Monica Mathen obituary.

Pedro_P

Monica Mathen aged 21 in her naval uniform. She moved to Britain in the 1960s, where she lived for more than 50 years
My mother, Monica Mathen, who has died aged 93, was one of that dwindling group of Anglo-Indians who lived under the British Raj, saw the transition into an independent country and then ended up in the UK, where she lived for more than 50 years.
During the second world war, she served in the Royal Indian Navy and later did a variety of jobs, including teacher, flight attendant and secretary, before taking a degree in Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, aged 49.
Born in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, Monica was the third of 12 children of Alice (nee Felthmann) and Oswald Fernandez. The Anglo-Indian community were given preferential employment on the railways, due to their command of English, and Oswald was station master for the Madras (now Chennai) area. He died when Monica was 13, and away at the Sacred Heart convent boarding school in Yercaud hill station. Three years later she entered Church Parkteacher training school, in Madras, and then taught there herself to help support her family.
In 1944 she volunteered for the Royal Indian Navy and joined the ciphers and codes department, based in Chittagong, in what is now Bangladesh. Her last station was in Bombay (Mumbai), on board HMIS Narbada, where she was confined to her cabin along with all other officers during the RIN mutiny of  1946.
Following independence in 1947, Monica became a flight attendant for the new commercial airline Tata Airlines (later Air India) and met Kandathil Mathen, known as Kimster, an ex-Indian airforce Spitfire pilot. They married the following year.
In 1961 Kimster was made head of Air India’s western operation, and the family moved to Britain, settling in Hounslow. Monica’s teaching qualifications were not accepted in the UK, so she found work as a ward assistant at West Middlesex hospital. While there she studied Pitman shorthand and typing and later worked first as a legal secretary in various solicitors’ offices, and then as a medical secretary in the major London hospitals.
In 1960s Britain my parents would be told that they could not rent a house because the owners preferred “no coloureds”. Monica treated this petty racism with a kind of superior bemusement – and we always got the houses she wanted.
When she eventually followed her long-time wish to study Chinese, at Soas, Monica’s Catholicism was temporarily displaced by a sympathy for Chinese communism.
And when I, too, became a mature student in my mid-30s, Monica temporarily moved in with us to help look after our children. More grandchildren came along and she was active in bringing them all up. She remained fit into old age and continued to enjoy kicking a football around.
Kimster died in 1995. Monica is survived by her children, Sue, Kim and me, four grandchildren, and her siblings Cynthia, Charles, Bruce, Dionne, Neil and Bluebell.

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