Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  Julie was terrified of going to Calcutta and could not stop replaying in her imagination scenes of her humiliation: a cocktail party interrogation; someone asking about her (it has to be admitted) highly recognisable Mayo accent; an encounter at a shop or queue or restaurant with a former pupil. ‘Sister? Is that you?’ Her mind went round and round over these possibilities. For Bill it was the first extensive encounter with the strength of Julie’s fears, and with the force of personality she could exert when in the grip of them. Bill saw her attitude to Calcutta at first as an aversion, a dislike, and then realised it was something more. He began to see that his wife was different – more neurotic and more strong-willed – than he had thought. So he suggested a compromise. He would go to Calcutta and ready the house for Julie and me, and settle in at work, and then we would come out in a month or two. In the meantime my mother and I would go and stay with Lannie, who for the moment was living close to her birthplace and her family in Walkden near Manchester. Julie had been friends with Lannie before she knew Bill, so that was not a problem. Bill was not especially happy with the arrangement, but he accepted it.

  In the event, Bill was so busy in Calcutta that the time passed quickly. His main work there – the reason he had been sent out at short notice – was to resolve a number of fraudulent, inadequately secured, undocumented, and interlocking loans on the bank’s books. His letter to Julie about it is of interest to me because its one of the few glimpses I have of Bill at work.

  Mr E is not a crook but he is, for some reason unfortunately not known to us – he won’t tell us – now desperate. We wanted to have an accountant check his books, but he refused, despite our pointing out that we couldn’t help him if he wasn’t willing to come clean. It has all been very interesting and very like X – it almost seems there is a pattern to this type of man, and business. The same inability to get any coherent logical account – details which alter, halve, double, are denied, counter-denied, repeated, accusations being made against nearly everybody, ‘I’m a religious man and a good boy’, ‘It’s not my fault’, ‘I will be honest with you …’, ‘You are accusing me of dishonesty’, ‘Just give me a little money to keep going and I will have the whole thing straightened out in two months’, etc, etc. It is fortunate that one needs to be so clever, and to have a fantastic memory, to be a good liar. There are few people who can talk and answer questions for two to four hours and lie successfully. It can be done of course if someone has prepared his story carefully and if there is not too much fact already known.

  Jonathan Coe once wrote that ‘most of the things called “ironic” in books are, in real life, painful’. In that sense, there is a big irony here: Bill had no idea that it was precisely to cover up her own lie that Julie was reluctant to join him in Calcutta.

  I was, apparently, happy in Walkden. In a photo of me at the seaside with my amah, Ah Luk, I certainly seem happy enough. On the other hand, I hated Calcutta, and according to what I was later told cried more or less all day every day for the months we were there. It seems to have been a pretty grim time all round. My father was preoccupied by a bank strike directed against foreign-owned institutions. My mother was deeply anxious about being back in India. It was hot, and everybody was miserable. It came as a great relief when on 21 October 1964, my parents and I took a boat from Calcutta to Singapore. From there we flew to Brunei and my father’s next posting, just off the coast of Borneo on the island of Labuan.

  3

  Labuan is where my own memories begin. Some of them are on that margin between recollection and imagination where early childhood memories live, and where it isn’t always easy to distinguish between what I genuinely remember and what I’m constructing as a memory from stories and photographs and later memories projected backwards. But there are some things I remember clearly and for sure. We had a little patch of garden – not that it seemed little to me at the time – with a kitchen garden planted in one corner, and a tree whose branches hung down so low I could almost touch them. The house compound was surrounded by jungle, which was overhanging and humid and damp and in which, because of all the foliage, the light seemed to be coloured green. Visitors who came to the house would usually come by canoe, which was quicker and in most weathers more reliable than the very bad road from town; though when my father went into work he always drove.

  We seldom went into the jungle, but there was a path through it we would sometimes take on weekends to head down to the beach. You couldn’t swim off the beach – I don’t know why not; perhaps the currents were too dangerous – but you could walk on it, and if you went far enough there was a burnt-out, rusted Allied landing craft left over from World War Two. The star attraction of the garden was a huge monitor lizard, four or five feet long, with a blue tongue; it would pad heavily across one corner of the garden most afternoons. The odd thing about the monitor was that he did not come every day but when he did, he always did so between quarter to five and five and he always followed the same route, a diagonal short-cut across one specific patch of lawn. (I say ‘lawn’ – rough tropical grass, again, with sand underneath.) The lizard never gave any sign that he noticed us, but I was warned to steer well clear of him, since his bite, although not actively poisonous, would involve contact with saliva so dirty it was the next best thing.

