Passage to India Part 3 - My Father's Flight to India in 1934

Copyright (c) 2009 Michael Ogden

This is the third part of my father's flight to India with Lady Blanche...... My father continued the story as follows:

However, the crowd allowed us no peace and we were for ever jumping up and shooing them away from the machine which seemed to have an irresistible attraction to their hands, their continual touching, pinching and picking at it being our worst trouble with them all the nine days we were forced to stay there.

However, to get back to this, our first day in the desert, we made out that Hassain would take at least two and a half days to get to Bushire, to deliver our note, and two and a half days more to lead the rescue party back to us with the oil we wanted. As it was then Friday afternoon, we decided that the following Wednesday afternoon was our probable date of rescue - unless, of course, they sent out an aeroplane to look for us, as we had said in our note that where we were was a perfect landing ground. (And so it was at that time - later it became a different story)

Anyway, as it was, we had to cater for five days and nights, and our provisions consisted of, one half gallon tin of water, (filled when we were at Tunis, therefore very smelly and unappetising), one bar of Cadbury's milk chocolate (we had had two bars but my father had to admit that he had eaten one en route!), and a glass jar with bits of chicken in it, which was our "piece de resistance", and we decided to keep it till the last possible moment, though it proved awfully disappointing and tasteless when we eventually ate it on the third day!

By now it was getting late afternoon and our valley being surrounded by quite high hills, the sun went down extremely early we found, and rose equally late, making our days short but our nights terribly long.

The worst part of our adventure, we thought, as apart from the nervous strain of all those hours of darkness, the cold, till the sun re-appeared to warm us a little, was very uncomfortable to say the least of it, and we had the added fear all the time of one or other of us getting ill or even getting pneumonia out there with no possible means of attention or help.

Directly it got dusk most of our "audience" started to fade away, but three remained with us, and awful ruffians they were too. One named Haidar especially. Lady Blanche hated the look of him, a big black haired man, bearded and with awful teeth, he seemed the leader of the trio. He ware a black cotton coat and trousers, had a gun and cartridge belt (with about a hundred rounds), and two large knives stuck in his belt. The second man whose name my father cannot remember was younger, thick black hair, a terrible squint combined with cataract in one eye. He also had a gun and knives. The third one, and probably the most unpleasant of the party, was older and unarmed, named Ali, a typical Jew both in looks and nature. This one was spokesman of the party, and when the crowd had disappeared entirely he started to try and make us understand something......