Now that I’m back in London, I’ve discovered that I’ve got a copy of my father’s very brief diary entries for the last 74 days of his time in India, which were published in the Indo-British Review, XIV, no.2, June 1988.   He had transferred in 1946 from a short period as a District Commissioner in Malda in West Bengal (he had previously been an under-secretary in Government House in Delhi) to be Deputy Secretary to Sir Frederick Burrows, the newly appointed Governor General of Bengal, who was a former President of the National Union of Railwaymen and who both my parents liked and respected.   The diary is deeply and sadly uninformative about his attitude to Independence, or that of anyone else around him, concentrating on the business at hand – the drafting of consitutional telegrams, without description of their content, discussions about Partition, again without detailed comment, working on the Indian Independence Bill, visits from Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the Fellow of All Souls responsible for the detailed terms of Partition, and Christopher Beaumont, who acted as Secretary to the Commission, a visit from Gandhi (he adds in a footnote that ‘What I remember especially about the Mahatma’s visit was that he was the only Indian leader coming to Government House of whom all the office staff asked permission to down tools so that they could have a personal sight of him’).   There was a certain amount of bridge playing and snooker with the Governor after dinner, as well as packing up his typewriter and gramophone (he later gave the typewriter to a church fete).   On Friday 15th. August, 1947, the Indian flag was hoist and my father boarded a flying boat to leave for Karachi and home.   Maybe the very ordinariness of the description of the transfer of power is itself eloquent of British attitudes at the time.