Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia
Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2019 8:07 am
1: The Suicide Club: The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT
by Andrew Whitehead
© Andrew Whitehead 2019
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
1: The Suicide Club
Freda Houlston's childhood was suffused with a sense of absence and loss. She was happy, cared for and loved. The household was, if not at all prosperous, then comfortable. She liked its semi-rural location on what was then the outskirts of Derby in the East Midlands. But she missed her Dad. When she was five, her father, Frank, went to war. He never came back. He ended up serving in the Machine Gun Corps, where the rate of attrition was exceptionally high. Frank Houlston was killed on active service in the spring of 1918 and is buried in one of the war cemeteries in northern France where so many of his generation lie.
Freda had only the haziest recollections of her father -- what she called flash memories of seeing him digging in the garden, or playing with her in the sitting room; she both could and couldn't remember him. The family photo collection has a fine portrait of Frank Houlston in military uniform. This can't be too long before his death as his cap bears the crossed-machine guns badge of the Corps. Alongside the posed childhood photos of Freda and her younger brother, there's a particularly striking family shot, professionally taken, of Nellie in a long black dress, probably in mourning. Freda is wearing an elaborate white summer dress, a large ribbon in her hair, and is reading a book; her brother, perched on a plinth, is in a sailor's suit. There are no photos of Freda with her father.
'This death shadowed my whole childhood,' Freda reminisced many years later. She came to regard the concept of fatherhood as 'somehow very sacred'. As a girl, she found the annual Poppy Day memorials for the war dead harrowing because they would 'open the wound again and again, so that I almost fainted many times at school when this service was being held.' [1] Frank Houlston's name is inscribed on the war memorial in the grounds of St Peter's parish church in Littleover. He worshipped there and was a 'staunch' member of the congregation. His death turned his wife against religion. Nellie Houlston was left a widow while still in her twenties, with two young children to bring up. She stopped going to church and abandoned any belief in the God that she believed had abandoned her. But in deference to what she knew would have been her husband's wishes, she sent her children to church and to Sunday School. The void that the absence of her father created pushed Freda towards what was the defining aspect of her life, a restless personal quest which culminated almost fifty years later in her ordination as a Buddhist nun. And her childhood involvement in the parish church offered her an initial glimpse of the spiritual -- of saints' lives, valour and suffering, and the power of prayer and meditation.
Freda recalled that her childhood home had on the wall a large copy of the popular painting by the Victorian-era artist, W.F. Yeames, harking back to the English Civil War of the 1640s: 'And when did you last see your father?' In the canvas a young boy from an imaginary Royalist family is being questioned by a panel of soldiers from Cromwell's army. The viewer's sympathy rests with the upright young child, faced by the enemies of his absent father, and troubled about competing loyalties to family and to truth. Freda remembered being taught the boy's supposed response to his interrogators: 'I saw him last night in my dream.' The choice of living room artwork might seem insensitive but was clearly an attempt to honour a missing father.
Freda's mother's rejection of religion was more striking because she met her husband at church. They were both at that time Methodists, and married at the Primitive Methodists' Bourne Chapel in Derby, now demolished but then a spacious and imposing place of worship. Freda's paternal grandparents were members of the congregation there. Primitive Methodism was an austere and unadorned form of non-conformist religious practice which appealed particularly to the respectable and aspiring working class. It preached discipline and thrift and encouraged a radical outlook on life. It was the faith into which Freda was born, and some at least of her social and political attitudes must have been imbibed from this tradition which challenged both political deference and social injustice.
The Houlston family was part of an artisan tradition -- skilled workers who sometimes ran their own distinctly modest businesses -- which stretched back to before the large engineering, rail and printing plants that came to define Derby's economy. Freda's grandfather John Houlston -- a determined teetotaller who lived until almost eighty -- was a watchmaker and jeweller. He was both craftsman and shopkeeper, repairing and selling watches. Freda believed that he had been a migrant from continental Europe -- though the census records suggest, more prosaically, that he was born in Birmingham. In the audio recordings Freda made when in her sixties, she suggested that both her parents' families had their origins in, or links to, Europe: to Germany, France, perhaps Italy. She suggested the family name may have been a corruption of Holstein, a region in northern Germany. It's as if she was fashioning a narrative of border crossings which helped to set the scene for her own repeated crossing of boundaries -- geographic, racial, religious.
