Ethel Maud Shirran, born 1904

Because my grandmother covered up her own real background and told several different versions of her life story, this account includes a certain amount of speculation, and several gaps where I either don't know what she was doing during a given period, or I have a list of things she was supposedly doing some of which may not ever have happened, and if they did I don't know what order they happened in. I'm hoping that some of the people reading this page will have known my gran and will be able to shed some light on some of these gaps.

The information I have so far comes from government and historical records, accounts of her published on the net and from the reminiscences of people I am in touch with who knew her: most notably Peter Bertram Rae, my father's half-brother, and his mother Herta Helene Josephine Margarethe Rae née Schmid; Urgyen Sangharakshita, the Buddhist philosopher and writer, who was my grandmother's personal friend for decades and also her mentor in Buddhist matters; the journalist and newspaper editor Sunanda K Datta-Ray, who was her friend for several years in the late fifties and sixties until they fell out over politics; NG Dorji, the great-nephew and foster-son of her husband Kazi Lhendup Dorji Khangsarpa; and a Dutch-Australian gentleman named Wim Vervest who is in possession of the memoirs and diaries of his late father-in-law Major Sam Newland DSO. Sam Newland was a close friend of Ethel Maud's first husband Bertram Rae, and Sam and his father Arthur both knew my grandmother in her Edinburgh days: Sam kept a diary of which the early sections sadly were lost during the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942, but in the 1950s he wrote down whatever he could still remember from the lost diaries.

Ethel Maud Shirran was born at a quarter past midnight on 10^th January 1904, at 13 George Street, Doune, Perthshire, less than a hundred and fifty yards from the town's Mercat Cross, in the presence of her father. Her parents were George Shirran, born near Turriff, raised as a farm boy in Monquhitter and now a Colour Sergeant in 1^st Battalion The Black Watch and currently an Instructor with the 4^th (Volunteer) Battalion; and Florence Blanche Shirran née Franklin, three parts English to one part Southern Irish and the daughter of another Colour Sergeant. Ethel Maud was named after one of her mother's sisters, a psychiatric nurse and something of a beauty. [GROS Statutory Births 1904 362/00 0006]

Her father George was raised a farm boy but became a soldier; his father Alexander was a farmhand who eventually got his own twelve acre croft; and Alexander's father John died a pauper. Her relatives on the Shirran side were farmhands, crofters, NCOs, railway porters, domestic servants and at least one somewhat more promising master carpenter, all of them probably with impenetrable Doric accents. On her mother's side more farmhands and NCOs, postmen, prison warders, lacemakers plus the one psychiatric nurse, and her mother's father's mother ended up in the workhouse. I establish these antecedents at the outset because my grandmother would later claim that she was a Belgian aristocrat and that her mother was "a dear little German countess", but in fact she was what is called in Scotland a teuchter, somebody whose family were from the rural north-east, and most of her father's family would have been Doric-speaking.

The house where she was born has a strange look, more like a drill hall than a normal house or block of flats, and I imagine it was actually an army building where her father happened to have digs - or perhaps even a cottage hospital. I suspect her of having been a difficult baby: her birth wasn't registered for fifteen days, which is rather a long interval for her father still to be "wetting the baby's head", yet George's normally clear signature in the registry looks like unravelled knitting. Probably she'd been keeping him awake all night.

In common with all her siblings, she was named after one of her mother's brothers and sisters: in her case after Ethel Maud Franklin, a heavily-built but strikingly good-lloking psychiatric nurse. She was to be her parents' last child, with four older full siblings: Florence Caroline Jessie, known as Jessie, aged ten and born in Gibraltar; Lillian Christina Edith, aged eight and born in Mauritius; Edith Blanche, known as Blanche, just turned six three days beforehand and born in Sitapur; and William John George, aged three and born in Benares.

Her oldest sister Jessie had followed their father from Gibraltar, back to Scotland, thence to Mauritius, to India, all around Uttar Pradesh from post to post before ending up in Benares, then possibly to South Africa (I don't know if his family accompanied him on that posting or not) before returning to Scotland: even William had spent his first twenty months in India and may have been to South Africa as well. But there was no such colourful birth for Ethel and I suspect she felt it keenly - perhaps was even teased about it by her sibs. I don't doubt that to somebody from Asia Doune, with its charming historical buildings and lowering Scottish skies, would seem every bit as interesting and tourist-worthy as Asian towns seem to Scots, but I don't suppose Ethel Maud saw it that way, and I suspect that this sense of having missed all the fun contributed to her later decision to get out of Scotland and head East, while her sisters were content to stay in Britain.

There was also a much older half sister, George Shirran's illegitimate daughter Margaret Rettie Shirran, a few weeks short of twenty-one and possibly already living in Edinburgh: she married James John Johnston in Edinburgh in 1908.

The family left Doune when Ethel Maud was less than eighteen months old - a pity, as it's a pretty little town. According to the documentation of what at that time was called the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Scottish Branch), George Shirran started working for them in Edinburgh on 1^st June 1905, although he didn't officially leave the army until 30^th June: I'm not quite sure how that worked out. [National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/2/8 Application for Inspectorship with the SNSPCC; National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/1, RSSPCC staff records entry 21] The NSPCC (Scottish Branch) would go on to change its name to the Scottish National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SNSPCC) in 1907, the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) in 1922 and Children 1^st in 1995.

In our terms, George in civilian life would be considered to be a social worker specialising in Child Protection. Initially, he and his family lived in at the Murrayfield Children's Home at 235 Corstorphine Road (now an office for Barnardo's), probably alongside the matron, a Miss Russell. George's job description was "Sergeant Children's Home", and he was paid a pound a week - about £80 in modern money - plus an allowance for coal and gas. That doesn't seem like much to support a wife and five children but of course they had free accommodation, and very likely free food as well. [National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/2/8 Application for Inspectorship with the SNSPCC; Post Office Edinburgh & Leith Directory 1907-1908; Canmore: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland; National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/1, RSSPCC staff records entry 21]

On 1^st August 1906, when Ethel Maud was two and a half, George Shirran became an Inspector with the NSPCC (Scottish Branch). It was probably at this point that the family moved to live-in accommodation at the Children's Shelter at 142 The High Street: George would give that as his address on a form filled in in 1910. [National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/1, RSSPCC staff records entry 21; National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/2/8 Application for Inspectorship with the SNSPCC] The Post Office Edinburgh & Leith Directory 1907-1908 shows that another Inspector called James Turnbull was living at the Shelter. George Shirran isn't listed, but he isn't in any of the 'phone books of the day: he was either too poor or too tight to pay for an entry.

142 The High Street is a curious little Regency building, built in 1813-14 but decorated with cod-Classical pillars, which sits on its own in a courtyard called New Assembly Close, accessed through an archway and pend off the Royal Mile, in between South Bridge and George IV Bridge. Built originally by the Commercial Bank, designed by James Gillespie Graham and incorporating elements of an older dance-hall to the rear, it became by turns the Free Tron Church; the Good Templars' Hall; the Trades Hall; the Children's Shelter; an administrative building for the RSSPCC; the Edinburgh Wax Museum and Dracula Theatre; and finally the Lord Reid Building, the office of the Faculty of Advocates.

This period when she was growing up in children's homes probably goes a long way to explain why Ethel Maud would later become addicted to melodrama and attention-seeking, and seek to cut herself off from her working-class Scottish roots. She grew up surrounded by abused or neglected children, many of them the victims of working class Edinburgh's perennial drink problem and most of them with excitingly dramatic problems. Living surrounded by the unfortunate children he was seeking to save and protect, her father George probably had a limited amount of attention to spare for his own six much less needy children. Even her birthday, three days after her sister Blanche's birthday and ten days after the fervour of Hogmanay, was probably always something of an also-ran.

Even as a small child, however, she had her own methods of making herself noticed. She would later say, in a letter to an Australian friend whose daughter's godmother she was, that she was "much amused" at her small goddaughter's "pugnacious tactics.....ah, me, I must confess that her Godmother was no better, if anything, much worse, and, shameful to relate, had a most nasty habit of biting people !!"

On 24^th February 1911, when Ethel Maud was seven, Inspector Shirran was transferred to Leith, Edinburgh's port suburb. It was probably at this point that the family moved to 9 Morton Street (now Academy Street), Leith, for they were living there by the time of the census of 2^nd April 1911. [National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/1, RSSPCC staff records entry 21; Census 1911 692/02 054/00 018]

The census lists George Shirran, an SNSPCC Inspector, born in Bogside Auchterless and aged forty-four and his wife "Florence F." (for Franklin), born in Gibraltar and aged thirty-four (as far as I know she was thirty-five), and their children Edith B, thirteen and William G., ten, both born in India; and Ethel M., seven, born in Doune, Perthshire.

A links is a golf-course but Leith Links by this time was a public park. The children would have had this vast expanse to run about on, including lawns, bowling greens, tree-lined paths, a communal drying-green for the local families to hang out their washing, a bandstand and the remains of two 16^th C gun emplacements.

The eldest daughter Jessie, meanwhile, now seventeen and entered as "Florence J. Sherran", was living and working as a domestic servant at a house at 20 Polwarth Crescent, Merchiston. Her employers were Robert W. Buchanan aged thirty-nine, a Doctor of Medicine, and his wife Jeane aged forty. [Census 1911 685/06 067/00 015] I have not found the other sister, Lillian Christina Edith, who was then fifteen, anywhere in the Scottish or the English and Welsh census. This is noteworthy because Ethel Maud would later claim to have been educated in Belgium or Brittany, and she was certainly more or less bilingual in French at eighteen. The apparent absence from Britain of Lillian at fifteen raises the possibility that the Shirrans were indeed desperate enough for space to send their daughters away to boarding school wherever they wanted to go, or aspirational enough to send them to finishing school - that is, to a fee-paying school, probably in mainland Europe, which specialised in taking girls in their mid to late teens for six months or a year, and teaching them social skills and deportment.

In November 1912, when Ethel Maud was not quite nine, George Shirran was transferred back to Edinburgh proper and his salary - which had been increasing steadily but slowly - jumped by seven shillings to two pounds a week. [National Archives of Scotland GD409/32/1, RSSPCC staff records entry 21] It was probably at this point that he was promoted to Chief Inspector, and that the family moved to a flat at 2 Boroughloch Square: they were certainly there by autumn 1913 because in November 1914 George would tell the Army that he had been at that address for at least a year. [GS attestation on re-enlisting in 1914]

Boroughloch Square - actually a triangle - is a small yard at the north-east corner of The Meadows, just off Buccleugh Street. Now mostly tarmacced, at the time it would have been cobbled, and about half the yard was taken up by the Boroughloch Brewery - so there would probably have been a strong smell of hops.

