Poppa's Gang

This is a short story I wrote in 1982, when I was 23 years old. At this time, I wrote a set of stories called "Anglo-Indian Tales" loosely based on characters in my family and on friends of my family, some of whom had been a part of the Anglo-Indian community in and around Calcutta up to the early 1960s.


We used to play chess with Poppa when we were small – Mama had bought us two volumes of ”Chess for Children“ from which she had painstakingly taught us (and herself) the game careful move by careful move, diagram by diagram. Poppa lived and played by often ferocious animal instinct, coupled with a fanatic meticulous desire for order, reason and logic. To some greater or lesser extent, we all inherited these traits, perhaps his daughter, Mama, and his grandson, my brother, most of all.

Poppa, an Anglo-Indian ex-Captain in the Indian army, had come to England for the first time shortly before my own family’s migration in the early 1960s. At Liverpool Street station he met a porter – the man was white. Stunned by the encounter and the man’s humble position, he presented him with ten shillings, together with instructions to buy himself some respectable attire and make application for honourable employment.

Mama told me that Poppa had moved house at regular intervals throughout his life – the reason for this being that he was persistently and tortuously hounded by “The Gang”. Mama would always be annoyed to hear of the “The Gang”, furiously condemning it as sheer fantasy, idiotic imagination. There was no “Gang”. Stubborn as a mule, Poppa could never be wrong.

The Big Fat Hen

Another excerpt from my unpublished novel Lizzie Goes To Japan

It was nearly four o'clock when Lizzie arrived back at the hotel from Asakusa.  Maybe Colin had called already, she thought.  She went to the Front Desk and asked, ‘Do you have any messages for me?’

The attendant said, 'Yes, Miss Chichele, we have one message for you.  Voice mail.  Would you like to hear it?'

'Yes,' said Lizzie.  'Yes please.'

It would be Colin.  He would be saying, Sorry, I can't come.

The attendant handed her the telephone receiver and pressed a button, then another button.  Lizzie listened.  It was Colin.  He said, 'Hi Lizzie, this is Colin.  I have to go into the office this afternoon, I have to collect a PC that I need for working at home.  I will only be about an hour.  So I will be coming through Takeshiba.  I can meet you somewhere.  I will call again later.'