Ragalla Estate where I was to undergo my training or “creeping” was a lovely Estate of about 1,500 acres situated in the heart of Udapussellawa one of the finest tea growing districts of Ceylon about a half hours drive from the hill town of Nuwara Eliya. The Estate which was part of the Galaha Tea Co. had for some years been seriously neglected, and about five years prior to my arrival been purchased by Mr Jack Cowan a City Financier as part of some deal.. He came out to see for himself the state of his acquisition, was horror struck at its condition, and engaged the services of Father as the best agriculturist to set about rehabilitating the property. Father at that time was on the point of retiring, and advised Cowan to engage a first class manager and through his connections in the business, had recommended Ronald Williams. The estate was situated mostly in the Ragalla valley at 5,000 ft and the land swept upwards from the valley to the Nuwara Eliya jungle at 6,500 ft. The great factory which had just been doubled in size was situated in the valley as was the large rambling mock tudor style bungalow, which was on a hillside above on the side of a small stream which was lined with fir trees, on the other side of which was a small church that was later to be the place of our marriage.

Ronny Williams was a big man in every sense of the word. He was an ex-cavalry officer, and a very fine horseman who had served in the armoured corps during the war. All his planting career had been in the wide open spaces on the large Estates in Uva province near Badulla. He was a firm but very kind disciplinarian, who immediately set me down to work at learning basic Cooly Tamil. Each day I was to master 25 words which he would test me on, as well as other duties in the office in the afternoons. To start with, the 25 words were easy, but as the score steadily mounted, I found it increasingly hard, as although I knew the words I had difficulty talking. I confessed one day to Father of my anxiety that I would never be fluent enough to master the language.
“ Dont worry at all, just know the words and one day when you get really cross you will find that suddenly they will string together and you will be talking. Also think of all the damn fools who have gone before you and have been fluent. You must just give it time and it takes about 6 months to talk easily.” He was quite right!
In the bright crisp mornings I would go around the estate with Ronny who had an extraordinary method of dealing with problems whenever they arose. As we toured either walking or by car, the conductor, or the tea maker or even his assistant manager Ricky Peel, a tough Liverpudlian, would tell him of some difficulty that they were having, and he would listen carefully and then say:
“ What do you think we should do?” . In turn they would give their views, and then he would carefully weigh up what they had said, against what he himself had been thinking.
“ Yes I think you are right we had better do that” he would say. In this manner he had never ever committed himself to a decision on his own, without that decision being first sifted and weighed against someone else’s judgement. Even myself, raw and new would always be asked for my opinion which would be listened to intently before invariably it was shot down in flames for one reason or another. However very occasionally he would say “Yes that is an interesting angle, I must think about that further”. Ricky Peel, had started life as a jobber on the Liverpool stock Exchange, and was always playing the local share market on the side. During the war he had been an RNVR officer in command of a Tank Landing ship that had been based like so many others at Trincomalee, and he had returned after the war to enjoy himself teaplanting in the wide open spaces, a big contrast to the gloom of Merseyside. At the time of my arrival he was having a liaison with a short tough French girl from Hanoi with a short gamine hairstyle who had come away from the insecurity of Vietnam and had married a planter called Phillips with whom she had a son now aged about 2 years. I was shocked that she had just walked out on Phillips who she said was boring, and coldly abandoned her young child, and come to live with Ricky. She was forever studying for degrees on correspondence courses like a perpetual student trying to prove her mental ability, but at the same time she was good, amusing, rather droll company, and enjoyed a drink and they were both keen golfers. One day whilst I listened to her tales of the Vietcong, and this was long before the Americans had got involved with the war, I casually asked:
“ Josette I see that you always have a big hunting knife on the sitting room coffee table. As a matter of interest how many people have you killed with it?”
“Only one”, she replied nonchalantly “ You see I was in the Market when this man suddenly made a lunge at me. In an instant I drew my knife and ran it straight into his chest, and I then just ran, and ran and escaped before anyone had time to catch me. It was then that I decided to immediately leave Vietnam and came on the first boat which happened to stop in Colombo and I decided to stay in Ceylon!”
I was quite sobered by her answer and I knew that from her, it absolutely rang true! She was a real tough cookie, the sort you don’t see nowadays. Whilst I was at Ragalla I finally received Jill’s full consent to get married and come out a year later. I was absolutely overjoyed and immediately took the opportunity of buying her a diamond round cluster engagement ring which I gave to Joyce William’s who about a month after my arrival was coming back on a trip to England and could act as my postman. My heart absolutely leapt at the prospect of having for keeps my very own wife to share the lovely but also quite isolated life in this paradise of a country. I had a year to wait, but with so much new going on, it was only in the quiet of the evenings that one yearned for company. Meanwhile the North East monsoon rolled in with heavy cold mists, and steady rain in the afternoons, but mostly bright cold crisp sunny mornings. Our little district tennis club “Dickson’s Corner” would be closed for three months, and would re-open at the end of January as the cold and wet made tennis impossible. But then suddenly the weather would clear, and the courts would be refurbished with a fresh layer of very fine sand mixed with anthill earth clay which had a mucilaginous quality that bound the new top layer into a smooth hard wearing and very fast surface that lasted well throughout the year.
In the afternoons I would spend time trying to get to grip with estate accounts in Ronny’s office. I noticed that whilst I had the papers etc spread across the desk there would be a steady and often persistent drop of honey bees which would fall out of the roof ventilator grill immediately above the desk, and sometimes down my neck. I mentioned this to Ronny and suggested that there must be a hive in the roof that we should have removed.
“Good Heavens never!” he replied “Don’t you realise that it is extremely lucky to have bees in the roof. The bother of having the odd one drop on ones head is a small price to pay, and I have never been stung by them anyway. Not like the time when I had to go and pay a Consultant Visit to an Estate that I had never been to before.

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Waterlilly, father's Motor Torpedo boat which went up in flames Xmas 1953 nearly burning us all.