We liked America. We liked New York with its bustle and its skyscrapers, we liked the wide-open spaces of the American heartland, and we liked the brash, cheerful exuberance of California. And contrary to our expectations, we liked the Americans too. Both Denis and I had judged Americans on the basis of the loud-mouthed tourists we had met, but at home in their own environment we found them hospitable and thoroughly decent. They loved children, we found, and having Tony with us was a guarantee of consideration and friendship.
But perhaps we liked America most because of the complete absence of any talk of war. In Malaya, there had long been a feeling that the brutal Japanese war in China must inevitably spread south to affect us. In England, preparations for the coming war with Nazi Germany dominated daily life. But in America, it was only sunny skies and optimism. War, and the prospect of war, seemed things unreal, almost indecent.
I remember sitting up in bed in San Francisco one morning reading the Christian Science Monitor and marvelling that there was nothing in the whole paper about war, or rumours of war. Instead, it was full of all the little issues that make up everyday life. Debates about school funding. Reports about advances in medicine. Comfortably boring stories about road building programs and foreshore redevelopment. And in the literary supplement, funny, clever articles by writers such as Stephen Leacock and P. G. Wodehouse.
‘Why can’t we stay here?’ I asked Denis. ‘Let Malaya – let the whole of Europe – look after themselves? Don’t we owe it to our children to let them grow up in peace?’
Denis was shaving by the window, looking out over San Francisco Bay. He rubbed his face dry on the big, fluffy American towel and came and sat on the end of the bed. ‘Because that’s the whole point, darling,’ he said. ‘We want our children to grow up in peace. If we stick our heads in the sand all that awfulness in Europe and in the Far East will swamp the whole world. It’ll even come here. The Pacific can be crossed in a couple of weeks these days, you know. And the Atlantic in half that time.’
We set sail for home in April 1939, sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii on the Monterey, then taking the Empress of Canada to Singapore. It was late one afternoon in June when the ship’s hawsers were drawn ashore and we began edging sideways into the Collier Quay. The sun was shining through gentle rain – what we called a ‘monkey’s wedding’ in those days – and I was smiling through tears of joy because Alec and Margaret Dean were waiting for us with little Mark beside them.
PART 2
The Chrysanthemum and the Rose
‘With Singapore, Winston Churchill
took a calculated gamble – and lost.’
DR ONG CHIT CHUNG
SINGAPORE WAR HISTORIAN
Chapter Twenty
The period between our return to Singapore in April 1939 and the outbreak of World War II in September that year was a special time for Denis and me, a Golden Age in every sense of the word. It saw the successful launch of Denis’s import-export business, the birth of our second son Robert, and the purchase of Whitelawns, the place that I will forever regard as home. It was a time of excitement and of new beginnings, and of the most profound happiness. The black clouds of war may have lain heavily on the horizon, but we paid them no heed whatsoever. We woke up each day, and looked at each other in the pearl-grey light of another tropic dawn, and smiled at the burgeoning prospects ahead. Nothing, we felt, could possibly spoil the bright and shiny pathway that lay before us.
The business took off like a rocket. One day Denis was typing a string of letters on the cane table of our rented house in Holland Hill, and virtually the next he was sitting behind a huge desk in a suite of offices overlooking Keppel Harbour, surrounded by earnest clerks and pretty Chinese secretaries. Mother had said that he was no businessman, but all I know is that within a few months ships full of Elesmere-Elliott & Co. cargoes were sailing the seven seas, and Mark Morrison was an almost daily visitor, his briefcase full of ways to invest our growing wealth.
Whitelawns fell into our laps almost as if by predestination. One Saturday we arrived home from a race meeting at Bukit Timah to find a message waiting for us: Wing Lung, the Chinese developer who had built the Tanah Merah Estate, had called and hoped that we would ring him back. I think I knew immediately what it was all about, but I had to wait until after dinner before Denis finally got onto him. I can still see Denis pausing after replacing the phone, and then turning to me with a half smile. ‘A bit of luck. A house has become available at Tanah Merah. It’s the one next door to the Deans.’
