These last reflections are in part prompted by the interesting Appendix, 'An Imperial Childhood', in which Cannadine looks back on the impact that empire may have made on him as a young person in Birmingham. He is particularly interesting about his father, who had served in the Royal Engineers in India during the Second World War. David's father regretted the passing of empire, but believed that 'Indians owed their freedom to the British'. He disliked 'the petty regimentation of army life', so presumably was not much taken with Ornamentalism; he admired the supremely un-ornamental Wavell and disliked Mountbatten who may have been too ornamental for his own good. These apparently mixed responses are surely characteristic of huge numbers of people of the recent and probably of the more remote past; they certainly resonate with my sense of how a great range of my family responded to service in India. Empire was a fact of life. You either went there in search of a job like any other or because military obligation (as in my case and Mr Cannadine's) compelled you to go there. You accepted its existence and may have invested it with benevolent purposes (if that is not reading too much into Mr Cannadine's belief in 1945 that the empire was giving Indians their freedom). This may have been a triumph of hope over experience. Exposure to empire was an immense widening of horizons, but did not necessarily turn people so exposed into imperial partisans for life. Manifestations of Ornamentalism may have been repugnant to many who had witnessed them, even though the spectacles could be terribly seductive. A police askari band reduced me to tears aged 20 on my last day in Kenya. But in my firmer moments I knew that such things were extraneous to the main business of colonial life of which I had seen a fair amount.