by Norman Lewis
I drove Dick down to the Pied Bull and we had a drink in the bar while awaiting the arrival of the other members of the party. Soon Dorothea came into sight with Emily and Bill Broadbent, all on horseback. Patricia had broken with custom by being dropped off at the pub by the Cambridge-educated son of a local landowner, who drove her over in his Porsche.
Dick left me. I walked to the door of the bar to stand for a moment with the faint scent of eel pie from the kitchen in my nostrils, looking down on this gathering of the clan. At this level success made itself felt, and Bill Broadbent, a once handsome saloon-bar joker, prematurely aged by the good life his asset-stripping had provided, was surrounded by family toadies who had not done so well, a single gin and tonic held in every hand. These men were less prosperous than the average villager. Some were too old to be employed at the base, and some declined to do so, speaking of private means. Apart from Bill, only two had come on horseback. The Essex historian Stephen Maudsley, writing at the end of the last century, had mentioned the great-grandfathers of these men. ‘Scant heed was paid to law and order in these remote parts. Scarcely a score of years have passed since the notorious Cloates of Crendon’s End raided a nearby village which had given them some offence.’ This seemed like the end of the road.
Jane and Patricia had moved out of the crowd and were walking together. They were fond of each other and, as had often been pointed out, however much Cloates might seem different from one another there were, as in this case, quite often resemblances that were not easy to define.
Patricia, described by Mrs Amos, as possibly her most finished product, floated, drifted, seeming at times almost to be airborne, while Jane plodded at her side as if carrying a sack of potatoes on her shoulders. Patricia’s svelte body was clad to perfection. By comparison Jane appeared outlandish, almost tribal, as so many village girls were. In defiance of Dorothea’s protests she had applied bleach to her hair, following this with a bizarre attack with scissors. Patricia was pleasant and gracious to all, fluttering the tips of her fingers at anyone greeting her who could not easily be reached. Jane pretended not to have seen such salutations. Both girls were smiling and, studying them as they came closer, I understood that Patricia’s smile was part of Mrs Amos’s art—an asset, trained and accomplished to match all the other ingredients of her beauty. Jane’s smile, for all her lumpishness, was human—fallible, but sweet.
Soon after this a project came up, taking me to the Far East, off and on, for nearly four years. I had begun to feel involved in Long Crendon and its problems, and before leaving I tried to secure a base there by buying Charmers End, but the asking price was beyond my means. Nevertheless, I kept in touch with Dorothea and we exchanged letters two or three times a year. Things continued to go fairly well for them. Her first letter informed me that she had sold her horse, and that she and Dick now owned a veteran but serviceable MG. After that, their gracious but shattered house with the remnant of its incomparable vegetable patch and its cracked rear wall, went to a buyer from London and they moved into a brand-new bungalow. Their view was of other bungalows.
Dick had had remedial treatment enabling him to stand up straight, and had taken a course in public speaking. Most of her news was concerned with Jane. ‘It’s just as they told us it would be,’ she said. ‘The year’s not up yet and you can hardly believe the difference. It’s really wonderful what they can do.’
By the next year Jane’s speech had been dealt with to everybody’s satisfaction. ‘You remember the way she used to mumble? I could hardly understand what she was saying myself. Now she speaks as clear as anybody. But she doesn’t sound too la-di-da with it, if you know what I mean. Which is rather nice.’
In her third year Jane sounded as though she might have started to think for herself. ‘She’s been awarded a prize for social awareness, whatever they mean by that,’ Dorothea wrote. ‘I suppose we’re the tiniest bit disappointed because modelling’s out. She says it’s not for her. Mrs Amos says she’s clever enough to do anything she wants, but we shouldn’t attempt to sway her. While we’re on the subject did you hear about Patricia? She’s always in the papers these days. Do you remember when she was just off to Brazil? Well, she married a Brazilian landowner with an estate the size of Essex. The bit in the paper said he was the seventh richest man in the world. The latest story is the marriage is on the rocks. Money isn’t everything.’
