The Red Pavilion
© Jean Chapman 1995
Jean Chapman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1995 by Piatkus Ltd.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
This book could not have been written without the constant help of my husband, Alan, who as an eighteen-year-old conscript served with the Scots Guards in Malaya from 1948 to 1951. He passed on to me not only his experiences but also opportunities to know and admire the peoples and country for myself. I also found Noel Barber’s book ‘The War of the Running Dogs’ and F. Spencer Chapman’s book ‘The Jungle is Neutral’ especially helpful.
The house stood in the middle of broad acres of lawn, a solid Victorian country property with aged walnut and mulberry trees edging the back gardens, copper beeches and limes, fragrant in the June sunshine, gracing the front.
Elegant without being pretentious. The ‘To Lease’ advertisement in the 1948 New Year edition of
Country
Life
had been quickly answered and the offer taken up. Six months later the personal possessions of the Hammond family had been packed and Pearling House generally depersonalised ready for its tenants.
Elizabeth watched and waited as her mother lingered under the front portico. Finally she switched on the engine of the Riley and revved it. ‘Come on,’ she breathed through clenched teeth. Her patience had long ago been exhausted by the frustrations of convincing her mother that the expense of the new BOAC flight from England to the Far East was more practical than four weeks on a liner.
‘We’ve not that long,’ she called finally. ‘I have to take the car to the garage. I want to make sure it’s going to be properly stored.’
Blanche’s swift glance at her elder daughter, accompanied by nothing more than a flutter of a handkerchief across her face, seem to symbolise more a wish to wave goodbye than to undertake the journey. Not for the first time Liz wondered whether her mother did not care more for Pearling than for her father and the distant Rinsey estate that had been their home for fifteen years. Liz yearned to join her father, to be back with her friends.
Eight years ago the war had torn her from all she held dear in upcountry Malaya — her amah, her pet monkey, most of all the Guisan family — and now every minute’s delay seemed intolerable.
‘Goodbye, civilisation,’ her mother muttered, climbing into the car at last. ‘And hail Shangri-la.’
The sniff of disapproval was followed by the judgement, ‘Your sister has the right memories — screaming monkeys and the water always hot in her paddling pool.’
Liz’s recollection was that her mother used to wave her umbrella aggressively at the garden leaf monkeys, stirring them into chattering excitement and mischievous retaliation as they shook the branches of the trees, showering suspended raindrops on to the gesticulating woman. Not wishing to give cause for any further anti-Eastern sentiments now Blanche was actually in the car, Liz limited herself to the reply, ‘Wendy was only four. I was fourteen.’
‘The war got you out of the benighted place just in time.’
Liz opened her mouth to argue merits, but contented herself with, ‘I hope to make my life out there, teaching ... drawing.’ She added the last word quietly, that ambition meant much to her and she did not want it pilloried.
‘You didn’t need a degree for that!’
‘“I ran up against a Prejudice, That quite cut off the view”,’ Liz quoted. She knew that to have come down from university with a first-class degree rather than a wealthy upper-class husband was failure in her mother’s eyes.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘I thought you considered a good education the supreme advantage?’
The weekend before they had paid a farewell visit to her twelve-year-old sister. Wendy’s efforts to keep back the tears had been flattened by her mother’s capacity to steamroller through any emotion, anyone else’s feelings, for what
she
thought was ‘the best for all concerned’. Blanche almost literally tearing her sister from her arms, had managed to combine a pat on Wendy’s heaving shoulders with a directional urge towards the hovering mistress as she told her, ‘When I know Rinsey is suitable, you can come for holidays.’
‘Isn’t that why we’re leaving Wendy here at boarding school?’ Liz asked, keeping her voice a short note below irony.
‘Your aim, dear, always seems to be to make me feel guilty about events over which
I
have no control. Ooh!’ Her mother’s drawn-out exclamation held the exasperation of a woman frustrated in all her efforts.
