Yet Brief is not a gallery, and few if any of these works were actually purchased. They are gifts from the artists themselves, for Bevis was one of them and part of their circle. He is only accidentally a collector, and the monetary value of his possessions is obviously of no consequence to him: the Skanda mural is flaking at the bottom, a victim of the damp Bentota climate, and a large Balinese painting on the drawing room wall is sadly faded. Bevis is untroubled by such things - he has, he says, no pride of possession.

One has no difficulty at all in believing him, for pride of possession is one of the hallmarks of the respectable bourgeois, and above all things Bevis loathes respectability. He has, in his way, spent a lifetime in flight from it. Born in 1909 to eminently respectable parents - his father, "Benny" Bawa, was a prominent King's Counsel, his mother a lady of impeccable Dutch Burgher ancestry - young Bevis quickly made it clear that he would do things his way, or not at all. At Royal College he was a schoolmaster's nightmare - academically impossible, incurably artistic and quite unbearably honest. In despair, his headmaster suggested he be packed off to England to study art. Bevis refused on the grounds that art cannot be taught - you either have it in you or you don't - and opted to learn planting instead, so as to make himself useful on the family estates. He did well enough for a while, but it was not, unlike art, something he had in him, so eventually he let it go.

In 1929 he joined the Ceylon Light Infantry, an army regiment of somewhat exclusive composition. Part of the induction process was a party to which young Bevis was invited "to see if I was a gentleman, knew how to hold my fork properly and so forth." He had no difficulty with this particular aspect of soldiering; indeed, he managed so well he was selected to represent his regiment as aide-de-camp to the Governor of Ceylon. He served under no less than four governors - Stubbs, Caldecott, Monk-Mason-Moore and, for a time, Soulbury - with considerable flair and his own inimitable sense of style. His red dress uniform sat uncomfortably on his reedthin, six-and-a-half foot frame at first, so he had a bustle made up in order to round it out in the right places. In between these none-too-taxing ceremonial duties, he found time to be one of Colombo society's most eligible well set-up, he was often pursued, but never captured. Marriage would have been too respectable; his reputation as a brigand was already in serious danger, thanks to his ADC's commission and a recent promotion to the rank of major.  Continued...

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