By R. RADCLIFFE


Ehu fugaces...'

Yes, I think so when I look back on my early years of planting in Old Mysore. It was then a more leisured life in which one had time to stop and stare and I am sure had a quality that is lacking today; anyhow, a quality that I miss and regret it's passing. The material things, prized today, had much less meaning then: a gun: a rod: a simple means of conveyance; for three years, I went to call on friends on a horse-my nearest neighbour three miles away and the farthest 10 miles with little in between were enough. I have many times ridden over to dinner taking my Syce and a hurricane lamp to light the way back home over country roads. A simple bungalow, lit by oil lamps, no running water, no indoor sanitation-the closest thing to an electronic gadget was an Eveready torch!

Hardly a car was seen on the road that passed my bungalow, but a daily bus plied to Belur and then in 1936, came the first lorry to lift the coffee to Mangalore for curing by Peirce Leslie and dispatch to London for sale. Prior to the arrival of the lorry and even then for three or more years thereafter, the coffee was sent by bullock carts down the Shiradi Ghaut. I remember now the jangling of the bells on the bullocks as the 20 or so carts arrived from the Hassan area one evening and the talk and camp fires of the Gowda drivers in the field outside the bungalow and drying-ground as they assembled for the 6 day journey. The carts' canopy covered in straw for the journey down the ghaut at night, with a hurricane lamp hanging from their axles.

I joined Brooke Mockett in 1933 as an Assistant Manager, on an estate started as long back as 1846 and spent the first five months at Ossoor, learning my work. I was put in charge of a South Canara Writer, Karkala Seena Shetty, to learn the language and ways of handling labour. He was a great shikari and had a fine pig-dog called Brownie' and introduced me to the exciting sport of pig beats. I lived in one room in the old cardamom house and fed with Eric Young in the Old Ossoor bungalow before moving on to Soondhully where I stayed until joining the Forces in 1940.

Eric Young was a strict disciplinarian and one to whom I owe a great deal for his care and teaching and above all, for his implanting the essential need for a committed application to the work in hand.

Another friend was Colonel Loftus Crawford, dead now these 40 years, who was my nearest neighbour at Hirvati whom I remember with continued pleasure-one of the three brothers who started their planting careers in 1886. It was from the Crawfords that I heard and learnt much of the old planting life in the 1880s and first quarter of this century and I do not think much had changed up to my arrival at Ossoor and did not really change until the 1939/45 War, though the coffee and tea market slump of the 1930s did put the clock back and there was a less leisured and easier living. This was a time in which much coffee was abandoned as cold, economic winds shriveled up the estates; work was neglected and stem borer and leaf diseases took over.

Arabica quality coffee was shipped to London, then the main auction market, in individual Estate Marks and sold for Sh 55/ 60 a cwt. (Rs 39 at old exchange rates): Robusta coffee (then very much untouched!) was sold locally at Rs 20 or less a cwt (old rates) and yet some estates managed to make ends meet. I recall an estate, with an average Arabica production of 2'/2 cwts per acre, never making a loss on annual workings! I had made out a budget to work for Soondhully for Rs 20 an acre, all-in, I had made my first coffee clearing there and this was sold as part of the estate to Consolidated Coffee at Rs 37,000 per acre some two years back.

There was a solution to keeping one's head above water, made easier as demand (greed?) was not so great as it is today. A 'vulgar' planter of my acquaintance who used to spend much of his time drinking some of the better (?) things of life and spent little time on his estate, when asked how he managed to keep going, answered "I know how to work the b..."and so it was and is. Perhaps, there is a lesson for today, when we hear so much about poor markets and problems.

In those days, close on 60 years ago, "I had bought ragi at Rs 5 per palls (old Mysore measure of 100 seers); paddy at Rs 9 per heeru (old Mysore measure of 252 seers). I had bought dry land at 4 annas per acre and rosewood at Rs 1 a c.f.t.-lived well enough in a simple way on Rs 250 a month and saved enough to buy my first car-an old Ford from Nanje Gowda in Saklaspur for Rs 400.

I rationed myself to a monthly use of Rs 20 (Petrol was then only 12 (or was it 8) annas a gallon), bought shot-gun cartridges and spent evenings going round the coffee boundary to pick up the odd jungle-fowl or hare and spent my weekly free day going out with the locals on pig beats. I can still remember the sharp scent of crushed lantana as I prepared my sand in that very clearing sold to C C for Rs 37,000 on my first pig-beat after 3 unbroken monsoon months of attention to coffee! Then fishing in the Kemphalla for mahseer in the annual 'break' at Deepavali. Subsequently, I bought 80 acres of land and made an estate.

A great life for which I am thankful to have had the opportunity to experience.

Today, I never seem to have the time for the many leisured, happy things I did in those far-off days and so it must be in Plantations with Managers ever burdened with demands of paper work, not only of Government but also of the Organisations for which they work. Not enough time in the field; no time to know the names of their labour; no time or opportunity to get down to real planting, close contact with the soil, to understand it and the plants they grow. Too much office-table planting!

"Ehu fugaces ... it is! I miss the quality which affluent, modern living conditions cannot supply. "What is Progress", says an ageing Planter. "Absence of malaria; better health; better food; better crops", came the answer!