by Nigel Barley
‘Catchpole! What’s all this fuss about? Sounds like an Irish Parliament out here.’ Now even the two who had been working stopped and looked up. His deputy produced a slouching gesture, half salute, half retainer’s touching of the forelock. He did not actually touch his forelock, for fear of disturbing his wig. Did the man really think he was fooling anyone with that damn thing sitting on his head like a duck’s nest?
‘It’s Raffles, Sir. They’ve come to take him back.’
Spratt pouted. The statue was being moved from the Museum and restored to relevance and the loss of Raffles might be considered a diminution of his own power, like the loss of a valuable hostage. But he preferred to see it as the extension of his reach to wherever the statue was now to stand. It had been agreed that only his staff could clean it of pigeon droppings, an important stipulation that he would not let slip. By degrees, slow increments of excrement, all the scattered public monuments of Singapore could be gathered under his skirts to form a gleaming, new empire of antiquities.
‘Where did they finally decide to put him?’
‘He’s going back outside the theatre with a nice new flower bed and some tasteful urns. There is talk of a fountain. He got rather too many footballs in the neck on the Padang. It seems some people used to aim at him deliberately.’ Catchpole shrugged. ‘Politics. Quite literal loss of face.’ His own multiplicity of chins was growing back nicely.
‘Jolly good. Carry on. What about our new acquisitions—the Japanese memorials? All shipshape and Bristol fashion?’
Catchpole looked shifty. ‘Sorry, Sir. I’m afraid events rather overtook us there. The sappers blew them all up yesterday, including the Shinto temple. No sense of history, I’m afraid, and it seems they had to use up those out of date explosives from the stores before the new inventory could be made. We might be able to get a few fragments …?’
‘Let it go, I think.’ Spratt stifled a smile. Perhaps it was all for the best. History itself was never wrong about what to keep and what to do away with. ‘You’ve organised the fund-raising bash for this evening? Everything tickety-boo?’
‘Yes, Major. The chairwoman, Mrs Rosenkranz, was just on the blower from the Austrian embassy, said she’s turning up at four to lay on the catering and selection of Austrian wines. She’s bringing along two stray Austrian admirals—both Rear and Vice—so we’ll be well covered at both ends. It seems they have a few left over. Do they even have a navy now? As you can imagine, they’re rather keen to impress our military.’ His voice dropped. ‘She was quite firm no Russians were to be invited under any circumstances.’
Spratt smacked his own leg with the swagger stick as though punishing an impure thought. ‘Damned fine woman, Mrs Rosenkranz—you know the Japs always suspected her of being involved in that brave attack on those swine from Changi, Fukui and the others. She should get a medal but I don’t think we need any instruction from her as far as Russians are concerned. As it is, Catchpole, Russians have no money and are not welcome. They sometimes come as uninvited guests, as the Austrians should be the first to understand. Don’t they know the war’s over? But make sure those admirals are on the guest list. Lists, man! Lists! We can’t have people just wandering about. There’s been far too much of it. Too much slackness all round.’
Major Spratt quick-marched over to the portico and looked out testily. The untidy riff-raff that had been camping out there had been removed and the grass was growing back encouragingly, if a trifle unevenly, and, next door, the gingerbread YMCA had been closed up, boards nailed over the windows, until some final decision could be made about it. Such was the power of recent history that the locals had it that it was haunted and avoided it like the plague. Sounds had been heard by those passing late at night, screams, howls, hellish laughter. Predawn lights had been glimpsed dancing will-o’-the-wispishly behind the glass as in some witches’ coven. Babies had allegedly disappeared from nearby houses and nursing mothers felt ghostly suckling at their breasts at night as strange sweet smells hovered in the air, to be suddenly replaced by foul miasmas of decay so that the Malays spoke knowingly of lurking pontianaks. All the usual stuff. He knew there was no point in talking to them about drains and subsidence and bat infestation. The building’s reputation had made it easier to clear away the squatters but might now be affecting the museum’s own visitor numbers by contagion, so it would need to be looked into sensibly. Perhaps another job for those sappers who so liked to make a nice bang in public every now and then. The important thing was that the museum’s dome had been repaired and the front gate repainted—even if the strategic shortage of volatile hydrocarbons meant that it was still wet two weeks later. Although the British had scattered great cities across the globe, they were all comfortingly provincial and could be read in much the same way. Everything in its place. Above the dome, a Union Jack. Beneath the dome, the Singapore Stone glowed in the early evening sun, giving back the heat it had soaked up during the day, and he paused and looked down on the writing and felt brief irritation flare at its incomprehensibility, what seemed like its deliberate and smug obfuscation. Catchpole had enthusiastically shown him a letter from a clearly deranged Malacca man claiming to have decoded it acrostically into statements prophetic of football scores in the Malay League, according to clues taken from the Times of India crossword. Talk English damn you. Too many confounded empires. All the mess and fuss of change, all these monuments cancelling each other out, not to mention the expense. At least that was all over now. A time for rest and relaxation, consolidation and conservation. Back to basics and back to business as usual. He took a deep breath of the soothing, aromatic air and about-turned smartly back into the museum.
