tie PARTITION: Tape 2 Writer 255MODEM Mod Date & Time St 255MODEM Sep 07 09:35 R* TAPE 2 ALYS FAIZ interviewed at her home in Model Town, Lahore, on 17 June 1995 Alys Faiz (nee George), aged 80; widow of distinugihsed leftist Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz; daughter of a Walthamstow bookseller; joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the mid-1930s (though never in the CPI); came to Amritsar in 1939 to see her married sister; married by Sheikh Abdullah in Srinagar in 1941: Side A 10 > re impending Imran Khan-Jemima Goldsmith marriage 179 - [re partition] 'my husband used to say that there was no alternative cos the M-H sitn was such that prob the Ms wd have become not a minority but an unf group, he thought it was the right thing, but I didn't cos if I and P had become a soc co that wd have been ideal ... the richest people here were the Hs, and the Ms were not1 189 - 'I think it had to be, but as it's turned out now, well I don't know where we are heading, the worst thing is the fund'm, that's dreadful, it will drag us down I think' 194 - [re partition violence] 'nobody anticipated that; they didn't anticipate the fact that there was so much hatred cos in our own village, in F's village, Hs were living within a stone's throw, and all over that area Sikhs and Hs and Ms were living side by side, cheek by jowl. and nobody thought it wd happen ... the rape and the murder and everything, nobody thought it wd happen' 202 - ’I was in Lahore, and the trains were coming with nothing but bodies, dead bodies, and we were in.K my mother and father were there ... and we sd nobody will be safe and they'd better get out and so we hired a truck, and I went down to Murree and they came down to Lahore ... people were frightened' 210 - 'from Murree, there were a lot of Sikhs there, and they wanted to get to Lahore and onwards, and we sd yes we'll hire a lorry ... and they were massacred on the way down, before they got to R'pindi even; we gave them water and food and everything, and they massacred them' 216 - 'the Pathans came down from the hills and the people came screaming and sd the gutters running with the blood ...every woman, they were mostly women and children, they were massacred, old men and everything' 221 - 'we knew they were massacred, cos the Pathans came from the hills; it's a known fact; they didn't get to 'pindi' 225 - 'then we had to get to Lahore, myself and my children and another woman who was married to a Pak; so we put on burqas and carried korans cos we were in Pak,