………The day that I had been waiting for over a year at last arrived. It was a glorious Sunday in mid December and during the night the Warwickshire had put into port and was anchored in the middle of the bustling harbour of Colombo. I drove over early in the morning, parking my little black beetle Austin A30 in the car park in front of the Jetty a white colonial style building and headed for a launch to take me out to the ship. As I climbed up the companion way onto the deck, there was my “Honey” waving to me. She was more radiant and dazzling than ever, but now no longer in England but instead under the hot bright tropical sun thousands of miles from home. We kissed and hugged, and then squeezed and kissed and hugged again on deck trying frantically to make up for a parting of over a year as well as a very rough passage that she had to start with. I was introduced to various friends that she had made on the long voyage, when suddenly a young chap stepped up to her and gave an enormous goodbye kiss and hug. It was my great future friend Peter Fergusson who also was coming out for the first time to go planting, and who had been very kind to her during the terrible storms of the Western approaches and the Bay of Biscay when even the Queen Mary had been hove to. I was introduced and told how ill she had been in the rough seas, and how all alone she had felt ,and how Peter had got her brandies to calm her down and give her a lift up to settle her nerves, and had been like a big brother to her. Soon we were off the ship waiting interminably for all the luggage and suitcases to be taken to the Customs shed, and after a long delay as is usual there ,we were finally free to leave, and I could then begin to show her my Island paradise. It was midday in the scorching heat with the sun directly overhead when we finally got to the car, and then to my horror I discovered that somewhere between launches the ship and back I had lost the keys , and to make matters worse it was a Sunday when all the main garages were closed. I was just wondering what on earth I would do and feeling so helpless and foolish, when suddenly I saw a van belonging to Rowland’s the Hillman importers. Their managing director Hepworth was a great friend of my father and I wondered if their man could help. I ran up to him and told him of our predicament, and wonder of wonders like some angel he went to his van and produced an enormous tray of keys which he had brought down to help unload cars from the ship. After a brief try the second or third one fitted and we were finally on our way to my intense relief. We drove through the Colombo Fort or business quarter, down the Galle face Green with its mile long turf facing the open ocean with its thundering breakers until eventually we arrived at the old colonial style imposing Galle Face Hotel with its huge airy reception halls and colonades and a miriad electric fans whirring quietly away in the ceilings giving a warm humid but breezy feel in the sweltering midday tropical heat. There at last we met Father and I took her to the enormous bedroom overlooking the crashing Indian Ocean rollers to at last unwind and freshen up. In the evening we had to do the rounds and meet all the leading Directors of George Steuarts including Macleod in their vast spacious and grand houses built mostly a hundred years ago on a scale and opulence which is scarely creditable today. Ceylon at this period in the early 1950’s was by far the wealthiest country in South East Asia. The War years had been a period of boom for all the plantation products with the closing down of the competition from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. It was virtually the only sizeable producer of natural rubber, its tea had only to contend with India as at that time there had been no major development in East Africa. Also for the last three years of the war and the immediate aftermath there were 250,000 British military personnel in the Army, Navy, RAF, with all the attendant women’s auxiliary services all spending money. The result was that the country at independence in 1947 had a colossal current account surplus with the Bank of England and could and did import luxuries from any part of the world. There were far more cars per head in Ceylon than anywhere further East including strange as it is to believe now, Japan where car manufacture had not even begun during the postwar period. It was into all this wealth where our family had such a great stake, that Jill had arrived from the rigours of postwar England with all its shortages, utility furniture, and drab smoke stained buildings, and a restrictive mentality where rationing had only just ended. But the cultural shock of being in an Eastern Tropical Country for the first time in her life was something that I knew was going to take time, as everything was so very different from England, France and Denmark which she had visited. The following morning I went to her room to have a complaint that the pawpaw which had been served with the early morning tea was uneatable. But of course she had never seen a pawpaw before , and had tried to eat all the foul black fleshy seeds at the same time! It was all the little things that we took for granted when living out there that she would have to learn about and adapt to. Luckily she was well educated, had an inquiring mind and a determination to be adaptable and to come to terms with her new surroundings, but even so those first weeks were an understandable strain for a newcomer.

Anyway after breakfast were were on our way up country driving through the luxuriant lowcountry with all the graceful coconut palms nodding their heads, through the rubber estates, and interspersed in the valleys between the plantations and the coconut trees, the beautiful soft pea green paddy fields with the gentle quiet villages, their houses tiled in pretty round tiles. We were now in these exotic surroundings really at the start of our new life together, young, wildly in love and both completely overwhelmed with the spectacle. For Jill the whole eastern lushness and prolific vegetation was spellbinding, and also quite frightening. For me who had been brought up in these surroundings but had been lonely and isolated on a distant tea estate, at last I had a mate and partner for companionship, love , but at the same time I revelled in showing her this whole new world which was such a contrast to her early life in Cornwall and a Reading suburb. This difficulty to become familiar with the fauna, much as I tried my hardest to explain it all to her, was to be really hard. About twenty miles out of Colombo I stopped on the side of the road to show her the rubber trees and how they were tapped for their latex. She seemed stiff with fear as I marched ahead through the low grass and ground cover. When I asked what was worrying her she replied that she was frightened and petrified of the snakes, which she thought would be swarming everywhere. I explained that snakes were rare, and most were exceptionally frightened and went scuttling away at the approach of anybody. I dont think that she was fully convinced but it made a start and taught me to be less headstrong in breaking her in too quickly into the new surroundings. The Sinhalese villagers were all dressed in traditional costume, the men in sarongs and the womenfolk in pretty pastel shaded blouses and saris. Each village had its Buddhist temple or “Pansale” staffed by saffron clothed monks, their heads shaved smooth. By the side of the temple was usually an inverted dumbell shaped “dagoba”, and in the grounds shade was invariably provided by a gigantic bo treee, a wild fig with a cobra headed shaped leaf. It was said that about 500 BC whilst sitting under a bo tree Prince Gautama had the revelation of the 7 stages of life’s progression through in-carnations to become a Buddha and enter the final state of Nirvana or “nothingness”.

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HMS Albion below Plantain Point. Would start jet engines at 2.30 when we were trying to have a nap!