Coming home

Jackie Macadam meets Margaret Beetham, daughter of the 20th century Church of Scotland missionary and theologian, Lesslie Newbigin.

“IT is hard to convey how different Edinburgh in 1946 was from the world I knew and loved.”

Margaret Beetham is recalling a childhood visit ‘home’ from India. Home Is Where, the book in which she recalls her life as a missionary child, has just been published.

Margaret’s father, Lesslie Newbigin, was one of the architects of the new united Church of South India. “In 1947 he became one of its first Bishops, a move which surprised some who knew of his and my mother’s deep roots in the ‘kirk’, with its anti-episcopal history,” she said. “Others, however, understood that the CSI came out of a desire to remake ‘Church’ by bringing together and refashioning different traditions.”

“When my parents spoke of ‘Home’ they meant Britain and specifically Scotland. My Mum loved Edinburgh, the city where she had lived and gone to university. She met Dad when they both worked for the Student Christian Movement in Scotland. But until I was six, I had never been ‘Home’ and when we got there it felt strange and alien. Everyone was white and, even the women wore dark clothes. No colourful saris. And it was bitterly cold!” she recalls.

“Wartime rationing continued for many food stuffs, for clothes and – crucially – for coal. We had missed out on the summer when people built up their stocks of coal so we ran out at one point and had to go and stay with my father’s mother. I couldn’t understand the accents of teachers and children at school but, then I wasn’t at school much because, though we had all been seriously ill with amoebic dysentery in India, neither I nor my two younger sisters had had any of the childhood diseases that circulated in Scotland, so we were ill successively with measles and whooping cough. No vaccines then. No antibiotics. No NHS.”

It was a somewhat traumatic change for Margaret and her sisters.

“I was born in Edinburgh in June 1939, on the eve of Britain entering the war. When I was barely three months old my parents took me back to South India where they had been sent as missionaries by the Church of Scotland. My earliest memories, therefore, are not of Scotland but of the warmth and colour of India.”

Margaret comes from a long line of missionaries.

“My mother was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries and my father was a well-known missionary, theologian and writer.

“I was the oldest of four children. I had a happy early childhood. In some families during the 1940s and ‘50s the old Victorian adage that children should be seen and not heard still prevailed but not in ours. My Dad loved word play, jokes and singingeverything from metrical psalms to the early Disney musical scores. We were all allowed, even encouraged, to join in conversation and to sing and dance around when my Dad played the piano. The colonial ‘bungalows’ (large colonial mansions where we lived, courtesy of the missionary society) were open on all sides, and, particularly in Madurai when my father was Bishop, also served as Diocesan Office, so there were always visitors, people coming to see my Dad, guests of the Diocese.

“I spent most of my first twelve years in South India where my parents were based, in two great cities, first Kanchipuram, near Chennai (Madras), and then Madurai. However, I spent much of the time at boarding school 7000 feet up in the cool of the Palni Hills, called ‘hills’ by the British in the somewhat patronising vocabulary of colonialism, though these ‘hills’ were far higher than the tallest mountains in Scotland.”

Not surprisingly, many of Margaret’s earliest memories are of travel.

“Each year we went from the city on the hot, dry lowlands we called ‘the plains’ and went up into the cool and green of the hills. I remember the excitement of those journeys. The bus rattled along the flat road spreading dust over the mud hats with their palm leaf roofs and the women in bright cotton saris carrying brass pots on their heads. Then it began to climb up the steep Ghat, sounding the horn on each corner. The engine nearly always boiled over and everyone would get out and walk about, looking down the steep slopes to the shola below where we could hear the monkeys. When at last we ground up the steep hill through the bazaar with its little open shops, we knew we were there.

Margaret Beetham

When my parents spoke of ‘Home’ they meant Britain and specifically Scotland. My Mum loved Edinburgh, the city where she had lived and gone to university... until I was six, I had never been ‘Home’ and when we got there it felt strange and alien.

“In the hot season missionaries would go up to Kodai for a short holiday and that meant going on the lake or picnics by one of the streams to which we walked with other families. When I was just eight I became a boarder in Kodai School, so the bus journey felt different, as I would be returning to school, but I still loved that journey from heat and dust to cool and the scent of pine and eucalyptus. Then, months later, the journey back to the heat of our city home on the plains.

“Train journeys, too, were exciting. Stations were always busy with people squatting waiting for a train, their bundles beside them, the sellers shouting ‘Chai! Chai!’ as they poured out the brown liquid. We especially loved going on the train overnight.

“Then you could magically make the back of the seat into a bunk so that there were three beds on each side of the carriage. When you lay down you could hear the train go’ clickety-click, clickety-click’ over the rails with an occasional rumble as we crossed a bridge until you fell asleep.

“Our longest journeys were those on the huge ocean-going ships which took us between India and Britain every five years,” she says. “The journey took three weeks. I can remember a storm in the Bay of Biscay when my sister and I ran about the ship while all the grown-ups were being sick in their cabins. We even went up on deck where the wind was fierce until someone shouted at us to ‘go below’

“That journey marked the moment when our childhood changed. I and my sister were sent to boarding school in Britain, to be joined later by our younger sister and eventually by our brother.

“Our parents, sent by the Church of Scotland to India, were torn between the conviction that God wanted them to be in India and their belief, shared by many but not all their colleagues, that giving us – their children – a good education meant sending us back to school in England, even though that meant many years of separation.

