Two Taproots: Growing up in the Forties in India and America

By Marguerite Thoburn Watkins

Marguerite Thoburn Watkins memoir, Two Taproots: Growing Up in the Forties in India and America begins as the USA enters World War II and her missionary family, the Thoburns, is evacuated from India to America. It covers the next ten years of the authors life. Three peripatetic years in New England with their wartime scrap drives, rationing and victory gardens, culminated in a precipitous return to India while the war was still on. The departure was secret because, Loose lips sink ships. She is back in India for Indian independence, the partition riots and the assassination of Gandhi.

But the story is primarily personal -- family, friends, boarding school life, experiences and impressions of growing up in two worlds. It is about formative years shaped by World War II, the last days of the British Raj, Indian independence, and by missionary life. The author was a professors kid on an Indian college campus and an American girl at boarding school in the Himalayas. Nourished, as she says, by English khana and Hindustani gana, by a rich stew of cultures and religions, and by the natural beauty of her homes, she describes herself as having two taproots, India and America. But she was also part of a third experience that was nourished by both countries, a third culture kid. She conveys the privilege, and challenge, of such a life, discovering, as do many expatriate children, that her country of citizenship seemed sometimes more foreign than the land in which she was born and that she is both at home and a stranger in either world.

The authors great love for India is apparent. As a writer," she says, "I can put myself back into a picture and am surrounded by the sounds, smells, people, names I thought I had forgotten. Like shifting color chips in a kaleidoscope, forgotten patterns regroup and are mine again for a moment.

The ongoing struggle for self-rule was a feature of her landscape in both Jabalpur and Mussoorie -- obstacle after obstacle, marches, arrests. When independence finally arrived, it came with a joyous rush but it came with partition, and the bloody partition rioting. The author writes:

Suddenly we too were involved, and the Landour Muslims were in harms way. One particular night toward the end of August, students heard shouts and screams from the hillside across the valley, a sobering experience. Partition rioting had started in Mussoorie.
Standing on the balcony in the afternoons, looking toward the Landour bazaar, girls watched the rioting far across the valley. We had a panoramic view of the Mullingar army headquarters on the ridge and below it the settlement of Muslim homes. We observed ant-like figures climb toward the safety of the Mullingar enclosure. To our horror, columns of smoke rose from burning homes. The flames from one large house lit the sky. Yet there was an eerie unreality to the scene; it was all so far away. We could see the destruction, but it was too far to hear very much. And too, we now had no news from the outside world, and little sense of how widespread and bloodthirsty the riots had become.

Finally it was time for the author to sail back to America to attend Bates College in Maine. It was the end of her childhood. The memoir closes as a new decade begins, New Years Day 1950. It was the start of her next incarnation, life at home in her country of citizenship.

I snuggled in, longing for my cat, and looked out the window at the snow and stars. In a few hours it would be New Years Day, 1950. I wondered what the new decade would bring me. And I thought about my two lives, the unknown one ahead in this home country that was not really home, where I felt like an outsider, and the one behind me in the country I loved, where I really was an outsider but did not feel like one. I had friends at college and family here who loved me but did not understand me. I thought about

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 22, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462839940

Marguerite Thoburn Watkins

Marguerite Thoburn Watkins was born and attended boarding school in the Uttarkund foothills of the Himalayas. She spent her childhood in the mountains and in Jabalpur in Central India, except for a time during World War II in the United States. She has lived most of her adult life in Lynchburg, Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her prose and poetry have appeared in anthologies and journals and she has two other books published by Xlibris: a memoir, Two Taproots, Growing Up in the Forties in India and America and a book of India poetry, Patterns in Henna.

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Copyright © 2004 by Marguerite Thoburn Watkins.

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Contents

TEA IN AN

UNGLAZED CUP

(RAJASTHAN, INDIA, 1996)

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

THE WAR YEARS,

1942-1945

EVACUATION ON THE S. S. BRAZIL

EARLY YEARS

HARTFORD, 1942

NEW HARTFORD, 1943

MELROSE, 1944

GOING HOME TO INDIA–THE GRIPSHOLM, 1945

CHAPTER II

JABALPUR,

1945-1946

THE PRINCIPAL’S HOUSE

(JABALPUR, INDIA 1945. THE FAMILY IS REUNITED AFTER A WARTIME SEPARATION.)

