One Hell Of a Life: An Anglo-Indian Wallah's Memoir from the Last Decades of the Raj

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PART 1 – Childhood

Chapter 1 – Popo Baba

‘HAIL, STANLEY. THOU ART GOING TO BE GREAT!’ That’s what God said to me.

I was in bed, fast asleep. It was 1927, Calcutta. In my dreams dark monsoon clouds billowed over the Hooghly River. Suddenly, God’s head and shoulders poked through the murky sky. He was wearing a peaked cap, like the one my grandfather wore as a railway guard, and His voice thundered out the words that awakened me.

I was going to be great! The mantle of greatness was already descending on my willing shoulders as I rushed to my mother’s bed, shook her and shouted, ‘Mummy, mummy, wake up. I’m going to be great. God told me that I’m going to be great.’

‘You’ll never be great,’ said my mother. She hugged me and kissed me and said, ‘You are mummy’s little buddhu.¹ You can never be great.’

‘But God told me,’ I cried.

My mother drew me into her bed, cuddled me and said, ‘You’ll never be great. You’re mummy’s little ugly duckling and you have elephant’s ears. You can never be great because you are a buddhu.’

I had always known that I was a buddhu. Other children used to make fun of me because I was ‘not very bright’.

Born in Calcutta, India, on the 26th of May, 1920, I was baptised into the Church of England at St Paul’s Church, Scott’s Lane, but my earliest memories are of when I was four and Frank, my brother, was two. We were living at Asansol, a large railway colony about 200 kilometres to the West of Calcutta. My father was a burra sahib (a VIP) in the Civil Service. We lived in a palatial government bungalow about five kilometres out of town, tended by a dozen servants. My father’s 1922 Chevrolet roadster was one of the few cars in the district. We were a privileged family.

By this time it was apparent that I was a ‘backward’ child. In later life I heard my mother telling friends that I never cried nor showed anger or frustration, that I was a ‘good’ child, placid and easy to look after; that I was always content to play quietly with toy cars. Her only complaint was that I never smiled or laughed and that I never responded to her hugs and kisses. She said that I was as ‘emotionless as a vegetable’, and my recollection of that period is as a mechanical blur with no highs and no lows. All this was twenty years before autism was recognised as a medical condition. (I can’t say that I was autistic, but later in life I was told that the symptoms I displayed were typical of at least mild autism).

Tall for my age and good looking, I never demanded attention and stayed quiet and passive for hours, unlike my brother who was a mischievous imp, always in trouble. My parents were disappointed that I was not always doing cute little things like Frank; the sort of pranks that proud parents boast about to their friends.

During the first four years of my life I uttered barely a sound, except when I saw a car. Then I would cry ‘Popo popo’ in imitation of a car horn. It was the pre-electric-horn era, when cars were fitted with bulb horns to warn pedestrians and other traffic of the approach of one’s car.

A typical horn was a long metal tube, sometimes ornamentally fashioned like a sea serpent with a large head, complete with vicious teeth and red tongue protruding from a snarling mouth, and with fiery red eyes that glared balefully at pedestrians from the front of the car as if to reproach them for cluttering up the road so untidily. The other end of the tube ended conveniently outside the driver’s window in a hand-sized rubber bulb, which the driver squeezed. At each squeeze the device emitted a protesting sound like a squawking crow or a moo-ing cow.

Indian peasants had a habit of walking in the middle of the road, ignoring traffic. Impatient motorists, consequently, felt compelled to sound their horns continually, simultaneously swearing loudly at other road users. Motorists, pedestrians, tongas,² ghora gharries, rickshaws, and bullock carts, and their drivers, all ignored traffic regulations, meandering over the road and swearing back loudly. To this was added the shouts of bullock-cart drivers to their animals, the tinkle of rickshaw bells and the farts of horses straining to pull tongas and ghora gharries. A glorious cacophony of noise. But of all these, only the car horn intrigued me in all its variety of styles and tones, and I would try to imitate it.

The mere sight of a car caused me to enunciate a stream of ‘popos’. My parents were delighted with these signs of a burgeoning intelligence and, to help me to become more articulate, they bought me a number of toy cars. This was the pre-plastic era, so my fleet consisted of a variety of chunky wooden push-along vehicles and metal wind-up cars and trucks. I liked the metal ones best. They were more life-like, with miniature windscreens, steering wheels, seats and running boards. Some even had little figures of ladies and gentlemen riding in them. The metal vehicles were always painted in bright gleaming colours: red, yellow, green, blue, and some black like my father’s Chevrolet.