A photograph still in the family shows John Houlston with workman's apron, jacket and cloth cap at the door of his premises in King Street, a short walk from the centre of Derby. By his side, conspicuously smartly dressed and ill-at-ease in front of the camera, is a boy of perhaps nine or ten. This is Frank, Freda's father; the picture appears to date from the 1890s. The shop is strikingly basic: the watches are displayed not in a shop window but what is little more than a front parlour window of an ordinary terraced house; the cramped signboard above the window bears the shopkeeper's surname and nothing more. 'It was a tiny place, a little jeweller's and watchmaker's shop, as attractive to us' -- Freda commented, looking back on her childhood -- 'as the Old Curiosity Shop.' [2]
Frank and his brother both followed in their father's footsteps, earning a livelihood as watch repairers and jewellers. Frank was twenty-four when he married Nellie Harrison, the daughter of a local coal merchant. She was still a teenager and described on the marriage certificate as a photographer. Frank seems initially to have set up a shop in a mining village outside Nottingham, but it didn't fare well and he moved back to Derby and established a watch and jeweller's business on Monk Street. This was an altogether grander shop than his father's. While John had worn working clothes to be photographed at the shop doorway, Frank posed in tie and waistcoat; his name was painted on the glass; the windows were well stocked. This gave every impression of being the shop-front of a substantial business. In social terms, the Houlston family appeared to be making its way. Frank was renting the shop, but in the census returns he insisted on recording that he was an employer as well as a shopkeeper and craftsman. By the time Freda was born -- on 5th February 1911 -- Frank and Nellie had moved to a bigger shop a few doors away at 28 Monk Street. This offered better accommodation for a young family in a sharply angled corner property with an unconventional layout. It was two houses as one, with two front doors on different streets, a double shop-front and living space above.
Freda Marie Houlston was born at home in that 'tiny shop in the heart of old Derby', as she remembered it. It's still there, now a tanning salon looking out on the barren vista of a car park and dual carriageway which have cut Monk Street in two. The far section of Monk Street and adjoining terraces have survived largely unscathed in what is now, and was then, a working-class locality. The corner shops and pubs, the back alleys, the workshop yards, are all still evident, if some way from flourishing. Walking those streets is the closest you can get to communing with the Derby into which Freda was born. By the time her brother Jack came along the following year, the family had moved to Littleover, a neat Derby suburb -- and another step up in the world. During the First World War, they were living on Wade Avenue, in a home distinctly grander than the city centre terraced streets. It was also a safer place to live during the war. There was just one Zeppelin bombing raid on Derby which caused casualties, but the rail and engineering works were obvious potential targets, and Freda had distant childhood memories of hearing a wartime bomb drop on the city. By the time they moved, Frank had also changed his religious allegiance from Methodism to the Church of England -- whether this was convenience, or religious conviction or a sense that the established church was better suited to his rising social status is unclear.
Frank Houlston didn't enlist immediately but was called up towards the end of 1916. He served initially in the locally-recruited Sherwood Foresters and later as a private in the Machine Gun Corps. When the war started, each infantry battalion had a couple of machine gun teams attached to it. The sickening slaughter on the Western Front persuaded the British army that they needed to deploy machine guns in larger units and with more expert soldiers. The Corps was established in October 1915 and gained a reputation for heroism -- the guns were often placed well in advance of the front line -- and for heavy casualties. So heavy that the Corps became known as the Suicide Club. Of the 170,500 officers and men who served in the Corps during the war, more than 12,000 were killed and another 50,000 wounded. Frank died on 14th April 1918 and is buried along with almost a thousand other combatants at the Aire Communal Cemetery neat St Omer. He left behind children aged seven and five.
