The Jewel in the Crown

"It’s a story about a British family in India in the last days of the British Raj (it all takes place in the early 1940s before the British left). That was the time when I was in India as a child, but I was 20 years younger than the heroine of the book, Daphne Manners. The basic plot is that Daphne falls in love with a young Indian journalist who has been educated in England. He’s quite posh, and of the same class as Daphne, but he’s Indian. No one can accept this. The author Paul Scott uses the story to illustrate the whole social map of India at that time. You’ve got the British hanging on for grim death, the European missionaries, nuns, civil servants, teachers, etc – people who were embedded in India and knew it very well – living through the end of the era and having to leave the country when India became independent. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The event that is engraved on my soul is from when I was in Ethiopia during the terrible famine of the early 1970s. I had taken a sabbatical from my job at The Sunday Times to join my husband in Africa. He met me at the airport and told me that there was an important story which I had to cover because the situation was so desperate. I headed off to the north as quickly as I could and I visited a camp where there were five thousand people and no food. The man running the camp had gone mad, and there were some schoolboys, aged about ten, from the nearest town trying to write down names of the dying. I went back down south thinking that I must get the news out about what was happening – make them send food up. When I returned to the camp about a week later, there was no one there – everyone had died. To this day I lie in bed at night and think about that experience: I should have taken just one person out."