It was an answer to all my prayers and I fell on Denis’s neck and hugged him tight. Then I drew back and looked into his face. ‘I didn’t hear you say we’d take it,’ I said accusingly. ‘What if someone else beats us to the punch?’
Denis smiled into my anxious eyes. ‘Wing Lung has given us twenty-four hours. I think we should at least take a look at the place before we say yes. For form’s sake if nothing else. We’ll drop round there tomorrow afternoon.’
‘We will not drop round there tomorrow afternoon,’ I said. ‘We will drop round there tonight. And then you can drop a deposit in to Wing Lung first thing tomorrow morning.’
The house was on a terrace above the beach, accessed by a short spur off the Tanah Merah Besar Road that led to the Deans’. When we drew up and turned off the engine I could hear the sea slapping gently on the beach, and there was a scent of frangipani in the air. A huge tropical moon lit the scene, lending enchantment to the large bungalow that sprawled before us. There were two broad turrets at either end of the house, linked across the front by a deep verandah. The roof was high for coolness, and there were windows everywhere. The overall impression was one of grace, and space, and gentle splendour.
‘It’s perfect,’ I breathed. ‘Like something out of dream.’
Denis put his arm around my shoulders. ‘It is nice, but perhaps we should take a look inside before deciding. There are things we should check. I could take tomorrow off and we could come down first thing . . .’
‘It’s perfect,’ I repeated. ‘I don’t care what the inside is like.’ I looked up at his face. ‘Please, darling.’
Denis was about to speak but checked himself. He looked back at the house lit by the moon, then out to the Singapore Straits, where kalang lights twinkled on the black water. ‘I do see your point,’ he said. ‘One could search a hundred years and never find a place like this. I take it that it’s settled, then?’
‘It’s settled,’ I said contentedly. ‘We will be terribly happy here, I just know it.’ Through the trees to the right I could see the lights of the Deans’ house, a bare hundred yards away. ‘Should we go over and tell Margaret and Alec?’
Denis shook his head. ‘Let’s wait until we’ve got the deposit down. Why don’t we pop in on them tomorrow, and take them down here with us when we have a key?’
We gave the place its name as we walked back to the car – Whitelawns, because the moon had painted its broad lawns a beautiful, silvery white. Incomparable Whitelawns, which I still visit regularly in my dreams.
We put our deposit down first thing the next morning but it wasn’t until the middle of September that the purchase was finalised and we could move in. And in the meantime our second child was born.
I had Robert, or Bobby as we called him, at home in Holland Hill. It was an easy birth, as second births sometimes are, and an hour after going into labour I was holding my child in my arms and receiving the plaudits of the small throng that had gathered to pay me homage. ‘Every bit his father’s son,’ Alec said, leaning over the bed and kissing me on the forehead. ‘Just had to show off his punctuality. Poor Margaret had to go through six hours of hell before Rory decided to put in an appearance.’
Margaret was placing flowers in a vase on my bedside table and she gave me a sideways look. ‘Rory takes after his father, too. Not only late arriving, but making a song and dance about it even then.’
Rory had been two weeks late and Robert was a week early, so tha
t the two boys were born only a fortnight apart. It gave us an excuse to hold a joint christening, and we decided to do it in style. The ceremony itself was held in the side chapel at St Andrew’s, and then we adjourned to the Deans’ where a white canvas pavilion had been erected on the lawns above the beach. Quite a crowd turned up – Shell Oil people who knew the Deans, the Singapore Cricket Club people who had known Denis for years, even some of our friends from KL. It had rained earlier in the day but by the time the hired stewards circulated with champagne to wet the babies’ heads the sky had cleared and a magnificent sunset suffused the sky.
‘It is like a dream, isn’t it?’ Margaret asked me quietly when we were inside feeding the babies. ‘We’re going to be neighbours. We will be living in paradise. And our children will grow up together and be friends for life. What on earth have we done to deserve such fortune?’
I stared back at Margaret and gave my head a tiny shake. ‘I’m too frightened to say anything,’ I said. ‘I sometimes think God may have mixed me up with someone else.’
