“A HAPPY THREESOME”

Towards the end of the fifteen months we spent in India the immediate attraction between my mother and Panditji blossomed into love.... She became his confidante. Nehru would never write to her until about two in the morning, when he had finished his work, and his letters were a fascinating diary of the creation of India. He would start with a charming opening paragraph, very touching and personal, and he would end affectionately.... My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru. He wrote to my sister in June 1948: ‘She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together... Pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help....’ So there existed a happy three-some based on firm understanding on all sides.

The relationship remained platonic but it was a deep love. And although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death. They met about twice a year. She would include a visit to India in her overseas tours on behalf of the St John Ambulance Brigade and the Save the Children Fund.... Panditji would come to London for the Common-wealth Prime Ministers’ conferences. He would always come down to Broadlands, our house in Hampshire, for a weekend. We kept a little grey mare for him so that he could come out riding with us.

My mother was on an overseas tour in 1960... when her heart gave out and she died in her sleep aged fifty-eight. A packet of letters from Panditji was found by her bedside. In her will she left the whole collection of letters to my father. A suitcase was crammed full of them. My father was almost certain that there would be nothing in the letters to wound him. However, a tiny doubt caused him to ask me to read the letters first. I was happy to be able to reassure him. They were remarkable letters, but contained nothing to hurt him.

Growing up in England, we had heard a lot about him (Gandhi). I’m afraid the ignorant English take on him was ‘a funny little man in a loincloth’. In fact, he did wear his shawl to come to Viceroy’s House, I think largely because it wasn’t yet that hot although it was the beginning of March, but also my father’s study was airconditioned and quite cool. After the initial photographs of the three of them outside the house, as they turned to go in, Gandhi put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, because he was quite frail and quite old. He was so used to his great niece, one of his ‘crutches’, always being there that he’d always have a hand on one of these girls for support. So instinctively he put his hand for support on my mother’s shoulder. This would have been welcomed by my mother of course, but sadly this photograph caused real outrage in England when it was seen. They thought it was not appropriate at all that this ‘black hand should be placed on this white shoulder’.

As he (Jinnah) had assumed that my mother would be photographed between him and my father, when asked to pose he said, ‘Ah—a rose between two thorns.’ Unfortunately it was he who was placed in the middle of the composition and not my mother.