Last Sunday I wrote about Leonard Woolf and quoted from his second autobiographical volume Growing which covers the period 1904 to 1911, which he spent as a civil servant in Ceylon. My article was about the start of his administrative career in the colony Ceylon, serving in Jaffna as Cadet and promoted soon enough to the higher grade of Assistant Government Agent. Today I touch on Woolf’s service and attitude to the people he either socialized with or served as British administrator in Kandy (1907– 1908) and then Hambantota (August 28, 1908 to May 20, 1911).
Kandy About transferring from the Jaffna train to one travelling to Kandy in Polgahawela (“what a soft liquid gentle Sinhalese word”) he remarks: “I remember after 53 years as vividly as if they happened 53 minutes ago...
I had left behind me the bareness, austerity, burning dryness of the sands of Jaffna and now I was bathed, embraced by the soft, warm, damp, luscious luxuriance of the tropics. Here life was full of trees..
. ferns and flowers.” Settled in Kandy in his Office Assistant’s bungalow above the Lake behind the Maligawa, he wrote half a century later: “I am glad that I spent a year of my life at the age of 27 in Kandy, for a life there was different to any other that I have ever known elsewhere, but I did not like it the way I liked Jaffna and Hambantota.
” Why we ask. Because Kandy was “Europeonized. Full of white men.
.. planters and because it was a beauty spot accessible from Colombo and i.