Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  In the stern I found two Chinese busily plucking ducks; white feathers overflowed an enamel bowl, webbed feet pointed pathetically into the air. Malays with sweat cloths around their brows and long hair were chipping rust off the deck like decay from an old smoker’s teeth.

  At breakfast – paw-paw, porridge, egg, bacon or sausages (for non-Malays), toast, marmalade and Nescafé – the chief officer said that a Malay had fallen sick with a fever during the night, and that he’d taken his temperature and found it to be 110 degrees. ‘A hundred and ten degrees?’ I said. ‘He must be dead.’ I thought of Groucho Marx feeling a patient’s pulse: ‘Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.’ But the man was up and about the next afternoon, so either I or the thermometer was wrong.

  ‘Look, Vietnamese ship,’ the captain said. On an island hardly bigger than a Hyde Park bandstand a small ship lay stranded. The vessel had brought a fortunate group of Vietnamese boat people here. They had beached it and been taken off by the Indonesian navy.

  By the afternoon, with misty rain falling, Captain Abdul Rahman seemed to think that we might have rough weather that night. ‘Better get sleep now. Maybe at night no sleep.’ My siesta, I noticed, was sanctioned by a relic of the Perak’s passenger-carrying days. On my cabin wall an ‘Information for Passengers’ notice said:

  There is normally a quiet period at sea when passengers, and also officers off duty, may be resting. If parents would be kind enough to aid in maintaining this atmosphere, it would be very much appreciated.

  By 7.00 p.m. we were halfway to Kuching. The captain expected to arrive in the mouth of the Sarawak river at sunset the next evening. If the holiday had started, customs and immigration officers would be at home celebrating, and we might have to anchor in the river overnight.

  The night was a rough one, as the captain had predicted. The Perak lurched and bucked, the wind howled and thunderous waves slapped her sides. It was uncomfortable, but I don’t suppose the Starling Cook would have been worried, and neither was I. I wondered if he had ever sailed on a ship as big as the Perak.

  In the morning the voyage was almost over. We were still rolling, but on the skyline there was now a pale smudge in the morning haze, the mountainous outline of Borneo. Or of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), to be precise, for the part known as Sarawak of this immense island lay beyond the still-invisible spur of Tanjung Datu.

  The captain said to Mr Wong, ‘Tomorrow Chinese New Year. Year of Monkey, yes?’ The steward answered, ‘Tomorrow Monkey Year. Year of Golden Monkey.’ For my information, he added, ‘Very mischeevious monkey.’ I thought, a mischievous monkey might cause delays.

  ‘Can you expect a quick turnabout once we are in a berth?’

  ‘Can,’ said Captain Abdul Rahman. ‘Ten hours’ work. Very quick.’ The Perak, he said, would pick up rubber, paper and rattans for Singapore and proceed to Brunei. But how much work would be done during the four days of the New Year celebrations? From Kuching it was thirty-six hours to Brunei. This would give me 21, 22 and 23 February to catch the Straits Hope, which was not due in Labuan from Singapore until the 24th. It was the sort of timetable Tony Blatch and Captain MacGregor had envisaged in Singapore, but I was not the optimist I had been at Piraeus.

  By noon we were abreast of the great forested fist of Tanjung Datu and began our last rolling progress across the last bay before the entrance to the Sarawak river. Between banks of mangrove and tree trunks entwined with creepers, the river twisted its way like a shining green caterpillar towards Kuching, the former capital of the White Rajahs. Soon, to starboard, an awesome dark shape reared up, dwarfing the landscape ahead: Santubong Mountain, a vast, shaggy sentinel at the entrance to the river. Behind it the waves of the mountains and forests of Borneo lay blue-black in rain and swirls of thick, low, grey cloud. The Perak slipped into the narrow mouth of the river just as the burning disc of the sun reached the western horizon.

  The Chinese members of the crew began their New Year celebrations. Mr Wong came up to the bridge as First Officer Omar Oman was ordering the old Malay quartermaster at the wheel ‘half ahead’, easing the Perak over the bar at the entrance of the narrow waterway. ‘Tengah-tengah – amidships.’ The jermudi, his wrinkled, high-cheekboned face shining like polished mahogany, echoed impassively in the fading light of the wheelhouse, ‘Tengah-tengah.’ Mr Wong said to me, smiling, ‘Chinese crew would like invite you join them in their special holiday dinner. Please follow me to stern.’

