66 The Love Pirate Read online

  But Bertilla had glimpses of hawkers crying their wares in what seemed to be a bazaar, heard gongs beating in a mosque and the wailing of a one-stringed instrument.

  “That reminds me,” her aunt said. “Have you any money?”

  “Not very much, I am afraid,” Bertilla answered, “but more than I expected, as I did not have to stay in a hotel in Singapore.”

  “How much?” her aunt enquired.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Bertilla answered. “I will count it when we arrive.”

  She looked down as she spoke at the handbag she carried.

  “Give it to me!”

  Agatha Alvinston held out her hand and Bertilla, surprised but obedient, handed over her bag.

  Without slackening her pace her aunt opened the bag and with a few deft movements took out the purse and some notes that Bertilla had put inside it.

  She transferred them into the pocket of her cotton gown and then with an almost disdainful gesture gave the bag back to Bertilla.

  “I would like to keep a little of my money for myself, Aunt Agatha,” Bertilla said.

  She was surprised at her aunt’s action and felt that to not own even a penny of money might prove to be an embarrassment.

  “You will have no use for money where you are going,” Aunt Agatha snapped, “and if, as I suspect, your mother has no intention of paying for your keep, you will have to work for it – and work hard!”

  Bertilla looked at her apprehensively.

  “I am short-handed enough as it is,” her aunt grumbled, “and you cannot trust these people – not one inch! Having taken all one can give them, they run away into the forest and one never sees them again.”

  Bertilla could not help thinking that they were wise to escape from her aunt, but she was not so imprudent as to say so and they walked on for a little while in silence.

  Now they were out of the town and she could see the jungle round her and especially the orchids. Even those in the Henderson’s garden had not prepared her for a vast forest illuminated by newly opened orchids.

  They were a blaze of glory and some of the trees actually seemed to have turned colour, ranging from pale yellow to mauve under a covering veil of orchids.

  From the boughs yards-long clusters of one species hung in garlands and the ground was carpeted with the tiny delicate orchid-like plants.

  Bertilla was hoping to see a honey bear, which was Sarawak’s only dangerous animal or a mouse-deer, the hero of many legends.

  But she had to content herself with a glimpse of an Angus pheasant.

  She was particularly looking out for the hornbill, which she knew with its long yellow beak surmounted by a strange projection of brilliant scarlet was one of the most extraordinary-looking birds in the world.

  Some of them, she had read, were the size of turkeys, but the ones she saw in the distance flitting amongst the towering trees were smaller.

  But if the birds were an excitement, the large colourful butterflies were an enchantment. In the forest their colours and the exquisite loveliness of their flight were breathtaking.

  Looking round her, Bertilla even forgot that her aunt, ominous and overbearing, was beside her.

  “It is lovely – absolutely lovely!” she exclaimed, talking to herself.

  She felt as if it all had a magic that was part of sight, sound and sense.

  She was startled back to reality by her aunt saying,

  “Come along! There is no time for wool-gathering. You have wasted enough of my day as it is already.”

  They walked on for another half a mile and Bertilla was beginning to feel very hot when they came at the end of the road to what she knew at first sight must be the Mission House.

  It was long and low, built of wood, and should have been as attractive as the natives’ houses which she had seen coming up the river.

  Instead it was ugly and unprepossessing!

  Children’s feet had stamped the ground in front of it until the grasses and the exquisite wild flowers that bloomed everywhere else were lost and it appeared to be just a playground of flat mud.

  There were three young women visible, all wearing shapeless cotton dresses over their naked bodies and they appeared to be supervising a number of small children.

  Until Aunt Agatha appeared, they were sitting comfortably at their ease, smiling as if lost in secret thoughts.

  The children were rolling and tumbling about, the majority of them somehow divested of their clothing so that their little dimpled brown bodies were naked.

  As Bertilla and her aunt came in sight, a sudden transformation took place.

  The three women jumped to their feet and started to shout at the children and scold them. The laughter died away as the children stopped playing and stood looking frightened.

  As soon as Aunt Agatha was within earshot, she began berating the women, speaking a language Bertilla could not understand, although there was no possibility of mistaking the sense of what she said.

  She was scolding and at the same time threatening them, Bertilla thought.

  They accepted what she had to say without answering back, but merely looked at her with their brown velvet eyes that were like pansies, until finally her voice stopped and she flounced away from them towards the house.

  The Mission, Bertilla could see, as she came nearer to it, was very roughly built and was in its construction little more than a large hut.

  There was one big room, which she thought must be the classroom and beyond it the rooms that would be occupied by her aunt and herself.

  It was all very austere and there was nothing in the least cosy or home-like about it.

  In fact, from the moment Bertilla entered the building, she felt it was a place where love had never been known and where the atmosphere was unpleasant.

  She told herself quickly that she was being foolish to let first impressions have such an effect on her and that she should be grateful that her aunt was giving her, if nothing else, a home when no one else wanted her.

  I suppose you will have to have this bedroom,” Aunt Agatha said grudgingly.

