54
TAIL PIECE
The Orient and I - Excerpts from a Memoir
By Mary Meadows
‘A cloud in the wind at a corner of the world,
Year in, year out, there’s no familiar thing.’
(Poem of the Ming Dynasty)
I only have to hear a snake charmer to be transported to my early days
in Singapore, when this eerie warbling from the Cathedral grounds
would waken me from a slumber every afternoon. I would raise the
bamboo chicks on the verandah of the Adelphi Hotel; but the snake
charmer intrigued me not at all. Nor did the scene below, the costume
and colour of a multi-racial eastern city threading through the colon-
nade of North Bridge Road. Nor the buildings with their Victorian
overtones, nor the coolie-hatted trisha riders pedalling through the
limousines, or the cymbal clashing of a Chinese funeral procession. It
was the red post box on the corner, with its Royal cipher, on which my
eyes longing focussed and I would lean far over the vernadah to catch
a glimpse of it. Then tea would arrive, pale with tinned milk, and a
plate of limp biscuits to remind me how far from home I was.
We had sailed in on the ‘Willem Ruys’ early on a December morning,
slipping through the fishing kalongs, moth-like junks and dragon-eyed
tonkangs, the island densely green. Singapore, jewel of the Empire
still, gateway to the rich Far Eastern trade, fulfilling the predictions of
Stamford Raffles who in 1819, landing on the jungle-covered eastern
shore had, with unsurpassed vision, declared this small island ‘by far
the most important station in the East and as far as naval superiority
and commercial interests are concerned, of much higher value than the
whole continents of territory’.
Val, my husband
[2GR 1945 – 47]
, was Deputy Secretary for Social
Welfare and Protector of Women and Girls in the Malay Civil Service
(MCS). He quickly disappeared into the Secretariat. So I ventured into
North Bridge Road, mingling with saris, sarongs and cheongsams and
the general bustle of Indian shops full of English cottons. The street
