But a walking shadow
Philip Glazebrook
GRANDMOTHER'S FOOTSTEPS by Imogen Lycett Green Macmillan, 120, pp. 360 his book is a touchingly uncritical account, by an adoring grandchild, of Pene- lope Betjeman in the context of India, which she had known all her life. It is an interesting subject. As a jet of flame held above silver makes all the random scratch- es in the metal's surface appear to be con- centric to the flame's reflection, so a powerful personality's reflection in the dark silver of India can lend the illusion of coherence to random Indian experiences. Penelope Betjeman achieved this concen- tricity. Out of incoherence and complexity she created around herself an India that suited her, and that she was able to love a 'real India' (as everyone who likes the place at all calls their own version of it), full of faithfully attached natives, expats devoted to good works, temples, ponies and iced buns — an India which did not contradict her early experience of Delhi and Simla as the C-in-C's daughter, yet allowed her to travel with satisfaction in the India of today. Lady Betjeman's India is a land the reader can believe in because it is the creation of so assertive and cocksure an individual. This quality is what made her such a successful tour- leader.
Her granddaughter, Imogen Lycett Green, on the other hand, would not make a convincing tour-leader. In Grandmother's Footsteps she travels India in her grand- mother's shadow, superimposing her own solo tour onto a more memorable trip made earlier with Lady Betjeman. Visiting granny's places, meeting granny's friends — sifting India for traces of granny deposited in her old haunts — all this comes across to the reader as a second- hand experience of India, which blurs the distinct images he will have formed through Lady Betjeman's own didactic views and emphatic letters. When Miss Lycett Green makes an appearance in propria persona, an individual confronting her surroundings, the incident kindles our interest: reaching a hill-station in South India, for instance, she expresses disillusion with the place and its history, and tells in direct language how it was that the land- scape (and the superannuated exile haunt- ing it) made her resolve to go home, her journey done. Here is the response of an individual to her surroundings, which are made the pivot of action — the proper use of landscape, in travel-book or novel. I wished for more of this purposeful writing, but on the whole her Indian experiences are the random scratches in the silver surface, wanting a considered outlook — or heavy editing — to give them coherence. Editing is badly needed throughout: writing so clumsy as to obscure the sense gushes across the pages, and there is so much casual misinformation (Giotto was born not in Assisi but 15 miles from Florence, Gibbon did not write The History of the Roman Empire, etc etc) that the reader doubts everything he is told.
Perhaps to capitalise on the book's sense of confusion and bewilderment might have been the author's best course. For there are possibilities in the spectacle of Miss Lycett Green, with her backpack and her breathless chatter, running headlong into the India which her grandmother had created to conform with her own needs. Arrived in the mountains to transport a memorial stone to the site of Penelope Betjeman's death, the grandchild finds her- self swamped by servants. She is allowed to carry nothing. She is required to eat alone. Anxious to walk, she is obliged to travel by bus to suit the servants. In the comedy of this there is a distinct truth about the British in India, and again Miss Lycett Green stands out as an individual representing more than just herself in a situation which was as natural as breathing to Lady Betjeman, but a straitjacket to her grandchild.
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