The Paanadura Kokaa comes for Christmas lunch

R. Stephen Prins recollects that Christmases of a bygone era with two Spittel grand-aunts were grand indeed

Every day felt a bit like Christmas to any visitor who stepped into the airy, inviting home of Mrs P. Lucien Jansz and Miss Agnes Spittel.

Whatever the time of year, there was always a whiff of something special in the air, a curious festive excitement compounded of various ingredients - the aroma of a cake baking in the background, the sense of visitors about to arrive, already present, or just departed, the warmth of greetings and gifts exchanged, the sight and sound of food and drink about to be served or plates and glasses about to be cleared. You arrived knowing you would be partaking of a celebration of some kind, even if it was just a quiet afternoon for three in the company of the two venerable silver-haired ladies in question.

Lottie Jansz and Agnes Spittel were sisters who spent their retirement years sharing a home together. Lottie was a former teacher at Bishop's College, Colombo, and widow of the late Canon Paul Lucien Jansz, Vicar of St Paul's Milagiriya and one-time warden of St Thomas's College, Mount Lavinia. Agnes was a former principal of St Paul's Milagiriya Girl's School.

When the sisters retired from their formal teaching jobs at schools, they took up teaching cookery to amuse themselves. This was during the war years. The classes were held in a hall in the vicarage of St Paul's, Milagiriya, and the cookery school came to be known as Cuisine Milagiriya. A whole generation of Colombo hausfraus learnt their cookery basics from the two Spittel sisters.

When Canon Lucien Jansz passed away in 1953 and Lottie had to move out of the vicarage, she and her sister continued Cuisine Milagiriya for a few years more in their new home in Police Park Terrace. Even after the cookery classes came to an end, the passion for creating good food remained as strong as ever. Friends would ask for recipes and cooking tips, and the sisters made sure the larder was always filled with treats for guests.

As children we counted as regulars among their guests. Aunt Lottie and Aunt Agnes (grand-aunts, really) were always delighted to see us, as much as we were delighted to try out their latest cakes and puddings.

On any given day you could be sure of cut-glass bowls in the refrigerator filled with caramel or sago pudding or blancmange, or a cellaret filled with jaggery or love cake or ijzerkoekjes and bottles packed tightly with alfals. All this to be washed down with intensely fizzy ginger beer and orange barley.

With the approach of Christmas, the atmosphere in the house would positively crackle with anticipation and good cheer.

Friends treasured the Spittel sisters' gifts of homemade milk wine and breudher. Preparations would begin in early December. Tables in the dining hall and the pantry were loaded with the paraphernalia for distilling the milk wine, while rows of scrubbed breudher pans would dry in the sun on a window sill. In the kitchen a large leg of pork hanging from an iron hook in the ceiling would drip blood into a bucket below, ahead of being cured for the making of ham. The silent drip-drip of wine and pig's blood, the smell .........................of grated nutmeg and lemon rind and chopped up ginger preserve and chow-chow, rose water and vanilla essence, the sound of the mincing machine grinding cashew nuts and almonds; Christmas cake, love cake, jaggery cake, breudher, milk wine, ham. The treats were on the way.

Christmas Eve was when the well-wishers arrived, rustling with flowers and gifts. The names we would hear included Mr and Mrs Lyn Ludowyke, Canon R. S. de Saram, Dr. and Mrs Louis Blaze, Clare Caspersz, Marjorie de Niese, Edna Wells, the De Soysa sisters, Dr. Dadhabhoy. The guests would come and go all day, and by evening the two sisters were exhausted by their own hospitality.

Christmas with the grand-aunts was grand indeed.

Looking back, you savour not only the memory of the wonderful foods these ladies served, from rich cakes to savoury lamprais, but also the astonishing cultural mix of the gentle, genteel social world these ladies represented more than half a century ago. Here, to a greater or lesser degree, and blended with finesse, were flavours that were Dutch, Portuguese, Sinhalese, Tamil, British, Malay, Arab and Parsee. Rich, textured and multi-layered.

When the food and drink were over and done with and the guests gone and it was just you and the grand aunts left in the hall, it was story time.

