Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

personal archives at his Broadlands Estate contained in well-organized, fireproof cabinets virtually every piece of paper bearing on his life, from the invitation cards to his christening to the menu of the last state dinner he had attended. He intended to use those archives as the foundation upon which some future author might construct his biography, sharing its royalty earnings with his grandchildren. In the years we worked together, he scoffed at the notion of designating his biographer. To do so, he said, would be like consigning himself to the grave. To our surprise, then, he announced to us about a year before his death in that mock imperious tone he sometimes employed, ‘I have decided that it is you two who will write my biography.’

      ‘Lord Louis,’ we protested, ‘you are one of the century’s most important Englishmen. This country’s establishment would consider it almost an act of treason on your part to entrust your biography to an American and a Frenchman.’

      Mountbatten harrumphed, declaring our reply revealed how little either of us understood about the English establishment, an institution for which he, in any event, had a very limited regard. A few months later he returned to the topic. His son-in-law, Lord John Brabourne, the trustee of his archives, agreed, he told us, with our judgement. Relieved, we suggested he might want to consider Hugh Thomas, then the Regius Professor of History at Oxford, but it was clear his thinking on the question was veering back towards his earlier sentiments. Mountbatten died without having settled the question. The task of selecting his official biographer fell, therefore, to his son-in-law, who chose Philip Ziegler, the editor of Freedom at Midnight, for the task.

      Although few people were aware of it, Mountbatten suffered from a series of minor cardio-vascular problems in the closing years of his life. His daughters and his doctor urged him to lighten his schedule and temper his zest for work. Rarely has well-intended advice fallen on deafer ears.

      On occasion in our chats in those years in his Kinnerton Street flat in London, the conversation would turn to the subject of death. Gandhi’s death in particular fascinated him because, he maintained, the Mahatma had achieved in death what he had been striving to achieve in life, an end to India’s communal violence. That gave a dimension and meaning to his death which destiny accords to few humans. Without ever saying so explicitly, he implied that such an end was one he devoutly wished for, one which he would consider a fitting final chapter to his life.

      In August 1979, he prepared, as he did every summer, to spend a family holiday at his castle, Classiebawn, in Ireland. The day before he left he spoke on the phone to one of the authors of this book.

      ‘Be careful up there, Lord Louis,’ the author warned, ‘you’re an awfully tempting target for those whackos of the IRA.’

      ‘My dear Larry,’ came the reply, ‘once again you’re revealing how little you know of these matters. The Irish are well aware of my feelings on the Irish question. I am in no danger over there whatsoever.’

      A fortnight later, together with the mother of his son-in-law Lord John Brabourne and a young child, he was murdered by an IRA assassin’s bomb hidden in his motor launch as he was setting out to sea for a morning sail.

      He would have had nothing but utter contempt for people who would murder an elderly woman and a child. But himself? He died swiftly, afloat upon those endless seas which had played such an important role in his own and his father’s life. Had his death brought some small measure of wisdom to the Republicans and Loyalists killing and murdering in Northern Ireland, might he not have considered it a worthwhile final act, one not incomparable with the death of the man he so admired, Mahatma Gandhi?

      Often during our work on Freedom at Midnight he had declared, ‘How can we here in the West possibly blame Hindus and Moslems for killing each other in India when in Northern Ireland we see people of the same basic stock, people who worship the same Resurrected Saviour, slaughtering each other?’

      Alas, almost two decades after his death, his sacrifice and that of all the others which have followed it have not succeeded in implanting among the peoples of Northern Ireland a semblance of the wisdom Gandhi’s death bequeathed to his countrymen and women.

      LARRY COLLINS

      DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE December 1996

PROLOGUE

      The rude arch of yellow basalt thrusts its haughty form into the city’s skyline just above a little promontory lapped by the waters of the Bay of Bombay. The Bay’s gentle waves barely stir the sullen green sludge of debris and garbage that encircles the concrete apron sloping down from the arch to the water’s edge. A strange world mingles there in the shadows cast by its soaring span: snake charmers and fortune tellers, beggars and tourists, dishevelled hippies lost in a torpor of sloth and drug, the destitute and dying of a cluttered metropolis. Barely a head is raised to contemplate the inscription, still clearly legible, stretched along the summit: ‘Erected to commemorate the landing in India of their imperial majesties, George V and Queen Mary on the second of December MCMXI’.

      Yet, once, that vaulting Gateway of India was the Arch of Triumph of the greatest empire the world has ever known. To generations of Britons, its massive form was the first glimpse, caught from a steamer’s deck, of the storied shores for which they had abandoned their Midlands villages and Scottish hills. Soldiers and adventurers, businessmen and administrators, they had passed through its portals, come to keep the Pax Britannica in the empire’s proudest possession, to exploit a conquered continent, to take up the White Man’s burden with the unshakable conviction that theirs was a race born to rule, and their empire an entity destined to endure.

      All that seems so distant now. Today, the Gateway of India is just another pile of stone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre, a forgotten monument to an era that ended in its shadows half a century ago.

ONE

       ‘A Race Destined to Govern and Subdue’

       London, New Year’s Day, 1947

      It was the winter of a great nation’s discontent. An air of melancholia hung like a chill fog over London. Rarely, if ever, had Britain’s capital ushered in a New Year in a mood so bleak, so morose. Hardly a home in the city that festive morning could furnish enough hot water to allow a man to shave or a woman to cover the bottom of her wash-basin. Londoners had greeted the New Year in bedrooms so cold their breath had drifted on the air like puffs of smoke. Precious few of them had greeted it with a hangover. Whisky, in the places where it had been available the night before for New Year’s Eve celebrations, had cost £8 a bottle.

      The streets were almost deserted. The passers-by hurrying down their pavements were grim, joyless creatures, threadbare in old uniforms or clothes barely holding together after eight years of make-do and mend. What few cars there were darted about like fugitive phantoms guiltily consuming Britain’s rare and rationed petrol. A special stench, the odour of post-war London, permeated the streets. It was the rancid smell of charred ruins drifting up like an autumn mist from thousands of bombed-out buildings.

      And yet, that sad, joyless city was the capital of a conquering nation. Only seventeen months before, the British had emerged victorious from mankind’s most terrible conflict. Their achievements, their courage in adversity then, had inspired an admiration such as the world had never before accorded them.

      The cost of their victory, however, had almost vanquished the British. Britain’s industry was crippled, her exchequer bankrupt, her once haughty pound sterling surviving only on injections of American and Canadian dollars, her Treasury unable to pay the staggering debt she’d run up to finance the war. Foundries and factories were closing everywhere. Over two million Britons were unemployed. Coal production was lower than it had been a decade earlier and, as a result, every day, some part of Britain was without electric power for hours.

      For