she could confine whilst they played Hoagy Carmichael tunes on the new Long playing records.
About May Jill was very excited to have a visit from a friend from University with whom she had done the same course, Janet Spicer, one of the paper family of that name. We went down to Colombo to meet her and drove back to the estate on the southern route skirting the Adams Peak Wilderness, through the gem area of Ratnapura where in the paddy fields were crude pits into the underlying gravel where they could search for sapphires,and semiprecious stones in which the area abounded. This was also the ‘wet zone’ with the highest rainfall and was ideal for the growing of rubber. We had just passed the town of Pelmadulla and I looked at my watch and said that we should be home in exactly 3 hours. The words were hardly out of my mouth when there was a bang and the differential axle on the rear wheel snapped. We abandoned the car, got a lift in a passing lorry back to Pelmadulla where I left the girls in the local planters club, and found a small garage which miraculously had the very left hand axle. The Sinhalese, as I said before are the worlds cleverest and most versatile mechanicss, and I found a man in a loin cloth who towed the crippled car back to his cadjan roofed garage and proceeded to replace the part. Meanwhile I went and had a beer with the girls and some curry all the time having to put up with a Polish Engineer who kept on boasting about how he had won the war alone, as well as all the girls he had conquered. Soon however we were on our way passing through the dense rubber country where fortunes had been made in the prewar years and during the war when Ceylon was the only major source of natural rubber, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies being under Japanese occupation.
The tea and rubber Estates in the whole of the steamy hot low country wet zone, was opened up and developed by Scottish enterprise. Everyone from the managers to the owners and agents of the companies , were Scots from the grim bare northern highlands creating wealth through sheer hard work and fortitude in the hot sweltering environment. And it was here that Mac had started his Ceylon Planting career. He told a lovely story of a canny Scot’s Manager that after the first world war had been asked to open up a large rubber estate in Opane near Pelmadulla. At the time of the rubber boom with the increasing growth of motor vehicles, land was at a premium. There was no virgin land available, and so blocks had to be purchased from Sinhalese villagers often with fairly dodgy titles. But there was little time to waste. Deals were negotiated in small lots, and immediately planting would commence in the frantic rush for yet more rubber trees. Eventually some 20 years later the manager came up for retirement, and was given a package which he considered derisory after all his hard years of slog in the steamy rain soaked environment.
“ Thank you,” he wrote “for the offer, which I do not think is quite up to what I had expected considering all my hard years of work.” Back came the reply: “Ye will nae get more than just what you are due which is the same as all the rest !”
So he replied “ I was upset at your tone and there is also the small matter of rent due to me to consider on 20 acres of land upon which are situated all the principal buildings of the Estate such as the factory, the staff and managers bungalows, the warehouses and labour quarters. These have all been built on land which I own, but hitherto have never charged rent!”
The crafty man had in all the wild rush for quick gain, acquired the block in his own name, and had built all the buildings on it which he had used as an insurance policy and a firm lever to get what he wanted when the time came.! A canny Scot.
We eventually got back to the Estate and a few days later I took Janet Spicer and Jill for her first Low Country wildlife trip to the game reserve of Yala. In those days it was a primitive place with just the barest of tracks but fortunately there were no tourists and no big hotels. There was a party of about a dozen of us planters, all well known to each other and we met up first for a good curry lunch at Tissamarahama Resthouse, and eventually in the very late afternoon we arrived with all our provisions at the Buttawa bungalow which situated in a lovely position not so far from the sea and its dangerous currents.
Over a gently sloping vast rock by the bungalow one could walk and admire the still quiet blue water of a brackish lake which was populated with a number of dangerous muggers, or estuary crocodiles. The bungalow had one recent piece of modernity, in that it had a flush toilet, unheard of in a jungle habitation at that time!
It had been a long drive and as soon as we arrived we erected our camp beds, men on one verandah and the girls on the other, and I just lay down and collapsed out when I was awakened with a terrible scream. Everyone rushed to the loo to see that it was my poor Jill had gone in with her torch and bolted the door, only to then find on the door with herself locked in, a most enormous tarantula spider. They have a large pinkish main body about the size of a man’s thumb with black hairs thinly covering it, and eight long hairy black legs which in a big one can stretch 6 inches, giving a very frightening view. Eventually with everyone shouting and gently tapping it moved off and she was able to release the door and come out. But she was naturally very shaken by the experience which was quite different to the New Forest!
Next day Jill , Janet myself and a Sinhalese tracker cramped into the little A30 car and went for a trip through the reserve. Occasionally we all had to get out and push the car when it got stuck in the sand which was everywhere. At one point we drove through a very narrow track with steep bush on either side when suddenly as I drove slowly round a corner was the most enormous wild elephant one could imagine towering less than 10 ft in front. There was nothing one could do as we were trapped, and I was getting worried when the tracker got out, doubled himself on the ground and started praying and pleading to the elephant in a funny language which was not sinhalese or tamil but was a form of veddah, the ancient aboriginal language of Ceylon. After a while to our intense relief the huge pachyderm moved off and we were released from our ordeal.
It was a marvellous break, amongst friends, and a chance for Jill to meet new people and partake in the wonderful life of the country. It had also been another new opportunity for me to take wild life colour slides of both the animals and birds using my new 360 mm telephoto lens.
Father was very keen that we learned to play bridge.
“Mike you will never get on in Ceylon unless you can play Bridge, so you must make an effort” he would say.
Jill’s Mother too was a county player in England so we both tried to learn from him. But he was a hopeless teacher and would not start from basics, and so in desperation he suggested that his good friend Gilly Laurie who was a 55 year old married to his friend Cuthbert and who lived close to Badulla, would teach us. She was a big woman with a golden kind heart and was to become like a kind Mother to Jill. Two other young assistants joined our school for lessons but again we never learnt anything this time not that she was a bad teacher, but she would keep on telling us stories of all her love making exploits in the past. So we were constantly bombarded with tales of what she had done with the first mate in the lifeboat on the liner going home, and how she
