Silver

 

 

As I write I am somewhat displaced. Outside, lanky bamboo canes wave in the evening breeze. Birds vie with the distant children’s voices to be heard. It’s 5.30pm and the sun is reaching its nadir. I am in Siem Reap, Cambodia, caught with the closing of borders some eight months previously due to the Covid 19 pandemic. I came for four days. I have stayed eight months. I am no longer living in Malaysia where I have spent sixteen years. I find myself a tad curious about the future.

In Malay, the word ‘perak' means silver. Not silver as in the precious metal, but silver the colour of processed tin (Sn, the initials of Stannum) which is derived from cassiterite or tinstone (tin oxide mineral). In 1903, Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose Jr. the American mining geologist and entrepreneur had written that …

“Perak is the largest producer of the Malay states, supplying considerably over half of the tin of the peninsula, and the Kinta district is at present the most important tin locality in that state…”

There are question marks concerning the origin of ‘Perak’ as a Malaysian State name. Antique maps (imagined by cartographers ancient and modern) suggest that the riverine ‘State’ drew its name from its essence - the Perak river (Sungai Perak) which cuts a swathe through the state. That river has, for centuries, been a resource of tin.

Tin had been mined from alluvial deposits (in Malaya) for some hundreds of years. Well before the 1500s Perak tin was used in Malay ingots and coins. Some ingots and coins were cast in the shape of animals, predominantly fish in Perak while later (1800s), tin was cast as coins or pendants bearing faces. With the advent of greater trade with the outside world (China, India and with people from the Arabic lands), tin coins gained Chinese attributes and/or Arabic writing.

Today, Perak, its Kinta Valley (written about by Tash Aw) and its surrounds brim with luxuriant green. The deep blue of the equatorial sky is reflected in man-made lakes (mining pools) teeming with silvery fish and visited by man and wading birds alike. The ‘lakes’ are tranquil, placid places. Places a thoughtful person might visit to gain a life balance, to become like the waters, unruffled. That is now, but before…..

Due to the world’s hunger for tin cans, pewter and electroplating, Malaya’s tin mining grew to represent over half of the world’s tin output. Tin mining grew from the simple open-cast mines of the racial Malays to, in the early to mid 1800s, larger scale workings, with thanks to the influx of thousands of migrant miners from China (mainly Hakka, via Penang). As the British took over tin mining in the early 1900s, they co-opted giant mechanical dredges to tear up the peaceful earth, and rent asunder nature’s habitat in Malaya’s (Malaysia’s) green, tropical Kinta Valley countryside. The result was huge holes which, due to nature’s good graces, eventually infilled with water to form man-made lakes.

I was there, in what was Malaya but is now Malaysia. I had an old, chipped, white enamel (tin) mug since I’d been in Malaysia (about sixteen years). That mug was chipped when I bought it, downstairs in the weekly Amcorp Mall Sunday flea market and it, curiously, reminded me of England, of my growing up around the old Roman town of Colchester, in the much simpler post war 1950s. The mug is nothing special - just white enamel over tin with a blue rim but, as I say, it’s nostalgia. It still reminds me of those ex-British Army soldiers’ enamelled tin mugs, tea…. drinking.... for the use of.

Before my unwitting residency in Cambodia, I had finally ended up in Puchong city, Selangor, Malaysia.  Puchong is not at all posh. It had been home to Orang Asli (indigenous peoples), then to immigrants from Java and Sumatra and finally to Chinese tin workers back in the day. But, like in the West, the old working class areas have slowly become gentrified. Puchong now has endless (mostly Chinese) shops and work units as well as one large department store (Tesco), and a good sized mall (IOI Mall) if you like malls, that is. There is also a select restaurant area called Setia Walk that sells meals twice the price and half the worth of the ‘DG’ Foodcourt not three minutes drive away. It was a vast difference from my quiet bungalow outside the small provincial town of Malim Nawar, in the northern State of Perak.

Previously, in those seven years in Perak I’d been mooching around, writing. By an odd quirk of fate my first Malaysian short stories were published by ‘Silverfish’ (established in 1999), from out of Bangsar, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. In Perak, I watched early morning fishermen catch silvery ‘Ikan Jelawat Putih’ or ‘White Sultan’ fish from that artificial lake across from my bungalow, marvelling at their patience. Sometimes, a fisherman would take a small wooden boat out onto the lake, casting a net, at other times another fisherman would don his thigh length waders and stride out to catch the silver scaled fish.

Tin, that silvery metal, for me was not just that enamelled mug but thin metal needing soldering. In Colchester’s St. Helena Secondary School (of the early 1960s), boys were given two choices. You could either make things of wood, or of metal. The girls got cooking, which isn’t fair. I’d have much preferred cooking. Cooking is so much more practical than wood or metal work, well it has been for me since my late teens.

I failed miserably at woodwork. Woodwork was all splinters and jamming odd shaped wood together into joints and hoping against hope that they remained together. Mostly mine didn’t. I was swiftly moved to metalwork. I only fared a little better with metal. The metal being tin. It was light, easy to cut and joints were arrived at by soldering, that is melting a metal wire (usually a mixture of tin and lead with a low melting point) onto two pieces of tin and, wallah, they were inseparably joined. Though, to be honest, mine were not always that inseparable. My metalwork skills could be compared to my woodwork skills, in other words, negligible. 