In her last letter Dorothea’s disappointment with her daughter seemed to have deepened. ‘Mind you, whatever we’ve done for her, we’d do it all over again. Her father and I have written to suggest that she might consider being something like a personal secretary to an MP, or a television presenter. She says we’ll talk about it when she comes home for the holidays. She hasn’t much to say about herself, which doesn’t seem a good sign. The news of Patricia isn’t so good. I sent you a cutting about her divorce from the Brazilian. Now she’s married a French count with a castle in Angoulême. He’s more than twice her age. Sometimes I wonder. Her mother can’t see this one lasting long either. I always say happiness is what counts.’
When I found myself once more in Long Crendon the changes that awaited me, although more radical than expected, had not been unforeseen. It was remarkable that so dramatic a face-lift could have been carried out in so short a time. The villagers had done whatever they could to uglify the place within the limit of their resources, adding a little raw red brick here and an atrocious plastic ornament there, but it was the newcomers who had set to work to strip it of every vestige of its character. There were many of these now, and in their total isolation they formed almost an ethnic minority. In their search for the picturesque they were able to finance change from limitless funds.
Certain iniquities had been suppressed. The smouldering dump had been removed and the police had ordered the pigfarmer to bury the corpses of diseased animals. Main drainage had come to the long street at last, thus—except in the case of outlying houses—putting an end to collection of night soil by the aid of which so many superb vegetables had been produced in the past. All three austere old pubs had been sadly tarted up. I stayed at the Pied Bull. Its simple but noble façade was tricked out with coloured lights and they had hung a sign of Pre-Raphaelite inspiration showing a bull without testicles. In the past narrow, straight-backed wall benches had enforced dignity upon the patrons but now they lounged in armchairs upholstered in buttoned pink plastic. At Charmers End the moat had been sanitised and provided with a concreted landing-stage, at which a black gondola with a lamp on its prow was tied up. The house had statuary and a double garage which could be glimpsed through the sombre foliage of the Cupressus leylandii, now to be seen everywhere in Long Crendon.
My conviction that the village was destined to become a cultural colony of the United States had proved to be well founded, but the process seemed to have been completed in a shorter time than I would have thought possible. Two cars were parked outside many of the village houses, some of them fish-tailed monsters. Matters of fundamental custom, such as mealtimes, had been revolutionised. Throughout the centuries, country people everywhere had sat down punctually at twelve-thirty to stuff themselves with the main meal of the day, rising from the table to burn up the heavy, stodgy food by hard physical labour in the field.
Now work of this kind was a thing of the past, and gone with it for most was the traditional midday meal. Men employed at the base no longer wished to consume a pound and a half of potatoes with every meal, and soon fell in with the American system of a quick and easily digested hamburger for lunch, following the return from work at six in the evening with something more substantial; chile con carne being the current favourite. A few of the more advanced families joined with their American friends to celebrate Thanksgiving: butterball turkey and all the trimmings, flown in from the US. The local English, apart from the newcomers, were becoming less reclusive. Even in the recent past they had lived their private, separate lives behind tightly drawn curtains, in fact as well as in the mind. Now
they organised get-togethers in the American fashion at which Pabst and Schlitz beer were drunk from cans and pre-cooked, containerised foods of the kind supplied by Indian and Chinese take-aways were served on cardboard plates and eaten with plastic cutlery. These accessories were smuggled out with little difficulty from the base. The memory in Long Crendon of poverty once endured was fading fast.
I found Dorothea and Dick in their bungalow. My immediate feeling was that they were no longer under a strain. A bungalow—with all the furniture polished and in place, the comforting sound of the toilet’s flush, and no major cracks in the wall—can act as a tranquilliser. Dick’s nervous tick, which had surfaced once every few minutes in the wrinkles round his mouth, had gone, and the doctors, in straightening him out, had added an inch to his height. Dorothea had put on a few pounds and was all the better for it. A hairdresser had brought life to the lank black Indian hair of old.
