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The years have not been kind. His immensely tall frame - well over six and a half feet - is diminished with age. What the visitor finds is the armature of Bevis, with much of the human clay long since melted. His face is that of a benevolent witch: heavybrowed, long of chin and jaw, framed by wisps of fine white hair. The voice, however, is still resonant and full of well-bred locution. Bevis comes alive when he speaks, and in reliving the long years, seems to lift their burden from him - one sees again the younger Bevis, bon vivant extraordinaire.
His blindness does not bother him as much as he thought it would. "I've always been a claustrophobe - had a dread of being buried alive and all that. I thought blindness would be like that too, but it isn't dark at all - you're always seeing pictures. Pictures of the past, and pictures of things that never happened. I play them back like a film; I live in the past all the time now." He began work on Brief in 1929. The property, located along the south coast near Bentota, was a rubber plantation then; it belonged to his mother, who bequeathed it to her elder son at his request. In a manner more practical than aesthetic, he chose the spot where he would spend most of his life. "I looked for the patch of rubber that was doing the worst," he says, and chopped it down." Continued...
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