While they prepared the air hose and pump, the rest of them paddled the boats quietly down the tide, with the current. He crammed his belt with sharp metal pegs, gathered up an enormous net and jumped in. One of the men pumped his air and we watched him sink down at the end of a rope, disappearing to the seabed. There he pegged the bottom of the net, about fifty feet in diameter, into the sand.
When he was pulled back and his kit removed, each side of the main net was hooked on to a shallow surface net with floats. This was to mark the two outside boundaries, spreading out like a hundred-yard-long funnel leading out from the main net. Silence remained the order of the day as they paddled, so as not to frighten the fish away. We were each given two-foot lengths of bamboo, bound with rope with six-foot iron chains on the end. We all got into the boat with the motor. When the feeder nets were fully unwound, the engine started up with a roar and ploughed noisily from one side of the funnel opening to the other. We jumped off like parachutists and swam deep into the translucent sea. We unwound the chains and dangled them at the end of the ropes, shaking them to make an ethereal tinkling sound far below, like altar bells. The thudding engine was way above. The fish were panicked into the main net.
We clambered aboard and grappled up the main net. There were a ton of fish, brightly coloured with pale green fins, a few octopus and one small shark. We scooped and shovelled them into the boats. This simple but effective method of maximising the catch had been taught them during the Japanese occupation.
It was the time of year when leatherback turtles struggled out of the sea and up the beach to lay their eggs. They came at night. They were up to seven feet long and left tracks like a tank in the sand behind them. We came across one of these great ladies, her tail end pointing to the sea. With her hind flippers she dug a hole about two and a half feet deep, scattering sand in all directions, some of it into her eyes which watered with soggy tears. Nothing would disturb her once she started laying, bursts of three or four eggs at a time, like soft ping pong balls.
I heard the story of a French photographer at such a scene in Java, lights all set up and ready to film. Across the sand there appeared a magnificent male tiger, eyes dazzled by the lights. He was hungry. He went for a laying mother turtle and sunk his teeth into her shoulder. She retracted it as much as she could, enough to trap his upper and lower jaw inside the vice-like entrance of her shell. He tried to tug his head free. She weighed at least half a ton. He strained, haunch muscles bulging with the effort, feet pushing through the soft sand. She continued laying her eggs. When she finished she covered them up with her hind flippers. She managed to turn with her one free front flipper. She moved with extreme difficulty down the beach, the tiger growling and now with the extra strength of terror. The sand became firmer as she entered the water. The tiger tugged and strained and shook. She dragged him further, into deeper water. She drowned him.
Back in Singapore I scratched around the periphery of Chinatown and made no progress. I met the well-known novelist Han Suyin, famed for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. It became a not very good feature film with William Holden and Jennifer Jones. She was half Belgian and half Chinese and used her non-professional name Elizabeth Comber. She invited me for tea at a hotel renowned for fat ladies eating cakes. She was at the height of her beauty, slim, long-legged, wearing a cheongsam with high neck and slit high up her left thigh, the acme of chic. Her ankles were superb in high heels.
She seemed not best pleased to meet me. Even after each other’s news on mutual friends, including her publisher, she remained patronising. As if addressing a child she asked whether I would like an ice cream. I said I would love one, and how much I admired all the different sorts there were in Singapore; why, I saw on the menu they even had caramel and walnut.
She ordered it for me. As we waited I said how taken I was with the clothes of Asian women, how much I admired the flamboyant grace of Hindu women in saris, how they moved, not so much taking steps with their feet, one by one, more like flowing, their diaphanous scarves waft-ing behind them.
That was more than she could bear. She cut in: ‘If you were a practising doctor, as I am, you would see what most Indian women look like naked. They have big bellies, pendulous breasts, sloppy bottoms, many discolourations of skin. Their saris do a good job of disguise.’
She sat up as she warmed to her subject. ‘A cheongsam, on the other hand, forces you to stay trim. Its cut forces you never to relax. You have to sit up straight. And the high neck makes you hold your head to your full height. When you walk upstairs you have to tread carefully, side-ways, each foot balanced on high heels, one at a time, and when you stand up from sitting down you must rise, knees together, like a model. A cheongsam presents you with a constant moral, physical and spiri-tual challenge.’
She then saw that my eyes, over a spoon of ice cream, were smiling fondly. To my relief she found this delightful and laughed. She had sailed into my ambush and liked it there. She accepted my invitation to dinner.
I told her of my efforts to stay in Chinatown. ‘Good heavens,’ she said. ‘You can’t expect me to know anyone there!’
On my fifth visit to Singapore I chose a particularly grubby hotel, with living standards even worse than I imagined in Chinatown. After several sorties I found a taxi driver who did live in Chinatown. I told him I was writing a book. ‘A story book?’ he asked. I concurred and eventually, after he had offered me a cigarette and we had had fried noodles together at the outside car park market, he asked me to stay with him and his family.
The address was 40b Temple Street, which they have long since vacated. Parallel to it, now bulldozed and built with high-rise apart-ments, was Sago Lane, a sort of Death Row, where the very old, too old to stay at home, ended their days, sitting beside their expensive coffins of polished hardwood, several laid out on shelves one above the other.