In the 1950s and '60s Ethel Maud would do her best to distance herself from her true ancestry - perhaps because in Scotland teuchters were seen as archetypal peasants, and lampooned as thick. She would claim that her mother had been either "a dear little German countess" or a Belgian aristocrat with a flat full of antiques. Her mother Florence Blanche Franklin in fact came from a long line of English and Irish NCOs, prison warders, farmhands and lacemakers, although Florence's maternal grandfather was a Walsh from Cork and it's possible there might have been some aristocratic blood way back on that side of the family (probably quite a long way back, since he was another prison warder). There have been many prominent Walshes over the years.

Ethel's later fixation with things Belgian might have started as an honest misunderstanding - although it also probably had a lot to do with the fact that she was applying for a job as a French teacher at the time. Her mother was a Franklin whose father came from a lace-making region in Northamptonshire, and the ancient people called the Franks came from Belgium, which is famous for lace-making. Ethel Maud may well have assumed that the Franklins must have been Frankish settlers from Belgium originally: but in fact "Franklin" is supposed to be an Anglo-Saxon word for a landowner who is not a noble.

The antiques, however, are possible. When I first lived in Edinburgh in the late '70s there were still a considerable number of old-fashioned "junk shops" where you could pick up interesting if grubby antiques very cheaply, and the heart of this trade was in Buccleugh Street and in Causewayside, which is the southern continuation of Buccleugh Street. If that was true sixty years beforehand then Florence may well have had a collection of good objets d'art that she picked up locally for a few pence.

On 27^th April 1914 Ethel Maud's brother William John George, just fifteen days past his fourteenth birthday, enlisted with 1^st Battalion The Black Watch, his father's old outfit. [Medals Index Card; In Memorium notice in The Scotsman 15^th July 1946 p.6 confirms he was in 1^st Bn] On 4^th August 1914 Britain entered the war that was to tear Europe apart, and on 3^rd November George Shirran re-enlisted with 8^th (Service) Battalion The Black Watch.

The years 1914-1918 must have been fairly stressful for ten to fourteen-year-old Ethel Maud, as indeed they were for most families in countries involved in World War One. In fact the Shirrans and Franklins got off comparatively lightly.

Soldiers theoretically weren't meant to be sent abroad to fight until they turned nineeen, which should mean her brother William missed the fighting. We know from the death of John Kipling that eighteen-year-olds sometimes did get sent to fight, and in that case William could have gone into battle from April 1918 onwards: but his Medals Index Card does not show the award of any medals, not even the British War and Victory medals which were given to all who served in World War One. [The Long, Long Trail: Enlistment in the army; WJGS Medals Index Card] Either way, Ethel's brother wouldn't have been too much of a worry: for most, probably all of the war the family would have been concerned that if the conflict continued for a long time he might be in danger in the future, rather than that he was in danger now.

Nor, so far as I know, were any of her surviving uncles on her father's side involved in the war, for they all seem to have been either too old, or have emigrated, or both. Even the youngest, James, was forty-four when the war started, and living in Minnesota.

She would certainly have had cousins on her father's side in the war, though, and her father himself was in the thick of the fighting. On her mother's side she had four uncles in battle, the youngest of them, Lancelot, just sixteen at the outbreak of war. These uncles on the mother's side all followed their father William James Franklin, Ethel Maud's maternal grandfather, into The East Surrey Regiment.

Having re-enlisted at the beginning of November, George Shirran was appointed as Company Quartermaster Sergeant and was sent to a succession of training camps in southern England, probably as an instructor. He embarked for France on 10^th May 1915 and entered into trench warfare a week later. On 9^th July 1915 a boy called Donnie Johnstone, a Bandsman in 1^st Battalion The East Surreys, died of battle wounds aged twenty-two. He was a close friend, possibly a sweetheart, of Ethel Maud's sister Blanche, who was then seventeen and living at home at 2 Boroughloch Square. She was attached enough to Donnie to place an In Memorium notice in The Scotsman, calling him "dearly beloved friend" and "To memory ever dear." This must have been stressful and upsetting not just for Blanche but for her mother and sisters who were sharing a flat with her, and worrying about George. [Article in The Scotsman 16^th July 1915 p.10]

George Shirran was in 'B' Company, 8^th Battalion The Black Watch, along with Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother's brother: as Captain and Quartermaster Sergeant of the same Company the two men must have worked together closely and known each other well. In late September and October 1915 'B' Company took part in the Battle of Loos, in which a proposed British lightning punch through German lines ran out of impetus too soon and resulted in the opposing armies spending three weeks shoving each other back and forth over the same narrow strip of ground and in and out of trenches, leaving eighty-six thousand men on both sides killed or wounded for no net gain. Captain Bowes-Lyon was killed a few days into the battle. This must have been terrifying for George's family as well as for him, but he survived and on 1^st November 1915 he was sent back home to the Black Watch depot at Perth. He would remain in Scotland, being posted from unit to unit of military labourers and trainees, until the end of the war.

[Off and on, George Shirran spent twenty-six years in The Black Watch and fought in three campaigns: the Nile Campaign, the Second Boer War and the Battle of Loos. The only significant injuries he sustained were a nasty blister on his foot when he was a trainee at Aldershot, and a brisk bout of syphilis when he was a Lance-Corporal in Egypt.]

On 10^th December 1915 Ethel Maud's sister Lillian married James Bragg Currie, a Private in the 3^rd Battalion, the King's Own Scottish Borderers. [GROS Statutory Marriages 1915 685/07 0093] Lillian however seems to have remained at 2 Boroughloch Square for the moment: in 1923 she would give that as her address when she stood as a witness at Ethel's wedding.

In March 1916, George was promoted to Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant. [GS Statement of Services on discharge in 1919] In July 1916 - seven months after her marriage - Lillian's daughter Florence Blanche was born, and added to the household at Boroughloch Square. In May 1917, Ethel Maud's uncle, her mother's brother Ernest Albert Franklin (known as George), was captured and became a prisoner of war.

On 13^th June 1917 Ethel's sister Jessie married Alexander Forsyth Caddell, a pharmacist (and later a doctor) [GROS Statutory Marriages 1917 692/02 0176] and on 24^th June Ethel and Jessie's paternal grandmother Jessie Shirran died of heart failure, aged eighty-eight [GROS Statutory Deaths 1917 227/0B 0021]. On 31^st March 1918 their uncle Lancelot was killed in battle, aged just twenty.

The most stressful event, however, was reserved for after the war. Having come through the war unscathed - having probably never had the chance to get scathed - Ethel Maud's only brother, Lance Corporal William John George Shirran, was discharged from the army on 3^rd December 1919 owing to ill health. [WJGS Medals Index Card] He died of rheumatic fever and heart disease at the family home at Boroughloch Square less than four weeks later, at 6:30am on 30^th December 1919. He was nineteen, just a few months younger than the century. [GROS Statutory Deaths 1919 685/04 1668]

Ethel Maud would later claim to have been educated in Belgium. We know she was living in Leith in 1911 and the family had no known ties with the continent, so it's vanishingly unlikely that she was sent to Belgium before or (even less likely) during World War One. However, Sam Newland recalled her as being already bilingual in French when she was eighteen, and as claiming to have been sent to a cheap boarding school on the continent - that it, she wasn't using the claim of having a continental education to give herself airs. In later life she spoke fluent French, well enough to teach it herself, and Sangharakshita recalls her as having excellent manners and as writing the numerals one and seven in the continental manner, that is, with a long serif on the number "1" and with a bar through the number "7" to prevent its being confused with the "1", viz.:

I know that there were finishing schools in Belgium after World War One and that they accepted foreign students, because I came across someone on the net trying to identify a finishing school in Brussels which had been attended by a British relative of theirs circa 1920; and in the chaos of post-war Europe they would probably have been quite inexpensive. The fact that Ethel's then fifteen-year-old sister Lillian seems to be missing from both the Scottish and the English and Welsh censuses of 1911 gives some corroboration to the idea that the Shirrans might have sent their mid-teenage girls, including Ethel Maud, to a school outside the U.K..

Given that we have outside corroboration that she was bilingual in French at eighteen, then, it seems likely that Ethel Maud really was sent either to a finishing school on the continent, or to a boarding, Francophone secondary school for the last few years of her regular school education. I don't think the flats at 2 Boroughloch Square are all that large, and at Christmas 1919, if Ethel was living at home, the flat would have contained eight people - Ethel, her parents, her brother William (busy dying), her sisters Lillian and Blanche and Lillian's husband and infant son. If Ethel was keen to go abroad and the family could afford it, I can see them sending her to the continent just to free up a bed.

The only difficulty is that although Ethel would later insist that she had been educated in Belgium, in his memoirs Sam remembered her as having said she'd been at school in Britanny. It may be that she changed her story later in line with her decision to pretend to be Belgian (which, in turn, she probably made in the first instance to improve her chances of getting a job as a French teacher): or the decision may have come about because she really was educated for a while in Belgium. If she said, for example, "While I was at school on the continent I stayed in Britanny", Sam might have thought she meant she was based in Britanny, when in fact she had meant she had visited it - and in any case Sam often made minor mistakes in details such as place-names.

Whatever the reason for her fluency in French, she would probably have been raised to be trilingual in Doric, Lallans and English, which would have improved her language skills. English, Doric (the language of the north-east of Scotland) and Lallans (Lowland Scots) stand in relation to each other about like German, Dutch and Afrikaans - clearly related, yet clearly distinct.

Be that as it may, on Saturday the 12^th and 19^th of August 1922, the front page of The Scotsman carried the following advert (see right):

Shirran is a sufficiently rare name that I can say with confidence that there was only one Ethel Shirran in Scotland at that time. When she married, Ethel Maud's occupation would be listed as "shorthand-typist" [GROS Statutory Marriages 1923 685/04 0464], so that presumably was what she studied at Skerry's. Assuming she studied there for an academic year, which seems likely, she would probably have been at Skerry's from September 1921 to June 1922, meaning that she started there when she was seventeen.

