Once Upon a Tender Time

by Carl Muller

  Beryl was drawn to these more expensive ‘Yank Mags’ but felt a certain self-consciousness in even riffling through them. She had picked up a copy one day. One advertisement claimed to know how a flat-chested woman could improve her social lot by developing her bust. Another announced ‘Naughty stickers’. She squinted at them. Nothing naughty about them, surely. Big bosomed, yes. Too curvaceous, yes. But the wide mouthed girls with hands on hips and legs invitingly apart were all quite tolerably clad. She slipped the magazine with the others she had selected and tried to look offhand. Daniel made a cursory check, squiggled on a pad and said, ‘Four rupees, lady, and then baby also taking two-fifty.’

  Beryl said, ‘Give here to see . . . you’re mad or what? Just taking like this. Here, put this back. No! This one. See the price, will you? I told, no, only one comic.’

  Carloboy surrenders the Captain Marvel and pulls a face. Sulkily he stands at the door to watch Jamis, the bicycle repair man, wrest the pink inner tube from a tyre.

  Jamis is a black-skinned Sinhalese With high, bushy hair, an Indian film-star moustache, grease on his hands and he wears his sarong tucked over his knees. He winks slowly and puts the tip of his tongue out at Carloboy. He squats beside a bicycle, a few oily spanners beside him. Jamis has inflated the damaged inner tube and immerses it, section by section into a tin basin of water to check where the leak is. Carloboy edges closer to watch. Jamis winks again and pushes his tongue into his cheek to make a bulge. Then, glancing quickly around, he slyly raises the bottom of his sarong and exposes a large brown penis with its knob of black-mauve-pink and a bramble of dark hair. Carloboy stares, fascinated, as the penis throbs, rising in little bobbing jerks as if it were a live thing. Just as swiftly Jamis rearranges his sarong and bends over the basin as pedestrians approach and Beryl emerges to lead her son away. The boy clutches his satchel, his comics and follows his mother and looks back at Jamis’ wise smile. The man gestures with his fingers over the spot where that big cock lay and Carloboy frowns and feels quite restless and strangely excited. Such a size. And the colour. He had seen a grown man’s sex. No, a big man had actually shown him!

  They crossed the Galle Road to the bus stand and took a red South Western bus to Bambalapitiya. At home, Beryl reads the small print on the pages of ‘naughty stickers’. Why, she needed a tumbler of water. She was instructed to fill a glass with water, then affix a sticker on the outside of the glass and look at the back of the sticker through the water. She smiled hugely. Viewed as so instructed, the girl’s clothes disappeared. She was big breasted, voluptuously big-hipped, narrow-waisted, altogether gorgeous, and completely nude. My, the things these Americans think of!

  Carloboy had serious things to think of too. He ran to the lavatory and raised the leg of his trousers to regard his own male equipment. So small, and sheathed with a foreskin that made a squiggly bit. at the end. He fondled it and thought of that big brown cock and the way it kept rearing up and he found his own penis grow stiff and stick upwards. He tried to pull back the sheath but it parted to ride a little way over his glans and wouldn’t go any farther. He kept stroking, pushing at the foreskin, back and forth, then dropped the leg of his trouser to watch the little bulge slowly disappear. The tenseness, the inexplicable feeling that he was on a tightrope of his own nerves also subsided.

  He tried again. He squeezed his penis. Nothing happened. But he let his mind go back to the bicycle man, the sly flick of that sarong, and suddenly he was hard again. So hard that when he tried to urinate, he couldn’t. And he felt the strangeness rather nice. Exciting. As though he had made a most pleasurable discovery.

  ‘What are you doing so long in the lavatory?’ Beryl shouted, and he emerged, looking down anxiously. No bulge. But there was a flush on his face because a nagging thought warned him that there were some secret things in a boy’s life which parents would never condone.

  Poddi called: ‘Baby, come and eat,’ and he sat at the little table in the rear veranda and Poddi said, ‘Have

  murunga3 and beef and rice have. All must eat, right?’