  Labuan was an interesting place to be; perhaps the most interesting posting my father ever had. Uniquely, at that point in its history it was a place of larger global strategic importance. Borneo is a huge island divided into two main parts. The bigger part, Kalimantan, belongs to Indonesia. The rest is a group of three states, two of them part of Malaysia, and the third, and biggest, of them, Brunei. Sukarno, President of Indonesia, had designs on the Malay part of the island. He had launched a series of incursions and provocations over the border, designed to start a war, which the huge Indonesian army would certainly win. Its opponent in this war was the British army, which, out of residual colonial feeling for the Malay states and a desire to protect the oil that had been discovered off Brunei – the same oil which was to make the country rich over the next decades – was sent out to stop the man unaffectionately known by British troops as ‘the mad doctor’. A fifth of the British army fought in this war, which I think has the distinction of being the least well known of the British Empire’s twentieth-century wars. It helped that it was never called a war, but always referred to as ‘the Confrontation’. The main British army headquarters for ‘the Confrontation’ was on Labuan.

  As a result, my father was immersed in a busy, lively, much more interesting version of a place that had previously been pretty much the ultimate colonial backwater. The island was full of soldiers and RAF people, and as a result social life was a lot more lifelike. (Part of the grimness of expatriate life in these places was captured by a piece of advice my mother once gave me: if you live in a place with a small social world, and you cook something that was a great success, and people ask you for the recipe, you must never give it to them. They will always make shortcuts and skippings and small alterations to it and turn it into something far inferior, which they will then, A, serve to you when you go to their houses, and, B, make themselves sick of, so that when you next try to serve your superior original version they will inwardly groan, and feel sick and mutter ‘not again’. Something a lot like this happens in the world of writing, when a successful book has so many imitators that it puts you off the original – but that’s another story.)

  Bill liked being the sole boss of the office: he felt that finally, after his thirteen basically boring years working his way up the bank, he was starting to get somewhere. It was nice to be reunited with his family, too, after the strange bachelor flashback of Calcutta. There’s a bit of an irony here, that Bill should have spent all those years in Calcutta, one of the world’s great cities, and ended up knowing twenty or thirty people, and have come to a place with a permanent population of a few hundred, and then suddenly find himself hanging out with Gurkhas (some of his favourite people for t
he rest of his life), and making a close and lifelong friend of Rob Butler, a laconic Australian who looked after the Allied war graves. Once, dropping in to visit Butler at the cemetery – which sounds odd, but it was so beautifully kept and peaceful and garden-like, in the midst of the jungle ecosystem, that we used to go there for walks – Bill spotted another of his new best friends, a young American, walking around the graves in deep conversation with a Malay man, and visibly embarrassed to be seen. Bill realised that the American was a spy, probably a CIA agent. It all added to life’s rich tapestry.

  Labuan’s energetic social life meant much more entertaining, which Julie enjoyed. She tried not to show how nervous she felt as a hostess. These parties were a severe strain on Ah Lee, the cook. He was under normal circumstances very good at his work, but he had started smoking marijuana while in the Merchant Navy – in those days, my father told me later, the Merchant Navy and jazz musicians were the two sets of people who dabbled in dope smoking. Ah Lee would resort to marijuana while under stress, with the result that immediately before a party, he would get so stoned he could no longer speak and could communicate only by leaning against a wall and pointing.

  The strain and strangeness for Julie were even greater. A peasant farmer’s daughter from Mayo turned nun turned schoolteacher turned housewife had no training in the business of giving cocktail parties – indeed, she had never drunk a cocktail in her life until Bill took her to dinner at Sheekey’s in London in 1960. (She had a dry martini, my father’s preferred drink – a rather heavy initiation, I can’t help thinking. Dad drank it made with Gordon’s gin and Noilly Prat vermouth, six to one, shaken not stirred, and with an olive. He said you could tell a well-made martini because you felt the effect in your shoulder blades.) The business of being a wife and hostess, which seems a strange thing to want to be for a woman who used to run a school, touched a deep sense in Julie of having escaped, got away, become someone else. As for what she did with the rest of her time, I have no idea. She had no job, and an amah – still Ah Luk – to tend to me. How she described this change to herself I don’t know.

