A Writer's Notebook

  T. He is a tall thin man with a sallow, clean-shaven face and spectacles. This gives him an odd air of a student, and you would think that he was a literary journalist rather than a jungle-wallah. He has a shy and apologetic manner. He has lived so much alone that he speaks very little. He is dressed in khaki shorts, stockings and a khaki shirt. He is by profession a miner and has discovered a jade mine in the north of Burma, where he expects to make his fortune. He comes down to Mandalay for the wet season, but the rest of the year he spends up at his mine with no other white man within seven miles of him.

  1929

  Borneo. H. is dressed in a khaki shirt and khaki shorts. He wears brown shoes and stockings that come to just below the knee. He is a man of about the middle size, fat, with a red face shining with sweat and a hooked red nose. He has blue eyes and fairish hair receding on the forehead. He talks almost entirely in catch-words, especially when he is with people who are drinking. It is his way of showing that he is a good fellow. But when he is alone with you he speaks more naturally, and like a gentleman. He keeps a couple of cats and a dog. He comes from a family of clergymen.

  A. He is a Welshman with quite a marked Welsh accent, a thin, slovenly, clean-shaven man, with outsticking ears and irregular features. He is neither good-looking nor healthy of appearance. He has a sardonic humour and a way of insincerely flattering people, and it gives him a certain amusement when he sees that they are taken in by his soft sawder. He is badly and untidily dressed. He plays the piano well and is fond of classical music. Whenever he is out of temper he soothes himself by playing. He gives you the impression of being a country boy of rather humble origin who by his cleverness at school and in examinations entered the Civil Service. He has in his room a lot of school prizes bound in the usual way. He is fond of reading French and has a small collection of modern French novels, but speaks it badly.

  The Sultan. It was arranged that we should be received by the Sultan in his audience chamber at ten, and as we walked along we saw him and his suite coming out of the place where he lives, which is above and at the side of the audience chamber, and we waited for a moment to allow him to get in. He was accompanied by two middle-aged men and a suite, all higgledy-piggledy, with a man holding an umbrella over his head. The audience chamber was a long low room with a gaudily-painted throne at one end. In front of this was a table with half a dozen dining-room chairs round it, and from this, on each side of the table, two rows of chairs ran down the hall. We were introduced to the Sultan and then to the two regents. The Sultan is a little boy of thirteen with a long face like a horse, a pale ivory skin, a large mouth which shows his long teeth and gums when he smiles, and very quick beady eyes. He was dressed in yellow silk, a coat, trousers and sarong, and on his head he wore a black fez decorated with an appliqué pattern of gold cloth enriched with imitation diamonds. Round his neck were a number of gold strings and chains and a large gold medal. The regents, who are his close relations, wore blueish-grey patterned silk handkerchiefs made into a kind of turban on their heads, and dark trousers, bajus and sarongs. One of them had a very pronounced squint and wore spectacles of blue glass. The younger brother of the Sultan, a little pale-faced boy of eight, was carried in by an attendant on whose lap he sat throughout the audience. The Sultan looked every now and then at the cross-eyed regent to see what he was to do, but seemed to have self-assurance and to be not at all shy. He sat in an arm-chair at the head of the table, with the regents on one side of him and the British Resident and ourselves on the other. Behind him stood a group of officials in very shabby clothes. One of them bore a state sword of execution and there was another who bore a spear, a third with a cushion and a fourth with the apparatus for chewing betel-nut. Large native cigarettes were handed round, about the size of an ordinary candle, coarse Borneo tobacco wrapped in nipah palm leaves; but they smoked easily and coolly. The rest of the councillors sat on chairs on each side of the hall and appeared to be listening intently to the conversation that went on at the round table. At the side of the throne behind the Sultan stood two enormous burning candles in large brass candlesticks, and these were supposed to indicate the purity of the Sultan’s sentiments toward us. The little boy, the Sultan’s brother, stared with all his eyes. The regent on behalf of the Sultan paid us elaborate compliments, and then the Resident on my behalf made a long speech telling them all about me and who I was. After this there was a little desultory conversation, each side trying to think of something to say. Then after a final compliment from the regent and a graceful return from the Resident we took our leave.

  The hill behind the Residency is covered with all manner of trees, but the haphazard arrangement, due to the chance of nature, has the effect of an artful devising. It looks like a jungle-covered hill in an old Chinese picture.

