by Carl Muller
By living in Wellawatte Sonnaboy did not have all the overtime opportunities that came the way of railway town drivers who had call boys to press them into extra work, but he was happy. He knew his ‘turn’ and all he had to do was report to the Dematagoda Running Shed, couple engine on train and take off. Beryl, naturally, was pregnant again and once more making a layette in pink. This was too quick, she thought. A third child at nineteen was most discouraging. She asked Dr Raeffel in Wellawatte about this baby business and that cheery soul had said she could go on filling the world with von Blosses until she was fifty if she had a mind to. It appalled her. At the going rate, she could have another fifteen at least. But greater, more dramatic things were to occupy her mind. Sonnaboy came home one day with a ‘call up’; and on the May morning that Marie Esther Maud was born he cycled home in the full uniform of an Army lance corporal of the Railway Volunteer Reserve. It seemed that in Bavaria, another little corporal was shaking the world. A weasely little fellow with a Chaplin moustache and the frilly name of Schirkgruber or something. Only, he had taken hold of Germany and called himself Adolf Hitler and invented the goose-step . . . .
So Heather Evadne Maryse von Bloss could be called a ‘war baby’ and Sonnaboy, seeing this third girl was vastly disappionted. Even Cecilprins, who spent most of his time in the lounger in Kotahena, was upset at the news. Sonnaboy had started well. But to have three girls after Carloboy was a bit too much. Of course there was grandson Ian de Mello, but that Ian was hard to classify. The Bandarawela children had also been busy. Opel had two sons—Claude and Winston—and was once more in the family way. Terry had a boy too—Morris—but they were all in the hills and Cecilprins could not visit them. He fervently hoped that Leah would come up trumps second time around.
Cecilprins had been overjoyed when Totoboy announced the birth of his first son. He rode a richshaw all the way to Wellawatte to gloat over this new grandson . . . and was rudely shocked.
‘My God, men, from where you went and got a black bugger like that?’
Totoboy frowned. ‘Is he black? Didn’t notice.’
‘Like chatti pot!’ Cecilprins bawled, ‘Even the mother not so black, no? How she getting such a black bugger?’
Totoboy squinted. ‘Have, no, some black fellows in her family. Must be in the blood.’
‘In the blood? Fine thing to say after putting negro von Bloss. Whole trouble is you’re drunk and how to know who is coming and going here?’
Iris, listening, was enraged. ‘What do you mean who is coming? You think anyone else is coming here. If baby is dark what to do? God is my witness, no? Chee! the way you are talking and old man also. Why you won’t say what your son is up to? Now drinking arrack . . . everyday coming drunk and the time I have with him. See, will you, even Fortune. She is dark, no?’
It did seem that Iris would continue to produce a line of very dark-skinned von Blosses. Cecilprins, screwing up his eyes, had to admit that Fortune, too, was pretty dark-skinned. Funny, he hadn’t noticed it before, but then, he never took much notice of the granddaughters. ‘And now she’s pregnant again,’ he told Totoboy. ‘ ‘Nother black bugger for sure. Never listened to your mama and me, no? Told not to get married to that woman.’
And Totoboy sent his father home and drank long and deep and told Mr Dole next door that he was very miserable.
Leah, however, came up roses. She brought forth Ivor Rudoph Wilhelm, a beautiful peaches and cream baby with a dusting of fair hair that hinted at gold. Everybody in the family was pleased while Cecilprins danced a little jig and was sent to bed early because he was quite breathless. Sonnaboy, who was quite taken aback at all the fuss around Leah and her son, decided to take Carloboy ‘in hand’. ‘You study,’ he would yell at the boy, ‘and be a big man and let everybody know who you are!’
Carloboy didn’t take much notice. He had found E. Nesbit’s The House of Arden a keen contender to Alice in Wonderland and loved the way the author had twisted familiar verse to his convenience.
He rose in class one day to declaim:
The Mouldiwarp of Arden
By the nine gods he swore
That Elfrida of Arden
Should be shut up no more.
By the nine gods he swore it
And named a convenient time, no doubt,
And bade its messengers ride forth,
East and west, south and north,
To let Elfrida out.
