IF YOU read this chapter you will come with me for a ramble in Indonesia. I don’t pretend it’s particularly relevant to the chronology of this book, so if you wish to skip the diversion, turn straight on to Chapter 17. For my own part, it must be recorded for it is a period that influenced me greatly, and I want to introduce you to some very charming and interesting people.
Two events started it. At the end of June, when I was already anticipating leaving the Theatre, a friend of mine said one day in the hut: ‘Let’s learn Malay.’ I looked at him speculatively and said: ‘All right, John. I’ll go and ask Noel Scott.’ Noel was a friend of mine and a member of the Malayan Civil Service who really spoke the language well. He agreed to become our teacher, and we started at 11 o’clock the next morning.
The second thing began at a rehearsal of Eddie’s down in the Bamboo Theatre. ‘I’ve got a fellow coming along,’ said Eddie, ‘who’s going to do a Javanese dance in my next show. I don’t know what it’s like, but he comes from the palace of some Sultan in Java. I’m told it’s very good.’ So we waited, and presently the dancer came over from the hospital, where he was in the Malaria Ward. His name was Tari, and he was a brown, very well and strongly-built Eurasian, with tattoo marks and the head of a tiger on his chest. He spoke no word of English but, through a friend, indicated that he would do two dances: a Monkey Dance and a King Dance. As they had no Javanese orchestra, they’d have to use dance music, and the tune finally decided upon was La Cucaracha. Tari then wanted to know how long he would be required to dance. ‘Well,’ said Eddie, ‘how long do you usually dance?’ ‘Oh!’ said Tari, laughing, ‘perhaps four hours!’ ‘Well I think four minutes of each will probably be enough,’ said Eddie. We then watched him practise for about ten minutes, and I decided at once that Noel, who spoke Dutch as well as Malay, must meet Tari.
That evening, we went over to the hospital to look for him in the Malaria hut and he had with him a friend and interpreter: a Dutch man with a tinge of Javanese in him, named Metz. We sat and talked under some mango trees, but most of it was in Noel’s fluent Malay which Metz politely tried to précis for me. But from then on I worked like mad every day at my Malay, and such knowledge and experience as I was to gain in the next year originated in that meeting of the four of us.
The first thing was to assist Tari all we could in his dance, and from green mosquito nets, cardboard and paint, a massive traditional Wayang hat was made, a mask, a sarong, and a flowing scarf or selendang. Anklets, bracelets, and earrings were made from silverpaper- covered cardboard and, to my eyes, when he was dressed up, he looked rather like a small and handsome cannibal chief. On the night of the show I led him into the wings and showed him where to dance and where the spotlight would cover him. Then the music started, and Tari danced.
Try to banish all idea of the melody of La Cucaracha, but grip only the pulsing rhythm of the drum beats; see this impressive green and silver costumed dancer in a spotlight against a black front-cloth, and in the background the shades of the mango trees and the noise of the cicadas and crickets. As the music began, Tari danced on from the wings, one hand pressed flat to his stomach, jerking his legs out straight before him in a half running attitude, and when he reached the centre of the stage he faced the audience and from then on he was the Monkey King, the magnificent monkey, so clever and so handsome, who had fought for the Gods of Java against the Personification of Disaster! When the Monkey King had won this great battle, he was given the robes of a real king, and in this dance we saw him in the mountains, near a waterfall, admiring himself. All in time to some mysterious rhythm of his own, seemingly only vaguely connected with the music we heard, he danced.
He rolled and shambled from side to side like a true ape, and as he danced he flicked his selendang proudly behind him to show off his fine clothes. Constantly he regarded himself smugly in the looking-glass of the waterfall, and each time he did so he raised a hand to his brow, palm downwards, his long, beautifully formed and curved fingers fluttering like birds’ wings before his eyes. When he wished to show his importance by stretching up from his legs in a curious and hidden way he seemed to grow inches taller. As he danced, the rhythm played insistently and fiercely on, the gigantic black shadows of the dancer caricaturing his movements on the dark backcloth. Suddenly – perhaps incorrectly – the music ceased! Tari dropped to the ground, and bowed his head to terrific applause . . .
