After I showed signs of giving up writing about some of my past, my wonderful wife, Dorothy, astutely saw that I needed some pretend-business to simulate the routines of my former working life. When I lost impetus, she began to prod and pace me with discoveries of photos from family collections and from Web-troves.

As we grow old, the theatre of the mind becomes the only show in town. Its extempore performances convince me that, in our old age, our everyday consciousness is mostly fabricated from memories. When we are young, the main task of consciousness seems to be a mental GPS, navigating us along routes of fuzzy recollections of “What do I do next?” and “How can I manage it?” In our youth, memories of an incoherent past do often sneak into attention, whether or not we actively search for them, but, as we age, the cumulating debris of lengthening life are not just haphazardly intrusive but increasingly take over our self-consciousness and become the basis of our vivid feeling of being alive.

I do not know whether the Hindi word Kul, which means both today and yesterday, is a linguistic accident or signals an important discovery about our experience of time. We can only guess tomorrow. We try to reconstruct an increasingly dubious yesterday by archaeology of mind-litter.

We know from elementary neurology that all of our memories are records made, stored and played out by nerve cells in our brains. Like all of the trillion trillions of other cells in our bodies, our neurons have been fabricated from the inert stuff of the world. Mr Spargot, a Latin Master, trying to provoke a flicker of interest in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, used to tell his pupils, that every one of us incorporates in our bodies a few of Julius’ former atoms. We used to joke that Mr Spargot was crammed with Neanderthal molecules (recent DNA sampling has shown that this is precisely true). Spargot was also on the ball because all of our bodies, including our living brains, are made up not only of some molecules inherited from our biological ancestors but of material left behind by other organic things, such as the millions of non-human single-celled creatures that inhabit us as their world, and the residues of the plants and of unlucky beasts that we once ate. In their turn, all of their and our molecules were made of stuff that has been around for longer than we can comprehend. The neurons that play out our memories when they are activated are self-assembled from millennia of rubbish: Ammonite atoms, perhaps even Pterodactyl parts, Brontosaurus bits, Diplodocus-droppings, and Mammoth-mess All of this all of which once was unliving star-dust that swirled about for the billions of years since the Biggest Bang of All, and became part of a violent and fiery proto-Earth, then baked through endless Cretaceous and Jurassic summers and froze in appalling ice. Each individual cell in our bodies and brains is stuff that can never have any knowledge of being part of a “self” any more than the metal components of a lap-top computer can “experience” the programs that it stores and runs. To transcribe some of my self-programs into web-electrons is to transfer them to yet another inanimate medium. So, over unimaginable periods of kul, we could not sense or care about being inert stuff and we can be certain that we cannot relish, resent or realise the next kul of nothing at all.  

When our marriage ended, my wife needed our old car so I could only rarely borrow it and so could rarely visit, now only seldom taking grandchildren to cover clumsy non-communication. Intervals between trips became long. I began to see Dorothy, who eventually became, and still is, my extraordinary wife. With her help, and her car, my visits became a little more frequent and Dorothy joined in, had the initiative to take reminders of India such as mangoes, and organised trips to the University Parks and tea on our tiny front lawn (Mum could not possibly manage the steep stairs up to our flat). With these changes, Mum became a little more communicative. She took some lively initiatives, once using meagre savings to fund a trip to a restaurant for lunch with her most-liked staff and friends. She kept up correspondence with old friends. For a few years the Bell sisters featured in her sparse news and I believe that they once made the difficult trip up from Crawley to visit her. After a few years she, sadly, heard that they had died asleep one night simultaneously stifled by a defective gas boiler. Mum gradually began to launch less-timid conversational ploys. She said of Dorothy, carefully choosing her words, that she was “Glad that I now had a companion”. She once, suddenly, said to me “I have not been a good mother to you”. I was struck witless and, instead of frantic denials, could only say that I had no complaints. She expressed polite relief. Accumulations of comics calendared the shameful rarity of my visits.

Inevitably, as family deaths accumulate, all of the supportive framework of childhood vanishes. Mick also died. Typically, he had climbed a tree in his garden to cut off surplus branches with one of his hoard of dangerous weapons, a heavy Nepalese Kukri knife. He fell out of the tree, did not seem immediately damaged, but had a stroke soon after.

I had begun to try to find a way to leave Oxford and was offered a job in Durham. This would have made visits to Mum very rare but I accepted. With diffuse cowardice I could not bring myself to tell Mum of my imminent departure. As far as I know she was unaware of the looming problem but resolved it by having a terminal heart-attack. I briefly sat outside the hospital emergency room and saw, and heard, the first struggles to keep her alive. These were only partially successful and she remained there for a few weeks, with a difficult future because the Nursing Home could only accept her back if she was relatively fit. My sister Sheila visited once, was uproariously critical and suspicious of the excellent medical attention that Mum was getting but very soon, and abruptly, went back to Guernsey where she now lived. We later learned that her sudden departure was because she was in the process of being left by her husband and was desperately trying to interrupt his new relationship with the lady who owned a Health Food shop in which he had begun to work.

Dorothy visited my Mum in hospital and brough her soiled nightdresses home to wash because the management claimed that this was expected, if not obligatory. I visited her, with Dorothy and my dear son Adrian who was then living with us, but Mum was in a deep coma and nothing could be said. I neglectfully chose this uncertain time to go to a meeting abroad. She died while I was away.

The Blackbird Leys Nursing Home arranged the funeral and, to run the event, activated a youngish Irish Priest, who had occasionally visited her. There were many more people than at my father’s pawky farewell. The Home-Manager-Nurse told me that the congregation was exceptionally large because “We expect, on average, just one or two years. Fifteen is extraordinary!” Mum had kept up correspondences with frail old friends, one of whom travelled the long way from London to attend; there was recorded music and the Priest did his thing. While they ate sandwiches the Home provided, people I did not know told me how sorry they were. I had not previously met the Priest but he located me to ask, with alarming intensity, if “I was all right?” I was surprised, and abashed to discover that, as in all my encounters with death I was numb - and I became alarmed that he might be picking up on absence of ostentatious grief as a deep character flaw: lack of spirit to generate, or even the decent Irish manners to act-out, some heart-rent distress.

Memories of a very long life can cluster without any connections other than time-sequence. Contacts with my parents became rare and unsuccessful, partly because they lived so far away, but mainly because they and my wife disliked each other very much. However we were able to introduce them to three wonderful grandchildren who have aged into the kindest, smartest and dearest adults I can imagine.

I suddenly heard that Mum had a stroke and had been taken to hospital. This left Dad, now 75, to manage alone as best he could. I tried to help by driving, weekly, from Cambridge to Rochester on my way to Oxford, but Dad was so desolate that we could not communicate even as poorly as we used. I drove him to visit Mum in St Bart’s hospital. Her small body hardly raised the bedclothes. She was as grey and still as the many corpses that I had once wheeled about much older and shabbier All Saints’. She said that she felt “like a seagull, clinging to a cliff in a storm”. My father could not find anything to say to either of us and I began to realise how bereft and helpless he was so I took him home and tried to help in ways that he did not think he needed, or wanted, such as organising attention from Social Services, arranging Meals on Wheels and alerting neighbours and police to watch out for him. Of course, I also offered incoherent sympathy, but he knew that I would not give what he desperately needed: support in a family that felt obligations to him, even if they were as uneasy in his company as he was in theirs.

I continued futile weekly visits although we never mentioned the total care he desperately craved. We both knew that my refusal contrasted bitterly with his life-long support of his own parents - but he never mentioned this. The most he did to illustrate his anxieties was to report fragments of information he picked up in meetings with other frail elderly that the Social Services arranged for him to meet. These seemed to be hard-case geriatrics eager to shock and demoralise him - one old man claimed that a persistent problem in Council Sheltered Accommodation is that malevolent strangers sneak into your room to piss on your bed.

After weeks I discovered that Dad would often empty much of the meals-on-wheels the Social Services delivered down the outside drain. He lost weight. Sometimes he did better by standing in the road outside his house until a neighbour asked him whether he was “all right” and tried to cheer him by cooking him curry that he liked. To me, who did not even cook him decent curries, he would shout “Why do you come?” meaning, of course, “What are you actually doing for me?“ I could only say, to hurt him back, that I was surprised that he had never once visited Mum since I took him to the hospital and that my inadequate efforts were “for Mum’s sake”. He raged that he felt too weak to get to the hospital and I stupidly sneered that it was on an easy door-to-door bus route. He shouted that he had become unable to communicate with me “since I had begun to crow” and, lurched into a fury and chased me round the kitchen table trying to hit me. He had become easy to dodge.

Mum became well enough to be discharged by the hospital. This forced the hard question as to how she could be cared for. Dad had optimistically brought her bed down steep narrow stairs to the front room. This must have been very hard work but was useless because she needed a level of care he could not possibly manage. Her lifelong friends, the sisters Aileen and Blanche Bell, now lived in Crawley in Sussex and, with remarkable generosity, they volunteered to look after her until she was better. This was a huge and instant relief for me and I hoped also for Dad. Seizing sudden new hope he hired a taxi to go from Rochester to Crawley to visit her and to plead, desperately, with the Bells to take him on as well. They refused. He taxied back in even greater anger and despair.

During the next few weeks Dad grew increasingly demoralised until I was told that he had been found, paralysed by a stroke, lying on the floor by his living room chair. He had been taken to All Saints’ hospital where I had portered many years ago. I found him, grey-faced, incoherently agitated and helpless, over-filling a railed cot. He recognised me but could only manage furious blurting to convey rage and contempt.

There is no useful plan to communicate with someone who is enraged and disgusted with you and can only express his feelings by incoherent roaring. I was relieved when he seemed to fall asleep but then I could only sit by him with nothing to say except stupidly to ask whether there was anything I could get, or do, for him, and to tell him that he would soon be better. He could never coherently answer. All the nurses were very kind and efficient, but had also mastered evasion of impossible questions. I used to sit by him silently thinking about whatever I could until it was time to drive on to Oxford to do my bits of teaching.

I came back a week later and found Dad in a different, lower-grade ward that I recognised as being as being the one with the spiral staircase on which I had my first close encounter with a corpse. I am not sure that he knew me during his brief wakes. I sat silent because I could not think of anything to say, or to do. I realised that I should try to ease at least one of us by protesting concern, admiration and affection but did not competently manage any of this. There were no cubicle curtains so I watched nurses bustling around other bed-ridden old men. Most patients were twitchingly comatose but one, suddenly rousing, reached for a bed-side table on which a flask of his urine had been left and, with relief, drank deeply from it. Two nurses saw this and coped with grimacing laughter. I had no-one to talk to and nothing sensible to ask or to do. So, after what seemed a tactful time I went on to Oxford to teach.

Awareness of Dad’s desolation made me ring often from my Cambridge home to pester patient nurses to tell me, yet again, that nothing had changed. I rang on Guy Fawkes Night and a kind nurse again repeated that all remained the same. When I persisted with desperate questions she said “Then come”. So I drove through dark streets smelling of gun-powder from celebratory fireworks that banged and flashed in little back gardens and lit by puny pocket-money-rockets bursting low into orange embers. The trip seemed longer than usual and I found my father’s hospital ward, and his body laid out on a curtained bed. The nurses had washed and cleaned him but could not get his false teeth in properly so they stuck out through his lips like an uncomical beak. I held his chest. It was still as huge as while he used to hug my sister and I to tell us that “He would give his right arm for us” but was now cool and hollow as a big, empty suitcase. I touched him as much as I could bear, sat by him and said useless regretful things. Of course I was sad but, as with my first encounters with corpses, I could not find any appropriate or helpful thoughts. I began to worry, as I still uselessly do, because the kind nurse who had answered my phone call from Cambridge had first said that he had not changed at all and then, brusquely and wearily, sighed: “Then come”. I still uselessly fear that I may have provoked an expedient final solution involving pillows or morphine but I was shocked by numbness rather than by the catastrophic grief that I felt that I owed. I sat, with an arm over his big, empty, quiet chest, not knowing how long to pause before getting on with the next things in my life.

My bed in Cambridge was a long drive away but my wife’s exceptionally warm and kind sister, Johanna (Joki) lived on a smallholding in Upchurch, a nearby village. I knew that she would be alone because her gentle and humorous husband, Sid, had been disabled while walking to work by a pensioner incompetently riding a bike through a rainy dawn. The pensioner was too poor to offer any amends but British Rail had continued Sid as a permanent night station-porter.

So I drove to Upchurch. Wonderful Joki provided sympathy and tea and put me to bed in a spare room. I instantly fell asleep until I was awakened by the arrival, at her front door, of her neighbour Ken who had a ramshackle chicken farm next to her property. Love had burgeoned during collaborative tending of rows of broad beans and Ken had become a regular night-visitor. I woke slightly, could not make out what they were saying but tones of concern and compassion made it easy to get back to sleep.

Mum was still with the Bell sisters in Crawley so I had to drive to tell her that Dad had died. I found their little house and was intercepted, on the pavement, by both, very hostile, women. They had taken a dim view of me since I was an infant and this dislike was now justified, and intensified by my failure to effectively help Mum and Dad and they wanted to get rid of me as fast as possible. They would not let me see Mum to give her my news so I only heard her shriek, indoors, “He’s come to tell me that Jack has gone” as they managed to shoo me off.

My wife was extraordinarily kind and efficient and, with help from excellent Joki, cleared my parents’ council house. I was relieved because I did not want to re-encounter objects that I had known all my life and that would trigger memories of bits of the past that I had shared with my parents. I was relieved that all reminders disappeared into a shed in Joki’s back garden.

I returned to Rochester to arrange a funeral that preceded a cremation because a formal Roman Catholic burial would have cost much more. The service was in a small, and relatively cheap Catholic church managed by a Priest hired by the undertakers. The Priest had not known my father or any of my family so, after he had rapidly got through the service, he had nothing to say to the congregation of three – my wife, my tiny daughter Helen and myself. To fill an uncomfortable silence the Boss Undertaker asked me if I wanted to say anything about my Dad. I could find nothing. They wheeled his body away. I did not want to disown him or to belittle him by silence, or to disparage his life or our relationship. I did not even have the excuse of being tongue-tied. In my profession I had a reputation for public glibness. It was just that I had not thought that anything might be required of me and, when the unexpected question was suddenly put, I once again failed to do what he deserved. I sadly remembered that his ultimate reason for sticking with the Roman religion was to know that there would be somebody to bury him.

This issue of orthodox Catholic Committal was the main point of a furious letter from his brother, my Uncle Mick, now a GP in Pevensey who, rightly, upbraided me for not continuously keeping him informed about my father’s illness, particularly for not telling him the day and time of the funeral and, worst of all, for arranging a cremation instead of the internment that he believed obligatory for all dead Catholics. Defensive anger at being blamed made me reply that the Roman ban of cremations had recently been repealed and that, although Mick had known of my father’s stroke he had never contacted me, asked for details or visited him. I realised that Mick was very busy with his medical practice and I had felt entitled to assume disinterest. This was unkind and unfair. Mick was certainly very upset but must have felt that visiting a moribund and uncommunicating patient would be futile and painful and, perhaps, he also felt that a difficult visit would achieve nothing and might involve unforeseeable commitments. He needed, and deserved apologies, empathy and consolation not my defensive anger.

