The Last Vicereine Read online

  RHIANNON JENKINS TSANG

  THE LAST VICEREINE

  A Novel

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Timeline of Key Events

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  PART 4

  PART 5

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  For Mum and Dad

  Timeline of Key Events

  8th May 1944 War in Europe ends

  5th July 1945 UK General Election; wartime leader Winston Churchill defeated; Clement Attlee becomes Prime Minister of a Labour government after a landslide victory

  15th August 1945 War in the Far East ends

  February 1947 Lord Louis Mountbatten appointed Viceroy of India by the King; his wife, Edwina, becomes Vicereine; UK Parliament debates India Independence Bill

  24th March 1947 Lord Mountbatten sworn in as the Viceroy at Viceroy’s House in New Delhi; negotiations with Indian leaders on a deal for transfer of power begin

  March–April 1947 Nehru hosts Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in his capacity as head of the Provisional Government

  15th April 1947 The Viceroy hosts Governors’ Conference at Viceroy’s House

  28th April–1st May May The Viceroy and Vicereine visit the North West Frontier Province and the Punjab; they inspect riot-torn areas and refugee camps, including the village of Kahuta

  3rd May–14th May 1947 The Viceroy and Vicereine go to Simla for rest; informal negotiations take place; Pandit Nehru and the Chinese Ambassador, Chia-Yuen Lo, among the guests; draft plan on transfer of power rejected by Nehru

  3rd June 1947 Announcement made of agreement on a new plan for the transfer of power

  14th August 1947 Pakistan created as a new independent country with Dominion status; Jinnah sworn in as Governor General

  15th August 1947 India created as a new independent country with Dominion status; Mountbatten, now Earl Mountbatten of Burma, is sworn is as Governor General; Nehru sworn in as Prime Minister of India with his cabinet; mass exodus of refugees in the Punjab and Bengal

  December 1947 The Mountbattens attend the Silver Jubilee Celebrations of the Maharaja of Jaipur

  1948 Edwina Mountbatten, now Countess Mountbatten of Burma, continues her relief work in her capacity as wife of the Governor General of India

  30th January 1948 Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

  21st June 1948 The Mountbattens leave India; C. Rajagopalachari sworn in as Governor General

  26th January 1950 India becomes a republic; post of Governor General abolished

  23rd March 1956 Pakistan becomes a republic; post of Governor General abolished

  21st February 1960 Edwina Mountbatten dies in her sleep in British Borneo; she is buried at sea off the coast of Portsmouth; Nehru sends the Indian frigate Trishul to accompany her and to cast marigolds on the sea in her honour

  27th May 1964 Death of Pandit Nehru

  PART I

  India, Full Speed Ahead Early February 1947 to late May 1947

  I was hiding and I was freezing.

  I was in an office above the main post office in Oxford. It was ridiculously early. There was no need for me to be at my desk at such an unholy hour. I wasn’t even sure why I was there.

  No, that isn’t true.

  I won’t lie to you. The truth is, I had run away. I blocked my ears and pretended I didn’t know what people were saying about me.

  ‘Did you hear about Letty? Poor dear! Such a shame!’ But work was all I had left. It was my bulwark against the nightmares. That is why I was hiding.

  The morning hours dragged past and my black pen scratched carefully on the ledger, my figures neat and precise despite my fingerless gloves and the biting cold. I had to keep things organized, everything in its place. Miss Meticulous, the postmaster often called me. It was meant as a compliment, then why did I take it as an insult?

  I removed my reading glasses, rubbed my eyes and rose to blow warm air from my mouth on to the window panes that bore flowers of frost on the rippling old glass. With the back of my glove, I cleared a spyhole. The sky was a flat sheet of pewter. Opposite me the glorious towers of Christ Church Cathedral and College were thick with snow, while the cars ground up and down the icy hill of St Aldate’s in asthmatic bursts. How I hated that winter. I hated what the cold was doing to people, what it did to me. I craved warmth. I craved sleep, real deep sleep, and peace in my heart.

