East of Suez

In 1955 I flew to Singapore. It was the first time that I had been farther east than Ceylon for nearly thirty years and I was curious to see what was left of the world of rubber planters, government officials, district officers, Chinese merchants and Malay houseboys, that Maugham had described in his short stories. The wind of change was blowing. The sun was shortly to set on Government House. But though the British Raj was ending, there would still be a number of Britons working in Malaya, just as there were in India . . . bankers, university professors, oil men, the administrators of the estates and vested interests that remained in English hands. Malaya would still be offering an opening for the young Briton. I wondered what kind of life he led.

The world that Maugham presented and interpreted and that I had seen in 1926 was mainly masculine. The district officer in Borneo who, after a month’s sail out by P&O had to make a seven-day trip up river to his post of duty, would not consider himself ready for marriage till he had spent several years getting adjusted to alien conditions. Even had he wanted to marry, his superiors would not have given him permission. In consequence there was a shortage of young women; nor for that matter were there very many middle-aged women. It was considered unhealthy for a child to stay in the tropics after the age of eight. There was a question, too, of his education, so that a wife after a few years of marriage was faced with the choice of remaining with her husband in the tropics or returning to England with her children.

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Alec Waugh

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In 1955 I flew to Singapore. It was the first time that I had been farther east than Ceylon for nearly thirty years and I was curious to see what was left of the world of rubber planters, government officials, district officers, Chinese merchants and Malay houseboys, that Maugham had described in his short stories. The wind of change was blowing. The sun was shortly to set on Government House. But though the British Raj was ending, there would still be a number of Britons working in Malaya, just as there were in India . . . bankers, university professors, oil men, the administrators of the estates and vested interests that remained in English hands. Malaya would still be offering an opening for the young Briton. I wondered what kind of life he led.

The world that Maugham presented and interpreted and that I had seen in 1926 was mainly masculine. The district officer in Borneo who, after a month’s sail out by P&O had to make a seven-day trip up river to his post of duty, would not consider himself ready for marriage till he had spent several years getting adjusted to alien conditions. Even had he wanted to marry, his superiors would not have given him permission. In consequence there was a shortage of young women; nor for that matter were there very many middle-aged women. It was considered unhealthy for a child to stay in the tropics after the age of eight. There was a question, too, of his education, so that a wife after a few years of marriage was faced with the choice of remaining with her husband in the tropics or returning to England with her children.