The Other Side of Paradise (2 page)

Unlike my mother, I loved Malaya and, especially, Singapore. Its very name was magical to me:
Singapura
… Lion City. There is a Malay legend that a Sumatran prince visiting the island spotted a lion while he was sheltering from a storm and took it as a good omen to found a city. There may have been lions on the island once upon a time – there were certainly tigers in the jungle upcountry on the peninsula, as well as elephants and all kinds of exotic wildlife. The only tiger seen in Singapore within living memory, however, was one that escaped from a circus and hid under a billiard table in Raffles Hotel before the poor creature was flushed out and shot.

When I was eight years old, I made a trip to England with my mother and Nana to visit my grandparents in London and was sadly disappointed by what I saw as unrelieved drabness. By contrast, Singapore was a bubbling cauldron of races, languages, creeds, customs, dress, colours, stirred up into an exotic and potent brew. Chinks, Stinks and Drinks, as people termed it crudely, but with affection. I loved the heat and the noise and the particular smell of Singapore – its special and very distinctive aroma of dried fish and spices, swamps and drains. I loved the dazzling shimmer of the sun on the sea, rickshaws jamming the narrow streets, the little yellow Ford taxis scooting about, the ponderously slow-moving bullock carts.

I loved the labyrinth of Chinatown in the North Bridge Road, the gaudily painted shop-houses selling porcelain and jade and silk and ivory, and the washing draped on poles sticking out like flags from upstairs windows. I loved the glittering temples, the junks and the sampans packed tightly together along the stew of a river, the satay stalls, the hawkers with their wares swinging from bamboo sticks bent across bony shoulders, the natives cooking meals at the roadside, crouched over smoky wood fires.

I loved Little India and Buffalo Road with the snake charmers, the jugglers, the fortune-tellers, the street traders with their trays of cheap trinkets, the Moorish mosques, the flower-garland shops and their sweet scent of jasmine, marigolds and roses, the pepper and curry aroma of the Indian market and the mounds of ripe tropical fruit spilling over into the street – mangoes, lichees, papayas, pomelos, mangosteens. The sight of plucked, dead chickens hanging by their feet, heads still attached, never bothered me because I was used to it, as I was used to seeing strips of dried crocodile meat, bottled black sea slugs and skinned snakes. I loved the life and colour and noise that contrasted so dramatically with the imperial dignity of British Colonial Singapore, north of the river.

East met West at the City Hall, the Supreme Court, Parliament House, St Andrew’s cathedral, the Victoria Memorial Hall, the government offices, the banks and big companies – the buildings all set off by wide boulevards with trim grass verges lined with scarlet flame trees and pink and white frangipanis. The Singapore Cricket Club – white European members only – lay close by, its fine pavilion and verandahs overlooking the immaculate green
Padang
with the sea on one side, a line of flame trees on the other. Not far from this orderly oasis, there were the English shops – Robinson’s department store in Raffles Place, and Whiteaways and John Littles. The Cold Storage in Orchard Road sold English ice cream, tins of English foods, French bread and pastries. Its refrigerators kept meat and fish fresh and its glass shelves displayed strawberries flown in from Australia and roses trucked daily from upcountry. In Battery Road round the corner, the latest English books could be bought or ordered at Kelly and Walsh and all kinds of pills and potions found at Maynards the chemist. The thirteen-storey Cathay Building was the tallest in Singapore and the only one to be air-conditioned. It housed the Malayan Broadcasting Corporation and Government offices, as well as a cinema, a restaurant and apartments.

There was dancing six nights a week in hotels and clubs and restaurants, and till dawn in the Coconut Grove. The Coq d’Or was swanky but Raffles Hotel was the most elegant. A tall and turbaned Sikh greeted you at the door, Chinese waiters glided with trays between the tables, a Filipino orchestra played Mozart or selections from light operettas and musical shows, and heads were bent close in delightful gossip behind the potted palms.

You could swim at the Singapore Swimming Club near the seashore or at the small and exclusive Tanglin Club in the suburbs which, besides its swimming pool, also offered grass tennis courts, squash courts, billiards and bridge, and a ballroom for Saturday night dances to its own band. Nobody carried cash. Chits were signed for everything – dinners, drinks, tins of cigarettes, lunches, clothes, cars, church collection … everything.

