“Circumstances of Departure” by Ken Evans

Revealing autobiography of a UK Classics teacher of Pakistani descent

About the Book:

After a life-time’s teaching Classics to the Upper-Sixth, at a very minor Boy’s Public School in Oxfordshire, the last of the ‘DWEMs’, as he likes to describe himself, believes that he is fighting a rear-guard action, defending and guarding a diminishing mythopoetic world view on which his own personal values, and those of Western Civilisation are built. And which are being cruelly tested, to breaking-point when he is called to ‘support’ one of his own ‘favourite’ ex-students who has been arrested for ‘Terrorist Activities’. It is this, above all else which becomes the Circumstances of Departure; his own and of others, in one way or another.
(DWEM was coined by Bernard Knox, to describe Classicists as a species: Dead White European Males.)

Excerpt from the Book:

“This is what I think! That the story of my life, like the rest of my generation of Pakistani kids, began not at the moment of our births, but much earlier, even before that time when our great sub-continent was torn apart to form a new country which was to become the Islamic Republic of Pakistan; the land of our fathers, and way back before that, in the darkest history of our shared Persian, Arabian, and Macedonian ancestors and forbears, which I for one, have come to learn about and accept as part of myself, and many the many other things that have made me what I am.

And furthermore, from the earliest questioning moments of my younger days that I can recall, I learned next to nothing about myself and very little about my family, so from the start of my life anonymity seemed to me to be the natural state of my world, and the world of my parents, and of the many visitors who silently came to the house and silently went out again, without me knowing anything about who they were and what they wanted. And up to the start of my schooldays, my time at home was also anonymous: seemingly that whilst in the house, it felt as if time itself was standing still, as I tried occupy myself during my long days looking for pictures and anything that might reveal something with which might connect me to something; or which might reveal something that I could understand: and get answers to the endless stream of questions that poured from nowhere into my head. For it seemed to me then, that both my mum and dad floated silently around the house and around me, without noticing me or ever connecting, and without including me in their brief noisy outbursts of Urdu conversations; and so I was forced by their silence to invent my own world.”

Circumstances of Departure is available in paperback from Amazon UK at:

www.amazon.co.uk/Circumstances-Departure-Ken-Evans/dp/1785075985

and from Amazon USA at:

www.amazon.com/Circumstances-Departure-Ken-Evans/dp/1785075985

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