by Nigel Barley
‘Thank you all for coming. I have been asked to communicate to you a message from the Japanese commander.’ He coughed nervously and his throat knotted itself and it seemed for a second that it would never relax and let him speak. ‘Please understand that I am simply the channel by which this message is to be communicated by others, a mere conduit.’ Loh Ching smiled to himself as if hearing another word. HK paused and picked up a paper from the tabletop so they could actually see he was reading it.
‘The Chinese community of Syonanto is hereby presented with the opportunity of performing a gesture of loyalty towards the Emperor and Dai Nippon to dissociate themselves from treasonable acts supporting the Emperor’s enemies in Manchukuo, previously known as Manchuria. As an expression of their gratitude towards their liberators, whose benevolent protection they enjoy, they are invited to make a gift of $50,000,000 towards the costs of their liberation from colonial rule of which they are the joyful beneficiaries. This money to be paid in full within six months of the above date.’ There was a collective gasp followed by a high-pitched buzz of outraged conversation. He looked at the angry or incredulous expressions around the table and his whole face seemed to collapse. His voice was empty and flat. ‘Truly, I do not know what to do. I have been to see the General and explained that this is a fantastic sum, way beyond our means. He declares the order to have come straight from Tokyo and that, if we fail to meet it, he will be forced to take harsh measures against us.’
There was a shocked silence. Then, at the far end of the table, Loh Ching coughed softly. All eyes swivelled towards him. His voice was a dry rustle, like wind through rice stalks.
‘This is a serious matter and I am surprised that Mr Fong seems to have learned nothing from the British. What did they do whenever they wished to increase taxation or tighten immigration regulations, or when we asked them to lower import duties? First they would need to consult, appoint a special committee to examine what might be done in the greatest possible detail and draft a report. If the change might be unpopular, it would be necessary to prepare public opinion for the sake of public order, which would take even more time. It might be necessary to implement any such change gradually in stages to prevent hot-headed young men taking to the streets or the undermining of other programmes that were dear to government’s heart—let us say—the recruiting of voluntary defence forces. It might well be inevitable that they give some small concession in return, something that cost them very little but meant much to us, the release of our people from jail or some such. With the best will in the world, it might take years to bring such a thing to a satisfactory conclusion without disturbing the smooth administration of our city, for they are asking us to pay for the bullets they shoot us with. The Japanese are a young and hasty people, angry and cruel like immature boys, and therefore much given to shouting and yelling, whereas we are an old civilisation that appreciates peace. They will need our help. We must soothe and calm them, advance when they retreat, retreat only when they advance.’ HK flushed to the roots of his hair at such chiding but he smiled and inclined his head, seeing here a chance to spread the blame.
‘As always, Loh Ching sees further than any of us. Perhaps he might therefore take personal charge of this matter where his wisdom and experience might bring great benefit?’ Loh Ching smiled back sadly but with hard eyes. He was not about to put himself stupidly between a wild beast and its prey as HK had done.
‘Alas, this is a job for younger men, those who have been educated abroad and understand the ways of the foreign world as I do not. This advancing and retreating, I believe, is nothing but the technique of ballroom dancing of which Mr Fong is held to be such a proud master at the German Club, is it not?’ A hiss of contemptuous laughter ran round the table. Blood thundered in HK’s ears and he dug his nails deeper into the armrests of his chair of office. ‘Like the Japanese, I am delighted to entrust the resolution of such an important concern entirely to our gifted, young chairman.’
* * *
The land on which the Botanic Gardens stood was given to the Government by the merchant Whampoa in the 19th century. Although he was a lover of plants and owner of a private garden that was itself a major public attraction, the gesture had not been motivated entirely by philanthropy since he had received, in exchange, a narrow, but much more valuable strip of rock and bitter sand—totally barren—but situated right on the Singapore waterfront. Each morning, the garden emerged afresh from the mists so that to walk across its dew-drenched lawns was to leave a track as in virgin snow. Gently undulant, with a lake that had once housed a crocodile and a jungle that still attracted insolent monkeys, it was, like all botanical gardens, a world in miniature, a dream made flesh, a closed green sphere fenced around with living trees that displayed the apparent benevolence of Nature, a claim to paradise. In contrast to the randomness of primary forest, every plant here actually recalled a human decision, being placed not to reproduce but to pout and pose with a self-knowledge normally only borne by mankind. Each one spoke equally of human passion, of the mystical urge to recreate the primordial Garden of Eden—from which Man had been expelled by a lethal coalition of apple and serpent—and of a scientific obsession with taxonomy and completeness.
