Who's afraid of Leonard Woolf ?

"It was a strange world, a world of hope and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him."
Leonard WoolfThe Village in the Jungle

It is a sweltering hot, humid afternoon. There is not much wind. I am sitting here writing in a wildlife bungalow on the western perimeter of the Yala National Park overlooking Bandanarewa - a small reservoir only a few miles for Beddagama (which means literally village in the jungle) and the site of Leonard Woolf's acclaimed masterpiece The Village in the Jungle, which was published in 1913 two years after the author had left Ceylon. Yala's arid and sandy terrain is really of group of five Parks, covering almost four hundred square miles. It emerged from the reserve set up at the turn of the last century by British sportsmen interested in controlled hunting. It's first warden was Henry Engelbrecht who had come to Ceylon as a prisoner of war in 1905. Because he wouldn't swear allegiance to the British Crown he was not allowed to return home - so he stayed on. Woolf described him as "hated", "very stupid" and "completely without fear and without nerves". He apparently had three local wives and numerous children. He wasn't much liked.

Leonard Woolf was born in London in 1880 into a prominent and wealthy Jewish family. After a spirited five years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he established lasting friendships with young men like Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes, he applied for the Civil Service expecting a position with the Home Office. However, with disappointing examination results, he was only offered a post overseas and he was sent out in 1904 to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service - an appointed group of white administrators who ruled the island.

Woolf disembarked in Colombo and spent two weeks at the Kachcheri (office) signing letters for the Colonial Secretary. He next set out to take up his first appointment as a Cadet in Jaffna, a province (one of nine) in the very north of the island. Jaffna, until recently the devastated stronghold of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in their battle for independence against the Sinhala controlled island, was in those days an area of sandy austerity encompassing a ? mile long peninsula that curved towards the southern tip of India. To get there he traveled by train to Anuradhapura, and then by mail coach - "an ordinary bullock cart in which the mail bags lay on the floor and the passengers lay on the mail bags". The last few miles to the Jaffna peninsula were again by train. A fierce blazing sun shone down on this flat unforgiving land populated almost exclusively (except for a few hundred Muslims) by the predominantly Hindu Tamils.

Woolf spent two and a half years, from 5th January 1905 to 19th August 1907 attached to the Jaffna Kachcheri responsible to the Government Agent. He was then twenty four years old and his letters back home (especially to Lytton Strachey) together with his autobiography Growing (1961) gave a comprehensive and frank expression of his thoughts, feelings, sentiments and recall of his time in Jaffna and indeed his entire seven years in Ceylon. He describes some of his own liabilities, one of which he believed was "the social defect which I have suffered from ever since I was a child," ...... namely that he was mentally and physically a coward.

Community

The white community in Jaffna when Woolf arrived there, consisted of a dozen Government officers, some ten missionaries, and an ex-army officer "with an appalling wife and an appalling son". Woolf developed an outspoken, confident and almost arrogant attitude. Nevertheless, with his superior Agent away attending to municipal responsibilities, Woolf was often in charge of the entire province. In a letter to Strachey he laments "but there is nothing to say to you, nothing to tell you of except 'events'. I neither read nor think nor - in the old way - feel". Of these events Woolf mentions the loss of his virginity to a "Burgher" girl. He developed typhoid; was sent to Bandarawela to convalesce; and later suffered from chronic malaria. He learned Tamil first during his stay in Jaffna and Sinhala later after he was promoted and sent to Kandy on 19th August 1907.

As soon as Woolf got to Kandy he realised that he had entered into an entirely new world - very different from the "flat, dry, hot low country with a very small rainfall which comes mainly in a month or so of the north-east monsoon." Kandy was then a town of 30,000 inhabitants and unlike Jaffna, was "full of white men". There was an air of European Cosmopolitanism, which to Woolf was extremely distasteful, and it did a great deal to complete Woolf's education as an anti-imperialist.

Beauty spot

The climate of course was a great deal better than Jaffna- being "hill country" and more than 1500 feet above sea level - a "beauty spot" easily accessible from Colombo. Woolf's sister Bella came out at the end of 1907 to stay with him - and she stayed until he was transferred to Hambantota in August 1908. This made a great deal of difference to Woolf's life in Kandy. Woolf played tennis, squash and hockey, and his day usually ended at the Kandy Club - "a symbol and centre of British imperialism". Perhaps the most exalted social responsibility of Woolf during his stay in Kandy was entertaining the ex-Empress Eugenie of France showing her the Dalada Maliyana which housed, as it does today, Buddha's tooth - one of the most sacred of Buddhist relics.

