Dragon apparent, p.5
Dragon Apparent, page 5
CHAPTER 3
Sunday Diversions
BACK IN SAIGON I had a day to spare before the real journey began. It was Sunday, and in the morning I walked slowly to the Jardins Botaniques. Clusters of Vietnamese beauties on bicycles were bound in the same direction, floating, it seemed, rather than pedalling, as the trains of their silk gowns trailed in the air behind them. The robes worn by Vietnamese ladies recall those of ancient China, before the sumptuary laws imposed by the Manchus. White silk is the material preferred, and as Vietnamese girls are always utterly immaculate and addicted to swanlike movements, the whole effect is one of unearthly elegance. The park was full of these ethereal creatures, gliding in decorous groups through the shady paths, sometimes accompanied by gallants, who, in their cotton shirts, shorts and trilby hats, provided a sadly anticlimactic spectacle. The girls thus arrayed belonged to the classes which included shop assistants and all ranks above. Domestic servants, or boyesses, as they are pleasantly known by the French, were dressed just as charmingly, but more simply, in pyjamas only. It is curious that members of the lower social strata are permitted to protect themselves from sunstroke by conical straw hats, whereas the bourgeoisie, although employing every hairstyle, from an uncontrollable torrent of tresses reaching to the waist to a permanent wave, do not allow themselves a head-covering. In passing it should be observed that the kind of coolie-straw that a girl wears for her best is a beautifully made piece of headgear, of lacquered, semi-diaphanous material, lightly stitched over a framework of circular ribs. It is held in position for Sunday strolling with a strap of silk with a bow at each end and a third bow under the chin. The result is extremely coquettish and I felt sure that the shop girl or typist must regret being prevented, by her social position, from wearing such a becoming adornment.
Photography is a popular excuse for these decorous fêtes-champêtres of Saigon. There were several accepted backgrounds for portraiture which were in constant use. The archaeological museum is housed in a pagoda-like building and a group of legendary maidens loitered constantly in the vicinity, awaiting their turns to be photographed, caressing the snout of one of the decorative dragons. Another favoured site was the lake verge. The water had dried away leaving a few inches of liquid coated with a patina of scum, through which unsupported lotus flowers thrust a yard into the air. There was a punt, a standard photographic property, which could be set adrift only with great difficulty, in which the lady to be photographed balanced herself, looking mysterious and rather forlorn, while the photographer camouflaged the painter with lotus leaves before taking his shot. The moment the exposure had been made, the punt was hauled in, another lady floated into photogenic position while her predecessor drifted away at the side of her escort.
The natural history of the Jardins Botaniques is charming rather than exciting. One does not look for sinister manifestations of nature-in-the-tropics in a public park, but I was surprised at the absence of all troublesome insects, such as wasps or flies. A few undistinguished butterflies fluttered about, looking like those to be seen on any English heath. There were few flowers, but sprays of purple blossoms, with thick velvet-looking petals, sprouted from the trunk and thicker branches of one of the trees. Since it was a local tree, there was no way of discovering its name. The only trees labelled were exotic specimens from Dakar and Madagascar, so presumably one would have to go to these places to study the vegetation of Indo-China. Cranes were building their nests in the topmost branches and a beautiful and very Chinese sight they made, with the sun shining through the lavender-grey plumage of their wings against the pale green foliage. Somewhere, too, just above my head, wherever I went, but always invisible, a bird produced tirelessly a single, mournful note. It was as if a cuckoo had flown into a great, hollow jar and there repeated incessantly the first note of its call. This was a sound which later I was to realise is hardly ever absent from the background of Indo-China.
The deportment of the Vietnamese in such places is beyond reproach. There is a gently repressive, Sunday-school atmosphere. Docilely, the visitors admired the caged deer; threw dice for ice-cream – folding the paper containers and stowing them in their pockets; viewed in silent satisfaction their choice of the eight original films of ‘Charlot’, shown by a 9.5mm., hand-cranked cinema contraption, rigged up on a bicycle; patronised the fortune-tellers, who counted their pulses and examined their eyeballs with magnifying glasses before disclosing the edicts of the fates; bought tributes of artificial flowers from a kiosk bearing on its pale blue awning, for decorative purposes only, the words, ‘Employez le pâté et savon dentifrice de …’ the manufacturer’s name having been removed.
