Twilight Reminiscences 19- A Summer Holiday-by Sanjiva Wijesinha
Source:Sanjivawijesinha
We’re all going on a summer holiday
No more working for a week or two….”
-from a popular song of the sixties by Cliff Richard
Isn’t it amazing how hearing a few bars of a song can suddenly trigger the flooding back of a host of memories?
I was having dinner at a restaurant with my wife the other day – it was one of those quiet uncrowded restaurants where they have soft music playing in the background. The music is soft enough not to disturb one’s conversation, but just loud enough so that you are aware of the melody being played in the background.
We had just given our order and were light-heartedly talking about something totally unrelated when I distinctly heard the strains of the song Summer Holiday – a popular song of the sixties by British singer Cliff Richard. I can still remember the movie in which this was the title song – a story about a group of young ones from England who hired a red double-decker London bus and then went on a two-week summer holiday to Europe. It is now almost 60 years since I saw the movie and the details of the film remain a bit hazy – except that I remember the movie was shown at the Liberty Cinema to which we cycled along what was then a quiet and unpolluted Duplication Road. I recall that the lead role was played by Cliff Richard himself. Just like in any of today’s good Bollywood movies, where at various profound moments as well as at the drop of a hat the hero or the heroine suddenly breaks into song, there were plenty of foot-tapping hit parade numbers worked into the plot of the story.
What was most memorable for me about this particular movie was that the song Summer Holiday was at the height of its popularity at the time I went for my school holidays to my uncle’s place in Hingurakgoda. He, who was living at the time in the Irrigation Department quarters there, had very kindly invited me to bring a couple of friends along and spend a week there with him. As young teenagers the three of us -Tiny Reid, Rakhi Jayawardena and myself – needed no second invitation. Getting away from Colombo during the August holidays, spending our time lazily reading, playing table tennis or noisy card games like ‘Three hundred and four’ in the government services clubhouse with the girls in the house next door, going fishing in the nearby irrigation channel or at the Minneriya tank, driving to the historical site of Polonnaruva just half an hour away or to the picturesque Giritale tank – all these constituted a wonderful adventure for us boys.
But the best part of our “summer holiday” was travelling about in my uncle’s car – an old Morris 8 which he had (with good reason) christened ‘The Boneshaker’. What shock absorbers had been originally fitted in the vehicle had long ago given up their task of providing passengers with a smooth ride on those uneven country roads. If the vehicle went over a rut (and there were many ruts in those outstation roads those days), tall adult passengers had a good chance of painfully hitting their heads on the roof.
The car had just a single wiper, the one on the passenger side having fallen off or been stolen some time ago and never replaced. This however was not a problem for my uncle, who always carried a cake of Sunlight soap in the car’s glove compartment. He used to smear soap on the windscreen if it started to rain, his rationale being that the surface tension of the soapy surface would create a clear film on the windscreen and thus not allow splattering raindrops to impede his visibility
I also learned from my uncle that a leaking radiator was not a major disaster, and could be effectively dealt with by using appropriate first aid measures. Once when he discovered that the radiator was leaking, he ran the car engine for a while to allow the water in the radiator to heat up, and then cracked an egg into the radiator opening. His theory was that the hot water would cause the contents of the egg (which by this time had gravitated to the bottom of the radiator) to coagulate – and this poached egg would then seal the crack in the radiator floor. Whether his theory was scientifically correct or not, I don’t know – but I do remember that there was no further leak from that radiator during the rest of our stay!
My thoughts were far away in Hingurakgoda of the sixties when my wife’s words gently broke into my reverie and brought me back to the present.
“What on earth are you smiling at?” she asked.
“Oh!” I said, “I just heard the song Summer Holiday playing – and I was remembering how Uncle broke an egg into the radiator of his car.
More stories from Sri Lanka can be found in my book Tales From my Island