‘Look,’ my mother would cry, just like Daddy’s car-car,’ to which I would reply, ‘Popo popo popo.’ Some of my metal vehicles had battery-operated lights which could be switched on and off, and invariably they had coil springs that could be wound up tight to propel them across the floor. My brother and the servants had great fun with these cars, making them speed along the marble floors of our drawing room, while I would stand and point and shout, ‘Popo popo.’

But the only play I ever adopted with these cars was to push and pull them quickly back and forth while emitting strings of ‘popos’. My father hit on the idea of keeping them all linked together by twine in line astern formation. I held my father’s thumb with my right hand, and with my left I would tow the train of cars crying, ‘Popo, popo.’ To encourage me to articulate these sounds more often, and perhaps expand my vocabulary, they would call out to me, ‘Popo, popo. Car car, car car.’ I would respond by clutching the twine in my hand, pulling my string of cars to my father and grasping his thumb, and join in this educational activity with cries of ‘Popo, popo.’

My mother had a penchant for conferring nicknames on people so she called me ‘Popo,’ and the servants took to calling me Popo baba.³

I would not play with other children, and I had not started talking by my fourth birthday. My mother blamed my backwardness on our isolation — there were no European children nearby for me to play with — notwithstanding that Frank was already developing fluency in both English and kitchen Hindustani.⁴

My mother, alarmed at my lack of intellectual development, enrolled me at the Asansol Railway School in the hope that I would play with other children and learn to speak. Although I spent a month there, I neither interacted with people nor learnt to talk despite the administration of mild, therapeutic doses of the cane (this was an era when corporal punishment was considered an essential educational tool). As a last resort, she decided to send me to boarding school. Without parental support, she reasoned, I would have to fend for myself and I would soon learn to speak.

Her choice fell on ‘the Miss Cutlers’, who ran a two-room school for twenty primary day students at Madhupur, a small nearby railway colony. They supplemented their meagre income by taking in two ‘parlour boarders’.

Chapter 2 – Lukvar

I spent two years at Madhupur. Electricity had not yet come to this far-flung outpost of the Empire, so I was introduced to the hissing pressure gas lamps and to oil lamps, to churning ice-cream by hand and to punkah coolies. Here, too, I learned to fly kites, play marbles, spin tops, and be a normal, healthy, naughty boy generally — above all I learned to talk!

Miss Mabel was the elder of the two Cutler sisters. In her late fifties, she was thin, bespectacled and genteel, and carried a cane. She played the piano for singing and marching, and taught the older children. Miss Kitty, a few years younger, was fat, tired-looking and given to shouting. They were typical of that breed of genteel English spinsters in the colonies, carrying the white man’s burden valiantly but finding the burden very heavy indeed; coping with heat, flies, no electricity, and restricted social life. Having little opportunity of finding husbands, they settled for their single state with an air of martyrdom — a martyrdom that they projected on to those over whom they had authority. They were stem, humourless disciplinarians and inspired fear in their charges in different ways, Miss Mabel with strokes of the cane, Miss Kitty with the threats implied in her loud booming voice.

My fellow boarder, Norman Stacey, was two years older than me. We saw little of the Miss Cutlers outside of school hours, except on Sunday evenings when they trooped us down to Church. We all were Church of England. I remember being robed in red and white and leading the choir and priest in procession, like a mascot, from the porch, up the nave to the choir stalls near the altar. During the long sermons I would lapse into slumber (the habit, generously permitted to the mascot seventy-six years ago, persists to this day). At night oil lamps cast their soft glow on the assembled faces and heads bowed in worship.

I shared a bedroom with Norman. We were parlour boarders in name only. The two ladies took their silver service meals in isolation in their elegant dining room and relaxed in their well-appointed drawing room. Norman and I ate at a wooden table covered by an oilcloth, in an enclosed portion of a verandah, and spent all our out-of-school hours in the company of Lukvar, the bearer the Cutlers appointed to care for us.

Lukvar was tall and slim, with bright eyes and a pencil moustache, and looked smart in the Cutlers’ livery. A child at heart, he enjoyed being our guardian and playmate. He told us fairy stories and sang songs to us as he bathed Norman and me in a large zinc tub which the bhisti⁵ filled with water. He brought our food from the kitchen and served us at our table, and was our constant companion.

