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. the night in Kandy and continue early next day to visit the Estates. Half an hour after we had started  from the airport in the pelting rain there in front of  us, crossing the road in the glare of our headlights was a huge crocodile  waddling  in the rain.
“Good heavens” I said   “Look at that fellow, I have never ever seen a crocodile on the road anywhere before.”
“But you get them here” she replied nonchalantly.
“Yes but normally they are in rivers and tanks and are hard to see. Yet you have arrived straight from England and  within half an hour , have seen a sight which must be pretty unique!”  But Nancy was not over impressed and took it all very much for granted! I never had a similar experience again!
On Kirklees about a month after we had arrived  Frank Lushington the manager retired. He had been there for thirty years from the days when it was privately owned by his aunt Mrs Armitage Ogden. When she decided to sell up to United Planters, part of the deal was that Frank would continue in his post until his retirement at 55 years. Frank was one of the most extraordinary eccentrics of Ceylon. As  a young man he was extremely good  looking, very suave with an abiding passion for polo and horseracing and loving when on leave the life of London Clubs and the turf. He was commonly known as “Swanky Franky” and before   the war had been one of my Mother’s many lovers and comforters in the difficult days of her marriage. By the time I came out  to work,  he had really gone to seed , had become fat and increasingly eccentric and he spent most of his time at his own private property near Welmada which he had originally  purchased as lovely rolling downland area  of land to excercise his race  horses. But once he became too old to ride, he developed a cut flower business and would send flowers overnight by train to his buyers  in Colombo.  Whilst we were on Hugoland  he took his leave to visit a  cousin in Jamaica and came back besotted with calypso music and Jazz. He was determined to have his very own jazz band and immediately started  changing all the younger  staff on the estate, and would only take on replacements that could play a musical instrument. The same applied to his personal assistant and he informed his agents in  Colombo that he would only accept a Scotsman. They replied that unfortunately none was available, and the nearest that they could oblige was  an Englishman with a scots name: Peter Ferguson. He arrived for his interview and said that he had been educated at Lancing, had been in the Royal Navy etc. Frank was not interested one jot.
“ Can you play a musical instrument, because that is all I am interested in?”
“Well I can fiddle a bit and play drums” he retorted very much tongue in cheek!
“Daniel” Frank  shouted to his head clerk in the office next door, “ Mr Ferguson  is coming to join us here. Get onto Colombo and order up for him one  guitar and a set of drums”
And so Peter came into the district as one of  our near neighbours, with his pretty blonde wife  Honor who was of Polynesian extraction and their son Jackie who was two. Peter  who was a year younger than me, was one of those larger than life characters who drank himself silly on gin, and Honor kept him in good company. He was remarkably talented.   A  brilliant golfer, tennis player, an accomplished artist and  he learnt how to play a guitar  over a weekend by constant practice and teaching himself. There were always stories of him with women and he was forever getting into scrapes. Once we were at the Hill Club before he was married, and there was an attractive blonde girl whom we had never seen before. Peter started chatting her up and then propositioned her to come out to his car outside. Suddenly a huge hand came out knocking us all off our bar stools and a Royal Marine grabbed Peter by the throat and punched him stone cold onto the floor. The attractive lady was his wife! On another occasion again after having too much on board he asked another girl to meet him in the car and then typically, he had a last quickie before disappearing out to meet her on  the back seat, where he started putting his hands up her  legs. There was a deafening shriek, which with the booze he could not understand, and it turned out that in the dark he had made a mistake, and had climbed into the car  where my  balmy godmother was sitting!  When we first arrived  Peter also had just returned from leave in the UK, and I asked him how he had got on with his Father who was a dentist in Seaford and who I knew  was very disappointed in his marriage to a “mixed race girl”.
“Oh it was alright for the first three days, then Dad made an offensive remark about Honor and I went to hit him, but he got me first and laid me out stone cold  and we left”. Here was the Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet champion boxer, and his father had a fist faster than his!. Years later when I was trying to find  out Peter’s  whereabouts in South Africa  I telephoned his father and said that I was a friend of Peter’s and  could   he help me with his address:
“If you are a friend of that little bugger you are no friend of mine” and with that he banged down the receiver!
    After Frank  had departed we had  in contrast a delightful couple, Pat and Beryl McKittrick with two lovely daughters, Carol 10 yrs  and Sue 12 yrs . Pat was a dark curly haired  Ulsterman from Belfast and had come out to Ceylon as a redcap (military policeman) during the war where he had met   and married Beryl who was a Wren, and whose family came from Scarborough. After the war he had decided to stay on and they had spent most of their subsequent  career on various Uva Estates. Pat was a very quiet sound practical personality, and with a very gentle character just turned 40 years with his two main loves being rugby football and the freemasons  as well as the wonderful social life. During the South West Monsoon on  most weekends he would be off following the Uva team as they battled it out in the wet cold misty upcountry air, or on the caked  hard concrete like ground at Badulla, or in the sticky wet clammy heat of Colombo or Ratnapura. Masonry took up a lot of his time and he was a Grandmaster of the Ceylon Lodge and was forever trying to persuade me to join, which I said I would not, without knowing what I was letting myself in for.  But this he would never divulge. He got on well with Peter  and there was always some party or other taking place between our respective houses as well as the Perkins next door. At the end of July 1962 his elder daughter Sue  flew out from England for her summer holidays and Pat had rented Hubert Paterson’s bungalow at Trinco. I lent him a whole load of fishing gear and we had a wonderful party to celebrate  her arrival by a huge new swimming pool that he had only just had completed.  The following Saturday just before he went to Trinco, he asked us over for lunch again at Kirklees this time to meet a very charming Dane who had come to stay for the weekend. We arrived a bit early and Beryl  gave us a beer in the cool of the verandah as we awaited Pat  who was still out in the field. He arrived about half an hour later rather peturbed:  “Mike you know a damn silly thing happened  just now. I was looking over with the building contractor at some new housing that was being built, and suddenly out of the blue this damn dog rushed out from nowhere and sunk his  teeth deep into my leg. We shot him, cut off his head for analysis,  but of course the  big  danger is rabies”
“ You must take the course” I said  “because if not, there is no treatment once you get it developed up to six months later”.

So once he had dressed his wound he was on first on the phone to our local   government  Doctor  in Udapussellawa, and then on to the planters doctor at the Hatton Home. Both said that he had no alternative and that he must commence the course within the next two days and continue  for fourteen  days,  unless the analysis was negative. So we had our lunch under a rather gloomy annoying cloud ,as it meant Pat having to collect the vaccine from Hatton and have a daily 5cc jab in the abdomen around his navel. But we all get over these annoyances and two days later he was off to Trinco continuing his course whilst on holiday. A  week later in the evening as we sat in the drawing room at Luckyland, the telephone rang. 2/5 Next Page.

 

Storm up Umoya from HL Garden & Factory