A few days later Noel said to me: ‘John, are you really interested in your Malay and this Javanese dancing or is it . . . well, just something to pass the time?’ I said that I was very interested and eager to learn more. ‘Good,’ said Noel, ‘because if you care to come along tonight you can hear a few kronchongs at the bottom of one of the Dutch huts.’ ‘What’s a kronchong?’ ‘You’ll hear tonight,’ said Noel.
Just as it was dark we went into the far end of one of the huts and found there a collection of Eurasians – or Indische Jongens, as they call themselves – who invited us to sit up on the bamboo slats. Noel, I noticed, was completely at home and Metz was again there to help me. It was not a good kronchong evening because they had few and poor instruments, but still it was attractive and, to me, quite new; it also served as an introduction to what kronchongs were. The kronchong is one of the true musics of Malays and Javanese and it is quite simple for a European to follow the melody, which is generally straightforward, melancholy and probably often with Portuguese influence behind it. The words are always in Malay, generally in the two rhyming couplets, or pantuns, beloved of all Malaysian peoples and, though generally concerning the beauty either of nature or of women, they are always beautifully balanced in structure and packed with subtle and delicate innuendo. But what excited my curiosity was the untrackable rhythms, elusive and rippling, that ran below the voices. In the near dark I could see no one clearly except the leader of the party, a swarthy jowled gentleman who had the British name of Barclay, and who kept apologising for the poorness of the evening’s performance.
In the next two months, while Noel started to learn Javanese, and I worked away at my Malay, we made many friends and learnt a great deal about Javanese culture and tradition. Our early primitive kronchong party had extended to a regular weekly feature, well known to all the Indische Jongens, and as Stage Manager I was able to get hold of instruments for them. And every evening in one bamboo rehearsal place or another we were watching Tari prepare a big Javanese dance with nearly twenty keen pupils. We were completely absorbed in these interests, and had a great deal of work to do, and were thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
One evening, Tari had a birthday and so of course we had to have a special party to celebrate it. Come along with us and see how things had developed.
About 8.30 Noel and I go down to the Dutch hut where Tari lives and find Metz waiting for us by the door. He tells us that everyone is ready – you can hear them tuning up. ‘Has the coffee arrived?’ we ask. ‘Yes,’ says Metz, ‘they’ve just boiled it up.’ ‘Good then, because we’ve got a bottle of lao to put in it tonight.’ We enter the hut.
The whole section of the hut is packed full and, as we sit up on Tari’s bed space, there is a terrific babble of conversation and laughter that eases a little as they grin and nod at the two English officers who seem to like kronchongs. Some of these Indische Jongens are contemptuous of kronchongs, regarding them as ‘native’ and low; they greatly prefer Hawaiian music and jazz; but they are surprised when we say that some of the 200-year-old kronchongs may easily last another 200 years, by which time jazz will have had several generations on the scrap heap. Tari has friends who work in the Nip cookhouse and he always has plenty of oil. On this occasion three large oil lights cast a fiery glow for several bays around. All the bed spaces are packed with sitting, standing, laughing youths, the light shining on every shade of smooth, brown skin, revealing white teeth as they chatter and laugh together in that curious language of their own.
It always takes time to tune in, and then it’s half an hour more before they’re really warmed up. We hand around cigarettes, Noel chattering in a mixture of the three essential languages, I limping in Malay and talking English with Metz. We have got to know these people so well that it’s now almost like a family gathering. The cement that binds the whole thing together, though, is the diplomat, Metz. He is a fellow of about 33, an ex-swimming champion of Java and a milk and dairy farmer in Malang. Educated in Holland, he is abreast of all the latest scientific developments in farming, but the Metz that we liked was the man who was a very shrewd judge of human beings, and who, with no bitterness in him, appreciated to the full the technological advances of Europe, but still preferred to live in Java where his hobby, apart from shooting, was the Javanese language and culture, a subject in which he was very deeply versed.