Lukvar often took us to sit in the kitchen in the cold winter evenings. This was attached to the servants’ quarters, about 30 yards from the house. It was cosy there with seven or eight servants and their families squatting on the ground crowded around the choola.⁶ Amidst the flickering shadows thrown on the walls by the kerosene lantern, everybody helped to chop vegetables, prepare the meat, and grind massalas for the curries and the mulligatawny soup — everybody, that is, except the methar⁷ and his family, who were untouchables, and were not permitted to touch other people’s food. This was a time for storytelling, and we listened spellbound to tales of kings and queens, of police and dacoits, of soldiers and horsemen, of valour and honour and treachery.

Lukvar taught us to wrap a cord around a luttoo⁸ and to throw it with a flick of the wrist so that it would spin on its nail-point. With a special flick upward we could make the top fly into the air spinning, and we would quickly place our hand palm-up under the point as it fell so that the top landed on our palm and spun furiously. He took us to the bazaar where we bought guddhees made of the thinnest and lightest rice paper patterned in triangles and crescents and balls of red and blue and green and yellow and purple and all the colours imaginable. He showed us how to make manja — how to run the thread through a mixture of rice paste and ground glass until the whole string acquired an abrasive coating — and fasten it to the kite for fighting. Then we wound it on to a lattai.

Flying guddhees on the adjoining maidan was a thrilling pastime. In their variegated colours, they were as brilliant and light as butterflies, and sent an exhilarating ‘charge’ down the string to the lattais in our hands as the guddhees wheeled and soared. They would rise so high they looked as small as postage stamps. There would be dozens of men and little chokras flying kites (never any women or chokrees — it was a male pastime!) and the wonderful sight of many multi-coloured shapes darting and bobbing about the sky.

We made our guddhee swoop under the string of another one, then pulled it in as rapidly as possible, running backwards to increase the pulling speed, so that our manja would slice into the other string and sever it. Our opponent did the same. There was always one winner and one loser.

The winner quickly manoeuvred his kite to lubjao⁹ the enemy guddhee now drifting out of control, to keep circling it so that his string would snare the other’s trailing string. Then he pulled the two down together to add one more captured prize to his proud score of victories, and felt like an air ace in the first World War. But alas, all’s fair in love and war, and this was war. As we struggled to bring our prize in, other predators swooped on our kite, trying to cut our string; and so the air war waged.

After two years, when I left the railway school at Madhupur, the only person I missed was Lukvar.

Chapter 3 – A Kidnap Attempt

Life in this exotic land was not always uneventful. Tall for his age and wiry, Norman was adventuresome, liked boisterous games and was forever leading me into mischief, which earned him the Cutlers’ almost unceasing wrath. He resented the many punishments inflicted on him and pined for home. This made him easy prey for a kidnap plot. Kidnapping young children of important Europeans and holding them to ransom was not common, but it was by no means unknown. Sometimes the crime was politically motivated, to strike at a Government official, other times for more nefarious reasons such as the blackmarket for young white children; in either case, the children were never seen again. Sometimes it was for ransom.

A renegade servant, in league with a band of kidnappers, offered to take Norman and me back to our respective loved ones. Norman jumped at the ‘opportunity’. All arrangements were made with Norman who acted on my behalf and without my knowledge. Secrecy was enjoined on him, and he was instructed not to tell me until the last moment because I was a baby and might blab the secret out.

On the fateful day, shortly after we had retired for our afternoon siesta, Norman told me that some kind Indian gentlemen would come along shortly and throw pebbles against the venetian shutters of our bedroom window, whereupon we would go down to join them. They would feed us barfi, luddoos and other delicious sweetmeats, and take us home to our respective mummies and daddies.

The time arrived. Pebbles thrown against the window shutters alerted us to the need to go downstairs and join our benefactors. Norman said, ‘Get up, Stanley. Time to go home.’

‘I don’t want to go home,’ I replied.

Norman opened the window and called out softly to the kidnappers, ‘Stanley baba says that he does not want to go home.’ ‘Bring him to the window,’ was the whispered instruction.

I went to the window and looked down at two well-dressed natives standing below, accompanied by two servants. ‘Don’t you want to go home to your Mummy and Daddy?’ one asked.

‘No.’

‘We will give you jalebees¹⁰ and russagoolas to eat. You like jalebees and russagoolas, don’t you? And what about luddoos? You must love luddoos.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’ll go for a ride on the choo choo train and take you back to your Mummy and Daddy. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Come on.’ urged Norman.

