From the memoir: British novelist Rumer Godden writes about her childhood in colonial India

Mam had wanted ten boys and got four girls. Jon arrived in India in August 1906 – the middle of the monsoon’s worst heat – poor Mam! I, in December 1907 at Eastbourne in Uncle Alfred Edward’s house and, with my typical drama, Mam fell downstairs just before midnight and the doctor had to come through a blizzard. I was also born with a tooth which old Ellen the cook pronounced to be lucky but, typical again, it was in the wrong place, the roof of the mouth, and had to be taken out.

Fourteen months apart, Jon and I were so close that we might have been Siamese twins, I, then, in her shadow which was natural. She was the first, while Fa and Mam were still romantically in love. There was a novel, fashionable then, by SR Crockett called The Lilac Sunbonnet, the sunbonnet belonging to his little girl, Winsome, a tot of nauseating sweetness who babbled baby talk. Mam, in a euphoria of happiness, insisted on calling the sallow sickly baby after her; Fa wisely added Ruth and Key as a family name but again poor Mam! Seldom has there been a less winsome, more naughty, highly strung...

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