The Other Side of Paradise

by Margaret Mayhew

  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

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Before the Fall

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: Captivity

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three: Liberty

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Mayhew

  Copyright

  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.

  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.