‘Come for a hawa khana,¹¹ entreated the kidnappers, but no amount of blandishments could make me change my mind. I really would not have cared if I ever saw my parents again, as long as I had Lukvar, our personal servant, and the other servants to look after me and tell me stories. At this stage of my mental and emotional development, I don’t think the loss of my parents would have even registered on my mind.

Norman hurried down the stairs and went off with the four men, while I returned to bed and went to sleep. At wake-up time Lukvar reported my cell mate’s disappearance.

‘Where’s Norman? Miss Kitty Cutler asked me, and in my innocence I merely stated, ‘He’s gone home.’

‘What do you mean, gone home?’ Knowing that I was backward, the two ladies now gently and patiently tried to coax me into telling them what had occurred. Meanwhile, a search of the compound by all the servants confirmed their worst fears: Norman had indeed absconded.

Pandemonium broke loose. In the absence of telephones, a servant was sent running to the police station with a note demanding the immediate presence of the sub-inspector-in-charge. Another was despatched to fetch a ghora gharry so that Miss Kitty could descend on the railway station in person and whip the railway police into action and reach the highest possible police authority at Asansol by telephone or by telegraph.

The school premises teemed with police. All the servants were questioned. The Indian sub-inspector, poor man, tried to get some sense from me, but all he could ascertain was that Norman was going home to eat russagoolas and kalajamoons.

That evening an European inspector arrived from Asansol and tried to coax more concrete information from me, but to no avail.

Three days later, Norman reappeared as mysteriously as he had disappeared, and security was tightened.

Chapter 4 – Off to the Sisters I Go

My father was posted back to Calcutta in January 1927. I was six and Frank was four. I gradually became aware that my mother had two more terms of endearment for me, apart from calling me a buddhu. She cuddled me a lot to encourage me to respond to her affection, and would read to me from picture books. My favourite story was ‘The Ugly Duckling’. She would read it over and over again, after which she would caress me and nuzzle me and call me ‘Mummy’s little ugly duckling’. She told me that I had elephant’s ears, big ears that stuck out from my head like the elephant’s at the Alipore zoo.

The author’s parents: Doris and Edward Blackford

I didn’t mind being called Popo, buddhu or Mummy’s little ugly duckling — I thought them all appropriate — but I felt that there was something terribly wrong about having elephant ears. I cried at this, and my mother made an elastic band to put round my head to keep my ears flat. I wore it regularly when I was playing about the house or in bed.

I remember a few occasions when I resented being sent to bed early. When my mother came to kiss me goodnight, I would show my displeasure by taking the elastic band off, lie on my side facing the wall, fold my ear over and hold it in that position by pressing my head down hard against the pillow. My mother would warn me, ‘Don’t do that, your ears will get more and more like the elephant’s at the zoo,’ and I would cry and shout, ‘I want my ears to be like the elephant’s ears! I like elephant’s ears!’

My mother enrolled Frank and me at St Thomas’ Church of England School, in Diamond Harbour Road, Kidderpore. What trauma! From the sheltered ambience of twenty pupils at the Madhupur Railway School I was suddenly thrust into a large crowd of 200 rowdy, boisterous children.

I wet my pants almost every day, much to the shame of my continent young brother, who started his schooling there. I had learning problems and remember spending long hours standing in the corner wearing a dunce’s cap. I did not learn very much.

My mother had a penchant for disagreeing with people and, as she considered herself to be always right, and as her differences with others were usually irreconcilable, she established a pattern of frequently falling out with people. In those days, schools for the wealthy had private buses to pick the children up. Quite often my brother and I were not ready when the school bus arrived, and my mother would make the driver wait, resulting in about fifty children being late. My mother caused this disruption repeatedly.

One day, horror of horrors, the bus driver just drove off. The principal, annoyed at the frequent disruptions to the school’s routine caused by the Blackford family’s tardiness, had instructed the driver not to wait. My mother sent Frank and me to school in a taxi, with a servant and a strong note complaining of the bus driver’s uncivil action.

The principal returned a note by our servant explaining her need for punctuality. My mother snorted and started to draft a sharp reply pointing out that the exigencies of any one day might make unexpected demands upon a family that might cause it to impinge somewhat on the smooth running of school schedules, and that any reasonable principal should make allowance for such circumstances. My father arrived home in time to abort the correspondence. He had learned from previous experience that, due to my mother’s intractable habit of endeavouring to convince others that her impossible demands were not only possible but also reasonable, such correspondence could be interminable, and that the subject would dominate her thoughts and conversation for days.