It was all very delightful and civilised.
* * *
Down by the river, where I went in the afternoon, the feeling was very different. Half the Vietnamese population of Saigon lives on the water and whenever I happened to be in Saigon, and had an hour or two to spare, I used to go there to enjoy the spectacle of the vivid, turbulent life of the common people. In my many walks along the river bank, I never, except within fifty yards of the Cercle Nautique, saw another European.
The original reason for taking to the water must have been that it was just as cheap to build a small sampan as a hut, the risk of fire was lessened, and there was no question of ground rent. Moreover, if one liked an occasional change of scene, nothing was easier than to move. The temperature on the river is quite a number of degrees cooler than in the town and one can take a dip whenever one feels like it. The laundry problem is facilitated for the womenfolk, and by keeping a few lines in the water one can occasionally catch a fish. All in all, there seems to be no real excuse for living anywhere else. Owing to the immense population now living in sampans on the Chinese Creek and its tributaries, numerous floating services have come into being to cater for them. There are sampan-restaurants, with cauldrons of noodle soup; water sellers who carry drinking water in the white-enamelled bottoms of their boats; shops of all kinds, and, of course, river-borne magicians.
To reach the quayside meant a walk of not more than five minutes up the main street, the Rue Catenat. It was five o’clock, and by this hour possible to risk the sun and walk out in the open, along the water’s edge, where the dockers were loading and unloading cargoes. A quarter of a mile away, across the river, was no-man’s-land. One could go there during the daytime, but at night the Viet-Minh sometimes appeared and fired mortar-shells into the centre of the town. Previously, the further bank had been clustered with huts, but the French had cleared them away, thus aggravating the refugee problem. At about this time the dockers had their evening meal and the owners of the eating booths had accordingly set a long line of tables. On each table stood three bottles, one of Tiger beer flanked on each side by brilliantly coloured mineral waters. Awaiting the customers, in bowls of attractive designs, were semi-hatched eggs with small apertures cut in their sides to allow of choice in the degree of incubation.
I walked on to the waterfront café at the Point des Blageurs and sat down to enjoy the scene in comfort. The animation with which I was surrounded was, in its way, different from and more intense than anything I had experienced before. One has been accustomed to crowds, to the spectacle of vast gatherings of people in the streets, in places of entertainment, in railway stations or restaurants. But such crowds have all been, more or less, engaged in a similar kind of activity. Here it was the diversity of occupation that was so remarkable. There must have been many hundreds of people in sight, all busily living their own lives and most of them independently of the actions of others in their immediate neighbourhood.
There were several junks moored just offshore. They had gardens on their decks, with domestic pets, a few cocks and hens, a canary in the cage, and flowers growing in packing cases. Somebody was constantly pottering round these deck-gardens, watering the flowers or looking to see if the hen had laid an egg. Through openings in the junks’ sides one could observe incidents from the domestic routine. Occasionally a naked child came flying through in an attempt to land on top of another child, splashing about in the water beneath. There were people sprawled about under the canopies of fifty sampans, playing cards, dicing, chatting, sleeping. People came ashore and exercised pigs on leads along the waterfront. A score of anglers drooped motionless over their lines, the most singular of these being one who tried his luck through a manhole cover in the street. Professional fishermen worked from sampans, lowering into the water large triangular nets at the end of levers. One would have expected this process occasionally to produce a spectacular fish; but not so. I never saw anything longer than three inches come out of the water. The prawn fishers seemed to have better luck. They worked up to their knees in black slime, groping about with their wicker baskets in the mud. It was filthy work, but they at least caught prawns. Women, if they were not cooking, were washing themselves, leaving no part of their persons unvisited, but completing the process in such a way that not an unwonted inch of their form was displayed. For no particular reason that one could see, people fidgeted continually with junks and sampans, shifting them here and there, and then replacing them in exactly the same position as before. In doing so they narrowly avoided collisions with lightermen who were ferrying passengers to and from the ships in the port. Hawkers passed incessantly, drawing attention to their wares with melodious cries or the beating of appropriate gongs. They were ignored by innumerable loafers who hung about, giving advice on a dozen gambling games that were in progress. In the background musical-comedy river-boats thrashed slowly past. They had triple decks and tall narrow funnels, their balustrades were as ornate as the balconies of New Orleans, and they were smothered in red Chinese characters.
