QUE SERA SERA

My memories go back almost seventy years, when, as a seven-year-old. I lived with my parents and two siblings in a provincial town.

- BY GEORGE BRAINE

My sister had just been born. My father was unemployed and we relied on my mother’s meager salary to see us through. To make ends meet, mother even stitched all our clothes.

My school was more than a mile from home, and I trudged to school and back, crossing a railway line and walking along a busy road. Most students rode bicycles, and hundreds would be cycling along the road each morning. I passed the houses of three classmates on my way to school. One, who lived barely 500 yards from school, was driven there every day. I don’t remember ever being offered a ride.

We lived in a small, rented house. Tiny veranda, sitting room, two bedrooms, and a small kitchen. No electricity or running water. An outhouse for a toilet, and water drawn from a well shared with several other houses.

My father tried to make some money by breeding German Shepherds and raising turkeys to be sold at Christmas time. But a rabid dog bit the mother dog, so she and her puppies had to be destroyed. Unable to shoot his own dog, my father requested a policeman to do the job. Adding to his woes, all the turkeys were stolen one night. Those were hard times.

Our landlady, Mrs. Ferdinando, lived nearby, and she had a teenage daughter. Every afternoon, they would listen to “Housewives’ Choice”, a request program on Radio Ceylon. On Sundays, it was “Sunday Choice”. Because their radio was turned-on at a high volume, we enjoyed Hank Locklin, Dean Martin, Jim Reeves, Hank Snow, Eddie Arnold, Harry Belafonte and other popular singers from home. Doris Day’s Que sera sera was the hottest single, and we heard it several times every day.

My brother Roy and I also spent a lot of time in the large, lovely house in front of ours, where the Kuruppu family - parents, a son and a daughter, resided.