Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to be: an outgoing woman, seemingly extroverted. But the price was always there to be paid. She had been speaking in public for a decade, sometimes two or three times a week, yet, before making a major speech, her hands shook almost uncontrollably. Her health was as fragile as a porcelain vase. She suffered almost daily from the cruel thrusts of a migraine headache, but no one outside her family knew, because physical weakness was not something she was prepared to indulge. Unlike her self-confident husband who could boast he ‘never, never worried’, Edwina worried constantly. While he slept immediately and soundly, sleep’s solace came to her only as a pill-induced torpor.

      Two distinctly separate periods had marked the Mountbattens’ quarter of a century together. During the first fourteen years of their marriage, while Louis Mountbatten was slowly moving up the naval ladder, he had insisted they exclude her wealth and their social position from the naval environment in which they spent much of their time. Away from the naval stations, however, in London, Paris and on the Riviera, Edwina became, her daughter recalled, ‘the perfect social butterfly’, a zealous party-giver and party-goer, blazing through the twenties with the intensity of a Fitzgerald heroine. When she was not dancing she sought the stimulation of adventure: chartering a copra schooner in the South Pacific, flying on the first flight from Sydney to London, being the first European woman up the Burma Road.

      That carefree, innocent period in their life had ended with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. By Munich, the transformation was complete. From then on, her life was dominated by the conviction that it was immoral not to be fully occupied by the pursuit of some social or political good. The giddy heiress became a social reformer, the social butterfly a concerned activist with a liberal outlook little appreciated by her peers.

      During the war, she led the St John Ambulance Brigade with its 60,000 members. When Japan surrendered, her husband urgently requested her to tour the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps so as to organize the care and evacuation of their most desperate inmates. Before the first soldiers of his command had set foot on the Malayan Peninsula, Edwina Mountbatten, armed only with a letter from her husband, her only escort a secretary, three of her husband’s staff officers and an Indian ADC, plunged into territory still under Japanese control. She continued all the way to Balikpan, Manila and Hong Kong, fearlessly berating the Japanese, forcing them to provide food and medicine for their prisoners until Allied help could arrive. Thousands of starving, wretchedly ill men were saved by her actions.

      Like her husband, she ended the war with a chestful of well-earned decorations. Now she was to play at his side a vital role in New Delhi. She would be his first and most trusted confidante, his discreet and private emissary in moments of crisis, his most effective ambassador to the Indian leaders with whom he would have to deal.

      Like her husband, she, too, would leave behind in India the imprint of her style and character. A woman of extraordinary versatility, Edwina Mountbatten would be able in an evening to preside over a formal banquet for 100 in a silk evening dress, a diamond tiara glittering in her hair, and, the following morning, in a simple uniform, walk through mud up to her ankles to cradle in her lap the head of a child dying of cholera in the filth of an Indian hovel. She would display in those moments a human compassion some found lacking in her husband. Hers was not the condescending gesture of a great lady perfunctorily acknowledging the misery of the poor, but a heartfelt sorrow for India’s sufferings. The Indians would see the sincerity of Edwina Mountbatten’s feelings and respond in turn to her as they had never responded before to an Englishwoman.

      As his wife advanced across the room towards him, Mountbatten could not help thinking what a strange resolution this day was to their destinies. Less than a mile separated the bedroom in which they stood contemplating each other and the spot on which he had asked Edwina Ashley to marry him a quarter of a century before. It was 14 February 1922, and they had been sitting out the fifth dance of a Viceroy’s ball in honour of the Prince of Wales. Their hostess that evening, the Vicereine, Lady Reading, had not been overjoyed at the news. The young Mountbatten, she had written to his new fiancée’s aunt, did not have much of a career before him.

      Mountbatten remembered her words now. Unable to suppress a smile, he took his wife’s arm and set out to install her on Lady Reading’s gold and crimson throne.

      India was always a land of ceremonial splendour and on that March morning, when Louis Mountbatten was to be made Viceroy, the blend of Victorian pomp and Moghul munificence that had stamped the rites of the Raj was still intact. Spread before the broad staircase leading to the Durbar Hall, the heart of Viceroy’s House, were honour guards from the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force. Sabres glittering in the morning sunlight, Mountbatten’s bodyguard, in scarlet and gold tunics, white breeches and glistening black leather jackboots lined his march to the hall.

      Inside, under its white marble dome, the elite of India waited: high court judges, their black robes and curling wigs as British as the law they administered; the Romans of the Raj, senior officers of the Indian Civil Service, the pale purity of their Anglo-Saxon profiles leavened by a smattering of more sombre Indian faces; a delegation of maharajas gleaming like gilded peacocks in their satin and jewels; and, above all, Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues in Gandhi’s Congress, their rough homespun cotton khadi harbingers of the onrushing future.

      When the first members of Mountbatten’s cortege stepped into the hall, four trumpeters concealed in niches around the base of the dome began a muted fanfare, their notes rising as the procession moved forward. The lights of the great hall, dimmed at first, rose in rhythm to the trumpets’ gathering crescendo. At the instant India’s new Viceroy and Vicereine passed through the great doorway, they blazed to an incandescent glare, and the trumpets sent a triumphant swirl of sound reverberating around the vaulted dome. Solemn and unsmiling, the Mountbattens slow-marched down the carpeted aisles towards their waiting thrones.

      A kind of apprehension, a rising tension not unlike that he had once known on the bridge of the Kelly in the uncertain moments before battle, crowded in on Mountbatten. Each gesture measured to the grandeur of the moment, he and his wife moved under the crimson velvet canopy spread over their gilded thrones and turned to face the assembly. The Chief Justice stepped forward and, his right hand raised, Mountbatten solemnly pronounced the oath that made him India’s last Viceroy.

      As he pronounced its concluding words, the rumble of the cannon of the Royal Horse Artillery outside rolled through the hall. At that same instant all across the sub-continent, other cannons took up the ponderous 31-gun salute. At Landi Kotal at the head of the Khyber Pass; Fort William in Calcutta where Clive had set Britain on the road to her Indian Empire; the Lucknow Residence where the Union Jack was never struck in honour of the men and women who had defended it in the Mutiny of 1857; Cape Comorin, past whose monazite sands the galleons of Queen Elizabeth I had sailed; Fort St George in Madras where the East India Company had its first land grant inscribed on a plate of gold; in Poona, Peshawar and Simla; everywhere there was a military garrison in India, troops on parade presented arms as the first gun exploded in Delhi. Frontier Force Rifles, the Guides Cavalry, Hodson’s and Skinner’s Horse, Sikhs and Dogras, Jats and Pathans, Gurkhas and Madrassis poised while the cannon thundered out their last tattoo for the British Raj.

      As the sound of the last report faded through the dome of Durbar Hall, the new Viceroy stepped to the microphone. The situation he faced was so serious that, against the advice of his staff, Mountbatten had decided to break with tradition by addressing the gathering before him.

      ‘I am under no illusion about the difficulty of my task,’ he said. ‘I shall need the greatest goodwill of the greatest possible number, and I am asking India today for that goodwill.’

      As he finished the guards threw open the massive Assam teak doors of the Hall. Before Mountbatten was the breathtaking vista of Kingsway and its glistening pools, plunging down the heart of New Delhi. Overhead the trumpets sent out another strident call. Suddenly, walking back down the aisle, Mountbatten felt his apprehension slip away. That brief ceremony, he СКАЧАТЬ