On 2 October 2007 I arrived at Kalimpong, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling district of northeast India. I was there to visit Dr Graham’s Homes, a residential school that I believed my grandmother, Lorna, may have attended. Until a few months before, I had known nothing of this. All we knew of Lorna was that her father had been a British tea planter, her mother an Indian woman who had ‘died young’, and that somehow Lorna and her two siblings had ended up in New Zealand in the 1920s. Some years later, their tea planter father followed them, and lived out his days with Lorna, her husband and two sons at Pine Hill, on the outskirts of Dunedin in the South Island. The youngest son, Don, is my father. Lorna died in 1978, when I was five years old, having never spoken of her Indian background, nor of how and why it was that she came to New Zealand. Don was curious in his early years, but never pressed his mother for details.
Growing up, I think I was more curious than my father. Every Sunday we visited his childhood home at Pine Hill, a small cottage set on fifteen acres of steep, exposed land. Huddled in the tiny sitting room, I would stare at the remnants of a life in tea all around us: a portrait of Lorna’s father, Egerton Peters, looking refined and out of place in these very modest surroundings; a polo trophy, inscribed with words about a winning team in Cachar captained by E. G. Peters; war medals, including Egerton’s Assam Light Horse Volunteers service medal; and large frightening deer antlers, trophies of his hunting days. I remember Lorna, but my curiosity about these objects came after she was gone. They were frustratingly tangible in contrast to the formidable silence of the story that lay behind them: it was unknown and unknowable, mysterious and disturbing. I would take the medals down off the mantelpiece, turning them over and over in my hand, reading the fine print again and again. Listening, looking, touching. Willing the story to reveal itself through these precious things.
The story began to unfold ever so slowly after a very sad event in 1999, when Don’s older brother, my Uncle Bill, passed away suddenly. Bill had never left Pine Hill; he remained a bachelor and lived a simple life in the rhythm of a ramshackle existence up there. When he died, there was a difficult question of what to do with the place. It had been in the family for nearly eighty years by that time, but the cottage was hardly habitable and looking after the land was a challenging prospect for anyone other than Bill, who spent his days ranging around the property keeping one step ahead of rust and falling down fences and stray goats. Eventually my parents moved up to Pine Hill, brightening up and extending the old place, and felling pines to open up the view of the city and harbour far below. Gradually too, they began to clear out the inside of the house. Lorna’s clothes were still in the wardrobe, some twenty years after she had passed away. The drawers and cupboards were full of the lives that had come before. Lorna had a habit of writing notes on all and sundry – bits of paper, old packets, the back of photographs – and folding them into books, and stuffing them into drawers.
My Dad had always been careful about papers, and keeping things, perhaps due to growing up with Lorna and witnessing her purposive writing and random filing. He found some things. There was Lorna’s marriage certificate that listed her mother’s name: Mary Fletcher. Oh. I felt deflated for an instant at the thought that there was no Indian mother – but only for an instant. Lorna’s physical features and dark skin, which her sons and grandsons had inherited, left no room for doubt about our ‘mixed’ ancestry. But it was not until several years later that the breakthrough came. I was planning a trip to India, and in the final stages I visited Dad at Pine Hill to ask him again about Lorna, to look again at the old polo trophy – anything to find a lead to follow. He went through to his bedroom and returned with a packet of photographs. I had never seen them before. Dad had. He remembered looking at them when he was a boy. Inside were photographs of a young Egerton in England, later images of him on the plantation, and portraits of Lorna’s siblings in New Zealand. Also inside this packet was a small brown envelope, marked ‘Kalimpong school’. Dad saw my eyes flick to it. ‘Don’t know what that’s about’, he said, ‘a school or something. Probably nothing.’ Inside were two photographs, of groups of perhaps thirty girls, from toddlers to teenagers, dressed in white and standing outside roughcast buildings. On the verso were the names. There was Lorna, standing at the back with her hand on her hip, and her little sister Alice crouched at the front.
