Part 38 (1/2)

Rereading that, I'm aware of an uncanny parallel between the ”wild young fellow,” presumably a Sinn Fein organizer, who wouldn't be swept away, and his creator, who would; and I'm reminded of some remarks, in a piece Jim wrote on his early reading, about the ”hallucinating clarity of image” he admired in Conrad and Richard Hughes. He talks too about Loti's Pecheur d'Islande Pecheur d'Islande which he read at school: which he read at school: I realised with surprise that I was becoming intensely interested in this story of Breton fishermen and their difficulties .... So powerful an impression did this book make on me that even today there are certain phenomena for which an expression of Loti's will alone suffice. A certain wintry light over the sea, for example, still conjures up Loti's lumiere blafarde lumiere blafarde. I had no idea then, nor have I now, of the precise meaning of blafard. blafard. In my own mind it bears such perfect witness as it is, that to find its accepted meaning might prove an inconvenience. In my own mind it bears such perfect witness as it is, that to find its accepted meaning might prove an inconvenience.

Well, the Oxford French Dictionary gives ”pale, pallid, wan, sallow, dull, leaden.” But of course Jim is perfectly right: none of them is sufficiently blafard blafard, with its edge of wildness, insanity even.

There was nothing obviously wild, much less insane, about the man I knew. Eccentric, yes; outspoken too. Adopting John Berger's precedent, he continued the practice, now alas in abeyance, whereby the recipient of a Booker Prize should bite the feeding hand in no uncertain terms. Presented with his winning check for The Siege of Krishnapur The Siege of Krishnapur, he made a short speech of thanks in his mild, wandering voice and took the opportunity to criticize conditions on the Booker McConnell plantations in the West Indies.

”We devote too much time to satisfying the ego, time which could be better spent in fruitful speculation or in the service of the senses; in any case, owning things one doesn't need for some primary purpose, and that includes almost everything, has gone clean out of fas.h.i.+on. I'm sorry to have to break this news of the death of materialism so bluntly; I'm afraid it will come as a shock to some of your readers.” Thus spake Jim when, an unlikely fas.h.i.+on journalist, I interviewed him for Vogue Vogue in 1974. Ascetic epicurean, gregarious solitary, aristocrat of the spirit, he was then entering upon the late, disinterested ”Marxist” phase (though he was never really a Marxist) which would issue in his most ambitious work, in 1974. Ascetic epicurean, gregarious solitary, aristocrat of the spirit, he was then entering upon the late, disinterested ”Marxist” phase (though he was never really a Marxist) which would issue in his most ambitious work, The Singapore Grip The Singapore Grip, with its clear-eyed depiction of economic imperialism at work in Southeast Asia and the Far East.

But there's an intimation of something else too in his hip Vogue Vogue prophecy. When, at his mother's suggestion, my wife and I visited the Kilcrohane house in 1981, we found on his desk and bookshelves j.a.panese dictionaries and Buddhist texts which seemed to indicate the way his thoughts were tending during his last year, and even to reveal an important, if barely visible, aspect of his nature; for his early brush with death and subsequent singularity had developed in him a mystical strain, one which expressed itself in impatience with London and withdrawal to the silence of West Cork-there, in an old phrase, to make his soul. When the wise man grows weary of the world, said the Buddha, he becomes empty of desire; prophecy. When, at his mother's suggestion, my wife and I visited the Kilcrohane house in 1981, we found on his desk and bookshelves j.a.panese dictionaries and Buddhist texts which seemed to indicate the way his thoughts were tending during his last year, and even to reveal an important, if barely visible, aspect of his nature; for his early brush with death and subsequent singularity had developed in him a mystical strain, one which expressed itself in impatience with London and withdrawal to the silence of West Cork-there, in an old phrase, to make his soul. When the wise man grows weary of the world, said the Buddha, he becomes empty of desire; when he is empty of desire, he becomes free; when he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end, that virtue is accomplished, that duty is done and that there is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.

-DEREK MAHON Dublin, 1999

For Bob and Kathie Parrish

Author's Note.

Odd though it may seem to attach a bibliography to a work of fiction, this novel depends very heavily on primary research conducted by others, as well as on opinions and personal experiences recorded by those who travelled, worked or fought in the Far East before or during the last War. Nevertheless the Singapore of these pages does not pretend to be anything but fictional: although many of its bricks are real, its architecture is entirely fantastic.

J.G.F.

Part One

1.

