The 25,000-ton French liner went from Marseilles to Port Said, where I climbed a pyramid, Aden, Bombay where we went to the Elephant Caves, Sri Lanka, Saigon and after four weeks we docked in Manila. The passengers were mostly married French couples, colonial school marms, and nuns who sat around in clumps, according to their different religious orders. The few Indians and Sri Lankans disem-barked halfway there.
On arrival in Manila harbour I met the most welcoming people. Passport and Customs controllers came on board and said there had been articles in the newspapers about me. They waved me through with broad smiles and I tottered down the gang-plank with my heavy suit-case. I was met on the hard by Tom Benitez and his driver who took the suitcase and led us to the air-conditioned limousine. Tom was tall and impressive. He had served in Washington. He had recently founded a new political party with two of the most highly respected elder states-man, intending to fight the election then at its height. They were Sena-tor Recto and Senator Laurel, renowned for their integrity. Their main ambition was to break away from graft and corruption. That problem was endemic. Editorials competed in terms of sheer relish at their never-ending exposures, from the Presidency down to local bureaucrats, of bribes and criminal dealings.
Tom’s wife Nena was away, taking the Bayanihan National Philip-pines Dance Group on tour in America, so he had me stay with her parents. They had a family compound with a large bungalow for them-selves and three smaller ones for their three sons and young families. Next door was a much larger house, the Residency of the Japanese Ambassador, which they had sold. The lawns were mown as finely as golf greens. The rooms were shielded from direct sunlight and the décor had a Spanish influence.
My first venture was in the far north of Luzon, the Mountain Province. Canon Simpson, Dean of Christ Church, had given me an introduction to some Episcopalian missionaries and their man in Sagada was Revd George Harris. On the way I visited a sugar estate in Pampanga. That area had been subdued some years earlier by Maoist terrorists called Hukbalahap, determined to destroy capital-ism. This was neutralised by the only great Filipino President in any-one’s lifetime, President Magsaysay. He actually bested corruption by strong leadership, and introduced land reform. I met one of the estate managers and asked his opinion. He said corruption had returned in force, but at least his men did not work for him; they worked with him. Together they had formed a co-operative in which they all had a share.
The capital of the Northern Province was Baguio, originally a US Army hill station with large villas, spreading gardens, high fir trees, a clubhouse, playground and a lake. The journey further north, to Sagada, was in a broken down old bus with pigs tied on the roof between all kinds of baggage wrapped in rattan. Under the seats were baskets full of clucking chickens. The passengers were Igorot people from the Mountain Province. The women wore long-sleeved shirts and skirts down to their bare feet, the man in T-shirts and jeans. When the slope uphill was too steep we all tumbled out, then went back past the suspension base which was completely flattened by weight even with-out us on board, and we pushed wherever we could get a hold. This bonded all of us, and it became easy to start up a conversation. Travel-ling by bus is much the best for that.
What the Igorots had created and maintained for centuries is one of the world’s greatest landscapes: the Ifugao rice terraces, as many as eighty rising in series one above the other, like the drawers of an enor-mous wardrobe of earth, water-filled, each one brimming with vivid green shoots of rice. Out in the open when at work the adults wore loincloths, the mature men and the women topless. Their enormous toes were permanently spread open to keep them from slipping in the mud.
Father Harris and his wife were from North Dakota so they were used to isolated communities. They had two small daughters. The Igorots had helped build the church. No scaffolding had been neces-sary. The men just leant poles against the walls and gripped them with their huge toes, leaving both hands free to apply cement. At the evening service they sang the hymns accurately in unison. As a departure Father Harris had taught them to sing one of Bach’s chorales in four voices. He took each one separately, the old men starting with the bass; then the tenors, and he combined the two. He did the same with the older women and then the younger ones. When eventually they were sure enough of the notes he brought all four voices together and they were all bowled over by the beauty of it. Within a few months his introduc-tion of singing was a major factor in the success of his mission. At the end of every service as they left there was the soothing and redemptive sound of their bare feet lisping on the stone.
