Once Upon a Tender Time

by Carl Muller

  Sonnaboy thought different. ‘What other children? Like that Bryce next door? Can’t look at him hard he runs.’

  Bryce was Victor Ratnayake’s son, a long-faced little brat who would come back from school with his shirt still clean and his stocking hose in place and who would sit in the veranda and memorize his multiplication tables until he was blue in the face. Bryce blubbered a lot.

  The blubbering had begun early in life because his father, a bald man who had been a headmaster in his heyday and later became something quite nondescript in the Department of Education, liked to use a cane. It was a hangover from his headmastering days, and the cane he kept at home was most impressive. One could, if impelled, write a sonnet on it. Victor Ratnayake did not believe in sparing it either. When the beatings began, many households in the immediate vicinity listened with a sort of outraged silence. All Bryce got were ‘six of the best’ but Victor made the six last.

  Bryce would be dragged to the bedroom and made to lie across the bed, legs on the floor. Victor would then take the thick rattan from the top of the wardrobe and, fondling it lovingly, begin to talk to his son. ‘You know, no? You are the only boy. Our only son. Can you think about that? You know what it means? It means . . . you’re listening? It means in this family you’re like someone special, no?’ Bryce, who has started to blubber thinks he sees Hope smiling benignly.

  ‘But every day you’re getting bigger,’ Victor intones, ‘and now you must know how to behave, no? And then you want to be like a baby. Have you seen me any day pouring the whole bottle of ink on the cat?’

  ‘N-n-no Daddy . . . Daddy don’t beat me . . .’

  ‘Beat me? Who said I’m going to beat? Beating is one thing. Punishing is another thing. See me. I have to go to work and bring the salary and come to give everybody here to eat and pay the fees and buy the clothes and the ink for the pen also, no? And now what? Now I must buy another bottle of ink. Why?’

  Bryce declares open the waterworks. Victor stands behind him and Bryce turns his head anxiously. The boy’s long face is drawn longer and his mouth curves downwards. He looks ghastly. More so his nose begins to drip.

  ‘Turn your face to the bed,’ Victor raps, ‘who said for you to move. Did I say? Do you know the way the cat ran and rubbed ink on the kitchen wall? And paw marks with ink all over the hall. So why? Can you tell one reason why you went and poured ink all over it? One reason?’

  Bryce shudders. Boys don’t need reasons. There’s the cat. . . there’s the bottle of ink. How can one explain impulse as reason? It was such a novel idea at the time. A blue cat. Everybody said it was a blue Persian but there wasn’t a bit of blue on it. All he wanted to do was make it truly blue. Also the cat had scratched him but that was not credited.

  ‘An’ another thing,’ Victor went on, ‘that is an expensive cat, no? Bought it because your mummy said to buy. And now how to get the ink from all the fur? You think we can bathe and scrub like for a dog?’ And all the while the cane makes little swishes in the air and Bryce, who is too young to have a heart attack, presses his face into the sheets and prepares for the holocaust.

  The single stroke across his buttocks comes suddenly—a searing, cutting, vitriolic stroke that brings with it all the native charm of a branding iron. The boy’s shriek splits the air.

  Just six cuts. A six-second administration of parental ire if done at a tolerable rate. The six cuts on Bryce’s blistered bum take all of thirty minutes. Victor would wait. A patiently vicious man; a man who never admitted to the fear and loathing that crowded him during his headmastering days when he took savage delight in walloping pupils willy nilly. Oh, there were stories. It was even noised around that he left St John’s College under a very sour-faced cloud, but he stoutly maintained that he was a dedicated disciplinarian. It is the stamp of the good headmaster, he said. Uncaned is untamed!

  Carloboy would listen to the howling next door and shudder. He hated this ‘Uncle Victor’. Diana would blanch and run to the loo and Poddi would say, quite sepulchrally, ‘There you heard? Again to that Bryce baby beating.’

  Carloboy always wondered what went on during those pauses. Swipe! Scream! A strange sort of gibber and silence. Quite a long silence too. Bryce has just ceased to suffer when the cane sings again. Another howl, another huddled silence . . . and thus were many half hours of Bryce’s young life accounted for, while Sonnaboy would threaten to go there and put a stop to it and Beryl would say no, because: ‘Nobody can interfere, no? He can punish the son.’

  ‘Punish? That is punish? That is torturing!’

  ‘So that’s not our business. If can’t torture let do anything.’

