Phillip Khan-Panni

Wild Daisies Phillip Khan-Panni

This is a collection of episodes from boarding school days in Darjeeling, the queen of Indian hill stations, during the dying days of the British Raj. The author was born in Hong Kong during World War II, smuggled across to mainland China under the noses of the occupying Japanese forces, and later kidnapped by his mother and flown by US bomber into India, where he was deposited in a succession of boarding schools. Along the way he collected pre-war English values and attitudes which were missing from the England he eventually found when he emigrated there. More than a personal memoir, it's an account of how it was to live for nine months of each year in a cloistered boarding school in Darjeeling, 7,000 feet up in the eastern Himalayas, speaking only English, playing Cricket, Football and Hockey, learning how to multiply pounds, shillings and pence from Pendlebury's Arithmetic, debating in the parliamentary tradition, and going for runs in the pouring monsoon rain. The '40s and '50s are recalled with wistful affection, and there is an account of the three-train-plus-ferry journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling, including the world-famous Toy Train which is still chugging up the mountain behind tiny tank engines. The title derives from the author's childhood practice of lying on grassy banks on sunny days, picking wild daisies, plucking their petals and rubbing the cushioned centres to release their delicate scent. To him, daisies are happy reminders of those slow-moving idyllic days when life was lived from day to day, and nothing mattered very much.