by Norman Lewis
‘And after that?’
‘After that it’s winter. They’ll go to bed and stay there like we all do. We stay in bed more or less until March. After that we get up and go on with whatever we were doing.’
‘So I’ve got the rest of the year?’
‘Leaving out the road and the bridge itself, yes. You’re safe until then.’
‘Ibiza sounds a possibility,’ I said. ‘The chances are I’ll be on a trip somewhere in the winter. What I’d like to do is give you a call as soon as I get back and if things still sound as bad as you say I’ll probably take your advice. You’ll be hearing from me in March.’
Chapter Five
JONATHAN CAPE HAD HIGH expectations for Golden Earth, as the Burma book had been called, and now reached the conclusion that yet another book about South-east Asia would not be one too many. From the point of view of the peace of the world, the situation there was now worse than it had been two years before, for it was generally believed that with the probable collapse of the French, the United States would step in. In North Vietnam, where previously the French had been opposed by scattered guerrilla forces, regular armies were now appearing in the field, and were prepared to stand and fight. Only the towns and the largest villages were fairly secure. The rest of Indo-China had slipped away into no-man’s-land. Any new book would have to be about Hanoi and the North, where it was predicted that the decisive battles of the war were about to begin.
Having been bulldozed into the decision to return again to South-east Asia, it was at least some measure of compensation to discover that on this journey I could at least kill two or more birds with one stone. The Borneo Company, one of the spearheads of Western penetration of the Far East, had been casting round for someone to write a commissioned history of the firm. They now heard of me through Oliver Myers, and the firm’s manager in Thailand, Angus Buchanan, had invited me to their headquarters near Chiengmai in Thailand for a discussion over a possible alternative to the book on North Vietnam. This also provided an opportunity to call on Loke Wan Tho in Singapore, with whom I had recently exchanged letters on the subject of an expedition he was planning to Nepal.
Having settled on North Vietnam I phoned Buchanan to say I would be coming, flew to Bangkok and thereafter took the train to Chiengmai, where Buchanan had promised to meet me at the station on his elephant, assuring me that this was part of the company’s traditional hospitality offered to visitors. At Chiengmai, however, Buchanan awaited me in a Volkswagen. What happened to the elephant? I asked, to which he replied that it was suffering from ingrowing toenails.
The Company’s headquarters were a cross on an enormous scale between a pagoda and a cattle shed, full of the scent of ancient ledgers and exhausted spices although in one corner of a vast room at the time of our arrival the fragrance of kippers for breakfast lingered on. It turned out that the object of my visit had been lost to sight, for by now discussions over the proposed book were going on with Compton McKenzie, although later I was to learn that the fee he had suggested was considered too high. It would have made a fascinating book, for in this same room the contract had been signed for the supply of the celebrated Anna as a children’s nanny to Mongkut, King of Siam. It would have been only one of hundreds of arrangements of comparable importance to have been negotiated under the sincere gaze of the Company’s Victorian principals whose portraits decorated these walls.
This, as was to have been expected, was a treasure house of outmoded English custom, and of course speech. Elderly staff members clung to the public school slang of the twenties. Low-level employees, who happened to be seen as pretentious, were referred to as they had been in Punch before the First World War as ‘bumpers’, a term applied to those who only rode horses on Margate Sands. Prostitutes were ‘polls’, and to be caught out with one could be ‘deuced awkward’. This picture of men living at the far ends of the earth who had ceased to bother with home leave was complicated in the manner of some of Somerset Maugham’s characters by a tendency to go native. It was normal for people who might have spent a third of their lives in Chiengmai to break into the flow of public school English with sharp little interjections of Thai, spoken through the nose. The most senior company servant had taken to wearing a convenient and sensible vest-like garment, excellently adapted to the climate, with black silk Shan trousers down to the knee. For the last ten years most of his spare time had gone into writing a book about the four Idyllic Occupations, which were reading, farming, fishing and the gathering of firewood. The story was that he still kept a Thai mistress who was a ‘serene highness’ and was entitled to be shaded by three ceremonial umbrellas wherever she went, although now she was old and rarely to be seen.
