Once Upon a Tender Time

by Carl Muller

  Carloboy liked, to hear her sing, to listen to those old love songs of the times, and quickly picked up the words and hummed the tunes even in class where stout Mrs Bartholomeusz with a pair of rabbit teeth biting into her lower lip, stuffed her standard two pupils with such gems as:

  What does little baby say

  In her bed at peep of day?

  and

  I love little kitty

  Her coat is so warm . . .

  After Beryl’s soft and sweet ‘Ramona’ and ‘Pagan Love Song’ and ‘There’s a lamp burning bright in the window’ and her jollier ‘When I’m cleaning windows’ and ‘Polly wolly doodle all the day’, Carloboy paid little heed to Mrs Bartholomeusz who used to titter and say that he must have left his tongue at home.

  Standard Two had a lot of Burgher children. There was Norman Dekker who always came in a white shirt with frills and a runny nose; Sheilah Mortimer who came with an ayah and kept darting out of class to ascertain that the ayah sat, waiting, under the tamarind tree and had not gone about some business of her own. Sheilah would toss her ringlets and say: ‘Mama tole her to stay till skoolover. When skoolover she mus’ take me home.’

  Carloboy liked Therese Wendt who sat next to him and had shiny black hair and big black eyes. She brought her teddy bear to class. The stitches had given way in spots and bits of yellow stuffing showed through. It was quite disreputable both in looks and attitude but Therese would scream her head off if parted from it. She called her teddy Small Kum.

  Mrs Bartholomeusz looked with favour on her Burgher pupils. So did old Mrs Poulier and the severe-faced Miss Poulier and Miss Rulach and Mrs Davidson. This was, virtually, a Burgher school with its fair sprinkling of Sinhalese, Tamil, Malay and Muslim children. There was a Sinhalese master who took the older boys in Geography and English and told them to read Cedric the Saxon and regaled them with stories of London and how he had seen shabby people who wore one suit of woollens everyday and lived on poor allowances of twenty shillings a week. The boys liked old Veegee, as they called him, because he was V.G. Fernando, and because he had a soft, near musical voice and never ranted at them. The most he would say, with a cocker-spaniel expression, was, ‘Oh, you are a duffer!’

  The children also liked the heavy-spectacled Sunny Herft who, although a Burgher, was darker-complexioned than Veegee and raised eyebrows each time he claimed Dutch blood. Mrs Bartholomeusz cold-shouldered the poor man and wanted no truck with such an oddity. She would tell Mrs Martenstyn who lived next door and had the largest pair of calves in Wellawatte, threaded with knotty blue varicose veins, that Sunny Herft was not to be acknowledged. ‘Real shame to even say he is a Burgher. God knows what’s been going on in that family,’ she would sniff and glance at her own face in the hatstand mirror and consider her pink-powdered cheeks the very essence of Burgherness.

  St Lawrence’s was an accepted launch pad. Children were dragged in, howling and kicking, were taught to read, write, draw aeroplanes and bowls of flowers, long divide and recite their twelve times tables. Some dawdled on till Standard Five and were then crammed into convents and colleges where they were taught L.C.M.s and how twenty hundred weights made a ton and that dividers and compasses were not meant to dig holes in the desks with. When Carloboy was deemed to be too, too precocious for the general good of the Lower School, Mrs Poulier suggested that Beryl put him into a college where the priests wielded canes with zest.

  ‘Such a bright child,’ Mrs Poulier gushed, ‘but he needs a firm hand.’

  Beryl stared. She sensed the old lady’s disapproval of her. Mrs Poulier also stared. How dare this girl—yes, a mere girl—have a six-year-old son who said ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’ and knew how to spell ‘perspiration’. And to invite that boy . . . yes, that de Run boy . . . to come to his home to see his sister pass water. Mrs Poulier had trembled. Such goings on. Mrs Bartholomeusz had been quite agitated. She didn’t want that von Bloss child in her class. Not ever!

  ‘Lucky I was near and heard them talking. I was shocked. Telling that Bunny to come home and can see his sister doing number one.’

  Mrs Poulier couldn’t understand a word of this and quickly told her Bella to bring tea. Bella, the office dogsbody, was loth to leave. It had been a most innocent conversation, actually, although it did betray Carloboy’s unseemly preoccupation with the passing of urine and the organs employed in such pursuit. It couldn’t be helped, one supposes, considering how he was warmly unctioned by Diana every night and had realized, all of a sudden, that ‘big people’ had very big penises and that his own birdie, when artfully fondled gave him strange but satisfactory sensations.

