THE LONELIEST BRITONS

Hokitika Guardian, 30 March 1922, Page 4

THE LONELIEST BRITONS

EXILES OF THE FAST EAST

brave women. 1 SACRIFICES TO KEEP THE MAP I RED. j (By Viscount Northcliffe). SINGAPORE, Dec. 1921. ! From this Far Eastern land my 1 mind’s eye travels Home, and sees there all the good people who sit in fireside in comfort, with the atlas of the world on their knees, and pat themselves on the back for their own share in the "parts coloured red those' many parts of the' enormous British Empire which iie separated by huge distances all about the globe. And I fell to wondering how many of these Imperialists understand the life of the man who is chiefly responsible for those red patches on thd map or know how much they are in his debt, i This man is the Englishman, the j Scot, the Irishman, the Welshman, in the Far East. If we are to reckon up what we owe him, we must call not on j the present only, hut on many dead ! and gone generations for their testi- | mony. His work often lies at the spot on j the globe farthest from His native Bti- | tain, farthest from all that he holds I dear, farthest from all which for most of us makes (life worth while. In the majority of cases, perhaps, [ the man in the Far East lives a life utterly unlike tha;t of any other man in the world. For years and years at a stretch, in many cases, he is cut ofr from the home which keeps tugging at his heart-strings. Sometimes such a man, married and with children. may not see the land of his birth for 15 or 29 years after he has come out East. For the newly arrived bachelor life may he solitary hut interesting. He lias the joy of taking up now work in now scenes which arc often even more leautiful than he had imagined them to be when fate or his own desire chose for him a. career of exile. In many districts ho may find excellent sport; and although games may he hard to get- perhaps impossible except on liis brief holidays -there is ■ much to render the Eastern life pleasant to a. young man with active tastes to whom companionship is not indispensable.

STRUGGLE FOR CHILDREN

ANGUISH OF PARTING WHEN THEY COME HOME.

;f> far, so good, for the bachelor. ]>it when the wife and the little ones come—

The father of a. family must so irlange his finances that his children i an, he sent home wli. it they are seven years old. That is essential if they

; v to grow up healthy in body and sturdy in mind. And their education means a heavy drain on his resources The other (lay I Tidard of a. man who h.d not been home for IS years;, lii.s income was t;1 .600 a year, and £1,209 of it went ion ftlio education of his children.

Hup peso he is childless, stiill his wife must, as a. rule, leave the tropical climate and go home for the necessary change at least once in every few years. . We may all hut set aside the thought of tb 0 unending struggle to make both ends meet in lands where 1 chore is a natural tendency towards j extravagance; to the man in the Far | East that is a small matter compared with the heart-breaking separation from wife and from children for many many years. Suppose the hoys are sent home at the age of seven. They will not have left school before they are 17 or 18. And that is an age at which it is most '.inadvisable to bring lads to the East again. They must he at home for some years yet. Say they ,are lucky, and when they aye old enough obtain jobs or appointments in their fait her’s 'district; between the time they go home and the time they come out again it may bo 14 years. Fourteen years—and those the most difficult, the crucial years in their lives, the years which almost always determine success or failure for their whole future. Can you not imagine the mental torture which is the daily 'life of the man in the Far 1 East, whose wife must leave him for twelve months perhaps three times in every twelve years; who must remain, year in, year out, toiling to scrape together the money which keeps him from all that he most loves; always wondering, always afraid, lest the whole agonising sacrifice may have been in vain, and his children return to him strangers in character and outlook ? We talk lightly of “links of Empire, U but it is no light thing for U 9 at home to understand just how lonely these men are. Their wives are a win for long periods; their children for so long that they return East to find, not the playmate of their nursing days, but a permaturely grey-haired and (“middle-aged stranger. Tn their loneliness these men turn for solace to what is, perhaps, the loneliest life of all—the life ofj the club. They make their’ little club the eentro an pivot of their lives, spending as much time as possible there for the sake of the mere human companionship. Gradually they drop back into bachelor life, with all the zest gone out of it. Behind it lies always the empty bungalow, peopled with mournful thoughts.

