'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎58r] (115/156)

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no longer subject to military restraints.
Back in England, after an absence of seven and a half years, we felt like * fish out
of water. So much had happened in the meanwhile. Evidence of war damage was everywhere,
rationing of food and clothing was still in operation, and incidentally continued to be
so for at least another two years beyond our arrival. Unlike the rest of the population,
we civilians and our families from India had never experienced the concentrated enemy
bombing of the great cities and could only listen with bated breath to the stories of
our parents and others about the trials and tribulations of life under the threat of
invasion. In comparison with their lot, we in India had led sheltered and uneventful
lives.
My mother and step-father were then living at Hove in Sussex. During the war, he, who
had survived three years in the trenches outside Ypres in the First World War, had
commanded a Home Guard Platoon. My mother, though elderly, had served in the Red Cross
Nursing Service as a VAD at one of the local hospitals.
That summer we took ourselves and the children, whose ages then ranged from 7 to 2£,
over to Ireland where we stayed at my wife's family home by the sea in Co. Waterford.
Food was certainly more plentiful there on the farm, and we lacked for little or nothing
in that respect. What, however, limited our activities was the scarcity of petrol and
tyres for cars. I remember that, as a great treat, my wife and I and her two sisters
decided to go to Killarney to attend the summer race meeting. We borrowed for the
occasion an ancient and decrepit pre-war Ford Consul, and just enough petrol coupons
to get to our destination. But we had not reckoned with the almost treadless tyres.
Halfway there, we had our first 'blow-out' and replaced the deflated wheel with the
spare tyre, which was even more worn! The second puncture came when we were still about
ten miles short of Killarney, and now we were quite immobilized as we had inflated tyres
on only three wheels. So we waited disconsolately by the side of the road. By and by
however, a fine new Ford station-wagon drove up and stopped; out poured half a dozen
or more Irish members of Major Watts' famous dance band, who had come from Dublin to
fulfill an engagement during race-week in Killarney. In their inimitable Irish way,
they made light of our problem. Their spare wheel had a new tyre on it, and this they
offered to lend us until we could have our own punctured wheels repaired. Then, dis
pensing with the jack, they proceeded to lift our lop-sided car up off the road to enable
the change of wheel to be effected. I know of no other country in the world where a
body of complete strangers such as our bandsmen would put themselves out in this way and
regard the whole thing as a tremendous joke. It did not seem to occur to any of them
that their car might itself suffer a puncture before they got to the end of their
journey. It was a day or two before we were able to return them their spare wheel