by Carl Muller
Sonnaboy was in a good mood. He was very satisfied with himself. He told his papa that he had reached a settlement with old Werkmeister and that the wedding with Elaine was off. Cecilprins tried to guess what might have happened but hadn’t the imagination. ‘Settlement’ could mean anything as far as Sonnaboy was concerned. The last time he had reached a settlement with the Bocks boy, there was a bill for a set of upper dentures. He dared not probe further but was relieved to find that Joe and his sons were in good physical shape, although they would cross the road quickly on spying him. He was sad about this. He had lost a friend. He had to admit, of course, that Elaine never did appeal to him as a daughter-in-law. ‘Too horsey and walks like a man,’ he had thought. But that was all over. He shuddered instead at what lay ahead. A Sonnaboy, waiting six years was no pleasing prospect. Somehow he had to convince that da Brea woman to unbend.
Meanwhile Iris took a long love-letter and a small box of chocolates in a shopping bag and called over at Nimal Road and discussed the situation with Elva who regarded this new development as a way to put one over her sister.
‘You give letter here, will you,’ Elva said.
‘But what about Beryl?’
‘You don’t worry. Here, you take the chocolates. What men, he paying you for doing this? No, no? Mama told him to marry me and telling to give me to police fellows. Damn cheek of him. And here I listening to Mama and won’t go with anyone else because Mama says I can marry him anytime he like.’
Iris was puzzled. ‘If so, then why he writing to Beryl?’
‘How to know? Trying to take from cradle, that’s what I think. But Mama won’t allow, so all this letter business is useless. And now because can’t meet Beryl that writing.’
‘But what to tell him?’ Iris asked, ‘Sure to ask if gave letter. Might ask for Beryl to give reply also.’
Elva frowned. The thought that Iris may have to be a two-way messenger hadn’t occurred to her. ‘Let’s see what he is writing,’ and she ripped open the envelope. Nothing fascinates girls of today and yesterday—and, it is supposed, tomorrow—like other people’s love letters. Elva and Iris were fascinated. After a vast discourse on the path of true love which Sonnaboy declared resembled a corkscrew, there were colourful allusions to Beryl’s form and features with a lip-smacking definition of what her legs were to him. He also explained how he had to stay away in order to get through his railway examinations and how he was determined to better himself for her sake. Darlings and dearests were scattered like petals in May and when he described how he longed for her and ached all over below the waist, Elva and Iris pinched each other and giggled fit to burst. ‘Write to me, darling,’ Sonnaboy begged, ‘Iris will bring your letter to me,’ and there were more pages of how birds sang sweeter every time he thought of her and how he put his pillow between his legs at night and imagined it was her.
‘So now what to do?’ Iris asked, ‘Asking to reply, no? Sure to ask as I go back.’
‘Wait, will you, saying he cannot see her, no? So how to know if Beryl wrote or not?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He wants reply, no? So I’ll give reply.’ And Elva wrote a long letter full of syrupy things about how the birds were singing arias in Nimal Road and how she wished she was a pillow and that he could stay away as long as it took because she was ever true and would wait for him till the cows came home.
‘Don’t forget the chocolates,’ Iris chortled, and Elva nodded and gave thanks prettily and added that the side gate to Retreat Road was now locked and there was no way Sonnaboy could meet her and he had better not come any more because someone was sure to see him hanging around and what if some neighbour saw and told her mama and thus get her in trouble?
This, thought Elva, was a master stroke. Sonnaboy would have to be content with the letters and when Beryl found that he was no longer coming around she may think that he had cooled off and was no longer interested and that he had found someone else. Oh, Elva was devious. She liked her scheme. After some time she would herself drop the ardour in the letters and hint that Beryl was losing interest herself. Then she, Elva, would move in to offer her sympathy and let him know that as an alternative she was, like Barkis, very willing.
Sonnaboy was in transports of joy. Beryl’s first letter was read a thousand times over. Iris was to him that rare creature who surely was Florence Nightingale, a Grace Darling, a Jeanned’ Arc all rolled in one. He rushed to reply, spending hours over his letter which became a veritable tome crammed with all manner of quotations and extracts from Leah’s old romantic magazines. Joanna Baillie, a tedious writer of the age appealed to him, for he found among her laboured writings such gems as:
Friendship is no plant of hasty growth,
Though planted in Esteem’s deep-fixed soil,
The gradual culture of kind intercourse
Must bring it to perfection.