War had brought a profound rupture to the Houlston family. Frank's enlistment and death prompted his widow, reluctantly, to take a more active role in the business and her mother was brought in to help look after the children. Eventually Freda's uncle took on the Monk Street shop -- it remained in family ownership for another half-a-century. Still more unsettling for Freda and Jack, two years after her husband's death, Nellie Houlston married again. The Swan family were neighbours in Wade Avenue. Frank Swan, a railway clerk, lived with three older unmarried sisters. He was in his mid-thirties and clearly cossetted and set in his ways. 'It was not a marriage of two young lovers,' Freda commented. 'Only when he saw my mother as a young widow with two children did it occur to him that it would perhaps be a good idea for him [to marry] and somehow the marriage was arranged.' [3] Freda described her stepfather as good natured and affectionate, but he seems not to have been much involved in her and her brother's upbringing and was preoccupied with country walks and amateur opera and dramatics. Nellie took her new husband's name; her children did not.
There were no children of Nellie's second marriage. And the family's upwards social mobility continued -- eased, it seems, by family money. Nellie took up golf, with notable success, getting to and from the course by motorbike -- which in the inter-war years must have marked her out as daring. That independence of spirit was passed on to her daughter, who also at one point in her life travelled to work in Delhi on a scooter. The family eventually moved to a newly-built detached house on one of Derby's most desirable streets, Keats Avenue in Mickleover. The big attraction for Nellie, who took a particular interest in the design of the house, was its location -- overlooking the golf course.
For Freda, Wade Avenue was the childhood home which stayed in her memories. Unlikely as it seems now, she says that Littleover provided a country childhood. She remembered the laburnum, lilac and pear trees in the garden, and the rural walks with her brother over to Mickleover. Her mother was a good cook and inventive seamstress, and she and her brother felt well looked after. 'I was dressed up in white needlework dresses threaded with blue ribbons,' she related; 'one of her accomplishments was that she was an extremely clever tailor in a domestic setting and especially good at making clothes for small children.' These memories -- recorded at the close of her life, when she was at peace spiritually -- may be a little rose tinted. But alongside the devastation at the loss of her father, she clearly had happy recollections of home, family and locality. The only other big cloud over her childhood was a bout of diptheria which she was fortunate to survive.
At school, Freda shone brightly. She went to a small fee-paying school, Hargrave House, then on to Derby's leading girls' school, Parkfields Cedars, and in this small pond -- there were fewer than five hundred pupils -- she excelled. The school magazine is a roll call of Freda's achievements. She routinely was joint winner of her form prize; she contributed poems and articles; she won a municipal prize for an essay on health; she was one of three girls who got honours in her School Certificate exams; she was on the committee responsible for the magazine; she was an additional prefect; and in her final year at school, she was head prefect.
She loved the school, which she described as 'in an old colonial building, whitewashed, and it had two cedar trees outside just above the tennis courts.' (It no longer survives -- burnt down in an arson attack.) The teachers were kind and dedicated, and her French teacher in particular was nurturing and encouraging. She played golf occasionally and learned ballroom dancing, but she was above all a studious pupil. Every year, a handful of girls from Parkfields Cedars went on to university, but admissions to Oxford and Cambridge were rare. Freda hadn't intended to apply. She was persuaded by a school friend to keep her company in studying for and sitting the Oxford entrance exams. Freda was called for interview; her friend wasn't. She didn't get a place, but was told that if she spent some time in France she had a good chance of being admitted to study modern languages the following year.