  Sonnaboy would scowl at his son. ‘You can hear? That’s the way must give you also. Next time push you next door and tell to whack you also.’

  Chapter Five

  Life seemed to be full of ‘moments’, moments that came and went, filled with magic, drama, disaster, unease, revelry, joy, desolation. The chronicler passes lightly, even with timidity, over the events of the year. Even Carloboy dismissed it as nothing but ‘war, war, war’ and immersed himself in war stories and comics and listened avidly to the adults who gathered to regale each other with what they would do if they were Montgomery or Wavell or King George the Sixth.

  This took on a keener note at family parties where the ladies would discuss prices and other people’s vices and the men would sit around the dining table on which cut glass decanters glowed and twinkled with the amber of arrack and the conversation, like the devilled beef and pawkies and stuffed peppers, was spicy, racy and as brash and breezy as a sailor in the Jacuzzi.

  ‘So what do you think that Rommel will do, men?’ old ‘Amba’ Geddes would quaver. ‘Fine thing, no? If can’t advance two miles in two days. What men, this is an army or what?’

  ‘Pooh, what do you know, men?’ Totoboy would say, ‘all strategy. That’s what—here, pass the bottle men—had in the Observer also about this strategy.’

  ‘What the devil is all this strategy business,’ Sonnaboy declared, ‘if waiting for all this nonsense will have tragedy, not strategy.’

  ‘My, child, the nonsense these men are talking,’ Leah remarks.

  ‘War, war, war,’ Elsie says, ‘if have war, enough for them.’

  ‘Not enough the war when coming home every day,’ Iris complains, ‘drunk and singing and won’t even go to the lavatory, men. Standing near the gate and doing all over the pillar.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, men, and people on the road also going, no?’

  ‘Anney, I don’t know how you’re managing with him.’

  ‘. . . and how what Hitler said once? Said all the Germans were only walking in the sleep. But how now? One thing, whatever anybody says that Hitler is a pukka bugger.’

  ‘Sleeping and walking? Huh, if all are sleeping and walking how did they capture Poland and all?’

  ‘. . . you must see the dance at home, men. Fighting to read the paper. Children also going mad about this war. Should have seen the nonsense yesterday. Next door house Mortier’s boys taking brooms and marching.’

  ‘. . . actually I think these bloody English can’t fight. Only big talk. They don’t know what to do with their army. Only polishing boots and shouting in the sun!’

  The children would let their imaginations climb the walls. Carloboy, who read avidly and translated all he read into real-terms action, usually held centre stage. His listeners—assorted neighbourhood boys—would listen, openmouthed. Oh, lots of tall stories, artfully spun, twisted out of penny dreadfuls into first-person exploits and made to seem extra real, extra dramatic, and Bryce Ratnayake and Merril Phoebus and Michael de Joodt and Maurice Foenander would listen and shrug and try to air vestiges of their own outrageous imaginations to match or exceed what was tossed at them.

  It was all a game, actually, but there was danger too, for seven-year-old Carloboy tended to believe in all he trotted out. He had his own Walter Mitty world. Suddenly he was a daring Nazi spy h
unter. And surely he had only to say ‘Shazam!’ and become a caped hero. He had actually worn a pair of blue socks on his hands one day, knotted a towel around his neck and hurled himself over the wall, a manoeuvre that made Phoebus’ hens in dire need of a psychiatrist. The hens became alien invaders. Carloboy, the towelled tormentor from Planet X was saving the Earth. Or he was a secret agent for the British Intelligence with plans to be delivered to the Chatham Street office of the Captain of the Navy. And what about the day he saw a man, very furtive, slouching along outside the Wellawatte police station?

  ‘I knew the moment I saw him he was up to something.’

  ‘How did you know?’ asks Johnny Bulner.

  ‘The way he was, men. Not like other people on the road. Very sus-sus-suspicious.’

  ‘My gawsh, if you see the people in our lane,’ said Sammy Redlich.

  ‘Why? What about them?’

  ‘All like what you said. Suspi-suspi something. Just going upan’ down, looking at windows. Not going to anybody’s house even. Just walking.’

  The boys nodded gravely. The pedestrian art was henceforth to be looked upon with the gravest concern.

  ‘So never mind your lane, listen, will you. This fellow near the police station. Suddenly he went to top of Hamers Avenue and stood near the lamp-post. Just stood.’

  ‘Gawsh. Muss’ave been waiting for his gang, mussbe,’ Sammy Redlich hissed.

