The Jam Fruit Tree

by Carl Muller

  But the next evening George turned up with a box of chocolates and a Swan fountain-pen for Cecilprins. Eric and Elsie, under the jam fruit tree, were surprised to see him walk in and George just nodded at them and proceeded to soften up Cecilprins and Maudiegirl. ‘Just passing. I was going to Mount Lavinia to see a friend. So I was passing your lane and I had this and said those people so nice and take me in their home and give me tea. Here, this is for the ladies. From Switzerland. See, have on the box, Swiss Chocolates. And this is for you. Brand new, in box and all. Only got yesterday in shipment. Very good pen, I think.’

  So he was invited to sit and half an hour later Cecilprins said, ‘Your friend must be waiting, no?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In Mount Lavinia. You were going to see, no?’

  ‘Ah yes. But never mind. Can go another day. You have nice jam fruit tree. Must be very old.’

  Cecilprins melted visibly. ‘When we came here, birds must have dropped seeds from the wall. When it started growing owner said cut it. Said the roots will go under the house and break the floor. Told the bugger to clear off. I pay rent, no? What I grow is not his business. When the children start coming it is so high and see today the size. Now forty years. Whole garden it shading now. Always I telling, that tree like this family. Always flowers, always cherries. Enough for everybody. All the children eating and boys in the lane climbing the wall and eating.’

  Nobody then considered the philosophy behind those words. But in truth, the jam fruit tree was so symbolic. The ever-bearing tree. And never-dying, too. Like the stout Burgher women of the age: fruitful, tough, always in bloom, earthy. Like the men too. Hard-working, hard-drinking, as lusty as life itself. Such a tree: always sprouting, reaching out, spreading over the leaf-strewn earth with its umbrella branches. It was the jam fruit tree that first gave the young ones an awareness of each other. Totoboy would climb and Anna would stand below and look up his short trousers and sing out: ‘Chee, I can see.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Your birdie. It’s hanging like a big worm.’

  ‘You wait till I come down, will you.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mama.’

  ‘So go and tell. Good for you to look, no? You also come up and show yours.’

  ‘But I haven’t birdie like you.’

  ‘So never mind. You climb, will you.’

  And between the branches, hidden in the masses of foliage they explored and wondered at the difference and the wind sang ribald songs and all was right with the world.

  George never knew, but it was his chance remark about the jam fruit tree that made him more acceptable. Old Cecilprins thawed enough to even offer him a ‘small sip’ and was even more gratified when this was politely refused. ‘Only on Sunday I take,’ George said grandly. ‘Put a tot before lunch. Weekdays, when working I don’t touch. When having big job with all these ships must be always clear. Those dock workers big rogues. Take your trousers even, if not looking. Some job, this is.’

  He came again and again. And he dispensed pilfered ships stores lavishly. Tinned mackerel, a bottle of Booths, spools of Coats thread, whatever he laid his hands on in the port. But all his swagger could not give him the gall to broach the subject of Leah whom he took to seeing at the florist’s and giving her little packets of caramel and tins of Schweitzers cocoatina.

  It was on the day that he brought a bottle of Tarragona and a twelve-pack of twenty under proof Irish whisky (and only the good Lord knows how he got it out of the port) that the Boteju Lane house became positively merry and Maudiegirl kept complaining of recurring rheumatics. Leah, emboldened, sat next to George and said she was tickled by the way the hair grew out of his ears. With the old Irish to break down fences, even Elsie hustled Eric to the bathroom where she raised her skirts, perched on the edge of the cement sink and told him to put it in. Poor Eric, scared out of his wits, fled, and Elsie sulked, said she had a headache and went to the bedroom to cry a little. Sonnaboy walked in and was annoyed. ‘What the hell is all this? Look at Totoboy. Drunk and mouth open. Whole damn house in a mess, no?’ But he swallowed a tumbler of neat whisky and went in to wash and change. George was happy. All he now had to do, he thought, was to corner the old man and pop the question. But, poor idiot that he was, he decided on another course of action. Had he cornered Cecilprins that day he would have gained ready consent. But George had to do it his way. He would go home and write a formal letter. That, he thought, would impress the old boy no end.

