Bye-Bye Blackbird

Eleven years old when his family joined the Anglo-Indian exodus, on the eve of India’s independence, Peter Moss never felt at home in the postwar austerity of his “father’s land”, where he saw how far and how fast Britain was forsaking both her empire and her greatness. When he returned to his childhood haunts, more than thirty years later, he found his Anglo-India had disappeared, submerged beneath the waves of history. Bye-Bye Blackbird is more than a loving portrait of that lost world. It is also a wry but affectionate look at Britain, bracing herself for the implosion that would follow the “Big Bang” of her imperial expansion, when the fall-out would come hurtling back to the epicentre and change the very nature of what it meant to be British. His explorations brought him into contact with a vivid spectrum of characters as diverse as a First World War pilot who duelled with the Red Baron’s successor above the trenches of the Western Front, a sadistic sergeant who loved to be lampooned in caricature, a redoubtable landlady who wouldn’t allow a Kikuyu bishop in her boarding house, Field Marshall Montgomery, Sir Winston Churchill and a mad Irishman who drove him back to India in a battered overland bus.