The Life of Jane - introduction and chapter one

    This is  a story of  a person based on a real person. Some of the events are real and did happen. Others never happened. The names  of the people in this story have been changed .



         Chapter One - Passage From India

    In the fall of 1945, Jane Sinclair was a happy young 8 year-old. She lived in a mansion in eastern India, with her father, her mother, one brother, one sister and 67 servants. Wherever she went in the mansion, there was always some thin, dark-skinned man or woman, sweeping the stairs, tidying up the big kitchen, or cooking meals in it, or bowing to her and her siblings as they walked through the 23 room house.
    "Walk, don't run everywhere," Jane's 10 year-old sister Beatrice told her."Remember what mum said. 'We're British and we must be dignified.'"
    "Beatrice's brown eyes flashed with energy as she said this. Then she was off to her tutor Sabha, a short, light brown skinned man, who taught her arithmetic, English and botany. "Beatrice is so clever," Jane's younger brother, six year-old Charles said. "Or so mother says." Charles and Jane went to a school on the outskirts of Jannipur, a small Indian town in what to-day is West Bengal. Here, despite the often sweltering heat, they wore school uniforms. They studied arithmetic, spelling and English grammar. They also studied English history. They learned nothing about Indian history, though Jane had learned to speak Bengali from talking to her servants.
     At school, their teacher was an English woman called Miss Trueheart, a tall, dark haired and always neatly dressed lady. The blonde Jane envied Miss Trueheart.
    Still, she loved her brown-haired mother, Mrs. Diana Sinclair, whose maiden name Brown , she the mother said later, "was so ordinary." At age 20, the Scottish-born Diana
Brown met and married a tall blonde medical student from Liverpool, named Robert Sinclair. He was just completing his medical studies at Manchester University.
    Then he and his bride were off to India to where he ran the medical services in what later became the state of West Bengal. Many years later human rights activists were astounded to hear a 50 year-old Jane say, "The British Empire was a wonderful thing."
     All her life, after the age of 10, Jane looked back on her days in India as marvellous. "Awesome," the young people would say to-day. "I loved it there,' she recalls. "The British did wonderful things in India. When they left, things just fell apart."


                                                'The Life of Jane' continues in the next section.
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