NINE MONTHS IN JABALPUR,

JULY 1945-MARCH 1946

I LEARN HOW TO WEAVE

THE BUNGALOW AT THE BACK OF THE CAMPUS

A HOUSEFUL OF PETS

LAUREL FISHER

A NEW ENGLANDER IN COLONIAL INDIA

GOING UP TO WOODSTOCK, MARCH 1946

CHAPTER III

MUSSOORIE,

1946

BACK AT WOODSTOCK

THE DHOBI GHAT STREAM

SHOPPING ON THE HILLSIDE

GOING DOWN DAY, NOVEMBER 1946

CHAPTER IV

JABALPUR:

WINTER, 1946-1947

TAPROOTS AND COMPARTMENTS

CHRISTMAS IN JABALPUR

CHUTAN AND HIS FAMILY

THE MILKWOMAN

JABALPUR GARDENS

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

DADDY SHARES HIS INTERESTS WITH HIS CHILDREN

THE ROAD TO TILWARA GHAT

CHAPTER V

MUSSOORIE,

1947

JUNIOR YEAR AT WOODSTOCK

THE OLD COLLEGE

INDEPENDENCE AND PARTITION, 1947

CHAPTER VI

WINTER,

1947-1948

JABALPUR AND NORTH INDIA

FINDING A NEW LOOK

TRAVELING BY INTER

A TOUR OF NORTH INDIA

IMMERSION AT TILWARA GHAT, 1948

ANNUAL CONFERENCE

CHAPTER VII

MUSSOORIE,

1948

SENIOR YEAR AT WOODSTOCK

GRADUATION—A RITE OF PASSAGE

PINK CROCUS BELOW A HAUNTED HOUSE

CHAPTER VIII

GOING HOME,

1949

WRITTEN IN THE STARS

I LEAVE INDIA

MY NEXT INCARNATION

THE TRAIN TO DEHRA DUN

APPENDIX:

WOODSTOCK SCHOOL

LEONARD THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my father

Charles Stanley Thoburn

who saw in every man the spark of God

and who shared with me

his love of myth, mountains, poetry

and especially of India.

TEA IN AN

UNGLAZED CUP

 (Rajasthan, India, 1996)

From Jaipur to Jodhpur we travel second class,

formerly known as third.

The train stops at Pharlani Junction.

A platform vendor swings aboard,

Garam chai, hot tea, rupees two a cup,

the unglazed earthen vessels, vase-shaped,

the tea leaves boiled with milk and sugar.

I sip the satisfying familiar sweetness, mud-flavored.

As others smash their cups on tracks,

I carefully wrap mine

and cradle it in my handbag for remembrance.

I watch fluffy black lumps of tree shapes,

red sun setting in shallow water ponds

and rectangular water fields,

the edges mineral encrusted,

listen to the mellow horn,

the wheels proclaiming bridge struts,

feel fine grit settle.

In the dark sky a fingernail moon,

and again the night call, Garam chai,

at another night stop.

A musician with tambourine

beats a rhythm, sings his way

slowly up the aisle,

accepting coins from those awake.

I unwrap my treasured teacup, watch

the red earth shatter

into three shards of clay

and a soft crumble of damp dust.

MTW

(Published in the Quadrangle, 1997)

PREFACE

My brothers, sister and I were the fourth generation of Thoburns to live in India, a country that had captured the imagination of the family. In 1859 James Thoburn took passage to Calcutta from Salem, Massachusetts, on a sailing ship carrying a cargo of ice to the East. James was a silver-tongued preacher under the auspices of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions. Distressed by the plight of Indian women, he wrote to his sister Isabella, persuading her that she was needed to start a school for girls. James later became a missionary bishop and Isabella founded Isabella Thoburn College for women, now called IT by Indian students.

David Lyle Thoburn, James’ nephew, a widower with a young daughter, followed in his footsteps, becoming the pastor of the large Lal Bagh church in Lucknow. It was here that he met his second wife, Ruth Collins, who was to become my grandmother. She was a Quaker from Iowa who felt a concern for India and had become a Methodist because the Methodist Women’s Board of Foreign Missions could send her to India.

Ruth and David Lyle had to wait six years to be married because the Women’s Board expected to be reimbursed for Ruth’s passage if she did not serve out her time with their organization, and this was true even though she would continue the same work once she was David Lyle’s wife and a member of the Methodist Board of Foreign Missions. The couple could not afford the passage money. They were relentless, those Missahibs.

Ruth and David had two sons, Wilbur and my father, Stanley. My father was born in the Himalayas, delivered at home in a summer cottage in Almora that the family rented during the hot months of May and June. He did not remember his father; David Lyle died in a cholera epidemic when Stanley was only two. Ruth remained on the mission field working at Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow. The boys attended boarding school at Philander Smith College, the Methodist boys’ school in Nani Tal, and Ruth spent her summer vacations there in the Himalayas with them. When they were ready for college they were sent to Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, an institution favored by the Thoburns. Both boys returned to India as adults.

