• Merryn’s nomadic “third culture kid” upbringing with missionary parents in Nepal and India


• The experience of attending an international boarding school in a North Indian hill station.


• The history of Indian Hill Stations like Mussoorie, from their origins in the British Raj to modern-day holiday destinations.


• Weaving the complex history of India’s Independence and Partition into her novel, A House Called Askival.


• The perspective of writing about India as both an insider to the international community and an outsider to the wider culture.


• How her childhood in the Himalayas influenced her love for her current home in the mountains of Scotland.


• Recommended travel books

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Merryn Glover, who is an award-winning author of fiction, nature writing, plays, and short stories. Welcome, Merryn.

Merryn: Hi there. Thank you for having me.

Jo: It’s great to have you on. You were born in Kathmandu and brought up in Nepal, India, and Pakistan. You have an Australian passport and call Scotland home after living there for over 30 years. Tell us more about that.

How did travel form such a backdrop to your life?

Merryn: Essentially, because my parents were working in South Asia, that’s how I came to be born and brought up there. It very much was my life.

Up until I was 18 and moved back to Australia to go to university, my father estimated that we’d probably moved 60 times. Some of those moves were backwards and forwards to the same locations or the same house, but it was very itinerant. In a lot of those locations, I didn’t necessarily have my own bedroom; it might be the curtained-off end of a living room, or I was often sharing with my big brother. It was very nomadic and it was just the life that we had. As a child, of course, you don’t think your life is unusual. It’s just the life that you have, and it’s only later on that you realize it is quite different to most people, particularly once I was back at university in Australia.

Jo: What did your parents do that you traveled so much?

Merryn: They were missionaries, in the old language, if you like, which tends to bring people out in hives.

They were working in linguistics, literacy, and Bible translation, primarily amongst one of the language groups in Nepal, but ultimately in quite a lot of locations in India and Pakistan as well. They were working a lot with local churches, local Christians, and in a lot of training, enabling them in their own literacy and linguistic work.

Jo: It’s incredible how much travel there is involved in that. When you remember being a kid, given you were moving around so much… I went to school in Malawi, in Africa for a while, and I don’t really remember it being different, as you said. How did you feel?

Did you feel different? Did you go to random schools? How was that experience?

Merryn: It was very varied. For the first seven years of my childhood, my parents spent a lot of time in a village in the hills of Nepal, and my mother homeschooled us when we were there. She was a qualified primary school teacher, so that obviously helped. She taught my brother and myself out on the veranda of the home that we lived in, in the village, for only a couple of hours every morning. After that, we were pretty free to roam and play.

When we were in places like Kathmandu, there were often small, mission-run schools that we attended, and you had quite an international mix of kids at those schools. Then when I was nine, I followed my brother to a boarding school in North India, in the mountains, and I was there till I was 18.

Interestingly, although boarding school means that you are away from your parents (and a lot of the time you are, and you’re dealing with homesickness and that sense of displacement), for some of the time, one or both of them were based where the school was, and we were day scholars.

On the other hand, being there for nine years, it became a place of continuity and consistency. It became like an extended family and a community, which I’m still incredibly close to. I’m still really close to those friends and a lot of the staff. It is this most extraordinary and very international community of people that I got to know through that school.

Jo: How interesting that you’re still close to them. And then you said you went back to Australia when you were 18. Did you just think everyone was so boring and provincial, or were you just wanting to be normal?

Merryn: We were based in Melbourne when I went back to university, and Melbourne is a very metropolitan city. For my parents’ leave, every three or four years, we would go back to Australia for anything from a few months to about 18 months when my dad was completing his PhD in Canberra.

Through the National University, there was accommodation for international students, and we were actually accommodated there. That was great for me because there were all these kids from Africa and India and so on running around in a big shared back garden. The primary school I went to in Canberra was in the area where all the embassies are, so again, it was relatively international by Australian standards.

But arriving back for university at age 18, university is a good time to make a transition because you’ve got a slightly more diverse mix of people. You’ve got mature age students and a fair international mix because that’s what Melbourne is like. You have people with varying degrees of relationship to Australia because of their own family heritage. Some of them more recently moved, some of them their families have been in Australia for generations, but they still have a strong Greek identity or whatever else it might be.

I was still probably one of the people with the weirdest accent. People thought I was American, which is partly because of the school I went to in India; there was a strong American influence in weird ways. It was an American-Indian accent mix; I don’t think any American would’ve owned it. Then some people thought I was Irish.

But at university, partly because of the course I did – drama, dance, and English – being different was quite cool at that stage. People just thought it was fascinating and wanted to find out more about it.

In contrast, friends I know who made that transition back to their parents’ country when they were 13 or 14 had a really hard time because that’s when you don’t want to be different. That’s when you really want to fit in and look and sound like everybody else. That is a really difficult time to change. So, for me, it was a good time to transition.

Jo: I’m really interested in this because my mum brought us back from Malawi when I was going into senior school, so I was about 11 or 12. As you were saying, 13 is a difficult time. For people listening who are thinking, “I want to travel with kids,” or “I want to go live somewhere else”… Looking back, I’m grateful for my time away; it was all positive in my mind.

Do you look back and think it was all amazing, or were there things that stick out in your mind as a terrible challenge? What can we do to encourage people to live somewhere else with children?

Merryn: I look back and I’m very thankful for most of it.

I think most of it was an extraordinary privilege.

Boarding school is a very mixed experience wherever you are, and that’s something that I explore in the book we’ll be talking about later, as quite a bit of it is set in a fictionalized version of the boarding school I went to. Although there were lots of things I loved about the school and I still love that community of friends that I’m very close to, just being away from your own family for that length of time when you’re still growing up is never going to be ideal.

But to encourage people, yes, it’s a wonderful thing to give children, if you can: the experience of other places and other cultures.

It’s very different now. When I was a teenager in India — I was born in 1969 — there was no internet. The only way you could keep up with fashion or music was when friends went back to America or Europe for their holidays and came back with cassette tapes or new clothes. There was a much greater gulf between my experience and that of my peers back in Australia, which in many ways, I was quite thankful for. I wasn’t brought up around television, and my life was much more about the context and the culture I wa