Minette de Silva – Architect
(A Brief Memoir by Jane Russell)
Chapter Two – St Georges
“I remember, I remember, the house where I was born.” Thomas Hood (1827)
St Georges, the house where Minette was born and grew up, was built on three acres of land on Bahirawakande (Bahirawa Hill) by Minette’s father in 1910. I loved St Georges. The steep winding road up to the house ran through a jungly forest of jak, areca, kittul, bamboo and various tropical fruit and flowering trees. Although in my early twenties, I’d become addicted to Four Aces, the tipped cigarette preferred by government clerks. So, I’d stop at each bend on my way up to catch my failing breat
For the fit and enthusiastic, there was a short-cut – a stone staircase of what felt like a hundred steps. It was dangerously slimy in the monsoon and subject to the predations of leeches. But, in the dry season, if I ran out of Four Aces, I found I could run down the staircase to the cade (shop) on the Peradeniya Road in about a minute. Then I’d slowly return by the tortuous uphill drive, clutching my ten-packet, lungs burning all the way!
St Georges had been designed by Minette’s mother, Agnes. She was the eldest child of Paul Nell, an engineer, and a (nameless) English lady who’d died when Agnes was in her early teens. Agnes came from a distinguished Burgher family of French and Dutch ancestry. Agnes’s grandfather, Louis Nell, was Solicitor-General under the British. Two of her great uncles, Charles Ambrose Lorenz and Andreas Nell, were celebrated practitioners in law and medicine respectively, and well-known scholars. Her cousin Lionel Wendt was a pioneering photographer, filmmaker and musician, and the founder of the ’43 group of Ceylon artists.
St Georges was a bungalow in the European colonial style – and yet not. It had been inserted into the hillside of Bahirawakande so the interior was shaded, cool and gloomily Dutch. On overcast or rain-filled days of the two monsoons, you needed a light to read. The lounge-dining room was long and spacious. Beyond the two wood and glass French windows that pivoted open sideways from a central hinge, the verandah was always full of light from the open sky. The sounds of heavy vehicles labouring along the Peradeniya Road and trains shunting at Kandy station were funneled up from below. Directly across the valley, the triangular mass of Hantana mountain, a grey-green mixture of grass and granite, dominated the view.
The verandah, like much of St Georges, had magical properties. I once dozed off while reading a dense history on the fall of the Kandyan kingdom and awoke to find myself back in Terrapin Hut 3 in Form 4A at Winchester Girls High School during Miss Green’s geography lesson. It was a sticky June afternoon in 1964. Miss Green, a kindly fifty-year-old, also our form mistress, was explaining about the tea, coconut and rubber industries which dominated Ceylon’s economy. We were looking at the peardrop-shaped island in our atlases. It was warm, I was sleepy. My attention dissolved into a daydream: I was floating somewhere above a shady verandah, surrounded by trees, listening to strange bird calls and sounds of insects, while inhaling an intoxicating scent of (what I later learnt was) jasmine and araliya. Across from me rose a huge, dark mountain.
A worm hole. Now I’d seen both ends.
Minette was George and Agnes’s youngest surviving child. Infant mortality was high in Ceylon as elsewhere, pre-and-post-World War One. But the de Silva’s were especially unfortunate. After they moved into St Georges, Agnes lost eight of the ten children she gave birth to. A younger sister to Minette, Susie, born in 2019, died in her second year. George recalled the incident.
Once I was away from home for five days (campaigning to enter the Legislative Council), and when I returned it was quite late in the night. As I entered the house. I enquired from my wife about Susie, our two-year-old. My wife simply directed me to the bedroom. I went in to see the child in the coffin. Then I fainted.
Minette’s steely resilience, which belied her ‘delicate flower’ appearance, may have come from this proximity to death during her childhood.
I shared St Georges with two British VSO’s. One – Jane Cregeen, a Canadian-Brit -taught English at the Teachers Training College in Penideniya. The other, Frances Bill, was the granddaughter of the last English-born Anglican Bishop of Madras, and a teacher at Kandy Girls High School. Frances was petite, like Minette, and very pretty. She was adored by the white-saronged, barefoot waiters at Elephant House where we went to drink lime sodas.
Despite her apparent North American bullish self-confidence, Jane Cregeen was in awe of Minette. They barely conversed. But, like me, Jane was sensitive to the other-worldly vibes surrounding St Georges. “Did you hear that noise?” she asked me one evening as she marked homework at the eight- foot/ten-place Burma teak dining table. I looked up from my reading. I listened. Yes, there was a noise outside on the verandah. A kind of creaking. “Might be the wind?” I suggested. But it was too close to the house to be the branch of a tree. And anyway, there was hardly any wind. Again, a creaking. Going up and down the verandah. We listened intently. Then it stopped. We both went back to work.
Later that night, sometime after midnight, I was still reading, stretched out on the Chesterfield which stood against the wall between the open French windows. Jane and Frances were asleep in their shared bedroom: they had to leave the house early to get to their respective teaching posts. I, on the other hand, an indulged Commonwealth Scholar to Peradeniya Uni., had three years of ‘freedom’ to complete a Ph.D. and could go to bed and get up as I pleased. In the silence, (even the trains had stopped shunting at Kandy station) a distinct creaking noise came from the verandah. I froze. The hairs bristled on the back of my neck. Creak, creak, creak. The creaks went up one way towards the front door and then came back towards the car porch. It was uncanny. I thought for a while, then realized, “Must be a ghost!” Having rationalized the noise, I relaxed and continued reading. The noise came and went but now it held no fears. Ghosts aren’t burglars.
When I mentioned it to Minette the next day – we often took morning coffee together, me with a full tasse du café and Minette with her proverbial half a cup, “nikaan baaageyak, karunaa keralaa, Nancy” – she smiled archly and asked,” Do you young English people believe in ghosts? I thought you were much too hard-headed!” I pushed her about what the noise might be. “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t heard it.” She thought for a bit. “There was a Malay security guard my father employed at one time. He had a pair of creaky, new leather boots of which he was very proud. That’s all I can think of.” So, there it was. The ghost of a Malay ex-soldier wearing/breaking in his new boots.