Stanley attended seminary at Boston University and this is where he met my mother, Pearl Champlin. Their first mission assignment was to the English Methodist church in Nani Tal. I was born there in a hospital for British officers’ wives.

Although he later became the first principal of the North India Theological Seminary, for most of his career my father was a professor at Leonard Theological College in Jabalpur. We children grew up there and in Landour, Mussoorie, in the Gharwal Himalayas where we attended boarding school at Woodstock, a school sponsored by American missions in India. During their vacation in May and June, when it was hot on the plains, our parents took us out of boarding and we became day students, staying at South Hill, a bungalow named by the nineteenth century Britisher who built it. We were there when we received word that we were to be evacuated from India. It was May 1942.

CHAPTER I

THE WAR YEARS,

1942-1945

Evacuation on the S. S. Brazil

I think of the start of our trip as a spring evening in Mussoorie when the grownups shut the door to a Fir Clump living room with the children left outside to play unsupervised on the graveled flat. It was long past time for home and homework. Closeted inside were all the adults from both Fir Clump and South Hill, their hushed voices indistinguishable from the sounds of evening–crickets, leaves in the wind, crack of twig, the hills settling down. The mixed-age group of youngsters did not divide as usual by year and interest, but hung together, realizing that something important was happening behind those doors.

In India we seemed always to have been at war, yet it had not directly affected Americans. Now here we were, amusing ourselves outdoors as the shadows lengthened and our mothers whispered about things unfit for the ears of children–Japanese prison camps with their privations and atrocities. Three months later we were on the deck of the troopship S. S. Brazil.

Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor–Sink US Pacific Fleet. This was what we had read in the Statesman in December 1941. Japan Declares War on US and Great Britain. United States Declares State of War Existent Since Moment of Attack. The headlines spread across our ebony-toned dining room table on a Jabalpur winter morning. Four days later we twisted our sandaled feet, resting our elbows on the table, as my father read USA Declares War on Axis Powers.

With a prickle up my spine, I realized that we Americans were now at war. It’s about time, I thought. In India the Commonwealth had been pitted against the archfiend Hitler since 1939. Why had we remained neutral so long? While Mother and Daddy expressed horror at Japanese perfidy and grief for the American dead so far away, we children felt the satisfaction of nationals whose country had finally seen the light. Now we were on the side of those arrayed against evil. And too, Jabalpur and Mussoorie were remote from both the arenas of war, as was America herself, ocean-protected from actual conflict. We perused the Statesman daily, making derogatory comments about Hitler and Hirohito. Yet our life went on as usual: evening walks to Bara Simla or the railroad yards, daytime bicycle swoops about campus and city, reading, dreaming.

In March of ‘42, we traveled with the school party up to Mussoorie, savoring the adventure of the three-day railroad trip back to Woodstock School for the start of the academic year. The excitement of war was in the air, but school is school, and I anticipated the familiar routine of work and play. I was not quite eleven.

The station platforms were as gloriously congested and confused, the motor road up the mountain as steep, the magnificent balls of Himalayan rhododendrons as red. At first the war made little difference in our lives. Then China, Singapore, Burma fell as the Japanese came closer. Surely the Allies would whip them. But we began to hear reports about concentration camps, torpedoed ships and parched survivors in lifeboats.

The exodus from Burma was underway. We lived at South Hill with my aunt and cousins in a large suite created by unbolting the doors between two adjoining apartments, and we took in a family of Methodist missionaries from Burma. While their husbands toiled at jobs on the plains, the three women lived in something like a sorority house. It must have been nice for my mother to have adult company at the isolated South Hill so far out on the Tehri Road. They chattered like schoolgirls, helping each other with hairdos, lending each other clothes.

Our guests had come out on the Burma Road so they were without possessions, but they were in good spirits and relieved to be in India. The three children enrolled at Woodstock. It was good of my mother and aunt to take them in, but the nine children led their own shadow lives. The oldest boy teased me unmercifully; he gave hospitality a bad name. The younger ones got along better. We now had two other mothers imposing rules, telling us what to do. We never tattled in those days, but how I longed for the peaceful time when we had our own suite at South Hill and my brother and I climbed about the hillside unrestricted until suppertime.