  The snow was piled up seven feet high on the sides of the road, so that the pavements looked like trenches with doors cut in them for entering the shops. The war had been over for more than a year, yet the country was still battling unending months of ice and snow. Suddenly, directly below me, I spotted a purple feather emerging from a taxi. I stared transfixed. The owner of the feather straightened up and surveyed the street as if she owned it. No one had a look quite like hers. It was unmistakable. She glanced up as if she could actually see me at the window, although I knew she couldn’t. She was short-sighted. Ashamed of myself and my situation, I stepped back. Yet I smiled at the way the feather on her hat bobbed jauntily along the ridge of the ice trenches and into the post office.

  Oh Edwina!

  It was that moment before a fall from a horse, that stab of panic as you struggled to regain your balance but realized you could not stop it from happening. I knew there was nothing I could do. Whatever it was that had brought her here, I could not fight it. I was forced to reveal myself. With a pounding heart, I hurried downstairs.

  She was standing in the queue. In her purple tweed coat with her fox fur elegantly draped over her shoulder, she was like a lone crocus in the middle of the winter. Wherever she went she brightened everyone’s day.

  ‘It isn’t—it can’t be?’ I heard two old ladies in black whisper behind their gloved hands.

  ‘It is, I tell you. It’s Lady Mountbatten!’

  An old gentleman turned around at the sound of her name, shuffled forward, removed his hat and offered her his place in the queue.

  ‘No, thank you.’ She rewarded him with her most charming smile. ‘I’ll wait my turn.’ But the old man did not go away. It was always like that. There was a magic about her. She drew people to her, held them in her orbit the way the sun holds the planets. No one could ever escape. The man leant heavily on his stick.

  ‘My son, Arthur, was a Jap POW in Burma,’ he said simply. ‘I want to thank you.’

  She smiled again and offered him her hand, but there was more to it than that. It was as if a light had come on behind her violet-blue eyes. She knew better than to ask and waited for the old man to continue.

  ‘Arthur says the day Lady Mountbatten came to the camp was the day he knew he was going to survive.’

  ‘And how is your son now?’ Her forehead wrinkled with genuine concern.

  ‘Aw, he’s just fine. Married his gal, Peggy, last month.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Here’s hoping I might become a grandad before too long.’

  ‘That’s wonderful! His Peggy waited for him, all that time?’

  ‘She did.’ The old gentleman seemed to think there was nothing remarkable about a girl waiting for years for a soldier who might have been given up for dead in the Burmese jungle, but Edwina thought differently. Leaning forward, quick as a flash, she dropped a kiss on the old man’s cheek.

  ‘Give him that from me!’

  I had seen Edwina working her charm, night after night, when I laboured with her at the St John’s Ambulance during the London Blitz. I would squeeze into the front seat of her car and we would drive through the blackout to inspect air raid shelters in the East End, with me c
alling out the hazards that loomed along the way. As always in life it is the poorest people who get the worst of things and those living near the docks in dense housing had suffered the most during the bombing. I was never sure which was worse—being up top to face the bombs, fire and smoke, or being buried deep underground in the airless shelters with thousands of others, where the floor was wet with urine and the buckets, which served as latrines, overflowed with faeces.

  ‘Hello. What’s your name? What do you need?’ Edwina Mountbatten would smile and ask of the toothless old dockers and exhausted young women who looked twice their age and were shivering with babies at their breasts. Cowering in dingy smoke-filled chambers, they would stare up into the torchlight, bewitched by her, and when they talked she would listen. Unlike me, who always wrote things down in a notepad as best I could during each visit, Edwina seemed to be able to hold it all in her head. Of course, she always wore an expertly tailored uniform and bright red lipstick, and kept perfect nails, but the thing about her was that it was not all just show. She cared about those people and knew how to get things done to help them.

  ‘Letty, get this request to the Secretary of State first thing in the morning and if he’s bolshie, you jolly well tell him it’s coming from me!’

