When Barbra Streisand first became famous an interviewer asked her came famous, an in where she was born. Not wanting to say plain old Brooklyn, she named the most exotic sounding place she could think of Rangoon. It was the opposite with Sue Arnold. She wished she was ordinary. "All I wanted was to be English."
She feels English, she thinks English and she's pretty confident that a Home Counties private education has ensured she sounds English. The trouble is, she doesn't look English. This is why the Observer journalist, a TCD graduate, has frequently encountered racism. It has ranged from unthinking comments to more sinister jibes, such as that from the conductor, Sir Adrian Boult, who, after refusing her an interview, wrote to her editor "Since when has the Observer (for which until now I have always had a high regard) started sending wops out as reporters?"
It's all the fault of her grandfathers. The two of them, upstanding gentlemen on His Majesty's service in Burma during the second decade of this century, took up with native women. William Thomas Townley McHarg fathered, in Arnold's words, "six Burmese bastards" before returning home permanently to his wife and two sons in Southsea. At least Charlie Lloyd was a bachelor when, as a chief of police at 56, he married a 17 year old local girl in Taunggyi. And he didn't do a runner back to the sceptred isle he drank himself to death in situ.
In both cases, Arnold's Burmese grandmothers went on to form second relationships and begin second families. So she was faced with a jungle of a family tree to track down when an assignment to cover a British royal tour of China in 1985 tempted her to stop off in Burma.
A Burmese Legacy Rediscovering My Family is an account of that quest, but, rather disappointingly, it's much more about her family than about Burma. That country, renamed Myanmar by its military government at the end of 1988, has been in a time warp since the British left in 1948. Successive military governments, which toyed with democracy in 1960 and then again in 1989, have kept the late 20th century at bay by strictly limiting access to foreigners and repressing their own people.
Arnold's mother Marjorie, with baby in tow, headed for the safety of India as Japanese troops advanced into Burma after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941. It was a gruelling six week trek with outbreaks of malaria and typhoid among the 30 refugees she travelled with. Marjorie weighed just four stone when she crossed the border into the tea gardens of Assam.
Sue Arnold was born in India before her parents returned to Burma after the war. Only two years later Marjorie left for England with her two daughters. "I was never one of them," Marjorie maintains. Arnold has no doubts but that her mother wanted to be white. "When I said my mother was a racist I was underselling her," she writes.
It's more than halfway through the book, and after much relative visiting in England, before Arnold makes her first trip to Burma. She confesses to feeling "a bit worried in case my long lost but soon to be found relatives turned out to be embarrassing." In the event, the only truly embarrassing relative she encountered was the "ghoulish figure" of her nephew, Nicky, a polio victim, who had hoped she might have brought him a TV set.
She was limited by what was then the standard seven day visitor visa, and perhaps it was inevitable that Arnold's descriptions of the country and its gracious people would be sketchy. But from her privileged position as a visitor with many local contacts, one would expect more insights.
A defining moment in Arnold's rushed trip came when she was recognised in a market by "a toothless hag" who used to sell cakes to her grandmother and children and saw the family likeness. "For the first time since arriving in Burma I feel a genuine link with my roots," she comments.
It all helped to banish her obsession with being English. Reflecting on the multi racial London she sees her children growing up in, she concludes "I am not sure what that means any more."
