Singapore Swing (8 page)

The current three-storey building with its grand, colonial façade, its filigree railings and the double-sloping roof with its red Mediterranean tiles stems from a major rebuild in 1899, when structures were still being erected for show as much as for function. A special inauguration dinner for 500 prepared by a French chef was held in November in the new Marble Dining Room. The band of the King's Own Regiment entertained the guests who marvelled at the electric ceiling fans, a modern gadget that put the punkah-wallahs out of a job. The Raffles was the first building in the region to be wired for electricity and, as it stood at the seafront sparkling in the Asian humid night, it doubled as a fairy lighthouse for the approaching Chinese junks. This is difficult to imagine today, since protracted land reclamation has ensured that the Raffles is nowhere near the water's edge, the town having devoured the sea like a dragon; nevertheless, the hotel's private generator secured its burgeoning reputation. London's
The Sphere
newspaper called it ‘
the Savoy of Singapore
' and a 1905 brochure could already claim amongst its guests such notables as HIH Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia, HSH Prince Adalbert of Germany and HIH Prince Kan'in of Japan. Admit it, even Z-list royalty sounds impressive.

The next thirty years were the golden era of the hotel whose advertising slogan was breathtakingly self-aggrandising: ‘
When at the Raffles, why not see Singapore?
' Somerset Maugham wrote his short stories in the Palm Court, sitting under the aroma of the white frangipani and the shade of the purple bougainvillaea. Noel Coward was snubbed by the posh colonial society who thought him ‘
rowdy and perhaps on the common side'
. He returned the compliment with interest: ‘
After meeting the best people [here], now I know why there is such a shortage of servants in London.
' Hermann Hesse detailed his short sojourn in the book
Journey to the East
, writing with his typical Teutonic sourness: ‘
We stay expensive but very good at Raffles Hotel. The food is as bad as everywhere
.' Standards must have slipped since Kipling's time.

The last remaining Sarkies brother was forced to sell the hotel when he embarked upon a costly renovation project during the 1929 crash and the ensuing world rubber slump. At least it remained a hotel; its main rival, the Grand Hotel d'Europe was demolished altogether to become the Supreme Court. Under new management, the Raffles had a last, brief gasp of grandeur in the late thirties before World War Two which occasioned more apocryphal stories. Guests were casually informed not to worry about Japanese air raids, for the building had its own early warning system. Little did they know that it consisted of an aged engineer who looked up in the sky to spot any enemy planes and blew a whistle should he detect any. During the occupation the staff had to learn Japanese and master the exotic flavours of beef sukiyaki and chicken teriyaki, but they held their own. They emptied the cellars into the Singapore sewers before the invading army could get their hands on the expensive wines and liquors and buried the silverware underneath the Palm Court, so that they wouldn't have to serve the Japanese in style
.

The Raffles went through another major renovation in the 1990s and is currently capitalising on its reputation as ‘
the last caravanserai east of Islamabad
' having acquired a memorabilia shop, a shopping arcade and many more bars. But along with the facelift came the facelessness; it now belongs to Raffles Hotels & Resorts, a generic brand name for several luxury hotels in places such as Phnom Penh (Raffles Hotel Le Royal), Beverly Hills (Raffles L'Ermitage) and, believe it or not, Hamburg (Raffles Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten). Raffles Hotels & Resorts are in turn owned by Raffles International Ltd which is the hotel management arm of Raffles Holdings Ltd, a lodgings-and-resorts conglomerate listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange. Finally, Raffles Holdings is a subsidiary of CapitaLand, one of the largest multinationals in Asia, headquartered in Singapore and specialising in the hospitality industry, real estate and assorted financial services.

If this is not the story of the city itself, I don't know what is.

- 8 -

Today's Raffles Hotel has brushed off any signs of overt snobbishness. It is certainly expensive, it is unfailingly upmarket, but it welcomes everyone and since it appears on every travel guide, there is a steady stream of tourists ordering their Singapore Slings, the hotel's most famous export.

I am sipping mine in a gazebo in the Palm Court, still an oasis of floral luxuriance in the traffic-choked city, and my ears prick up. The bartender has just told me something I can't believe. He is a short and agile thirty-something Malay, affable, courteous and perfectly spoken, but at the same time cool and detached; he resembles more a stately butler than a high-class barista. He enunciates every word precisely and separately as if a slow, invisible autocue has been laid out in front of him.

‘Yes, Sir – the recipe for a Singapore Sling was written down by an anonymous guest back in 1936,' he replies assuming the mien of a travel guide. ‘It was he who first described the cocktail. It was being drunk in the plantations.'

I look at my glass. It is an aggressive pinky red, more befitting the dress of a Hungarian milkmaid.

‘It was also considered a ladies' drink because of its colour.'

I gulp more of the fruity concoction; like any good cocktail, it doesn't hit you right away.

‘Ngiam Tong Boon hid the recipe in a safe.'

Ngiam Tong Boon?

‘The barman who invented the cocktail.' He uses the fingers of both hands to draw imaginary quotation marks around the spoken ‘invented' and then goes on pouring lager into a frosted glass for the Australian couple next to me.

‘Oh, it's a secret! Is this why you poured the drink out of a plastic bucket?' I ask.

The hidden sting in my question makes the bartender shadow-flinch: ‘No, Sir. Every morning we prepare the Slings afresh and store them in sterile containers because we don't have the time to prepare them from scratch.'

I am not so easily convinced.

‘On a good day we might be asked for 2,000 Singapore Slings. They must all taste the same,' he maintains. ‘And no, Sir, it's not a secret any more.'

He hands me a beer mat with the recipe.

‘Last time I was here, I'm sure they prepared it in front of me,' I say.

