by Carl Muller
Carl Muller
Once Upon a Tender Time
The Concluding Part of the Von Bloss Family Saga
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Books by the Same Author
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Footnotes
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Author’s Note
Acknowledgement
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
ONCE UPON A TENDER TIME
Carl Muller completed his education from the Royal College, Colombo, and has served in the Royal Ceylon Navy and Ceylon Army. In 1959 he entered the Colombo Port Commission and subsequently worked in advertising and travel firms. Muller took up journalism and writing in the early Sixties and has worked in leading newspapers in Sri Lanka and the Middle East. His published works include Sri Lanka—A Lyric, Father Saman and the Devil, Ranjit Discovers where Kandy began, The Jam Fruit Tree—for which he was awarded the Gratiaen Memorial Prize for the best work of English Literature by a Sri Lankan in 1993; the prize was endowed by Booker Prize winning author, Michael Ondaatje—and Yakada Yakā
Carl Muller lives in Kandy, Sri Lanka, with his wife and four children.
Books by the same author
THE JAM FRUIT TREE
YAKADA YAKĀ
To the memory of Anuradhapura, a place of incredible enchantment and woodland beauty, where I spent the happiest days of my own boyhood.
Foreword
The story of Carloboy von Bloss is a story which has been ‘factionalized’ from many lifetimes. This message of the tender years is based on the real experiences of many, not one, and strung together, not compartmentalized, to create a single experience of child abuse, growing up, first loves, experiments and experiences.
The backdrop is fact, the centre stage fiction, sometimes exchanged, transposed. The author exhorts readers not to get involved, and confused, in the exercise of picking fact out of fiction or fiction out of fact. Many true to life characters pop up to mix with the fictional. All very Pink Pantherish and Roger Rabbity. A strong skein of fact runs through this tale but even this unravels, dissolves at times and the reader may find real people they know and recognize in a fictionalized classroom or a real school with boys or girls who do not exist.
It is a writer’s responsibility to protect the living, honour the dead. It is also an urgent matter, in the times such as these, to shout a warning to the adult world. Children need love, support, understanding, protection. Carloboy von Bloss had small measure indeed.
Carloboy von Bloss is a lesson, an example of all the things a child could experience, the good, the bad and the ugly. He weathered every careless brush stroke of life and eventually found a desolation that demanded that inner strength of mind to help him overcome.
This is not a happy book but it does not dwell on agony or ecstasy overlong. It just goes on, like its hero, a procession of good and bad, better and worse. A cloud nine over a cesspit.
And it’s true . . . up to the point where fact embraces fiction and lives, hopefully, most satisfactorily ever after.
Chapter One
‘Yeeeach!’
Beryl von Bloss, twiddling the big cloth-covered buttons of her housecoat in the grey-orange light of the smoky kerosene lamp, knew what that squelchy cry from the next room was all about. She was going to give up on the buttons anyway. There was absolutely no sense in latching together the front of a housecoat and climbing into bed. Not with husband Sonnaboy in it—in bed, I mean, not in her housecoat. She reminded herself that this was not regular nightwear. At twenty-three, a young wife should be wearing something more diaphanous. Trouble is she had two nighties in the bathroom tub and one that needed mending. Also, as she wisely pointed out, what with baby Marie in her cradle and daughter Diana’s constant bed-wetting and son Carloboy’s midnight tantrums and the servant-girl, Poddi, maintaining a sort of night watch, thin nightdresses were definitely not on. Night and day made scant difference in the von Bloss household. Infants, children, servant-girls, things stirred vigorously whatever the hour.
Sonnaboy considered buttons, zips, press studs and the frustrating world of textile fasteners in the trying category of impedimenta. Getting into bed was not in itself an end. He had, ritually, to get into Beryl too, and these damn buttons were, to his urgent loins, an obstacle. He had tried them earlier and sworn. ‘What the hell, men, damn buttonholes you’re stitching so small. And the size of these buttons. What for you’re putting them so big?’
