Isn’t it amazing how hearing a few bars of a song can suddenly bring a host of memories flooding back?

I was at a restaurant with my wife the other day – it was one of those quiet restaurants where they have soft music playing in the background. The music is soft enough not to disturb one’s conversation, but just loud enough so that you are aware of this melody playing in the background. We had just given our order and were lightheartedly talking about something totally unrelated when I distinctly heard the strains of the song Summer Holiday – Cliff Richard’s popular song of the sixties.

I can still remember the movie in which this was the title song – about a group of young ones from England who hired a red double-decker bus and went on a two week summer holiday to Europe. The other details of the film remain a bit hazy - except that the movie was shown at the Liberty Cinema, to which we cycled along a quiet and unpolluted Duplication Road, and that the lead role was played by Cliff Richard. Just like any of today’s good Bollywood movies, where at various profound moments as well as at the drop of a hat the hero or the heroine suddenly breaks into song, there were plenty of foot-tapping hit parade numbers worked into the plot of the story.

What was most memorable for me about this particular movie and the song Summer Holiday was that it was at the height of its popularity at the time I went for my school holidays to my uncle’s place in Hingurakgoda. He, who had a house in the Irrigation Department quarters there, had very kindly invited me to bring a couple of friends and spend a week there with him – and as young teenagers we needed no second invitation. Getting away from Colombo during the August holidays, spending our time lazily reading, playing table tennis or ‘Three hundred and four’ in the government services clubhouse with the girls in the next door house, going fishing in the irrigation channel close to the quarters or at the Minneriya tank, doing the occasional trip to Mihintale – all this constituted a wonderful adventure for us boys.

And the best part of our "summer holiday" was travelling about in my uncle’s car – an old Morris 8 which he had (with good reason) christened The Boneshaker. What shock absorbers there had originally been in the vehicle had long ago given up their duty of rendering smooth a ride on those uneven country roads. If the vehicle went over a rut in the road (and there were many ruts in those outstation roads those days), adult passengers had a good chance of hitting their heads on the roof. The car had only one wiper, the one on the passenger side having fallen off or been stolen some time ago and never replaced. This however was not a problem for my uncle, who always carried a cake of soap in the glove compartment. He used to smear soap on the windscreen if it started to rain, his rationale being that the surface tension of the soapy surface would create a clear film on the windscreen and thus not allow splattering raindrops to impede his visibility.

I also learned from my uncle that a leaking radiator was not a major disaster. Once when he discovered that the radiator was leaking, he ran the car engine for a while to allow the water in the radiator to heat up, and then cracked an egg into the radiator opening. His theory was that the hot water would cause the egg (which by this time had gravitated to the bottom of the radiator) to harden – and this poached egg would then seal the crack in the radiator floor. Whether his theory was scientifically correct or not, I don’t know – but I do remember there being no further leak from that radiator during the rest of our stay!

"What are you smiling at?" my wife’s words gently broke into my reverie.

"Oh!" I said, "I just heard the song Summer Holiday and was remembering how Uncle broke an egg into the radiator of his car".