In the Mouth of the Tiger (53 page)

The day before we moved in, the estate agent had arranged for us to meet the couple who had run the house for its previous owner. ‘Mrs Chu is a perfect dear and you might well want to take her on,' Miss Peabody said. ‘But I'm afraid the husband – Chu Lun – might
not
be suitable. In fact Mr Ord was going to dismiss him, and would have done so if he hadn't put the place on the market. Chu Lun is an
overpowering
sort of man if you know what I mean, and there's a thought he might not be quite honest.'

‘What makes you say that?' Denis asked sharply. ‘Does he have a police record?'

‘Oh, nothing like that.' Miss Peabody gave a small smile and a shrug. ‘Just let's say I have an instinct about the man.' She looked down at the notes. ‘Offer Mrs Chu a job if you find her acceptable, but don't forget that we have a lot of men on our lists who could look after your gardens just as well as Chu Lun.'

‘Would Mrs Chu take the job if we didn't take on her husband as well?' I asked, and Miss Peabody nodded.

‘She thinks of him as a bit of a nuisance. She'd probably be glad he wasn't in her hair.'

Miss Peabody was very wrong. Chu Lun may have irritated his wife at times but she obviously loved him, and she made it quite clear at the outset that she would not work without him. ‘We would both very much like to
work for you,' she said. ‘I know the house well, and Chu Lun of course knows the gardens very well. He made them what they are. We are a good team and we would serve you well.' She was a small, tidy woman, immaculate in a sarong and starched white blouse, and she had kind, wise eyes. I took to her immediately.

Chu Lun was a very different proposition. He was a big man for a Chinese, and quite dark, indicating Baba ancestry. He was handsome in a battered sort of way, with a hairline moustache that gave him the look of a rather raffish, Asian version of Errol Flynn.

‘Would you be happy to continue as our gardener?' Denis asked, and Chu Lun gave an exaggerated shrug.

‘I would prefer to be a successful Chinese businessman,' he said. ‘But since fate has made me a gardener, I would be happy to be your gardener. And I would be a very good gardener. At least until I made my fortune.' It wasn't the answer one expected from a prospective Chinese servant in 1939, and I thoroughly understood Miss Peabody's reservations. But Chu Lun spoke with a smile and a self-deprecating bob of the head, and I for one rather warmed to the man's frankness.

‘You are from a Baba family?' I asked, and Chu Lun's smile broadened.

‘On my mother's side, Mem, I have the blood of Bugis pirates in my veins. It sometimes makes it very hard to be a humble gardener.'

Denis and I glanced at each other, and then Denis cleared his throat. ‘Mem and I would like you both to work for us, as our amah and our head gardener. When can you move back into the servants' quarters? I understand that you moved into Changi when the house was put up for sale.'

Chu Lun also cleared his throat. ‘Tuan,' he said, ‘thank you for offering us our jobs back. But I have a proposal to make about where we might live. I have a large family (which Chinese family of any standing does not?) and we would all like to live together. The servants' quarters here are very good, but not very large. If you and Mem were to allow us to build our own house somewhere on your land, we would be very grateful, and we would promise to serve you and Mem for as long as you wished.'

Denis glanced at me again, the faintest twinkle in his eye. Chu Lun was clearly no shrinking violet. I nodded imperceptibly. I liked the couple, Amah for her soft, sensible face, Chu Lun for his upright bearing and the way he looked one in the eye. He was also obviously a man who knew his own mind.

‘It would not be sensible for me to
lend
you a plot of land to build your house, Chu Lun,' Denis said. ‘What would happen if you and I were to fall out? Or if Mem and I were to sell Whitelawns and return to England? You would lose your home and Mem and I would have an unwanted house on our land. But we are prepared to give you and Amah a try, and if we are all happy with each other after a few months, then I would be prepared to give you a block of land on which to build a home. We would do things through lawyers so that the transfer was quite legal. What I propose would be possible because Whitelawns is made up of several separate parcels of land.'

Chu Lun pondered the offer with a furrowed brow. ‘It is a generous offer, Tuan,' he said, ‘and of course a wise one. Amah and I would feel secure, and you and Mem would know that you have faithful servants who were indebted to you.'

