To Run Across the Sea (17 page)

In due course the experts arrived with photographs of the capital of the wild frontier in its heyday, and within weeks the comfortable muddle of Hat Yai was no more. Its shacks reeling on their stilts were pulled down, the ducks and buffaloes chased out of the ditches, and the spirit-houses (after proper apologies to the spirits) shoved out of sight. It became illegal to fly kites within the limits of the town, or to stage contests between fighting-fish.

Where the bustling chaos of the East had once been, arose the replica of the main-street made famous by so many Westerns, complete with swing-door saloons, wall-eyed hotels and rickety verandahs on which law-abiding citizens were marshalled by the sheriff to go on a posse and men of evil intention planned their attack on the mail-train or the bank. Hat Yai possessed no horses and the hard men of those days rode into town in jeeps—nevertheless, hitching-posts were provided. For all the masquerade, Hat Yai in the fifties bore some slight accidental resemblance to what Dodge City had been a century before, and there were gun-fighters in plenty in the vicinity. It was at that time an unofficial rest-area for Malaysian Communist guerrillas from across the frontier, tolerated simply because the Thais lacked the strength to keep them out. The communist intruders were armed to the teeth, and Thai law-enforcement agents—part of whose uniform included Davy Crockett fur caps from which raccoon tails dangled—were few in number. Reaching for one’s gun was a matter of frequent occurrence in the main-street saloons. Although it was largely a histrionic gesture and few people were shot, newcomers like myself were proudly taken to see the holes in the ceilings.

The arrival of the movies played their part in the vision of the new Thailand. In a single year, 1950, hundreds, perhaps thousands of movie theatres opened up all over S.E. Asia, the first film on general release being
Arsenic and Old Lace
. With this the shadow-play that had entertained so many generations of Thais was wiped out overnight. A multitude of mothers throughout the land worked tirelessly at pressing back their daughters’ fingers from the age of five to enable them to take stylish part in the dance dramas such as the
Ramayana
. From this point on it had all been to no purpose, and the customers who befuddled themselves in the saloons with
mekong
whisky, drunk hot by the half pint, were waited upon with sublime grace by girls whose performing days were at an end. Real-life theatre demanded the imaginative effort of suspending disbelief; gangster movies did not.

Investigating the threatened disappearance of the puppet-show, a Bangkok newspaper reported that it had only been able to discover a single company, surviving somewhere in the north of the country, working in Thai style with life-size puppets manipulated not by strings but by sticks from below stage. It took 40 years to train a puppeteer to the required pitch of perfection in this art, and it seemed worthwhile to the newspaper to bring this company down to Bangkok to film what was likely to be one of its last performances.

This was given in the garden of the paper’s editor, Kukrit Pramoj, and attracted a fashionable crowd of upper-crust Thais, plus a few foreign diplomats, many of whom would see a puppet-show for the first and last time. So unearthly was the skill of the puppeteers, so naturalistic and convincing the movements of the puppets, that, but for the fact that their vivacity surpassed that of flesh and blood, it would have been tempting to suspect we were watching actors in puppet disguise.

After the show most of the guests went off to a smart restaurant, filling it with the bright clatter of enthusiasm that would soon fade. Such places provided ‘continental’ food—the mode of the day. In this land offering so many often extraordinary regional delicacies, found nowhere else in the world, successful efforts were now made to suppress flavour to a point where only a saporific vacuum remained. Kukrit, then, as ever since, a champion of Thai culture, made the astonishing admission that he knew nothing of the cuisine, now only to be savoured at night-markets and roadside stalls. In a flare-up of nationalist enthusiasm he announced his determination to put this right. He made enquiries among his friends and a few days later I received an invitation to lunch with him at the house of a relation, a prince who was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn. The prince, said Kukrit, employed a chef trained to cook nothing but European food, and he could not remember when—if ever—he had tasted a local dish. Entering into the spirit of adventure he had tracked down a Thai cook with a popular following in the half-world of the markets, to be hired for this occasion. And so the meal offered, for him too, the promise of novelty and adventure.

