still small she then told Mac that she had no wish to return permanently to Ceylon but instead would make her home in Scotland. So most of the time Mac, a very full blooded man who needed and who enjoyed company, was left alone on the estate pining for his love in Scotland. Whilst he was now a wealthy man at the peak of his career, his sorrow was loneliness and a home without the companionship that he yearned for..
So it was that as we worked on the Estate together, I learning the trade and he berating me in the daytime like for example:
“Mike let me get this clear to you once and for all. I am in charge here and I take the responsibility for what I tell you to do. Your job is to have them carried out. I do not want to hear about any scientific theory from your University at this stage. Later maybe, but for the moment you do exactly what I say however crazy you may think my orders are. For example if I tell you to plant the young tea plants upside down with their roots in the air, so they die, that is my responsibility, and I am the guy who will take the can. Understand once and for all that with me you do exactly what you are told to the letter, with no nonsense and no cheek or answering back!”
But once we were off duty he was a different man. In his lovely modern and beautifully appointed bungalow at Downside, I would come over in the evening for a beer and we would sit in his large drawing room and then after a couple of stiff whiskies he would rise and walk over to his grand piano and just play. From his finger tips would flow Chopin waltzes, nocturnes as well as pieces from Grieg, Schubert, Motzart and Schumann. Mac could not read a note of music but he had that exceptionally rare gift of a very retentive ear. So he would buy a record, or hear a piece on the radio, listen to it, and immediately sit down and play the melody. It was the same as mentioned before with his word perfect knowledge of Sinhalese both derived from his acute sense of hearing. He was also always reading being very conscious of his lack of an early education and like Father before him, he was a self educated man, something nowadays very hard to find in the banal world of the time wasting internet, and computor games. About a month after I had started work Father came up from Trinco to visit the Estate and the following morning I took him for a long slow drive to visit all the fields and also to chat with the coolies and supervisors etc. Eventually towards midday we arrived back at the factory to see a couple of Ceylon Policemen walking around. We asked what they were doing and were told that they had been summoned from Welimada by our lorry driver Piyasena who had claimed that a battery that he had possessed had been stolen. The matter was insignificant and we completely forgot about it. But that evening however at about five o’clock we went for a tour of the factory to see the young tea leaves being spread out to wither in the lofts. Whilst we walked on the top floor with the Teamaker who was in charge of the factory, a Tamil called Mr Ponnamalam he suddenly turned to us and said: “You know about that battery that was lost and the police were inquiring about, well I know where it is and I will show you.” We followed him to the end of the loft and he pointed to the high galvanized iron cooling tank for the engine that powered the factory. There in the tank which was placed on a twelve foot high plinth one could clearly see from where we were standing, the battery with six white knobs on top deep at the bottom of the water. We shouted for someone to climb up and get it down so that we could then ask a few questions. When about ten minutes later we came down outside the engine room we saw crouched down the engine driver Sirisena washing out a battery. So we asked him what he was doing and where was the battery that we had seen and had asked to get down.
“It is here, this is my personal battery which everyone knows, and I had put it up there to give it a good wash prior to refilling it with fresh acid” he replied.
“No that was not the one that we saw” Father said, “The one we saw up there had white knobs on whereas the one that you are washing now, has black ones”.
“You are mistaken this was the battery up there and now I am washing it out here” The argument went back and forth , we said we saw white and he was absolutely insistent that we were mistaken and had in fact seen black with the reflection. So certain and convincing were his responses, that in fact that had I been on my own, I would probably reluctantly have agreed with him due to his determined resolve, but then there were three of us, and we all could not have been deceived together. By this time we had moved into the engine room, where there was the steady thud thud of the large Ruston Hornsby engine throbbing away at 120 rpm. Suddenly Father sprang at Sirisena, caught him by his shirt and twisting it into his neck he drove him into the corner with his fist in his face. Bellowing in his loudest voice he yelled:
“Show me now where the other battery is or I will knock all your teeth out”. The speed of Father’s action and the shock of his leap had caught the man unawares and he broke down and sobbingly confessed: “The white battery is under the sacks behind the engine.” It then all came out that he and the Lorry driver Piyasena had gone into partnership with a van for hire, but Piyasena had swindled him and then finally sold the van and all he had was the battery and he felt that was all due to him. Father turned to me and said: “In all my years in Ceylon he is the first Sinhalese to admit to a lie and confess albeit under a threat. For that I will give him the reward of a fifty rupee monthly rise in pay”. This he told to Sirisena who now was truly grateful, and who felt he now had a friend in Father rather than an enemy. Father on his part was 64 years old, very tough at heart, and could still move quickly. He had a razor sharp brain and had that Charnaud fearlessness “Sans Peur” and an acute sense of when to use shock tactics a lesson learnt from his army days in the First World War.
I know that this little tale would not mean much to the average reader. However it left a very deep impression on me, of how there are some people that will lie and continue lying to the bitter end, and then go on to try and persuade you that what you saw with your very own eyes and heard with your very own ears was false. It also made me instinctively wary of deceitful people who would smile to your face whilst preparing a knife for you when your back was turned.
About a month later there was another sequel to this incident, when Thomas the Head Clerk discovered when he went to write out 50 cheques for our village bought leaf suppliers, that two pages of double cheques had been cut out with a razor blade together with their counterfoils from the back of the cheque book. He was very upset poor man, but Mac told him not to worry and immediately contacted the bank, which as it happened was on strike in Colombo with only executives keeping operations running. One of our cheques had just been cashed with Mac’s signature of squiggles, forged for todays equivalent of £7,000. The Sinhalese teller did not like the look of it when it was presented in Colombo and had queried the signature with the British Manager who told him to pass it. I eventually made inquiries through out the village and estate and found out that the lorry driver Piyasena was involved and we immediately sacked him, although it took us over a year to get him evicted from his estate house. So in a way he got his just desserts atlthough from another direction.

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