Godden's early years were spent in India. "Our father, 'Fa,' worked for one of the oldest of the Indian Inland Navigation Steamer Companies which, between them, were responsible for the navigation of the great rivers of Assam and Bengal. This meant that we had not lived in cities...but in remote small towns always on the bank of a great river, most of the time in Narayangunj, a jute station in Bengal on the river Megna which, in places, was two miles wide; yet it was only a tributary of the Brahmaputra, which itself mingles with the Ganges....Our Megna flowed between banks of mud and white sand from which fields stretched flat to the horizon under a giant bowl of sky; if we children grew up with any sense of space it was from that sky.
"As an extremely small girl I took my airings not in a pram but with my ayah on an elephant inappropriately called Birdie; when we came back and Birdie obediently knelt to let us get down, I always picked her a bunch of grass and she would take the infinitesimal offering with the end of her trunk and stuff it in her mouth."
It was the custom for parents living abroad to send their children home to be educated.
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