between Churchill and Nehru which occurred at the coronation seems to have precipitated a change in the former’s attitude to India. ‘If I had been returned in 1945 I would have introduced a constituent assembly for India,’ Churchill told Rab Butler and Lord Salisbury over lunch at Chequers shortly afterwards. ‘Of course, they might have got rid of us anyway, but I’d have liked to try.’ He regretted that the British had not befriended the Indians, and had instead dealt with them only in political terms.⁸⁰

Churchill even invited Nehru’s sister, Nan Pandit, then Indian High Commissioner to Britain, to visit him at Chartwell while he recovered from a stroke. He was not supposed to drink alcohol or walk in the garden to show her his prized carp, and within minutes had done both. When he noticed his security guards following discreetly down the garden, remembered Nan, ‘he flared into a temper that was so like my father, the similarity could not be ignored and I had difficulty in restraining a smile.’ The pair of them sat on a bench, and Churchill put his hand on Nan’s arm.

‘We killed your husband, didn’t we?’ he said. Ranjit Pandit, a gentle, unassuming Sanskrit scholar, had been imprisoned with Jawahar and most of the rest of the family following Quit India. A sentence in a British jail had made his asthma and pleurisy worse, and he died in 1944, shortly after his release. Nan was so taken aback at Churchill’s words that she did not know what to say.

‘Every man only lives to his appointed hour,’ she replied eventually.⁸¹

Britain’s wrongs against the Nehru family were not so readily forgiven by Nan’s cook, Budhilal. Some years after her meeting with Churchill, Nan was hosting an ambassadorial dinner for his successor, Anthony Eden. Budhilal, who had been at the ale, staged a strike in the kitchen, declaring that he would never cook for the prime minister of a nation that had imprisoned Nan, and wielding a soup ladle in an emphatic manner. Taken aback, Nan returned to her guests in the drawing room, and whispered her plight to Edwina Mountbatten. Having organized refugee camps for hundreds of thousands, Edwina had little trouble getting the dinner party together. Over dessert, she revealed the truth to Nan’s guests, who found it rather funny. ‘My mother, slowly emerging from a state of shock, was even able to manage a wan smile,’ added Nan’s daughter.⁸²

After forty years of effort, Mountbatten finally stepped into his father’s shoes and became First Sea Lord in 1955. The following year came the Suez crisis, that last and most foolhardy flourish of British imperial delusion. ‘Thank goodness Philip isn’t here,’ remarked the Queen, on being told that the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal.⁸³ Dickie Mountbatten was around, and he opposed Britain’s invasion wholeheartedly, as did his wife and Jawaharlal Nehru. Mountbatten was told by the Ministry of Defence that he had no right to give political advice. Immediately, he offered his resignation to Eden; it was refused.⁸⁴

There were other ways to make his views heard. In his unique position of confidant to the monarch, Mountbatten was heard to whisper in her ear that, ‘I think they are being absolutely lunatic.’⁸⁵ Acting on Mountbatten’s word, Elizabeth exercised her constitutional right to advise Eden not to invade. He exercised his constitutional right to ignore her. Britain invaded; the United States cut off its credit; and Eden was forced into a humiliating withdrawal. He resigned the following year. Mountbatten was promoted to Chief of the Defence Staff.

It is said that Dickie became a particularly close confidant of the Queen during the 1950s.⁸⁶ He always carried four pictures with him: Edwina as a young woman in white fur and pearls, one each of Patricia and Pamela, and one of Elizabeth, smiling, relaxed and unusually sexy in a white gown and long gloves. It was signed ‘Lilibet’, the nickname by which her intimate circle have always known her.⁸⁷

In April 1958, Nehru announced that he wanted to resign and return to private life, telling a press conference shortly afterwards that he felt ‘rather stale and flat’.⁸⁸ For once, the roles were reversed, and Edwina told him to take a rest. He took a month’s holiday, trekking in the Kullu Valley, high in the Himalayas. ‘Tell me whether I should continue to write to you or not?’ wrote Edwina tentatively. ‘I shall well understand if you say “not a note for the next months”.’

