A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Intermittent streaks of blue lightning revealed opulent orange liana blossoms overhead, tendrils of blood-crimson climbers, the impassive white of a servant’s turban. ‘Pale green lamps of luminous fungus’ glowed occasionally, and often the roof just above their heads was raked by black jungles of foliage that lunged at them from the dark. ‘The Misses Shaw,’ Isabella relates wearily, ‘passed an uneasy night. The whisky had cured the younger one of her severe sick headache, and she was the prey of many terrors. They thought that the boat would be ripped up; that the roof would be taken off; that a tree would fall and crush us; that the boatmen, when they fell overboard, as they often did, would be eaten by alligators; that they would see glaring eyeballs whenever the cry “Rimou” – a tiger! – was raised from the bow; and they continually awoke me with news of something that was happening or about to happen, and were drolly indignant because they could not sleep; while I, a blasé old campaigner, slept whenever they would let me.’

  At longed-for dawn, a cloying mist hung among the swamps and then, ‘as the great sun wheeled rapidly above the horizon and blazed upon us with merciless fierceness, all at once the jungle became vociferous. Loudly clattered the busy cicada, its simultaneous din, like a concentration of the noise of all the looms in the world, suddenly breaking off into a simultaneous silence; the noisy insect world chirped, cheeped, buzzed, whistled; birds hallooed, hooted, whooped, screeched; apes in a loud and not inharmonious chorus greeted the sun; and monkeys chattered, yelled, hooted, quarrelled, and spluttered. The noise was tremendous. But the forest was absolutely still, except when some heavy fruit, over-ripe, fell into the river with a splash. The trees above us were literally alive with monkeys and the curiosity of some of them about us was so great that they came down on “monkey ropes” and branches for the fun of touching the roof of the boat with their hands while they hung by their tails.’

  Later that eventful day, Mr Hayward, Isabella and the wilted Misses Shaw, their limp skirts trailing, were safely deposited as the Sungei Ujong Residency, where Captain Murray made them welcome. He was, she told Hennie, ‘a most eccentric little man, never still for two minutes’; his manner was jovial, if jumpy, he hummed to himself, slapped people on the shoulder, laughed in the wrong places. He was kind-hearted and honest, in Isabella’s view, ‘thoroughly well disposed to the Chinese and Malays, but very impatient of their courtesies, thoroughly well meaning, thoroughly a gentleman, but about the last person that I should have expected to see in a position which is said to require much tact, if not finesse’.

  Still, watching the Resident in action the next day at the local court-house, where he sat in judgement upon a Chinese accused of stealing a pig, she felt that his charity quite made up for any lack of ceremony. He had little of the magisterial manner, she told Hennie; ‘He was hammering with a knife, whittling the desk, humming snatches of airs, making desultory remarks to me, exclaiming “Bother these fellows,” or “What a pack of awful lies,” or “Do get on and don’t keep everyone broiling”’ – tactics which scandalised cautious Mr Hayward who interjected criticisms in a manner reminiscent of the White Rabbit. After listening to all the evidence, Captain Murray and Isabella decided that no judicial decision could be reached and the case was dismissed – ‘He did steal that pig though!’ she exclaimed. Her conclusion generally was that, while she could not say, ‘the dignity of justice is sustained in this court, there is not a doubt that the intentions of the judge are excellent and if some of the guilty escape, it is not likely that any of the innocent suffer’.

  The delinquent Chinaman, like most of his fellows in Sungei Ujong, was a tin-miner. The Chinese had pioneered tin-mining in the Malay States some forty years before and still arrived in their thousands, bringing with them their customary virtues – industriousness, inventiveness, enterprise – and their habitual vices – opium-smoking, gambling and internecine feuding. So industrious were they that they commonly worked twelve hours a day, panning for tin rather as the Californian forty-niners had panned for gold, and, unlike the forty-niners, most of them lived frugally. They ate and slept on a single mat in a communal shed, their sole possessions were a mosquito net, an opium pipe, a palm-leaf raincloak and a teapot swaddled in a basket. Time was measured in joss-sticks; money by the amount they could send to the folks back home. So inventive were they, that they had adapted the ingenious irrigation methods of their homeland to operate the mining sluices and irrigate their plantations; so enterprising were they, that many had given up mining for more congenial pursuits and their talents were diversified throughout the Peninsula. Chinamen flourished as sellers of pork, fire-crackers, sweetmeats, oil; as makers of bricks, lanterns, coffins, buggies; as boilers of soap and sugar; as smiths of tin, guns, locks; as burners of charcoal and lime; as carriers of water, cotton-bales and anything else portable; as pea-grinders, ivory-carvers, clerks – and as racketeers and pirates, which brings to mind their vices.