Representatives of foreign firms such as the Bombay Burma and the Borneo companies were invited and even expected to attend local festivities, which most of them thoroughly enjoyed, and here, if they had any feeling for such things, there were traditional entertainments to be watched that had hardly changed in a thousand years, and which in their poetry and magnificence would have been hard to match anywhere else on earth.
Meadows, one of the Company’s old timers, gave me a lift over to the Wat Arun—the tallest building in the area—where a festival was taking place. The first sign of military sponsorship was a large placard bearing a notice in Thai, and beneath it an English translation.
ALL HAT WEARING. BRASSIERES ALSO TO WEAR.
ALL TO DANCE.
PARTNERS TO TOUCH. NOT WALK BEHIND.
LADIES HAIR CURL IN PERMANENT WAY.
LOW CASTE NO UMBRELLA-ING.
Meadows explained that among the new rules laid down in search of power and prestige was the requirement that hats be worn within the precincts of all pagodas. Sensibly, as they were never worn at other times, these were on hire, displayed on tables in long lines outside the Wat’s walls, and beside each lady’s hat had been placed an orchid, and a safety pin with which to secure it if desired. Behind the lines of hats were tumblers containing mekhong, a locally made whisky drunk hot, with adjacent primuses to deal with drinks that had cooled down. The monks had drawn the line at whisky drinking within the perimeter of the Wat itself, so to be on the safe side many of the males helped themselves to the equivalent of a half pint of Johnny Walker, becoming instantly drunk, and sometimes bursting into loud laughter.
A notice over the richly carved lintel of the entrance to the temple enclosure said: ‘All doors are open. Courtesy and affability conciliate.’ Through the entrance two wonderfully kept cows ambled past, chewing on the flowers they had snatched in passing from the hands of sauntering guests. To one side of the gate several members of the festival committee came forward to receive us and to present Major Chai Wut, Chief of Police, who happened also to be a registered astrologer. Meadows told me later that the Major had recently had several gold teeth put in ‘to make his face wider and happier’. He said he had taken rather a liking to the man. He was at his most pleasant when drunk, as he frequently was, and was well-known for the number of semi-destitute hangers-on whose rice he provided, largely from the proceeds of minor corrupt practices. Meadows complimented him on the new American pistol he was wearing and the Major showed himself delighted. ‘We are surrounded by evil men, Mr Meadows,’ he said. ‘It behoves us to antidote our precautions.’
In the matter of protocol first priority was a visit to the Wat itself, and we climbed the wide marble staircase leading to a L-shaped hall. The floor of this was packed with prostrate figures, and turning the corner of the L the huge figure of an enthroned Buddha came into view. Meadows nodded respectfully in its direction as if to a foreigner of distinction who might or might not feel inclined to return his salutation. Through the deep and throbbing drone of prayer came a muffled babel of sounds from outside the building: the shrieking voices of actresses, the tangled rhythms of several orchestras, and the crackle of .22 rifles on miniature ranges. Now and then we heard a thumping explosion. Meadows explained that this sound would be produced by the mo
st up-to-date of the many attractions—the hand-grenade throwing range; it had recently been tested out in the Bangkok festivals and voted to be most popular of all side shows.
We went down the staircase and out into the open again. Here the scene was one of extreme vivacity, emphasised by the occasional appearance of Europeans from one of the companies who, even at such a time, contrived to move with a sort of stiff purpose through the formless ebb and flow of the holiday crowd. We were facing the entrance to a lofty tent in which the orchid show was being held, and at that moment a procession of beautiful women were leaving it. They were dressed in the wonderfully archaic costumes of the previous generations, now only worn by prostitutes catering for the romantic tastes of the Europeans of the companies. Meadows told me that they were from the best local house, The Retreat of The Transcending Concord. In one corner of this view an actress in a twelfth-century play defied a Mongolian rapist. In the other the gift promised for the occasion by the hereditary prince was led into sight. Traditionally this was a gambolling dragon of wicker and canvas, but this year, Meadows said, for educational reasons the prince had ordered a model of a dinosaur and an attendant tossed out leaflets listing scientific facts. The noise was overpowering, for at that moment what Meadows thought was the most powerful amplifying system in northern Thailand went into action—the gift, according to Meadows, of the leading opium traders in the town. The music was from the film The Asphalt Jungle, the most popular ever to be shown in the town.