My job was mainly to push trollies bearing comatose people along dingy corridors. Much of my time was in the porters’ rest room waiting for a buzzer-signal for the next job. The Navy had made me easy with sharing crowded space with middle-aged strangers who were delighted to expose my inexperience of life. My best contribution to their entertainment was to once make tea with water from the hot tap. I had little conversation to offer. Perhaps being so silent got me selected as official Mortuary Porter.

This was a promotion, but ungrudged by my older permanent colleagues because my wages stayed the same. It gained some freedom from supervision and isolation that evolved into virtual independence, but my senior colleagues did not resent these benefits because the job required night work that they did not want. Night allowed corpses to be tactfully removed from their last beds without disturbing the still-living until they woke and noticed a change. My job was to ferry bodies along gloomy corridors and out to be shelved for further disposal in a cool, old brick building. Between shifts as a discreetly clanking Charon, I slept in a chair in a huge hospital kitchen, submerged in heavy smells of old food and distorted reflections in scrubbed aluminium.

Sometimes even brief jobs became difficult because one Victorian building was lift-less. I first cuddled death stumbling a corpse down a narrow spiral staircase from a second floor ward to ground level. I had known this as a lively and cheerful person who joked about an artificial leg propped by his bedside. He had suddenly become knobbly, awkward luggage and his prosthesis, which nurses had cleaned and attached for this trip, had more heft and floppy independence than any other part of him. I embraced him down the twisting staircase as courteously as I could but he was now just a heavy load with clumsy, randomly- moving parts. I tried to generate regret for the live person I had known joking and drinking tea, but he had suddenly changed into a tedious burden that I was relieved to get to his warehouse before his prosthesis detached.

I described these feelings to permanent porter-colleagues who kindly, but condescendingly tried to reassure me that I had not become sub-human: “You just can’t feel or it will crush you”. This did not help the realisation that I had not only experienced detachment, but active irritation and dislike. Perfect numbness needs practice.

I learned from others nearer to my age, who were making similar discoveries. Once I stood by the mortuary relishing a 4 a.m. dawn, waiting to shelve the corpse of an old man wheeled by the nurse who had prepared it for this trip. Such transfers usually involved little conversation but she was even younger than I and needed to delay returning to her ward by stretching an encounter with someone who was still alive. She told me that she was new from her home in Ireland, how much she disliked her new job, and tapped the corpse to illustrate why: “It’s how people treat you. Do you know what he said to me?” He kept shouting “I’m dying, - I’m going, - please hold my hand ”. Proudly angry, she said that she had answered “No way, you dirty old bugger – just get on with it". She needed reassurance that he had been outrageous and that she had done the only possible thing to maintain her self-respect. I hope she took my silence as incoherent sympathy.

We were both discovering that while people are alive they deserve recognition as individuals we acknowledge with liking, hate or even love but, at the moment they die they suddenly become neutral, cumbersome objects. It is shocking that, within a moment, corpses are no longer the once-living persons they exactly resemble but only aides-mémoire for past experiences and feelings. Somebody who is completely tangled in one’s affection and memories has, abruptly, become inert stuff. Recall of shared life and affection may remain but the actor has forever left the stage .

My discoveries about deaths became useful during the next twenty years. Meanwhile, my parents tolerated me while I gobbled food bought with my father’s tiny wages and treated their council house as a communal shelter to which I had as much right as they, not thinking to repay their kindness even with anecdotes of my nightly experiences. We seemed to have, somehow, agreed that it was their duty to house and feed me during University vacations because I had nowhere else to live and must save wages from vacation jobs to manage during college terms. I had tried to organise brief reliefs - as by becoming, for a fortnight at a time, a guinea pig at the National Common Cold Research Centre near Salisbury - but these were only very short respites.

I now realise that my mother was lonely, and would probably have welcomed companionable chat about my strange night-life but she was too diffident to press for bonding gossip. My father’s idea of my role as his permanent house-guest was to be a solitary audience for interminable witty and clever monologues about the nastiness of his current life. He had got a job at last – but it was as a porter at the Isle of Grain oil refinery. Not only had portering been the humblest role in the big offices he had once managed, but he had to get up in harsh, dank winter, to catch a 5 a.m. company bus in which his fellow-workers sat, he said, “looking like wild animals”. He would sometimes offer memory-scraps from his earlier career. These might have been easier listening if they had been glints of past happiness. Unfortunately depression only allowed recollections that he now took as evidence that some of his former colleagues had not liked or respected him as he had once thought they did. I was too self-absorbed and crass to offer anything but silence and he became increasingly savage about my night-absences. Our mutual unease sometimes broke into confrontations. Once, when I got home early one morning he burst into my room to roar and threaten to beat me up for having sexual adventures under lying cover of night work. It was pleasant to realise that he was partly right but embarrassing to feel that, as he pointed out, while I lived in his house and was supported by his tiny hard-earned wages, that I owed submission to his rules.

What Dad needed was for me to become a companion or, at least to accept him as totally and uncritically as if I were still very small. Sadly, neither of us could backtrack to our earlier arrangements or invent congenial new roles.

The logistics of leaving home to independently support myself during University vacations were difficult, but I surreptitiously married and then, with a new, illicit wife mimicked undergraduate life as well as I could while doing casual jobs such as sand-papering Post Office trucks for painting. These jobs re-emphasised the important lesson that the Navy had begun to teach: how extraordinarily tedious are the things that most of us have to do to maintain our entire lives. I sometimes found spells of easier, dull but cosy, indoor work as a temporary clerk in Marshall’s Airport drawing-office and in Eaden Lilley’s toy department, where my new wife now worked and organised me casual stints. Another income-trickle was, very cheaply, translating Russian astronomy textbooks for Pergamon Press owned by notorious Robert Maxwell.

I continued, as best I could, until I got a degree in Psychology. This was mediocre but, early in the post-finals summer, I was the only one among my fellow students who could still be located in Cambridge to be physically interviewed for a grant to become a PhD student. Because my degree-level was just good enough to qualify, this launched my life-work. The Experimental Psychology Department had applied for the money to fund another person who could not use it because he, unexpectedly, had an even more mediocre degree than mine. I eventually put together a PhD thesis and then was hired to work in the Cambridge Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Research Unit to continue, for the rest of a very long and happy working life, doing interesting things while comfortable, warm and dry indoors.

First person accounts of idealised undergraduate experiences often describe how protagonists are rescued from natural or acquired vanity, silliness, or even spite by perceptive guidance from wise tutors. My college Director of Studies was certainly learned and probably very perceptive and wise and well-intentioned but, unknown to me, and perhaps also to him, he was just a year from his death and could manage only weary tolerance. He taught in a tiny work-room overlooking Silver Street that I have envied all through my life, sitting with a pleasant view, at an admirably workmanlike kitchen table (that I admired) which he had covered with a blanket (that I did not approve of) and displaying a photo of D.H. Lawrence, (evidently taken on a bad-beard moment while he was working himself up for another of his incomprehensible rants on Passion’s Golden Purity that are so markedly different from his lucid poems). For my tutor I dutifully read, liked, and wrote on set-piece questions about Aristotle’s Poetics, Mallory, the Pearl, Piers Ploughman and some Chaucer. This pleasant drudgery gained acknowledgement of duty done but no comments igniting new insights. I enjoyed reading everything that he told me to, but no more than if I had discovered it for myself. I would have been impressed into attempts at more useful conversations if I had then realised what I accidentally discovered decades later – his long and rich correspondence and friendship with his much earlier pupil, T. H. White, whom I revered as the author of The Once and Future King. My tutor was too jaded, and I was too shy and docile to make our encounters memorable but there were other actors to maintain my fading enthusiasm for “Eng. Lit”. I got up early for lectures on Shakespeare by a don called Rossiter, not (just) for exam-expedient note-taking but for enjoyment of histrionics and style. His performances were remarkable and I was distressed to hear of his death – but also slightly cheered by learning that this was in a motorcycle accident that, somehow, seemed a final flamboyance predicable from his lecturing performances.

With Rossiter gone I still had a reason for early-rising for a splendid lecture-course on The Allegory of Love given by C.S. Lewis on leave from Oxford. He was amazingly fat, brilliantly eloquent, and sometimes very funny. His remarkable talents consolidated my conviction that literary scholarship is a rich entertainment invented by, and perhaps also intended for, those with extreme histrionic talents. I would like to boast that this was why, after a struggle with my College authorities, I managed to change my degree course to Experimental Psychology, and this eventually became my livelihood. Unfortunately those who have noticed would say that the idea of scholarship as performance has never left me.

Immersion in this engrossing new environment had made me almost completely forget my parents so I was surprised that they had not forgotten me back. My mother wrote that they planned a visit - expensive for them because they had to hire a car, and possible only because they could share expenses with the Bell sisters who were to accompany them. I was alarmed suddenly to become responsible for the success of an Extreme Family Treat but knew that my father, at least, must greatly look forward to it because he loved driving cars but had never been able to afford this since he left India. In spite of the potential difficulties of his skill-rehabilitation they arrived, and I met them, on time, and it was easy for me to pose as the personal owner and trustee of all of the famous Cambridge sights and to be knowledgeable about cheap restaurants for lunch. My mother was appreciative; the Bell sisters supported her enthusiasm; my father, for some time, could not find anything to remark until, in the impressive setting of Trinity Great Court we saw an actual, living Don, scuttling along with long hair supporting his mortar-board hat. My uneasy father cheered up to find something in all of this splendour that he could mock. The academic’s hair length, and my visible, barber-expense-saving progression towards it gave him a topic for deflating ridicule. I was surprised, and very touched when, as we parted he handed me a twenty pound note. This was astoundingly generous: worth at least £223 in current spending-money and probably more than a week’s wages from his new, detested, job as a porter in the Isle of Grain Oil refinery and more than a months’ living allowance from my State Scholarship. I was deeply embarrassed, touched and gleeful at being suddenly empowered for extravagance on frivolities that did not include a close hair-cut. I think that I used some of it to support my obsession to achieve at least minimal distinctiveness by buying a ridiculous paisley cravat as a substitute for the neck-ties that I had given up wearing.

Cambridge still remains the same gorgeous stage set. Later I became a college tutor in Oxford and undergraduate memories made me try to reassure my students by telling them that they should regard the University as a magnificently equipped costume room, as at Covent Garden, where they might safely dress for any fantasy role they wished with no risk that this would affect their later lives. Now I am not so sure.

Of those I have mentioned here, Michael Frayn has just added to his huge and distinguished lifetime output his memoir of undergraduate friendships with remarkable, gifted and kind people that have enhanced his long life. Hugh W wrote at least one very funny thriller that, for me engagingly, borrowed protagonists’ surnames from the staff of the 1950’s/60’s Cambridge Psychology department. It is sad that HW cannot write more. Ken who, at the beginning of his eventful life tried to put me on track to develop myself beyond my innate psychological limitations and defects, resumed a sad correspondence when he was nearly at his end - with half a million words of an unpublished autobiography describing that, but not how or why, he went down from Cambridge Glory to become loosely attached to the History Department in the University of Manchester. He then taught in Jamaica where he claims to have been involved in some sort of small, ( probably Marxist) rebellion, then in Nigeria (he writes vividly on mangrove forests and on his excruciating personal angsts). He taught himself Vietnamese, wrote academic volumes on Nigerian and on East Asian Politics and was elected a Professor of Politics and History in the Hague. He mentions his struggles with lifelong obesity but claims compensatory ecstasies with a prodigious number of prostitutes that he described as “Dutch Treats”. He hated an ill-judged early retirement during which, except during maintenance-care-visits from one of his treats, he became increasingly ill and solitary. His loyal intermittent carer kindly e-mailed me news of the last weeks of “the most lonely person in the world” ending with an account of how she followed a van that took his body to a mortuary “so that he would not be alone”.

In spite of the memory-baggage, some of which I have described here, I still, very greatly, enjoy visiting Cambridge.

Ken’s successes had convinced him that Cambridge was an intensely competitive environment in which newcomers would be ignored into invisibility, or even despised unless they could flamboyantly shine in many dimensions of notability. I was scared of competition, because it had never worked for me, but decided that I must somehow begin to re-present myself, and withdrew tiny Naval salary savings from my Post Office account to buy a new civilian jacket: “drape-cut” with enormous lapels. This was impressive in the Medway towns but instantly seen as a pretentious disaster by everyone I was to meet in Cambridge. I was also on a roll, having become “mightily chuffed”, (to use the Naval language I had learned) by the moment of official recognition that I had, at last, become a true-blooded Brit. This happened when I mumbled my shameful “temporary naturalised status” to a kind clerk at the local passport office and was reassured that my ex-Naval paybook now made me as Truly British as Lord Nelson himself.

There are countless accounts of how wonderful it was to be young and in Cambridge at this time. The kindest is typical of Michael Frayn and is in his novel Sweet Dreams where Cambridge becomes a lobby for heaven. A very slight acquaintance with Michael enriched my undergraduate experience but, during my first weeks several ex-coders I already knew provided unthreatening company. All seemed, like myself, to have become infected with desperation to stand out, even in small details of their lives. Hugh W, a year ahead of me, now posed as a wine-sophisticate. He said that he really knew little about wine but showed me an article, scorning sherry, that he had written for a student magazine. He said that he supported his new pretensions by buying very cheap bottles of red wine and passing them off as remarkable discoveries for which he invented names, often mock-Spanish or pseudo-Algerian. Because it was so memorably disgusting I still remember one that he called Sparfuchita. I took Ken’s pressing advice to join the Cambridge Union, but a delusion that I could turn myself into a professional journalist made the student newspaper, Varsity, more engaging. I had never debated anything, and was far too shy to try, but Varsity gave me an excuse to justify a painfully huge Union subscription by watching debates from the gallery to gather material for a review column. Varsity also provided a cosy basement in their offices in St David’s Crescent in which I spent most of my time and met memorable people. Pleasant, and impressive, was an Editor, Gavin Lyall. He had not yet married Katharine Whitehorn, or written the first of his spy-thrillers that I still enjoy. These are too few, because he died sadly young. During a stint as overall editor of Varsity he was far more congenial, and much more liked and admired than strange Michael Winner whose attempts at nocturnal sleep-learning from a tape-cassette under his pillow did not improve his minimal degree class but, perhaps, helped his later, extremely public career as a self-advertising reviewer of restaurants and beautiful women. There were also other remarkable people, such as Peter Cook who, long before his international fame as an all-purpose comic caused me extreme jealousy by writing a brilliant Varsity feature on Christmas work in the Post Office – an annual stint for most of us.

