Out of India - Michael Foss

Michael Foss divided his childhood between two worlds: the cold, grey despondent austerity of wartime Britain, and the penetrating but confusing light of India in the period between the war and the Partition that marked the end of the imperial Raj. After the misery of war, spent among grudging English relations or in the harsh hands of a convent school, India in all its strange and fretful glory burst upon the child, leaving an impression never to be lost. in the midst of all this, the composed life of the British Raj continued, the futile rituals of an idealized and long-vanished England maintained in cantonment and hill station - mess night and coffee morning, church and boarding school, cricket and riding to hounds - even as ethnic and religious violence erupted around them.