  And before long I, Brigadier Letticia Wallace of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, had learnt to emulate Edwina’s ways. If I could not be a barrister in the man’s world of the Inns of Court, then I would be a woman, but by God, I would be one who got things done! I pulled rank. I wore lipstick and Joy perfume. I tightened my belt to show off my not insignificant curves and donned the highest of heels for meetings in Whitehall. I accepted smokes, flirted outrageously, stomped my feet, bossed, shouted, wheedled and cajoled; all of this to get things done, to make things better for people.

  I could be ruthless too. Like Edwina I did not tolerate fools gladly and could not stand pompous incompetence, laziness or complacency. Edwina taught me that rank brings responsibility and if things were not right, heads would roll. In time, I came to see what Edwina had understood from the first day, that when we delivered light bulbs, bandages, blankets and eventually latrines, we also brought humanity and hope.

  Edwina placed a small crocodile-skin handbag on the counter and removed her left glove to pay for some stamps with a shilling. While her change was being counted, I put on my shabby pre-war black hat and coat and waited for her by the door. I didn’t know why she had come. But I knew she had come for me.

  We walked the short distance to the little house I was renting in Holywell Street. I had wanted to take her to lunch at the Randolph Hotel but she had taken one look at me, known at once that something was not right and was determined to get to the bottom of it. So, my house it was.

  The curtains in the front parlour were drawn and the ashes in the grate unraked. She headed straight to the kitchen in the back, the scent of powder, soap and perfume wafting in her wake. She stood in the middle of the room, staring at the unwashed dishes in the sink, smelling the rancid odour of the bacon I had fried for breakfast and the dank laundry left to dry higgledy-piggledy on the rack in front of the range. Pursing her lips, she pulled out her hatpin and removed her hat.

  ‘Letty,’ she said, ‘Why on earth didn’t you come to us, to Dickie and me? We are just so sorry. We’d no idea that Charles had died.’ She looked at the photographs of my boys lined up on the mantelpiece and at the formal portrait of my husband, Charles, in his wig and gown, taken when he had become King’s Counsel. He was smiling slightly and resting his chin in his hand. Beside this portrait was George, tall and looking squarely into the camera, dressed in the uniform of a midshipman; and Robert in his flying kit, standing with his friends in front of his Spitfire; and all three of them in cricket whites, father and sons, red-headed and freckled in the summer sun, arms around each other, grinning at the end of a veterans versus first eleven game at Charterhouse in 1937. I tried not to look at them but failed.

  On 7th September 1940 my elder son Robert’s Spitfire had been shot down over East Anglia. He was killed. On the 5th of August 1944 my second son George’s ship had been sunk by a German U-boat; all hands were lost. It had destroyed Charles. He had clung to life for no more than a few months after their deaths. So there I was. Alone in my untidy rented house, hiding away in Oxford. Letticia Lady Wallace was my title, but it lay like lead on my heart.

  ‘Don’t worry, Edwina,’ I said, ‘I’m all right. I’m well-provided for financially. Charles left money and there is my family trust.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean and you know it,’ she snapped.

  Taking a poker, she began to stoke up a fire on the range, adding coals and blowing gently to coax it to life. Embarrassed, I knelt at her side with the bellows.

  ‘You came all the way from London to Oxford on the train in this weather to see me?’

  ‘Of course! I needed to see you.’ She hesitated and I knew she was deferring to my grief, holding back her own agenda. ‘I went round to your place in Argyll Street in London yesterday and your housekeeper told me what had happened.’

  I got up, my knees cracking, and went over to the sink to fill the kettle. Bringing it back, I hung it on its hook over the fire.

  ‘That’s better,’ Edwina said. ‘Have you got anything to eat? I’m famished.’ Her face was pinched from the cold and for the first time I realized that she too might not be in the best of health.

  ‘Eggs,’ I said, ‘and some bread and milk. The bread might be a bit mouldy though.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll cut it off. Scrambled eggs would be good. I don’t suppose you’ve got any Worcester sauce?’

  I shook my head, salivating at the thought of it.