  When the letter arrived two days later, Cecilprins and Maudiegirl went into a huddle. They were feeling pretty low about the revels of the day before yesterday. Dunnyboy said how he saw George squeezing Leah’s breasts and Totoboy had slept in his chair all evening and did not go to work the next day. Maudiegirl slapped Leah who shouted: ‘Fine thing, no. Take all his presents but bad for him to touch me.’

  This plunged them into a new awareness of the situation. ‘Tchah, damn shame, no? Damn shame for us,’ said Cecilprins. ‘Now see, writing, and saying want to marry Leah. He and his port. Can come to make us drunk but can’t come to discuss like gentleman. Writing letter. All this Eric’s fault. Bringing him here in the first place. I suppose now he waiting for me to reply and say here my Leah, take and go.’

  Anna, ever the practical soul said: ‘Tell Sonnaboy. Catch and give him good pasting.’

  Maudiegirl shuddered. ‘You’re mad, anney. He go to police and tell how he gave us things and damn shame for us, no? Write and tell not to come again. Tell that Leah already promised.’

  ‘Or tell Eric to tell him not to come,’ said Elsie.

  ‘And where, pray, is Eric? Two days now he not coming. What you do to him?

  Elsie blushed. ‘Nothing, anney. All your fault. Drinking and drinking. Now he not even coming.’

  ‘So good,’ said Cecilprins fiercely. ‘Fine son-in-law he be. If put two drinks he running home. If going to be like this better you don’t marry.’

  ‘Chut,’ said Maudiegirl, ‘All your fault, no? Taking his whisky and whole night snoring and smelling like tavern. Tomorrow you tell Eric in office that Elsie very upset. Will come running. And better you write to this George, no? Tell not to come again. Tell will return his whisky. Have some put-away money in the tin on the almirah. Can buy from Cargills and give Eric to give to George. What to do? When have girls always this trouble. From all over coming like as if have bitch in heat.’

  So a letter was written and George, ripping open the envelope eagerly couldn’t believe what he read. He was furious, and when George was furious he threw caution to the winds. This, he determined, was injustice of the rankest. What wrong had he done? Those girls were just waiting for someone to get under their skirts. Hah! Old fools with their rosaries and starched collars and all high and mighty. I’ll postmaster him. Then, with incredible venom, he actually made a list. At the top he wrote, one bottle Tarragona invalids wine and the twelve-pack of Irish. Then, licking his pencil he added the following:

  1 packet Jordan almonds

  3 tins Schweitzer’s cocoatina

  2 packets milk paste chocolates

  1 tin Yeastman’s baking powder

  1 box Fry’s chocolates

  1 tin East India coffee

  1 packet Harvest’s egg powder

  2 boxes Congou tea

  3 tins Dorset butter

  1 ball Cheshire cheese

  2 bottles Mason’s beef tea

  1 tin Isinglass golden syrup

  1 packet pudding powder

  1 Swan fountain-pen with filler

  1 bottle calf’s foot jelly

  1 tin Abernethy biscuits

  6 tins Paysandu ox tongue

  1 tin Julienne soup

  1 packet Osborne biscuits

  1 bottle Bengal Club pickle

  2 cakes Rimmel toilet soap

  1 flask Hennessy brandy

  1 tin Rowntree’s cocoa

  He scanned the list and furrowed his brows at it. ‘So much I give and not a word to th
ank,’ he gritted, ‘useless buggers, I’ll show who I am. Think they can take and take and then kick my backside, no.’ He went to his cousin Jembo with a martyred air and related how shabbily he had been treated. He produced his list and Cecilprins’ letter. Jembo’s eyebrows shot skyward. ‘Damn fool, no? to give like this. Damn good for you. When I asking for bottle for my birthday, you remember? What did you say? Ah, now you’re coming running. But good for you to give these people all these things. Why you go to give all this? Once in a way you give girl some toffees enough, no?’

  Jembo was a bull of a man. Built like a wardrobe. Nobody messed with him because he was so big, so nobody knew what an arrant coward he was. Crafty George saw distinct advantage in confronting the von Blosses in Jembo’s company. One look at Jembo and they will take cover. They reached Boteju Lane rather late that evening and while Jembo stood under the jam fruit tree, crossed his arms over his chest and made menacing faces, George paraded the veranda, flourishing the offending letter and brandishing his famous list. ‘So what I do!’ he thundered. ‘All because of Leah, no? Because I loving her I bring you things out of my goodness. All from my hard-earned, no? How you know how I sweat to buy these things I bring to show I am kind person only thinking of you. Not like other people who only give the girl, I give for everybody. And for that I get slap in the face. Nice way to treat people, no? Pudding powder!’