PEARLS AMONG WOMEN. The nnluckiest of all are the planters who must live in what are universally acknowledged to be tire most monotonous of surroundings—the rubber plantations. Theirs, as I have previously explained, is a particularly hard life, because, apart from the inevitable loneliness of work carried on far from other men’s habitations, and apart from the heavy gloom of thfe plantation itself, there are many hours of the day which must be spent without either work of companionship—hours in which a solitary man may fall to brooding. In smaller matters, too, the man—and especially the woman—in the Far East suffers in a way which we in our comfortable, wieather-proof, snugly arranged houses cannot understand. Globe-trotters come out and spend a few days in a planter’s bungalow. They are fascinated (and rightly) at the

spacious, lofty rooms, at the size oi the. house, at tlite beautiful, garden, and the troops of apparently perfect servants. Cooled by punkahs, they eat piquant and delicious luncheons and dinners, while they gaze out over exquisite scenery. They do not see what brings those untimely lines upon the white face of the brave lady of the house, who must age years before her time because of the all but unendurable burden that her life sometimes becomes. They know nothing of the ceaseless supervision of the servants, hut lor which the whole domestic scheme would collapse; nothing of the exhausting strain of keeping some kinds of natives up to their work, the drudgery of struggling day in and day out against their inborn laziness, their fecklessness, their general sympathy with dirt. Above all, they know nothing of the loneliness of the woman’s life in a remote station where the nearest white woman may be half a day’s ride or drive away.

The wil'd of the man in the Far East must lie a pearl among women to slipport, year after year, the steady inroads upon her health and her looks made by the climate, the conditions, the narrowness of social life. She must be content with simple amusements and with what at Home would be deadly monotony.

She must be happy to play lawn tennis, or Bridge or (hut only in favoured stations) golf with the same people month after month. She must never grow weary of seeing the same faces day after day, qnd the faces of none hut her servants for weeks at a time. Not the least among her trials, if she he a normal woman, will ho the difficulty and the expense of dress. Unless she is a slattern or a genius, she will not care to face her husband and her friends in any Imt “decent clothes ; and such tilings are hard to come by in the Far East. She must realise, and, realising it, cheerfully accept, the decree that the best years of her life shall pass far from her normal way of existence. And she must put a brave face on it while she watches her children grow pallid, knowing that tlAe money to send them to home and health will he forthcoming, perl nips not for three or four years—perhaps, as in some terrible cases, never.

WORKERS FOR EMPIRE

MEN WHO MAKE THE MOST OF A HARD LIFE.

The Far East, as often as not, is the land of the lonely man—of the man who gives up, who sacrifices himself, who, from a son volitional point of view., buries himself and wastes his life. That view is very far from the truth. Ninetenths of what makes life tolerable lie up, voluntarily, with his eyes open. The remainder he uses as no one else can do, Thai remainder is work. As a worker, the Briton in the Far East is unique. As he falls into the routine of the life ho seems to sink his own personality into that strange aggregate of men and women who represent Britain in the Far East. T/v becomes a soldier—a soldier is an army for ever on active service. It is an arduous, unending campaign ; hut !us heart is in it, and ho knows (though lie docs not say so) that the reason why so much of the map around him is coloured rod is because he and his fellow soldiers stick so pluckilv to their hard life. Like all British soldiers, he thinks it his special privilege to “grouse.” Yiet, when he is lucky and gets home for a rare, brief leave, it is often with affection that he turns Eastward once more, hack to the work that awaits him overseas beyond Burma. Just so do soldiers think with affection of their chosen life.

As a rule he is full of vitality, and his cnergyjs amazing in such a climate. He works a great many hours a day; lie works hard at his play. He squeezes every ounce of satisfaction out of life, He plays the game, and plays it for all it is worth. Unlike Lord Salisbury, he uses smallreals maps, when he uses them at all—maps in which he can realise how closely knit are those scattered red patches of Empire. He knows perfectly well that it takes live days to get to Hongkong from Singapore and four more to go on to Shanghai ; but he does not look at it in that light. He likes to think of all these places from Malaya to Tientsin as within practical hail of each other. Unfortunately, be does not try very hard to bridge these distances in anything but sentiment or to think of them in 0115' but steamer terms. My experience is that a man in, say, Penang, will know, as a rule, very little about his fellows in Shanghai or Colombo or North Borneo, while his ignorance of doings in .lava or Imlo-v liina or Siam is profound. Of all the British races it is the Scots who take most readily and easily to exile over-seas. A Scot you will find in every office and every bank from Penang to Peking; and whenever you are introduced to “the oldest member of our community,” rest assured his speech will betray him for a venturer from beyond the Tweed. The Scot settles down for good in the Ear East with more complacency than he does in his native country. He forces the life to content him. Unlike the Englishman he seems able to forget his home, or at least to think of it as a good enough place for a short holiday. The Englishman has a horror of dying out East; to the Scot it presents no terrors. He looks upon a “run home” as a pleasant change of air—not as a wonderful bliss to be longer for and worked for year after year. The 'Scot does not suffer as the Englishman and the Irishman suffer. But upon the broad shoulders of both, of the toughened Scot and the homewardyearning Englishman, rests the tremendous burden of British prestige. And mightily do they bear it.