The war had brought certain changes of which the casually wandering visitor, still permitted, would probably have been unaware, for the gardens carefully maintained their public face of weeded paths and bordering flowers. In the past there had been conflict between pure botanical and commercial research and between both and the public call for loud carnations and bright bandstands. But behind the scenes, the workers now no longer merely tended the land, they embraced it carnally, lived off it, consumed its yield—fired with chillis and ginger pillaged from the Spice Garden—to supplement their scanty diet. It had become a self-supporting, country estate, plucked from the 18th century. The roof of the Director’s house had been repaired with palm-leaves stripped straight from the fragment of preserved jungle. The lake that once teemed with cosseted carp was now regularly fished, not by probing ichthyologists, but by hungry undergardeners with nets of grim efficiency. Even the indolent palms found themselves harnessed to factory production, tapped for sugar and soapy palm wine in the Economic Garden, whose aspirational name became truer by the day. Tapioca, it had been discovered, fermented and distilled, yielded a brandy that revived the dead and almost killed the living and a steady trickle was coaxed from an apparatus housed in a lesser potting shed to raise the morale of administrative staff and soothe the semi-alcoholism of expats. Petrol shortages had led to the acquisition of a breeding pair of goats to munch the lawns smooth while yielding periodic feasts of milk and kid meat. Vegetables and fruits had insinuated themselves beneath the canopy of the protected forest and nested discreetly in amongst the undergrowth as it was surreptitiously de-flowered and, on the trellis where rose and woodbine had once artfully twined, now clambered practical rattan and nourishing long beans. In the early morning chill, despised skills of village and forest—once relegated to the ethnographic section of the museum—were softly taken up again and thumbs that had coolly flipped beer tops and flared lighters now again plaited twine held taut by bare big toes grown stiff in fancy shoes. Around the gardens, little local monopolies established themselves, bringing racial division into the world of culture but breeding solidarity through the need for exchange. Indian toddy-makers warred on Chinese fishermen and both were disdained by Malay farmers but coconuts and little leaf packages of tobacco still circulated in silent and peaceful compromise. But Paradise was sapped by other small flaws. For Europeans, it was the lack of potatoes that grew well enough at first but then abruptly burst and rotted in the steamy heat. For Asians, it was the absence of rice whose special needs precluded discreet cultivation. For both, gritty, tasteless tapioca became a substitute and a penance, the resented starch of life. And Catchpole, like a medieval pope, levied an imperial tithe on it all on threat of denunciation to the Professor, who had already silently noted and winked at al
l this, as long as the academic work and collections were maintained and gross unfairness avoided. Then, to Catchpole’s horror, one morning, Professor Tanakadate had had the workmen set up a big banner blessing all these illegal cultivations as a magnificent ‘Victory Garden’ in which the employees demonstrated their loyalty to the Rising Sun and from which other Singaporeans might learn. And so secret tithe became lawful tribute and stalking Catchpole was rudely stripped of his power and income.
The Herbarium had always drawn Pilchard powerfully and now he returned to it as to a haven of order and tranquillity that worked according to the slow rain-soaked time of plants and the Catholic Church, not the jostling and impertinent time of Man. It was to him what wine cellars are to others. Its very smell, rich with ecclesiastical overtones of the inevitability of decay and growth, carried a metaphor, on the air, of comforting rebirth and tranquil eternity and offered a peace of mind that he thought of as compost mentis. The blinds, ‘tatties’, were lowered over the windows, against the heavy heat, so that colours receded to muted shades of sepia and light itself was thickened and slowed. Ranges of shiny mahogany cabinets with brass fittings stretched along the walls, each opening to disclose confident, racked drawers, each numbered drawer containing stiff folders of dried samples, laced to the page and identified in browning natural ink harvested from squid. Some were a hundred years old, delicately fading to dust, others new, a sheen still upon them, their place determined not by secular chronology but the timeless Linnaean classifications according to which God or evolution had created the world. Yet the Nature that had born them was also their prime enemy. They had to be regularly checked for infestation by chewing mite and boring beetle. In the wet season, fungus bloomed, for in the tropics there were eager spores and eggs everywhere looking for a home.