Denis and I did have one worry during those magic days. It came and went like the shadow cast by an errant cloud crossing the face of the sun on a glorious summer’s day. Bobby had been born a healthy baby, but we suddenly realised that for some reason he was not thriving. Breastfeeding became difficult, with Bobby more often than not refusing to suckle. And then he began to lose weight. We took him to the Baby Clinic at the Alexandra Hospital, but they were no help at all. I asked if I should try a bottle but the thin-faced Sister shook her head. ‘You must persevere, Mrs Elliott,’ she said. ‘A baby needs a mother’s love. He needs to be cuddled and kept with you.’ She sniffed pointedly. ‘I understand you have him looked after by an ayah?’
Miriam was looking after both boys at this stage, but I was quite sure that Bobby was not pining away for lack of affection. ‘I think I should try him on the bottle,’ I persevered obstinately.
The Sister sniffed again. ‘If you really must.’
We tried several of the popular formulas without success, and then, abruptly, I was scared to death. The infant mortality rate was high in Singapore, and nobody really knew why. ‘Failed to thrive’ was the term usually put on the death certificate. One popular opinion was that the constant humidity was to blame, and I recall one awful night shouting angrily at Denis for bringing us back to Singapore.
‘Our son is going to die because we didn’t stay in San Francisco!’ I said cruelly. ‘Not much point making the world safe for our children if we haven’t got any children left, is it?’ It was that night that Miriam convinced us to try Bobby on Klim, the normal powdered milk one put in one’s tea. The next morning he was perceptibly brighter, and drank his morning bottle greedily. He never looked back. Within days he had regained, then passed, his birth weight, and by the time we moved into Whitelawns at the beginning of September Bobby was a tubby, happy little bundle of energy.
The day we moved into Whitelawns was hot, clear and windy, and when we arrived to open up the house for the removalists the coconut trees were tossing wildly, the Singapore Straits sparkled like a sea of diamonds, and waves dashed themselves onto our beach with cheerful, noisy abandon. Everything seemed doubly alive and full of vivid colour. I got out of the Alvis and swept Tony high onto my shoulders. ‘This is where we are going to live,’ I said. ‘For ever and ever and ever.’
I really did think, then, that we would be living there forever, and the prospect was balm to my soul.
The bungalow at Whitelawns was set on fourteen acres, a couple of them making up the gardens around the house while the rest, the remnants of an old coconut plantation, stretched back towards Changi. The gardens had been well planned, with broad terraced lawns leading down to the beach and wide flowerbeds providing a riot of colour around the house. There were cannas, crotons, hibiscus, purple and red bougainvilleas, flame of the forest trees, and a grove of tall, lacy traveller’s palms. Behind the house, separated by screens covered in morning glory, there were well laid out vegetable gardens and a small orchard of bananas, papayas, sugar cane and rambutan.
The interior of the house lived up to the promise of the exterior. All the rooms were large and airy and lit by wide, full-depth windows. We made one of the turrets at the front of the bungalow into our bedroom, and the other into a spacious nursery. The deep front verandah that ran between became our informal living area, full of a comfortable jumble of chintz-covered cane furniture, scattered rugs and pot plants. There was a formal lounge with a grand piano and a fine view of the sea, and a formal dining room that opened onto a deep and ferny gully. We’d had all the furniture made by a Singhalese carpenter in Changi, and it was all enamelled – cream in the bedrooms, white in the lounge, and pale green in the dining room. I still wanted to get as far away from the dark mahogany of Argyll Street as I could manage.
The day before we moved in, the estate agent had arranged for us to meet the couple who had run the house for its previous owner. ‘Mrs Chu is a perfect dear and you might well want to take her on,’ Miss Peabody said. ‘But I’m afraid the husband – Chu Lun – might not be suitable. In fact Mr Ord was going to dismiss him, and would have done so if he hadn’t put the place on the market. Chu Lun is an overpowering sort of man if you know what I mean, and there’s a thought he might not be quite honest.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Denis asked sharply. ‘Does he have a police record?’
‘Oh, nothing like that.’ Miss Peabody gave a small smile and a shrug. ‘Just let’s say I have an instinct about the man.’ She looked down at the notes. ‘Offer Mrs Chu a job if you find her acceptable, but don’t forget that we have a lot of men on our lists who could look after your gardens just as well as Chu Lun.’