Then we were sent to an RAF camp at Withall, near Birmingham, where we practised writing down lists of Russian numbers read, very fast over headphones, and failed to learn the little about electronics that stolid Petty Officers tried to teach us. Then, with some unease at loss of mutual support, we were separated and sent to different ships some of which actually went to sea. I was sent to a destroyer, called Corunna, in which I learned to sleep in the hammock that I had uselessly carted around with me for more than a year, now swaying against the ceilings of iron rooms like one of a cluster of huge, beige insect-pupae. I recall few other impressions except that the hillocks of green-grey sea-surfaces, constantly wallowing under the portholes always looked solid enough to clamber. My most vivid memories are of perpetual seasickness that obliged my messmates find a spare bucket for me to carry around. These new acquaintances were more tolerant of me, and each other, than any other group of people I have ever known. It was not that they much liked each other, or were exceptionally kind. It was just that living without mutual abrasions was part of a job that they had learned to do very well. They explained calm mutual tolerance by describing how being shut up in metal boxes for weeks on end can make even slight frictions dangerously unpleasant. I have since found as much humour, some genuine mutual liking, but far less civility in University Common rooms .

A fine new thing was the daily rum ration. This has long been abolished but, in my time, it was a wonderful bonus that ships’ crews, while afloat, should be assembled, every day at precisely local Noon, to each drink a tumbler of delicious rum that had been mixed with water so that it would spoil if we tried to hoard it. Our “Tots” were ceremoniously ladled from a brass-ornamented polished wood half-keg. The rum was stupefying and caused inertias during which ships’ crews seemed to be incapable of defending themselves against anything at all.

Eventually we were sent from our various ships to Cuxhaven, in North Germany. This is a chilly Baltic port where we lived in a barracks near a very smelly fish-processing factory. There was no more rum but at last we were given the task that for which we had been trained for so very long - to sit, at all hours of days and nights, in stuffy, smoke-filled wooden huts listening, on headphones attached to huge grey radio-sets, to any Russian military radio-chatter that we could pick up. Almost all messages were long lists of digit-code, read very rapidly. We thought that we could have done as well if we had been taught only Russian numerals instead of Turgenev and outdated Soviet patriotic songs. The messages were dully incomprehensible because they were sent elsewhere to be decoded. Collecting them was unpleasant because, to ease sleepy boredom everybody smoked all the time snuffing out their cigarette butts in the lids of the tins that had held their astoundingly cheap and generous rations of “Duty Free” cigarettes. I did not smoke and saved my cheap fags to help my addicted father with his task of turning the indoor walls and ceilings of my parents’ new council house orange with nicotine. I do not remember that any of us had any feelings about individual Russians who read out the lists of numbers that we copied, even when we began to recognise voices and respiratory problems. The Korean war was still being fought, but not yet directly by the Russians against us though its progress made it seem possible that, at any moment, our comfortable tedium might be disrupted by Slavonic Armies swarming down the Baltic. Above each of our huge, expensive radio sets hung seriously big axes with which, if an invasion occurred, we were to destroy the costly equipment of our furtive occupation. We did not worry and felt no fear or animosity for those on whom we eavesdropped. Life became a very cosy, suburban late adolescence. Even now, some colleagues who have survived into their late eighties and nineties message to boast how, at Cuxhaven, they spent time with unimaginably friendly and lovely German girlfriends.

It is inevitable that randomly assembled groups of unrelated people should share time-islands, disconnected from any other part of their lives, with persons they are unlikely to meet again. However, in each such group, at least one energetic survivor will, usually late in life, become compelled to attempt backward time-travel by convening reunions of elderly strangers. Perhaps as they grow old people need reassurance that that they too, were once, briefly, and now unimaginably young.

The only Coder Special Re-Union to which I went was organised in a ramshackle London Club where the lift was not working and fifty geriatrics toiled up many, many flights of stairs to an eating hall that seemed to have been crudely modelled on the attic of a Swiss Chalet. The food was expensive and dull, as was the wine, which was also insufficient to help conversation. Our grasp of memories of trivial experiences had become weak. We discussed vanished colleagues and were relieved to accept any consensus of recollection. Soon after soup people settled to what they really wanted to talk about: their personal Post-Special lives with blatant/subtle hints at satisfactory incomes, achievements, possessions and, in two cases, long catalogues of wives. The unchanging dead were briefly mentioned as a contrast to mutable us, still eating lamb in a still-altering present that, though it may not be wonderful is at least visible, audible, tangible, tasty and smell-able until it, too vanishes with the brain cells that compute and store all that we understand about who, where and what we have been.

My departure had been long expected so there was no fuss. My sister was delighted because this meant that my father could share the front first floor bedroom with my mother and she would have the back bedroom to herself. Only my sick grandmother took this as a significant change in my life, or as the beginnings of a fracture of the family. She took me aside to tell me that “things were getting very bad here” and that I was lucky to be getting away. I puzzled a bit because I had felt that family life was uneasy but I had not noticed any recent change for the worse and put her remarks down to depressing illness. Departure day arrived, I found my travel warrant, said unemotional “goodbyes” and walked to the rail-station to begin a very different life.

Victoria Barracks Portsmouth was like a 19th century red-brick mental hospital with added acres of tarmac for drilling. It smelled strongly of stale people and of foul yellow soap congealed into long tough bars that I would learn to call Pusser’s (Purser’s) Hard. It was a cold and wet October. The gate sentry seemed pleased about this and shouted to tell an accumulating mob of bedraggled adolescents at the Barrack Gate to stand in the rain until he was satisfied that no more were due. We shuffled about, did not like the look of each other and said nothing. Then angry middle-aged men in uniforms turned up to lead us to sheds and give us things. I got a razor that I did not need, a shaving brush, a prickly blue serge uniform, even pricklier beige underwear with long sleeves and legs, a toothbrush, a dark blue cardboard-bound copy of Queen’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions, various blue-denim garments, an absurd too-big peaked hat with a white hat-cover to wear in summer or “in the tropics”, a hammock with supporting cords, monstrous boots and a boot-cleaning kit, hairy socks and a huge stained cylindrical canvas bag to hold all this stuff. Our keepers shouted instructions to find our barrack rooms. These were warehouses for people crammed with two-tiered iron bunk beds and dented metal cupboards.

My bunk mate was as young as I but had signed on to stay in the Navy until he would be almost middle aged to earn the privilege of becoming what was still called a “Stoker Mechanic” - although it was decades since anyone had actually shovelled coal in engine rooms. His name was Aubrey and I think that he knew that he would suffer for this but was not yet embittered and wary. He preferred the upper bunk and, because he looked big and irritable I happily agreed. We found the Mess Hall mainly by tracking the smell. The food was unfamiliar; generous slops of yellow pasty stuff flecked with large meat fragments and covered in bread-crumbs. I loved it, but the tea was very dark and tasted strange. Aubrey said this was because the Navy put bromine into it to quell our dangerous sexual appetites. I knew from school chemistry that bromine was a deadly poison but could not be sure that Aubrey was misinformed and kept this to myself. Before he joined up Aubrey had an actual paying job and so now still had some money. I did not, so, when we had found the NAAFI he generously bought me beer to drink. I did not like it much.

Cohabitation with Aubrey became tolerable, even comfortable, like a marriage that has passed failure and attained resignation. Like all close partners he had some irritating habits. The most regular was that, every night, about five minutes after lights out, he would begin purposefully pleasuring himself. This was inconvenient because he was very large, our two-tier bunk was rickety, he experienced many false positives and, even when I was exhausted his ritual delayed precious sleep. Aubrey also had domestic quirks. Before lights out he would work at his hobby – making fire-place rag-rugs for his mother and aunts. He became furious if I, or anyone else wearing boots clambered on to a table to reach stuff stacked in high-shelf cupboards and would shout : “Would you march all over the tables at Home!? What would your mother say!?“ He was not so upset if you were wearing only socks but made it clear that he felt that he had moved from a cosy, civilised world into a den of feckless ruffians.

I did not see him during the day because he drilled and trained among other aspiring engine-room crew while I was with the Coder Specials. We found this job-description tiresome because our trainer, a Gunnery Instructor nicknamed Jeremiah, was a grand-master of abuse who relished bawling “Specials Fall In” with the clear implication that he was herding a shambling group of Learning Impaired. This was not unjust because many of us found distinctions between our left and right sides confusing and needed much time, and practice, to march in step or to present a rifle with a proper, dignified slap and boot crunch. One shambling gifted linguist had taught himself an impressive amount of Russian in a couple of weeks before he was called up so we nicknamed him Boris. He was so startlingly incompetent in all other life skills that it was a great pleasure to discover that he had been to Eton.

If your parents name you “Patrick Rabbitt” by the time you are 8 years old you are certain that you have heard every possible weak joke that can possibly be wrung out of your bad luck and you ignore any new attempts with weary indifference. Jeremiah confronted me with creative genius by screaming novel ingenuities such as “Rabbitt P At Ease“. After a few weeks we were moved to new and spick concrete buildings, inland in Hampshire but called “Her Majesty’s Ship Mercury”. It was much newer and more attractive than my school had been. We learned to type on coding machines and were shown many black and white films to teach us about Service Life. I particularly remember one showing a hundred sailors being precisely counted and assembled on a parade ground only to be gradually disbanded as those who lacked teeth, or had poor eyesight, venereal diseases, piles or herpes were removed until only one unblemished super-matelot remained. I still don’t understand what we were meant to learn from this: Possibly that almost nobody is perfect.

There was a pub nearby on a green in Hambledon just outside which cricket had, allegedly, been invented. Nobody minded if we drank in it. Most of us preferred to achieve relaxing dizziness with sweet cherry brandy rather than harsh whisky or gin or sour beer. My memories of social life in Mercury are of peaceful lack of competition. Those in charge wanted to stuff us with information and teach us skills that we meant to forget as soon as we could. We had no desire to compete with each other to learn things that would be irrelevant to our personal futures. The present was only slightly uncomfortable and was best ignored by making weak jokes to try to accelerate it into a future that would certainly be quite different. We believed that our real lives would be self-assembled, whether by efforts or neglect and, whether solid or ramshackle would be different from the numb present in ways unique for each of us. This, of course, turned out to be the case.

A letter from my mother told me that Old Mum had died of heart-failure. She had reached 76. Memories of an entire life spent under the tyranny of her vast, genuine, and uncontrollable affection convinced me that I must feel catastrophic grief. I was shocked that, although I had no trouble recalling hundreds of her intense demonstrations of caring I could not feel the misery that I felt I owed in return. My new life was simple but it took all my attention. I was shocked by lack of feeling, tried to generate appropriate pining but could not immediately manage this. So I deferred spectacular grief with a resolution that I would postpone atoning for my treacherous numbness with postponed excruciating regret. Unfortunately many decades have passed without my ever being sufficiently distracted from the small preoccupations of living to pay Old Mum her dues.

Things worked out well and with half a crown for entrance money and bus-fare I was allowed to prospect non-denominational youth clubs as far away as Chatham and Gillingham. I did, indeed, meet girls and learned to un-tie my tongue in their company. I did not realise what a momentous transition this was until one day I was walking past the Post Office in Rochester High Street and met, and briefly greeted and laughed with a girl I only slightly knew. My father suddenly came out of the Post Office, saw us and went furiously home to lurk, outraged, in his Football-Pool Room preparing his most furious and prolonged verbal attack ever. I was frightened, angry and depressed, but not surprised because, without ever having being overtly told, I tacitly understood that I was forbidden to speak to random girls, let alone to appear, however innocently, to be on friendly terms with any . Since I was six my grandmother had puzzled and intrigued me by stressing that I must never meet, let alone associate with women she referred to as “Nymphomaniacs” who would “Ruin My Life”. I have never been lucky enough to meet any nymphomaniacs, (who sound rather jolly) and the few women who have generously tolerated me have enriched and enhanced my life. So, though I was prepared for Dad’s rage I was shocked at its intensity, and I did not understand how it could apply to nice, cheerful, Pauline.

For both my father and myself this was a critical moment of recognition that we had moved into different worlds between which it was not just difficult, but perilous to try to communicate. We had shared the common years of our lives in India and still lived in the same house but somehow we lived in entirely different towns. For my father Rochester was a wasteland where he was deprived of self-respect. He had mastered the street plan and some bureaucratic survival rules but he could not manage to find pleasure or even comfort in increased familiarity. I did not miss, or even think about the intense colours, the raucous birds, the cries of street-sellers of water and sweets, huge high clouds in a hot blue sky, shabby sun-fragrant great mango trees, powerfully loathsome smells or the unique senses of humour of Indian friends. I had, instead, a wonderful Public Library with its friendly smell of decaying books and kind Esme, who let me take out more than my quota and did not fuss if I returned them late. I also had the Casino roller-skating rink where I worked every evening for thirty shillings a week and tried to impress girls. Our transactions never went beyond my taking their money for loaned skates but the Casino enriched my life in many other ways - it liberated me from any need to depend on pocket money from my family and this joblet was an acceptable excuse for not being at home in the evenings and simulated a social life with strangers of my own age.

Rochester was a twee city with a grim Norman Castle Keep near a dignified park called The Vines which has a colonnade of impressive trees. It also has a gentle red-brick ex-Huguenot housing precinct and a gloomy mansion, once lived in by Charles Dickens, known as “Miss Haversham’s House”. I had imperceptibly become comfortable with the idea that I was now an authentic Brit and part of an intense and richly documented race-history.

This was mostly achieved by random reading that included T.H. White’s remarkable The Once and Future King and his other hyper-patriotic title England Have My Bones. I loved White’s fun with re-cycling of Arthurian myths but missed though silently absorbed an underlying ideology that, nowadays, would be called Fascist - Nationalist. One of my school-friends, Nick Cash, still alive and communicating, had a schoolmaster father who had known Henry Williamson. This led me (again with Esme’s kind help) to work through Williamson’s WW1 memoirs, The Flax of Dream and, eventually, Tarka the Otter which I did not much like, especially the cruel end which seems to relish, and not just comment that pain and cruelty are “part of nature”. I am now ashamed that I so easily assimilated Williamson’s world-view. His romantic fascism was less insidious than T.H. White’s but I quietly absorbed it, momentarily put-off by his account of pleasuring his cavalry mare with his forearm during a lull in his WW1. It is embarrassing to realise that what I learned to intensely believe when I was 16 and 17 makes me still not only recognise but understand the intensity of romantic illusions that the English extreme right still cherish. As in all withered love-affairs to understand does not revive emotions but does force one to remember and to acknowledge some illusions. I now realise that the romantic patriotism I felt was the identical literary artifact that still drives destructive nostalgia and change-anxiety in True Brits. Then I felt I had, at last, discovered the right text-books to show me how to become authentically British ; not just a licensed resident but with fervent, historically-licenced allegiance. Now, talking with Whole White British contemporaries, I find references to this literature are not only acceptable conversation-ornaments but also markers of the degree to which “Britishness”, and indeed “Great” Britain are literary inventions. To sample this huge, compelling literature is not to awake to something that we once were, now are, or can become in the future - but It is a useful clue to the strange hopes, fears and exaltations of identity in this invented country of the mind.