  Of these, the treacherous feuds between the secret societies that honeycombed every Chinese community were the most socially disruptive. Each society imposed various mumbo-jumbo rituals upon its initiates, in a manner reminiscent of western Masonry, and demanded total and unquestioning allegiance from them. This was sometimes dangerous, for, while many associations had benevolent, mutually-protective aims, some were of criminal intent and their members committed blackmail, pillage and murder. Acknowledged leaders of the societies were known as ‘Capitans China’ – polite, wealthy, enigmatic men in black satin skull-caps who generally co-operated with the British, but who wielded no one quite knew how much power behind the scenes. It was this permeation of Chinese power and influence that so surprised Isabella at first. ‘I have written a great deal about the Chinese and very little about the Malays, the nominal possessors of the country,’ she admits after her descriptions of Sungei Ujong; but her impression was that the Chinese had practically over-run the region with their unfailing energies, their clandestine disciplines, their sobriety, thrift and unquestioning obedience.

  Isabella also however, describes a visit she made with Captain Murray to the typically Malay home of the Datu Bandar, the second Rajah of the State. ‘I thoroughly liked his house. It is both fitting and tasteful,’ she decided. They were ushered into a small room through a doorway ‘with a gold-embroidered silk valance…. There was a rich, dim light in the room, which was cool and wainscoted entirely with dark red wood, and there was only one long, low window, with turned bars of the same wood…. The furniture consisted of a divan, several ebony chairs, a round table covered with a cool yellow cloth, and a table against the wall draped with crimson silk flowered with gold. The floor was covered with fine matting, over which were Oudh rugs in those mixtures of toned down rich colours which are so very beautiful. Richness and harmony characterised the room, and it was distinctively Malay; one could not say that it reminded one of anything except of the flecked and coloured light which streams through dark, old, stained glass.’

  Amid such elegance, where they were most courteously entertained by two of the Rajah’s relatives – superb-looking men in red dresses and turbans – the ‘sailor-like heartiness’ of the Resident seemed particularly inappropriate. He slapped his hosts on the back, roared with hasty laughter, his thick-set, determined little body incongruous on the silken divan. Nevertheless, Isabella was sure his heart was in the right place and that he was ‘much respected and loved … in spite of a manner utterly opposed to all Oriental notions of dignity, Malay or Chinese’.

  The next day, they left the eccentric Captain Murray to his lonely problems as Judge, ‘Superintendent of Police, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Surveyor of Taxes’ and returned uneventfully to Malacca, where Mr Hayward positively gulped with relief as he restored the two limp but essentially undamaged Misses Shaw to the arms of their fond papa. For them it was the end of the adventure; for Isabella much still lay ahead.

  II

  On 1 February she again boarded the quaint little steamer Rainbow which, at anchor in t
he Malacca Roads, was tipping and rolling as new ‘cargoes of Chinese, Malays, fowls, pineapples and sugar cane’ were shoved aboard to join the considerable numbers of Chinese, Malays, Javanese, goats, buffaloes and ducks already squashed on the decks. At last, with the sea running in at the scuppers and five little junks hooked on for a free ride behind and Chinamen still clambering in over the bulwarks and Isabella perched upon a hen-coop on the bridge, they all chugged away ‘over the gaudy water into the gaudy sunset’. And the next part of her long ‘Malay letter’ was headed, ‘British Residency, Klang, Selangor’ – a name to conjure with, Isabella explained, that Hennie would probably be unable to find on any atlas.

