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thousand tribesmen invaded Kashmir from Pakistan, I overheard the grown-ups discussing how, on their way into the valley, the marauders had raided a convent in Baramulla where they had raped the nuns and then pulled any gold teeth out of their mouths. I was utterly appalled: I didn’t know what rape meant, but the idea of someone’s teeth being pulled out with pliers was the worst thing imaginable, and it could obviously happen even to a white person like us, and even to a NUN if she were in the wrong place – what worried me was, were
we
in the wrong place?
    By then our cosy family life in Secunderabad had come to an end because Dad had gone to serve with the Punjab Boundary Force, and the rest of us – Mum, Aunt Joan, Swaller, Tessa and me – were staying with Mum’s Uncle George (always known as U.G.), a retired indigo planter who lived in a house called The Homestead in Kotagiri, a village in the Nilgiri Hills. Tessa and I liked it there; we kept out of his way because we were a bit scared of him, but he had two little dogs that we loved, and a passion-fruit vine growing over the front doorway from which we could help ourselves to the fruit at any time (passion fruit is my whole childhood in one taste). Once he told us a frightening story about friends of his who were out in an open horse-drawn trap just up the road from his house, when a leopard sprang right across it – from one side of the road to the other – snatching up their dachshund in its claws as it passed. It was a thrilling tale, but it left Tessa and me with a new thing to worry about that we hadn’t thought of before: to the fear of snakes and tooth-pulling tribesmen from Pakistan we now had to add leopards – which apparently teemed in the rather-too-close forest around The Homestead. We were reading
The Jungle Book
at that time and it was completely alive to us because Mowgli’s world, with Bagheera his leopard friend, Hathi the elephant and Shere Khan the tiger, was at the end of our garden; it was territory we knew – almost an extension of our own lives. The Little Black Sambo books were our other favourites: apart from Kipling’s, they were the only children’s stories in English that were relevant to us growing up in India, the only ones we could identify with – their heroes and heroines being Indian children, similar to the ones we saw every day, surviving terrifying adventures involving snakes, tigers, muggers (Indian crocodiles), mongooses, monkeys, bazaars, unkind grown-ups and big earthenware pots called
chatties
exactly like the ones which held water in our own kitchen. We didn’t particularly notice that the children in the stories were black and of course we didn’t know then that Sambo was a pejorative word.
    Helen Bannerman, the author of these now-controversial books, became a bit of a hero to me later in life when I discovered a little about her. She was born in Edinburgh in the middle of the nineteenth century when women were not yet permitted to attend university in Scotland, but could study and take examinations externally; in this way she became one of the very first women to gain an LLA (Lady Literate in the Arts) degree. She married a doctor in the Indian Medical Service and spent thirty years with him in India, helping local people, and when their four children were born, she wrote the books for them. She had long since died by the time the backlash over Little Black Sambo began years ago, but her son, Robert, wrote in a letter to
The Times
, ‘My mother would not have published the book had she dreamt for a moment that even one small boy would have been made unhappy . . .’ Her grandson is the distinguished physicist Sir Tom Kibble, who is one of the co-discoverers of the Higgs boson.
    When we returned to England, Little Black Sambo and his fellow characters remained precious because they reminded us of India, but the books