A Different Sky (63 page)

The polling booths opened at 8 a.m. and from an early hour there was a reasonable turnout, although much less brisk than expected. Police were on standby, ready for incidents. Chinese Middle School students had promised not to march as intended on Government House with a new protest and the weather was forecast to be no hazard to voters. Howard was busy all day urging people to vote, driving those in need to the polling station at a local school in one of the cars Raj had hired. The ballot boxes were closed at 8 p.m. and when it was done he was exhausted.

A strong smell of the river drifted on the night. Howard was late arriving at Victoria Memorial Hall from the campaign headquarters and found Boy Scouts carrying in the last ballot boxes. Already a crowd had gathered outside the hall in anticipation of the results. As far as Howard could see, most of those waiting appeared to be the usual young trade unionists. Empress Place was filling up, cordons were erected to hold people back. Police vans and riot police were in evidence; an atmosphere of expectation was tight upon them all.

Arc lights blazed on graceful colonial buildings, and Howard thought of the Englishmen who for over a century had ruled the colony, showing no chink in their armour. Now it was possible the radical lawyer Lee Kuan Yew and Lim Chin Siong, a man of communist sympathies, as well as the anti-establishment David Marshall, would enter those portals of power, intent on razing the past. Howard was pushed uncomfortably about in the crush, and over the heads before him saw Raj entering Victoria Memorial Hall, with Yoshiko beside him. Light from the great lamps set up outside reflected lustrously on Raj's pomaded hair. With his usual authoritative manner, he was demanding that people step back to allow him to move forward. From the river came the hoot of a boat's horn.

Inside, the counting of votes had started and the long wait for results
begun. As the hours stretched out the crowd outside continued to grow, and by midnight many thousands overflowed the area around the hall, spilling back to the Cricket Club and the Padang. Never before had the country been stirred in this way and the crowd was restless, impatient for news. Inside the hall the mounting tension was almost unbearable as everyone waited; already a clear, unexpected and shocking swing to the left was emerging.

When at last the results were announced at two in the morning, the Progressive Party had taken only four seats out of twenty-five, and David Marshall's Labour Front had a landslide majority. Flushed with victory, Labour Front supporters ran riot in the hall. The People's Action Party candidates, Lee Kuan Yew and Lim Chin Siong had, as expected, taken their constituencies with unprecedented numbers of votes. As this news was announced to the waiting crowd, cheering students and trade unionists broke through police barriers to lift the successful candidates on to their shoulders, jubilantly carrying them forward, their shouts and cheers echoing into the night.
Merdeka! Merdeka!
Howard heard the cry all around him. The great arc lights picked out Lee Kuan Yew as he was jolted and pitched about on the shoulders of his supporters. Howard feared the man might slip from his precarious perch. Instead, he kept his balance, raising his arms in triumph.

Until the end, Raj had been sure the Progressive Party would win. His face wet with excitement, dark patches of sweat staining his shirt under his armpits, he had walked about confidently during the counting. The Labour Front victory was a shock for which he was unprepared. Crushed and perplexed, he grew petulant then furious, especially at the success of the two People's Action Party candidates.

‘How will they allow such radicals into the Legislative Chamber? That Lim doesn't even speak much English, only Chinese. What's the matter with people?' Raj asked Howard accusingly, his fleshy face creased with disappointment, still baffled by the distressing vote.

‘I invested so much money in this. I have never before made a bad deal,' Raj raged as they stood watching the triumphant, cheering crowd as it was announced that David Marshall would become Chief Minister of Singapore. It was a warm, close night and a bloated moon, spongy
as a piece of bean curd, hung low in the sky. Above them the clock tower of Victoria Memorial Hall rose darkly into the night.

‘The electorate has changed,' Howard said quietly, observing the scene before him, feeling guilty at failing Raj yet secretly jubilant that the Labour Front had won. ‘Anyone who wants to stand in politics here today can't afford to ignore the Chinese masses, or the people's desire for self-government.'

