We reached London in August 1955. It was probably the worst time in the year to go to the UK.
We disembarked from SS Batory in Southampton and went by train to London. We had a flat on the First Floor on 5, St Charles Square, Ladbroke Grove, London W 10 with a kitchen and a bathroom on the left as you look upwards and our bedroom/drawing room on the right facing the front. I went back to this address around 2005 and it was still there. Better painted but still otherwise the same. In front of our window, where earlier there was nothing, now was a school. Beside our house on the lane on the right was a bus terminus which is not there any more.
My earliest memory is of post-war London. Cold, grey, drizzling and an acrid smell in the air. I first joined Oxford Junior School but it was quite far from home and I changed over to Bevington Primary School which was closer and at the junction of Portobello Road, famous till today for its Saturday market when second hand goods and antiques were sold for a pittance.
My classrooms were bright and airy we were always in one fight or more at the same time (especially with the girls). At our 11o'clock break we would get a sealed bottle of whole milk which was compulsory but an ordeal to drink because it was so cold. Then we would go out into the playground to play or fight (usually wrestling). We would play a game called "conkers" where we would attach a thorny fruit (a conker) to a string and swing it about the adversary's conker and deftly pull the string till one conker broke away. The conker that had parted with its string was the loser.
It was back to classes till lunch which was in a huge hall. There we would have to collect our plate which would have some bread, potatoes, vegetables (usually spinach) and some gruel with a piece of meat. Ma told me many times to enquire whether it was beef and then not eat it if it was. But I never did because there was no substitute and if it was beef then I could not eat it and would have to go hungry and attract the attention of the teachers whose main purpose in life seemed to be to ensure that the children gorge themselves right up to their throats. In any case it tasted good and the brown sauce was a treat. Sometimes it was fish and chips which was also nice. Then, at the end of the school day, it was a weary walk back home with Ma and Moon in her pushchair stroller pram. Ma would take this opportunity to do her shopping on Portobello Road. I was always fascinated by the wares that were sold and also the big Woolworth's there. Ma had a stiff leather bag shaped like a bucket which Daddy called "balti bag" into which she would stuff her purchases. Once, I remember, her purse was picked from this bag and we never got it back.
Right at the junction of our school and Portobello Road was a butcher's shop. Ma would buy lamb (no goat's meat there) and our weekly treat would be lamb curry and rice. This had a superb flavour and taste which I have never tasted since. They also sold some exquisite cold meats which Ma would buy once in a rare while as a special treat. After all, we had to subsist on £80/- per week which was the allowance Daddy got (an absolute pittance in today's money but somewhat reasonable for us 4 then). The unsavoury part of the story was that the meat had been in cold storages for a decade or more as a wartime buffer. On the other corner was a post office which sold all kinds of stuff from newspapers to cigarettes and everything in between including small eats. Moon would often get a lollipop from this shop if she had been a good girl.
Ma soon started attending evening classes in cooking, knitting and sewing (probably what is known as fashion design in modern parlance). I remember she would come home awfully late at night while Moon and I cowered in fear as the roads were not safe at night. Daddy studied on oblivious to the world.
Then came the shattering news that the Suez Canal was closed and we could either wait till it opened or go back to India round Cape of Good Hope as Vasco da Gama had done about 450 years earlier to reach Calicut. We waited a few months and then, when the Suez War was getting more strident, Daddy took the decision to return via the Cape. So we returned to Bombay on SS Circassia boarding at Liverpool with a stop at Cape Town riddled with apartheid. Circassia was a more luxurious and faster ship than Batory, but I do not remember it being as much fun as the Batory where the Cheese Scrambled eggs were divine and it was my first sea voyage. I think we finally reached Delhi in March/April 1957 and I joined back St Columba's for half a year before starting in St Joseph's Bangalore in January 1958.
Added by Biswajit Basu based on the displayed picture:
In fact, this first one is THE very house as it looks now. It was a dark red during my time. On the lane running beside the house was a bus terminus where there were a couple of double-deckers which are not there now. At the back we had a retractible double rope on pulleys strung to the back of the house behind to dry our clothes in those rare days of sunshine.
You would climb up the stairs to the front door. The owner, Mr EP Young stayed in the Ground Floor and his daughter, Mary, would often answer the bell. Once inside you walked down a short corridor (with the only phone) and turned left, to go up the stairs. On the first floor landing, on the left was the kitchen and the bathroom and across the landing corridor was the door to a huge room which was our combined bedroom and drawing room. The bed was huge and all 4 of us slept on it. There was a sofa and some chairs and a lovely cosy fireplace which we only ran occasionally and lived to the heat from a paraffin heater in the centre of the room. The huge windows that you see in the front of our house on the first floor were our bedroom/drawing room windows. The Pathak's were on the second floor and were replaced by the Gangulys. Their son, Monomoy Ganguli, who was not yet born then but retired recently as a Lt General as the Director General of Medical Services (DGMS). He is presently the head of the Parsi Petit Hospital in Bombay. Their flat, above ours, was exactly the same as ours.
I would come down the stairs, emerge out of the door and turn right to go to school.
I can draw you a sketch of our flat to give you how we lived in these cramped circumstances for 2 years. I got appendicitis on that bed in December 1955!
Post Script:
Daddy went to study for DO (Diploma in Opthalmology)
Author note:
More about the voyages are in these posts -
A mention of neighbours is in this post -
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