A similar contretemps regarding the bus occurred not many days later. And when it happened yet again that my brother and I were not ready, my mother left the servants to complete Frank’s and my dressing while she, five feet tall in her high heels, stood in front of the bus to prevent it driving off. Leaning forward aggressively and wagging her finger, she harangued the driver, ‘Principal ko bolo ... (Tell the Principal ... etc’) Within six weeks of our starting at St Thomas’, Frank and I were withdrawn.

The only other school near us was St Teresa’s, run by the Daughters of the Cross, who were Roman Catholic nuns. This my parents considered unfortunate for two reasons: my family held strong anti-Catholic sentiments, and also, the Catholic schools generally accepted a poorer class of people. Among the European community in India seventy years ago all the ‘best’ people were Church of England and their menfolk were Freemasons. My mother was a snob. We were ‘the Joneses’ that other people tried to keep up with!

With great misgivings, my mother enrolled Frank and me at St Teresa’s, and so off to the Sisters we went. This was my fourth enrollment in a new school. It was also my first contact with Catholic nuns, with their peculiar dress and headgear which must have been designed by the Pope for the express purpose of striking terror into the heart of any small Protestant child. I wet my pants as soon as one of the sisters grabbed me by the hand and dragged me into a classroom, and gave repeat performances frequently in the ensuing weeks. In contrast to St Thomas’ where I had to remain in my wet pants all day and go home in them, at St Teresa’s the good sisters got an ayah¹² to change my pants immediately, to wash and dry them, and then returned me to the bosom of my family clean and dry. I also made good progress in school work.

We soon established cordial relations with the sisters and bought raffle tickets by the score. I remember winning a large doll, with blonde hair and blue eyes which closed when the doll was laid on its back to sleep. I wanted to keep it, but my mother confiscated it and gave it to one of my girl cousins. I stood in endless queues, sang umpteen songs and hymns, learned to recite Hail Mary’s by the dozen and stopped wetting my pants. I grasped the fundamentals of arithmetic. I still remember, during my second year there, the feeling of achievement, nay excitement, that I experienced as Miss Dolly Van Span guided us through the intricacies of long division and multiplication, and I had full comprehension!

However, my mother did not like me making the sign of the cross and saying Hail Marys. She countered these Papist practices by teaching me the good old Protestant prayer, ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look upon Thy little child ...’ But she had to admit that sending Frank and me to the nuns was the right decision as far as our education and emotional development were concerned.

Chapter 5 – Anthony Firpo

Part of the material in this chapter was included in The Baptism of Anthony Firpo in Mark My Words, the 1996 anthology of The Henley Scribblers.

The most renowned restaurant in Calcutta was Firpo’s, on Chowringee Road. In fact, it was well known throughout the East for its perfect cuisine. Its Edwardian decor, crystal chandeliers, snow-white tablecloths and orchestra represented the epitome of gracious living in a country noted for its extravagant lifestyles.

Firpo’s was the place where anybody who was anybody, in this cosmopolitan metropolis where status mattered, met other class-conscious people for lunch; where a young blade took the lady he wished to impress for tiffin or an afternoon tea-dance, and hang the expense. Here officials of the Indian Civil Service and military officers glanced casually at maharajahs, tea planters, jute wallahs and other members of the upper set, each little party maintaining that frosty reserve for which the upper-class English are so noted. (The middle-class gentleman in England became upper-class once he set foot on Indian shores, and adopted upper-class customs.)

We patronised Firpo’s — naturally — and my young brother and I enjoyed its delicious ice creams. Whenever we went out in a taxi or the family car I now cried out ‘Firpo, Firpo; so my nickname was changed from Popo to Firpo.

The proprietor, a charming distinguished-looking but obsequious Italian, always greeted us with a bow and a smile and with that touch of deference which implied that we might have been royalty incognito (India was the land of royalty wandering about incognito), and my mother, by her manner, acknowledged that she appreciated receiving his fealty as her due. He was delighted to hear that I had been nicknamed "Firpo’ because of my addiction to his strawberry ice, and gave me an extra large serve of my favourite flavour ‘on the house’ whenever we dined there. When my mother learned that his first name was Anthony, she expanded my nickname to ‘Anthony Firpo’, and this was the name my family used for addressing me or referring to me for the remainder of my stay in India.

Chapter 6 – Proud To Be British

Proud to Be British was published in Ever on Sunday, the 1997 anthology of the Sunday Prose Group, and as part of the story, The Boiler Inspector’s Son in The Indian Summer an anthology of Anglo-Indian writing compiled and edited by Bernadette Earle.

