fidgeted and murmured among themselves as she talked, and as soon as the class finished at three o’clock they raced each other across the yard, happy to be free from her lessons even though the rest of the day would be spent working in the fields, or bent over a weaving loom. She could only hope that the food they ate and the minimal medical attention she could offer, for their racking coughs, gummy eyes and running sores, was a compensation for the two hours of mutual incomprehension they shared with her. By the age of eight or nine, most of them stopped coming altogether. They were too valuable to their parents as extra pairs of hands.
Nerys listened as Evan’s breathing slowed and deepened.
However positive she tried to be, it was hard not to feel that they were wasting their time in this place, two ignorant outsiders battling against the primitive conditions, an obscure language and centuries of history.
Of course, Evan wouldn’t have agreed that they were ignorant. But Nerys didn’t share her husband’s absolute conviction that the Word was the only truth, and bringing it to the heathen the only thing that really mattered. She was even afraid that she might be losing her faith altogether, although the mere acknowledgement of this, in silence and under the safe cover of darkness, made her wince with anxiety. How could there be a missionary’s wife who didn’t believe in the Lord?
Ironically, it was India that had brought her to this precipice of doubt.
Back in Wales, she had first met the Reverend Evan Watkins when he was on home leave from his Indian mission and she was in teacher training, and it had all seemed perfectly straightforward. Their God, the one she and Evan shared, was a dailymatter, of course. He was Grace said before meals, prayers at bedtime for family and the sick, the King and Queen and the unfortunate heathen. He was chapel on Sundays, the thick black Bible, Nonconformist hymns, and a whole way of life that she was accustomed to and took comfortably for granted. Even after Evan had proposed (and she had hoped – even prayed – that he would ask her), and during their short engagement, the wedding, their honeymoon in Anglesey (she wouldn’t dwell on that now) and all the preparations for India that had followed, she had never questioned the basic premise. Evan had heard the call to do missionary work, and she was proud to be accompanying him. She would help him and support him in every way she could, and they would succeed together.
At Shillong, the centre of the Presbyterian outreach mission to India, where they had lived for their first months of married life, it had not been so very difficult. Within the compound there was a large school run by the mission, where the teaching was excellent and the local families seemed prepared to accept the Christian message that accompanied it. As well as the big chapel, with its regular services for mission families and respectable numbers of converts, there was a medical clinic for first aid and minor ailments, classes for local women in domestic skills, hygiene and vegetable-growing that Nerys had enjoyed helping with, and all the support of a small but determined religious community. There was even, at a little distance, a mission hospital, with a resident qualified doctor and three nurses, where women could come to give birth in safer and more sanitary conditions than were available anywhere else in the area. Lepers were treated there too, and TB patients, and sufferers from septicaemia and rabies and all the other shocking ailments of India. Nerys could see that they were doing some good through their work, she and her husband, even though it was in a small, oblique way.
India itself had shocked her. She had only been able to conjure up the most pallid images in advance so the actual vastness,the brutal heat of the plains, so fierce that it flayed her skin and bleached the skies, the swarming people, the solid torrents of monsoon rain, the
Nerys listened as Evan’s breathing slowed and deepened.
However positive she tried to be, it was hard not to feel that they were wasting their time in this place, two ignorant outsiders battling against the primitive conditions, an obscure language and centuries of history.
Of course, Evan wouldn’t have agreed that they were ignorant. But Nerys didn’t share her husband’s absolute conviction that the Word was the only truth, and bringing it to the heathen the only thing that really mattered. She was even afraid that she might be losing her faith altogether, although the mere acknowledgement of this, in silence and under the safe cover of darkness, made her wince with anxiety. How could there be a missionary’s wife who didn’t believe in the Lord?
Ironically, it was India that had brought her to this precipice of doubt.
Back in Wales, she had first met the Reverend Evan Watkins when he was on home leave from his Indian mission and she was in teacher training, and it had all seemed perfectly straightforward. Their God, the one she and Evan shared, was a dailymatter, of course. He was Grace said before meals, prayers at bedtime for family and the sick, the King and Queen and the unfortunate heathen. He was chapel on Sundays, the thick black Bible, Nonconformist hymns, and a whole way of life that she was accustomed to and took comfortably for granted. Even after Evan had proposed (and she had hoped – even prayed – that he would ask her), and during their short engagement, the wedding, their honeymoon in Anglesey (she wouldn’t dwell on that now) and all the preparations for India that had followed, she had never questioned the basic premise. Evan had heard the call to do missionary work, and she was proud to be accompanying him. She would help him and support him in every way she could, and they would succeed together.
At Shillong, the centre of the Presbyterian outreach mission to India, where they had lived for their first months of married life, it had not been so very difficult. Within the compound there was a large school run by the mission, where the teaching was excellent and the local families seemed prepared to accept the Christian message that accompanied it. As well as the big chapel, with its regular services for mission families and respectable numbers of converts, there was a medical clinic for first aid and minor ailments, classes for local women in domestic skills, hygiene and vegetable-growing that Nerys had enjoyed helping with, and all the support of a small but determined religious community. There was even, at a little distance, a mission hospital, with a resident qualified doctor and three nurses, where women could come to give birth in safer and more sanitary conditions than were available anywhere else in the area. Lepers were treated there too, and TB patients, and sufferers from septicaemia and rabies and all the other shocking ailments of India. Nerys could see that they were doing some good through their work, she and her husband, even though it was in a small, oblique way.
India itself had shocked her. She had only been able to conjure up the most pallid images in advance so the actual vastness,the brutal heat of the plains, so fierce that it flayed her skin and bleached the skies, the swarming people, the solid torrents of monsoon rain, the
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