  Little Bunny de Run has ‘left the class’ twice that morning arid just before the interval had raised his hand again. ‘Please, miss, leave the class?’ Mrs Bartholomeusz had been too engrossed with coloured chalk to even look up. She just said yes and Bunny trotted off to the loo. Carloboy was impressed. ‘My gosh, how many times you went today,’ he remarked, and this time Mrs Bartholomeusz was listening.

  ‘You must see my sister, men, whole time she’s doing. In the night how many times I don’t know. All over me also. Damn wretch she is, my mummy is always saying. And Daddy says put her in the bloody bathroom to sleep. You come home and see if you like. I think if just tell to pippie she will do.’

  Mrs Bartholomeusz gave a sharp yelp and rushed to the principal.

  Mrs Poulier decided that Carloboy was a confusing boy—and she disliked confusions, conundrums, complications and corns, which she suffered from terribly. No wonder the child was such a trial. This girl seemed to be totally unqualified to be a mother. Too young to be anything, really, and Mrs Poulier couldn’t remember ever being young.

  Beryl ignored the disapproval. She considered herself a dyed-in-the-wool mother any road, having birthed three and knowing that number four was not far behind. ‘I thought to keep him here till the fifth standard,’ she said.

  Mrs Poulier blanched. ‘Now St Peter’s College has a junior school. They admit boys from Standard Two.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m asking. Why he can’t learn here? You just now said he was bright, no? And see the other children who are in Standard Five and all. I know, no, how bright he is. When come home must see the way he’s reading and writing big words and spelling also. That Mrs Bartholomeusz is telling how he is saying dirty words in class. But that’s not his fault, no? Sometimes railway people coming home and he’s listening the way they are talking and must have picked up.’

  Mrs Poulier nodded. ‘Ah, yes, children pick up very quickly. We know the sort of homes they come from by the way they behave here.’

  Beryl’s eyes flashed. ‘What do you mean? You’re trying to tell that our home is bad or something?’

  Mrs Poulier said that the thought had never crossed her mind.

  ‘Because he’s saying damn and bloody?’ Beryl gritted. ‘So if you’re the damn principal take the cane and give him a bloody whack, will you!’

  ‘Mrs von Bloss, I’m shocked!’

  ‘What to shocked. What do you know? You think your bloody school is too good for my son? If I go and tell my husband you know what he’ll do? Come here and burn your bloody school down. You don’t know my husband. No damn nonsense with him!’

  Carloboy, quite oblivious of the drama in the principal’s room, was helping Therese Wendt to change the sex of her teddy bear. Therese had suddenly decided that Small Kum was a strange name for her faithful toy and wished to call it Clementine. ‘Then I can sing to it Oh my darling, Oh my darling like in the song,’ she announced solemnly and fluttered her eyelids.

  ‘We can make it a girl. Wait, I’ll show you.’

  The operation was successful. A hole was punched between the teddy leg’s and Carloboy regarded his crude handiwork with proud satisfaction.

  ‘You tore it,’ the girl wailed, ‘see the hole you made.’

  ‘So now it’s a girl, no? All girls have like that. As
if you don’t know. Just go and see. I can see at home my sister also have. And the baby.’

  Therese Wendt saw reason. She regarded her Clementine and touched the hole and squirmed a finger into it and who could tell what went on in that little-girl head? She kept regarding her teddy all the time and several times that morning she put her hand under the desk, under her short dress, to pull apart her frilly knickers and touch her own little hole. Yes, her teddy was a girl now, just like her, and she loved it more than ever.

  It was a jolt to be told that he was to be taken to St Peter’s. ‘Uniforms for you,’ Beryl blared, ‘white shirt, blue trousers, white socks, black shoes and tennis shoes for games. Now come with a filthy shirt every day if you can. Best thing is khaki for these buggers.’

  Sonnaboy was disappointed. ‘Never mind if going to the actual college,’ he said, ‘have to go to the seminary because the Army is in the college.’

  ‘And haven’t any girls there?’ asked Carloboy.

  ‘Why? You want to learn with girls? No more girls! Only boys—and not like that Poulier nonsense. You behave yourself and talk properly. Damn and bloody full in the mouth! I heard yesterday you talking to that Potger boy. Hullo you bugger . . . that a way to talk?’