The prince lived on the outskirts of Bangkok in a large villa dating from about 1900. It was strikingly English in appearance, with a garden full of sweetpeas—grown by the prince himself—which in this climate produced lax, greyish blooms, singularly devoid of scent. He awaited us at the garden gate. Kukrit leaped down from the car, scrambled towards him and, despite a government injunction to refrain from salutations of a servile kind, made a token grab at his right ankle. This the prince good-naturedly avoided. ‘Do get up, Kukrit, dear boy,’ he said. Both men had been to school in England and, apart from their easy, accent-free mastery of the language, there was something that proclaimed this in their faces and manner.

My previous experience of Thai houses had been limited to the claustrophobic homes in which the moneyed classes took refuge, shuttered away in a gloom deepened by a clutter of dark furniture from the menacing light of day. The villa came as a surprise, for in the past year an avant-garde French interior designer had flown in to effect a revolution. He had brought the sun back, filtering it through lattices and the dappled shade of house plants with great, lustrous leaves, opening the house to light and diffusing an ambience of spring. We lunched under a photo-mural of Paris—
quand fleurit le printemps—
and a device invented by the designer breathed a faint fragrance of narcissi through the conditioned air. The meal was both delicious and enigmatic, based we were assured on the choice of the correct basic materials (none was identified), and auspicious colours according to the phase of the moon. Kukrit took many notes.

The entertainment that followed was in some ways more singular, for the prince told us that he had inherited most of his grandfather’s photographic equipment, including his stereoscopic slides, and he proposed that we should view them together—‘to give you some idea of how royalty lived in those days’.

King Chulalongkorn, who reigned from 1868–1910, was a man of protean achievement. On the world stage he showed himself to be more than a match for the French colonial power that entertained barely concealed hopes of gobbling up his kingdom. At home he pursued many hobbies with unquenchable zest; organising fancy-dress parties and cooking for his friends, but, above all, immersed in his photography. He collected cameras by the hundred, did his own developing, and drew upon an immense family pool of consorts and children for his portraiture. We inspected photographs taken at frequent intervals of his sons lined up, ten at a time in order of height, for the king’s loving record of their advance from childhood to adolescence—all of them, including the six-year-old at the bottom of the line, in a top hat. Toppers had only been put aside in one case when four senior sons had been crammed into the basket of an imitation balloon.

The queens and consorts were even more interesting, and here they were seen posed in the standard environment of Victorian studio photography; lounging against plaster Greek columns, taking a pretended swipe with a tennis racquet, or clutching the handlebars of a weird old bicycle. Fancy-dress shots, of which there were many, bore labels in French—the language of culture of the day—L’Amazone (Queen Somdej with a feather in her hair grasping a bow); Une dame Turque de qualité (the Princess of Chiang Mai, with a hookah); La Cavalerie Légère (an unidentified consort in a hussar’s shako); La Jolie Cochère (another ditto, in white breeches and straw hat, carrying a whip). The impression given by this collection was that the Victorian epoch had produced a face of its own, and that this could triumph even over barriers of race. Thus Phra Rataya, Princess of Chiang Mai, bore a resemblance to Georges Sand, Queen Somdej had something about her of La Duse, while a lesser consort, well into middle-age, reminded me of one of my old Welsh aunts.

The prince put away the slides. Like his grandfather King Chulalongkorn, and his great grandfather, King Mongkut—who was an astronomer, and invented a quick-firing cannon based on the Colt revolver—he had a taste for intellectual pleasures. He showed us his Leica camera with its battery of lenses. Candid photography was in vogue at the time. By use of such gadgets as angle-viewfinders it was possible to catch subjects for portraiture off-guard, sometimes in ludicrous postures. There was no camera to equal it for this purpose, said the prince. As for his grandfather’s gear, it took up rather a lot of space, and he would be quite happy to donate it to any museum that felt like giving it house-room.

We strolled together across the polished entrance-hall towards the door, where my attention was suddenly taken by what appeared to be a large, old-fashioned and over-ornate birdcage, suspended in an environment in which nothing belonged to a period earlier than the previous year. I stopped to examine it, and the prince said, ‘Uncle lives there.’

