had marble floors and massive rooms with high ceilings from which hung 1930s ceiling fans. Hester explained that the old-fashioned charm of the house helped compensate for unreliable electricity, no air-conditioning in the public rooms, and no hot water. She said that less than a year earlier, in December 1957, President Sukarno had expelled the tens of thousands of Dutch who had been living in Indonesia up to then, in her house and others like it.
After lunch, we were driven home—a trip that could take anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half, depending on the traffic—to one of a row of eight embassy-owned prefabs that had been designed for northern climes. Were it not for the palm trees and the tropical vines that clung to the wire fences, our street could have been in an American postwar mass-produced suburb, such as Levittown outside New York City.
I could reach up and lay my hand against the ceiling of the tiny rooms under a flat, black, tarred roof that absorbed heat when the sun shone and leaked when it rained. The kitchen, with its white enamel kerosene stove and fridge and wooden-faced built-in cabinets, looked almost American. But our embassy guide explained that there was not enough electricity to run a stove or fridge. Thus the need for kerosene.
Fortunately, there was enough power (from a noisy generator next door to our house) to allow all eight prefabs to run a window air-conditioner in the master bedroom. We were advised to keep anything leather in that room. “Otherwise, in three days in this humidity, mold will turn your shoes into blotting paper.” All the windows had screens, shutters, and crisscross security bars as well as venetian blinds, making us feel a bit as if we were living in a miniature fortress.
We were introduced to what seemed to be a lot of servants, mostly inherited from our predecessors, and we changed out of our wilted clothes into fresh ones.
I quickly learned that diplomats in Indonesia in the late 1950s, in addition to having a big domestic staff, were exposed to a variety of dangerous diseases. Chief among these were amoebic and bacillary dysentery, malaria, typhoid, and dengue fever, and, more rarely, polio and tuberculosis. Entertainment consisted of lunches, dinners, and teas at people’s houses. One communicated with friends chiefly by hand-delivered notes. There were occasional engraved invitations to formal dinners and balls on gilded, embossed cards. Even the most informal notes inviting people to supper arrived on folded “informal” cream or white stationery with the hostess’s married name engraved (never printed) in black on the top page. The whole scene seemed vaguely familiar to me, striking a chord in my English-major brain. And then I realized what living as a diplomat’s wife in Jakarta in those days most resembled. It was not so much the 1930s exotic, colonial world of Somerset Maugham as it was the earlier, smaller, class- and caste-ridden world of Jane Austen’s rural England.
The squirearchy that ran our little social world was headed by our ambassador and his wife. Important secondary roles were played by the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and his wife and, in our case, the political counselor and his wife.
International diplomatic etiquette—which had been transmitted without change from the nineteenth century—required that I pay calls on the wives of all the officers at the embassy senior to John, beginning at the top, and then call on the wives of John’s counterparts in other embassies in town. (Whatever their country or language, John’s counterparts at the different embassies in town and their wives had also all been taught to pay and receive calls.)
My first protocol call took place in the Puncak (pronounced poon-chak), a retreat in the mountains, where the air was cooler. The Puncak was two hours away by road from Jakarta, southeast on the road past Bogor toward Bandung. John’s boss, Political Counselor John Henderson, and his wife, Hester, had invited us for our first weekend to go there with them.
On the drive up through lush tropical and semitropical scenery, the first stretch of green we had seen since arriving at Kemayoran Airport, John Henderson explained that their weekend house was on a few acres belonging to the representative of the American motion picture industry, Billy Palmer. Billy was an old Southeast Asia hand, he added, and was said to have grown up at the palace of the Thai king. Billy had had a “good war” during World War II in Southeast Asia working for one of the clandestine services.
From the front porch of the Hendersons’ mountain bungalow, our hosts pointed out to us Billy’s swimming pool, Ambassador and Mrs. Jones’s cottage down the hill, and the low green bushes of the surrounding tea plantation. The horizon consisted of tall, blue, cone-shaped volcanic mountains. In the valley just below, among patchwork squares colored rich gold, brilliant green, and silver, barefoot farmers were guiding big, gray, docile water buffalo to plow terraced fields for another rice crop.
American and European diplomats and businesspeople and their families were sitting or standing around Billy’s swimming pool. The adults mostly were red-faced, slightly overweight, dressed in faded cotton shirts and shorts or sagging bathing suits. (Elastic was usually the first casualty from the effects of scrubbing laundry on rocks or wooden washboards.)
Sprinkled through the crowd around the pool were honey-colored, crisply uniformed Indonesian Army officers in sunglasses, and their elegantly saronged wives, whose thick blue-black hair was caught up in elaborate chignons.
It seemed like one big house party, with swimming, drinking, card playing, and gossiping. This hum of conversation was punctuated occasionally by the sound of a J. Arthur Rank–style gong at one end of the pool, being struck by a manservant in a batik sarong draped below a white drill fitted jacket, to announce meals. Cut off from the heat and squalor of the plains where Jakarta was, this mountain resort seemed to me more like Shangri-La than like a real place in a real country.
At night after dinner, a movie screen was set out on the grass in front of a roofed terrace. Billy’s dozens of guests sat on the terrace to watch the latest film from Hollywood or a cinema classic. Villagers from miles around watched from mats spread out on the grass. Peddlers selling refreshments and curios set up their portable stalls and stoves in front of the terrace and did a lively trade on all sides.
John had once said to me that Asia grows magical after dark—and that was certainly the case here. It was a clear night, and the moon and stars seemed so much closer, with no city lights to dim their brightness. There were also little scraps of light scattered through the grass, from charcoal grills, oil lamps, and anti-mosquito coils. Zippo lighters passed hand to hand as people lighted their cigarettes before the movie began.
It was a classic film: Sergeant York (1941) with a young and handsome Gary Cooper in the leading role of a good country boy who did not like violence but became the most decorated American soldier of World War I. It was based on a true story, and it was easy for us Americans there to feel proud of a country that could produce such a man. I sensed that Billy Palmer’s handpicked Indonesian military guests could share our feelings. The social atmosphere here among these high-level Indonesians made me hopeful that John and I would find Indonesian friends, despite the ugly posters and graffiti that had greeted us in Jakarta. None of us Americans knew then that these pro-Western military men would a few years later save their country, the most populous Muslim country in the world, from falling into the hands of supporters of Mao’s Chinese Communist Party.
We were told that the Palmer estate and the tea plantation around it were surrounded by territory riddled with Darul Islam (Islamic extremist) rebels who were engaged in episodic armed combat against the religiously tolerant central government. The Darul Islam held sway after dark on the mountain road connecting Billy’s estate and Jakarta to the north and Bandung to the south. A couple of years earlier, John Henderson told us, one of his best journalist friends and another American he was traveling with had been flagged down and killed by the Darul Islam on that West Java road. Outsiders like us had no way of telling who was Darul Islam and who was not.
The word was out, however, that Billy Palmer had made a deal with the rebels that they could attend the film showings