Tari, a simpler character, is the Dance personified. When he talks he talks with his whole body and all his limbs. When he points to a person he looks at him and raises his chin in his direction – he never points with a finger, for that is not polite. Funnily enough he is an engineer and, as a prisoner, has had an unusually interesting time both driving motor boats in Bangkok harbour and sometimes an engine on our railway. But his whole background, education and language is basically Javanese. Most of his life has been spent in one of the K ratons, or Royal Palaces in Central Java; he spoke beautiful and fluent High Javanese, and in Java he had special dances assigned to him as his duty and privilege. His friend, and relation by marriage, who lay next to him, was a Dalang, or educator of the Javanese in the villages on the subject of manners and traditional behaviour. He too, is a dancer and an authority on the Wayang Kulit, or Puppet Show of mythological gods and heroes.
The characters of the musicians are more diverse. Barclay, the leader, is the organiser of the whole group and plays the violin, but sometimes another man, a sergeant with Ambonese blood, seizes the fiddle from him and plays like an oriental Magyar. Playing the string-bass made of a soap box and telephone wire is Leider, a round faced lad who speaks like a machine gun. He is very young and has an enormous Red Indian tattooed across his brown chest, but when he plays his bass he is away in a world of his own, twanging out a complicated rhythm that no one else can begin to copy, his whole being quite submerged in his music. Inevitably next to him is a little thin chap, a perfect Malaysian type, the clown of the gathering and as quick in his wit as lightning. His name is Franz, and he plays the ukelele. When he isn’t playing the ukelele he is gambling, and when he isn’t gambling he is smoking some foul cigarette and pulling somebody’s leg. He was the first person, after ten weeks hard work, that I dared to have a long Malay-talking evening with alone – I don’t know who was the most frightened.
Our two singers are both guitar players as well. One is a lazy, tolerant fellow with a remarkable voice and no ambition at all; the other is the better guitarist, a regular soldier, and a very hardworking, honest man. Just opposite us, and completing the party, are three men who come from the Isle of Ambon, where Malay is the common language. They are in demand for their very jolly Ambonese songs, the Ambonese being among the best soldiers in the Dutch East Indies, and having songs peculiarly their own and strikingly simple and joyful.
But the players are waiting to start, the strumming has ceased and they are looking to the leader for the first tune. There comes an introductory four slow notes on the fiddle and then, on the first beat of the next bar, the guitars and ukeleles thrum down on a quivering chord and the melody of Poting Padi, one of the oldest Javanese kronchongs, is selected to start off the evening. It is as impossible to describe as it is to notate kronchong rhythm, for though the melody is wistfully maintained on the fiddle, there is such an interweaving, such a criss-cross pattern of rhythm and counter-rhythm from the other strings, that though all are quite separate, they somehow, being interwoven, become one. The ukelele is generally a repeated, throbbing chord with or against the beat. Two guitars pick out separate, fast little tunes of their own, playing all round the theme, yet never quite touching it. And the string-bass? Well, Leider never knows what he’s going to play till he feels the music, and then such a crazy, twanging, booming rhythm is produced, as Eastern as it could possibly be, that yet contrives to fit perfectly into the whole performance. The instruments come to the end of the melody, and where before the violin led into the verse, after a sudden break comes the voice of the singer: ‘Waktu potong padi . . .’ The perfect kronchong voice is controlled, resonant, and somehow plaintive. As this man sings, he sinks his cheek onto his guitar and stares unseeingly at the floor.
When the song ends there is a chorus of shouts like ‘Ayoh!’ ‘Nyah!’ and a half dozen alternative suggestions called out for the next song. But the programme has been arranged beforehand, and Tari has probably selected it as this is his day. He is very conscious of his responsibility as host tonight and, when he is not looking after the coffee, he is sitting very erect smoking interminable cigarettes. He’s only just escaped having to sing a Javanese song himself because of it being his birthday.
But we’re off again. The last song had dealt with the cutting of the rice harvest, and comparing the happy days in sight of Java’s padifields with the sad condition of their existence in Burma and Thailand where so many of their friends had died. This new tune, however, is Oleh Sio, a jolly little Ambonese song of quite straightforward rhythm and the instruments have been passed over to the Ambonese bay opposite us, where the strings are twanging like mad things.
