by Norman Lewis
The roofs of old Chiengmai, curling at the eaves, lay upon the city like autumn leaves, and from these arose the spires of many temples, spreading the faintest of haloes into the misted sky. There could have been no more poetic scene than the line-up soon after dawn of the archers with their crossbows, members of a clan enjoying the privilege of shooting at the stationary outlines of fish in the intensely green waters. All these men in their ancient garb presented roughly identical features to the rising sun as they muttered a prayer at the instant of releasing an arrow.
There was only time for one of the many pagodas, the Wat Phra Singh, enshrining the Buddha which, deposited momentarily on this spot while being taken to the king, refused to move further. The pagoda also possesses one of the largest collections of grandfather clocks in the world. We arrived when a stream of male citizens over fifty, who are allowed to sleep there once a week in order to benefit from the holy emanations, were taking their departure. With that the long-drawn-out whistle of the train was heard, and we said goodbye. ‘I cannot possibly tell you how much I wish I were coming along,’ Meadows said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’ve been here too long,’ he said. ‘In the end you feel a change coming over you but by that time it’s too late. Before I know what’s happening I’ll be wearing Shan trousers. It’s time to go, the question is can I pull myself out?’
It was a sweltering afternoon in Singapore when I arrived. Attracted by its reputation for embalmed Englishery, I took a cab to the celebrated Raffles Hotel, and was allocated a room with chintz curtains, a telephone dressed up unconvincingly as a cat, a Gideon Bible, and bedroom slippers for both sexes which seemed only to emphasise the loneliness of the long-distance traveller. A call to Loke’s number rang only once before the receiver was picked up and a remote and passionless female voice held me at bay. I sensed well-controlled impatience at the other end of the line as a cautious questioning began. Having described myself as a personal friend of Mr Loke and outlined the purpose of my visit to Singapore, I was told that Wan Tho was out of town at that moment, but she hoped to be in touch with him that evening, in which case she was sure I would hear from him. From this I could only suspect that I had been fed into a system in which calls by the hundred for the great man were filtered and sifted, before a batch of possibles were delivered to a secretary for a final verdict as to who was acceptable and who could be forgotten about.
An hour or two passed. I wandered down to the bar and got into conversation with a man who was in office-building construction and Loke’s name came up. Loke, he said, with a laugh of satisfaction, had recently dabbled unhappily in steel futures, and now found himself with several thousand tons of steel girders on his hands. He had had to find somewhere to store these, temporarily, but it was no longer possible to find a square yard of unutilised land in Singapore. The only solution was to stack them in his magnificent garden, largely until then devoted to—and I knew this was coming—Malaysia’s foremost orchid collection. The ambience of Singapore, he assured me, was uniquely entrepreneurial.
Having eaten little since dawn, I was now beginning to feel the pangs of hunger. What was the food like here? I asked my friend. He raised his eyes to heaven, and said they prided themselves on traditional English cooking, including steak and kidney pie, with a curry evening meal on Saturdays, which was strongly to be avoided. It was quite pleasant in the garden, and most people ate there in the evenings, although long-sleeved shirts and antimalarial cream were a must.
I had to leave Singapore the following morning and I had given up hope of Loke, so I went down and occupied the only vacant table in the garden, which may have been turned down by other diners due to its positioning at the edge of a pool, in which large goldfish with sullen expressions and immensely bulging eyes circled endlessly in hypnotic fashion in an anti-clockwise direction. The waiter came with the menu, suggesting before I could speak ragout of beef with herb dumplings, which struck me as unsuitable in a climate in which even the sky seemed to sweat. The alternative to this was savoury meat loaf, to which I had just committed myself when everyone seated in the vicinity was suddenly distracted from whatever they were doing as five white Cadillacs, moving so silently that only the scrunch of their tyres on the gravel could be heard, crept up the drive to form a line outside the hotel’s entrance. It reminded me of the funeral cortège of an American gangster, minus the flowers, and I was never more surprised than at that moment when I saw two figures crossing the lawn in my direction, one being someone from the hotel, and the other Loke.
