Figure 1.-- Here I am with my little brother again off to the Coronation party. Here in the photograph for the Coronation party I have my tie on. I guess I was considered old enough to begin wearing a necktie.

The final Ceylon photograph is me and my brother again. We are off to another party. This one was to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (June 1953). This was a big event throughout the Empire, including Ceylon. And of course military families were especially tied up with the monarchy and patriotism. As the Coronation approached, we were made very aware of who Princess Elizabeth was. Her father, King George VI, died just before my 6th birthday in February 1952. I remember it clearly. We had no electricity in our house and certainly no radio. Someone called at our house to tell us the King had died. Immediately, our nanny, cook and houseboy burst into tears. Thinking that this is what you do when your monarch dies, I lay face down on a sofa and began to cry. During the build up to the Coronation, fifteen months later, we learnt a lot about the girl who would be our new Queen. At school, we built the entire coronation procession, coaches, horses and all, in cardboard and it ran along one wall of the classroom. In Kandy, up in the hills, the annual Perahera procession, carrying the Buddha's tooth, was expanded to over 100 elephants, in honour of the Queen. (The relic of the Buddha resided (and still does) in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.) After the Coronation, all of us schoolchildren were given a special commemorative book, called Our Queen. I still have mine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we celebrated the Coronation even more enthusiastically in the Empire than at home. When I made enquiries years later, none of my friends who'd been in England in 1953 could remember making elaborate models of the procession or having special books given to them. There were, of course street parties up and down the land and my parents went to a lot of parties in Ceylon. But I wasn't invited to those! Here in the photograph for the Coronation party I have my tie on. I guess I was considered old enough to begin wearing a necktie.