  We went over the cutch factory. It is built by the side of the river at the bottom of a hill. A variety of sheds, on piles, of roughly-hewn logs covered with a corrugated iron roof. Behind it grow bananas, papayas and various trees. It has a rough and ready air and gives you the impression of having been erected higgledy-piggledy as occasion arose. It is sloppy and untidy and has none of the trimness of a factory in England or America. Cutch is a material used for tanning made from the bark of the mangrove tree, and as you walk about the factory there is a slight odour of tan. There are huge vats in which the bark, which has been previously broken to pieces by a complicated machine, is washed in water and boiled till the tannin has been extracted, and when the cutch is finally ready it comes out in a thick, reddish brown viscid liquid which looks like molasses. This then dries out and is made into large, very hard cakes. The manager and his two assistants live each in his own bungalow on a hill and they have a little club which they all go to as evening draws in. The club consists of one long room in part of which is a billiard-table and in the rest a small bar, a bridge-table, and a table on which are piled up papers like the Daily Graphic and the Mirror, and magazines like the Royal and the Strand. The club is looked after by one boy who serves out drinks and in the interval acts as billiard-marker. It is very grubby. The manager is a fattish man with horn-rimmed spectacles and false teeth, clean-shaven, with a bronzed, squarish face. He has been here for five and twenty years and is said to have great influence on the natives. He has a way of interspersing his conversation with fragments of bad French. He is said to be kindly and reliable. The three men who compose the staff get on very badly together. They have fearful quarrels. The engineer is a man getting on for thirty, who speaks with a broad Scotch accent so that it is not easy for the Englishman to understand what he says. He is of about middle height, dressed in shabby grey drill and a ragged tennis shirt. He has a good-looking attractive face with blunt, but not unpleasant, features, and blue eyes which you may think are just bleary with drink, but if you look at them with imagination have an imaginative and tragic look. They give you the impression of being oddly puzzled as though they had seen things out in the East which the man could not understand, and you might think to yourself that this raw, simple uneducated Scot had become aware of something strange which had knocked him off his balance and left him adrift on the sea of life. He is said to be a very heavy drinker and when drunk is objectionable and violent. The third man is small but big-boned, sandy-haired, with a large nose, and extremely taciturn.

  Labuan. You land at a little pier and come upon the main street, which runs along in front of the sea. It consists of Chinese and Jewish shops which have this peculiarity: often two or three trades are conducted in one shop, and you will see on one side of the door in the open window a dentist’s chair or a hairdresser’s establishment and in another a watchmaker working at his bench, while in the rest of the shop they sell canned goods. There are three or four shops of Jewish traders from Baghdad. In one, a regular jack-of-all trades of a shop, with everything that you might find in a pedlar’s pack for sale, there was reclining on a bench at the back a Jewess of amazing, of almost unbelievable beauty. Half lying, half sitting, in an att
itude of lazy abandonment, she had nothing on but a faded pink dressing-gown. Her white feet were naked. She had a lovely oval face, ivory in colour, a mass of very black hair and magnificent, ox-like eyes. She might have stepped right out of one of the Arabian Nights. There was about her a sensual languor and a voluptuousness which took your breath away. Her husband was a tall, emaciated, bearded Jew in spectacles, such as you might easily see in the East End of London; sharp, cunning and obsequious.

  F.M.S. Dawn at sea. I happened to awake as day was breaking and went on deck. The hills of Perak were grey and above them were grey clouds, and as the sun rose for a moment it coloured the clouds pink and gold so that they looked like the sarongs of Trengganu.

  Ricebirds. The ricebirds fluttered disorderly, a white flock, like haphazard thoughts that pass through the mind without reason or sequence.

  The Resident Councillor. He is a little man, between fifty and fifty-two, with grey hair and bushy grey eyebrows. He has a good profile and you can imagine that in youth he was good-looking. His blue eyes are tired now and his mouth with its thin lips is peevish. He speaks as though he had no teeth in his mouth and it is difficult to understand his mumbling. He is said to be very shy, but gives you the impression of being merely ignorant of social usages. It embarrasses him to introduce one person to another. He cannot summon up enough courage to leave a party until someone else has made a move. He is conscientious and hard-working, but stupid. He is the kind of official who is always afraid of doing the wrong thing, and bound up in silly prejudice and red tape. Though he has been here for thirty years, he speaks little Malay and takes no interest in the country or in anything else but doing his work so that his superiors may have no cause for complaint against him, and getting away as soon as he is entitled to a pension. His mind is so occupied with trifles that he cannot give any attention to general topics. His concerns are purely local and are confined to the club and the comings and goings of the people in his district.

  Planters. For the most part they seem to belong to two classes. The greater number of them are rough and common men of something below the middle class, and they speak English with a vile accent, or broad Scotch. They have vulgar minds, occupied only with rubber and its price and the sports of their club. Their wives are either very genteel and anxious to be ladies, or else blatant, noisy and hail-fellow-well-met. There is another class of planter who has been to a public school and perhaps a university. He has become a planter because he had no means of earning a living in England, and rubber planting is apparently the only occupation at which a man can earn a salary without training or experience. He is often a little anxious to impress on you the fact that he is a gentleman born, but except that he leads a slightly different life when he goes to England on leave, his conversation and his interests are exactly the same as those of the others. Among all planters there seems to be the same feeling toward the Government officials, and this is a combination of awe, envy, contempt and petulance. They sneer at them behind their backs, but look upon a garden party or a dinner at the Resident’s house as an event in their lives. You would have to go far to find among the planters a man of culture, reading or distinction.