CHAPTER 4
A Convoy to Dalat
THE DALAT CONVOY left at five o’clock. Suspecting – as indeed proved to be the case – that the hotel boy would not call me, I lay awake most of the night, perspiring gently, listening to the occasional explosion of distant mortar bombs and to the rumble of army trucks patrolling the streets. I was travelling in a shirt and shorts, and my bag was packed with the bare essentials for a journey of unknown length: a pair of long trousers and a jacket for formal occasions (if any), a mosquito net, anti-malarial tablets, insect-repellent cream and a camera. A French acquaintance had suggested, in all seriousness, that I should carry a pistol; not so much for self-defence as to be able to Save The Last Bullet for Myself, should I fall into the hands of the Viet-Minh. This suggestion I had rejected. I was carrying a travelling permit obtained for me by the Office of Information, importantly styled ‘Ordre de Mission’, in which I was described as ‘Lewis Norman, Écrivain Anglais, habilité par M. Jonathan Cape, Thirty Bedford Square’. This paper had to be frequently renewed, the description suffering in consequence both compression and distortion. In the end I became ‘Louis Norman Thirsty Bedford’, and it was under this agreeable title that I finished my journeyings.
At half-past four, feeling not particularly refreshed, I got up, dressed quickly and went down into the square to find a cyclo. As usual, there were three or four, drowsing over their handlebars, outside the hotel. I sat down in the chair, arranging my bag awkwardly under my legs and we pushed off. As cyclos are not supposed to understand French one does not give them verbal directions. They just pedal straight ahead and one flaps with either hand when the time comes to turn.
We found the civilian part of the convoy in the process of assembly behind the redbrick cathedral. The spectral figures of my fellow-passengers lurked by the bus, leaving it until the last possible moment before getting in. I was the only European present and no one took the slightest notice of me. In these times the whites preferred to travel by air.
The bus was equipped internally to carry about twice the number of passengers one would have supposed from its external dimensions. This had been achieved, quite simply, by fitting seats that would have accommodated a ten-year-old child in comfort and by arranging it so that one’s legs were clenched firmly by the seat in front. I thanked heaven, in the circumstances, that I was travelling with the silent and introverted Vietnamese and not, for instance, a busful of excited Arabs. The travellers were dressed in their workaday clothes of black calico, except for the driver, who wore black satin pyjamas embroidered with the Chinese characters for good luck, and a most expensive-looking, golden-brown, velour hat. He was about five feet in height and weighed, perhaps, eight stone; physically somewhat ill-endowed, it seemed, to control this overloaded juggernaut. Very sensibly, I thought, watching him hauling on his mighty wheel, a notice pinned to his back asked passengers, in two languages, not to distract his attention by talking to him.
Sitting next to me was a well-preserved lady in middle age. Her hair was arranged in a complicated chignon, set off with jewelled pins in the form of small daisy-like flowers. Having neglected her fine set of teeth, the white bone was showing slightly through their coating of black enamel. She was heavily perfumed with jasmine and as most of the female passengers showed a predilection for such pungent attars, the atmosphere of the bus was soon heavy with a funereal sweetness. My travelling companion carried a small box, like a powder compact, from which, shortly after we moved off, she selected betel nut and began to chew. At quite long intervals she leaned over me and shot a thin stream of juice through the window. When later we stopped I noticed that the wind-carried splash of orange betel against the blue side of the bus was, in its way, not undecorative.