It's extremely unlikely she would have been sent to a school on the continent - even one in Brittany - while the war was still going on, so the earliest she reasonably could have been sent abroad is the start of the academic year following the end of the war - that is, September 1919. That means that she could have spent up to two years at a boarding secondary school on the continent, or alternatively have attended secondary school in Scotland, left at sixteen and then done six months or a year at finishing school, before starting at Skerry's.

Skerry's Colleges were a nationwide chain of small specialist colleges founded in Edinburgh in 1878, and eventually spreading to Glasgow, Dundee, Liverpool, Newcastle, London (Croydon), Cork, Dublin (two different branches), Belfast and Cardiff. Although it had started off in Edinburgh, Glasgow became the main hub of the organisation. Skerry's Colleges in Scotland existed mainly to prepare candidates for various Civil Service and university entrance exams, although training in office skills was also available; the colleges in England concentrated more on office and administration skills, plus running some fee-paying preparatory and grammar schools for children. Correspondence courses were available for those who lived too far away to attend in person: indeed, Skerry's invented the idea of the correspondence course, so it was the ancestor of the Open University.

When the Civil Service became a less popular career-choice - possibly due to the loss of Empire - Skerry's Colleges went into a decline. Most of the branches in the U.K. had closed by the 1960s, although the one in Cardiff survived under an alias, changing its name to King's College in the 1920s and merging with Monkton House in 1994. Skerry's College in Cork, however, flourished like the green bay tree and became a full-blown modern business and computer-training centre. It still survives, although in 2005 it was taken over and is now "Griffith College Cork (incorporating Skerry's College)", offering a wide variety of full-time and evening courses.

Skerry's in Edinburgh occupied an ornate five-storey brown stone Victorian Gothic building, crowned with a spire, on the corner of Nicolson Street and Hill Place opposite Nicolson Square. The premises are now a Royal Bank of Scotland, but otherwise much the same.

In later life Ethel Maud would claim to have a degree in either Law or Medicine from Edinburgh University. This was almost certainly untrue. Although there is a long gap in her known activities between 1932 and early 1936 and between mid 1936 and about 1942, she doesn't appear anywhere in the university's records. Also, it would still have been very unusual for a woman to study law when she was young: the late Janet Sheed Roberts, who was born three years before Ethel and was to live to be a hundred and ten, had been in her younger days the only woman in her Law class at Edinburgh University.

She may, of course, have studied at a college or university other than Edinburgh, later in life, but almost certainly all the qualifications Ethel had when she left the Scottish capital were whatever she had left school with, plus a diploma in shorthand-typing from Skerry's. However, this was not as big a step-down then as it seems to us now. In 1922 typing itself was less than fifty years old and it was still unusual for a woman to be in paid employment in any field other than nursing, teaching or domestic or agricultural service. To be a shorthand-typist in 1922 was quite dashing and cutting-edge - something like a programmer or a games designer nowadays - and Skerry's provided the best training available in the field, so she was a good cutting-edge, dashing thing.

So, we know that in 1921/22, if not before, Ethel Maud was studying at Skerry's. Her sister Blanche moved down to East London and married an Englishman in late 1921, and in April 1922 her sister Lillian's son Anthony was born.

By August 1922, or close enough beforehand to count as "recently", Ethel was in paid employment. She was then eighteen, sparkly, clever and witty, with honey-blonde hair. In later life she would wear this splendid hair in long heavy plaits, coiled on top of her head - possibly to give herself extra height, as she was rather short. I don't know if she already wore a plait like this in 1922, but this coiled hairstyle was common among the farm lassies of the area and class her father's people came from, women who "went to their beds in cotton shifts, letting their waist-long hair tumble down from the captive plaits or bun of the day to spill gold or silver across the pillow" [The Ballad and the Plough: A Portrait of Life in the Old Scottish Farmtouns by David Kerrcameron, ch. VII], so she may have copied it from an older relative.

Some time around autumn 1922 Ethel Maud met Bertram Langford Denis Rae, known as Bertie, a young Catholic from Burma who was half Southern Irish (almost certainly descended from the Raes of Keel House, Castlemaine, County Kerry), and half Asian. He was less than four months older than Ethel, educated in Britain and was living in a flat at 23 Melville Terrace on the far side of The Meadows with his friend Sam Newland and Sam's father Arthur, a couple of hundred yards from the back of Boroughloch Square. According to Sam's later memoirs, Ethel already had a rather fast reputation: "Before Bertie turned up in Edinburgh [that is, before summer 1922], I was told about her carryings-on with the foreign students who had money to blow on her."

Bertie had been born in Burma, the son of a senior police officer and respected amateur anthropologist called Denis Wilmot Rae and of a native woman named Ma Kyin, who was Shan but with some Chinese ancestry and who was said by Sam to be a great beauty, and according to Sam he had been educated as a boarder at Bedford School, a large and very ancient English public school. He had hoped to do a Law degree but his father's early death had left him with insufficient funds, so instead he was forced to follow his father into the Imperial Police. However, he maintained an interest in legal matters and it was probably from him that Ethel Maud learned most of what she would later know about the Law.

Bertie's family were gentry on both the Irish and Chinese sides, but rather raffish. He had a much older half-sister - his father's daughter by his Chinese first wife - who ended up living in a council house in Brixton. In the late 1920s and early '30s his older brother Robert would end up in a psychiatric hospital, having chosen for some reason to plead insanity rather than self-defence after fatally stabbing a love rival who was trying to murder him by hitting him over the head with an elephant bone, and his older sister Virginia (Jeany or Jenny) and younger brother Harry would become variety artistes in Paris. Jeany either had or would later develop a serious drink problem, and would end her life as a bear. His youngest brother Denis later became Sam's second in command in the "Z-Force Johnnies" and won the Military Cross.

At the time that he and Ethel first met, Bertie was living rent-free (but paying for his own meals) in a set of rooms at 23 Melville Terrace which his friend Sam Newland and Sam's father Arthur had rented from a Mrs Russell. He was studying for the entrance exams to get into the Imperial Police; exams which for some reason required him to demonstrate a knowledge of French. He might have been doing a diploma (not a degree) at Edinburgh University, but more likely he was either at Heriot-Watt College - which had a long history of taking in overseas students and which educated its students to a high level, although only in a narrow range of subjects which included French - or at Skerry's, doing their primer course for candidates intending to sit entrance exams for the Civil Service, including the Imperial Police. It is unlikely however that he and Ethel met at Skerry's, as she would probably have left the college round about the time that Bertie first arrived in Edinburgh.

However they met, Bertie and Ethel hit it off so hard and fast that they moved in together soon afterwards. According to Sam:

Bertie Rae turned up during this year [the acedemic year 1922/1923 seems to be meant] from Bedford Grammar School in England, and as we had a spare room he occupied it free but had to pay for his meals. He stayed here the best part of 1922, but took up residence at his girl's place, soon after meeting her. She was a Miss Ethel Sherran, the daughter of a retired sergeant major of some Scottish regiment which had been stationed for a long period in India. Ethel was born out in India, but been sent to a cheap school in Brittany in France and knew French like a native. As Bertie was studying to pass the Imperial Police examination and French being one of his subjects, Ethel took on the job of teaching him. This was one reason why he went and took up lodgings at her place. Ethel's best friend was May Maculloch, to whom I was eventually introduced and in time I got engaged to her.

Sam's chronology for his stay in Edinburgh is a little confused but he appears to be saying that Bertie joined him in Edinburgh in summer 1922, met Ethel in the mid to late autumn and moved in with her towards the end of 1922. If Sam's memories are correct Ethel had probably already begun to embroider her own past - since Sam understood her to have been born in India. It's possible this was a misunderstanding on Sam's part, but on the other hand it does fit well with my idea that Ethel Maud first started to fantasise because she felt left out of her siblings' cosmopolitan childhoods.

Only a few years beforehand, in 1919, the popular silent film Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl had portrayed a chaste, doomed romance between a young Chinese Buddhist missionary and an abused teenage girl,

In October 1922, probably round about the time Ethel and Bertie first met, Ethel's much older illegitimate half-sister Margaret died of mitral-valve failure, aged just thirty-eight. I don't know whether Ethel and the other children of Florence Blanche even knew of their half-sister's existence, but there is some evidence that she was in touch with her father: she evidently had at least some idea of how his career had developed, since he is described as an "army sergeant" in the registry entry for her death.

Some time between autumn 1922 and summer 1923 Ethel's best friend, May Maculloch, became engaged to Sam (although in the end they didn't marry). Both girls must have been pleased to discover these personable, educated foreign boys, because so soon after World War One available young British men with all their bits were still in short supply, and it must have been even more true than usual that any halfway presentable boy who hadn't already been snapped up was probably gay.

"During the summer", Sam said, "Bertie, Ethel, May and I used to play tennis at the public courts in Melville Park [this is an error for Meadow Park, a.k.a. The Meadows, which is bisected by Melville Drive] which was just across from our digs.

Like Mma Makutsi of the N° 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Ethel appears to have spent her clerical salary on a pair of expensive and not entirely practical shoes. As the youngest of four sisters (and that's just the legitimate ones) in a household which, while probably well above the breadline, was still far from wealthy, she'd probably never had an item of clothing other than socks, knickers and tights that was new before, unless she romanced one of the foreign students into buying it for her. Those expensive-looking shoes with their big glittery buckles may well have been the first pair she ever owned that hadn't been worn by at least one elder sister before her.

If Sam Newland's account is accurate it appears that the summer of the tennis games was 1923, not 1922. Sam says he was introduced to May Maculloch "eventually", so he and Bertie must have known Ethel for some significant time before Sam met May. He already knew May by the tennis summer, so he and, presumably, Bertie must have met Ethel at least several weeks beforehand. He also says that Bertie moved in with Ethel not long after meeting her, so if the tennis summer was 1922, the first summer in which Bertie and Ethel knew each other, Bertie would have had to have moved in with Ethel during or soon after that summer. Yet, Sam says Bertie stayed at 23 Melville Terrace for most of 1922.

