The moving stuff of everyday life
View(s):Book facts: “Thus, She Grew – a Biographical Novel” | By M.T.L. Ebell (Vijitha Yapa, Rs.750) | Reviewed by Anne Abayasekara
This endearing narrative gives “a view of 25 years in the life of Mignon (Dissanaike) Perera”, the author’s mother, taking us through the changing scenes of her life from childhood to young womanhood, marriage, travel abroad with her husband and their homecoming.
Described as a “biographical novel” which implies that not all of it comes straight from the pages of her father’s diaries on which it is based, the book is in part imaginatively recreated by the author, M.T.L. Ebell, an established writer whose first book, “Short & Verse”, was awarded the prize for the best English short stories published in 2007, at the State Literary Awards 2008. In this work, Ebell shows her skill in presenting a different kind of story. The blurb on the back cover of the book tells us that delving into her father’s diaries, kept over a period of years, spurred the writer to put together an account of what she learned therein about her mother and father, their family history and life in Ceylon in the colonial days of the early 20th century.
The central figure is Mignon, the middle daughter, who was a toddler when her mother died, but we are given vivid glimpses of Mignon’s devoted father, Andrew Dissanaike, called `Appa’, her two sisters and aunts, uncles and cousins and of the ordinary stuff of everyday middle-class life at the turn of the century.
Few of us have access to written material that enables us to reconstruct the early life of a parent before we ourselves were born. And still fewer would have the gift of so skilfully creating a coherent and smoothly flowing story that has the ring of truth.
For someone my age, names that were well-known in my youth, like that of S.G. de Zoysa (Sidney), IG P.N. Banks, Mr. Kantawala, then Ceylon Trade Commissioner in Bombay, Sir Herbert Dowbiggin, Rev. W.J.T. Small of Richmond, Fraser of Trinity, crop up to lend credence to the narrative. Also familiar to us of that era are some of the places the couple had to call at in London – the Colonial Office, Crown Agents and Ceylon House. Mignon writes to her two sisters back home about her landlady having introduced her to Elsie J. Oxenham’s school stories, of her borrowing an Erle Stanley Gardiner book from the local library and of buying a Leslie Charteris “Saint” book for her husband Algy, as both of them enjoy the series – again all very popular authors in years past.
The daily routine, as well as special events, plus the feelings of the people concerned, are recorded as if given from the perspective of different characters.
The book opens with the arrival of Mignon’s adored elder sister, Aisla, at her mother’s parental home in Matara where Mignon, a toddler had been taken as the time approached for her mother Carey’s difficult confinement to reach full term. Aisla had stayed behind in Galle, not from choice, but because Carey felt that the older child’s presence would be a comfort to Andrew (Appa). So, Aisla came face to face early with death. She knew her mother had died because she heard people say so. The aunts were crying and one of them had fainted and been carried out.
Aisla quietly crept into the room and went up to her mother’s bed and touched her. ‘Did the worst happen?” she asked the doctor. ”What?” asked the startled doctor as he squatted down beside the girl. “Florence said, `I don’t know what Andrew will do if the worst happens’, so did it?” The doctor carried the little girl into the next room before he answered her. “In a way it did,” he said, “but not the very worst. See, here is someone new for you. Another sister.” Ailsa looked at the baby’s small puckered face and said: “I want my Minni. I want to see my first sister.” Then we switch to some pages from Andrew’s diary. He’s trying to come to terms with the aching loss of his beloved Carey as he wonders whether he should try to bring up his three daughters by himself in Galle, or take them to Carey’s old home, “Kachcheri Walawwa” in Matara.
We also learn that Carey, with whom Andrew fell in love and who, in turn, returned his deep affection, was a few years older than he. Although she was approaching 30, she was determined to wait until the man she loved worked his way up to the post of senior master at Richmond and earned enough to support a wife and family. It was the happiest of unions. They had two daughters, Ailsa and Mignon, and it was in giving birth to their third daughter, Gladys, that Carey died. Andrew’s stark entry in his diary, “And then Carey died”, says it all. Poignantly, he writes: “I will remember, although in silence, how Carey loved me.”
Some chapters give information which Ebell must have gleaned from her father’s diaries, although they are written in the first person as if, for example Carey herself had left a record. There is a sudden jump in time from the early 1900s to 1945 when the thoughts expressed are those of the unrepentant Peter, Carey’s wastrel brother.
The three girls had, apparently, been handed over to the care of Carey’s sister, Susan, who lived in Matara in the gloomy atmosphere of the ancestral house known as Kachcheri Walawwa. It’s a bit disconcerting to find the old house, Kachcheri Walawwe, thinking aloud. It imagines that the mistress of the house and property, the children’s beautiful and efficient grandmother now long dead, is still alive and in charge. The old house itself senses that Ailsa and Mignon are not happy here, that they don’t play, that their young lives are too restricted.
The scene shifts to the Sacred Heart Convent in Galle to which Andrew admits the two older girls, Ailsa and Mignon, as boarders, assuring the Mother Superior that little Gladys too will be handed over to her care when she’s a little older. Both sisters feel safe and happy there and Ailsa whispers, on their very first day, “This is heaven!” They also thoroughly enjoy going to their father’s house in Richmond Hill, Galle, during the school holidays and feel they have the best of both worlds.
Andrew’s eldest sister, Laura, unexpectedly marries a widower named Nicholas Perera, with five children. The marriage is a big success and her step-children are soon won over by Laura’s tact and kindness and the two families move closely together. Aisla marries Nicholas’s son, Osmund (Ossie), while Mignon falls in love with and marries his brother Algernon (Algy).
Readers of an older generation will be familiar with the scenes which Mignon and Algy find new and fascinating on their voyage out to England on the SS Strathnaver, in May 1939, before commercial airlines were thought of and the way to travel abroad was by sea. Mignon loved her time in England where Algy, then a promising young Inspector of Police, had been selected to follow an Officers Training Course at the Police Training School in Hendon.
Shortly before they embarked on the return journey in August, Mignon and Algy went to Scotland to visit their cousins, the children of Andrew’s brother Jonathan and his Scottish wife. In Scotland, something of great significance takes place when Mignon’s cousin, Ivy, has a heart-to-heart talk with her. There are hints throughout the earlier chapters that, while Mignon and Algy were undoubtedly happy together, some vital element was lacking in their intimate relationship. Mignon’s long conversation with Ivy changes everything and when the couple do go on board it’s like a second honeymoon.
They board ship on August 28, 1939. England declares war on Germany on September 3, and from thereon, life on board is full of anxiety and tension, while their families in Ceylon are equally anxious . Happily, they reach Colombo harbour without incident, by which time they are both bursting to give the assembled family some good news of their own that eclipses the horrors of war. Algy comes over to Mignon and says: “And now we can tell you, we are here; we travelled safe.” Placing his arm round his wife and caressing her tummy, he proudly announces, “And This One travelled free!” (This One being M.T.L. Ebell’s eldest sibling).
Follow @timesonlinelk
comments powered by Disqus