WORKERS at the towers of silence, undertakers to the wealthy Parsees of Bombay, are failing in their duties. Not, though, the fellows who carry bodies to last resting places high above the teeming streets of the Gateway to India; they are still helping in the disposal of the dead in a way deemed by the non-Hindu sect not to be sacrilegious of fire, water or earth.

It is the vultures who are falling down on the job. A declining population of a particular species of this carnivorous scavenger means there are no longer enough of them efficiently to pick clean the bones of the recently deceased. Not to put too fine a point on a distressing situation, the bizarre Zoroastrian rite is sometimes taking as long as three years.

Cheer up, however. The British are on the case. Or rather, one is, a scientist who is to research possible reasons for the vulture's malaise.

It is that news item which resolves me to pack four hefty volumes to re-read during my coming holiday: the Raj Quartet series of novels by Paul Scott that includes The Towers of Silence and which, in a rare moment of literary perception long before it was faithfully adapted for television as the acclaimed The Jewel in the Crown, I recognised as a masterpiece about the last decades of British India.

It has also given unexpected topicality to memoirs written by an old soldier in Richmond mainly for the benefit of his grandchildren, his dwindling band of former comrades and the regimental archives. Maj Roy Tyler MBE provides this sidelight on another of the sub-continent's strange funerary customs:

"In Paklihawa in Nepal, where in 1958 he was at a Gurkha recruiting depot ... a bearer brought my lunch. A river ran round three sides of the site and looking idly out I saw a very dead human bottom bobbing up and down as fish and terrapins fed on it ... higher up in the hills the dead are buried under stones in the mountain streams; surges of water after a storm will sometimes dislodge one and off the cadaver goes, downstream into India."

Much else of 78-year-old Maj Tyler's memories is also not for the squeamish. Jewish terrorist atrocities in Jerusalem; a parachute landing elsewhere in Palestine alongside an officer whose nose had just been sliced off by a rigging line; and violent death everywhere from Algiers to Berlin.

He is on the Richmond committee for the link with a twin town in Norway, a country where 55 years ago he witnessed extraordinary scenes during the liberation of Oslo. Outside the German HQ, a Norwegian resistance detachment was shaving the heads of women collaborators, while inside "a terrific pre-incarceration party was going on with the Germans and their women's services. The whole atmosphere was unreal and sickening - a twilight of the Gods!"

I return to his post-war experiences in India. Some of it is pure Jewel in the Crown. His visit to a neglected cemetery in Benares where he happens upon the grave of four-year-old Emma, daughter of an East Surrey Regiment sergeant, recalls the death of Susan Layton's baby. Nearby is "To the memory of Surgeon Captain Peter Small, succumbed to a reptile bite, 22 December 1894"; an earlier The Day of the Scorpion, then, evoking another title from the Raj Quartet.

Suddenly, the name Merrick leaps from the page. And this in a story about the military police, in which Maj Tyler served for 35 of his 37 years in the army! But the coincidence with Jewel in the Crown and the ill-starred Ronald Merrick, the provost officer whose portrayal by Tim Pigott-Smith mesmerised the TV audience, falls away; this Merrick, as remembered by Maj Tyler, was a provost sergeant-major whom nurses had invited to bring his chaps to a hospital dance.

When they arrived, the matron was horrified: "Determined to defend her girls to the end, she spread-eagled herself across the door" to stop the soldiers going in. The memoirs aptly quote Kipling:

It's Tommy this, and Tommy that, and 'Chuck him out, the brute',

But it's saviour of 'is country when the guns begin to shoot!

Maj Tyler, of Culloden Mews, Richmond, is a Londoner who was commissioned from the ranks in 1960, and was in the Territorials before joining the Somerset Light Infantry in 1939. He is North Yorkshire president of the Royal Military Police Association, vice-president of Darlington branch of the Parachute Regimental Association and a Friend of the Green Howards Museum.

SOMEONE else who has been moved to put a personal slant on history is Mrs Betty Inns, whose husband was an old comrade of Roy Tyler . L Cpl Billy Inns, who was given a red-beret guard of honour at his funeral last year, was wounded and captured at Arnhem, the heroic attempt to capture "a bridge too far".

His story was told here last October, alongside that of a First World War officer and Military Cross winner whose family home had been in the Darlington street where the Inns lived a couple of generations later.

Now Mrs Inns has written about that street, Westbrook, an unusual cul-de-sac which gives on to High Northgate - the old Great North Road - near the Cannon cinema.

Westbrook Villas' place in history is one of association with the Stockton & Darlington Railway. The road, still privately owned by the score of householders, comprises large Victorian Gothic houses built for the burgeoning middle-class and managerial types of a town made prosperous by its pioneering role in world railways.

Mrs Inns and her husband lived in Westbrook for 42 years until 1997 and she has written her memoir as a kind of thank-you for their happy time there. Copies of it will be sent to all her former neighbours, most of whom have large gardens over the road from the houses and fronting the Cocker Beck; the local history room at the public library is also on the distribution list.

Her researches, as well as providing a detailed description of each house and the (surprisingly few) changes made to them over the decades, tell us that until the first house was built in 1860 the land had been a garden owned by the Pease family of Quakers whose own story is so bound up with that of the railways.

The last pair of semi-detached villas was completed in 1896; many are in the white Pease bricks also used for Darlington's old town hall, clock tower and covered market. Behind several of the houses survive the old coal-drops used by merchants whose nearby yards were supplied via the S&D Railway.

One of the most interesting discoveries is that before the last quarter of the 19th century, two of the largest houses had become schools. An 1871 street directory shows that 17 boys boarded at No 8, where the Inns were to live. There was schoolmaster Christopher Jackson, assistant master Henry Mason and domestic staff including a housemaid and a nursemaid. Curiously, there were also Christopher, Ethel and Eleanor Walton, listed as "family".

Was this, one wonders, one of the "Yorkshire schools" just over the county boundary from the "Dotheboys Hall", at Bowes, exposed by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby? Certainly, big as the house is, that's an awful lot of people to be squeezed in. And in such a nice road, too! By 1881 the school was no more.

No 18 was the other school. In an 1875 D&S Times' advertisement it offered to prepare young ladies for university; that must have been a rarity in those days. What was once a classroom, an outbuilding across the back-lane, is now the house's large garage. But this, too, seems to have been a short-lived venture, with an 1891 directory showing only a Robert Jones living in the six-bedroom house.

Just under half of Westbrook's households then had resident servants, whose masters included two accountants, a solicitor's clerk, a railway manager, an ironworks manager, a coal merchant (the father of Hayden Foster, the 1914-18 war hero mentioned above), an engine fitter, a draper and stonemason Thomas Nelson whose successors still carve gravestones in the town.

Ann Bulmer and her daughter kept No 17 as a boarding house and Elizabeth Robinson at No 19 is listed as an hotel proprietor. Westbrook Villas is not the posh address it once was, but it is heartening in 2000 that this leafy byway has escaped the worst excesses of multi-occupation.