It would have been no small matter for a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl to live abroad without any family at hand, but Freda's mother was supportive, and Freda herself showed the courage and initiative evident throughout her life. With the help of a pen friend, she managed to get a place, at no cost, at a high school in the cathedral city of Reims. It was close enough to the First World War battlefields to be able to visit her father's grave, 'overgrown with cat mint and Dorothy Perkins roses'. [4] She stayed with her friend's family and for a while in a boarders' hostel, and in spite of being homesick and deciding that her love of the French language didn't extend to its spoken form ('I couldn't stand the noise, the sound of French voices'), the confidence and experience she gained served its purpose; she secured admission to Oxford at the second attempt. Indeed, she left Parkfields Cedars with a clarion call of academic distinction: a state scholarship, a county major scholarship in which she was placed third in the county as well as a place at Oxford -- awards which bore prestige and more importantly ensured that Freda had sufficient money to take up the place she had secured. Two Oxford women's colleges competed for her favour. She 'has been offered admission to Somerville College, and an exhibition [minor scholarship] at St Hugh's College,' reported the Derby Daily Telegraph. 'She has chosen the latter.' [5]
There are only a few straws from Freda's school-going years which point to her later involvement in politics. In February 1929, she spoke on behalf of France at a model assembly of the League of Nations held at Derby Central Hall. Parkfields Cedars had a flourishing school branch of the League of Nations Union, an organisation which often proved to be a stepping stone towards the organised left. What she saw of deprivation in the poorer parts of the city left its mark on her. 'I can still remember the days when children in our slums in Derby used to run around with bare feet because they had no shoes,' she recalled almost half-a-century later. 'Incredibly undernourished babies used to be seen in the hands of utterly incompetent mothers.' [6]
Her spiritual interests were more evident. She was confirmed at St Peter's -- though she had no great liking for the minister there, nicknamed Brown Owl because of his hooked nose and spectacles. She read Anglo-Catholic literature as well as lives of the saints and enjoyed taking Holy Communion: 'a direct communication, a sense of awe in the face of the divine.' Many years later, she recalled to her fellow Buddhist Sheila Fugard that she visited a local Anglican church for solitary contemplation -- often St Peter's, but perhaps also on occasions the more timeworn St Edmund's at Allestree or maybe the elegant All Saints in the heart of the city which had gained cathedral status in 1927. [7] 'The only thing I could think of was to get away into the church when no one was there, when it was quiet,' she told a radio interviewer several decades later. 'So I tipped away from home in the early morning before school hours, and during the last two years at school I used to sit in church at home and just wait. There was a prayer in my heart certainly.' [8] But she was repelled by the humdrum life of the local parish church in Littleover with its 'obsession with church fetes and meetings and services and an utter lack of understanding of anything connected with the spiritual life in its deeper sense ... I realised that Brown Owl's sermons and all the things that went on in the church had just no meaning for me at all.' By the time she headed to Oxford she regarded herself as a free thinker -- not in the sense of rejecting religious faith, but simply that she would not be pigeonholed into a particular religion or denomination.
'The story of my childhood' -- Freda recalled with perhaps more candour than she intended -- 'is really the story of building up whatever talents I had to the stage of being able to enter Oxford University, which was a highly competitive thing.' She looked back on Derby as a prelude to her life. Once she had headed out to university, Freda's links with her home city became slender. Her mother was of course a continuing reference point. Both mother and stepfather came to her wedding at Oxford, in spite of any reservations they may have harboured about a Punjabi son-in-law. Nellie went out to Lahore to visit, and to see her oldest grandchild, Ranga. But once Freda had settled in India it was thirteen years before she took the long journey back to England, bringing her one-year-old son, Kabir, with her. Freda was not at hand to visit her mother in her old age -- she died in 1966, four years after her husband -- and felt some guilt at her absence.
Jack didn't share his sister's academic ability and chose a very different path in life. 'We are all rather in a turmoil at home at present -- my brother has just joined the Navy!' Freda wrote in September 1931 to her Oxford friend Olive Chandler. 'He did it on his own -- and never told any of us until he was all through but for the final medical exam. Dad was rather incensed -- but Mother managed to calm him down ... She says next November, when we are both away, doesn't bear thinking about. But there was no sense, anyhow, keeping him in Derby where trade is so bad, and there was no prospect of being able to keep himself for years to come.' [9] Jack was coming up to nineteen. He managed to disguise that he was colour blind, passed the medical examination and spent more than twenty years in the navy, attaining the rank of Chief Petty Officer. Freda and Jack had been close as children, but saw little of each other as adults -- he missed her wedding because he was at sea and although he travelled widely he seems not to have come out to India to visit. The close-knit Derby family which had endured the shared grief of Frank Houlston's death dispersed and the skeins of affinity, though real, became stretched.
_______________
Notes:
1. The Suicide Club
1. 'Birth and School', audio recording made by Freda Bedi c1976, Bedi Family Archive (BFA)
2. 'Birth and School', BFA
3. 'Birth and School', BFA
4 'Oxford', audio recording made by Freda Bedi c1976, BFA
5. Derby Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1928
6. 'Oxford', BFA
7. Sheila Fugard, Lady of Realisation: A Spiritual Memoir, Bloomington, Indiana, 2012, p32
8. Audio recording of Freda Bedi's interview on the radio programme 'Frontiers of Consciousness', San Mateo, California, April 1974, BFA
9. Freda Houlston to Olive Chandler, 11 September 1931, BFA
by Andrew Whitehead
© Andrew Whitehead 2019
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1: The Suicide Club
Freda Houlston's childhood was suffused with a sense of absence and loss. She was happy, cared for and loved. The household was, if not at all prosperous, then comfortable. She liked its semi-rural location on what was then the outskirts of Derby in the East Midlands. But she missed her Dad. When she was five, her father, Frank, went to war. He never came back. He ended up serving in the Machine Gun Corps, where the rate of attrition was exceptionally high. Frank Houlston was killed on active service in the spring of 1918 and is buried in one of the war cemeteries in northern France where so many of his generation lie.