He was full of cheerful apologies, including one for the cars. ‘Kind of thing I hate,’ he said, ‘but I have to put up with. Marvellous you chose to turn up now. We’re on our way to my sister’s birthday party, dear boy. Black tie, white Cadillac. There’s no getting out of it. Hop in.’ Five years had passed since the days of our bird-watching in Pembrokeshire, but birds and photography played as great a part in his life as ever, he said. He had a wonderful story to tell: he was now a bosom friend of Malcolm Macdonald, the British High Commissioner for Asia, who also knew something about birds. Loke had found him a house in Kuala Lumpur, in the garden of which an extremely rare eagle was about to build its nest. Loke persuaded Macdonald that the chick-rearing operation ought to be kept under observation, and within days of the Commissioner agreeing to this, he found a thirty-foot tower erected next to the tree with the nest, at the top of which Loke spent most of his spare time for a month.
We were bound for an open-air restaurant a mile or so out of town, the central feature of which proved to be a rotunda set in a garden of flowering trees among which bird cages were artfully concealed, some furnished with real songsters, others with vociferous mechanical bulbuls, used to stimulate birds in the neighbourhood into natural song. About two hundred Chinese guests were seated at long tables forming a hollow square. Within the rotunda a pianist in tails seated at a grand piano worked his way with some panache through a repertoire of Sankey and Moody hymns.
Loke explained that most of the guests were Christadelphians, members of an American fundamentalist sect that attempts to inculcate severe morality in its adherents, including—despite the example of the marriage at Cana—an absolute ban upon alcohol. For this reason all believers present were invited to wash down the exquisite food placed before them with Dr Pepper, 7-up, or other such blameless refreshments. ‘Don’t despair, old boy,’ Loke said. ‘We’ll do something about it in your case. You’re unsaved, so you don’t count.’ More white Cadillacs were arriving, and he said of the colour, ‘I imagine it’s part of our way of showing our faith.’ He slipped away and his sister dropped into the empty chair. She was exceedingly pretty, with features veering in the direction of European models, as I had often noticed in the case of upper-crust Chinese beauties. She was carrying a bowl of great delicacy which I later found out was Ming. She picked up the gilt-edged card at the side of my plate, giggled and read the text, ‘Let us continue in the breaking of bread, and prayer.’ With that the glass was filled from the splendid bowl. ‘Malt,’ she said. ‘I hope you approve … well, I guess only God sees this. Cheers.’ She went, and Loke was back. ‘I checked with one of the elders, and I was right. He said the colour emphasises the concept of purity.’
It was a lively affair. The guests exchanged jokes, pulled funny faces, demonstrated conjuring tricks and punned in English—probably in Chinese, too. They were easily amused. A feature of the banquet, which ran to some thirty dishes, was a partridge served to each guest in which a simulated and edible bird’s nest had been inserted. Someone stood up and said, ‘Normally the bird is to be found in the nest. Now we are eating a nest that was discovered in the bird.’ Everyone clapped.
The real and mechanical bulbuls warbled in their cages, the pianist charged for the third time into Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow, played as if it were a wedding march, and a Chinese lady wearing a kind of surplice arose to upbraid us all in a brief sermon in English, which appeared to
fall on deaf ears. Now, with the disposal of the last of the simulated birds’ nests, the signal had gone out for ‘the hour of contagious joy’ to begin. Red noses and false moustaches were distributed and a pentatonic twittering arose from the guests as they indulged at this stage in horseplay of a decorous kind.
At the end of the night the scent of the frangipani strengthened, Sankey and Moody had been put away, and I was reminded of the past’s indelible grandeur by the strumming of an ancient zither someone had smuggled into this most modern of scenes. With the first flush of dawn Loke drove me to the airport. On the way we talked about his forthcoming expedition to the Himalayas, where for two whole months he proposed to wash his hands of his business concerns, sever communications with Singapore and do nothing more than hunt down, photograph and skin rare birds. The invitation to me to join the party was renewed. Had I ever thought about taking up taxidermy? he wanted to know, and I told him that I hoped to do so when I had the time. ‘You’re bound to spoil a few birds at first,’ he said, ‘but you’ll soon get the hang of the thing.’
