The British Garrison Cemetery, Kandy

Today, while taking a morning stroll along the lakeside in Kandy, Sue and I were approached by a German tourist.

“Excuse me. I have a recommendation for you. You must go and see the British Garrison Cemetery. It is not far and the light right now is fantastic.”

He seemed very moved and to have need to share what he had seen, so we thanked him and followed his directions. We took a path uphill, not far from the Temple of the Tooth and found the cemetery in a secluded spot behind a set of wrought iron gates. It comprises one or two acres and looks like an idealised version of an English country churchyard. The graves and paths are immaculately maintained and the only other people there were two workers armed with brooms and wheelbarrows.

Although near the centre of this crowded and noisy city it’s a peaceful spot on a hillside surrounded by woodland. On the slope above, the white dome of a Buddhist temple can be seen. From time to time the silence is broken by the cry of some exotic bird. Troops of monkeys patrol the general area and are probably the most frequent visitors.

The graves, of which I am told there are 163, are mainly of young men and women, children and babies, many carried away by disease or wild animals. The Attendant walked over and drew my attention to an anonymous looking plot. “This is the grave of the seventh and last Englishman to be killed by a wild elephant during the British era” he says in precise English.

The cemetery lay neglected for many years after the British pulled out of Ceylon in 1948 and was renovated about fifteen years ago and the Attendant has worked here ever since. As we were leaving he beckoned us into his little office, which also serves as a small museum containing photos, records and a plan of the cemetery. I suspect that for him the fact that British people visit the site from time to time helps give him a sense of purpose in preserving this small fragment of colonial history.

My feelings are mixed. There is a melancholy beauty to this little spot, commemorating as it does people who are largely forgotten and who served an Empire on which the Sun definitively set in 1948. At the same time I feel uncomfortable that so much effort has been put into preserving these corpses when countless thousands of their contemporary fellow islanders, people most of them would have seen as their inferiors, have no such memorial.

At the end of our visit I tightly rolled up a thousand rupee note and forced it with difficulty into the tiny hole in the donations box reserved for paper rather than coins and thanked the Attendant. Then Sue and I made our way back down into the tourist throng.