It cannot be true both that Bertie didn't arrive at 23 Melville Terrace until June 1922, and that he met and began playing tennis with Ethel well before the end of summer 1922, and that he moved in with Ethel soon after he met her, and that he stayed at 23 Melville Terrace for more than half of 1922 (or until nearly the end of 1922, depending on how Sam means it). For the tennis summer to be 1922 Bertie would have had to have moved into 23 Melville Terrace at the start of the year, meaning that he had left school without completing the academic year. But this is unlikely, among other things because Sam speaks as if Bertie arrived after the end of Sam's first year at university, which ended in June 1922.

On the other hand, if Bertie completed his final year at school he would have arrived in Edinburgh in June or July. If Sam's dates are accurate we would have to assume then that he met Ethel in the autumn and moved in with her about Christmas 1922, having spent half a year at Melville Terrace.

Sam however, is often inaccurate on the exact details of dates (he even misremembered his own father to have died on Christmas Eve 1924, although the records clearly show Arthur died on 28^th December), and he seems to have been mysteriously unaware of a major event in his friend Bertie's life. Sam goes on to say "Bertie managed to pass the examination in 1923 and was sent out to Burma in the same year. Ethel followed the next year to marry him and I had to lend them £100 to pay for her passage." but in fact records show that the couple married in late May 1923 [GROS Statutory Marriages 1923 685/04 0464] - apparently without Sam knowing about it. The marriage certificate which Sam did not know Bertie and Ethel had shows Bertie as still living at Melville Terrace at that point, and when Bertie sailed for Burma in 1924 his address was given as care of a Mrs Willowe at 28 Sciennes [pronounced "Sheen"] Road, a tenement round the far side of the same block as the flat at Melville Terrace.

It rather looks as though Sam's memory was confused and that Bertie in fact stayed with him for most of the academic year 1922/23, not the calendar year 1922. This is understandable since in Burma the academic and calendar years coincided. Bertie stayed with Sam from summer 1922 to spring 1923, married Ethel apparently without Sam's knowledge and then moved with her into lodgings in the Sciennes area. Either way, the tennis summer would have been 1923.

Sam's account is confusing in another way, for he says that Ethel sailed to Burma the year after Bertie, but shipping records show Bertie and Ethel sailing for Burma respectively on the 7^th and 15^th of November 1924, and there's no sign of Bertie having gone back to Burma in 1923 and then returned to Britain a few months later. Possibly Bertie left Edinburgh in 1923 to do a course elsewhere in the U.K.. Either way, Bertie's police record shows that he joined the police in December 1924. Ethel joined him in Burma shortly afterwards and they (re)married immediately.

I'm pretty sure that when I first investigated the Shirran family in 1990, not knowing anything about my grandmother's later history except that she had at some point "run off with a Tibetan" (as the Hodgson family's Italian au pair Maria put it) and had later been going by the name Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa, I found a reference to Ethel Maud being Bertie's "common-law wife", and being described as such when she acted as a witness on an official document. However, I also thought that the document in question was the marriage of one of her sisters, but having checked the registry more recently, in 2010, she wasn't a witness at the marriages of her sisters Jessie or Lillian and in any case all of them, even Blanche who married in England and whose marriage lines I can't afford to buy access to, married before Bertie and Ethel met. So I don't know where I saw this information, if in fact I did see it, and didn't just misread something. Perhaps she was a witness at the christening of her nephew Anthony Currie, assuming he was christened after Ethel and Bertie moved in together (he was born in early April 1922, so would have been about six months old when they met) - or to somebody's will.

At any rate if I saw what I think I saw, that may mean that despite the address given on the marriage certificate, Sam was right and Bertie did indeed move in with Ethel before the marriage, maybe in late 1922. This may seem surprising for the time but Bertie's parents had had a rather casual attitude to these things, and didn't marry until they already had two children. Around seventy years beforehand it had been reported that among the farmworkers of North-East Scotland, where Ethel's father's family came from, 19% of children were born out of wedlock - and since most people who married in that time and place had hordes of kids, that probably means that nearly all first-born children were born before their parents married [The Ballad and the Plough: A Portrait of Life in the Old Scottish Farmtouns by David Kerrcameron, ch. XIV]. Now in 1922 it was the heyday of the flapper; liberated, sophisticated young women who were also quite liberal with their favours.

The social and legal implications of shacking up together in Scotland would be different from what they would have been in England or indeed in most countries. Up until 2006, you could be legally married in Scotland by "habit and repute", meaning that if you lived together for several years, presented yourselves as man and wife and were known as such to the neighbours, then man and wife was what you were. Cohabitation wasn't just an alternative to marriage but, under certain circumstances, a way of becoming married.

If they lived together before they were married, though, it probably wasn't at Sciennes, or that would have been on the marriage certificate. It would not be at all surprising if Ethel Maud had moved two hundred yards across The Meadows to become Bertie's "bidey-in". Later events would confirm that she disliked babies and small children, and by summer 1922 the household at Boroughloch Square included, in addition to Ethel herself, her parents, her sister Lillian, her sister Lillian's husband James and her sister Lillian's six-year-old daughter and infant son, in what was probably quite a small flat. But on the contrary, it was Bertie who moved in with Ethel, so presumably at this point that would mean cramming into 2 Boroughloch Square along with the rest of the mob, and he who became her bidey-in.

Apart from the prospect of (presumably) an active sex-life, part of the attraction was that Ethel was teaching Bertie French. I suspect that free meals also came into it somewhere, and George Shirran, Chief Inspector for the RSSPCC, probably felt sorry for a boy whose father had died when he was seventeen and left him flat-broke in a foreign country.

Ethel Maud Shirran, shorthand-typist and spinster of 2 Boroughloch Square, married Bertram Langford Rae, student (Indian Police) and bachelor of 23 Melville Terrace, on 31^st May 1923 at the Sheriff Court House in Edinburgh, witnessed by Ethel Maud's mother and her sister Lillian. [GROS Statutory Marriages 1923 685/04 0464] They were both nineteen. If Sam was correct to claim that Bertie moved in with Ethel before the end of 1922 then Bertie seems to have lied about where he was living - perhaps for some reason he didn't want to admit to the Registrar that they were already cohabiting. Hpwever, I think it more likely that Sam's dates are confused and that Bertie moved in with Ethel only after the marriage Sam didn't know he'd had.

I suppose that they married at the Sheriff Court House, rather than in a kirk, because Bertie was a Catholic and Ethel Maud was, like most of her family, a Presbyterian (Lillian was an Episcopalian, or at least she married in an Episcopalian kirk). The Sheriff Court House, built in 1867 and pulled down in 1937, was on the site of what is now the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge, in the centre of the extraordinary district of Edinburgh known as "the Bridges".

The heart of Edinburgh is Castle Rock, a vast volcanic plug, and the long descending ridge of the Royal Mile stretching away to the east, formed from glacial debris deposited in the lee of Castle Rock. The land falls away very steeply from this ridge and there were originally large lochs on either side of it, the Borough Loch half a mile to the south and the Nor' Loch right at the foot of the slope to the north, and then a marsh between the Nor' Loch and the tidal inlet called the Firth of Forth.

Mediaeval Edinburgh was largely confined to the ridge, and when it needed to expand it went upwards. Edinburgh invented the skyscraper: there were fourteen-storey buildings in Edinburgh in the 16^th century, functioning as vertical streets, with shops and businesses as well as private homes up and down the communal stairs. Gradually the city crept down the slope and spread out to the south, but the roads down from the ridge to the field level were almost impassably steep for wheeled traffic.

In the mid to late 18^th century, Edinburgh's town planners drained the Nor' Loch and the marsh to the north of it, and turned them into Princes Street Gardens and Edinburgh's New Town. South of the ridge they cut off the tops of the existing buildings in two long swathes and built George IV Bridge and South Bridge over the tops of the previous buildings, incorporating bits of their basements and ground floors into the foundations of the bridges which extended almost to the Borough Loch, now drained and turned into a public park called The Meadows. These two bridges in the south, plus North Bridge, which continues South Bridge up over the top of the ridge and down on the north side, enabled carriage roads to be brought down in a long gradual slope from the ridge to the ground level. [Waverley Bridge, on the north side, is something else: a normal, horizontal bridge across the channel of the old Nor' Loch.]

North Bridge is comparatively normal - you can look at it and see at once what it is, a road on a great sloping bridge which spans an open space. But George IV and South Bridges are streets in the sky, and the old town still exists underneath them. Stand in the undertown and look up and you see buildings and cars and pedestrians many storeys above you. Stand on one of the bridges where it crosses over a road and you can look over a parapet and down into another world. But most of the time as you walk along the bridges you feel as if you are on an ordinary street, and don't think about the fact that what appears to be the ground-level entrance of a business on that street is actually on an upper storey of a building whose true foundation is in the old street level several floors below you. The closer you get to the ridge, the greater the drop from the bridge to the lower town.

It was on this upper level, in a court building whose top three floors were on George IV Bridge and whose foundation was on the Cowgate several storeys below, that Ethel Maud and Bertie were married. It is at this point that we see the first possible beginnings of Ethel Maud's long climb up the social ladder, although there's no way to know whether it was her idea or Bertie's.

"Langford" must once have been the surname of somebody who married into the Raes of Castlemaine, but by now it was just a family first or middle name. In later life, however, Ethel Maud would call both herself and her son "Langford-Rae", as if it were a double-barrelled surname: perhaps in imitation of, or rivalry with, her big sister Jessie, who was legitimately Mrs Forsyth Caddell. Bertie's full name was Bertram Langford Denis Rae and in later life he would go by "BLD Rae", but in the marriage registry he has given his full name as "Bertram Langford Rae" and signed himself "Bertram L Rae". Perhaps he had dropped the "Denis" because it reminded him too much of his late father - or perhaps he was toying with the idea of going double-barrelled, like his cousin Langford Frank Allen Rae, a Chief Inspector of Police in Calcutta who ended up calling himself Frank Langford Rae.

At any rate, by marrying a mixed-race boy from Burma, who she must have known would soon be heading back to the East, Ethel Maud had set out on the journey to find the colour and excitement - Gibraltar, Mauritius, Sitapur, Benares - which her siblings had been born to.

At some point between August and December 1923, according to Sam (and assuming the tennis summer was 1923), Bertie moved back to Burma, although according to his entries in the Civil List he did not actually join the Imperial Police, or begin training at the Provincial Police Training School in Mandalay, until 12^th December 1924, and the shipping lists show his as sailing from Liverpool on 7^th November 1924. Ethel Maud followed him east eight days later, although she and Bertie had to borrow £100 from Sam (who was very comfortably off) to pay for her fare.

