Travels with Ena: 1983 and its Impact – Part 1

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Aelian Kannangara, Aluwihare, Bandaranaike, Cyril Wickremesinghe, Ena de Silva, Esme Goonewardene, John Kotelawala, Richard Aluwihare, SLFP, UNP

Half a life ago I got to know Ena de Silva well. Having heard about my adventures at S.Thomas’, she decided that there was another unorthodox person in the family, and invited me to stay with her at Aluwihare. This was her ancestral village, to which she had retired at the end of 1981. It was eighteen months later, in May 1983, that I made the first of what were to be frequent visits there over the next 29 years, half of my life.

Ena was not an especially close relation. Her mother Lucille was a Moonemalle, whose father’s sister was the mother of my maternal grandmother, Esme Goonewardene. But the two cousins, both born in the last year of the 19^th century, remained close, perhaps because they both married Civil Servants who were senior administrators in the last years of British rule.

The Moonemalle Inheritance: Part One – Old Place – Ada and Theodore Moonemalle and their children

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Anuradhapura New Town, Bishop Lakshman, Cyril Wickremesinghe, D. S. Senanayake, Esme Goonewardene, Eva Goonewardena, Ida Goonewardena, Mitford House, Old Place, Order of St Michael and St George, Richard Aluwihare, Theodore Barcroft Lewis Moonemalle, Trinity College

Theodore Barcroft Lewis Moonemalle married long after his sister did, and his eldest daughter Lucille was exactly the same age as her youngest cousin, except for Brian, who was born in 2003 and died early in 2009. Lucille was born in 1900, as was my grandmother Esme. They both married Civil Servants, the latter Cyril Wickremesinghe, born in 1890, who was the first Sri Lankan Government Agent in what before him had been the exclusive preserve of Britishers. Lucille married Richard Aluwihare, who was five years younger than Cyril and who fought in the trenches during the First World War.

His name still adorns, at the very top of the list, the plaque in Trinity College that commemorates the several Trinitians who fought for the Empire. Many of them died, though Sir Richard, as he later became, was one of the fortunate ones, and was able to tell stories in later life of the horrors of mud and blood and gas and shells he had experienced as a raw youngster.

Cyril did not go to the War, though he had shone as a cadet at Royal. We still have a beautiful picture of his platoon, and I have often wondered whether any of that valiant group of innocents also went to war, and if any of them died. Cyril himself joined the Civil Service when he was just 21, and served in Kurunagala during the war, which is when I presume he met my grandmother. His mother, who had known her father in Galle, doubtless arranged things, though my grandmother never doubted that theirs was a wholly romantic affair.

Lakmahal 4 – Making a Match: A Time of Promise

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Cyril Wickremesinghe, Esme Goonewardene, Lakmahal

Cyril and Esme Wickremesinghe when he served in Puttlam

Cyril Wickremesinghe and Esme Goonewardene married in 1919, and were stationed in various places in the country over the next seventeen years, before finally settling down in Lakmahal at the beginning of 1937. Their eldest son, Cyril Esmond Lucien, was born in 1920. Interestingly, they moved thereafter to Ceylonese names, Tissa in 1923, Lakshman in 1927, and in between their only daughter Mukta, named in memory of the pearl fisheries Cyril had supervised when he was stationed in Puttalam.

He had risen rapidly in the service, becoming the first Ceylonese Government Agent in 1930. This was in Sabaragamuwa, and there is a wonderful portrait of him and his wife seated in state along with the Sabaragamuwa chiefs in their traditional costumes, headed by old Maduwanwala Dissawa with his flowing white beard. But even more evocative for me of that bygone age is a photograph of a much younger couple, stunningly attractive both of them, taken it seems in Puttalam, which would make it the early twenties. They are surrounded by young men in studiedly casual European sports clothes. The womenfolk are much more formal, staid almost, with my grandmother looking almost ethereal in the middle.