Passage from India

It is not fashionable to feel sympathy for the men and women who lived and served in the British colonies and who had to leave when independence came, whether it was from Kenya, Ghana — or from India, which celebrated the 70th anniversary of its freedom earlier this month. But I do, because I remember the pain and the loss and the homesickness of leaving India — a feeling which has niggled away somewhere deep down all my life. The Indian writer Shrabani Basu (the film based on her book Victoria & Abdul comes out next month) is no friend of the Raj, but she read my recent memoir and said: ‘It must have been particularly painful for the children, as India was the only home they knew.’ Exactly.

My family sailed ‘home’ on a troopship from Bombay to Liverpool in June 1948, when I was eight. It wasn’t home in any meaningful sense.