  I would like to be able to say more about Ah Luk, but the truth is I remember her only from stories and anecdotes. I was apparently very fond of her and she of me. She had a mouthful of gold teeth – photographs confirm this – and was gentle and kind with a sly sense of humour. Often she and I would walk down the street, she pushing my pram or hand in hand, while my parents followed. Ah Luk didn’t speak much English, and she and I communicated in a kind of English-Cantonese pidgin. One upshot of this was that until I was about eight I could make myself understood in rudimentary Cantonese. I would translate for my mother at the markets, that sort of thing – and because Cantonese is a good language for swearing, and no doubt also because of Ah Luk’s sense of humour, I spoke the Cantonese equivalent of barrow-boy cockney. When I asked the price of something on my mother’s behalf, I would say something like, ‘Oy, cock, how much is this fucking fish?’ The stallholders would laugh and tell me the price. I would then tell my mother. My mother would then ask why they were laughing, and all they would ever say was, ‘He one very clever piecey small boy, missy.’ All that was thanks to Ah Luk.

  The emotional ties between amahs and their charges aren’t often discussed; I suppose the children forget as they grow up, and there are no written accounts, as far as I know, from the amah’s point of view. It’s a pity. In colonial days – up until the early 1960s or late 1950s – families who were returning to England for good could buy a special group ticket that featured one-way first-class travel for them, with a free third-class return ticket for the amah thrown in. It’s a sad image, those amahs on their solitary journey home.

  As for me, I was in love. The gardener’s daughter, Ming Jah, was the object of my affection. In my memory she was infinitely older than I, glamorously near teenage, though looking at a picture of her now I see that she can have been only about six or seven. We spent every possible moment together – which I suspect means every moment she could bear to until she got bored of having a devoted three-year-old following her around. Ming Jah spoke no English, so we communicated in Malay. This eventually became a problem and my parents stepped in to separate us, because after a few months my Malay had overtaken my English, and my mother’s pedagogical worries kicked in. Before that I was as happy as an unsupervised three-year-old can be. Ming Jah and I spent most of our time playing in the garden and underneath the house, which was, in an allusion to the local style, raised up on stilts. It had a strange, humid, musty smell, one I have since occasionally caught when visiting a tropical greenhouse – a hot, wet, green smell. When it rained in Labuan, it did so in huge, overwhelming vertical cascades; there was no such thing as being out in the rain, it just wasn’t possible. When the rain cleared, everything would be impassably muddy.

  We were all, in our different ways, happy in Labuan. But we were there for only thirteen months – well, I say ‘only’, but this was in fact the longest we as a family had been anywhere. There is a slightly poignant note from my father, applying for a brochure from a boarding school in England: the school, Gresham’s, was as it happened the one I ended up attending, seven years later. Dad asks them to send the prospectus care of the bank in Hong Kong; he says he can’t give a return address because he doesn’t know where he’s going to be living.

  We were back in Fung Shui not long after my third birthday. From this point on – spring 1965 – we lived in Hong Kong until my father took early retirement in late 1979. If I were a character in a novel, a Bildungsroman, it would probably be at about this point that the penny drops in the reader’s mind that this is a story about a particular or peculiar kind of post-colonial childhood. I am a post-colonial boy. I say a ‘peculiar kind’ because I was post-colonial not in the sense of having a copy of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre sticking out of my back pocket, or that I grew up a Bengali intellectual reading Dickens in Calcutta, or that I had to speak the language of the oppressor in preference to my own tongue: I was post-colonial in the sense that we kept getting kicked out of colonies that didn’t want to be colonies any more. Burma was in a convulsive moment of post-colonial revolutionary coup (one, incidentally, that has proved a disaster for all its citizens, making it one of the only places on earth which one can unequivocally say was better off under colonial rule). Bengal was nationalising banks and expelling foreign capital; Labuan was in the grip of a war with a would-be new imperialist, fought by the armed forces of the old Empire; Hong Kong was in the last decades of the winding-down former Empire, the clock ticking to 1997 and handover/reunification. The character based on me would be a comic figure, one who only has to step through customs on arrival in a country for the local population to rise and revolt against their colonial masters. But it didn’t feel at all like that at the time – though it did a little to Bill, I think, who grew up when the British Empire was still a reality and who lived to see it disappear. I don’t think that he felt at all nostalgic for it, but perhaps there was a way in which the contraction of British power matched the contraction in possibility he came to feel in his own life: his sense of his place in the world shrank as Britain’s place in the world also shrank. A process can be inevitable, and right, and necessary, without being any the less painful for all that.

