I resigned.’
Less than half a mile further we stopped behind a line of lorries, their tarpaulins peeled back. Scrawny Chinese attendants sat on gunnysacks of rice, cooling themselves with tattered bamboo fans. ‘Good. I was worried we had missed the convoy,’ Magnus said, switching off the engine.
‘We’ll be crawling up the mountain,’ I said, looking at the vehicles.
‘Can’t be helped, meisiekind. But at least we’ll be escorted,’ Magnus said, pointing to two armoured scout cars at the head of the line.
‘Any recent attacks in Cameron Highlands?’
Three years had passed since the Malayan Communist Party had launched its guerrilla war against the government, forcing the High Commissioner to declare a State of Emergency. The war showed no signs of ending, with the communist-terrorists – which the government referred to as ‘CTs’ or, more commonly, ‘bandits’ – keeping up regular attacks on rubber estates and tin mines.
‘They’ve been ambushing buses and army vehicles. But last week they showed up at a vegetable farm. Torched the buildings and killed the manager,’ Magnus said. ‘You haven’t exactly picked the best of times to visit us.’
The sun reflected off the vehicles in front. I wound down my window but that only let in a rush of heat shimmering off the road. More cars had stopped behind us while we were waiting. Fifteen minutes later we were moving again. For security reasons, the undergrowth along the road had been hacked away and the trees felled, leaving only a narrow field of stumps. Far back from the road, beneath what had once been the cool shadows of trees, an aboriginal longhouse stood high on stilts, like an ark that had been washed up by a flood. An old woman in a sarong squatted on a tree stump and watched us, her breasts exposed, her lips painted bright red.
Groves of bamboo leaned into the road, filtering the light into weak yellow patches. A lorry, overloaded with cabbages, careened down from the opposite direction, pushing us against the rock face on the side of the road; I could have reached out and pulled a clump of ferns growing on it. The temperature continued to drop, the air warmed only in the short stretches where the road dozed in the sun. At the Lata Iskandar waterfall, the sprays opened its net of whispers over us, rinsing the air with moisture that had travelled all the way from the mountain peaks, carrying with it the tang of trees and mulch and earth.
We arrived in Tanah Rata an hour later, the road entering the village watched over by a red-bricked building perched on a rise. ‘You might want to explore the area,’ Magnus said, ‘but remember the village gates close at six.’
Mist washed the lorries in front of us into grey, shapeless hulks. Magnus switched on his headlights, turning the world into a jaundiced murk. Visibility improved once we left the main street. ‘There’s The Green Cow,’ Magnus said. ‘We’ll go there for drinks one evening.’ We picked up speed, passing the Tanah Rata Golf Club. Looking at Magnus from the corner of my eye, I wondered how he and his wife had coped in the Japanese Occupation. Unlike so many of the Europeans living in Malaya, they had not evacuated when the Japanese soldiers came, but had remained in their home.
‘Here we are,’ he said, slowing down the car as we approached the entrance into Majuba Tea Estate. The granite gateposts were gouged with empty sockets where the hinges had once been set, like teeth that had been pulled out. ‘The Japs took the gates. I haven’t been able to replace them.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘The war’s been over for, what, six years already? But we’re still short of materials.’
Tea bushes clad the hillsides, shaped into box hedges by decades of picking. Moving between the waist-high bushes, workers plucked the leaves with voracious fingers, throwing fistfuls of them over their shoulders into rattan baskets strapped to their backs. The air had a herbal undertone, more a flavour than a scent.
‘It’s the tea, isn’t it?’ I said, inhaling deeply.
‘The fragrance of the mountains,’ Magnus replied. ‘That’s what I miss most, whenever I’m away.’
‘The place doesn’t look as if it suffered too much damage in the Occupation.’
Hearing the bitterness in my voice, Magnus’s face tightened. ‘We had to put in a lot of work to rebuild after the war. We were lucky. The Japs needed us to keep production running.’
‘They didn’t intern you and your wife?’
‘Ja, they did, in a way,’ he replied with a touch of defensiveness. ‘The senior army officers moved into our home. We lived in a fenced-off compound on the estate.’ He sounded his horn, sending a tea picker who had strayed onto the road skipping back onto the grassy verge. ‘Every morning we were marched to the slopes to work alongside our coolies. But I have to say, the Japs were kinder to us than the English were to my people.’
‘So now you’ve been a prisoner twice,’ I said, recalling that he had fought in the Boer War. He would have been only about seventeen or eighteen then. Almost the same age I had been when I was interned.
‘And now I’m in the middle of another war.’ He shook his head. ‘Seems to be my fate, doesn’t it?’
The road took us further into the estate, winding uphill until we came to a long driveway lined with eucalyptus trees. The driveway funnelled open at a circular ornamental pond, a line of ducklings on the water smearing the reflection of the house. The barbed wire fence protecting the grounds reminded me of my internment camp.
‘It’s a Cape Dutch house,’ Magnus said, misreading the uneasiness on my face. ‘Very common where I came from.’
A Gurkha hurried out from the guard post to open the gates. A pair of large brown dogs loped alongside the car as Magnus drove around the house to the garage behind. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t bite.’ He pointed to the darker strip of hair along their spine. ‘Rhodesian ridgebacks. That one’s Brolloks; the smaller one’s Bittergal.’
The two dogs looked equally big to me, their cold, wet noses sniffing at my shins as I got out of the Land Rover. ‘Come, come,’ Magnus said, hefting my bag. At the front lawn he stopped, swept out an arm and said, ‘Majuba House.’
The walls of the one-storey house were plastered in white, setting off the black thatch of river reeds combed down the roof. Four wide windows, spaced generously apart, took up each flank of the front door. The wooden shutters and the frames were the green of algae. A holbol gable with a plasterwork of leaves and grapes capped the porch. Tall stalks of flowers which I later found out were called strelitzias grew by the windows, their red and orange and yellow flowers reminding me of the origami birds a Japanese guard in my camp had so loved to fold. I pushed the memory away.
On the roof, the wind pulled at a flag, the broad stripes of orange, white, blue and green unfamiliar to me. ‘The Vierkleur,’ Magnus said, following my gaze. ‘The Transvaal flag.’
‘You’re not taking it down?’ The hoisting of foreign national flags had been prohibited the year before, to prevent the flying of the Chinese flag by supporters of the Malayan Communist Party.
‘They’ll have to shoot me first.’
He did not remove his shoes before going inside, and I followed his example. The walls in the hallway were painted white, the yellow wood floorboards buttered by the evening sun through the windows. In the living room, a row of paintings on a wall caught my attention, and I went in for a closer look. They were scenes of a mountainous landscape, barren and stretching to the horizon.