  Cecilprins, growing whiter, tried to calm him down. ‘We only think you must not get serious on Leah, ‘ he stammered.

  ‘Beef tea!’ George yelled.

  ‘We not mean insult, child . . .’ Maudiegirl began.

  ‘Egg powder!’ George roared.

  ‘You give all back, right,’ Jembo growled from the garden.

  George was hitting second wind. He tore Cecilprins letter into shreds and flung the bits all over the veranda. ‘That’s the way I take your insult,’ he hooted. Maudiegirl clutched her heart. The van Dort family were perched on the side wall lapping up the show. Then there was a bang at the gate and Sonnaboy strode in. He didn’t have to be filled in with past history. Neighbours on the wall, a strange ape in the garden and George in the veranda shouting his head off.

  He never did like George. One big hand closed around the back of George’s neck in a grip of iron and the noisy little cockerel was hauled off the veranda and down the steps. Something like a sledge struck him, numbing the entire left side of his face. Jembo uncrossed his arms, dropped his lower jaw and only stayed long enough to give a high squeak of alarm. Then he was through the gate and legging it for the Galle Road like a champion sprinter. George, he decided, could take the thrashing for them both. And George did. He was propped against the jam fruit tree and methodically pulped. George did not know it at the time but he was in the hands of a true craftsman. And Sonnaboy excelled in his craft. Then it was time for everyone to jump on his back and cling to him and somehow drag him off before murder was done, but not before he had scooped up the thinly-screaming George and hurled him through the gate where he lay for all the world like a rag doll after an injudicious encounter with a steamroller.

  Leah, whose screams were positively operatic in quality and pitch, pushed past everybody to put her head on George’s breast and declare that she would kill herself, so there. The neighbours applauded vigorously. This was better than the Bioscope. Sonnaboy strode to the gate. ‘Can he walk?’

  George moaned.

  ‘Good. You still want to marry my sister?’

  ‘Grooooh.’A lot of Leah’s hair seemed to be in his mouth.

  ‘Good. And you try any more nonsense after you marry her and I will come and hammer you every time. Did you hear?’

  ‘Oooooooh.’

  Maudiegirl kept gasping as though she had swallowed a lobster. ‘Aiyo, mother of mercy, take him inside, child, put some embrocation. Blood coming also. Where that other fellow? Who that other fellow. Didn’t even tell his name, no?’

  So George was dragged in with scant ceremony and Leah fomented his face and Maudiegirl brought cottonwool and flavine and George moaned that he couldn’t stand erect and Leah said I know, I know, you lie back, will you, have big bruise on your ribs also. ‘Where else it paining,’ and she made a great show of tending on her poor martyr and seized the chance to take a close look at this man she was going to marry. Cecilprins came in with an enormous pair of green striped pajamas and a banian, ‘Here, you change and give your clothes to wash. Trouser knee also torn. Can darn, no?’

  So Leah washed and darned and brought him beef tea—his beef tea—and asked him where it hurt. ‘There,’ he said and she would feel the spot and venture lower down and say, ‘Here also?’ and he would nod and her hands would slip to his hips and ‘Here also?’ and soon she was squeezing his cock and exclaiming at its size and that it would do very nicely, thank you.

  *

  Totoboy first saw Iris Holdenbottle through an alcoholic haze. Nothing to write home about, was Iris. Quite the bawd, but clever with her fingers, needle and thread and sewing-machine. A bossy, loudmouthed fishwife of a woman. A bargiwallah, as the Indians say, and with a temper that kept her in a permanent state of explosion.

  This is a poor way to tell a story, to be sure. I have not really laid the groundwork for any of the characters so far woven in, and for this, I beg your pardon. Let me do so now.

