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that then resonated with us were
The Secret Garden
and
A Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because they were about Indian-born girls being unhappy back in their own country. Later, like every other teenager, I imagine (did
any
girls want to be Meg or Amy?), I identified with Jo in
Little Women
because she was the odd one out, though it annoyed me for ages that she married the Professor and not Laurie – but then I fell in love with
The Scarlet Pimpernel
so I didn’t really care any more.
    From grown-ups’ conversations we gathered that Dad, far away in Punjab, was not particularly happy, but we had no real idea of what he was doing; it was only after we grew up that he ever spoke to us about it, or that we learned of the horrors which came with the partition of India – and it was only after our parents had died that Tessa found the big envelope of letters that Dad wrote to Mum at this grim time (and which I never promised not to read because we didn’t know they existed). But the unbelievably terrible events he witnessed then, and his powerlessness to improve the situation, changed him – and it altered the course of our lives – so I will try and explain.
    By Indian Independence Day, with some exceptions (including Dad), the 60,000 British soldiers who had served in the army in India had either left, or were confined to barracks as they prepared to leave, while the remaining bulk of the Indian Army was divided up (as I explained earlier), with Hindu soldiers staying put and their Muslim counterparts leaving to form the new Pakistan Army. The same thing happened with the Indian police force: British members were sent home to England while the rest of the force was split, with the Muslims going off to Pakistan. All this created a huge vacuum in India: there was no strong, neutral peacekeeping authority left to control the new border between India and Pakistan (which ran alongside the Sikh heartland) as millions of people with two fundamentally different religions began to cross it in opposite directions. And to add to the tension, the actual path of the border line itself was not announced until two days
after
Independence so those who lived along it did not know, literally, whether they belonged to India or Pakistan.
    Realising there might be problems ahead, Mountbatten set up the Punjab Boundary Force of about 17,000 soldiers and local police, which came into being two weeks or so before Independence, to try to keep the peace in this explosive situation – but there were not enough men or resources allocated (members of the PBF, as it was known, called themselves the Poor Bloody Fools), and it could not do the job expected of it. Hindus, particularly the Sikhs, whose territory the Muslim refugees had to cross to reach Pakistan, started attacking and slaughtering departing Muslims and Muslims in Pakistan did vice versa. What made it infinitely worse was that, though most of the population had no weapons, the Sikhs were armed with three-foot-long swords called
kirpans
which could not be taken from them as they are a religious symbol. The ensuing massacres were known as the Bloodbath: it is believed that a million people died.
    My father arrived in the Punjab on 10 August 1947 to take up his peacekeeping duties for Lahore district, plus Ferozepur and Montgomery areas – all places that did not yet know whether they would be in India or Pakistan when the border was announced. He wrote to Mum on 13 August telling her how, on his first day, he had come upon the dead bodies of forty Muslim men, women and children lying in the road, slaughtered by Sikhs, and that ‘panic reigns everywhere’. From then on he wrote to her daily and in each new letter the horrors mounted – though he was at the same time clearly trying to protect her from the more terrible details.
    Dad hoped that things would improve when the border was defined – ‘We are