‘So get off, will you, and let me take out,’ Beryl hissed, ‘how to do anything when you’re on top . . . there, can’t wait a little while. Now don’t make too much noise. Children are sleeping never mind, but that Poddi is not a small one. Sometimes just sitting on the mat and waiting. Must be listening.’
The von Bloss sleeping arrangements were simple. Sonnaboy and Beryl in one room; the children in the other. Carloboy and Diana in one old, low bed, Marie in an ancient cradle swathed in a dingy mosquito net. Poddi spread her mat between bed and cradle.
Poddi was twelve, had a sergeant-major’s appetite, a headful of lice, dirty feet and a missing front tooth. That was the debit column. To her credit, she was maturing alarmingly and had developed a frontispiece which was of intense interest to the servant-boy next door. That worthy, as black as sin and with piano-accordion teeth would sidle up to the low side wall and bob his head knowingly. Poddi would give hers a toss and ply her eekel broom, then stop raising the dust to demand: ‘At what you’re looking?’
The scamp would slyly reach over the wall.
Poddi would move back. ‘Wait, I to nona1 will tell.’
‘So tell.’
‘I’ll go and tell.’
‘So tell.’
‘If telling, you’ll get for you good whacking.’
‘Apoi,2 as if you don’t like. Little to squeeze only I’m asking.’
‘For what?’
‘Just. You near come a little. My one you want to see?’
‘Chee!’
‘Little close come will you?’
‘Can’t, can’t, if nona suddenly call—I going.’
So Poddi, coming along very nicely, thank you, lies on her mat and listens to the old bed creak rhythmically in the next room and realizes that there are more things on earth than she has been privy to and this, she tells herself, is a most unsatisfactory state of being.
Her fantasies are punctured every night by Carloboy who gives voice to utter boyhood disgust with a long drawn out Yeeeeach! Poddi knows the reason why and rises to minister. Beryl, too, abandons the last two buttons of her housecoat and rises, muttering. At least her son’s timing was better tonight. Sonnaboy grunts, snaps on his short pajamas and strides to the lavatory. Carloboy, shedding the befuddlement of sleep is seated in bed and pummelling Diana furiously. Diana, clouted into wakefulness ripens the air with perf
orated bagpipe squeals while her tormentor justifies himself to all and sundry by crying: ‘Again doing pippie all over me!’ and hurriedly scooting down the bed as his mother bears down, housecoat flapping and in a mood that is far from indigo.
It’s the nightly ritual. Diana, everybody knew was a perfect little ‘pisspot’. She peed the bed with ardour. It was a big bed and Diana, to say the least, remained in her sodden corner against the wall, growing soggy in the small hours and soggier by cockcrow. Six-year-old Carloboy had this penchant to roll. Bedtime crackled with repartee.
‘You stay there,’ the boy would say, ‘and I’ll sleep on this side and don’t come to pippie near me.’
‘Mummeee, see what this Carloboy is telling.’
‘Pisspot, you’re a real pisspot!’
‘Mummeee!’
Beryl from the hall: ‘Shut up you damn wretch and go to sleep. You wake the baby to see. Put you out and close the door!’
Silence. Five minutes later Beryl comes to the bed. ‘Devils are still not sleeping? Close your eyes and sleep! Not a hum!’ and the devils decide to call it a day because being little devils is a tiring business and they are only six and four and very small and Mummy is very big and smacks very hard and dislikes them intensely.
Each night, Carloboy tries to keep awake until Poddi comes in. Trouble is Poddi’s washing plates and scouring the cooking pots with a polmudda (the pointed tuft of husk that covers the eyes of the coconut—makes an ideal scrubbing brush) and scraping the ashes out of the hearth and performing all manner of chores. Some late evenings, however, she gets through early and carries in her mat and pillow.