When the Igorot children graduated to Baguio High School, maybe even university in Manila for the very bright, they seldom returned. Their houses were primitive stone, hardly a man’s height, crammed together in the small spaces of flat ground. For lavatories there were sunken pens occupied by pigs which ate the faeces. There was usually a hefty stick on the side to keep the pigs at bay. When the elderly retired they spent their declining days hollowing out a four-foot length of thick tree-trunk, for their bodies to be lowered into in the foetal position and then stacked with hundreds of others in a high cave, overlooking the land of their birth.
One of the Liboro uncles, Angél, was running for election as gover-nor of Mindoro Province, a large island with great sugar estates and no land reform, a night’s ferry journey south of Manila. I went with his nephew Tato Liboro, who lived in the family compound. He was a suc-cessful attorney and highly literate. His wife was the most beautiful mes-tiza. They had four children and decided that was enough, even though they were practising Catholics. He told me of one of his confessions.
Tato knelt at the confessional grille and the censorious priest had asked: ‘Birth control?’
‘Yes Father.’
‘That is a very terrible sin.’
‘Yes Father.’
‘A mortal sin.’
‘Yes Father.’
‘How many times have you practised it?’
‘Plenty of times, Father.’
While Uncle Angél concentrated on the island of Mindoro, Tato was his electioneer in the tiny island just north of it, called Lubang. It had a few fishing boats, and its main agriculture was rice and subsistence farm-ing. Fourteen years after the Second World War two Japanese soldiers were still at large there. They ignored all the leaflets advising then that the war was over and they could give themselves up in peace and return home, and would they please desist from helping themselves from the local islanders. They only gave themselves up twenty years after that.
During the years of Japanese occupation no new foreign films had been allowed in. The Filipinos made do with what they had. They saw the same films over and over again, including Wuthering Heights,with my father as Heathcliff. Even in Lubang.
I was sitting on the ground with Tato and a family who were winnowing rice by hand. The women shredded the ears through a comb made of nails and some younger ones pounded the seeds in a big pestle, casting the light husks on one pile, and the white rice into a large basket. Several pregnant women sat and gawped at me. Tato said that was because they wanted their babies to look like me. I said I thought the fathers had more to do with it but he said that made no difference to them. One very old woman stared more obtrusively. She was chewing betel nut, a stimulus, and expectorated scarlet saliva to one side. Even-tually she made up her mind, pointed at me as if her memory had returned, and said: ‘Heathcliff!’
Electioneering built up to a climax and groups sang national songs with improvised words on politics. I never really identified the two leading parties’ programmes; both were stridently against ‘Graft and Corruption’; the differences related to personalities. Tato and Uncle Angél thought they were winning but this was not to be. On election day the opposition distributed banknotes worth two weeks’ wages per vote. Once a peasant had accepted the bribe he or she felt bound to honour it. The newly elected governor of Mindoro would of course have to reimburse this unseemly expense from ‘Gruff and Collupshun’, on
ce in power.
In Manila, at least, Tom Benitez and his party won the constituency seats in Quezon City. There was much discussion about Philippine nationalism but it seemed to me based on rather immature anti-Americanism. I discussed this with Senator Recto and said it was a shame, given the Philippines’ good economic performance. He had coined the phrase ‘Filipino First’. He challenged me to define national-ism. I said it should reflect national pride and unity in a land of so many hundreds of islands, dozens of languages and such stark contrasts in wealth, and such strong economic prospects. He was kind enough to give me an excellent introduction to Ruslan Abdulgani, Vice President of the Supreme Advisory council of Indonesia.
The journey south to Cebu by sea was beautiful. It was capital of the Visayan Islands, central Philippines. The ferry was a brand new 2,000-tonner. I had a cabin on the top deck. I sat on the roof beside the funnel and gazed at the hilly green islands crowned with coconut palms, girdled with thatched seaside villages of woven pine.