Like the choice of cakes and puddings, you had a choice of stories. These could be real or fantasy, from storybooks or from life. The real life stories naturally were huge favourites, because they concerned people we knew, grey-headed aunts and uncles who were once prancing, dancing children in times long gone. Wide-eyed, we joined Aunt Lottie and Aunt Agnes as they took us by the hand down those quiet, leafy side lanes of their sepia-tinted childhood in late-Victorian Ceylon.

We heard marvellous stories. Tales of old Ceylon in the 1880s and 1890s, of the family migrating from province to province, travelling days and nights in a caravan of bullock carts as Dr. F. G. Spittel moved around the country to take up successive posts as colonial district surgeon.

The Spittels were a large clan, and each member was a character with his or her own satchel full of stories. The children were destined to be either doctors or teachers. Dick and Noel became surgeons and Beatrice became a nurse, while Agnes, Lottie, Bessie and Marian, my grandmother, became teachers. The earliest casualties were the eldest, Frederick, who died of pneumonia as a boy, and Marian, who died at childbirth, in her early twenties. The others went on to live long and incredibly active lives. Their stories would fill a book.

The Spittels breathed adventure and stories. They loved telling stories and hearing and reading other people’s tales. Their homes and lives were lined with books.

The home of Aunt Lottie and Aunt Agnes had books of all kinds. Storybooks, poetry books, song books, Bibles, prayer books, cookery books, detective stories, children's books, books in French, German, Italian and Spanish, encyclopedias, and dozens of dictionaries in assorted languages. One particularly impressive pudding of a book was that Victorian magnum opus, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

The language books were the leftovers of a vast library that had belonged to Canon Paul Lucien Jansz, the scholar, linguist, teacher and man of the cloth who had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 63, in 1953, while still Vicar of St Paul's, Milagiriya. He had willed his library to the university, where he had taught for a while. Aunt Lottie, his widow, often talked of the "five lorry-loads of Lucien's books" that left the vicarage for Colombo's groves of academe.

My brothers and I came on the scene too late for the pleasure of meeting the legendary Uncle Lucien, or seeing his fabled library. But not seeing was in a way stimulating to the imagination. We grew up picturing the wonders of that profoundly scholarly world, and came to know the person through the many stories we heard of his amazing gifts and his genial personality.
Rev. Lucien Jansz wore his scholarship with great modesty. It was his wife's fond boast that "Lucien had a working knowledge of 58 languages" at the time of his death, aged 63. As a child of nine years he was conversing in three languages - English, Sinhalese and Tamil - and starting to learn three more - Latin, Greek and French. At 12 years he was learning Pali and Sanskrit from a Buddhist monk.

There were dozens of stories within the family about Uncle Lucien's linguistic feats, such as his mastering Malayalam in six weeks in time to give a feast day sermon to a minority congregation somewhere near Chilaw. Another was about a visiting priest from Wales who, on hearing from Lottie that Lucien loved languages, said he would be happy to teach his fellow cleric a smattering of Welsh during his short stay. Canon Jansz smiled and thanked him, and when they had all sat down to dinner, proceeded to say grace in unfaltering Welsh, to the visitor's amazement and no little embarrassment.

The jovial, good-natured priest always had a twinkle in his eye and a joke or pun up his clerical sleeve. During the war years, when many Ceylonese were going to Europe to serve as soldiers and food rationing was common everywhere, Canon Lucien Jansz would refer to the austere vicarage menu as "cannon fodder". And after major surgery for colonic cancer, he would like to say his life was limited by a "semi-colon".

He was also much given to occasional, spontaneous verse, composing off-the-cuff rhymes that were as delightful and nonsensical as a limerick by Edward Lear.

My father's favourite was a couplet tossed off extempore when the vicar was relaxing one Sunday on his teak-and-rattan chaise longue on the vicarage verandah, after a busy morning of services, a little pre-lunch glass of brandy in his hand. His wife walked in and expressed dismay that the Vicar of St Paul's should be visible thus to parishioners and passers-by on the Galle Road. Replied her husband without a blink:

"I am the Vicar
And I like my Liquor."