The city of Singapore was not built up gradually, the way most cities are, by a natural deposit of commerce on the banks of some river or at a traditional confluence of trade routes. It was simply invented one morning early in the nineteenth century by a man looking at a map. 'Here,' he said to himself, 'is where we must have a city, half-way between India and China. This will be the great halting-place on the trade route to the Far East. Mind you, the Dutch will dislike it and Penang won't be pleased, not to mention Malacca.' This man's name was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles: before the war his bronze statue used to stand in Empress Place in a stone alcove like a scallop sh.e.l.l (he has been moved along now and, turned to stone, occupies a shady spot by the river). He was by no means the lantern-jawed individual you might have expected: indeed, a rather vague-looking man in a frock coat.

Although people had once lived there, the island of Singapore, when he arrived, was largely deserted except for a prodigious quant.i.ty of rats and centipedes. Rather ominously, Raffles also noticed a great many human skulls and bones, the droppings of local pirates. He wasted no time, however, in negotiating for the island with an alarmed native and then proceeded, his biographer tells us, to set up a flag-pole thirty-six feet high. 'Our object,' he wrote in a letter to a friend, 'is not territory but trade: a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circ.u.mstances may hereafter require.' As he stood there on that lonely beach and gazed up at the flag with rats and centipedes seething and tumbling over his shoes did Raffles foresee the prosperity which lay ahead for Singapore? Undoubtedly he did.

When you think of the city as it was forty years ago you should not imagine an uncivilized frontier-town of the jungle. You had only to stroll around the centre of the city with its wide avenues and lawns and look at the monolithic government buildings, at the luxurious department stores and at the marmoreal dignity of the banks, to realize that Singapore was the work of a great and civilized nation. True, there were other parts of the city, the various native quarters where Tamils, Malays, and above all the Chinese lived, which were rather less imposing. There, in those 'lower depths' Chinese secret societies undoubtedly performed monstrous crimes, kidnapped their own prominent citizens, fought out appalling territorial battles, stunned themselves with drugs and so forth. If you were merely a visitor, a sailor, say, in those years before the war, Singapore would undoubtedly have seemed no less tawdry, no less exciting than another of the great Eastern sea ports. You would have gone to drink and dance at one of the amus.e.m.e.nt parks, perhaps even at The Great World itself, whose dance-hall, a vast, echoing barn of a place, had for many years entertained lonely sailors like yourself. There, for twenty-five cents, you could dance with the most beautiful taxi-girls in the East, listen to the loudest bands and admire the glorious dragons painted on the walls. In the good old days, before the troops started flooding in at the beginning of the War, that place could swallow an entire s.h.i.+p's company and still seem empty except for you and the two or three Chinese girls with dolls' painted faces sitting at your table, ready to support you with tiny but firm hands should you look like plunging to the floor full of Tiger beer.

There, too, when you staggered outside into the sweltering night, you would have been able to inhale that incomparable smell of incense, of warm skin, of meat cooking in coconut oil, of honey and frangipani, and hair-oil and l.u.s.t and sandalwood and heaven knows what, a perfume like the breath of life itself. And from the roof of the Seamen's Inst.i.tute, or from some other less respectable roof, you might have seen the huge purple sign advertising Tiger Balm and, beside it, once darkness had completely fallen, its guardian, the great sabre-toothed tiger with glowing orange stripes beginning its nightly prowl over the sleeping roofs of Singapore. But there is no denying it, certain parts of the city were tawdry and others were wretched, and becoming more so as the age advanced: already, by 1940, the walls of cheap hotels and boarding-houses. hitherto impermeable except to an occasional m.u.f.fled groan or sigh, were becoming porous and beginning to leak radio music, tw.a.n.gings of guitars and news bulletins. Every great city has its seamy side. And so let us look for preference at the gentler parts of the city at the elegant European suburb of Tanglin, for instance, where Walter Blackett, chairman of the ill.u.s.trious merchant and agency house of Blackett and Webb Limited, lived with his family.

At first glance Tanglin resembled any quiet European suburb with its winding, tree-lined streets and pleasant bungalows. There was a golf course close at hand with quite respectable greens; numerous tennis courts could be seen on the other side of sweet-smelling hedges and even a swimming pool or two. It was a peaceful and leisurely life that people lived here, on the whole. Yet if you looked more closely you would see that it was a suburb ready to burst at the seams with a dreadful tropical energy. Foliage sprang up on every hand with a determination unknown to our own polite European vegetation. Dark, glistening green was smeared over everything as if with a palette knife, while in the gloom (the jungle tends to be gloomy) something sinister which had been making a noise a little while ago was now holding its breath.