Sonnaboy didn’t quite grasp what it all meant but the words did give a ring and he reasoned that there was something about the lines that should give Beryl food for thought—things like ‘kind intercourse’, for instance.
Iris would look at the bulky packet and say, ‘That’s a letter?’ and Sonnaboy would grin and belabour her with questions about what Beryl said and how was she and is she sorry that he cannot meet her. Soon Elva began to make specific requests. Beryl could do with some biscuits (Sonnaboy would despatch a large tin of Almond Rings) or soap (Iris took away Pears Best Scented) or was longing to eat some cherry tarts. Sonnaboy was in his element. His Beryl asked . . . his Beryl received. Poor girl. Her mama must be starving her. But what did she want red currant jelly for, and bottled plums? He could understand lace and two yards of organdie and a brooch to match a yellow Sunday dress but his Beryl did ask for the strangest thing—like American cheese, nectarines, an egg-whisk, ivory napkin rings. She was a great one for ribbons, he thought as a demand arrived for three yard rolls in several colours. To Elva and Iris, this was mother-lode. They grew quite reckless and Elva found letter-writing a full-time job while Iris said: ‘Feel like asking for a pair of shoes. Mine getting wasted by coming up and down like this.’
The game lasted all of six months and meanwhile, Bertie Carron of His Majesty’s Customs Preventive Office who always wore white with white hose and white calf shoes, and had a very red face (like a side of mutton, Elva said) had seen Elva at St. Mary’s church, Bambalapitiya, and decided that she was the sun, moon and stars of his existence. Bertie was weekending in Bambalapitiya and had been dragged to church by his hosts, the Bulners, who considered that Bertie needed some religion thrust on him. Bertie treated God with all due respect, true, but wanted no truck with priests who, he never tired of pointing out, were all overfed and mumbled in a sort of sacerdotal pig-Latin. Bertie had strong views on a lot of things. Also, he was a fine product of British education and would quote Addison and Cowper and had read Plutarch’s Lives and knew enough Latin to have sailed through the London Matriculation. His views on church-Latin were thus not contested.
In introducing Bertie, the chronicler feels it incumbent to fix Burgher society of the 1930s in proper perspective. The reader may be inclined to dismiss all Burghers as a roistering, bawdy breed who spoke funny and were extremely Catholic in matters of sex. This is not absolutely true. The characters we have met so far do run true to form. Burgher boys and girls who were wont to marry young, had no formal sex education in those days and no parent to even hint at such things as the birds and the bees. The children learned, so to say, ‘on the run’, from childhood to puberty and had no pretensions about how they undertook their ‘practicals’. These were, the chronicler may well call them, the ‘lick and a quick polish Burghers’. They did everything to that finite degree of ‘getting by’ and were content.
This does not mean that all Burghers were remarkably heterosexual, singularly unambitious, unashamedly incestuous and given without reserve to booze, large families and the principle that tomorrow never comes. The tempora and the mora were an
influencing factor. With the British in control, life was good and there was that general feeling of release from long years of Victorian morality and drawing-room ethics. It may be even mentioned in passing that this was also the time when King Edward VIII of merrie England was fanning the air with the great Windsor scandal and being pretty shameless with his American Wallis Simpson and really tipping over the royal applecart. The cost of living in old Ceylon was marvellously low (unbelievably low, in fact), and all the best and worst of British manufacture and make was available; and not just from Britain but from her other colonies too: Australia, the East Indies, Hong Kong, India, East and South Africa and wherever else the Raj held court. Oh, life was good in the 1930s. It was no wonder, then, that the Burghers—favourites of the white administrators, found little trouble in employment and in managing their lives and paying scant heed to what the future may hold. Boys grew up to be pushed out to tea and rubber plantations, or the railway, or the police. While most Burghers were content to move in their small circles of workaday bureaucratic influence (and it is the British who made bureaucracy a fine art in the colonies) others took fullest advantage of British education and technical training to become scholars and academics and engineers and architects and excel in all manner of disciplines. Thus there was, at the time of introduction of Bertie Carron, a sort of Burgher social step-ladder. At the top were those who had risen to be physicians and professors and engineers and judges and civil servants and such like. Such had furthered study in England and returned with letters behind their names and were Fellows and Licentiates and Associates and excelled in their particular callings. These were the Burghers who had clawed their way up from the roistering, boisterous bottom-rung to study hard, tread the rainbow of academic achievement and look back on their beginnings with pure horror. Naturally, not every member of the normally over-large families of the age could make it to the top. It depended on the individual. The von Blosses, for example, had no superfatted aspirations. Cecilprins rose from counter supervisor to assistant postmaster and was more than content. After thirty years service and having raised thirteen children he retired and drew a monthly pension and mooched around the house, suitably appalled at his children’s pyrotechnics. It never occurred to Cecilprins that he could, with some application, take the qualifying examination that would make him a postmaster or that, with some dedication, actually become a Grade I Postmaster in charge of his own post office. He was content, and, with many more of his ilk, proclaimed that contentment was all. As long as there was a regular pay packet and money enough to feed, clothe and house his family and throw a regular party and show the neighbourhood that the von Blosses were ‘well off’, what else could possibly matter?
