Page 13 of The Girl from the Tea Garden (The India Tea #3)
StMary’s College, Simla June, 1935
Dear Cousin Jane Thank you for the lovely homemade birthday card with fifteen cats on it!
Airmail takes just over a week to get here now, so it arrived in plenty of time.
You are very artistic, and cats are one of my favourite animals.
I know you are always busy in the café, so it ’ s kind of you to paint the picture in your spare time.
I ’ m sorry to hear that Aunt Olive is bad with her nerves again.
Just as well you have a good manageress in Lexy.
I think Lexy ’ s idea of changing the name from Herbert ’ s Tea Rooms to Herbert ’ s Café is a good one– much more modern.
I ’ m sorry to hear that her friend Jared Belhaven has died though.
Wasn ’ t he some sort of cousin of ours?
Is Cousin George still courting the usherette at The Stoll?
Uncle Jack must be doing really well if he’s taken over from MrMilner in the running of the Tyneside Tea Company.
Well done, Uncle Jack! Is that why you’ve moved to a bigger house?
Send me a photo or do a drawing of it when you can.
My best friend, Prue, has been exhibiting at the Simla Art Show this month and I’m in a production of Saint Joan next week.
We’re performing it in Davico’s Ballroom because it holds a much bigger audience than the school hall.
I was hoping to be Saint Joan, but they gave the part to Deborah Halliday– I’m sure it was because she’s got blonde hair.
But anyway I’m Brother Martin, a young priest who is kind to Joan at the end.
At least I’ve got a part. Also I’m singing in the end-of-term concert.
I’m so excited because Auntie Sophie and Uncle Rafi are coming to hear me.
They’re visiting DrFatima (that’s Rafi’s sister), who works at the hospital and lives in a flat in Lakkar Bazaar so she can be near her work.
She’s very beautiful for a doctor. Sometimes I go and visit the sick with her and help make the patients cups of tea.
MrsHogg (‘The Fluff’, as Prue calls her) thought it would be a good idea if I did some volunteering work, so I do that on Saturdays after classes.
Sometimes Prue comes with me, and DrFatima says we are very useful, especially on the purdah wards, where the women can’t be seen by male doctors or any male staff at all.
DrFatima also goes into the hills and takes her travelling clinic to very remote places.
Maybe next year I might go too. The town is filling up with visitors.
The Delhi government lot have been here since the middle of April, but now there are army and civilian wives escaping the heat of the plains, and young single officers on leave– some of them very handsome!
You wouldn’t believe the amount of flirting that goes on, and there are dinner dances and entertainment almost every night.
I see the partygoers passing below the bungalow in rickshaws dressed up to the nines in satin and sequins (the men in white mess kit or tails) and they often wake me up on their return, laughing their heads off or singing.
The lights of the rickshaw lamps bump up and down in the dark like fireflies as the rickshaw-wallahs pull their passengers up the slope.
It looks so romantic. It makes me think of Sam Jackman.
I still wonder a lot about what happened to him.
Perhaps Auntie Sophie will have news of him.
I can’t wait till I’m allowed to go to parties– real grown-up ones– where I’ll have a dance card filled with the names of young men dying to dance with me!
Aunt Fluffy says I have to wait till I’m seventeen.
Although she does hold dinner parties that I’m allowed to be at, the guests are usually pretty old and talk a lot of politics, but she often has Indians to dinner, like DrFatima, who isn’t in purdah, or Indian Army officers that Colonel Hogg used to know.
There’s a really jolly Sikh officer called Sundar Singh who used to be with Rafi in the Lahore Horse.
He’s here on some survey. He’s had a sad life, as his wife died in childbirth, and he doesn’t get to see his son much as he’s being brought up by Sundar’s sister near Pindi, but he’s full of fun and always telling jokes and I think he’s a bit smitten with DrFatima– though I don’t think Sikhs are allowed to marry Moslems, which is a bit of a pity, as he makes her laugh, which is quite hard work because she is a serious sort.
I’m allowed to go to the pictures. Last week Sundar took Aunt Fluffy, DrFatima and me to see The Merry Widow .
It was wonderful and I’ve been pretending I’m a Maxime’s dancer and practising steps ever since.
Aunt Fluffy complains that I make more noise upstairs than the monkeys on the roof!
Write to me soon and tell me how you are.
Give my love to Aunt Olive and I hope she cheers up soon.
Your loving cousin, Adela (Alias Jeanette MacDonald!)
Briar Rose Cottage, Simla July 1936