Once Upon a Tender Time

by Carl Muller

  He felt her wetness. His forefinger disappeared into this wetness.

  ‘Other finger also put. Baby’s hand small, no? Put all to see.’ Holding together his thumb and fingers she pushed in his hand up to his knuckles. ‘Now well put inside. Slowly, slowly.’ The knuckles disappeared. Carloboy gazed, fascinated, as his fingers slipped snugly in. He pushed hesitantly. The woman gasped. ‘Now a little take out and again push. Like that do. Quickly do!’ The boy eased his elbow and began to pump his fingers into the orifice. The woman’s raised knees began to tremble and she clutched at the boy’s hip. She flung her other hand to the head of her vagina, fingers kneading her clitoris until, with a sharp cry, she locked her thighs, gripping his fingers inside her, pulling Carloboy against her, pressing her mouth to his hip and she squirmed with the paroxysm.

  She gave him a kitchen rag to wipe himself and went to a store room where she took a one rupee note. Treasure indeed for Carloboy who took it eagerly.

  ‘Again come you must, right? Another rupee I’ll give.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Baby mango tree near wait. I’ll come and tell.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Baby like, no?’

  Carloboy nodded. He sniffed at his hand. It smelled funny. Like egg in the fridge. He seemed to smell it all over him. ‘I’ll wash a little?’

  She said no. ‘Home run and wash. Now nona come. Quickly go.’

  He went.

  The chronicler would like to stick his oar in at this juncture to make what he considers a pertinent observation. It was a peculiarity that in those times, sexual assaults on children left them besmirched more in mind than in body. One cannot say which is worse, of course, but one had little doubt that thousands of today’s upright citizens could say—if they have a mind to, that is—that childhood sexual encounters were, at the worst, rather messy, quite shameful at the moment, but never physically hurtful. Mental degradation, oh yes, but physically unharmful. It has been gleaned from many latter-day admissions of young adults that the sexual assaults they were subject to were mostly extraneous. Mutual acts of masturbation and the satisfaction of genital friction at the most. This, although most deplorable, carried little in aftermath. Sodomy was, somehow, abhorrent. Virginity was rarely violated. The natural resilience of childhood helped too. The only fear was in being discovered and there remained, too, an initial sense of shame that prompted children to avoid further contact with any person who had inveigled them into a sex act, used their bodies briefly and rewarded them with coin or sweets. Of course, some found it a source of revenue and thought little of allowing this uncle or that to meddle with them as often as it pleased him. There was danger in this, of course. Beryl’s brother, Charles Whitechapel da Brea, who married Hazel Marjorie Peterson, sired four children. The eldest, a girl, was Pamilla, the second, also a girl, was Eliza, the third, a boy—and the only boy was Geordie—and he was followed by yet another girl, Rosabelle. In the rumbustious history of that family (where Pamilla married Chootyboy Brooks and Eliza was screwed in the rear seat of a car in Saranankara Road and had a beautiful bastard boy, and Rosabelle thought nothing of groping for Carloboy’s cock at every family get-together) Geordie became darling of a long procession of men up and down the lane, of prefects and masters in schools, more prefects and masters in an upcountry school where he was boarded and finally came to regard himself as a sexual plaything for any and every male who wished to use him. Geordie also had a huge cock and was incredibly effeminate. He liked to be kissed by the men he openly courted and when he found that his eight-inch organ was an impediment to short trousers, would artfully tuck his member between his legs and walk tight-thighed like a girl, thus making him more attractive to all and sundry.

  But more of this later. It is necessary, the chronicler maintains, to place Carloboy and his ilk in raw perspective. This is not a social study in any sense of the word, but too often Society tends to keep a lid on what should be dragged out, debated. As would be imagined, and as Father Grero of St Lawrence’s Church would have decidedly said, the cohorts of Hell were working overtime on the innocents of the parish. It was all part of that ever-popular triumvirate: the devil, the world, and the flesh—and it made those tender years in many homes quite a circus!

  And there was the war, of course. The war, and sadly, an unholy preoccupation with the war. Fathers discussed Rommel. They were proud to know the German Field Marshal by his full name, Erwin Rommel, but would never know or care to know of the name of the man who was giving Pattiboy ten cents to shake him until he ejaculated.

  Sonnaboy thought highly of Rommel. ‘How the story? That bugger Rommel went to the prison camp and gave tea to the British prisoners.’