Although slightly surprised, I thought I understood. ‘You mean the house-spirit?’

‘Exactly. In this life he was our head servant. He played an important part in bringing up us children, and was much loved by us all. Uncle was quite ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the family.’

The prince had no hesitation in explaining how this had come about. When the building of a new royal house was finished, a bargain might be struck with a man of low caste. The deal was that he would agree to surrender the remaining few years of the present existence in return for acceptance into the royal family in the next. He would be entitled to receive ritual offerings on a par with the family ancestors. Almost without exception such an arrangement was readily agreed to.

‘How did uncle die?’

‘He was interred under the threshold. Being still a child I was excluded from the ceremony, which was largely a religious one. Everyone was happy. Certainly Uncle was.’

I took the risk. ‘Would a Western education have any effect at all on such beliefs?’ I asked.

‘That is a hard question,’ the Prince said, ‘but I am inclined to the opinion that it would be slight. It appears to be more a matter of feeling than conscious belief. Education is an imperfect shield against custom and tradition.’ We stood together in the doorway and the cage swayed a little in a gust of warm breeze. ‘In some ways,’ the prince said, ‘you may judge us still to be a little backward.’ His laugh seemed apologetic, ‘In others I hope you will agree that we move with the times.’

W
IEDLER, MY CONTACT IN
Tahiti, had come to the island forty years ago, married a local lady and was now a happy member of a vastly extended Tahitian family. He lived in Papeete, but we had made the trip together to Huahine, one of the six principal Tahitian islands where Wiedler was trying to effect a reconciliation between a favourite nephew and his wife, who had gone home to her mother there. The nephew, a smiling bronzed Adonis with marvellously tattooed torso and thighs was waiting for us in the gardens of the hotel. This had been built on the site of an ancient Polynesian temple of which many vestiges were scattered about. Rivulets of clear water curled through the grounds, mirroring the reflections of passing girls, swathed stylishly in their
pareas
and decked with frangipani. The morning was untidy with blossom which the girls were brushing with a certain reverence from the paths, and a sea of many colours showed through the branches of trees. The white line of a reef was drawn just below the horizon, and the distant surf added its muttered commentary to our discussion. Gauguin faces were everywhere to be seen.

The problem was that Ricky—as the nephew called himself—was employed in the new black pearl industry on a remote island in the Tuamoto group, with a lagoon 46 kilometres across but a population of only 128, and his wife was bored. There was no television. The cabins supplied by the company were fitted with solar panels producing enough electricity to work a video, and there was a good selection of cassettes, all on violent themes. Apart from that, the only distraction was churchgoing on Sunday. The wife had agreed to stay on if their housing could be improved by the addition of a picture-window. This would have to be imported at great cost from the States, and extreme dexterity and seamanship would be required to manoeuvre it in a small canoe through the opening in the reef to reach the village. Ricky had raised the further objection that once in place the window would generate intolerable heat, and that the ever-present sand would prevent it from being slid open or shut on its runners. There the matter rested. In any case, Ricky added, he was heartily sick of the view of the sea.

The positioning of this hotel had been selected with great care, offering not only marine prospects of the most glamorous kind upon which Ricky seemed glad to turn his back, but an inland view of an extinct volcano known in Tahitian as Pregnant Woman Asleep—which indeed well described it. This, and the other ancient volcanoes, from which the islands are formed, provides a unique feature of the Tahitian scene, for here there are no eroded surfaces and no bare rock. Every peak, pinnacle or precipice is mantled by a tight carapace of ferns, appearing from the distance as a carpet of the deepest green.

Considerable imagination is shown in such places to keep the visitors amused. Beyond the normal ‘activities’, trips are arranged on Huahine to view the colossal eels, spared, it is supposed, by an ancient taboo, inhabiting a shallow local stream. Guests with the strength to do so are urged to try their hand at lifting one of these confiding monsters—weighing up to 30 lb—from the water. On Raiatea they will drop you off on a desert island, provided with a survival kit that includes in the season of hurricanes a rope to tie yourself to a tree, and leave you there as long as you like.