Then comes a comic song that Franz sings, but he’s been smoking so many cigarettes that his voice is hoarse and raucous. Its title is Lenggang, lenggang, kangkong! which really means: ‘Sway on, sway on, kangkong leaves’, and it is a song that purports to tell the qualities of the kangkong spinach that comes from all the different parts of Java; but in reality it deals, with hardly delicate innuendo, with the physical charm and bed-worthy attributes of the girls from all over that pleasant island. In Franz’s eyes is a thoroughly mischievous look, for he knows we can’t catch all the words and he becomes more and more daring to the applause of the audience.
They then become more serious again, and a modern kronchong, The Bengawan Solo, the ‘Holy River of mid-Java’, is solemnly played and sung through. The Dutch Government had thought it necessary to control the singing of this song, but until the words were carefully explained it was difficult to see anything objectionable in them. But once one was told that it was a nationalistic song, it was easier to get the idea of the hidden references. For instance, the sacred Solo River represented the stream of Javanese culture and national pride that would swamp over and spread to all the corners of Indonesia – yes, that would make its thought and culture felt throughout the whole world! Yet the nationalist phrases were submerged in innocent and moving descriptions of the river, its source in the Thousand Mountains, its yearly floods and its importance to Java.
As is inevitable in every kronchong gathering, sooner or later we have Terang Bulan, ‘Moonlight’ – and mixed in with further kronchongtunes are more of the Ambonese songs and several fast little Javanese ditties. There is also one amusing song in what they call ‘broken Dutch’, the title being Zarina een kind uit de desa (Zarina a child of the village), which tells the sad story of a pretty young Javanese girl who is adored by Kramo, her lover, but is carried away by a proud, fat, moustachetwirling Belanda, or full Dutchman.
The evening ends with a Selamat Malam (Peace on your Night), to which one of the singers improvises the words of new verses as he plays. When it is all over, the atmosphere inside the hut is thick with smoke, baking hot, and the musicians have now no more time than to snatch a hasty cigarette and pack up their instruments before Lights Out. ‘Thank you very much everybody, thank you. We’ll have another next Monday. Goodnight, goodnight – selamat malam!’
The enthusiasm evoked among the Indische Jongens on seeing Tari’s short dance on the stage made it comparatively easy to persuade Tari to try and train volunteers to do a really big dance. He decided, in the end, to try to copy a famous palace dance that Europeans can see – if they are lucky – performed several times a year at the Javanese Keratons in the central states. The work entailed to make this dance possible strained Tari’s patience and perseverance to the utmost, and made me cadge and steal as Stage Manager as I’d never done before.
In this dance, Tari was going to use six girl dancers, four men dancers, two sword dancers, two spearmen, two clowns, and himself; and he required a gamelan, or Javanese orchestra, of at least five instruments. The décor required on the Set meant painted elephants, a Royal Dais, and magnificent looking draperies; and the design of the clothes, with the huge Wayang hats, slinky dresses, flowing selendangs, bracelets and ornaments seemed at first glance more than we could possibly hope to imitate. But we got them all.
It happened at the time that the Nips were calling in all the old mosquito nets from the hospital, huge green things that covered about a dozen people’s beds. By arrangement with a corporal in the Q.M.’s Store, the ‘return’ given in was two short, and one dark night Metz and I stole those two nets from outside the doctors’ hut where they were lying and rotting. Then I wheedled 60 thin sacks and about 15 large cardboard boxes out of Bill King; it was a point of honour with Bill to produce the most unlikely things when asked, but I had to conceal now how much I was getting from the knowledge of other producers. A few rice sacks, a little paint, some silver paper and a needle then turned all these raw materials into the gaudy Wayang dresses we needed.
The gamelan was trickier, and in the end they decided they could make do with a gendang, two gongs, a tote and a K trek. The gendang was a drum made from a hollowed palm stump, and at one end of it was a goat skin, and at the other the skin of a calf, and they were bound on with a rotan, or jungle creeper. The gongs were made with two square edge-bent-down sheets of iron suspended over waterpitchers on a wooden frame; the amount of water in the pitcher determined the depth of the note. The Toté, which is a small ninekeyed type of xylophone was very difficult, for it required a fairly thick bit of metal to convert into the keys; but the Indische Jongens are wonderful scroungers, and when I found the metal, they found tools, and the bars for the nine keys were cut out and in position on the little wooden frame within 24 hours. So we had our Toté. The K trek, a purely onomatopoeic word, was simple, and consisted only of course strips of metal bound together with wire in the shape of a metal cloth-pattern-book and which, when struck or shaken, gave out a crisp metallic rhythm.
