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Dreaming of Home and Haileybury

William Somerset Maugham’s short stories are like the furniture in a grand boarding-house or the home of an elderly aunt. When I read ‘A Man with a Conscience’ or ‘A Winter Cruise’, I am reminded of Bechstein pianos or solid mahogany writing-desks with brass handles. They’re strangely comforting and consoling, and I’m very fond of them.

Somerset Maugham was a reader as well as a writer, and his characters read too. Those homesick planters and administrators marooned in festering residences, dressing for dinner, taking native concubines and drinking rather too many stengahs and gin pahits, pounce avidly on the English weeklies and the Straits Times, no matter how old. One Malay States veteran, Warburton in ‘The Outstation’, has The Times delivered from London and reads a copy a day at breakfast, in correct chronological order, living a vicarious Home Counties life months after the events recorded.

Maugham was a traveller too, not a true sailor like Conrad who trundled around much the same territory in south-east Asia, but a man who used P & O and sundry rust-bucket tramps and mongrel vessels because that was, in his day, the most effective way of getting from A to B or from Malacca to the islands of the Andaman Sea. He took his books on board. Indeed in the very first tale in his fourth, mainly oriental volume of short stories his narrator takes a book bag wherever he goes: ‘It weighs a ton and strong porters reel under its weight.’

One evening after bridge at the club the narrator and his host return to the residence and the Acting Resident falls on the books, which are divided into numerous different categories but which include, crucially, ‘books to read at sea when you were meandering through narrow waters on a tramp steamer, and books for bad weather when your whole cabin creaked and you had to wedge yourself in your bunk in order not to fall out’.

In another bitter-sweet story, ‘Red’, an obe

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William Somerset Maugham’s short stories are like the furniture in a grand boarding-house or the home of an elderly aunt. When I read ‘A Man with a Conscience’ or ‘A Winter Cruise’, I am reminded of Bechstein pianos or solid mahogany writing-desks with brass handles. They’re strangely comforting and consoling, and I’m very fond of them.

