Where the Clocks Chime Twice

by Alec Waugh

  I asked what he was planning for his daughter. My own daughter was just sixteen. She was going to Switzerland the following year. I explained about applying for currency in advance. He scarcely listened. He was following his own thoughts.

  “I couldn’t go back,” he said. “But the infuriating thing is that if that last time I bathed I had swum out by mistake too far and the sharks had got me my daughters would have been no worse off; probably better off. Their uncle could have looked after them. They’ve always spent half of their summer holidays with him. He lost his son in the war. His daughter’s married. He’d be delighted to have my kids. They know him better than they know me. They’d be better off with him. But because I’m alive, they’d not be happy there. They’d think they ought to be with me. It would look queer my being stuck out here, and that’s the one thing that children can’t stand, something that looks queer, that they can’t explain to their friends.” He laughed, a short, wry little laugh. “It’s odd how often the best service one can do one’s friends and family is to disappear, to die under conditions that would confer no disgrace. There’s always something discreditable about a suicide.”

  “The Romans didn’t think so; they held that a man had the right to leave a party that had begun to bore him.”

  “I dare say, but we’re not Romans.”

  He spoke impatiently.

  We had begun to move; in half an hour we should be passing Praslin. Rain was falling steadily. “Have there ever been times,” he said, “when you have thought ‘if I were to die now, everyone would be left with a good impression of me. Everyone would speak well of me. My family would be proud of me. But in the next fifteen years things may have happened to make them feel ashamed of me; I may have forfeited their pride and trust. If only I could make my exit now’. Have there been times when you’ve thought that?”

  “Is there anyone in the world who hasn’t?”

  An idea for a story crossed my mind, of a man who has gone to seed in the tropics, who is afraid of going back to face the son who has made a hero of him; and who in order to preserve the son’s memory intact swims out to sea to meet the sharks. I saw it as a possible short short.

  I looked at Campbell thoughtfully. Confidences are usually made late at night, after many drinks. But they are also made on grey chill mornings upon station platforms. Had Campbell realised quite how much he had admitted, how much he had betrayed? Did he guess that he had taken me behind the scenes?

  “What about that Sinhalese boy?” I asked. “Are you taking him back with you?”

  He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be fair to him, the climate— who’d there be for him to talk to? He’s going to Colombo.”

  I hesitated. There was something that had been puzzling me about Campbell all along. That story about joint income-tax in England; there should have been a way round that. I had discussed it with the C.I.R.O. He thought there was.

  “The C.I.R.O. seemed to think that you could have filed separate declarations.”

  “My income-tax agent didn’t think so.”

  “Couldn’t you have signed a deed of separation. I know one man who …”

  “Do you think I’d have come all this way out here, if I’d known of a single way in which it could have been avoided?”

  He snapped it out and he was frowning. I had gone too far.

  “What other reason could I have for coming here?” he said.

  What other reason? I could think of one. I thought of his fear of going back; of that something happening that might destroy his reputation. I enumerated certain points—his precise modulated accent; the way he walked; the Sinhalese servant; Si le grain ne meurt; his attitude to my first book; the defensive mechanism of a man who instinctively, without knowing why, distrusts discussion of a dangerous subject. He might not have discovered until middle life that danger lay there for him. He might have discovered it in India. What if his wife had offered him an ultimatum —to leave the country for his children’s good. It all fell into place.

  I may have been completely wrong, but I noticed that Campbell avoided me for the remainder of the trip.

  V

  Ex-British Raj

  1. Ceylon

  When Doubleday’s chief editor, Ken MacCormack, suggested my writing a life of Lipton, my second reaction was ‘That should involve revisiting Ceylon’.

