We played with him on the lawn, and a crowd of villagers appeared and later he was confined to the elegant teak bookcase which became his new home. There he was happy, quiet and content with water and a hen’s egg to eat once week. An advertisement was placed in “The Times of Ceylon”:
“Cobra for Sale. Nice Quiet self effacing Character, well house trained,. Any Offers?”
Two days later he got a letter from a senior executive from one of the big insurance companies in Colombo.
“We would like some further details and information as to his character, but we do feel that on the face of it he would appear to be an eminently suitable character to join our Board of Directors!”
But shortly after the Christmas break it was back to Colombo and swatting to prepare myself for a return to school. It was now March 1946 and out of the past 6 years I had received only 13 months education in Australia. The whole of 1940 I had been confined to my bed recuperating from an attack of tuberculosis and then there had been 3 ½ years as a POW and a further six months travelled by ship etc and getting on my feet again.
Since our return to Ceylon Mother had written to Mr Bellamy the House Master of Army House, Bradfield College, Berkshire where Hugh had been, to tell him of our experiences. He very kindly accepted me without having to undergo the normal common entrance exam, providing I undertook to have a lot of private tuition on the side to catch up with my contemporaries. The problem now once again was transport as all passenger shipping was commandeered by the armed services trying to get personnel from the far east back to England to be demobilised. However a friend in RAF Transport Command heard of our plight and very kindly arranged for us to travel aboard an RAF York which was a modified high wing Lancaster bomber. So on the 11th April 1946 we said goodbye to Father and to the tropical lushness and beauty of Ceylon. It had been a wonderful relaxing interlude full of Happy memories and it was going to be seven more years in the future before I returned to work. But at that moment it was all the excitement of what was in those days a most exceptional and rare form of travel. We drove to RAF Ratmalana on the south of Colombo not far from the Mount Lavinia Hotel where we stayed. There was the York sitting on the tarmac in front of the control tower. She was small even by the standards of those days, a squat high wing square bodied aircraft. There were just 25 passengers all seated in the stern of the plane, all of whom were service personnel, mostly RAF, Mother was the only female, and as we boarded we just chucked our bags on a heap on the floor opposite the side port door. On top of the bags the crew then loaded about half a dozen full sticks of bananas having first filled all sorts of crannies in the cockpit and under the large radio set with pineapples for their families back home who had long forgotten about tropical fruit. We finally took off on the 11th April 1946 at about 10am on a bright clear morning from with the huge deafening roar and vibration from the four great petrol Merlin engines. The plane shuddered with the ear splitting vibration and slowly the pilot released his brakes, we gathered speed and then slowly we were airborne, on the move once again just skimming over the coconut palms, on my first air trip and certainly quite the most exciting and enjoyable one of my whole life. The plane climbed slowly and very steadily on the one side Colombo spread below , on the other the hills with the beautiful point of Adam’s Peak towering 8,000 ft in the distance. Slowly we climbed up over the sea until we cruised at 180 knots at 10,000 ft. There was no pressurization or any form of heat control and we donned our warm woollies as we passed over the gently rolling Nilgri Hills of South India. We could look down like a bird flying slowly over the tea estates only a three or four thousand feet below and see the tea-pluckers spread across the lovely rolling pea green tea fields. We watched lorries and cars travel along the snake like roads, then later when further north and we were over the desert we could watch the camel trains, till eventually 8 hours later we arrived at the RAF base Karachi just in time for a welcome cup of tea. In the evening we had a good meal and spent a comfortable night in standard black iron beds in the officers mess, and then after breakfast we were en route again for RAF Shaibah near Basra. As we reached Iraq we flew over the vast marshlands of
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