Connie’s eyes lit up with the challenge. Soon brother and sister were climbing from picture rails to dresser tops, sliding along window cornices, and using the drapes like hanging vines. It was great fun, but not as much fun as their next activity. They discovered a food lift, or dumbwaiter, which transported dinner from the basement kitchen up to the dining room. Paul squeezed Connie into the lift and pulled on the rope. The pulley turned, and Connie disappeared up through the opening and into the wall. “I’m here,” came back her muffled yell. Paul pulled the rope in the opposite direction to bring her back down.
Paul then climbed in to try it for himself. It was a slower trip up with Connie pulling on the rope, but he was fascinated to peek out of the cupboard door at the top and get a different view of the dining room. He felt sure this was the best way ever invented to get from one floor to the next, that is, until he spied the huge trays that Cissie used for baking bread. The trays were just too tempting not to try out on the carpeted stairs.
Paul and Connie each carried a baking tray to the top of the third-floor stairs. Paul was the first to set his tray down on the top step and sit on it. He pushed off and was soon on his way bumping down the stairs. When he reached the bottom of that flight, he scooted to the next flight of stairs and slid down them as well. It was all so much fun!
Suddenly Aunt Hope appeared. “What do you think you’re doing, young man?” she demanded with a slight smile on her face.
Paul felt his face grow red, but he was glad that it was Aunt Hope who had caught him. Mama said that she sometimes raced down the stairs singing at the top of her voice, an unladylike thing to do.
“I think you’d better go and play outside until dinnertime,” Aunt Hope said, picking up the trays. “I’ll see that these get back to the kitchen where they belong.”
Outside, the world was just as foreign to Paul as it was inside the house. It was hard to see more than a few houses down the street, and they all looked the same. Their exteriors were gray, the streets were gray, the weather was cold and gray. Paul longed for a bright, sunny day with the wind in his face, as he had been used to when he rode his father’s horse through the fields of the Indian hill country. Still, he decided that he and Connie would just have to make do with what they had.
Paul surveyed the scene. He noted a gas lamppost outside of the house with a crossbar about twelve feet up. Climbing the post did not seem like a difficult challenge, and that is what he and Connie did. Soon they were swinging upside down from each side of the crossbar with their knees looped over it. Paul was delighted to see the shocked expressions on the faces of passersby as they looked up and saw the pair swinging there. It was the most fun he’d had since arriving in England.
By contrast, Sunday did not turn out to be much fun at all. It was then that Paul realized just how different life in London was going to be. Aunt Eunice explained to the children that Sunday was a special day set aside to worship and contemplate God. This was not new to Paul, who was used to setting out the mats in the chapel on Sunday back in India and listening to his father’s sermons in Tamil. But a London Sunday was not nearly the same as an Indian one. It seemed to Paul that English Sundays revolved around what could and could not be done, worn, or touched.
On their first Sunday morning in the house the children were introduced to the drawing room. They were expected to sit quietly in the room while the adults drank tea and talked. Aunt Eunice gave them permission, if they were very careful, to look at but not touch some of the family treasures displayed there. Among the things on display were an opal from Australia, a small thimble made from a peach stone, a pair of carved ivory eggcups, brightly colored shells, and tiny salt and pepper shakers. Many of the items were very old and had been in the family a long time.
Aunt Eunice produced a box of blocks that had belonged to the Harris children when they were young. “You may play quietly with these,” she told Paul and Connie, “as long as you build religious objects only.”
Paul looked at her questioningly.
“For example, the Tabernacle or a Hebrew house,” Aunt Eunice explained.
Paul decided that he could make just about anything and call it the Tower of Babel or the Temple of Solomon!
The following Saturday, Uncle Bertie was driving the Brand family forty miles southwest to Guildford, where Paul’s father’s family lived. As they rode, Jesse told the story of his family’s long connection to India. Jesse’s grandfather, Joseph Brand, had been the first member of the family to settle in India. He had never intended to live there, but as a young man he had enlisted as a midshipman. While on the ship, he had committed an offense and was arrested. When the ship was at anchor off Bombay, Joseph managed to escape from the vessel and swim to shore.
In Bombay Joseph got a job with a well-off merchant and eventually married the man’s daughter. He became very wealthy during his time in Bombay and later decided to return to England with his family. He left his money in a Bombay bank and took with him a bag of jewels to fund his new life in England. However, the jewels were stolen before the family reached their destination. Soon after the family arrived in England, the bank in Bombay failed, and Joseph lost all of his money. Now his grandson, Jesse Brand, also called India home. But Jesse was not there to earn money and get rich. He was there to preach the gospel and use his medical and building skills to help the Indian people.
Once the travelers arrived at the family house in Guildford, Paul’s father’s five sisters and one brother and their families were waiting for them. Jesse was the oldest child, and Paul was overwhelmed with how happy all his father’s siblings were to see him again.
