River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  In those days, Bangkok was an agreeable place – not so much pollution, not so many roaring Hondas and cars clogging its streets, a softer, less brash nightlife. It was full of comrades – ‘old Indo-China hands’ – rootless souls like myself searching for a new beginning and a definition to life after our raison d’être had been torn away. We met each Saturday for a buffet lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in an old wing, long since pulled down, of the Oriental Hotel; talked over old times and drowned our sorrows in beer and red wine. Spooks and diplomats on the fringes of the press corps liked to live vicariously through our outrageous stories of sexual adventures and derring-do, but they were outsiders; our stories and our laughter were really for our own benefit: the tightknit community linked by the common bond of comradeship and the hopeless courage of Indo-China. Our outward joviality and lack of moderation covered up, if we were honest, our sense of melancholia and gloom. Life seemed pointless. Nostalgia for Indo-China gnawed at our hearts; at least, it did at mine. The French call it Le Mal Jaune.

  There would, no doubt, be other stories, other wars. Journalists who covered Indo-China were resilient if nothing else and in due course some drifted off to Lebanon and Angola, which were just heating up, in search of other wars to make them feel alive. I was convinced that for me there would never be another Indo-China, where everything had fused magically together as one perfect piece: the place, the war, the story, the woman I loved; making it the happiest and most romantic of places to be for a young man still flush with the optimism and raw idealism of youth.

  My mood was melancholy. I was burnt-out, filled with weariness, a sense of unworthiness. No matter how much I tried to justify my actions I felt guilty of egotism and desertion. My journalistic life had been a success. I had quarried a rich harvest of stories out of Indo-China, the best of my life. But at what a disillusioning price.

  I had been assured by colleagues who covered the defeat of Saigon and finally emerged from Vietnam that Jacqueline and her mother were safe and were trying to leave, together with many other Saigonese. I wrote to her, hoping for an answering letter that never came. Perhaps the mail was held up. Then late one afternoon, some weeks after the fall of Saigon, I got a call from a colleague to come to the Trocadero Hotel immediately. A surprise was waiting.

  I arrived in trembling haste, not daring to guess what the surprise might be, but sensing inwardly that Jacqueline and her mother would be there. Sure enough, they were standing in the lobby. Wearily, they told me that they had planned to stay on in Saigon, having nowhere else to go and hoping life would settle down. But in a matter of days they had changed their minds. As the communists’ grip on the city tightened and a dour authoritarianism prevailed, it became apparent that there was no future for them there. The communist rulers regarded them as being on the losing side and treated them, and many others like them, as conquered people. With a heavy heart, Jacqueline’s mother gave her house over to her neighbour for safekeeping, and she and Jacqueline embarked on the heartbreaking task of getting their papers in order, so that they could leave Vietnam for ever. Obtaining an exit visa was a nightmare of red tape and obfuscation, despite their French nationality. Dominique, the patron of the Valinco, summed it all up in an outburst of frustration one day: ‘Si les Vietcongs donnaient les visas de sortie, même les rats s’en iraient,’ he declared.

  It took Dominique well over a year to leave Saigon, and Jacqueline and her mother almost half as long. The only residents who seemed to have prospered from the ‘liberation’ were some foreign journalists who had stayed behind in Saigon. Not only did they have the satisfaction of covering a momentous event; they took over Saigon’s British Club and liberated its booze and patriotically saved the abandoned British embassy’s Union Jack which they found had been torn down from the flagpole and was now a canopy over a squatter’s shack.

  Jacqueline and her mother left Saigon for ever, their possessions stuffed into a couple of trunks, all the French would allow on the evacuation flight. Because they had left Vietnam of their own accord, the French government later denied them compensation for the house and belongings that they had lost. But not a word of complaint at its injustice passed their lips. Like the people of Vietnam they had grown accustomed to battling their way through life and accepted their loss with stoic, quiet suffering.

  Now the anguish of the past weeks was swept away. Jacqueline’s mother soon left for Paris and Jacqueline and I remained for a while in the little house by the railway station with its garden of hibiscus, palms and frangipani, its whirling ceiling fans and croaking frogs.

