Father’s granting of a rise to the engine driver was typical of him. About two months prior to my arrival from England there had been a major accident in the firing room. Here were the big furnaces for the tea driers fuelled either by oil or the cheaper firewood which however was not always available. When oil was being used there was a big sign in English Sinhalese and Tamil to say that in the event of a flame failure the furnace must be cooled before attempting re ignition. But the drier cooly had taken no notice on this occasion and had placed a manual flare to reignite the flame that had gone out with a blockage. There was the most tremendous explosion which blew open the whole furnace backwards as well as the rear wall of the building and had catapulted the cooly through all the debris, mercifully without causing him undue injury. The Insurance Man came to survey the scene and assess the cost involved, and turned to Father and said:
“Well one thing for certain, he wont be getting his job back” “On the contrary” Father replied, “ I will have him straight back. He has now learned his lesson the hard way, and no amount of the reading of signs would ever give him that experience.” He got his job back! Soon the South West monsoon was set in with torrential rain on the other side of the island and with a steady dry hot wind blowing down on us. The growth on the tea bushes slowed down and we started to make those beautiful flavoury teas for which some Estates in Uva are famous. I spent an increasing time in the factory paying attention to every minor detail and soon we were competing with the best Estates in Uva such as Mac on Downside, Aislaby and Roehampton. Mac now became very impressed with my turn as a teamaker and now on occasion would ask my advice which was quite gratifying seeing how we had started our work together.
One day I took time off and was in Nuwara Eliya during a gap in the storms. It was a bright cool sunny day when I came out of Cargill’s store to be welcomed by a big burly Scotsman and his wife just getting out of their car: “Hullo Michael” he said, “How is it all going, and are you enjoying yourself now that you are on Hugoland/”
I was in a quandary, I had no idea who this man was, who obviously knew me well and knew exactly what I was doing. He was, I felt sure from Colombo, but I had met so many people when I had arrived that it was hard to put names to faces. Extremely worried I responded in the most tactful manner that I could summon:
“ Sir do forgive me, I know that we have met but I cannot for the life of me remember your name, or for that matter where it was.” He lent forward with a huge grin on his face and said : “ Dont worry at all my boy, my name is MacLeod and I am managing director of George Steuarts the Company who you work for and who employs you! You soon will get to know me very well in the coming years!” I felt miniscule, a fool, and wished that the ground would swallow me up. But he took it as a good joke, and that was Big Mac all over, the most charming of men. Later I got to know him well even to the point when eleven years later in London I eventually was offered a job by him in the Commonwealth Development Corporation where he later became a director. In August of 1954 we had a visit in Ceylon of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburh on a Commonwealth tour. First in the morning there was a Grand Parade at the Nuwara Eliya Racecourse and we were all marshalled by Anne McEwen , Johnny’s Mother with whom I had been at school with. She was short, fat and robust in the way she shouted and got everyone into correct line in a correct fashion for the first parade. Later there was another walkabout and chat, this time with the planters and their wives at the Radella Club. Luckily the South West Monsoon had cleared for the day and it was a bright sunny afternoon. I shook hands with Prince Phillip, and what impressed me at the time was his heavily nicotine stained fingers a thing that one just never sees today. The Queen who was next to him was very chatty with us all, extremely cheerful and her light brown curly hair gave her a radiant look in the soft afternoon sunshine.
As I worked at Hugoland more or less non-stop, I had little time for socializing. On some Wednesday afternoons I would drive to Dickson’s Corner Club for tennis, and occasionally to the Uva Club in Badulla, both over an hours drive away. With the slowing of work in the dry weather I decided that it would be a good opportunity of learning to speak Sinhalese. I now was fairly proficient like all planters had to be with Tamil, the language of the estates, but in our case with the estate situated amongst the Sinhalese villages and employing about 200 of them it was vital that I could converse easily with the locals so as to gain their respect. Accordingly I arranged to go each afternoon for a couple of hours to the local village school in Lunuwatte and have lessons from one of the Sinhalese schoolmasters. He tried to give me a grounding in reading the sanskrit alphabet of loops and additions to them. I found this a bit over hard , but his lessons in colloquial Sinhalese proved their worth and opened a new door by enabling me to have conversations in the shops, with the Buddhist monks as well as with the normal men and women workers on the estate. A couple of years later with the rising ethnic tensions, this knowledge of their language and of being able to empathise with the villagers in the quiet simple dignity of their life, their history, and with their religon, proved invaluable.
As the dry weather progressed and my work kept me busy from morning till night, and the one thing that really kept me going were the letters that would arrive every couple of days from my Jill in England. In July she had got her BSc degree in dairy technology, and had got a job at Cow & Gate in Yeovil. I had sent her the money for her passage out in November by Bibby boat and could not wait for the moment that she arrived in Colombo. Her Mother had at last got reconciled to her going abroad, and Father and Mother each kept on writing to Ma, to say how they would all look after her daughter and see that no harm came to her. She never was really convinced, and for years until we returned home finally, was suspicious of me and would regularly lash me with her waspish tongue which I took as best I could, as one would expect from a stormy cloud. Eventually it would pass over and the sun would shine again! It was all part of the bargain! In November at long last Jill was due to sail but much to my frustration her departure was held up for ten days by a dock strike in Liverpool. Eventually however I was glad to hear on the radio that it was over. I cabled the Bibby line to order bunches of mimosa to fill her her cabin and so give her the first taste of the scents and aroma of up-country Ceylon, and to be as it were a welcoming greeting to the start of her new life.

3/3 Next Chapter.