If you left your bungalow unattended for a few months while you went home on leave, very likely you would come back to find that green lariats had been thrown over every projecting part and were wrestling it to the ground, that powerful ferns were drilling their way between its bricks, or that voracious house-eating insects, which were really nothing more than sharp jaws mounted on legs, had been making meals of the woodwork. Moreover, the mosquitoes in this particular suburb were only distant cousins of the mild insects which irritate us on an English summer evening: in Tanglin you had to face the dreaded anopheles variety, each a tiny flying hypodermic syringe containing a deadly dose of malaria. And if, by good fortune, you managed to avoid malaria there was still another mosquito waiting in the wings, this one clad in striped football socks, ready to inject you with dengue fever. If your child fell over while playing in the garden and cut its knee, you had better make sure that no fly was allowed to settle on the wound; otherwise, within a day or two, you would find yourself picking tiny white maggots out of it with tweezers. At that time, when parts of the suburb were still bordered by jungle, it was by no means uncommon for monkeys, snakes and suchlike to visit your garden with the idea of picking your fruit or swallowing your mice (or even your puppy if you had an appetizing one). But all I mean to suggest is that, besides the usual comforts of suburban life, there were certain disadvantages, too.

Not far from where the Blacketts lived Orchard Road sloped gently down (a gradient that was more psychological than real) almost straight for a mile or so until it lost itself on the fringes of Chinatown and the commercial city where Walter had his headquarters on Collyer Quay and did battle on weekdays. Down there in the city, taking the place of the rats and the centipedes which had once made it their home, seething, devouring, copulating, businesses rose and fell, sank their teeth into each other, swallowed, broke away, gulped down other firms, or mounted each other to procreate smaller companies, just as they do elsewhere in other great capitalist cities. But up here in Tanglin people moved in a quiet and orderly way about their daily affairs, apparently detached from these sordid encounters, detached especially from the densely packed native ma.s.ses below. And yet they moved, one might suppose, as the hands of a clock move. Imagine a clock in a gla.s.s case; the hands move unruffled about their business, but at the same time we can see the working of springs and wheels and cogs. That ordered life in Tanglin depended on the same way on the city below, and on the mainland beyond the Causeway, whose trading, mining and plantation concerns might represent wheels and cogs while their mute, gigantic labour force are the springs, steadily causing pressures to be transmitted from one part of the organism to another ... and not just as that time or just to Tanglin, of course, but much further in time and in s.p.a.ce: to you thousands of miles away, reading in bed or in a deck-chair on the lawn, or to me as I sit writing at a table.

2.

The Blacketts, on the whole, had reason to be satisfied with the calm and increasingly prosperous life they were leading in Singapore in 1937. Only once or twice in the two decades following the Great War had anything occurred to disturb their peace of mind and even then nothing that could be considered particularly serious. True, their elder daughter, Joan, had shown signs of becoming involved with unsuitable young men ... but that is the sort of thing that any family with growing children has to expect.

Although his wife, Sylvia, became greatly agitated, Walter himself was inclined to take it calmly at first. Joan, who had recently returned from a finis.h.i.+ng school in Switzerland, had found it hard to settle down in Singapore, separated from the friends she had made in Europe. She was rebellious, contemptuous of the provincial manners of the Straits, as one naturally would be, Walter supposed, after being at such a school (the school, incidentally, had been her mother's idea). Given time it was something that she would get over.

Joan's involvement with the first of these young men, a penniless flight-lieutenant whom she had met n.o.body knew where, was an act of rebellion probably. Even Joan had not tried very hard to pretend that he was anything but impossible. Besides, she knew well enough what her parents, who took a dim view of the Services, thought of even those generals and air vice-marshals whom duty had called to Singapore, let us not speak of flight-lieutenants. Walter had not set eyes on the person in question because Joan had had the good sense not to try to bring him home. He had waited calmly for her to see reason, explaining with a touch of exasperation to his wife that her tears and her fretting were a waste of energy which she could use to greater profit in some other direction, because Joan would presently come to her senses with or without the aid of her mother's tears. In due course, it had taken a little longer than he had expected, Walter's confidence had been justified. Joan had disposed of the flight-lieutenant as surrept.i.tiously as she had found him. Tranquillity had returned to the Blackett household for a while.

