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On The Table Read Magazine, “the best entertainment eBook magazine UK“, Clare Jenkins shared what inspired her to co-author her new book, Teatime At Peggy’s: A Glimpse Of Anglo-India, with her husband Stephen McClarence, and her creative writing process.
I interviewed Clare Jenkins about her life and career, what inspired the story of her new book, Teatime At Peggy’s: A Glimpse Of Anglo-India, and the experience of co-writing with her husband, Stephen McClarence.
I’m a journalist, former BBC Radio broadcaster and producer, and an oral historian. And now I’m co-author, together with my husband and fellow travel writer Stephen McClarence, of Teatime at Peggy’s: A Glimpse of Anglo-India, published by Bradt Travel Guides.
I’ve actually written and edited a few books, usually based on personal testimony. Relative Grief, which explored people’s experiences of bereavement, was co-written with my radio colleague Judy Merry, and A Passion For Priests gave voice to women who were in relationships – or had been in relationships – with Roman Catholic priests.
As a journalist, I’ve always written, and I’ve interviewed many writers, including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Melvyn Bragg, Jackie Collins… When I interviewed Rumer Godden, who wrote wonderful novels, including about India where she spent her early life, she told me: “I was born with a gift for telling stories. It’s very seldom that two cultivated parents, themselves writers perhaps, have a writing child with a real gift. They may write very adequately but – and I’m not being rude to you – they’re journalists, not born writers.”
I took that one on the chin as, despite doing an MA in Creative Writing, I’m not a fiction-writer. I majored in scriptwriting and wrote a pretty good radio script, but my strength is in non-fiction.
As I say, I’ve always written, mainly journalism. I’ve also written numerous radio scripts, both for short features (for programmes like Woman’s Hour on Radio 4) and for longer documentary features.
One of those doc-features was Teatime at Peggy’s, broadcast on Radio 4 back in 2016. It encapsulated 15 trips to the central Indian town of Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, where Steve and I became friendly with members of the town’s fast-dwindling Anglo-Indian community.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Anglo-Indians are the mixed-race descendants of European (often British) men and Indian women. They held prestigious jobs under the British Raj – for instance, in the postal and telecommunications services, and on the railways. At the time of Indian Independence, there were around a million Anglo-Indians in India. However, after 1947, many emigrated to countries like America, Canada, Australia and the UK. Now, because there are fewer than 150,000 left, they’re designated a Minorities Community. I have an Anglo-Indian strand in my own family – my Great-Uncle William was a tea planter in Assam and had an Indian wife. So we knew a bit about Anglo-Indians but learnt a whole lot more during our visits to Jhansi.
The idea of turning the radio programme into a book came during lockdown. Every time we’d visited Jhansi, Steve had taken copious notes and photographs, while I’d recorded interviews and conversations with the people we met. The main people were Peggy Cantem, who was the matriarch of the Anglo-Indian community there, and her old friend Captain Roy Abbott, possibly the last British landowner and farmer in India.
Although I’d used some of my recordings in the radio programme, they were just a fraction of what I’d gathered over the years. So we decided to combine all the material we had and write a book together – a travel narrative cum social history.
The writing process initially took about three months. But then, of course, because it’s co-written, there was a lot of batting it back and forth, and discussions (and the odd argument!) about the right balance of observation, description and dialogue. So that probably took another couple of months. So it wasn’t by any means an overnight project…
There just seemed so much more to say about our experiences in Jhansi, our train journeys from different places across India to reach Jhansi, and about the lives and rich histories of our Anglo-Indian friends.
The co-writing process – especially as my co-writer is my husband! Thankfully, we’re both great admirers of each other’s work, so we survived the experience.
The people we interviewed were the main research process, as they’re the experts on their own lives, and on the history and present experiences of the Anglo-Indian community in India. But we’ve also read books and articles on Anglo-Indian history, to get a better understanding of how the community started and how it’s evolved.
In the main, it’s chronological, based on our visits over the course of 17 years. But it starts with a particularly vivid story about a road accident, which then leads into our first meeting with Peggy and the start of our journey “down the rabbit hole” into an Alice in Wonderland world of eccentric characters and richly different experiences.
We had a wonderful editor at Bradt, called Ross Dickinson. His editorial report started ‘This book was a joy to edit’ and went on to say that ‘I love non-fiction which opens up a new world for me, and this did exactly that. I had no idea about who or what Anglo-Indians were, but now, after reading (and editing) this, I genuinely feel thoroughly enlightened about a group of people whose existence I had never even considered before.’
Because Steve and I are both journalists, we’re pretty practised at fact-checking, editing and proof-reading. There was still a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing in the editing process, but that was mainly connected to adapting to the publisher’s style guide.
Don’t think about who’s going to read it, whether anyone will read it, whether you’ve got anything worth saying, whether your writing style is any good… Just do it. Set a daily word target – say, 500 to 1,000 words, but don’t worry about getting them perfect. As someone once wrote: ‘Don’t get it right. Get it written.’
We’re already halfway through a sequel, provisionally called Corners of a Foreign Field, which is based on further interviews with people we met during our 25 years of travelling the length and breadth of India. Those people all have British associations – the last British tea planter in Assam, the bagpipe-playing Tibetologist we met in the shadow of the Himalayas, the couple who ran one of Kolkata’s most eccentric hotels, two Anglo-Indian sisters in the hill station of Mussoorie… We’re very much enjoying reliving those experiences.
We’re hugely proud of it and loving the feedback we’re getting from readers. One 5* Amazon review said “it must become a classic”, another called it “a fabulous read”, someone else called it “a gem” and various people have told us how it’s opened their eyes to a fascinating world they knew nothing of – and which might yet disappear altogether.
Apple Books: https://apple.co/3Los6C7
Kindle: https://amzn.to/3YnrBQL
Paperback: https://amzn.to/4bMTnJ8
Bradt: https://bit.ly/4akR28u
Twitter/X: @ClareJenkins13
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/s/sp-st/stephen-mcclarence/
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