Blog Archives

A hailstorm at Dankotuwa – By GEORGE BRAINE The sky is a cloudless blue, but the ground is covered in snow and ice. The temperature has plunged to -15 centigrade. The landscape is searing white. I have returned home after shoveling snow off the driveway, my fingers numb with cold. I am in Sapporo, in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. My memories go back to 1956, when I first saw ice. My father was the superintendent of Carrington Group, a coconut plantation at Dankotuwa, in the NWP. The plantation also had a large dairy and a piggery. The bungalow was on top of a hill, with “sweeping vistas” (as my father later wrote) on all sides. One morning, around 10am, we were startled by the crashing of rocks on the tin roof. On rushing outside, we were dumbfounded to see, not rocks, but a storm of ice falling from the sky. (We ...