Read The Other Side of Paradise Online
Authors: Margaret Mayhew
The Other Side of Paradise
About the Book
She lived only for pleasure…until war made her find courage she did not know she had, and love where she least expected it
.
It is 1941, and while Britain is in the grip of war, ex-pat life in the Far East remains one of wealth and privilege. In Singapore Susan Roper spends her time dancing, playing tennis and flirting with visiting naval officers – her life is devoted solely to pleasure. When she meets an Australian doctor who warns her of the danger that they all face she dismisses him as an ignorant colonial.
Singapore carries on partying, oblivious to the threat of invasion. The British flag will, they believe, protect them from all enemies. But when Japan invades, Susan finds herself in grave danger. As she becomes closer to the tough, arrogant and unsuitable doctor, Susan has to face many hardships before she can acknowledge the truth…
Contents
THE OTHER SIDE
OF PARADISE
Margaret Mayhew
To Memories
Acknowledgements
I have received a great deal of help in researching the background to this novel, and I should like to thank the following kind people.
In England: Geoffrey Howe who personally put me in touch with the British High Commission in Singapore. Daphne Barcroft, Anne Scott, Frances Francis, Joyce Townend and Ros Henry who were all living in Singapore before it fell to the Japanese and who lent me private photographs, letters and accounts of those times. ‘Lofty’ Tolhurst who let me drive his immaculate Austin K2Y ambulance and Richard Brotherton of the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust.
In Singapore: Carole Johnson and the staff at the British High Commission. Geraldine Lowe-Ismail, an exceptional tour guide who showed me the hidden Old Singapore and translated into Malay for me. Dr Perry Travers of the Alexandra Hospital. Ray Perry, general manager of the Singapore Cricket Club. Stefan Voogel, general manager of the Tanglin Club and Mary Shotam and Nan Sandford also of the club. Leslie Danker at Raffles Hotel. Nancy Cheng and her mother Joon Eng. Pat Monkman at the Eurasian Association.
The following books have been of particular interest and help to me.
The Fall of Singapore
by Frank Owen,
Out in the Midday Sun
by Margaret Shennan,
White Coolies
by Betty Jeffrey,
Sinister Twilight
by Noel Barber,
Malayan Postscript
by Ian Morrison,
You’ll Die in Singapore
by Charles McCormac,
Shenton of Singapore
by Brian Montgomery,
Journey by Candlelight
by Anne Kennaway.
As always, I thank my editor at Transworld, Linda Evans, and last of all, but never least, my husband, Philip.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall
.
Proverbs
0! What a fall was there, my countrymen;
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down
.
Julius Caesar
Prologue
We lived in Cavenagh Road, Singapore. On the opposite side of the road stood Government House – the palatial white residence of the Governor, positioned on a hill with the Union Jack flying from a flagpole high on the roof. Its hundred immaculate acres were tended by a small army of gardeners, the residence staffed, so rumour had it, by more than seventy household servants.
Our house, owned by my father’s company, was two-storeyed and rather more modest, standing in a mere three acres. It was also whitewashed, with broad eaves and wide colonnaded verandahs fitted with black and white striped rattan roller blinds known as chicks. The chicks were lowered against the burning daytime sun or the torrential monsoon rains and raised in the evening to admit any cooling breezes. The east verandah, furnished with a teak table and chairs, was used for breakfast; the west, with a rattan divan and armchairs cushioned in chintz, was for relaxing with sundowner drinks in the magical hour before nightfall: whisky and soda
stengahs
for my father, iced lime juice for my mother and myself. After dinner the houseboy served coffee and my father drank more
stengahs
and smoked a cigar while insects fluttered and flapped around the lamps. Palms and ferns and flowering tropical plants grew in giant pots – in the rooms, on the verandahs, lining the steps that led down to the lawn where my mother took afternoon tea in the shade of a jacaranda tree.
The house had been built at the turn of the century in a style faithfully echoing Edwardian England, but it had been constructed with the steam heat of Singapore in mind. Louvred shutters and latticework walls ventilated the rooms. The floors were tiled, the sweeping staircase made of cool marble, archways allowed the constant passage of air and the lofty ceilings were equipped with electric fans that revolved night and day. My mother had brought furniture from England – family heirlooms of fine English woods that coped poorly with the heat and humidity and succumbed to the ravages of voracious insects that tried to devour us too. At night we slept under mosquito nets in rooms sprayed by Flit guns.
We had eleven servants – Malay, Chinese and Indian. Our Chinese cook, known as Cookie, had a Chinese assistant and our number one Indian houseboy who served at table and cleaned the downstairs rooms was helped by another Indian boy, number two. Three Chinese
amahs
cleaned and tidied the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, a wash-
amah
did the personal washing and ironing, a Malay
syce
drove the Buick, and two Tamil gardeners –
kebuns
– took care of the grounds. Once a week a
dhobi
came to take the household linen away to be laundered, together with the white drill trousers and shorts that my father wore.