Pilchard was surprised to find Catchpole there, acid-free folders spread about him at a table. Pilchard peered over his shoulder, looking down into the seam of the gone-to-seed toupée that was visibly moulting. On his neck, a boil was sprouting, coming nicely to the boil in fact, and Catchpole picked at it’s snowy peak absent-mindedly. He was playing with his rubber plants. In the Gardens, everyone had to be able to turn his hand to any subject and here, by selective breeding, they had produced generations of freakish, musclebound varieties that pumped out ever more prophylactic latex.
‘Where’s Dagama?’ Dagama was the gaunt and moustachioed Eurasian who ran the Herbarium with a rule of iron but a heart of gold. Catchpole frowned and his forehead moved up freely under his wig, lubricated by sweat. A Herbarium was a sort of library not, therefore, a place of casual conversation.
‘Gone,’ he said curtly in a church whisper and returned to his folders. Catchpole was northern and had that form of extreme rudeness that Yorkshiremen call, with pride, ‘plain-spokenness’.
‘Gone? Gone where? Why are you whispering? There’s no one else here. You won’t wake up the plants.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, man, who can tell. These days people disappear without leaving so much as a glass slipper behind. Actually …’ he showed smug rodent teeth behind fat lips, ‘… it’s sort of funny. You know those fungi spores he was always so keen on—cryptogams? Well, apparently, the Nips went crazy after those warships of theirs were blown up by the commandos in the harbour and started sniffing around everywhere for spies. You wouldn’t know about it, of course, tucked away snugly in Changi but they put the fear if god up the rest of us, exposed out here. In fact, we feared for our lives.’
‘Really? In Changi, we feared for our deaths.’
‘Well … cryptogams … cryptograms …’ He see-sawed with his hands and smirked. ‘You can see how they’d get muddled up—perfectly understandable—the Nips’ Ancient Greek maybe a bit rusty—so it’s my belief they hauled him off as some sort of secret codes expert. I repeatedly warned him cryptogam was a classificatorily obsolete term. Actually, I heard on the QT they took him to Outram Road and he didn’t exactly get the best room. I shouldn’t think he’ll be back.’ Said with some satisfaction. Pilchard wondered for a second if Catchpole had been at the collection preserved in spirits but he had always hated poor, gentle Dagama, wanted to get his own hands on the Herbarium, the memory of the gardens, the voice of posterity. It occurred to him to ask just who had let on about the cryptogams. Was this the voice of reason or the voice of treason? Catchpole looked at his watch with piggy eyes.
‘Lunch!’ he cried excitedly and leapt to his feet like a dog hearing its bowl rattled. Now he was all loud chatter. ‘The old man’s a stickler for timekeeping, a gentleman of the old school. I didn’t know Japanese were big on the concept of “gentleman”. A few weeks back we had a meeting about how to deal with the army’s trespassing on the garden from the north and everybody decided what we needed was more fencing. The anti-aircraft gunners had moved in you see, made themselves at home. But the Prof got hold of the wrong end of the stick and turned up the next day with a rapier and face guard, ready to throw down a gauntlet in challenge and take them all on. He keeps going on about bullshito, you know, the samurai code.’
‘Bushido? But bushido is a word of Chinese origin. It was invented at the very end of the 19th century by an American-Japanese Quaker who wrote a book for foreigners called—I think—The Soul of Japan in English. Only later was it translated into Japanese so they came to believe it about themselves. We have—had—a copy in the Library though I can’t claim to have read it.’