On the sea voyage returning from England, my mother had stayed unhappily in her cabin while I, watched by Nana, played energetic deck games, ate my way through the long menus and counted the days left until I saw Singapore again. My father felt the same. After all, we had both been born in Malaya – born and bred to it. England wasn’t Home to us, as it was to so many expatriates who dreamed of ending their days there. I think my father knew and understood the native people better than almost any white man in the city. He treated them well and they respected him.

The island of Singapore, only about a hundred miles from the equator and separated from the southern tip of the Malay peninsula by the narrow Johore Straits, is about the same size and shape as the Isle of Wight. The man-made causeway linking the two by road and rail is not much more than a mile long. When Thomas Stamford Raffles sailed there in 1819 to set up a trading post, he would have seen a long, low expanse of green with gently rolling hills at its centre. With great foresight, he also saw and understood its worth. He snatched the island from under the noses of the Dutch, staking a claim for Britain to the maritime superiority of the eastern seas. The island was swamp and dense tropical rainforest, inhabited only by fishermen and pirates, but the pirates soon fled, the fishermen stayed, the swamps were drained, the jungle hacked back.

The grounds of our house were still bordered by a dense and dripping jungle foliage of huge banana leaves, palm fronds, creepers and vines, mosses and ferns. Yellow-beaked mynah birds chattered among the trees and monkeys swung in great flying leaps from branch to branch. From the upstairs verandahs we could see the roofs of attap huts in native
kampongs
, and the orderly lines of rubber trees planted on cleared land. The cicadas provided their incessant background chorus and at night the bullfrogs croaked loudly in the mangrove swamps.

Our garden bore little resemblance to an English one, except for the lawns of neatly scythed grass – not the fine grass of England but a coarse, bright-green kind called lallang that could withstand the climate and the sun-baked soil. There were mango trees, flame trees, papaya trees, butterfruit trees, cinnamon trees, rambutans and bananas, the yellow-flowered cassia, the big jacaranda, the monkey-cup with red flowers shaped like little cups, the feathery casuarina trees that whispered in the wind, the tall tembusu with creamy-white flowers that smelled wonderful after rain, as well as the sweet-scented frangipanis that grew all over Singapore. I remember, too, the yellow and red canna flowers, the golden jackfruit, the tall clumps of feathery bamboo, ripe black figs hanging from vines, a hedge of bright-pink hibiscus, purple bougainvillea scrambling over trellises, the smell of the curry leaf and of the lemon grass that Nana used for an infusion to relieve my mother’s frequent migraines.

We had a grass tennis court, and a pond full of goldfish, and we kept a big aviary with canaries and budgerigars, merboks and sharmas singing their hearts out. More singing birds – canaries and budgerigars – were housed in cages hanging from the eaves of the upstairs verandahs and white fantailed doves lived in a dovecote and fluttered down every morning and evening to be fed, sitting on my shoulder and cooing in my ear. Geckos and little transparent lizards, called chee chows, skittered up and down walls and across ceilings. It was said that if you could grab a chee chow by its tail, the tail would drop off, but I never managed to catch one: they were too quick. I had a succession of all the usual English pets: white mice, guinea pigs, tortoises, rabbits, puppies and kittens and, for my tenth birthday, a pony. As the pets died off they were buried with ceremony in a shady corner under the frangipani trees, each grave dug by one of the
kebuns
and carefully marked by me with a bamboo cross.

I was horribly spoiled, of course. Waited on by gentle servants, cared for devotedly by Nana – bathed, dressed, fed, taken for walks by her and to paddle at the beach holding her hand. I went to children’s birthday parties arrayed in fancy dress or in frilly organdie frocks that she had made specially for me. I was given expensive toys: a big doll’s house, a coach-built doll’s pram, a swing and a see-saw in the garden, a Wendy house, a shiny red tricycle, a Dunlop tennis racquet, a three-speed bicycle that made a satisfying click-click-click sound when I pushed it along … everything I asked for.