  The Chinese were already seating themselves at a round table they had positioned near the stern rail. Under the ship’s lights in the thickening darkness, bowls of soup, pork, vegetables, fish balls, chilli and other dishes were already scattered across the table. The duck’s feet rose above the surface of the soup. Junior crewmen were pouring Tiger beer into glasses and three bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label stood among the dishes. Mr Boon Koh Peng, the elderly steward with the shock of white hair and bowlegs, poured three fingers of whisky all around, dropping ice into mine from a jug. A clatter of dishes and chopsticks soon drowned out the rumble of Perak’s propeller shaft under our vibrating stools; glasses were raised and emptied, and excited holidaying Chinese faces began to turn a deep pink, the inevitable and undisguisable effect that liquor has on pale Oriental skin. ‘Kong hee fat choy!’ they cried rosily across the table at each other and at me. ‘Happy New Year!’ And Mr Boon genially raised his glass and leaned over to say, ‘Monkey coming. That what this means.’

  It was a good moment. Only a tongue of dark-red cloud lay across a flaming orange sky, so that the Perak crept across the inner bar through black water that glittered with golden splinters of light. ‘Kong hee fat choy!’ As the Chinese sat carousing in their circle of light in the stern the tangled trees on the riverbank merged into mysterious conglomerations of shadow, and behind them to the east the mountains merged quietly into the night.

  ‘Kong hee fat choy! Must finis’ Johnnie Walker!’ After the feast, the handshaking, the draining of beer, whisky and small saucers of tea, the Chinese dispersed to put on smart clothes and to gather the New Year presents they were taking to friends and relatives in Kuching. Most of them had been on this run for years and were going to a second home.

  I found the captain on the bridge in long khaki shorts and an undershirt. ‘Good dinner?’ He gave me a smile and the flash of a gold tooth. He had news. Kuching immigration had agreed that the Chinese members of the crew and I should be allowed to go ashore tonight, that all the berths were full, and that the Perak should anchor in the river a few miles downstream at a place appropriately called Pending until a ship’s departure left a free berth. However, there would be no work for a day or two at least, so the Perak might spend four days here. A launch was on its way to pick us up.

  It soon arrived, and on it was the Straits Steamship Company’s agent, Mr Paul Ho. Well scrubbed and neatly dressed in clean tropical shirts and pressed trousers, clutching their bundles of presents, the Chinese filed down the gangway and, smiling to right and left, took their seats in the motor launch that growled alongside. I waved to the captain (I would be in touch with him through Mr Ho), a Malay boy cast off, and we spluttered away into the darkness of the narrow, meandering, silent river. Now and again the lights of a small village interrupted the blackness of the riverbanks, and a pressure lamp or open fire revealed the wooden wall of a little house on stilts or people in sarongs standing in a doorway. We passed through a knot of small ships, clusters of white lights in the blackness, anchored in mid-river in Pending, then landed among the barges and moored rivercraft and warehouses of Kuching. The Chinese hurried off under the street lights as Mr Ho drove me across the neat, leafy town to the Aurora Hotel. I thanked him for interrupting his New Year’s Eve at home. ‘Relax,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in touch. I guarantee Perak will not sail without you.’

  Half an hour later, from the cramped balcony of my room in the Aurora, I watched young Malays and Chinese hurrying arm in arm about the Padang under the ancient, thick-trunk
ed trees that screened the hotel from the golden domes of the mosque. Occasionally the peace was broken by youths in crash helmets who sped past on scooters to New Year parties. The sound of firecrackers, no louder than thorns crackling in a fire, came distantly from buildings across the Padang. Kuching is a gentle, unassertive little place, a friendly garden town not yet ruined by high-rise pretentiousness. Its name means cat, after Sarawak’s cat’s-eyes trees. Across the river, on a grassy eminence, the White Rajah’s palace, the fortlike Istana, seems to fix the time firmly in the nineteenth century.

  I lay on my bed, feeling it sway as if I were still aboard the Perak. On the ceiling a painted arrow showed any of the faithful who might sleep and pray in this room the direction to holy Mecca.

  Twenty seven

  Next morning I thought for a moment that a revolution had started. Chinese firecrackers rattled around the town like rifle fire, and truckloads of singing Chinese boys roared past my hotel window banging drums and clashing cymbals. New Year’s Day – the first day of the Year of the mischeevious Golden Monkey.

