Basil Wickramsinghe had a quiet way of speaking – almost as if he were imparting a confidence. That had an interesting effect on me. People who shout usually have little to say, or spoil what they do have to say by their sheer volume. Not that there was anybody like that in Corduroy Mansions. William French spoke at normal volume, and was a listener too. Caroline was a bit – how should one put this? – breathless, but she had a warm, come-hither voice. And then there was this rather shy man, who sat there and looked at me, and asked me to define an adverb. I said that we had too much to talk about to worry about definitions, but it sent me off to the dictionary afterwards. So that’s what an adverb is: to paraphrase Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, I discovered that I’d been using adverbs all my life. I knew all along, of course.
Our conversation drifted. What, I asked, was his earliest memory?
BW: Forgive me, but what’s that got to do with anything?
Paul: I want to talk about you, Mr Wickramsinghe. I find that asking people about their earliest memory helps to break the ice.
BW: But there is no ice. Do you see ice? I don’t.
P: Perhaps. But I’m still intrigued.
BW: And what if the memory is a traumatic one? Are you sure that it’s a good thing to go over traumatic memories?
P: Most people would say yes – or at least I think they would. Isn’t that what psychiatrists recommend when people have had some awful experience? People are debriefed after the trauma.
BW: Mmm. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.
P: Why? If something stressful happens to you, don’t you like to talk about it?
BW: No, not necessarily. There’s far too much intruding into people’s lives these days. Perhaps we should just let people deal with things in their own way.
P: A bit unsympathetic, surely …
BW: Not at all. Don’t you think that it might sometimes be better to encourage people to put things out of their minds, rather than to dwell on them? If something unpleasant happens to me, I generally prefer to banish it from memory, rather than keeping it at the forefront of my mind.
P: And let it fester? To come out much later?
BW: Like a splinter coming out of the skin? Eventually splinters come out, don’t they?
P: You could say that.
BW: Well, I don’t think I shall. I think that the best thing might be to get on with life. Isn’t that what we have to do in respect of the pain of the world? If we stopped to consider how cruel the world is, and how painful, we’d never be able to achieve anything. We’d be in a constant state of despair.
P: To get back to your earliest memory …
BW: The usual things, I suppose. I have a memory of sitting under a mango tree we had in the garden. I was told that the mango tree was cut down just before my fourth birthday – so I must have been three. So that’s my earliest memory: being three under a mango tree. And it was warm, and there was rich, thick sunlight, like yellow butter.
P: It was always warm in one’s childhood. I remember being warm …
BW: And then I remember playing cricket on the lawn, probably in exactly the place where the mango tree used to be. That was in Galle. We lived in the Old Fort and the garden was not very big but large enough for a small cricket pitch. I had a team called Captain Basil’s XI, although there were only six of us. We wore whites and had little caps that my mother bought from a school outfitters.
P: I can just see you … And what else do you remember from those days?
BW: Going to church on Sundays. We were Anglicans, you see, and my father was a sidesman at the local Anglican church. I was so proud of him; I thought it such a wonderful thing to be a sidesman, almost as important as being the Archbishop of Canterbury. On which subject, the Archbishop of Canterbury came to Sri Lanka and visited Galle. He came to our church and I remember being filled with excitement at the prospect of seeing him. I had recently joined the Boy Scouts, and the other Scouts and I lined the little walkway that led up to the church door and we sang “God Bless the Archbishop of Canterbury” as he went in. He stopped and smiled at us, and I remember feeling that my heart would burst.
P: Oh.
BW: Recounting all this now, I feel almost embarrassed to talk about it. Why should this be, I wonder – because it sounds sentimental? Because it’s nostalgia for a vanished world? For a curious idea of sharing something that no longer resonates any more? Perhaps, but what’s wrong with thinking about something that once had meaning? Are we to forget it altogether?
P: It depends what the meaning was.
BW: You can say that. You can dismiss it. What was wrong, I ask, in sharing spiritual values and in sharing other things too? Shakespeare. The Book of Common Prayer. A beautiful language such as English is. And cricket itself, of course.
P: We still share cricket.
BW: In a way. But the soul has been taken out of cricket, I think. Cricket’s just a sport now – like any other. You know something, Paul? England used to be a lovable country because it believed in things that were worth loving. Now it believes in nothing. And who can love a country that believes in nothing, not even in itself?
P: I still love it.
BW: Do you? And what, may I ask, do you do for it?
P: What a question! That’s like asking me to define an adverb.
BW: Perhaps it is.
Next week: Eddie French, nascent entrepreneur
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