Catchpole considered him coolly. ‘Now, that’s just the sort of remark that gets you into trouble, old boy, disparaging, juvenile. You never learn do you? I’d keep that bit of wisdom to myself it I were you, hide your light under a bushel, or the old man might well send you straight back to Changi. He’s quite capable of it. Sometimes, when he looks at you, you can see he’s thinking the space you occupy might be better spent on having a volcano put in.’
Meals for senior staff in the garden were nowadays a communal affair and under the jurisdiction of Ong Kam Yeng, a thin, spidery man with sad eyes, once Pilchard’s own cook, now promoted to greater eminence and retaining no residual loyalty. His first move had been to install his nephews, identical twins nicknamed Ping and Pong, as assistants in the kitchen but also about the gardens generally. It was not clear whether these were their real names or a mark of European confusion or just contempt for Asian difference. The brothers deliberately perplexed everyone, joyfully swapping identities back and forth at will and confirming the Western prejudice that all Chinese looked alike and were ultimately interchangeable.
Even before the occupation, racial divisions were unspokenly enforced, here, as across the whole island, and senior staff had eaten apart. Everyone knew that ‘senior’ meant ‘white’ and now also ‘Japanese’. Eurasians and other hybrids had always been difficult to place but the disappearance of Dagama and the others had relieved that anomaly and restored the calm of a more classical taxonomy. Nowadays, meals began, not with prayers but with what was known as the ‘presentation of parts’. Catchpole had brought a large bunch of edible fern shoots tied up with twine. Ong Kam Yeng handled them with a grudging acceptance. The Professor offered two duck eggs, the sort of luxury only a Japanese could command. Dr Post unwrapped a newspaper parcel. The headline read ‘Japan victorious all over East!’. They must be doing badly then. Ong grunted and probed the bloodied contents. ‘Two squirrel—tupai. I make one pie from your two tupai.’ Tiny Dr Hanada dug in his briefcase and bowed as he offered an immaculate unripe tomato and an obscene and hairy yam, both whisked away. And then Ong was there at Pilchard’s shoulder with the expression a wife has on her face when she is waiting for you in the hall at two in the morning on payday with her arms crossed and you are drunk and the money is gone.
‘I had a can of beans. I will find them and bring them tomorrow. A beanfeast.’
Ong made a lemon-sucking face and reached to repossess fork and spoon. ‘You bring tomorrow. You eat tomorrow.’
‘Is that Confucius?’
The Prof
essor looked up over half-moon glasses and batted tired eyelids as a father will at children squabbling over the breakfast table. ‘Mr Ong. Dr Pilchard has not yet been assigned a speciality. We must be patient. Let us wait until tomorrow for his contribution.’ Ong rescinded cutlery, grunted and left, overruled but unmollified. ‘Perhaps Pilchard-san you might look into the Orchid House until your strength has returned. The hybridization programme is a mess, the documentation is dreadful.’ Pilchard nodded. He detested orchids, the temperamental, leggy showgirls of the plant world, flowers on a stick, denying the reality that all plants ultimately made their living from dirt. ‘You know, gentlemen, there is a strange imbalance in all botanic gardens. In cold countries we cultivate tropical plants under glass in artificial heat. But no one in hot countries ever cultivates temperate plants in artificial cold. It is what you might call the asymmetry of colonised places. Like your own, Japan is a country of the West and of the cold North and so not part of the exotic East.’ His face lit up briefly as if with the glow of reflecting snow. ‘We might think of it in the future but I am afraid the Emperor’s birthday …’ He stopped. Etiquette demanded he now stand and bow to that East of which Japan was not a part, at the mention of His Name, but these were not Japanese so … ‘falls in three months’ time. It would be … helpful … yes that is the word … helpful, if we were able to name a new orchid after him and send something off to Tokyo or even General Yamashita …’ his eyes shone ‘… a variant of the Tiger Orchid for him perhaps, a nice container, some elegant calligraphy … I can do that part. As we say “We must grind up sesame seeds” for we depend on the powerful. Could you see if we have anything far enough along that might do, Dr Pilchard? A nuisance but truly … helpful.’