Very few Europeans and Anglo Indians lived near our home at 43 Dent Mission Road, Kidderpore, Calcutta, and only one with a child my age. Right opposite us was the Van Spall family. They were ‘coloured’. Mr Van Spall came from Indonesia and was of Dutch extract; the mother was Anglo Indian, and their only child was named Richard. For some reason which I did not comprehend at the time, he was known as ‘Little Dickie.’ Little Dickie Van Spall and I became inseparable companions.

I was seven years of age and was awakening to a growing pride in being who I was: British and Church of England. We colonialists were a proud people and we took glory in the benefits that Pax Britannica conferred on an otherwise benighted world. I loved playing war games and introduced Dickie to this exhilarating past-time, where we were always the British and shot up the Huns, or where we wrested some new plot of earth from the natives and claimed it for Mother England.

Our intrepid two-man squad sniped at unsuspecting pedestrians and vehicular traffic with our hockey-stick rifles from the flat roofs of our bungalows, and we threw imaginary grenades. Whenever the servants ventured outdoors, we charged with ‘fixed bayonets’ and they had to run away squealing with their hands in the air. Sometimes Dickie and I were on opposite sides. Then I was always the whole British Army and he was the German; and the British always won. Naturally. The British were invincible. Then the war would be interrupted temporarily by a call to biscuits and lemonade from my mum or from Mrs Van Spall, depending on over whose terrain the war was waging.

Tall for my age and well built, I was learning to interact with other children and to use my height and the loud voice, which nature had bestowed on me, to lord it over less assertive souls. Poor little Dickie was a tiny little fellow with thin legs and arms, with fine features and a faint, timid voice — the perfect foil for a rabid colonialist like me. I had a further advantage over Dickie: I used to wear my father’s service medals. He had been a Chief Engineer with the Merchant Navy during World War I, and three times his ship had been torpedoed and sunk; he had served with distinction, he was a war hero. Dickie’s father, on the other hand, had not seen war service, and this established my superiority as a Britisher and heir to a military tradition.

My father taught me a new song one day. It went:

Protestants, Protestants, ring the bell:

Catholics, Catholics, go to Hell.

Neither Dickie nor I were familiar with the terms ‘Catholics’ and Protestants,’ but Dickie quickly picked up the words and went home merrily singing this ditty. Next day he informed me that my father had the words wrong. The correct version, his father told him, was,

Catholics, Catholics, ring the bell:

Protestants, Protestants, go to Hell.

Later, when I relayed the correct version to my father, he assured me that we were using the right words and it was Mr Van Spall who had it wrong. ‘What would he know?’ roared my father, ‘He’s only a bloody foreigner.’ (I didn’t know what a bloody foreigner was, but from the sound of my father’s tone I knew that it must have been something bloody awful). Then he added generously, ‘I suppose we have to let these unfortunate people live in our country.’

Thus I started picking up the nuances that India belonged to the British, not to the Indians, and that we should let unfortunate people, like bloody foreigners and Indians, live in our country. I didn’t know what Protestants and Catholics were, but I gathered that we were Protestants and the Van Spans were Catholics, and that Protestants were by far the superior of the two. I soon learned also that the people who called themselves Catholics (pronounced Car-tholics — the first syllable sounded like ‘car’) were not really Catholics at all, but were in fact ‘bloody Roman Catholics’, which was something really nasty. They paid allegiance to a bloody little Italian fellow they called ‘the Pope’, and not to George V, King of England, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith, as decent people did.

What’s more, all Roman Catholic priests in India were bloody foreigners — Italians, Yugoslavs, French, German and so on, with an occasional Anglo Indian priest. ‘Have you ever come across an English Roman Catholic priest on your travels?’ my mother asked my father. ‘No never! ‘was his reply. The Bengal mission was serviced by Belgian Jesuits, and I later learned, too, that of all the Roman Catholic clergy the Jesuits were the most treacherous and we shouldn’t trust them a bloody inch.

Gradually I was getting my facts straight and my priorities right: Britannia ruled the waves, the sun never set on the British Empire, all the best people were British and Church of England, and their men folk were Freemasons, like my Dad. I certainly had no identity crisis — not yet, anyway. I definitely knew who I was and on which side of the fence I should take my stand.

I already had a career path mapped out. When people asked me, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ I would reply unhesitatingly, ‘I will be a Boiler Inspector like my Dad. If