  ‘Yes, men,’ old Phoebus would say, ‘one thing, not like the other bastards, no? Killing civilians and putting massacres and all.’

  ‘Had a big article in the papers last week. Imagine, men, his father was a schoolmaster. And must be quite old now, no? Was in First World War also. I remember about twenty-five–thirty years ago how he fought in the mountains. Won some pukka battles.’

  ‘I think he’s the one who took Czechoslovakia and Poland and France.’

  ‘Then what? Who else? And how the way he went to Paris? Our bloody engines taking four hours to go to Galle. Rommel took his Panzers to Paris in eight days and not fast those tanks, no?’

  ‘Anyway, our Montgomery also not a small one.’

  ‘Dass true. If anybody licks Rommel, it will be Montgomery, you wait and see.’

  ‘Why just say Rommel the British are scared, men.’

  ‘His son also putting in the army.’

  ‘Who? Rommel’s?’

  ‘Yes, men, and Hitler gave the Iron Cross also.’

  ‘To who? The son?’

  ‘No, men. To Rommel.’

  ‘Ah!’

  So what could be more important? Oh, plenty, when one considers the giddy-go-round events of the time, and especially when the cowshed school was adamant that Carloboy should go to the Dehiwela branch of the same school because Father Theo couldn’t abide the boy. Sonnaboy, too, moved over the rear wall of his 34th Lane house into a house in Mahadangahawatte Lane where Carloboy found a common wall which allowed him to still sneak over to Uncle Aloy’s whenever the serial bug bit and which gave Uncle Aloy much satisfaction.

  It all began with Father Theo who found a slate-eyed Sonnaboy most distasteful on the subject of railway high jinks. Also, Sonnaboy’s visit to the school had unnerved the priest whom everybody called ‘Glamourboy’ because he fancied himself, pomaded his hair heavily, and spent as much time at his mirror as he did in the chapel.

  ‘It is not what happened or did not happen,’ he had said primly, ‘these are not the sort of things that must be aired in a classroom. Boys are young and young boys are impressionable.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Supposing a child in our charge thinks that he could lie on the rail track and allow a train to go over him?’

  Sonnaboy raised an eyebrow—the equivalent of a Victorian ‘pshaw!’

  They parted with many things unsaid, naturally.

  When the letter came Beryl was not in the sunniest. ‘See, men, telling that after taking distance into account, he must go to Dehiwela St Peter’s.’

  ‘What? Who is saying?’

  ‘Here the letter. From the school. All students living past Manning Place to go to Dehiwela.’

  It was pleaded that the cowsheds were crammed to distraction. Pupils home in from as far away as Slave Island, from Kollupitiya, Havelock Town, Timbirigasyaya, Wellawatte, etc., etc. It was impressed that the coconut thatch complex in Dehiwela was also St Peter’s under the benevolent eye of St Mary’s Church and hence extremely Catholic in character with every priestly effort to keep it that way. Henceforth, it was patiently explained, distance would be the selective force. Geography had to be taken into account, proximity pandered to. Carloboy, it was deemed, was approximately 500 yards closer to the Dehiwela establishment than he
was to Bambalapitiya.

  ‘Any bugger came near the gate with a measuring tape?’ Sonnaboy wished to know. ‘Bloody priests. Now have to send this bugger to Dehiwela. Let Diana go alone and send him by bus.’

  Sonnaboy had other fish to fry so he allowed this school change to go unchallenged. Since Germany was now in a sort of reverse gear and Japan was occupied in the Pacific and since the worst of it seemed to be over, and the Easter Sunday air raid had come and gone6 and North Africa and Italy were where the mopping up operations by the Allies had begun, many nervous Ceylonese who had headed for the hills returned to their Colombo haunts. House rents rose sharply as demand grew, and Sonnaboy’s landlord remarked that thirty rupees was no self-respecting rent. He demanded sixty-five and got instead such a slap that he raced to the police station and found that it hurt him too much to make a vocal complaint. But Sonnaboy found the house behind his backyard vacant and, on inspection, was satisfied that it was bigger, had a servants’ lavatory and a very nice strip of garden. Also, Beryl said, she loved the purple bougainvillaea which rioted spectacularly in a corner of the garden, and the road beyond the gate was tarred and not a red dust road which raised clouds of dust with each passing vehicle.

