Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Practising Detachment With Ethel And Lord Buddha I How To Live A Better Life In Sri Lanka
What is it about planting modest herbs that can keep the busy world at bay in Sri Lanka?
At long last, it's time to remember Ethel here in Galagedera, some 9,000 kilometres from her home overlooking the towering Hartland cliffs and the pounding ocean waves below.
Ethel and her sister Minnie were ancient second cousins, farmers, both, who managed a roomy farm on the stony, stormy cliffs of North Devon, just down the road from Morwenstow, home to the opium-puffing Parson Hawker who superintended a graveyard strewn with other more distant cousins.
Hawker, an eccentric hermit somewhat after my own heart, kept a pet pig that followed him like a dog, wore a yellow poncho and red fez instead of more traditional clerical clothes, and wrote poetry in a hut overlooking the sea.
His congregation, farmers, and wreckers to a man, often threatened his charitable urges to rescue shipwrecked sailors, preferring instead to rob and murder them. Even so, they revered him and treated his curious habits as wholly normal.
But normal is as normal does, and this part of Cornwall and Devon is famous for its unconventional ways. And blissfully unfashionable too. The art deco bungalows built by the sort of modish characters often found in Agatha Christie novels never brightened these lonely fields. Holiday camps, boutique hotels, quaint potteries, and fudge shops avoid the risk of trying to flourish in these parts.
From the fleshpots of Newquay to the west to Exmoor to the east, Ethel’s and Minnie’s Devon is a scrambled egg of territory, shot through with hills and valleys, and protected to the south by the bleak expanse of Dartmoor. It is real countryside, unbeautified. Centuries-old hawthorn trees twist along field boundaries, their shapes tortured by unrelenting gales. The few roads that run there lie so deep in the land that they seem like tunnels beneath savage hedgerows.
Endangered butterflies, otters, and hazel dormice live on land that remains largely untouched by humans. The coastal waters host grey seals, dolphins, and basking sharks. Buzzards, Kestrels, Sparrowhawks, and Peregrine Falcons patrol its skies, and slithering through the damp grass are some of England’s rarer reptiles - adders, smooth snakes, sand lizards.
No relocation TV show would ever choose this area to showcase houses to its wealthy guests. Wesleyan, Methodist, Presbyterian and non-conformist chapels, many now derelict, dominate the scattered villages.
In so many ways, Ethel’s domain is not unlike mine here in Galagedera. Remote, undiscovered, wild, local, authentic. So when Ethel died in her late nineties, leaving me a small bequest, I had no compunction about using it to buy an extra parcel of land that abutted the estate, to honour her with a special garden one day.
A decade of tried-and-failed gardens passed, each succumbing to wild boar attacks, hungry porcupines, guinea grass, monsoon floods, and ravenous barking deer.
We erected a transparent-mesh greenhouse, and successive crops of tomato, eggplant, and courgette busied themselves failing under its humid roof. Shade nurseries went up, and orchids, trees and special plants were raised like delinquent children in detention centres.
Finally, money went where it should have long before, and we erected a 6-foot-high fence on sturdy concrete foundations to repel all but the most determined animal invader. We built raised beds, and now, as the monsoon season returns, we face the task of choosing what to plant here in memory of that must study of cousins - Ethel.
For sturdy she was. Orphaned early, Ethel and her sister set about managing their farm single-handed; the only relief came when the War Office awarded them a captured German soldier as their sole farm labourer.
The only break in the week was Sundays when the two sisters and Hans, the soldier, went to their chapel to sing the great Wesleyan hymns, including, of course, Charles Wesley’s greatest hit, Love Divine.
What I wondered went through their minds as they sang “Take away our bent to sinning;
Alpha and Omega be.” For the two sisters and Hans lived in what was then called a ménage à trois. Today, of course, we would call it a thropple, but in their day, they would have had to borrow the word from French to describe their arrangements. The phrase only appeared in written English in 1865, when Richard Burton used it to describe Somali domestic households.
They weren't, of course, the first. Lord Nelson famously lived openly with his mistress, Emma, and her husband, Sir William Hamilton, as did the Duke of Devonshire, his Duchess Georgiana, and Lady Elizabeth Foster.
Artists, of course, were noted for menages. Shelley and his wife made their home more intimate, sharing it with his wife’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. And around the same time Ethel was settling into domestic bliss, E.M. Forster and his lover, Bob Buckingham, were making a home with Bob’s new wife, May, in distant London.
But in North Devon, Ethel and Minnie’s shockingly colourful lifestyle went unnoticed.
Only after Ethel’s death did anyone ever go upstairs where three bedrooms lay – apparently chastely - side by side. It seems crass to wonder what the sleeping arrangements were, but I imagine they were not dissimilar to the layout of their final graves. Overlooking the grey surf of the Celtic Sea, an adjunct of the Atlantic, the two sisters lie on either side of Hans.
“Love Divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven to earth come down;
Fix in us Thy humble dwelling;
All Thy faithful mercies crown!”
And there they lived, the two sisters, Methodists to their core and firmly of the view that whenever the vicar from the Church of England came to call, as he did weekly, he was forever only there to cadge cake, tea, and biscuits.
Ethel finally retired from managing her truculent acres in her late eighties and then supervised a variety of gardeners and labourers, all themselves in their 70s and 80s, and many of whom she routinely sacked for laziness.
