same time was absolutely polished and charming with an elegance and poise so rare these days. During  that first visit back to Luckyland and back to Hugoland  I felt rather like a Roman Centurion or Governor coming out of the mist to view the ruins of his villa at Chichester or wherever. I had left 12 years before, but subsquently the tea industry had been nationalized and two gigantic Soviet style companies had been created each covering about 250,000 acres. The sheer bureaucracy and the mountain of paperwork was even in that short time starting to destroy all initiative. On the whole the tea was well maintained but all the infrastructure such as roads, factory machinery  maintenance  was steadily getting worse and worse. The roads on the steep hillsides with the high tropical rainfall were the first to suffer, as unless there are quick repairs the road becomes little better than a ravine bed. At Hugoland  Father’s lovely bungalow, and the garden that we had nutured with so much loving care with my strange and unusual trees from Venezuela and Burma and Father’s huge orchid collection was totally desecrated. It was now used as a District Agents office, full of files and the lovely blue grass lawn and flower borders just dug up dug up for vegetables. I wept to see all our style thrown into a dust heap. But then one thinks, all life is in flux and this is the new order of unfeeling for the past and functionalism for the present. Can we in England lecture the Sinhalese  when in our own society nowadays in spite of all the wealth that has been created, we have no one  who  is capable of either dressing in style  and rarely nowadays does one ever meet a well dressed cultured individual.    Elegance and poise and a discreet sense of colour and flamboyancy have all gone out of the window  abandoned in the nouveau rich world of brashness.    Learning, by  which I mean  being well educated in history and literature and poetry  has been subjugated to a mentality of watching the latest football match or Grand Prix on television ? The future is likely to be even bleaker still with the youngest generation having their banality ratched down a further notch with the recent advent computor games  and banal television occupying  most of a young persons time, so that the wonderful classics such as Dickens, Hardy or Thackeray  or the romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats or Byron are now islands totally out of a young persons reach.    Through Harold we managed to rent a small bungalow at Nilaveli about ten miles North of Trincomalee for the princely sum of £3.50 per day. It was about 50 yards from the sea and  the thundering North East Monsoon surf. It had been the home of the contractors that had built the adjoining Blue Lagoon Hotel and  was very simple,  with  just two cadjan palm covered bedrooms and a small hall and verandah. There were no ceilings and so there was a marvellous view of all the activity in the rafters with and endless succession of gheckos, skinks spiders and a ratsnake and other animals running , eating and dining on some insect or other. Outside was a flush toilet, a kitchen with a paraffin stove and a shower in the open consisting  of an upright bent pipe. The beds were clean and the sheets changed each day. For lunch we would go to the fish market in Trinco and buy wonderful firm pelagic fish, seer or baracudas, enormous prawns and beans. We ate like kings and in the evening we would have supper in the  new hotel. Those ten days with Paul and Beryl and Jill all chattering away were bliss  and we never seemed to stop laughing. We met a charming young Tamil couple on their honeymoon who joined us for drinks and supper in the evening and time seemed to fly on wings, until soon we had to depart for cold wintry England. Tragically also that  Hotel in that  ideal spot was soon to be burnt down by Tamil rebels in the war that was to break out about 5 years later.
Janet meanwhile had grown up into a very sensible girl after her year in France where she had become fluent in French. In 1975 she went to Nottingham to read Art History & English graduating well three years later. As is normal she had a number of men friends which she fortunately never became over obsessive about and when their time came they were dropped.  Janet was a person  very like me in character whose head ultimately rules over the heart whatever the current passion of the moment . She had the other very great gift of always listening to reason and logic from older people particularly her parents and grandmother with whom she was very close before making a major decision. On her graduation I advised her that a degree however good is useless unless it is backed up by a secretarial qualification. To start with she was adamant but eventually gave way and enrolled at St.James  for a two term course.
To sweeten the pill of the drudge we took her out to Ceylon for a month over Christmas in 1978 to give her the opportunity of seeing once again her childhood haunts and seeing a society totally different from anything in the West. We flew out in mid December and had to spend a freezing windy day in Bahrain when an engine packed up on our plane . But eventually we landed and we followed a very similar pattern to that of Paul although this time we based ourselves at Downside with Lionel and Yvonne Almeida who were kind and most charming hosts and he looked after our small remaining 50 acres of tea diligently. The North East monsoon was in full swing blowing strongly with very heavy rain in the afternoons but the mornings were bright and sunny with the dew sparkling on the grass like diamonds. Just before we had arrived, the East Coast had been struck by a hurricane but fortunately the weather was not quite so violent upcountry. Janet  spent her spare time constantly brushing up her shorthand which we had to keep on testing her and then we went down to Trincomalee to stay at the “Sea Anglers Club” where we spent our Christmas surrounded by langur monkeys (wanderoos) who scampered all over the roofs and into the windows and beams of the dining room! At least it was a bit different to the usual fare in England and everyone was jolly and relaxed. We would take out the club boat trolling for fish and one day as we were returning under the steep jungle clad cliffs of Sober Island I hooked  a small fish which I started to reel in. The next thing out of the blue a sharp eyed sea eagle came and seized it out of the water still hooked onto my line. So I was confronted with the eagle with the fish in his talons soaring up in the air. To start with I played out the line and then eventually I reeled in and near the boat he finally let go leaving me with my catch three quarters eaten!
We then journeyed via Polannaruha the old Sinhalese capital of the 11th Century to show Janet the beautiful ruins and elegant statues of the disciples of Buddha carved out of a granite boulder, on towards Kalkudah and the lovely coral reefs there. A short journey on and we came to the Mahaweli Ganga the largest river in Ceylon in full flood  covering the road for about a hundred yards with a spate of about 2 – 3 ft deep. We stopped and pondered what to do next, and then a large truck appeared and slowly was able to traverse the current because of his larger wheels and higher wheel base.  There was a  youth standing  by the waters edge and I started chatting to him in  Tamil  about how he viewed the complex political situation in the country and the increasing racial tension. His face turned from a relaxed jovial smile to one of extreme bitterness and sheer determination.

“You know we Tamils have these last 20 years been progressively marginalised  and are treated as second class citizens in our own land where we have been living for 2,000 years. This is not right and furthermore the government is giving priority to giving land only to the Sinhalese in our traditional  areas on land cleared for new irrigation schemes. Soon we will take up arms and prove our point as we feel that we are being infiltrated and overwhelmed in our own traditional areas”. I felt he was speaking from the very depth of his heart and tragically  the following year the guerilla war was to commence in a bitter ruthlessness unequalled anywhere in the world and which continues to this day. I told him that I wanted to cross the river by pushing the car through and he called up a whole gang of young boys to help me. Our driver was very concerned but I told him not to worry. We placed all our luggage out of the boot onto the back seats closed the door, switched the engine was off, and the brake off and we heaved. Jill and Janet got a lift over in another truck as we pushed the old Opel car ahead of them. As we got into the deepest and fastest flowing part of the flood the car started to float and at the same time a huge snake about 7 or 8 ft long swam past us

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