Teatime at Peggy’s by Clare Jenkins and Stephen McClarence

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Teatime at Peggy’s by Clare Jenkins and Stephen McClarence and published by Journey Books (Bradt).

About the Book

A warm, humorous and evocative celebration of the eccentric, time-warped and fast-disappearing Alice in Wonderland world of one of India’s most endangered communities: the 150,000-strong Anglo-Indians (mostly descendants of British men and Indian women).

For 15 years, award-winning travel writer Stephen McClarence and his BBC Radio journalist wife Clare Jenkins regularly visited Jhansi, the railway town in Uttar Pradesh that inspired Bhowani Junction, John Masters’ classic 1954 tale of Anglo-Indian life during Partition. There they spent hours ‘down the rabbit hole’ with Peggy Cantem – ‘Aunty Peggy’ as she was known throughout the town, daughter and widow of railwaymen, overseer of the European cemetery with its 66 Mutiny graves and ‘dancing and prancing peacocks’ – and with her great friend Captain Royston (Roy) Abbott, ‘The Rajah of Jhansi’, possibly India’s last British landowner and ‘more British than the Brits’.

In Peggy’s tiny, crowded ground-floor flat, she and her friends would reflect on Anglo-Indian life then and now: the dances (waltzes, foxtrot, jive), amateur dramatics, May Queen balls (Anglo-Indian women were famed for their beauty), meals of Mulligatawny soup, toad-in-the-hole and ‘railway lamb curry’.

Those friends included the ladylike Gwen, scooter-riding Buddie, Cheryl with her ‘hotchpotch’ ancestry, Winston Churchill-reciting Pastor Rao, Peggy’s tiny and impoverished maid May, her cook Sheela and auto-rickshaw driver Anish. Conversations covered Monsoon Toad Balls (to find ‘the most hideous-looking man’), moonlight picnics in the jungle, pet mongooses, the British Royal Family… They also covered the history of the minority Anglo-Indian community, once designated an OBC (Other Backward Caste).

The only community in India with the word ‘Indian’ in its name, it’s now in danger of dying out. There are only 30 Anglo-Indian families left in Jhansi, many officially below the poverty line. Their first language is English, they often dress Western-style and their homes could be in the 1950s Home Counties, were it not for the mounted tiger heads alongside the Sacred Heart fridge magnets, the aviaries of parakeets outside, the three plaster flying ducks inside, the pictures of Buckingham Palace embroidered on the antimacassars. Teatime at Peggy’s is a valuable addition to the history & literature of this fast-dwindling community.

About the Authors

Stephen McClarence is an award-winning travel writer whose work has appeared in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Daily and Sunday Express, Yorkshire Post, National Geographic Traveler and DestinAsian magazine. A finalist in (and winner of) numerous travel writing awards, he won the major National Daily Travel Writer of the Year award for a Times article about Ramji, a rickshaw driver he met in Varanasi. He has also reviewed books for The Times and been an exhibiting photographer.

Clare Jenkins has been a regular contributor to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, including reporting on women’s lives in India. She has also made hundreds of features and documentaries for BBC Radio, including some from India, latterly via her production company, Pennine Productions.  These include a half-hour programme about Jhansi’s Anglo-Indians, broadcast in 2015 and also called Teatime at Peggy’s – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpwc7

She has previously published books about women’s relationships with Roman Catholic priests, and people’s experiences of bereavement, and is a member of the Oral History Society.

Teatime at Peggy’s is a joint project, although the narrative is written in Stephen’s voice. The couple, who have visited India regularly for over 20 years, are now working on a sequel, about their encounters with other people in India who have British connections.

My Review

Auntie Peggy was the President of Jhansi’s Anglo-Indian Association. She was the nerve centre of this vast number of people and kept the community together, and even attracted attention from literary luminaries such as Sir Mark Tully and William Dalrymple. Her house was a jumble of things she had accumulated over the years, but it was a warm and welcoming home.

The area has a lot of ghostly echoes of the past, no one at the hotel they were staying at knew what ‘Cheese Gatwick’ was as no one had ordered it in living memory. They visit one of the last British residents in the area, a Captain N.R Abbot. He is one of the last of the Raj that is still left, a tiny part of the past still going in the modern age. He loved living in India and was heavily involved in the community, supporting them in all sorts of projects and on a personal level.

It would be another year before they saw Abbot again, bringing with them some of his favourite Cracker Barrell cheese. They describe the pain and delights of the Indian railway system that they have to negotiate each time they visit the country. It makes our train system seem punctual… They had the full tour of his house and a trip to one of the 800 or so European (i.e. mostly British) cemeteries in the country before setting off on a five-hour journey to his farm.

Abbott had lived in India all his life apart from a brief period in the 1970s, but he found Britain too cold so moved back. He preferred the lifestyle in India and felt that living in the UK would give him less autonomy. He runs his farm and household with military efficiency, micro-managing every detail and being involved with every decision. The discipline is rigid, but he does look after his staff very well, paying for schools and other community projects.

Jenkins and McClarence return time and time again visiting Peggy and Roy, as they come to call him. They become friends but they never really feel that they know him completely.

On a later trip, they spend more time with Peggy. She is quite a character, full of in-depth knowledge about the Anglo-Indian community. Strangely though, here own family history is a little sketchy, she didn’t even know the names of all her siblings. She introduces them to Cheryl, another larger-than-life character with a mixed family history, and this is something that her own children have continued with their own cultural hotchpotch going on.

They become tourists for a bit in Orchha, a place favoured by hippies but is now inundated by coaches of tourists. They are soon back in Jhansi and are invited to an inauguration ceremony, but it isn’t until they get there and are seated in the front row, that they realise that they are the VIP guests.

On each of the trips back to the region, they learn that the Anglo-Indian community is slowly diminishing and they are integrated into the wider Indian population. They have never really fitted in, and have always been considered one of the lower castes. But the change isn’t all bad, it is just bringing different opportunities and challenges.

On their frequent trips to India they take the time to visit other parts of the country and in one of the places they visit, Anand, they learn about the ritual of ‘cowdust time’. Each trip always ends up in Jhansi and time to catch up with Roy and Peggy. Every time they see them they are a little more frail and showing their age.

I really liked this book. It has a certain charm, helped greatly by the main people that the book focuses on, Peggy and Roy. Jenkins and McClarence have captured their personalities really well as well as the delights and frustrations of India, from the trains, the squalor and the consistent exuberance of the locals. Like all good travel books that I have ever read, this captures the spirit of the place exceptionally well. I felt that I have learnt a little more of the real India in this briefest of glimpses.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for the copy of the book to read.