The monkey's benison: Rumer Godden and imperial India

Rumer Godden was one of the most successful writers of her lifetime. Several of her novels, including Black Narcissus and The River, became successful films. But her best work is not fiction. Her memoirs of India are drenched with light and colour

Godden in 1970 (Godfrey Argent/National Portrait Gallery)

One day in the mid-1920s, in the cool season, a British shooting-party went to hunt in the country outside Delhi. They left at dawn, killed things, then lunched with the ladies, who had driven out from Delhi to meet them. The ladies dressed well. One, in her late teens, wore “a pale pink dress and a hat to match that I thought pretty, white, straw-brimmed with a chiffon crown patterned in pale colours.” They ate curry puffs and game pie. As they did so, monkeys “peered down at us from the branches. Suddenly, one of them let fall a stream of shit on my precious hat.” Now she would be lucky all her life, a friend told her. It is not clear why he thought being shat on by a monkey would mean luck, good or bad; but in fact her life would bring her plenty of both, as she would recall over 60 years later:

As if the monkey had given me a benison, shaming and stinking as it was – and ruining my hat – I have had extraordinarily good luck and extraordinarily bad ...I sense now that it is not luck or in our stars but the working of a pattern we cannot see yet have to trust, a providence, in my case bringing ups and downs so unusual it has often been difficult to believe they were happening.

Rumer Godden would indeed have both good luck and bad, and would have trouble in her personal life, with an unsatisfactory marriage, a child who died in infancy, a miscarriage, and wartime destitution. And yet she would also become one of the most successful novelists of her lifetime, and her books would be filmed by, among others, Powell and Pressburger, and Jean Renoir. But it is her life in India, and her recounting of it, that has drawn me.

*

Rumer Godden was born in December 1907; as it happens in Eastbourne, but her family was in India, where her sister had been born a year or so earlier. Her parents were part of that large long-gone white tribe of India that ran what we now call the Raj, although they would not have called it that; they would have called it the Indian Empire. (They would not have called it British India, either; that then meant the two-thirds or so of it that was under direct British rule, as opposed to the Princely States.)

This tribe was not homogenous. At its apex was the Indian Civil Service – the so-called “heaven-born”. The military came second. Those engaged in business or industry, known as the “box-wallahs”, came next. One wonders if this caste system afforded the Indians a little ironic amusement. Godden’s father was, one supposes, a box-wallah, but he was one of some importance, managing the river steamer services. He was stationed in Assam at the time of Godden’s birth but later in the Bengali town of Narayangunj (Godden’s spelling; it is now known as Narayanganj). The city lies on the Shitalakshaya River, which is part of the same river system as the Brahmaputra; it is only a few miles from Dacca. Today the district has a population of about three million. A century ago it would have been a sleepier place. But then, as now, it was an important centre for jute.

But when the family moved from Assam to Bengal, neither Rumer nor her older sister Jon went with them. In 1913 both had been exiled to England, at age six and seven respectively. It was then the custom to send the children “home”, to a country that often felt like anything but home. The two girls found themselves in a large gloomy aunt-filled house in Maida Vale. In 1966, in a memoir written jointly with Jon, Two Under the Indian Sun, Godden would write:

In India children are largely left to grow ...we had not really been “brought up” before. It was a painful process, for us and the Aunts. ...The Aunts were so truly noble and good, so noble and so dedicated, but never, in all that tall dark house, was there a gleam of laughter or enterprise or fun…

Rescue came in the unlikely form of the First World War. The Goddens, afraid that their daughters would be at risk from Zeppelin raids, decided to recall them to India, and their paternal aunt Mary arrived to take them there on the P&O liner Persia. In retrospect it seems an odd decision. Although the Germans did mount air raids with both Zeppelins and conventional aircraft and did kill about 1,400 civilians in Britain, largely in London, the U-boats were a much bigger menace. Maybe that was not yet clear. The Goddens do not mention that the Persia herself would be sent to the bottom with great loss of life while sailing the same route a year later. For the young Goddens, however, the voyage was a liberation. Their Aunt Mary took one look at their heavy, unattractive clothes and as the ship began to move, she snatched the ugly straw hats from their heads and tossed them through the porthole. The young Goddens watched them sink slowly amongst the bits of box and orange-peel as the Persia was swung out into the Thames. “They were the last sight we had of England,” they later recalled. “We were reprieved – for five years.”

*

Rumer Godden's sister Jon was also a successful novelist, though never as well-known or as prolific as her sister. Two Under the Indian Sun was a collaboration. How much of each woman is in the book is hard to tell, but the writing style does feel similar to Rumer’s own later memoirs. In the second volume of her autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, she mentions the book but says little about its creation. Two Under the Indian Sun is now out of print in both the UK and the US, but is available from an enterprising Indian publisher, Speaking Tiger. The book is one of the best memoirs of childhood I have ever read. Thanks to the Zeppelins, it records a childhood in India with their family instead of exile in a draughty English boarding school smelling vaguely of cabbage, being bullied for one’s accent and wearing a prickly, uncomfortable uniform while dreaming of one’s parents and the warm, bright colours of India. Arriving at Narayanganj:

We saw roses and sweet peas, and flowers we had forgotten, hibiscus and oleanders. Magenta bougainvilleas climbed to the top of tall trees. Here was a new world of scent and colour, warm in the sunlight … “Is this our garden?” asked Jon, dazzled.

It was not just a garden. The household was a huge establishment of gardeners, grooms, dining-room attendants, sweeps, bearers and more. According to the Goddens, this was not so much something the family wanted, as a reflection of Indian perceptions of what was fitting – and of what a given servant might nor might not do. A bearer’s caste allowed him to serve drinks, but not to wait at table because he could not touch food cooked by those of other castes. Only the sweeper could empty chamber-pots – but if a pet guinea-pig died, he could not dispose of the corpse (“a boy of a special sect had to be called in from the bazaar; he put on his best shirt of marigold-coloured silk to do this grisly work”). How much of this was true, it is hard to know – but the Goddens state that their father was responsible for meeting the cost of this household himself, although the Company paid for the house. So it is hard to see why he would have had such a large household had he not been constrained by custom to do so. It may however explain some British expatriates in the Empire, who, in time, grew to know no better:

Primrose ideas take root with frightening ease; ...the big house and garden, the ponies, the muslin dresses we changed into every afternoon, the way [the staff] attended us everywhere we went, the difference between us and the milling thousands of Indians all around us, all added up to a princess quality that would have dismayed Mam if she had ever seen it; but Mam, in her simplicity, did not see it; in fact all our elders seemed curiously blind – even more blind in the way, five years later, they expected us to immediately adjust when we went back to England.

It would be a rude awakening.

Yet the children also faced dangers that would, in their words, “have horrified parents living in England or America.” Malaria, dysentery and dengue fever featured, as did having one’s tonsils taken out on the dining-room table by a Welsh doctor who seems to have taken it all in his stride, as did their parents. Neither were they really shielded from the harshest aspects of life in India. In one powerful chapter, titled simply Cain, the sisters describe how they became exposed to the harshness of the world: the beggar-boy in the bazaar who has been deliberately deformed, so that he can beg; the endless lawsuits that drain the servants of their wealth; the accidents in the jute mills and the fires in the bazaar; and their household sweeper, who fathered a child on his own daughter then beat her to death when she sought solace with a kinder man. One year when they are in a hill station to avoid the hot weather, trouble flares between Hindus and Muslims back in Narayanganj. Their father meets one of his steamers arriving there with Hindu pilgrims returning home; he warns them there is trouble and they should not disembark, but they disregard his advice. They do not reach their homes; passing through an apparently deserted street, they are ambushed and knifed to death.

This last incident is a reminder that Partition lay years in the future. Naranganj was to become part of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It is a Muslim country. But in 1914 millions of Hindus and Muslims alike lived in places where they are no longer to be seen. Moreover the vast Indian Empire stretched from the Khyber Pass to the borders of Thailand (Burma was part of it until 1937, when it became a separate territory). Within this huge area people could move freely, and did, the more so as the railway network grew. One night in the bazaar:

A couple of tall Kabulis, holding their long staffs, pushed contemptuously through the crowd, which parted uneasily in front of them; we knew that they were moneylenders, hated and feared, come from the mountains of Afghanistan to collect the exorbitant interest on their loans, but we could not help admiring their height and swagger, their hooked noses and blue-black bobbed hair under the huge floppy turbans, their loose white trousers and dark embroidered waistcoats; among the slim white-clad Bengalis they looked as decorative and as arrogant as a pair of peacocks among a flock of sparrows.

I wonder how many people know that Afghan moneylenders ventured as far as Bangladesh a century ago. There is a sense in which our globalised world has become smaller even as it has, for some, been knitted together.

*

It was usual for British families to decamp to the hills in the hot weather, heading for hill stations such as Ootacamund, Darjeeling and Simla. Every few years, of course, a man would have home leave, but the First World War prevented this. One summer – it seems to have been 1917 or 1918 – the Godden’s father took a long leave in Kashmir instead, hoping to hunt. The family took a houseboat at Srinagar and later, when the weather was hotter, embarked on a trek into the mountains, where their father fished for mahseer and hunted bears. The children were left largely to their own devices. They were told not to go too far away, but of course they did. “We went deep into the sweet-smelling woods, following woodcutters’ paths or paths made by animals, losing ourselves and knowing a few moments’ panic… Once we saw what we thought was a huge grey dog slipping away from us between the trees…”

Darjeeling in the 1990s (M.Robbins)

Their father confirmed that it must have been a wolf. Today they have been hunted to extinction and when I lived in the Himalayas in the 1990s, I was told that an epidemic of destructive wild boars then troubling the country was a consequence. The boars now had no natural predators. A century ago wolves would have been quite usual in the Himalayas. The bears, however, are still there. That summer, the Goddens’ father shot three. It is a cruel pursuit perhaps, but no-one would have objected to it at the time. “Each dead bear, its feet tied to a pole, its huge head lolling, was carried back to camp by rejoicing villagers whose crops it had often raided,” the Goddens wrote.