  She showed her into a tiny room just large enough to hold a native bed of wood and webbing on which there was a thin almost non-existent mattress,

  “I have been using it when anyone was sick,” she said, “but there is nowhere else for you to sleep.”

  “I am sorry to cause you such inconvenience, Aunt Agatha.”

  “So you should be. I suppose now that your Aunt Margaret is dead your mother does not want you. She was always one to shirk her responsibilities.”

  She spoke in such a disparaging tone that Bertilla longed to fly to the defence of her mother even though she herself secretly thought the same.

  She knew, however, that there was no point in arguing with her aunt and so she said nothing.

  The Malayans who had carried her trunks all the way from the quay brought them into the bedroom and put them down on the ground.

  “Will you please pay the men, Aunt Agatha,” Bertilla said. “You have all my money.”

  Her aunt immediately entered into what she realised was a long and violent argument as to how much the men should be paid.

  As it had been a long and tiring walk and they had each carried one of her trunks on their backs, Bertilla wanted to reward them handsomely.

  But, as she had not one penny left, there was nothing she could do but stand by helplessly while her aunt obviously beat them down until they left looking disparagingly at what she had given them with a sullen expression on their faces.

  “You had better take off your finery and put on something sensible to work in,” her aunt said.

  “Do you think I could have something to drink first?” Bertilla asked. “As it is so hot, I am rather thirsty.”

  “You can help yourself, but don’t expect me to wait on you!”

  “No, of course not,” Bertilla answered. “If you will just show me where everything is kept.”

  She was to find out
later in the day an explanation for her aunts’ gaunt appearance. There was very little food.

  She learnt that the children who came to the Mission to be given Christian teaching and education were fed at midday with the cheapest sort of rice. It was augmented with fruit that could be picked in the jungle and occasionally a little sugar.

  The fruits were all strange to Bertilla, but she recognised the durian by its horrible smell, which seemed like a combination of onion sauce, cream cheese and brown sherry. About the size of a coconut, covered all over with short stout spines, it had a cream-coloured pulp inside it divided into five cells.

  Because Bertilla was hungry, she forced herself to eat one and found that, although the smell was overpowering, it tasted rather like rich buttered custard.

  Her aunt ate the same and Bertilla, because she was so hungry, forced herself to swallow the rice even while she realised that it was an inadequate diet.

  There was a type of tea grown locally of which her aunt drank a great many cups a day and she was told that they would occasionally kill one of the small chickens, little larger than bantams, which ran round the Mission.

  It was one of her tasks to find their eggs where they had laid them in the grasses and flowers that grew outside the patch beaten down by the children.

  What horrified Bertilla more than anything else was her aunt’s attitude towards her helpers.

  They were beautiful young women with exquisite figures and long dark hair hanging below their waists and when her aunt was not looking they talked and laughed with one another.

  They were obviously full of a natural happiness that bubbled over even in the most adverse circumstances.

  One was obviously a Dyak, as she had greatly enlarged earlobes, stretched by the traditional heavy earrings the women usually wore.

  The other two, Bertilla thought, were Malayans.

  Her aunt left her no illusions about them from the very first evening of her arrival.

  Bertilla had come from the Mission House, where she had been told to clean the floor and tidy up after the children had left at the end of the day and had seen to her horror her aunt striking the Dyak woman across the shoulders with a stick.

  She hit her several times and the woman, screaming loudly, ran away into an adjacent hut made of palm leaves, where Bertilla had learnt all three women lived.

  Aunt Agatha shouted something after her, which sounded, to say the least of it, unpleasant and then she had looked round to meet Bertilla’s horrified eyes.

  “You were – striking her, Aunt Agatha!”

  “I was! And you will see me do it again and again,” her aunt replied.

  “But why? Are you allowed to do it?”

  “Allowed? I am allowed to do anything I like with such riff-raff! They should be in prison, but instead they are serving their sentences by working for me.”

  Bertilla began to understand why the women stayed.

  She had already thought that the manner in which her aunt spoke to them would have led any servant at home, let alone a teacher, to hand in her notice at once.

  “You say they should be in prison?” she questioned. “What have they done?”

  “Stolen, broken the laws, although there are not many of them here to break,” Aunt Agatha answered. “They have to be punished for their sins, as everyone who is a sinner is punished.”

  She looked at Bertilla in an unpleasant manner as she spoke and Bertilla remembered how when she was a child her aunt was continually exhorting her father to beat her.

  She turned away disgusted and feeling degraded at the way her aunt was behaving.

  Later in the evening when she listened to Aunt Agatha describing her methods of teaching Christianity, she felt even more appalled.

  The next day, after she had been fortunate enough to find a nest of eggs hidden under a clump of crimson rhododendrons, she was allowed a small egg for her breakfast.

  The children returned to the Mission House and Bertilla saw an example of her aunt’s ideas on education.

  First there were long and lengthy prayers read by Aunt Agatha with everybody on their knees. Then there was Bible reading, which seemed to go on interminably.

