Highways to a War (12 page)

He’s perched above the widest part of the river’s tidal basin, its brown water jammed with slipper-shaped sampans. Boat Quay’s curve follows the curve of Singapore River, and lines of misshapen, tile-roofed godowns and shophouses like Wu Tak Seng’s follow this curve into distance, leaning on each other like drunks. The wrought-iron British arch of Elgin Bridge is opposite his balcony; Cavanagh Bridge is visible downriver. A little beyond, he knows, is Singapore harbor, whose space is invisible yet tangible, thrilling as a wind behind the heat.

Just below him, opposite Wu Tak Seng’s doorway, Indian coolies in shorts and singlets are unloading bales of rubber from a low, flat bumboat in the river, on whose bow is a painted eye. The hollow, wooden tapping comes up to him again: a small Chinese boy clad in a singlet and outsize blue shorts is making his way among the crowd, carrying a polished length of bamboo and a little wooden rod. He has a wide grin and a cast in one eye; he taps with the rod in different sequences, and is summoned by Chinese men in shophouse doorways, who hold him in conversation.

This is puzzling; but today, Langford says, he likes it to be puzzling. On a set of old stone ferry steps going down into the water, tidal debris and garbage lie, and he views even this with pleasure: the mysterious litter of Asia.

He dwells a good deal on this moment. It confirms what he learned on his ride from the airport: that his life’s new direction lies here.

“Really nothing I can do for you, I’m afraid.”

Mr. Chand looked at Langford across the desk with an expression resembling faint surprise. He drew deeply on a cigarette, stubbing it afterwards in an ashtray which held an extraordinary number of butts.

He was Chief of Staff of the
Straits Times:
a thin, ascetic-looking Indian of about forty, whom Langford would never see again; yet he’s carefully described in the audio diary. I can understand why: in that special time when everything lay ahead, Mr. Chand was guardian of the gate to a fabled land. He’s thus transfigured forever in the lens of youthful hope, with his throaty voice, thick black hair going gray, and the deep lines in his cheeks. His serious, fatigued air was that of many senior journalists, Langford says—as though the tensions and corruptions of the world had reduced him to cynical despair, yet had hardened his resolution to carry on.

Despite the heat, Mr. Chand wore a crisp white business shirt and a narrow, striped tie, and did not perspire. He made Langford feel sweaty and untidy. A number of metal paperweights held down memos, sheets of copy and galley proofs on the desk; edges of paper fluttered like trapped birds in the breeze from an overhead ceiling fan, whose smooth whipping was enviable after the loud chugging of the one in the shophouse. One of the galley proofs read: AMBUSH IN SARAWAK.
Malaysian and British Security Forces Trap Indonesian Raiders.

Langford liked this office. The tired rattan chairs reminded him of old Hollywood movies about the East, he says. He was filled with a heady longing for the office and Mr. Chand to accept him; to let him stay. The clatter of typewriters came through the open door, and there was the familiar and welcoming smell of printer’s ink. He’d walked into this white colonial building without an appointment, and had got in to see Mr. Chand simply by announcing himself at the desk downstairs and requesting an interview. He’d produced a copy of a general reference from the Melbourne Age, headed
To Whom It May Concern.
But Mr. Chand had barely glanced at it.

“We have no vacancies for photographers at present,” Mr. Chand said. “And even if we did—” He opened his hands and then folded them. “Forgive me for pointing this out, Mr. Langford, but since independence, we like to hire Singapore nationals: people who understand this country. The days when British and Australian news people could blow in here and pick up jobs are gone, I’m afraid.”

He could understand that, Langford said. But he wanted to stay in Singapore: he’d taken a great liking to the city.

Mr. Chand’s sober face became a shade more friendly. “Not so pleasant just now,” he said, “with this bloody Indonesian Confrontation. Difficult times here.” He picked up a fresh packet of Players cigarettes and offered one. Langford took it, his hopes beginning to rise.

“You’ve never been out of Australia before?” Mr. Chand asked. “You simply landed here on spec? A bit rash, wasn’t it? But perhaps you have private means.”

He had enough to survive a month or so, Langford said. He lit Mr. Chand’s cigarette and then his own.

