Laundry blues

My grandmother McIntyre, who had lived in India during the Raj, as did my Petre grandparents and both my parents when they were children, insisted on pronouncing laundry as "lahndry", jodphurs as "joad-poors", while my grandfather Petre pronounced lunch as "tiffin". I thought all this was normal until I was about ten, then realised that no one else's families appeared to have these pronunciations, or even to know about life in India.

It must have a been a shock to my mother and her three siblings when they arrived in Middlesborough, all under ten years old. They hadn't been sent to boarding school in England because their parents had in their turn, and had not enjoyed the experience. Nothing could have prepared them for the life of many departures and interrupted education that they were about to begin. How cold and austere England must have seemed! This was 1946, so they would have been plunged into rationing.

I had not intented to blip the "lahndry pile" today, but I've had a bad headache and have been in bed all day. This is mainly what I have been looking at. Thank heavens I did the washing yesterday, for it's been rainng and thundery all day.



PS They lived in Calcutta, which is now called Kolkata. I would like to visit this corner of India formerly known as West Bengal, and Bangladesh. I have marked Kolkata on the map because it makes a change from Stroud