Tags
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.
