I continued to sort and sample.
At some irrational level, he didn’t believe he could die: I knew enough now to feel certain of this. How else to explain his habit of standing up to film under fire, when the troops around him were flat on their bellies? Or his practice of filming in the front line, and even beyond the front line? He never seemed to grow older; well, he might well be safe from age now: might be locked in the frozen youth of the soldier.
He waited, in the darkness behind my chair. The calm voice waited on the tapes, and my grief was ambiguous. Reason said he was probably dead, but emotion said he might still be alive: it was just possible, and the mixture of affection and bafflement that he’d stirred in me as a boy was back again. It reached out to me now from that tropical kingdom of Dis he was lost in, beyond the Thai border.
TWO
THE BELLY OF THE CARP
1.
AUDIO DIARY: LANGFORD
TAPE 1 : SINGAPORE, FEBRUARY 22ND, 1965
—In order to conserve my capital, I’ve decided to live poor. I’ve taken a room in a Chinese shophouse: I like the idea of getting to know Singapore from underneath. I have one bag of clothes, this new tape recorder, and the Leica that I hope’s going to make my fortune.
—Came here to do some freelance work. Arranged this with the Age before I left: pics for a series of articles they’re planning to run on independent Singapore. I also have a reference I can show to the people at the Straits Times.
—I intended eventually to go on to London. But now I’m not sure that I will.
In the first moments of waking, he looks up in puzzlement at the aged ceiling fan revolving above his bed. It’s a strange device to him, and makes a noise like a motor boat. Then it says Singapore, and he remembers where he is. His wristwatch says ten past seven.
I see him here, in Wu Tak Seng’s shophouse: he describes it in loving detail. At twenty-nine, he’s still in the peak physical condition of an athlete; he runs five miles a day religiously, and no doubt comes to consciousness with the sense of his body purring in neutral: perfectly tuned and ready to serve him. The single sheet on the bed has been kicked off during the night; he finds himself naked in the dense, humid warmth of Asia.
A strong shaft of sun comes through a doorway framing sky. He contemplates this for a moment and then stretches, beginning to hear a set of novel sounds. There’s a trilling and whistling of many small birds, as though he’s in an aviary. Half-chanting Chinese voices float up to him and always seem to break off on a note of question, and someone lengthily hawks and spits. Strange mechanical hoots and a persistent, hollow tapping come from somewhere below. He arrived at Paya Lebar airport yesterday evening, on a Qantas 707 from Sydney, and now, as he lies here, the road from the airport unravels again in his head.
His taxi was a rattling Morris Oxford driven by a Sikh, and in the headlights, Asia was disclosed to him for the first time, like a video show arranged for his pleasure. Dim and shadowy, the old road from Paya Lebar was very different from the freeway that brings the air traveler of today into Singapore from Changi: it was a glowing and teeming tunnel of life, walled and roofed over by the dim fronds of palms, and by giant, snake-limbed banyans and rain trees. Dusk became blue-tinged darkness there: malam, the big Malay night, flaring and glimmering with the little mysteries of kerosene and oil lamps. These lit up the humble thatch-and-bamboo matting of kampongs; it was a rural road, Langford says, and that appealed to him immediately. Along it, in endless, festive crowds, flowed the figures of three races: Malay, Indian and Chinese. Slow, creaking bullock carts impeded the Sikh’s taxi, and the turbaned figure at the wheel cursed as though they were not extraordinary. Toy-tiny roadside stalls with awnings the color of paper were memories from another existence: a life of medieval simplicity, always known about, yet forgotten until now. The stream of warm air through the taxi’s open window carried vast vegetable smells; Indians in dhotis pulled handcarts; Chinese in singlets and baggy shorts rode bicycles. There were few cars, then.
Sometimes the course of a life is set by an experience that’s both undemanding and unexpected. A simple drive from the airport had apparently begun this process for Langford, and the voice on the tape develops a soft fervor.
—This is the place I’ve always been waiting for. If there’s any way to stay here, I’m going to do it.
He sits up on the edge of the bed, and begins to look for his clothes.