Sam's widow Rene, whom he met and married in Burma, knows of Ethel only by the name Elise or Elisa, which suggests she changed her name the instant she reached Burma and found herself in a place where nobody except Bertie and Sam knew her original name. She is also named in her son Rory's army records as his next of kin, Elise Langford-Rae, so as at the mid 1940s she was definitely already Elise, but not yet Elisa Maria. However, she sems to have continued to use the name Ethel Rae on at least some official documents well into the 1950s.

Rene also recalls that Sam said that after Bertie had departed for Burma Ethel made advances to him and tried to get him to elope with her, which shocked him to the core, and Sam himself says in his memoirs that "even in my Edinburgh days when she was in love with Bertie, she tried to get off with me but I would have nothing to do with her". It's difficult to know exactly what to make of this.

Sam never seems to have known that Bertie and Ethel had already married before Bertie left for Burma, instead recalling that "Ethel followed the next year to marry him and I had to lend them £100 to pay for her passage". Believing Ethel to be still single, he may have misunderstood her and thought she was proposing that he run away with her and marry her when in fact she just wanted to have sex with him. This would have been a doubly dirty trick, to sleep with her husband's best friend who was also her own best friend's fiancé, but subsequent events would show that she had a marked preference for non-white men and Sam was more Asian-looking than Bertie, plus he was there and Bertie wasn't. An uncomplicatedly wholesale attitude to sex seems to have been another characteristic of the farmtoun women, according to Kerrcameron.

If, however, Ethel herself used the term "elope", that's a different matter. Manic though she sometimes was in later life, it's hard to believe she would have been reckless or loopy enough seriously to consider committing bigamy when she was already married to a policeman with an interest in the law, and her whole family knew that she was. If she really did press Sam to elope with her then it was surely either a fantasy game or a wind-up - and if it was a wind-up, the more shocked Sam was the funnier she would find it. If Sam was havering about lending her the fare to Burma, she may even have set out to freak him into paying her to go away. In later life, her friend Urgyen Sangharakshita formed the impression that her coquettishness was "always calculated" and that she was not in fact very highly sexed.

Be that as it may, Ethel sailed First Class from Liverpool to Rangoon on the Henderson Line ship Kemmendine on 15^th November 1924, eight days after her husband. She was described as a spinster and used her maiden name, E.M. Shirran, possibly because it was Sam who booked her ticket. Her last address in the U.K. was c/o Thos. Cook & Son, Ltd., Edinburgh - presumably then as now a travel agent.

By the fourth week of December 1924 Ethel Maud - or Elise as she now became for most purposes - had joined Bertie in Mandalay, the old capital of Burma. If colour and the exotic was what she was looking for, there was plenty of it in Mandalay. It certainly would have made a heady contrast with her home city, which at that time was still blackened by the smoke from the coal fires which gave it its nickname "Auld Reekie": even if, to the unbiased eye, the frilly pagodas of Mandalay are no more elaborate and decorative than the ornate extravaganzas of Victorian Edinburgh.

On 12^th December 1924 Bertie was appointed as an Assistant District Superintendent of the Indian Police, although in fact he was a trainee. He was probably at the Training School for about a year: the records show that Eric Blair, the future George Orwell, who was at the school a couple of years ahead of Bertie, was there for thirteen or fourteen months, and at some point prior to April 1926 Bertie was sent to Pegu (now Bago) for further training. [India Office and Burma Office List, 1947 supplement: (OIR 354.5); The Combined Civil List for India, issue 76, April-June 1926]

One of many minor mysteries associated with my paternal grandparents is the fact that when Bertie started at the Police Training School he was granted an extra sixty rupee "Bachelor's Allowance" to hire a servant to keep house for him, despite the fact that he was a married man and Elise either had already joined him in Burma or was within a few days of doing so. He continued to be paid this allowance at least until mid 1925, despite having married his wife for the second time only twelve days after joining the Imperial Police.

It may be that Elise was away working, as she would later claim to have been a journalist working for a French newspaper in the early to mid 1920s (bearing in mind that she was bilingual in French). I have found no evidence of any stories appearing under her byline, so it's unlikely that she was a regular correspondent or reporter, but a newspaper article written about her much later, when she was seventy, referred to her as having been a free-lance and it's perfectly possible that she was some French paper's Burmese stringer. That is, if a newspaper knows that it may occasionally want to cover stories in a particular area of the world, but not often enough to justify the expense of maintaining a full-time correspondent there, it establishes a link with a locally-resident journalist called a "stringer" who is paid per piece, rather than a full-time salary, although they may or may not receive a regular small retainer as well.

It's quite likely that Elise didn't arrive in Mandalay until after Bertie started at the college, but it weould be surprising if he didn't know that she was following only eight days behind him. What I suspect is that it was a minor fiddle, as that would explain the double marriage, as well as the anomalous allowance. If the students' level of grant money was fixed at the outset of the course and didn't change with changes in circumstances - and the fact that Bertie continued to receive Bachelor's Allowance after his second marriage to Elise suggests that it was so - then I suspect that Bertie falsely pretended to be unmarried when he applied to the Police Training School, in order to be granted Bachelor's Allowance, then once he had it he married Elise for a second time in order to bring his perceived marital status into line with his actual marital status.

Of Elise's time in Burma little is known except that she had, according to Sam, a formidable reputation as a flirt. According to Sam, of which more anon, she and Bertie were together until 1930. During that time Bertie was stationed in Mandalay, Pegu (Bago), Insein and Taunggyi, according to the Combined Civil List for India. Elise obviously lived with her husband for at least some of the time, since she had a child by him, and Sam, speaking with reference to a visit he made to the couple just after they moved to Taunggyi, speaks of her frequenting the Gymkhana Club in Rangoon a lot and also making a lot of train journeys, which must presumably have happened prior to the move to Taunggyi, since they had been there only a very short time at this point. This suggests that Elise did live with Bertie in Insein, a suburb twenty miles nor' nor' west of Rangoon/Yangon, but spent a lot of time commuting into the city.

She always spoke of Burma, and especially its Buddhist community, with affection: but other than Insein, none of the places she would later claim to have been to in Burma coincided with anywhere that her husband was stationed while they were together. In his book Precious Teachers, Sangharakshita reports that on the occasion of her formal initiation into Buddhism in the late '50s, Elise would claim to have travelled "throughout the length and breadth of Burma, the Chinese frontier on one side, the Chin Hills, the Kachin Hills, the Manipur border". None of these named places are anywhere near any of Bertie's postings as given in the Civil List, either before or after their separation. It may be she that she edited out the names of the towns where she had resided with her husband, aside from Insein, and concentrated on those she had passed through en route to somewhere else or had visited after their separation, because by that point she was re-writing her past and didn't want to connect her self in Sikkim too firmly with her self in Burma, for fear that might lead somebody back to her self in Scotland.

On the other hand, Bertie was based in Falam in the Chin Hills in 1942/43, when it was just on the British side of the Japanese advance, and if it was true, as she would later claim, that Elise worked as a journalist, it's just about possible that she visited him there, or that she accompanied him later when, as a member of the Civil Affairs Service (Burma), he followed behind the advancing Allies to restore civil order.

Years later, in the 1950s, a gentleman named Walter Christie who had been at school with Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, wrote a letter about Orwell which appeared in an Indian newspaper. He received in reply a letter from Elise in which she claimed that she had known Orwell/Blair very well when he was (like Bertie) an Assistant Superintendent of Police in Burma, stationed first in Insein and then in Moulmein. Orwell/Blair was only a few months older than Bertie, but was two years ahead of him at the training school. His postings are known to have been as follows:

Before Insein he was in Syriam, a river port a few miles south of Rangoon, and after it he was in Moulmein, another port a hundred miles east of Rangoon, before moving on to Katha, nearly five hundred miles to the north, where he remained until he quit the service, and Burma, in June 1927.

That Elise knew that Orwell/Blair went from Insein to Moulmein confirms that she did have inside knowledge, although that's not surprising since she was married to one of his colleagues and I'm told that the European colony in Burma was very small and very gossipy. She claimed that she had been working as a journalist for a French newspaper at the time, that she and Orwell had had "long talks on every conceivable subject" and that she had been struck by his "sense of utter fairness in minutest details". The gist of Elise's letter later appeared in an article about Orwell which Christie wrote for Blackwood's Magazine.

However, in the late 1950s or early '60s Elise told her friend and mentor, the English-born Buddhist theologian Sangharakshita, that she had known Orwell/Blair because "every now and then she and Langford-Rae would find themselves handing over to him, or taking over from him, as they were posted to different towns around the country". She made no suggestion to Sangharakshita that she and Orwell/Blair had been close friends, and clearly indicated that she had been travelling around Burma with her husband when she met him.

By the late 1950s Elise had an established pattern of inflating a single conversation with somebody famous into a full-blown intimate friendship, and the opportunities for Bertie and Orwell/Blair to have exchanged places are strictly limited. I haven't managed to get hold of the Civil Lists for 1926, but Bertie must have been at the Training School until early 1926 and by the start of 1927 he was a probationery Assistant Superintendent at Police Headquarters in Insein - at the same time that Orwell/Blair was moving from Moulmein to Katha. As far as I can see, it's possible that Bertie had already moved into Insein by April 1926, taking over from Orwell/Blair who was being relocated to Moulmein, but that is the only time the two officers could have overlapped, and if Elise was living with her husband when she met Blair, as she told Sangharakshita, this is probably the only time she could have done so. Even if Blair and the Raes really hit it off it isn't likely that they would have visited Blair while he was in Moulmein, as it's a hundred miles from Rangoon and a much smaller town: although I suppose it's conceivable that while he was based in Moulmein Blair might have visited Rangoon occasionally when he was on leave, and called on the Raes in nearby Insein while he was there, or met them at the Gymkhana Club which Elise is known to have frequented and where, as we shall see, she had a considerable reputation.

Dr Michael Shelden, Orwell's official biographer, believes that Elise must have been telling the truth about her close friendship with Orwell/Blair because she "didn't seem interested in promoting herself or her old friendship with a man who was now very famous. I understand that she had a weakness for embellishing her past, but I don't think that's the case here. She could have made money telling her story to the press in the 1960s, but didn't." However, this argument doesn't really hold water because by the 1960s Elise was avoiding giving away any specific information about her time in Burma which might lead anybody actually to pin down her identity, and possibly connect her to the name Ethel Maud Shirran.