  The crackers were particularly impressive, considering a government ban I read about in the Sarawak Tribune that had been pushed under my hotel door. The following ‘items of fireworks’ had been banned, the paper said: Coloured Pearls, Silvery Chrysanthemum, Ground Bloom Flowers, Sparkling Wheel, Flashing Wheel, Dancing Fresh Flowers, Spider’s Web, Peacock Fountain, Silvery Glittering Flower, Fire Splinter, King Cat Sparklers, Small Bee, Red Ground Chicken, Friendship Fireworks, Moon Flitting Phoenix and coloured Electric Sparks. It seemed a pity to have missed all that.

  I drank green tea and telephoned Bushey Webb. ‘I can hardly hear you,’ he shouted. ‘The illegal firecrackers. Deafening. Must have been smuggled in somehow!’

  I was downstairs when he strode in through the glass-fronted door in a short-sleeved flowered shirt, shorts and sandals. ‘You see me in my who-gives-a-bugger kit,’ he announced, beaming like a large and overwhiskered ginger cat. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Alan Webb has lived in Sarawak for nearly thirty years, and is one of very few – perhaps four – foreign residents to have been granted Malaysian citizenship since that country became independent of the British in 1957. He is a solid man of medium height with a reddish round face. A massive pair of bushy sideburns come together at his upper lip and give him his nickname. He is a Buddhist, a convivial drinker, and describes himself with a hearty laugh as a gourmet. I had met him two years earlier with my seafaring friend Brian McGarry, towards the end of a six-month search I had made in McGarry’s old ketch, the Fiona, for the Eastern world of Joseph Conrad – scouting the places Conrad had visited as the master of ships in the 1880s and later written about in novels like Victory and Lord Jim. When we had reached Kuching in the Fiona, Brian found he needed to repair a life raft. The firm Webb owns was able to provide all that was required, and a good deal of unexpected hospitality as well.

  He is a hospitable man in the unstinting tradition of all the local people – Dayaks, Malays, Chinese or British. Little jungly Sarawak – the domain carved out in the early nineteenth century by James Brooke, the first of the White Rajahs – is a place of outstanding interracial harmony, despite, or perhaps because of, the furious nineteenth-century sea and river battles between, on the one hand, Brooke, his British and Malay followers and allies, and odd ships of the Royal Navy, and, on the other, the rebellious chiefs, intruding pirates and marauding sea rovers from wild north Borneo and the ill-famed Sulu Sea. The peace the victorious Rajah Brooke imposed and maintained has survived the threats of communist terror, banditry and three hectic years of Indonesian armed confrontation in the 1960s, when British troops came to help the Malaysian armed forces resist an Indonesian invasion. Malaysia had just achieved independence from Britain and President Sukarno of Indonesia was contesting by force the inclusion of the western Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah within Malaysia. That was when I came to Kuching for the first time. The little port had become a bustling military cantonment, and the nights were raucous with the Hogarthian revelry of young British soldiers down from the thousand-mile-long border with Indonesian Kalimantan – down from the mountains, from the heads of half-lost rivers, from the tents and longhouses of Dayak headhunters, from patrolling jungles inhabited by snakes, wild boars and orang-utans. Actually, their revelry was more Rowlandsonian than Hogarthian; the troops were rowdy and drunken, but not in the ugly, vicious way of a Hogarth print, and the people of Kuching seemed to understand.

  Now the fighting was long over and the foreign troops gone. Sarawak, a state of independent Malaysia, was as peaceful as it had been in the twenties and thirties in the days of British administrators, bank managers, young company assistants, police officers, museum curators, the days of British clubs, memsahibs and scandals – the world you can read about in the short stories of Somerset Maugham.

  Bushey Webb lived in a pleasant Maugham-like, wood-frame bungalow on the edge of the town. It was set back in a cleared rectangle among trees where bright-coloured birds flitted among frangipani, bougainvillea and clumps of tall pale-green bamboo. I clumped up wooden steps across a creaking wooden veranda and entered a large L-shaped room whose front part had a home-made curving bar at one end and bookcases at the other. An overhead fan stirred the sticky air, and harmless chichak lizards flicked about the walls. Motionless, their black pinhead eyes looked sharply about them for insects, and they breathed quickly in the heat, their sides labouring.

  ‘Oi Fah,’ Bushey called from the bar. ‘People are dying of bloody thirst in here, you know.’ When his young smiling Chinese wife appeared carrying a dish, Bushey said, ‘What’s this, then? Spare ribs? Jolly good show.’ He poured Tiger beer into mugs for all of us. ‘Kong hee fat choy!’ he toasted across the foam. ‘Happy New Year,’ said Oi Fah.