  F.M.S. Mac was staying at the rest-house and was over from Dutch Borneo where he lives, in the hope of selling to the Dunlop Company rubber lands belonging to some Dutch Malays. But he was prepared to sell anything that anyone would buy, and he spent much of his time trying to get a young Eurasian to purchase a motor-car and seeking to interest some Jews in Singapore in black diamonds, of which he claimed to be able to get mining rights in Borneo. He has been in various parts of Malaya for the last thirty-five years and has followed a great number of occupations. He came out first as a missionary and then became a Government official, doing surveying work for Perak; after that he was a planter and then a miner, and he has been agent for a number of European firms. He seems to have succeeded in nothing and now is a man of hard on sixty. He is tall and heavily-built and walks in a clodhopperish sort of fashion as though his boots were heavy with clay. He has a dark red face and blue eyes, red at the rims. He gives you an impression of low cunning. His stories of the F.M.S. are mostly about the people who in one way and another have done him down, and he gives you the impression that he is the only honest man in a world of rogues. The one story he told me which was of any value was of a woman who married a man and, finding out that three or four half-caste children in the village were his, arranged with the headman to have them drowned in the river. There was probably not a word of truth in it, but he told it with a sardonic humour which made it effective.

  O. He is the secretary of the club, a little hunchbacked man of about fifty who was a planter for many years. He has much more knowledge of the world and of literature than most of them, and speaks with a lively scorn of the complaints which the planters’ wives make of the pains of exile. He says that of course all planters belong to the lower middle classes, and most of their wives, instead of having a house with plenty of servants and a motor-car, would at home be serving behind a counter.

  G. R. He is the Government engineer. He is a very small, dapper fellow with clean-cut features and grey hair. He is precise in his manner. He is very much the soldier and the gentleman, and has a house in the Isle of Wight to which he proposes to retire next year. He wants to find some occupation and suggests chicken-farming, which he hopes will take up his time and bring him ten per cent on his outlay. He is the typical dug-out with a great respect for all the prejudices of the military caste. You can imagine how well he will fit in with the retired soldiers when he finally settles down at Ventnor.

  P. He is a great big burly fat Irishman with a double chin. He has the red face, curly hair and blue eyes of his nationality, and speaks with a brogue. He has been thirty-five years in the state, having come out first as an ordinary policeman. He is now head of the police. He has recently married again, a handsome Belfast girl of the barmaid type, younger than his own daughter. He rolls about in a jolly good-humoured way. He took us over the gaol. Here we saw the prisoners, the long-sentence men with irons on their legs, engaged on various tasks. Some were preparing rice for the cooking, and others were carpentering. In two little cells we saw a couple of men who were condemned to death, and they sat cross-legged on their beds clothed in nothing but a prison sarong, which is a strip of dingy white cotton, made by the prisoners, with a prison mark on it. They were doing nothing. They stared into vacancy. We were told that during the last three days before their execution they are given five dollars a day which they can spend on any food, drink or smoke they choose. On the morning of the execution they are taken across the courtyard where they have a bath, then are put in a room where they have breakfast, and are then taken up a small flight of narrow stairs to the execution chamber. A white cap is put over their heads. They are turned with their faces to the wall. The rope attached to an iron ring in the ceiling is placed round their necks and the bolt of the trap on which they are standing is drawn. We were shown this by a little vulgar Cockney, with broken and discoloured teeth, who is married to a Japanese wife. I asked him if he did not find an execution very horrible, but he laughed and said it didn’t interfere with his night’s sleep. He told me that one man who was to be hanged next day, when he was asked if there was anything he wanted, said, “Yes, I want a woman.” The head of the police chuckled. “Damned sporting of him,” he said. “Of course I wouldn’t have minded, but it wouldn’t have done, you know. I’d have had the whole community down on me like a ton o’ bricks.”

  It was curious to see the prisoners having their bath, which they have twice a day. They come in batches to a large tank, each provided with his pail, and at the word of command sluice themselves four times, rub themselves down, and then again at the word of command sluice themselves four times more. Then they hurriedly put on dry sarongs and make way for the next batch.

  The areca trees outlined against the night were slim and elegant. They had the gaunt beauty of a syllogism.

&nb
sp; L. K. He is known as Powder-puff Percy. He has been at Balliol and is much better educated and more widely read than the planters and the Government officials with whom he must spend his life. He started as a cadet and has now become a schoolmaster. He is a very good bridge-player and an excellent dancer. They complain of him that he is conceited, and he has aroused a furious antagonism in the community. He wears his clothes with a certain dash and he is a good and amusing talker in the Oxford manner. He is slangy in a smart way and at the same time cultured. He has a vocabulary of his own. He is good-looking with something of an intellectual face, and he might be a young don or a professional dancer at a night club.

  C. was a donnish, studious man, precise, respectable and dull. His wife was frivolous and flirtatious. He was able and occupied a prominent position in Singapore. Near them lived a woman with her beefy, hearty husband. She was prudish, and as respectable and dull as C. They were both middle-aged. One day to the amazement of everyone in the colony they eloped. The abandoned partners instituted divorce proceedings and eventually married again. C. was deprived of his job and lives in England, in penury, with the woman he ran away with. The only flaw in the satisfaction of Singapore is that the pair are reported to be immensely happy.