Nearly every evening we rehearsed the dance in one secluded spot or another, the main embarrassment coming from moving on interested spectators who nightly came to watch. Tari’s patience and skill was amazing to see, and his constantly reiterated ‘Weet je?’ (Do you know?) was the first Dutch phrase I understood, for he said it as he demonstrated every single minute movement of each dancer. The smooth, graceful entry of the girl dancers Tari produced after two months; by then their hand gestures and feet movements were coordinated. The Sword Dancers were soon quite good for they’d done it before. The Spearmen were ornamental and statuesque, rather than dancers and the two clowns were allowed individual license to mimic the other dancers as they chose. Among the four male dancers were young Franz and Leider of the string-bass: the latter being keen but hopelessly clumsy and unable to keep serious for a minute at a time; but the slender, undernourished-looking Franz was the most graceful of the lot.
To see the way every dancer was trained up, to watch the fitting of the whole thing together, to see the beginning of some of Tari’s own dances while our improvised little gamelan hammered out the elusive oriental melody in a minor key, was a unique experience – and the incredible flexibility of Tari’s superb hands and fingers was alone worth an hour’s watching. But this show was doomed never to go on, Takdir Allah!
More and more bodies were being required once again by the Nips for up country maintenance of the railway and, though by knowing well all the Adjutants and Sergeant-Majors I held back the essential dancers for several weeks in the teeth of their Dutch C.O.s, a large draft had to go up only ten days before the show was due, and my complete cast went up into the jungle together rather than be hopelessly split up. The gamelan and Tari were used in the Dutch Show that happened to be on that week, but our Keraton Dance never went on.
Metz didn’t go up country because he was ill in hospital with fever and other troubles, and visiting him one day he pointed out to me a dark, grey-haired shrivelled up little Eurasian who looked just like a coolie. ‘That man,’ said Metz, ‘is one of the richest men in Sumatra. His name is Lorenzo. He speaks very good Malay. And if you like, I can arrange for him to give you and Mr Scott a series of talks. He is very interesting.’
So we formed a circle once a week that met to listen to Papa Lorenzo. Colonels and ornaments of the M.C.S. and even a few Dutch officers came along to listen. He became a sort of institution, and people placed orders with him for after the war, and one man started to write short stories about him.
Lorenzo dismissed as uninteresting Sago and Eucalyptus tree estates in Ambon – they only brought him in clothes money. But he told us a lot about his 5,000 acre estate of coconuts near Medan, in Sumatra, and he described in detail the processing of the copra that was carried on in his spick-splinter new factory there. It was very technical but most absorbing, and we learnt that this rather dirty mummy of a little man had a lovely house outside the town and used it occasionally to fly over the Straits of Malacca to do a little racing in Singapore. Certainly his Sumatra holdings were profitable!
But that was still small fry. For his real business was in pearls, and he was a pearl king from an old pearling family. He worked himself only three months a year, and that was when he went out on his 1,500 ton flagship to watch the work of his fleet of over a hundred pearling vessels as they worked in the seas and among the islands of the Moluccas. The normal ship was small, only about 250 tons, and they worked in teams to cover various areas yearly.
The divers all came from old diving families and passed the art on to their children, receiving high pay and a regular scale of compensation to their families if they were maimed or killed by sharks or barracuda. He laughed at the idea of a diver killing a shark in deep water – he’d never heard of it – but he lost on average thirty men a year! But if we were interested in giant fish, there were seas on his charts marked where his tiny vessels were forbidden to go because the water was comparatively shallow and haunted by enormous octopi. He had actually lost two of his boats which had been capsized and pulled under by these monstrous brutes that in size went up to 10 metres long in the body, and had tentacles of eighty metres; these two ships were sucked down in full view of about twenty other vessels in the area! Sometimes they had been able to shoot some of these creatures, because at night they floated on the surface, apparently sleeping.
