Missing: Barbara Erskine

[reviews_and_ramblings]

"My interest in history began with my own family. My mother’s parents had lived out in India – my grandfather’s family having been there for some 200 years serving with the East India Company and in the Indian Army.

My grandmother’s family came from the wilds of south west Ireland but she met and married my grandfather in India and there my mother and my aunt were born. By the time I was born they were all back in England, but I still remember the exotic cedar- lined trunks in my grandparents’ attic, the silk saris, the delicate gold and silver stitched slippers which were sent as gifts to their grandchildren from Indian friends and colleagues, the wonderful exotic smells of spices and incense arising from those treasure chests, big enough for a small child to dive into.

My father, romantically, met my mother on the squash court in Sussex where he was stationed as a Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot. His family combined two wonderfully contrasted heritages. Two hundred years of clergymen (mostly – though some were ‘yeomen’ and presumably yeowomen and some ‘gentlemen’ and gentlewomen ) living on the borders of Essex and Suffolk in what must have been a Jane Austen-type lifestyle of utter respectability, with a wild and aristocratic castle-dwelling bloodline from the mountains and moors of northeast Scotland." (Barbara Erskine)

To read more:

http://rosaromance.splinder.com/post/17665752/