Nehru on a car ride with the Mountbattens
In her highly readable book "India Remembered" Pamela Mountbatten notes:
My parents had met Pandit Nehru in 1946 when he had travelled to Malaya to meet the Indians living there. My father was Supreme Allied commander and some of his staff warned him that there might be trouble and were against his meeting with Nehru. One of his staff had already refused to provide transport for the visitor. When he heard this my father was furious.
He drove with Pandit Nehru in his official car to the YMCA in Singapore, where the meeting was being held. My mother was already there with a group of Indian welfare workers. As she came forward to be introduced, a crowd of Panditji's admirers swarmed in behind them and she was knocked off her feet. She crawled under a table from where Panditji rescued her.
Towards the end of the fifteen months we spent in India, the immediate attraction between my mother and Panditji blossomed into love. Nehru was a widower and his daughter, Mrs gandhi was still married with a husband to look after, and was not often around. he had sent his sister as ambassador to Moscow, and then to New York, and he didn't see much of his second sister, who was in Bombay. If you are at the pinnacle of power you are alone; whatever you say to your colleagues is likely to be immediately broadcast, so you can't talk to your political collaborators at all and you are lonely. She became his confidante. Nehru would never write to her until about two in the morning, when he had finished his work, and his letters were a fascinating diary of the creation of India. He would start with a charming opening paragraph, and he would end affectionately. But the main part of the letters were a diary of everything he had been doing and the people he had seen, his hopes and fears, and towards the end of this twelve year correspondence, his disappointments and disillusions.
My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. it broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru. He wrote to my sister in June 1948: 'She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way and pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help. Mummy has been incredibly sweet lately and we've been such a happy family'.
So there existed a happy three-some based on firm understading on all sides. This letter was writen I suppose because their relationship had deepened the month before, in May, when we had gone to Mashobra, and indeed Panditji, found themselves able at last to relax a little for a few days. Everybody had been too busy to work on friendships until that point, but I think it was that trip that was really special for us all. Nehru referred to this in a letter to my mother written much later in March 1957:
Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you did also) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another, I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this discovery. We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other's eyes without fear or embarrassment.
The relationship remained platonic but it was a deep love. And although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death. They met about twice a year. She would include a visit to India in her overseas tours on behalf of the St John's Ambulance Brigade and the Save the Children Fund. From the beginning she would continue to oversee the work of rehabilitation and relief which she had set up for the refugees uprooted by Partition.
Panditji would come to London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conferences. He would always come down to Broadlands, our house in Hampshire, for a weekend. We kept a little grey mare for him so that he could come out riding with us.
My mother was on an overseas tour in 1960 and had just left India, carrying out a heavy program of inspections and engagements in Borneo, when her heart gave out and she died in her sleep aged fifty eight. A packet of letterss from Panditji was found by her bedside. In her will she left the whole collection of letters to my father. A suitcase was crammed full of them. My father was almost certain that there would be nothing in the letters to wound him. However a tiny doubt caused him to ask me to read the letters first. I was happy to be able to reassure him. They were remarkable letters but contained nothing to hurt him.
On my mother's death the two Houses of the Indian Parliament stood in silence in her memory and a frigate from the Indian Navy attended her funeral at sea off Portsmouth. They cast a wreath of marigolds into the ocean on behalf of the Prime Minister, Nehru.
Nehru on a car ride with the Mountbattens
In her highly readable book "India Remembered" Pamela Mountbatten notes:
My parents had met Pandit Nehru in 1946 when he had travelled to Malaya to meet the Indians living there. My father was Supreme Allied commander and some of his staff warned him that there might be trouble and were against his meeting with Nehru. One of his staff had already refused to provide transport for the visitor. When he heard this my father was furious.
He drove with Pandit Nehru in his official car to the YMCA in Singapore, where the meeting was being held. My mother was already there with a group of Indian welfare workers. As she came forward to be introduced, a crowd of Panditji's admirers swarmed in behind them and she was knocked off her feet. She crawled under a table from where Panditji rescued her.
Towards the end of the fifteen months we spent in India, the immediate attraction between my mother and Panditji blossomed into love. Nehru was a widower and his daughter, Mrs gandhi was still married with a husband to look after, and was not often around. he had sent his sister as ambassador to Moscow, and then to New York, and he didn't see much of his second sister, who was in Bombay. If you are at the pinnacle of power you are alone; whatever you say to your colleagues is likely to be immediately broadcast, so you can't talk to your political collaborators at all and you are lonely. She became his confidante. Nehru would never write to her until about two in the morning, when he had finished his work, and his letters were a fascinating diary of the creation of India. He would start with a charming opening paragraph, and he would end affectionately. But the main part of the letters were a diary of everything he had been doing and the people he had seen, his hopes and fears, and towards the end of this twelve year correspondence, his disappointments and disillusions.
My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. it broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru. He wrote to my sister in June 1948: 'She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way and pammy and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and help. Mummy has been incredibly sweet lately and we've been such a happy family'.
So there existed a happy three-some based on firm understading on all sides. This letter was writen I suppose because their relationship had deepened the month before, in May, when we had gone to Mashobra, and indeed Panditji, found themselves able at last to relax a little for a few days. Everybody had been too busy to work on friendships until that point, but I think it was that trip that was really special for us all. Nehru referred to this in a letter to my mother written much later in March 1957:
Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you did also) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another, I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this discovery. We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other's eyes without fear or embarrassment.
The relationship remained platonic but it was a deep love. And although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death. They met about twice a year. She would include a visit to India in her overseas tours on behalf of the St John's Ambulance Brigade and the Save the Children Fund. From the beginning she would continue to oversee the work of rehabilitation and relief which she had set up for the refugees uprooted by Partition.
Panditji would come to London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conferences. He would always come down to Broadlands, our house in Hampshire, for a weekend. We kept a little grey mare for him so that he could come out riding with us.
My mother was on an overseas tour in 1960 and had just left India, carrying out a heavy program of inspections and engagements in Borneo, when her heart gave out and she died in her sleep aged fifty eight. A packet of letterss from Panditji was found by her bedside. In her will she left the whole collection of letters to my father. A suitcase was crammed full of them. My father was almost certain that there would be nothing in the letters to wound him. However a tiny doubt caused him to ask me to read the letters first. I was happy to be able to reassure him. They were remarkable letters but contained nothing to hurt him.
On my mother's death the two Houses of the Indian Parliament stood in silence in her memory and a frigate from the Indian Navy attended her funeral at sea off Portsmouth. They cast a wreath of marigolds into the ocean on behalf of the Prime Minister, Nehru.