The orchid house was claimed to have been the largest ever put up in Thailand. It was in effect an extremely large tent in the shape of a pagoda, with a stiffened canvas spire one third the height of the Wat Aran, glittering with gold leaf and coloured glass inserts in the sky above it.
The main exhibit, which we examined with proper respect, was a Vanda Coerulia, the blue Thailand Orchid, believed to be extinct in the wild. The prince had organised an expedition which, after a two-day journey by bulldozer from Chiengmai, had discovered the rare flower out of sight from the ground in the forest canopy. The orchid itself was six feet in length, and a packing case had to be built on the spot to accommodate both the plant and part of the tree. The journey back as far as the paved road was by bulldozer, after which the valuable load was transferred to a suitably decorated cart. In addition to the usual coloured streamers, and a picture of a magic tiger intended to deter hijackers, the orchid was accompanied on the final stage of the journey by a musician whose function it was to pacify any spirit the flower might contain by playing to it on an archaic form of panpipes.
A variety of birds had found their way into the tent and the attendants had put down saucers of food suited to their different requirements. There was a sharp hiss somewhere overhead and the birds flew up. ‘Could that have been a bullet by any chance?’ I asked Meadows.
‘It was,’ he said. ‘You hear them whistling about the place every now and then. Trouble is they will mess with guns. That and the fact that half of them are tight most of the time.’ A nurse in a sparkling white uniform was hurrying by; slowing down to bow slightly, she released a faint odour of ether.
‘Any casualties?’ I asked.
‘They expect a few. We’ll probably see the ambulance touring round. It’s very well equipped. I hear they had a couple of flesh wounds yesterday. Someone lost a hand at the grenade-throwing last year.’
The attendance at the orchid display struck me as respectful rather than enthusiastic. Along with the striptease it was probably part of the cultural revolution, something to be gulped down in dutiful style before passing on to more impetuous pleasure. A smiling, swaying colonel was in charge of the most popular of the attractions and, spotting us, he immediately hustled us to the head of the small queue that had formed. The grenades were the training variety, loaded with a small proportion of their usual charge and drilled with vent holes, which were supposed to prevent fragmentation. They were thrown at tiny models of tanks, guns and men fixed lightly to an electrical conveyor, and the prizes to be won were exhibited on a stand in the rear. Anyone who blew a model of a battle tank off the rails received a bedside lamp made from a shell case. The demolition of a self-powered gun was rewarded by a watch with a luminous strap, and that of a midget soldier by a gold-dipped fob-watch, engraved with a stylisation of a bursting bomb.
The front two rows of onlookers seated behind a protective barrier were occupied by the vacant-faced young novice monks who were the town’s leading citizens. Behind them, in order of importance, came the big opium smugglers, army and police officers, a few exquisite princesses descended from Mongolian war-lords and condemned to a vacuous liberty through the decline in harems, then the richest shopkeepers and the elegant and dignified prostitutes from the town’s leading brothel—each one carrying a plastic shoulder-bag proclaiming a progressive outlook. It was an occasion when the Siamese genius for good humour was shown to best advantage. Each contestant picking up his grenade received shouts of encouragement When a tank was knocked out a cheer went up. A bad throw provoked groans of disappointment. The management seemed anxious that people should win their prizes and failure caused them to click their teeth in dismay. Sympathetic-looking nurses were dodging about in the background of this and other gatherings in the vicinity, on the look-out for dead-drunks who were tenderly gathered up and carried away for treatment.
Meadows thought that I should go first. An army N.C.O. stepped up and placed three grenades on the bench at my side. In so far as a Thai could look anxious, this man did so. He mumbled something with lowered eyes, and Meadows translated. ‘He is concerned for your success and begs you not to fail.’ The N.C.O. handed me a white glove and I noticed that the palm of it was blackened by smoke. Meadows saw me staring at it and said, ‘There is a five-second delay. Probably better to give it three seconds. Be on the safe side, eh?’ At that moment an ambulance siren started up and the ambulance dashed off. I was looking down at the grenades and noticed they were smaller than in the old days, although the Italian ‘Red Devil’, which was the smallest of them all, could blow your forearm off and with it half your head, if you held it too long.