  Chapter Four

  The boys of St Peter’s, deprived of their school, were pushed into two temporary locations—one, a row of made-over cowsheds, hurriedly readied in the grounds of the seminary of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Bambalapitiya, and the other a large rectangle of palm-thatch buildings behind St Mary’s Church, Dehiwela. Carloboy saw little sense in this switch in schools. ‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘when we are here, going to Wellawatte school. Now when we are going to there will have to come here to school.’

  Beryl didn’t think so. ‘You shut up,’ she countered, ‘coming to poke the mouth.’ She had made up her mind. Diana must go to the Holy Family Convent next year. Sonnaboy wanted to know why.

  ‘So my school, no? And Mother Gonzaga will be happy when I go to tell. And now Millie also teaching there so can keep an eye.’

  Millicent June, another of Beryl’s elder sisters (she had several) had ‘not been a small one’—which in the Burgher argot meant that there was more to her than one would imagine. Millicent had had her fling—cigarettes in long holders and dancing the box step at the Sailors and Soldiers Institute and going to matinees at the Regal Cinema with her bosom friend Zoe Charlotte Prinsz who was known, naturally, as Charlotte the harlot. The two women were inseparable. They went for walks on the beach together, ate together, chattered to each other like house sparrows and decided that they should marry on the same day. They never reckoned on the zigs and zags of life. Millie, with an earnest young buck ready to swoon at her feet, would look at his Adam’s apple and say no. Very crisply, too.

  Elva Columbine, her younger sister, would wish to know why. ‘What? You told that Rulach boy not to come to see you again? Only las’ week you saying how nice he is.’

  Millie would glower. ‘None of your business. If I don’t want I don’t want. Getting entangled like that, and then what about Zoe?’

  ‘So what about Zoe?’

  ‘See, will you, no boy for her, no? If I say yes and that Aldo Rulach and I get engaged and all, and if he says come go somewhere, Zoe will be all alone, no?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what will she feel? Sin, no?’

  Elva, born with no compunction whatsoever, couldn’t understand. ‘What to sin, men. Just let her be. Funny thing, I think. If you get married you’ll take Zoe also and go for the honeymoon?’

  ‘You shut up! What I do not for you to talk. Too much you’re getting for your age.’

  So Millie whiled away her youth and eventually decided that she would teach. An easy decision, for Zoe and she both answered the call for teachers and the Holy Family Convent accepted them. They seemed to have made a pact to tread the long, dreary road of spinsterhood together.

  Millie or no Millie, Sonnaboy grunted objections. He didn’t like to be reminded of Mother Gonzaga and had stayed clear of that forbidding nun ever since his first encounter with her.1

  Beryl had apparently thought the matter through. ‘We will be shifting to Wellawatte, right? And have to send this bugger to Bambalapitiya . . . and Diana also have to send to Bambalapitiya convent . . . so we get a rickshaw to take both.’

  ‘Rickshaw? My God, everyday to go? Two rupees a day for sure.’

  Beryl sniffed. ‘When drinking six rupees, six rupees arrack everyday good. Can put both in the rickshaw and send. Rickshawman put him at St Peter’s and take Diana to the convent. Then he wait there.’

  ‘Huh! He’s just going to wait. If get a hire he will go. Or if go to Kollupitiya and drink toddy at the tavern and get drunk will take the child and go somewhere else!’

  Beryl grew cross. ‘That time in the morning how to get drunk, men. You thought he’s like that driver Ferreira? And only have to wait till ’leven thirty, no?’

  Sonnaboy was thinking about Ferreira. ‘Still can’t get over the way that bugger is drinking. I told you how I went to his house in Fussels Lane?’

  ‘Yes, yes, you told. Now the ric
kshaw—’

  ‘Eight o’clock in the morning. Pouring arrack in the teacup and drinking!’

  ‘I know, I know. How many times you told I don’t know. So rickshawman take Diana, come to seminary and put this devil inside also and come home.’

  Sonnaboy looked gloomy. ‘All easy to say but you think it’s easy? Take and go, bring and come. In class never mind. Can go and piss. Now will piss in the rickshaw also. and you think she’ll go alone after dropping this bugger? Howl all the way.’

  ‘This bugger’ is not pleased with the exchange. I can’t go to school with her,’ he says.

  ‘Shut up! What do you mean you can’t? Slipper you if try your nonsense.’

  Carloboy sulked and edged away. ‘One day she will pippie and pippie and I’ll get drowned for sure,’ he muttered.

