Let me give my memories of one weekend at Cambridge University when I met two of the most remarkable men of the age, one after another.
I had been elected President of the University West Indian Society and one Saturday I was invited in a small group to meet Pandit Nehru, Prime Minister of India, who was visiting Cambridge. I shall never forget him. Like so many very famous people he was smaller in stature than one expected. He was beautifully dressed in white and charcoal grey with a red rose burning on the breast of his jacket. I also remember his grave and steady eyes. But these were outward things. What was most memorable, what I shall never forget as long as I live, was the strange and formidable strength that he conveyed as he spoke to us in the quietest, most gentle, of cultured voices – spoke of his experiences of England as a student, of his fight for India’s independence, of his memories of the Mahatma Gandhi, of his debates with Lord Mountbatten leading up to independence, of his trials and triumphs since independence, and of the temptation that sometimes came to him to give up power and retire to just such a place of quiet, universal learning as Cambridge. I cannot remember exact phrases but the overall impression of a very great man speaking quietly and modestly about immense events will never leave me. And yet I am wrong: I do remember still one phrase he actually spoke, though it was not his own but a quotation, he said, from the Mahatma. It is a very simple phrase but I still remember it. Gandhi used to say to them as they fought for India’s independence: “Do not hate the British. No man is our enemy, only the evil in him.”
