Miss Aileen, the drill, art and music teacher, blows her whistle and the children leap up to catch the ball that swings beyond their sight and falls—oh, victory—with a plump sound into the net. Banda rings the bells under the jak tree. Pakiar sweeps up the fallen leaves. Miss Eva unrolls the map of the world and hangs it up on the blackboard, pointing at continents and islands they have never seen—desert, tundra, tropical, equatorial; tropical and coniferous forests. The pygmies creep through dark forests and the Eskimos draw their sledges with their huskies through the snow and ice. They sing ‘Cherry Ripe’ and ‘The Lonely Ash Grove’ and whirl round in the Maypole Dance. Babe Jonklaas teaches them ballet and they pirouette on their toes in imaginary tutus. There are no intruders here, but there are secret goings-on. Elizabeth is found kissing Lalani in a deserted classroom. The hostel matron peeps through the key hole and finds her little charges cavorting about on their beds, performing a Bacchic dance. The spinster clerk in the office has a favourite. Starved for love, she loves the almond-eyed, brown-haired Cynthia. ‘Ah, my little white sugar ball; my sugar sweet one,’ she says. And Cynthia receives very adult love letters from a lonely soldier. Indra brings her father’s gynaecological volumes to the classroom and the children pore over the mysteries of life in the vividly illustrated pictures of birth and evolution. Soma brings books from home too—books which her father once read; lurid fictions which the children read without understanding any of the meanings.

Ruth Allen too reads verse after verse of poetry from the collections and anthologies she brings with her to assembly. She is easily moved and weeps as her voice intones lines from the war poets, reminding herself, so far from home, of life, death, mortality. Her voice breaks, quivers with a familiar grief as she reads aloud extracts from letters addressed to her from ‘Home’. Letters from friends and family to an exile. Ah, yes, she is a valiant woman, bent on her mission to mould her charges in this Methodist missionary school. Ruth Allen reading poetry always reminds Christina of Suandhi, who had once been a student of the school. She would write poems, many poems. Did any of them bear presagement of her death? She had drowned in the river Mahaweli on a school picnic. She has become a legend here. Only a few of her poems remain.

Picnic at Hantane

Christina, Grace, Muriel, Nanda and Pearl, with their other classmates, decide on a picnic to Hantane with Miss Olga and Miss Elaine. They will take the road to that soaring peak, to Hantane, and look down from its summit on an all-encompassing view of the township where they live …

I will lift up mine eyes to the mountains …
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil;
He shall preserve thy soul …