Running in the Family Read Free Page A

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 playerscompeted 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 the 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