In deeper water, down to 200 feet, they used great inverted glass tanks that were sent down to the bottom of the ocean on the same principle that a teacup held upside down, but level, can be pushed under water and still keep the air inside it. Of course, the pressure of the air inside it was regulated from the surface, and the normal precautions against ‘bends’ had to be taken. Inside the glass cage – and the glass was 18 inches thick – were powerful arc lamps that brilliantly lit the immediate floor of the ocean bed and sent a sepulchral aura round to the range of about twenty yards. Sometimes sharks or swordfish swam into the glass not realising it was there, and dazzled by the light that intruded on their submarine kingdom. Also inside the glass tank was a long bench to lean or sit on, and all round it were wire shelves which held the oysters which the divers literally picked up off the sea bed. At these depths, oysters reached up to two feet across, and were as heavy a weight as a man could carry.
On each ship was equipment for opening the oysters, only about 20 per cent of which contained pearls, the big pearls, as might be expected, being in the oldest and biggest oysters. Until they were opened up on board, they were kept in sea-water tanks.
Back in Medan was his factory, and here the pearls were cleaned and polished by the very latest electrical methods. The pearl revolved under the action of a certain gas at a very high speed, but only for a fraction of a second. Lorenzo asked us to bring over a scientist because he thought he’d got the name of the gas wrong, but when we brought over a Dutch and an English chemist, we found that the old boy had remembered it perfectly. Since his family had begun in the business, some four generations ago, they had collected five enormous, almost pure black pearls, which had become sort of heirlooms in that they couldn’t be sold and which were nearly unique. He was now head of the firm, for his brothers were lazy and existed comfortably enough on the moderate allowances he made them. He had a yearly contract with Simon Artz for 2,000,000 rupees a year!
No wonder we liked to chatter with the old man, who in turn relished the Wednesday evenings we used to meet. When the officers left Chungkai there was a procession of us going to wish him farewell. A friend of mine, rather notoriously absent-minded, went round to bid him goodbye just as we were parading to leave. As he left Lorenzo’s hut he stumbled into one of his neighbours, who smiled as my friend apologised to him and asked him if he knew Lorenzo.
‘We know him very well,’ said Ted, ‘he’s a dear old fellow and quite extraordinarily interesting.’
‘I thought it might interest you to know,’ said Lorenzo’s neighbour, smiling quite nicely, ‘that in reality he is a clerk who works in a Printing Press in Medan!’
The last part of this interlude is more political in theme. When all the dancers and kronchong players had gone up country again, Noel found an excellent new Guru who taught him Javanese and who really broke the back of Malay for me. He was an Indische Jongen named Freiman; his mother was a Sundanese of the highest rank, a Raden Mas, and his father a European. He had a gift for languages and spoke Sundanese, Malay and Javanese, knew some Arabic and Sanskrit, quite apart from four Western languages.
At first he was very clearly nervous, for he was teaching eight English officers oriental languages and was himself only 26 years old. It took a long time to get to understand him, but he eventually became one of my closest friends. I was attracted to him because he was one of the most honest and uncompromising people I knew; he was proud, yet prided himself that he could behave as correctly in a Javanese household as he could in a European one, for he was too intelligent to try to submerge either of the cultures that ran in his veins, being acutely conscious of both. When his barriers were at last down – and that wasn’t until I met him again after the war – I learnt that what I had suspected was true, that he was a thoroughly shrewd young man who had hesitated to accept Noel and me entirely at our face values, and had feared that we’d forget all the political and racial problems that had unfolded themselves round his bed area, where most of the intelligent Indische Jongens, officer and O.R., used to assemble.
Freiman himself was an Indische Jongen who claimed only to be an Indische Jongen – not a Dutchman, and not Sundanese. In Java the Indische Jongens theoretically have full European rights, and compared with Eurasians anywhere in the British Empire they have little to complain about. But in Java there are several hundred thousand of them, and in practice it cannot work out that they have those same rights often so proudly boasted of by the Dutch. This section is written because we English rubbed shoulders and worked alongside every Asiatic race and most European ones and, as the Eurasian problem is a universal one, it was interesting to study it as applied to Java, a country where it has so far been most honestly treated.