The Indian houseboys wore white trousers and white jackets buttoned to the neck; the Chinese
amahs
silky black trousers and short-sleeved white cotton blouses with high collars, soft and silent slippers on their feet indoors and clog-like
trompahs
outside; the
syce
a sarong, a white
badjhu
and a brown velvet
songkok
on his head; the Tamil gardeners wound brightly coloured garments round their bodies and turbans round their heads and their gums were stained blood red from chewing betel nut. The kitchen and storerooms were in a separate building connected to the back of the house by a tin-roofed walkway and the servants lived behind the house in huts built from attap palms. Some had families and children who lived there too, and my father turned a blind eye to any poor relations who arrived. They were all housed and fed and, if necessary, the doctor was sent to attend them and the bill paid. My mother had never learned more than a few phrases of kitchen Malay and communicated with the servants mainly in pidgin English, whereas my father was fluent in Malay, Cantonese and Tamil. I could speak Malay and some Cantonese.
As a child I was cared for by Nana, a Eurasian
amah
who was the illegitimate offspring of an English
tuan
– the respectful Malay term for sir or mister – and a Chinese girl. Her proper name was Nancy and she had come with impeccable references as nurse, first to my brother and then to me. Her features, hair and skin tone were Chinese and she dressed in Chinese clothes – black trousers and white tunic – but she spoke very good English, which is why my mother had employed her. Her father had died young. He had been a rubber planter, a kind and gentle man who had sat her on his knee and taught her English nursery rhymes, English nursery sayings and English poems learned in his own childhood. I was brought up on them, in turn, just like any child ten thousand miles away in England. I knew
A Child’s Garden of Verses
and all the A.A. Milne books. I knew all about Squirrel Nutkin, Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher and the rest, and about The Owl and the Pussycat going to sea in their beautiful pea-green boat. I knew all the flowers in
A Flower Fairy Alphabet
. I read
Little Black Sambo
and
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
, and
Peter Pan
and
The Secret Garden
. I ate up bread crusts to make my hair curl, stopped pulling hideous faces in case the wind changed, jumped over lines so the bears wouldn’t get me.
Mixed in with English superstitions were some Chinese ones, learned also from Nana. For instance, I knew never to pick up a flower fallen to the ground in case it put a spell on me. Flowers cut from the garden were safe and Nana and I offered those to the fat green glass Buddha who sat on the table at the foot of the staircase, facing the front door. He had been given to my father by a rich Chinese businessman to protect our house from evil spirits, and I loved his smiling face and his fat tummy. We would place fresh flowers in his hand or behind his ear as a mark of respect, and I would, disrespectfully, rub his tummy for luck when I passed by. The Chinese loved colour. Their paper lanterns and silks and paints were always in vivid colours. Black and white signified death and mourning.
It was Nana who taught me Cantonese, but since my mother did not approve of my speaking native languages, we kept it a secret between us. She stayed until I was ten and then left to look after an English baby in another family. She had meant far more to me than my mother and I missed her deeply.
My father had been born in Penang island, on the north-west coast of the Malay peninsula where his father worked for an international bank. In the early days the island was rented from the Sultan of Kedah for one dollar a year and was famous for its beautiful tropical vegetation, for its nutmeg trees and for the cable car that took you up to the top of Penang Hill to admire spectacular views of islands, the silver ocean and distant peaks on the mainland.
Like most English boys in Malaya in those days, my father had been sent away to boarding school in England and it was expected that he would eventually join the bank where my grandfather worked. Instead, he had chosen a career in rubber and at the age of nineteen had started work as assistant to the manager of a remote estate up-country, surrounded by jungle and many miles from civilization. He had learned everything about the rubber trees, planting them and tending them and tapping them, and how to oversee the native workers and how to speak their languages. At the end of three years he had been taken on by a rubber company with offices in Kuala Lumpur.
In those days, single young men employed by such companies were not allowed to marry for several years. In any case, marriageable white girls were in very short supply in Malaya, and when the time came to find a wife my father took his long leave in England. He met my mother at a dinner party in London, fell in love with her, became engaged and, very sensibly, married her before the end of his leave so that he could take her back with him to Malaya. Fiancées left to follow on their own were liable to encounter someone else on the long sea voyage.
My brother, Richard, had been born a year afterwards but he had lived only three months before he had died from a snake bite when a cobra had slithered into his pram. I had been born in September of the following year, 1923, but I never replaced my brother in my mother’s heart.
My mother had hated Malaya from the moment she stepped off the P&O liner from England. She detested the stifling wet heat, the violent thunderstorms, the monsoon downpours, the dirt, the smells, the food, the animals and reptiles and insects, the black, brown and yellow faces gabbling away in strange tongues … almost every single thing about a country that she blamed ever after for the death of her son. And she was bored and homesick for London. In Kuala Lumpur she met the same few people over and over again. Letters took weeks to arrive from Europe, magazines were months out of date, films shown at the cinema even more so. Clothes were out of fashion and the dance tunes played at the Selangor Club were many years old.
However, my father continued to climb steadily up the promotion ladder and was eventually offered a senior post with Malayan Latex, a flourishing rubber export business based in Singapore. I was ten years old when we moved to the house in Cavenagh Road.