‘The Governor will not like working with such raggle-taggle people'. Raj was unable to contain his anger; his lips bunched together threateningly.

Soon David Marshall, the ebullient new Chief Minister, responding to the ecstatic crowd, appeared on an upper balcony, waving excitedly to the throng. A man of great gestures and blazing eyes, used to promoting courtroom drama, his voice boomed out through the public address system, filled with crusading zeal. Raising his arms in victory before the crowd, he threw his head back and roared into the night.

‘It is the people's victory. Today victory is yours.'

Howard walked over from Belvedere to Bougainvillaea House each evening to be with Mei Lan after he returned from work; it was now a regular routine. Often, he ate dinner with her squashed around the large table with more than a dozen women and several children. He was not sure what the status of his relationship with Mei Lan was, and feared to ask, but he seemed to have a definite if undefined role to play. A habit had built up and he knew this was all she wanted and he must be content. Although he kept a formal distance, she did allow the occasional brief touch to pass between them but he felt this was in kindness to him. Now, sitting beside her on a bench outside the back door of Bougainvillaea House, facing the canal that had once been such a source of contention, he resolved to tell her about the sale of Belvedere. Light from the house lit the patch of grass and the bougainvillaea bushes about them. A smell of brackish water came to them from the dark trench of the canal, and the ragged fringe of trees behind which the old gazebo of Lim Villa still lay, could just be seen.

‘Agents have already been to see it and some potential buyers as well but Belvedere is not easy to sell. No one wants such a run-down place. The agents say we must look for someone who wants the land
to build upon after pulling down the old house.' Even as he spoke, he saw shock gather in her face as she tried to digest the news.

Now that the election was over Howard had returned to a calm routine at the Social Welfare Department; he was even asked to lecture on economics to students at the University of Malaya. At Social Welfare he was well liked, yet restlessness filled him. His brush with the excitement of politics had unsettled him, had left him wanting to be part of the exhilarating rush for freedom. When unexpectedly, after only a month in office, David Marshall offered him this chance Howard did not hesitate to take it. He was invited to lunch at a small restaurant and had hardly sat down when the Chief Minister fixed his large sad eyes upon him.

‘I need a young man like you in the Chief Minister's office,' he said, taking out a box of tobacco and pressing some into the bowl of his pipe.

‘You hardly know me.' Howard could not hide his shock.

‘I have done my homework and besides, I know the worth of a man immediately I look at him.' Marshall lit up his pipe, releasing the heady perfume of tobacco. He had not forgotten Howard, and had noted his quiet confidence and insight as exceptional; just the qualities he needed to have in the men around him now.

‘I intend to ask for immediate independence for the country. No more stalling or delays from all those old government farts – we'll push the thing through. Until now I've had undefined functions as Chief Minister, but not any more. After the election it was assumed by the Governor that I would regard the title of Chief Minister as an honorific one. They did not even have an office for Chief Minister at Government House, and didn't intend to give me one either. When I threatened to set up office under “the old apple tree” where I had held my lunchtime public talks, they cleared a space under the stairs, quite literally. A small room, no more than a broom cupboard with a table and a telephone; the Governor tried to humiliate me. So, when I entered the August Presence I wore a bush shirt; I thought that would be insult enough.' Marshall was gleeful, puffing fiercely at his pipe. Then his face became serious as he leaned back in his chair, staring at Howard over the table.

‘At some point there will be another election. Times are changing, and a few months ago who would have thought we'd get this far?
The future will be nothing like our past. The country will need young men like you. Working with me will give you political insight and experience. You should think of standing as a Labour Front candidate in a future election. Until then, if you stay by my side, I'll teach you the tricks of the trade.' Marshall flashed an impish grin.

Over the following days and weeks Howard thought about what Marshall had said. He remembered the men he had met at the Malayan Democratic Union, men who could make a difference, and knew a seed was planted in him then that had only now begun to germinate. He was grateful to Marshall for pointing the way ahead. The next day he gave in his notice at the Social Welfare Department, and Marshall whisked him away within the week.