Father Theodore, who took English and played a great deal of tennis, was not amused. That was at St. Peter’s College, Bambalapitiya, where Carloboy was schooled after his term with the Pouliers. The priest considered the whole poem a sacrilege. To keep the bridge, as Horatius did, was a historic epic, and not to be punned on or distorted even by as popular an author as Nesbit.
This may be as good a time as any to mull over the ‘British education’ that made every student in the island more familiar with the glory of being British and the British culture, arts and letters than of what Ceylon held for him or her. Scant heed was paid to the island’s history, its heroes, customs and traditions. In the Royal College were such stalwarts as Reid, Hartely, Harward, Marsh and Boake. In the many Catholic institutions, Irish nuns, French and Italian priests, Franciscans, Benedictines, Dominicans pounded out the Western and European values. Anglican and Methodist ministers also pitched in. Warden Stone held in his hands, the destiny of thousands who attended St. Thomas’ College. In St. Joseph’s College it was the sainted Father Le Goc. The Reverend W.S. Senior became the great literary figure of Trinity College and the hill country.
It was a peculiar situation. The most ludicrous sights were to amaze one . . . a Sinhalese affecting the grab of the white master to the extent of white topee, dark coat, shirt and tie, and a large belt to hold up . . . his sarong! He would also carry an umbrella and look, for all the world, like one of those ‘Punch’ caricatures!
Colombo’s roads were named by the British for and after the British. So were the tea estates, the parks, the gardens, the public squares. The newspapers carried British cartoons by ‘Phiz’ and little descriptive articles about the Rev. J.C. Brown who was a missionary at the Cape of Good Hope, and the talent of Inigo Jones. Thus were the people of Ceylon steeped in all things British and, most regretfully, began to slowly but surely shed the colourful Burgher patios which this chronicle has faithfully followed. There was no getting away from the British influence. Sonnaboy would go to the Manning place market to buy beef; or go to Davidson Road to see his friend De Niese; or stop at MacHeyzer Road to watch a game of rugby football or go to Maitland Crescent to take in a few overs of a cricket match. Carloboy, at eight, knew that Sir Alfred Jones had been the President of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and never bothered to ask why this thrilling bit of information had been thrust upon him. He also knew that the most gallant British sea dog of the days of timbered ships was Admiral L.T. Jones . . . but he did not know how many rivers flowed to the sea in Ceylon and the distance from Colombo to Jaffna.
Oh, there were a great many books on Ceylon, written by Englishmen and some Burghers and Sinhalese too. Some locals even wrote things like the History of Ceylon and others attempted to give students the story of their own country in the form of ‘popular tales’ but none of these were encouraged classroom reading. Rather, students were called upon to give their opinions on whether or not Kaiser Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia was a warmonger and general intriguer. School texts were Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Mill on the Floss, Shakespeare, of course, and a great deal of poetry from Chaucer to John Masefield. It was a period of the swift nurturing of the ‘brown sahib’, and yet, the chronicler maintains, some of old Ceylon’s truly great and scholarly men and women were produced in this period, even if they thought and acted British and always maintained that the sun would never set on the long and heady days of empire. A paper, written by Dr Bernard Hollander and delivered before the Ethological Society sparked great interest and brought in its wake many learned lette
rs in the Ceylon Observer. Hollander supported the view that criminals could be cured by surgery, and advanced the thought that moral defects could be righted by trepanation. Indeed, letters to the Editor (something compulsively British) were of such great charm and abiding interest that men like pensioner Johnny Foenander made of the exercise a real hobby and an enterprise. His letters would appear in print daily on every conceivable topic. His was the stilted, old-world English so admired in those times and one letter, on the evils of over-education, merits reproduction:
It is all very well to cultivate learning (which is not knowledge, by any means) but healthy bodies ought to be maintained at a health-standard as a primary duty, and evening lessons of the preparatory kind, by artificial light too (and in cities, God help us!), when the young wood of the young bow ought to be relaxed, are all wrong—and utterly wrong, believe me. I am not afraid of a race of fools; I am afraid of a race of rickety human encyclopaediettes, who are a nuisance to everyone and a health-drawback. I have children brought to me who go to bed supersaturated with what are called evening lessons, and who chatter in their sleep, and wake from bad scholastic dreams to begin again the weary Sisyphaean task of education. A nice set of neurotics we are breeding and rearing, to be sure!