  ‘Nice try!’ I said, managing half a smile. Both of us knew it was a long shot. We had not had little luxuries like that since before the war.

  But finding it suddenly easier to motivate myself in her company, I set about getting the utensils together to make the simple meal.

  ‘Your housekeeper said that you nursed Charles at home yourself until the end?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I was sitting by the fire with pieces of bread on the end of the toasting fork and Edwina, with her sleeves rolled up, was vigorously beating the eggs in a bowl.

  ‘It was awful,’ I said, remembering against my will. ‘But at least it was quick. Less than three months. The cancer was too advanced for anyone to do much about it.’

  She dished up the eggs and I buttered the toast. Removing our coats at last, we sat at the tiny table near the fire. She ate quickly yet daintily, like a little bird, pecking at her food. But I knew the inquisition was coming.

  ‘I manage well enough when I’m at work, really, I do. It’s just at home, especially these last few months, the cold and the dark, I can’t seem to get myself organized,’ I said.

  ‘What on earth possessed you to leave London and move out here all alone?’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time, letting Argyll Street and starting a new life here in Oxford where, a long time ago, I was once a student. I thought I might use the Bodleian to brush up on my criminal case law and eventually get a teaching post at the Society of Oxford Home Students. You know me, always keeping busy.’

  I wanted to say that I had planned to go riding eventually. That I had hoped in time I would feel able to take Communion again. But neither of these things had happened. I had visited Pusey House for High Mass once. They were singing Byrd and I had calculated that the simplicity and beauty of the Latin mass might open the door to prayer for me once more. But the sight of the priests in white and gold serving the pretender they called God filled me with such rage that I almost threw my hymn book at the stained glass window. I walked out before the end of the Credo.

  Edwina picked up a piece of toast, bit it and looked at me with her piercing violet eyes.

  ‘Well, it clearly isn’t working, is it?

  ‘No.’

  The kettle whistled and I got up to pour the te
a. Mine was black; hers white, with one sugar. Cradling the cups in our cold hands, we sat in silence in front of the range. The fire roared angrily at me as if admonishing me for my neglect.

  ‘Look at us!’ she said. ‘Like two old harpies.’

  ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ I joked, and was surprised to feel the muscles of my face stretch into something forgotten, something I had once known as a smile.

  ‘I had a partial hysterectomy just before Christmas, you know,’ she announced briskly. ‘God I hate getting old.’ She clenched her teeth. ‘And I tell you now, Edwina Mountbatten is not going to accept her fate and degenerate into some fat, wrinkly old matriarch. I’d rather die on parade than trussed up in a wheelchair in a draughty old stately home.’ And this time it was my turn to say sorry. She nodded and sipped her tea. And then she got to it. The reason she had come to Oxford in her fur and feather. I knew too well that quick intake of breath and haughty lift of an eyebrow.

  ‘Something has come up, Letty.’ She paused.

  I waited in silence for more. She placed a despairing hand on her forehead. Overly dramatic, the pose might have been funny if she had not been so upset.

  ‘A horror job. Dickie says he absolutely doesn’t want it, but I think it’s a front. I suspect he’s been angling for it ever since he left South East Asian Command. He’s doing it to spite me, damn him!’

  I tilted my head to one side by way of a question.

  ‘The PM called him into Downing Street just before Christmas and then he went to see the King. He says he tried to wriggle out of it.’ She gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘The thing is, and I’ve told him so, I really don’t want to go. I’ve got my relief work here in Europe. But even the King was all for it and I can’t say I blame him. Dickie has been hassling the poor chap for months about Princess Elizabeth marrying Philip. He probably thinks good riddance. With Dickie dispatched, he will finally get some peace and quiet! But Noel Coward is saying it’s a scandal and that Attlee and the Labour Party are lining Dickie up as the fall guy.’ She pulled at her hair with her fingers—so unlike her—and took several shallow breaths. ‘Letty, it’s awful! We will probably come back with bullets in our backs.’ She spoke quickly, and I was mesmerized by the bright red of her lipstick and the urgent lilt of her voice.