‘If you can bring it back tomorrow, you can sail on Monday. As I said, a simple letter would be more than adequate.’
Gerry was quite amenable to writing a most glowing reference, especially after being treated to several pints at the Queen’s Head on Cheapside and pocketing the five pound note that Tom slipped him. He even entered into the spirit of the agreement and suggested writing it on the firm’s notepaper.
Tom sailed for Malaya the following Monday in the company of a group of other young single men, each with his own reason for heading East. He spent most of the voyage lying on his bunk in the tiny cabin, or on the deck, reading. He had the occasional drink, but managed to resist the temptation to fritter away all his savings drinking at the bar or gambling at blackjack in the games room.
As the ship headed east and the weather grew warmer, the atmosphere on board began to change. People grew more relaxed and sociable. Tom relaxed too, and his spirits rose. He began to forget the boredom and frustrations of the last few years. He began to look forward to his new existence.
Six weeks later they docked at Georgetown on Penang Island. As Tom walked down the gangplank onto the shore he could see instantly why they called Penang the ‘Pearl of the Orient’. He was enchanted.
Georgetown was a gleaming colonial town with white stuccoed buildings set around spacious squares and greens. It oozed oriental charm. Tom was taken to the offices of United Rubber by rickshaw; his luggage followed behind on another one. He sat back on the leather seat and absorbed the sights. The rickshaw took him through the Chinese quarter. The streets were teeming with people and lined with shop-houses, their shutters painted in pastel shades. They were filled with every imaginable thing for sale, the goods flowing out onto the pavements. The rickshaw trundled past ornate Chinese temples, English churches and exotic mosques with towering minarets.
After signing his contracts at the offices, he was taken back to the waterfront to spend his first night at the Eastern and Oriental Hotel. That evening he had a taste of the good life that was to be his for the next three years. He had a butler and a valet to look after him in his room. He took cocktails on the terrace, overlooking the harbour, and then ate a three-course meal in the sumptuous dining room, surrounded by potted palms and cooled by fluttering ceiling fans.
The next morning he was met by the company agent and taken by pony trap up into the hills to the plantation. He was shown his bungalow, complete with three servants: a houseboy, a garden boy and a cook. The bungalow was built on a hillside, with a view over the tops of the rubber trees and towards the distant hills and the sea.
The very next day he started work. His job was to oversee the production of rubber on a four-hundred-acre plantation of trees. The work was undemanding and the rewards grossly disproportionate to the effort required of him. Most of the workers under him were Hokkien Chinese, some Tamil. Over the next few months he quickly learned the rudiments of both languages, and as a result increased production on his patch considerably.
His days passed in a fairly predictable routine. He would rise early, bathe in the water brought to him by the houseboy, and have a simple breakfast on the veranda. He would then walk down to the headquarters of the estate, meet his gang of workers and discuss with them about which trees were to be tapped that day. As they got on with the work, he would walk around the plantation and ensure that everything was going to plan.
In the afternoon the workers would bring back buckets full of latex to the plantation headquarters to be measured into the vats. Tom’s job was simply to record what each worker had brought so that they could be paid the correct sum at the end of the week.
It had been pure bliss for Tom. To sit on the veranda once work was done for the day, watching the sun go down over the rubber plantation, sipping a gin sling that the house boy had mixed for him, listening to the cicadas in the frangipani trees behind the bungalow, gazing at the distant blue-grey hills. Or to spend the evenings dancing at the club to a jazz orchestra, or to run off to his chaste meetings with Joy, so laden with unspoken desire.
He lay there now on the bare bunk, his stomach still grumbling after the meagre evening meal, the bamboo slats digging into his bony spine. It seemed scarcely believable that he had been that carefree man lazing on the veranda in Penang, that he had ever led that life of simple pleasure and luxury.
He thought back to the shock he had experienced the first time he had endured hard labour when they arrived at camp. The men had been ordered to clear a section of jungle for the railway track and were given only the most basic of tools to chop down great thickets of bamboo and towering trees, to drag them out by fixing ropes around them and pulling them in teams. He remembered how his whole body had ached painfully after the first day, how blisters had formed on his feet and hands, how his muscles had seized up in protest.
The months wore on. From clearing the jungle for the railway, they were building it, moving stones and earth by hand in wicker baskets, handful by handful, to build embankments, chipping through solid rock with rudimentary tools to make cuttings through the hillsides, constructing bridges from logs of wood they had felled. And all the time, they were forced on by the guards, who lashed them and shoved them and screamed at them to work faster: ‘Work, work! Speedo, speedo!’
Tom, Harry and Ian faced