  For many reasons I had been anxious to go back. I went there first in 1926, at the start of a world trip that had Tahiti as its main objective. I was twenty-seven and I was travelling alone. It was my first trip east, and my preconception of the tropics was based upon films and novels—Maugham and Kipling and White Cargo. I pictured them in terms of such contrasted types as the stern-jawed Briton sitting down night after night to his solitary dinner in the jungle in full evening dress, and the malarious, unshaven planter slumped down on his verandah beside an emptying whisky bottle with a dusky figure in the background. Bigoted missionaries, crafty traders, corrupt officials, pioneers who for months on end did not see another white man—such were my stock characters. I pictured the Oriental port as a ramshackle stretch of bungalows along a quay, with a native quarter in the background— narrow crowded streets, the whiff of opium, swift glances behind veils.

  I was quite unprepared for the high white buildings of Colombo, the wide macadamed streets, the tree-shaded boulevards, the long, bright, flashing cars.

  A fellow passenger had recommended me to the G.O.H. (Grand Oriental Hotel). Its wide high lounge was set with wicker tables and lined with shops in which silks and jewellery and curios were costlily displayed. Silent servitors in long white coats, red sashes, and red turbans were busy with iced drinks. Fans were purring above women in cool print dresses and men in white ducks and tussore. “Are you always as busy as this?” I asked the desk clerk. He nodded. “Very nearly. But this is Governor’s Cup Week. We shan’t have a room free by Thursday.” I looked about me. There were some two hundred of my compatriots in the lounge, I did not see a familiar face. It was high time to sort out my letters of introduction.

  Of these I had quite a packet. During the week before I sailed I had assiduously canvassed my acquaintances. “Do you know anybody in Ceylon, Malaya, Borneo?”

  The letter that I selected first was addressed to the manager of the East India shipping line. I scarcely knew the man by whom I had been given it. But I set off confident that his five lines of recommendation would sponsor me into Ceylonese society.

  My reception, I recognise it now, was far more affable than I had any justification to expect. I was not kept waiting. I was shown right away into a large airy office with an impressive view over the harbour. My hand was shaken cordially. I was asked after our mutual friend. I was asked about ‘things in London’. “One gets so out of touch with everything out here.” No telephone calls interrupted our conversation. My interrogator had perfected the technique of receiving you as though you had come for a weekend. Finally I was asked how long I should be staying and what I had in mind; when I replied that I was in search of copy, he shook his head. “Colombo won’t be any use to you, not this week, anyhow. Governor’s Cup, you know. Everything’ll be crowded out. If I were you, I should go to Kandy. Plenty of local stuff up there. Much cooler, too. There’s a good early train that you could catch to-morrow. Then … let’s see, when is it you sail? Tuesday. Why not lunch with me on the Monday and tell me what you’re going to write about us.”

  He rose to his feet. The whole point of welcoming a visitor as though he had come for a week-end is that he should find himself ten minutes later in the passage without feeling that he has been used discourteously.

  “What about the native quarter. Shouldn’t I see that?” I asked.

  He looked perplexed. “The native quarter? I suppose you mean the Pettah. I dare say that would be in your line.”

  On the wall behind him was a poster announcing a Rugby football match. Colombo v. Up-country. The date was that afternoon’s. Wouldn’t that be worth looking at? “Certa
inly, if you’re interested in Rugger. It’s our big match of the year.”

  The ground was three miles away. I drove out by rickshaw. The rickshaw is a most satisfactory means of transport for short journeys. You have the fulfilled sense of travelling at the greatest speed of which the vehicle is capable; at the same time you are moving so slowly that you can see the scenery. I told the boy to take me through the Pettah. It proved to be a quite broad thoroughfare, with the docks on one side and on the other a succession of one-storied shops. It was most unromantically clean except for the orange-red splashes that stained the sidewalks, and whose nature puzzled me until my driver turned his head sideways and spat out a stream of betel-juice.

  Within two minutes we had turned out of this ‘native quarter’ into an opulently façaded avenue on each side of which large bungalows stood back in their own gardens. It was clear that quite a number of people resided here under conditions of some affluence.