Dick was as busy as ever. Within minutes of my arrival he was summoned by telephone. He was running a little agency affair of his own, Dorothea said. Accommodation was very short in a rapidly expanding area, and he was doing what he could to help out. He had at last found the Lord. Many of his friends from the States were Baptists, and he had been born again. Dorothea put in a few hours most days, as ever, at Charmers End, not because they needed the money now with Jane more or less off their hands, but because she liked having something to do.
Jane had been home for three months. ‘Isn’t that earlier than intended?’ I asked.
‘We had a long talk with Mrs Amos,’ she said, ‘after which there didn’t seem much point in going any further.’
‘In what direction? You told me Jane had decided against modelling. What about the other possibilities? It sounded as though Mrs Amos had high hopes for her.’
‘According to Mrs Amos, Jane was exceptionally gifted. She was attractive and intelligent, and she could have done anything she wanted.’ She gestured resignation.
‘But she didn’t want to be a television presenter or anybody’s personal secretary.’
‘It was her whole attitude. That kind of thing didn’t seem to mean anything to her. In one way, Mrs Amos said, she’d turned out better than she hoped. Another year’s formation and she could have had the world at her feet. But it all left her cold.’
‘Dorothea,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to suspect you’re to be congratulated. You have an interesting daughter.’
‘Mrs Amos said you sometimes come across people you thought you could change, and they fooled you by pretending to go along, but really underneath they were going their own way all the time.’
‘So Jane beat the system,’ I said. ‘She survived.’
‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ Dorothea said. ‘Anyway, we brought her home.’
‘And now what is she going to do?’
‘She’s filling in time in the accounts office at the base.’
‘And after that?’
‘She’ll take up nursing.’
‘What could be better?’
‘You won’t be surprised to hear she has an American boyfriend.’
‘Why should I be surprised? What is he—a pilot, or a navigator?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s on the catering side. An assistant cook.’
For once in my life I was struck by inspiration. ‘Would he by any chance be coloured?’ I asked.
‘How on earth did you guess?’ she said.
It was just something that had occurred to me. I said, ‘We’re getting to know Jane. Both of us. What time do you expect her home? I’m much looking forward to seeing her.’
THAILAND
IN 1951 MARSHAL PHIBUN SONGKHRAM, ruler of Thailand, despatched a body of experts to the US, charged with an extraordinary mission. This was no less than to discover the fountain-head of wisdom and power which, as the Thais agreed, had promoted America to leadership among the nations. They returned with the belief that this moral and material superiority stemmed largely from the drinking of whisky, the dancing together in public of men and women, and the regular ceremonial performance of the striptease.
Phibun forthwith ordered a whisky distillery to be set up. Stages were erected in towns and villages throughout the country upon which responsible persons of both sexes were to dance together. Physical contact between the couples was ruled out and the dancers would cavort round each other, waving their arms gracefully in the manner of the classic Thai dancers of old. The striptease, viewed as a purely cultural exercise was commonly staged thereafter in temple enclosures at the time of a festival, while a monk, imprisoned near by in a wicker cage, preached to the audience in incomprehensible Pali.
Thirty-five years have passed. The Thais still drink mekong, their version of whisky, usually taken neat and hot—and dance the Ramwong on all festive occasions. Only the cultural striptease has fallen behind, rarely to be found nowadays except in the remote and more conservative parts of the country. On the whole Phibun’s recipe seems to have worked out reasonably well. Thailand’s economy is flourishing. It has commendable records in the field of public health and education. Its enormous birthrate is about ten times that of the United Kingdom, and the charm of the people and the varied and often extraordinary inducements offered to foreign visitors have promoted its tourist trade to the most lucrative in the Far East.