I fell passionately in love with the English countryside (though, in comparison with India, it was a toy-garden grown in a bottle and fast failing even in 1953). I no longer missed (or even thought about) the dense Bombay Ghat jungles or massive Himalayan deodars and steep rugged hills. Now I do not at all like my memory of the person I had become but then I felt extraordinarily lucky to have something to passionately believe and could use to light up a shabby, but increasingly cosy little world with illusions of significance. I somehow managed to convince myself that even I was, authentically, part of The Grand Epic of Britain that was symbolised by Rochester’s nubbly, rectangular 12th century castle keep, by which I sat for hours watching the brown river Medway. The books I was reading fostered convincing illusions that I, too, was a part of an elite sub-set of humans made exceptional by centuries of a brilliant, misunderstood and confabulated history and, caught up by this delusion, I lost any feeling of connection with Joe Rabbitt, sweating and dying in 1817 for East India Company share profits, or with my railway ancestors, getting up very early in warm dawns, coughing sharp coal smoke and wrestling huge spanners to service hissing engines. My new illusions made me happier than had the Irish Catholic guide to human existence - a brief hard time on middle earth followed by unimaginable agony or triumphalist reward. It was becoming impossible to share the mental life of an unbearably loving and sporadically ill-tempered father whose best argument for the truths of Roman Catholicism had become “So who else is going to bury you ?” – as if deaths and funerals are key events that ,retrospectively, define our entire lives.

I should have let my resentment of the Catholic Church quietly fade but self-importance demanded that I must make some pretentious gesture of public rejection. My father knew me too well to be interested in discussing my mental life and shut down arguments by jeering. I needed to find, to histrionically confront, and ideally, to spectacularly confound some Officially Licensed Opponent. The only one available was a quite gentle and humane senior priest in the church we attended, Father Riodan.

I made a formal appointment to discuss my problems with “My Faith”. No doubt dialogues with conceited adolescents were routine inconveniences of Riodan’s job. I turned up at his vicarage, was sat down in a clean, austere room and given a cup of tea. He was benign, even welcoming. I think that he expected that I had come to bore him with talk of discovery of a “Sacred vocation” and that he was prepared to be sceptical but without entirely discouraging a crisis of self-importance. Pompous bad manners and ill-nature made me blurt that I did not believe in his religion, or in any other, and that I needed to debate why either of us should persist in so obvious a farce. In silence he politely showed me out. I noticed that, on the table alongside the un-drunk tea, there was a plate with a few ginger biscuits. I wondered whether he would have offered me one if I had complained of soul-struggles for enhanced sanctity. Recognition of my pretentious vanity made me dislike him for exposing it. He must have died soon after because, when I next visited the Church, under protest to my family, I found his new, very solid, gravestone by the entrance. I was mildly sorry and recall that, for a moment I, thought that though his marker was not ostentatiously bulky or elaborate it was such a solid piece of work that he would have a struggle to get out from under it on Judgement Day .

The hinge of change was news that Grandfather Edwin had suddenly died with the éclat of the “Man of the world” that Aunt Bea so admired. He had felt sleepy after lunch, went upstairs to lie down and a stroke killed him as he took off his shoes. I had not known him and he had obviously decided, many decades ago, that his daughter and her family were surplus to his life. His easy death seemed to merit appreciation rather than mourning.

My household adults also seemed only mildly to regret loss of someone they hardly knew. His departure solved problems. Carlops was wonderful for children: a stream-full of sticklebacks and tiny trout marked the garden end and beyond this was a rabbit valley with drumlins, caves, peewits, curlews and assertive ravens. For adults this was only bleak wilderness with no fantasy-opportunities.

I had grown happier at Heriot’s than I had been anywhere else and made more interesting friends than I had ever known but my adults had no relish or optimism for life in Scotland. Ivy and Claude were as pleasant and unobtrusive as insecure dependence on my father’s pension and temperament allowed. Dad grew increasingly depressed that Edinburgh offered him no opportunities for fantasy careers, such as “importing and exporting machine tools”; he had no capital, contacts, or business experience.

In India Dad had been the boss of large offices controlling large Police Districts, with an additional part-time role as the pivot of our small family. He seemed to lack interest in most humans, but never affection for us. He just could not communicate warm feelings through everyday chatter but needed to make passionate declarations in long vehement monologues that suppressed general conversation. Ivy, Claude and Kenneth were as tactful as dependent humans can be but were oppressed by his eloquent despair, did not share his frustrated entitlement and accepted that their lives in Britain must be hard times stoically endured. They wanted to move to Edinburgh City where Claude and Kenneth could find factory jobs. The chance to fill Edwin’s space in Aunt Bea’s house was a welcome escape and a boost to Dad’s dreams of new beginnings. My delight in curlews and lapwings, admiration of dignified grey Edinburgh and discovery of the best friends I had yet known did not matter. At least I could begin to feel less guilty that I was becoming much happier than my adults and failing to find any way to share my new pleasure in life with them.

We re-discovered the Rochester house and the snug outdoor lavatory, the shed, full of interesting tools and dried pots of paint and the tangled grass patch where Benjamin was buried. Old Mum moved into Edwin’s ex-room on a level with an adjoining bath and washing room that also had the only wall-mirror in the house. Her weight and the stairs meant that for her last 5 years she rarely left this room, and never moved beyond this level of the house or saw the street outside. Mum and Sheila had the front top bedroom and Dad and I shared the top back. Aunt Bea went into the ground-floor front room, once her parlour, sleeping under a blotchy picture of a lively eighteenth century cavalry-battle painted by her late husband, Tom. He had made a good living as a painter and decorator and his artwork suggested that, had he survived, he might have become notable for pub-signs.

I warmed to the late Edwin when I discovered a trunk in the cellar that he had filled with the collected works of H.G. Wells. The War of the Worlds and Mr Polly saw me through initial confusions and anxieties in Rochester. My parents found no Catholic School but their apprehensions were mollified by discovering that I could be taught, free, in the local free Grammar School.

I was now in good shape to relish this huge luck. My Heriot friends had sharpened up my British Act and I even had a slight Scots accent, ( e.g. pronouncing “Maths” as “Maarths”) and was teased for this rather than for exotic biology. Some anxious uncertainties as to how to become more British had disappeared. Rationing and my mother’s cooking had reduced me to average shape for my age and I was discovering that school-teachers were not just cosplaying bouncers programmed to control entry into a club run by a temperamental God; only bigger, smarter, well-intentioned humans.

Distance from the nearest Roman Church meant that we grew lax in attending Mass or Confession and my parents’ public Catholicism attenuated into solitary pleading for favours from their God. They would have, truthfully, insisted that their love for each other and also for my sister and myself, was great (and part of the duty they they owed to HIM). Unfortunately love is not effectively communicated by repetitious, vehement declarations. It is a control program that generates small kindnesses and pleasant interactions.

School was a marvellous escape from home. The syllabus was undemanding and my teachers’ enthusiasm intermittently glinted through their tired tolerance. Most had recently de-mobbed from WW2 service and memories of this, the most vivid part of their lives, overwhelmed their every-days in dingy post-war Britain. Our geography- master, Mr Hadlow, found it more interesting to explain exactly why it is difficult to drive a truck to keep up with others in a long military convoy than to discuss volcanoes and Ox-bow lakes. I was excused (i.e. excluded from) Latin and French because I was so incompetent that I could not hope to pass impending O-level exams in them.

I made excellent new friends and, even better, discovered the Rochester Public Library which had more books than I had ever seen in one place. Marvellously I could take away any three at a time for free. There was also a kind librarian called Esme with whom I fell in love. School was not just an escape from my family but a training ground for tiny new ambitions and achievements. I passed GCSE O-levels and joined a sixth form to prepare for A-levels. Rochester became a friendly environment and my ease in the pleasant city, and increasing independence and self-confidence contrasted with the bad times my adults were having.

At home I spent most of my time in the second-floor back bedroom that I shared with my father, avoiding the rest of my family and inventing strange ways to mitigate boredom. The most rewarding was to look through a pair of old binoculars at the neon street-lights that trailed up my horizon of Chatham Hill. If you waggle binocular lenses distant neon lamps trace ribbon-smears of their light across your retinas. This is not remarkable - but because neon lights are not constant, but flicker, fast, moving lenses paint on your retinae light ribbons broken by narrow, precisely-spaced, strips of shade. I was intrigued to work out that this happens because we see neon light as un-interrupted glow but rapid lens movements stretch both the light pulses and the otherwise imperceptible off-instants across our retinas. This is hardly the kernel of a theory of relativity but stretching light and time across your eyes gives some relief from boredom by illustrating that the world is not at all what our sense-organs fool us that it is. My other anti-boredom experiments on my conscious perception were sniffing a household cleaning fluid called Thawpit until my vision dimmed and I heard, and felt, a buzzing in my ears and head. Even sillier was testing my understanding of the role of carotid arteries by looping a cord around my neck tied to the support-rail for clothes-hangers in a wardrobe. After brief forward-kneeling-leaning, dizziness confirmed interrupted blood supply to my brain. These ways of distorting consciousness were much duller than those that 1970 Hippies were to discover but as good as most available to schoolboys in the early 1950’s

My new school-friends were a great pleasure and we used to meet in their family living rooms to talk pretentious nonsense, discover Eartha Kitt’s amazing vocal range and mildly suggestive lyrics (Let’s Do it) and hear the first of amazing Tom Lehrer. On exceptional evenings we would drink a very little cider. It was awkward that I could never repay these fine evenings in my own home because my father turned all visiting friends away at our front door. This was not just ill nature but practicality. Blanche, the browner of my mother’s lifelong friends the two Bell sisters, (her startlingly white sister was harsh Aileen) had come to the UK and lodged with us while she took a course in how to work a Comptometer, a very early electric calculating machine. Blanche was a cheerful addition to our morose household but her presence meant that there was never any room free for us to use. My friends were puzzled and curious but never understood. They did not say so at the time but they were also quite offended. Fifty-five years later one of them wrote from the Hague, where he had been a Professor of International Politics, to scold me into explanations that I found too difficult when I was 15.

My life changed in other ways. I found an evening job, in the Rochester Casino roller-skating rink that relieved me from needing pocket money from my parents and gave me a reason to be away from home most evenings. Handing out and taking back roller skates was not a vivid social life but I tried to advertise myself as an intellectual-girl-magnet by taking from the library a huge bound copy of The Collected Works of Carl Jung that Esme allowed me to keep for longer than the library-legal fortnight. I displayed this on my roller-skate-issue-counter and, occasionally, ostentatiously read it to signal extreme intellectualism. No-one ever commented. This was just as well because I could not have sustained discussion. I did not get on with Jung. His ideas seemed pretentious and silly and of no help with meeting girls.

Rochester has a fine Norman Castle keep, with some anecdotes of minor sieges. It is also in a part of England in which tales of battles of Saxons and “Yeomen of Kent” against Vikings and Norman invaders are legends in which some schoolboys, hyper-romanticised by random reading, still imagine roles. I became enthralled by spurious and genuine discoveries of my new life and world. The only blemish on my new happiness was growing distance from Dad.

Britain had crumbled his authority and was altering the entire family dynamic. In happy families mutual affection is learned and communicated through banter and affectionate teasing that Dad could never understand or manage. He tried to communicate his immense attachment to us by sudden, strenuous outbursts of love and need, grasping my sister Sheila and me, each with one huge arm, squashing us to his chest and repeatedly declaiming that he would “Give his right arm for us”. I was sure that this was literally true, at least at that moment, but puzzled what use the huge limb clutching my shoulders could be if it were amputated and left lying about the house or who might want it in exchange for us. The only response I could make was to simulate complacence with whatever it was that I was being offered by lying passive against his huge chest.

Even in India Dad had colleagues, but had never seemed to like them much or to have easy friendships outside the family. Perhaps this was why his only idea of conversation was to deliver endless, clever and witty monologues that he obviously thought made him as companionably entertaining as anybody could possibly be. His favourite TV experience was an advertisement for Apple Cider that showed a crowded bar full of people having a noisy happy time. Obviously his ideal world would be raucous with merry congeniality - but I could not see how he could manage this. Perhaps he saw a role as a respected and much-loved senior friend entrancing his doting companions with long, brilliant, solo performances. He would have agreed that conversation needs reciprocity but had never learned this trick and would have suspected disrespect if offered cheerful banter. Perhaps the cider advertisement was another hint as to what life in Britain might be if only he could somehow crack the code. My sister and I were the only tiny group that he could still dominate and, in his way, deeply love but Rochester was giving us lives of our own and interests that he could not share and this made us increasingly distant from him. In contrast to our newly developing lives he had nothing to fill his time except fantasy escapes from his new, pawky reality. His life-task and ambitions shrank to “doing the football pools” and he prayed, both directly to his Catholic God, and to Mary, God’s softer-hearted Mum, to negotiate with her Son for his redemption by a brilliant prize. He began to report dreams of affable meetings with members of the British Royal Family. These did cheer him up a bit because he hoped that they might be omens of some sudden, happy transformation of his life.

Old Mum became ever more startlingly obese; cardiac problems swelled her feet and ankles and, as stairs became impossible she became imprisoned in her bedroom with nothing whatever to do. She never read a book or listened to the radio, or had TV or any company except my father. She grew increasingly feeble. Her room was on the same level as a bathroom extension that led to another in which Dad sat all day at a round table, endlessly striving for salvation by football pools. The bathroom had a tub, a washbasin with a spotty mirror and a pair of enamelled buckets. Old Mum, and also Dad, seemed to spend much time at the mirror inspecting their faces for signs of progressive decay. Old Mum would discover plump white sebaceous pimples, particularly on her eyelids. Her arthritic fingers could not squeeze them so she would corner me to do this. She would eat meals prepared for her together with Dad but had no other occupation. For my mother, and for silent, kind, scuttling Aunt Bea, it became essential to avoid uncomfortable interactions and they shared silences in the basement room.

I saw Old Dad in hospital, dying of pneumonia, only once, before God yet again made it clear that S(He) makes no deals. It was strange that Old Dad called me “Patter”, as he had when I was very little, touched me, as he never usually did, smiled as gamely as he could and seemed to still like me and to be glad to see me. I was not taken to his funeral. Nobody seemed upset by his absence. Claude had never known him, Ivy had not met him for at least 20 years, my grandmother hated him and he had been so self-effacing in our family group that my parents seemed to be unaware of his loss. Probably he had also realised that his death would solve problems because he would have been surplus in a house with only three bedrooms that must be shared by two families, comprising eight people. The right of my grandmother to a room of her own was un-challengeable. So Dad, Mum and my sister Sheila shared the biggest bedroom and I was delighted with a box-room which had no window and was just big enough for a bed and the vertical cylinder of a pungent Valor kerosene heater. Ivy, Claude and Kenneth uncomplainingly agreed to share the big, cold attic, probably because my father paid all or most of the rent. There was a single indoor lavatory and bathroom, a common living room and a kitchen. Old Dad must have realised that, in this new world, he had run out of space as well as time.

I missed Old Dad, but less than I had expected, or than he deserved for being a pivot of my childhood happiness. My distractions from grief were timid struggling to learn a new life and the danger of remembering a past in which he had been a cheering, and cryptically affectionate, presence. Also, all the adults in the house simultaneously contracted scabies which demoralised them with intolerable itching and poor health and spirits.

I was legally obliged to be sent to a school but there was none nearer than Edinburgh. My parents thought that because State Schools were free they must also be academically inadequate - they were certainly un-Catholic. They randomly picked George Heriot’s, an old and quite famous school in the centre of Edinburgh. It was not Catholic but made up for this by the prestige of being much more expensive than they could afford.

