Fiona MacKeown, mother of Scarlett Keeling, was not the only Briton to travel from rural England to Goa with a large family, celebrated writer Evelyn Waugh too visited Goa in 1952 with six children.

Recalling Waugh’s visit to Goa, Ian Jack, former editor of Granta, presented a historical snapshot of the evolution of contemporary Goa in The Guardian, in a piece titled ‘The land where the hippy trail reaches a historic impasse’.
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.

Bigger difference

“Waugh had six children; MacKeown had nine, 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 and parties on Goa’s beaches as “the lost, the damaged and the crooked”, Jack described how over the years the tourist circuit for foreigners has 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?” Jack wrote.

First hippy sighting

“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 “A woman born of an age... has somehow forgotten to teach caution.”