"There are two questions to be answered with respect to every new publication - is it worth buying? Is it worth borrowing? And we would advise our readers to weigh diligently the importance of these interrogations." Sydney Smith asked these questions in the early 1800s, and they certainly still have impact today. The bother is that, stealing apart, one is still forced to do one or the other in order to make up one’s mind. In an endeavor to help, here is what this book is about. My father, an Orcadian who had spent most of his life in India, was aged sixty-seven when I was born in 1913, the only child of his second wife, a Scotswoman of twenty- five years of age. He himself had been born in 1846 before the Indian Mutiny and his own father in 1814 a little over a year after the battle of Waterloo.

Since the year 1800, I was to be but the second male member of my paternal family not to spend most of his life-time in Bengal. I spread myself wider. I came into an easy Edwardian world, lived through two world-wars, floated through the thirties, served in Spain with the International Brigade. Then, when Britain declared war, I worked with the Poles who had retreated via Romania into France after the Nazi invasion, I went through the Blitz in London before going to Cairo and then to Jugoslavia where, once peace came in 1945, I began my twenty five years stint with the United Nations. This led me to South East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and back to Eastern Europe once again. I have been overseas since 1944 and now my home is Morocco.

I have two reasons for writing this book: the first is that sharing my experiences may help or even divert those whose journey is but recently started. The second reason is to convince myself, and those of us who are left, that our journey from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first was worth while. On a more modest reckoning, we could ask whether we earned our rations. But, in the end, the only way to answer these questions and those of Sydney Smith's is by reading what follows.

 

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