  Another point to make about the last days of Empire, from the perspective of a post-colonial boy, is that it is not as if the colonial bubble were something one could physically feel as a protective membrane. There may have been a time when Britons abroad felt like masters of the universe, automatically more important than the natives wherever they might be – a little as Americans do today perhaps, and as the citizens of any empire are likely to do in their prime imperial moment. By the 1960s, when I was growing up, this was over for the British. The residual effects had to do not with the psychological apparatus of Empire, but to do with the fact that you could go to these exotic places and make your living and have your life, all in English, and then go away, and
somehow the place would not have entered into you nor you into the place. Easy come, easy go. This was very little different from the way in which the international upper middle class will travel around the world for work today, educating their children in the language of their home country and living insulated from most of the realities of wherever they are, so that a job working for a bank or advertising agency or – whisper it – aid agency differs very little whether you’re in São Paulo or St Petersburg or Sydney or Bombay. The furniture and trappings and weather are a bit different, but in truth not so much so that the essential reality is much changed. This capitalist bubble seems to me to be at least as effectively insulating as the old colonial one, with which it overlapped and with which it has a great deal in common. My father grew up in the colonial bubble, which was punctured by war, and his sense of safety and permanence never came back. I suppose the bubble in which I grew up was a hybrid, post-colonial-to-capitalist bubble; the new bubble, a capitalist one, has a thicker membrane than any of its predecessors, I think, and is showing no signs of going away any time soon.

  I would be lying if I claimed to have noticed any of this at the time, or at any point before I sat down to think about it as an adult. What I did notice, though, was that my childhood left me with a kind of reverse exoticism. When I came ‘home’ to England, which hadn’t been home for either of my parents, I couldn’t help but notice how alien everything seemed. Everyone was so white, for one thing, and so restrained. It was cold – though I quickly grew to like the cold and to prefer it to the permanent mugginess of Hong Kong. But much more than any of these it was cultural. Today this is easier – children from Shanghai to Shinfield know about Nike and Nintendo and can quote from favourite episodes of the The Simpsons. That wasn’t true when I was growing up, and I remember spending a great deal of intellectual effort on trying to work out what people were talking about and/or pretending that I already knew. What was the Tube, and in what respects did it differ from the Underground? Was it always underground or were there bits of it that weren’t, and were they the bits that were called the Tube, and what was the Magic Roundabout? What was a jumper, and what was the difference between it and a sweater and a pullover, and was there one name it was all right to use but another that would be babyish or stupid? This didn’t happen all day every day, but it happened a lot, and the feeling of not knowing what people were talking about gradually wore down to a slight but permanent cultural dislocation. Someone once said that for V. S. Naipaul’s characters the most difficult question was always ‘Where are you from?’ I felt – feel – that. There was a permanent sense that I was, to use the period phrase, ‘picking up fag ends’ – overhearing scraps of other people’s talk, or understanding scraps of it, and trying to put these together to make a coherent story. Trying to work out what they meant, with the emphasis on work. All children do this, to an extent, as they try to crack the codes of adult talk and adult lives. I’m not claiming to be unique, just that I did a lot of it. To sum up, I was an only child who had an unusually isolated childhood; a geographically fragmented early childhood; and who grew up with a powerful sense that everybody had secrets that could not be asked about directly, and that I needed to work out by myself. The thousands of hours spent playing on my own, with a powerful motive for fantasy and imagination and working things out through hypothesis, and a linguistic dislocation so that English was my real home, much more than any specific place – these were a big part of what made me become a writer.