Ghosts of Empire

I'm working my way through Ludovic Kennedy's autobiography. I'm not yet sure on where I stand, whether on the whole I would recommend it to anyone else. It has the virtue of humor in places, mixing the author's intersection with historical events in others, and near-profound observations in yet more.

In the early 1960s he reports on a trip to India. There he visits post-independence Poona (now Pune), site of a former British garrison.

"There was another side to Poona in the vast and neglected British cemetery on the edge of town, a wilderness of crumbling gravestones and parched, brown grasses where goats munched and browsed and long ago time had stopped. Here in microcosm was a history of the British Empire; and walking among the derelict plots, abandoned by all except their occupants, one was made aware of the harshness of life in foreign parts in Victorian and Edwardian times, of the self sacrifice of those in the army, the police the telegraph service and other branches of the civil administration who had come here with their families to live ad die in the service of king and country. 'In loving memory of Trooper David Brown, aged 19. Died of the Cholera.' 'In dearest memory of June Dunn aged 4 and Emily Dunn aged 2, beloved only children of John and Laura Dunn. Died of the Cholera. Ever in our thoughts.' 'To the sacred memory of my dear husband, Robert Asketer of the Postal Service. Died of the Fever, aged 31.' The graves and headstones with similar inscriptions stretched almost out of sight, monuments to doomed youth. 'Gone but not forgotten', they cried, but it was no longer true.Here at Poona and in England too they had been forgotten as though they had never been."

Kennedy, "On My Way to the Club." Fontana Paperbacks 1990 at 270.