  Ceylon—the island known today as Sri Lanka—was first invaded by the Portuguese in 1505. After 150 years of Portuguese domination the Dutch moved in for another 150-year spell, after which the British took over around 1815. The Portuguese employed the sword and the Bible to good effect. There was not much difference between missionary zeal and the poniard’s steel. Then came the Dutch with their law books and ledgers, their kokjes (a preparation of creamed flour, wrapped around a special mould and deep-fried; this is now adopted as a special Sinhala sweetmeat and called ‘kokis’) and breudhers (a dough cake baked in a special ring mould with plums and sultanas and a traditional cake for Christmas breakfast) and fondness for building houses with stoeps, which were open verandas and which the Sinhalese called isstoppuwas. When the business-minded British barged in they gave the country coffee and tea, rubber and coconut, roads and railways, Queen Victoria and how to shake hands and play cricket.

  The native Sinhalese were a pretty insular lot. Pretty haughty, stuck in their ways and while putting up with all these foreign comings and goings, stubbornly clung to their way of life and scorned all else. The Portuguese and Dutch took little notice. All they wished was to bleed the island of all it had: spices, salt, elephants and ivory, sandalwood, gems, bamboo and arecanuts. The Portuguese did much the same but in addition, baptized here, there, everywhere. And in the wake of the militia came the settlers—a new race of people who worked their way into the country’s canvas; descendente of the Portuguese and Dutch, mixtures of both and then a goodly range of hybrids. It was like what was mentioned in the Book of Genesis, how the sons of Heaven came down and found the daughters of the Earth fair. May this same Heaven forbid—for the sons of the Dutch found Sinhalese and Tamil girls to their liking and the British, who ramrodded the plantations went in among the natives too. The result was a hotch-potch that was, for convenience, classified as Burgher (from the Dutch ‘burgher’ or townsman). The brew was further spiced by other foreign types who drifted in and out with each East Indiaman that sailed in—French, Germans, Persians, Indians, Afghans (who became very serious-minded money lenders) and Scandinavians. A few Chinese were also added into the pot. They settled down, went around on rickety bicycles shouting, ‘Nooooo-dles,’ and otherwise taking pretty Malay girls to bed in Slave Island where they lived with Dutch artisans, clerks and craftsmen.

  Indeed, the first Dutch civilian workers who chose to try their luck in this new outpost were those who came to provide ancillary services to the stockaded forts. The main fort in Colombo (still called The Fort) was served by the assorted denizens of Slave Island, and the most sought after of them was the cobbler. As long as the army marched, the
cobbler was in business. Which is why, to this day, the Sinhalese will derisively refer to a Burgher as a shoemaker—deemed a deadly insult—and worse still, a cockroach, which is deadlier still although, for the life of me, I cannot determine why the name was given.

  The Burghers found immense favour with the British because their mother tongue was English, although they thought Dutch and spoke English which did nothing to phraseology or syntax. Yet, they were regarded as those of ‘European descent’, posed no communication problems and were a far cry over the Sinhalese who were of ill-disposition, morose, apt to fawn and bootlick and then do a Brutus. So it was that while the true people of Ceylon, the Sinhalese, were the subject race, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the vast contingent of Burghers, all nondescript, no-roots, fair-skinned hybrids, became the white-collar workers, the police inspectors, the fire chiefs, foremen, storekeepers, managers, executives, assistant superintendents on estates, administrators, and formed an upper stratum in the social hierarchy. Did I say fair-skinned? Scratch that. There were white Burghers and brown Burghers, black and grey Burghers. It all depended on where the wild oats had been sown. But the names clung on, even if a Van der Wert or a Van der Houten had blue eyes in a very dark face.

  It’s hard to find a ‘true’ Burgher today. The type this story deals with are very much the real McCoy. They hailed from Mutwal and Modera, Chilaw and Negombo, Galle and Batticaloa. But they were as adaptable and as hardy as the cockroach (maybe that’s what earned them the derisive) and they believed in living life to the full. Old sayings are still heard around the country. One insists that ‘Burgher buggers became beggars by buying brandy bottles’ while a Sinhalese doggeral goes:

  Kaapalla, beepalla, jollikarapalla,

  Heta marunoth hithata sapai

  Ada jollikaralla

  Which, in homespun Sinhala means: ‘Eat, drink and be merry and even if we must die tomorrow, don’t let it worry you because you’re having a good time today.’ (Who said Shakespeare had no Sinhalese blood in him?)