These summer retreats involved long journeys; it is a long way from Narayanganj to Kashmir, and indeed to other hill stations, and the family would spend days in a compartment on a train, washing and cooking as best they could. The vastness of the country affects them:

...In the brief Indian twilight ...a curious sadness would fall on us, when we all ...grew still. Then the compartment seemed suddenly small, the train infinitesimal as it travelled over the vast Indian plain. ...A palm tree stood out against the sky where one star, the evening star, showed. A fire flickered in a lonely village that, in a moment or two, was lost to sight…

Reading this, I was reminded of a bus journey I took from Siliguri to the Bhutanese border at Jaigaon many years ago. It was a cool afternoon in November. As the countryside slipped by, the sun began to sink, and the landscape was transformed. I enjoyed everything: the long grass catching the light and the shadow, the quiet shacks by the roadside, sleepy village shops, sparkling village ponds, lush bright fields, palm fronds, boys playing cricket and laughing. A man wheeling his bicycle slowly back from the fields. A path winding away from the road and disappearing, between trees, to nowhere. Orange lorries, white cars, a thin young man with glasses riding on top of a truck’s green tarpaulin, a train standing in the middle of the fields, birds by the Brahmaputra. Then dusk, a round red sun above green-yellow fields, and darkness, and Jaigaon with flickering lights in the main street, food stalls, rickshaws, chaos, slowly ambling crowds with white shirts that shone in the darkness. In India you can lose yourself in a journey.

*

Two Under the Indian Sun is an outstanding memoir of childhood. But as the First World War ended, the sisters were entering their teens; stresses and strains developed between them, not least because Jon was the glamorous one and got all the male attention. (This rivalry would be the theme of Rumer Godden’s later novel The River, which would be filmed with great success by Jean Renoir.) In any case, the war had given them a reprieve; now, in 1920, they would be returned to England to be educated, as was the normal way. “It was a grey chill rainy spring morning when the ship berthed at Plymouth. Everything was grey, wet, colourless ...We travelled third on the train to London. “Then in England do we travel third-class?”

Two Under the Indian Sun ends there. But Rumer Godden’s strange and brilliant life was just beginning. For five years she attended schools and college in England, not always with happy results, but was lucky enough to meet a teacher who recognised her writing ability and urged her to develop it. She also acquired an interest in dance and took classes, but her progress was slowed by a childhood injury. She recounts this period in the first volume or her autobiography, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (the words are adapted from a passage in Ecclesiastes). It includes an account of a sojourn in France that would give rise, years later, to one of Godden’s most successful novels, The Greengage Summer – which also became a film; it was, it turns out, barely fiction at all.

In October 1925 Godden’s older sister Jon returned to India and, overcome with nostalgia, she decided to go too. But she had changed; Naranganj seemed dull and ugly, and the garden and busy river that had fascinated her as a child no longer did. Unsettled, perhaps, she embarked on an abortive engagement that she quickly broke, leaving her guilty and restless. Now 19, she began for the first time to question the British presence on the subcontinent. She had read A Passage to India and it shocked her. “Were we, the English in India, really like ...those righteous, insensitive characters?” Godden blamed her father for telling them nothing of India, or Indian life, in their youth. In A Time to Dance, written decades later in old age, she acknowledged that this was unjust. Her father was well-liked by his large staff and his boat captains, and spoke Hindi and Bengali, and some Assamese.

He found her work in an agricultural research establishment in Dacca, but not long afterwards most of the family, including Godden herself, returned to England and remained there until the autumn of 1929. During this period she trained as a dance teacher, and on her return to India set up a small dance school in Calcutta. The British community did not approve (“In Calcutta’s then almost closed society, ‘nice girls’ did not work or try to earn their living. There were women doctors, school inspectors, matrons of hospitals, missionaries, but they did not rank as ‘society’…”). Worse, dance schools had a reputation because they were run by Eurasians – people of mixed race who found themselves in a difficult position in India. A British man who married one would be asked to resign from the civil service or his company. Godden worked with and taught Eurasians and also employed a troupe of dancers from that background; she found herself ostracised as a result. “I quickly learned who my real friends were,” she wrote nearly 60 years later. This anti-Eurasian prejudice was to figure in one of her earliest books, The Lady and the Unicorn, and in a much later one, The Dark Horse.

Godden had other problems besides ostracism. She became pregnant by a British stockbroker in Calcutta, Laurence Foster, and they married – there were few alternatives in 1934. The child, a boy, was born prematurely and died four days later. Meanwhile the marriage proved unfortunate. They were not always unhappy and had two other children, both daughters. But Foster proved feckless. Quite early on they had to leave a pleasant apartment in Calcutta because he had simply not bothered to pay the rent. A keen sportsman, he spent heavily on playing golf when on leave in England, although their finances were stretched. Then the second daughter proved delicate at birth and had to be nursed carefully for some months at a family home in Cornwall. It did not help that Godden still felt uneasy about the British in India, about the worsening political situation and the poverty that she saw all around her in Calcutta; and unlike her father, who at least genuinely liked and understood India and its people and spoke two of their languages, Foster and his friends cared little for such matters:

...The fight for independence was growing and, with it, terrorism especially among the young. ...A young polceman friend was stabbed in the back by students as he was playing rugger with them; a girl at University going up to get her prize – ironically for English – from the Governor tried to shoot him in the face. Yet I could not help sympathising with them. Who would not want, I thought, to be free? “Idiots. They’re far better off under the British,” said Laurence and his friends.

This alienation, for Godden, went deeper. She talks, in A Time to Dance, of the concept of darshan - the travelling to, and contemplation of, a holy or miraculous place or person – she cites Gandhi or Kanchenjunga – not to photograph or physically record, but simply to let it seep into one’s soul. Foster lacked this side to his nature and so did his companions. “It slowly dawned on me that not only did they not know, they seemed unable to feel any sense of wonder, ecstasy or awe,” she wrote. That Godden was different – that darshan did exist for her – would later become clear in one of the strangest and least-known books she ever wrote. But that lay several years in the future.

*

Meanwhile the monkey-shit seesaw also went the other way. Godden’s career as a writer was beginning.

Shortly after the marriage to Foster, Godden had had a novel accepted for the first time (it was Chinese Puzzle). In 1938, on her way home to deliver her second daughter, and not feeling social, she decided to turn in at the same time as her older daughter, Jane, which was six o’clock; and, while Jane slept, her mother wrote. On arrival at Tilbury 18 days later she had the draft of a novel. Her father was sceptical.

“Fa, I’m writing a book about nuns.”

“Don’t,” said Fa. “No-one will read it.”

But Black Narcissus has never been out of print.

According to Godden’s own account in A Time to Dance, the book’s genesis went back to when she was 18 and visiting Shillong, a then fairly remote town at over 5,000ft (about 1,500m) that was then in Assam (the state’s borders have since changed). The story took root on a picnic to a deserted cantonment in the mountains:

I wandered away from the others and going down a steep little path came upon a grave; it was marked only by a small headstone in the shape of a cross with a name, ‘Sister...’ and two dates; she had died when she was only 23. No-one could tell me anything about her; no other graves were near, no sign of any mission, but the villagers had made her grave a shrine…

Although far from the only novel Godden would write set in India, it is still much her best-known. Published in January 1939, it passed largely unnoticed at first but as the weeks went by it attracted increasing critical attention. In 1946 it was to be filmed by Powell and Pressburger, no less, starring Deborah Kerr. Godden did not like the film version but viewers disagreed, and still do; it has become something of a classic period piece, with its seething sexual tensions in an isolated community of Anglican nuns, high in the Himalayas. The book also remains popular. But in 1939 its success took its author by surprise. Godden, who by some oversight had not even been told it was published, wandered into Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road to find a table piled high with copies.

But the monkey was about to shit again.

*

Godden had planned to fly back to India in the autumn of 1939 but the flight was cancelled. But as the war situation worsened, it became clear that the children would be safer in India, where her husband still was. “If you are to go at all, you must go now,” Godden’s father told her. In June 1940 she embarked on the Strathallan with her two infant daughters and a much-loved Swiss-Italian nanny. As with so much in A Time to Dance, the voyage is made wonderfully vivid, although Godden was writing nearly half a century later. There is a knack here for resurrecting those details that bring her memories alive, and discarding those that do not. This time, everyone was very conscious of the danger the ship was in, and Godden recalls that the passengers – mostly women, often with children – were frightened and frequently sought solace in the bar, or with one of the stewards. They were not wrong; like the Persia, the Strathallan would also be sunk some time later (again, Godden does not mention this). They spend “an uneasy week” in Mombasa; “There are two cruisers and other battleships in the harbour and the Italian planes come over every night, attacked fiercely by ack-ack fire.” Yet as always she is conscious of beauty, sneaking on deck at night when she can to see the phosphorescence in the water as she stands in the bow.