And I was lucky in another way. The hot Singapore climate was thought unsuitable for an English girl’s development and, like the boys, many girls were packed off to boarding school in England. Passenger air travel was in its infancy and the sea voyage took at least four weeks, which meant being away for several years. Various English schools were discussed for me and the London grandparents had agreed to have me for the holidays, but, in the end, and to my huge relief, I was allowed to stay in Singapore and went daily to the convent school of St Nicholas on Victoria Street. I was never sure why I had been spared the fate of going to an English boarding school. Perhaps it was because my education wasn’t considered as important as a boy’s, or because I was an only child. I suspect, though, that my father was afraid that if my mother accompanied me on the long voyage to England she would make it an excuse to stay there.

The convent’s religious motto, in French, and written large across a wall above a painting of Christ, translated roughly as
Walk in My Presence and be Perfect
. I was far from perfect but my life was – especially in the holidays. A never-ending round of picnics at the pure-white sand beaches along the east coast of Malaya, the fun of swimming at night in phosphorescent seas, weekends up in the Cameron Highlands – at a hill station near Ipoh – playing tennis and swimming at the Tanglin Club or in the bigger pool at the Singapore Swimming Club, watching matches from the Cricket Club pavilion, sailing at the Yacht Club, horse riding – the fat pony replaced by a pretty dappled grey mare who was sold when I eventually tired of horses at around sixteen.

When the war broke out in Europe, ten thousand miles away, Singapore went on dancing. There were no shortages, no rationing, no blackouts or restrictions such as people were suffering in England and which were all very hard to imagine in the warmth and plenty of Malaya. The demand for Malayan rubber and tin increased, shiploads left from Keppel Harbour for Europe and America and the economy boomed. The good life was even better in the duty-free port where whisky and gin and cigarettes were cheap. The Germans might be invading other countries, which was appalling, of course, but there was no reason whatever for us to fear the same fate. We were living in an island fortress under the protection of the British flag. The RAF and the Royal Australian Air Force warplanes flew constantly over our heads, we could hear the big boom of the Royal Navy’s fifteen-inch guns at firing practice, and the naval base on the north-east shore of the island was said to be the finest and best equipped in the world. British soldiers from famous regiments strode about the city streets, as did Australian and New Zealand servicemen. And so did tall, bearded Sikh soldiers, tough little Gurkhas and the Malays of the Malay Regiment. At the theatre and cinema or dancing after dinner at Raffles, three-quarters of the men were in uniform, the dance halls packed with them. The fortress was impregnable; the island a garrison.

I left the convent after taking School Certificate and loafed around for a while, doing nothing but enjoy myself. The European war had been going on for two years by the time I eventually started a secretarial course in the mornings at Pitman’s College in River Valley Road – more because I was getting rather bored than with any serious intention of working as a secretary, or as anything else for that matter. The course would fill in the time conveniently until I got married. I received my first grown-up invitation to a ball at Government House where I wore my first long evening gown – white satin with a bodice decorated with pink silk roses, a single row of pearls round my neck and elbow-length white kid gloves. The Governor and his Lady descended the grand staircase to greet their guests with all the majesty of the King and Queen whom they represented. Other formal invitations soon followed – cocktail parties, dinners, dances in the Officers’ Mess at Changi, at the Royal Air Force bases and at the Royal Navy base. In between, I spent a great deal of time studying my reflection in the triple looking glass on my dressing table, experimenting with new hairstyles, new makeup, different-coloured lipsticks and nail polish, different perfumes, and I spent hours shopping in the stores, signing for whatever took my fancy. As a child, my frocks had been hand-sewn by my beloved Nana – pretty shantung or lawn dresses with bands of intricate embroidery and smocking across the bodice. When she had left they had been bought from Robinsons or John Littles, but now the Indian
dersey
who made clothes for my mother came to the house bearing bundles of fashion magazines and swatches of material, and I was acquiring a whole new and grown-up wardrobe.

There was no shortage of unattached young European men in Singapore. They worked in the Colonial service, or in the banks, or for the big commercial companies, and there was a constant supply of young army, navy and air force officers. The men easily outnumbered the girls and stood around like male wallflowers at dances. Even the plainest girl danced every dance. We bright young things led a gilded life. We swept through the tennis club, tangoed at Raffles, frolicked on the beaches, clapped our hands for servants to do our bidding.