Sam Merry

The English Sergeant and Indian Orphan Sam Merry

The English Sergeant and Indian OrphanBorn to work to a typically large family in a Mansfield Cotton Factory twenty years after the Peterloo Massacre, William Lacey decides he wants adventure and joins the cavalry to fight in the Crimea - just missing the Charge of the Light Brigade - and then volunteers for the Indian Mutiny at the age of twenty-two. After the Mutiny, he meets and falls in love with Amelia Padam, a fifteen-year-old in Va-ransi. Through her he explores differences between superior British Christian imperialism and the more tolerant Indian way of life. After marriage, they go to England via the new Suez Canal where she learns more of Britain and its attitudes to foreigners in Nottingham-shire, while their large family try and adapt to a new way of life.