As readers of this blog know, I enjoy reading books from other cultures as a way of learning more about the world and its peoples, but I have to tell you that reading Can a Duck Swim? by fellow Australian June Porter took me a very long way out of my comfort zone…
This autobiography, based on the diaries she kept while a lady-in-waiting to Lady Rutherford, wife of the Governor of Bihar in India during war, is about a culture that is as remote to me as the most far-flung peoples anywhere. The book so often had me gnashing my teeth with outrage that I almost had to buy a mouth-guard like those football players wear…
If the expression ‘lady-in-waiting’ hasn’t already set your teeth on edge, read on.
I have read heaps of books about the Second World War, and from the experiences of my parents and parents-in-law, I know something about its impact on people as individuals. To read about this woman and her husband using their privileged social position to cadge scarce places on planes and trains so that they could swan about in British India aping the aristocracy made me feel sick.
While your relations and mine were at risk of losing their lives, getting by under rationing and missing their loved ones, June Porter sailed off to India to meet up with hubby and have a grand old time at tiger hunts, at dances and at other social occasions, and – oh, poor dear! having to put up with boring visits to women in purdah. They couldn’t speak the local language, you see, and they didn’t have the wit to organise themselves an interpreter.
Porter’s (unpaid) ‘work’ was to manage Lady R’s diary, write some letters, and accompany her to her assorted social responsibilities. Her husband’s job as ADC was ‘special duties’ for the Governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, and his ‘work’ was ‘to accompany the Governor wherever he went and arrange his social and official diary‘ (p. 31).
This book drips with nostalgia for the days of the Raj. Porter never addresses the issues of Indian Independence and decolonisation, and barely mentions the poverty that was all around her. When not name-dropping or gushing about meeting assorted royals, she quotes from her own letters about her new frocks or complains about her scanty brushes with the real world.
After the war, when every available berth was needed to repatriate soldiers back to their loved ones, the Porters manage a holiday in Britain and Europe, and then come back to Adelaide where – eventually as lady mayoress – she eventually fills her days with tennis, garden parties, and fundraising for charity.
200 pages of this wears very thin.
Other reviews? Well, there’s a generally uncritical one at Flinders Ranges Research but that’s all I could access online.
Author: June Porter
Title: Can a Duck Swim?
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2013
ISBN: 9781743052013
Publisher: Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press
Availability:
Fishpond: Can a Duck Swim?: An Autobiography
Or direct from Wakefield Press
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
seems like it would have made a short section better on a book on the dying embers of the Raj ,all the best stu
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By: winstonsdad on May 4, 2013
at 9:58 pm
Oh maybe it’s got some value as a window into the attitudes of the people who ran the show, because I think that writing a memoir like this without any self-reflection about how and why things have changed since then just looks shallow. If there were a paragraph or two about how she realises now appalling it was to live in such luxury when there were people starving on her doorstep; or that now she thinks it’s only right that India should manage its own affairs; or that now she realises that her desire to be reunited with her husband took a berth from someone almost certainly more deserving; or that the way she spent the war years might look incredibly selfish to other people, I might feel differently…
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By: Lisa Hill on May 5, 2013
at 2:29 pm
You need to judge a book based on what it is, not what it isn’t. As a memoir, it could have social-history interest to someone reading up about the Raj or post war Australian civic life, but I think most buyers would be friends, relatives or associates of the author.
If you are interested in what some other reviewers wrote about this book go to http://www.thebigbookclub.com.au/page.php?section=348&mId=52235
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By: Barbie on April 9, 2014
at 5:31 pm
LOL, Barbie, I thought I had judged it for what it is!
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By: Lisa Hill on April 9, 2014
at 10:34 pm
[…] Some who grew up in the colonies transitioned from their experience to an adult awareness of the issues that surround colonialism. In Oleander, Jacaranda (1994) Penelope Lively wrote vividly about her ashamed astonishment that as an adult she could not bear to witness the ubiquitous poverty and squalor in Egypt, but had never even noticed it as a child though it was all around her. “How did I not see it? she asked herself… OTOH June Porter wrote a memoir about her time swanning about in India during the Raj… it was called Can a Duck Swim? (2013), and you can see my thoughts about her insouciance here. […]
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By: The Kowloon Kid, a Hong Kong childhood, by Phil Brown | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on September 13, 2019
at 11:48 am