But while the ‘top’ Burghers drove around in their cars and held sway in their offices and became educators and architects and scientists and legal luminaries, they could never shake off the reality of the ‘common herd’, especially when Aunty Mona would come to the Royal Academy and demand to see her Ralphie. Ralphie was a professor of English and a figure of great eminence. He was the proudest boast of the Meerwald family in their home in Kotahena. ‘See that Ralphie,’ Papa Meerwald would say, cuffing his son Spencer, ‘If learn like him you also can be big man like him one day, no? Went to England and all and now can even teach English people to talk English.’ The Meerwalds preened themselves and basked in the glory of professor Ralph Meerwald. ‘Sister’s son, men,’ Papa Meerwald would say, ‘and must just hear him talk. Like six books. And writing books also. One thing, our family all bright.’
Professor Ralph would blanch when told of Aunty Mona’s arrival. The old woman had this jarring habit of screeching her greetings from a mile away. Why couldn’t she stay on the bottom rung where she was so immensely popular? But Aunty Mona didn’t see things this way. ‘Going to see our Ralphie,’ she would tell Sophia Gogerley, ‘See, taking him a small bottle of my lime pickle.’
‘Who, that profferso fellow?’
‘Who else? All the time learning and reading and books, books everywhere, and sure he not even eating properly. Lucky for him his Aunty Mona there to think about him. When he was small, real one for currant cake. So yesterday baked small one for him.’
So Aunty Mona would trip the corridors of the Royal Academy and on spying her nepnew screech: ‘My, just look at your state! Like a stick, no? Brought some currant cake. Now cut and eat a big piece at once. And here some lime pickle also. Real rice puller. Give you appetite.’
Professor Ralph would dearly love to curl up and die. He looked on Aunty Mona as one of those poor relations who should never be allowed to crawl out of the Kotahena woodwork. He was, after all, one of the elite. Aunty Mona was a downright embarrassment. And what—perish the thought—if the boys started to call him currant cake?
So Ceylon, and thereafter Sri Lanka, has its Burgher bowl of cherries and its Burgher pits. Great men and women emerged and are remembered to this day. They were eminent historians and antiquarians, anthropologists, great literary figures, educators and scientists. Also—and of undying interest—were the Burgher hoi polloi: the mechanics, the white-collar workers, the engine drivers and police officers, the foremen and storekeepers, the teachers and lighthouse keepers and tugboat masters and those in the armed forces where the old C.R.N.V.R. (Ceylon Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve) preceeded the R.Cy.N. (Royal Ceylon Navy) and the S.L.N. (Sri Lanka Navy) and there was a mushrooming Ceylon Army with the C.L.I. (Ceylon Light Infantry) and Ceylon Artillery and C.A.C. (Ceylon Armoured Corps). The Royal Ceylon Air Force began with one Sunderland and lots of types with pointed moustachios and grey-blue jackets, swagger sticks and flying goggles. It would be correct, then, to say that the 1930s saw a Burgher upper, middle and lower class. But, in fact, hardly any lower class for, as a rule, the Burghers themselves considered it comfortable to be labelled middle class with the fine distinctions of upper and lower middle, while only those who moved in exhalted circles with the British were regarded as upper and belonged to some sort of Burgher ‘holy of holies’.