  Rental, too, was ‘reasonable’ and there was a closed-in veranda and a hall, and Sonnaboy’s friend Georgie Ferreira, who was an auctioneer and always wore his wife’s frilly nightgowns to bed, lived opposite.

  ‘Not bad, no,’ Sonnaboy told his family, ‘and have a back veranda and big kitchen also. Over the wall, Ratnayake’s house and over that wall Phoebus. Only next door have some Tamil fellows but only men there. Nothing for you to go an’ talk.’ This to Beryl who sniffed and said, ‘So when we are going?’

  Chapter Six

  Carloboy found St Peter’s, Dehiwela a strange place and the pupils too decidedly rougher, even quite eccentric. There was Feddo Holmes who carried his sandwiches in his Atlas and Maxie Ribeiro who made shocking whistles with two fingers stuck into the sides of his mouth and Lanny Gogerly who wrote letters to his classmates inviting them to suck his cock. A kindly soul, he would remind them to bring their handkerchiefs to wipe his cock after they had regaled themselves.

  A border of long thatched classrooms enclosed a large, sandy quadrangle and boys of many sizes, and colours were marched in column to St Mary’s each morning where prayers were said and then marched back again. The only trouble, as the boys agreed, was ‘Pottaya’, a weedy master who had one squint eye and the other which looked suspiciously false and, as anyone will tell you, a pottaya is a cock-eyed coot, a blind person or one who, due to some conjunctival defect, has to look in the general direction of Barcelona if he wishes to focus on the legs of the girls next door. ‘Pottaya’, like all every-day Sinhalese words, is not a nice one. It is used in scorn, with derision, contempt and particularly to draw universal attention to one’s drawbacks. There are many such words that make up the interesting vocabularies of schoolboys all over the island. A man is ‘bada’ is he’s got a stomach that is a close contender to the Sugar Loaf mountain. A ‘thattaya’ is someone who has more hair on his bum than on his head; a ‘pakaya’ was reserved for a very nasty type of human being who was widely accepted to be full of low, organic desires and if there was an identified homosexual named Perera or Silva or whatever, would usually be titled ‘Puk’ Perera or ‘Puk’ Silva as the case may be. Any person with an offensive body odour was invariably a ‘gandaya’, while ‘lapaya’ was reserved for any antagonist who had a facial blemish, a mole, an ugly scar, birthmark, and so on. Indeed the chronicler feels that this is as good a place as any to recall a distant day when a British covenanted engine driver,1 who was heartily detested by Sonnaboy, decided to bridge the gap between his surly Sinhalese fireman and himself by speaking Sinhala. The driver, a florid fellow named Keating, had listened to assorted types like porters and other lowly railway life who liked to speak rough and in a universally accepted argot. Porter Sarnelis would yell to porter Joronis:

  ‘Adai! Joro! Here come, yako!’ 2

  ‘What, yako?’

  ‘This is yakagey (a devil of a) job. Come some help give!’

  ‘Just go, yako, to me other work have.’

  Keating, who prided himself on a good ear for language, was overjoyed. Clearly, yako was an accepted form of address. He met his fireman and decided to go ape. ‘Good morning, yako,’ he sang.

  Fireman Jayamanne stopped his shovel in mid-swing and earnestly studied this sudda3 driver. No, the man was revoltingly normal. Clearly the man also was in that weird stage of trying to pander to the natives. He sighed. There was no help to it. ‘Morning, sur,’ he said.

  Keating rubbed his hands. His first Sinhalese word. He’d soon have these fellows eating out of these same hands. ‘Open steam cocks, yako,’ he said.

  At the end of the day Jayamanne was feeling pretty overwhelmed. He met Sonnaboy and his voice quivered. ‘Morning from time to me yako saying,’ he groaned, ‘here come yako, some more coal put yako, hullo yako, cheerio yako—he’s mad? Colombo to Galle yako yako saying and going!’

  Sonnaboy went to Keating. ‘What is this, men, you’re saying yako yako to the fireman?’

  Keating beamed.

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  The beam switched off.

  ‘You know what yako is? Devil! My God, men, you calling your fireman devil, devil. Galle and back!’

  Keating gasped. ‘Why,’ he squeaked, ‘I never knew . . . Oh rhubarb, is he annoyed?’

  ‘Annoyed? Push you off the bloody engine—that’s what I’ll do! Nex’ time you say pako4 right. What, men, must know the right word to say, no? This Sinhalese not so easy.’

