Victoria

When I had first told him the name we'd chosen for our daughter, Abe had suggested that it was a pretty damn waspy title for the offspring of an Indian princess and a Chicago pollock.- - -

I never would have chosen the name "Victoria" but was secretly delighted by it. Amrita first suggested it one hot day in July and we treated it as a joke. It seemed that one of her earliest memories was of arriving by train at Victoria Station in Bombay. That huge edifice - one of the remnants of the British Raj, which evidently still defines India - had always filled Amrita with a sense of awe. Since that time, the name Victoria had evoked an echo of beauty, elegance and mystery in her.

Alexander of Russia, the patron saint of the Cobourgs, was dead, so Alexandrina of England, named in honour of him, gave way to Victoria the tutelary deity of his (when living) subservient Cobourgs. Both names are alike foreign and unharmonious to British ears,* although of the two, Alexandrina perhaps the most euphonious. Let us hope, and we have reason to hope, that the Queen will nationalize that of Victoria, and make it the theme of song and history with that of Elizabeth.

*George IV., who, whatever his faults, had a true British spirit and sentiments, declared both to be anti-British, and expressed himself in no measured terms at the time about giving the royal infant such unEnglish names.

London Transport lost no time in beginning work on the new Victoria tube line following the Minister of Transport's approval of the project, announced on August 20.