The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [127]
George's grandmother, far from being a Greek countess, had been an Indian woman of humble parentage whose union with his grandfather – a colour-sergeant in a British regiment stationed in Agra – had been of a strictly temporary nature, but had resulted in the birth of a daughter who had eventually been placed in a home for the orphaned or abandoned children of mixed parentage. At the age of fifteen the child had been found employment as a nursemaid in an army family, and subsequently married a young corporal in her master's regiment, one Alfred Garforth. Their son George, who had been born in Bareilly, was the only one in the family to survive the Mutiny of 1857, his parents, his baby brother and three small sisters having all been murdered in the space of fifteen frenzied minutes.
George had been spending the day with the family of a friendly storekeeper who had escaped the massacre, and during the few years that remained before the regiment returned to England, the same kindly couple had given him a home, for as his father too had been an orphan, there were no relations to take care of the boy. It was during this period that little George learned from his playmates that a ‘half-caste’ was an object of scorn. There were several such among the barrack children, and they and he were teased and despised by those whose parents and grandparents were white, and looked down upon - with almost equal scorn by Indian children with parents and grandparents who were brown.
‘Yer grandma was a sweeper-woman!’ or ‘Yah, yah, yer a bleedin' blacky-white,’ were familiar taunts in scuffles among the barrack children, while the vocabulary of the bazaar children could be even more wounding. Yet George, by the irony of fate, was fairer than many of his white tormentors, and had he possessed a tougher character, or been less good-looking, he might have lived down the unknown grandmother. But he was not only a very pretty little boy, but a painfully timid one, a combination that endeared him to adults but made his own generation yearn to kick him – which they did with enthusiasm and on every possible occasion.
George developed a bad stammer and burning hatred of his schoolmates and the barracks and anything and everything to do with the army, and when the regiment sailed for England, taking him with them, it was only the kindness of the storekeeper and his wife, Fred and Annie Mullens, that saved him from being sent to an army orphanage, for they had arranged for him to be educated at their expense at a small boarding school near Bristol that catered exclusively for children whose parents were overseas. A large number of these children spent both holidays and term time at the school, and nearly all of them had been born abroad, which was George's misfortune, for they too spoke of ‘half-castes’ with scorn, and one of their number who had the misfortune to be black-eyed and dark-complexioned was cruelly teased on this score – George, to his shame, joining in with the best of them. For with the possible exception of the Headmaster, no one at the school knew anything about him, and he was therefore able to invent a family-tree for himself.
At first this was a comparatively modest affair. But as he grew older he enlarged it, adding mythical grandparents and great-grandparents and a variety of picturesque ancestors. And because he was always afraid that one day his eyes would become darker and his skin betray him by turning brown (as his baby curls, once blond, had done) he gave himself an Irish father – the Irish being prone to black hair – and added a Greek grandmother for good measure. Later he was to discover that a majority of waiters and small shopkeepers in Soho were immigrants from Greece, and as by then he could hardly change this mythical woman's nationality, he decided to make her a countess.
Towards the end of his school-days his benefactor, Mr Mullens, who had a friend in Brown & MacDonalds‘, arranged for his protégé to enter that firm as a clerk, imagining