The room, for which he pays only ten Straits dollars a day, is on the third and topmost floor of a Chinese shophouse on Boat Quay, owned by a merchant called Wu Tak Seng. The two rooms next door are divided into cubicles accommodating whole Chinese families: six or eight people in each. The place is of a kind that very few Europeans in Singapore except the most desperate would ever contemplate renting, even for a few nights. The furnishings are like those in a hostel for derelicts: two metal chairs; a Laminex-topped table; a bare electric bulb. For a wardrobe, there’s a hanging-space in one corner, behind a ragged floral curtain. Yet what Langford proposes to do is to make it his home for the next month. What arrangements there were in the way of showers and lavatories in Wu Tak Seng’s building he doesn’t record; but probably they wouldn’t have been as daunting to him as to someone city-bred. After all, he’d spent most of his life in comfortable familiarity with the outdoor dunny on the farm, and its ancient, somber stink; and he’d taken his regular turn at removing the can, and burying the family shit. His upbringing had made him in many ways indifferent to the comforts and luxuries of this century; it would stand him in good stead, in Asia.
The only source of light and air is the doorway at the end of the bed, opening onto a tiny balcony. Two louvered shutter doors, painted a faded and flaking sky blue, stand permanently open; one of them has a broken hinge, and hangs at an angle. He describes a balcony with a balustrade of crumbling stucco, on which sits a struggling jade plant in an earthenware pot. A bare bamboo washing-pole, angled like the bowsprit of a yacht, projects above the street. Dressed, he walks out there, into sun which pours over him like a thick, scalding soup.
The whistling and trilling he heard on waking is explained: many bamboo cages containing pet birds hang bathed in sunlight above the balconies on both sides. Mingled with their sound is that of a radio playing Chinese music, raised Cantonese voices, chugging marine engines, hooting of river craft, roaring trucks, jingling bicycle bells, and the sounds of many feet: clicking shoes, clacking sandals, and the whisper of feet that are bare. There’s also a dry, rattling noise, subtle as the sound of the naked feet: in the spreading trees that line the Quay, big black pods are shaken by a faint breeze; a sound that will be stitched into his life here.
The radio is quite close, and a female Chinese voice is singing, high and wailing and plaintive as a child‘s, yet sexually tantalizing, hovering on the edges of both discord and sweetness: the melody a blend of Chinese and Western. He’s never before heard a Cantonese love song, and it flowers for him as that most telling of all hybrids, beauty crossed with strangeness. Together with these sounds, a wave of smells comes up to him: cooking rice and pork, rotting cabbage, rubber, the sweetness of sandalwood, and a strong stink of the tidal inlet. He puts both hands on the warm stucco of the balustrade and breathes in Singapore.
He’s perched above the widest part of the river’s tidal basin, its brown water jammed with slipper-shaped sampans. Boat Quay’s curve follows the curve of Singapore River, and lines of misshapen, tile-roofed godowns and shophouses like Wu Tak Seng’s follow this curve into distance, leaning on each other like drunks. The wrought-iron British arch of Elgin Bridge is opposite his balcony; Cavanagh Bridge is visible downriver. A little beyond, he knows, is Singapore harbor, whose space is invisible yet tangible, thrilling as a wind behind the heat.
Just below him, opposite Wu Tak Seng’s doorway, Indian coolies in shorts and singlets are unloading bales of rubber from a low, flat bumboat in the river, on whose bow is a painted eye. The hollow, wooden tapping comes up to him
again: a small Chinese boy clad in a singlet and outsize blue shorts is making his way among the crowd, carrying a polished length of bamboo and a little wooden rod. He has a wide grin and a cast in one eye; he taps with the rod in different sequences, and is summoned by Chinese men in shophouse doorways, who hold him in conversation.
This is puzzling; but today, Langford says, he likes it to be puzzling. On a set of old stone ferry steps going down into the water, tidal debris and garbage lie, and he views even this with pleasure: the mysterious litter of Asia.
He dwells a good deal on this moment. It confirms what he learned on his ride from the airport: that his life’s new direction lies here.
2.
“Really nothing I can do for you, I’m afraid.”
Mr. Chand looked at Langford across the desk with an expression resembling faint surprise. He drew deeply on a cigarette, stubbing it afterwards in an ashtray which held an extraordinary number of butts.
