Cheroots are handy in such a situation. Around me in the compartment smiling Burmese puffed away on thick green cheroots and didn’t seem to notice the stink of the growing yellow pool just outside. At the Shwe Dagon Pagoda I saw a very old lady, hands clasped in prayer. She knelt near a begging leper whose disease had withered his feet and abraded his body and given him a bat’s face. He had a terrible smell, but the granny prayed with a Churchillian-sized cheroot in her mouth. On Mandalay Hill, doorless outhouses stand beside the rising steps, and next to the outhouses are fruit stalls. The stink of piss is powerful, but the fruitseller, who squats all day in that stink, is wreathed in smoke from his cheroot.
Writing in the Tropics
THE BEST JOB FOR A WRITER, A JOB WITH THE FEWEST HOURS, is in the tropics. But books are hard to write in the tropics. It is not only the heat; it is the lack of privacy, the open windows, the noise. Tropical cities are deafening. In Lagos and Accra and Kampala two people walking down a city street will find they are shouting to each other to be heard over the sound of traffic and the howls of residents and radios. V. S. Naipaul is the only writer I know of who has mentioned the abrading of the nerves by tropical noise (the chapter on Trinidad in The Middle Passage). Shouting is the Singaporean’s expression of friendliness; the Chinese shout is like a bark, sharp enough to make you jump. And if you are unfortunate enough to live near a Chinese cemetery — only foreigners live near cemeteries, the Chinese consider it unlucky to occupy those houses — you will hear them mourning with firecrackers, scattering cherry bombs over the gravestones.
Sit in a room in Singapore and try to write. Every sound is an interruption, and your mind blurs each time a motorcycle or a plane or a funeral passes. If you live near a main road, as I do, there will be three funerals a day (Chinese funerals are truckloads of gong orchestras and brass bands playing familiar songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”). The day the Bengali gardener mows the grass is a day wasted. Hawkers cycle or drive by and each stops; you learn their individual yells, the bean-curd man with his transistor and sidecar, the fish-ball man on his bike, the ice-cream seller with his town crier’s bell (a midaftemoon interruption), the breadman in his Austin van, leaning on the horn; the elderly Chinese lady crouching in her sam foo and crying, “Yeggs!” through the door, the Tamil newsboy, a toddy alcoholic, muttering, “Baybah, baybah.” Before the British forces left there was a fish-and-chip van; it didn’t beep, but there were yells. The Singaporean doesn’t stir from his house. He waits in the coolness of his parlor for the deliverers to arrive. The yells and gongs, at first far off, then closer, console him. It is four-thirty, and here comes the coconut seller ringing his bicycle bell. He has a monkey, a macaque the size of a four-year-old, on the crossbar. The coconut seller is crazy; the buyers make him linger and they laugh at him. A crowd gathers to jeer him; he chases some children and then goes away. After dark the grocery truck parks in front of your house; the grocer has a basket of fish, a slaughtered pig, and the whole range of Ma-Ling canned goods (“Tripe in Duck Grease,” “Chicken Feet,” “Lychees in Syrup”), and for an hour you will hear the yelp and gargle of bartering. You have written nothing.
The heat and light; you asked for those in coming so far, but it is hotter, though less bright, than you imagined — Singapore is usually cloudy, averaging only six hours of sunshine a day. That persistent banging and screeching is an annoyance that makes you hotter still. You are squinting at the pen which is slipping out of your slick fingers and wondering why you bothered to come.
Natives and Expatriates
THE ENGLISH SENSE OF ORDER, THE RESULT OF AN HABITUAL reflex rather than a systematic decree, gives the impression of a tremendous solidity and balance. It was carried abroad and it reassured those who could enter into it. English attitudes traveled without changing much, and to a large extent this accounts for some of the Englishman’s isolation. The English overseas are accused of living a rather narrow existence, but the point is that they associate themselves deeply with a locality: in this sense all Englishmen are villagers. It shows in the special phrases they use when they are away, among “natives” or “locals.”
“We’ve lived here for donkey’s years, but we’ve never been invited to one of their houses,” says the Englishman, adding, “though we had them around to tea.”
“They’re very secretive and awfully suspicious,” says his wife.
“They seem very friendly, but they’re not interested in us. They lack curiosity.”
“They keep to themselves.”
“An odd lot. I can’t say I understand them.”
You might think they are talking about Kikuyus or Malays, but they aren’t. They are Londoners who moved to Dorset eight years ago and they are talking about ordinary folk in the village. I knew the locals: I was neutral — just passing through, stopping for five months. The locals had strong opinions on outsiders who had settled in that part of Dorset.
“They come down here and all the prices go up,” one old man said. He might have been a Kenyan, speaking of settlers. There were other objections: the outsiders didn’t bother to understand the village life, they kept to themselves, acted superior, and anyway were mostly retired people and not much use.
Expatriates and natives: the colonial pattern repeated in England. There was a scheme afoot to drill for oil on a beautiful hill near a picturesque village. The expatriates started a campaign against it; the natives said very little. I raised the subject in a pub one night with some natives of the area, asking them where they stood on the oil-drilling issue.
“That bugger—,” one said, mentioning the name of a well-known man who had lived there for some years and was leading the campaign. “I’d like to talk to him.”
“What would you say to him?” I asked.
“I’d tell him to pack his bags and go back where he came from.”
So one understands the linguistic variations in England, the dialect that thickens among the natives when an expatriate enters a pub. No one recognizes him; the publican chats with him; the talk around the fireplace is of a broken fence or a road accident. The expatriate is discussed only after he leaves the room: Where does he live? What does he do? The natives know the answers, and later when he buys a round of drinks they will warn him about the weather (“We’ll pay for these warm days!”). It is a form of village gratitude, the effort at small talk. But in England a village is a state of mind. “Are you new in the village?” a friend of mine was asked by a newsagent. This was in Notting Hill.
His Highness
THERE IS A SULTAN IN MALAYSIA WHOSE NICKNAME IS “BUFFLES” and who in his old age divides his time between watching polo and designing his own uniforms. His uniforms are very grand and resemble the outfit of a Shriner or thirty-second-degree Mason, but he was wearing a silk sports shirt the day I met him on the polo ground. The interview began badly, because his first question, on hearing I was a writer, was “Then you must know Beverley Nichols!” When I laughed, the sultan said, “Somerset Maugham came to my coronation. And next week Lord Somebody’s coming — who is it?”
“Lewisham, Your Highness,” said an Englishwoman on his left.
“Lewisham’s coming — yes, Lewisham. Do you know him? No?” The sultan adjusted his sunglasses. “I just got a letter from him.”
The conversation turned quite easily to big-game hunting. “A very rich American once told me that he had shot grizzly bears in Russia and elephants in Africa and tigers in India. He said that bear meat is the best, but the second best is horse meat. He said that. Yes!”