  At four each morning, the house reverberated as the express from Chiang Mai thundered past. But nothing could disturb us as we snuggled together, intoxicated at being lovers once more.

  There were high moments. We travelled together to Burma, where an earthquake had done terrible damage to many of the 5000 temples of the ancient city of Pagan, the former capital. There we met Major Dick Bone, one of the most extraordinary British characters in Asia.

  Dick Bone’s romantic story was in the tradition of a Somerset Maugham novel. On St Valentine’s Day 1945, as a young lieutenant in the Fourteenth Army, he had taken part in the capture of Pagan from the Japanese. Clambering up the cliffs of the east bank of the Irrawaddy, he found himself surrounded by dark forms rising through the dawn mist – the ruins of hundreds of temples dotting the Pagan plain. This awe-inspiring sight affected him deeply. He went on to Rangoon and fell in love with a Burmese woman Thein Wa, to the disapproval of his race-conscious superior officers; once the war was over, they transferred him to Singapore under a cloud. Before leaving, Bone gave her rubies as a token of his love, with the assurance he would come back to her. True to his word, he resigned his commission and smuggled himself back to Burma on an RAF freight plane, registering himself on the flight manifest as ‘bones’.

  Bone never left Burma again. He stayed on through all that sad and beautiful country’s troubles, a brave spirit, often in penury, often unwell. When his little bookshop in Rangoon was nationalised overnight by the Ne Win government pursuing its imbecile ‘Burmese way to Socialism’, he worked as a navvy on the roads to make ends meet. This was too much for the status-conscious British embassy; to its eternal shame, the embassy struck him off its invitation list to the Queen’s birthday party as unsuitable. Bone contemptuously handed in his British passport and took Burmese nationality.

  I think he and Thein Wa were as humanly happy as it was possible to be. But Bone’s first love was always Pagan. Whenever he had money to spare, which was not often, he would spend it on an expedition to the temples, sometimes staying for weeks. He became one of the greatest living experts on this venerated spot, with a library of thousands of photographs and countless learned essays.

  He deserved to die with Pagan engraved on his heart for he was faithful to it even in death. A few months after we saw him, he was being driven from Rangoon to the temples in the French ambassador’s car on one of the narrow Burmese roads. A lorry smashed into them and both men were killed. A ‘Burmese born in England’ was how his Burmese friends described him; an exceptional tribute.

  Bone and Thein Wa were excessively kind to Jacqueline and me. They were inspiring in their love and respect for the values of Asia. Thinking of Burma always reminds me of Bone and the serenity and peace of our visit to Pagan. I can see him now at sunset, the hour of the day he loved best, his elfin figure sitting in the cool of the evening on the terrace of the Thatpinyu, a Burmese cheroot sparking in his hand, his soft benevolent eyes watching the sun drop below the horizon, his extraordinary life going by.

  In Bangkok, Jacqueline and I talked of the future but I do not think I recognised adequately how her optimism had been blunted by the disillusionment of her flight. The idea of living in Europe, even France, the country of her birth, dismayed her; she knew she would be out of place under those northern skies, the damp winter cold; everything was overshadowed by the crushing loss of her Saigon.

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p; ‘Mon Indo-Chine est morte,’ she said with heartrending finality one day and I understood exactly what she meant. Indo-China was her anchorage. All that she valued in life was linked to it and now she had said goodbye for ever to the world she had always known. How little outsiders grasped the humiliation and demoralising sense of her loss. Walking down Tu Do street a few days after the communist capture of the city, she had encountered one of my colleagues who, throwing his arms around her and planting a kiss on her cheeks, said thoughtlessly, ‘What on earth are you looking so unhappy for, ma belle? Why, Saigon is la dolce vita now.’ She was too gripped by sorrow to explain that for many ordinary Saigonese this was the unhappiest time of their lives.

