Born in India in 1937, Michael Foss' childhood was spent between the cold, grey austerity of Britian under threat, and the brightly lit and teeming vitality of wartime India. Here, beautifully evoked, is a childhood spent amongst grudging and unloving English relations; a sufferance of cruelly harsh schooling; a bleak, dank landscape;and a sense of permanent cold and a savage hunger even for dreadful food. All of this was suddenly changed for the sub-continent's jumble of conflicting sights and sounds and smells: the vital, stinking, hot, nosiy, crowded streets; the calm, quiet grace of Moghul architecture; the ancient Hindu kingdoms reduced to stones in the roots of trees; the monumental Victorian buildings that echoed British power; the attitudes of the Raj; the squalor admid grandeur, and extreme poverty contrasted with self-consicious majesty and pomp.