SQ 04 - The English Concubine (33 page)

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Authors: Dawn Farnham

Sangkek Um/Pak Chindek:
The wedding mistress and master of ceremony, they were the specialists required to advise on and conduct the lengthy, complex and elaborate Peranakan wedding ceremony.

Map of Singapore Town in 1862.

Based on a map of Singapore and environs by J.M. Moniot, Surveyor General Straits Settlements, 1862.

About the Author

Dawn Farnham was born in Portsmouth, England in 1949. Her parents emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, when she was two. She grew up a sandgroper, barefoot and free, roaming the bushy suburbs and beaches with her friends. In the 1960s she, like so many other young Aussies, left on a ship for London, aged seventeen. In the Swinging Sixties she met and married her journalist husband, moved to Paris, learned French and travelled round Europe in a Volkswagen Beetle.

As a foreign correspondent, her husband was posted to exotic locations and they lived in China, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time she raised two daughters and taught English. Back in London she returned to school, doing a BA in Japanese at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a Master’s Degree at Kings College.

She and her husband now live in Singapore where she is a volunteer guide at the Peranakan Museum and the Asian Civilisations Museum. It is in this thriving port city-state that she found her muse and began to write, finding particular pleasure in Singapore’s colourful and often wild past. This is the fourth and final novel in The Straits Quartet and continues the story of Charlotte Macleod from
The Red Thread, The Shallow Seas
and
The Hills of Singapore
.

For more information about Dawn Farnham and her books, visit
www.dawnfarnham.com
.

First published in digital form in 2013 by Monsoon Books

ISBN (ebook): 978-981-4423-23-6

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Cover design by Cover Kitchen.

Cover painting ‘The Esplanade from Scandal Point’ by

J. T. Thomson (Collection of National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board).

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Table of Contents

Title Page