With that, we parted in hope, continuing a regular correspondence but never to meet again. There was to be no expedition, for a year or two later Loke was killed in a plane crash in Taiwan.
On the occasion of my first visit to Indo-China in 1950, my flight from Paris to Saigon by DC4 had taken, including a night’s stopover, an excruciating four days, but by the greatest of good fortune had provided an opportunity to get to know a senior French policeman, Vincent Lagrange. Shortly after our arrival he had invited me to dinner at his house in the rue Catinat. Here he lived in resplendent surroundings with a Vietnamese mistress of outstanding beauty, Nam Chuan. A curious situation had arisen, for the fourth member of the party was Chu Ti, a bosom friend of Nam Chuan who lived in a cottage in the garden. Nam Chuan and Chu Ti had been born in the same village, but the two girls were poles apart. Lagrange’s girlfriend was worldly, a typical French official’s mistress, swathed in silk and tinkling softly with concealed jewellery as she moved about the room. Chu Ti was beautiful, but her attractions were of a different kind, including the freshness and simplicity of a village girl in country cottons, and the clogs worn by country people in their muddy fields. In my discussions with the girls, I was astonished to find that, despite Lagrange’s position as an upholder of French Dominion, no secret was made of the fact that Chu Ti had been fighting in the jungle with the rebel Viet-Minh, and had been wounded in a skirmish before being smuggled into Saigon to convalesce.
Although Lagrange never made reference to this episode he must have been aware of it, and it was only to be concluded that he was firmly under Nam Chuan’s thumb. Later in our relationship he had admitted to a near-certainty that Nam Chuan had something going with his house-boy who took over whenever his employer was on tour. Lagrange was philosophical (‘Ah, qu’est ce que vous voulez? Elle est jeune et jolie et je suis vieux’). Whatever their domestic complications, I saw a good deal of the Lagrange household. Vincent seemed happy to have me accompany him on official trips, and I took Chu Ti to the movies, which she adored, although with a strong preference for gangster films. How extraordinary it was that this little jungle fighter who had seen prisoners’ throats cut and men frizzled by flame-throwers in battle should squirm in her cinema seat not only from the pain of unhealed wounds but at the adventures of Edward G. Robinson acting the part of Al Capone.
Before making this second trip to Saigon, I had written to Lagrange but received no reply. Having settled in at the Hotel Continental, my first concern was to get in touch with him. There was no reply when I telephoned so I took a cyclo to his house where I was met by a concierge who was new to me. She told me that Lagrange was on three months’ leave in France, and that Nam Chuan, who for her was Madame Lagrange, was staying with relations for the great spring festival, the Tet. Chu Ti she had never heard of. I wrote out a note for Nam Chuan which she promised to have delivered, and next morning they phoned up from the reception at the hotel to say that someone was waiting for me. It was Chu Ti, who in the first moments seemed almost unrecognisably changed, although in a matter of moments I realised that the transformation was due to nothing more than the town-clothes she was wearing. I remembered that a reporter on Le Figaro had mentioned that because the Viet-Minh were now in most of the villages, a warning had gone out to country girls to leave their pyjamas and coolee hats behind when they came into Saigon to avoid being suspected of spying or worse. I stammered my pleasure and surprise, and we touched hands. Meetings of the kind are not publicly effusive in South-east Asia. I could see that she was daunted by the surroundings. ‘Can we go somewhere else?’ she said. We took one of the pedecabs waiting at the door, and told him to take us to the Jardins Botaniques.
These, too, had changed, having benefited from the cash-flow of war, although losing none of their charm. For the Tet, the municipality had splashed out, filling the gardens with a purchase of tame silver and golden pheasants, birds that could be seen in the wild on the outskirts of the city, but were here for this occasion in recognition of the good luck with which they were supposedly charged. It was a merit-acquiring exercise to feed these magnificent birds with specially dyed grain on sale for the purpose, and everyone who could afford a piastre’s worth for distribution made a purchase.