  I said, ‘Oi Fah, I read somewhere – in Somerset Maugham, I think – that, to the Chinese, Europeans have the smell of corpses. Is that true?’

  ‘Not of corpses,’ she said promptly. ‘Of cheese.’ She and Bushey laughed. ‘And yet you married me,’ he said.

  An Italian-made electric organ stood in the other part of the room and a pile of old copies of the Observer and the Sunday Times lay on a bamboo table. The books in the shelves were about Borneo or cooking, and there were novels by John Masters and memoirs of the India of the Raj by Philip Mason. Firecrackers sounded distantly. A golden oriole, a bright-yellow bird the size of a thrush, perched on a rail of the veranda. It could easily have been 1934. ‘Did you clap your hands and shout “Boy!” to bring your servants running in the old days?’

  ‘Never, I promise. Anyway, now we only have an amah who helps Oi Fah in the kitchen, and a Malay who cuts the grass.’

  I knew from Maugham that life for the British residents in Malaya in the good old days had not been all hectic sex in exciting mansions with bowing servants and slippered ease. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been much to planters’ houses,’ a Maugham character says. ‘They’re a bit dreary. A lot of gimcrack furniture and silver ornaments and tiger skins. And the food’s uneatable.’ The Webbs’ food was far from uneatable. After the Tiger beer and pink gins (‘Gin merah, they’re called in these parts, red gin’), we sat down to curry. Bushey pushed a dish of sliced red chillies in my direction. ‘That’s the real stuff, that is. Make you hold onto the rail later on. Just the thing.’

  ‘Bushey!’ Oi Fah reproved him, patting his arm.

  ‘About Maugham,’ Webb said, ‘there was a certain amount of resentment in Malaysia towards him, you know – abuse of hospitality, that sort of thing.’

  I said, ‘Maugham answered that in a preface. He admits that his stories are about the exceptions. British government servants, traders, planters, ordinary people living in Malaya were as happy or unhappy with their wives as most people elsewhere. I think he calls them “good, decent, normal people”. But there must have been some peculiar people about, surely? And dramatic incidents. After all, stories like “The Letter” were based on fact,
weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Bushey. ‘Certainly, there were eccentrics out here. Take old Fred Salt, an ex-sergeant major from the Gunners, who always wore one gold earring in his ear, while his dog, a bitch, went around with the other gold earring in her ear. He now lives in Darwin with his Dayak wife.

  ‘Nowadays the British community here is very small. There’s me, there’s a bank manager who is also the honorary consul, and there’s a Guinness representative, Frank Burke-Gafney, a very young-looking Old Hand. But he’s usually travelling because Guinness is popular in Borneo and Indonesia. A potent aphrodisiac, people think, and cheaper than snake wine or rhino horn.’

  Bushey took more rice and scattered red-hot chillies over it. ‘In the days of the Rajah, I lived up-country at Sibu. The Island Club there would have thirty to forty members. Just a wooden bungalow with an atap roof, a tennis court and a bowling alley. With old English bowls, mark you, made by Gamages out of the hardest wood there is. There was the resident, the district officer, the police superintendent, the land-survey wallah, an agricultural officer, the public works engineer, a judge, a doctor and business people like me. Timber in my case.’

  ‘Any Chinese or Malay members?’

  ‘You could bring them in as guests, but Malays don’t usually drink and the Chinese preferred their own clubs – we played bridge, not mah-jongg or fan-tan. There were no planters here; there’s no rubber in Sarawak. The planters were all in the Malay Peninsula – in the Federated Malay States, the FMS, as we used to say. Raffles’s Long Bar was full of them.’

  I had often seen in my mind’s eye the newly arrived young planters, fresh off the P&O steamer from home, catching their breath at Raffles, so to speak, before taking the train to the rubber estate up-country, where they would work for an initial stretch of seven years before their first home leave. Thereafter, leave came every five years. ‘They call the young planter a creeper,’ wrote Maugham, ‘and you can tell him in the streets of Singapore by his double felt hat and his khaki coat turned up at the wrists. Callow youths who saunter about staring and are inveigled into buying worthless truck from Birmingham which they send home as eastern curios, sit in the lounges of cheap hotels drinking innumerable stengahs, and after an evening at the pictures get into rickshaws and finish the night in the Chinese quarter.’