In Java there are three types of these Indische Jongens: first, the Eurasian pure and simple; then the man who is predominantly European in blood and who tries to identify himself solely with the Dutch; and lastly there is a considerable section of orphans, for whom both races bear the responsibility, and who have a grudge against the white world and gravitate back to the kampongs where often as not they marry a Javanese woman. It is quite obvious that these three types neither want nor get the same rights.
It seems to me that the sensible section is the one that is open to admit that it forms a special people, a people that will continue to exist and a people that has a right to be considered the equal of any other. Too often, alas, those of predominantly Dutch blood try to out-Hollandise the Dutch, making themselves loathed by their fellow Indische Jongens whom they affect to despise, and either being laughed at or just used by the full-blooded Dutchmen. The third section is quite numerous and used to get them all a bad name, for sometimes in the big towns numbers of them used to form gangs of robbers, as in the old Kemayuran area in Batavia, where they practised the deadly form of Malaysian boxing, known as Penchak, whereby they could attack and kill a man in a few seconds. In the Penchak method of fighting, a lithe little man can spring from a crouching position on the ground and dislocate the neck of his opponent with the lightning blow of a foot, and the Indische Jongens in the old days would undertake to kill a man for a few dollars paid them by his enemy. Still, it is difficult for the Dutch, who helped beget them, to blame these bitter and rebellious people for the violent way they attempted to exist in order to get their own back on society.
But it is among the Indische Jongens proper that I had most of my friends. Physically a good looking, healthy and scrupulously clean people, their women have the reputation of being among the most exquisitely beautiful in the world. Mentally their obvious fault is one they can eradicate, a fault common and understandable in all Eurasians – a form of inferiority complex. Nearly all of them know it, and show it; but they talk about it openly and call themselves fools for it – which almost certainly means that they will eventually persuade themselves out of it.
Their intelligence is better and acuter than that of the average Dutch soldier – of that I am certain. And they don’t laugh at the elephantine and ponderous jokes of the Hollander with his ‘bierbuik’ – their sense of humour coincides more exactly with the English. They are musical, artistic, and sensitive; and once you get to know them, a very pleasant people.
One may ignore the Hollandised type, for though they are pathetic, they are very satisfied with themselves. But how are the Dutch going to treat the main problem, or are they going to try and ignore it? And are the Indische Jongens going to demand anything sensible and constructive? It is an interesting situation for the spectator.
In Java only the Javanese may own land – a European may lease it, but a non-Javanese smallholder may never own his farm or garden. As all Indische Jongens are legally Europeans, and incidentally for that privilege became P.O.W.s, in Java they are landless; so that among the large section that lives in the kampongs the chief complaint is that they cannot own their own padi-fields, yet they are clearly not living as or being treated as Dutchmen. ‘All right,’ say some of the Dutch Civil Service, ‘we’ll give them their “land rights” – but then they will be regarded as Javanese and will lose their European status.’ Possibly this would satisfy a section of the kampong dwellers, whose grudge is more often personal against their fathers rather than against the Dutch Government as such.
But this is not what the great bulk of the Eurasians want. Some of them talk about a colony in New Guinea, but they honestly no more want to go there than the average London Jew wants to go to Palestine. What do they want? They say, to be genuinely treated as having equal right with the Europeans of pure descent in Java and the East Indies. They say they are deeper rooted in Java than a European can ever be, and they are fully as cultured and intelligent. They are not particularly identified with the Nationalist Movement – perhaps they would have been more sensible if they were, for if their roots are indeed in Java, one day, when Java is independent, they’ll again be between the devil and the deep.
So what will the ponderous old ‘Totok’ Dutchman do? He is intensely proud of and often boasts about Java, for it was just before the war a comparatively well administered, though carefully controlled, colony. But he has created there a problem that is the biggest of its kind in the world and he’s got to do something about it. When they have time to divert their eyes from their own affairs, the eyes of Eurasians, Asiatics and Europeans will be focussed on the Java stage.