As time goes by

Without much ado, she began the piano lessons every morning with the music books which she had brought along. In between lessons, there were a few moments during the `elevenses’ morning coffee breaks during which we learnt more about her and her family background. She was a widow, she said, and had lost her husband and her son in the War. Her husband had been in the British Army and was killed somewhere in France during the Ardennes offensive. Her son, a handsome young Flight Lieutenant, had crashed in a fighter-bomber sortie over German-occupied France. She never got a chance to have a last look at either her husband or her only son. This harrowing sense of loss will be perfectly familiar to the relatives of men in the Indian armed forces, but quite incomprehensible to our politicians and bureaucrats.Like most other British families she had accepted her fate and tried to build a new life for herself. Recalling those days during World War II, she told us how she used to drive military three-tonners and five-tonners day and night conveying supplies and munitions for the troops. Momentarily, I could not associate this gentle, elegant woman with war and destruction. She came to dinner one evening and brought along an album of photographs of her husband Paul and their son Geoffrey. “Those were dreadful days,” she began, “and yet there were certain moments of exhilaration and an intangible feeling of closeness between family and family. And when Hitler sent the Doodlebugs, the V-1 and V-2 bombs from across the Channel we all looked up, wondering which row of houses would be hit.”

She paused, wiping her eyes. “Some families,” she continued, “were wiped out. Most others lost a husband, a son or a daughter.”

A few days before our return to India, Sarah called us over to her modest apartment for cocktails and as a farewell of sorts, she played a few pieces on her piano a medley of her favourites. And then a few wartime pieces like They will never grow old and I’ts a long, long way to Tipperary. And at the end of it all, her eyes were misted. Rupert Brooke, who died in the First World War when he was barely 27 immortalised the sentiment surrounding a soldiers last resting place in one of his poems:

“If I should die, think only this of me,/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field,/ That is for ever England.”

That evening in London with Sarah Bernstein at the piano, my thoughts went back over the years to the thousands of Indian soldiers and airmen who had made the supreme sacrifice in the wars with Pakistan and in Sri Lanka. There are several thousands now serving in Leh and Siachen. Many are killed or maimed, then railroaded out with a pittance of a pension on which even a dog cannot survive. Do we as a nation ever think about these brave sons of India? Don’t they merit a memorial? Doesn’t loyalty and dedication deserve a better response in terms of welfare measures from our ministers?