I picked up a grenade, which fitted snugly into the palm although it was heavier than I expected, and the thought flashed through my mind whether this one could have slipped through with the full charge intact. In the old days of grenade-throwing, either in practice or with serious intentions, the thrower sometimes fumbled and dropped the thing. The N.C.O., perpetually smiling, watched me closely and nodded encouragement. ‘Five seconds,’ he reminded me. ‘But better three.’ I noticed at this moment something about the music I found a little unnerving. Several orchestras were going at full pitch and predominantly the instruments employed were xylophones and gongs, but it was the sudden outburst of frantic squealing of rams’ horns that I would have preferred not to be obliged to listen to at that particular moment. I gripped the grenade, struck the pin projecting from its bottom on the bench, counted three fast to be on the safe side, and threw it at a midget battle tank that had come jerking into sight on the conveyor. The throw was too high. The grenade struck the iron background sheet before falling to the ground, and there was a two-second delay before it exploded with a belch of smoke and shower of sparks, accidentally almost derailing the personnel-carrier following the tank. ‘I have an idea that was a full charge,’ I called to Meadows, but he had moved two or three paces to the rear and there was no reply. My second grenade was wide of the mark and did not explode. The third just missed a self-propelled gun and exploded with a thunderous crack the moment it struck the ground. I turned round to Meadows. ‘Your go,’ I said, but he laughed and shook his head. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said.
Fifty yards away they were dancing the Ram Wong on a raised circular stage under the supervision of a police lieutenant whose job it was to enforce the new cultural laws. These obliged couples to take each other in their arms in Western style, which they did so long as the policeman was able to keep his eye on them. He was oblige
d, however, to look after two other cultural side shows so that as soon as he left the Ram Wong the dancers, including several Europeans, changed back immediately into the traditional dance in which the man followed the girl, both partners jigging and waving their arms rhythmically to the music.
We turned away in the direction of the striptease, but halted by a notice at the entrance to the tent, TEASING TO STOP ONE HALF HOUR FOR NECESSITIES OF BODILY RELIEF. TO RESUME SO PLEASE TO RETURN WITH OUR THANKS.
Just as we reached the gate we were stopped by the sound of running feet from behind. It was the N.C.O., clutching a package which he thrust into my hands. ‘Please to open,’ he said, and I tore away the wrapping, and found myself holding one of the grenade-throwing bedside lamps. There was a note with it. For dashed good effort. To accept with compliment. ‘To compensate one grenade not explode,’ the N.C.O. said, baring his teeth with pleasure.
We examined the lamp closely. It was beautifully made, the surface incised with posturing figures from the Ramayana. How extraordinary, I thought, that you could only find a really excellent example of the ancient art applied to a shell case. ‘I find this’, I said to Meadows, ‘highly symbolical of the times and the place.’
Next day I left for Bankok and Singapore. Meadows drove me to the station in Chiengmai, where it was announced in an almost congratulatory way that the train would be no more than two hours late in leaving. Thus I was given an opportunity of seeing something of the old part of the most delectable of oriental towns in the early morning hours before the bustle of the day began.
Chiengmai, capital of the North, remained beneath a thin veneer of development Thailand’s most pleasing city. It was sedate enough at this hour to be explored on hired bikes, with everything worth seeing compressed into the old town within the medieval walls. Part of Chiengmai recalled scenes from old movies, of China before Mao, and a glance at the map confirmed that the remotest provinces of China were not far away. Men and women wearing hats like enormous lampshades hobbled past under the weight of a pole balanced on the shoulders with heavy burdens at each end. Time-defaced human and animal figures, ribald and threatening or merely grotesque, lay abandoned among the rubbish in odd corners. The department stores, open by seven, had special offers of spirit-houses to suit all pockets, from clearance lines in plastic to deluxe versions in richly-grained teak. They were put up everywhere to give shelter to the ancestral spirits of the family, and to such vagrant ones as might be tempted to take up residence, just as a bird may take over a nesting box.