I am still embarrassed at the burden this must have been to them, particularly because in contrast to their growing misery nothing happier could have happened to me. I recall Heriot’s as a grey, granite castle-form structure surrounded by peripheral settlements of low, classroom buildings. At first I did not dare to speak to anyone because I was scared that my accent would mark me as an alien deserving instant scorn and aggression. I was soon identified as having a “touch of the tar brush” but less despised for this than for being fat, small, weak and awkward (so they called me “Tarzan”). In spite of these inadequacies they began to accept me as just another boy, whose shortcomings were not necessarily racial. I only signalled ethnic peculiarities in rare lapses of vigilance.

One of these happened when a beautiful female undergraduate at Edinburgh University was allowed to use my class for what I now realise must have been her student project: to discover what Scots children thought about citizens of other countries now that the bitter World War was over. She gave us all a questionnaire to check our feelings about a list of nationalities. Everyone hated the Germans and Japanese and liked the Russians more than the French or Americans. The questionnaire offered only one slot to rate all “Indians”. I found this absurd and expanded the list to distinguish Mohammedans, like Pathans, (mostly very brave and aggressive but not very clever), Hindus (clever but unreliable, and usually cowardly, except for fierce, martially-gifted sub-categories such as Dogras and valiantly combative Maharattas). There were also Sikhs (big men with distinctive turbans, excellent warriors and Security Guards and all-round decent chaps), Nepalese (admirable soldiers and mountaineers and always cheerful), Assamese (nearly as fine as the Nepal Gurkhas), Tamils (brilliant at cooking dhosas and very fiery curries, very dark but not otherwise distinguished) and Bengalis (far too clever for their own, and everyone else’s good). Not to mention mixed races, like Portuguese/Indian Goans, (tricky, overbearing and needing careful watching).

Of course I am now embarrassed by these foolish stereotypes. Then I felt that the nice lady needed to realise that the people of the world are far more complex than she thought. As I deserved, my classmates taunted me for weeks - mostly for blatant showing-off but also because my gesture asserted and highlighted my own racial peculiarity. So they teased me about which of these, unnecessarily differentiated, sub-categories of Wog I was, and invented witty attributes to define my sub-species. Like boys anywhere, they instantly recognised, and scorned, any symptoms of my daring to be overweening about my differences from them. They knew my weaknesses and made it clear that they would taunt me much more harshly if they wished, but this was only what they did to anybody who made efforts to become conspicuous.

Those who taught us were the kindest whole-white adults I had ever met - almost as gentle and clever and civilised as Parsees. It took me time to notice, and then gradually to appreciate that they felt that their job was to teach us to become as as they were by offering us interesting information rather than by indoctrinating us with weird religious fantasies or forcing into us stuff that they clearly found as dull as we did using anger, chastisement and threats of eternal damnation. These teachers also felt that to be, or at least to seem, friendly to us was part of their job. For example, Mr McKerrow remained patient and unthreateningly ironic even after he gave up trying to re-teach me Latin.

My life became happy in other, unpredicted ways: my daily bus-journeys between Edinburgh and Carlops unreeled moving-window vistas of fields with dense flocks of lapwings shrieking “pee-wit” (their local name) loud enough to drown the bus-rattle. We could also hear, but never saw, curlews (click here for sound file). Leaving the magnificent fauna of India, I had worried that Britain was without any wildlife. But behind our house there were occasional partridges and hordes of round, brown rabbits that lolloped and scuttled on the far-side of an end-of garden burn teeming with caddis larvae, sticklebacks, tiny trout and seasonal tadpoles. These tiny creatures now seemed both comfortable and exotic, unlike the lavish feral lives in India that I had ignored except when my father and Uncle set out to kill things.

Beyond the garden-boundary-burn was a glacier-scooped valley with humps of small drumlins covered with grass that was so thick and slippery that even when there was no snow we could toboggan down their slopes on the house ladders.

This was marvellous for children but not at all for adults. My mother had never in her life cooked a meal and her first tries were disgusting failures that she self-punishingly ate after everybody else had refused. We all lost weight very rapidly. For me this was fine – I was soon no longer conspicuously fat. It was becoming clear that our family income was far from enough to support any lifestyle that my parents had imagined. My mother tried to supplement my father’s pension by teaching but could only find an extraordinarily stressful job in a school for uncontrollable screaming and distressed learning-disabled children. She gave this up. My father tried his best but could not find anything other than to visit, with Claude for support, all of the barber shops he could find in Edinburgh to try to sell them small plastic radio-sets. These, if you worked out which buttons to press, could also act as speaker-phones between adjacent rooms. Dad and Claude trudged round the Edinburgh barbers but never talked about their encounters. They sold nothing, but their tiny brown demonstration set became the centre of our family life. It delighted me with Uncle Mac’s 5.00 p.m. Children’s Hour and even more with Dick Barton- Special Agent immediately after. These special children’s programs came on just as the bus dropped me to scuttle through sleet into the communal room. Later there would be comedy shows like Tommy Handley’s It’s that Man Again and Kenneth Horne’s Round the Horne. There had been nothing so fine on the radio in India and I took these as authoritative guides to Contemporary British Culture. I don’t think that my parents understood, or even listened, even when Christmas came round with special programs in which the casts of several different shows were mingled into joint productions and used each other’s catch phrases. I thought this was a peak of witty sophistication but no-one else found it amusing, let alone joyous, and it did not distract the adults from deepening depressions. Claude, Ivy and Kenneth seemed to prefer their attic to the company of people and radio programs that they did not like.

I began to realise that I was in the first school in which I had ever been happy with companions who were as sceptical and mocking as friends should be. Even better than being at school was the bus journey there and back that soon became whited- out by amazing snow that I had read about but never seen. I did not realise that days and sunlight could become so very brief or how different seasons could be from each other or how fast they could change. To try to ease the contrast between my growing happiness and my parents’ misery I would offer them almost-accurate stories of my new life, the strange surnames of my friends (they seemed to find “Borthwick” and “Dudgeon” particularly funny but to have no idea how ridiculous it is to be called Rabbitt). I could mildly amuse them by telling how School Assemblies began with bagpipes played by a pair of adolescents in full Highland Dress, and by inventing hopefully-funny tales about how many boys wore sporrans and what they kept in them. My mother continued struggling to produce awful meals and I mocked her for being a “Holy Christian Martyr” by abjectly eating them herself. I felt personally responsible for my parents’ low spirits but, of course, I could not help them from withdrawing further.

I do not understand why, for me, birds often lever sudden breaches of reality. In India Shite-hawks could fracture time. Here dense crowds of squealing pee-wits jerked me into joy and invisible, plaintive curlews, suggested but did not provoke, causeless melancholy. One dusk a fine thing happened as I was walking alone through the mock-castle keep of Heriot’s old building after ineffectual “Extra Latin” with Mr Mc Kerrow. A sudden burst of wonderful happy whistling was my first experience of being slid out of the world by a blackbird’s flute. I keep constantly alert for this to recur and, during the next 75 years it sometimes has, but never again so astonishingly.

Heriot’s made me sensitive to a new idea of what school-teachers can be. I recall a remarkable Biology teacher, the first person to make me realise that we are part of a natural world that is astoundingly abundant, complex and inter-connected and that these astonishments can be revealed and understood by reading books that assemble vast and wonderful puzzles. This cheerful and gentle Biologist transformed my ideas about how much there is in the world to understand and how we can go about understanding it, and why some bits of information about the natural world are more illuminating than others. Much later I was sad to hear that the school had sacked him for, just once, taking some older students to a pub. I am certain that this was a harmless outing with none of Father Paul’s furtive calculation or even any under-age alcohol consumption. I think that he did it only because he craved affectionate acknowledgement from adolescents in his care and wanted to illustrate a harmless pleasant time. Perhaps the school had to reckon that Edinburgh families were notoriously straight-laced.

There was also an extraordinarily articulate Arts Master who, with no warning, spent his ninety-minute post-lunch-class lecturing us on the dangers of re-heating left-over food. Perhaps he was testing just how far, and for how long he could abandon his business. He seemed wonderfully coherent and eloquent about a desperate nation-wide need for food-hygiene and concerned for our welfare. In spite of all this knowledge and good-will he disappeared overnight and we heard that he had become ill and died.

These unusual grown-ups seemed to want nothing from us but to share information that entranced them. They were not “in love” with boys, but lusted to pass on facts and relationships between them. Perhaps, also, they had affection for the condition of boyhood rather than for individual pupils, and perhaps they hoped for an intensity of personal validation that they could only get from the young. We all recognised, and many of us exploited this possibility - some with fascination mixed with sympathy and scorn for its futility. We knew that our current boyhoods were just works-in-progress towards growing up, but recognised transience without plans or preparation to become adults. Magpie Nuns, flogging Irish Brethren and aloof Jesuits had all seemed convinced that childhood is a perilous condition that must be cured as soon, and as strenuously as possible by doses of Religion, Latin and Sarcasm. My first teachers did not envy, and so had no wish to share our inferior states of being but just tried to rush us as fast as possible into their grey universe that they obviously disliked. Nuns and Monks and Priests had seemed to be as bored with their lessons as we were and to treat them as a training-gym for a religion with which they were obsessed. I was surprised to find myself becoming happy. But then, as it always does whenever we think a particular bit of our life will last for ever, everything suddenly changed.

We were to briefly stay with my mother’s father, Edwin, in Rochester, so that he could give us a crash course on how to live in Britain. Because there would be no spare bed-place for him, my grandfather had to be guided to the first of the many buses and trains that would eventually get him to a village, called Carlops, near Edinburgh, where his daughter Ivy, and her husband Claude, (whom he had never met) had rented a house, apparently without reason or plan. This must have been scary because he was 86, had never been further North than Iraq and had no idea how to cope, or get information on how to navigate the complex connections of the long journey to Scotland. Old Dad also did not mention that he was already experiencing the first symptoms of the pneumonia that would kill him within a few weeks. Cold sea-water baths had not been a good idea. He silently faded into the cold, grey new world.

The rest of us instantly forgot about him and found a taxi to take us to Rochester where we were to stay with my mother’s absentee father, Edwin. After his first wife, my mother’s mother, died Edwin had married a French lady, leaving my mother, aged 12 and still at a convent-school in Shimla, to be brought up by nuns and to make the best life she could while he went to Lyons to run a bistro with a new French wife. The rest of us had never met him but he had been in our consciousness for the last two years because he had tried to educate us about post-war England by sending us a parcel of rolled up copies of the Daily Mirror every month.

I tried to be excited and interested by my first sight of Britain. In India, daylight changes to dense dark in a few minutes but here thin grey air seemed to slowly get thicker, smokier and colder. I guessed that there were no hordes of people, as there would have been in Indian streets because everybody must be sheltering from the August chill in the tiny, grey, joined-together houses, some of which were still broken and boarded-up from wartime bombing. Most houses had dirty metal rods in the shapes of capital Hs or Xs sticking up from their roofs. The taxi driver told us that these were television aerials and seemed pleased to hear that because India had no television we had never seen anything like them.

Edwin’s Rochester house was also small, and grey and joined to others - but was special because it was at the end of a row and so had a side-gate as well as a front entry. There were three levels of two little, cubical rooms joined by narrow stairs. To the back there was a first floor extension over a kitchen, and a tiny plant-free garden with a cosy outdoor lavatory and a tool-shed full of interesting clutter.

We met my new Grandfather Edwin in the downstairs back room where there was a dining-table, but not enough chairs for all of us. Edwin turned out to be short, with a pointy pink face and neat-brushed, Brilliantined curly silver hair. He was urbane, but uncomfortable with the sudden crowd of strangers. He had lived here for many years with his sister, Bea, whose dead husband, a painter and decorator, had bought the house. Bea was tiny, and shy and very meek and kind. Edwin, whom she introduced as “A Man of the World”, tried not to become concerned and tetchy as he explained how we would all fit into limited space, how long we might stay and how vulnerable the bedroom eiderdowns were to careless children. He relaxed a bit, and cut off our memories of our times and lives in India to describe the miseries of the new peace in Britain and, more disturbing than the bombing and perpetually uncertain future of the war, how Bea and he had once shared a single, rationed sausage for Christmas dinner. Old Mum, who now weighed 19 stones, stood resolutely enduring ferocious leg aches and mounting bladder-pressure that she had contained throughout the long taxi ride. Then she catastrophically peed all over the brown linoleum floor.

The torrent was sudden, and copious and prolonged and I cannot remember anything that was said to condone or sympathise with her. It must have provoked an explanation of what, and where the toilet arrangements were: in daytime in the snug little outdoor lavatory and, after dark, indoors in white enamelled metal buckets. This discussion must have broadened into directions of who was to sleep in which room. I think that after Old Mum had been dried and cleaned she was immediately sent to the top-floor front bedroom where she would sleep with my mother and sister. We had gathered at basement level, and Old Mum was in her late seventies and very heavy. The steep, narrow indoor stairs were too challenging, so she had to shuffle outdoors through a side door into a sloping side street from which she could gain the main-road front door and then toil up remaining steep indoor stairs to the top front bedroom. Dad and I were to share the back top-bedroom and Aunt Bea had the street-level front room, formerly the “front parlour”. Edwin kept his over-kitchen-extension bedroom and Benjamin labelled a “near rat” and obviously the least welcome of any of us, was locked into an ancient bird-cage in an outdoor shed. He signalled by frantic wriggling, squeaking, and almost-biting that he knew that his life had permanently changed for the worse and we were no longer his family. After Old Mum’s embarrassment white enamelled buckets were provided at each level.

Obviously this arrangement could not last. Our visit had been planned as a brief re-discovery of kinship and for orientation by Edwin to do his best to bond with his unmet relatives and provide survival hints on how to apply for Ration Books for food and clothes and for the documents needed to transform us from transients into “naturalised” ration-deserving citizens. Actually there was no practical or emotional reason for us to be in Rochester rather than anywhere else in Britain. Unsurprisingly, Edwin began to show strain in polite ways such as following me upstairs to check that I was not sitting on eiderdowns with my shoes on. Dad, startlingly rapidly, became depressed and desperate about his life and prospects and almost completely gave up speaking. He tried to pick up cues from newspaper advertisements and street hoardings on how to build a new British persona that might gain an acceptable new career. Noticing an advertisement that “If you want to get ahead , get a Hat” he bought both an unsuccessful “middle-class trilby” and a flat “working class cloth cap”. Among other anxieties he had to find, in this strange town, various Council Offices where we might become licensed citizens deserving rations of food, coal and clothing and, possibly, medical treatment.