The journey ended with an apparently happy reunion in Calcutta. Over the next few months Godden’s husband seemed more settled than he had been, and harder-working. Then one night in June 1941 he came home and announced that he was in the army; asked whether by choice, he did not say. Somewhat surprised, Godden saw him off to training camp at Bangalore, only to return to the house and find lines of tradesmen waiting with bills and writs. Foster, left in charge of the family finances, had not paid the bills. Instead he had gambled on the Stock Exchange, had lost, and had used the firm’s money to recoup his losses and had lost that too. Godden resolved to pay off his debts. The earnings from Black Narcissus were gone, and so was her husband.

As luck would have it, Godden had already arranged to borrow an isolated bungalow in the Himalayas for the hot weather. A few weeks later she, her children and the few remaining staff headed for the hills, and instead of returning for the cool weather, she remained there. The result was a strange and little-known book, Rungli-Rungliot.

*

One December day in 1993 a friend and I travelled by bus from Jaigaon on the Bengal plain to Kalimpong in the mountains and then across to Darjeeling. It is never cool on the plain, even in winter, and besides the bus had a quite enormous stereo. In that year the big Bollywood hit was Khal Nayak (The Villain), a melodrama that included a dance number, Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai, noted for its suggestive lyrics. (The title, roughly translated, means “What’s beneath my blouse.” There was dancing to match.) I rather liked it but found it palled somewhat when heard for the tenth time in one day. As the driver fiddled with the volume control, my friend suggested we go on the roof. We scrambled up the ladder at the back of the bus and perched on the rack with the luggage; it is a good way to travel in hot climates.

The bus wound its way past Siliguri and into the mountains towards Kalimpong. We climbed; the air grew cooler, the country around us greener; and after some time we crossed the Coronation Bridge, a large prewar single-span bridge across the powerful River Teesta, which lay many hundreds of feet below us in a gorge. At this time of year, it was a startling bright cobalt blue. The river was visible for less than a minute, but the sight was not one to forget. Later the bus wound its way along the narrow road that clings to the contours between Kalimpong and Darjeeling, passing close to Tiger Hill, the vantage point from which one admires sunrise on distant Kanchenjunga – again, not something one forgets if one has seen it, which to my delight I have.

Somewhere between Kalimpong and Tiger Hill, we will have passed a small village with a police post. This was Rangli-Rangliot.

Rungli-Rungliot, as Godden spells it, means “Thus far and no farther”, and was the phrase spoken – she says – by a Buddhist monk at some point in the past to stop the flooded waters of the Teesta reaching the hilltops and drowning all and sundry. (Godden states that the words are in Paharia, but it is not clear which language she meant by that word; it can refer to several dialects and even to Nepali.) She arrived there in the summer of 1941, broke, without her husband but with two children, the Italian-Swiss nanny, her husband’s Sikkimese bearer and his family and one or two servants, for all of whom she was responsible.

Later in the war she would publish her short book, Rungli-Rungliot, based on the diaries she kept, and it was republished shortly after the war, but then forgotten until, like Two Under the Indian Sun, it was put out in a new edition in India by Speaking Tiger. The book includes charming illustrations by Tontyn Hopman, a Dutch artist stranded in India by the war who became a friend of Godden’s a year or two later (and who died as recently as 2016, at the age of 102).

Rungli-Rungliot is a curious book. Godden’s other autobiographical work is marked by its clear, straightforward prose; it dazzles by the clarity and quality of her memories, not by tricks of presentation, and seems effortless although there is, in fact, not a word out of place. Rungli-Rungliot, written much earlier, has a less sure touch and can even seem overwritten. It is still memorable. Climbing slowly northward into the mountains on the narrow-gauge railway that runs to Darjeeling:

We crept along at the edge of the Teesta River, up the valley, and the river looked as if it might flood again; it was wide and deep and incredibly swift, neither green nor grey in the rain swell but celadon, between low banks of grey-white stones all made smooth by the water. After the rains, in the winter, the river would be blue; first a chalky blue and then a blue with a grape-green tinge from the ice water. It is a dangerous cruel river, as cruel as it is beautiful, and the hill people say it has to take a life a year.

A Tontyn Hopman illustration for Rungli-Rungliot

Godden’s retreat is not at Rangli-Rangliot itself but in a so-called “out-bungalow” some miles away, where one of the tea-planters would be stationed and would live when, as she put it, not drinking or hunting. She refers to the place as Chinglam. Like Rangli-Rangliot, this is a real place, eccentrically spelled; in A Time to Dance she uses the correct spelling, Jinglam. It is isolated; it can be reached by car but via a vertiginous road on which one had to strain in first gear. An expedition to Darjeeling, for mail or shopping, is an undertaking. Yet Jinglam is, it seems, its own reward – a place of staggering beauty, with the valley falling away steeply thousands of feet in front. The Swiss nanny, Giovanna, takes to yodelling; the sound “rings right across the valley” and before long the workers in the tea-plantation start to do it too. Behind the house there is a high saddle from which Godden and her children can see the eternal snows of Kanchenjunga. When tiring of this they can come back to a warm and welcoming bungalow. “The oil lamps I bought from the Thieves Bazaar in Calcutta are a success. ...The lamps are Victorian and they are beautifully shaped, gilt, and they give a soft adequate light.” The planters are mostly gone to war, but the head planter remains and is kind and popular. A keen naturalist, he “has shot everything [but] is as avid to shoot everything again …I went to tea with him and he had a python in his chicken-run. It was a full-sized python but there was no need to be afraid ...because it was anchored in the middle by a deer that it had eaten, which was progressing, by degrees of slow digestion, towards its tail.”

There are few other Europeans around, but there are of course her staff. (“The cook was very turbulent, and left partly because he was turbulent and partly because he had foot-rot.”) And there are plenty of visitors; pedlars, wandering Lepchas from Sikkim and people from the plains and two Bhutias (Bhutan is quite close by). She presents the latter as wild and savage people. I wonder if they were; the Bhutanese are rather civilised. But in 1941 they would have had little contact with outsiders. In fact Rungli-Rungliot, brief though it is, is a haunting snapshot of a quite recent past. But it is also the account of an idyll, in one of the most beautiful places on earth, suspended between the bright blue of the Teesta river and the eternal snows of Kanchenjunga, bathed in the soft light of a Victorian oil lamp or the sparkling air of a crystal winter’s morning.

Rungli-Rungliot drips with darshan. Yet it is leavened with wit and it never cloys. It is mostly forgotten now, but Godden would write over 40 years later that this book had brought her more letters than anything else she had written.

*

Jinglam was an idyll, but early in 1942 Godden left. She doesn’t say why in either book, but implies that she had to. According to her biographer, Anne Chisholm (Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life), this was not the case; it was her own decision, but the reasons for it are not quite clear. At any rate, Godden now found she headed what was described, in wartime India, as an ‘abandoned family’. This was less dramatic than it seemed, meaning simply the dependants of someone who was normally based in India and was serving for now in the Army, which had thus become responsible for her. She was told to choose somewhere in the Indian Empire to which she would be relocated, and would remain for the duration under the protection of the Provost Marshall (the head of the military police). She chose Kashmir, thinking it to have a good climate; clearly the long summer in the mountains described in Two Under the Indian Sun was not forgotten. She also felt that its location in the far west of the Empire would be safer. This was not fanciful. The Japanese would soon overrun Burma and would push west into India proper, and would eventually be only a few hundred miles from Jinglam. They would not be repulsed until 1944.

Kanchenjunga at dawn; Darjeeling below (M. Robbins)

In March 1942 Godden arrived in Kashmir with her children – a move recorded in A Time to Dance as one she and the children made on their own; in fact, Chisholm says that Laurence Foster was with her and took leave to try and settle the family. (In general, the marriage does not seem to have broken up quite so finally and quickly as Godden would later suggest.) In any case, Godden was reminded that she had not been to Kashmir in winter:

Surely it is as Russia must once have been, coming across frozen marshlands into this land of winter, such winter, strangling the country with ice, snow, frost and mist ...The road runs straight, through avenues of tall bare poplar trees; along it peasants shuffle in rags, thin shawls and straw sandals and the light tongas move as silently as sleighs, except for the horses’ bells.

Srinagar is a ten-hour drive from Rawalpindi:

We arrived in Srinagar itself at last daylight, driving past handsome carved fronts of rich men’s houses rising out of the rottenness of the lanes around them; beside the Jhelum river is the huge palace of the Maharajah, built of white stone in that city of wood, with fluted pillars, columns and long glassed windows; on the few occasions the Maharajah visits his State, the people float roses down the river to greet him. ...The women’s cotton robes are filthy but the colours are blended by the very filth, dull blue and muted green, a prune colour or purple; they wear white veils and not one silver earring but bunches of them hanging either side of the face.

These quotes are from letters that Godden wrote at the time and later included in the later parts of A Time to Dance; often they were to her sisters. However, it is not just these snapshots from the time that are vivid; the book lacks the strangeness of Rungli-Rungliot and the prose is straightforward and undramatic, and yet its author, in her 80s when it was published, seems to be sitting with you, not writing but speaking, a little steam rising from her tea, her eyes on you one minute and then focused elsewhere as some long-ago joy or misery comes to her. One wonders why she took so long to write A Time to Dance, but perhaps she did not want to recall everything yet felt unable to write it without doing so. Her wartime life was very harsh. In Srinagar she, her children and their adored Swiss-Italian nanny, Giovanna, were quartered in two rooms in a bad hotel, surrounded by other wives of officers who had formed a small world to which Godden could not adjust. Worse, the hotel was insanitary and the entire family got dysentery, one child got typhoid and the youngest and weakest had a contagious disease that forced them all to move out. At length Godden herself contracted jaundice. She had little money but knew that somehow she had to find somewhere. Then she remembered a house she had seen from a great distance, across the lake, lost among the trees high on a mountainside.

