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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 ...