  Selangor was the middle State on the Malayan west coast, jammed between smaller Sungei Ujong to the south and larger Perak to the north. In its jungles some 15,000 Chinese worked, many of them in tin-mines; some 4,000 Malays lived, mostly in riverine villages and worked no more than they had to; a dozen or so Europeans were there, surveying for minerals, botanising, or organising institutions for the promotion of justice, freedom and safety. Those engaged in the latter pursuit were British and lived in or near Klang, the official capital, ‘a mis-thriven, decayed, defected, miserable-looking’ cluster of dwellings on the banks of the Klang River. Its houses, that crumbled along slushy alleys, were surrounded by weed-choked fields and inhabited mostly by pompous little armed policemen; its most prominent buildings were the gaol, a large fort on a grassy mound prickling with mounted guns, and above that a wooden bungalow before which the British flag hung limply in the heat. At the Residency, captain of all he surveyed, lived Mr Bloomfield Douglas, Resident; ‘a tall, vigorous, elderly man with white hair, a florid complexion and a strong voice heard everywhere in authoritative tones’, was Miss Bird’s first impression of him. He met her at the jetty and escorted her to his house which looked, she thought, like ‘an armed post amidst a hostile population’. A six-pounder graced the front lawn; behind was a guard-room stacked with rifles, bayonets, piles of shot; a bodyguard of twelve fully-armed men was on permanent alert and ‘a hundred more could be summoned instantly at the bang of a gong in the porch’. Douglas spent most of his time inspecting his spruce soldiers (called ‘policemen’), strutting about in a lavishly-gilded uniform, barking orders and shooting snipe. He even concocted a little ‘alarm’ one evening, specially for Isabella; but ‘I knew instinctively that it was humbug,’ she explained, ‘arranged to show the celerity with which the little army could be turned out.’ With all these precautions for the safety of himself and his family, Douglas must have been secretly terrified of the Malays, who undoubtedly dubbed him a ‘duck without spurs’ – that is, a coward.

  Isabella was appalled at the folly and boorishness of Douglas’s martial effervescence, at his evident ignorance of the people’s true needs, his disorderly administration and his contemptuous bullying of the Sultan of Selangor himself. She visited the latter in the Resident’s company and watched while Douglas read out the proceedings of a recent ‘Council-meeting’ and asked the Sultan to confirm them, which he docilely did. ‘The nominal approval of measures initiated by the Resident and agreed to in council, and the signing of death-warrants are among the few prerogatives which “his Highness” retains,’ she commented acidly, meaning her readers to observe what slight resemblance this dictatorial conduct of the State’s affairs bore to the statutory roles of ‘adviser’ and ‘advised’.

  The pervasive feeling of being in hostile territory, engendered by Douglas’s behaviour, was maintained during a short trip Isabella made in the official yacht, Abdulsamaat, together with the Resident, his son-in-law and a newly-appointed revenue collector. Thirty policemen escorted them and the trim vessel bristled with guns, bayonets and cutlasses. Their destination was Langat, where the Police Magistrate of the District, Mr Ferney, lived in a small bungalow on a hill. Isabella thought that Langat was a charming place – a typical Malay village, the houses tilting on stilts near the river, a few fishermen picturesquely floating about in canoes, grubby youngsters staring at her with their liquid brown eyes. It probably did not occur to her to wonder what it would be like to stay there for long – for a month perhaps, or a year.

  In fact, one Englishwoman who had recently left after a year’s detention there thought it was very like hell. She gives her reasons in a peevish, trivial, quaint little book entitled The Golden Chersonese with the Gilding Off, published a year after Isabella’s book, and a direct riposte to it. Its author was Emily Innes who, as the wife of James Innes, the District Magistrate before Ferney, had been dumped on the banks of the river one hot day and rather left to sink or swim. Their ‘residence’ at first was ‘an ordinary Malay wigwam of palm leaves and boards on piles,’ Mrs Innes complained, and there was ‘no garden, trees, flowers or society’. This was a truly extraordinary statement for her to make about her jungle surroundings, but she was clearly a patriot for whom a real tree was an oak or elm, a real flower a rose or hollyhock, and real people were all English.

  Behind the Innes’s ‘wigwam’, one slippery path bisected a paddy-field and petered out in an insect-ridden swamp, and, in the absence of a garden, ‘we walked on the mud path every day in the year when the weather permitted it and when Mr Innes was away I walked on the mud path alone’. She recognised every worm as she trailed dismally along that path, her skirts draggling in the slush, her hat always protected by a parasol to preserve it from either the burning sun or the clinging rain. In the absence of ‘society’, Emily had to make do with the mild, inert Malay women who smelt of rancid coconut oil and plunked themselves down on her ‘parlour’ floor and stared at her for hours on end until she shooed them away. According to Mrs Innes, they asked but two questions: ‘How much did her dress cost?’ and ‘How was Queen Victoria these days?’ Their most disquieting feature was the horrid crimson trickle that flowed from the corner of their lips as they talked and made them look as if their mouths were full of blood. This was due to the habit of chewing betel-nut which was to the Malay, as opium to the Chinese or whisky to the Scotsman, a stimulant, luxury, necessity. Betel turned the chewers’ teeth black, it wasn’t particularly healthy and foreigners all thought it looked revolting, but it was the Malay ‘thing’.