Somerset Maugham was a reader as well as a writer, and his characters read too. Those homesick planters and administrators marooned in festering residences, dressing for dinner, taking native concubines and drinking rather too many stengahs and gin pahits, pounce avidly on the English weeklies and the Straits Times, no matter how old. One Malay States veteran, Warburton in ‘The Outstation’, has The Times delivered from London and reads a copy a day at breakfast, in correct chronological order, living a vicarious Home Counties life months after the events recorded. Maugham was a traveller too, not a true sailor like Conrad who trundled around much the same territory in south-east Asia, but a man who used P & O and sundry rust-bucket tramps and mongrel vessels because that was, in his day, the most effective way of getting from A to B or from Malacca to the islands of the Andaman Sea. He took his books on board. Indeed in the very first tale in his fourth, mainly oriental volume of short stories his narrator takes a book bag wherever he goes: ‘It weighs a ton and strong porters reel under its weight.’ One evening after bridge at the club the narrator and his host return to the residence and the Acting Resident falls on the books, which are divided into numerous different categories but which include, crucially, ‘books to read at sea when you were meandering through narrow waters on a tramp steamer, and books for bad weather when your whole cabin creaked and you had to wedge yourself in your bunk in order not to fall out’. In another bitter-sweet story, ‘Red’, an obese old sea captain revisits the island spot where he found happiness as a gilded youth. The man who has taken his place and married the abandoned sweetheart is an ascetic Swedish bookworm called Neilson. The sailor is both intrigued and threatened by the books.
‘You’ve got one big heap of books here,’ he said, when Neilson returned. ‘They do no harm,’ answered Neilson with a smile. ‘Have you read them all?’ asked the skipper. ‘Most of them.’ ‘I’m a bit of a reader myself. I have the Saturday Evening Post sent me regler.’
I was reminded of Maugham’s bookishness when travelling recently on a four-masted barquentine from Singapore to Phuket. The journey occupied a lazy week and I took, for reading, that fourth, 576-page volume of haunting tales that recall a life gone for ever, yet whose echoes linger on in the brave new worlds of Independence and International Tourism. In Malacca, for instance, where we docked for a brief run ashore, an old building has had a shiny makeover. Its towers are now capped with golden mosque-like domes and its contents dedicated to the memory of the nationalist natives, notably Tunku Abdul Rahman, who made Malaysia what she is today. Only tiny sections of this museum remind you of imperial times and Maugham-style rubber planters and administrators – here a photograph of a grim, leathery General Templer quelling the 1950s Communist insurgency; there a newspaper headline announcing ‘Three Europeans killed. Gurkhas rushed to scene.’ Not much more. I remembered being here, years after Maugham, when this building was still – just – a club. The windows were broken and the room which now contains valedictory pictures of dignitaries in robes and black hats housed a full-size Burroughs & Watts billiard table. I wonder where it has gone and what has happened to the club’s handful of rubber-planting members who still, in those days, came in for a drink, a game of something and a read of old papers, magazines or even books. Our skipper on the barquentine was a German, Jurgen, who lives on the Baltic coast up near the Danish border and is seriously bookish. He once helped the author Gavin Young with his nostalgic and evocative In Search of Conrad. His twin brother, Klaus, is also a sea-captain working with the same little fleet of Luxembourg-registered clippers. Klaus married a Scottish girl and lives at Inverary where he attends the kirk and plays the pipes. Jurgen is more, well, German. Maugham would have had a field day with the twins and would surely have written at least one short story about them. One evening our captain even married two of our little party, a couple from Exmoor who had been meaning to regularize their situation for a quarter of a century but had only decided to do the deed over a drink on the edge of a Chinese shanty-town overlooking a murky river in Malacca. I acted as best man and composed a paragraph of pastiche in Maugham’s style to celebrate the event. I’m not sure what Maugham would have got out of the rest of the voyage, for although our vessel was a classically beautiful sailing ship she existed entirely for pleasure, as indeed do her elegant sisters. In Maugham’s day ships worked. He, of course, would have taken weeks on a claustrophobic P & O steamer just getting out from England. I flew Gulf Air which was a lot quicker but much less romantic. On Maugham’s ship a passenger would have died of hiccups off Aden after being cursed by his native mistress, the ship’s doctor would have dallied with the bored wife of a  complaisant bridge-player, and the first-class passengers would have agonized over the propriety of inviting their second-class counterparts to join them for parties. We, instead, drank elaborate cocktails at the Tropical Bar, went snorkelling off rubber Zodiacs, took part in quizzes and complained about the quality of BBC satellite TV in our cabins. Despite this modernity there were echoes of the past as the sails flapped lazily in the languid tropical breeze and Celesta, the ship’s parrot, screeched at crew and passengers. In Singapore harbour we were nudged away by tugs called Sea Panther and Noble Knight. Further north a rusty Malay boat performing the same service bore a sign asking us not to smoke or spit. Beneath those words was the legend ‘Penumpang, Dilarang, Berada, Di Luar, Semasa, Bot, Bergerak’ which ought to have inspired a story, though I wasn’t sure whether an author should turn the words into members of the local football team or a series of ferry-stops on the river. I sometimes wondered, looking up from my book on deck, whether anyone was as ‘lonely as the ship that throbbed her hasting way through an unpeopled sea’ and whether, when there was no breeze, you could still, like Maugham, describe the sea as ‘smooth and shining like the dye in a dyer’s vat’. It was years since I’d first read Maugham’s stories, and part of my pleasure in reading them again lay in the reassurance of bumping into a long-lost friend and discovering that I still liked him. I found that I enjoyed his quizzical outsider’s point of view as much as I had when I first fell under its spell in my teens. I still liked the carefully crafted way in which the stories develop. Even if you can see the twist in the tale well before it arrives, it is fun to have a deft denouement in an age when ‘plot’ has almost become a dirty word. I was oddly comforted by his belief that tragedy is nearly always triggered by booze, dope or sex. Money sometimes plays a part but usually only as the result of an addiction to cards or the gaming tables. Material greed of the sort now universally sanctified is almost completely alien. So, mercifully, is the idea of ‘celebrity’. Above all, perhaps, I was reminded that there was often a self-denying sense of fair play about the Empire. I was educated in the same tradition as Maugham’s people, even though one of that education’s main purposes – the maintenance of the British Empire – had almost passed away. There is nothing in Maugham’s writing which justifies the imperial idea but he recognizes the truth that many colonial officers ruling vast tracts of foreign lands were fundamentally good people. They may have been flawed, they were almost certainly limited, but they were nearly always motivated by ideas of Christian decency and common sense which, though now deeply unfashionable, I still find nostalgically attractive. Those sad colonial civil servants thinking wistfully of home and Haileybury are long vanished but they are part of my past too. I don’t want to be ruled by them or even to belong to the same club, but I like remembering them. There is still inspiration in the sea, in sailing and in the East. Our captain was, I reflected, more of a Conrad man, because he was a sailor rather than a traveller. I remembered what Munro, the museum curator with the Russian wife in ‘Neil MacAdam’, said about Conrad’s inaccuracy. Munro, who may or may not have been voicing Maugham’s own thoughts, believed that Conrad ‘was not an acute observer even of what he saw’. But then, being, like so many of Maugham’s exiled civil servants, a fair and decent man, he adds: ‘But does it matter? I don’t think it’s a mean achievement to have created a country, a dark, sinister, romantic, and heroic country of the soul.’ This was a good five-pipe question and I fell to contemplating it over my volume of brilliant and moody stories. I knew that a biography of Maugham was being written because I had sat next to the author at dinner in London a week or so before. I wondered if the book would revive interest in him or if his writing was dated and dying. Then I began wondering what, if anything, that shrewd and talented observer would have made of the wedding on deck between a man and a woman from the wild moors of the West Country, celebrated by a German captain in tropical whites somewhere in the Malacca Strait as the sails rustled, the parrot screeched and the sun set. And I was ridiculously pleased to have brought these stories to read on the voyage. The author’s observation in the first of them, ‘The Book-Bag’, seemed particularly appropriate:
Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe.
And so I flew, very happily, as we sailed the author’s oceans and gazed on what was once his land.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Tim Heald 2006


About the contributor

Tim Heald has enjoyed short stories since first being introduced to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories as a child. He has written a number himself, most of them published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. They tend to involve his serial detective, Simon Bognor, but remain uncollected though sometimes anthologized.

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