Page 3 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
Adela’s stomach lurched at the threat; how disappointed her parents would be if she was sent home in disgrace. Yet a part of her felt defiant; she would like nothing better than to leave the strictures of StNinian’s and return to her beloved home at Belgooree.
Frustrating as her punishment was– Adela loathed sewing and yearned to be out in the fresh autumnal air– she submitted without protest, hoping the trouble with Nina would soon blow over. Perhaps the snobbish colonel’s daughter had only said those hurtful things about her parents in the heat of the moment. Adela was sure she couldn’t have meant them, for they weren’t true.
But the trouble didn’t stop. Nina was vindictive. Adela had misjudged quite how humiliated Nina had been, both by the drenching and by being publicly hauled in front of Miss Black. Nina called Adela a little sneak and organised the other girls into not speaking to her.
‘We’ve sent you to Coventry,’ Margie told her, ‘for being horrid to Nina.’
‘But she started it,’ Adela protested.
‘Can’t hear you!’ Margie called as she hurried away and left Adela mending sheets in the common room.
Only Flowers Dunlop smiled warily at her when she entered the classroom or dormitory, andonce she realised that Adela didn’t hold a grudge against her for what had happened, she was happy to chat about life as a member of a railway family. Her father was station master at the busy depot at Sreemangal in the tea district of Sylhet. He was a second-generation Scot in India. Her mother came from the nearby hill station of Jaflong. Adela had seen them dropping off an excited Flowers at the start of term: a jovial red-faced man and a pretty woman in a lime-green sari who had stood out like a sore thumb because no one else’s mother was dressed in native costume.
‘I’ve been fishing at Jaflong with my father,’ Adela enthused. ‘It’s beautiful there, and the fishing boats are like gondolas– just like in Venice.’
‘Have you been to Venice?’ Flowers asked, wide-eyed.
‘No, but I’ve seen pictures. And one day I’m going to go there– I’m going to travel all over the world and become a famous actress.’
‘How will you do that? Are your family very rich?’
‘No,’ Adela admitted. She waved away such an obstacle. ‘I’ll marry a prince or a viceroy and he will take me around the world. We’ll spend the summers in Europe,or maybe America– yes, we’ll have a house in Hollywood so I can star in the latest films.’
Flowers chewed on the end of her pigtail. ‘I want to be a nurse and make people better.’
Adela looked at her in pity. ‘I can’t think of anything worse– all that blood and having to empty bedpans and wash men’s bottoms.’
Flowers gasped. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that.’
‘You’ll have to. Auntie Tilly’s brother is a doctor and he says that’s what nurses have to do. He calls them angels, but I think it sounds like a job from hell.’
‘Adela!’
‘Well, I’m just telling the truth. I think you should become a lady doctor instead, then you can be in charge of all the nurses and wear nicer clothes and still make people better.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Flowers’ slim face looked pensive. ‘I don’t think girls like me become lady doctors.’
‘Why ever not? You’re obviously brainy.You’ve only been here a month and you’re top of the class in almost everything– no wonder bossyboots Nina doesn’t like you. She was first in everything last term– except for the singing prize, which I won.’
Adela abandoned her sewing and paced to the window. Outside, the leaves of a large chinar glowed brilliant scarlet in the mellow autumn sun. How she longed to be home in the hills at Belgooree, out riding through the tea garden on her piebald pony, Patch, shooting duck by the river with her father or, after an explore through the sal forest, pestering their khansama, Mohammed Din, for scraps of chicken for Scout, her hill dog. Anything but be stuck in school doing endless sewing, with everyoneexcept new-girl Flowers giving her the cold shoulder.
How she loathed StNinian’s! She hated lessons and having to sit still and learn algebra and the names of long-dead kings and queens. School was only bearable when she was out of doors running and playing games on the half-bald playing field or larking around in the spinney with Margie and the others. She used to make Margie laugh with impersonations of the teachers. But Margie wasn’t speaking to her.
Adela had to admit the bleak truth that things had been changing with Margie long before the fight with Nina. All term their friendship had been lukewarm. Margie hadn’t come to stay at Belgooree over the summer like she had in previous holidays; she had gone to Simla in the Himalayan foothills with Nina and her mother. ‘We went to a garden party at Viceregal Lodge,’ Margie had boasted, ‘and Nina got a part in a play at the Gaiety.’
Adela had been consumed with envy to think that Nina had performed on a real stage with a paying audience and– if she was to be believed– in front of the Viceroy himself! Nina couldn’t act for toffee. It should have been her, Adela Robson, with a good singing voice and dancing legs, who entertained India’s most important people, the ‘heaven-born’– those elite British government officials who spent the hot weather in Simla.
But that was never going to happen, not while she was stuck in a boarding school in Shillong. Here, the only chance to act was in the inter-house plays in front of the headmistress and occasionally Miss Black’s missionary brother, DrNorman Black, who had helped found the school and came to judge the competition – if he wasn’t away spreading the gospel to heathens.
Adela gave an impatient sigh. If only she hadn’t interfered between Nina and Flowers. Since then school life had become completely unbearable.
‘All your troubles are my fault. I’m sorry,’ Flowers said.
Adela swung round. The girl was studying her with sorrowful brown eyes.
‘Don’t be,’ Adela said.
‘I should just have drunk that ghastly stuff and got it over with.’