Shelden states: "It was known among the few surviving members of the Imperial Indian Police that Orwell had fallen for a European woman in Burma, but no one could remember her name or any details about her when I was doing my research in the early 1990s." He believes that Elise was the woman Orwell loved, in part because his novel Burmese Days, set in Katha, has a blonde heroine called Elizabeth Lackersteen, with whom the hero is in unrequited love.

The blonde hair and the similarity of the names Elise/Elizabeth are certainly suggestive, and both women have a great interest in social status. In other respects however they are not at all alike. Elizabeth is tallish and slender with short yellow-blonde hair, while my grandmother was shortish and buxom with long honey-blonde hair coiled up in a bun. Elizabeth is cold and languid, passive, sexless and anti-intellectual, while Elise was flirty and chatty, very bossy, given to telling scandalous stories and intellectually lively. Elizabeth has to be rescued from a water buffalo, while Elise was given a gallantry award (of which more anon) for helping to catch a bandit. Above all Lackersteen is a bigot who ill-treats her staff and regards non-whites as sub-human, while my grandmother, for all her faults and her bossiness, seems to have been about as free from racial prejudice as it is humanly possible to be, and showed a marked preference for Asian men (which in itself pretty-much rules out her having reciprocated any sexual interest Orwell might have felt).

The fact that Lackersteen is emphatically not based on my grandmother, except insofar as she is blonde, female and called Elizabeth, does not rule out the possibility of my gran being the European woman Orwell was in love with. Elise was very sparkly and witty and striking with a great rope of magnificent, metallic-looking hair, and even if - as seems likely - she and Orwell/Blair only knew each other for a few days or at most weeks in April 1926 while Blair was handing over to Bertie, she probably made a deep impression. And there are a few other elements in Burmese Days which do suggest that Blair might have found the Raes memorable.

One of the main themes in Burmese Days concerns an Asian man who wishes to join a local English Club for Europeans only, and Bertie's relatives still recall that it was a source of pain to him that even though he was a senior police officer, Class One on the Civil List, half-Irish and educated at a public school in Britain, he was never allowed to join the local European Club because he was mixed race. Also, one of the characters in the book is a Burmese woman called Ma Kin, married to a man named U Po Kyin: Ma Kyin was the name of Bertie's formidable mother.

It's also conceivable that Elise in some way influenced Eric Blair's decision to use a pen-name - if she admitted to him that her real name was Ethel. I don't know when she started to improve on her background, as well as her name. A family member stated that "she presented herself as Belgian about the time she married the future first minister of Sikkim", but I know from talking to former students that she was already passing as Belgian at the school she taught at in Delhi in the mid 1950s. The two things are probably linked: she was applying for a job as a French teacher, so she probably thought she'd have a better chance of getting it if she claimed to be a native speaker.

If she was still admitting to being Scots when she met Orwell/Blair, there is another odditty here, which could be taken as some evidence that he didn't like her, or that he did like her very much and she rejected him. In a letter to Anthony Powell, written in 1936, Orwell commented: "I am glad to see you making a point of calling them 'Scotchmen' not 'Scotsmen' as they like to be called. I find this a good easy way of annoying them."

At some point Elise began to claim to have either a law or, less commonly, a medical degree from Edinburgh University, despite the university having no apparent record of her existence. And the University of Edinburgh keeps very thorough records. The fact that she wasn't at Edinburgh University does not of course preclude her having done a course elsewhere in Britain during the trip to Scotland to deliver Rory to her sister, or at some college in Asia at any point between her return to the Far East (which probably occurred in the early 1940s) and 1950. She did later seem to have a better-than-average knowledge of and interest in the law - but not really to the extent one would expect if she was qualified, so I suspect that she in fact had no formal higher qualifications apart from a diploma in shorthand-typing from Skerry's, and she got her knowledge of the law from Bertie.

Bertie and Sam Newland knew at least the gist of her real background, but nobody else in Burma did. According to Wim Vervest, Sam Newland's son in law, the European community in Burma at that time was very small and very gossipy. In Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Catriona the daredevil Jacobite swordsman Alan Breck says "Them that cannae tell the truth should be aye mindfu' to leave an honest, handy lee behind them. If folk dinnae ken what ye're doing, Davie, they're terrible taken up with it; but if they think they ken, they care nae mair for it than what I do for pease porridge." If Elise had kept quiet about her background, the gossips would have kept digging until they uncovered it - so if she didn't want that to happen, she had to come up with an alternative history with which to blunt their curiosity. And it had to be a history more upmarket than her own, because the point of hiding her background in the first place was to be accepted as a social equal by the ladies who lunched.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray has said to me in conversation that the Raj at that time was so snobbish that a person with Elise's true background, had it been known about, would have been expected to go to the servants' quarters and stay there. I'm not sure if that's entirely true because she had, after all, married into the Irish landed gentry and her father had been a close army colleague of the then queen's late brother Fergus Bowes-Lyon; but it's clear she would at the least have been looked askance at, and down on, had she admitted to her true origins. Yet she felt herself to be, and genuinely was, a person with a powerful and original mind and much to contribute, so it's understandable that she reinvented herself as somebody whose voice would be heard - quite aside from the fact that even before she left Edinburgh, she had already shown a certain skill at historical embroidery.

Also, at a time when Bertie was already having social problems and being denigrated as a result of being mixed race he probably didn't need his colleagues and neighbours to know that his wife came from a long line of farm servants, NCOs, prison warders and railway porters and had an illegitimate half-sister wot worked in a formica factory, and an uncle who went AWOL from the army reserves in Cape Town while suffering from syphilis. Elise may have begun on her deception to boost her husband's standing, as well as her own.

Some time round about late April 1926, Elise fell pregnant. The fact that mid-to-late April 1926 is the only likely time-frame for Elise to have known Orwell/Blair, and the scholar's suggestion that Blair was in love with her, raises the spectre of Blair being the father of her child - or, indeed, any of the men she flirted with at the Gymkhana Club in Rangoon. However her son, my father, resembled Bertie, Bertie's brother Denis and Bertie's later sons by his second wife much more than he resembled Blair, so we can be 99% certain he was Bertie's boy.

My father Roderick (Rory) Denis Edward Langford-Rae was born on 28^th January 1927. His place of birth is listed as Rangoon (now spelled Yangon). His father at this point was stationed in Insein, a suburb twenty miles nor' nor' west of central Rangoon: there's no record of whether the family were living in Rangoon and commuting, or Elise was living apart from her husband, or Rory was born in Insein and the registrar simply lumped Rangoon and Insein together, even though at that time they were classed as separate towns.

Very possibly they were living in Insein but Elise had to go to a hospital in Rangoon to have her baby. She was never to have another child, despite being married to a Catholic and probably being Catholic herself by this point, and she would much later declare herself to have no maternal feelings towards her son whatsoever: this may well indicate that it was a very difficult birth, perhaps an emergency Caesarean, which interfered with the bonding process and put Elise off from ever trying again.

For whatever reason, Rory wasn't christened until he was fifteen months old, on 25^th April 1928. Late christenings seem to have been the norm in his father Bertie's family. Given his mother's professed lack of maternal feelings, and his own later fluency in several Chinese dialects (despite in the event spending most of his childhood in Britain), it is likely that almost as soon as he was born Rory was handed over to the care of either a Burmese ayah or his mixed Shan/Chinese grandmother Ma Kyin. Later on Ma Kyin would play a significant rôle in the childhood of Bertie's niece Susan, so it may be that leaving children with Ma Kyin was standard family practice.

Bertie remained in Insein until summer or early autumn 1929, becoming first an Extra District Assistant and then a Sub-Divisional Police Officer. From Insein, he went to Taunggyi in the Southern Shan States, where he was in charge of the Civil Police until the end of 1931 or start of 1932.

In the late 1950s Elise showed NG Dorji, a young schoolboy who was the great nephew of her last husband Kazi Lhendup Dorji, a silver plaque which had apparently been awarded to her in Burma in recognition of the striking courage she had shown in helping to catch a bandit. She did not boast about this award, nor show it around generally, nor make social capital out of it, and even she probably wouldn't manufacture a fake award just to play a trick on one schoolboy: therefore it was almost certainly genuine. The date of this act of bravery is unknown, but since she was married to a senior policeman it seems likely that the event was in some way connected with her husband's work. As we shall see, she and Bertie probably parted company in 1930, so whatever it was must have happened prior to that.

In his memoirs Sam, who by this point was working for the Forestry Department, writes:

After handing over duty to my new relief I went on to Mogok and went on 4 months' leave from the 4th. October 1929, thus terminating my long official association with Mogok Forest Dvn [Division].
       [cut] I stayed for about 10 days in Mogok, and then left for Taunggyi in the Southern Shan States to pay my old friends Bertie and Ethell [sic] Rae a visit. Bertie was by then a D.S.P and a man of some importance and terribly busy with his police work. I stayed in Taunggyi about a week, during which time I drove out to Loilem to pay a surprise visit to old Rundle of Chin Hills days and spent a very happy day with him. At the end of my stay Bertie said he had some work to do at Kalaw so I went along with them and shared the I.B [Inspection Bungalow]. Hamilton of the Forest Department, an Anglo-Indian, promoted to the I.F.S, had just completed his wonderful house at Kalaw and I was very keen to see it. [cut]
       We stayed in Kalaw for about a week and played tennis at the club every day. Thom, the famous hunter or shikari of the pioneering days in Burma, was still going strong, and challenged evry [sic] male visitor to Kalaw to a singles in tennis. I was never a match player, so I refrained from taking him on. He was great on his game shooting stories and Bertie and I used to listen to him by the hour. All that was necessary to set him going was to stand him a couple of double whiskies and sodas. [cut]
       One day towards the end of our stay in Kalaw, Bertie had to go out on work and left Ethell and me to occupy our time the best way we could. After lunch we sat talking of my leave and I told her why I had cancelled the 8 months I was to have spent in the U.K. She suddenly became erotic and wanted me to take my full leave and that she would come with me. She said we could go to Europe and have a good time together as she was sick of Bertie and if I did not take her, she would go with the Taunggyi Civil Surgeon, who was proceeding on a year's leave very soon.

