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how Dad went to England when he was seventeen, swotted like mad at an army crammer and got into Sandhurst, after which he returned to serve in the Indian Army. (His parents eventually resumed their old life in Burma.)
    My father lists these bare facts, but he writes a little more about two other, obviously rather traumatic and therefore memorable, events in his life. One was being bitten by a rabid dog when he was a young soldier of twenty-three, and having to go to the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli, ‘in the hills’ (as people referred to the Himalayas), and endure two injections with a huge needle into his stomach, one on each side of his navel, every day for fourteen days. The other was how his grandfather, an elderly widower who had retired from the Great Indian Peninsula Railway to the Nilgiri Hills in south-western India, married the nurse who cared for him in hospital there when he developed pneumonia. She was called Mrs White. Dad went to stay with the newlyweds when he was in the Nilgiri Hills himself, convalescing from the rabies injections, but after that the family don’t seem to have heard much from them again, and when the old man died a couple of years later, he left everything to his new wife. This must have been a bitter blow to the family: Dad wrote that his grandfather had a ‘fat’ pension, and he’d been impressed by what he saw on his visit to them. ‘He [the grandfather] had acquired some acres of Shola forest which he cleared and turned into a very pleasant estate with a fully furnished and well-built house, servants’ quarters, outbuildings, full staff and a motor car with driver.’ Not a single penny – or perhaps I should say rupee – of all this was passed to Dad’s family. Mrs White was never forgotten by the Keenans . . . An odd postscript to the story is that this grandfather and my mother’s grandfather are buried practically side by side in the Christian cemetery of Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills: they did not know each other in their lifetimes, but two generations later their descendants married, and they themselves ended up neighbours in death.
    Since Dad never got round to the memoirs, I can only follow our progress round India via the family photograph albums, and I see from the pictures taken at my christening in Ambala that, aside from the fact that I was a truly
hideous
baby, we lived in a rather pleasant, colonial-style white bungalow with a deep veranda enclosed by arches. There seems to be someone called Nanny in these pictures, but she never appears again, and I never heard her talked about. My half-brother David – eleven years older than me (his father was Mum’s first husband who died not long after David was born) – was at school in England so she was not there for him; perhaps she looked after my sister Moira, who was seven when I was born, or maybe she was just taken on as a maternity nurse for my own first few weeks.
    We obviously didn’t stay long in Ambala because six months later, on the next page of the album, in 1940, we are in Kasauli, where Dad had had his anti-rabies injections fifteen years before. I learn from Google that Kasauli is not only another army cantonment town, it is also a popular Indian holiday resort, so maybe we were just there on leave, because, on the following page, again only a few months later, we have moved to Jubbulpore (now called Jabalpur), an ancient town in central India with a large army cantonment and a strange history: it was chosen as the base of operations for Sir William Henry Sleeman, a British soldier and administrator, who, in the 1830s, suppressed the Thuggee cult in India. Thuggees (it’s where our word ‘thug’ comes from) had terrorised the country for six hundred years: they would befriend travellers and then, having gained their confidence, they would strangle them, steal their possessions and bury their bodies by the road.