From then on Howard was at Marshall's beck and call, in and out of the small office in Government House, and the larger premises in town. When he entered the colonial depths of Government House he felt both awed by his own audaciousness and anger at the inflexible pomposity of the place, impatient for the changes Marshall promised would come. He grew used to the sight of the colonial immortals: the Governor, the Chief Secretary and all the others at Government House that Marshall required him to meet. Marshall was tireless and full of verve but, from the day he was elected Chief Minister, trouble loomed and dangerous strikes appeared imminent.

Across the canal, Belvedere's garden was entered through a gate in the fence. From here the land sloped upwards past the tennis court and the mangosteen orchard with its ancient, half-dead trees. The land was overgrown and Mei Lan walked carefully, always looking for snakes in the long grass. She had thought hard about what she was doing, and had decided it was the only way. The French doors were open to the dining room, and she could see Rose at rest on the old sofa; she had lost weight and did not look well. Mei Lan was full of apprehension as she approached Belvedere, realising how much she now depended on Rose's agreement to her plan.

Rose looked up as she came through the door, and immediately brightened. She had grown fond of Mei Lan and now secretly hoped she would one day be her daughter-in-law, even though Howard made her understand that this might never be. From Belvedere's great kitchen came the smell of frying onions and the preparation of
lunch. Each day now meals were wheeled on a large metal trolley down the bumpy slope of Belvedere's garden and across the bridge to Bougainvillaea House. Already, Rose felt guilty that her need to sell Belvedere would complicate life for Mei Lan and her expanding shelter.

‘I'm going to have to sell. I have no other means of stopping the place from falling down around us,' Rose tried to explain, smoothing down the antimacassar on the arm of the sofa, not wanting to meet Mei Lan's eyes.

Mei Lan looked out of the window at the decaying mangosteen trees and wondered why Rose had not cleared them away. A musty smell of grime and old cooking impregnated the crumbling house. From above came the cooing of a pigeon, and a single wisp of straw floated down from a nest perched on a beam under the ceiling.

‘Where will you go?' Mei Lan asked, and listened as Rose explained about the Queen Street house inherited from Aunty May and how it would be so much more comfortable.

‘Why don't you stay on here, just as you are, and let me buy Belvedere from you? You know how badly I need the rooms,' Mei Lan burst out, unable to contain herself any longer. She saw Rose's eyes widen in shock and broke off in sudden apology, sure she had blundered.

At the back of her mind, although she did not want to admit it, Mei Lan knew she needed to keep Howard across the canal. The news of Belvedere's imminent sale had forced her to acknowledge that the thought of him moving away was untenable. It was difficult to imagine him not sitting down at dinner with her each night, squashed around the crowded dining table of Bougainvillaea House, along with abandoned mothers jiggling crying babies on their knees. This arrangement was not what Howard wanted, she knew, but each time she considered anything more, something closed within her.

‘You're used to running Belvedere as a boarding house and already we're using your kitchen, your linen, your pots and pans. You have even accommodated some of the women and Cynthia runs the clinic; nothing needs to change. It will be like before when you had lodgers, but you will not have to spend a single cent.' Excitement rushed through her and for the first time Mei Lan felt she was looking squarely at the future, and not turning away from all it might hold. Recently, at last, she'd had the feeling she was beginning to heal.

The day before, for the first time, she had forced herself to walk past the YMCA. Against all probability the building still stood, renovated and restored to its old function as a student hostel. After the war the specially built prison cells were bricked up, the termite-infested woodwork ripped out and burned, but the place had not been pulled down as expected. There was talk of demolishing the building and leaving the open ground as a memorial to the suffering of so many. For a while the place lay as a dilapidated ruin in an overgrown wilderness of trees, but within a year it had been spruced up and opened its doors as a hostel again. For ten years now the building had lived a regenerated life: laughter was heard in its corridors, mah-jong was played in its games room, the original billiard table and record player had been located and re installed. It seemed almost obscene. Yet, the tortured building had somehow managed to shrug the past away.