Noel Mathias Archives - Dreaming Beneath the Spires

(This is Part IV from a memoir of my Father, Noel Mathias. Parts I to III are:

Shake and Shake the Ketchup Bottle

We were never certain if the stories my father told us were truth or invention.

He claimed he responded to an advertisement in The Illustrated Weekly of India: “All mosquitoes eliminated from your house and garden in a day. Guaranteed to work, or your money back.” He sent in his ten rupees and waited. He received two small rocks. Take the mosquito, read the instructions, place it on the lower stone. Cover with the other stone. Crush mosquito.

Another story: A country bumpkin arrives in Bombay, craning his neck at the skyscrapers. A city slicker marches up, “It’s my building. You have to pay me a rupee for every storey you look at?” The bumpkin hands over fifteen rupees, then conspiratorially confesses to the bystanders. “I gave him fifteen rupees, but actually–I looked at the whole building.”

Yeah, his humour leaned towards the verbal though silly. A man leaves his wife. As he crosses the threshold, she wails, “You said you wouldn’t leave, and you’ve left.” He, “I promised to cleave, and I’ve cleft.”

* * *

“Was that really Professor Mathias?” one of his students asked, observing him joke with us on a train. “I have never seen him smile.” “You can only talk to him soberly on sober subjects,” my cousin Dorothy lamented. However,

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Uncle Fr. Tony Coelho S.J / Noel Joesph Mathias

My Uncle Fr. Tony Coelho S.J. (left), Noel Joesph Mathias (right)

A memoir of my father, Noel Mathias, continued from here

My father graduated from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore, while India, like the rest of the world, was in the throes of the Great Depression. He recommended to the British Minister, the head of the British Legation in Afghanistan, by his father’s friends, and worked in Kabul from 1940 to 1943 as a decoder for the encrypted messages that arrived from Delhi and London, highly confidential work, for there were seismic rumblings beneath the foundations of the Empire.

Later, a family friend, F. L. Silva, suggested an ideal profession–a Chartered Accountant—and so, using his share of his father’s legacy, he went to England to acquire a coveted British degree, eventually becoming Noel Mathias, F.C.A., Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, England and Wales.

* * *

“This other Eden, demi-paradise, this precious stone set in the silver sea”

My father’s stories about his eight years in England were as familiar to us as the stories of our own childhood. [Read more…]

The Things My Father Said (From my Memoir: Up to the Hills)

A Memoir of My Father, Noel Mathias. In England, in the Forties & Fifties. (From my memoir: Up to the Hills)