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ill-at-ease in when we were brought home does not exist either, thank heavens. Curiously, though, no matter the changes, I have to say that for me those old Jesuits were right: I still feel nostalgic for the time and the country in which I spent my early years, and I still feel very much at home in India.
    I should have grown up to be a spy because I learned recently that ‘Kim’ Philby, the notorious British double agent, was also born in Ambala, in 1912. He was actually called Harold Adrian Russell but nicknamed ‘Kim’ after the boy in Rudyard Kipling’s book of the same name, and the irony is that the Kim in the novel was also involved with the British Secret Services, being tasked with delivering a message to the Head of Intelligence – in Ambala of all places, of course. And weirdest of all, when reading his obituary not long ago, I discovered that Harry Chapman Pincher, the well-known British journalist who made a whole long career out of writing about spies, was also born in Ambala.
    But I didn’t turn into a spy; I did something very slightly similar by becoming a journalist, and then marrying a diplomat – I call my husband AW – and in 1986 we were posted to India where I immediately felt as if I belonged (despite living in a hotel room for months) but where AW and our daughters took a while to settle down.
    Later, long after we had left India and were posted to Syria, AW and I went back on a visit, partly because our daughter Hester was doing a gap year there, and partly so that AW, who is a Buddhist, could visit Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama has his base. We hired a battered old taxi in Delhi for the journey to Dharamsala and at one point our route actually took us through Ambala – where the driver fell asleep and we very nearly had a head-on collision with a lorry which would have been fatal. AW said my obituary would have read ‘Brigid Keenan, born in Ambala 1939, died in Ambala 1994’, and people would think I had never left the place in between.
    My brother and sisters and I grew up aware that our family had been in India for a long time – at least four generations we were told – as railway engineers (my grandfather), army and customs (other grandfather), railway administration (great-grandfather), foresters (uncle), indigo planters (great-great-uncle). Furthest back, and most romantically, was a Frenchman, E. Dubus, apparently taken prisoner by the British in Bengal during the Napoleonic Wars, who was allowed to return to France for a year, on parole, in order to bring his silk-weaving business back to India from Lyons. He set up his factory, which was called Nakanda, in Bengal. I inherited a drawing he made of the building and in 2014 AW and I went – armed with a copy of the picture – to the once-French settlement of Chandernagore near Calcutta, and to various silk-weaving areas in the region trying, and failing, to find Nakanda. We came to the conclusion that perhaps it was in the part of Bengal which is now Bangladesh. We are still on the case. (What we
have
found, among Mum’s and Dad’s old family papers, is the marriage certificate of E. Dubus’s daughter Madeleine (my great-grandmother) to an Englishman, Walter Charles Lydiard – another silk manufacturer in Bengal – in 1872 in India.)
    Dad himself was born in Bangalore in 1902; we were always urging him to write down his memoirs for us but he only managed about half a dozen pages scrawled on the backs of envelopes or on already-used scrap paper, briefly telling how, soon after he was born, his family moved to Burma where his father worked for Customs and Excise; how they moved back to Bangalore in 1912 so their five children could go to school (nowhere suitable in Rangoon); how his father volunteered for the army in the First World War and was posted to Basra in Iraq (Dad’s mother stayed in Bangalore with the children); and