Singapore

Chapter 18  Singapore

In Singapore I had the use of a flat, the home of a business acquaintance whom I had twice met in England. He was on home-leave and the flat was in the care of his elderly Chinese housekeeper who had her own quarters adjacent to the flat. The Amah's English was negligible and her accent puzzling but she showed great ingenuity in doing without language. After she had retired to her own flat towards nine each evening, I would help myself to cold drinks from the wide assortment in the refrigerator. In a few days I discovered her system which was simply to provide at first an assortment of drinks and a variety of Chinese and European foods, rather like scattering bait on the water to see what the fish are taking. As soon as she had discovered my preferences, she confined her catering to these.

Later, I was able to ask the Chinese secretary at the office of my Company to telephone the flat to explain anything I had not managed to convey to the Amah.

As they spoke different dialects of Chinese, they used Malay as the common factor.

  From a weighing-machine I learned that in my longstanding battle to keep flesh on my bones, I had lost ground to the extent of another pound and a half. Taking a sheet of graph paper, I plotted my weight over recent years and projected it into the future. By 1984, at the present rate of loss, I shall weigh only five stones and by the year 2000, I shall be back to my birth-weight of ten pounds. By April 7th, 2024 when I shall be a hundred years old, I shall weigh nothing at all. Like the "Incredible Shrinking Man" I shall have faded completely away.

It was Sunday, and we lay around the swimming pool at a friend's hotel, basking in the sun. Nothing much had happened for over three hours apart from periodic visits of the waiter to replenish glasses and an occasional swim in the pool by one of the more energetic members of the party. An Australian, resident in Singapore was there with his wife and after the conversation had centred on Saigon for some minutes, she said:

"Saigon? Saigon? ... let me see - isn't that the place where they've had some trouble lately?"

She knew she had heard of it somewhere!

As we lazed, there was a general agreement that for good living and good eating, Singapore was one of the jewels of the East.

"I had a devil of a job keeping my Director away from, here," said one of the party, taking his pipe from his mouth. "But for fifteen years I made it, although he was always saying that he must come and get a first-hand idea of our operations here. Fortunately, the newspapers 'play up' every trifle and I managed to convince him what a terrible place this was to live and work. Why, they felt sorry for me, back at Head Office!" he exclaimed. "I used to send them cuttings about any odd riot and once I got myself photographed in an armoured car and sent them the picture. Then too, I used to splash items all over my expense claims for things like prickly-heat ointment and jabs against yellow-fever, black-water fever, cholera, typhus, bubonic plague - the lot! Not that I had the jabs," he added. "Just the ones you've got to have when you go to other God-forsaken countries. But it really impressed them. They thought I was a dedicated Company man. When he got here finally, my Director said: 'This isn't a bit like I expected!' and I said: 'No, well it's improved a lot in recent years"'.

There was a general laugh. Most of the white residents of Singapore live in luxury, with servants and a standard of living which few of them could afford in their home countries.

Even for the native Chinese and Malays making up the bulk of Singapore's population, living standards are far higher than in almost any other part of Asia, which makes it a pleasant country to visit. White residents sometimes complain of the sameness of a climate where everything - temperature, humidity and rainfall - always seems to be in the eighties. The highest point of the island is Mount Faber, which is 470 feet high, and "from its summit" as one of the guide-books says, “a panoramic view of the island can be obtained." Some of the beaches, with palms almost at the water's edge, achieve a graceful charm, but after a short while the flatness of the terrain leaves only an impression of unrelieved and tropically profuse vegetation, recalling the comment of the painter who said that Nature is "too green, and badly lighted."

When I was nine, I was given for Christmas a book of eight hundred jokes. A family legend grew up over the ensuing years, that I had memorised the book of jokes and that they were my unvarying stock. While this was a slander, I had certainly become conscious of the need for a new audience, and at last, a mere 8,000 miles from home, I found one in the person of the demure Chinese secretary who was working for me.

Not merely the immortal eight-hundred, but also the worn-out quips of yester-year were new to her, and for the first time in decades I shone, sparkled and scintillated like a newly polished diamond.

"A gentleman always raises his hat before kicking a lady", I had said, not expecting any reaction other than the gloomy silence of a family determined, in my own interests, not to encourage me. But she laughed! It was new to her; perhaps she thought it was original, and as I realised that they were all new to her, out they came for a frolic in the sun.

I was invited to her home and finding a family of seven daughters, could not resist commenting that at school we had been told that the Chinese wanted sons, and daughters were looked on as misfortunes to be drowned at birth. Quite clearly I had been misinformed. All spoke good English, with a slightly literary flavour to it, as well as Malay and Hokkien. A very young-looking mother organised a banquet of Chinese and Malay dishes, in honour of the grandmother, an elderly lady with a wide and warming smile, who presided over this family gathering. The father of the girls seemed quite cheerful amid this feminine avalanche.

The races indigenous to this region of the world are exceptionally attractive, or rather, they seem to produce a higher proportion of attractive specimens, both male and female, than equivalent groups of white people. This was made apparent to me by the behaviour of a young English fellow in his mid-twenties, just out to join a British Company for three years, who was constantly requiring to be pulled back from under the traffic because his eyes and attention were following the girls passing by.

If anyone of them had taken the trouble to walk right round him, unquestionably his neck would have been broken, just as an owl's can be wrung by anyone who walks round it three times.

He was already, in his own view, an expert in the haggling by which prices are established. He indicated his sunglasses, a famous German make, and told me how he had beaten down the seller in Change Alley, from 27 Straits Dollars (about £3) to 7. Before we had gone another hundred yards, one of the lenses fell out and smashed on the pavement, revealing one very surprised eye. He complained to the local agents of the famous German firm, who were able to prove that it was a cheap, illegal copy. A much more impressive bargain was the Omega watch he bought in the street a few days later for about £4. When it had gained two hours a day in the first couple of days, he went to an authorised Omega dealer, though why, I am not sure, since it had a tick like an alarm clock and a winder-ratchet audible at fifty yards. No, it was not an Omega and had never been! Genuine Omega watches are hard to find at £4.

Also in and around Change Alley are the money-changers, mainly Indian, who, with lightning rapidity will cover a notepad with calculations which mean nothing - the important figure work goes on in their heads. If you bargain hard and shrewdly, you can often get nearly as good a rate for your dollars or pounds as at the adjacent Bank.

Change Alley is a low, narrow, little tunnel, flanked with little stalls and shops and roofed with toys and other merchandise. If you do not faint from the heat, you will merge into Raffles Place, where there is a new underground car-park, and on the far side, a fixed-price department-store for those who do not enjoy haggling. This involves sitting patiently in the shop while the assistant plies you with Coca-cola - a shrewd stroke since you will be reluctant to leave without buying something, after accepting free drinks and also must accept the price after a reasonable time, or explode. For the residents, haggling becomes an almost automatic process, and an English lady described how, after years in Singapore, she horrified a shopkeeper in her native Woking by suddenly going into the haggler's patter of, "Oh, no! That's far too much; I wouldn't dream of giving that for it!"

All around are shops and arcades stuffed with tax-free, duty-free cameras, radios, amplifiers, record-players and tape-recorders, representing an unbearable temptation to visitors from other countries, and even for local residents. I met an Indian engineer who admitted to owning four tape-recorders and about twelve cameras.

"A friend of mine," he said, "considers that I must have been deprived of toys when I was a child!"