How does a childhood spent in the Himalayas of Nepal and India shape a life and a love for the mountains of Scotland? How can fiction help us understand the complex, painful history of India’s Partition? I discuss all this and more with the award-winning author, Merryn Glover.
Merryn’s nomadic “third culture kid” upbringing with missionary parents in Nepal and India
The experience of attending an international boarding school in a North Indian hill station.
The history of Indian Hill Stations like Mussoorie, from their origins in the British Raj to modern-day holiday destinations.
Weaving the complex history of India’s Independence and Partition into her novel, A House Called Askival.
The perspective of writing about India as both an insider to the international community and an outsider to the wider culture.
How her childhood in the Himalayas influenced her love for her current home in the mountains of Scotland.
Recommended travel books
You can find Merryn at
MerrynGlover.com
Transcript of the interview
Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Merryn Glover, who is an award-winning author of fiction, nature writing, plays, and short stories. Welcome, Merryn.
Merryn: Hi there. Thank you for having me.
Jo: It’s great to have you on. You were born in Kathmandu and brought up in Nepal, India, and Pakistan. You have an Australian passport and call Scotland home after living there for over 30 years. Tell us more about that.
How did travel form such a backdrop to your life?
Merryn: Essentially, because my parents were working in South Asia, that’s how I came to be born and brought up there. It very much was my life.
Up until I was 18 and moved back to Australia to go to university, my father estimated that we’d probably moved 60 times. Some of those moves were backwards and forwards to the same locations or the same house, but it was very itinerant. In a lot of those locations, I didn’t necessarily have my own bedroom; it might be the curtained-off end of a living room, or I was often sharing with my big brother. It was very nomadic and it was just the life that we had. As a child, of course, you don’t think your life is unusual. It’s just the life that you have, and it’s only later on that you realize it is quite different to most people, particularly once I was back at university in Australia.
Jo: What did your parents do that you traveled so much?
Merryn: They were missionaries, in the old language, if you like, which tends to bring people out in hives.
They were working in linguistics, literacy, and Bible translation, primarily amongst one of the language groups in Nepal, but ultimately in quite a lot of locations in India and Pakistan as well. They were working a lot with local churches, local Christians, and in a lot of training, enabling them in their own literacy and linguistic work.
Jo: It’s incredible how much travel there is involved in that. When you remember being a kid, given you were moving around so much… I went to school in Malawi, in Africa for a while, and I don’t really remember it being different, as you said. How did you feel?
Did you feel different? Did you go to random schools? How was that experience?
Merryn: It was very varied. For the first seven years of my childhood, my parents spent a lot of time in a village in the hills of Nepal, and my mother homeschooled us when we were there. She was a qualified primary school teacher, so that obviously helped. She taught my brother and myself out on the veranda of the home that we lived in, in the village, for only a couple of hours every morning. After that, we were pretty free to roam and play.
When we were in places like Kathmandu, there were often small,
