The Empire Trilogy (200 page)

But then one day in his second year of captivity, while he was out with a working party on the road, a young Chinese brushed up against him and pressed something into his hand. He looked at it surreptitiously: it was a cigarette packet wrapped in a handkerchief. When he opened it he put his head in his hands: it contained a lump of sugar and two cooked white mice. And he thought: ‘Well, who knows? At least there's a chance. Perhaps she'll survive after all, and so will I.'

But more years pass and yet more. Let us suppose that Kate Blackett, now a woman with grown-up children of her own, is sitting at her breakfast-table in a quiet street in Bayswater. Kate has a pleasant, kindly, humorous look (as characters tend to have when their author treats them well) and this is an agreeable room she is having breakfast in: on the wall there is a charming painting by Patricia Moynagh of a curled-up cat, and a delightful, serene painting by Mary Newcomb of several people standing on a ferry, and another of a dog peacefully asleep surrounded by red flowers. Through the window, from where she is sitting, there is a glimpse of garden in which a cat is trying to catch butterflies … Or rather, no. Let us suppose that it is winter. Rub out the cat, erase the butterflies and let us move back inside where it is warmer.

Opposite Kate at the table is a man reading
The Times
for 10 December 1976. Kate can see nothing of this man (her husband, let us hope) but some grey hair on top of his head and two hands holding up the newspaper. Does he wear glasses? It is impossible to say. His face is hidden by the newspaper. The fingers which are holding it are long and slender and he is wearing a green sweater … (we can see part of its sleeve) and that is all there will be of him until he decides to put down the newspaper. Well, not quite all, however, for presently he speaks to Kate with a slight drawl. An Australian perhaps? From his voice he could be English, though, or even an American who has lived a long time in England. Perhaps, then, Kate has married Ehrendorf, that incorrigible Anglophile, who has at last come to his senses and realized which was the most attractive of the Blackett girls.

‘Listen to this, Kate,' he says. ‘Here's something that might interest a rubber tycoon's daughter: “Plantation work pays less than one dollar a day.” From Our Correspondent, Geneva, 9 December. “Millions of workers on rubber, sugar, tea, cotton or coffee plantations are earning less than $1 (62p) a day, according to the International Labour Office.” Let me see, what else does it say? Trade union rights … et cetera … malnutrition … disease .. Yes … “Many migrant workers on rubber or sugar plantations live in conditions of acute overcrowding. Sometimes there are up to 100 workers in one large room.” Daily wage rates … And so on. There.'

Kate looks around the room vaguely but says nothing. Singapore seems very far away to her now, and no longer quite real … a magical place where she spent her childhood. Why, Malaya is no longer even called Malaya. Things that once seemed immutable have turned out to be remarkably vulnerable to change.

Or have they? That man behind the newspaper, if it were Ehrendorf, let us say, and if he happened to remember his arguments of years ago with Matthew about colonialism and tropical agriculture, might he not, as his eye was caught by that headline ‘Plantation work pays less than one dollar a day', have said to himself that nothing very much had changed, after all, despite that tremendous upheaval in the Far East? That if even after independence in these Third World countries, it is
still
like that, then something has gone wrong, that some other, perhaps native, élite has merely replaced the British? If it
were
Ehrendorf might he not have recalled that remark of Adamson's (passed on to him by Matthew) about King William and the boatman who asked who had won the battle (‘What's it to you? You'll still be a boatman.')?

But Ehrendorf, with his good manners, would surely have put down the newspapers by now or would at least have given part of it to Kate to read. Instead of which this individual has by now moved on to read about some other matter in some other part of the world, leaving Kate to gaze out of the window at the garden where it is suddenly summer again and a cat is trying to catch a butterfly. In any case …

In any case, there is really nothing more to be said. And so, if you have been reading in a deck-chair on the lawn, it is time to go inside and make the tea. And if you have been reading in bed, why, it is time to put out the light now and go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, as they say, as they say.