Laziness was never part of the Methodist way of life. Even as she became almost wholly immobile, Ethel cared for herself. Her home was filled with shelves of bound sermons. A church organ sat behind her high-backed chair and, true to her roots, no alcohol was permitted in the house, though she overlooked the liquor chocolates I routinely brought.
More importantly she held as unshakable truths the extraordinarily progressive tenets of the 1908 Methodist Social Creed –
“We joyfully receive for ourselves and others the blessings of community, sexuality, marriage, and the family.
We commit ourselves to the rights of men, women, children, youth, young adults, the aging, and people with disabilities; to improvement of the quality of life; and to the rights and dignity of all persons.
We believe in the right and duty of persons to work for the glory of God and the good of themselves and others and in the protection of their welfare in so doing; in the rights to property as a trust from God, collective bargaining, and responsible consumption; and in the elimination of economic and social distress.”
Her remarkable life seemed so wholly unremarkable from the outside, but who today can boast of having only ever lived in just one or two houses; of working from a teenager into their 80s; of listening to the news; and of sharing her lover with her sister.
She was, and is, a most private and powerful personal inspiration, and as I finally make this garden for her, I am taking extreme care to plant it with the sort of Eat-Well, Get-Well spices, herbs & traditional plants Ethel herself might have chosen were ever to have visited me here in the jungle north west of Kandy.
Naturally, all the classic Sri Lankan spices will have their home here - chilli, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon, pandan, curry leaves, lemongrass, ginger, fennel, gotukola, cloves, long pepper, and black pepper.
And she would have grown many others being planted too: rosemary, chives, garlic, dill, lavender, rosemary, thyme, bay, sage, oregano, parsley, and tarragon.
Sri Lanka’s lesser-known medicinal plants will also grow here under Ethel’s otherworldly care – Ranawara, Nelli and Bulu trees, kittul palms, Cluster Fig, Thebu, Iramusu, Begger weed, Polpala, aloo vera, and vines of vanilla, ivy gourd, butterfly pea flower, and love in a puff.
But also planted specially for her, her sister and Hans is a set of mints unlike any other.
It’s a mystery how mint ever arrived on these shores, but it must have done so centuries ago, for it has found its way into countless Ayurvedic medicines. It is used to stimulate appetite, support digestion, balance excess body heat, clear the airways, soothe congestion, ease throat irritation, relieve headaches and cool sunburns.
It thrives in this Kandyan hill country, and it has also made its way into every Sri Lankan kitchen - in mint sambals, mint rotis, refreshing drinks, Muslim rice dishes, and, of course, tea. For a few leaves in hot water is more than enough to end the day well with. You sit there, sipping your calming infusion, certain that enough is enough and any more is way too much.
And for Ethel, not one but 13 herb variants are being grown, each with a totally different flavour. There is common mint of course, peppermint, Moroccan mint, apple, and pineapple mint, but also mint that tastes of lemon balm, limes, basil, chocolate, strawberries, oranges, pears, and even after eights.
It took time to get the collection up to 13, a number I was keen to reach. In Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism, the number 13 holds tremendous spiritual significance, representing everything an especially eager monk ought to do to purify his mind and achieve the total detachment necessary to be successful.
Called the Dhutanga Thirteen, they include such rules as wearing only robes made from discarded cloth and owning no more than 3 robes. Eating habits are also regulated.
Mindful monks can live only on food obtained from the daily alms rounds – and when doing this, they must take each house in order, skipping none; and eat no more than a single meal daily from a single alms bowl, never asking for seconds.
They must live away from villages and towns, under a tree and never under a structure, preferably in cemeteries, all the better to contemplate the impermanence of life. And they must certainly be happy with whatever lodging is offered.
But perhaps most difficult of all is the requirement to always maintain a classical sitting posture, even when sleeping.
In this there are a variety of options, almost all of them nearly impossible to mange for long periods of time.
In the Full Lotus position, both feet rest on the opposite thighs, whereas in the Half Lotus one foot rests on top of the opposite thigh. The Burmese Posture has you place both legs flat on the floor side-by-side – unlike the Virasana posture, which has you kneeling on your heels.
It's a rare monk today, and perhaps ever, who managed to succeed in all this. Cramp, if nothing else, would surely get in the way of being detached.
I would fail before I even started, and I am sure that for others like me, Ethel’s more measured Methodist way might have wider success in helping me learn “some melodious sonnet / sung by flaming tongues above,” as another great Wesleyan hymnist put it.
Ethel did not need to become detached from all that was unimportant to enjoy her unique purity of mind. All she needed was a farm or garden.
A later Methodist hymn writer set it out more precisely: singing “The Gardener plants eastward a garden / where heaven meets earth – Paradise.”
Gardens do that, don't they – they? We spend our time caring for them, but of course, it's the garden that takes care of us.
As I hope this one will always do for whoever walks through it.
As a garden gesture, it is also the sort of extravagant, horticultural excess that Ethel would never have permitted herself to enjoy. Which is why I will enjoy it here for her, and of course for Minnie and Hans too, in this endangered part of Sri Lanka, which still bravely keeps at bay the onerous commercial excesses of modern life with the prayers of monks and imams sounding through the jungle, with the sound of civets and devil birds at night, and with its sudden monsoon rains and low mysterious clouds.