Like Fiona, Evelyn Waugh too visited Goa with 6 children

Jack’s piece today continued the British news media’s recent focus on Goa and the coverage of teenager Scarlett’s killing on the Anjuna beach.

Almost all newspapers reported the summons issued by the Goa police to her mother to question her on charges of negligence. Columnists recalled their experiences in Goa.

Jack wrote: “Fiona MacKeown was by no means the first parent of a large family to travel from a rambling home in rural western England, in the middle of a damp winter, and see what Goa had to offer by way of diversion. Evelyn Waugh had six children (a seventh died in infancy); Fiona MacKeown had nine, Waugh travelled from Piers Court, a Georgian mansion in Gloucestershire. MacKeown came from a huddle of caravans near Bideford, Devon.”

“But the bigger difference is that Waugh left his children behind,” Jack wrote.

A Roman Catholic, Waugh visited Goa to witness the exposition of St Francis Xavier’s relics, the Jesuit missionary whose body had been brought back from China to Goa in the 16th century.

Describing the people involved in drugs, parties and worse on Goa’s beaches as ‘the lost, the damaged and the crooked’, Jack described how over the years the tourist circuit for foreigners had been increasingly taken over by the drug mafia.

“We know what hippies made of Goa when they first saw it in the late 1960s because they’ve given us accounts of the empty beaches, friendly shack-owners and cheap charas. But what, in turn, did Goa make of the hippies? In 1984 in the capital Panjim I met a local historian who recalled his first sight of one. ‘She was sitting on a bench reading a paperback edition of Wordsworth – I think it was the Prelude. But she was dirty. I had never seen a dirty European before’,” he wrote.

Jacks concludes the piece by writing that ‘It was to an even darker scene that Fiona MacKeown brought her family in November, 2007: a woman born of an age which has somehow forgotten to teach both caution and curiosity, in the belief – not shared by Burton, Waugh and Greene – that apart from the weather everywhere is much the same”.