I was to stay ineffectually metalworking until a new year brought the opportunity to work with plastic. My brief introduction to the ways of tin were over, as had been those of working with wood. I had no idea where tin came from. In my school days Malaya was associated with ‘Emergencies’, “Communist Insurgency’ ‘National Service’ and boys’ dads not coming home, all eloquently written about by Anthony Burgess (The Long Day Wanes) and Leslie Thomas (Virgin Soldiers). Plastic was much more my cup of tea, so to speak. What with the manufacture of plastic shoe horns, the warm bending and all that polishing using an electric buffer, it was a young schoolboy’s delight. And yet, to this day, some fifty plus years later, I have never felt the yearning to make anything from plastic, tin or of wood. But I do cook most days.

My mum, bless her, cooked cakes with sinkholes which, I now realise, strangely resembled Malaysian mining pools before they became infilled with water. A cake would come fresh from the oven, perfect, a delightful shape and yet, within minutes would develop a crater. It was if each cake was hastily mined by some unseen spiritual or mystic force.

Mum was born in 1918.Throughout her life my dad would say that she was the reason the ‘Great War’ stopped. Mum was a native of England’s Surrey (Epson). My dad, born in 1919 (one year after the war had stopped) had been dragged up in Norfolk’s silvery herring fishing settlement of Great Yarmouth. As far as I can tell, dad’s mother never did divulge the man who helped create him. That secret went to the grave with her. Oh, there was much speculation, including a man referred to as Mr Percy Strange, but I don’t think he was a doctor, much less a mystical surgeon with Himalayan and occult connections.

Dad’s mother kept her maiden name - Bradley until her marriage. That’s the name on dad’s birth certificate and mine too. My paternal Grandmother struggled on Yarmouth’s ‘Rows’ - 145 very narrow streets which ran parallel to each other with small terraced houses abutting beach pebbled streets so narrow, that special handcarts (Trollcarts) had to be made to move among them. Regular horse carts were too big. 

Grandma’s life was, by all accounts, difficult. In the second decade of the Twentieth Century, working-class single parent families had it hard. Yet, in many ways, that hardness may have been offset by the custom of men working on the ‘boats’ while the women were left on the land. There was also the dreadful aftermath of the Great War (1914 - 1918), with women widowed and other children fatherless too. Growing up, I was led to believe that my paternal grandfather died in a submarine during that Great War. It was a convenient untruth. That untruth was perpetuated to stop me from questioning dad’s parentage. The truth was eventually revealed to me by my Aunt Doreen, dad’s half-sister, one fateful day in Gorleston (Gorleston-on-Sea) where she lived with my Uncle Ron and half-cousin Susan. I was in my twenties by this time.

“Tha say ‘e were one Percy Strange, anda dead ringer for your far ‘e were.”

“But dad’s dad died in a submarine, during the first war, didn’t he.”

“Yew old enough ta’ know tha’ there mardle wert made.”

“It was a story. Like a lie.”

“Marty, tha’s a little harsh.”

“Sorry, but it was, wasn’t it. A lie, I mean.”

“Hold yew hard! Ya know ya dad, ‘neath all that putting on parts ‘I was a champion boxer in the army’ stuff, e’sa very sensitive man, anda masterous story ‘bout yon granfar and ’t submarine suited a purpose an ‘e won’t ‘ave truck wi’ nothing else.”

I’d been intrigued. Sure I was a little upset that mum had lied to me about this. Dad never spoke of it. But I was old enough to want to know more.

“Howsomever, Marty, that there’s where story ends. Accordin-lie t’were couple o sightings of this ‘ere chap, this Mr Strange as e may ‘ave been, in Hunstanton ‘couple arternunes one week. T’ name may or may not be real you know. T’were suggestion passed down by that there old Joe, he what lived o’er Heacham way, family fren your granmaw’s. He say this chap were t’ spitting image of ya father, much older of course.”

And eventually I was muzzled. Sleeping dogs left to lie. Right now, before we go any further, I ought to just mention that I really hate being called Marty.

Grandma was a ‘herring girl’. She and others gutted and packed the herring fish, known as ‘Silver Darlings’ because of their looks, and brought ashore to Britain’s most important fishing port - Great Yarmouth, by specially designed boats called ‘Drifters’.

The silvery Blue Atlantic Herring has been a source of cheap nutrient for thousands of years. Herring (Clupea harengus) can be eaten fresh (though bony), filleted and pickled (as Rollmöpse - an hors d’oeuvre), salted or smoked as bloaters (whole smoked herring), buckling (smoked whole but without the head and usually including the roe), or as kippers (filleted herring smoked). I confess that, in the 1980s, I had a mild addiction to Rollmöpse (rollmpos - singular, Rollmöpse - plural). Rollmöpse are pickled herring fillets rolled around a filling, normally pickled ‘Silverskin’ onion, cucumber or sauerkraut. The name hails from Germany. I simply couldn’t get enough. There was always a jar or two in the fridge. But tempus does indeed fugit and the craving, at some point, dissipated.

