Vyvyen Brendon
Sheep and Dust
‘Imprisoned in an alien environment, poor, friendless, disoriented and alone.’ Thus Helena Drysdale portrays the plight of her forebear Isabella Gascoyne (née Campbell). She is describing the most traumatic period of Isabella’s life, not as a soldier’s grass widow on a remote Indian army cantonment, or as a settler’s wife on an isolated New Zealand farm, but as a little girl of five left at a boarding-school in her home country.
The Gascoyne family saga thus ranges across three of the five continents encompassed by the British Empire in the mid nineteenth century. It was because Isabella was born in India that she was consigned to an English boarding-school at such a tender age. Only through banishment, thought pukka Raj contemporaries, could one avoid the fearsome perils of rearing a child in a heathen land. Orphaned, like a Frances Hodgson Burnett heroine, when she was only ten, Isabella grew up in the London household of a family friend and then went to India in her turn. Her plan was to keep house for her brother Archy, who had joined the Indian army. Instead she was swept off her feet by his best friend, Lieutenant Charles Gascoyne, and began married life in 1835 on the Cawnpore military station. She had at last ‘found a home’.
Ignoring the advice of Anglo-Indian childcare manuals, the Gascoynes also created an Indian home for their children rather than sending them to Britain. It is true that they lost two out of nine babies, but this was not an unusually high infant mortality rate for the time even in England.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete