Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  ‘Idleness, the bane of so many women in Eastern countries, need never be known in Malaya’ was a message to which some women certainly responded. ‘True, the household tasks of the average Mem are few, but … there are many outside interests – Girl Guides and various lasses, to enumerate only two – which are crying out for help and for support.’21 Guiding, first introduced in 1916 among pupils of the Methodist Girls’ School, Kuala Lumpur, had spread to Singapore and Penang after the Great War. In the 1920s companies were formed in Province Wellesley, Ipoh, Taiping, Telok Anson, Batu Gajah, Tapah, Malacca, Seremban and Klang. The Girl Guide’s promise of community service harmonized with the prevailing climate of internationalism and Empire, and consequently the movement received financial support from the governments in Malaya. Many different nationalities participated; Guides and Brownies included Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, Ceylonese, Japanese and Europeans, and all worked in cooperation in the spirit of the Guide laws. However, with the support of the Sultans of Selangor, Johore and Kedah, vernacular Guiding began in the 1930s; in 1931 all-Malay Brownie packs were formed in Kuala Lumpur and Seremban by Mrs L. A. Thomas. Similar all-Malay initiatives were started by Dr M. G. Brodie in Kedah and by Mrs Marsh in Singapore, and later in the 1930s a Chinese vernacular company and a Tamil Brownie pack were established in Kuala Lumpur. The success of Guiding in Malaya rested on the commitment of a band of British officers, from Captains to Commissioners, and when the movement celebrated its twenty-first anniversary in 1938 the contribution of individuals was duly recognized.

  Gardening was a popular interest for a section of mems who enthused over the miraculous profusion of colourful shrubs and flowers. Katharine Sim was amazed to find ‘The sunflowers grew 4” each day’ and zinnias took only three weeks from seed to budding flowers. She tended her garden nearly every evening. Visiting other gardens to gather seeds and cuttings, she came across a Scottish planter’s wife who ‘in two years made a wonderful garden out of nothing’.22 However, for the less industrious, ease and entertainment were on offer in Singapore and Penang. There, ‘The butterfly can enjoy her weekly thé dansant at the Club, her frequent tennis tournaments, her golf, her bridge and her Mah Jong. There is usually an amateur dramatic society, where she can display her gifts … and there may be a musical society.’23 Satirists found easy targets in Singapore: ‘the charming young thing who is all frills and flounces’, the ‘wicked young person of the dance floor’, who ‘likes to be thought just a little naughty and daring, or “advanced”’, or the sportswoman who ‘dresses for golf better than she plays it … disdains the underhand serve at tennis … She plays an aggressive game of bridge and knows how to score the honours. She smokes of course. And she can put away a whisky-soda with relish.’24

  In all her varieties, the mem was a leading figure in the social scene, as a local writer testified:

  On Saturday mornings it is the mems who predominate in Raffles Place: the wives of the men from England. There are fat mems and thin mems … mems towing roaring children; smart mems … the considerably less affluent-looking mems of serving soldiers; smiling mems and dour mems … flashy mems from England’s industrial suburbs … mems who are younger than they look and mems who look as old as they are … empty-headed mems, intelligent mems, thoughtless mems, bridge-playing, mah-jong playing, useless mems, hard-working mems, parasitical mems, hard-drinking … common mems … mems with three servants and to whom the novelty of the situation has never quite faded; missionary mems, both dismal and jolly … mems, mems, mems.25

  In practice, there was strong social pressure on these women to be sociable. European houses in the Straits Settlements tended to be large and airy, with extensive verandahs and generous gardens – perfect settings for parties. Wives joined their husbands at the club, and weekends often revolved around games of golf or a day at the swimming club; happy memories of these times still linger. The Malets were much involved in amateur dramatics at the Klang Club, and their friends in Kedah and Selangor were also keen on cricket, so that when Mrs Malet’s brother Jock Sandeman played she acted as official scorer. ‘Peter’ Watkins was typical of countless mems whose favourite forms of relaxation were tennis, bridge and mah-jong, which suddenly became fashionable in the 1920s. A child of the time recalls, ‘I loved the clatter of the tiles and the picturesque designs of the three suits, including bamboos and circles, as well as the “fancy hand” tiles of the four winds and red and green dragons and the blank tiles called “soaps”.’26 A more unusual leisure activity was riding, which was one of the Rawcliffes’ pleasures. For Doris Barrett of the planting community in south Kedah, leisure focused on both home entertaining and the Sungei Patani Club, where she and her husband, Malcolm, enjoyed playing games of all sorts. Such people were the life and soul of the British community. Their lifestyles were plainly far removed from the tales of colonial excess, the dipsomania and adultery portrayed by some journalists and visiting celebrities ‘for whom bottles and larders were opened, and whom hosts and servants danced eager and unending attendance … We didn’t live that way,’ protested an indignant Singaporean.27

  As for life upcountry, even in the 1930s it took courage and common sense to live in an isolated tropical settlement with little or no company and few distractions. Posted to ‘a very remote district’, Kuala Selangor, in the mid-1930s, a police officer felt that, although his wife was resilient,

  It really wasn’t very fair on a new bride to be sent … where there wasn’t a single other government officer who was married … The house was … by modern standards very very crude, there was no electricity, no proper sanitation … For a young woman straight out from England the sanitation was pretty awful, what we called the thunderbox, and it was a very lonely life for her.28

  Many planters’ wives faced similar problems, as did even the wives of Malayan civil servants. In 1937 John Peel (later Sir John) considered himself fortunate to be appointed District Officer of the new hill station at Cameron Highlands, but the official residence was ‘a wooden hut with a tin roof and the office was attached … There were two rooms, no running water or sanitation … all very primitive [and] there was a hole through the wall to use the telephone in both places, the office and bungalow.’29 Here the Peels lived with their first baby. Yet traditional attitudes towards a colonial wife’s role – to support her husband wherever he went – persisted through the 1930s. Her reward would come when ultimately they retired comfortably home to the British Isles. Meanwhile, there was a moral obligation on the mem to recreate the atmosphere of England in a foreign dwelling.

  Some women had difficulty, Katharine Sim suspected, ‘shut away in themselves perhaps because they try to live in one place with their hearts in another – in England’.30 The practical ones did their best. ‘Fresh from England, the mem invariably tries to make the place look “less bare” by putting up curtains and hangings’, or by introducing familiar touches such as homemade cushions and lampshades, one of them wrote.31 Advice was always forthcoming from the senior mems. Treasured cushions increased the chance of prickly heat, and, in view of the high humidity and the ravages of the mason bee,

  Simple rotan furniture is favoured in Malaya; it is light and cool and easily replaced, and it can be made to look very dainty if painted with bright paint … Pictures are a care, and need constant attention … The same may be said of carpets, although bright rugs, which are brought from India … lend a touch of colour to rooms, and are easily taken up and shaken.

  Advice was also offered on choosing a comfortable, cool house at a reasonable rent, and about hiring servants. ‘Tamil servants are generally cheaper than Malays and Chinese, and many of them are good for general duties. But the experienced Mem and the Tuan who is careful about his clothes will prefer a Chinese or a Malay.’32

  Household hints for mems appeared routinely in print. In the slump years the emphasis was on economical housekeeping, such as how to double the life of a bath towel, how to revamp frocks using the skirt of one and the bodice
of another, how to curry casseroled rabbit or make macaroni cheese or prawn and green pea wiggle to serve on buttered toast; most of all, how ‘to avoid Cold Storage as much as possible, except for a few cheap and good dishes such as breast of veal … or neck of lamb’.33 A refrigerator was a necessity by the 1930s, and budget-conscious housewives liked to keep a grip on the food buying to reduce the cook’s overheads, his commission from the market stall-holders and his bicycle or rickshaw allowance of perhaps $5 a month. The kitchen, however, was Cookie’s domain. ‘The new Mem … is usually in the hands of her cook,’ observed Mrs Gun Munro, before advising her to ‘inspect the food when it is bought … If at any time it is found unsatisfactory, she can deduct the price from the cook’s allowance.’34 But even mature mems were happy to keep out of the kitchen. (A bizarre proof of their dependency is that some European women cooked for the first time in the wartime emergency of 1941-2.)

  For a young British woman fresh from England, with little experience of the world and no knowledge of Malay, learning to manage a ‘cookie’, ‘boy’, amah and the other male household servants was sometimes a daunting task. To her surprise, Mabel Price discovered that she was paying her kebun for flowers which he stole from a nearby cemetery, but ‘petty theft by the servants was taken for granted and not resented’.35 Advice on such matters was usually on hand:

  Newcomers would do well to beware of the houseboy who is ready to accept a small wage [under $30 a month]: either he will be found hopelessly incompetent or else he will make up the deficit by ‘pickings’ and other devious means … it might [also] be well to warn new arrivals … to carry out irregular but fairly frequent inspections [of the servants’ quarters] to ensure cleanliness and sanitation above all things. Also to keep a reasonable check on the amount of electricity used … Some would never turn off the switch from one month’s end to another.36

  It was vital to learn some basic Malay for communication (even Chinese and Indian servants spoke pidgin Malay). Many new wives must have just muddled through, but Peggie Snell in Singapore acquired a useful dictionary entitled Malay for Mems. If an employee showed particular skills (and the Sims’ ‘boy’, Ah Seng, was a dab hand at turning table napkins into rabbit’s ears or water lilies, boats or spires), it was important to know how to thank and praise him. All in all, however, the new mem faced a steep learning curve in the matter of language. To someone just out from England it was bewildering to be greeted with ‘what was practically gibberish to her!’

  ‘Will you have your mandi now and a pahit after?’ … Why not say bath and a drink? … A typical sentence would run something like this: ‘Oh yes, old so-and-so, he’s living in the P.W.D. bungalow at T.A. His Mem has been rather sakit (ill) lately’, or ‘The D.O. from K.K. came in for pahits before tiffin yesterday’, or ‘My amah is quite gila (mad); she sent my black dress to the dhobi (laundry)’, or ‘You should always put ayer busok (Jeyes Fluid) in the jamban (lavatory) …’ People were extremely kind, but they had not the slightest idea how odd this kind of talk sounded to newcomers.37

  Once the mem adjusted to social protocol, she still had to become acclimatized to living in a perpetual Turkish bath. This called for physical and mental adjustment, as a Singapore housewife implied.

  Life, for the women, means sitting in the house, alone, all through the long hot morning. Lying down for a rest, sleeping if you are lucky, reading something light perhaps, and too weary to do anything, too hot to make the attempt. Half of you lying, resting, when you do not want to rest, and the other half, like a disgruntled grasshopper … conscious of the long expanse, stretching away in front of you … How to fill the days, how to make life profitable and satisfying, how to adjust yourself to a climate from which there is no escape, no let up, no time ahead when it will be cooler, more bearable. It is the monotony, partly, that gets on your nerves.38

  The effect of the tropics on the nervous system was taken very seriously in the interwar period. Health and education became public issues. In 1929 a prominent Federal Councillor protested, ‘If you strip the ladies of their lipstick and their face powder, who do you get? You see women entirely worn out. You see their health breaking up …’ Some respite in the form of weekends by the sea or trips to hill stations was needed both for anaemic-looking wives and for leggy children fighting prickly heat and other ailments. Parents were also anxious about the effect of lassitude on their children’s learning. In their early years children were often taught by their mother or by a neighbour. The Barnes boys had lessons with the daughters of Mrs Nankivell, a trained teacher and wife of a Public Works Department engineer near Malacca. Until she was eight, Ray Soper learned at home.

  My mother taught us for a couple of years using the P.N.E.U. [Parents’ National Education Union] Correspondence course which came out from England. We had school in the mornings, myself and Momoy Low from next door. We put the small table and chairs in the carport and also a blackboard. We made models of wigwams and used plasticine. How I struggled with ‘Songs the Letters Sing’ (a phonetic reading system), and why Australia, though entirely surrounded by water, was a continent and not an island! When I did master reading, I went on to a reading series with Dick, Jane and Rover the dog. Some of the books had stories in them such as Henny Penny.40

  As the result of constant contact with their amahs, toddlers learned to speak pidgin Malay even before they were fluent in English. Mothers sometimes had to take in hand the learning of correct speech. John and Peter Kelley were taught to read English (and also to speak it) by their mother, using a little Malayan primer illustrated with scenes of Malay life.41 A hotchpotch of comics and books – Chick’s Own Paper, Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’s Annual, Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes – or old copies of Punch and the Straits Times gave reading practice to a rubber planter’s family; science consisted of watching fauna in the garden. ‘Our education suffered dreadfully. Occasionally Mother had a vague dab at it.’42

  All arrangements undoubtedly had drawbacks, and, with interruptions for leave, few children enjoyed much continuity in their early education. Planters were warned, ‘Parents who can afford the great expense have, as soon as possible after the infant stage has been passed, to send their children Home to school. The separation is a cruel thing … is one of the tragedies of life in the East for Europeans.’43 One option was to attend local mixed-race mission schools. In 1929 Robert Oliver, whose father was in the Post and Telegraphs Department, went at the age of five to St Mary’s School in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Another little boy and I were the only whites in the class. All the rest were Chinese and Malays. Like most primary schools at that time it was run by a religious order.’44 The actress Dulcie Gray was also a pupil at St Mary’s for two terms, during which she passed her School Certificate. Dulcie was the only European girl there, but ‘I made special friends with a Chinese girl, the daughter of Sir Chu Kia Peng [sic], and went to her magnificent home in Kuala Lumpur. A beautiful Indian girl called Jaya was another friend.’45 However, some parents found the mission schools unsatisfactory. The Barneses of Malacca and the Prices of Penang withdrew their sons from Catholic convents run by French nuns. There were additionally private schools about which little is now known, but Derick Cullen attended Tomlinson Hall School, Singapore, run by his Aunt Molly. After four years’ schooling in England a planter’s son attended a small school in Penang run by the Revd Greer, with half a dozen other European children. Some British parents preferred a boarding school at Kaban Djahe in Sumatra, which was run by a husband-and-wife team, the Cooksons, both teachers. Among the British pupils were the children of medical doctors, and the school was also popular with Americans working in the oil industry.

  After 1939 a fair number of English children from Malaya and Singapore were sent to private schools in Australia, and their adventures in transit on Blue Funnel’s little ships Centaur, Gorgon and Charon make a fascinating story. However, the establishment of private schools in the Malayan hill stations during the 1930s greatly improved educational prospects.
The first was St Margaret’s Church of England School at Fraser’s Hill, which Jette Rawcliffe and her sister Sheila attended, and where Dulcie Gray’s sister, Rosamund Savage-Bailey, was a teacher. A low white-washed bungalow with a red corrugated-iron roof, overlooking the jungle treetops, it was, as Dulcie recalled, ‘ugly to look at and ordinary, but it was set in paradise’.46 There were twenty-six pupils there, mostly boarders, aged from four to fourteen, and the teachers found themselves acting as nursemaids and house-mothers too. A successful Brownie pack, which the Savage-Baileys helped to run, was started in 1932. In the mid-1930s Rosamund moved on to Cameron Highlands and St Margaret’s was bought by a kindly and determined Scotswoman, and when Christopher Watkins, aged six, was sent there it had become known as Mrs Davidson’s School.

  When the Cameron Highlands were developed in the early 1930s the choice became wider. The Catholic Church had shown an early interest in acquiring land in the Highlands, and with wealthy backers a convent boarding school – an attractive building in Flemish style, the Pensionnat Notre Dame – was built on the lower plateau at Tanah Rata. Open to children of both sexes and all denominations, its numbers increased from twenty-seven in 1935 to 300 by 1940. The official opening on 1 May 1935 was attended by the English planter Henry Malet and his wife, whose daughters, Susan and Jennifer, were among the initial intake. Meanwhile another boarding school had been established on the higher plateau of the Cameron Highlands. The school’s founder, Miss Anne Griffith-Jones, came from an old colonial family and had experience of running a nursery school at Tanglin Club in Singapore. Known universally as ‘Miss Griff’, she possessed a restless energy and great efficiency. Inevitably there was some rivalry between the two institutions. In their brown-and-gold uniforms, Miss Griff’s pupils were easily distinguished from the convent children, who wore blue and grey, and the two groups were nicknamed the ‘Blue Beetles’ and the ‘Yellow Cockroaches’.