Afterwards, I punched Denis gently in the ribs. ‘You call yourself a businessman? Chu Lun has you around his little finger!'

Denis grinned. ‘I rather like the old rogue,' he said. ‘Perhaps we both have a little bit of pirate in us.'

We had been in Whitelawns only a week when war was declared in Europe. Denis and I heard the announcement on the BBC's shortwave radio service, the newsreader's voice crackling and fluctuating on the ether so that it was robbed of all emotion. We were eating breakfast at the time, with the morning sun slanting through the shutters of the dining room and Amah hovering in the background with a fresh pot of coffee. ‘So the madmen are back at it again, are they?' was all that Denis said. The news seemed to have no impact on me whatever, probably because we had been expecting war in Europe for so long that the reality of war was almost an anti-climax.

‘Is it going to affect us?' I asked.

‘It is the scenario the Japs have been waiting for,' Denis said. ‘Britain tied up at home so that they can have a free hand out here in the East. I suspect they'll start throwing their muscle about in their attempts to get a bigger share of the world's resources. If they don't get what they want, there will be all hell to pay.'

‘How long before they threaten us?' I asked.

Denis spread marmalade on his toast thoughtfully. ‘They're heavily tied up in China at present,' he said slowly. ‘And they don't yet know how things will go in Europe. Gives us a year or so.'

‘And then there will be all hell to pay?' I pursued.

‘And then there will be all hell to pay.'

So our idyll at Whitelawns was to be played out in the shadow of impending apocalypse. But it was to be an idyll nevertheless, largely untroubled by thoughts of the war or the future. The conflict in Europe was half a world away, and the threat from the Japanese was still only a threat after all. So like most others in the Far East, Denis and I chose to bury our heads in the sand and to live each sunny day to the full.

One of the things we wanted in our life was riding. Whitelawns had a small stable block, four looseboxes around a cobbled yard, and our first priority was to fill it with appropriate horseflesh. Soliloquy had grown too old for a move to Singapore so Denis had retired her to a cool green meadow on Fraser's Hill, and her replacement was a black thoroughbred stallion named Thor. My own horse was a chestnut we called Dame Fashion, a beautiful, honey-coloured mare. She had only one vice – a tendency to be skittish when the wind blew, and so we gave her the nickname ‘Sumatra' after the sudden windstorms that whipped in from the Riau Straits and which would make her quite impossible to ride. For Tony, we bought a placid pony called Brown Rascal, a gentle creature with large brown eyes and the nature of a big friendly dog.

Our next priority was to have the yacht we had bought in Penang – now renamed the
Norma
– brought closer to Whitelawns so that we could sail her whenever we liked. She had been brought down to Singapore by a professional crew and was lying at the Singapore Yacht Club, an inconvenient twenty-mile drive away. The project gave Chu Lun a chance to show his mettle. His first task was to put down a mooring just off the beach from Whitelawns, and he took on the task with frowning enthusiasm, enlisting half the local village of Mata Ikan in the enterprise.

I was able to watch the exercise in all its phases from our high terrace above the beach. First a small junk was procured from one of Chu Lun's relatives and anchored on the spot designated for the mooring. From the junk young men from the kampong dived repeatedly to examine the sea floor, coming up with buckets of sand and pieces of rock. These were examined by Chu Lun himself, sitting at ease under an awning on the junk's poop-deck, a glass of Tiger beer in his hand. Presumably he pronounced the ground safe, and the project moved to its next stage. Three or four old engine blocks were chained together, then dropped over the side of the junk. The proceedings were accompanied by lots of shouted commands from Chu Lun and screams
of mirth from the dozen or so young men who had done the lifting. The chain meant to secure the buoy to the mooring must have been left unshackled in the excitement, so more diving was involved. It was soft pink dusk before the red and yellow buoy was finally bobbing on the placid waters and Chu Lun was climbing up to the house to give Denis his report. ‘We are ready to bring the yacht around, Tuan,' he said with an elaborate salute. ‘Everything went well, and as you see you now have a mooring.'