Also by Nigel Barley, published by Monsoon Books…
Rogue Raider
The tale of Captain Lauterbach and the Singapore Mutiny
NIGEL BARLEY
It is the First World War and Julius Lauterbach is a German prisoner of war in the old Tanglin barracks of Singapore. He is also a braggart, a womaniser and a heavy drinker and through his bored fantasies he unwittingly triggers a mutiny by Muslim troops of the British garrison and so throws the whole course of the war in doubt. The British lose control of the city, its European inhabitants flee to the ships in the harbour and it is only with the help of Japanese marines that the Empire is saved.
Rogue Raider is the adventure story of how one ship, the Emden, tied up the navies of four nations and how one man eluded their agents in a desperate yet hilarious attempt to regain his native land. It is fictionalised history but a true history that was deliberately suppressed by the authorities of the time as too embarrassing and dangerous to be known. Revealed here, it brings vividly to life the Southeast Asia of the period, its sights, its sounds and its rich mix of peoples. And through it an unwilling participant in the war becomes an accidental hero.
Island Of Demons
NIGEL BARLEY
Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it.
In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies — ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter — transformed the perception of Bali from that of a remote island to become the site for Western fantasies about Paradise and it underwent an influx of foreign visitors. The rich and famous flocked to Spies’ house in Ubud and his life and work forged a link between serious academics and the visionaries from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton and many others sought to experience the vision Spies offered while Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their day, attempted to capture the secret of this tantalizing and enigmatic culture.
Island of Demons is a fascinating historical novel, mixing anthropology, the history of ideas and humour. It offers a unique insight into that complex and multi-hued world that was so soon to be swept away, exploring both its ideas and the larger than life characters t
hat inhabited it.
In The Footsteps Of Stamford Raffles
NIGEL BARLEY
Stamford Raffles is that rarest of things — a colonial figure who is forgotten at home but still remembered with affection abroad. Born into genteel poverty in 1781, he joined the East India Company at the age of fourteen and worked his way up to become Lieutenant Governor of Java when the British seized that island for some five years in 1811. There he fell in love with all things Javanese and vaunted it as a place of civilization as he discovered himself as a man of science as well as commerce. A humane and ever-curious figure, his administration was a period of energetic reform and boisterous research that culminated in his History of Java in 1817 and it remains the starting-point of all subsequent studies of Indonesian culture.
Personal tragedy and ill-health stalked his final years in the East. Yet, though dying at the early age of 44 and dogged by the hostility of lesser men, he would still find time to found the city-state of Singapore and guide it through its first dangerous years. Here, mythologised by the British and demonised by the Dutch, he is more than a remote founding father and remains a charter for its independence and its enduring values.
In this intriguing book, part history, part travelogue, Nigel Barley re-visits the places that were important in the life of Stamford Raffles and evaluates his heritage in an account that is both humorous and insightful.
“A witty, sprightly and elegantly written book” The Sunday Times, UK
“Alive with curiosity … a charming and affectionate book” Times Literary Supplement, UK
“Barley’s irreverent and amusing tone … makes his work accessible to all” New York Times Review of Books, USA
About Monsoon Books
Monsoon Books is a leading independent publisher of English-language books and ebooks on Southeast Asia. We publish literary and commercial fiction (historical, crime, thriller, kid’s, romance, erotica) and quality nonfiction (biography and autobiography, true crime, food and drink, sexuality, journalism, travelogue and current affairs) from outstanding writers worldwide and we have numerous bestsellers to our name.
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About The Author
Nigel Barley was born south of London in 1947. After taking a degree in modern languages at Cambridge, he gained a doctorate in anthropology at Oxford. Barley originally trained as an anthropologist and worked in West Africa, spending time with the Dowayo people of North Cameroon. He survived to move to the Ethnography Department of the British Museum and it was in this connection that he first travelled to Southeast Asia. After forrays into Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Burma, Barley settled on Indonesia as his principal research interest and has worked on both the history and contemporary culture of that area.
After escaping from the museum, he is now a writer and broadcaster and divides his time between London and Indonesia.
Copyright
First published in print by Monsoon Books in 2011
This electronic edition first published in 2012 by Monsoon Books
ISBN (paperback): 978-981-4358-42-2
ISBN (ebook): 978-981-4358-43-9
Copyright©Nigel Barley, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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