My copy of Growing is one of the old Hogarth Press editions, the kind of book that feels slightly ghosted by its time. I began with the Ceylon years, skipping the first volume, drawn to the places Woolf describes. My own roots are in a one-oil-field country at the edge of the old colonial map.
Woolf writes of Anglo-Indian society not with nostalgia but with lucid ambivalence:
I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story.
A question of influence that never fully resolves. Where does narrative begin, and what part of the past was fiction before it was fact?
>Jealous.