In September 1946 a 23-year-old Englishwoman sailed for India in one of the first passenger liners to be reconverted from a trooper. She spent the following Cold Weather as the dogsbody with a documentary unit making films about tea gardens in Assam. Fifty-four years on she would describe this excursion into Asia as ‘a huge surprise’ for which she was totally unprepared: ‘I went down the gangplank at Bombay, and India burst upon me with the force of an explosion.’
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