  I hoped my presence lightened some of her misery; I am not sure. There was an impotence of spirit. A crisis in our relationship was looming. Cambodia lay between us like an open wound and with a sinking heart I realised it was impossible to live again our past in Saigon, or to wash away my sense of failure at having abandoned her. There was a moment when we could have stayed together. I think I neglected it through irresolution as I grappled with the circumstances of a new life. So, in due course, Jacqueline flew to Paris to join her mother, while I carried on in Thailand as best I could. It was very hard saying goodbye. We intended it to be a short separation; it continued, as these things do, for several barren months.

  There was plenty to write about, to keep my mind from plunging into despair. Several times I went to stay with Dr Chester Gorman, the brilliant American archaeologist, at his base in northeast Thailand. In two years of excavations of burial mounds at Ban Chiang left by prehistoric man, Chet had turned up a wealth of early bronze Age artefacts dating back to 3500 BC. In the light of his findings, scholars suggested that the Bronze Age might have dawned in Southeast Asia. Chet taught me that 6000 years ago this depressed area of northeast Thailand bordering on the Mekong had been one of the most advanced in the world, inhabited by people who had mastered the techniques of metallurgy and rice agriculture. Chet died, alas, prematurely from cancer a few years later. His scholarship remains.

  Soon afterwards I went to Vientiane, the charming and sleepy capital of Laos on the banks of the Mekong. The defeat of America here had not been as brutal or abrupt as in Cambodia and Vietnam. People said that gentleness had traditionally been the Lao way and it was to some degree true. Nevertheless, since May, when the communist Pathet Lao had begun to take control of the country, a good quarter of the city’s 180,000 inhabitants had fled; not just corrupt politicians, but doctors and qualified people, and those with much to lose. I found myself badgered by bewildered people wondering what to do. Typical was my driver, who had gone home one night to find his brother and sister had swum the Mekong to Thailand. In a town full of informers, they bolted without telling him.

  The French community had made Laos the last white enclave in communist Indo-China. They called it ‘Le Pays de Cocagne’ – a Provençal expression standing for ‘the country of milk and honey’. Now many of them, too, were going, abandoning their homes in the face of the communist take-over. One I knew made a dramatic escape in a stolen light plane which he flew across the Mekong and landed on a main road in Thailand. The departure of the French who ran so much of Vientiane’s commerce had led to the town falling into elegant decay. Many shops had closed. Others, deprived of custom, were selling wares en masse. And what wares they were: champagne and fine French wine at less than a pound a bottle, furniture, silver, antiques, all going for a song. At the French Mission Militaire, a quaint hangover from the 1954 Geneva Accords, a horse belonging to the riding school was for sale for a fiver.

  Laos’s new rulers, the communist Pathet Lao, out to create a new society unsullied by western influences, were glad to see the back of the French, many of whom were colons, army veterans and gangsters who stayed behind after the French military withdrawal in 1954. At seminars and meetings, in songs and slogans, the communists drummed it into the people that the western ideas which had dominated their lives for so long were evil. They taught them to be proud of the Lao language, its culture and traditions. This emphasis on the old Lao values had a sobering impact on what had been one of the seedier towns in Southeast Asia. Crime and prostitution, once rampant, had largely been eliminated in just a few months. Thieves were paraded through the streets with placards around their necks denouncing their crimes, then sent into the countryside for re-education. The Pathet Lao claimed they had achieved these reforms without bloodshed. They abolished the 600-year-old monarchy, banishing the king and his family to a re-education camp. But they still allowed the king’s portrait to hang on the walls of private houses.

  I had spent some time in Laos in 1971 and had liked the seedy charm and wackiness of Vientiane. The country had known war for a quarter of a century; yet there was no sense of urgency. Here there was Madame Lulu’s, famous for ‘oral sex and warm beer’. There was the White Rose, the most famous whorehouse in Vientiane, where Trevor Wilson, the local head of MI6, reputedly typed his secret dispatches for London while sitting on the steps, a girl on one side, his deputy on the other. There was the Purple Porpoise bar, on the shore of the Mekong, run by an Englishman, filled with hard pilots of Air America, the CIA airline. There were some fine French restaurants. Vientiane was also full of French minables and charlots.