Leah would always find space in her scrapbooks for such letters to the editor. This Foenander fellow must be a genius. Writing such marvellous letters. And the words . . . encyclopaediettes! Sisyphaean! Supersaturated! Marlene, inordinately interested in her mother’s ledger-scrapbooks, wished to have her own albums. Leah said: ‘Having here twelve big books, no? So anything you want to paste or copy just put in these books. All this for you to read and learn, no?’
None of the children of that age could escape the ‘British connection’. Ian could be found, frowning over John Hare’s Reminiscences and Recollections and Dorcas poring over the Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill’s My African Journey. Carloboy, quite indisciplined in literary taste would flit from anything to everything—cheap Sexton Blake library paperbacks to Ivanhoe, Kidnapped, the knights of the Round Table and the exploits of Hercules.
Everything took on an unmistakably British air. One could move around and there would be roads named Vaverset Place, Pennycuick Lane, Hampden Lane, Manning Place, Chatham Street, Vauxhall Street, MacCallum Road, Torrington Square, Maitland Crescent, Dickman’s Road, Ward place, etc. etc. etc. In the hill country—the tea country—the estates and tea gardens were fondly named by their British and Scottish owners: Glenloch, Abercrombie, MacLaughlin, Brookside, Hatton (after Hatton Gardens), Great Western, Glenfinnan, Doone. Also, in perpetuating the old, staid and proper way of British life, British households maintained (and quite cheaply, too) Sinhalese and Tamil domestics who were schooled in the duties of house-stewards, butlers, nannies, grooms, valets, cooks, head and under gardeners, serving boys, maids and many poor, but blossoming village girls who were taken in to be kitchen, scullery and laundry maids and become fair game for the beefy sons of the house with their white duck trousers and tennis racquets and cricket bats and very eager to see how these native wenches fared under their cloths.
Before we move on, the chronicler recalls one Colombo road which stubbornly clung to its native name—Timbirigasyaya (the plain of the Timbiri trees), which must have sounded quite intriguing and exotic to the British, who decided to keep it. It was related how the Government Agent of the Western Province, a Britisher named Cummings, tried to frame his mouth on the word and gave up the struggle. ‘Devil take it!’ he said, ‘It looks like timber, gas and somebody’s bloody ayah!’ and so the British called it Timber-gas road, leaving out the ayah which was the local equivalent of the Indian amah or nanny.
It is hoped that the reader has got, however hazily, a picture of the times. This was truly a period of transition. The easy days of plenty were petering away and with war clouds spreading over Europe and the Far East, things began to look rather bleak. Christmas 1940 saw Sonnaboy and Beryl move to 18th Lane, Bambalapitiya. Heather was an infant, and the move was to facilitate Carloboy’s access to St. Peter’s College. Actually, that institution had been split, with a section housed behind St. Mary’s Church, Dehiwela, and another in the large Catholic Seminary grounds in Bambalapitiya. St. Peter’s too, was a war victim, for the actual college beside the Dutch canal at Wellawatte had been commandeered by the army and where troops marched around all day and ginger-moustachioed sergeants blew whistles and screamed till they were very red in the face.
Oh, the von Blosses, like all else, were not badly off, but things were getting ‘pricey’, as Beryl reminded. A loaf of bread was now twenty-five cents and duck eggs (imported from India) twenty-five cents each. Distinctions arose even in the buying of beef. The Muslim butchers offered ‘beef without bones’ for seventy-five cents a pound. If, however, you were prepared to take a chance, you could buy beef ‘with bones’ for sixty cents where you get a sort of ‘lucky dip’—offcuts with a lot of skin and gristle, an assortment of knuckles and other scraps. Offal, however, remained twenty-five cents a pound and Carloboy was pressed into service each time Beryl brought home mile-lengths of tripe which had to be cleaned and washed many times over. Nothing was standing still. Prices were slowly, inexorably rising, and suddenly came another calamity—shortages! What? No beef? And what the hell, men, have to queue at Elephant House now for New Zealand lamb and Australian mutton. What about the local beef? Sonnaboy would ask and he would be told by municipality inspectors that the beef was going to the Armed Forces camps and trucks were rushing cattle to Trincomalee where they were slaughtered and distributed to the cold rooms of ships of the Royal Navy East Indies fleet. This is no time to grumble. This is the time for some sacrifice. We are at war! And there is enough dehydrated beef available!
