Baa Baa Black Sheep (4 page)

Occasionally from the bar, as so often happens, we would have to make trips into the bathroom. And here we would stare and stare again at the pictures on the walls, hardly believing what we were seeing. For we were looking at exceptionally large photographs of some of Hollywood’s most prominent actresses, all standing around in various poses, and all of them nude.

How the Sultan had gotten such pictures we never were to know. Maybe he had had other nude bodies cleverly dubbed to the faces. But if so, the dubbing had been so cleverly done we couldn’t tell the difference.

But the Sultan of Johore certainly was a jovial old gentleman, so jovial that he was not allowed in the city limits of Singapore after dark. He was treated like some schoolboy in having to return to his own domain after curfew. One of the reasons for this, as the story went, was that the Sultan had, as one might say, “contributed to the delinquency of minors” there in Singapore.

The Sultan had had many a white wife. I don’t know which one he is working on now, or even if he is still alive, but we saw one of his wives there, an attractive English girl, or she could have been an Australian. He was also a big-game hunter. Even the Englishmen, who are hard to impress, had classified him at the time as one of the most skilled big-game hunters in the world.

I mentioned once before his binocular case, which he always carried on his rides across the causeway into Singapore, and how the case contained, instead of binoculars, a couple bottles of bourbon. This was because he didn’t like the kind of stuff (he called it “stuff”) they served at Raffles Hotel or in any of the other high-class places in Singapore.

So with his binocular case he would come into Singapore, and then, just before dark, would have to go away again—back to his fabulous palaces. During one of our visits he told us that he was getting darned sick and tired of living over there and running the Malay States. He wanted to go back to Hollywood. Apparently Hollywood impressed him much more than it did me.

“I want to go back to Hollywood and live,” he repeated almost longingly. “I like that better than I do over here; but unfortunately, I am the Sultan.”

It was here in Singapore that I became acquainted with the ricksha and their coolie runners that are so plentiful in the Far East. What a way to make a living! It might be terrific exercise, I thought, admiring some of the well-muscled legs of the coolie runners, but I let any thought of trying it out go by, when I was informed that the average coolie runner is worn out by the age of twenty-one.

Few rides were taken in rickshas after the novelty wore off. There were taxicabs and we used them for our travels. One trip took us out in the jungle to visit a rubber plantation. The plantation was much the same as I imagined it would be, how the trees were tapped, and the manner in which rubber originates.

The interesting part, to me, was the factory where rubber was dried, processed, and formed into huge bales of raw product. “Oh, the sweltering heat of this place! How could any human work for long?” I recall saying to some pilot. But they did, for they knew no other way.

The bulk of the work within the plant was done by women, under the direction of a smattering of male overseers. These were Chinese women, and the tiniest women I had ever seen before. Most of them I judged as weighing around eighty pounds or so. Talking about conveyor belts, the human conveyor belt they had in use here was most amazing. Two muscular Malay men would strain to lift a bundle of this raw rubber onto the turbaned head of one of these tiny women. And these women would walk slowly, one after the other, through the factory, some places appearing to be nothing but catwalks to me.

When I asked the weight of one of the bundles, one of the English-speaking overseers laughed and said: “Why don’t you pick one up and see for yourself?” Several of us pilots tried to pick up a raw-rubber bundle and couldn’t budge it. Some of us even took off our shirts because we were getting hot and sticky with the physical effort, and gave it a second try. We couldn’t lift a single one.

Yet these little women walked along, smiling at our futile efforts, without a bead of perspiration on their faces. We were
told that when one of these women slipped, which wasn’t often, the weight broke her neck.

I learned two things from this exhibition. It is all in knowing how. And secondly, life is cheap in the Orient. Furthermore, I was to learn later just how much cheaper an Oriental life was in comparison to our value of it.

Another full day, arranged again by Dick Rossi, was to be most enjoyable in our exploration of a world new to us. Not being an art critic, I can’t possibly tell you anything about the residences of the famous Tiger Baum magnate, the Salve Man, the Chinese who made a multimillionaire out of himself by putting out a prepared salve that cures all illnesses. He had two such places, the old one in downtown Singapore, and a new residence in the suburbs, each filled with the finest of jade statues, guarded by tall Sikhs who must have been around six foot seven or eight.

Tiger Baum’s old residence had been converted into a museum, open to the public or tourists, anyhow, as no one appeared to live there but the tall, turbaned Sikhs. The masses of nearly perfect jade of various shades were worth a few fortunes within themselves, let alone the increased value of the exquisite sculpturing. It was here at Singapore that I confirmed whatever impressions I may have had about the Far East or what I had read and learned from various sources in the past.

At the Baum estate in the country, where we were allowed to visit this afternoon, we were everywhere except within the quarters where the family lived. Again we saw equally beautiful jade statues, but something here of a completely different nature held me spellbound.

As we strolled slowly through this vast estate, looking in wonder at its treasures, we had to touch and smell them in order to determine that some were not real.

There were trees and plants I was familiar with, from virtually all over the world, and they had been laboriously and tediously manufactured to almost complete perfection from non-perishable materials. In and about the vegetation were animals placed in natural poses, and to all outward appearances they were superbly mounted. But when we gave them a closer inspection, we saw that they were made of materials similar to those of the scenery.

