I do not think of Rumer Godden as English so much as I think of her as British, a child of colonial India as well as of England. Godden's writings about her childhood and adult life in India feed the senses through physical imagery as brilliant and beautiful as sari-silk. She never lost her child's awareness of taste and touch, and all of her books bring minute attentiveness to the specific power of place.

Here is an excerpt from one of her books of Indian memoirs:
A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep.

Some things are a pleasure to buy. I went to the pottery shops and chose deep blue cups and saucers, plates, dishes and bowls in the cheap Kashmiri pottery that is made in strong native colours, blue, yellow, green or brown. I bought Kashmiri numdahs [rugs], pale fawn with white edges, and, for curtains, hand-printed khuddha – Indian cotton cloth – with small designs in yellow and black of stylised flowers on cream; they would be lined with pink to match the three-bears Cantonese enamel bowls. ... For lights I still had the oil lamps I had bought for very little in the Thieves Bazaar in Calcutta to take to Jinglam, and also, my one extravagance, a papier-mâché lamp, golden, painted with kingfishers in deep rich colours. There had been, almost unbelievably, six pounds left over from the three hundred. I should have kept it for emergencies, but I spent it entirely on the lamp, ninety-six rupees. "What is the difference in it to cost all that?" ... I touched the lamp – it was a pleasure to touch its sheen – "This is made of hand-made paper from a village that has made it for generations. It is pulped and moulded by hand and painted with colours ground from semi-precious stones; the blue is lapis lazuli, the pink, carnelian, the gold, real gold leaf. Its painting is so fine it takes two weeks to do one lamp, the pattern is traditional, and after it is painted, it is lacquered with a lacquer of amber and oil. It will last longer than I shall."