Poppa's Gang

This is a short story I wrote in 1982, when I was 23 years old. At this time, I wrote a set of stories called "Anglo-Indian Tales" loosely based on characters in my family and on friends of my family, some of whom had been a part of the Anglo-Indian community in and around Calcutta up to the early 1960s.


We used to play chess with Poppa when we were small – Mama had bought us two volumes of ”Chess for Children“ from which she had painstakingly taught us (and herself) the game careful move by careful move, diagram by diagram. Poppa lived and played by often ferocious animal instinct, coupled with a fanatic meticulous desire for order, reason and logic. To some greater or lesser extent, we all inherited these traits, perhaps his daughter, Mama, and his grandson, my brother, most of all.

Poppa, an Anglo-Indian ex-Captain in the Indian army, had come to England for the first time shortly before my own family’s migration in the early 1960s. At Liverpool Street station he met a porter – the man was white. Stunned by the encounter and the man’s humble position, he presented him with ten shillings, together with instructions to buy himself some respectable attire and make application for honourable employment.

Mama told me that Poppa had moved house at regular intervals throughout his life – the reason for this being that he was persistently and tortuously hounded by “The Gang”. Mama would always be annoyed to hear of the “The Gang”, furiously condemning it as sheer fantasy, idiotic imagination. There was no “Gang”. Stubborn as a mule, Poppa could never be wrong.

“Ailsa, lend me the money, just a little cash, I need to move again. The Gang have found me – they know where I am, Ailsa”.

Sometimes Mama would cry with frustration. “But for God’s sake, what do they want from you, this Gang”.

He would shrug, mumble, become embarrassed, turn away.

“Oh, they’re after my papers, as usual, my secrets, my things”.

He was truly frightened for his life. Mama had no sympathy.

“My father was the incarnation of men’s evil”, she would tell me, a grown-up now at eight years old. “Never did a man use such foul language, drink and gamble so much, womanize to the extent he did”. I did not understand the terminology, the concept or the implications of his presumably wicked actions, but one did not question the heat of Mama’s words, nor doubt the sincerity of them. In this way she had inherited her father’s traits.

One day she told me:

“I remember one night my father was very drunk. It was at the officers’ club at the jungle station. My mother was playing the piano there that night, as she used to, and she had to take me along. We had to ask another soldier to help us carry him home, but this man was so drunk also that he almost collapsed under Poppa’s weight. So my mother and I carried him between us, and I was only four years old. On the way he passed out, over some disused railway track, and we couldn’t raise him. My mother said, “Leave him there to die – either the cold will get him or some tiger will eat him”. She wanted him to die so much – we both wanted it. And if his damn dog hadn’t stayed with him and sat on his chest all night he would be dead now”.

Animals were faithful to Poppa. He had escaped a man-eating tiger once, when it had crept into his stationary railway cabin in the middle of the jungle and walked off with the man in the couchette beneath him. But he was no coward. He could have fought the creature bare-handed if he had slept through the incident.

In his winter days, Poppa relived his early manhood and kept several women in tow. The most faithful of these was Lillian, a social worker in her early fifties, who kept house, cooked, sewed and shopped for him. He treated her as he had treated our Nana, as baser and less significant than the dirt on the soles of his shoes. I met her only once, and she was crying. Lillian could cope with The Gang – she probably doubted their existence less than he himself did. He was a forceful, powerful, charismatic presence, the kind who commands natural loyalty and sacrifice from those who love him.

Regularly in the late afternoons he would call for a chess game, and with each sitting consumed several pints of water. It was our duty to fetch the water, and to prepare it to his satisfaction – with a drop of milk and three spoonfuls of sugar. We would gaze in wonder as he consumed this rare concoction – like cold tea without the tea. I don’t remember much about the games, only staring fascinated at the cup beside him and running to refill it when it was empty.

One fateful day a member of The Gang was spotted in Lewisham High Street, near to where Poppa lived. Mama could not understand that The Gang had not given up chasing him after nearly fifty years, and said so.

“You must indeed be a very rich or important man”, she cast at him witheringly; “perhaps we could see a little of your money or benefit some from your great influence”.

Poppa was preoccupied in thought and did not even respond, but I had never seen him so anxious.

