Iris Macfarlane was born in Quetta, India (now Pakistan) in 1922. Her early adult life was split between England, where her children were educated, and Assam, where her husband Donal Macfarlane was the manager of a tea estate. Here she learnt Assamese and translated Assamese folk-tales and wrote a children's story based on her experience. She studied Assamese and Indian history, which led to a number of articles in History Today, and the book The Black Hole; the Makings of a Legend (1975). This remarkably honest and insightful book tells the story of four generations of women who were sent out to India and Burma and separated from their children. Through contemporary letters, diaries and other personal papers, and on the basis of her own experience, Iris Macfarlane reconstructs the lives of her great-grandmother Maria, her grandmother Annie, her mother Violet and herself, who bore the pain and cost of the British Empire and its demands. There is a forward by Professor Susan Bayly which places the account into the context of other writing on the Raj.