I am Anglo-Indian, the old expression for what we now call mixed heritage. My mother, Caroline, known as Carrie, was Indian, was born there in 1919 and was brought up in India. She was on the way to university but was sidetracked when she met her first husband in 1938. She then had two daughters, one in 1939 and the other in 1944.
Immediately after that she joined up because of course it was now wartime and they were fighting the Japanese in India. She divorced her husband as he was an abuser and was determined to move on with her life. She was promoted to a staff sergeant. She met Charlie, another staff sergeant, fell in love and got engaged. Her mother was not happy about this because although the family was Indian, they were very well off. My grandfather was responsible for all the telecommunications across India and Charlie was a sergeant from the East End of London. Her family were dreadful snobs but my mother never was.
She became responsible for bringing the wounded back from the front against the Japanese. Later on at the end of the war she brought the men back from being Japanese prisoners of war, arranging nursing care for their emaciated bodies and so on. Meanwhile Charlie had compassionate leave to see his family in London due to the Blitz.
After pressure from her family, my mother met my father, a captain and married him in India. In my mother’s family, her brother and sister were both dark skinned but my mother could pass as white which pleased my father. The problem for my mother was that she was very beautiful, hence her problem with men. Unfortunately I took after my father.
The other side to my mother apart from her courage during the war, for which she won two medals , the most famous of which was the Burma Star, was her intelligence. She had been tested and she came out as a genius but also she was a very talented writer.
I was born in Norfolk in 1947 and the one thing she did was that although racism was rife in England after the war and she was trying to pass as white, she could not resist giving me an Indian name, Tara, which is the Hindi word for star as I was born near Christmas. She did not want to lose her Indian roots altogether and many years later when I was 12 years old she took me back to India to meet my Indian family. The poverty I saw there was unimaginable and shocked me as a child.
In England, racism as it was then was seriously blatant, signs on landladies’ windows, saying no blacks, no dogs, no Irish. Later Britain went through a long period of being tolerant and in fact we became famous for our tolerance. We were respected all over the world for that but no longer. We are now notorious for our intense hatred for people of colour. It is such a tragedy. So just after the war, my mother never made any Indian food, she never taught me Hindi or Urdu and we lived a really English life so that no-one would suspect that we had Indian blood in us.
My father was a headmaster but in order to get higher up in his career, my mother wrote text books for him and put them in his name. She sorted out his career, gave him interview practice and wrote his application forms. She knew he had to have experience abroad so with her help he got a job in Malaya as it was then, still under the British Empire, from 1952 to 1955. So I learned to speak fluent Malay and reasonable Cantonese.
I met men who had been prisoners of the Japanese and learned a great deal about living different lives and made very close Chinese friends. I loved life there. My mother was right as always and when we returned to England, my father’s career just went up by leaps and bounds. She also was concerned about our education. She used to say that we should not take boys seriously and that our education was the only way to be independent.
Whenever we did our homework, we had to show it to her first and if she was not happy we had to do it again. She had to make sure that my father and the three daughters were on the right track before she thought about herself.
She felt she could now concentrate on her writing and eventually in 1968,my mother had a play on television. She had a play on the stage and had several articles in the News Chronicle. She was then entitled to join the Writers Guild of Great Britain. Because I went with her to their lunches I met so many interesting people. One funny experience was when I was sitting next to this man who was very funny and interesting and I asked him if he wrote anything and he laughed and said that he had created Emmerdale Farm. His name was Kevin Laffan.
As she was getting older she had a bucket list and at the top was to have a flight in Concorde. She saw a flight to Paris, over the Bay of Biscay to go on Mach 2 breaking the sound barrier. After arriving at Paris the company would take them all to have lunch at a very posh hotel and then a normal flight back to Heathrow.
It was very expensive but she rang them anyway and explained about being a pensioner. She told them about her bucket list. The young man on the phone was not sure so he spoke to his manager about it. He returned to the phone and said that his manager had given permission for her to pay half price. Afterwards she told me that it had been the most fantastic day of her life.
My mother died in 1995 having left behind 3 well educated daughters, all due to her. She was not a snob and she used to say that although my father was a top headmaster, he was not as intellectual as her car mechanic. When Jack would bring the car back, he would then come in for a cup of tea and he and my mother would discuss so much, covering a wide range of subjects.
This exceptional woman was my life and then my lovely first husband came next. He loved her too and he used to say that he was in awe of my mother’s brain, as was I.
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