After this incident, he wanted to move in with us, but Mama put her foot down. There were many arguments, much shouting and tears. Poppa retreated to Lewisham and rarely moved out of the house, whilst Mama received daily phone calls from a tearful and desperate Lillian.

“Humour him”, Mama instructed Lillian. “If he goes out try to keep his mind distracted from that bloody Gang”.

It was easy to condemn his attitude, but we were all guilty of worrying over an idée fixe to the point where it became ridiculous. It was of those inherited traits with which he had blessed us, as if we lived under an irretractable spell, cursed.

Poppa became more silent and more obsessed and withdrawn, and Lillian told us that sometimes he would put his head in his hands and cry like a baby. It has always been difficult for us, in times of stress, to relax and observe a situation, to weigh up its advantages and disadvantages, its realities and its fantasies. Poppa was the master of this art, seemingly incapable of releasing Angst, of fighting tension. When struggling with fear, worry and other difficulty, he would pace through rooms back and forth like a tiger, Mama said, for hours on end. Physically robust, tall, lean, upright and muscular, with the faculties of a man less than half his years, his thoughts weighed on him, he brooded and allowed his mind to torment him. He did not have the ability to receive and digest different wavelengths of opinion, it was akin to banging his head against a wall, instead of opening a secret door inside it and stepping through to the other side. I believe he wanted very much to somehow scale that wall or pass through it, but if a mind refuses to accept or closes itself to other minds, there can be no peace. A mind must relax and allow the outside to flow in and be accepted or rejected, but first digested. Perhaps it was because of the strength of his own personality that this was not possible. It was as if he had taken himself on in a fight. So it was that his own mind began to drive him mad.

Mama often went to Lewisham to see Poppa, and on one occasion visited the flat to find only Lillian, timid and tremulous, frightened because she did not know where Poppa had disappeared to, or in which mood he would return. In the early evening, he did return, in pensive mood and sad. He would not relate to Lillian his whereabouts of the afternoon, but told her in no uncertain terms to leave his house before he threw her out himself. Mama protested strongly but Lillian, poor weak woman, left in tears.

Poppa sat down heavily and drank the cold tea that had been sitting in the pot for over two hours. He told Mama that Lillian was a whore, also that he had spent the day with Nana by her grave, and that it had given him great inner comfort.

Mama reminded him angrily that he had also called Nana a whore when she had been alive, but Poppa rose and shouted at her so Mama left. I remember how she came home and wept.

Afterwards we did not hear of Poppa or The Gang for a while, but presently Lillian called Mama to say that she was living in Poppa’s flat and that she was happy now. Mama informed me that there was a certain kind of woman who actually enjoyed violence, whose minds accepted it as a form of pleasure. I imagined these women to be dressed as nymphs in transparent night-dresses, with flowing dark, hair and faces which wore expressions of constant agony. They struggled to escape their oppressors but were fated to be unsuccessful.

Presently Poppa invited himself to Sunday lunch and after lunch came the obligatory chess game. He seemed very much at ease, and talked freely and naturally about this film that he and Lillian had been to see together, and that walk which he and Lillian had taken in the Park. There was no mention of The Gang. Mama was too surprised and apprehensive to be happy at the change which seemed to have come over him. Total mistrust existed between Mama and Poppa, and between himself and the rest of the world.

It was winter. For several weeks he appeared happy He had decided that he would like to live alone again, so Lillian moved back to her flat, and he visited her frequently. On his 81^st birthday at the beginning of January, Mama sent him a card. Her own birthday was due a week later.

Shortly after 11 o’clock two nights before her birthday, Mama received a phone call from Lewisham Hospital. Poppa had been hit by a car in Rushey Green and his pelvis was completely smashed – he was in Intensive Care. A witness said that Poppa had just posted a letter in the post box and was crossing back over the road. The driver of the car had not stopped.

I had never seen Mama cry so much. For almost three days she and Lillian all but lived at the Hospital, praying and watching and waiting. Mama could not seem to understand why a man of Poppa’s presence and stature should be humiliated with inserted plastic tubes and smashed bones.

“Everything’s been taken away from him”, she told us. “Every remaining scrap of dignity, everything”.

He was in terrible constant pain and he was barely conscious. Mama prayed hard for death to come to him, but for three days it did not. Mama told us that after that she believed Hell came to men on earth, while they were still alive.

