was fascinated by this. He visited the old man often, and drank often too. But all this time he was disturbed by the way the toddy was brewed. He didn’t like the old kerosene drums the old man used to ferment the toddy in. Some of them were rusty, and on others the lids didn’t fit properly. The old man said that this was the way things were done, that toddy had to be varied and different. Every sip had to provide you with the sensation of stepping off a cliff without knowing what lay beneath. Mad fool, Johnny thought; he did not accept this. He wanted every mouthful of toddy to be as good as the best toddy he had ever tasted. He didn’t enjoy discovering a bitter toddy, or a new and unusual one. He knew, too, that people sometimes fell sick after drinking toddy; they became blind, they died. On top of all this, one day when they had been filling bottles, they found a rat at the bottom of one of the barrels. It lay bobbing amid the sediment, curled up and peacefully preserved in the alcohol. Not even the cat touched it when they threw it out into the long grass.
So Johnny went away and thought for a long time. He drew pictures in the sand, idle mid-afternoon sketches of simple machines. He didn’t know what he would do, but he knew, instinctively, that he would do something.
People still talk about Johnny’s invention in the valley; they say nothing as magical has been seen since. Not even the revolving dining room at the Harmony Silk Factory, built when I was in my teens, could rival Johnny’s first, instinctive creation. This is high praise indeed, for the revolving dining room was itself a much-admired feature of our house. The entire floor would split in half and a partition wall would emerge from a vault beneath the floor, separating the one large room into two smaller ones. Hidden in the ceiling, behind the walls and under the floor was a simple but highly effective clockwork mechanism. Polished mahogany panelling adorned the room, drawing the attention of a visitor (more specifically, a policeman or a rival ‘businessman’) to the décor rather than the construction of the room. Fake European masterpieces, painted by artists in Penang, hung in gilded frames on the walls. (I looked them up in books when I was at school, and discovered that my two favourites were The Fall of Icarus by Bruegel and The Death of Actaeon by Titian.) One of the two rooms – the second, smaller one – was built into the thick rear wall of the factory, making it soundproof and totally secure. The purpose of this was originally to provide a hiding place in case of an emergency. It was conceived of at a time when we had a new police superintendent who arrived in the district determined to put an end to all crime, from the most petty thefts to the largest organised rackets. The new Sir was often seen striding down the main street of our little town, his bushy flamered moustache always immaculate, his waxen English skin still strangely unblemished by the sun. He never spoke to anyone, and people began to fear him. This was when our revolving dining room was built. Endless sketches were made, parts were ordered from Singapore, carpenters all over the country were put on notice, timber was felled in north Borneo. By the time the necessary machinery had been installed, however, the superintendent – Malcolm – was firmly in Johnny’s pocket. He came to the factory and drank Napoleon brandy late into the night, and he acquired a Chinese mistress called Wendy. When he visited our house, I noticed he had a gold wristwatch with an ebony face. It looked brand new.
But it was Johnny’s first creation, the Amazing Toddy Machine, which was the most famous and enduring. Although very few people actually saw it, its reputation was widespread, and its products enjoyed even farther afield. At the heart of this new invention was a large glass tank in which the various raw components were mixed. Everything could be seen clearly in this tank – the initial chemical reaction, the colour, the consistency – and regulating the process was made easier. Nothing was left to chance. The transparency of the machine allowed the brewer to intervene if he thought something was going wrong. The tank was sealed, so any impurities (not to mention animals) could not find their way in. As the system grew, Johnny found a way of increasing the output dramatically – more glass tubes were attached, linking more tanks to each other, all bubbling away at various stages of ferment. At some point a distillation mechanism was added, ensuring the final product was as clear and smooth as spring water. For a while, purely as a novelty, the toddy was filtered through layers of mangrove-wood charcoal, drip by slow drip. People were puzzled by the taste of this, but fascinated too, and soon even more glass tubes and tanks were added. At its height, the machine was said to have resembled a tiny crystal mountain, sparkling with a life of its own.
Johnny’s gift for machines has always been evident to me. Even as a young child, I knew that while other people could perhaps take apart a car engine and then reassemble it, not everyone could do it as Johnny could. It wasn’t so much what he did but how he did it – steadily and gently, with a rhythm all his own. The parts of the engine fell away into his hands like pieces of silk; he held greasy steel bolts the way you or I might hold a newborn chick. I used to watch him fixing things. Whenever he repaired a clock – that was my favourite – his short peasant’s fingers, clumsy in every other way, would suddenly move with all the delicacy of a silk-weaver’s. Where other men might have used tweezers or screwdrivers or other tools, Johnny seemed only to use his fingers, touching each part of the clockwork. I always pretended to be doing something else – passing through the room or reading a book. He never knew I was watching.
The Toddy Machine was the beginning of a particular episode in Johnny’s life that goes something like this:
Armed with this gift, this knowledge of machines, Johnny becomes well known. People all over the valley hear about the toddy, they hear about the young man who made it. The mines need people to work in them, but these are hard times for the Chinese mines. They have been in the valley for fifty, sixty years, long before the railway was built between Port Weld and Butterworth. They are big, open-cast mines with old-fashioned gravel pumps. But it is not good for them now because new mines have opened all over the valley. British mines.
What makes these British mines different is that they do not need many hundreds of coolies to work in them. This is because they have, at the heart of the mine, a mechanised colossus never seen before in these parts. It is called a Dredging Machine, and it does the work of a thousand coolies. It sits astride the mine as the goddess Guan Yin herself sat on a vast lake, floating for all eternity. The Chinese fear this machine for they do not possess one. The British do not need many men, they simply need a few good ones. Of all the Chinamen in the valley, only one will be able to understand the Dredging Machine, and it does not take long for the British to learn of his existence.
The first time Johnny sees the dredger he does not see the monstrous, angry machine everyone else sees. Instead, he sees a living creature. He understands it at once. He sees limbs – huge mechanical limbs – and a body; he senses organs buried deep within it, and a heart too. It is as if he has always known this thing. When he is shown the machine, the words of explanation are as familiar to his ears as the rising and falling of the damp November winds. He has heard them a thousand times before. Even on that first day, he wants to start working with the machine. The British man who is in charge stands behind him, watching as he works the levers which turn the cogs which run the pump which fires the pistons which bring the ore up to the surface from the depths of the mine. The five minutes – the test of Johnny’s understanding of the machine – turn quickly into ten, twenty, forty minutes, an hour. Johnny and the machine cannot be separated. The machine wants to be worked by Johnny. ‘Quite remarkable,’ the man in charge says. ‘The dredger loves this boy.’ They are like a mother and her child who, after a lengthy separation, fall into each other’s arms with relief. Johnny is then taken to the longhouse where the special workers are given lodgings. It is made of rough, unplaned wood, full of splinters which embed themselves in Johnny’s feet and hands. The rain drums loudly on the zinc roof, but the house is dry and secure. Johnny sleeps on a thin mattress laid out on the floor. At night he can hear the scratching of small animals, but they are outside and he is inside. He is also given a piece of paper saying that he is now an employee of the Darby Tin Mine. Everyone is smiling. They do not yet know of the bad things Johnny will do.
About two months after Johnny first begins working at the Darby mine, the dredger breaks down for the first time. At first no one
