Phew, they're still there!

 

 

I've just heard on the radio, and then followed it up by reading, about a life jacket worn by a passenger on RMS Titanic as she escaped the sinking steamship on a lifeboat sold at auction on Saturday for $906,000. (Don't even ask me if that's in Australian or American dollars; it's totally crazy in whichever currency.)

 

 

I immediately rushed out to the jetty house to check the storage box. Phew, they're still there! Four old life jackets which could be worth a million dollars in years to come. I had better include them in my will.

 

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Saint Jack

 

What a brilliant movie! Now read the book at www.archive.org

 

Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners." Which is how Paul Theroux ranted about Singapore in his 1973 book "The Great Railway Bazaar", by which time it had been his home for three years, from 1968 to 1971, teaching English at the National University of Singapore.

It was also the setting for his first Asian novel, "Saint Jack", published later that same year. It was good he was elsewhere when it appeared, because Singapore's government didn't like the novel or its author any more than he liked the government, and banned the book.

 

 

It sold moderately elsewhere, until Peter Bogdanovich turned it into one of his best movies, shot on a low budget and on location. A phony script for a film called "Jack of Hearts" was submitted to obtain the official approval and this is what the Singaporeans on the cast and crew were told they were shooting as the cameras recorded the true grit of the waterfront, street markets, and notorious Bugis Street. The film, of course, was banned in Singapore when it was released in 1979.

"Saint Jack" tells the story of an affable American pimp who helped American GI's find companionship while on R&R in Singapore during the Vietnam War. Theroux has never said he knew any such individual, but his years of residence in Singapore give the novel a ring of truth.

Watching it decades after I had visited Singapore repeatedly while stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma, it has more than a ring of truth about it: it is exactly how I remember Singapore from my days there in 1975 and again when my Saudi boss sent me back several times in the early 80s to supervise his transshipments through Sembawang.

 

 

Since then the world has changed, and so has Singapore, but a kindly soul, Toh Hun Ping of Singapore Film Locations Archive (whose website has disappeared since I first wrote about it), went to the extraordinary trouble of splicing together yesteryear's street scenes in "Saint Jack" with today's equivalents. Thanks for the memories, Hun Ping!

 

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P.S. I've just spent the last twenty minutes taking the second 's' out of 'transshipment' and then putting it back in again. I now let you decide!

 

Sunlit on the Clyde

 

Sunlit on the Clyde
To locate "Riverbend" in the photo, click here

 

We’d been driving through Nelligen for years — just passing through on the way to somewhere else. Then one afternoon we stopped. The river was doing that thing it does in the late light, where everything goes gold and still, and we sat there long enough to think: what if this was the destination? That’s how Sunlit on the Clyde began. Not as a business plan, but as a feeling."

Which is how the new owners of Nelligen's Sunlit Waters Motel describe "The story behind Sunlit on the Clyde", although it began more like this:

 

 

Long before the new owners allowed the place to fall into disrepute thanks to some of its 'shadier' social clientele, its previous owner, Mavis Dunbar, had already allowed it to fall into disrepair. She simply had grown old and run out of energy and patience with the never-ending demands of holiday-makers dropping in at all hours. You remember McDonald's catchcry, "You want fries with that?" Well, it is rumoured that Mavis used to ask her guests on arrival, "You want toilet paper, too?" In short, Sunlit Waters Leisure Retreat, as it was known, had seen better days long before Mavis Dunbar passed away in August 2020 - click here.

 

Sunlit Waters Leisure Retreat, as it was then
Some of the old photos can be seen here

 

With just a bit of a clean-up and a fresh coat of paint on the outside and a very substantial refurbishment of the cabins, the old place, much to the relief of all in the neighbourhood, has slowly arisen from the ashes.

By driving an extra two-hundred metres past that "Holiday Here" bubble, you really could have struck it lucky and found "Riverbend Cottage", but, like good ol' Mavis, we, too, have grown old and run out of energy and patience to cater to the demands of holiday-makers, and "Riverbend Cottage" is no more, but we've kept the old website for old times' sake.

For the past thirty-three years, "Riverbend" has been our "feeling that the South Coast doesn’t have to mean crowds, car parks, or a motel room that could be anywhere. It can mean the sound of the Clyde in the morning, a proper breakfast on your own deck, and the satisfaction of having found somewhere that most people drive straight past."

 

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Call me Arthur Hoggett!

 

 

Our regular visits to the pool not only refresh our bodies but also our minds as we always find plenty to talk about with our fellow-"aquanauts", and a recent visit was no exception.

After exchanging a few words with a Yorkshireman whom I had not met before, he said that I reminded him of someone in the movie "Babe".

All I could remember from that movie was the pig, so I asked, "What, I remind you of Babe the Pig?" "I was thinking of its owner", he replied.

 

Farmer Arthur Hoggett in the movie "Babe"

 

When we got home, I immediately looked up "Babe" on YouTube, and there was farmer Arthur Hoggett with his uncanny likeness of my father.

 

My father's photograph sometime in his early fifties

 

I read somewhere that as you age there comes a moment when you look into the mirror and suddenly see your father. Call me Arthur Hoggett!

 

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Reaching your peak too soon often means you have nowhere left to go

 

At my house at Komin Kochin Avenue # 7 in Rangoon in 1975

 

In any memoir it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject's nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this!"

I could have claimed these to be my own words, but I've placed them in inverted commas to show that I took them from the first paragraph in Paul Theroux's book "Saint Jack". It is about an expatriate living in Singapore who begins to fear dying, alone and vulnerable, in an alien tropic, which may well be why I left what has been the best job I've ever had when I was stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma.

 

 

There I was, twenty-nine years old, with an accounting degree on which the ink had hardly dried, occupying the position of chef-comptable with the French oil company TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles.

 

Flying out to an offshore oil rig

 

I occupied a sumptuous office which I shared with three Burmese accountants and two beautiful secretaries, was chaffeur-driven to and from work in a brandnew PEUGEOT 504, and lived in a gracious British Empire-style mansion in the leafy parts of Rangoon where I was being waited on hand and foot by four domestic staff. To top it all, I earned a salary several times higher than what I could have earned at home.

 

My three Burmese accountants

 

Did I stay when the French general manager almost begged me, first in French and then in broken English, to renew my twelve-month contract? I didn't, and to this day I still don't know why I didn't! I loved my job, I loved Burma and its people, but boredom, hubris, call it what you want, maybe even the money piling up in my bank account back home, made me chuck it all in — and I have lived to regret it over and over again.

 

My secretaries

 

What I should have known was that after having reached such a peak, everything else thereafter would taste like ashes in my mouth. For several years I kept thrashing about, looking for another job like it, and I wasted a whole six years before I finally hit my stride again in 1982 when I became the group financial controller for a large commodity trader in Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia is not beautiful Burma.

Perhaps the first sentence in my memoir yet to be written should read, "Reaching your peak too soon often means you have nowhere left to go."

 

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