I was terrified of being in the streets because everyone was Whole White and I felt that I was an obvious imposter and that anyone who noticed this would be as scornful and hostile as the passengers and stewards on the SS Maloja. To cure me of pathetic funk Dad insisted that I must go with him whenever he went outdoors to negotiate our new lives. He tried to shock me out of obnoxious cringing by getting me to walk alongside him and join his impromptu exhibitions of doing embarrassing things in public - such as stopping, for many minutes at a time, to stare at large advertising hoardings. When I scuttled across the street to disassociate from his strangeness he laughed in angry contempt, and shouted that I “dident have the gumption of an owl”. I must have embarrassed him terribly because once, when we had to register for something or other in a local council office, I refused to pass through the door and face an intimidating horde of whole-white clerks. Provoked to fury by my gumption-deficiency Dad slapped my head, hard and often, and physically dragged me into a huge room full of alarmed middle-aged men sitting at desks. It was a bad time for all of us. Benjamin began to sicken in his shed.

Then came news that Old Dad had contracted pneumonia, had been taken to hospital in Edinburgh and might die. I loved Old Dad and Benjamin almost equally and became afraid that I would lose both of them so I prayed to bargain with God that at least one would survive. After hard thought, I decided that the right thing was to pray for Old Dad and to concede Benjamin to God. S(He) immediately accepted my bid and I buried Benji in the garden in a cardboard shoe-box. Soon, to Edwin’s and Bea’s great, but tactfully contained, relief the rest of us set off to live with Claude and Ivy and her son Kenneth in the house that they had rented - for no reason that they could ever explain - in a village called Carlops ( in English “the Witches' Leap”) in the countryside about fifteen miles west of Edinburgh.

My grandfather, Old Dad, had disappeared but, because he had kept out of the way for so many years, none of us noticed. We would have been prudent to monitor our 86-year-old, because we later discovered that he had begun an odd habit of choosing a Cold-Sea-Water option for his daily baths. Even sharing a cabin with three other, noisily unwell, people my mother also managed to be invisible. Benjamin gnawed at the clothes cupboard night and day and his impressive progress made us worry that he might break out before we reached Britain.

The ship staff, like incompetent parents running a failing children’s party, seemed to feel responsible for our morale and initiated small diversions, such as the least successful fancy dress party I could imagine. Every morning a notice board recorded the previous day’s knottage and invited bets on the next. The staff did their best to excite us with future attractions such as a short docking at Port Suez (“Gilly Gilly” conjurers and sellers of shabby trinkets and unhygienic fruit ). We were warned that, in spite of stifling weather, we were to keep our cabin portholes shut to thwart famously agile water-borne thieves. My grandmother would have none of this and said that she preferred to breathe so we lost our worn toothbrushes from a shelf below our single porthole.

After the Suez canal we wallowed through the sickness-relieving calm of a dark-blue Mediterranean. I tried, but I could not make Homer’s “wine-dark” fit what looked like any other sea. However, late one evening, on the Starboard side, Mount Stromboli fizzed bright red sparks like a huge expensive firework.

The most touted attraction was a day ashore in Marseilles. This had been excitedly advertised and anticipated since we left Bombay and was to become another significant moment in my education. I knew that it was ridiculous to be surprised that though we had struggled to learn a little French at school, everyone here spoke it by choice, effortlessly, all the time. I suppose I had thought that French, like Latin, was part of an abstract and difficult school curriculum that had nothing to do with actual living. I also, too slowly, understood how silly it was to be astonished that in France, just as in Bombay, there were motor cars, lamp-posts and swags of electric cabling. A particularly instructive moment was a visit to a Cathedral, which seemed a boring big building facing a square crowded with beggars. This was unsurprising because, in India, beggars swarmed every public space. The shock was that, over here, in a centre of European culture, all of the frail and disabled old women and men were whiter than I now felt myself to be.

After the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic had brought on a final spasm of sea-sickness we reached Tilbury, a dismal dock on a dingy lower-mid margin of our Brave New World.

The shore was glistening grey mud with a fringe of black-green bushes and then low, grey sheds. The cold August wind made it uncomfortable to stand on the deck to watch our bumpy mooring. We gathered our cabin-luggage and eased angry Benji from the splintered upper-cupboard into my sister’s oilcloth satchel-bag which immediately began to bulge and throb with his indignant fury. He would never trust us again. We wandered down a gangway trying, but failing, to feel that this was a momentous and joyful moment and found a vast, cold shed in which our hold-luggage had been stacked. We recognised hessian-covered stacks of ugly chairs and battered little tables for the junk that they had always been and knew that they were completely useless and had no power to encourage us to believe that our new lives would simply prolong familiar contentment or to reassure us that we were, somehow, still connected to a solid past and to an optimistic future by memories of all of the durable happiness that we had known.

Suddenly we were at a dock with two old family friends, Blanche and Eileen Bell, teacher ex-colleagues of my mother. We had given them all the hopelessly surplus household objects and they had loyally come to see us off. Benji was zipped into my sister’s little oilskin shoulder bag. He did not like this and began fiercely to wriggle and gnaw. The bag twitched and bulged but the customs people, dock-police and sailors did not notice. Like a staunch drug-mule, Sheila trotted through dim metal ship-corridors to our cabin where we shut Benjamin into the top compartment of a wooden clothes cupboard where he immediately began gnawing for release. He kept this up for the next 3000 miles and 21 days, and came within a few splinters of becoming noticed as flagrantly illicit, and probably “put down” by maritime pest control.

After inspecting a dark, stuffy, tiny four-berth cabin we decided that my sister, mother, old Mum and I would share it while Dad and old Dad found another to sleep with strangers.

The cabin was too small to celebrate the distinguished moment of departure from India, so we moved to a public space on the upper-rear deck where there were chairs to watch whatever there was to see. The SS Maloja had already travelled all the way from Sydney, via Cape Town, and now lurched from the Bombay quayside with engine-grinding, splashes and groans. It was dusk, and street lights began to shine, leaving trails of glints on the water. Old Mum squirmed in a too-small wicker armchair, became excited at their fading and named them as the “Pearls of the Orient”. I wondered where she had found this uncharacteristically romantic phrase and though I tried I could not fit it to a lurching horizon of lamps, fading in greasy darkness until there was nothing but nauseous black sea.

Maloja swayed, Old Mum began to feel very ill and found her way through dark stairs and passages to our cabin where seasickness kept her for most of the next twenty days. I also became sea-sick and soon followed to squirm in my bunk unable to sleep because of the sour stench of her and my sister’s and mother’s and my own vomiting, the creaking and splashing and lurching of the ship and the tireless crunching of Benjamin’s escape project. I began to worry how long I could bear dark sour fug with groans and acute bowel discomfort and tried to ignore, in the stale lurching mornings, offers of breakfast that none of us wanted.

More than seventy-five years later, my memory cannot arrange the rest of our journey into a neat sequence of experiences in time and places: only a shuffle of mind-shots without sound effects. I must have spent most of my time in the deck-lounge from which I could see the horizon, a ruler-straight line between darker and lighter blue. Sometimes there was another vessel, a curved-and-pointy-sailed Arab dhow or another steamer. Rarely there was a grey distant whale-hump, more often just a spout, like a burst of steam from a submerged locomotive. Whenever this happened people crowded to the nearest deck-rail to marvel at being so near to the huge, careless creature.

A more substantial entertainment was a cupboard of scruffy books which included many by P. G. Wodehouse. I sat in the deck-lounge and read them all, as rapidly and inconspicuously as I could, but drew embarrassing attention by sudden bursts of laughter at Lord Emsworth’s pig-obsessions and Bertie Wooster’s idiot friends. Reading was not just my usual escape from boredom: It had become formal, self-conscious research into how to become more British. A less congenial mentor than Wodehouse was Dornford Yates, who had written several thrillers such as Berry and Co and Jonah and Co, describing a close-knit extended family of firm-jawed straight-left-punching British quasi-aristocrats grappling for advantages over lower class villains with poor personal hygiene (they were often “oily” and sometimes Jews or other Levantines). These True British Heroes shared quite funny jokes with each other, even when under pressure from wicked interlopers, who were often scheming women, and always desperate aspirants to a class-status to which they were not entitled. So obviously inferior in morals as well as in biology and gender (Dornford Yates seemed to be sceptical, or at least very wary, of most females who were not “true” and “decent” and, at least upper-middle-class or, even better, or loyal, and slightly comical “lower class” servants). The badinage between Berry and his family and friends was entertaining and seemed to offer useful tips on how to pass as a Brit rather than, as I was beginning to accept, an instantly recognisable and undesirable “crypto-Wog”. I knew already that I could never develop a lethal straight left but, at least I might learn how to be amusing in a British way?

My realisation how futile it was for me to try to learn how to fight like Berry and Co was emphasised by an Australian Rugby team on a long journey to out-manoeuvre and damage as many consenting North Europeans as they could find. They had become bored since leaving Sydney and, for entertainment, began to search out and size-match pairs of small boys, put boxing gloves on them and provoke them to hit each other as hard and skilfully as possible while they made bets and shouted advice. I knew that this was a very bad idea and was thrashed by a small, hard, fast-moving Australian child. Having offered me the apt insight that I “minded pain too much” the Rugby players ignored me for the rest of the voyage.

Sea-sickness relented and I began to enjoy exotic British food, such as kippers, that I had never tasted before. Also to become aware how the suave stewards and other passengers subtly indicated that my family and I were very different from, and much less desirable than Australians, (who qualified as “near Brits”) and how impossibly far we all were from being the elite, real thing. The stewards were particularly good at highlighting our difference by feigned politeness. The first cue that betrayed us was our accent. All through our lives we had smugly mocked the “Chi-Chi” accents and locutions such as “going to go” and “coming to come” of Native Indians who were superbly articulate in versions of English that had evolved far beyond our 19th century Victorian Raj-speak. Now we were shocked and distressed to find that, within centi-seconds, we were identified as “not the right sort”, equally by cockney-parody Australians and by sneakily supercilious “genuine” Brits. I began to understand that, unless I worked hard at it, I might spend the rest of our lives as a comical aspirant to an un-attainable status. Like gentle and generous Mr Lackadawallah who, I now think, was being shrewdly playful and subtle, hinting the impending end of the Raj by continuously singing:

After the ball is overreh

After they all have gorne..

Happy alone in the twilight,

….I sit and linger orne..

The idea of White- (or Beige)-Entitlement that had supported our lives was turning into bitter private irony. P. G. Wodehouse’s and Dornford Yates’ instruction manuals might be helpful, but they were obviously flawed and incomplete. Comical pride, affections for pigs or affable stupidity were not enough for me to learn to impersonate the individual I had always felt myself to be. I quickly recognised that, as I had always known, I did not have a “square jaw” or a “lethal straight left” and was now learning that to master the stilted badinage of the Drones Club and the joke-themes of people hallmarked as true-Brits by Dornford Yates and “Sapper” was going to be no help at all.

Even better than the cinema were visits to Crawford Market, where samples of every desirable thing in the whole world seemed to be displayed for sale under a vast, dirty glass roof and flights of incontinent trapped sparrows and pigeons. There were wicker baskets of bright vegetables, nose-tingling spices, jewellery and gleaming fabrics with much silver and gold trimming, fresh-killed meat and living pets. I saw a pair of baby palm squirrels and whined and pleaded until my parents bought them, and I named them Joseph and Benjamin. They were grey with black and white back-stripes just like North American chipmunks in zoology books. They were the greatest delight of my life, sucking milk from rolls of cotton wool, voracious for peanuts and banana-bits, sleeping confidently and snugly, in school-blazer-pockets, in my school satchel or in any cosy dark recess. They hardly ever bit and would sit on my shoulders and gently nibble my neck hair. They made a playground of my balcony bedroom and, somehow, clung and scampered across the pebble-dashed outsides of the building walls. Inevitably the tamer and gentler, Joseph, my favourite, was mobbed by crows and fell seven stories to his (or perhaps her) death on the pavement. Benjamin, conspicuously male, survived as a perpetual joy. He would sleep in any dark place I put him, with his bushy tail wrapped round his head and body, or sit on my shoulder and gently investigate my ears. His messes were infrequent and hygienic - tiny, dry, easily disposable pellets. He was brilliantly shameless. When bored he would excite himself by frantically chirruping at nothing at all, or sit on the balcony rail and masturbate with his mouth and front paws. If crows attacked him, he would make his tiny body seem menacing by bushing-out and jerking his tail and scold them with chirruping alarm calls until I ran to drive them off. Joseph had been tamer, without sass or aggression and, like all gentle things, perished for meekness. Benjamin was my first bright lesson that insolent anarchy can bring you perpetual joy if you resolutely manage to have no ideas at all - let alone fret about what others notice or think about you. It began to seem possible to learn this amazing wisdom from his freedom, but I could not cross the boundary into uncaring living by becoming as empty as he was of any notion that there were thoughts in the world - even my own. Benji lived in a permanent present, utterly happy or abjectly terrified, not able, or trying, to imagine whether his next moments would bring banana-bits or crows. For me Catholicism had been indoctrination into perpetual striving to make every shiny bit of now a bargaining counter to negotiate against a threatening future. Benjamin seemed to have no feelings of embarrassment or sin and to know that all instants of living are unique time-jewels, each complete in itself, and that we cloud and distort them if we try to make these fragments of experience lenses to read past or future.

I

The flat became even more crowded as relatives we had never met began to worry how any new regime would treat them or that hostile discrimination would make their lives intolerable. Negotiations for a legal partition between mainly Hindu India and mainly Muslim Pakistan began. It was unclear how either new state would regard individuals who had lived in India for generations but still prided themselves on being True Brits. We were shocked that emotional loyalty to Great Britain did not qualify us for British Passports and that, unless we could find a new nationality, we must become citizens of whatever State the Indian Congress and Lord Mountbatten and his advisors devised. (My father would not have been reassured to learn that Mountbatten took his simple, but binding, instructions from Churchill who, while issuing them, balanced a rectangular sponge on his bald head for his pet budgerigar to perch on). Some of our relatives migrated to strange Australia or to South Africa. Most haggled for permission to enter the unknown country that, for all their lives, they had called “Home”. As unfamiliar relatives passed through Bombay to ship to new futures, our flat became a transit camp for strangers whose names had been cast-lists of family gossip. I dodged as much of this turmoil as I could by hiding on my balcony and, on weekdays, being school-bussed to St Xavier’s College to be taught by Jesuit Priests.

These Jesuits were very unlike Magpie Nuns or Irish Christian Brothers. Most were Portuguese, far too urbane to beat us up or shout at us for any reason. They seemed to have no desire to form any kind of relationship with any of us, They just, unenthusiastically, taught us things that we unenthusiastically tried to learn. They never mentioned religion. This was pragmatic because most of their pupils were not Christians and they funded their school by cramming boys of all faiths and none through the Junior and Senior Cambridge School Certificate Exams. Because they were Roman Priests our teachers must have got up very early to say Mass, prayed a lot at various times and invented ingenious guilts to confess to each other but none ever hinted at this secret life. Christianity was so ignored that I won a “Religious Essay Prize” by being the sole entrant in a long dormant annual competition; - the prize was the delightful pagan take on the world: Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

Eight years before, in my Convent Primary School, skin colours had been irrelevant to friendships or as pretexts for mild squabbling. I now re-met many former friends including my favourite former best, Kenny Woods. He and I suddenly found that we were not Whole White (as we had been brought up to boast). The most polite word for our shade was “wheaten”, a wholesome description common in newspaper advertisements offering to trade daughters into acceptable marriages. We now learned that to be light beige, however desirable in a bride, was deeply wrong and equally despised by Pukka Sahibs and Pukka Indians. Our ex-friends had grown burly and aggressively vengeful about two centuries of oppression in the Raj. The Jesuits forecast the political weather and insisted that our rare music-lessons must feature New Independence Songs, especially one that we called the Bugger Off Song which had a punchy chorus:

Dur Hatto, Dur Hatto,

Dur Hatto e Dunia Walo

Dur Hatto, Dur Hatto.