Bertie Carron, then, as a Customs Preventive Officer, was decidedly upper middle. It did not deter him from seeking Elva out in order to press his suit. He considered her lower middle and nice to look at from any angle, especially if he focussed on her lower middle. Bertie considered himself as a divine gift to any young lady and could not understand the stories he heard about how this Elva tossed off suitors the way a dog would diligently rid itself of fleas. Obviously, he told himself, Elva was selective. She wasn’t going to commit herself to the first man who hove into view. What she needed, he told himself, was a ‘good Burgher’, not those mikos (a nondescript half-breed) who go about on bicycles and don’t know to knot a tie. ‘Class will tell,’ he informed his mirror as he angled his peaked cap with the silver Customs badge. He would call on Elva in full regalia. He would tell Elva’s parents of his intentions. He would be friendly and firm and display just the right amount of condescension to impress on them that they were in the presence of their better. It was a bit of a shock when Elva looked him over and asked him why his face was so red.
‘Red? Oh, you mean my complexion?’
‘Like boiled mutton,’ she giggled, ‘and see, over the collar also, very red your neck.’
Bertie frowned. ‘It is impolite to make such personal remarks,’ he said loftily.
Even Florrie, who was quite dazzled by this immaculate apparition, said, ‘If wore khaki like prison guard then red won’t show so much.’ But she was pleased. Elva would do well to marry the fellow. Talked funny but that’s what comes of learning too much. ‘But no harm, no? to have gentleman like that in family?’
Despite herself, Elva was quite impressed by Bertie. For one thing, she told Iris, she liked to see him in his starched white shorts. ‘Lots of hair on his legs, men, and when crossing the legs can see hair going up the thighs also.’
Iris said wisely, ‘Ah, if have hairy legs, good, men. That type men very good when doing the job, they say.’
&n
bsp; Elva giggled. ‘Your Totoboy also got hair on the legs?’
‘Apoi yes.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘So tell, will you, if true.’
‘True? True about what?’
‘True about doing it. Totoboy also very good?’
Iris gave this some thought. ‘I don’t know still, men. Getting drunk too much, that’s the trouble. If can catch him after two-three drinks . . . . Trouble is he bringing bottle to the bed and when I get all ready and opening his trousers and all, he says one for the road and puts two more drinks and then fall on top and going to sleep.’
Anyway, Bertie was duly accepted and Beryl was relieved. Now that Mama had decided on Bertie, she obviously didn’t entertain hopes of Sonnaboy marrying Elva. So maybe she may consent to Sonnaboy marrying her. She decided to test the temperature.
‘Mama, why that Sonnaboy not coming now?’
Florrie glared. ‘Butter won’t melt in your mouth, no? the way you’re asking. Let him try to come and see what I will do.’
‘But Mama—yeeeeee! why you hitting? Only asking, no?’
So Beryl ran in to weep and wonder what had become of Sonnaboy. Months passed and she would nip out after school and dawdle on the road and no sign of the man. She told her pillow that her heart was breaking and her pillow, in its wisdom, lay silent. In the evenings she would wind up the gramophone and play ‘Where’s my wandering boy tonight’ and wallow hugely in her misery.
Six months had seen a lot of changes in Sonnaboy’s career. He was now a Class III driver and had been informed that he would soon receive his first real station transfer. Transportation Superintendent Aleric de Bruin said he would be posted to Kadugannawa where Sonnaboy would run the short haul trains to Kandy and back and Rambukkana and back. Also, lots of shunting and wagon movements in Rambukkana, Kadugannawa and Peradeniya and Kandy. ‘You’ll get a small bungalow if you are married,’ de Bruin said, and Sonnaboy knew that he had ‘arrived’. This news was too good to be conveyed to Beryl by mere letter. He decided to meet her, and met, instead, a cheeky-looking girl named Maxine Foenander who accosted him in Retreat Road and said, ‘You’re Beryl’s boyfriend, no? I know because Beryl pointed you out to me one day.’