Mr. Chand looked through the fresh smoke with narrowed eyes. “You are not running away from something in Australia? No? Then my advice to you, old chap, is to go back. Or on to Britain, perhaps. Much easier for you there.”

He held out his thin, weary hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Langford.”

 

 

A black-and-white picture of Wu Tak Seng’s shophouse survives. It also shows a stretch of Boat Quay, with the iron arch of Elgin Bridge in the background. Wu Tak Seng himself is sitting on a varnished wooden chair in his doorway, in singlet and baggy shorts. He’s framed by the sinister shapes of hanging sharks’ fins.

This is one of a number of pictures that Langford shot around the streets of Singapore in that time—some taken for his Age feature articles; others purely for pleasure. They’re becoming historic, now.

Old Singapore, old colonial Asia, had lingered here just long enough for him to capture it in black and white. Soon it would be replaced by a sanitized metropolis of the late twentieth century: a place where there would be little left of Asia. Glass shopping palaces would sell Japanese transistors and designer jeans, and the last of the crumbling old godowns would cower along the river, waiting to be bulldozed. But in 1965, early in the Johnson era, it was all still there: the Singapore of Raffles, Somerset Maugham and Rex Lockhart. It was newly independent, but still part of Malaysia until August, and it remained for a little longer the city that Rex and Diana had known, in the days when they lived at the Cockpit: the old airline pilots’ hotel on Oxley Rise, favored before the War by Qantas Empire Airways flying boat captains, and a favorite now with correspondents on expenses. The Cockpit was where Langford had promised himself he’d move to, when his fortunes turned around.

And the dying British Empire’s military reach also remained, in that year. Singapore was still Britain’s major naval and air base in Southeast Asia, and from here, at the Far East Land Forces Headquarters at Phoenix Park, the region was still policed. The drawling, confident English voices were sounding for a little while longer in the Long Bar at Raffles and in the Tanglin Club, and the shadow of British authority persisted, in this Chinese city on the equator—just as it had long persisted in Tasmania.

He felt at home here, Langford says.

He couldn’t have been farther from home; but I think I understand. Rex Lockhart’s stories of his Singapore heyday had filled out a dream begun in the sleepout, so that Singapore, before it was ever seen, had a private and occult meaning. This emerges in passages in the audio diary.

The first diary entries were no doubt recorded on an impulse, in odd hours in his room in the shophouse. Confiding in the cassette machine must have been a solace, at a time when he was a good deal on his own; and what was at first a comfort evidently became a habit. His first, spoken meditation on Singapore needn’t be quoted. It’s clear to me that the city’s real significance for him lay in areas he found too rarefied to express: his efforts to do so are clumsy, and a little embarrassing. Words weren’t Langford’s medium: his love affair with Singapore is in his pictures, and the pictures are wonderful.

Meanwhile, he nearly starved, after that first month. He became quite ill in the end; yet still he refused to go on to London. The audio diary documents his plight; but he doesn’t reveal his difficulties in his letters home to Marcus and Cliff. He never even asks them for a loan.

 

 

 

 

But Jim Feng remembered Langford’s situation, when he and I talked in Bangkok.

Mike came into the bar of the York looking thinner each week, he told me. Yes, a little bit thinner every time, he said: a bit more hungry-looking. Not many people manage to do that now, do they? To starve, I mean. Not from your country, anyway. But Mike did. Jesus, he was thin. He laughed: a soft Chinese laugh that might have been sardonic or affectionate—or both.

The old York Hotel (demolished now) was a favorite with journalists, both as a residence and as an unofficial press club, and was patronized as well by Australian jockeys and trainers, who came up to Asia to make fortunes at the tracks in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. Somehow Langford found his way here in his third week in town.

Although he knew no one, he’d learned that the York was a journalists’ hangout. It was on Scott’s Road, next door to the much grander and more expensive Goodwood Park. His photograph of the place sits in front of me: like the Goodwood, it was reached through formal gates, and had a drive going up to its entrance. But whereas the Goodwood, remote and haughty on its rise, had a long and impressive driveway, the drive of the York was humbly short, and crossed an open and dangerous monsoon drain. A rambling, tile-roofed old Chinese house that had seen better days, it still had its dignity: two-storied, with black lines of mildew down its dim stucco front, like bloodstains seeping through bandages. Tall old palms stood in tatters, rustling and sighing by the Sino-Greek pillars of the entrance. Batwing doors from a Wild West saloon led into the main bar, which was paneled in beautifully carved Siamese teak.