It was built of pink-grey stone with a wooden verandah and a roof of wooden shingles. ...I stood and looked. ...I was taking ‘darshan’ except that I knew at once I would not, simply, look and go away. ...I have had several cherished houses; always, by circumstance not by desire, I have had to leave them but never have I loved a house as I loved Dove House.

Godden moved in with her daughters as soon as she could. She writes in A Time to Dance that she should have liked to stay there for ever. It seems to have been a place of astonishing beauty. In a letter at the end of May 1943 she describes dusk in the mountains, the lights slowly appearing around the lake below, and from the garden comes “a gust of sweetness, the scent of flowers. Tonight I am grateful from my head to the soles of my feet ...for living here, for being allowed to live here.”

But Godden was to stay there for less than two years. The monkey curse struck again in June 1944, when a servant poisoned her and the children in an apparent murder attempt. Exactly what happened is not clear. In A Time to Dance Godden states that she met an accomplished British woman, a painter, by the name of Olwen, and eventually agreed that they would share Dove Cottage and the cost of running it; Godden was as short of money as ever. Bit by bit Olwen’s servants displaced her own and Olwen’s bearer recruited a new cook, Salim, a man who, Godden wrote, never seemed quite as he should be. Both Godden and Olwen became very unwell, and it was clear that Godden, at least, was being fed drugs of some sort; she was to remember walking around the grounds wearing a Norman Hartnell ballgown. At length the Provost Marshall appeared at the house, removed both women, forbad them to return and arrested Salim who, unbeknownst to either woman, had a past record of making himself indispensable to English ladies and relieving them of their belongings. Charges were brought against Salim but it became plain that the court would not convict, and that the women might face counter-charges for slander. Advised to leave Kashmir, Godden slipped away, leaving Olwen to face the music – something of which she admitted she was not proud; Olwen, she said, did not forgive her.

That last part, it seems, was true; according to Chisholm, Olwen – whose real name was Helen Arberry – did feel that she had been treated badly. They never met again. Other parts of the incident may not have been quite as Godden wrote them. In particular, Chisholm’s account, which draws on Godden’s own letters from the time, suggests that the cook Godden calls Salim (his real name was Siddika) had not been recruited by Arberry’s bearer as Godden wrote later, but had been employed by Godden herself before Arberry moved in.

In the early 1950s Godden wrote a fictionalised account, a novel called Kingfishers Catch Fire, in which some at least of the episode is very true to life; a headstrong young widow and mother, Sophie, becomes badly ill in Srinagar and is cared for with her children by the Mission next to the graveyard, and then, in spring, largely recovered, she insists against local advice on taking a hillside cottage away from the town. This is very much what Godden did. Once in the cottage, Sophie fails to understand the dynamics of the nearby village, and causes trouble between the local peasants. She also wilfully refuses to understand her young daughter’s fear of the local children, which turn out to be all too well-founded. Her life in the cottage ends badly, as she is poisoned by her cook.

Is this how Godden herself saw this episode? Probably not. Neither her own books nor Chisholm’s fine biography suggest that Godden was prone to self-criticism of this sort. One could ask why she wrote Kingfishers Catch Fire if not in expiation; but that one is easy to answer – writers never waste good material. What Kingfishers is, though, is a good novel. Chisholm rates it very high, suggesting that, as a portrait of the British in India, it ranks alongside A Passage to India and The Jewel in the Crown. This is high praise, and is based in part on the way Chisholm feels the book respects the locals themselves. In fact, I am not sure it does; I thought Godden’s depiction of the villagers had quite dated and imperial overtones. 

Where Kingfishers Catch Fire is an undoubted success, however, is in its vivid portrait of a woman who has misunderstood her Indian neighbours in a hundred different ways, while also offending against the conventions of her own community; the latter is fiercely critical of her decision to move to an isolated location amongst people she does not understand. In this sense, the book is true to life. Mollie Kaye – better known as M.M. Kaye, the author of The Far Pavilions – was in Kashmir herself at the time; they do not seem to have known each other well, though they did become friends in later life. Kaye was later to remember that the British community had thought the move was unwise and that no-one was very surprised that Godden had had trouble. It was even suggested that no-one had really tried to poison Godden and Arberry at all though on that score, at least, Godden – and the Provost Marshal, and the Kashmiri police – seem to have had no doubts.

Whatever really happened at Dove Cottage, it cast a long shadow over Godden, and she was still nervous of entering Kashmir when she returned with the BBC Bookmark crew in the 1990s, not long before she died. According to Chisholm (who accompanied her to India), Godden demanded assurances from the Kashmiri authorities that she would not be subject to any proceedings if she returned, and she was not willing to revisit Dove Cottage. Yet her description of her life there in A Time to Dance suggests a beauty so profound that it seems to have transfixed her even as she wrote of it 40 years later.

*

That beauty must have sustained Godden as she left India via a stinking, diseased transit camp near Bombay in the summer of 1945 – a difficult time that she describes in her second volume of autobiography, A House With Four Rooms. She was not finished with India; her sisters were still there, and she would return soon after independence, in November 1949, with the distinguished French film director Jean Renoir, to make his much-loved film of her novel The River, for which she wrote the screenplay. Her last visit to India was with the Bookmark team in 1994 at the age of 86. But she was not to live there again. She spent the rest of her life in Britain, in Sussex and later in Dumfriesshire, producing more than 60 books, including some highly successful ones  for children. A number of her novels were filmed, and several, notably Coromandel Sea Change and In This House of Brede, were highly successful. She continued to write until the end of her life and her last novel – Cromartie vs. the God Shiva – was published as late as 1997.

Rumer Godden died in November 1998 at the age of 90. One of Britain’s most successful ever novelists, she is probably less read now, but still has a following and in time, like J.B. Priestley, she will be rediscovered as a quintessential English writer. In fact the rediscovery is under way; a number of her novels have now been republished by Virago. For me, however, it always will be her vision of India that astonishes and delights; the clear-eyed but loving childhood memoir in Two Under the Indian Sun, and the thoughtful beauty of A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. The latter is written with the clarity of old age and filled with people who were already long dead but to her very much alive. It is a book that sometimes comes quite close to perfection.

The train to Darjeeling (M.Robbins)

And there is the mystical, forgotten Rungli-Rungliot. I read it a year ago, in December 2017. I took it with me when I reported to a hospital in New York for a heart procedure that I knew might not work. (It did.) As I left the house in the early hours, I remembered that I should take a book; there is a lot of waiting to do in hospitals. Rungli-Rungliot had just arrived, and I slipped it into my bag and felt it bumping against my hip as I walked through the pre-dawn streets. Later that morning, checked in, monitored and waiting in my cubicle, I reached for the book. I came to Godden’s description of her climb to Darjeeling on the narrow-gauge railway from Siliguri on the Bengal plain. Sitting in a cubicle in a New York hospital, frightened of what lay ahead, I let my mind wander back to the journeys I had made to Darjeeling myself, over 20 years earlier. There was the one via Kalimpong and past Rangli-Rangliot itself, across the Coronation Bridge, the Teesta river a glacial blue many hundreds of feet below. There was another when we climbed by road, slowly, in the wake of round, stately Hindustan Ambassador saloons in green and grey, packed with Indian families.

Once, we rode the train. The engine, painted bright blue, had a plate that proclaimed its date of birth in Britain: 1877. It may have hauled Godden and her family upwards, through Ghoom and Tung, past hamlets of clapboard and corrugated-iron roofs, just as it took me on a sunlit afternoon in 1992, the deep green of the Himalayan foothills all round us. An Indian guard clapped me on the shoulder. “Your great-grandfather built this,” he said. There was another passenger, an elderly Englishman in a sports-jacket. The late sunlight bounced around the carriage and lit his face, and he was smiling with what looked like wonder, and I knew that he had been here before, a long time ago.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Why Europe? Peace. That's why

The Brexit debate in Britain has been bogged down in bad-tempered arguments about tariffs and the terms of trade. But Europe is a much bigger question than that

Ever since the Brexit referendum campaign began in early 2016, we’ve been bombarded with economic arguments from both sides. Neither has convinced the other. Leavers cling to their belief that Britain can simply trade on World Trade Organization terms, although they rarely understand what that really implies. Remain campaigners, meanwhile, have continued to hit voters with facts and figures that in the abstract mean little, and have failed to have impact. Remainers have needed to come up with a better story.

Arriving to sign the Treaty of Trianon, June 1920

We have one: the European Union has kept the peace in Europe. This is quite an achievement. After all, its people have been butchering each other with grim enthusiasm ever since the first hairy hominids quarreled over who should paint the bison on the cave wall. And it's not ancient history. I can remember a conversation with my field director in Sudan about the ghastly war being waged in the south of the country. He had no doubt of its brutality. “But don’t forget,” he added, “Europeans were deporting people to death camps just 40 years ago.” 