Carloboy, dozing off with a frown was dragged awake on the last such occasion by the slap and sussuration of Poddi’s mat being unrolled. Usually he would give a small treble snort, turn on his belly and bury his face in his pillow, but this time he just lay, watching the girl in the dim yellow glow of the railway signal lamp.
Carloboy liked to muck around with that lamp. There was a thingummy at the top which you yanked on and this freed the inner mechanism. By turning the handle, a three spot cylinder would revolve: first click, open slot for the wick that was lit inside and a yellow-white light. Next click and a green glass spot masked the burning wick. Next spot was red. Railwaymen carried these tricolour lanterns. Guards would wave the green spot at nights so that drivers, leaning out of their cabs and looking back were assured that all systems were ‘go’. Sonnaboy used his lantern as a night light at home.
It was in this light that Carloboy, six years old and ‘knowing damn too much for his age’, as Beryl would insist, saw Poddi taking off her clothes. It had never occurred to his child mind that Poddi could so transform herself to become a creature of special interest. He stared. Why, Poddi did not wear knickers! The girl bent down, took up a length of cloth and draped it around her waist, then slung on a sort of blouse which she extracted from inside her pillowcase, then lay down with a small, complaining sigh and scratched her head.
For that tiny instant of eternity, Carloboy had seen Poddi—her brown buttocks, short, fat thighs and the little black beads of her nipples which caught the yellow lantern light. The boy stared at the foot of the bed. If he raised his head a little, moved it a little to the right, he would be able to see the girl on her mat. The yellow light would be flowing all over her, but she was now in a cloth and jacket and be the old ordinary Poddi of the daytime. It had been too shadowy to see much else. Poddi had turned when draping her cloth, depriving him of her facing nakedness and he now screwed tight his eyes and tried to imagine what that would be like. Carloboy was quite familiar with the way girls were. Wasn’t Diana smacked, stripped and propelled a dozen times a day to the bathroom, howling like a sorely tormented cat? Didn’t Poddi bathe them in the little bathroom, in the big metal tub with one handle? Carloboy would be made to sit under the running tap and warned not to splash water . all over the place (which he always did) while Poddi soaped Diana, and he would say, ‘Put lot of soap in her pippie place, everytime pippying, no?’ Funny, he hadn’t the word for it. He had a birdie and—what did that Uncle Ebert say one day? Ah, yes, that was the day an ant had bitten his birdie. A big red ant. It must have been in his shorts. He was frightened then. The ant bite was fierce and as he scratched and scratched the tip of his foreskin had swelled into a red, curling lump. Beryl had laughed and dabbed butter on it. He was sobbing when Uncle Ebert had come in, chuckled and asked: ‘What happened? Ant bit your fly?’
Later he had asked his mother, ‘Why is Uncle Ebert saying fly?’
‘Fly? What fly?’
‘Why he asked if ant bit my fly. Don’t even know the word birdie.’
‘Shut up!’ Beryl raised the hairbrush.
So he had a birdie or a fly and because Diana was quite different, it had to be a ‘pippie place’ for Want of anything better—or worse. He would have seen Poddi’s pippie place also but the girl had twisted away as she wore her cloth. So, he tried to keep awake and the effort would daze him into sleep and that was rather a disappointment.
Carloboy was too precocious for words. Also, he rolled in his sleep and, despite the usual rigmarole about keeping to his side of the bed and Diana to hers, he would tumble against her, sometimes throw a leg across her and Diana, an obliging girl, would turn on the waterworks.
Which brings us full circle. Beryl hauls Diana out of bed, gives her son a wallop, Marie wakes to howl and grow very red in the face, Poddi is hustled to see to the baby and Diana is pinched and pushed to the bathroom.
Sonnaboy rumbles from the next room: ‘Why don’t you put that wretch into the bathroom tub to sleep? Everyday washing sheets, drying pillows and see the stains on the pillows. One cake of Sunlight not enough for a day in this house! Otherwise put on a mat, will you?’