  ‘Gang?’ Carloboy frowned. ‘No gang anywhere to be seen. Anyway I also went quietly to the market there and waited.’

  ‘Gawsh.’

  ‘Shut up, men. You and your gawsh,’ Michael de Joodt told Sammy.

  Bryce Ratnayake gave a small shiver of excitement. ‘So you saw his face and all?’

  ‘Had a hat,’ Carloboy decorated his mystery man, ‘just like hats they wear in that serial picture Shadow. Also in ’Merican detective stories. Covering whole top of the face . . . an’ a beard also.’

  ‘Beard?’ Bryce squeaked.

  ‘Yes, black beard. Real crook he looked. An’ a bicycle also.’

  ‘But you said he was walking about, no?’ Merril Phoebus objected.

  ‘Yes, men, so listen, will you. Have been keeping the bicycle near the lamp-post.’

  The boys are enthralled. Carloboy thought fast. He was actually seeing himself, the ‘Shadow’, stalking a man who held the fate of Ceylon’s coastal defences in his hands. A German spy. ‘I knew at once he was a German.’

  ‘G’wan! As if have any Germans here. My daddy said all are fighting now in Italy.’

  Bulner sniffed. ‘You buggers don’t know anything. I saw the papers, men. That is only some Germans helping that Mussolini fellow. Now Germans are everywhere. France an’ going to Russia also. If can go to Russia why they can’t come here?’

  Carloboy also sniffed. ‘So don’t listen then if anybody don’t believe. As if I care.’

  ‘Never mind them, men,’ Bulner said, ‘so what happened?’

  Carloboy was a good storyteller. ‘I waited near the kaday and then again he went near the police station.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘How do I know? Can I go an’ ask for what he’s walking near there?’

  ‘Foo, I would have gone quietly behind an’ when he was near the gate given him a bloody push to go flying inside and shouted German, German!’

  Carloboy frowned. ‘I thought to do that,’ he said quickly, ‘but how if he shouted and said I pushed? Will say he was just walking and I came and pushed. Thoppi1 for me then.’

  Phoebus rose to a point of order. ‘So even if he shouted who can unnerstan’ what he’s saying? You said he’s German, no?’

  ‘So you think German people don’ know English?’

  ‘Dass true,’ said Foenander, ‘see in the comics how all the German soldiers saying Achtung! Achtung! and funny things like that but still they’re talking English also.’

  Carloboy welcomed the crosstalk. It gave him time to embroider his story, build it up to a big scene. ‘Lucky I had some money. Not like for you, my daddy always gives me money.’

  ‘My daddy also gives when he is in a good mood. Yesterday when I bought cigarettes from the market he said where the balance. Had thirty cents an’ first he took it, then he called an’ said to take and keep it.’

  ‘You’re giving balance?’ Bulner asked incredulously. ‘Be like me, will you. I just feel in the pocket and then say must have dropped on the road.’

  ‘Ammo,2 if I go to say like that I’ll get a kanay.’3

  ‘So that even never mind. Have the money, no?’

  ‘Anyway,’ Carloboy said, ‘I quickly went to the market and bought some toothpaste.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Hee, hee, to brush the German’s teeth?’

  ‘You laugh. Only know to laugh. Slowly I went to the bicycle and put the Swastika mark on the seat with the toothpaste.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My God. What for?’

  Carloboy was enjoying himself. ‘Listen, will you!’ Suddenly he had his climax. He was a hero. He was about to unmask a spy and earn the gratitude of the army and generals and admirals and everyone else he could drum up.

  ‘He came back and whole time looking back at the police station. Then two police kossas4 came out . . .’

  And so the fevered dreams were spun out and Carloboy became in turn, adventurer, explorer, the king of the cowboys, a comic book hero. Small wonder his teachers found him tiresome and everybody regarded him as a ‘bloody little liar’ and never knew what to expect of him.

  A great contributing factor were the Saturday afternoon ‘serials’—those popular cliff-hanger films which were screened at the Capitol Cinema and the National Talkies. Second grade cinemas with wooden seats which housed colonies of bugs but places of weekly pilgrimage for hundreds of small boys who would scrimp and scrounge and beg and, yes, even steal, to follow the exploits of such swashbucklers as the Green Arrow, Zorro and Sir Galahad, or tingle in excitement as Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe flicked through the curtains of space as Flash Gordon on a trip to Mars.