Some days Aunt Lottie and Aunt Agnes's family tales would yield to fiction and fantasy. Aunt Lottie would take a book off the shelf and read us selections from those Victorian classics, Alice in Wonderland and The Book of Nonsense and More Nonsense and Grimm's Fairytales. These were in handsome, large format, hardcover editions from the 1920s and had belonged to the library of Peter Jansz, the only child of Lucien and Lottie. Peter, who at a very early age was showing signs of the brilliance of his father, died of cerebral meningitis when he was six. Lottie never quite got over the loss, even forty years on. We seldom mentioned Peter Jansz's name, and whenever someone did, it was with a lowered voice.

Peter left behind a wonderful collection of nursery rhyme books, storybooks, encyclopedias and fun books. You opened them and entered a hushed and strangely beautiful world woven out of words in weird forgotten fonts and mystical hand-tinted pictures. Always, along the outer rim of this child's world of wonder and laughter and beauty and knowledge was the faintest tinge of sadness, like a pale discoloration on the edge of a page. Years on we realised that this poignancy was part of a pervasive sadness that hung over Lottie long after the death of Peter Jansz. And later, when we read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, we experienced a strange sense of déjà vu at the death of Tiny Tim.

We literally enclosed ourselves in Peter Jansz's legacy of books. There was one illustrated book in German made out of stiff boards that opened out in a series of linked segments, like an accordion. We extended the book around us like a little fence and sat inside a magic zigzag circle of unreadable, cursive foreign text. When it was time for us to go home, Aunt Lottie would abruptly break the circle and snap the long book shut with a flourish.

The book we most enjoyed, Aunt Lottie included, was Edward Lear's volume of nonsense rhymes. This was a large, wide and heavy book containing all of the Victorian writer's limericks and accompanying sketches. The cover was pea-green, the same hue as the "pea-green boat" in Edward Lear's famous poem about The Owl and The Pussycat.

When opened, the book looked like a large white bird with wings outspread resting on Aunt Lottie's lap. The corners of the book rested on the arms of her chaise longue, and she would read out limerick upon demented limerick with a throaty chuckle. Often the readings would be brought to a halt when our laughter became uncontrollable. We loved the divine eccentricities and wild freedoms of Limerick Land and its outlandish inhabitants. We had especially soft spots for the Young Lady from Portugal, whose Ideas were Excessively Nautical, and the Old Man in a Boat Who Said I'm Afloat, I'm Afloat. Aunt Lottie was particularly taken with any verse or picture that touched on birds, being a great bird lover herself. She liked the Young Lady Whose Bonnet came Untied When the Birds Sat Upon It.

When Aunt Lottie was tired of reading and holding up a heavy children's tome, she would put the book aside and become silent and reflective. Sometimes she would break the silence with a memory from her own distant childhood. Sometimes she would recite poetry.

One of her favourite poems was a nursery rhyme in Sinhala that she must have learnt as a child in the 1890s. It was about a tall white crane that hailed from the paddyfields down south. Whenever an especially tall visitor arrived, Aunt Lottie would break out into her beloved Paanadura Kokaa verse, to everyone's huge amusement.

And just as that dotty nursery rhyme tickled Aunt Lottie in her last years, it tickled us as adults whenever it raised its absurd head, unbidden, from time to time.

At one point it even became necessary to do something about the pesky kokaa, a bird that just would not sit still, that refused to leave us alone and go back to the dusty, ancient nest of a nursery-rhyme book where she belonged.

Then something happened. She started slowly transforming herself. Her plumage changed, and so did her voice and accent. Soon she was something quite different, yet essentially still her old cranky-looking, long-legged, conceited self.

When The Paanadura Kokaa finally evolved into an English nursery rhyme, the two people who would most have appreciated the freshly hatched, fluffy linguistic oddity were already long gone. I desperately wanted to show her off to Aunt Lottie and Uncle Lucien. It would have been interesting to see their reactions. I like to think they would have been amused. No doubt Uncle Lucien would have come up with an infinitely better English rendering of the rhyme.

If I were to create a Christmas card that sought to capture the magic of certain very special Christmases of long years ago, and I needed a verse and a picture to go with it, I think I would turn to the Paanadura Kokaa for my inspiration. She meant a lot to many of us.