It was a fair point, and one also made by a much-loved Israeli writer, the late Amos Oz, in his essay Between Right and Right. Don’t wag your fingers at us Israelis and Arabs for our cruelty and stupidity, he wrote; when we finally make peace, we’ll come together much faster than you did. “Our conflict in the Middle East is indeed painful and bloody and cruel and stupid, but it’s not going to take us a thousand years to produce our equivalent of the Euro,” he wrote. “Our bloody history is going to be shorter than your bloody history.”

The European Union was founded to stop this bloody history, and by and large it has. It’s an argument not much used by Remainers, who prefer to drone on about tariffs and the regulatory framework. When it does get raised, one is often told, “No, the EU has not kept the peace; NATO has done that.” But NATO is an organisation that has no sanction except a mutual agreement to use force, and such pacts did not keep the peace between the world wars; indeed they did not prevent the first one. The EU can, and the reason for that lies in the nature of the nation-state itself.

The concept of the nation-state is quite new. I suppose one could, if one wished, argue that the England of Elizabeth was the first. For the most part, though, the modern country based on ethnic or linguistic identity only really goes back to 1848, when those identities became a liberal rallying-cry for freedom from traditional power structures. Even then, there were few such countries until 1919. Then the break-up of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire meant there were, quite suddenly, a number of states that were ethnically defined. By reorganising the continent along these lines, the Paris peace conference profoundly altered its character in much the same way that decolonisation would affect Africa some 40 years later.

But ethnic and linguistic boundaries are rarely clear-cut. After the Paris conference, countries emerged whose territory did not always match their ethnic base, leaving their own people outside their frontiers and enfolding those of other states within their own. Few realise the scale on which this happened in 1919. Perhaps a third of Hungarians wound up living in Slovakia, Transylvania or Yugoslavia, plus a few in what became Austria. Meanwhile many thousands of Slovenians found themselves in Austria instead of the new Yugoslavia, which itself went to war with Italy over Trieste. Neither was this confined to continental Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks fled from western Turkey. Millions of people suddenly found an international frontier between themselves and the local tobacconist. In some cases, family members even became different nationalities by accident of birth (the writer Stefan Zweig was Austrian, but his elder brother had been born in Bohemia so assumed Czechoslovak nationality). The legacy of Versailles, the Treaty of Trianon (which defined the borders of Hungary), and other decisions at Paris was that millions of people owed allegiance to countries other than those in which they lived, and almost no country fully accepted the borders it had been given.

All of these potential conflicts festered, and destabilised Europe. What could have helped, with more support, was the League of Nations, which did try to mediate disputes (in one case, the Åland Islands, very successfully). But the only real answer was some way of organising the continent so that people could just wander across frontiers if they wanted to, and there was some sort of overarching structure that protected everyone and prevented conflict – both of which had been the case under Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, for all their faults.

Portugal, 1976: Mário Soares takes over (Hans Peters/Anefo)

That was the idea behind the EU. It started with the Iron and Steel Community, the purpose of which was to bind together the Western European economies so that the countries could not fight each other, and provide an area of mutual prosperity that would be worth belonging to rather than fighting your neighbours. Although initially it was just north-west Europe and Italy, in my lifetime it has twice expanded to stabilise regions in a time of rapid change, and steer them towards democracy. When I was in my teens, Spain and Portugal still had their prewar fascist dictatorships, and Greece had a foul military government. When these collapsed, the prospect of EU membership was an incentive to replace them with something less nasty. Better to be part of a modern, prosperous, peaceful bloc than stay in isolation and move backwards.

This was also what happened in Eastern Europe after the Wall came down. In this latter case, political scientist Laurence Whitehead has written of “the wish for modernity”. In a 1996 essay, Three International Dimensions of Democratization, he put it thus: “An almost universal wish to imitate a way of life associated with the liberal capitalist democracies of the core regions (the wish for modernity) may undermine the social and institutional foundations of any regime perceived as incompatible with these aspirations. ...[This] will also serve to generate the consistent and broad-based support needed to bolster fragile new democracies.” This was important. It was absolutely not pre-ordained that these countries would become stable democracies; in fact in the late 1970s Spain seemed very unstable, while in the 1990s the Eastern European states looked as if they might fall into the hands of people like Slovakia's Vladimír Mečiar. The prospect of joining a prosperous, strong alliance was their incentive not to.

Better still, today tens of potential ethnic conflicts are defused because everyone is part of a larger polity that protects them, and if they want to visit relatives or work in the next village and it happens to be in another country, that's not a problem. Ireland is one of the best examples of this, but there are others. The region of Cieszyn Silesia or Těšín Silesia was formerly the Austro-Hungarian region of Teschen; in 1919 the border between the new states of Czechoslovakia and Poland went straight through it, separating communities and causing a shooting war between the two states. Today that border is a benign one between two democracies. Elsewhere, the accession of Slovenia to the EU means that a Slovene who happens to live in Klagenfurt can drive to Ljubljana in two or three hours and should not feel cut off from the “mother state”. That is not to say that s/he will have no grievances, or that an Irish Republican living in the Six Counties will not. But the cause of conflict – a border that separates one from one’s fellows – is substantially defused.

Ireland: Sinn Féin protest against a hard border

Conversely, the re-emergence of borders will revive such conflicts, not least because it would provide a fertile breeding-ground for populism. This is because of the nature of populism itself, and its inherent connection to identity politics. There is no agreed definition of populism, but in his 2016 book What is Populism? Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princetown University, says a populist is someone who claims to identify with “the people”. S/he rejects everyone else. How “the people” are defined is left conveniently vague, but it is made clear that everyone not fitting that description is an outlier, a deviant, or, worse of all, part of an unresponsive “elite” against which s/he is leading a popular rebellion. 

If the populist says to you, “I represent you. You, the people,” you have come home. You have an identity, and have no need to share it with those with whom you do not identify, whether they be Slovenes, German speakers, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, perceived welfare scroungers, Goths or gays. Even more important in this context, you do not need to share your identity with those who speak another language or are ethnically related to the folks across the border. They are not “the people”. But you are. If someone lives (say) on the wrong side the Polish-Czech border, or the Irish border, you will find them a useful scapegoat. If that border has no real substance, and everyone crosses it daily to shop or to visit friends or relatives, it will be much harder to manipulate people in this way. If on the other hand we return to a world in which power-structures are defined solely by language or heritage, we will walk straight into the populists' trap. 

To weaken European unity is to go backwards towards the 1930s. It is to abandon multilateralism and go back to a fractured world of quarrelling, paranoid countries that can be manipulated by the strong, just as Hitler manipulated them in the 1930s – for example by promising Poland the disputed territory of Teschen in 1938 so it didn't oppose his plans for Czechoslovakia, telling Hungary he'd help get them Transylvania back from Romania, and encouraging Romania to join the Axis powers so that it would get Bessarabia (now mostly in Moldova) back from the USSR. It worked like a charm.

To be sure, leaving the EU would make us poorer, but that is only part of it, and it is not even the most important part. The real point is that Europe is an instrument of peace. NATO can only promise to revisit conflict on those who seek it. European unity, however, can remove its causes. It has achieved much in 60 years, but as the British philosopher John Gray has pointed out, history is not an automatic progression towards something better; it can go into reverse. That is why Brexit is an historic blunder. If it weakens the EU, as some on the right (and a few on the left) would like it to do, we will see a vicious lurch backwards through history.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

It's all about the bike

We all have things that make life worthwhile, because it is for them that we love life. For me, it's the bike

It is November, and a cold morning in in New York. I walk two blocks down to Central Park North, where a line of blue CitiBikes wait in a stand. It’s just before eight and there are still plenty there, so I choose carefully; one of the latest ones, with the infinitely-variable gears, a lovely smooth twistgrip, and a seat post that is not so worn that one can’t see the seat-height markers. My bag goes in the basket at the front, then it’s time for some quick pre-flight routines. Check the brakes and tyres; you don’t want to take the bike out if it has a problem – you’ll only have to put it back and report the fault before the stand will let you take another. Adjust the seat-post; after much trial and error, I now put it between four and five. Then the key with the barcode goes in the slot; there’s a clicking and whirring, a flash of amber lights, then a green one, and the bike slides backwards onto the sidewalk. Time to go.

*

The bike’s been with us a while. Its ancestor was the Velocipede, a sort of weird wheeled hobby-horse that appeared in Germany in the 1810s. Pedals arrived much later, but there was, as yet, no way of gearing them; they had to be attached to the hub of the front wheel, and the only way to get gearing high enough for progress was to make that wheel enormous. The result was the lethal penny-farthing, with its huge front wheel and tiny rear one and its rider sitting some feet above the rocky roadway onto which he would, all too often, be ejected by some emergency, vagary of the surface, or his own lack of adroitness when mounting or dismounting. Nonetheless, as BikeSnobNYC (of whom more later) puts it: “for the first time people could move themselves quickly without the aid of steam, wind, or hairy, flatulent animals.”

And it wasn’t long before, for the first but not the last time, some idiot decided to ride round the world. His name was Thomas Stevens; born into a poor family England, he had moved to the US at 17. He made it round the world in less than two years, via Constantinople, Delhi and Hong Kong, arriving home at the end of 1886. The tradition of the eccentric cyclist had begun.

But by the time Stevens got home, the roller chain had been invented and in England J. K. Starley had invented the safety bicycle, which had (in general) two wheels of more or less equal size, a diamond frame and a saddle not far from the road so there was less far to fall. And it’s a safety bicycle that, in all essentials, I’m riding today. It’s a Bixi bike, first built for the Bixi bike-sharing scheme in Montreal. They’re now the mainstay of New York’s CitiBike scheme, while in London they’re painted red and called Boris bikes after the mayor who helped introduce them. They weigh 20 kg, about 43lb, and going up the Great Hill of Central Park, you can feel every ounce. I don’t care. Bikes are freedom. And it beats the rush-hour subway train on which you breathe in someone’s armpit.

