CHAPTER VII
A.D. 1878
PERSECUTIONS

Once more Miss Tucker settled down in Batala—for life! She would only leave the place again for her short and well-earned holidays; and at the last for her passing away.

During many years her home was still to be in the quaint old palace, described by others as draughty, weird, forlorn, desolate; though she herself so resolutely looked upon the discomforts of the old building through rose-tinted glasses. But its dreary aspect was soon to be changed. The bright faces of Panjabi lads, the merry voices of Panjabi scholars, were to fill with fresh life those big and empty rooms. ‘The Baring High School,’ as it was called, had its first existence in the shape of a small boarding-school at Amritsar, which Mr. Baring decided to remove to the palace at Batala. About fifteen boys were, in the beginning, at Anarkalli,—described by A. L. O. E. as ‘our choicest young Natives, converts or descendants of converts; one is the grandson of a martyr!’ These boys or their friends paid fees, when they could, which was not always; and the fees, though perhaps sufficient to cover their food, were by no means sufficient to cover the cost of a good education.

From the spring of 1878 Mr. Baring resided there, as C.M.S. Honorary Missionary, with control of the Boys’ School, which indeed had been started mainly at his own expense; while Babu Singha worked under him as the Master of the School. Miss Tucker, as she stated in her letters, held no such post as that of Matron. Her position was entirely independent, being that of Honorary Zenana Missionary. She paid for her own rooms and her own board in the Palace, and regarded Zenana visiting, and the writing of small books for Indian readers, as her prime occupations. But for Charlotte Tucker to live under the same roof with all those boys, and not to give them loving interest, not to attempt to teach or influence them, would have been a sheer impossibility.

Another Boys’ School had been started in Batala, which must not be confounded with the above. The Baring High School was—and is—distinctly for the education of Indian Christian boys. The Mission School, known later as ‘The Plough,’—Miss Tucker recognising strongly that this early stage of work in Batala could only be compared to a farmer’s ploughing of his fields,—was for Indian boys, not yet Christian. They received Christian teaching; and when a boy in the Plough School became a convert, he was passed on usually to the High School. The very starting of this ‘Plough School’ was due to Miss Tucker’s liberality. Out of her own purse she generously paid the main part of its expenses.

We must turn again to her letters, with all their curiously fresh, young eagerness and enjoyment, to realise what her life was at this time. Charlotte Tucker might call herself ‘old,’—she was very fond of doing so on every possible occasion; but certainly none of the weight of age had as yet descended upon her spirits.

TO SIR W. HILL.[79]

‘Batala, April 13, 1878.