Once Upon A Tender Time

Carl Muller

Description

Once Upon a Tender Time, a poignant tale of childhood, is the concluding part of Carl Muller's Burgher trilogy. The Burghers of Sri Lanka, hardy and fun-loving, produce children by the dozen-but often forget them. Carloboy Prins von Bloss and his companions are usually considered a pain in the neck by the adults they encounter as they go about the serious business of discovering the world and, primarily, the facts of life. Romps in the backyard, trysts in deserted houses and long bicycle rides to discover true love are commonplace. Also frequent are thrashings and canings as adults try to do.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184751079
• Langue: English

Extrait

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 Yak
Carl Muller lives in Kandy, Sri Lanka, with his wife and four children.
Books by the same author
THE JAM FRUIT TREE
YAKADA YAK
To the memory of Anuradhapura, a place of incredible enchantment and woodland beauty, where I spent the happiest days of my own boyhood.
Foreword
T he 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
Y eeeach!
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 nona 1 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 perforated 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 o