The Central Park perimeter road is traffic-free and takes me up through the North Woods. The trees have shed their leaves now; it’s late in the month. (In New York City the trees retain their colour well into November.) Every morning ride through the wood marks the calendar. In winter the trees are bare but for the brownish remnants of the year’s foliage, and patches of snow linger on the verge. Then as February rolls into March the daffodils appear, buds poking through the remaining snow, and within a week or so that snow is gone and clumps of daffs line the road, which still bears a grey film from the salt of winter; the seasons are changing but your hands are still frozen as you sweep down the far side of the Great Hill, past the Pool and across the Glenn Span Arch, a masterpiece of fitted stone. Later, in April, a green fuzz appears on the branches and then spring takes you by surprise in a blaze of white, blue and green. You do not see this if you take the subway. I am sure Thomas Stevens felt a sense of wonder as he rode into Constantinople on his penny-farthing. I feel one crossing the North Hill on my way to work.

I felt that sense of wonder from the beginning. Some time in the early 1960s my parents removed my beloved dark-blue tricycle with the little luggage boot on the back; it went, I suppose, to a poorer family (or maybe ended up in the canal). I was taken to a shop to choose my first real bike. There was not much of a choice. I could have a red and white bike, or a light and dark blue one. I chose the blue. It was wheeled into the back garden and I was mounted on it and told to pedal. Of course I kept swaying in different directions. Then the day came when I rode down the garden for the first time without falling off. I was six; I am now over sixty, but nothing has entranced me the way that moment did. There was a sense of autonomy, of something achieved, of a barrier not so much broken as smashed to a thousand pieces.

My elder sister tried to knock me off my bike. We played a game called Nine Lives; we rode side by side and tried to steer each other into my father’s rose bushes. I can see us doing that now, some 55 years ago, and the lawn and the sky and the trees and the roses are as bright as a restored Kodachrome.

*

There’s some pedalling to do now. Once past the Pool, the ground rises and I twist the grip to get a lower gear. The North Meadow drifts past on the left; it’s quiet now but in the spring there’ll be basketball there, and brightly-coloured caps and vests. On my right looms the twin towers of 300 Central Park West, one of my favourite buildings in the city, and once home to Sinclair Lewis. More recent residents include Alec Baldwin, Faye Dunaway and Moby. Good luck to them; Irving Berlin once lived opposite me. New York’s like that. The building’s two huge Art Deco towers pass by framed by bare branches; in the spring they will be masked by vibrant white blossoms and in the fall by the flames of the dying year.

I know I’ll see traffic here. There’ll be the odd person who passes me in another CitiBike – of course they do, when you’re 61; once I would have raced them. And there’s a man on a tandem who sweeps along with his six or seven-year-old on the back, a trailer behind for the groceries. He’ll curve gracefully onto an exit somewhere on the Upper West Side near 96th Street and dump his son somewhere, and rejoin us on the Central Park circuit going south, overtaking me again somewhere near the Dakota Building. One or two Lycra louts also pass me by, heads down, ass-in-the-air, on custom-made road bikes built of the finest unobtainium.

When I see them, I think of my sister’s bike. That was red and white, with a single gear when they were not fashionable, just cheaper and simpler to maintain. It had rod brakes. The brown plastic saddle was surprisingly comfortable. One day when my sister was in her teens, my parents bought her a better bike, a maroon Elswick Hopper with three speeds. The red-and-white bike was relegated to a country cottage on the moors in the West of England. She still rode it sometimes, when we were on the moors in the spring or summer. One day when I was about 10, and she 15, she sat me on the saddle and I clung on behind her, legs spread wide to avoid the spokes, and we careered off down the narrow vertiginous country lanes on a late spring morning with the sun lancing through the fresh, bright new leaves. It was a Sunday and the church bells chimed as we shot through a village, and later we splashed through a ford near a chapel where people were preparing to worship, and they looked at us daggers drawn for our godlessness. Later, as I grew into my teens, I took over the red-and-white bike and darted through the lanes with their gravelled crowns and their high hedges that fell away now and then to reveal a valley of steep, bright-green fields and bracken-coated hills crowned with granite outcrops called tors, standing out against against blue skies lined with clean white clouds. Now and then one swept round a blind bend to find a car (the rod brakes worked surprisingly well, when one was frightened). More often one encountered the rumps of cattle on their way to milking, packed tight into the narrow lane, the sweet smell of their dung filling the air.

*

As I approach Columbus Circle the perimeter road sweeps round to the left, and just for a while there are cars with me in the park. I start paying attention, and prepare to cross the traffic stream for my exit into Seventh Avenue. The latter is wide and straight, and heads down to Times Square, which I can see in the distance. I’m headed for 46th St, which I will take across to Second Avenue. I go carefully here; three miles through Central Park has relaxed me but now I must remember than I am an infantryman in a tank battle. But I shan’t let that stop me trying to catch every light. Once, just once, I got every single set on green and sailed down to Times Square in three or four minutes. But I mustn’t forget the bitter lesson that every New York cyclist has learned at one time or another: Don’t run a red unless you are very, very sure.

There are more bikes now, and I’m enjoying spotting the two-wheeled tribes of the city. There are a few of these. For definitions, I recommend Bike Snob’s. Or, to give the official author’s name, BikeSnobNYC. (It’s his website. He does have a real name – it’s Eben Weiss – but Bike Snob will do fine.) His book’s title is Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling. Which he doesn’t really because he has too much sense of humour. Anyway, Bike Snob’s classification is a masterpiece of Linnaean taxonomy.

Let’s start with the Urban Cyclist. S/he (it’s usually a he) is a devotee of single-speed, fixed-wheel bikes, preferably with no brakes; large, impractical messenger bags; relentlessly casual clothing; and (though Bike Snob does not say this) a sort of sod-you mien which assures the rider that he is a rebel even if his destination is actually a merchant bank where he will shower, don a tie and defer to the senior analyst.

Am I an Urban Cyclist? I do worry about this.

“Urban Cyclists endlessly seek ‘authenticity,’ and are often fond of ‘vintage’ bicycle frames,” rasps Bike Snob. “However, since most Urban Cyclists are roughly half the age of their vintage bikes, they’re clearly not the original owners. So really, this means they’re actually less authentic and more contrived than the riders of off-the-rack bikes.” Hang on, Bike Snob, I ride a 45-year-old bike, and I’m authentic. Mind you, I actually am old enough to have ridden it new. One day an Urban Cyclist past me in Central Park, not far from Columbus Circle. “You’re doing all right on that old bike,” he said kindly. I explained that the combined age of bike and ride was 104.

Still, I’m not an Urban Cyclist, because I don’t ride a fixed-gear single-speed bike with narrow bars or carry a messenger bag. Neither do I have the ghastly road manners of the Urban Cyclist, who seems to consider all other traffic an excrescence and road rules an affront. Maybe I’m what he calls a Retro-Grouch (“the Retro-Grouch always dwells approximately fifteen to twenty years in the past. This is because the Retro-Grouch has a passionate respect for the tried and true...”.) This may fit me. I do prefer steel frames. I loathe integrated shifters and dislike indexed gears, both being a pain in the arse to repair and adjust. The absolute limit, for me, are electric dérailleurs. I mean, just get a bloody car.

*

Today my CitiBike is taking me to work. But once upon a time a bike was an escape from hell.

At 13 I was packed off to a boarding school in North Oxfordshire, in the heart of England. Built in the 1850s, the school was basically a cut-price Hogwarts, without the magic. The dormitories were cold and the food indifferent. One of the vilest things about the school was the cadet force. As a young elite, we were supposedly being trained to control and direct the less fortunate of the Empire (which even then had slipped away). So we were expected to emerge from school with a basic military training. Every Thursday we would parade in full uniform in a windy playground and learn drill, and in the summer months we would bump through country lanes in the back of army Land Rovers to a firing range where we would learn to shoot with .303 rifles that had been obsolete in 1939 and whose recoil smashed back into your shoulder. Meanwhile the parades were the occasion for near constant screeching as some empowered 16-year-old, made an “NCO”, would find fault with your webbing straps. I hated the place.

One memory is especially stark. On Sunday morning there were two chapel services. You could go at seven or you could go at nine. If you went at seven and had breakfast afterwards, you would get butter. If you went at nine and ate after that, you got margarine. A nasty, cheap value judgement on those who chose to get some sleep on a Sunday; God knew we got little of it for the rest of the week. But I went to early chapel, had my butter – and then slipped out of the school on my racing bike and hit the country lanes around the school.

In those years I acquired a love of the Middle English countryside; the gentle hills, hedgerows, woods and soft light, the hazy clouds drifting across the horizon, the winding roads and the sudden vistas, the ancient pre-Roman fort that rose above the fields near Banbury, the long quiet roads between sleepy country towns. Nearly 50 years on, random images are with me. Riding across the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire border and feeling that the quality of the light had changed, that it was softer; an old man in a Mini on his way to market, with collarless shirt, watch-chain and pork-pie hat; Land Rovers so well-used that they seemed to have merged with the countryside.