Period postcard showing the Rangoon Gymkhana Club, much frequented by my grandmother

I got the shock of my life when she made this most improper suggestion. I had always looked upon her as an old friend like Bertie but I realised now that all I had heard of her carryings-on with many of the Rangoon Gymkhana Club males - both married and single - must be true. She had a platinum wrist watch studded with diamonds, which she said she had got as a present from the manager of the Burma Railways, in whose private carriage she often travelled on her way to and from Rangoon. I could have wept for Bertie, knowing all he must have had to endure with her as his wife. I told her in very plain language that I had no intention of going off with my best friend's wife and I did not think she had descended so low as to suggest such a thing. I then went off to the Kalaw Club and played billiards till Bertie and Ethell turned up in the evening for tennis and we all went home for dinner together. Ethell must have had a "kink" of sorts, for even in my Edinburgh days when she was in love with Bertie, she tried to get off with me but I would have nothing to do with her. Before Bertie turned up in Edinburgh, I was told about her carryings-on with the foreign students who had money to blow on her.
About 6 months or so later [i.e. April or May 1930] I heard she had gone off with the C.S, Taunggyi, as she said she would, to Europe to live a life of sin and fast living. The doctor could not have married her as she never returned to Burma again and I have not heard anything further about her since. She probably ended up like Rebecca Sharp of Thackerey's Vanity Fair.

In fact she was probably heading, at least initially, for her sister Lillian's place in Kilmarnock, which isn't the fleshpots of anywhere. The comparison with Becky Sharp is quite apt, but Elise was to do rather better, and Sam - who had been taught by American Baptist missionaries and was rather slow on the uptake in sexual matters - failed to notice that her liaisons were, indeed, calculated rather than kinky, and always brought her some material reward. In this case, she had talked Sam into paying for her fare from Scotland to Burma - a loan for which he had still not been reimbursed, and would only ever receive part of it back and that not until the 1940s - and now she was trying to seduce him into paying her fare from Burma back to Scotland again.

There is considerable doubt whether Elise ever actually had actual sex with any of the men she flirted with: in later life she was to marry a man by Moslem rites, refuse (at least according to her) to have sex with him unless he signed official marriage papers as well, and leave the marriage unconsummated when he did not. Indeed, since contraception at that time was unreliable and since Elise was, so far as I know, a Catholic at this point and therefore unlikely to seek an abortion, the fact that she didn't have any other children but Rory tends to support the idea that her sex life was quite limited - and her professed lack of maternal feeling suggests she would actively have avoided any risk of getting pregnant again.

Assuming that any of it was true and not just her winding Sam up for a laugh, and that the expensive watch which she was clearly wearing in Beretie's presence wasn't just a present from him, the whole thing reminds me of a song by Noel Coward (from The Girl Who Came to Supper), about a group of girls who hang around the casinos in Las Vegas:

We're six lilies of the valley,
Rose, Maud, Kate, Jane, Marybelle and Sally.
We toil not, neither do we spin much,
But we find in the casino that we win much
More by being gentle with the gentlemen
Playing at the tables,
Often sentimental men give emeralds and sables
To Rose, Maud, Kate, Jane, Marybelle and Sally,
Six pretty fillies,
Far from being silly-billies,
Six lilies of the valley.

As at October 1929, the Combined Civil List for India (page 422, issue 090) lists the Civil Surgeon in Taunggyi as a Major W J S Ingram MC MB.

We do not know why Elise became as she claimed bored with Bertie, or with Burma, if indeed she wasn't just yanking Sam's chain - Bertie was a man with a wide range of interests who ought to have been quite stimulating company. It may be that she had, in fact, been traumatised by whatever happened in the bandit incident, and was confusing depression and tiredness with loss of interest; or it may just have been that, as Sam says, Bertie's promotion had left him tearingly busy, and she didn't have the patience to put up with him not having much time for her anymore - especially as the move to Taunggyi meant that she could no longer frequent the Rangoon Gymkhana Club.

I can find no record of Elise's journey to Britain in 1930, which may mean she travelled on a troop ship, or that she journeyed to mainland Europe and then crossed to England on a ferry. She certainly did travel to Britain at around this time, since she was to sail outward bound from Liverpool in autumn 1931. By some point prior to summer 1933, Elise and Bertie's son Rory was living with his aunt Lillian in Kilmarnock, and it seems likely that Elise simply took him with her when she left Burma in (according to Sam) spring 1930. Family information is that she at least took him to Scotland and left him there, rather than sending him on his own; but also that he was deserted by his mother when very young, and that this was a source of lifelong tension and resentment between them. Since it seems to have been quite normal for children of the Raj to be sent back to Britain at seven, the implication is that Rory was significantly younger, which would fit with Elise having simply taken him with her in 1930. There is no record of what Bertie thought about this, or whether he was even consulted.

Subsequent events would show that Bertie, a Catholic, was very much a family person but Elise was not - indeed she would later tell her friend Sangharakshita that she was totally lacking in maternal feelings, although the evidence suggests that this was not entirely true. It was actually common for children who were born in the Raj to British parents to be sent to boarding schools in Britain when they were about seven, because it was felt that the climate was healthier for them (which was probably true) and that they would get a better education (which was not necessarily true): so Elise's action in leaving her small son behind on the other side of the world was not as abnormal then as it seems now. But even then, taking a three-year-old away from his family and country and everything he had known was not exactly normal, and it was a sore point with Rory forever after.

In fairness to Elise, however, tensions in the Southern Shan States were running high and were soon to overboil into the Saya San rebellion, so it's possible that despite her general lack of maternal feelings she thought that Rory - and herself for that matter - would be a lot safer back home in Scotland. If that was part of her reasoning, Bertie may very well have concurred. In which case, she was probably just coming on to Sam to see if she could get him to pay her fares, again.

That she came to Britain some time between October 1929 when Sam last saw her and September 1931 is incontrovertible, for on 18^th September 1931 an Ethel Rae of the right age sailed from Liverpool to Burma on the P. & O. S. N. Co. ship Mooltan. This is certainly the right Ethel Rae. Her prior residence in the U.K. is given as 88 Queen's Gate, S.W.7. (then the address of the Granby Court Hotel), and although she had stated her intention to reside in Burma, in early March 1932 an E.M. Langford Rae of the right age sailed from Rangoon and disembarked at Plymouth from the Bibby Line merchant ship Worcestershire (the same ship on which Bertie would sail to Rangoon in 1935) which reached Tilbury, probably only a couple of days later, on 6^th March. Her proposed address in the U.K. was care of R. Callender at 88 Queen's Gate, South Kensington, S.W.7, so clearly Ethel Rae and E.M. Langford Rae are one and the same. Allowing a month each way for the trip, she had spent less than four months in Burma. There is no sign that she had a child with her, so this was not the trip on which she first brought Rory to the U.K.: she must have brought him on a previous trip.

She is described in the Worcestershire's records as having no profession at that point, so if it was true that she became a journalist (again?) later, either this was not yet the case, or she wasn't admitting to it. It is possible that it was during those three and a half months back in Burma that she split from Bertie, rather than in 1930 - or even that they separated later, perhaps when Bertie visited Britain in 1935.

In September 1933 Rory started as a boarder at St Augustine's preparatory school in Ramsgate, aged six and a half. Family information suggests that it was probably Elise who chose his secondary school, so she may well have chosen his prep school as well, and she seems to have been in London until 1936, so Rory would have been able to visit her at weekends, school permitting.

Beyond this point, my grandmother's story dissolves into mystery and rumour, illuminated by only a few scraps of hard informnation, and does not coalesce again until about 1950. She would claim, later, to have earned her living as a journalist and to have lived in the White Russian quarter in Shanghai [Sunanda K Datta-Ray, article "After the Great Leap" in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 15^th March 2003], in Ethiopia and at the palace of Kemal Ataturk.

On 14^th March 1936 an Ethel Rae of the right age sailed First Class from the Port of London on the P. & O. S. N. Co. ship Viceroy of India, heading for Tangier but with the intention of residing in England in the future, so the trip was always intended to be temporary. Her last address prior to the trip was 16 St. James St. S.W.1.

Seventeen days later, on 31^st March the same year, an Ethel M. Rae of the right age arrived at the Port of London from Gibraltar on the P. & O. S. N. Co. ship Cathay, First Class, expecting to stay in England, with an address at the Stanhope Court Hotel, S.W.7. Because of the middle initial 'M' and the address in S.W.7 this really has to be "my" Ethel Rae, and I can find no other record of an Ethel or Elise Rae of the right age leaving Britain between her arrival in 1932 and her arrival in 1936, other than that trip to Tangier less than three weeks earlier.

Modern, powered naval ships are able to sail from England to Gibraltar in seven days, and from Gibraltar to Tangier nowadays takes just eighty minutes by ferry. Assuming that the P. & O. S. N. Co's ships were in the same general range, speed-wise, it is possible that both these Ethel Raes are the same woman, but if so she can only have spent two or three days in Tangier.

It seems unlikely she would have travelled a week's journey each way just to spend a couple of days in Tangier for fun, although I suppose it's possible she fancied a very short cruise much of which was spent being tossed about the Bay of Biscay. She might have meant to stay longer but been recalled to an emergency, or have been attending a family event.

However, her occupation on the outbound journey is listed as "Nil" again, and on her return journey - the one which is the more certainly her because of that middle initial - her occupation is given as "H.D." or "Household Domestic". A Lieutenant-Colonel Sidney Hatson aged fifty-six made the same journey from Gibraltar to the Stanhope Court Hotel, on the same ship, so it may well be that Ethel/Elise went to Tangier for a holiday, intending to stay for a week or two, and then this Lieutenant-Colonel Hatson offered her a job if she would cut short her holiday and travel back with him. Quite what that job would be isn't specified but Lieutenant-Colonel Sidney Hatson had previously been resident in Belgium and his long-term future residence is given as "Foreign Countries", so it seems he was only visiting London temporarily and may have taken her on as a bilingual secretary. I can find no trace of her sailing to the continent - but again, she may have gone by ferry. But since her intended country of residence is still given as England, the job may have been purely temporary, or she may have been intended to be Hatson's agent in London.