  Mrs Innes’s ‘solitary comfort and pick-me-up’ was her afternoon cup of tea, which she drank on the verandah, staring the while at the wide, fetid, sluggish river and the wide, fetid mud-flat between her and it. The slime bubbled, spawned and stank. In its warm dank entrails, land-crabs scrabbled filthy holes, leeches sucked, rats slithered, eels wriggled, nameless reptiles with flabby bags below their mouths crawled, scavenger fowls clawed for worms, children dabbled their feet; shells of eggs and coconuts, skins of bananas and mangoes, faeces of people and buffaloes sank to rest there and so, on occasions, did all the magisterial papers of Mr James Innes, blown thither by a sudden gust of hot wind from the open-fronted court-room.

  It was indeed a dolorous place for poor Emily, who was not one to make the best of a bad job, and her complaints, as she tears the gilt off the Golden Chersonese, are legion. Centipedes whose stings were deep and painful wriggled up at her out of the bath plughole, the tinned meat from Singapore was covered with mildew, flying blind beetles tangled in her hair, the servants would not learn how to whiten Mr Innes’s topee properly; boiled scavenger fowls tasted like white wood and the river fish like mud; soursops were bland as cotton-wool steeped in sugar-water, jackfruit had the flavour of tinned railway butter; she discovered lizards on the table-cloth, an ants’ nest in her jewel case, carpenter beetles in the soup and a scorpion in her hat-box; fowls laid their eggs in the pigeon-holes of Mr Innes’s judicial desk and sometimes, from the hot dense night, the roar of the man-eating tiger rumbled so close that she thought she could see his fiery eyeballs burning.

  And Emily Innes, standing on her lonely verandah, may have seen just that, for the Langat area was tiger-infested. During the short time that Isabella was there a beautiful dead tigress was dragged triumphantly back fro
m the forest. ‘All the neighbourhood, Chinese and Malay turned out,’ Isabella says. ‘Some danced; and the Sultan beat gongs. Everybody seized upon a bit of the beast. The Sultan claimed the liver, which, when dried and powdered, is worth twice its weight in gold as a medicine. The blood was taken, and I saw the Chinamen drying it in the sun on small slabs: it is an invaluable tonic! The eyes, which were of immense size, were eagerly scrambled for, that the hard parts in the centre, which are valuable charms, might be set in gold as rings. It was sad to see the terrible “glaring eyeballs” of the jungle so dim and stiff. The bones were taken to be boiled down to a jelly which, when some mysterious drug has been added, is a grand tonic. The gall is most precious, and the flesh was all taken for what purpose I don’t know. A steak of it was stewed and I tasted it and found it in flavour much like the meat of an ancient and over-worked draught ox, but Mr Ferney thought it like good veal…’

  But though the ways of the tiger were terrible and its howl chilled the blood, there was for Emily Innes when she lived at Langat a yet more dreadful sound – the shout from the river and the whistle of the Abdulsamaat that announced the arrival of her husband’s boss Mr Bloomfield Douglas. His mien was overweening and his voice, Emily confirms, ‘was pitched in tones that would have done admirably well for giving orders during a storm at sea’. He was always hungry and usually brought hungry companions, but was often without the precious provisions and mails from Singapore to cheer the marooned and boat-less Inneses. Upon his arrival therefore, the servants, the local policeman and a helpful Chinese shopkeeper ran about the mud-flats grabbing all the fowls they could lay hands on, which were hastily boiled in a curry stew for the ‘guests’. The last tins of condensed milk were opened, the last claret uncorked and then, after the Resident and his friends continued on their merry way – taking with them all the snipe they had shot – Mrs Innes was left to pick up the pieces and make monetary recompense to indignant villagers for lawless seizure and premature decapitation of their poultry.