Running in the Family

by Michael Ondaatje

  During the week in Dorset my father behaved impeccably. The in-laws planned the wedding, Phyllis was invited to spend the summer with the Roseleaps, and the Ondaatjes (including my father) went back to Ceylon to wait out the four months before the marriage.

  Two weeks after he arrived in Ceylon, my father came home one evening to announce that he was engaged to a Doris Gratiaen. The postponed argument at Cambridge now erupted on my grandfather’s lawn in Kegalle. My father was calm and unconcerned with the various complications he seemed to have created and did not even plan to write to the Roseleaps. It was Stephy who wrote, setting off a chain reaction in the mails, one letter going to Phyllis whose holiday plans were terminated. My father continued with his technique of trying to solve one problem by creating another. The next day he returned home saying he had joined the Ceylon Light Infantry.

  I am not sure how long he had known my mother before the engagement. He must have met her socially now and then before his Cambridge years, for one of his closest friends was Noel Gratiaen, my mother’s brother. About this time, Noel returned to Ceylon, sent down from Oxford at the end of his first year for setting fire to his room. This in fact was common behaviour, but he had gone one step further, trying to put out the fire by throwing flaming sofas and armchairs out of the window onto the street and then dragging and hurling them into the river—where they sank three boats belonging to the Oxford rowing team. It was probably while visiting Noel in Colombo that my father first met Doris Gratiaen.

  At that time Doris Gratiaen and Dorothy Clementi-Smith would perform radical dances in private, practising daily. Both women were about twenty-two and were greatly influenced by rumours of the dancing of Isadora Duncan. In a year or so they would perform in public. There is a reference to them in Rex Daniels’ journals:

  A garden party at the Residency Grounds.… Bertha and I sat next to the Governor and Lady Thompson. A show had been organized for them made up of various acts. First on was a ventriloquist from Trincomalee whose act was not vetted as he had arrived late. He was drunk and began to tell insulting jokes about the Governor. The act was stopped and was followed by Doris Gratiaen and Dorothy Clementi-Smith who did an item called “Dancing Brass Figures”. They wore swimsuits and had covered themselves in gold metallic paint. It was a very beautiful dance but the gold paint had an allergic effect on the girls and the next day they were covered in a terrible red rash.

  My father first saw them dance in the gardens of Deal Place. He would drive down from his parents’ home in Kegalle to Colombo, stay at the Ceylon Light Infantry quarters, and spend his days with Noel watching the two girls practise. It is said he was enchanted with both girls, but Noel married Dorothy while my father became engaged to Noel’s sister. More to keep my father company than anything else, Noel too had joined the Ceylon Light Infantry. This engagement of my father’s was not as popular as the Roseleap one. He bought Doris Gratiaen a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually it was paid for by the family.

  My father had nothing to do in Kegalle. It was too far away from Colombo and his new friends. His position with the Light Infantry was a casual one, almost a hobby. Often, in the midst of a party in Colombo, he would suddenly remember he was the duty officer that night and with a car full of men and women planning a midnight swim at Mount Lavinia, he would roll into the barracks, step out in his dress suit, inspect the guard, leap back into the car full of laughing and drunken friends and depart. But in Kegalle he was frustrated and lonely. Once he was given the car and asked to go and buy some fish. Don’t forget the fish! his mother said. Two days later his parents got a telegram from Trincomalee, miles away in the north end of the island, to say he had the fish and would be back soon.

  His quiet life in Kegalle was interrupted, however, when Doris Gratiaen wrote to break off the engagement. There were no phones, so it meant a drive to Colombo to discover what was wrong. But my grandfather, furious over the Trincomalee trip, refused him the car. Finally he got a lift with his father’s brother Aelian. Aelian was a gracious and genial man and my father was bored and frantic. The combination almost proved disastrous. My father had never driven to Colombo directly in his life. There was a pattern of resthouses to be stopped at and so Aelian was forced to stop every ten miles and have a drink, too polite to refuse his young nephew. By the time they got to Colombo my father was very drunk and Aelian was slightly drunk and it was too late to visit Doris Gratiaen anyway. My father forced his Uncle to stay at the CLI mess. After a large meal and more drink my father announced that now he must shoot himself because Doris had broken off the engagement. Aelian, especially as he was quite drunk too, had a terrible time trying to hide every gun in the Ceylon Light Infantry building. The next day the problems were solved and the engagement was established once more. They were married a year later.

  APRIL 11, 1932

  “I remember the wedding.… They were to be married in Kegalle and five of us were to drive up in Ern’s Fiat. Half way between Colombo and Kegalle we recognized a car in the ditch and beside it was the Bishop of Colombo who everyone knew was a terrible driver. He was supposed to marry them so we had to give him a lift.

  “First of all his luggage had to be put in carefully because his vestments couldn’t be crushed. Then his mitre and sceptre and those special shoes and whatnot. And as we were so crowded and a bishop couldn’t sit on anyone’s lap—and as no one could really sit on a bishop’s lap, we had to let him drive the Fiat. We were all so squashed and terrified for the rest of the trip!”

