Life as a family in Agartala

When Judy was born, I despatched telegrams to our families in New Zealand with the good news, took photos of the baby and mother, and entertained visiting well-wishers. Two days later I went to Calcutta to sit the exams, again passing OK, although I remember my thoughts were never far from the baby and Mum back in Agartala.

 

A few days after I got back home, Audrey and Judy moved to our house, and we started to learn the job of parenthood.

 

In January, my Aunt, Doris, paid a visit to us. She had for many years worked as Treasurer of the Baptist Womens Missionary Union, and was a very significant person in my early life.  She stayed with us for three weeks in Agartala, and obviously enjoyed getting to know Judy, and spending time with us as a young family. Sadly she died of a heart attack a few weeks after returning to Auckland. She was only 63.

 

Judy was a good baby; we had a reasonably straightforward learning curve as parents. When she was around twelve months, however, and learning to walk, she caused us to scratch our heads.

 

As we were sitting reading in the evening by the light of the pressure lamp, a little figure appeared in the doorway (there were no internal doors in our house) and started to look around and talk to us. As it was well past her bedtime, and we had thought she was sound asleep as usual, we picked her up and bundled her back into bed.

 

The next evening this treatment didn’t work; Judy appeared a second time soon after we had put her back to bed.

 

After a few nights of this game, we hit on a solution. We decided that we would just carry on as if she wasn’t there; in other words, we would not reward her behaviour with any attention. So when the little figure appeared in the doorway and started to carry on her usual lively social interaction, we just continued reading and passing the odd conversational remark to each other, completely as though she wasn’t there. Of course we were splitting our sides with laughter inside, but we managed to hold our breath long enough to convince Judy we weren’t seeing or hearing her. She came up to each chair in turn and peered into our faces, and that was the most difficult time for suppression of giggles! Eventually she got her pillow (she always carried a “Nai-nai” to hold while she sucked her thumb) and lay down by the doorway, and after a few minutes, went off to sleep on the floor. We picked her up and put her back in bed, and she never tried that game again.

 

More good news

 

She was nearly eighteen months by the time Audrey had to go up to Shillong, to the Welsh Mission Hospital for Terry’s arrival, and Judy and I went with her and stayed in a rented Australian mission house while the other two were in hospital. We had great fun together, walking around the pleasant Shillong suburbs (5000 feet, cool in Summer, it was April).  After Terry’s birth, there was a terrible cyclone in that part of the sub-continent, with thousands killed or made homeless in East Pakistan, and heavy rain and winds in Shillong.  Judy and I battened down in our house (the others were still in hospital). Other days we visited the hospital and did our baby-worship. And sent the mandatory telegrams back home.

 

During those days I counted the number of words Judy knew, and came up with over 100, including one or two two- or three-word phrases.

 

Once back in Agartala, we began another learning curve: getting accustomed to being a family of four rather than three. 

 

Living on the extreme eastern side of India, which used a common time-zone across the whole country, everything happened very early by the clock. My day at school started with prayers for the hostel children at 6 am, which meant I had to get up around 5 45, or earlier if I could drag myself out of bed. The advantage of this was that we had a good early start.

 

I would come back for breakfast around 6 30, and by the time classes started, around 10, I had got through a lot of work in the office: jobs like paying bills (in cash), keeping the accounts, discussions with the staff, and  preparing my lessons (in Bengali, often, and so needing careful work at that stage of my language learning).

 

Meantime the schoolchildren had a snack, did their PE, and then went on to craft classes until around 9, when they broke to get bathed and dressed for their first main meal before classes  proper. It took me quite a while to adjust to this odd routine, in fact I don’t think I ever did find it comfortable!

 

Siesta

 

In the middle of the day, we would have a siesta. In those days we were getting two weekly newspapers (gifts from family): the Times Weekly Airmail edition from London, and TIME magazine, which my father and I had read together some years before when I was at university. We would read these during our siesta, and then have a shower and afternoon tea before I went back to work. It was from the Times crosswords that I first learned how to solve cryptic clues, although I never solved more than about one third of each puzzle from the Times.

 

I did notice that the Times was a week ahead of TIME in its news coverage. The record was one week when we were in Darjeeling; the UK Budget was announced on the Wednesday and by the Saturday we had received our copy of the Times with the report. We could never get TIME to agree to swap addresses in that way; any change in the delivery system took a long time to come through.

 

After school classes finished, Audrey and the children and I would walk around the mission compound, sometimes joining the school children at their games, sometimes visiting friends. I remember it as a relaxing time, although there were regular business committee meetings after 4 pm, some of which went long into the evening, delaying dinner very frustratingly!