Presently, however, it transpired that Mrs Blackett, testing the material of one of Joan's cotton frocks beween her finger and thumb, felt an unexpected crinkle of paper. Ah, what was this? Something left by the laundry? Mrs Blackett had happened to grasp the light material of her daughter's frock just where there was a pocket. Joan, who was in the frock at the time, blushed and said that it was nothing in particular, just a piece of paper of no importance. 'In that case,' replied Mrs Blackett, 'we had better throw it away immediately, because it does not do to let our clothes bulge out in an ugly fas.h.i.+on by carrying unnecessary things in our pockets.' Quick as a flash her fingers darted into the pocket and retrieved the offending piece of paper (as she had suspected! a love-letter!) before Joan had time to retreat. The ensuing scene, the shrieking and hysterics and stamping of feet, even reached Walter who was upstairs in his dressing-room at the time, brooding on business matters. He gave the storm a little time to blow over but it showed no sign of doing so and at last he was obliged to come downstairs, afraid that they might burst blood-vessels in their pa.s.sion. His appearance quelled mother and daughter instantly: they gazed at him gla.s.sily, b.r.e.a.s.t.s still heaving, faces tear-stained. He promptly sent Joan to her room and, when she had gone, reminded his wife that she was under instructions to take these matters calmly.

'The fact is, my dear, that these emotional scenes do no good at all. Quite the reverse. I should like to know how much you have found out about this young man as a result of all this shouting and screaming? My bet is ... nothing.'

It was true. Mrs Blackett hung her head. Joan had declared that she would rather be dead than reveal the least thing about him, where she had met him, where he worked, even what his name was. 'His name appears to be ”Barry”,' said Walter with a sigh, perusing the letter, 'and I can even tell you where he works, since he has written on his firm's notepaper. As to where she met him, that is of no importance whatsoever. So all you have succeeded in doing is putting Joan's back up. In future kindly consult me before you say anything to Joan about her boyfriends. I shall now go and have a word with the young lady.'

Walter climbed the stairs thoughtfully. The marriage of his daughters was a matter to which he had not yet given a great deal of attention. And yet it was undoubtedly a matter of great importance, not only to Joan, as it would be, in due course, to little Kate, his younger daughter, but potentially to the business as well. After all, if you are a wealthy man you cannot have your daughter marrying the first adventurer who comes along. To allow such a match is to invite disaster. The fact was that Joan would do far better for herself and for Blackett and Webb Limited if she agreed to marry someone whose position in the Colony matched her own.

There were, as it happened, two or three young men in Singapore with whom a satisfactory alliance of this sort could have been made and who, given Joan's attractions, would have asked for nothing better. But when, on her return from her finis.h.i.+ng school, such a union had been suggested to her, Joan had been indignant. She found the idea distasteful and old-fas.h.i.+oned. She would marry whom she pleased. Naturally the elder Blacketts in turn had been indignant. Walter had demanded to know why he had paid good money to such a school if not to drill some sense of reality into her. But Joan had been stubborn and Walter had quickly reached the conclusion that patience was the best policy. They would wait and see, tactfully fending off unsuitable young men in the meantime. Despite the scene which had just taken place Walter remained confident that Joan was too sensible a girl to remain permanently attached to someone whom her parents considered unsuitable.

Walter, climbing the stairs, had considered rebuking his daughter and ordering her not to communicate with this young man again. Instead he decided to continue banking on her good sense and merely said: 'Joan dear, I've no objection to you flirting with young men provided you are sensible about it and don't do anything you might regret later. What I do object to is the fact that you have upset your mother. In future please be more discreet and hide your love-letters in some safe place.' Joan, who had been expecting another row, gazed at him in astonishment as he handed her back the letter which had caused all the commotion.

Was Walter taking a great risk with his daughter's future by responding so mildly? Mrs Blackett was inclined to think that he was. Walter, however, rea.s.sured her. He was on friendly terms with the chairman of the firm on whose notepaper the young man wrote his love-letters and saw him frequently at the Club. He was confident that if the worst came to the worst and Joan persisted in taking an interest in him, it would require only a nod and a wink to have the fellow moved away from Singapore to a convenient distance (back to England if necessary). As it turned out, this intervention was not necessary: at a certain age nothing can be more stifling to enthusiasm than the permission or approval of your parents. 'Barry', (whoever he was), lovelorn, was allowed to continue his residence in Singapore.

Mrs Blackett now decided that the best way to prevent Joan from carrying on with unsuitable young men was to surround her with suitable ones. True, there was a serious shortage of the latter in Singapore but she would draw up a list and see what could be done ... Joan's trouble was that she never met anyone of the right sort. Mrs Blackett would put an end to that by inviting one or two young men chosen by herself to tea once a week. Joan would be asked to act as hostess and Walter would be there, too, to keep an eye on things. What did Walter think of it? Was it not a good idea?