‘Damn nonsense,’ Beryl storms, glaring at Carloboy, ‘you also! Can’t sleep in one place. Going to roll! Having such a big bed must go to roll on top of her? Go on! You also go and wash!’
Poddi reminds: ‘Aiyo! Everywhere pippie have been doing.’
It takes time to propel the family once more into the celebrated arms of Morpheus, and when the new day breaks it is Poddi’s task to wash the sheets and pillowslips and carry the folding clotheshorse to the rear garden where the damp and smelly pillows are dried in the sun. The stains don’t go away. They are creamy yellow at first, then darken to brown and rust-brown. Through the years, Beryl made a lot of pillows. The pulun3 man would come to the door carrying his large gunny sack of ‘tree cotton’ and Beryl would buy pounds and pounds of the stuff, and sneeze, and stitch covers of longcloth and stuff them (and sneeze) and scowl and push Diana away from the sewing-machine.
‘Pillows, pillows, pillows!’ she would bark. ‘Useless beast, only know to piss on everything. You piss on these to see. Give you properly!’ And Diana would make mournful eyes and shrink away.
She was a scarecrow of a child, sharp-featured and lank-haired. She knew, even at four, that home held many terrors. She disliked her brother, feared her mother and was overawed by her big, brawny father who came and went at the most ungodly hours. She also detested the baby, Marie Esther Maud, who did pippie all the time and was never smacked. Nobody yelled at Marie. Indeed, Marie did all the yelling, and her full-blooded wails were enough to drive anyone up the wall. There was a pink oilcloth in her cradle and a tub of soiled diapers in the bathroom. Poddi would change the squares of cloth after the ritual sponging, cleaning and powdering, and Beryl would warn, ‘You don’t go and the child with the safety pin prick, did you hear?’ and Poddi, who heard, would stick her tongue out fiercely at the baby because she had no one else to vent her spleen on.
Chapter Two
1941 was a queasy year. Ceylon of old had to weather the consequences of many and sometimes quite violent changes caused by hordes of uninvited guests who forged in, upset native applecarts and then swept away leaving such a shambles that the situation begged for another spirit of change to barge in with mop, squeegee and bucket.
The chronicler may as well lay the ground now, elaborating on what has been covered sketchily in his previous books.
The Portuguese, who arrived in Ceylon in 1505, looked dimly on the island’s feudal system. There simply had to be a superimposition of European authority. This actually happened thrice in four centuries which left the natives in that silly position of not knowing whether they (and these other foreign infestations) were coming or going. It destroyed their faith in the permanency of things.
The Portuguese came . . . the Dutch came . . . the Portuguese went. The British came . . . the Dutch went . . . everybody else, at least, seemed to know when to come and when to go or be run out, but the natives found these many exits and entrances bad for their nerves. They got quite dizzy and overexcitable. And where, they must have wondered, could they go? Take to the hills, or jump into the sea? This is an island, for Chrissake!
Trouble was, what the Portuguese did, the Dutch undid; what the Dutch set up, the British thumbed down. In Bambalapitiya, the Portuguese built a church to Senhora nostra dos Los Milhagros—Our Lady of Miracles. The Dutch tore it down and raised a ‘Reformed’ church on the site. The British took it over and made it a Presbyter of sorts. Eventually it became St Paul’s and a large girl’s school was built behind it and the chapel stayed in business while the entire complex and the area around it was called Milhargiriya—a bastardization of the Portuguese ‘Milhagros’. And Milhargiriya it is to this day and the miracles are, of course, the girls in the school who are the magnet of every schoolboy in Bambalapitiya. The Sinhalese were quite happy with the name. It had a nice Sinhala ring to it. After all, there are lots of Sinhalese place names with the ‘Giriya’ ending (meaning throat or gullet).
All quite confusing, to be sure, and another thing: what about loyalty? No, there was no relying on anything.