Hindustan hamara Hi

(Get far away, get far away

Get far away and leave the country

Get far away, Get far away

Hindustan belongs to us).

Many Whole Whites had already left, but overdue revenges could be taken on beige laggards, now uncertain of qualifying for British visas and despised as “half-castes” by both “Whole-Brown Indians” and “Whole-White True Brits”. Our new vulnerability excited Whole Brown former friends, now grown huge, energetic and enthusiastic at legitimisation of previously-suppressed dislikes. They shouted choruses of the Bugger Off Song at us, twisted our wrists, gave us “horse bites” and “Chinese burns” and threatened worse violence. This was unpleasant, but taught us that querulous passivity encourages attacks while even weak and painful retaliation may reduce perpetrators’ enjoyment and so their aggression. Occasional physical assaults hurt us less than did soul-bruising demotions from being commonplace people who could merit affection, tolerance, mockery or despite for unique specific personal characteristics, to an undifferentiated sub-class deserving scorn and punishment for despicable biology. It would be inspiring to say that this gave us a little insight into, and shame for our own, intense, deep and lifelong racism. Becoming targets for the injustices we had perpetrated all our lives only made us wary and unforgiving.

Nevertheless, most school days were peaceful, particularly when hot humid Bombay summer suffocated thoughts about anything but heat rash, bafflement by trigonometry and the need to scrape murky sweat from our forearms with geometry rulers and set-squares. Our tiny scuffles at school mirrored small race/religious riots that began to break out in the City. The school bus was often blocked by crowds of Hindus and Mohammedans who had been cheerfully peaceable neighbours until a few weeks ago, but now clustered to shout abuse, wave sticks and bang kitchenware at each other. These confrontations seemed histrionic rather than dangerous - these ordinary people had clearly known each other all their lives, did not seem seriously to want to harm each other and would politely pause and part to let our bus through. We could not guess that mannerly scuffles were rehearsals for possibly the bloodiest million-death-genocides of the record-breaking 20th century. When Mountbatten eventually, and very tardily, defined exact separation lines between Mohammedan East and West Pakistan and Hindustan, the absence of clear boundaries between races within big cities like Delhi, and the rights of different faith and race communities within them, began to be bloodily disputed. Local squabbles between communities who had lived peacefully together for generations blazed into murderous assaults and, eventually, vindictive million-corpse genocides.

Kenny and I were bewildered and hurt by our personal, racial demotion but sheltered by the civility of colour-indifferent friends: Russo Contractor, a charming tall Parsee, often told us, without resentment, how his father, an eminent senior physician, was angry that less competent “pure-British” colleagues treated him, and other medics of his race “like dogs”. For three years after I left India I exchanged letters with Suraj Desai, a gentle, humorous person, and with Vishnu Vasudeva, the calmest, cleverest and probably the fattest human I have known.

Our tiny household had given me my only idea of how families lived, but refugee swarms of relatives showed me that others could be very different. I might have agreed with Tolstoy that unhappy families are miserable in disparate ways - but I also thought that all families were unhappy. Hordes of transiting relatives showed that we were exceptions. My father’s sister, Aunty Maureen, arrived with posh luggage, her German doctor husband Christie Mueller, and two sons, John and Teddy. Their cheerful mutual banter and enjoyment of each other’s company were astonishing. Affectionate Mueller family fun was mainly generated by Christie who disrupted religiosity with jolly, mild irreverence such as:

There is a Happy Land

Far, Far Away

Where they eat Bread and Jam

Three times a Day

Oh! How they laugh and shout!

When the Bread and Jam’s brought out

How they all laugh and shout !

Three times a day.

This amazed, scared and delighted me. I knew that some people scoffed at our Catholic Faith but was smugly certain that these would be punished forever by agonising pain and despair. If their taunts had really stung while I was still on Middle Earth I could get my own back, by enjoying their appalling agonies from a luxurious viewing platform in Heaven, provided by a God who is a connoisseur of excruciating revenge. Christie’s careless jollity shocked me because it reduced the Holy Dread, that was the centre of my Spiritual Life, to careless little jokes. My father did his best to smile but was obviously uneasy. During all our shared years I never discovered what Dad thought that Catholicism was about, but he clearly felt that it secured part of his control over the rest of us. Christie’s gentle mockery i sabotaged this authority while making explosive counter-attacks impossible. I began to inkle how tiny subversions could wriggle me from under oppressions without making open challenges that I was too timid to risk.

Nearing our departure-day we began to experience other perturbations in our understanding of our future. A confirmed sailing date suddenly made us re-assess our life-time horde of battered possessions. We had to imagine how to frame an unknown future without the stage-props of our entire past. I was distressed by the idea of losing dented chairs and tables, scruffy deer’s heads, a tiny, prickly, balding leopard skin and the mess of micro-clutter that had been the background-scenery and the time markers of all my life-memories. The urgent altered future suddenly made all of these “things” meaningless and I began to disassociate myself from them, along with the past that they had furnished. My father could not accept liberation from clutter that had marked the calendar of his entire life. Being forced to think how to shed at least some of his stuff made him recognise that his future was not only imminent and unknown but also dangerously dodgy. He began to ruminate, to lose contentment and to begin to mope irrecoverable joys.

Since Dad and his brother Mick had been very young their greatest mutual happiness had been to get together to kill birds and animals. They called this activity “Shikari” – far more than just a Hindi word for hunting: an expression of bonding in joyful competence at a subtle, strenuous craft. The symbols and instruments of the greatest happiness they had known were the family guns.

While our lives stay lucky we can mistake joy as the permanent texture of existence. Dad was lucky in illusions that happiness can be permanent but he lost these within an hour when Mick made a final brief visit to our last Indian home, overlooking the Indian Ocean that he had circled for 25 years. He and my father could no longer delay deciding what to do with the cherished guns for which they had never had official permits. They briefly debated, and abandoned, schemes that Mick might store them aboard ship or that Dad might risk prosecution by smuggling them into Britain to merrily kill sanctioned vermin, but all proposals were implausible. So, as the lights on the Marine Drive promenade began to go out they took the instruments and symbols of the greatest joys of their lives to the edge of the black sea and threw them in.

My memories and interpretations of my life have always been confused by pretentious reading. At first, I edited this moment into the dark ending of the idyll where King Arthur lies silent and wounded while less-damaged Sir Bedivere hurls Excalibur into a deep black mere. Now that I am far older than either Dad and Mick ever managed to become I realise that Mallory and Tennyson got it wrong. Bedivere made no eloquent fuss; just discarded the symbol of the best times of his life as quietly and efficiently did as a middle-aged policeman and a ship’s doctor who had seen, suffered and relished more than most humans. When Dad and Mick set out downstairs I thought that I completely grasped their pain but, as they came back , I was startled to see that they were both, silently, weeping.

Another medical comfort, not for children, was whisky. My father only tasted alcohol when Mick brought it. It was fascinating to watch them drinking tumblers of brown “pegs”, sparkling with Soda Water bubbles, and Dad suddenly expanding with merry policeman’s anecdotes of how obdurately recalcitrant criminals can be “tuned up” with hide-whips until they produce satisfactory confessions. These were rare glimpses into the most significant part of Dad’s life, that, usually, he entirely concealed from the rest of us. Much later I shared the similar memories of other middle-aged academics who also grew up as Cop-Sons. One had a father who had been a very senior Roman Catholic policeman in the North of England who, even late in retirement, would do his bit to enliven family Christmases by describing the most efficient ways in which iron bars can be used to obtain admissions of guilt. Another, a very senior Police Inspector, would gleefully describe “educational sessions” behind the Claremont lock-up just off the Stirling Highway in Perth, Western Australia. My meek colleagues and I agreed with each other how frequent, startling, and sudden can be the swings from Good Cop to Bad Cop. We also agreed that our fathers’ lives had been so very different from our own tranquil trundling that we could not dare to judge them because they had inhabited such separate realities. They had to see, and endure, things that we simply cannot imagine. For example, a common reason for early retirement from the Bombay City Police was a large curry-grinding stone dropped from a high tenement for no motive but hatred.

The part of his job that gave my father the greatest pleasure in his life was touring his district to hold meetings in obscure villages to settle disputes about petrol rationing and the proper regulation of bus and lorry services. He would time these jaunts to coincide with Mick’s visits and cheer up as they approached. When we set out I was stuffed with the luggage into the back of an old Ford car as an over-excited “spotter” for hares, partridges, quail and anything else that hopped or fluttered. When I sighted something alive we would stop to kill it. It is embarrassing to remember how proud I was to be praised for sharp eyesight and enthusiasm. Both Dad and Mick seemed to be capable with shot-guns because their kill (which they called a “bag”) of little brown birds was always huge. They always shot more than we could possibly eat, or even manage to give away, so their claim that they killed “only just enough for the pot” was absurd. I loved all of it - the smell of cordite, the banging of the guns, counting the mounting hillocks of corpses and, most of all, the vivid happiness of my father and uncle. I only winced to see wounded birds struggle in my father’s huge hands as he swung them to complete their deaths against the stock of his gun. He laughed and said that this was ”a part of nature”.

If no partridges or quails could be spotted Mick and Dad would kill almost anything else we encountered. I particularly remember a flock of huge grey, stately, vivid-crested Sarus cranes, at their daft community-mating dance in a dry rice paddy. They were too busy with ballet to notice us until the 12 bores shattered them. I also remember, guiltily, that they were especially delicious to eat. Few of these stately and joyous birds are now alive but, in the 1940s, at least to my Father and Uncle, the natural world seemed limitlessly abundant and overstocked and impossible to exhaust, even with passionate entertainments of slaughter.

A different example of murderous prodigality was driving along a narrow jungle road when a huge python began to cross ahead of us. I do not think that it sensed that we were near because it did not speed its slow coiling, perhaps a little perturbed to be on hot smooth tarmac, but minding its own business. We stopped and it suddenly realised that it was not alone and slightly sped up. My uncle leapt out and shot. It stopped and we could see that it was wonderfully glossy and beautiful and more than three times as long as Mick. It began a long death while I watched its patterned skin, flecked with beads of blood, gleaming in sunlight. Dad and Mick debated whether they could do anything with it; but they judged that shot-perforations had ruined the trophy value of its skin and that it would make a nasty curry. They began to realise that they did not really care and that the death of the huge, beautiful creature had already given them all that they needed. We drove on before the twitches stopped.

My father always said that Mick was a “fine shot” and a “great hunter”. I believe the first statement because he seemed to hit most things that he aimed at - but some experiences question the second. When he was very young Mick, once stalked a tiger alone, on foot. This was not sensible but he was sure that he would get the drop on it and he believed that he was skilfully trailing it through a tunnel in a cactus-hedge until he suddenly met it head-on. He was lucky that it didn’t like the look of him either and they both fled backwards as fast as possible.

Once I waited with Mick and Dad in a car parked on a track through dense jungle where they hoped to encounter some large animal, dazzle it with a new spotlight that my father had plugged in to the cigar-lighter in his old Ford Car, and kill it before it regained its wits. We sat in thick dark listening to piping of invisible spotted deer and coughs of a leopard stalking and herding them. Excitement faded to boredom until, suddenly there was a lurching presence on the road ahead. Mick leapt out eager to blaze away. My father’s new spotlight suddenly lit a startled, blinded, plodding villager. Dad knocked Mick’s gun aside. “I thought it was a bear…..” Mick said. We drove home in silence.

Another embarrassment developed during a hot afternoon when we were driving along a forest road and heard strident challenges of wild Indian jungle fowl, the lovely, proud and agile ur-ancestors of billions of blowsy battery-hens. Dad stopped the car, Mick disappeared into the undergrowth and we heard a shot. Dad loyally gloated but we waited for a puzzlingly long time until Mick limped back. He had shot himself in the leg. Nobody spoke. Over evening whisky Jack began sympathetic-aggressive queries about the damage; commented how extraordinarily unwise it is to carry a loaded gun, with the safety off through low brushwood, remembered similar, worse, accidents suffered by others and speculated the luck that different, more unfortunate, body-parts had not been damaged.

My father greatly enjoyed the main tasks of the official tours that supported these interludes. These were to go to arranged meeting places, usually near tiny, obscure villages, where a canvas awning was hung on a tree to give shade from the sun while he sat at a small table and adjudicated representations by local lorry and bus-owners. These meetings were always near dak-bungalows, all, now ancient, government-maintained overnight lodgings for touring officials. I was sent to stay in these while Dad adjudicated and was always entranced. The buildings were small, usually with pitched roofs, and little dark rooms that smelt of musty emptiness, hot damp and at least a Century of Imperial Rule. They had tiny living rooms with battered furniture and, always, bookshelves filled with ancient red-bound folio-volumes of “Punch” - a meant-to-be funny now long-obsolete British magazine, with dull stories and unamusing “cartoons”. These were not sketched in the bare outlines of 21st century wit but were carefully drafted and detailed pictures, including sufficient laborious details to make them near-substitutes for photographs. I remember one, a plump elegantly-dressed old man sitting on a park-bench with a pair of young lovers (one male and one female), who were carefully represented to seem ultra-fashionable and soppy: their dialogue was captured by the caption “Darling”, “What darling?” “Nothing, Darling - just Darling, Darling” with the annotation “Old gentleman feels queasy”.

These Dak-bungalows always had tiny front verandas where hot gusts stirred spider webs hanging like hanks of grey muslin. Verandas were always furnished with “Bombay Fornicators” - wood and wicker reclining chairs with long arms that were flat, and generously wide enough to support tumblers of whisky or beer. These arm-rests extended forward to provide horizontal supports for legs outstretched to allow air to circulate in shorts and also to reveal whether - or not- government officials, although exhausted by their jobs, risked underpants in the heat. When no tired Imperial functionaries clutching Scotch and soda sprawled on display, these verandas were basking-places for lizards and pretty little snakes keenly interested in insects tempted by dapples of sun-pools. Accompanying the scent of whisky-pegs was a thick smell of hot green vegetation, long ago planted to be ornamental but now reverting to mini-jungle with a few unexpected, wilting flowers.

In Ahmedabad our bungalow did not have enough bedrooms to accommodate visitors. The Belgaum ex-church allowed a dedicated room for my father’s youngest brother, the ship’s surgeon Mick, to store his surplus stuff and to live, during shore-leaves, while his ship docked in Bombay. In parched industrial Ahmedabad there had been little space to tempt visits. In Belgaum Mick and his possessions could take over what was once the Clerical Robing Room. Also, Belgaum accessed one of the best areas in all of India for him to relish his greatest passion – killing things.

