Book review: 'The Secret Children'

Book: The Secret Children
Author: Alison McQueen
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 448
Price: Rs350

Serafina and Mary, are sisters, Anglo-Indian, born in the 1920s to a British tea-planter and a vivacious, tribal Indian concubine. They live in Assam, away from the censorious eyes of British India. For them to survive, unscathed, in a world where they are considered easy prey, is a bitter experience. Add to that the distressing discovery of who they are — bastard children whose father has deliberately cut himself off from them. Even the memories of their childhood, fun-filled holidays with him become tainted as they realise what a pretense they were.

But James Macdonald, Serafina and Mary’s father, is no ruthless rake. He genuinely adores his lively children. However, being a victim of British social norms and historical events, he feels forced to abandon them. Raised as a son of the Empire and moulded to take up the mantle of colonial overlord, this is the professional and personal price he must pay for his youthful indiscretion. While Mary escapes to gloomy England, tearing herself away from all that she loved in the land of her birth, Serafina re-locates to Chittagong initially, where she lives a white lady’s grand life, before moving to England where she never really settled down.

“I didn’t understand how these beautiful young women could have come from those scenic landscapes to the grey skies of Britain,” writes Alison McQueen, who based the novel on her mother’s life. “My questions drove my mother half mad. I had no idea that she and her sister were the illegitimate daughters of…The shame of it had followed her like a shadow…I have finally come to know who my mother is and why things had to be the way they were.”

The Secret Children is a heartrending account of two beautiful, pampered children growing up, carefree, in verdant tea gardens, and then being summarily sent away to a convent, and later to unknown cities to train as nurses because the illegitimacy of their birth is an embarrassment to their father.

Writer Alison McQueen, who saw her mother, Mary, lead a lifetime of shame because she was a “half-breed” writes, “There must have been thousands of children born under similar circumstances during an era when such things were considered beyond the pale. Yet where was their voice? I was privileged enough to know some of these secret children, and it was my honour to write a story for them.”

Sharing the details of her life with her daughter finally exorcised the demons of shame from Mary’s mind and, in her twilight years, she has learned to be proud of who she is. And that, perhaps, is the happy ending to a very sad story.