Full Description
For 15 years, award-winning travel writer Stephen McClarence and his BBC Radio journalist wife Clare Jenkins made a series of journeys through India to learn about one of its most eccentric and fast-dwindling communities: the Anglo-Indians. Mainly descendants of British men and Indian women, their combined heritage stretches back 350 years through the times of the East India Company and the British Raj. In Jhansi - a railway hub in the state of Uttar Pradesh and inspiration for John Masters's 1950s book Bhowani Junction - the Anglo-Indian community is reduced to around 30 families. Teatime at Peggy's shares their stories.
Inspired by Jenkins' own Anglo-Indian family connections, the couple immersed themselves in the customs of this little-known dimension to India, soon developing a profound affection for their new friends, particularly for two of the area's most memorable figureheads: the title character 'Aunty Peggy', daughter and widow of railwaymen, overseer of the European cemetery, and 'friend of the great and the good, the rich and the poor'; and Captain Roy Abbott, the last British landowner in India, who never dined without wearing a blazer, cravat and immaculately pressed trousers.
The authors spent hours at Peggy's kitchen table - eating cake, samosas and curry; drinking tea; welcoming eccentric characters, like Pastor Rao who could recite Winston Churchill speeches from memory; listening to stories, told in lilting accents, of the Railway Institute and May Queen Balls, Monsoon Toad Balls (where 'the ugliest, most hideous-looking man' would win the prize), waltzes and foxtrots, dancing in the jungle to Victor Silvester gramophone records, games of rummy and housey-housey, and Anglo-Indian cookery that embraced plum cake, goat's brain curry, Mulligatawny soup and crème caramel.
Warm, humorous and evocative, Teatime at Peggy's is a lyrical, loving homage to the Anglo-Indians. Filled with larger-than-life characters and with the ever-present exhilaration of 21st-century India, it is both intimate and revelatory, and a testament to the importance of tradition, community and friendship. This enchanting book is for anyone who knows India well - or who simply yearns to take the 'trip of a lifetime' to the 'sub-continent'. and see things a little differently.
Contents
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: The holy man and Peggy
CHAPTER 2: Captain Abbott - British India preserved in aspic
CHAPTER 3: 'Inconvenience caused is deeply regretted'
CHAPTER 4: A living god and a dancing girl
CHAPTER 5: A cricket match and a dead cow
CHAPTER 6: 'Hardly anyone knows what a foxtrot or waltz is now'
CHAPTER 7: Caparisoned tuskers and naked men
CHAPTER 8: 'God-fearing with sober habits'
CHAPTER 9: 'The peafowls are. dancing and prancing'
CHAPTER 10: Madurai and marriage
CHAPTER 11: A village wedding
CHAPTER 12: Moonlight picnics in the jungle
CHAPTER 13: May Queens and Monsoon Toad Balls
CHAPTER 14: 'Jhansi Ki Rani' and 'the Tony Curtis of Jhansi'
CHAPTER 15: 'Each time she laughed, her eyeballs would come out'
CHAPTER 16: 'You've never seen a better jiver than Peg!'
CHAPTER 17: 'The crane fell down, dead as a dodo!'
CHAPTER 18: 'My mongoose hasn't come this morning'
CHAPTER 19: End of an era
AFTERWORD
GLOSSARY
