Blog tour: Teatime at Peggy's

Welcome to the blog tour for Teatime at Peggy's: A Glimpse of Anglo-India by Clare Jenkins and Stephen McClarence!

More about the book…

For 15 years, award-winning travel writer Stephen McClarence and his BBC Radio journalist wife Clare Jenkins regularly visited Jhansi, the railway town in Uttar Pradesh that inspired Bhowani Junction, John Masters' classic 1954 tale of Anglo-Indian life during Partition. There they spent hours ‘down the rabbit hole’ with Peggy Cantem - ‘Aunty Peggy’ as she was known throughout the town, daughter and widow of railwaymen, overseer of the European cemetery with its 66 Mutiny graves and ‘dancing and prancing peacocks’ - and with her great friend Captain Royston (Roy) Abbott, ‘The Rajah of Jhansi’, possibly India’s last British landowner and ‘more British than the Brits’.

In Peggy’s tiny, crowded ground-floor flat, she and her friends would reflect on Anglo-Indian life then and now: the dances (waltzes, foxtrot, jive), amateur dramatics, May Queen balls (Anglo-Indian women were famed for their beauty), meals of Mulligatawny soup, toad-in-the-hole and ‘railway lamb curry’.

Those friends included the ladylike Gwen, scooter-riding Buddie, Cheryl with her ‘hotchpotch’ ancestry, Winston Churchill-reciting Pastor Rao, Peggy’s tiny and impoverished maid May, her cook Sheela and auto-rickshaw driver Anish. Conversations covered Monsoon Toad Balls (to find ‘the most hideous-looking man’), moonlight picnics in the jungle, pet mongooses, the British Royal Family… They also covered the history of the minority Anglo-Indian community, once designated an OBC (Other Backward Caste).

The only community in India with the word 'Indian' in its name, it’s now in danger of dying out. There are only 30 Anglo-Indian families left in Jhansi, many officially below the poverty line. Their first language is English, they often dress Western-style and their homes could be in the 1950s Home Counties, were it not for the mounted tiger heads alongside the Sacred Heart fridge magnets, the aviaries of parakeets outside, the three plaster flying ducks inside, the pictures of Buckingham Palace embroidered on the antimacassars.

More about the authors…

Stephen McClarence is an award-winning travel writer whose work has appeared in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Daily and Sunday Express, Yorkshire Post, National Geographic Traveler and DestinAsian magazine. A finalist in (and winner of) numerous travel writing awards, he won the major National Daily Travel Writer of the Year award for a Times article about Ramji, a rickshaw driver he met in Varanasi. He has also reviewed books for The Times and been an exhibiting photographer.

Clare Jenkins has been a regular contributor to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, including reporting on women’s lives in India. She has also made hundreds of features and documentaries for BBC Radio, including some from India, latterly via her production company, Pennine Productions.  These include a half-hour programme about Jhansi’s Anglo-Indians, broadcast in 2015 and also called Teatime at Peggy’s - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpwc7

She has previously published books about women’s relationships with Roman Catholic priests, and people’s experiences of bereavement, and is a member of the Oral History Society. 

Teatime at Peggy’s is a joint project, although the narrative is written in Stephen’s voice. The couple, who have visited India regularly for over 20 years, are now working on a sequel, about their encounters with other people in India who have British connections. 

My impressions…

What a treasure chest this book is! I have been drawn to anything even remotely related to India for the past ten years – and of course I knew of the existence of Anglo-Indians – but never before have I come across a precious resource such as this one.

Entertaining and informative, this is a beautiful ode to the fast-disappearing Anglo-Indian community with all its quirks and traditions. This somewhat eccentric lifestyle comes alive in these pages, where we get to meet almost mythical figures such as Peggy Cantem – aka ‘Aunty Peggy’ – and Captain Royston Abbott – aka ‘The Rajah of Jhansi’ – and become lost in a world we knew nothing about.

A clear labour of love, I would recommend Teatime at Peggy’s to anyone who likes to travel from the comfort of their living room, and certainly anyone with an interest in India.

Three words to describe it. Evocative. Humorous. Fascinating.

Do I like the cover? Yes, it gives me all the warm and fuzzy feelings!

Have I read any other books by the same authors? No, not yet.