I had an Ordnance Survey map that became crinkled and creased with use. I would search it for the strange diagrams that told of an abandoned airfield, for there were still many of them then, a legacy of a war that had really not ended that long before. Some turned out to be ploughed up; at others, a farmer’s gate lay across the entrance. But sometimes you could ride onto the main runway and feel the ghosts all around you. At other times I would sweep up and down the rolling South Midland hills, through stone-built villages, past abandoned quarries or huge churches whose bells tolled on Sundays and whose sound lingered from village to village. For a few hours, the bleak aggression of school was forgotten.

I learned then that the bike has a special purpose. You need no fuel, no-one’s permission; you are gone. It is a way of saying, fuck you.

*

I rattle south down Seventh Avenue. I’m quite lucky with the lights today, but there’s an Urban Cyclist who thinks I’m in his way. (I’m not. He seems to think I should ride into the back of a parked car rather than move to its side and make him do so too.) It’s the usual obstacle course of yellow cabs pulling in, yellow cabs pulling out, beer trucks, somnambulent pedestrians staring at their phones and people darting out between parked cars. (The beer trucks I do not mind. They do God’s work.)

Williamsburg Bridge (M.Robbins)

Bike Snob has plenty of other stereotypes for us besides Urban Cyclist and Retro-Grouch. I rather like what he calls the Beautiful Godzilla (“...who rides as though the rest of the world were created simply to yield to her. She’s generally young, good-looking, and clad in expensive clothes. ...She’s on her cell phone at all times...”.) I give her a wide berth. In fact, I give a few things a wide berth. As Bike Snob says, “It is sobering to think that, as a cyclist, all that’s between you and being run over by a Ford Explorer is the driver bending down for half a second to retrieve a dropped McNugget.”

I was reckless once. One day in the early 1980s a friend from Birmingham was staying with me in London and I spent the night drinking with him in the Ship and Shovel below Hungerford Bridge. Tossed out at closing time, we decided he should not take the Tube alone (my part of London was then dodgy at night). “Get on the saddle,” I told him. He did so, and it promptly tipped backwards (I kept the saddle loose so I could tip it forward when I stopped). Finally he got his balance and I drove us south across Waterloo Bridge and around the big roundabout at its base, along the South Bank, through the Vauxhall Cross and down South Lambeth Road without serious incident. I would not do it now.

Bike Snob reckons you’re safer if you obey the rules. Cross on a red, he says, and you’ll probably hit some other idiot cyclist doing the same thing. He’s right. In New York City the bike lanes have dedicated lights for bikes, designed to let you cross the junction when no-one’s turning across your path. Jump those lights and they might be. Neither do I approve of what New York cyclists call ‘salmoning’ - going the wrong way up a street or bike lane like a salmon going upstream to spawn.

Here the main offenders, apart from Urban Cyclists, are the takeout delivery riders. These are a menace. Many ride electric bikes – not power-assisted pedelecs, which are legal in New York, but actual powered bikes, which are not, but are widely tolerated. They weigh three times as much as an ordinary bike and are a lot faster. You do not want to meet them coming the other way. And yet I have a certain sympathy. The pizza delivery riders (a tribe Bike Snob doesn’t talk of much) are at the bottom of the city anthill, striving to make a living in the cold and the heat, often born somewhere else, maybe undocumented, almost certainly uninsured.

One day I am riding north along the bike lane on First Avenue. It’s a busy spring rush-hour and the lane is packed with Urban Cyclists, commuters on old road bikes, young women with full baskets and people like myself on CitiBikes. Ahead of me is a large young man on a very smart mountain-bike, dressed in the latest Lycra gear and brightly-coloured helmet. Suddenly a short, squat man of Asian appearance, with backward baseball cap and grimy anorak, appears around the corner ahead and charges towards us on an old mountain bike, not powered, the sort of old wreck the pizza guys use, with tape round its frame to guard against knocks. The two brake, feint to one side and another and nearly collide and then the large man blocks the Asian and screams at him “You’re going the wrong way! You… Are… Going… The… Wrong… Way!” as if he were a drill sergeant and the Asian guy was a raw recruit who just shat the bed. I rode past. Dude, I thought, I hope you order in a pizza tonight and it comes late and cold, with a roach in it.

*

One tribe that Bike Snob does not discuss much is the Righteous Cyclist, who rides because it’s a green thing to do, has a bike rescued from a dumpster and is convinced s/he are saving the world. Bike Snob does not seem to like them. He may be right. No-one loves the miasma of self-satisfaction that wafts around the righteous. And yet the fact is, they have a point. Journalist Peter Walker’s splendid 2017 book How Cycling Can Save the World is an informative and readable guide to how bikes can do just that.

Walker points out that the cyclist’s emissions, for a start, are lower. Of course cyclists do have emissions. Bikes are built of steel, or aluminium, or titanium, which takes energy to manufacture (unless you have a bamboo bike; still, that’s not a big business just yet). And of course cyclists use extra energy, so consume more food, which takes up more land, and if they’re on a healthy diet they’re probably emitting quite a lot of methane as well. Still, Walker cites a 2011 study by the European Cyclists’ Federation that factored in all of this (except perhaps the methane) and found that a cyclist emits 21g/Km of CO2, against 101 per bus passenger and 271 per car passenger. Interestingly, e-bikes emitted only 1g/km more than bikes (though it’s not clear what kind of e-bikes they’re talking about). But Walker also quotes a US study that found e-bikes can be more efficient than rail.

And of course cycling is good for you.

“Along with lower weight, cycling brings astonishing improvements to cardiovascular health,” says Walker, and reports a study in the north of England that found 32 regular cyclists had a “very significantly lower incidence of blocked arteries or other coronary obstructions.” Mind you, this survey was from post-mortems, and some of those cyclists had perhaps been killed in traffic, as cyclists far too often are. Walker acknowledges the dangers but again, he marshals evidence; the health benefits outweigh the danger of cycling. This time he quotes a Utrecht University study that found the health benefits of cycling exceeded the danger of accidental death by nine to one. This was in the bike-friendly Netherlands, where bikes are often separated from other traffic. Even in more dangerous Britain, however, “the life-extending benefits were greater by a factor of seven.” Walker does not say how the comparators were defined; after all, a non-cyclist need not be unfit. But it’s true there’s widespread evidence that the health benefits of regular cycling outweigh the dangers of accidents and pollution.

In fact, bikes can make you better. The exercise releases endorphins, gets your weight down, strengthens your heart and, maybe just as important, it makes you feel better about yourself. “In an age where there’s a pill for everything, exercise is the billion dollar drug that never gets prescribed,” says one cyclist, Phil Southerland, who took up cycling and found it greatly helped with Type 1 diabetes. He’s quoted in a rather nice book by Anna Hughes, called Pedal Power: Inspirational Stories from the World of Cycling (2017). Hughes teaches cycling, repairs bikes and writes for a living, and has cycled around the coast of Britain and down its length. She quotes a couple of stories like this – the most astonishing that of Dr Nan Little, who turned to cycling as a treatment for Parkinson’s and saw a very marked improvement in her condition. She took to bikes as part of a trial treatment programme for Parkinson’s run by a Dr Jay Alberts, who says that vigorous cycling increases brain function and this seems to ease the symptoms.

*

Of course, some of this is in your head. But it’s no less real for that.

Cycling really is inspirational. As we’ve seen, Hughes’s book tells us how bikes have made people better. But she has much else to tell, and this is a delightful book to dip into, or keep by your bed, or to read when the world seems dull. Hughes tells us (for example) of the Women’s Rescue League of America, which at the end of the 19th century warned that cycling was unladylike and unchristian and could cause both infertility and sexual satisfaction (they thought the latter evil). They had opposition. Hughes quotes one Ann Strong, writing in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1895: “Bicycles are just as good company as most husbands, and when they get shabby or old a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the whole community.” Meanwhile in Britain two years earlier, a 16-year-old called Tessie Reynolds had ridden from Brighton to London and back in just eight and a half hours. Moreover she did it in pantaloons, to the horror of some. But the die was cast. The new safety bicycle was a liberation, and women did not intend to be left out.

Annie Kopchovsky wasn’t, anyway. Hughes records that this mother-of-three set off from Boston in June 1894 to win a bet by cycling around the world. She left home, says Hughes, with a change of clothes and a pearl-handled revolver, riding a Columbia women’s bike weighing a stonking 42lb, very nearly as much as a CitiBike. Rechristening herself Annie Londonderry, she had a bit of a false start; the Columbia was too heavy and after riding it to Chicago, she swapped it for a 21lb Sterling and started back the other way. From then on she was in business. As Hughes recounts:

Bold, charismatic and beautiful, she captured the imagination of the world’s press … she proved to be an excellent speaker, enthralling audiences with her tales, and an excellent rider ...Posters and placards covered her and her bicycle, and she was often dressed head to toe in ribbons advertising anything from milk to perfume.

She won her bet.

Men have never had it their own way in the cycling world. Hughes talks too of Eileen Sheridan, who in 1954 smashed her way from Land’s End to John o’Groats in just two days, 11 hours and seven minutes. It is 870 miles. Sheridan kept riding to make it the round 1,000 miles, which she did in three days and an hour. Hughes inspired me to find out more about Sheridan; now 95, she was just 4ft 11in and famous for the gusto with which she rode – pictures show her wearing a big, cheerful grin on her bike. The 1,000-mile record stood until 2002. Sheridan’s London to Edinburgh record has, to this day, not been beaten. The 1,000-mile bike rests today in Coventry Transport Museum. One day I shall go there, and stand before it in awe.