Freda had only the haziest recollections of her father -- what she called flash memories of seeing him digging in the garden, or playing with her in the sitting room; she both could and couldn't remember him. The family photo collection has a fine portrait of Frank Houlston in military uniform. This can't be too long before his death as his cap bears the crossed-machine guns badge of the Corps. Alongside the posed childhood photos of Freda and her younger brother, there's a particularly striking family shot, professionally taken, of Nellie in a long black dress, probably in mourning. Freda is wearing an elaborate white summer dress, a large ribbon in her hair, and is reading a book; her brother, perched on a plinth, is in a sailor's suit. There are no photos of Freda with her father.
'This death shadowed my whole childhood,' Freda reminisced many years later. She came to regard the concept of fatherhood as 'somehow very sacred'. As a girl, she found the annual Poppy Day memorials for the war dead harrowing because they would 'open the wound again and again, so that I almost fainted many times at school when this service was being held.' [1] Frank Houlston's name is inscribed on the war memorial in the grounds of St Peter's parish church in Littleover. He worshipped there and was a 'staunch' member of the congregation. His death turned his wife against religion. Nellie Houlston was left a widow while still in her twenties, with two young children to bring up. She stopped going to church and abandoned any belief in the God that she believed had abandoned her. But in deference to what she knew would have been her husband's wishes, she sent her children to church and to Sunday School. The void that the absence of her father created pushed Freda towards what was the defining aspect of her life, a restless personal quest which culminated almost fifty years later in her ordination as a Buddhist nun. And her childhood involvement in the parish church offered her an initial glimpse of the spiritual -- of saints' lives, valour and suffering, and the power of prayer and meditation.
Freda recalled that her childhood home had on the wall a large copy of the popular painting by the Victorian-era artist, W.F. Yeames, harking back to the English Civil War of the 1640s: 'And when did you last see your father?' In the canvas a young boy from an imaginary Royalist family is being questioned by a panel of soldiers from Cromwell's army. The viewer's sympathy rests with the upright young child, faced by the enemies of his absent father, and troubled about competing loyalties to family and to truth. Freda remembered being taught the boy's supposed response to his interrogators: 'I saw him last night in my dream.' The choice of living room artwork might seem insensitive but was clearly an attempt to honour a missing father.
Freda's mother's rejection of religion was more striking because she met her husband at church. They were both at that time Methodists, and married at the Primitive Methodists' Bourne Chapel in Derby, now demolished but then a spacious and imposing place of worship. Freda's paternal grandparents were members of the congregation there. Primitive Methodism was an austere and unadorned form of non-conformist religious practice which appealed particularly to the respectable and aspiring working class. It preached discipline and thrift and encouraged a radical outlook on life. It was the faith into which Freda was born, and some at least of her social and political attitudes must have been imbibed from this tradition which challenged both political deference and social injustice.
The Houlston family was part of an artisan tradition -- skilled workers who sometimes ran their own distinctly modest businesses -- which stretched back to before the large engineering, rail and printing plants that came to define Derby's economy. Freda's grandfather John Houlston -- a determined teetotaller who lived until almost eighty -- was a watchmaker and jeweller. He was both craftsman and shopkeeper, repairing and selling watches. Freda believed that he had been a migrant from continental Europe -- though the census records suggest, more prosaically, that he was born in Birmingham. In the audio recordings Freda made when in her sixties, she suggested that both her parents' families had their origins in, or links to, Europe: to Germany, France, perhaps Italy. She suggested the family name may have been a corruption of Holstein, a region in northern Germany. It's as if she was fashioning a narrative of border crossings which helped to set the scene for her own repeated crossing of boundaries -- geographic, racial, religious.
