history 18.htm

Part 5

Life in an English University

THE YEAR 1910 SAW ME IN ENGLAND where I arrived almost as an invalid, suffering from mental fatigue and indigestion that came on the heels of my three years studying every night for the Queen's Scholarship up to 12 midnight. I was woefully broken down in health and the Brothers kindly arranged for me to go to Vichy in France to drink the mineral water from one of the many springs there. I must say I didn't feel at home in Vichy at all for all the people who went there were grown up men suffering from one aliment or another. But luckily for me I happened to meet one Mr. Raikes Bromage, an old Clare College man, who kindly arranged for me to be enrolled as a student of that College; and so it was thus that I became an undergraduate residing in Clare College Cambridge and now at the time of writing, there are three Penang Chinese young men studying there.

Clare College is on the River Cam and is nearly the smallest of all the Colleges in Cambridge. It was called after Lady Clare, whose money went into building it. She was sorely disappointed in a love affair and thus solaced herself to the benefit of countless generations of young men, including me, a young man from the little island of Penang, of which perhaps she had never heard.

I don't know the year when it was built, but it must have been quite a long time ago and in course of time it became too small for the residence of the increasing number of students; the overflow finding accommodation in rooms of people's houses near by. Thus did I find myself living in a rented room in a house in the town, but whether a student lived in or out, he had to come to the College hall for dinner every night of the term. It was hoped by this means that the students would get to know one another. In my case, I was exempted from the duty of such attendance, after a trial of a few days, because I couldn't digest the food that was served owing to my poor digestion resulting from chronic dyspepsia; so I dined off fish and chips every night for the remaining days of my three years at Clare. Those fish and chips were cooked in the College kitchen and were brought to my rented room in a private dwelling house nearby.

In a white district

A residential College had its disadvantages for me, because during each of the three vacations during an academic year all the students had to pack up and go home; but as I didn't have a home in England or Scotland or Wales to go to, I had to look for a room in London. It was there that I chose to spend my vacation. I had to find a room to live in, so I went from street to street, searching for it. I looked at the windows for the sign "Rooms To Let". At the first one, I stopped and knocked at the door. A woman opened it and on hearing me ask for a room, she said that she didn't take in Asiatics. It then dawned upon me that I was in an exclusively white people's district; and so I went to an Asiatic boarding district quite far away and there I had no difficulty in finding a room.

I spent altogether three years in Cambridge at the end of which period I had majored with the law degrees of B.A., LLB. My legal education wasn't finished yet. I had to be called to the Bar and become a barrister-at-law and thus be able to practise the law; so I joined Lincoln's Inn, which was one of four Inns which called law students to the Bar and thus enabled them to earn a living.

Soon after I was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, I booked a passage on a Japanese steamer not only for myself but also for my wife and my young baby daughter, the marriage having taken place in England. My wife was a British Guiana Chinese girl, studying in Scotland to whom I proposed marriage at our first meeting, so carried away by her beauty. She was really a beautiful girl, the like of whom I had never in my life seen before. I was truly infatuated. The baby girl who was born of this marriage is P. G. Lim who is now at the moment of writing this episode the Malaysian Ambassador at the Hague.

The reason why I went round the Cape and in a Japanese steamer was because my friend one Aloysius de Mello died a few days earlier as the result of the P.& O. liner on which he was a passenger having been torpedoed by a German submarine as it was leaving the Thames for the English Channel. There was a war at the time between England and Germany. Poor de Mello! I went to bury him at Beachy Head. To avoid meeting the same fate, I went round by the Cape of Good Hope. It was indeed a realisation of good hope for me, for the First World War was on its way and came soon after with the sinking of the Lusitania. Luckily for me I was back in Penang, when the war broke out and didn't have to sample the hardships of that war, which the people in England went through

Part 6

A Mother's Surprise

On seeing my mother again after an absence of five years my happiness was boundless and I gave her a present of the five gold sovereigns which my bank in England had given me. These coins were then in circulation. Pleased as she was with this gift, she was even more than surprised to see me bring back a wife and a daughter. She couldn't communicate with my wife, for she knew no English, as she never went to school and my wife knew only English.

We didn't live in her big and spacious house. We lived in another house, which chanced to be vacant and which the owner was pleased to sell; but we kept contact with my mother by occasional visits.

I think my mother in her quiet moments have reminiscensed over the fact that she wanted me to marry a girl of her choice in Penang before I departed for England. She was full of praise for the girl and her family, assuring me that this girl would be a good and dutiful wife. Poor Mother! Though now dead and gone, I believe her spirit looks after me in my solitude up in my house on the hill. I have evidence of this, which I shall proceed to set out here and now.

Dentures and gloves

It was my habit each night to remove my upper-denture of false teeth and put it in a bowl of water in the kitchen. One morning five or six years ago it disappeared from the bowl of water. A few weeks letter it was found intact under a papaya tree a few yards from the kitchen. A year or two later it again disappeared and a grandson of my widow-caretaker found it on the platform of Claremont Station, which is about 200 or 300 yards from my house. He was on his way to morning school. He was intrigued by a denture, a thing he had never before seen. He took it with him to school and in the evening when he came back home he showed it to his father and asked the latter what it was. This denture again disappeared a year or two later and happily was found again on the lawn behind the kitchen.

I thought this disappearance was the work of a poltergeist; but later on I found it was another agency. This time it was one of my gloves that I wear at night on going to bed. It was my habit to put both the gloves at one of the feet of my bed. One day one of them disappeared. My caretaker woman and her son and her grandchildren by this son searched and searched but could not find it; but four days later it came back and lay exactly beside its mate - a mysterious reappearance which must be the work of my mother's spirit still keen to show I am her last and favourite son. #

to be continued

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