Before and behind us the convoy stretched as far as the eye could see. It seemed to be composed entirely of the lorries of Chinese merchants. They looked like motorised covered wagons with their tops of plaited bamboo. Their sides were painted with the usual Chinese characters for good fortune, peace, longevity and riches. It was a bad thing in an attack, they said, to be sandwiched between Chinese lorries, which were said to panic in the most unphilosophical manner at the first shot fired. At each end of the convoy there were armoured cars, and on the rare occasions when the road was wide enough, they came fussing along the line of the convoy, like hens marshalling nervous chicks. The trouble was that the road rarely permitted the passage of two vehicles abreast and, naturally enough, it was in the narrow sectors, where the convoy might be spread out over five miles of road, with the armoured cars wedged in immutable position, that the ambushes took place.
For the first thirty or forty miles out of Saigon we were still in the flat, rice-growing country. We passed many solitary villas by the roadside – the ‘big-houses’ of Cochin-China, with dragons of smoky-blue china undulating like sea-serpents across their roofs and a menagerie of ceramic lions and elephants in their gardens. Vietnamese animal figures are never intimidating in their aspect. Their expressions are always genial, even flippant, and one suspects that the intention is humorous as well as ornamental. The rooftops seemed to be the favourite place to assemble china figures of all kinds; perhaps because they would be silhouetted in this way to the best possible effect. The best examples included jovial, bearded philosophers in the act of beating tambourines, with one leg skittishly raised, or else ogling ladies who enticed them coquettishly. Souvenirs of family visits to the seaside perhaps. Who knows? At all events most of the houses were deserted, or had been requisitioned by the military; but where the family remained there was invariably a platform on a pole placed somewhere near the front door with offerings to the spirits: a bowl with rice, a pot of tea, joss-sticks, even a packet of cigarettes.
This was the Borri country, where the first Jesuit missionaries had set out upon their labours, enchanted with the civility of their reception, although perturbed by the prevalence of devils. ‘They walk about the Cities so familiarly in human Shapes, that they are not at all fear’d but admitted into Company.’
The villages were stockaded, with strong points at the angles of the fortifications. Inside there were towers and miradors as they are called locally; structures like oil derricks supporting a machine-gun post. Sometimes truncated towers had been built into the roofs of the larger houses. It was said that one could enter these villages with safety only in daytime, and some of them, not even then, unless in convoy. The surface of the road here had been ruined by the habit of Viet-Minh sympathisers of digging trenches across it. For miles on end convoy speed had to be reduced to a walking pace as we bumped across the endless corrugations produced by this rustic sabotage. The landscape on the village outskirts was peaceful enough, with the ancestral tombs scattered about and taking up, incidentally, a great deal of cultivatable space. The more imposing tombs had been built on what slight eminence could be found and great attention had been paid, for the benefit of the ancestral shades, to the view they afforded. It was evident that a certain amount of landscape gardening had occasionally been attempted in the vicinity. The tombs themselves were of pleasantly weathered stone, sometimes charmingly tiled. Often it looked as though a group of villas had been engulfed by some terrestrial convulsion, leaving only the flat roofs with their ornamental balustrades above the ground.
Our first stop was Bien Hoa, where all the passengers got out and bought food. I had not yet reached the stage when I was able to fall in with the scheme of things and buy myself a bowl of Chinese soup or a dried and salted fish, so I went hungry. I was soon to be cured of this reluctance of self-adaptation to a new environment, for I never remember any subsequent journey during the whole of my travels in the country when the hour of departure was late enough to permit me to get breakfast, or rather petit déjeuner. It would not, in any case, have been easy to eat in comfort at Bien Hoa as a whole tribe of beggars came out of the village and performed a mournful pilgrimage down the convoy displaying their ghastly sores. Among these were many cases of elephantiasis. The presence of these beggars seemed, by the way, to disprove the French allegation that the Vietnamese never give alms.