Tom Benitez’s American friend Ed Canova met me. He was the local head of the Aboitiz company which owned the ferry, thermal electricity generating companies and much else. He had me shown round the pineapple and sisal plantations. He asked me to give a talk to the Rotary Club about the small farm my father had had at Notley – a hundred acres with 2,000 deep-litter hens, eighty fattening pigs, four large greenhouses, market garden and meadows with eight Jersey cows for their cream. This was intensive mixed farming, efficiently managed by Larry’s brother. At Rotary in the Philippines they were unfamiliar with the concept of ‘gentlemen farmers’ in Wellington boots. The atmosphere was serious, a cross between business-ese and bottom lines. I took them through the four seasons, growth and non-growing, to the marketing. At the end Ed Canova thanked me and said I had agreed to take questions.
I thought it had gone well and was graciously, even patronisingly pleased to invite the first questioner. A hand went up and I said: ‘Yes, sir, and what is your question?’
He stood, straight-faced and asked: ‘Who’s your mother?’
I practically fell off the podium. I grabbed the lectern, recovered, aware that I was hot-necked and beetroot-faced. The fact that I knew the answer had not helped. I replied that she was the actress Jill Esmond who had married my father when they were twenty-three, divorced nearly ten years later when he was with Vivien Leigh. She had brought me up. The terrible feeling I had was of shame. What was that about? In mentioning the three people in the world I adored more than any other, my mother above all. Why the shame? Happily they had other questions.
There were picnics and parties. The prettiest women are to be found in Cebu. Conversation was pleasant, seldom exciting, but this was more than made up for by the Filipino genius at dancing the night through.
Both Faubion Bowers and Santha had written enticingly about the islands in the Sulu Sea. I went to the capital, Joló. It had a tree-covered hill, while the other islands were of white coral only, at low tide barely a yard above the level of the sea meadows. They were completely submerged at high tide, the houses standing on stilts above the placid blue water. One of them, about a hundred yards square with nipahuts, was occupied by the ladies of the Sultan’s harem; the next by eunuchs to attend to them. Joló itself was alive with kite-flying children, the harbour festooned by even more of them.
The Aboitiz company manager met my ferry. He took one look at me and said I needed a haircut. At his house I saw myself in a mirror and realised that I looked like Beethoven’s mother. There was a hairdresser on the fringe of the outdoor market. I had heard of Muslim extremists there hiding scimitars in watermelons and killing Christians. He reas-sured me. I went into the shop and he left. As the barber cut my hair the window was plastered with dozens of children’s faces gawping at me, the strange white foreigner. Security of a kind, I supposed.
Señor Camlón was a pirate and the State had placed a hefty price on his head, dead or alive. Joló city itself was barricaded with barbed wire because of him and his nefarious smuggling from North Borneo. It so happened that his great friend was the Chief of Police. I was beginning to think that this made powerful sense in a place like Joló. The Chief showed me Camlón’s anchorage. There were only two boats there at the time, fifteen feet long and shaped like wheelbarrows, with three 50-horsepower outboards lined up on the stern, at that time the most powerful available anywhere. On a robust steel stand they each carried a medium machine gun. The bow had a stout ram at sea level. A year before the police had given chase, but they had no chance because their boats only had two outboards.
The bulk of contraband cargo was in duty-free goods from Sandakan, on the coast of Sabah, for onward delivery to Zamboanga in Mindanao. Occasionally they carried small arms for the Muslim Moro rebels. The Police Chief thought it was better for them to be carried by Camlón’s outfit than any other because he at least knew more or less what was happening.
He took me to a two-storeyed house with a restaurant on the ground floor. There was a table with three old wooden chairs and Camlón sitting alone. He looked the caricature of a pirate; not quite striped jersey and earrings, but big white teeth and sparkling eyes, and a complexion like fruit and nut chocolate. Beer was brought in by the prettiest and most enticing gamine I had ever seen. He called her ‘Nutty’, short for Natividad. Over dinner Camlón repeated the stories the Chief had told me about the police chase at sea. Afterwards Nutty asked me upstairs to dance. The two men looked at me as if to say ‘what more could a man want with such a beauty’.