Jawahar wrote back passionately. ‘How do you think I would fare if months passed without a letter from you?’ he asked. ‘Have you realized what your letters mean to me?’⁸⁹ Two months later, in July, the Economic Weekly published an anonymous article under the headline ‘After Nehru’, predicting that on his departure Congress would fragment into petty interests of caste, religion and region. Remembering the Chanakya article of 1937, some wondered whether Nehru had written another anonymous diatribe against himself.⁹⁰ Only the sustained pleading of his colleagues persuaded Nehru to stay in office after his vacation – in opposition to the views of his closest friends. ‘I understand only too well J.L [Jawahar Lal]’s desire to quit his office’, wrote Amrit Kaur to Edwina, ‘and I only wish he had lived up to what his inner voice told him.’⁹¹

Mountbatten believed that Nehru wanted to ‘die with his boots on’, but there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his wish to retire.⁹² Amrit Kaur wrote to Edwina the following year: ‘I never see JL. I feel sorry for him because he is a lonely person.’⁹³ He talked to Indira’s friend Marie Seton at length about his desperation to visit a tea shop or a bookstore without being mobbed. ‘The trouble with power is that one doesn’t know if one is still a human being or not,’ he told her. ‘I want to remain human.’⁹⁴

His depression worsened as India’s relations with China deteriorated. Nehru had always believed in pan-Asian identity. In 1958, China invaded Tibet, sending refugees scattering across the border into India – including the Dalai Lama himself, who set up court at Dharamsala in the Himalayas. ‘It is going to be heavy weather all round’, wrote Nehru to Indira.⁹⁵ It was she who persuaded her father to offer asylum to the Dalai Lama, which he did – to the intense annoyance of the Chinese government. By the middle of 1959, many were predicting that China would invade India next. ‘Look at the terrain, and tell me how the Chinese can invade,’ Mountbatten told American troops in South Carolina on 12 October 1959. ‘I’d hate to plan that campaign.’⁹⁶ Nine days later, Chinese troops entered Indian territory in Ladakh, high in the mountains of Kashmir.⁹⁷ That troubled state would henceforth be disputed between three nations.

The first society event of 1960 was the wedding of Pamela Mountbatten to the interior designer David Hicks. Noël Coward, among the guests, remembered it as being ‘hilarious and most enjoyable’. Hampshire was hit by a blizzard, and all the lights at Broadlands fused during the reception. Afterwards, when a coach left for the station, it broke down before it got out of the drive. The guests inside, including Walter Monckton’s wife, Biddy, and Coward himself, had to get out into the snow in their morning suits and silk gowns, and push.⁹⁸

The following day, 17 January 1960, the Sunday Express reported that the name of Mountbatten was to be restored to the royal house. Three weeks later, the Queen announced that ‘while I and my children shall continue to be styled and known as the House of Windsor, my descendants other than descendants enjoying the style, title or attribute of Royal Highness and the titular dignity of Prince or Princess and female descendants who marry and their descendants shall bear the name of Mountbatten-Windsor.’⁹⁹

Edwina did not stay around to enjoy her husband’s triumph. On the day after her daughter’s wedding, she left for Delhi. There she met Jawahar again: seventy now, to her fifty-eight, but still looking remarkably young. The same could not be said for her. Edwina’s face was lined, but her delight at seeing Jawahar illuminated it. The effect was clear to everyone.¹⁰⁰ On 26 January, the pair of them attended the Indian Republic Day parade, and a reception afterwards in the Mughal Gardens. Memories of the magical night of 15 August 1947, when so many of the same people had celebrated in the same garden, hung in the air. Edwina and Jawahar chatted with the guest of honour, the Russian President, Marshal Voroshilov. Marie Seton was struck by Edwina’s radiance. ‘She moved easily about, unconcerned, talking to people with unselfconscious vivacity’, she wrote; ‘as she talked she shed the charm of her independent spirit.’ Observing Edwina and Jawahar together, she noted, ‘Some people believed that she exerted a great influence on Jawaharlal, but at least one of his friends was of the opinion that it was she who hung on every word he said.’¹⁰¹ In fact, their admiration was mutual, and undiminished by the passing years.

The days were filled with charity work, and the evenings with quiet dinners at Jawahar’s house. One afternoon, Jawahar hosted a display of folk dancing from all over India. Seton was present again, and was able to see the happiness of Jawahar and Edwina first-hand. Every group of dancers wanted to be photographed with Jawahar, and Seton delighted in watching him ‘caper around with group after group’, now wearing a tribal cloak, now a skull-cap, now a garland of flowers. Seton sat down with Edwina on the grass to watch a troupe of war dancers from Nagaland, spinning and dipping fiercely, clad in little more than feathers.