  ‘So never mind all that,’ Sonnaboy interrupted Beryl’s tirade, ‘what did Father Paris say?’ (Father Paris was principal of St Peter’s).

  ‘Said can take. You think these Catholic schools won’t take? Pay the fees—that’s all they want. Entrance fees also, and from fifth standard library fees and if playing games must give grounds fees or something. Wait and see. Every father’s feast day also will ask for money.’

  St Peter’s College had been turned into an Army camp and barracks. The British had commandeered the school because of its excellent in-city suburban location, because it skirted the old Dutch canal south, empty acres of brown-green fields east, and the main Galle Road and sea west. Northwards, the main road offered direct link with the Royal Air Force camp at Kollupitiya and that most essential institution, the British Club, while a mile or so on was the Royal Navy Headquarters, H.M.S. Highflyer, the Governor’s mansion and the port of Colombo.

  St Peter’s, fat calved sergeant-majors imagined, was a local Sandhurst. The mess served bitter beer and the orderlies had knobbly faces and raw beef complexions and bad teeth.

  The British in Ceylon were, well . . . not the best of the litter. They had such a superior way of swanking around. They would never have admitted that many of them had simply copped out of the muddle that was England—that they were just a bunch of colonial opportunists who, disenchanted with being nobodies among the forty-six million-odd in their own splintered isles, had decided to inflict themselves on the ‘heathens’ of the tropics.

  Africa had some ripe ideas: they boiled a few missionaries for breakfast. Ceylon, however, was balm to the British soul.

  Here, they could think, even fondly, of the chaos of London, and the suet puddings and the unending roar of traffic on the Great North Road and the lines outside the Labour Exchange, and tell these dim black buggers with their knotted hair and splayed feet of the wonder that was England and how Nelson had to tell them what was expected of them.

  The British had this monstrous idea that they were actually doing the natives a favour. Behold! We have descended from our cloud realm to show you how to eat peas. Go! Bring out your daughters! That was the general idea. It was easy to see how the people of Ceylon quickly became not only a subject race but also quite an abject race. They even considered it an honour to be addressed. ‘Bo-oy!’ even if such ‘boy’ was an old man who shuffled up with the gin and Roses and had his hair bunched in a grey knot at the nape. These white masters were a bunch of hamfaced layabouts . . . yet, they thumped tables and wore monocles and bibs at the dinner table and perpetuated an image of indomitable courage, heroism, chivalry, romance and sportsmanship. All others were dismissed as lesser beings, cast in cracked moulds. The Spanish? Oh, such cruelty to animals! Italians? An excitable people. Can’t achieve unless they make a deafening noise. The Chinese? A bunch of gamblers, and slitty-eyed too. The Germans? Ah, the biggest cut-throats in Europe, and we, the Brits, are going to pulp Hitler anyway. (King George I of England was a German and didn’t know a word of English but that was not for native consumption).

  Thus did the British hold centre stage in Ceylon and the islanders aped them and simply adored England and Dick Whittington and riding a-cock horse to Banbury Cross and King Arthur and Saint George who couldn’t abide dragons. A certain permanency of attitude remains, evidenced by the queues of visa seekers at the British embassy in Colombo to this day!

  Thus was Carloboy, and boys and girls in their thousands, immersed into this essentially British cauldron and wrestled with a spelling system that defied analysis and a quite unintelligible hotch-potch of weights and measures while teachers constantly kept saying how lucky they were to be introduced to Chaucer whose English was so full of ‘ffe’s and ‘Ide’s that in later years Carloboy remarked that it sounded like a Frenchman with boils on his tongue.

  To Carloboy, St Lawrence’s School was quite a honeypot. Besides subjecting Small Kum to a sex change, and earning the admiration of little Therese Wendt for his clinical and surgical expertise, he enjoyed his classroom mornings even though Mrs Bartholomeusz sang atrociously and always clapped out of time when the children were marched round the room, exultant in the fact that ‘London Bridge is falling down’.

  For small boys, school hours, however pleasant (or otherwise) are quickly shelved no sooner they come home, wolf down their food and hasten their shirts into the bathroom tub before mothers shriek at the stains from collar to tail. Carloboy had no such luck. Beryl would come for him and inspect him narrowly. ‘What have you gone and done to your shirt?’ She would insist on knowing: ‘What is that red mark on the pocket, and see the socks! And you’re kicking stones again? Look at the state. Bloody brute! Never listen to what you’re told, no? Come go! You think I have nothing else to do, coming in the sun everyday.’

