Courting trouble

Desmond de Silva was born in the colony of Ceylon in the early months of the second world war, the only son of a barrister. After the Japanese entered the war in 1941, Ceylon was in the front line and it faced an onslaught. Winston Churchill appointed Lord Mountbatten as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, based at Peradeniya, just outside Kandy. De Silva’s grandfather George E. de Silva was a member of the Ceylon war council, and Mountbatten, for Desmond, was ‘Uncle Dickie’. Four decades later, he was to marry Mountbatten’s great niece, Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia. De Silva’s life, as seen through these episodic memoirs, has a Boy’s Own quality.

These memoirs deal with an often forgotten fact: that by April 1942, because imperial Japanese forces had overrun the rubber-producing countries of Southeast Asia, Ceylon was the only reliable source of rubber for the Allies. If Ceylon had fallen to the Japanese, the impact on the Allied invasion of Europe would have been enormous.