“My father is living out his Hell on earth”, she said. “He must. It will come to us all, and has much to repent”. Suddenly Poppa became “my father”, and the anxieties and arguments seemed very far away. However, she would not admit anything but that he had lived an unholy life, merely that she felt no human being deserved to suffer the extremes he was suffering.

On the second day, Mama’s birthday, her birthday card from Poppa arrived, and Mama realized that this must have been the letter that Poppa was posting in Rushey Green on that fateful night. He had posted it late at night so that it would be picked up by the post early the following morning, and arrive the next day, exactly on her birthday. I remember that she stared at it for a very long time, and cried very hard. It seemed very hard for her to understand how life went on and Poppa’s card arrived, with no regard for Poppa’s state. As if the delivery should somehow have been halted by spiritual beings, out of respect for Poppa.

She began to relate stories revealing his good points: courage, strength of character, personality, physical robustness. She was very proud of him, even Lillian received less sympathy for she was weak and had broken under him.

He battled with death as he had battled with life, torturing himself by fighting the inevitable. Finally at the end of the third day, flesh became too weak and relinquished the fight. It was an unhappy, bleak time.

First came the inquest.
It was not, as had previously been thought, that the man responsible for Poppa’s death had completely disappeared. He had apparently presented himself to the Lewisham police later that evening, having returned to the scene of the “crime” shortly after the accident to discover that Poppa had been removed in an ambulance. According to his evidence, he had been unable to turn his car around after the moment of impact, and had attempted to do so by turning left down a side road, which subsequently resulted his losing his bearings for a short period of time, being unfamiliar to the area. The judge’s verdict was manslaughter and the charge a fifty pound fine.

We never discussed the inquest or its outcome at home. Poppa’s death was in the past and the past cannot be changed. Moreover, no measure of punishment could reincarnate him.

The morbidity and pathos of the incident were brought home to us when, reluctantly, Mama went to clear and tidy up the flat in Lewisham. It was my first visit there as well as being my last, and I recall as being a dark, dimly-lit place. Poppa had detested bright lights. On the sideboard stood an alarm clock of the bell and hammer variety, with an extraordinarily loud tick.

“However did he abide that”, Mama exclaimed in wonderment. Clearly, it was a new acquisition. “Whatever possessed him to buy it. That tick would have driven him mad, with his nerves. How did he tolerate it”.

My brother Paul claimed the clock – a person of similar noise tolerance level. Mama was further amazed.

Poppa’s suits hung in supreme condition in the wardrobe; his jackets and stylish and expensive hats lined the hooks by the door. Mama said we would give them to Oxfam. Dad wished he was the same size as Poppa had been. The clothes were Poppa, they recreated his image of uprightness and dignity, and it seemed that as if at any moment his figure would appear from underneath one of the hats by the door and declare in a thundering rumble: “Now Ailsa! What do you think you’re about, prying into my things!”

Mama’s face was not dry all the time we remained in the flat. She would not sift through his papers, but collected them, as many as possible at one time, a little clumsily in a bunch, and put them into plastic bags from Tesco’s. There appeared to be photographs, letters and several sheets of writing and newspaper cuttings, all of total negative value to all but the rightful possessor of them. One small fragment, obviously torn from a larger sheet, fluttered to the floor and landed with the writing displayed. Mama bent to retrieve it, and then froze, as if shocked, reading its contents.

“That’s funny”, she murmured. “That was the name of the man in court”.

Dad went to read over her shoulder, and presently the words on the sheet became known to us all. It was a quarter of a page only, and made no sense at all, as most of the text was missing. It read, in Poppa’s hand:

“to Michaels, which has

life, so I believe, and I must
action to take. They must not
my whereabouts, which can only
They are mine and will remain…”

“Michaels was the name of the man who was driving the car”, Mama repeated dumbly.

For several moments, we all stood in total silence, not knowing whether to speak or suggest. Whatever happened, I felt, none of us must mention The Gang. Not a word.

And then Dad said, putting his arm around Mama, and pulling her close to him, “It’s just coincidence, lovely. We don’t even know what this note means. Look how old it is. That Michaels was just a young chap. It’s just coincidence, that’s all”.