Singapore Swing (6 page)

‘
This little piggy cried wee, wee, wee, all the way home
!'

‘OUCH!' I scream.

Lillian smiles angelically. She points at my nose. ‘Sinus,' she says, or rather I guess. And yes, I suffer from bouts of rhinitis. I tell myself that this New Age nonsense is in reality Old Age nonsense, having been part of Chinese medicine for thousands of years.

I sneeze violently. ‘Slow on the nose bit,' I blurt out.

She points at the open window. ‘No nose,' she says. ‘Dust from construction.'

As if to underline her sentence, the merciless sound of a drill fills the room with un-Enoesque unpleasantry, and twenty Chinese collectively wince at this sudden breaking of harmony in the ether. My masseuse looks up outraged and walks to the only woman not dressed in a medical apron who fans herself by the till. They talk sotto voce and the woman disappears through an inside door. She reappears with a wrestler build-alike and leads him hurriedly through the exit. I wouldn't like to be in the drill operator's flip-flops when they meet him.

Lillian makes a move mid-foot and I jump.

‘Shoulder,' she says and points at my sling.

As she works her way in a small semicircle, starting between the fourth and fifth toe and ending at the edge of my foot's arch, I feel pins and needles on my two rotator tendons. The bottom of my heel hurts a bit. I look at the explanatory leaflet – it is my sciatic nerve. ‘Bad posture?' Lillian offers in return. And so on to eyes, brain, lymphs, kidneys, pancreas – all my insides are being stroked through my soles. Dammit, if this really is working, I can't wait till she reaches the penis reflex.

The drill stops and everyone breathes in. The wrestler and the till woman return and smile at the patients. Well, she does; he grunts. We can now distinguish those sustained synth notes again. Not that there was any chord change since the drill started, mind you.

I close my eyes and enter a dream state of pleasure. There is the odd pain here and there, which never goes above four out of ten, but it disappears under Lillian's considered pummelling. The muscles above my cuneiforms hurt particularly badly. They correspond to my lungs and my chest and yes, I have the odd allergic wheeze. I take a deep breath in the wet, Singaporean weather as Eno changes two chords dramatically in the space of ten seconds. I surrender to the comforting, sonic warble, for this is what ambient muzak demands: total passivity. This is music for meditation to offload your brain: don't try any knee-jerk tap against the beat. (What beat?) Don't follow melodic lines – they don't exist. This is minimalist musical nirvana and in the circumstances it's perfect; I like its hypnotic rumble, though I'd never download the MP3.

Lillian has now finished one foot and is massaging my calf to half way below the knee; then she bursts out laughing. I feel awkward and so does she because she stands up until her throaty chortle subsides. Then she sits down again and starts symmetrically on the toes of the other. But then she stops as if she'd forgotten something, picks up both my feet and raises them.

‘You feel this lighter?' she asks and points at the foot she's been working on. I do and tell her so. She starts laughing again, this time uncontrollably. I bet she's discovered something embarrassing about me. I try to remember: when was the last time I checked myself at the clinic?

Lillian catches my eye and beams like an enlightened bodhisattva. Such a strange job, massaging people's feet. Does she enjoy it? Would she rather be a proper nurse? Does she get paid enough? Why did she laugh before? I look at her smiling eyes whose sole purpose are to keep me relaxed and I can't tell. It is not that oriental expressions are inscrutable. It is that orientals try not to break the mutual harmony by allowing you to scrute them.

Raffles left Singapore on 7 February 1819, having founded in ten days one of the most important British colonies, and returned to Penang to confront a fuming Bannerman who had heard the astonishing news. Soon after, an official Dutch protest arrived: since Johore was a dependency of Malacca and Singapore belonged to Johore, Singapore was obviously Dutch.

It was then that Raffles knew his bluff had paid off: the mere fact that the Dutch were protesting diplomatically and had not gone to capture the British outpost straight away was excellent news. Nowhere more so than among the expat box-wallahs of Calcutta. Money talks and in this case it crowed dithyrambically about the opportunities opened up by the founding of a British port halfway between Canton and Calcutta. Hastings was astonished at the audacity of the manoeuvre but took note of the commercial reaction in India. He wrote a cagey letter, on one hand praising Raffles' initiative and confirming the engagement with the ‘legitimate' heir to the throne, but at the same time regretting the measure itself since it might incur a collision with the Dutch. He also wrote a flaming missive to Bannerman ordering him to send troops immediately.