Everything unfolded quickly from there. Kalimpong was listed in the India Lonely Planet, which was in my bag that day at Pine Hill. On the tourist trail was Dr Graham’s Homes, described as a ‘working orphanage and school built in 1900 by Dr J. A. Graham, a Scottish missionary, to educate the children of tea estate workers’. I added Kalimpong to my itinerary and several months later, at the end of a journey that took me from China to Russia and Western Europe, I arrived in Delhi. My friend and I spent three weeks travelling across northern India from Jaisalmer to Kolkata before flying to Bagdogra Airport, gateway to the eastern Himalayas. Met there by our Nepali guide and Tibetan driver, we visited Darjeeling, and joined the small throng of tourists trying (unsuccessfully) to catch a view of the magnificent Mt Kanchenjunga through the thick mists before finally making it to Kalimpong on 2 October. I was extremely nervous by this time, and could scarcely believe it when we were informed that Dr Graham’s Homes was closed for the day – it was Gandhi’s birthday, a public holiday. After a torturously slow day taking in the tourist sites that were open, we made an early start the following morning up the winding road to ‘the Homes’ as it was locally known.
Clutching the photograph of Lorna, I first met the headmaster. He was new to the role, and wasn’t sure how to help me. But he instantly confirmed that we were in the right place, recognizing ‘one of our cottages’ in the background of the photograph. Then someone arrived to take us to the Homes museum. Here I was shown the original admissions book, where it was suggested I could find Lorna’s name. I did. Running my finger along the tabulated row I immediately learnt some facts that seemed amazing after a lifetime of not knowing: her mother was Nepali (not ‘Indian’), she was alive at the time the children were admitted to the Homes, and they had each spent fifteen years there. Then bound volumes of the Homes magazine, dating back to 1901, were brought out. I leafed through looking for Lorna, but it was not what I would expect of a school magazine. The pages were full of articles about the ‘Anglo-Indian problem’, fundraising, and committee reports, and not much at all about the children. Then I began to notice numerous references to New Zealand. There was a picture of two women in ‘Wellington, New Zealand’. An excerpt from a letter told of milking cows in Middlemarch on freezing winter mornings. Middlemarch is a rural district very close to where I grew up in the south of New Zealand. It was disconcerting to find such a familiar reference here, in the foothills of the Himalayas. What was this about?
Before I had time to ponder this, another helper arrived, excited and a little breathless. He knew how to help us. We just needed to go to the office, and there was a person who could find my grandmother’s file. We ambled down the path to what I think of now as the archive, where Mrs Ruth Glashan had been looking after the historic files for over forty years. As I began to explain my circumstances, Mrs Glashan interrupted, saying that she only needed my grandmother’s name and approximate date of admission. Exiting without a word, she returned in what cannot have been more than three or four minutes, with Lorna’s file – a stack of papers clipped together long ago. I was completely taken aback. I took a moment, thinking of my Dad, and what he might want or not want to know, and how there was no turning back once I looked at these documents. I had always believed, as Dad probably feared too, that something really bad must have happened for Lorna to be so unwilling to talk about her past.
Turning my attention to what was before me, I saw application forms, and many letters. There were some parts I could read, but the writing was very difficult to decipher. There was something about insurance policies, and a letter written in 1917 about going to the colonies. I couldn’t make any sense of it. Mrs Glashan sent me off after an hour or so, promising to copy the file and suggesting I visit again the next morning. And so it was that the following afternoon I wandered down the hill from the Homes via ‘Woodburn Cottage’, the cottage in the background of Lorna’s photograph where she had lived for fifteen years. I had my photo taken in the exact same spot and continued down the hill, with a copy of the family file and a short history of the Homes in my backpack. I imagined coming back here for research. I felt like I had stumbled across a hidden part of New Zealand’s history. I had studied history many years before and now wondered about the possibility of this as an academic project. And I thought about the others who, like Lorna, went to New Zealand, and I wondered about their descendants, and if they had grown up in the dark about their Indian heritage like we had. This book is the culmination of following both of these threads.