Left to right: Rachel (Margaret), Jim (John), Jane (Janet), Chris (Alison) 

Top: Mum and Dad (Helen and Lesslie Newbigin) with my younger sister and me, May 1942 

Dad and Mum’s Diamond Wedding, London, 1996 though that meant many years of separation.

“They wanted to do their best for us but – like all of us – they were caught up in the cultural assumptions of their time. And they were right in this way, we did get a ‘good education’. It got me into Oxford and made possible much of my later life.”

However, Margaret had a varied early education. “I went to three different schools before I was eight; primary schools in Edinburgh and Huyton, a suburb of Liverpool where my mother’s sister lived, with whom we stayed for some months in 1947, and then the school up in the mountains of South India to which I went as a boarder from the ages of eight to twelve. This had been founded by American Missionary Societies for the children of their missionaries. It followed an American curriculum and I was taught, for example, that the British were wicked imperialists and one of the most important figures in history was George Washington. This was confusing when I went back to school in Britain and was told that the Americans were rebels and George Washington hardly got a mention. Still I was happy at this school and it was a wrench to leave, as I did when I was 12, to go, with my sister, to a boarding school for girls in Kent.

“My mother had gone to this same school, founded for the daughters of missionaries in 1838. It gave me a good academic education. However, it was a hard time for me and my sisters in that we were separated from our families for all the years of our schooling. No going home in the holidays for us. We stayed with various older relatives of our parents, mainly with my mother’s older sister who lived in a two-up-two-down terrace on the edge of Liverpool. We were sometimes hungry at school but in the holidays we were always fed, which was quite a big thing in the 1950s when there was not much money. However, as my sister Alison, said to me when we sat together in the hospice at the end of her life, no one ever hugged us. We did not see our parents or siblings – at least not for five years. Nor did we have Skype or access to phones of any kind (no mobiles then, of course). We wrote letters to each other every week. I still have some of them put away in a trunk under the bed in the spare room.

“Journeys in Britain were not like Indian ones. I had to be the responsible big sister looking after tickets and money and making sure we got to the right place at the right time on our journeys from Kent to northern England. Sometimes we went to our Granny’s in Northumberland, more often to Liverpool where our Auntie May would be waiting for us ‘beside the W H Smith stall’, a green hat on her head and the inevitable umbrella tucked under her arm. I once got into terrible trouble for arriving with the return half of one ticket between us. I was thirteen. I wonder now how no-one ever questioned these two girls travelling on their own, but no one ever did. Once we were safely on the train, we quite enjoyed those journeys. They were in-between times and spaces, where we could just be.”

“Our schools in India and in England were religious foundations which in different ways took Christian teaching seriously. Interestingly my father decided I should be confirmed into the Church of England when I was fourteen. I rebelled but only as far as refusing to go to the local church to which we were marched each Sunday two by two in our school uniform. Instead I went with a friend to another church in the town. We were allowed to leave school early on one Sunday a month and walk to that church for early communion, after which the rector and his wife gave us breakfast, a real taste of what a family home might be.”

Margaret says that it was while she was with her dying sister that she began to write her memories down.

“For most of my adult life I never told even quite close friends about my childhood or let on that I was a ‘mish kid’, as the Americans call us. As one friend put it to me about her similar experience, I shoved my memories as it were into a cupboard and pushed shut the door. When my sister, Alison, was dying of cancer, I was able to spend a lot of time with her, first in the hospital and then in the hospice. She was the one closest to me in age and ever since I could remember Mum had told me that I was the big sister and must look after her. We shared so much of our childhood but had not always been close as adults. Now, as she was dying, we talked a lot or sat in silence together, and memories came back to me as though I had opened that cupboard door and everything had fallen out. Gradually over the years after my sister’s death, I began to write accounts of those memories and what they mean now. I wrote first for my family but gradually, encouraged and supported by friends and by my Writing Group, I began to think it would be good to tell this story more widely.” 

Publishing it, though took a lot of thought. 

“I was very hesitant about publishing it as it felt very exposing, not of me so much, but of those I love. I checked it out with my siblings and children but, of course, most of those who feature in the story are dead. Also, as I make clear in the book, it is based on my memories and memory is unreliable. I was afraid I might have wronged those I wrote about. However, I also had an increasingly strong conviction that this was not just my story but one account of an experience which was shared by many others. In the first place, the children of those in Britain whose parents over the last hundred and fifty years or more have left ‘Home’ to work for the church or the state or the army overseas. There have been a few accounts of missionary childhoods but not many written by women.

“Beyond those histories I am very aware of how many children today have been displaced from the world they thought of as ‘home’ and find themselves in strange countries, with or without their families. That is in part why I wrote the story in the third person, even though it is my story.”

“The book might be about the past and about my childhood, but it is set in the present and in my old age. I have found a home here and now, in my neighbourhood, among my wonderful friends and work colleagues, in my church community.”

For most of my adult life I never told even quite close friends about my childhood or let on that I was a ‘mish kid’, as the Americans call us.

‘Home Is Where: The Journeys of a Missionary Child.’ By Margaret Beetham is published by Darton, Longman and Todd. Ebook version available on https://www.dltebooks.com/

This article appears in the June 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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