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that included a couple of major newspapers.
    This remarkable character — the original ‘rough diamond’ — was, it seems, not only successful but also an exceptionally likeable man. Everyone liked him. And Kipling was no exception. I don’t know whether he married or not, but if he did there were no children, for when he died he handed on the Allen empire to his much younger brother Charlie, who, born after their father had struck it rich, had been sent to Eton. C. T. (who, like that well-known television tycoon ‘J. R.’, was seldom, if ever, referred to except by his initials) had loads of charm but not a grain of business sense, and he managed to blue the Allen fortune in record time. But he was still riding high when he entertained us in Cawnpore in the autumn of 1927.
    The Allen house, the Retreat, was one of the most attractive houses I have ever stayed in, a huge, rambling, East-India-Company-style bungalow with a thatched roof and wide verandahs from which flights of stone steps led down to a garden of sloping lawns and colourful, scented flowerbeds, and a vast, meandering lake full of shadowy creeks and shady backwaters where herons and wild duck nested. The banks were thick with palms and flowering trees, and the lake was patched with lotus and water-lilies and alive with butterflies and birds, and there was a graceful, Indian-style pavilion on a small green island. It was a beautiful, peaceful and enchanted place which we spent hours exploring, drifting around in a punt.
    Mornings at the Retreat began with a clamour of birdsong; doves and pigeons, hoopoes and parrots, crows, mynahs, blue-jays and
sat-bhai
, saluting the day in joyful chorus. At around seven o’clock a bearer would appear with
chota-hazri
— literally ‘small breakfast’ — without which no Indian day would be complete. This consisted of tea and toast andwhatever fruits were in season: papaya when available, bananas (of which there were always at least half a dozen varieties to choose from), oranges, lychees and mangoes. After that, bathed in a tin tub and having dressed, one went out into the cool, glittering morning to walk through the gardens and along the lakeside, sniffing the flowers and watching the birds and squirrels.
    Sometimes we would be taken out shopping in the bazaars, but always we were back again at the bungalow by eleven o’clock for ‘brunch’, the main meal of the day. This was a curious mixture of breakfast and lunch that was served on the verandah, and consisted of porridge for those who fancied it, and Grape-nuts or Shredded Wheat for those who didn’t; fruit juice and coffee, bacon and eggs, and at least one Indian dish, such as curry and rice,
jhal-frazi
or chicken
pilau
, plus some pudding or other to end with. The earlier part of the afternoon was generally occupied by a siesta, and after tea on the lawn we would go out, as in Lucknow, to see the sights of the city.
    And here, once again, we were back in the Mutiny; for Cawnpore was the scene of one of the great tragedies of that terrible period, a crime that shocked India almost as deeply as it shocked the British. For almost sixty years later, when I was a child in Delhi, listening pop-eyed and riveted to tales of the ‘Black Year’, I was told by a Muslim resident of that walled city a tale that had been current there for many years. How the head
maulvi
of the
Jumma Masjid
had nailed a manifesto on to the main door of that great mosque, denouncing the massacre of the captive
Angrezi
women and their children in the
Bibi-ghur
, and calling upon the Faithful to lay down their arms and return to their homes, since God could no longer be on their side because of the ‘Sin of Cawnpore’. I used that tale when I wrote
Shadow of the Moon.
* For a wonderful description of this part of Calcutta, read
The Lady and the Unicorn
by Rumer Godden.
* This history was completed by a Colonel Mallenson, who