  On the football field five hundred or so spectators—British every one of them—were watching a game whose standard of play in spite of the heat was high. Such a standard could only be maintained if a hundred Britons under the age of thirty were regularly playing Rugby. At half-time the spectators gathered into groups; there was much waving of hands, much welcoming of old acquaintances. They all seemed to know each other very well. I had pictured the tropics in terms of the lonely planter who does not see another white man for weeks on end, and insists almost at the pistol’s point on his guest staying with him for a month at least. I had imagined that one of my chief problems as a traveller would be the tactful telescoping of such hospitality. That clearly was not to be my problem here.

  Next morning I caught the train to Kandy. It was my first experience of tropical scenery. I could scarcely have had a better introduction. Kandy is seventy miles to the east of Colombo, and close on two thousand feet above sea-level. It is a three-and-a-half-hour journey. For the first hour you are in the plains. The paddy-fields wind like rivers between groves of coconuts, with teams of water buffaloes churning up the mud to prepare the ground for sowing; then you begin to climb and the nature of the vegetation alters—the paddy is set out in curving terraces that follow the contours of the hills, coconuts are displaced by rubber trees and the low, tight-pruned tea shrubs; there are valleys and mountains and long vistas. The air grows cooler.

  “Plenty of local stuff here.” I soon saw what my adviser meant. There were small shops, selling cheap European goods with josssticks burning in the doorway. There were the botanical gardens of Peradeniya with orchids and palms and many-coloured crotons; Kandy—the capital of the Sinhalese monarchy until the close of the Napoleonic Wars—is to-day one of the holy cities of the Buddhist world. Sacred elephants were bathing in the river; there was the Temple of the Tooth and the great jewelled bell that contains the sacred relic; a yellow-robed priest showed me the silver-bound holy books and how the long thin strips of parchment are inscribed with a sharp-pointed pen and then rubbed over with black paste. He inscribed a section for me as a souvenir. The temple is white and turreted, and across the roadway is a seminary that has the air of a cathedral close. It stands on the edge of a large ornamental lake that I strolled round in the early dusk. It was the first time I had seen fireflies. Never since have I seen them in such profusion.

  I had arrived by good luck for the first night of the Perihera— the series of religious processions for which Kandy is renowned. By common consent, it is one of the most splendid spectacles that the East can offer. Myself, I have not seen its equal. First came an advance guard armed with whips; they strode proudly forward cracking them like cowboys; then came a band of drummers in red and white shirts, they were bare to the waist with brasswork on their arms and shoulders; torchbearers followed with flaming braziers; there were elephants in red and gold, at the head of them an old white-bearded man carrying the sacred emblem in his hand. Strips of white cloth were spread before the elephants; there were dancers, there were buglers with long, curved instruments; there were warriors engaged in mock combat with long two-handed swords. The sidewalks were lined three deep. The noise was deafening. The red and gold, the brass and silver, the white cloth and the flaming braziers, glowed and glittered against the silhouette of trees and towers.

  After the glare and thunder of the Perihera, the hotel with its dark mahogany screens and stairway seemed like an empty church. “Are you always as quiet as this?” I asked the desk clerk. He shrugged. “It’s Governor’s Cup Week. All the residents are in Colombo. But there’s a P. & O. liner coming in to-morrow. There’ll be a hundred and fifty coming out to lunch.”

  They started to arrive soon after ten. It was their one day in the tropics and few of them were suitably attired. Some of the men were gasping under the weight of tweeds, others had the look of navvies with rolled-up sleeves and open collars. Some of the women were in full Ascot glory—long skirts had not yet come back—some were in beach costume. It was the younger set, for the most part, that had made the trip. They were all in the highest spirits. Jocularities were being tossed from group to group over intervening tables. The owner of the curio shop, who the day before had seemed less a salesman than a caretaker, now had two assistants. “How often do you have this kind of party?” I asked the desk clerk.

  “Once or twice a week. Quite a few of them stay over between boats. It’s the tourists who keep us going.”