  Keating was grateful. It’s the way these awful people spoke, he told himself. One can’t rely on one’s ears especially when these natives talk with their mouths full of betel leaf and salivate redly. He had obviously misheard a ‘p’ for a ‘y’. Well, dash it, he would effect rectification.

  ‘I say, thank you, von Bloss, thankee, thankee. I’ll set things right, don’t you worry,’ and the next afternoon he stood on the platform, twinkled at Jayamanne who, as the Fates would have it, was holding the shovel, and carolled, ‘Hullo, pako!’ A long twelve seconds later he was being carried away by a knot of Running Shed workers while Jayamanne, most unrepentant, shouted to all who would listen that even if the Governor-General castrated him he didn’t care. ‘Yesterday all the day to me yako saying! I just keeping quiet! Now see will you. Now coming to pako say! Sudda even like this dirty words to me can tell?’

  The flat of the shovel had taken Keating across the diaphragm and he purged blood in the hospital and couldn’t sit up in bed for a week. Jayamanne was subjected to a lot of departmental torture and covenanted drivers were also advised to leave the Sinhala language to those who understood it and thus maintain the dignity of the white sahib.

  Oh, and by the way, Jayamanne was known as Pako Jayamanne thereafter which made the man a most bad-tempered individual.

  Pottaya was Veyappapillai—a Tamil master who always wore a coat three sizes too big for him and a permanent leer. In class, he would turn an eye on Holmes, impale Ribeiro with his glass eye and say, ‘Gogerly, I can see what you’re up to!’ No one could, try as they would, know where he was looking and what he was actually looking at. Most disconcerting. Mrs Harridge, who taught Art, was never sure. ‘Where he’s looking I don’t know,’ she would tell Mrs Lappen, another teacher who had galloping adenoids and a voice that was like a box guitar without an A and D string.

  ‘Hngh! Ownly gno to detain aevery wun. Gnot wun day without gniving detenshung, gno?’

  Mrs Harris nodded. ‘The way he’s looking, mus’ be punishing the wrong boys also, I think.’

  Pottaya was, to say the least, peculiar. He relished, revelled in detention. ‘You, you, you, you!’ he would squeal, ‘yes, you also! All stay after school!’

  Dreams of barefoot cricket in the sand lot are shattered. Bittharay5 Gomes, who was a particularly repulsive boy wi
th large, unwashed ears, would be among the detained. Within the first ten minutes, Pottaya would look fifteen points over his head and say, ‘You, Gomes, you can go.’

  Ten minutes later he would tell Holsinger, ‘You also can go. Others read your Latin for Today Chapter Three.’ The others would make small sounds of exasperation. A quarter of an hour later: ‘You, Matthys, you can go.’ This left Carloboy and Maxie Perera, and outside all the buzz of a day’s school had evaporated and the evening was yellowing and the sand lot was empty and the evening wind was taking a break and had stopped its cello recital in the tamarind tree. Five o’clock. ‘How long is this bugger going to keep us here,’ Carloboy thought.

  ‘Perera! You can go.’

  That’s bad news. The boys knew that Pottaya had this cane on his desk and he always caned the last boy in his detention class. Carloboy scowled at his Latin text. Pottaya rose and came around the rostrum to lean against his desk. Maxie made a face. ‘Thoppi for you,’ he hissed, and went.

  As in most classrooms, the master’s desk sat, like a birthday cake, on the rostrum, and the master sat, thus elevated, to glare down at his class and wonder what he had done in a previous incarnation to deserve it. This was all well and good, said Mrs Harridge, but was greatly put out when a story rocketed through the school that on a particular day in the week she had worn pale blue knickers. She had, of course, but how could every boy in the school know? The titters and hisses and stage whispers in chapel made her a near basket case. The bigger boys, privy to more things in heaven and on earth than the smaller fry, embroidered the story, adding that there was a distinct brown stain on those knickers. It was then noted how boys in the front row, seated under her very nose, mind, kept bending to pick up pencils, erasers, books, and spending much time at floor level, where they undoubtedly found a worm’s-eye view of Mrs Harridge’s lower section most entertaining. They bent down, groped around, gazing through the portals of her desk, studying her legs, waiting for that delicious moment when teacher would spread her knees and give them a peep show of fat white thighs and her underwear.