Celebrating her life amidst the mourning

Clara Abeyawardene was my cousin, the eldest daughter of my father’s eldest sister. This meant that she was much older than me, and as children it was her children we knew best. Or rather the elder two, Rohan a year older than me and Manoji a year younger. Amal was always much loved by all, as now, as a totally good tempered child. But he was much younger and did not really make a dent in our consciousnesses then.

Rohan and Manoji were however great playmates and I still cherish a photograph of me with Manoji on our balcony, taken perhaps half a century ago. But then the whole family left us, when Hector and Clara decided to move to England.

I was then privileged however to enjoy a closer relationship with the family than perhaps anyone else of Clara’s relations, for she looked after me when I first went to England when I was seventeen. I arrived in England exhausted, physically and emotionally, having travelled on the continent for three months beforehand. Clara and her family just nourished and cherished me and brought me back to equilibrium.

They hosted me in a comparatively small house in Wallington, with Amal having to move from his bed to accommodate me. Clara was also working by then, but she ran an efficient household, with wonderful meals whipped up on her return each evening. Hector too, despite his own hard work as a popular doctor, also did his share, and it was good to see the family working together. They tried to stop me doing anything, which I got over by claiming that I liked having my hands in hot water while washing up as the days grew colder.

I suspect she was happy however for she was a woman of great intellect and ability, who had not been able to develop in the restricted conditions imposed on upper class girls in Sri Lanka when she was growing up. My father used to tell me that she was incredibly bright, and wanted to go to medical college, but her mother did not think that proper, a fate that had befallen my own mother too.

It was a lively and happy family then that I stayed with, in September 1971. I came back to them over ensuing holidays, though for shorter periods as I grew more enamoured of Oxford, and staying there even in the depths of the vacation when dons would become young again and were happy to treat me as one of themselves. So, having spent Christmas with the family in 1971, I was there only briefly a year later.

It was in the following term that tragedy struck, and Hector succumbed to a massive heart attack, when in his early fifties. I stayed with them in the days following the funeral, and though this was the least I could do, Clara and the children always remembered this with a touching gratitude.

I had to do the same again when Manoji had an aneurism in November 1975. She was studying medicine at Manchester, something which I think, given her own deprivation, gave Clara more pleasure than anything else. Mother and daughter were always very close, and I still recall the last time I saw Manoji, when Clara brought her and her boyfriend down to Oxford. I had known him before for he had been an undergraduate there, and I think Clara was happy to feel she had my full support for what might have seemed unusual for a conservative family.

But tragedy struck later that year. How the family recovered from another bereavement so soon surprised me, but there was no equilibrium yet. Three years later, Rohan who had been at the University of Kent in Canterbury also died. I could not imagine, staying with them on that occasion, how Clara and Amal would cope. He was I think just 17. For me it was almost unthinkable that my two playmates of just a decade back should both have gone in such untimely fashion.

But Clara and Amal coped, and built up a fantastic life together, and also separately. Amal did very well both in his work and his private life, and I have been privileged, from a much older perspective, to observe a wonderfully close family. Clara was immensely proud of them, and in particular of her eldest grand-daughter who looks so much like her, but she also knew better than to be intrusive. She continued, after Amal had set up on his own, to live on her own, and to have a wonderfully active life, full of intellectual curiosity and a wanderlust that was remarkable even as she moved into her seventies.

She travelled to exotic destinations, she took classes in erudite subjects and re-invented herself with ever-expanding circles of friends. Until recently she would email me interesting items on Sri Lanka. Thankfully she and Amal, despite their long sojourn in England, continued to be devoted to the land of their birth. I am immensely proud that Amal should be in the forefront of efforts to support our country, through the pluralistic Conservative Friends of Sri Lanka that he helped to establish.

Clara was able to come to Sri Lanka on several occasions after I got back from Oxford, 35 years ago, and it was always a pleasure to have her stay with us. She had a reputation for being tough, but she always got on well with everyone at home, in particular the various Tamil girls who for different periods stayed with us as refugees from terror, the state terror of 1983 and the LTTE terror in Jaffna in the early nineties. She and Sharmini, the last of them, would chatter for hours, and they came and visited me, both at the University in Belihuloya and my cottage by the Kalu Ganga. I also loved the way she and my father would sit together in tranquility, talking about the past, and it was after one such visit that my father put up in his room a photograph of her mother.

His eldest sister had obviously always had a soft spot for her youngest sibling, and I remember him telling me that, when he came courting my mother, she had told him that he could not possibly go on a bicycle, and had bought him a car. Then, after my parents married, they had provided a home for Clara for some time when as a young girl she had found life at home difficult. I was only told about this, but I recall her younger sister Tekla staying with us at Lakmahal too, when I came to years of consciousness.

Clara kept going well into her eighties. I saw her last in her own home in the lovely flat overlooking Lords that Amal had provided her with. Before that I had for many years made sure that I had a meal with her when I visited England, at the large house the family had moved to in Carshalton Beeches in the late seventies. She was alone there in the last few years, but maintained the house beautifully until at last she was persuaded to move nearer to her son and his family.

Last year I heard she was ill and though in recent years I have tried to avoid London, I made sure I went to see her in hospital. This year too I had decided to spend a day in London just to see her, but a week before I got there I heard she had died. Still I think it best that now my last memory of her is that day last November when she was clearly in great pain but gave me that smile of incredible sweetness which lit up her usually serious face. More than an older relation, she was to me a great friend, and in losing her I have lost one of the bedrocks of my youth. But I also feel that, in mourning her, we must also celebrate independence and determination that ensured, despite much bereavement and sorrow, a full and satisfying life.