The lifelong effects of being a child in the British Raj

I belong to a dying breed. Well, not a breed exactly, but a dwindling number who witnessed a world and a way of life that will never be repeated: we are the last babies of the British Raj. In my view the doyen of our group was the writer Charles Allen whose many books, starting with Plain Tales from the Raj, are almost all about the India he left at eight years old. He and I were on the same ship coming ‘home’ in 1948: the SS Franconia. So were more than a thousand other British men, woman and children, from typists and missionaries to engineers and soldiers, sailing away from India for the last time, leaving behind the graves of perhaps two million other Brits.

Allen died last year aged 80. I am writing this because those of us who remember anything about those times have to be around that age, or over. India became independent in 1947. Do the maths. We are not going to be around for long.

We Raj babies remember an extraordinary Technicolor world in which monkeys, elephants and camels lived among us and not in zoos, where buffaloes grazed in fields and cows roamed city streets. Mysterious and magical things happened in this world: men dressed in skirts and big bright turbans, and the women who repaired the roads looked like queens or princesses in swathes of vivid cloth. We were told extraordinary tales of men who could put swords through their cheeks or sleep on beds of nails. Every now and again we would glimpse a scary sadhu, a holy man, almost naked and smeared with ash. Joanna Lumley, who was born in India but came to Britain from Malaya when she was eight, remembers the sounds of other religions: ‘Chanting, tinkling bells, murmuring deep horns and the muezzin calling, it all seemed normal and commonplace.’