He was Chief of Staff of the Straits Times: a thin, ascetic-looking Indian of about forty, whom Langford would never see again; yet he’s carefully described in the audio diary. I can understand why: in that special time when everything lay ahead, Mr. Chand was guardian of the gate to a fabled land. He’s thus transfigured forever in the lens of youthful hope, with his throaty voice, thick black hair going gray, and the deep lines in his cheeks. His serious, fatigued air was that of many senior journalists, Langford says—as though the tensions and corruptions of the world had reduced him to cynical despair, yet had hardened his resolution to carry on.
Despite the heat, Mr. Chand wore a crisp white business shirt and a narrow, striped tie, and did not perspire. He made Langford feel sweaty and untidy. A number of metal paperweights held down memos, sheets of copy and galley proofs on the desk; edges of paper fluttered like trapped birds in the breeze from an overhead ceiling fan, whose smooth whipping was enviable after the loud chugging of the one in the shophouse. One of the galley proofs read: AMBUSH IN SARAWAK. Malaysian and British Security Forces Trap Indonesian Raiders.
Langford liked this office. The tired rattan chairs reminded him of old Hollywood movies about the East, he says. He was filled with a heady longing for the office and Mr. Chand to accept him; to let him stay. The clatter of typewriters came through the open door, and there was the familiar and welcoming smell of printer’s ink. He’d walked into this white colonial building without an appointment, and had got in to see Mr. Chand simply by announcing himself at the desk downstairs and requesting an interview. He’d produced a copy of a general reference from the Melbourne Age, headed To Whom It May Concern. But Mr. Chand had barely glanced at it.
“We have no vacancies for photographers at present,” Mr. Chand said. “And even if we did—” He opened his hands and then folded them. “Forgive me for pointing this out, Mr. Langford, but since independence, we like to hire Singapore nationals: people who understand this country. The days when British and Australian news people could blow in here and pick up jobs are gone, I’m afraid.”
He could understand that, Langford said. But he wanted to stay in Singapore: he’d taken a great liking to the city.
Mr. Chand’s sober face became a shade more friendly. “Not so pleasant just now,” he said, “with this bloody Indonesian Confrontation. Difficult times here.” He picked up a fresh packet of Players cigarettes and offered one. Langford took it, his hopes beginning to rise.
“You’ve never been out of Australia before?” Mr. Chand asked. “You simply landed here on spec? A bit rash, wasn’t it? But perhaps you have private means.”
He had enough to survive a month or so, Langford said. He lit Mr. Chand’s cigarette and then his own.
Mr. Chand looked through the fresh smoke with narrowed eyes. “You are not running away from something in Australia? No? Then my advice to you, old chap, is to go back. Or on to Britain, perhaps. Much easier for you there.”
He held out his thin, weary hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Langford.”
A black-and-white picture of Wu Tak Seng’s shophouse survives. It also shows a stretch of Boat Quay, with the iron arch of Elgin Bridge in the background. Wu Tak Seng himself is sitting on a varnished wooden chair in his doorway, in singlet and baggy shorts. He’s framed by the sinister shapes of hanging sharks’ fins.
This is one of a number of pictures that Langford shot around the streets of Singapore in that time—some taken for his Age feature articles; others purely for pleasure. They’re becoming historic, now.
Old Singapore, old colonial Asia, had lingered here just long enough for him to capture it in black and white. Soon it would be replaced by a sanitized metropolis of the late twentieth century: a place where there would be little left of Asia. Glass shopping palaces would sell Japanese transistors and designer jeans, and the last of the crumbling old godowns would cower along the river, waiting to be bulldozed. But in 1965, early in the Johnson era, it was all still there: the Singapore of Raffles, Somerset Maugham and Rex Lockhart. It was newly independent, but still part of Malaysia until August, and it remained for a little longer the city that Rex and Diana had known, in the days when they lived at the Cockpit: the old airline pilots’ hotel on Oxley Rise, favored before the War by Qantas Empire Airways flying boat captains, and a favorite now with correspondents on expenses. The Cockpit was where Langford had promised himself he’d move to, when his fortunes turned around.