Spurting the gravel from under the wheels of the Riley as she swept it out of the drive, Liz had a sudden, vivid memory of her mother at Rinsey. She remembered the garden fought for inch by inch by her mother and various garden boys, of her chopping at the liana creepers in fury with a Malayan parang belonging to the cookie — and the Chinese boys laughing behind her back.
She had been a younger, far slenderer woman then, but the passionate exclamation was the same. Liz wondered why she had inherited the passion and not the tall blonde slenderness. She felt she was physically mid-everything — height, brownness of hair, looks ...
‘At least the Guisans won’t be there, something to be thankful for.’
‘They may be.’ Liz recognised the hurt-for-hurt tactic, but stonily rejected the prospect of Rinsey without her friends. ‘They may be. Father may have traced them all by the time we get there.’ She pondered the stories of internment and torture by the Japanese but added, ‘People are still turning up.’
‘The girl and boy probably have five or six children each by now,’ Blanche went on as if Liz had not spoken, ‘and God knows what
they’ll
be like!’
‘Why do you say such things?’
‘Because the Guisans summed up two things: your father’s lack of judgement in employing the man in the first place, and the danger of interbreeding in a hot climate.’ Blanche opened her handbag and stood a silver drink flask upright before closing it again. ‘I just hope this time your father finds the climate too enervating after England and the navy. He was much too previous in letting the house.’
The bitterness edging the voice and the tight folding of the leather handbag strap left Liz in no doubt that if her mother’s will had prevailed she would have stayed at Pearling, continuing to work on the market garden she had created during the war. Funny really, Liz thought. Blanche had fought to wrench a flower garden from the jungle, then worked herself to exhaustion digging up lawns at Pearling to grow food. Now, as Blanche had already surmised, they would be re-grassed.
For the first mile of their journey the lanes twisted towards the village of Pearling, through farmland Liz’s paternal great-grandparents had owned and her grandparents had sold to invest in the Far East. She was aware of her family’s deep roots in this green and moderate land, but her heart ached for the excesses of the tropics.
She turned a corner and confronted a boy on an overlarge bicycle riding near the middle of the road. He swerved violently to the side, wobbled, caught his pedal on the grass and described a fair dive into the lush verge. Liz slowed automatically, peering back through her rear-view mirror.
‘You’re not stopping!’ Blanche exclaimed.
‘I think it’s the post-office boy who delivers telegrams,’ she said as she saw him stoop to pick up a cap, which he hesitantly raised in their direction.
‘Oh! he’s fine!’ Blanche decided, glancing back. ‘I thought we hadn’t much time,’ she added when Liz did not immediately drive on.
Liz looked in her mirror again and decided he was unhurt and time was short though she resented her mother’s dismissive attitude. This time at Rinsey she might not be able to be quite so like the Red Queen in
Alice
in
Wonderland
, issuing her orders, autocratic to the point of despotism.
The Chinese cookie and office clerks, the happy contented Malay houseboys, the Tamil rubber-tappers would perhaps have different attitudes after having seen their English lords and masters run before the Japanese. Leaving them to the severity of a culture which saw confession as a necessary precursor to guilt and so torture as a weapon of justice. No wonder her father had found his workforce at first scattered and then organised by extremists into rebellious groups demanding higher wages.
A swift intake of breath by her side alerted Liz a second before Blanche shouted: ‘Lights! There’s traffic lights ahead!’
‘I see them, mother,’ she said.
‘You’d gone off into a dream.’
‘I can think and drive at the same time.’
‘No,’ Liz agreed, for the first time rather dreading the journey herself. It would be a couple of days even after landing at Singapore before they could reach Rinsey, though her mother would undoubtedly be an asset back at her father’s side. Motivating unwilling workers had become quite a speciality of hers during the war — and Father, though Liz would admit it to no one but herself, was not good at business, it seemed to embarrass him.
‘We’ll have a few days at Raffles,’ her mother mused. ‘Your father said he would meet us in Singapore ... no point in rushing upcountry. We’ll have some cotton dresses and slacks made.’
What Liz wanted was a complete reunion with her father and the Guisans; Joseph, her first heartthrob, and his sister Lee, her best friend. Contemplating an even longer delay, she frowned. She wanted to travel straight on to greet them all, find them all safe, not to stay poncing about at Raffles for days.
