‘Oh, I wanted to come! I’ve loved everything to do with Asia since I was a girl. We used to go to the Victoria and Albert every school holiday.’

He smiled genially. ‘Quite a young explorer aren’t you. Does the Museum still have the laughing Buddhas in a row?’

‘Oh yes...’

‘And have you been to Calcutta yet?’ She shook her head. ‘Well you have a care. It’s not the place for un-chaperoned girls from England. Are you staying with someone?’

‘Oh yes, my mother’s cousin.’

‘Still. You don’t strike me as the city type. And Calcutta’s not just a city. It’s a monster.’

‘Oh I’m not scared. You can’t learn anything with fear attached to you, that’s what Daddy says.’

‘Yes he always said the most ridiculous things. It’s all right girl, I’m jesting. Still. We have tiger and rhino here, scared of those?’

‘Thrilled! Beats our badgers.’

‘Hm. Indeed. Nothing is worse than big Indian cities, please remember that. Now do you want to shoot one?’

She considered the appropriate answer, slightly horrified. Should one shoot a tiger in India? Everyone else did. ‘No. But I’d like to see them. And hold a cub?’

‘Good girl. Right answer. I don’t shoot any here.’

The next few days were spent in an idyllic oriental heaven of picnics and elephants, and picnics with elephants. She wore a topi and carried a monkey stick. Trevor and his wife barely had visitors and were only too pleased of this pleasant distraction from the humdrum of planter life. Her diary was full of thrilled narrative. The only photograph that her parents had of her time in India was this one of a Susan holding a tiger cub, smiling with delight into the camera.

Everything was new and everything delighted her - the spiced Indian tea they drank at five o’clock, the pedlars in the village who called with an array of native knick-nacks to buy, the garden with its banana trees