Edwina turned to Marie and remarked, ‘Don’t they have beautiful bottoms?’

‘Very beautiful,’ Marie replied.¹⁰²

Soon afterwards, Edwina left Delhi for Malaya, and hopped from there to Singapore, Brunei, and finally Borneo, arriving on 18 February. She was driven to the house of Robert Noel Turner, Chief Secretary of North Borneo, and his wife Evelyn. After only a brief rest, she went on to the St John Ambulance headquarters. That night, Turner was impressed with her vivacity at their dinner party.¹⁰³

The next morning, the heavy mountain mists briefly cleared, and Evelyn Turner woke Edwina at seven to show her the spectacular view. Edwina emerged on to the balcony in a silk dressing-gown to look up at the heights of Mount Kinabalu. ‘It’s venerated by the Dusuns who live on the lower slopes,’ Turner told her. ‘They believe it is the resting place of the souls of the dead.’¹⁰⁴ The mists rose again only minutes later and obscured the mountain once more.

When Edwina returned to the house that evening, she complained of tiredness. The Turners’ secretary suggesting calling a doctor, but Edwina would not have it. She got herself up again and went to the St John dinner that evening. When she arrived back at the house, she almost collapsed; but, righting herself, she dismissed it as only a headache and went to bed, refusing even an aspirin. The next day, Edwina grudgingly submitted to a medical examination. The doctor thought she had influenza, or early stage malaria; but she would not be put off her programme, and continued on to two hospital visits and a coffee party before finally allowing Mrs Turner to send her to bed with an egg flip. She insisted on attending a St John parade and an official reception that evening. Guests noticed that she looked pale and drawn despite her efforts to smile, and that she left after only twenty minutes.

At 7.30 the next morning, the Turners’ secretary knocked on Edwina’s door. There was no reply. She opened it to see the Countess Mountbatten of Burma lying on the bed. Her body was already cold. She had suffered heart failure a few hours before. Still one of the world’s richest women, she had had no splendid possessions with her: only a pile of old letters on the bedside table. She must have been reading them when she died, for a few, having fluttered from her hands, were strewn across her bed. They were all from Jawaharlal Nehru.¹⁰⁵

In Delhi, Marie Seton was waiting to hear the historian Arnold Toynbee lecture at Sapru House, when she saw Jawahar arrive. ‘I noticed that his face was expressionless and self-contained, and that he took no notice of anyone.’ When the audience sat down in the hall, the chairman rose to announce that Edwina Mountbatten had died that morning. A gasp ran through the hall, and everyone rose to their feet for a spontaneous memorial silence. Seton and her friends were deeply concerned for Nehru. ‘Despite the self-control he demonstrated at the Toynbee lecture, I think it [Edwina’s] was the death which left him most bereft of companionship’, she wrote; ‘she was the friend who had stimulated and encouraged him most.’¹⁰⁶ Just as after the death of Gandhi, Nehru’s public face would be a mask, hiding his private grief.

Back in Britain, Mountbatten received over 6000 letters and telegrams of condolence, which were delivered almost hourly to Broadlands by the Post Office. Dickie’s valet found him in the drawing room, crumpling one between his trembling fingers and weeping.¹⁰⁷ Three months later, Noël Coward met him for lunch, and noted that he had ‘aged a good deal since Edwina’s death’.¹⁰⁸ Dickie could not sleep properly for the next three years.¹⁰⁹

Edwina had a horror of being interred in the claustrophobic family vault at Romsey Abbey, and had asked her husband to bury her ‘in a sack at sea’.¹¹⁰ HMS Wakeful was offered by the Admiralty, and sailed from Portsmouth. The coffin was discharged into the waves from beneath a Union Jack. Mountbatten, in tears, kissed a wreath of flowers before throwing it into the sea.¹¹¹ The Wakeful was escorted by an Indian frigate, the Trishul. Jawaharlal Nehru had sent it all the way to the English Channel, just to cast a wreath of marigolds into the waves after Edwina’s coffin.