  Typical were the three Corsicans who decided they would rob the Banque de l’Indochine on Friday when the accumulated money was flown to Bangkok for protection. They were puzzling how to get through Vientiane airport security onto the tarmac to grab the sacks of money as they were delivered to the aircraft, when one of them had a brainwave; the bishop of Vientiane’s private chauffeur could be their driver. The robbery went ahead without a mishap. The bishop’s car had an airport pass; security waved it through with a flourish. Stocking-masked and throwing copious quantities of pepper, the crooks jumped out, overwhelmed the bank guards and grabbed the money. Vientiane was in uproar; there had never been such an audacious robbery. But it ended in tears. Conscience-stricken by what he had done, the chauffeur confessed to the bishop later that same day; disregarding the secrecy of the confessional, the bishop tipped off the police. By midnight, two of the crooks had been arrested. The third was picked up the next morning; he had had the gumption to escape across the Mekong to Thailand with his share and was driving into Bangkok when his car suffered a puncture in front of Bangkok airport. A friendly policeman strolled over to help, opened the boot and found it filled with the stolen money. All three were behind bars within twenty-four hours, hardly the Napoleons of crime they had dreamed of being.

  The British had their characters, too, chief among whom perhaps was Ed Fillingham, who worked for the World Bank and whose job was to balance the Lao kip, the local currency. He did so each week with a briefcase of dollars, the Lao economy was so small. ‘Sacré Ed,’ his French friends called him, and with good reason, for Fillingham was a drinker who earned his nickname ‘Filling Station’. He had a delightful mischievous streak, which sometimes landed him in trouble. His French friends told me that he disgraced himself one year at an evening party in the garden of the British ambassador’s residence; I think it was the Queen’s birthday party. Ed mysteriously turned up with two tall stone jars which, with a nudge and a wink, he placed in the garden among the guests who were by now quite used to his pranks. This was a party trick to savour. Out popped two naked beauties, who darted through the grounds illuminated by the fairy-lights. Ed had hired them for the night from the White Rose to be served up naked at the embassy party. The ambassador may have been amused; his wife was not.

  Vientiane seemed to attract the most eccentric of British diplomats. John Lloyd was a profoundly left-wing and anti-American ambassador who talked openly about the ‘Americans and their beastly bombers’, to the embarrassment of his staff. Alan Davidson, his successor, was more discreet. He arrived to take up his post on the day of one of Vientiane’s periodic coups. His big passion was fish, and he later became the author of several authorit
ative books on seafood. He carried his secret papers about in an old fishing bag, and his secretary once complained that he had turned the embassy into a fishery research station; the fridge was full of fishy specimens from the Mekong. On one occasion, hearing of the capture of a giant Mekong catfish in the upper reaches of the river, Davidson dropped everything, flew to the site in the north of Laos, bought the fish’s huge head from the fishermen and took it back to the embassy. The catfish is one of Asia’s rarest fishes, in danger of extinction. I think today Davidson’s specimen is in the Natural History Museum in London.

  In October I went to Hanoi, the wartime capital of North Vietnam. I passed myself off as a schoolteacher, hiding the fact that I had been a journalist in South Vietnam – otherwise, I would not have been granted a visa – and joined a French group of sympathisers, mostly teachers and card-carrying members of the French Communist Party. It was a rare journalistic opportunity, the first time a small group of Western tourists had been taken on a carefully controlled tour of what was then still that most secretive of countries.

  The flight, via Vientiane, took us over savage and wild countryside, steep mountains and silvery twisting rivers, landing at Hanoi’s Gia Lam international airport. During the war, this had been an intensely defended air base, thick with surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns. Now a row of antiquated biplanes, helicopters and Russian turbo-props, slumbered in the tall grass; there was no sign of the Migs which had defended it. Our bus steered an erratic course through a meandering stream of cycles, jeeps and Molotova lorries, which a few months before had been running ammunition to the NVA in the south. Now the cargo was cement for reconstruction, and rice.

  Hanoi was an extraordinarily industrious city. The squalid suburbs, as grim as any in Asia, smelt of desperate poverty, machines and round-the-clock production; yet, paradoxically, its densely crowded streets were strangely muted. The citizens of Hanoi – workers, soldiers, militiamen – rode only bicycles.