I asked him about Sago Lane.
‘Don’t live in Sago Lane.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because why, because it is very noisy. They play musical instruments, marching in the street all day long. Every time there are funeral proces-sions. They play mah-jong all night. They have death houses where old people go, so they are looked after, but then they die and all the rela-tives are drinking and gambling. Because why it is very dangerous. They have gangsters. I want you to stay with my fourth brother as our guest, as our friend. You sleep with our family. Can!’ He beamed at me.
‘I come tomorrow night,’ I said.
‘Also can!’
They lived on the second floor and rented out one room for an opium den. They closed it down a couple of years later as soon as Fourth Brother had passed his accountancy exams. I wrote all about this in my book but there are two further stories.
Temple Street teemed with people, arms full of shopping and babies. Cars seldom went there because it was so crowded. Every day was market day. The street was choc-a-bloc with precarious trestle tables under awnings, with fruit, fish, vegetables, toys, baby things, dry goods of every kind and at one end the reptile market, with fresh snakes, and small tortoises awaiting slaughter. Bets were placed on how long their hearts would beat after their heads were cut off.
Every morning I looked down from our second-storey window. Opposite was a single man with three small children. He sat in the shade under the arcade over the pavement, next to the monsoon drain, reading his newspaper. When he finished he tore it up, gave a fistful to each of the children. With so much activity nobody noticed three little bottoms over the drain. Then they went back to their father who patted them on the head, gave them their schoolbooks and off they went.
One evening further down the street there had been a fight between rival gangs. Acid had been thrown. The police raided the house, made a number of arrests and the place was vacated, including itsopium den. Singapore policy on opium was wise. That drug was easy to detect. You could smell an opium den as you passed by. For addicts there was an effective rehabilitation policy. The police did not n
ormally close the places down because opium would be replaced by heroin, a far more dangerous drug and difficult to detect. Their aim was to cut off the sources of opium supply and leave the streets in peace, but after the throwing of acid they had to be one hundred percent thorough and close that one.
For two days all was normal, which is to say the deafening yells of street vendors, the smashing of mah-jong pieces on the trestle tables, the radios blaring the favourite love song: ‘I’ve got the bells of ding-dong, deep down inside my heart.’ Fourth Brother hated the song because he had yet to find out what the words meant.
Meanwhile the rats which had lived above the opium den had not been getting their fix. They went into cold turkey. They bounded down the stairs, out of the door, along the arcaded pavements, into the helter-skelter street.
Everyone panicked. Screams of every age and sex. Women leapt on to the trestle tables which collapsed, awnings were pulled down, pressure lamps fell and set them on fire. The rats were horrible hairless creatures with blackened teeth and mad eyes, careering up and down. Even the reptile market was knocked for six and the tortoises waddled down the street, blinking between flying legs. On and on went the mael-strom of rats until they picked up the scent of other opium dens. They scampered up the walls of houses, ours, some of them, until they found their way into the eaves. There they breathed in the fumes with relish and relaxed. Peace.
In Chinatown, unless seriously shaken like that, the interdependence of life in so jam-packed a community imposes a discretion and con-siderateness of behaviour which you would never guess at, given the boisterous noise.
My second story is about a view of propriety, a difference between East and West, what can and what can’t be done. It concerns Larry. One morning I was reading in Time Magazine a review of his film The Entertainer, based on John Osborne’s play. Larry played the lead: Archie Rice, the drink-sodden, down-in-the-dumps, gap-toothed, untalented, music-hall pretend optimist. In the play his performance was rightly hailed as stupendous: poignant, funny, and shatteringly moving. That was the play.
The review of the film was ho-hum. In the middle of the page was a photograph of Larry as Archie, cane in hand, trilby on, a leer, and three unfortunate naked ladies posing either side of him.
Fourth Brother peered over my shoulder and asked: ‘Who’s that?’
‘My father.’
He squinted down at the magazine. ‘He doesn’t look like you.’
‘Not there, he doesn’t.’
‘And are those his wive?’
‘No.’ ‘How many wive have you father.’
I thought I’d play along with this to see where it led.
‘Three. He’s just got married for the third time.’
‘So you’ve got three mothers.’
That had never occurred to me, but I let it pass.
‘And how many brothers and sisters?’
‘None. I am an only child.’
He was horrified. Shocked. He seized the magazine and called out to Sixth Sister, the one who worked in a rubber factory snipping out imperfections from sheets of Ribbed Smoke Sheet One. He told her of his acute embarrassment, what he had made me confess; that my father was impotent, had been for a quarter of a century. Three wives. Must be something to do with him, not them. Such was his commotion that some of the opium addicts came out of their room in their underwear to find out what was happening. I could not get in a word of explanation. The magazine was by now crumpled from him showing everyone the picture, their comparing it with me, and shaking their heads at Fourth Brother’s terrible manners, how insensitive.
For a whole week nothing more was said. Then he came to me, all smiles.
‘I know who your father is.’
‘Well done.’
‘Very famous. Everyone know him.’