Suddenly, in May, our family was instructed to leave immediately for Bombay to be evacuated by troop ship to the States. The embassy had been urging all American civilians to leave India. Even those of disputed citizenship were being embraced in a protective net. Our friend Ronald and his mother had been waiting to get to America for years; she was a citizen, but he was officially a Chinese national. They were given passage also. My parents weighed their options and duties to work and family. Our furlough, taken once every seven years, was due in the coming year. Japanese bombers had flown over Madras. The deciding factor was Theodore’s health. He had been diagnosed as epileptic and was taking Dilantin, perhaps unavailable in wartime. The difficult decision was made; we took furlough early, departing precipitously with our possessions left behind for our houseguests’ use until our return. We were not to see Jabalpur or Mussoorie again for almost three years.

At Dehra Dun we caught a train for Bombay. This was the only time we traveled on the BBC, Bombay Baroda Central, and the only time we ever traveled second class instead of third. Our family had the luxury of a compartment to ourselves. The stainless steel bathroom fixtures shone; they were European style. Benches were widely spaced; each of us had plenty of room to spread out a bistar. Special slatted shutters rolled down for privacy or to protect us from the sun. We inspected the gun racks with interest, for the compartment was equipped for Indian army officers. Once again we were reminded of the Sepoy Rebellion, at that time called the Mutiny.

In Bombay we stayed in a fully staffed air conditioned apartment made available to us by friends. It had a refrigerator–what luxury to suck ice cubes. We investigated the gardens and the park across the way while our parents made arrangements at the mission office.

Finally we boarded the S. S. Brazil with her wartime-gray smokestacks rising high into the air. The Brazil had been a luxury liner with the Moore-McCormack Line but was now converted into a troopship. Once our steamer trunks and tin suitcases were aboard, and our passports inspected, we climbed the wooden gangplank and followed a midshipman to our stateroom. Mother and the four of us were assigned to officers’ quarters in a comparatively spacious room with two portholes; it had been fitted out with enough double-decker bunks to sleep three families. The men were quartered with the crew below deck and slept in triple-decker hammocks. We were never allowed down there. Daddy’s roommates smoked, drank, swore, and in some cases took drugs–this at a time when the only druggies we had heard of were in the opium dens of China. Yet Daddy said the crew were brave fellows and loyal to their country. He and his roommates developed a mutual respect, but their dormitory was off-limits for children.

On the S. S. Brazil most of the decks were enclosed in olive-drab canvas forming long cavernous dormitories with three to four tiers of bunks. The deck dormitories were not used on this return trip, although all other spaces were crammed.

The lifeboat assignments were disturbing. Only women and children were assigned to boats. Men were allotted spaces on inflatable rafts. In the event of disaster we would be separated from our beloved father; this was more upsetting to me than any other aspect of the voyage. Lifeboat drill was a serious matter; the alarm sounded frequently, engendering a panic I strove to repress as I stood at attention by the boat wearing my life preserver. Gray waves slapped below me and I breathed the unique smell of tar and salt water that I grew to hate. It made me feel sick. It made me feel afraid. Two crewmembers counted heads and checked preservers.

The luxurious swimming pool below deck had been drained, the area converted like everything else into troop’s quarters, so on the top deck one of the holds was open and full of salt water for swimming. The ship’s social life centered around the pool. In the daytime we swam, sunned, chatted and watched the sea, which was slate blue to the horizon. When we crossed the equator, the crew assembled makeshift costumes and a trident. A robed and crowned Neptune initiated the first-time violators of this magic line and at the end of the ceremony threw them into the water. The Society of Neptune was only for adult males; children observed the foolishness with open mouths.

The ship observed complete blackout at night; portholes were covered with thick shades and a single ghostly blue bulb lighted each narrow corridor. We sat on deck in the dark every evening and sang our parents’ favorite songs, Home on the Range, K-K-Katie, One Day Closer Home. We sang our way across the oceans. This was the best time–our family and friends together, singing in the starlight.

The food was excellent, even lavish, served in a huge formal dining room. Stewards served course after course–soup, fish, meat, dessert, all followed with platters of fresh American navel oranges and apples to take to the staterooms. Kitchen staff and dining room traditions must have been inherited from the luxury steamship company and maintained to keep up the morale of the troops. Accustomed as we were to boarding school food, we savored every bite.

In front of us our destroyer trailed a wake of white foam, the waves curling to each side. For six weeks this escort plowed the sea ahead of us. Once, suspecting a U-Boat, it put down depth charges. We were on deck watching, having been alerted by the crew to stand near our lifeboats. No alarm sounded but this time it was not a drill. The sailors called it an exercise. Everyone silently regarded the unfamiliar churning wave patterns caused by unheard subterranean explosions.

