I am not one of those who look up their family trees in order to discover that a great-grandmother was related to the Czar of Russia and that a great-granduncle was probably Queen Victoria’s lover. I’m happy to accept that Grandfather Bond was a good soldier (he retired as drill sergeant) and that Grandfather Clerke (my mother’s father) helped in the making of solid railway carriages for the Northern Railway.

The former had come from England with his regiment when he was seventeen. The latter was born in a place called Dera Ismael Khan, a frontier outpost, where his father was a clerk in the office of the Commissioner, a certain Mr Durand, who drew up the Durand Line between India (the part that is now Pakistan) and Afghanistan.

A foot soldier, Grandfather Bond was always route marching from one cantonment to another, with the result that his four children were all born in different places. My own dear father was born in the hot, dusty town of Shahjahanpur, on July 24, 1896. He was baptized in the same cantonment church where, some forty years previously, the assembly of worshippers had all been massacred at the outbreak of the 1857 rebellion.

My father had two brothers, who did not distinguish themselves in any way; but he was a good student, well read, and after finishing school at the Sanawar Military School, he took a teacher’s training at Lovedale in the Nilgiris. He moved about the country a good deal, working at various jobs, including a stint as an assistant manager on a tea estate in Munnar, then Travancore-Cochin (now Kerala), and all the while he collected butterflies, stamps, picture postcards, the crests of Indian states, and anything else that was collectible. He used his teaching skills to land tutorial jobs in various princely states where, like EM Forster and JR Ackerley before him, he taught English, spoken and written, to the young royals before they were sent off to English public schools. He was working for the ruler of Alwar when he met my mother.

He had taken a month’s holiday, and was staying at a boarding-house in Mussoorie, the popular hill-station perched on a ridge above Dehradun. It was late summer in 1933, and he was thirty-six years old. My mother was eighteen, and undergoing a nurse’s training at Cottage Hospital, on the ramparts of Gun Hill, not far from her old school. They met, had a torrid affair, and very soon I was on my way.

If we are lucky, we love with both heart and body, and I like to think that my parents were lucky. Neither of them spoke of it as a courtship, however, and when I consider the short time they spent together before I was conceived, I wouldn’t call it a courtship, either. The season demanded passion, and they happened to find each other; so chance had a greater role to play in my birth than it does in others.

Passionate — and often short-lived — affairs were not unusual in Mussoorie; in fact, they were expected of visitors to this hill station. Shimla, the summer capital of British India, was usually teeming with officials and empire-builders and ambitious young civil servants.

As was Nainital, capital of the United Provinces. But Mussoorie was non-official. It was where people came to live their private lives, far from the reproving eyes of their senior officers. Unlike Shimla, Mussoorie was also small, tucked away in a fold of the Himalaya, ideal for discreet affairs conducted over picnic baskets set down beneath the deodars.

But discretion wasn’t always required; if rules were broken and scandals erupted, the Queen of the Hills took things in its stride. As far back as 1884, a visiting reporter of the Calcutta Statesman, appalled by the “immoral tone of society up here”, recorded that “ladies and gentlemen after attending church proceeded to a drinking shop and there indulged freely in pegs, not one but many”, and that at a fancy bazaar “a lady stood up on a chair and offered her kisses to gentlemen at ₹5 each.”

Mussoorie was at its merriest in the 1930s, when another lady stood up at a charity show and auctioned a single kiss, for which a gentleman paid ₹300 — probably the price of a little cottage in those days. It was the year my parents met. My mother told me later that my father had been friendly with her older sister, Emily, whom he had known for some years in Dehradun, where he was a frequent visitor. But things hadn’t worked out.

This rather complicated personal history, and the age difference between them, did not prevent my parents from becoming man and wife, although I have never come across a record of their marriage. But they certainly became Mr and Mrs Bond for my baptismal certificate; issued in Kasauli the following year, it gives everyone’s names in full: father, Aubrey Alexander Bond; mother, Edith Dorothy; infant son, Owen Ruskin Bond.

Excerpted from ‘Lone Fox Dancing’ (Speaking Tiger Books, 2017) by Ruskin Bond

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