Today, though, whenever I take a charter flight at night over to Las Vegas and observe the various names of places in brilliant lights there, I can’t help recall those few nights in Singapore.

In comparison to the wild or odd names over doors in Las Vegas the larger dance halls in Singapore had worked their names down to the simplest of detail. The names went like this: one was called The Old World, another The New World, and still another The Great World.

We pilots got into all three of them, naturally, but first of all, and being so new from the United States, we wanted real Chinese chow. Four or five of us went up to a roof garden on a building in Singapore where there were no other white people, the patrons being all Chinese. There was a Chinese orchestra consisting of six one-string instruments upon which every so often the players would grab a string, give it a twang, while a pair of girl vocalists would give a lengthy “Ai-oo-oo-oo.”

This was totally different from our bands and accompanists, for not a trace of a smile came from any of the entertainers. The dignified, better-class Chinese, I gathered, seated about the other tables, were equally somber.

This seemed to be about all there was to it, excepting that we had been drinking a little too much, and finally the manager asked us to leave. We couldn’t appreciate his decision at this point.

But it turned out just as well, since in time during the subsequent nights we moved to all three worlds, The Old, The New, and The Great. These were tremendous taxi-dance affairs, the girls being of mixed breeds, either English with Chinese, or Indian with English, and so forth, all half-caste or quarter-breeds. The combinations impressed us as becoming, even beautiful—the whiteness of the whites blended into the symmetrical features of that part of the world.

We went by taxicab to their flats. They are quite different from our girls in the same business in the United States. These girls didn’t mention the word “money” either. But we found out, in the beginning, what every American finds out away from home: the United States dollar was readily exchangeable to the native currency wherever we traveled. Damn few of us had any native money left when we pulled out of any country, possibly enough for a souvenir, but those
who did sometimes experienced difficulty in exchanging back.

These young women were very congenial. They would ask you if you cared for a drink. And you would say, “Yes, scotch and soda,” which was the drink in that part of the world. So then she would take a large brass key and unlock a carved teak cabinet and pour you a glass of good scotch and fill it with chilled soda. No ice. She doesn’t join you in a scotch and soda. She doesn’t care to drink, she says, because drinking in a hot climate like Singapore is not good for one. And before the evening is over, you begin to realize the same thing. After each effort of physical exertion throughout the night the young thing goes to the bathroom and compresses hot steaming towels and mops the young man down from head to foot. It is very refreshing.

To this day, and I’m not trying to be naïve, either, I don’t know how to describe the status of these lovely creatures. In some cases I am sure that it is not what one would ordinarily assume. However, in the critique that followed our visit in Singapore we found that our fellow pilots usually left ten Straits dollars, five dollars in our money, upon the girls’ dressers when they departed.

When the
Bosch Fontein
pulled out of Singapore, it was with some regrets, although we were all anxious to get to Rangoon, Burma. Intrigue had gotten into all of us, I believe. It would be just a very short haul from Singapore to Rangoon, then our adventures would commence in earnest.

My comrades had settled down. There were no quarrels for a change aboard ship. And the last thing I remember about Singapore is that a member of the crew threw a piece of meat over the side after inviting us to watch, and a huge shark came from the depths to snatch the meat. Then the shark disappeared into the darkness of the water, as did Singapore, too.

Our destination at last … Rangoon, Burma. It was somewhere in the middle of November of 1941. We were happy to land, for we were airmen, not seamen.

Here at Rangoon the missionaries and the volunteer pilots’ trails parted, though I was to meet several of our shipboard friends later. The Dutch crew sent us ashore amid hugs and fond farewells, for the pilots had really hit it off well with the
Bosch Fonteins
crew. Even her captain was no longer the stern, retiring person he appeared throughout the long voyage, for he was all smiles as he helped his crew members bid us good-by. He vowed that they would be back to pick us up after our year-long contracts had expired, the same as that of any construction worker.

Excitedly we attempted to obtain information concerning the goings-on of the AVG, everybody talking at once, from the handful of representatives who were in Rangoon at the time. We got little from these few. About all the dope we could get was that we were not going to be based in Rangoon. Instead, our training center, or whatever they called it, where we were to depart from by train that afternoon, was somewhere in central Burma, about halfway to Mandalay.

But our spirits were not dampened. Mandalay had a mystic ring to us. And the Burma Road had become a famous backdoor inlet to the interior of China.

What usually was neglected in our school geography books about the Orient was the smells. Rangoon, for instance, one of our first stops, was hot, dirty, and sticky and with many residents limping around with elephantiasis. I’ll swear, one Indian we saw had this disease so badly, his privates were so enlarged, that we suggested to each other he should have a wheelbarrow to lug them in.

Until becoming used to it all I wandered about in a daze,
my lips remaining clamped tightly together for fear that the stench that hung in the air would get into my mouth. But, as with everything else, one gets accustomed to Oriental odors after a while. Even today, after spending those four years in the Far East, bad odors don’t seem to bother me as they did at one time.