Greatest ever? Eileen Sheridan

There is much more to inspire in Hughes’s likeable book. Not least the story of Rob Holden, who decided to ride up Mont Ventoux on a Boris bike. This is the London version of the CitiBike (it is, in fact, the same bike) and is named after the mayor who brought it about. Mont Ventoux is the 6,000ft+ peak in the South of France that has tortured many a rider on the Tour de France, and has killed at least one (the great British cyclist Tommy Simpson, who collapsed and died just below the summit on the 1967 Tour – an incident I can just remember). A Boris bike weighs about 43lb so Holden was clearly mad. In any case, he could only book it out for 24 hours. But he decided to get it there, make the climb and get it back in that time. “We didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into,” one of Holden’s friends admits afterwards. Did they succeed? The answer’s in the book.

*

This November morning I’m on much the same bike as Holden was, but my more modest journey is nearly over. I’ve made it down Seventh Avenue nearly to Times Square, and it’s time for me to steer for the East Side. I swing into 46th Street, which crosses Park Avenue just where the latter vanishes under the buildings to make its bifurcated way past Grand Central Station. Today the junction’s busy and I pause for a while; it’s quite cold. Nowadays the cold affects my hands; even in mittens they become numb.

As a young man I had no fear of it. In 1985 I was a traffic broadcaster for the motoring organization, the RAC, and sometimes worked an early shift, with my first broadcast at 5.30 or so. The tube trains were not reliable enough at that hour, so I rode in the three or four miles from Stockwell on my bike. In summer this could be a wonderful journey, free of traffic, passing along the Lambeth Embankment and across Lambeth Bridge and seeing the Palace of Westminster mirrored perfectly in the Thames in the calm of the morning. But January 1985 was very bad. I borrowed bright-blue salopettes from my cousin and disinterred an old pair of high-heeled cowboy boots that had been fashionable some years before; I also wore a balaclava with a narrow space for the eyes. I looked like a Ruritanian paratrooper on his way to commit a burglary.

Here in New York I mostly find a leather jacket and jeans sufficient; only when it dips below 40 deg F will I need an outer coat. But sometimes when it is very cold, the ride has its rewards. One bitter day in mid-December 2016 I was a little late, and found myself the only person riding north through the darkness of Central Park. I breathed deeply as I struggle up the hill towards the reservoir. Then I came out on the long stretch past the Guggenheim; it was deserted, but a huge full moon has risen above the Upper East Side and was flooding the world with gold, and the frost on the surface, the snow and the ice glistened like jewels in the half-light.

*

When spring does come, I may ride both ways, using either of my two road bikes. One’s a Fuji that is light and well-made but has somehow never charmed me. And there is my Panasonic.

Fuji up on the roof (M.Robbins)

Bike maintenance has its nice side. In a warm garage on a chilly night, for instance, adjusting things while listening to the radio and dreaming of rides in the spring to come; or making things work when they didn’t before. Here in New York City, though, there’s no garage and I must get the bikes up on the roof of our brownstone, where there’s a hose to wash them. The Fuji’s indexed gears need careful adjustment, with the bike on a chainstay stand, and I’ll clean and oil the chain. (Not sure quite what to use for this, I once googled “chains and lubrication”, but what I found had little to do with bikes.)

The Panasonic Villager, with its friction gearchange, is easier, and after 10 years I still find it a delight. It weighs in at 34lb – not bad for 1973, when it was built, but heavy now. But it always feels faster, with its smooth steel frame and good-tempered gears. The freewheel, oddly, is in the bottom bracket, not on the rear wheel, so that one stops pedalling and the chain continues to move. It was meant to make slow-speed gearchanges easier and it does, but it never caught on.

My first proper road bike was a Carlton Corsa that I got when I was 15. That summer a friend and I rode across country from Banbury in the Midlands to the north-west tip of Wales. Snowdonia was steep and beautiful and yet it is not the mountains I remember, but a very long day’s right across the Marches, that great long stretch of Shropshire and other counties that most English people barely know, yet has a quiet beauty and remoteness. We crossed a series of hills and valleys, following a tangled skein of narrow lanes, through half-forgotten villages, past farmhouses where black-and-white collies lay in wait between the gateposts, seemingly asleep but springing up as we passed and barking and chasing off the wheeled invaders. It was a soft overcast day of deep greens and greys. Even now, 46 years later, that day is somehow England in my mind.

But the ride of my life was somewhere else, far away. In 1992 I went to Bhutan, the small kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas. I was to work as a development volunteer for the Department of Agriculture, setting up a communications unit. I stayed for two and a half years and was eventually very happy there, but the first few months were not so good; the other volunteers were clannish and withdrawn, the (English) head of the project did not seem pleased to see me there and the monsoon season was closing in, making me feel trapped in the narrow Thimphu Valley. Most of all, I wanted a bike. I have never felt right without one. A fellow-volunteer down on the Indian border heard about this and got a friend to bring one from the nearest large Indian city, Siliguri. It was a Hero Hawk, a five-speed racing bike built in the Punjab, and it looked very smart in its red and white paintwork. It also weighed a ton and, although of good quality, had not been assembled properly. The handlebars moved around, the gear cable was too short and the pedals started to fall apart. Bit by bit I dealt with all this.

That year, the monsoon lasted a month longer than usual. Then at the end of October, it was as if a tap had been turned off. Suddenly it was warm and bright, and pleasantly cool at night. One day I decided to ride up the road that led to Dochula, the pass into Central Bhutan. I did not plan to reach the pass itself, which was some 20 miles away and was at over 10,000ft (3,000m), a climb of some 3,000ft from Thimphu.

The road to the pass was the main East-West road that links the country together, but to an outsider it looked like a country lane; there was barely room for two cars to pass, and one of them would usually pull in. Yet the very presence of the lateral road, as it is called, was a triumph in such a landscape, rising and falling through immense elevations and clinging to steep, unstable terrain. It had been built by the Indian military. Until 1962 there had been no paved roads in Bhutan at all.

Hero Hawk. And monk (M.Robbins)

I began my climb slowly; there was little traffic; to my left the mountainside rose steeply, covered in pines and carpeted by pine-needles, and there was a fresh, heady scent. To my right the ground fell away increasingly suddenly as I climbed, until the isolated farmhouses in the valley below were dots in the variegated landscape, surrounded by poplar-like trees and intricate terraces of rice paddies, the latter bare now although some would soon be planted to winter wheat. Bit by bit I climbed until I realised suddenly that I was not so very far from the pass, and after two hours or so I came out on the clear patch of land on the summit, beside a long prayer-wall, surrounded by prayer-flags. Ahead of me lay a sight such that I had never seen before, and shan’t again; the whole of central Bhutan spread out before me in the clear afternoon sun, the Himalayas rising above it, and in the distance to the left the long line of snowpeaks that marked the border with Tibet. The eternal snows. A little nearer was a huge mountain with a strangely square shape; this was Masangang, at nearly 23,500ft (about 7,100m) one of the great peaks of the earth.

I stayed for two hours. Then it was getting dark. I had no lights that worked, and besides I should not have wanted to make the descent without daylight. Reluctantly I swung away back down towards Thimphu. I picked up speed as the light began to fade, pushing my luck on the sharp mountain bends, mindful of the weak pressed-steel brakes. A frantic journey brought me to the only decent straight stretch, some five miles from Thimphu; here I released the brakes and shot forward with the wind in my hair, and I was laughing.

After that I was happy in Bhutan.

*

Now there are only the concrete canyons of Manhattan. I bump and rumble over the broken road, mindful of manhole covers that are not flush with the road (and are lethal when wet), construction barriers, potholes with savage little lips to them, opening car doors, sleepwalkers in the cross walk, dogs on long leads, the elderly, the distracted and the plain rude. A dog-leg down Lexington, past the great marble post office at Grand Central and left into 44th Street, then down to First Avenue and prepare to dock in the long CitiBike stand between Tudor City and the United Nations. The UN itself looms all large and dull glass, the flags outside it flapping in the wind; in the summer they hang dispirited in the still, muggy air. The sky over the East River is light grey, variegated, with fast-moving clouds. I push the bike into one of the last empty stand; there is a click and a green LED tells me it is docked. Freedom, for now, is over. I will reclaim it in the evening, when I will put my key in the slot and sweep away up First Avenue.

Journey's end, winter (M.Robbins)

If I have the energy. I am quite old now, and maybe tonight I will go by subway. Those rides across Shropshire, or up a Himalayan pass, are a dream; in a few years, perhaps, I shan’t ride a bike at all. I wonder how I will deal with that. We all have things that make life worthwhile because we love them, in effect, more than we would care for life in itself. I suppose that for me, bikes have filled that role since that sense of wonder when I first realised, aged six, that I could stay upright.

I wonder what images will come to me as I come to the end. Drifting through Central Park on a spring morning, surrounded by flowers, or on a winter night bathed in moonlight. Flying through green lanes under a soft grey sky past farm gates with collies maybe, or zipping through a shallow ford between high hedges under a bright blue sky with high white clouds, the water droplets from the wheels catching the morning sun. Looking for a last time towards the ramparts of Tibet before climbing back aboard a red-and-white bike and sweeping back down round curve after curve in the gathering twilight, hauling back on the brakes, laughing. Or a Kodachrome vision in primary colours, of a six-year-old boy in an Aertex shirt and leather sandals, tottering through the garden on a small blue bike on a bright green lawn, past lines of vivid roses.

Mike Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from 

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