And the dying British Empire’s military reach also remained, in that year. Singapore was still Britain’s major naval and air base in Southeast Asia, and from here, at the Far East Land Forces Headquarters at Phoenix Park, the region was still policed. The drawling, confident English voices were sounding for a little while longer in the Long Bar at Raffles and in the Tanglin Club, and the shadow of British authority persisted, in this Chinese city on the equator—just as it had long persisted in Tasmania.
He felt at home here, Langford says.
He couldn’t have been farther from home; but I think I understand. Rex Lockhart’s stories of his Singapore heyday had filled out a dream begun in the sleepout, so that Singapore, before it was ever seen, had a private and occult meaning. This emerges in passages in the audio diary.
The first diary entries were no doubt recorded on an impulse, in odd hours in his room in the shophouse. Confiding in the cassette machine must have been a solace, at a time when he was a good deal on his own; and what was at first a comfort evidently became a habit. His first, spoken meditation on Singapore needn’t be quoted. It’s clear to me that the city’s real significance for him lay in areas he found too rarefied to express: his efforts to do so are clumsy, and a little embarrassing. Words weren’t Langford’s medium: his love affair with Singapore is in his pictures, and the pictures are wonderful.
Meanwhile, he nearly starved, after that first month. He became quite ill in the end; yet still he refused to go on to London. The audio diary documents his plight; but he doesn’t reveal his difficulties in his letters home to Marcus and Cliff. He never even asks them for a loan.
But Jim Feng remembered Langford’s situation, when he and I talked in Bangkok.
Mike came into the bar of the York looking thinner each week, he told me. Yes, a little bit thinner every time, he said: a bit more hungry-looking. Not many people manage to do that now, do they? To starve, I mean. Not from your country, anyway. But Mike did. Jesus, he was thin. He laughed: a soft Chinese laugh that might have been sardonic or affectionate—or both.
The old York Hotel (demolished now) was a favorite with journalists, both as a residence and as an unofficial press club, and was patronized as well by Australian jockeys and trainers, who came up to Asia to make fortunes at the tracks in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. Somehow Langford found his way here in his third week in town.
Although he knew no one, he’d learned that the York was a journalists’ hangout. It was on Scott’s Road, next door to the much grander and more expensive Goodwood Park. His photograph of the place sits in front of me: like the Goodwo
od, it was reached through formal gates, and had a drive going up to its entrance. But whereas the Goodwood, remote and haughty on its rise, had a long and impressive driveway, the drive of the York was humbly short, and crossed an open and dangerous monsoon drain. A rambling, tile-roofed old Chinese house that had seen better days, it still had its dignity: two-storied, with black lines of mildew down its dim stucco front, like bloodstains seeping through bandages. Tall old palms stood in tatters, rustling and sighing by the Sino-Greek pillars of the entrance. Batwing doors from a Wild West saloon led into the main bar, which was paneled in beautifully carved Siamese teak.
It was long, cool and cavernous here; customers sat at small round tables, also of teak. Fans flapped and turned in twilit, unlikely heights near the ceiling. There were vast mirrors in gilt frames behind the bar, painted with Chinese birds and flowers, and earthenware spittoons stood in corners, filled with evil black liquid and butts. An aged Hainanese barman in baggy blue trousers and wooden platform sandals shuffled among the tables with drinks, or chopped up ice loudly behind the bar. He had a wise, patient smile, slicked-back gray hair and the flat-backed head of the natives of Hainan island; he made constant loud nose-clearing noises for which he was famous, and was known to the press as Old Charlie. Remembering afternoons in the York, Jim Feng spoke nostalgically of the scuffing of Old Charlie’s sandals on the tiles, and of the sound of the ice being chopped.
At first, Jim said, Mike hung out with the jockeys rather than the correspondents. Maybe because his tight situation embarrassed him. One of them, Les Lonergan, was from Hobart; so Mike got a big welcome. There aren’t so many Tasmanians in the world, are there? They were noisy, friendly little guys, those jockeys—fond of jokes, like Mike. One of Les Lonergan’s party tricks was to disappear inside one of the Shanghai jars in the foyer and make horrible noises; another was to come fast through the batwing doors and then reverse, going out backwards before they closed, like on a rubber band. All those jockeys were making lots of money. Some rode for the trainers who had brought them here; others rode for Singapore stables, and for the Malayan sultans. Les Lonergan rode for the Sultan of Johore.
Highways to a War Page 9