War—even though the action seemed to be in northern and central Europe and soldiers were exhorted ‘to hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line’— had the salutary effect of taking everybody’s minds away from the lean times they were experiencing. The bulletins, the newspapers, the B.B.C. and the rumour mills kept everybody’s mind on Montgomery and Rommel, the German Messerschmitt Me109 and the Vicker’s Supermarine Spitfire. War comics became the new craze and stage shows had patriotic skits and the walls of Government buildings carried bold black slogans: ‘Careless talk costs lives’ and ‘Help the war effort. Save paper, bottles and tins’. War songs became the in-thing. Totoboy, characteristically, became a veritable fount of such patter. He would stagger into the White Horse Inn, Chatham Street, or Brown’s Bar in Canal Row, waving a tiny Union Jack and roaring:
Kiss me goodnight, sergeant major,
Tuck me in my little wooden bed,
We all love you, sergeant major,
When we hear you call, we show a leg.
Don’t forget to wake me in the morning
And bring me a nice hot cup of tea,
So kiss me goodnight, sergeant major,
Sergeant major be a mother to me!
Everybody would flock to the cinemas to see the RKO and Pathe news bulletins and stand at attention for the National Anthem which was ‘God Save the King’ and had nothing to do with Ceylon!
The family will always remember Christmas 1940. Everybody came to visit at 18th Lane because Cecilprins came to spend Christmas there and, ‘Must go and wish Papa, no?’ It was goodly company indeed. George and Leah with Marlene and Ivor; Totoboy and Iris with Fortune and Brennan and baby Winston (‘Named after Winston Churchill,’ Totoboy said proudly while Cecilprins raised himself in the lounger, took a quick look and said that that was a real flight of fancy. ‘Churchill is white and fat,’ he said, ‘and what is this? Never mind black, but like a well-sucked mango seed, no?’); Anna and Mr Colontota, Elsie and Eric with Noella, Dorcas, Beulah (who was shoved into the kitchen to help Beryl) Ian and toddler Thelma; and there was Sonnaboy’s brood: Carloboy, Diana, Marie and baby Heather who, everyone said, was too sweet to be true. Cecilprins had hoped that Viva and Terry would come and he actually insisted tha
t, ‘Can wait a little, no? without eating so early. Can’t say if Viva and Terry will also come. I wrote and told, also.’
Sonnaboy was outraged. ‘What? You wrote to come? Fine thing, no, and without even telling us.’
Cecilprins ignored the black look. ‘Today Christmas, no?’
To be sure it was. Most of the family had gathered at St. Mary’s Bambalapitiya for midnight mass (Leah and George went to St. Lawrence’s Church, Wellawatte, and so did Anna) and they were all decked out fit to kill. There had been the many usual rounds of Christmas shopping and Sonnaboy would buy two bottles of Black and White and tell Beryl: ‘Keep in kitchen safe. Must put a stock in for Christmas.’
By evening he would decide that it would be nice to ‘put a small shot’ and in order to do so, needed company. So he would put a head over the back garden fence and bawl: ‘Oy, Hatch, come for a small drink.’
Norman Hatch would trundle out, grinning. ‘I was also just thinking must get a bottle today.’
‘So come will you. Put a shirt and slippers.’
‘Fine way of buying for Christmas,’ Beryl would sniff, ‘Now finish the bottle and go and buy again.’ Beryl was right, of course. Drinks for Christmas were always bought early, finished long before the day and stocks were constantly replenished.
Totoboy popped in just before the family were ready to leave for midnight mass. He demanded a stiff one.
‘But, Uncle, if you drink how are you going to receive?’ Carloboy asked.
‘Receive? Receive? Who giving me, men, to receive?’ He took a big glass of whisky, ‘Ah, pukka. You know that Father Robert’s sermons, no? How to sit and listen without a drink?’
‘But what about communion?’ Carloboy persisted, ‘You won’t receive communion?’
Totoboy shuddered. ‘My God, men, he told Sonnaboy, ‘the things you’re teaching these buggers. Now I need another one.’