It was long, cool and cavernous here; customers sat at small round tables, also of teak. Fans flapped and turned in twilit, unlikely heights near the ceiling. There were vast mirrors in gilt frames behind the bar, painted with Chinese birds and flowers, and earthenware spittoons stood in corners, filled with evil black liquid and butts. An aged Hainanese barman in baggy blue trousers and wooden platform sandals shuffled among the tables with drinks, or chopped up ice loudly behind the bar. He had a wise, patient smile, slicked-back gray hair and the flat-backed head of the natives of Hainan island; he made constant loud nose-clearing noises for which he was famous, and was known to the press as Old Charlie. Remembering afternoons in the York, Jim Feng spoke nostalgically of the scuffing of Old Charlie’s sandals on the tiles, and of the sound of the ice being chopped.

At first, Jim said, Mike hung out with the jockeys rather than the correspondents. Maybe because his tight situation embarrassed him. One of them, Les Lonergan, was from Hobart; so Mike got a big welcome. There aren’t so many Tasmanians in the world, are there? They were noisy, friendly little guys, those jockeys—fond of jokes, like Mike. One of Les Lonergan’s party tricks was to disappear inside one of the Shanghai jars in the foyer and make horrible noises; another was to come fast through the batwing doors and then reverse, going out backwards before they closed, like on a rubber band. All those jockeys were making lots of money. Some rode for the trainers who had brought them here; others rode for Singapore stables, and for the Malayan sultans. Les Lonergan rode for the Sultan of Johore.

They offered to lend Mike money, but he refused; instead, he got good tips from them, asking them how their horses were going to go. You know how he always liked to bet. At that time, gambling helped him to survive.

I didn’t meet Mike immediately; but you couldn’t help noticing him. Very big, among all those little jockeys: they called him “Snow” because of his hair, which was how his nickname got started. Seemed to make a mascot of him: maybe they liked that country look about him. He always looked clean, but his clothes were in terrible taste: cowboy shirts, very loud colors, with piping around the pockets. Always wore those things, didn’t he? I wondered what he was doing here. I thought he was a horse trainer, perhaps. Always looked happy, always looked easy. By and by he was very thin, and not so healthy—but he was still cheerful; still seemed to be enjoying himself. I think he wasn’t doing so well with the betting, then. He told me he lost a packet on a horse Les Lonergan rode in Singapore; he backed it straight out, but Les came in second.

That was when Donald Mills got interested in Mike. Donald was Second Secretary at the Australian embassy. He used to drink in the York quite a lot. One of the jockeys told Donald that Mike was an Australian, and he went up and started talking to him. And that was how I met Mike myself.

 

 

Friday: the long lunch hour at the York. Standing at the bar, Langford felt a touch on his elbow.

Turning, he found a man in his thirties, whose jut-jawed, faintly pugnacious face was set in an expression of cheerful good will. Mills had a ruddy complexion, narrow blue eyes and a high clump of springy bronze hair; he wore a bone-colored safari suit with perfect, knife-edged creases. He had a companion who was Chinese, also in his thirties, wearing a short-sleeved khaki bush shirt faded almost white, and brown, ankle-high boots that were polished to a military brilliance. Jim Feng’s smile had a warmth that Mills’s seemed to lack.

Mills put out his hand, his arm at full length. “I hear you’re fresh from home. That calls for a drink, wouldn’t you say?”

He led the way to a table, moving with a high-elbowed brisk-ness that Langford describes as worrying to look at. Jim Feng signaled to Old Charlie, who shuffled forward.

“Busy time, Mr. Jim?”

“Always running, Charlie. Your family are well?” Feng ordered gin-tonics, and then leaned towards Langford.

“I believe you are a cameraman,” he said. “I too. Maybe I can be of help, if you’re still settling in.” His voice was low yet distinct. He was tall and big-boned, with the light ivory skin, well-cut features and long head of North China: a type that Langford says he’d never seen before, knowing only the stocky Cantonese of Singapore and Australia. Feng’s hair was slicked straight back from his high, broad forehead in a style that vaguely recalled the film actors of the 1930s.