  HONEYMOON

  The Nuwara Eliya Tennis Championships had ended and there were monsoons in Colombo. The headlines in the local papers said, “Lindbergh’s Baby Found—A Corpse!” Fred Astaire’s sister, Adele, got married and the 13th President of the French Republic was shot to death by a Russian. The lepers of Colombo went on a hunger strike, a bottle of beer cost one rupee, and there were upsetting rumours that ladies were going to play at Wimbledon in shorts.

  In America, women were still trying to steal the body of Valentino from his grave, and a woman from Kansas divorced her husband because he would not let her live near the Valentino mausoleum. The furious impresario, C. B. Cochran, claimed “the ideal modern girl—the Venus of today—should be neither thin nor plump, but should have the lines of a greyhound.” It was rumoured that pythons were decreasing in Africa.

  Charlie Chaplin was in Ceylon. He avoided all publicity and was only to be seen photographing and studying Kandyan dance. The films at the local cinemas in Colombo were “Love Birds,” “Caught Cheating,” and “Forbidden Love.” There was fighting in Manchuria.

  HISTORICAL RELATIONS

  The early twenties had been a busy and expensive time for my grandparents. They spent most of the year in Colombo and during the hot months of April and May moved to Nuwara Eliya. In various family journals there are references made to the time spent “up-country” away from the lowland heat. Cars would leave Colombo and perform the tiring five-hour journey, the radiators steaming as they wound their way up into the mountains. Books and sweaters and golf clubs and rifles were packed into trunks, children were taken out of school, dogs were bathed and made ready for the drive.

  Nuwara Eliya was a different world. One did not sweat there and only those who had asthma tried to avoid these vacations. At an elevation of 6000 feet the families could look forward to constant parties, horse racing, the All Ceylon Tennis Tournament, and serious golf. Although the best Sinhalese tennis players competed up-country, they would move back to Colombo if they had to play champions from other nations—as the excessive heat could be guaranteed to destroy the visitors. And so, while monsoon and heat moved into deserted Colombo homes, it was to Nuwara Eliya that my grandparents and their circle of friends would go. They danced in large living rooms to the music of a Bijou-Moutrie piano while the log fires crackled in every room, or on quiet evenings read books on th
e moonlit porch, slicing open the pages as they progressed through a novel.

  The gardens were full of cypress, rhododendrons, fox-gloves, arum-lilies and sweet pea; and people like the van Langenbergs, the Vernon Dickmans, the Henry de Mels and the Philip Ondaatjes were there. There were casual tragedies. Lucas Cantley’s wife Jessica almost died after being shot by an unknown assailant while playing croquet with my grandfather. They found 113 pellets in her. “And poor Wilfred Batholomeusz who had large teeth was killed while out hunting when one of his companions mistook him for a wild boar.” Most of the men belonged to the CLI reserves and usually borrowed guns when going on vacation.

  It was in Nuwara Eliya that Dick de Vos danced with his wife Etta, who fell flat on the floor; she had not danced for years. He picked her up, deposited her on a cane chair, came over to Rex Daniels and said, “Now you know why I gave up dancing and took to drink.” Each morning the men departed for the club to play a game of billiards. They would arrive around eleven in buggy carts pulled by bulls and play until the afternoon rest hours while the punkah, the large cloth fan, floated and waved above them and the twenty or so bulls snorted in a circle around the clubhouse. Major Robinson, who ran the prison, would officiate at the tournaments.

  During the month of May the circus came to Nuwara Eliya. Once, when the circus lights failed, Major Robinson drove the fire engine into the tent and focussed the headlights on the trapeze artist, who had no intention of continuing and sat there straddling his trapeze. At one of these touring circuses my Aunt Christie (then only twenty-five) stood up and volunteered to have an apple shot off her head by “a total stranger in the circus profession.” That night T. W. Roberts was bitten in the leg by a dog while he danced with her. Later the dog was discovered to be rabid, but as T. W. had left for England nobody bothered to tell him. Most assume he survived. They were all there. Piggford of the police, Paynter the planter, the Finnellis who were Baptist missionaries—“she being an artist and a very good tap dancer.”

  This was Nuwara Eliya in the twenties and thirties. Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations. There was a large social gap between this circle and the Europeans and English who were never part of the Ceylonese community. The English were seen as transients, snobs and racists, and were quite separate from those who had intermarried and who lived here permanently. My father always claimed to be a Ceylon Tamil, though that was probably more valid about three centuries earlier. Emil Daniels summed up the situation for most of them when he was asked by one of the British governors what his nationality was—“God alone knows, your excellency.”

  The era of grandparents. Philip Ondaatje was supposed to have the greatest collection of wine glasses in the Orient; my other grandfather, Willy Gratiaen, dreamt of snakes. Both my grandmothers lived cautiously, at least until their husbands died. Then they blossomed, especially Lalla who managed to persuade all those she met into chaos. It was Lalla who told us that the twenties were “so whimsical, so busy—that we were always tired.”

  THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

  Years later, when Lalla was almost a grandmother, she was standing in the rain at the Pettah market on her way to a party. Money was not so easily available and she did not own a car. When the bus arrived she herded herself in with the rest and, after ten minutes of standing in the aisle, found a seat where three could sit side by side. Eventually the man next to her put his arm behind her shoulder to give them all more room.

  Gradually she began to notice the shocked faces of the passengers facing her across the aisle. At first they looked disapprovingly and soon began whispering to each other. Lalla looked at the man next to her who had a smug smile on his face. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Then she looked down and saw that his hand had come over her left shoulder and was squeezing her breast. She smiled to herself.

  She had not felt a thing. Her left breast had been removed five years earlier and he was ardently fondling the sponge beneath her gown.

  FLAMING YOUTH

  Francis de Saram had the most extreme case of alcoholism in my father’s generation and, always the quickest, was the first to drink himself into the grave. He was my father’s and Noel’s closest friend and the best man at several weddings he tried to spoil. Unambitious, and generous, he lost all his teeth young—something he could never remember doing. When he got into a fight he would remove his false teeth and put them in his back pocket. He was in love for a while with Lorna Piachaud and started fights all over her wedding reception. He even attacked his own wife and then, overcome with guilt, decided to drown himself in a section of the Kandy Lake that was only twelve inches deep. While he crawled around on his hands and knees, H— consoled Francis’ wife as well as he could “and took as much as he could get.” If Francis was the extreme alcoholic, H— was the great rake, his tumescent heart notorious all over Colombo.

  Francis and his friends discovered that the cheapest drinks could be found on ships, where alcohol was duty free. Pretending to visit departing relatives, they would board vessels in the harbour and stumble off gangplanks in the early hours of the morning. They were usually ordered out of the lounge when Noel, unable to play a single tune, started thrashing out one of his spontaneous concerts on the piano. Once, when asked to prove who they knew on board, my father opened the first cabin door and claimed a sleeping man as his friend. My father was wearing a tie from his “Cambridge” days and the sleeper, noticing this, groggily vouched for him. They coaxed the sleeper to the bar and my father managed to remember all the Cambridge names, recalling even the exploits of the notorious Sharron K—, who caused havoc with the population of three colleges.

  One night Mervyn came to our house and told Vernon, “We’re all going to Gasanawa, get dressed.” It was one in the morning. Vernon went off to find his clothes and returned to find Mervyn asleep in his bed. He couldn’t be moved. You see he just needed a place to sleep.

  Gasanawa was the rubber estate where Francis worked and it became the base for most of their parties. Twenty or thirty people would leap into their cars after a tennis tournament or during a boring evening and if the men were already drunk some of the women drove. They all poured out at Gasanawa where they slept in cabins that Francis had built for just such moments. Whenever he was sober, Francis tried to make the estate a perfect place for parties. He lived on gin, tonic-water, and canned meat. He was in the middle of building a tennis court when his boss ordered him to build a proper road into the estate. This took three years because Francis in his enthusiasm built it three times as wide as the main road in Colombo.

  People’s memories about Gasanawa, even today, are mythic. “There was a lovely flat rock in front of the bungalow where we danced to imported songs such as ‘Moonlight Bay’ and ‘A Fine Romance.’ ” “A Fine Romance” was always my mother’s favourite song. In her sixties I would come across her in the kitchen half singing, “We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes/but you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.”

  So many songs of that period had to do with legumes, fruit and drink. “Yes, we have no bananas,” “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts,” “Mung beans on your collar,” “The Java Jive.” … Dorothy Clementi-Smith would sing the solo verses to “There is a tavern in the town” while the others would drunkenly join in on the chorus. Even the shy Lyn Ludowyck betrayed his studies and came out there once, turning out to be a superb mimic, singing both male and female parts from Italian operas which the others had never heard of—so they all thought at first that he was singing a Sinhalese baila.

  But for the most part it was the tango that was perfected on that rock at Gasanawa. Casually dressed couples, coated in a thin film of sweat, swirled under the moon to “Rio Rita” by John Bowles on the gramophone, wound up time and again by the drunk Francis. Francis could only dance the tango solo so that he wouldn’t do damage to women’s feet, for which he had too much respect. He would put on “I kiss your
little hand, Madame” and mime great passion for an invisible partner, kissing the mythical hand, pleading to the stars and jungle around him to console him in an unrequited abstract love. He was a great dancer but with a limited endurance. He usually collapsed at the end of his performance, and a woman would sit beside him bathing his head and face with cool water while the others continued dancing.

  The parties lasted until the end of the twenties when Francis lost his job over too splendid a road. He was lost to them all by 1935. He was everyone’s immaculate, gentle friend, the most forgiven and best-dressed among them, whispering to someone a few seconds before he died, while holding a fish in his hand, “A man must have clothes for every occasion.”

  The waste of youth. Burned purposeless. They forgave that and understood that before everything else. After Francis died there was nowhere really to go. What seemed to follow was a rash of marriages. There had been good times. “Women fought each other like polecats over certain men.”