Cobra Road [antikvár]

A Ripping Yam Houses in the village in which I grew up had names rather than numbers, sturdy English announcements like The Limes and The Willows, and whimsical invitations like Bide-a-Wee and Restawhyle. Not far from us, Dorothy and Ernest King linked their names and destinies in redbrick Dorern. Of all of them, none was more gratifyingly exotic than ours. Panagarh. I wrote it with a curlicued flourish on the flyleaves of my books. When I gave my address people wrinkled their noses and said: 'Eh.? How do you speU that.?' 'Definitely Eastern,' my father pronounced. 'Somewhere far away and hotter than hell.' 'China,' someone suggested. Foreign, anjway, everyone agreed. I do not remember how I discovered it was a town in India. Perhaps Uncle Herbert knew. He had served with the Royal Artfllery on the North West Frontier for seven years in the 1930s. In a photograph in the family album he perched on a rock, wearing shorts and puttees, reading his home town newspaper, the Hereford Times. He showed my mother and father photographs of British soldiers gathered around the corpse of a