‘That’s true.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘He’s rich.’
‘No, Fourth Brother, not really. As a working actor he’s comfortable, but not rich.’
‘He’s a millionaire.’
‘Far from that.’
‘He’s a multi-millionaire.’
‘Nothing like it. Never will be.’
‘He is!’ He whooped with delight. He felt redeemed from his terrible sin. ‘Now I understand. So now I know why he have three wive.’
In other words, if you’re that rich it does not matter if you are importent. I wrote to Larry and told him the story. He said that I must get a new pen, the one I was using was so pale he thought it was the opium, which of course I never touched.
I wrote back:
What fun to have a letter to answer. It makes me feel far closer to you – even though you, you lion, want to put a whole pride of cubs between you and your grand cubs one day to be. I had a letter from Vivien saying that she was starting to feel herself again and even believe that there is great peace and joy for her. I hope I will always be as close to her as I have been.
Sometimes things make me laugh which shouldn’t. The idea of having brothers and sisters for the first time when I am a quarter of a century old. No longer do I wish anything but that it should be so. I think I have learned to value your happiness more. I think we mightrecognize each other in the street again. I have lost 25lbs since I last saw you, but the resemblance between us is, I think, still there; except that Han Suyin said I was better looking because my nose was more finely shaped. Wasn’t that nice.
In Singapore, Malaya and Thailand I met officials in their various finance and economics ministries to learn how they promoted their many developmental policies, and travelled the length and breadth of the two mainland countries. There were two experiences which still cry out in my mind to be recorded, the first physical and the second meta-physical.
The first was of a kind of which it suffices to say, with discretion, that I remember her well. Beyond description. I slept in late in the southern Thai village of Haadjai, over-exerted, and the first meal I had was lunch. I was sitting under an awning, feeling so unburdened I wondered if my appearance had changed from top to toe.
I saw a trishaw and the divine young girl. She saw me, stopped the trishaw, came over and brought her hands together in the Thai ‘wai’, which I returned and she sat down next to me. She wanted a Coke. The manager came over, smiling broadly. He spoke English. ‘She told me,’ he said, ‘she liked you very much.’ I blushed and said something about how lovely she was. He continued: ‘She said you were very good. She and her fiancé are so proud.’
‘Her fiancé?’
‘Yes. They are saving up to get married. You were good and kind and generous.’
So I ended up feeling that I was not only Casanova, but St George.
The second was in the northern capital of Chiengmai where I studied Buddhism for a month with the Lord Abbot, Pra Maha Suratana, at the Wat Pra Singh monastery. The deal was that I should spend each morn-ing teaching English to their primary school students, using the Oxford English Course. It had a picture of Christ Church on the cover, which was of some comfort. The contents on the other hand were daft. I had to read out each sentence – the first being: ‘Have tigers blue eyes?’, and they had to repeat it back to me. Their pronunciation was good, but the second sentence must also have made them seriously wonder what was wrong with the English: ‘Have I three hands?’ We got by, somehow, for an hour each morning. ‘No, I have not three hands.’
Really. Oxford.
I stayed in a rest house. At dawn the monks came round with their metal begging bowls. Each household, in order to gain merit, ladled out rice, meat and vegetables, enough for breakfast and the one main meal of the day which was lunch. Thereafter they fasted, smoked and drank incessant cups of tea. They spent time gardening, to ‘keep their bodies strong’, in the temple intoning for hours in a bass monotone which they said induced emotions of peace, removed from all human desire, and studying the scriptures in Sanskrit, which they called the Pali language, of all the Buddha’s teachings. These were massive. During his lifetime he had surro
unded himself with leading scholars and dictated his teach-ings to them so that the record would be accurate and complete. They sounded grave and beautiful when read out.
English translations available in the temple library were piecemeal. There were the do’s and don’ts common to every faith, except that Buddhism was more a way of life than a religion. There was no God. The moral code was governed by the wish for self-perfection. At its simplest, the world was a mess and the purpose of life was for everyone to help straighten it out. The reward was to be reincarnated at a higher level, the highest was to become a Bodhisattva to live forever above earthly existence. The sanction against sin was to be reincarnated within the Wheel of Life as something inferior. I found all this attractive but unbelievable.
I was intrigued by the Buddha’s teaching on embryology. Through his meditation he was able to divine the development of the human foetus, in the womb, from only six weeks after conception. That was two and a half thousand years ago. He has since been proven correct by modern science. He got the order right: the brain, spinal column, optic and dental nerves and the development of the organs.
More important to me by far was a philosophy I had never seen put into words but had long sensed; he called it the Oneness of Life, all of it, both animal and vegetable. This appealed to me absolutely. I had always felt a strong affinity not only with animals but with trees, fields of wheat, gardens of any kind. Meditating on this single thought brought me great satisfaction. It complemented the philosophy I had learned in Java about the acceptance of life. It changed my outlook.
My letters to Larry always ended with my blessings to him and Joan in all the things they do. I said that 1961 would be the year I would finish my book, now at 35,000 words, and would present him with some-thing he could keep. So it was a shock when he wrote:
So Who's Your Mother Page 13
