"The evening edition must hit the streets by 10 am!"

Then I started my work on a Sinhala newspaper, Dinamina. Dinamina was a very prominent newspaper. It was very prominent among the newspapers of Lake House at that time. So much so that the average person in Sri Lanka would describe Lake House as Dinamina kanthoro — office of Dinamina, without any reference to other publications. Then, while I was there, I was asked to be the feature writer of The Observer, a prestigious age old newspaper.

Then the question you raised…the last non-Sinhala editor was a person called H. D. Janz . He was the last of those non-Sinhala editors of The Observer. I joined Lake House when he was there. But later on when I went over to Observer, editor was a gentleman by the name of Denzel Peiris, one of the most outstanding journalists in our country, but fairly unknown. His acumen has gone unsung. I  feel very bad about that.

At that time they brought a man from Fleet Street. When he came over, he said…we had an evening edition of The Observer: “The evening edition should hit the pavement by ten thirty in the morning”. So this alarmed most of us. So Mr. Denzel Peiris said please come around five thirty or six, so that we’ll be able to have the paper ready for distribution by around nine thirty, ten.

The editor, Denzel Peiris and I would initially discuss the topic of the editorial of the day. I started writing. He takes…It was handwritten at that time. Even today I prefer writing by hand. He takes the first page while going down to the printing section. If there are insertions to be done, he will do that, hand over. When he comes back, I’m ready with the second page.

That was a process that was utterly tense. I’m not too sure whether any other people would have experienced that kind of tense, newspaper editing as we did at that time. And the gentleman from Fleet Street admired the way I wrote. He asked me whether I have been at Cambridge or Oxford. And Mr. Denzel Peiris said, “he had never left Sri Lanka”. So therefore very satisfying that way.