Passage to India Part 2 - My Father's Flight to India in 1934

Copyright (c) 2009 Michael Ogden

This was Lady Blanche's first real forced landing and told my father, who she called Oggie, that she had such confidence in his ability to bring them safely down in emergency, that she never had a moment's anxiety.

Directly they had landed, my father said they set about looking for the cause of the trouble and putting it right. Having found it was a small pipe connecting the oil to the pressure gauge, he mended it, and it was not till this was done that they looked round and realised that by then they were surrounded by about a hundred local people, a good many of whom were armed to the teeth with rifles and knives in their belts -a roughish lot, most of them pock-marked, all of them dirty and scantily clothed in a collection of cotton rags tied round their waists with rope - but not on the whole, unfriendly.

My father said their next difficulty was to get themselves understood, and although they tried bits of English, French, and my father even tried Hindustani as he had learnt it when he was a boy in India, in fact all the tongues they knew. They definitely failed to make contact. My father related that the crowd around them had tried very hard by continually shouting at them to make themselves understood.

At that point, my father related that a young man pushed his way through the crowd and greeted my father & Lady Blanche with a cheery, "Good Morning, Mister." Thinking that their troubles were at an end, my father then discovered that those were the only three words he knew in English! However, this young man certainly seemed more intelligent than the rest, and by signs and such words as Bushire, British Residency (which he seemed to understand) ,my father and Lady Blanche at last got him to start off with a note which they both wrote on the back of an envelope to walk to Bushire seventy miles away, and to bring them more oil as soon as possible. In spite of the money he was given, nothing would induce him to go till Lady Blanche had given him her leather golfing coat, a thing she bitterly regretted afterwards having had to do, as the nights especially were extremely cold in that part of the world, and she would have given anything for it later on.

While this was going on, a sand storm blew up, and having no covering for the machine, father related how they had to use their overcoats over the cowling and a handkerchief stuffed in the carburetor and hope this would keep the sand out of the engine. They themselves by this time were pretty objects, faces and hands covered with oil and then a good dusting of sand on the top which didn't improve their looks - though it wasn't till one of the men put his arm against theirs, intimating that we were practically the same colour that my father & Lady Blanche realised what really awful ruffians they must be looking! Having got Hassain (the messenger) off with their note and watched him out of sight (They could see several miles across their sandy valley in all directions), they sat down to talk things over.........