  That afternoon, in the light of what I had seen during the last forty-eight hours, I re-read my guide-book. I could understand now why Colombo was no place for the stranger with casual letters of introduction. Ceylon is not only a pivot of the tea trade, second only to Calcutta in importance, but lying as it does off the southeast tip of India, it is an essential port of call for every liner that sails East of Suez. Inevitably, in self-defence, its nine thousand European residents have built up a self-contained society. They would have no life of their own at all if they made themselves responsible for every chance arrival who had been told to look up old George’. I,recognised the formula. There were two quite separate worlds here, and they never mixed—the Residents’ and the Tourists’. Or rather there were three; I thought of the Perihera whose traditions went back into a past that preceded by centuries the European invasion of the island. There was the third world of the Ceylonese themselves.

  Three worlds that did not mix. That was how I summed it up after my first visit in 1926. To-day, after a second and much longer visit, I would repeat that verdict, only to add that now the differences are more acute. In the first place, Ceylon’s recently granted independence as a self-governing nation within the vaguely defined perimeter of the British Commonwealth has led to the retirement of a number of British officials, and has contributed inevitably to the contraction within their frontiers of the businessmen, planters, technicians, and executives who remain.

  In the second place, fewer visitors are arriving with authentic claims upon the attention of the European resident. Before the war a number of passengers made a regular practice of stopping over between boats. The hill station of Nurewa Aliya provided a good winter holiday for the leisured English. Australian mothers brought out their marriageable daughters, Ceylon with its surplus of unattached young men inspiring in Adelaide and Melbourne the same jokes about ‘the fishing fleet’ that Malta did in England. Such visitors usually took the precaution of supplying themselves with testimonials that amounted to commands. But to-day the shortage of liners and the long waiting list for essential passages have prevented the resumption of such traffic. Air transport has brought London within two and New York within three days, but the cost of a round trip ticket and the greater accessibility of the Caribbean have delayed Ceylon’s development as an international winter playground. The world cruise has not yet returned; and tourists are, in fact, confined to passengers in transit between Europe and Australia and Europe and the Far East; a type of visitor whose arrivals and departures pass unnoticed by the residents. This time, however, I was not travelling as a haphazar
d tourist but on a definite professional assignment. I was writing the life of Thomas Lipton, and the first purpose of my trip was to visit his old tea estate at Dambatene.

  From the start I was taken in hand by Lipton’s. “I’m asking one or two people round for drinks. I’ll call for you at half-past seven,” their No. i told me on the telephone. It sounded rather late, he added, but “we like to shoot some golf or tennis after office closes”. He was a tall spare man in the early fifties, dark and handsome in a military way, with a short-clipped moustache. In a few weeks’ time, after twenty-five years’ service in Ceylon, he was being posted home. “One of the snags of this life is having to send your children back to school in England. In the last eleven years I haven’t seen my elder son for as many months. That’s partly the war’s fault, of course, but I’m not having that happen with my younger boy,” he said.

  His bungalow was two or three miles out from the business section. The party had been arranged, not as I had expected on the verandah but indoors. It was a hot night and the men took off their jackets. Informality of dress is, indeed, one of the great changes that I noticed on this second visit. The solar topee has disappeared, and the young men work in white shorts, white stockings, and short-sleeved white shirts. I was handed a highball, then a hot cheese canapé. “I’m afraid that you might have thought it odd, not being asked to dinner on your first evening here,” my hostess said. “But we never bother about dinner after cocktail parties. We have all these what we call ‘short eats’ instead. We thought you’d be more interested in meeting some of our local types.”

  She was right. I was. They were, for the most part, my host’s opposite numbers in other firms. They were the people I had wanted to meet and failed to meet on my first visit. Ceylon was very different now, they told me. Everyone was working harder. Office hours of half-past eight to five, an hour off for lunch and no siesta. Barely time before the light failed for the short spell of golf or tennis that you must have in the tropics if you are to keep your health. Everyone was working harder and with less to show for it. The cost of living was astronomical. The Ceylonese were running their own show now, fixing their own taxes. Ceylon was no longer a tributary nation, organised in the interests of Whitehall to provide Englishmen with careers and pensions.