Walter was dubious. He doubted whether Joan would take an interest in any young chap of whom her mother approved. He was even more dubious when he saw the list that she had drawn up. But in the end he agreed, partly because he saw no reason why his wife should not have her own way for once, partly because he had a secret weakness. This weakness, which was so mild and agreeable it might almost be considered a virtue, was for holding forth, as a man with some experience of life, to younger men just starting out. So it would happen, once these weekly tea-parties were inaugurated, that while Joan sat tight-lipped and rebellious, her green eyes as hard as pebbles, Walter would grow animated and have a jolly good time. Mrs Blackett, meanwhile, would dart glances from her husband to her daughter to the young guest trying to estimate what impression each was making on the other. As a matter of fact, the young man usually sat there looking faintly alarmed as Walter harangued him: after all, this was Blackett of Blackett and Webb, an important man in the Straits, and his parents had told him to be careful not to put his foot in it and to behave himself properly for once.

For a number of years now it had been Walter's agreeable habit to take his visitors by the arm and escort them along the row of paintings that hung in his drawing-room. So it happened that the young man intended for Joan, although on the whole he felt safer sitting down and less likely to knock something over, would reluctantly allow himself to be plucked out of his chair while Joan continued to sit mutinously silent beside the tea-pot, ignoring her mother's whispered entreaties that she should say something to her guest, and even accompany the two men across the room.

Some of the paintings which Walter was showing the young man were primitive in style, painted perhaps by a native artist or by a gifted s.h.i.+p's officer in his spare time: here was a three-masted vessel being loaded with spices or sugar, a line of native porters with bundles on their heads marching in uncertain perspective along a rickety quay surrounded by jungle. In the next painting, by a more sophisticated hand, the s.h.i.+p had arrived in Liverpool and was being unloaded again, and after that would come three or four paintings of the port of Rangoon and Walter would exclaim: 'Look! They're loading rice. Still all sailing s.h.i.+ps, of course, and Rangoon's just a sleepy little village. But you wait!'

In the early days, he would explain, while the youth at his side gazed at him uneasily, white rice would not survive the long pa.s.sage round the Cape and so it was s.h.i.+pped as what was known as 'cargo rice', that is, one-fifth unhusked paddy and four-fifths roughly cleaned in hand-mills. Throughout the East, to India mainly, it was s.h.i.+pped simply as paddy (The blighters cleaned it themselves.'). Now Walter, unreeling history at a prodigious speed, would guide his guest (well, Joan's guest) to a later picture of Rangoon. 'You see how it's grown in the meantime. And see how steam has taken the place of sail in the harbour (though some s.h.i.+ps still have both, of course). And these great buildings with chimneys, d'you know what they are? Steam rice-mills!'

For now it was possible, with the opening of the Suez Ca.n.a.l in 1870, to s.h.i.+p cleaned rice to Europe, thereby cutting out the fine-millers who used to clean the 'cargo rice' in London.

'Ruined 'em,' Walter would remark with a frown. 'They weren't quick enough. A businessman must keep his wits about him.' And if the young man happened to be starting out on a business career himself, as he probably was, Walter might pause to lecture him on how you must always be ready to move with the times, never taking anything for granted.

'Go and join them!' hissed Mrs Blackett to her daughter in a penetrating whisper. 'You're being impolite to your guest.'

'But Mother, I've told you a thousand times ...' And it was true ... she had.

The last picture of Rangoon had been painted after the turn of the century and showed how the thriving rice trade had caused it to spread and grow into a great modern city, now only surpa.s.sed as an Eastern port by Calcutta and Bombay. Walter would draw his dismayed captive closer and after a moment's examination of the teeming wharves on the Rangoon River he would put his finger on a fine warehouse and say. 'Our first! The first to belong to Blackett and Webb ... or rather, to Webb and Company as the firm was then called. We still have another exactly similar here in Singapore on the river. Well now, you see how a bit of trade can make a place grow?' And with an air of satisfaction he would lead the suitable young man on to yet more paintings of Calcutta, Penang, Malacca, and of Singapore itself, in various stages of development.

'You see how we made these little villages grow in just a few years. That's what a bit of tin and rubber have done for Singapore!'

There was still another painting to be seen, and one that was more important than all the others, but by now Mrs Blackett was growing impatient and calling Walter and his audience back for another cup of tea. These tea-parties, she was beginning to think, were not having the desired effect. A disturbing thought occurred to her and she eyed her daughter suspiciously. Could it be that the reason for Joan's lack of interest in her guest was that she was already carrying on in secret with yet another unsuitable young man?

3.