Hosting Sir Hugh Clifford, the Colonial Secretary, to escort the Empress; and then later organising an evening of Kandyan dancing at the King's Pavilion somehow impressed Clifford enough to influence his appointment as Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota sometime later. Certainly the most unpleasant work Woolf had to do in Kandy, and indeed everywhere in Ceylon, had to do with prisons.

Duties

One of his duties was to be present in a prison when anyone was flogged or hanged, and to certify that the sentence had been carried out. "The flogging of a man with a cat-o-nine tails is the most disgusting and barbarous thing I have ever seen - it is worse than a hanging." Woolf was repulsed with capital punishment. Although he believed that law and order should be strictly maintained Woolf believed that much of British criminal law was an uncivilised method of punishing and deterring crime.

Woolf's efficiency and organisational abilities after only a year in the post of Office Assistant in Kandy convinced the Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Clifford, that he should recommend Woolf as Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota - the youngest AGA in the British Civil Service.

Woolf arrived in Hambantota as AGA and took over from his predecessor on Friday 28th August 1908. He eventually left it on leave for England on Saturday 20th May 1911. It was the third and final phase of Woolf's stint as a British Civil Servant. Long before this he had almost given up his weekly letters to Lytton Strachey. The Hambantota district was a 1000 square mile hot, dry, malarial area bounded on the south by the sea in the south-eastern corner of Ceylon. Again it was different from the comfortable hill country climate of Kandy and the uncomfortable arid unprotected Jaffna peninsula. It was almost entirely a jungle area and had a population of about 100,000. He was given the Residency in Hambantota to live in on a high promontory jutting out to sea overlooking the harbour "with walls of astonishing thickness and an enormously broad verandah and vast high rooms". I know the Residency well. It is very near the Hambantota rest-house and only about twenty miles from where I am sitting today in Yala. I have spent many hours at night listening to the unique smacking sound that the sea made as its waves rose and fell on the beautiful curved beach below us. It made the same impression on Woolf.

"All year round day and night, if you looked down that long two-mile line of sea and sand, you would see, unless it was very rough, continually at regular intervals a wave, not very high but unbroken two miles long, lift itself up very slowly, wearily, prise itself, for a moment in sudden complete silence and then fall with a great thud upon the sand. The moment of complete silence followed by the great thud, the thunder of the wave, became part of the rhythm of my life."

There were no other Europeans in the town. Working sixteen hours a day and being responsible for salt and rice production, education, combating cattle disease, judging local disputes, and looking after visiting dignitaries, Woolf made the area the most efficiently governed in the country. He was tireless and spent his almost three years in the district riding his horse, walking, traveling in a bullock car and bicycling over the entire area; his severe administrative work ethic did not always make him popular but he achieved results and enormous respect. Woolf also, although he detested big-game hunting, developed a fascination for the wildlife in the area and for the jungle. Sometimes alone but often with Henry Engelbrecht, he experience some alarming encounters in the Magampattu jungle very near here, once literally digging out a wounded leopard from a cave which Woolf luckily shot at point blank range when it charged. A terrifying experience.

Woolf's diaries

Every AGA in the island was required to keep a daily diary of his work. Woolf's diaries with a long erudite introduction were published in 1962. His working day is documented in detail. Being an inveterate letter writer nearly all other of Woolf's experiences in Ceylon are thankfully preserved in 125 letters, edited by Frederic Spotts, published in 1989.

Most of these, and by far the most outspoken, are those written to Lytton Strachey. Other revealing correspondence was to Saxon Sydney-Turner, R.C. Trevelyan, G.E. Moore, Desmond McCarthy and John Maynard Keynes. This correspondence was an obvious emotional lifeline for Woolf and it is unfortunate that letters to his family have been lost as they may have revealed something other than the political and geographical issues of which he wrote to his Cambridge associates.

Apart from these letters, his diary, and three short stories published in 1920 (?) under the title Stories of the East, only the masterfully empathetic The Village in the Jungle (which many believe had an authenticity unequaled even in works by Conran and Forster), remained of Leonard Woolf's writings in Ceylon.

This was until his autobiography Growing was published in 1961 when he was eighty years old. In Growing Woolf tells the complete story of his seven years as a civil servant in Ceylon, and it is obvious that he applied the same method to the towns and jungles as he did to the Sinhalese and Tamils, and to the strange Anglo-Ceylon society into which he was plunged when he was twenty-four years old. Today, almost a century later, it presents a vivid picture of a curious way of life which has already disappeared.