A photograph still in the family shows John Houlston with workman's apron, jacket and cloth cap at the door of his premises in King Street, a short walk from the centre of Derby. By his side, conspicuously smartly dressed and ill-at-ease in front of the camera, is a boy of perhaps nine or ten. This is Frank, Freda's father; the picture appears to date from the 1890s. The shop is strikingly basic: the watches are displayed not in a shop window but what is little more than a front parlour window of an ordinary terraced house; the cramped signboard above the window bears the shopkeeper's surname and nothing more. 'It was a tiny place, a little jeweller's and watchmaker's shop, as attractive to us' -- Freda commented, looking back on her childhood -- 'as the Old Curiosity Shop.' [2]
Frank and his brother both followed in their father's footsteps, earning a livelihood as watch repairers and jewellers. Frank was twenty-four when he married Nellie Harrison, the daughter of a local coal merchant. She was still a teenager and described on the marriage certificate as a photographer. Frank seems initially to have set up a shop in a mining village outside Nottingham, but it didn't fare well and he moved back to Derby and established a watch and jeweller's business on Monk Street. This was an altogether grander shop than his father's. While John had worn working clothes to be photographed at the shop doorway, Frank posed in tie and waistcoat; his name was painted on the glass; the windows were well stocked. This gave every impression of being the shop-front of a substantial business. In social terms, the Houlston family appeared to be making its way. Frank was renting the shop, but in the census returns he insisted on recording that he was an employer as well as a shopkeeper and craftsman. By the time Freda was born -- on 5th February 1911 -- Frank and Nellie had moved to a bigger shop a few doors away at 28 Monk Street. This offered better accommodation for a young family in a sharply angled corner property with an unconventional layout. It was two houses as one, with two front doors on different streets, a double shop-front and living space above.
Freda Marie Houlston was born at home in that 'tiny shop in the heart of old Derby', as she remembered it. It's still there, now a tanning salon looking out on the barren vista of a car park and dual carriageway which have cut Monk Street in two. The far section of Monk Street and adjoining terraces have survived largely unscathed in what is now, and was then, a working-class locality. The corner shops and pubs, the back alleys, the workshop yards, are all still evident, if some way from flourishing. Walking those streets is the closest you can get to communing with the Derby into which Freda was born. By the time her brother Jack came along the following year, the family had moved to Littleover, a neat Derby suburb -- and another step up in the world. During the First World War, they were living on Wade Avenue, in a home distinctly grander than the city centre terraced streets. It was also a safer place to live during the war. There was just one Zeppelin bombing raid on Derby which caused casualties, but the rail and engineering works were obvious potential targets, and Freda had distant childhood memories of hearing a wartime bomb drop on the city. By the time they moved, Frank had also changed his religious allegiance from Methodism to the Church of England -- whether this was convenience, or religious conviction or a sense that the established church was better suited to his rising social status is unclear.
Frank Houlston didn't enlist immediately but was called up towards the end of 1916. He served initially in the locally-recruited Sherwood Foresters and later as a private in the Machine Gun Corps. When the war started, each infantry battalion had a couple of machine gun teams attached to it. The sickening slaughter on the Western Front persuaded the British army that they needed to deploy machine guns in larger units and with more expert soldiers. The Corps was established in October 1915 and gained a reputation for heroism -- the guns were often placed well in advance of the front line -- and for heavy casualties. So heavy that the Corps became known as the Suicide Club. Of the 170,500 officers and men who served in the Corps during the war, more than 12,000 were killed and another 50,000 wounded. Frank died on 14th April 1918 and is buried along with almost a thousand other combatants at the Aire Communal Cemetery neat St Omer. He left behind children aged seven and five.
War had brought a profound rupture to the Houlston family. Frank's enlistment and death prompted his widow, reluctantly, to take a more active role in the business and her mother was brought in to help look after the children. Eventually Freda's uncle took on the Monk Street shop -- it remained in family ownership for another half-a-century. Still more unsettling for Freda and Jack, two years after her husband's death, Nellie Houlston married again. The Swan family were neighbours in Wade Avenue. Frank Swan, a railway clerk, lived with three older unmarried sisters. He was in his mid-thirties and clearly cossetted and set in his ways. 'It was not a marriage of two young lovers,' Freda commented. 'Only when he saw my mother as a young widow with two children did it occur to him that it would perhaps be a good idea for him [to marry] and somehow the marriage was arranged.' [3] Freda described her stepfather as good natured and affectionate, but he seems not to have been much involved in her and her brother's upbringing and was preoccupied with country walks and amateur opera and dramatics. Nellie took her new husband's name; her children did not.