In a many masted past, Great Yarmouth could harbour up to one thousand weathered herring drift boats lining up. Their masts/funnels would point into the grey, overcast, Norfolk sky while their bowels were being emptied. It would have taken two hardy sea men to handle each of the wicker baskets filled to the brim and overspilling with the silvery herring.

Men would have trudged from boats to wooden fish troughs, emptied fish for the Scottish migrant ‘Herring Girls’ and local women in their drab cotton clothes to begin their unenviable task of cleaning, salting and barrelling the fresh fish of the day’s silver ‘Herring Harvest’. For centuries herring had been plentiful, seemingly inexhaustible. Fortunes had been made in their fishing and, some say, that they had been the backbone of early northern-European capitalism. But by the early twentieth century herring had been overfished. Just as, in Malaysia, there had eventually been a glut of tin, and a collapsing market.

I have no concrete idea of my paternal Grandma’s struggle, but to be poor and a single parent in the second decade of the twentieth century, with sparse education, must have been extremely difficult for her. Her life was a far cry from the lives of the visitors to Yarmouth’s ‘seaside resort’, the ‘Pleasure Gardens’, the Boating Lake’ and the ‘Waterways’ (incorporating the Boating Lake and the new Venetian Waterways, and designed by Borough Engineer Mr S P Thompson, in 1928).

My dad, in his growing years, offered his services porting fish and fish discards around Great Yarmouth wharfs, just to earn a little to help his mother. Occasionally he attended school, or sometimes helped out as a ‘Tally boy’ writing labels for boxes on the sea-faring Drifters.

I hardly knew my paternal grandmother, or her husband Mr Littlewood, by whom she had three children after my father, Albert, Doreen and Ray. My chief recollection of Grandma was rabbit stew with Norfolk ‘Dumplings’. On the rare occasions that my parents could afford to travel between whichever town in Essex we were stationed in at the time, via motorcycle and sidecar, to Grandma’s small council house in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, Grandma made rabbit stew. In that murky stew floated dough dumplings of flour, suet, salt and pepper. I think it was my father’s favourite meal, either that or the cheapest stew available during the late 1950s/early 1960s.

Being of dubious parentage, my dad spent his young life in a Merchant Navy Hostel for boys, in Great Yarmouth. He graduated to sailing the seven seas as a young Merchant Navy sailor then, when old enough, was accepted into the army - the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which was then sequestered in Norwich. Between his sailing days and his army days, my father pretty much toured the entire globe from North America to Africa and India, and bits and bobs in-between. But not to Malaya (Malaysia).

My mother’s father was Liverpool Irish, just like The Beatles. He went by the nickname of ‘Bonner’ (in Irish ‘O’Cnaimhsighe’, meaning midwife). I never met him. Nor his wife, my maternal grandmother. They had passed long before I was born. I understand that Grandfather worked in the new fangled Electricity Company, but doing what I have no idea. You see, my past is a tangled net, full of holes and in severe need of repair.

I was born opposite Clapham Common, in the County of London. There was no spoon in my mouth, let alone a silver one. When asked, I always say that I’m from London. It’s easier that way.

Being so young when my family moved, I remember nothing of Clapham, nor of Epsom, Surrey, where we moved next. My recollections only begin when we had moved into Mill Lane, Rochford, in the much maligned county of Essex. No jokes about Essex girls, white handbags or white stilettos here. My father had a job at Rankin’s Flour Mill, toting bags of flour. My mother worked in Southend (on sea), making electric light bulbs. There were various way-stages on the road to my teens, apple farms, mushroom farms, gentry who reared horses, but by the time I was thirteen we were living in council housing in Marks Tey. I escaped barely four years after.

None of this story is in any way glamorous. My grandparents worked hard, produced children who equally worked hard, and had little or no access to the sort of education which could have pulled their poorly shodden feet out of the soil. It took me until I was twenty-eight to get to ‘Art School’ and then on to university. My mum had left school at 14 years and had become a laundry maid, then housekeeper to gentry and, eventually, the cycle of life deemed that she should be a laundry maid once more, this time in a ‘Home for the Elderly’, in Colchester. We were glad of the bathroom and the inside toilet; things we had severely lacked while in ‘tied’ accommodation.

It took me many misdirections, many winding roads, some lesser travelled but, by the time I had enjoyed my fifty-fourth summer in England, I was determined for it to be my last. With a head filled with romantic notions of lotus-eaters, endless days of summer, exotic women and a great variety of exotic food, I touched down in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, spent a little time there and created my bungalow, where I lived for seven years in the silver (tin) state of Perak. That was before what I thought was to be my finally settling in Puchong, Selangor. It wasn’t to be.

I had come to Cambodia, with its Buddhist temples and smiling inhabitants, and discovered more about myself, some good, some not so. I take each day as it comes, trying to take my eyes off the recent past and what I thought that I had there, and not looking too far into a completely unknown future.

Today, the Phnom Penh Post tells me that silver deposits have been recently found in northern Cambodia, now that’s a coincidence isn’t it.