  Sonnaboy scowled. ‘The Way you’re shouting at him. What men, he’s the one who has to go, no. If piss in the rickshaw will wet his clothes also.’

  ‘So what to do? She also must start school, no?’

  As a lot of parents grumbled, going to the seminary was all well and good, but why the seminary cowsheds for God’s sake? The seminarians were quite special. They would one day be ordained and wear white cassocks with black sashes and a crucifix and grow saintly beards. These boys had their teachers—stooped priests with dusty robes and ink-stained fingers who mumbled in class and at Mass. One exception was Father ‘Jive Boy’ who was the music master, choir master, played organ, piano, violin and cello and moved around as though he was keeping time with some be-bop chorus of rebel angles. He swung and swayed through Mass and every turn at the altar seemed like a slow Spanish fandango. Even his fingers seemed to dance when he bestowed the last blessing and sang out ‘Ite, missa est’ (‘Go, the Mass is ended’).

  The classrooms built for the Peterites were, in truth, the seminary’s cowsheds. The oblates had their pinta day until wartime privations overtook the country. The cows disappeared. So did the knock-kneed men who humped the bales of fodder. The cowsheds were cleaned out, whitewashed, roof rethatched, and made ready for the grim business of stuffing knowledge into young heads.

  Until the family moved, in a procession of bullock carts, to Wellawatte, Carloboy was propelled across the Galle Road every morning and shoved through the seminary gates. There, he was greeted by a white, marble statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, a grove of coconut palms, badly pruned lines of box hedge and an imposing tombstone. To his right, the cowshed classrooms. The seminary nestled deeper in this sprawling land tract which swept down to a white-stave fence beside the railway and the sea. A belt of Indian almond trees and hardy allamanda shrubs hid the seminary. It was a squat, yet airy building with pillared verandas and innumerable doors. It was, in short, a priest factory, and operated on the lines of a sacerdotal sausage plant—push in a boy, grind him into submission, stuff him with Latin and Church history, marinade him with the Apologia, toss in a rigmarole of ceremonial and an awareness of the ‘pecking order’ and then roll him out in a uniform that is supposed to desex him, to spend the rest of his life telling the rest of the gullible world that he can forgive sin and can touch the body of Christ and advise daughters on how to comport themselves in their marriage beds. They emerged, too, as sleek as prime sausages. After all, priests live not by bread alone.

  Carloboy was a dreamer of the worst sort. And, like all small boys, was all ears. He liked to listen to his father and the railway cronies when they came home to sit around a couple of bottles of arrack. Conversation, as the spirit level dropped in each bottle, was extremely colourful. And he would be always pressed into service. Sonnaboy would call: ‘Here, come here, son, go and bring five Peacocks,’ and Carloboy would take the twenty-five cent bit and race to the kiosk at the top of the lane where old Kadayman, ‘market man’, sold cigarettes, Sunlight soap, packets of tooth powder, round crackly bread rusks, cigarettes, coconut oil, envelopes, notepaper. Kadayman also had lots of boiled sweets in dirty jars and rows of garishly coloured aerated waters.

  Sonnaboy smoked Peacocks, which everybody said were the strongest cigarettes. They were dubbed ‘coffin nails’. Carloboy would sometimes put a cigarette to his lips and taste the tobacco. The Peacocks were not tipped. Sometimes a little thread of blackish tobacco would remain on his tongue and he would turn it in his mouth, then spit it out. It tasted terrible.

  ‘Colon uncle’2 smoked Sportsmans, which cost two cents more and were very mild. On paydays, Sonnaboy would buy his Peacocks in tins of fifty. The tins had sharp rims and were excellent for cutting pastry circles when Beryl made patties. Sonnaboy used to smoke Elephant cigarettes, just one cent each, but switched to Peacocks after the Elephant company puffed itself out of business.

  Uncle Totoboy3 preferred Diving Girls. There were so many brands in the market, including the Capstan Navy Cut (which the natives called Naicut) and Players, that Carloboy began to collect empty packets. Uncle George,4 who worked in the port, could always be relied on to bring home something new—like Craven As and Markovitch and Wild Woodbine, which he pinched or cadged from sundry seafarers.