  But they don’t take the bus home. Beryl has things to do in Wellawatte. She trips ahead, Carloboy trailing, vainly pushing in the tail of his shirt. He meets other children also being hauled home and grins or stares as the case may be. They manoeuvre the Manning Place junction and, at the Elephant House outlet, swing into a little alley. Carloboy perks up. They would visit Aunty Lillian who lived in the last house. Lillian Nora was Beryl’s elder sister, a thin, shapeless woman who wore dresses that were uninspiring tubes of unattractive cloth, had bony shoulders and deep lines around her mouth. Lillian was married to ‘Bunny’ Toussaint and had a boy, Maxwell, who was seven and who was taken to St Peter’s College by his elder brother Dodwell who was twelve. Lillian had just had her third son, Wavell, and relations kept popping in and out to fuss over the new baby.

  Lillian beams. ‘So how? What, taking him home? Come, come, come and sit a little. Some job, no, coming in the sun like this.’

  Beryl is still rankling. “That even never mind. Just see the state of this devil. Every day have to find clean shirt and trousers. Have been tearing the socks today. Don’t know what they’re doing in the class.’

  Carloboy stares blankly. He is not inclined to throw light on this issue of stained shirt and torn socks. He is hungry and school is already several light years away. He eats Aunty Lillian’s ginger biscuits and drinks two glasses of water, drips water down his shirt, front and then goes to the bedroom to gaze at baby Wavell who waves clenched fists at him and blows little bubbles of spit. He then perches on the veranda wall to watch a man chopping wood in the next garden.

  Carloboy likes the return home. Beryl uses the outing to do all manner of things. She may go to the Elephant House shop to buy sausages or dehydrated meat. Fat Mrs Ebert behind the counter always unscrews the lid of a tall sweets jar and give him a chocolate toffee. The boy would push the toffee into a side of his cheek and put the coloured wrapper in his pocket to give to Diana. It always raised a
howl from his sister who protested that all she got was the wrapper.

  Beryl may also enter the grimy, slushy, pungent world of the Municipal Market where vegetable sellers are shouting their wares and there is always the ring of knife on steel as the Muslim butchers hacked away at thin, blood-daubed haunches of cattle, and goat heads were piled outside the mutton stalls—brown, white, black, grey, curly-furred heads with parchment ears and opalescent eyes—and crows filched any and everything and stray dogs with large, raw patches of mange, lapped at the blood in the drains and flies clouded the dustbins. The floor was treacherous with blackened salad leaves, banana peel, rotting eggplant and maggoty tomatoes. Urchins in ragged trousers dragged trolleys with reeking piles of dripping leaves. Old women picked soft onions, squishy beetroot, soggy potatoes. Pitifully true, to this day in this same market. One man’s garbage was a poor coolie-woman’s banquet! There was always a queue for meat. It wasn’t so a year ago, but it was wartime now and Wellawatte’s butchers sold meat on rotation. Only two stalls would function each day instead of the usual eight.

  Best of all, Beryl would never fail to stop at Danny’s, the little bookshop opposite the Police Station. The block held a sleazy eating house, an indistinguishable store, Danny’s, a bicycle repair shop and a tumble-down oilman’s store. Carloboy loved Danny’s. Old Daniel used to be a door-to-door ‘bookman’.2 Beryl would seek the latest copies of Girls Own and Girls Crystal. Daniel’s fastest line were the two and four-penny weeklies that regularly came in in unbelievable variety. There were hundreds of these badly printed papers with lurid covers in two or three colours. And the comics!

  Beryl knew she would have to buy Carloboy a comic—a Radio Fun or a Film Fun or a Hotspur. She had her own favourites. There was the popular Titbits, of course, but she leafed through the story papers first: Oracle, Secrets, Peg’s Paper . . . hmmm, not bad, the stories. She needs number 54 of Peg’s to continue the serial by Emma Brooke. She picks up the latest copy of True Confessions (‘I went to bed with my sister’s husband’) and a copy of Magnet because she likes to read about Billy Bunter. She regards Carloboy with some softness. Look at him, clutching a copy of Beano and Film Fun and a Captain Marvel comic . . . and a Wizard also, and practically sparkling at the pictures on the covers of the Sexton Blakes and Nelson Lees and those new American Fight Stories and Action Stories.