(Failed)? Or were they apocryphal? I certainly remember speaking to somebody who had seen a plate outside a dental surgery in the Yemen which said: Bachelor of Dental Surgery (Failed). I suppose that if one’s toothache were severe enough, one might just take the risk.
“Edward Hong was very urbane. He was an impressive-looking man with a pencil moustache and elegant patent-leather shoes. He appeared terribly pleased to see me and summoned a maid to produce a tray of tea, which we drank out of Royal Doulton cups.
“‘I do so miss good old John’s,’ he said, referring, I assumed, to St John’s College, Cambridge. ‘I had such a well-placed room in Second Court, and from time to time I took tea with the Master and his wife in the Lodge. He had a strong interest in Chinese ceramics, and I used to help him read the reign marks on the base of vases. We also used to discuss Waley’s transla-tions of Tang poetry. We discussed those for hours. Hours.’
“I listened to this talk about St John’s and Cambridge for almost half an hour. At one point, he asked me if the Church clock continued to stand at ten to three, and I replied that there was, as far as I knew, honey still for tea. He was delighted with that, and at the end of our conversation I think that he would have done anything for me. So that was when I asked him whether it would be possible to arrange an introduction to some contemporary pirates.
“He hesitated for only the briefest of moments before he smiled and said that this could certainly be arranged. It would take a day or two, he said, and in the meantime would I care to meet his daughter, Mary, who was studying piano and French?
‘She loves Chopin,’ he said, ‘and I love listening to her playing.
I can listen to Chopin for hours – hours and hours.’”
“I had rather a lot of Chopin that morning, I must confess,”
wrote Domenica. “The Mazurka in C sharp minor, the Nocturne in E major, and so on, all interpreted sympathetically by Mary Hong, daughter of Edward Hong, M.A. (Cantab.). By lunchtime I was obliged to look discreetly at my watch and claim that, owing to jet lag, I needed to get back to the hotel for an afternoon nap.
“We parted the greatest of friends. If I came back for a mid-morning tea a couple of days later, Edward Hong said, he would make sure that there would be a pirate contact for me to meet.
‘He might be a little on the rough side,’ he said. ‘But we can have some Chopin afterwards to make up for it.’
“I returned to the hotel and spent an afternoon writing up my diary. I haven’t done such a thing for years, but I have the feeling that my experiences here in Malacca are going to be somewhat unusual and should be recorded. I did a little pen and ink sketch of Edward Hong in the margins and one of his daughter playing Chopin. I was quite pleased with these, although you would regard them as mere amateur scratchings, Angus. Yes, you would, although you would be far too polite to say as much.
“I spent the next two days wandering around Malacca. It’s a delightful place, a bit like Leith, in fact, but with totally different people and buildings, and climate, too, I suppose. I spent very pleasant hours reading in a chair in the garden of the hotel, under a very shady tree that looked remarkably like those Sea Grape trees you see in places such as Jamaica, but no doubt something quite different. I read about the history of this place
– very colourful – and about all the different groups of people who have made their home here. This had implications for my study of the pirates. Because of the dearth of information on the subject, I had no idea whether they would be Malay, Chinese or Indian in their origin, and this had implications not only for how I would approach the study, but also for how we could communicate.
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“I had envisaged that I might need an interpreter, but then it occurred to me that because of the . . . how shall I put it?
. . . delicate nature of the research it could be difficult to find a local person who would be prepared to live amongst the pirates themselves. For this reason, I might need to speak to them directly.
“I telephoned Edward Hong about this. He said that the pirate bands were of mixed ethnicity and that I should expect to encounter all the main groups to be found in Malacca.
“‘It’s rather like the French Foreign Legion,’ he explained.
‘People join up if they want to get away. But what makes them different from the Legion is that they bring their wives and children with them. And as for languages, well, I would suggest that since you don’t have any of the local Chinese dialects – and no Tamil, or Malay? No? Well, I’d use a pidgin of some sort.’
“As it happens, I know all about pidgin – I learned Tok Pisin in New Guinea and I became quite interested in the subject. It’s amazing how far one can get with pidgin, Angus. And pidgin languages are so colourful! Wonderful creations! I suspect they’ll be speaking pidgin down in Essex before too long – they’re certainly heading in that direction.
“As you know, pidgins are a real mixture of this, that and the next thing. You get a bit of English, a bit of German, a bit of Dutch – everything. And the grammar is simple in the extreme. Do you know that when Prince Charles went to address the Papua New Guinea legislative assembly – where the official language is a pidgin – they introduced him formally as ‘Nambawan pikinini bilong Mrs Kwin’? Isn’t that marvellous? And it was quite accurate, of course. The word “bilong”
does an awful lot of work in pidgin. And here’s another little gem. In Neo-Melanesian pidgin, if I wanted to say: Why did you wreck that machine? I would say: Olsem onem yu buggerupim onefelo masin? You’ll notice that the verb has an obvious etymology.
“My mind was set at rest by the thought that I would be able to speak directly to the people in the pirate band – not that I imagined I would be speaking too much to the pirates them-The Charms of Neo-Melanesian Pidgin 73
selves. I imagined that I would be talking to their wives – or, I suppose pirates have partners these days rather than wives – and discussing social arrangements and the like. It’s always very interesting to find out how decisions are made in these alternative communities. Often, you know, the power structure is fairly clearly delineated. Remember
Remember how the right to speak was determined by possession of the conch? Well, I rather suspected that I
