They reached India on 10 December and spent Christmas in Madras. Buchman disappeared on Christmas Eve, and reappeared with a Christmas tree, decorations and presents, and a signed photograph of Gandhi for each of them - 'a priceless present', Wade observed.

It was plain, however, that the air needed to be cleared, and after Christmas they kept a day free for that purpose. In many ways it was like the conversations in the Tientsin Hotel room all over again. This, however, was an even more painful confrontation: Wade and Rickert, as relatively new boys, kept well clear of it, but as Hamilton recalled, Shoemaker, Day and he all spoke their minds forcibly:* 'We all tried to say what we felt and, from our side, we said fairly bluntly the things we felt Frank had been - secretive, authoritarian, inconsiderate.'

(* Godfrey Webb-Peploe, the last to join the party in Port Said, had by now carried out his previous plan to visit Amy Carmichael's mission centre in Dohnavur.)

Wade saw Buchman coming out, tears rolling down his cheeks. 'They're all against me, Nick,' he said. 'What have I done?'

Wade replied that he thought Buchman had been a bit outspoken.

'Do you really think so?' asked Buchman, in great distress.

'Yes,'said Wade,'I do.'

'It isn't easy to get a profound unity of six people,' wrote Shoemaker to Mrs Tjader, a few days later. 'All of us have our characteristic sins and weaknesses...(Frank) is so in the habit of holding others in line that he isn't always ready to be held himself.'9

Despite these private upheavals, the months in India were rewarding. On 23 December Buchman had met Gandhi again at the Congress Party conference at Belgaum, and photographs show them laughing vigorously with Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, later the Governor-General of independent India, and the Ali brothers, the Muslim leaders in whose home Gandhi had recently completed a 21-day fast. There, too, he first met the young Jawaharlal Nehru, who afterwards sent Buchman his photograph and asked for the book, Life Changers, which Buchman had promised to send him. Unitedly the party took on the Student Christian meetings with friends like Gandhi's confidant, C. F. Andrews* and Bishop Pakenham-Walsh.

(* The Revd Charles F. Andrews, who died in 1940, was a missionary and author who devoted himself to the rights of the Indian people both in India and in Africa.)

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