There were no children of Nellie's second marriage. And the family's upwards social mobility continued -- eased, it seems, by family money. Nellie took up golf, with notable success, getting to and from the course by motorbike -- which in the inter-war years must have marked her out as daring. That independence of spirit was passed on to her daughter, who also at one point in her life travelled to work in Delhi on a scooter. The family eventually moved to a newly-built detached house on one of Derby's most desirable streets, Keats Avenue in Mickleover. The big attraction for Nellie, who took a particular interest in the design of the house, was its location -- overlooking the golf course.
For Freda, Wade Avenue was the childhood home which stayed in her memories. Unlikely as it seems now, she says that Littleover provided a country childhood. She remembered the laburnum, lilac and pear trees in the garden, and the rural walks with her brother over to Mickleover. Her mother was a good cook and inventive seamstress, and she and her brother felt well looked after. 'I was dressed up in white needlework dresses threaded with blue ribbons,' she related; 'one of her accomplishments was that she was an extremely clever tailor in a domestic setting and especially good at making clothes for small children.' These memories -- recorded at the close of her life, when she was at peace spiritually -- may be a little rose tinted. But alongside the devastation at the loss of her father, she clearly had happy recollections of home, family and locality. The only other big cloud over her childhood was a bout of diptheria which she was fortunate to survive.
At school, Freda shone brightly. She went to a small fee-paying school, Hargrave House, then on to Derby's leading girls' school, Parkfields Cedars, and in this small pond -- there were fewer than five hundred pupils -- she excelled. The school magazine is a roll call of Freda's achievements. She routinely was joint winner of her form prize; she contributed poems and articles; she won a municipal prize for an essay on health; she was one of three girls who got honours in her School Certificate exams; she was on the committee responsible for the magazine; she was an additional prefect; and in her final year at school, she was head prefect.
She loved the school, which she described as 'in an old colonial building, whitewashed, and it had two cedar trees outside just above the tennis courts.' (It no longer survives -- burnt down in an arson attack.) The teachers were kind and dedicated, and her French teacher in particular was nurturing and encouraging. She played golf occasionally and learned ballroom dancing, but she was above all a studious pupil. Every year, a handful of girls from Parkfields Cedars went on to university, but admissions to Oxford and Cambridge were rare. Freda hadn't intended to apply. She was persuaded by a school friend to keep her company in studying for and sitting the Oxford entrance exams. Freda was called for interview; her friend wasn't. She didn't get a place, but was told that if she spent some time in France she had a good chance of being admitted to study modern languages the following year.
It would have been no small matter for a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl to live abroad without any family at hand, but Freda's mother was supportive, and Freda herself showed the courage and initiative evident throughout her life. With the help of a pen friend, she managed to get a place, at no cost, at a high school in the cathedral city of Reims. It was close enough to the First World War battlefields to be able to visit her father's grave, 'overgrown with cat mint and Dorothy Perkins roses'. [4] She stayed with her friend's family and for a while in a boarders' hostel, and in spite of being homesick and deciding that her love of the French language didn't extend to its spoken form ('I couldn't stand the noise, the sound of French voices'), the confidence and experience she gained served its purpose; she secured admission to Oxford at the second attempt. Indeed, she left Parkfields Cedars with a clarion call of academic distinction: a state scholarship, a county major scholarship in which she was placed third in the county as well as a place at Oxford -- awards which bore prestige and more importantly ensured that Freda had sufficient money to take up the place she had secured. Two Oxford women's colleges competed for her favour. She 'has been offered admission to Somerville College, and an exhibition [minor scholarship] at St Hugh's College,' reported the Derby Daily Telegraph. 'She has chosen the latter.' [5]