  Then a hymn was sung in English by children who could not understand it and by their so-called teachers, who mispronounced every word.

  Even so, Bertilla thought they enjoyed the music played by Aunt Agatha on a very old wheezy portable piano that she was instructed to clean daily against damage that could be done to it by white ants.

  After this three of the children who were old enough were required to repeat their catechism. This usually ended, Bertilla was to discover, in tears and spankings.

  Religion was then disposed of until long prayers were repeated parrot-fashion before they dispersed in the afternoon.

  The three women were expected to teach the children to read simple words and to add.

  Coconuts, stones and pieces of wood were brought for the mathematics lessons and Bertilla noticed that as soon as her aunt’s back was turned the teachers would lose interest and the children began to play.

  There was a disagreeable incident first thing in the morning when a Dyak woman came into the Mission House with a spray of orchids arranged in her dark hair.

  The flowers looked very pretty and Bertilla could not help thinking that the woman, who was indeed little more than a girl, looked like a flower herself.

  But the mere fact that she had tried to improve her appearance sent her aunt into a fury.

  She screamed with rage, tore the flower from the girl’s head, pulling out several hairs as she did so and stamped it on the ground.

  She then produced her stick and started to beat the girl over the shoulders as Bertilla had seen her doing the evening before.

  It was all rather shaming and undignified and Bertilla felt so embarrassed that she walked out of the room and went to the other part of the house.

  Even there she was unable to escape her aunt’s ranting and roaring.

  ‘She is not normal,’ she told herself. ‘I think living here alone has sent her mad!’

  Then frantically she realised that there was no one she could turn to, no one she could ask for help.

  Because she was so nervous when they had their midday meal together after ladling out the rice for the children, she asked her aunt,

  “Are there any Europeans in Kuching?”

  “There is the Rajah and his wife,” Aunt Agatha replied sourly, “but they don’t understand the work that I am doing here and in my opinion he is a man who is not fit for his responsibilities.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Bertilla asked.

  “I have actually with my own ears heard Sir Charles say that English is an uncouth, barbarous language, hardly worth speaking, and he prefers French or the strange guttural grunts of the Dyaks.”

  Aunt Agatha spoke as if French was something unclean and went on,

  “You want to know if there are any Europeans? Well, there is a French valet in the Rajah’s service, if you would like to associate with him. There are three married couples for whom I have no use and five or six bachelors who will not come courting you.”

  “I had not thought of such a thing,” Bertilla expostulated.

  “Riff-raff! Stupid ignorant people who don’t worship God and are prepared to leave these heathens to their own barbarous and abominable customs!”

  Aunt Agatha voice rose as she got up from the table to shout,

  “I am alone! There is only me – me to carry the word of God and to bring the light of His ways into the darkness.”

  The way she spoke, with what seemed like a fire in her eyes, made Bertilla even more afraid of her.

  ‘She really is crazy!’ she thought and wondered if she should tell Sir Charles Brooke about it at Astana Palace, where he lived.

  Then she told herself that the Rajah who reigned over the whole of this land would not wish to be worried with her and her troubles.

  In such a small com
munity they must all know her aunt and the work she was trying to do. Perhaps someone would come to the Mission and she would have a chance of telling him or her of her fears.

  But no one came near them. They seemed to live in isolation in the ugly house with its mud-patch playground surrounded almost entirely by jungle.

  There were no books in the Mission except for the Bible and a certain number of religious tracts, which were sent out regularly from England and had accumulated since her aunt first came to Sarawak.

  When Bertilla was alone at night lying on her hard bed, she began to feel afraid that she was in a prison she could never escape from.

  She was almost too busy in the daytime to think, for when her aunt had said she intended her to work, she had not exaggerated.

  Bertilla found that she had to clean the whole of the living quarters of the Mission House and, on the second day after her arrival, the cooking was turned over to her.

  The elderly woman who prepared the rice for the children had either taken ill or had run away.

  The floors had to be scrubbed daily because of the encroachment of ants and a great number of other insects which to Bertilla were abhorrent.

  There were also the children’s clothes, what there were of them, to be washed.

  Bertilla discovered that as most of them came to school naked, her aunt had cotton garments made like sacks, which they could slip over their heads to hide their dimpled brown bodies.

  Because the three prison women did as little as possible and even tried to defy her aunt, Bertilla soon found that it was easier for her to do herself what chores had to be done than to hear her aunt screaming at them and watch her beating them.

  It was only at night that she could escape from the noise, the disagreeableness and the tasks, which seemed endless.

  Then she would lie alone in her airless little room and listen to the chorus outside of bull-frogs, tree-frogs and strange beetles, each of which made a noise all their own.

  Often she would hear the chorus of sound swell and multiply until it seemed to Bertilla as if every tree and every leaf and every blade of grass was alive and calling into the velvet darkness of the night for its mate.

  She knew as they called that she called too and her heart went out over the sea to a man who had given her all the happiness she would ever know.