Among those works listed below which have been most valuable in this attempt to recreate the Far East of forty years ago I am particularly indebted to Professor P. T. Bauer's work on the rubber industry and especially to his classic report on smallholdings prepared for the Colonial Office in 1946 which, with J. S. Furnivall's
Colonial Policy and Practice
, first suggested to me another angle from which to consider the British Empire. The passage from
The Planter
in 1930 read by Matthew in the dying-house is quoted in Bauer,
The Rubber Industry
, p. 285. R. C. H. MacKie's
This Was Singapore
, the most evocative description of Singapore between the wars, also exerted a considerable influence on certain scenes. For Chinese love terminology I have relied chiefly on the fascinating
Yin Yang, The Chinese Way of Love
by Charles Humana and Wang Wu, though here and there I have been unable to resist taking a hand in it myself. Finally, no one could consider writing about the military campaign without making use of the outstanding work of the official historian, the late Major-General S. Woodburn Kirby.

Books apart, I am grateful to old Singapore hands, particularly Mrs Enid Sutton and Mr Richard Phelps, who have enlightened me about life there in those days, as well as to those inhabitants of modern Singapore who gave me their hospitality and help, especially Mr Nick Bridge of the New Zealand High Commission, and Mr Donald Moore. I would also like to thank: Mr Lacy Wright and Miss Thé-anh Cao who kindly showed me Saigon in the last few weeks before it became ‘Ho Chi Minh City', Mr Ian Angus of King's College Library, London, my brother, Robert Farrell, of the University of Victoria Library, a constant source of good ideas and information, and Giorgio and Ginevra Agamben, from whom I first heard of the ‘Singapore Grip'. Lastly, without a generous contribution from Booker McConnell Ltd for an earlier novel it would have been financially difficult for me to write this one.

Abend, Hallett,
Chaos in Asia
(London 1940)

Abend, Hallett,
My Years in China
(London 1944)

Allen, G. C. and Donnithorne A.,
Western Enterprise in Indonesia and Malaya
(London 1957)

Anon.,
The Bells Go Down
(London 1944)

Attiwill, K.,
The Singapore Story
(London 1959)

Barber, Noel,
Sinister Twilight
(London 1968)

Baring, Maurice,
Flying Corps Headquarters 1914–1918
(London 1968)

Barnett, Robert W.,
Economic Shanghai
(New York 1941)

Bauer, P. T., Colonial Office:
Report on a visit to the Rubber Growing Smallholdings of Malaya
(London 1946)

Bauer, P. T.,
The Rubber Industry
(London 1948)

Catroux, G. A. J.,
Deux Actes du Drame Indochinois
(Paris 1959)

Clune, Frank,
All Aboard for Singapore
(Sydney 1941)

Connell, John,
Wavell
(London 1969)

Cooper, Duff,
Old Men Forget
(London 1953)

Dalton, Clive,
A Child in the Sun
(London 1937)

Decoux, J.,
A la Barre de l'Indochine
(Paris 1950)

Dixon, Alec,
Singapore Patrol
(London 1935)

Donahue, A. G.,
Last Flight from Singapore
(London 1944)

Fauconnier, H.,
Malaisie
(Paris 1930)

Federated Malay States,
Annual Report of Labour Department 1941

Firestone, Harvey S. and Crowther S.,
Men and Rubber
(New York 1926)

Furnivall, J. S.,
Colonial Policy and Practice
(London 1948)

Gilmour, O. W.,
Singapore to Freedom
(London 1943)

Glover, E. M.,
In Seventy Days
(London 1946)

Gull, E. M.,
British Economic Interests in the Far East
(London 1943)

Gunther, John,
Inside Asia
(London 1939)

Hahn, E.,
Raffles of Singapore
(Singapore and Kuala Lumpur 1968)

Hastain, R.,
White Coolie
(London 1947)

Hobson, J. A.,
Imperialism
(London 1938)

Humana, Charles and Wang Wu,
Yin Yang
(London 1971)

Kirby, Major-General S. Woodburn,
The War Against Japan
vol. 1 (London 1957)

Kirby, Major-General S. Woodburn,
Singapore, The Chain of Disaster
(London 1971)

Lief, A.,
The Firestone Story
(New York 1951)

MacKie, R. C. H.,
This Was Singapore
(London 1942)

