Teatime at Peggy's

For 15 years, award-winning travel writer Stephen McClarence and his BBC Radio journalist wife Clare Jenkins made a series of journeys through India to learn about one of its most eccentric and fast-dwindling communities: the Anglo-Indians. Mainly descendants of British men and Indian women, their combined heritage stretches back 350 years through the times of the East India Company and the British Raj. In Jhansi - a railway hub in the state of Uttar Pradesh and inspiration for John Masters''s 1950s book Bhowani Junction - the Anglo-Indian community is reduced to around 30 families. Teatime at Peggy''s shares their stories.Inspired by Jenkins'' own Anglo-Indian family connections, the couple immersed themselves in the customs of this little-known dimension to India, soon developing a profound affection for their new friends, particularly for two of the area''s most memorable figureheads: the title character ''Aunty Peggy'', daughter and widow of railwaymen, overseer of the European cemetery, and ''friend of the great and the good, the rich and the poor''; and Captain Roy Abbott, the last British landowner in India, who never dined without wearing a blazer, cravat and immaculately pressed trousers.The authors spent hours at Peggy''s kitchen table - eating cake, samosas and curry; drinking tea; welcoming eccentric characters, like Pastor Rao who could recite Winston Churchill speeches from memory; listening to stories, told in lilting accents, of the Railway Institute and May Queen Balls, Monsoon Toad Balls (where ''the ugliest, most hideous-looking man'' would win the prize), waltzes and foxtrots, dancing in the jungle to Victor Silvester gramophone records, games of rummy and housey-housey, and Anglo-Indian cookery that embraced plum cake, goat''s brain curry, Mulligatawny soup and crème caramel. Warm, humorous and evocative, Teatime at Peggy''s is a lyrical, loving homage to the Anglo-Indians. Filled with larger-than-life characters and with the ever-present exhilaration of 21st-century India, it is both intimate and revelatory, and a testament to the importance of tradition, community and friendship. This enchanting book is for anyone who knows India well - or who simply yearns to take the ''trip of a lifetime'' to the ''sub-continent''. and see things a little differently.

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