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.’ All but overwhelmed, she determined ‘to capture the wonder of that experience, to pin it down, so that not a single iota of it could escape me and be forgotten … and I scribbled, scribbled accordingly.’
Three years later Emma Smith transformed her scribbles into a novel, The Far Cry, which became the new publishers MacGibbon and Kee’s first publication.
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