Last time…

When I first visited South East Asia as a poor, scruffy backpacker on a Round-the-World ticket, the Raffles Hotel was one of the reasons I budgeted a few nights in Singapore. As soon as I had found a room in the backpacker turf that Bencoolen Street used to be, I walked into the lobby in reverence and decided to splash my daily budget on a slowly-slurped Singapore Sling in the Writers' Bar. It was just before noon and I was the only tourist – correction, I was the only
obvious
tourist: young, short-trousered, T-shirted and Duran Duran-haired (I cut it shorter in Penang, fearful of the Thai border barbers). Everybody else – and there was a very sparse crowd – was older, well-groomed, mostly male, smelling of Old Spice. There were no pairs; everyone was sipping a solitary drink, sitting as far away from each other as is possible like repulsed magnetic filaments of the same polarity. What I remember most vividly was the silence: a London Underground mind-your-own-business silence. People had not come to this bar to be sociable. They had come to be transported to the past.

That's where I'll take you now.

I can still see her standing there. She just curled her index finger at me like Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
and commanded me over to buy her a drink.

No, I jest. The truth is, and I am embarrassed to admit it, I spilled her drink as I was passing by, like a Little Boy Lost. I was, after all, a wide-eyed backpacker whose vision might have been 20/20 but only within the tunnel of his own existence. And she was not 100 per cent in the clear, either: she was sitting down, holding her drink carelessly at my waist level away from her face, so far away it was contributory negligence, Your Honour.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. I was young and timid and maybe I was afraid they might chuck me out. Oh, the humiliation – being escorted out of Raffles in disgrace.

‘You can buy me another,' she said commandingly.

It was then I had a good look at the woman I would remember as Edith. Truth is, I have forgotten her name but she looked like everyone's aunt – thin and old, dressed in a tight white dress that emphasised the lack of curves in her body. She looked old and frail, but her voice was a deep mezzo-soprano that would easily belt out the Habanera from
Carmen
. She was the whitest woman I had ever seen, as if recently exsanguinated by a vampire; maybe there were some suppressed oriental genes in her make-up that had emerged in her life's twilight. I have forgotten her name – did she ever tell me? – but I remember our conversation in detail: it's etched permanently into my brain, like a plastic bag unwittingly burnt on a kitchen hob.

‘A gin and tonic,' she continued. ‘With an
orange
slice, please. Can't stand lemon. Too acidic.'

Yes, I bought her one; there went my eating budget for another day, but I was captivated. There are people who never have to work for a living not because they have been born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but because everyone else wants to feed them with one. They are the people we simply want to take care of because they are either attractive or helpless and at her age she was both. She was attractive in the way only a woman late in life can be: by being demanding in her femininity and by playing pushy with her incapacity.

By the time I arrived back with her drink, she'd wiped her dress dry with a personalised Raffles napkin.

‘Thank you,' she said, ‘you are a real gentleman. Chin-chin.'

Her pronouncement had a barely perceptible but calming authority in the bar whose atmosphere had been disturbed by the Duranie look-alike who had spilled the lady's drink. It was not as if muted conversation restarted after total silence, no; it was a subtle change in the air – as if the thoughts of the punters could again be allowed to wander off and their eyes left to focus at infinity.

‘So what do you do?' she asked.

‘I am on a Round-the-World trip,' I said. ‘I've just come from Indonesia and I'm making my way up to Thailand.'

She gave me an uncomprehending look, as if she was asking herself why anyone in his right mind would ever think of going to Thailand.

‘And you?' I asked boldly in return.

‘I live here,' she said. Her accent was courtly – and I have the Edwardian court in mind.

‘In Singapore?' I asked.

She stared at me with her tiny, blue eyes still as lively as they must have been in the zenith of her youth. I felt it was then she realised that it was a lowly backpacker who had bought her the drink; it was obvious that she did not approve but had to make conversation out of politeness.

‘No,' she said. ‘At Raffles.'

I said nothing, weighing the implications of that admission.

‘It's gone downhill, I know. But where else do you stay in Singapore? And where else do you go? KL? Penang? Or,'

– and I swear I saw horror in her eyes – ‘
India
?' I shrugged my shoulders and tried to say something but wasn't quick enough. ‘And don't say Surrey,' she answered her own question.

‘Don't talk to me about Surrey – the chill…'

She shimmied a bout of shivering.

‘Do you know that there is an original billiards table – in the Tiffin Bar – from 1900?' she said. ‘It was underneath that table – the very same – they shot a tiger – a real Sumatran tiger – it had swam across the straits from Johore.'

She sat upright and leaned forward.

‘Damn right, they did – don't believe anything else – anything else they tell you. I knew the guy – the guy who shot it – and he told me the story – as it happened – under the billiards table. That was a time when the name Raffles
meant
something – a time when everyone knew their positions in life. The Chinese did the cooking and the cleaning – the Malays, they tended the gardens – and the Tamils, they were the porters and the guards.

Never seen a better man in a uniform than our Tamils beautiful, manly, tall, with thicker moustaches than any Sikh you can find. The manager was never English – he was always someone from the continent. No Englishman, you understand, would deign to serve other Englishmen in Singapore – this was not a job to go for in the colonies. Best left to some Continental chap – Italian I think – or Swiss – I knew a few, all gentlemen – though they could not really manage the hotel, as in
manage.
They couldn't hire and fire – jobs were inherited. When someone retired this cleaner or that cook – his village would send you a replacement. If you didn't get on with someone – and you sacked him – the village would send you someone even less – what's the word,
employable
– and you were stuck with him. The manager just had to make things work – he had to make all these people with no common work ethic what's the word,
function
'.