Off to India

Arriving in Agartala, February 1958

The greatest adventure was our first trip to India. In late December of 1957 Audrey and I set out on the Wanganella on our journey which was to take us to Agartala. We had Janet travelling with us; she was going out to East Pakistan (ie Bangladesh)  to marry Stuart Avery, one of the missionaries working there. 

In those days steamer was the normal way to travel around the world. The Wanganella did one trip a fortnight to Sydney and back. It took four days to cross the Tasman. 

In Sydney we stayed in the Baptist Youth Hostel, where I had stayed several years before on my way to the Conference at Mooloolaba. Then a few days later we boarded the Strathaird, a P+O liner, for the trip to Bombay. She was an older ship of 23,000 tons and she trundled around the southern coast of Australia, calling at Melbourne and Adelaide on the way to Fremantle.

Then we set out across the Indian Ocean, which was pretty calm. At one stage the engines broke down, so we wallowed with no power for half a day until the engineers had everything going again and we set off again, but this time heading north, because we had been diverted to Jakarta in the Dutch East Indies, where there was a war of independence going on and a load of Dutch refugees needed rescuing. 

We watched the refugees boarding at the wharf at Jakarta, where we were not allowed to land; they were all Asians, not a white face among them. All the Indonesians were put on the lower decks and we were moved up to First Class to accommodate them. 

The ship called at Colombo in Ceylon, as Srilanka was called then, and we went for a sightseeing tour of the city and the southern coast down to Galle. Then we left for the last leg of our journey and in a day or so arrived at Bombay, where we got off the ship and drifted our way through customs.

I don’t remember where we stayed in Bombay, or even if we stopped at all. But with a minimum of delay we were on the broad-gauge express for Calcutta. Having wasted time on the diversion to Jakarta we were already late for Language School in Darjeeling. The express took nearly two days to reach Calcutta, where Stuart met us; well he met Janet and we tagged along. 

We were all staying at the Baptist mission in Calcutta, where the Baptist Mission press was set up, and where William Carey had started the whole idea of protestant missions in that part of the world in the eighteenth century. 

After a couple of days for shopping, we headed off for Agartala on a DC3. The main shopping item was a mosquito net. I still remember Stuart taking us to the New Market and being diddled out of ten rupees by the shopkeeper. Stuart counted the ten rupee notes out into his hand – 21 of them for a 210 rupee item.  Then he counted them back with all of us watching and only got 20. So Stuart added another one and then the shopkeeper counted back again and again he got 20. Stuart grabbed the money and we all started to leave, but the guy realised he had been caught, and settled for the notes in his hand.

We landed at Agartala on a fine early spring day, with everything looking dry. We were welcomed by the missionaries at the airport (a World War II RAF runway), and by the whole Christian compound when we reached our new home.