I have no information on how long she remained in Britain beyond this point or exactly when she returned to the East, although return she certainly did at some point, and when Rory names her as his next of kin in his army records in the mid 1940s he gives her address as care of a bank in Bombay. At the time of her formal conversion to Buddhism, as recalled by Sangharakshita,

Bertie and his second wife Herta in Burma in 1941 she wrote that she had travelled in "China, Malaya, Thailand, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and even to Iceland", but without having any clear evidence of where she was between 1936 and 1941, or between 1946 and 1950, it's impossible to be sure whether any of these stories is true or not - apart from the reference to Morocco, which tends to confirm that it was indeed she who was the Ethel Rae who sailed to Tangier.

Presumably if these are genuine, most of them will have happened during the 1930s although not neccesarily for long. I suspect that "even to Iceland", for example, means she spent a few hours or days there while changing planes or ships en route from Scotland to somewhere else. To mention it as a place she had travelled to wouldn't even be all that dishonest: it was still unusual for civilians outside the upper echelons of society to do much foreign travel, so even to have stopped off briefly in some exotic country would be genuinely noteworthy.

Around the beginning of 1935 Bertie went on leave apparently for a year, and visited the U.K., and presumably Rory and perhaps also Elise during this time. Some time in the last quarter of 1938, Elise's maternal grandmother Caroline Ellen Franklin, the matriarch of the Franklins, died aged eighty-three. Bertie was in Britain again the following year.

Some time in 1940 Bertie and Elise's divorce was finalised. I don't know how long the divorce had been in progress or why Elise had gone off Bertie in the first place, but the fact that Bertie and his second wife Herta Helene Josephine Margarethe Schmidt went on to have five sons (plus a sixth who died at birth) suggests that Elise's reluctance or inability to have more children may have come into it.

In later life, Elise would refer to Bertie simply as "Langford-Rae", and gave out so little information about him that her friend Sangharakshita didn't know Bertie's first name, or whether Elise was widowed or divorced. Yet, she must have remained in fairly close touch with Bertie, for she would later act as a kind of godmother or mentor to Bertie and Herta's first son Peter Rae. She was so uncommunicative, however, and her doings so mysterious and obscure, that Herta still refers to her as "X-Rae".

Elise must also have maintained some link to Bertie through Rory, for both Bertie and Elise were in touch with their son until his death in 1965. Every photo' that I have of my father comes via Herta.

In September 1940, the year of his parents' divorce, Rory started at Ampleforth, a boarding public school in Yorkshire known as "the Catholic Eton". Peter Rae loved his brother Rory and remembers Elise with fondness, but even he says that Elise probably sent Rory to Ampleforth because she wanted to be able to boast about what a posh school her son went to, and to assuage her guilt at having dumped him on her sister at such a young age. Ampleforth was, however, genuinely a very good school, so one cannot say that Rory lost out by this arrangement, except insofar as he was sent to a different school from Charlie Hodgson, his best friend from prep school. But Rory and the Hodgsons remained close friends all his life and they became his surrogate family in Britain. He stayed with them every Christmas and Easter holiday, returning to his family - whether in Burma or Kilmarnock I don't know - for the long summer holiday.

Kilmarnock, probably: from 1942 on Burma was a war zone and Rory's parents were refugees in north India. There are reasons, of which more anon, to think that Elise may have spent part of the war on a tea-plantation in Assam, and Rory would later work in the tea industry there: it is unlikely Rory woud have travelled abroad during the war, but as soon as the war was over he might have visited his mother in that beautiful, waterlogged country, and in so doing acquired some useful future contacts. He served in India from November 1945 to December 1946, so if Elise was still in Assam he might well have spent his leave with her.

On 11^th December 1941, Japan invaded Burma. The British community in Rangoon was evacuated by 7^th March 1942 and by the beginning of April as many Europeans as could manage it had fled the country, mainly for north-east India. About twenty years later, in conversation with some friends in Kalimpong, Elise would mention having been one of a group of Europeans gathered around a radio in a hotel in Rangoon, listening for news of the Japanese advance. Although nothing my grandmother said about herself can be taken as gospel without outside corroboration, there seems no benefit to her in lying about this, so we can say that she was probably back in Burma and in Rangoon by 1942. If she was indeed working as a journalist at this time, it would be natural for her to go back to Rangoon, a city she knew well, in order to report on the war in Burma.

We know she must have made it out of Burma, since there was never any suggestion that she had been taken prisoner and she was too loud and noticeable and blonde to hide, yet she does not appear in the official List of Evacuees. Sunanda K Datta-Ray, in his book Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, recalls his friendship with Elisa Maria, as she then was, during the late '50s and early '60s. Although he knew her quite well and had a journalist's interest in her, he found out very little about her background prior to 1950. He did however report that "An elderly Englishman said he had met her when she was the wife of an English tea-planter in Jorhat." and that "She claimed that an uncle had taken her for safety across Siberia when war broke out, but no one was sure whether it was the First or Second World War or some minor Balkan conflict."

Combining this with Elise's later claim to have travelled "the length and breadth of Burma, the Chinese frontier on one side, the Chin Hills, the Kachin Hills, the Manipur border" and the fact that her ex-husband Bertie had a first cousin named Langford Francis Denis Rae who was a tea-planter in Cachar, Assam, my working hypothesis is that one of Bertie's relatives, perhaps a brother of Ma Kyin, escorted Elise north to join Langford Francis Denis Rae at his tea plantation in Cachar - which is very near Manipur - and that as the front with Japan moved ever closer they then moved about a hundred and sixty miles nor' nor' east to Jorhat, away from the front. She later relocated the story to Siberia to make it sound more exciting, and to distance herself from anybody who could identify her.

She cannot have visited both the Chin and Kachin Hills in a single journey from Rangoon to Cachar, for they are on opposite sides of Burma. But the Chin Hills are near Manipur and the Kachin Hills near the Chinese border, so she may have passed up one side of Burma and later, after the war, back down the other - most probably from Rangoon to the Chin Hills to Manipur to Cachar, thence to Jorhat and then back down through the Kachin Hills and along the Chinese border.

If she was in Jorhat with Langford Francis Denis Rae she certainly wasn't his wife - he had a wife named Betty who was to outlive him - but Sunanda's informant may have misread the situation, or Bertie's cousin Langford may have remained in Cachar and Elise travelled on to Jorhat with or to some friend of his. There's a potential source of confusion here, though, or perhaps a Freudian slip, because later in life Elise would refer to her husband in Burma simply as "Langford-Rae". Bertie was properly "Bertram Rae" or just "Rae", with "Langford" being just one of his middle names: but his cousin Langford Francis Denis Rae in Assam really could properly be referred to as "Langford Rae".

Rory signed up for the army in summer 1944, but was not actually called up until January 1945. He lists his next of kin as his mother Mrs Elise Langford-Rae, so we know she had not yet re-married at this point. On his Service and Casualty Form he gives her address as c/o Lloyds Bank, Fort Bombay, India, and on Army Form B199A he gives her address as care of Lloyd's Bank, New Delhi. Both these forms had additions on them spread over several years so it's hard to say which one comes first chronologically, but when he enlisted in 1944 he gave his own home town as Fort Bombay. Fort Bombay isn't an actual fort, but a commercial district in central Mumbai where a fort used to be; but the fact that Rory lists it as his home suggests Elise was actually living there circa 1944, not just using a bank there. Form B119A seems possibly to belong to the very end of 1946, so it looks, tentatively, as though by summer 1944 Elise was living in the Fort area of Mumbai and Rory was regarding her home as his, and then by December 1946, if not before, she'd moved to New Delhi. She was certainly in Delhi by the early 1950s.

From the early 1950s until 1957 Elise was definitely in Delhi, first as a tutor to the son of the Nepalese Ambassador and then later as a schoolmistress. It is not known exactly when she arrived in Delhi, nor what she might have done beforehand. Her own (largely unsupported) account and gossip collected by Sunanda circa 1960 records a variety of locations and events but it's not clear where many of them fit on a timescale from 1930 to 1957, or how much truth there was in her own version of events - or even exactly how many husbands she managed to burn through in that time.

Herta, Bertie's second wife, understood Elise to have married or been planning to marry an Ethiopian doctor just after the war, and indeed Elise would later claim to have spent time in Addis Ababa - although, suspiciously, she would describe it in exactly the same terms she used for Shanghai.

Rory in the army. Ethiopian. Bertie and shooting incident. Her list of lcoations. in Kalimpong 1950 International rolling stone

"Her first appearance in Sikkim was apparently with Taya Zinkin, the journalist wife of Maurice Zinkin of the ICS. // All that was known for certain about the mystery woman came from the recollections of people whose paths had crossed hers. An elderly Englishman said he had met her when she was the wife of an English tea-planter in Jorhat. Delhi journalists described her as a fixture in H.V. Kamath's bachelor establishment. They had also known her as married to a director of health services, carrying on a vendetta against Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, her husband's minister. Mrs Langford-Rae had taught boys at St Columbus' school as well as civil service cadets; she had been an interpreter; and Pasupati Shumshere Jang Bahadur Rana in Kathmandu remembered her as his governess when he was a child in Delhi and his father the Nepalese ambassador." http://www.dakshintimes.com/dakshina-kannada/mangalore/news/1006261162/h-v-kamath-manipal-breathed-his-last-monday-manipa.html HV Kamath born 1919 or 1920, so she was at least fifteen years older than him.

"I remember being very impressed by a variant of the practice in Kalimpong when I first visited Kazini Elisa-Maria Dorji Khangsarpa of Chakung. Delhi old-timers might remember her as Mrs Ethel Maud Langford-Rae, French teacher and governess to the Nepalese ambassador's children. The Dalai Lama's card on a silver salver implied that His Holiness had called but, of course, he had done no such thing. Kazini was nothing if not resourceful and had put out the card — it may have accompanied a book — to impress innocents." From an article Solomon's Calling by Sunanda Jorhat_tea-garden.jpg IndiaLine: Jorhat Tourism http://www.indialine.com/travel/assam/jorhat/ Jorhat.jpg by prabal dewan http://www.holidayiq.com/myprofileinfo.php?strSubscribeId=273732 HolidayIQ http://www.holidayiq.com/destinations/photos/magnificient-glory-of-jorhat-Jorhat-Photos-16.html Mistry_Sahibs_bungalow.jpg WelcomHeritage Mistry Sahib's Bungalow http://www.nivalink.com/mistrysahib/index.html

█ 23 Melville Terrace.	█ 2 Boroughloch Square.
█ Archers' Lodge.	█ Point where photo' was taken.