Raffles returned to Singapore on 31 May 1819. In less than four months, the fishing village had become a small town of 5,000 people who had moved to this tax haven. Raffles and his friend, William Farquhar, who had been left behind to oversee the settlement's development, roughly delineated the various neighbourhoods of the city: to this day they remain the same. The secure north side of the river was to be the government and European settlement – this is where today we find the City Hall, the Victoria Theatre, the Padang and the Christian churches. Further north, where Sultan Hussein and his court resided, would emerge as the Muslim area, still very much alive today. The south side of the river would be left to the Chinese whose junks could find shelter inside the river mouth in the North and South Boat Quays; since the cargo was being unloaded there, the commercial area was established in what nowadays is termed the Central Business District (CBD). The only hill in view would be the army headquarters, Fort Canning, in use until World War Two. The locals still had the memory of Forbidden Hill and were afraid to climb it, until Farquhar fired off a huge cannon from the top and announced that he had dispersed the ghosts. The dispersal was terminal: as I approach the river by Coleman Bridge and look at the bottom of the hill, I notice that the spring where the Raja's harem used to bathe has metamorphosed into the River Valley Swimming Pool. Nice touch.

Raffles wasn't to return to the colony he established until three years later. When he disembarked at Singapore on 10 October 1822, the population had risen to 10,000 souls and the value of its trade was greater than Penang and Malacca put together. But the more the colony flourished, the more Raffles was being chastised by life: he received an official rebuke from the company and the court as the legal status of Singapore was still the subject of Anglo-Dutch negotiations; he fell out with Farquhar and sacked him; his supporter in Calcutta, Hastings, retired under a cloud, accused of malversation; and his royal friend and ally, Princess Charlotte, died during childbirth. Closer to home and to the heart, Raffles' employers extracted their revenge by proxy: his three children succumbed to the treacherous climate of Bencoolen and Raffles himself started having a series of strong headaches we now suspect to have been the beginnings of a brain tumour.

I am suspicious of the claim, quoted in some travel guides as ‘fact', that biographers have been coy and that it was really tertiary syphilis, considering that his wife never showed any symptoms.

Raffles left Singapore for the third and final time on 9 June 1823 at the age of 42. Three years had transformed ‘
a haunt of pirates to the abode of enterprise, security and opulence
'. He only had three years more to live, three years he was to spend in the company's displeasure and, it seems, those of the gods, too. When the couple finally left Bencoolen on 2 February 1824, a devastating fire broke out on their ship. Raffles lost all his possessions: his manuscripts and memoirs, his valuables, his maps, his natural history drawings – all gone.

When Raffles eventually reached Plymouth, he heard some good news at last: the status of Singapore had been settled with the Treaty of London between Great Britain and Holland. The Equator divided their spheres of influence: Bencoolen was surrendered to the Dutch, but Singapore and Penang remained British while Malacca was returned to Britain. The three ports became collectively known as the Straits Settlements; they led to the colonisation of the whole of Malaya and served as a springboard to China: Hong Kong would be ceded within a generation.

Raffles waited for compensation for his losses during the fire and a pension from the company. In the meantime, he issued a subscription to buy a plot of land above Regent's Park and house the tropical animals he'd brought back from Java and Sumatra. They became the first residents of the London Zoological Gardens which he co-founded with Sir Humphrey Davy (of the miners' lamp fame). Raffles was elected as London Zoo's first president and, if you visit the Lion House, you can see his bust outside.

