A blog post by bestselling author Fenella J. Miller
My mother was Anglo Indian, the daughter of Raja in India and spent four years living with her Indian family just before the war. She wrote her memoirs of that time and the first part of this two book series is based on her own experience.
My grandmother had met my grandfather when he was studying to be a barrister at Oxford – I’m not sure what she was doing there – and they married but never lived together in India at his home. They lived a somewhat nomadic life, trailing tutors, nannies and other staff around Europe until my great grandfather died and my grandfather had to return to India to take up his duties.
My mother decided to go to India to meet her cousins, aunts, uncles and grandmother when she was seventeen and stayed with them until nineteen thirty-nine when she flew back on the last flight that was able to land in Germany before the outbreak of the war. I’m proud of my Indian ancestry but have never met any of that side of the family apart from my uncle and his two children. My brother – who lived in India for ten years – went to see the small principality decades ago over her (if that’s what you call it) and it was like a ghost town. The huge house that features in my book and in my mother’s memoirs was just occupied by the remnants of the family. The village that had housed the people who had worked there was deserted as there was obviously no work there for them now.
I used the descriptions of the events that my mother experienced while she was in India but all the characters are completely fictional and not based on anybody who actually existed.