I had already given Denis a blow-by-blow report of proceedings, but he insisted on Chu Lun sitting down and telling him about it all over again. I was astounded at how professional he made the proceedings sound, and even the failure to link the securing chain to the weight when it went overboard was explained as a safety precaution. ‘I have seen men dragged down in such circumstances,' Chu Lun explained seriously. ‘My way is the better way, I think. I would hate to lose young men in such a way.'

‘You don't mind losing old men?' I asked mischievously, and though Chu Lun's face remained impassive I saw an appreciative glint in his eyes.

After dinner that night Denis called Chu Lun back. ‘You obviously know how to handle boats,' he said. ‘Would you be able to bring the
Norma
around from the Yacht Club? I will be busy at the office tomorrow, but it would be nice to see her bobbing at our mooring when I come home. You could run her around on the diesel, perhaps. That way you won't even need to rig her.'

Chu Lun hesitated for the barest half second. ‘I have handled many vessels before now, Tuan,' he said a little stiffly, as if offended that his sea-dog status had not been taken for granted. ‘I am sure I could handle a thirty-fivefoot ketch.'

To give Chu Lun his due, he managed the task without a hitch. The same team of vigorous young men were employed, and the same junk accompanied the
Norma
when she sailed – fully rigged – up to her new mooring in the late afternoon of the next day. Amah and I were waiting on the beach. ‘He is a good sailor, Amah,' I said appreciatively as the
Norma
crept up on the mooring with men scampering about on her foredeck with boat hooks and Chu Lun shouting from the cockpit. Amah clicked her tongue. ‘Chu Lun has a big mouth,' she said, shaking her head. ‘He has never sailed a yacht in his life before.'

No doubt the blood of his Bugis forebears had come to his aid.

Chu Lun was officially our head gardener, but the title was a misnomer
because he was involved in many tasks and projects but very little gardening. In fact he hated gardening with a passion. The actual gardening was done by two young Tamils, hard-working, unassuming men who were perpetually scything the lawns, chipping the grassy banks of the terraces with chipping sticks, or weeding the numerous garden beds. I managed the garden on a dayby-day basis – a labour of love – while a real gardener from Changi came in every week or so to do the serious work of planting and transplanting, topdressing the lawns, and maintaining our vegetable patch.

Chu Lun's contribution was broad indeed. He became a kind of major-domo, in general charge of the household and of Denis's various local projects. He loved tinkering with machinery so he also maintained the Alvis and the marine diesel on the yacht. He became cook, general hand and sometimes ‘sailing master' on the
Norma
. He
did
have an instinctive feel for the sea and quickly became an accomplished steersman and navigator. Later on, when we would take off for two or three days knocking around the islands of the Riau Archipelago, Chu Lun would come with us, a vital and valued member of the party. We invited Amah of course, but she would throw up her hands in horror: ‘Not if that man has anything to do with it!', she would cry.

But it was as a key member of the Three Man Kongsi that Chu Lun made his greatest contribution. The Three Man Kongsi comprised Denis, Chu Lun, and the entire kampong of Mata Ikan, and it was established quite soon after we came to Whitelawns as the result of a minor crisis that had struck the village.

A ruthless towkey had established a local monopoly in the purchase of sea-shells, traditionally collected by members of the kampong from the beaches and reefs around Mata Ikan and sold to the cement industry for processing into calcium. Chu Lun had come up to the house early one evening and put the problem to Denis, sitting cross-legged on the steps of our verandah. ‘There is great worry in the kampong, Tuan,' he had said after the normal pleasantries.

‘Tell me about their worry, Chu Lun.'

Chu Lun sipped his Tiger beer. ‘Tuan, for many years it has been traditional for our unemployed people, our young people, and our afflicted people to collected shell from the sea,' he said. ‘It was stockpiled in the kampong, and bought by reputable men who would collect the product of perhaps half a dozen kampongs to sell to the cement factories. Now, a certain towkey has bought out the reputable men, and he deals individually with
each kampong, bargaining with them to achieve the lowest price. All the kampongs are suffering, but the smaller ones suffer the most. Mata Ikan is one of the smallest of all, and it has suffered the worst. We cannot sell our shell at all, because the price offered is so low that it is an insult to our people. Without the money from the sale of shell, the kampong is suffering. We are finding it difficult to feed and clothe those in the kampong who cannot feed and clothe themselves.'