My grandmother seldom spoke of the childhoods of her five children and always began with wistful praise of the first-born, Bertie, who had died at age sixteen. Sparse remarks on the others would usually start with Jehovah’s curse on Eve in the book of Genesis: “In Pain and sorrow shall thou bring forth thy young”. (Roman Catholics mainly ignore the Old Testament, except for quotations that especially succinctly capture remorseless Divine Disposal of our lives and Human Misery and Guilt ). Old Mum mentioned her youngest, Mick, more often and more favourably than any of the other survivors. This seemed to irritate my father. I imagine Mick as having been a plump child because when I knew him in his 40’s he was unambiguously fat and teased by my father with a nickname, “Butux”, that seemed to refer to what Jehovah would call his “Hinder Parts”. Old Mum’s recollection of Mick’s earliest years was his obsessive killing of birds and beasts. Even when very young he would kill random birds with a catapult to carefully cut their corpses into bits. When questioned, he explained that he meant to become a doctor and must dissect creatures to learn how they worked. As he grew older family guns became available to him, and the variety and sizes of his victims increased. He did indeed go to Calcutta Medical School, got a medical degree and found work as a ship’s surgeon, but his passion persisted and he gradually filled our various homes with taxidermified heads and skins. I particularly remember the skin of a tiny leopard that became a bedroom mat prickling my bare feet every morning.

Mick had to cache his possessions with us because he spent most of his life in cramped cabins aboard ships. He would visit us when his ship docked at Bombay to re-fit after circling the Indian Ocean, from Basra and the Persian Gulf to Karachi then South to Bombay and South-West to Durban and then North to Mauritius and back again to the Middle East and then, again, South-East to Karachi and Bombay.

My compulsive reading of anything I could find fractured my grasp of the reality of anything and everybody that I tried to imagine. So, when very young, I imagined Mick’s trundles on cargo ships through shining tropical seas as romantic journeys like those of Phlebas the Phoenician on a Quinquerime of Nineveh from distant Ophir, with cargoes of ivory, apes and peacocks, sandalwood and cedarwood, sweet white wine (which I had never tasted but which sounded delicious) and all sorts of other good stuff. In reality, until the war, cargoes were crates of the cheap, almost-useful things that you find in chain–stores. Mick’s ships also carried crowded deck-cargoes of passengers - often pilgrims to and from Mecca. Phoenician fantasies were permanently deleted by my first visit to one of Mick’s ships while it docked in Bombay. It seemed tiny; there was a lot of rust and furrowed congealed paint, ponderous rusty machinery and what seemed an insufficient number of dodgy-looking lifeboats.

Mick’s surgery was a tiny cabin under the bridge which smelt of iodoform and had a single hard bunk upholstered in worn brown oilcloth. He said that because the ship’s crews were always healthy he had little to do while afloat so I wondered how he filled his days. He mentioned being impressed by sighting whales but this happened too often to maintain excitement over decades. He had also stopped noticing many wonderful things: tropical skyscapes, huge gleaming white clouds, dolphins hydroplaning green waves at the ship’s bow, or flying fish collected for breakfast from decks every morning became uninteresting repetitions. Mick owned a great variety of fishing tackle so he probably fished a lot. Sometimes for sharks, because he brought us sets of checker-pieces that he had made from their spines: armies of vertebrae stained red with mercurochrome and counter-regiments of raw white bone. Mick could have got little exercise because the ships’ decks were too small and cluttered for jogging, or even brisk walking. To try to remedy this he bought a twangy spring “chest-expander” but soon gave up on it and stored it with us. I never saw him read for pleasure and, apart from making shark-spine checker-sets, he did no handicrafts. There was little entertainment aboard because radios provided only random music and brief news bulletins and this was decades before video tapes that are now the main support of human consciousness on huge oil-tankers. Mick’s best times must have been trips ashore in exotic ports where he collected what now seems to me the usual tourist stuff: impressive but impractical daggers; small cloth bags of tiny semi-precious, or just pretty stones; huge boxes, looking like giant black scrotums, made of polished double-coconuts called “Coco de mere”; small bright rugs. Many of his possessions were dangerous: scary hunting knives with serrated blades; a swagger-cane that concealed a short sword; a set of brass knuckle-dusters; a small, heavy, leather-covered cosh that he called a “life-preserver” and a clumsy Colt revolver with snubby lead bullets. His armoury accumulated in trunks in our houses and I ferreted amongst it for play. Perhaps play was all he, also, ever did with these things, though the theme of his collection hints at anxieties. Perhaps he felt that ports in the middle East can be dangerous places.

Although Mick said that his medical practice was undemanding it was not negligible and, in Persian Gulf ports, he gained a profitable reputation for private minor surgery, especially mending harelips for Mecca pilgrims. My random reading cast him as an under-employed member of Ulysses’ crew, living in strenuous boredom, interrupted by rare anxieties such as Sirens and Clashing Cliffs, accepting the remorseless accumulation of undifferentiated years, gradually losing any idea of Ithaca and coming to believe that all landfalls are, probably, going to be dicey, but with luck, also brief and survivable.

I suppose that boredom with shipboard monotonies made Mick visit our inward-focussed family more frequently than he would if other choices had been available to him. His visits were great excitements but always brought a shudder of anxiety because, every time, he would produce nasty-tasting medicines and give urgent instructions for painful interferences with my small, fat body such as tonsillectomy, adenoid-removal or ruthless lancing of persistent boils. When I turned five he became so passionate that I should be circumcised for “hygienic reasons” that I became afraid that he would suddenly decide to do the job himself, probably on the dining room table. He never got round to this, but never gave up urging it. This obsession became pressing when I turned 16 and began struggling through puberty. We were then in the UK, with its new National Health Service, and my father seized this advantage to take me to a local GP to “get me done for free”. Although Dad protested that my eminent medical uncle had insisted on the ”procedure” the humane, and overburdened GP angrily refused. A surge of appreciation for the NHS has lasted the rest of my life.

We were impressed, because none of us had ever met anyone important enough to be a passenger on an aeroplane. Also awed that so eminent a being as Satan had taken trouble to secure our damnation which his agent, Father Paul, had activated. We were proud to hear that God himself must have disguised a Holy Angel as a super-competent aircraft mechanic to mend the Devil’s mischief and to speed Clancy to lay fear of Ultimate Damnation on us.

Clancy explained Hell in detail because, since we were at imminent risk of it we should completely understand the extreme horrors from which he was determined to save us. From the moment when our current depravities tumbled us into The Pit, we would be mocked by loathsome demons who would bellow, sneer and prod at us with vicious pitchforks while we burned for all eternity in flames that were hotter than any earthly blast-furnace but would never reduce us to unfeeling ashes. To gain a dim idea of what eternity means we should imagine the vast globe of the Earth, swimming in space, visited just once every hundred years by a sparrow who brushes it with a wing-tip. Over an unimaginable time this tiny Space Sparrow would manage to whisk away the atmosphere, molecule by molecule, blot up the vast oceans and stroke the mighty Himalayas to the Earth’s molten core and beyond. Yet, when this task was over, Eternity would not even have begun and we would, just as desperately as in the first milliseconds of our torture, thrash and scream with parched fiery throats at agonising but non-consuming flames, bellowing hatred for each other and for the scornful pitchforking demons.

We were slightly distracted by wondering how a sparrow could live so long, and breathe in empty space, and what it might eat and do during the centuries between planet-eroding flutters. We realised that this was silly because obviously this would be a Sacred Sparrow and launching it would be a trivial doddle for the omnipotent God who had lovingly invented Hell, and affectionately maintains its anguish for eternity.

After this introduction, the Retreat went well. Our meals became smaller, fewer and less interesting. The menu was the same as for religious fasts by Monks – “one small meal and two collations” a day, with no luxuries such as sausages. While eating we were not allowed to talk to each other, even to pass the water or salt, but listened to one of us reading aloud from a Holy Book. During long intervals between meals we sat out Father Clancy’s sermons. There were also morning Masses and evening Benedictions and, between these, more Rosaries than we had supposed that we could cram into the rest of our lives. We made a fresh Confession every day to reduce the risk of suddenly dying with an unlaundered soul. During the brief intervals between bouts of communal holiness we were freed to wander the school playgrounds without talking. Each alone, luxuriating in solitary, silent Virtue.

This worked very well for me. One day I sat on the gravel in a corner of the football/hockey/cricket pitch and watched a black Brahmini hawk use a wind that I could not feel to slide across bright sky. During a sudden reality shift I was out of my mind – or, more exactly, my mind was out of me - and somehow part of the soft sky, dark pines and deodars, sliding with the hawk through experience with no start or end. Even now, in good moments of bad old age, I can still use this memory to recapture the taste of forever. I love the shite-hawk for a glimpse of un-clockable non-time.

The retreat ended, Father Clancy strenuously blessed us and disappeared from our lives. Normal meals, even with sausages, and classes with Geometry and Latin resumed. There had to be Morning Masses and Evening Benedictions every day, so Father Paul must have been replaced but, unlike Paul, this unremembered successor did not take kindly trouble to research, for us, and to proudly announce during Church Services , the most profitable investments in new Indulgences announced by the Church that offered exceptional returns for modest amounts of prayer. I remember that his best discovery was an arrangement with St Joseph, Jesus’ Foster- Dad, for a guaranteed “Happy Death” in exchange for attending Mass, every Friday, for surprisingly few weeks.

The school lending-library was four small shelves offering much of what P. G. Wodehouse had written up to 1940 – but no later, because he had disgraced himself by continuing to make broadcasts for the Axis while living in the German-occupied South of France. Another author was G. A. Henty. I relished Wodehouse, especially his Wooster/Jeeves and PSmith stories, but I knew that I would be scorned by Henty’s sturdy, excruciatingly honourable characters while they strove to secure and extend the Great British Empire. These heroes would notice, but politely never mention, that I was remarkably feeble at games and, most probably, also a cowardly sneak.

Above the bookshelves there was a tiny School Notice Board. It was usually empty but, one day, displayed a three inch single-column-clipping from the Times of India telling that the war with Japan was suddenly over because the US air-force had utterly destroyed two Japanese Cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each with just one, powerful Atom Bomb. The cowardly Japanese had immediately surrendered, as we had always expected that they would. We knew nothing about atoms and could not imagine how the smallest possible bits of stuff, finer even than grains of gunpowder, could cause such terrifying damage. It was a long time before we saw the pictures of rubble and charred corpses and read accounts of thousands of seared deaths - as agonising as Hell but, because the US Air Force is kinder than God, much briefer. We did not puzzle why the US had made two obliterations when one would, surely, have been enough to make their point, but decided that this was because the Japanese are notoriously stupid and stubborn. We had always known that we, the Allies, must eventually win because we were obviously braver and nicer and more competent and because God liked us much more than he liked heathen Japs. It was also easy to understand that God had made us cleverer about atoms than the lesser races were.

When the War ended we felt that the world had utterly changed but could not grasp just how. One clue was the appearance of White British and Australian soldiers, who had chosen to be de-mobbed in India and to wander, enjoying sudden freedoms in a huge sub-continent. One of these had credentials as a physical training instructor and the Brethren hired him to smarten and toughen us up. He lasted only a few days until boredom caused him to spend a drunken afternoon in the open space between the main school buildings demonstrating awkward forward rolls and unsteady hand-walking on mattresses that he had borrowed from our dormitories. Another sign that the war was over was the sudden changes in the relative popularity of silly songs that we hummed without noticing we were doing this. A few months ago most had been Anglo-Indian distortions of hackneyed True-British staples, such as a Vera Lynn take-off:

“There’ll be Blue Birds under, The cliffs of Jelunder”

Now that the war was ended, and we all began to realise that promised India Independence Day was imminent, distortions of Brit favourites became tinged with cheerful Schoolboy scatology:

Last Night as I lay on my pillow

Last Night as I lay on my bed

I slept with my arse out the window

This morning my neighbour is dead

Bring Back, Oh Bring Back

Oh Bring Back my Neighbour to me

Bring Back, Oh Bring Back ….

Finally there was a radical culture change and Bollywood began to take over. For me, even now, a persistent ear-worm is a wailing ditty of exasperation of helpless love beginning:

Meeri Jan, Meeri Jan

it went, and still goes, on and on, corrupted into gibberish by my failing memory:

Aiiiii Aiiiii Ohhhhh

Never let me Go….

Passionate pre-pubescent chanting of “My life my life” followed by protestations of helpless and permanent devotion involving anguish, blood and tears celebrated the approaching end to school year boredom.

Nine months had, at last, unravelled and it was time for trunks to come down from attic storage and for us to begin a wonderful journey to freedom on the miniature train, skirting steep slopes of deodars until Kathgodam, followed by the three-day-and-two-night rail journey to homes and families that we had spent a almost a year learning to forget. These long separations were lessons in emotional amnesia that lets life continue even after everyday pleasures have been lost. While we were with them, our families had been mini-universes in which we spent lives unimaginable elsewhere. Once the school year began the trains had rapidly trundled us from cosy patterns of family days into an environment where even repetitiously chants of banalities became numbing distractions, like the shuffling of zoo animals in cages. Happily, unlike time, the Great Indian Railways did not only run one way and so raced us back to pasts that we had strenuously forgotten and must now re-learn to manage.

These harmless encounters were suddenly ended by a rumour that Paul was accused of indecencies perpetrated during the (very rare) Saturday afternoons when most of us were led along the Mall, Simla’s main shopping street. Paul supervised walk-refuseniks who, incomprehensibly until now, preferred staying behind in the school. No one could understand what Pauline indecencies might be sufficiently thrilling to exchange for our rare, brief freedoms from the grey school yards and the choking discipline. The most common guess, “Putting hands up pants,” seemed pathetically dull. We felt that this must be a mistake that would soon be forgotten and that Charlie Chaplin’s jerky performances would resume.

Every morning at 8.00 a.m. Father Paul said a Mass that we all attended. This highly practised ritual seemed to rouse no emotions in him or in us. During what we did not realise was to be his farewell morning Mass, he walked to give his final sermon from the plain wood floor to be level with us; ranked Brothers, uniformed in white robes, centred on their grim Principal like a fierce sporting team behind a dour Captain. With his voice and beard still calm, Paul began to threaten that imminent proof of his innocence of alleged misdemeanours that he could not stoop to describe would soon destroy his malicious detractors. Controlled indignation and pain gradually crumbled into anger. We boys were shocked to see an adult exactly simulating performances we gave when we tried to magic dangerous truths into fictions. As always happened to us, Paul slowly began to realise that nobody was believing him and subtly shifted from outright denials to hints that the misdeeds with which he was accused were, after all, only very minor and maliciously misunderstood. His voice became soft and strained and he mumbled a parting blessing. We never saw him again.

Paul’s smidgeons of kindliness had become a substitute for affection that we did not get from any other adult in the school. He must have had a successor, but I cannot remember anything about him, not even a dim image or a name.

For the School Principal the Pauline Incident was something far more serious than a threat to school morale or imminent bad publicity. It was a personal attack by the boss Devil, Satan himself, to harvest the souls of our little community. He desperately needed specialised help. The Catholic Church trains shock-troops for just such emergencies, so the Principal appealed to the Redemptorists, a preaching and revivalist order and an SAS for soul-reclamation.