The attic was her bedroom. She put on an old 78 record of Frank Sinatra and came into my arms as light as a feather. Her movements were graceful. After leaning back to give me a provocative gaze she said she really must go to bed because she had so much reading to catch up. I was intrigued and asked what it was. A Filipina who read? Rare indeed.
‘Comics,’ she said. And that was that.
The Police Chief laughed all the way home.
Back in Manila I stayed again with the Liboros. Someone introduced me to the rowing club and lent me a racing sculler like the one I had had at Oxford. The Pasig River was full of contaminants and looked like an oil slick. I had to keep an eye out for clumps of water-hyacinth floating on the surface. It smelt of stale vegetation and sewage, even opposite the elegant Spanish built wooden Presidential Residency, the Malacañang Palace, and its two neighbouring guest houses.
Further upstream, away from the city centre, were children of the very poor, picking over a miasmic mound of rotting garbage. Some of them jumped into the river to cool down. A line of women pummelled clothes on hard boards with no soap. It was extraordinary that so many preferred life like that, in the capital, instead of in their pretty rural villages surrounded by rice fields and farms.
A party was given for me by one of the leading lights in the art world; Luís Araneta. His house, and especially his garden, were decorated with many impressive antique pieces. A number of couples from leading families were there, some speaking Spanish among themselves, though all were comfortable speaking English.
Their style of life seemed at odds with the country as a whole. Very few of them had seen much of it. Their outlook seemed hardly Asian, more like Latin America with a dozen top families in a hotly competi-tive oligarchy, while the rest of the people grappled ever upwards with what they could. In fact, although colonised by the Spanish until the end of the nineteenth century, this was done via Mexico. There is a hoary old observation that the Philippines spent five hundred years in a convent, followed by fifty years in Hollywood. Even the phrase Catholic Asians sounds like an oxymoron.
I was shown a documentary film which had won an international prize. In the final climax a live volcano smoked in the background near Legaspi in Southern Luzon, and a Spanish church half-buried in lava closed the sequence, the voice over saying that the deeper you dig in the Philippines the more you come across Spain, Spain, Spain. Yet the country they look up to is the United States, the colonial power which drove out
the Spanish at the turn of the century and gave the Philip-pines independence half a century later. Filipinos know infinitely more about America, where so many go to university, than about their Asian neighbours. At an intellectual level the Philippines is hardly related to them. I did not write about the country in my book about South-East Asia. However, fifteen years later I did have the good fortune to return, many times, and in a fascinating business.
Seven
When my plane landed under heavy rainfall in Djakarta at the end of 1959 I was the only passenger to get off. It was a DC4 from Singapore, going on a night flight to Australia. The steps down to the tarmac were unlit and soaked so I walked down carefully, a typewriter in one hand and a heavy camera case in the other. At the bottom was a soldier with a little machine gun pointing at my chest, motioning that I should precede him through the rain and into the building.
Inside there was a single bulb in the corridor and a door for the gents’ loo. I said I wanted to go there, went in and he followed me. As I stood I found it difficult to concentrate with him behind me, gun aimed at my spine. I turned and smiled apologetically, and asked him in the name of progress to point the gun somewhere else. He smiled back and complied.
Four years before, President Sukarno had achieved a moral status internationally through calling together a conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Bandung. It was attended by India’s Prime Minister Nehru, Egypt’s President Nasser, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and dozens of neutral countries which were non-participants in the Cold War. The Non-Aligned movement was formed. This put Indonesia on the world’s political map. It was an inspired idea which incorporated a philosophi-cal, economic and political presence. It had to be recognised by the opposing forces of capitalism and Communism. And it was Sukarno, too, who had unified the world’s most enormous and disparate archi-pelago and given all its people the Indonesian language, based on Malay, and some kind of cohesion as a nation.
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