These experiences provided materia for "Briefly by Bevis." His reminiscences of the governors he served were generally complimentary, though he didn't think much of Sir Reginald Stubbs' dress sense - "I often wondered if he went to bed with his tie, waist-coat and shoes on" - nor of some of the less-refined Ceylonese MPs he had to meet at state functions (one, encountering asparagus for the first time and dimly recalling that he was supposed to eat it with his fingers, squashed it into "little oozy lumps, the way one eats rice and curry"). Other grist for the mill included: forays into the jungle with a friend whose marksmanship did not quite live up to his reputation ("Ern pointed; saw nothing. Ern aimed; I saw nothing. I Ern fired; we went and looked; he had hit nothing") and an encounter with the indefatigable Vivien Leigh ("In a few concentrated weeks of unimaginable rush I developed bags under my eyes like the udders of two ten-bottler cows...."). Colombo loved it, and "Briefly by Bevis" moved from the Daily News to the Sunday Observer so that his fans could enjoy him at greater leisure.

Later came a stab at landscape gardening with his childhood friend and fellow-artist Arthur van Langeberg. There was lucre in it; several foreign embassies commissioned them, but soon Bevis had had enough. He returned to Brief, there to live the rest of his life free from the curse of respectability. As his health declined he grew more and more settled - the glittering, drawing-room Bevis now only a memory. Yet even today, he enjoys nothing better than the pleasure of good company. Friends visit, from Colombo and abroad; strangers come, drawn by rumours of the magnificent garden. Bevis is happy to meet them and ever ready to chat - though the caller had better have something interesting to say for himself in turn. And when the visitors depart, Bevis remains - benighted in the midst of beauty but unafraid, smiling as he turns over the crowded pages of his memory, the mental photograph album of a life lived as though each moment might be the last, and all the richer for that.  Continued...

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