  Pure escapism. All these serials, came out of Republic studios, or Universal or Columbia and they held their young viewers enthralled. And they were ‘serialized’, hence the name. Carloboy would join a gang of boys who had the good fortune to own an adult who was a passionate serial fan. Uncle Aloy, as they called him, lived in 34th Lane and being a bachelor and well liked by all and sundry, was trusted by the neighbourhood to ‘take the little buggers to the pictures’.

  Of course, going to one serial, which only lasted thirty minutes of real film time and gave young viewers thirty bug bites per minute, was of no real use whatsoever. The only real guarantee was that a few enterprising bugs could be carried home. The charm of the serial was that there were fourteen ‘chapters’ seen, week after week. The ‘talkies’ did a roaring business even if the children were on half tickets (just fifty cents) while Uncle Aloy paid a rupee and they would commandeer a row as close to the screen as possible and impatiently count the bells.

  Three bells in all, the first fifteen minutes before curtain just to tell the audience that the management was pretty peeved about the number of vacant seats in the two and four rupees rows, the second to say that the management was in a better frame of mind and since the public had not broken faith, the film would commence in five minutes and would those in the toilets kindly leave off whatever they were doing and return to their seats.

  With the third bell came the eclipse. A sudden darkening of the hall and a serried creaking of seats as couples in the four rupee rows learned towards each other and fumbled.

  Below the rupee seats was the ‘gallery’ (popularly referred to as the ‘gallows’) where, at twenty-five cents per head, hordes of street urchins and ruffians in hitched-up sarongs and dirty T-shirts, hissed, hooted, whistled and brayed as they wallowed in the action. Marvellous fist fights. Congo Bill or Tarzan killed panthers, each in his peculiar way; Congo Bill would
use a wicked double bore while Tarzan would thump his chest, yodel and leap on the animal’s back.

  Another favourite character, Jungle Jim would dangle over a hiccoughing volcano while a villainous bushman would saw at the rope with a spear and everyone in the ‘gallows’ would get quite hysterical.

  Carloboy loved every minute of it. The end of each serial was always the most nerve-racking, the most nail-biting. Holt of the Secret Service would be drugged, tied to a railtrack and left to say hello to an oncoming train. The music would grow very bassy and drums would tattoo and there was the train, rushing, rushing, and Carloboy would grip his knees and poise on the hard edge of his seat, and there would be an explosion of white stars and the serial ended.

  And so, week after week, the serial was the most potent, most galvanic, most magnetic event for Burgher boys of all ages and Uncle Aloy the most adored of adults in a galaxy where most adults were usually regarded as too heavy handed and too fond of wielding slippers, belts, razor strops, sticks and anything handy. Sometimes Uncle Aloy treated them to Kit Kat chocolates or Mars bars and bottles of orange barley water. What more could Carloboy wish for? He had Buck Rogers on a spaceship to Venus, Don Winslow taking his battle cruiser into Gibraltar, the Black Hawks zooming out to meet a squadron of German fighter planes, Dick Tracy on the trail of counterfeiters, the Shadow stalking a homicidal maniac, the Spy Smasher on the heels of a bunch of Chinese who wanted to do something nasty to Hong Kong, Red Ryder plunging into an ocean of stampeding longhorns and the Lone Ranger with his silver bullets and secret silver mine. There was also the Ghost Who Walks in his Skull Cave and with a skull ring which left the mark of the Skull on every lowlife he clouted.

  Biff! Bam! Pow! Wham! Wow! became a part of every small boy’s vocabulary. Carloboy lapped it all up, gorged on every fantasy, became part of this never-never world. Could he slip into a telephone booth or a broom closet, strip off his shirt and plunge out as Superman? Or just say some abracadabra, wait for a bolt of lightning and be transformed into Captain Marvel? Dell Comics of America furthered the legend. They produced a boy who had only to shout ‘Captain Marvel!’ and lo, a burst of atmospherics and he became Captain Marvel Junior. Later, a girl joined the family—Mary Marvel—and Carloboy wished and wished that he could be in America. These superheroes were so delightfully devastating. Yes, he was in the wrong country. Batman was in America. So was Superman and the Marvel family. And what about Torch and Toro . . . and the Submariner . . . and Captain America . . . and why weren’t there cowboys in Ceylon? No Gene Autry, no Roy Rogers, no gunfighters, no Kit Carson . . . Ceylon was a drag. Sometimes he wondered why his father couldn’t wear a cape and tight plants. Daddy would be a marvellous Superman. Daddy had bigger muscles too!