- 6 -

A glowering, grey sky shrouds the colonial buildings, a fit setting for the war memorials on the opposite side of the Padang. A small stone-paved path leads to the first marble column facing City Hall, dedicated to ‘Our Glorious Dead'
.
Each of the five steps is inscribed with a Great War year: 1914, all the way to 1918. Its foundation stone, laid on 15 November 1920, was attended by George Clemenceau, and its unveiling, on 31 March 1922, was made by the Duke of Windsor. ‘
We are met here to do honour to the men who, in common with many others from all parts of our great Empire, died that we as an Empire might live
,' said the Duke. Within two decades another, Asian, empire would take over Singapore and shatter the image of Britannia forever. And, like the city itself, which has had to learn how to live in cramped conditions, the memorial has been recycled: a second inscription is unveiled when you look at the cenotaph from the other side. Conveniently, the ground slopes down, allowing for seven steps at the back inscribed each with a year from World War Two, a war that was not observed from afar but was felt and suffered for in the city itself.

The paved promenade in front has a space-age view: two huge constructions that look like two giant metallic flies' eyes dominate the landscape. This is the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Sydney Opera House wannabes that lack the grace of the Australian original, though I'm sure the acoustics are no less than perfect. New states in search of self-definition want to be patted in the back for their cultural credentials and Singapore, like Sydney, has opted for a showcase edifice devoted to Western culture: opera and symphonies, ballet and theatre. From another angle the flies' eyes remind me of two monstrous durians that have fallen gracelessly out of the sky. Prince Charles is right about modern architecture in one respect: when it fails, it fails with great aplomb.

The Esplanade development, completed in the mid-nineties when the Asian ‘tigers' seemed to grow and grow with no upper limit, appears curiously lifeless today, and pales in comparison with, say, Raffles Place. The restaurants – Chinese, Thai, Italian – have the plastic atmosphere of fast food joints with the obligatory cockroach running on the odd, well-polished floor. The setting is spectacular, but the menus look routine and the seats appear cheap. Through the glass panes, the Embassy Restaurant – recommended in older guides – is closed ‘until further notice'. So, there is a limit to expansion and a frontier to the dream, as everyone found out in the Asian market meltdown of 1997. Although it suffered much, much less than the rest of them – Singapore's economy actually expanded by 0.4 per cent during that period – even this most dynamic of the ‘tigers' had to count its teeth and lick its wounds.

Lick its wounds like Raffles…

Despite his colossal historical status the man Raffles must have been unbearable. He was too much of a lone wolf and had argued and offended everyone in his whirlwind path: from the Dutch and English Crowns to the East India Company Board and from his military attaché in Java to his old friend Farquhar. It is in this life we pay for our sins, not any other, and Raffles' behaviour came back to haunt him in the final act.

In April 1826, a few years after he had arrived back in London, he received two letters from the company. The first was, in modern terms, a job appraisal which can be summarised as, ‘your actions were wrong, risky and uncondoned but with the benefit of hindsight we forgive you since Singapore ended up a success'. The second was a thunderbolt. Not only did the board refuse to compensate him for his losses, not only did they not issue him a pension, but they asked for their money back. Hastings had let him draw his salary during the years he spent in London between Java and Sumatra but without explicit authorisation. Now Accounts Receivable – the bane of us all – demanded this amount back (with interest), along with the expenses Raffles claimed in founding Singapore. To cap it all, the company demanded reimbursement for his ‘
precipitate and unauthorised emancipation of the company's slaves
.'

The bitterness must have broken Raffles. Three months later, on 5 July 1826, one day short of his forty-fifth birthday, he collapsed at the bottom of the stairs in his country house near Edgware. An autopsy found that he died of a stroke brought upon by a brain tumour. The funeral at St Mary's Church in Hendon was private and sparsely attended. Raffles had a knack of making enemies even posthumously: the parish priest turned down all requests for any commemorative plaque until his own death 50 years later, because of the deceased's
‘unchristian and thoughtless actions in Java and Bencoolen
'. By that, the good servant of God meant the slaves' manumission.

It was thus that Raffles' bodily whereabouts were lost and forgotten; only in 1914 were his remains rediscovered, and an inscription was hung above his burial vault. History, of course, keeps its own pantheon that exists independently of human pettiness: within eight years of Raffles' death, a statue had been commissioned by his considerable fanbase and placed in the north isle of Westminster Abbey.