Luck was seen or stored in the least likely of ways. Spoilt, yapping little dogs of a kind once bred for the old imperial family were brought here for the Tet. For a miniscule fee one could be taken on a lead to urinate against a small post carved with the signs of longevity and peace, in this way discharging luck like a strong electric current. Soft drinks were to be had in the six symbolic colours, but possessing no flavour of any kind: included in the purchase was a horoscope cast on the spot. The pursuit of good fortune seemed often to be linked with absurdities to which even the most sensitive members of the community were prey. Chu Ti, for example, for whose discrimination and intelligence I had the highest respect, was clearly happy to scatter festive grain in the path of a pheasant, and showed signs of disappointment when the birds pecked at her offering in a disinterested fashion.
We sat under a tree to which a little banner had been fastened thanking it for flowering at such an appropriate time, and I asked her about the two years that had passed since our last meeting. ‘The future is beginning to smile,’ she said. ‘By next year the war will be over. We shall be liberated.’
‘Do you still go to the jungle?’
‘When they need me. I help with the wounded, but there’s less fighting.’
‘And your own wounds?’
‘They’ve healed. The bullet is still there, but it gives no trouble.’
‘I’m glad. And what is the news of Nam Chuan?’
‘The news is good. She has been honoured by one of the leaders.’
‘The Viets? You don’t mean the Viets?’
‘No, the Cao-Dai.’
At that moment I remembered Lagrange had told me that both girls had become followers of the strange new religion, based on Buddhism, the teachings of Confucius and Christianity, that was sweeping through South Vietnam and had even been successful in recruiting membership among the largely communist Viet-Minh. Their saints included Victor Hugo and Joan of Arc, Lagrange said. Also St John the Baptist and the Jade Emperor. They had a Pope, archbishops and bishops galore. They held spiritualist séances and went to Mass. Everybody was an official with a title of some sort or another, so there was something in it for all. ‘Vegetarians, aren’t they?’ I had asked, to which Lagrange replied, ‘It’s not all jam. You live on soya and vegetables. After forty you’re not allowed to go to bed with your wife.’
‘I forgot you were Cao-Dai,’ I said to Chu Ti. ‘Last time I was here the French took me to see the cathedral of Tay Ninh.’
‘Did you like it?’ she asked.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of Walt Disney?’
‘No.’
‘He’s a man who went in for fantastic
things. He could have designed the Cathedral. It’s very fantastic. It has a statue showing Jesus Christ borne on the shoulders of Lao-Tse, who is carrying Buddha and Confucius. They’ve been made to look like Japanese acrobats just about to go into their act.’
Chu Ti’s expression made me suspect that she saw nothing incongruous in this. I wondered sadly what was to become of the unapproachable style and taste of these gifted people under assault by the vulgarity of the West, of which Cao-Daism offered a foretaste.
‘Nam Chuan is now a member of the Charity Corps. She has been elevated to the rank of fidèle-ardente.’
‘And has all this altered her life in any way?’
‘Her life is changed. She releases captive birds. She eats rice. Three nights a week now she sleeps in the garden.’
‘What does Lagrange think about this?’
‘Monsieur Lagrange is not happy.’
‘That I can well imagine,’ I said.
Next day I had an appointment with my old friend Monsieur de la Fournière, director of the Office of Information and Propaganda, who, as architect and organiser of my earlier journeys into the country, had even been able to persuade his contacts among the military to allow me to travel on their convoys.
He was a man full of enthusiasm. Recognising me as I came through the door, he bounded from his chair and rushed to grab my hand. There was the usual banter about the English winter climate. ‘So you couldn’t put up with the fogs,’ he said. ‘I must say I’m delighted to see you, and you couldn’t have come at a better time. As you’ll see for yourself the war’s been won, and it’s practically over.’ He was a man whose optimism was so blind and persistent as to rank almost with the mildest of mental disorders. He hustled me to a wall map and threw out his arm to show the bold black arrows representing the French Forces in the field hurling back the weak and scattered Viet-Minh, clearly now at the point of annihilation. ‘Quite a change since you were last with us, eh?’