![]() If all that sounds journalistically observant, that’s because Panter-Downes was a journalist – she wrote 850 or so pieces for The New Yorker magazine. ![]() ‘It was the little patch of England that each exile discovered it to be’. She discovered a road junction called Charing Cross, houses called Kenilworth, Bleak House, Westward Ho! and Lupin Cottage, a social calendar that included races, dog and flower shows, days out hunting on the downs and evenings gossiping at the (still very exclusive) club. She found ‘terracotta buildings, Victorian gables and a house with turrets that might be in Wimbledon’. The book described the last Brits who ‘stayed on’ in Ooty after Indian Independence, and the places where they lived. Browsing through the wide-ranging collection of books – everything from heavy academic texts through business manuals to Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Vicarage – I found Ooty Preserved, her 1967 account of ‘A Victorian Hill Station in India’. ![]() I first came across the writer Mollie Panter-Downes in India, in Higginbothams Bookshop in Ootacamund – known in British Raj days as ‘Snooty Ooty’. ![]()
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