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.