‘Would Mrs Chu take the job if we didn’t take on her husband as well?’ I asked, and Miss Peabody nodded.
‘She thinks of him as a bit of a nuisance. She’d probably be glad he wasn’t in her hair.’
Miss Peabody was very wrong. Chu Lun may have irritated his wife at times but she obviously loved him, and she made it quite clear at the outset that she would not work without him. ‘We would both very much like to work for you,’ she said. ‘I know the house well, and Chu Lun of course knows the gardens very well. He made them what they are. We are a good team and we would serve you well.’ She was a small, tidy woman, immaculate in a sarong and starched white blouse, and she had kind, wise eyes. I took to her immediately.
Chu Lun was a very different proposition. He was a big man for a Chinese, and quite dark, indicating Baba ancestry. He was handsome in a battered sort of way, with a hairline moustache that gave him the look of a rather raffish, Asian version of Errol Flynn.
‘Would you be happy to continue as our gardener?’ Denis asked, and Chu Lun gave an exaggerated shrug.
‘I would prefer to be a successful Chinese businessman,’ he said. ‘But since fate has made me a gardener, I would be happy to be your gardener. And I would be a very good gardener. At least until I made my fortune.’ It wasn’t the answer one expected from a prospective Chinese servant in 1939, and I thoroughly understood Miss Peabody’s reservations. But Chu Lun spoke with a smile and a self-deprecating bob of the head, and I for one rather warmed to the man’s frankness.
‘You are from a Baba family?’ I asked, and Chu Lun’s smile broadened.
‘On my mother’s side, Mem, I have the blood of Bugis pirates in my veins. It sometimes makes it very hard to be a humble gardener.’
Denis and I glanced at each other, and then Denis cleared his throat. ‘Mem and I would like you both to work for us, as our amah and our head gardener. When can you move back into the servants’ quarters? I understand that you moved into Changi when the house was put up for sale.’
Chu Lun also cleared his throat. ‘Tuan,’ he said, ‘thank you for offering us our jobs back. But I have a proposal to make about where we might live. I have a large family (which Chinese family of any standing does not?) and we would all like to live together. Th
e servants’ quarters here are very good, but not very large. If you and Mem were to allow us to build our own house somewhere on your land, we would be very grateful, and we would promise to serve you and Mem for as long as you wished.’
Denis glanced at me again, the faintest twinkle in his eye. Chu Lun was clearly no shrinking violet. I nodded imperceptibly. I liked the couple, Amah for her soft, sensible face, Chu Lun for his upright bearing and the way he looked one in the eye. He was also obviously a man who knew his own mind.
‘It would not be sensible for me to lend you a plot of land to build your house, Chu Lun,’ Denis said. ‘What would happen if you and I were to fall out? Or if Mem and I were to sell Whitelawns and return to England? You would lose your home and Mem and I would have an unwanted house on our land. But we are prepared to give you and Amah a try, and if we are all happy with each other after a few months, then I would be prepared to give you a block of land on which to build a home. We would do things through lawyers so that the transfer was quite legal. What I propose would be possible because Whitelawns is made up of several separate parcels of land.’
Chu Lun pondered the offer with a furrowed brow. ‘It is a generous offer, Tuan,’ he said, ‘and of course a wise one. Amah and I would feel secure, and you and Mem would know that you have faithful servants who were indebted to you.’
Afterwards, I punched Denis gently in the ribs. ‘You call yourself a businessman? Chu Lun has you around his little finger!’
Denis grinned. ‘I rather like the old rogue,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we both have a little bit of pirate in us.’
We had been in Whitelawns only a week when war was declared in Europe. Denis and I heard the announcement on the BBC’s shortwave radio service, the newsreader’s voice crackling and fluctuating on the ether so that it was robbed of all emotion. We were eating breakfast at the time, with the morning sun slanting through the shutters of the dining room and Amah hovering in the background with a fresh pot of coffee. ‘So the madmen are back at it again, are they?’ was all that Denis said. The news seemed to have no impact on me whatever, probably because we had been expecting war in Europe for so long that the reality of war was almost an anti-climax.
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 40