There are only a few straws from Freda's school-going years which point to her later involvement in politics. In February 1929, she spoke on behalf of France at a model assembly of the League of Nations held at Derby Central Hall. Parkfields Cedars had a flourishing school branch of the League of Nations Union, an organisation which often proved to be a stepping stone towards the organised left. What she saw of deprivation in the poorer parts of the city left its mark on her. 'I can still remember the days when children in our slums in Derby used to run around with bare feet because they had no shoes,' she recalled almost half-a-century later. 'Incredibly undernourished babies used to be seen in the hands of utterly incompetent mothers.' [6]
Her spiritual interests were more evident. She was confirmed at St Peter's -- though she had no great liking for the minister there, nicknamed Brown Owl because of his hooked nose and spectacles. She read Anglo-Catholic literature as well as lives of the saints and enjoyed taking Holy Communion: 'a direct communication, a sense of awe in the face of the divine.' Many years later, she recalled to her fellow Buddhist Sheila Fugard that she visited a local Anglican church for solitary contemplation -- often St Peter's, but perhaps also on occasions the more timeworn St Edmund's at Allestree or maybe the elegant All Saints in the heart of the city which had gained cathedral status in 1927. [7] 'The only thing I could think of was to get away into the church when no one was there, when it was quiet,' she told a radio interviewer several decades later. 'So I tipped away from home in the early morning before school hours, and during the last two years at school I used to sit in church at home and just wait. There was a prayer in my heart certainly.' [8] But she was repelled by the humdrum life of the local parish church in Littleover with its 'obsession with church fetes and meetings and services and an utter lack of understanding of anything connected with the spiritual life in its deeper sense ... I realised that Brown Owl's sermons and all the things that went on in the church had just no meaning for me at all.' By the time she headed to Oxford she regarded herself as a free thinker -- not in the sense of rejecting religious faith, but simply that she would not be pigeonholed into a particular religion or denomination.
'The story of my childhood' -- Freda recalled with perhaps more candour than she intended -- 'is really the story of building up whatever talents I had to the stage of being able to enter Oxford University, which was a highly competitive thing.' She looked back on Derby as a prelude to her life. Once she had headed out to university, Freda's links with her home city became slender. Her mother was of course a continuing reference point. Both mother and stepfather came to her wedding at Oxford, in spite of any reservations they may have harboured about a Punjabi son-in-law. Nellie went out to Lahore to visit, and to see her oldest grandchild, Ranga. But once Freda had settled in India it was thirteen years before she took the long journey back to England, bringing her one-year-old son, Kabir, with her. Freda was not at hand to visit her mother in her old age -- she died in 1966, four years after her husband -- and felt some guilt at her absence.
Jack didn't share his sister's academic ability and chose a very different path in life. 'We are all rather in a turmoil at home at present -- my brother has just joined the Navy!' Freda wrote in September 1931 to her Oxford friend Olive Chandler. 'He did it on his own -- and never told any of us until he was all through but for the final medical exam. Dad was rather incensed -- but Mother managed to calm him down ... She says next November, when we are both away, doesn't bear thinking about. But there was no sense, anyhow, keeping him in Derby where trade is so bad, and there was no prospect of being able to keep himself for years to come.' [9] Jack was coming up to nineteen. He managed to disguise that he was colour blind, passed the medical examination and spent more than twenty years in the navy, attaining the rank of Chief Petty Officer. Freda and Jack had been close as children, but saw little of each other as adults -- he missed her wedding because he was at sea and although he travelled widely he seems not to have come out to India to visit. The close-knit Derby family which had endured the shared grief of Frank Houlston's death dispersed and the skeins of affinity, though real, became stretched.
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Notes:
1. The Suicide Club
1. 'Birth and School', audio recording made by Freda Bedi c1976, Bedi Family Archive (BFA)
2. 'Birth and School', BFA
3. 'Birth and School', BFA
4 'Oxford', audio recording made by Freda Bedi c1976, BFA
5. Derby Daily Telegraph, 18 December 1928
6. 'Oxford', BFA
7. Sheila Fugard, Lady of Realisation: A Spiritual Memoir, Bloomington, Indiana, 2012, p32
8. Audio recording of Freda Bedi's interview on the radio programme 'Frontiers of Consciousness', San Mateo, California, April 1974, BFA
9. Freda Houlston to Olive Chandler, 11 September 1931, BFA