  When Daddy was home, Carloboy became a ‘gopher’. ‘Go and bring a bottle of ginger ale’, ‘Go and get five eggs, and don’t drop on the road. Carry and bring carefully’. Beryl, too, used the boy to bring this, that and the other. He ran for bread, for two limes, for ten cents worth kotthamalli (coriander) for a packet of pappadams, an exercise book, a chundu (a local measure, usually a quantity slightly less than what could be held in a cigarette tin) of salt.

  All over, boys became both street-wise and market-wise. Merril Cockburn would say: ‘Don’t go to that Thambi5 market when nobody else is there buying anything. Dirty fellow, he is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t know, men. Yesterday I went to buy a soother. Mummy said have there plastic ones.’

  ‘What for soother?’

  ‘I don’t know, men. Can’t find the baby’s soother. Dog must have taken I think but scolding me. One thing, anything get lost at home everyone saying I’m the one.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I went and nobody else there. Only I. So I said want one soother. He pulling me to go inside to the back. I said what for, there have soothers in the front, blue colour ones—only Mummy said to buy pink if have—’

  ‘Never mind that, what happened?’

  ‘I got ‘fraid, men. Nobody else also. Putting hand round and pushing me to go inside. Telling will give lot of sweets if I come. I pushed and ran. Had to go to Light Stores to buy the soother.’

  Yes, whether six or sixteen, Burgher boys were the runners, the fetchers, the bringers. They quickly found shortcuts through private gardens, scaled walls, crept through barbed wire fences, raided fruit trees, dallied to take in anything that appealed to them, stopped to gaze at padda boats6 on the canals, threw stones at dogs bonded after a horny public performance, stole flowers, mangoes, guavas, kicked over dustbins and even rolled bicycle rim hoops as they ran.

  Moving to 34th Lane, Wellawatte, Carloboy could do his market runs in either direction—race down to Hampden Lane and the little tea kiosk and stores by the canal, or run, kicking clouds of red dust to the Galle Road where shops stretched in either direction. It was a busy life for a small boy who got very used to haring about, barefooted, burnt berry brown and with a marketing bag that was sorry to behold.

  The garden in front of the 34th Lane house was ‘private’. There was a rusting metal sign which read, NO ADMITICEN , and which everybody ignored. The garden was a jungle of briars and lantana and led to the bottom of St Lawrence’s Road where the church stood to left and Carloboy’s cousins, Marlene and Ivor7 lived below the bend to the right. The new home was all very well . . . but now he had to share a rickshaw with Diana and voiced protest.

  The rickshawman was a wizened little Tamil who may have been anything from forty to sixty. He had a white cloth around his head and big feet and a shirt that was all patches. He wore baggy trousers that hung,
frayed, below his knees and salaamed furiously. These human beasts of burden were a familiar city sight in the Forties. Millie had a rickshaw wallah who bowled her jauntily to the convent, and so did George de Mello who hated travelling by bus. The rickety men, hauling their rickety contraptions, ran all over the city roads. Reverend Mothers went sedately in their ‘convent rickshaws’ and a rickshaw would be usually sent to fetch a doctor. Fat merchants transported their goods in them if the load did not warrant the employment of a cart, while the rickshaw was deemed the ideal conveyance for taking drunks home from the various bars in Hospital Street, Chatham Street and Bristol Street. This was always an event. There in the gathering night raced a rickshaw with old Pukface Adolphus, soused to the sacroilliac, conducting an invisible orchestra and bellowing:

  Arssoles arr cheap today

  Cheeper dan yeshterday

  to the tune of ‘Santa Lucia.’

  Indeed, the Colombo Municipality created Rickshaw Stands where the conveyances would park and the men wait for custom.

  Carloboy would sit and dig an elbow into Diana, who would pull down her lower lip and prepare to screech her indignation. Every morning the rickshawman would stop at the top of Station Road, put down the shafts and skip into the Municipal Lavatory. Diana would remark, ‘Again he’s going there.’

  Carloboy reads the yellowing sign. The air around this public convenience is positively foetid but the thought would strike him that the man must be having a penis as big as the one Jamis had exhibited. ‘That’s the road lavatory,’ he said. ‘If go in can see him pissing.’