Maxwell, Sir G.,
The Civil Defence of Malaya
(London 1944)

Mills, L. A.,
British Rule in East Asia
(London 1942)

Morrison, Ian,
Malayan Postscript
(London 1942)

Onraet, R.,
Singapore, A Police Background
(London 1947)

Owen, Frank,
The Fall of Singapore
(London 1960)

Percival, Lieutenant-General A. E.,
The War in Malaya
(London 1949)

Playfair, Giles,
Singapore Goes Off the Air
(London 1944)

Priestley, J. B.,
Postscripts
(London 1940)

Richardson, M. L.,
London's Burning
(London 1941)

Rose, Angus,
Who Dies Fighting
(London 1944)

Schumpeter, E. B.,
The Industrialisation of Japan and Manchukuo
(Cambridge, Mass. 1940)

Simson, Brigadier Ivan,
Singapore: Too Little, Too Late
(London 1970)

Stahl, K. M.,
The Metropolitan Organisation of British Trade
(London 1951)

Stewart, Brigadier I. M.,
The History of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 2nd Battalion 1941–2
(London 1947)

Teeling, L. W. B.,
Gods of Tomorrow
(London 1936)

Tsuji, M.,
Singapore, The Japanese Version
(London 1962)

Willis, A. C.,
Singapore Guide
(Singapore 1936)

The author and publishers are grateful to the following sources: Constable & Co. Ltd for permission to quote from
170 Chinese Poems
translated by Arthur Waley; Eyre & Spottiswoode for permission to quote an extract from
The War in Malaya
by A. E. Percival; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. for permission to quote from the MGM release
The Ziegfeld Girl
© 1941 Loew's Incorporated. Copyright renewed in 1967 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.; and Leo Feist Inc. for permission to quote from three songs: ‘You Stepped out of a Dream' by N. H. Brown and G. Khan © 1940 renewed 1968 MGM Inc., all rights administered by Leo Feist Inc.; ‘Minnie from Trinidad' by R. Edens © 1941 renewed 1969 Leo Feist Inc.; and ‘Caribbean Love Song' by R. Edens and R. Freed © 1941 renewed 1969 Leo Feist Inc.; to EMI Music Publishing Ltd for permission to quote an extract from ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square' by Eric Maschwitz, © 1940 Peter Maurice Music Co. Ltd.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1978 by James G. Farrell

Introduction copyright © 1999 by Derek Mahon, adapted from the foreword

to
J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer
by Lavinia Greacen (Bloomsbury, 1999)

and used by kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farrell, J. G. (James Gordon), 1935–

The Singapore grip / by J. G. Farrell ; introduction by Derek Mahon.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

1. Singapore—History—Siege, 1942—Fiction. 2. Rubber industry and trade—

Fiction. 3. British—Singapore—Fiction. 4. Strikes and lockouts—Fiction.

5. Sieges—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

PR6056.A75S585 2005

823'.914—dc22

2004030522

J. G. FARRELL
(1935–1979) was born with a caul, long considered a sign of good fortune. Academically and athletically gifted, Farrell grew up in England and Ireland. In 1956, during his first term at Oxford, he suffered what seemed a minor injury on the rugby pitch. Within days, however, he was diagnosed with polio, which nearly killed him and left him permanently weakened. Farrell's early novels, which include
The Lung
and
A Girl in the Head
, have been overshadowed by his Empire Trilogy—
Troubles
, the Booker Prize-winning
Siege of Krishnapur
, and
The Singapore Grip
(all three are published by NYRB Classics). In early 1979, Farrell bought a farmhouse in Bantry Bay on the Irish coast. “I've been trying to write,” he admitted, “but there are so many competing interests—the prime one at the moment is fishing off the rocks..... Then a colony of bees has come to live above my back door and I'm thinking of turning them into my feudal retainers.” On August 11, Farrell was hit by a wave while fishing and was washed out to sea. His body was found a month later. A biography of J. G. Farrell,
J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer
by Lavinia Greacen, was published by Bloomsbury in 1999.

* * *

JOHN BANVILLE
was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of twelve novels, including
The Book of Evidence
, which was short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize,
The Untouchable
, and
Eclipse
.