‘You’re doing it again!’
‘Yes.’ She admitted the loss of concentration, but, pleased to be distracted from more dour thoughts, turned to her mother with a grin. ‘I was about to order you a gin sling in Raffles.’
Blanche tutted but laughed. ‘You always have to make life as bearable as you can.’
*
Liz felt it was the numerous sips from the flask, refilled several times as they flew in the new Constellation via Lisbon, Colombo and out over the Bay of Bengal, that kept her mother going at all. Once the journey was begun, her mother confined her criticisms to the odd ironic remark. A stoical quality surfaced on these occasions. Blanche might raise Cain if her wishes were not carried out, but never continued grumbling once the inevitable had happened. She metaphorically closed her eyes to the situation, and on this protracted flight spent much of the time feigning sleep.
The final leg of their journey from Rangoon to Singapore drove all weariness from Liz’s eyes. As the plane came in from the north of the island, she peered down and saw the luxuriant jungle of Malaya bordered by white sandy beaches. The tiny island of Sentosa could be seen off the coast of the larger island of Singapore, and she caught a glimpse of the causeway to the mainland as the plane turned.
The sky was deepening from orange to red as the rapid tropical dusk accompanied their arrival. Blanche, the taller of the two, strained to see over the heads of those waiting but could not see her husband. Any second Liz expected a raised arm and a shout, and held her own greeting ready in her throat, joy and the cry pent up — but as the small crowd cleared she felt choked with childlike disappointment.
Anxiety for her mother took over as she turned to see Blanche slumped on the edge of a bench, head in hands, in the last stages of exhaustion. Leaving her in charge of their bags, Liz walked out into the full heat of the night beyond the reception area. She had forgotten it was quite this hot, to the uninitiated like stepping into a bakehouse with the ovens at full blast. The cicadas were loud in every verge and patch of the coarse-leaved lalang grass.
She looked past the hopefully loitering trishaw boys, trying to push away a growing sense of desolation. After all, so much could delay a person in Malaya. A single train breakdown on the one line that ran the length of the west coast, or a landslip from the rain-soaked, jungle-clad hillsides could hold him up for hours, even days.
She strained to look at every man who loomed taller than the Malays and Chinese, but soon decided that for her mother’s sake they would go to Raffles and wait there. It was the obvious solution.
She beckoned a Chinese boy to find them a taxi. He ran swiftly off, then helped to porter their cases, trying to carry them all at once, all smiles and eager for the dollar note she held.
Blanche caught her breath as the heat outside greeted her. ‘My God! We’re back,’ she said to no one in particular.
The teeming life of the city slid by the open car windows, the chattering bustle of some million Chinese, a quarter of a million Malays, half that again of Indians and Pakistanis and tens of thousands of Europeans — all making a living from the island and the peninsula of Malaya.
They travelled across the island from Seletar airport along the river front lined with godowns — the warehouses, piled with goods as if for a gigantic auction sale. The lights of the many bumboats and houseboats were bobbing about like a multitude of fireflies.
The whole populace seemed to be in the streets, bustling around the street hawkers’ stalls, eating at the many charcoal barbecues that sprang up each evening. Japanese-made trishaws now outnumbered the local rickshaws, Liz ironically noted as they swung between carts and bicycles piled high with produce. Monkeys trained to pick coconuts rode the back of their masters’ bicycles, tethered by thin cords attached to the animals’ collars. She pushed to the back of her mind the other things they did with monkeys and other animals in the meat markets. England had coloured her outlook in that respect, but for the rest she wanted to lift up her arms and embrace the whole palm-fringed tropical island.
The car pulled up on the drive between the fan-palm trees and hedges screening the entrance to the Raffles Hotel from the seafront Beach Road. The driver carried their cases in to the reception desk, where an undermanager, immaculate in his tropical suit, stood ready to greet them. Blanche collapsed wearily into a large basket chair and waved Liz on to make the enquiries.