The Tea Planter's Children

The Tea Planters Children is rich evocative gentle and beautiful. It is filled with a childs love of place and nature and manages successfully to enter the reader into a vanished world. Throughout there is a real feeling of a particular time. It describes a childhood at Arnakal a tea plantation in the hills of Kerala during the early nineteen-thirties which were years of recession and high unemployment in England and the rise of Fascism in Europe. In India Mahatma Ghandi not yet the revered figure we now remember was campaigning for Independence. Discussed by their parents these political goings-on were in the background of the childrens lives. The Tea Planters Children is a recollection of a childhood spent in a remote place with little contact with other European children where the freedom they were allowed led to hilarious if sometimes nearly disastrous adventures and describes the discoveries the children made the unsuitable pets they tried to keep the wild animals in the surrounding jungle and the eccentricities of the people they knew until their final unwilling departure for the unknown country their parents called Home. Sixty years later the brother and sister returned to stay once more at Arnakal to find amid all the time-wrought changes much that was still familiar and beautiful in the place where they had been born.