During the six-week voyage the Brazil docked only twice, at Capetown and again at Bermuda. The May weather was cold raw winter in Capetown in the Southern Hemisphere; gray clouds hovered over Table Mountain. The harbor was too shallow for a ship the size of the Brazil and it took two tugboats at full steam to hold it parallel to the dock. Fierce waves rocked the ship back and forth breaking one gangplank after another. We stayed three days, and were allowed ashore as long as the gangplanks lasted.

A South African Methodist minister heard about our ship in spite of the security precautions, and offered to host an American Methodist minister and family. His request was granted, and a lovely family came for us, entertained us in their home, and squired us around the beautiful city of Capetown. This meant a great deal, for we felt very much the refugees sailing perilous seas. And our host was able to speak freely to my father, an American, about his opposition to proposed apartheid laws. Such an oasis of good will during a difficult time!

The second day we arrived back at the dock to discover that the last gangplank had splintered. An outside door on a lower deck was open; it was level with the dock. Several crewmen waited here. At the moment the ocean slapped the Brazil closest to the dock, those ashore propelled a passenger toward the outstretched arms. Each of us in turn jumped across this boiling moat to the safety of the ship. In cadence we jumped–ship out, ship in, next one jump, ship out… It had a dangerous and fascinating beat–out, in, jump, out, in, jump. Our last Capetown day was spent confined to the ship, hanging over the rail and observing the bustle and the drunks on the dock.

We were not allowed ashore at Bermuda, but anchored far away, the island only a spot of green in bright turquoise water. This was not due to military security, but to the measles. There were several cases aboard and we were in quarantine. I felt cheated of a Bermuda visit. Years later when I scraped together household money for Bermuda, my mother noted with satisfaction, You should have been allowed to go during the war.

In New York the usually taciturn representatives from the Board of Foreign Missions met us with undisguised joy. They were sure that we were dead. Two weeks earlier the German radio had broadcast that the S. S. Brazil had been torpedoed, hoping that the Brazil would break silence to refute the report and thus reveal her location.

And then we went on to Boston and Melrose by train where we were greeted by my grandparents and aunt. We were safely in America. Mother was home. The adventure of American life was about to begin. But we did not realize that we would have to stay here for almost three years.

Early Years

Life in America, the life described to me by friends and by my mother, guaranteed adventure. My grandparents who sent us wonderful packages every Christmas lived in America. Surely America was the Promised Land.

A normal life was the one I had been living in Jabalpur on the Leonard campus. Normal school was my boarding school in the Himalayan Mountains. Normal vacation was my parents’ vacation when they took me out of boarding and we lived in a suite at South Hill. Normal was the barefoot mali, his dhoti tucked up, digging in the Jabalpur garden, or Chutan cooking on the charcoal-burning chula stove in the kitchen and going through the rice to pick out stones. The usual way to shop was in the bazaar haggling amid a cacophony of voices speaking in different accents and languages. Ordinary transportation was by bicycle on the plains or, in the mountains, walking. It was the usual thing to speak Hindi with some, English with others. Normal clothes were homemade clothes. And it was normal, even without much money, to have servants.

I was looking forward to the differences in America, but I did not expect to feel different. I expected America to feel familiar because I was an American. I did not anticipate what I found, that it would be strange, and that I would seem different to others.

I was born in 1931 at Naini Tal in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Lady Elgin Hospital, a British female army establishment serving the wives and daughters of officers. My American missionary mother was eligible as a patient only because the army had appointed Daddy their Methodist chaplain. In the thirties the army was conscientious about seeing that all religious groups, both non-Christian and Christian, had chaplains. Most British clerics were Church of England. My father’s Methodist congregation included British, Indian and Anglo-Indian members, a few Americans on summer vacation, and the boys and girls from the Naini Tal Methodist boarding schools. My father served on city boards, and now, as a chaplain for the British army, was an American almost completely assimilated into the life of this Himalayan hill station. And why not? He had been born at nearby Almora and attended boarding school at Philander Smith College in Naini Tal.

Mother and Daddy sent cables to proud grandparents, one to my paternal grandmother, also in North India in Lucknow, and one to Mother’s parents in Massachusetts. Marguerite Ada Thoburn born Naini Tal June 6, 1931. The telegram to America arrived on June fifth, the day before my birth, relayed with uncharacteristic promptness. By the American clock, ten and a half hours behind the Indian one, I had not yet arrived.

As a young woman I needed a copy of my birth certificate; I had lost mine. I wrote to Daddy in India, asking him to get it for me. He used the college’s only telephone to contact the hospital in North India. It seems that there had been a fire