Early morning in Bangkok in the riverside garden of the Oriental Hotel. The city puts on edge in the light smog that has turned last night’s moon to cotton wool. Shortly, the aspen leaves quiver at the approach of the first of the long-tail boats, powered by a 125 h.p. engine and with open exhaust, bringing commuters into the heart of the city. Many more boats follow, spreading waves of sound that seem to penetrate the skull. The Thais do not object to noise, which they associate with life, vigour, progress and success. Bangkok may be the only city where imported cars are fitted specially with extra large-bore silencers before delivery to the buyer.
With the discharge of their cargoes of office-workers, the serious business of the morning is at an end, and soon the dragon fleet comes roaring back to pick up a thousand or so foreigners waiting to be shipped away on the routine visit to the floating market.
It is an experience that illustrates R. L. Stevenson’s maxim: ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’ The ear-splitting voyage takes the visitor behind the scenes of an oriental city in a way not likely to be repeated in the course of his stay. Here are the splendid old junks, the ghostly houses breathing out incense over the watery smells, the flooded gardens with Siamese cats swimming like otters through the flowers afloat in the yellow wavelets. A man disposes of a rat; another, net in hand, chases after a frog; a woman wrapped in a sheet washes her body with delicacy and grace; naked children hurl themselves like lemmings into the soupy water. Here, for the space of half an hour, the intricate inner life of Bangkok is exposed to the foreign eye. The true reason for the tourists’ admission to this intimacy is that they are invisible. Every morning for so many years, and at precisely this hour, this water-borne invasion has passed through. Now not a head is turned in their direction.
At the floating market anticlimax awaits. The market as it once was has long ceased to exist. Increasing affluence makes it unnecessary for the locals to shop by boat, and the once lively scene has given place to a banal charade. The hopeful travellers are lured ashore to run the gauntlet of souvenir stalls, then herded into a slatternly zoo to watch four men traipse round with a python of immense length, before shoving it back into a sack. This is also a crocodile farm, where a few half-submerged animals remain unresponsive to the keeper’s proddings with a pole. Visitors are urged to buy crocodile bags and belts produced on the spot, and a guide mentions in a jovial way that the flesh of the animals providing these is supplied to leading restaurants. ‘It tastes like frog,’ he says. ‘You’d never tell the difference.’
This is a high spot of the average tour, but there are further excursions in plenty on offer. Bangkok contains a sta
ggering total of 400 temples. ‘But,’ says the guide, ‘we have to be realistic and know when to call it a day.’ Most visitors settle for the Temples of the Emerald, Golden and Reclining Buddhas, and that of the Dawn, and it is better after that to leave the glittering mish-mash of orientalia of the Grand Palace for another day. Having seen the film, some visitors opt for the longish pilgrimage to the River Kwai. Interest slackens a little on the Rose Garden trip, and of the ancient capital Ayutthaya, included in most tours, the guidebook notes without enthusiasm, ‘outside the ruins and temples it holds little interest,’ adding sombrely, ‘it is one of the three gangster-ruled cities of Thailand.’
Bangkok is the Babylon of our days, yet few programmes feature more than a cautious, sight-seeing incursion into the world’s most renowned nightlife. Trudging from temple to temple the subject of the famous massage parlours inevitably comes up, for despite rumoured orgies, nothing is spelled out in print. ‘What do you suppose they do?’ the innocents ask each other, but nobody answers with confidence.
A last-century Thai chart on view in the library of the British Museum identifies thirty-six bodily areas responding to massage with relief, if not cure, for many complaints, including tumours and cancer. The ancient and respected Thai healing art thus illustrated is still taught and practised in temples throughout the kingdom, and may be considered medically to rank in effectiveness with the acupuncture of the Chinese.
Its therapeutic benefits have been overshadowed, it is said, since the stationing of 46,000 American servicemen in Thailand at the time of the Vietnam war, when a profane side of the healing profession developed into an industry in which 750,000 women are now employed. In this the borderline between therapy and prostitution is hard to define. The final conclusion is that it is easily crossed.