It did not take Paul long to realize that the Brands were less strict than the Harrises. However, Paul and Connie managed to give their father’s sister, Aunt Daisy, quite a fright. On Sunday morning Jesse was to preach at the local Baptist church. By now Paul knew that he had to dress in his most formal outfit, which included highly polished shoes, long socks, shorts, a shirt, a vest, and a jacket. Once they arrived at church, Paul was relieved to be able to take off his shoes and carry them down the aisle. Connie followed his lead.
“What are you doing?” Aunt Daisy hissed as she turned to see the children with their shoes in hand.
Paul registered the horrified look on his aunt’s face but had no idea what he had done wrong, that is, until he looked around. How extraordinary! he thought. In the Kolli Hills everyone took off his or her shoes at the church entrance, but in England no one bothered to do so! Paul and Connie pulled their shoes back on.
Soon Jesse was off traveling farther afield to other churches in England, telling of the missionary work he was doing among the people of the Kolli Hills and raising money for a girls’ home and school to be built there.
While Jesse was away, Paul and Connie and their mother stayed at the Harris home in London, where the children were enrolled in Miss Chattaway’s small private school, within walking distance of the house. After just one day at Miss Chattaway’s, dressed in his itchy woolen shorts, striped tie, and domed cap, Paul longed for the freedom of his school in the tree. He daydreamed about sitting in his cotton shorts high up in the branches doing his math sums and lowering his book to his mother on a rope.
The hardest thing for Paul to get used to was being inside so much of the time. In winter the weather in London was cold and damp, and it was dark by three-thirty in the afternoon. How far away his life in India now seemed. Paul struggled to remember how much freedom he had enjoyed there. As he thought about life in India, he realized how different his life had been from the other boys in his class and how impossible it was to describe his experiences to them.
The year sped by, but in the back of his mind, Paul knew that when it was over his parents would be returning to India without him or Connie. Paul watched his mother paint plaques with Bible verses on them in English and Tamil. Evelyn hung several of them over Paul’s bed and urged him to read them every night before he went to sleep and to think about what they meant to him.
The time arrived for Paul and Connie to say good-bye to their parents. It was a school day, so there was little time to linger in the morning. Paul and Connie got ready for school as usual and then knelt with their parents in the drawing room. Paul’s mother and father prayed for their children and promised to write every week. Then they kissed Paul and Connie and hugged them.
Paul was the first to grab his schoolbag and head for the door, and Connie followed. The two of them ran down the steps, turned around once to wave, and disappeared around the corner and into a lane.
Paul could barely concentrate on his schoolwork that day as he thought about his parents leaving the house and embarking on a ship without him. He imagined his mother weeping as the ship cast off and his father putting a comforting arm around her.
That night was one of the loneliest in Paul’s life. Nothing in the house seemed the same without his parents there. Even though Aunt Eunice and Aunt Hope were especially kind, Paul felt abandoned. Before he went to sleep, he studied a picture of himself and Connie and their parents standing by their home in the Kolli Hills. He propped the picture on his nightstand, where he could see its outline even in the darkened room. He recited the words on the plaques that his mother had painted: “I will be a father unto you” and “As one whom a mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” As he drifted off to sleep, Paul wondered how he was going to make it through the four years until he would see his parents again. He would be fourteen years old by then, and four years seemed an impossibly long way off.
Chapter 4
An English Boy
Dear Miss Harris,” Aunt Eunice read aloud in an accusing tone. “We have not been too satisfied with young Brand of late. He is really a boy of good ability, and I feel that if he will wake up, he will do very well indeed.”
Aunt Eunice paused for a moment, raised her eyebrows, and stared at Paul before she continued reading. “No doubt he is not yet used to our English climate. But he is often late and reads on the way to school. He ought to have a good talking to, both now and just before the beginning of the new term. Yours truly . . .”
“That was from your headmistress,” Aunt Eunice snapped. “How am I supposed to explain that to your father and mother?”
Paul did not have the slightest idea how to answer the question. It was true that he struggled at school. So much of what he was taught didn’t interest him. Paul would rather be outside exploring than crammed into a small, dark classroom listening to dull lessons. Of course, he did not think that he should say that to Aunt Eunice. She would just respond by telling him that he had to adjust, had to get used to being an English boy, and he could not spend his youth dreaming about India.
This was quite a problem, and Paul was glad that summer was on its way. Not only would school be closed, but also he could spend his days outside. He was going on holiday with Uncle Charlie’s family and some other cousins to the seaside at West Runton on the east coast of England. Paul always enjoyed spending time with his uncle and his family. Unlike his aunts back at the house in London who were strict Baptists—too strict, Paul thought—Uncle Charlie, much to the chagrin of his older sisters, had become a Presbyterian. While still a devout Christian man, Uncle Charlie did not mind if Paul read books on Sunday and played outside.
The six-week vacation Paul spent at West Runton was just what he needed. He did not have to think about school, and he could spend his days doing all the things he liked. It reminded him of being back in India. He could take his shoes off, run, climb trees all he wanted, and read all day.
