Never Judge A Book By It's Cover , Chapter 4. The Unlikely Union of Harold and Andeline and Chapter 5. Fork 'n' Knife

4. The Unlikely Union of Harold and Andeline

Andeline squatted beneath the beams of the bamboo structure, dissonant gongs, gong gonging above her head, her mini dress hitched up around her hips. She contemplated the day she had had as she emptied her bladder, unable to stifle a laugh at what a hopeless romantic she obviously was. How could she have gone from being aloof, to planning a marriage, she wondered. Uh, she was worse than Stephanie!

The gong beats grew faster and more urgent as the unceremonious ceremony of the killing of her father’s best pig drew ever closer. She hated it when this happened. She was a real lover of meat, but she did not want to hear her dinner dying. The squealing began. How her father couldn’t make it less harrowing she would never understand. The pig had begun squealing at the outset as it became aware of the prospect of it’s destiny, an urgent call for help.

A frightened call, “Squeal, squeal, squeal… Why did you love me and stroke me and feed me, now you are forcing me to the ground and tying my feet together? Squeal, squeal, squeal… Why are you hurting my trotters? Squeal, squeal, squeal. Why are you not smiling today? Squeal… What have I done to deserve this….. Squeal, squeal. Oh, no! I remember you did this to my piggy friend, several curly tails ago. Squeal. I never saw her again… Squeal, squeal, Squeal!”

Andeline stood up and rubbed her head. The knowing grip of anxiety asphyxiated her breath and she remembered the way her mother used to hold her hand when the animals were being slaughtered for dinner. The squealing grew louder and turned into a great gizzard piercing roar of a petrified cry as if an oil tycoon’s minions had dug too deep into the Earth and let out the contents of Hades. Andeline shuddered. The cry only lasted a few minutes but felt like half an hour. Andeline remained rooted to the spot, unable to continue back inside with the parallel of empathy she felt for the pig, who had spent it’s life wondering round the grazing area, happily nuzzling into the out held hands of Endal, their family and Andeline herself.

Sympathy for the pig, the loss of Billy as he turned from a handsome soldier into a perfect bastard and the memory of her mother caused her emotions to swell and swirl so the adrenaline hurled forth to produce the internal sting of tears as they sprigged up into her eye ducts. She forced them back. Sniffing.

“Would you like a hanky?” The speedy gongs and the general atmosphere spiked with rice wine and betel nut had left Harold gasping for air. He had stumbled out of the longhouse, losing his footing down the bamboo plank steps, out into the warm moist night air to find Andeline leaning against a post. Her beguiling appearance wafting into his vision so that he forgot all his own personal woes.

Andeline stared at Harold. Relieved that he had not caught her peeing.

“It’s clean.” Harold waved the white square of cotton at Andeline, when she did not respond. “I haven’t used it yet.”

Andeline smiled. Her eyes glistening. She tried to hold her tears back.

“The sound of the butchering was ghastly wasn’t it?” Said Harold in a rare moment of empathy and understanding.

“It was,” sniffed Andeline. Unable to hold her tears back as Harold’s smidge of kindness lay resting on her emotional state at just the wrong moment, the hot tears sprang forth thick and fast as though that fated little Dutch boy had just taken his thumb out of the dike. Years of remaining strong for her siblings, pent up emotions and maybe just a tiny dash of PMT came tumbling out and Andeline rushed into Harold’s unsuspecting arms for a soothing hug.

Harold who could not even remember having received a hug before stood shocked and unhelpful as Andeline cried and cried and cried some more on his shoulder. Her aural fluids seeped into his shirt, but he did not mind. Her mascara was staining his sleeves, but he did not mind. Her nasal mucus was trickling down his neck, but he did not mind. For her hair was tickling his face and he rather liked it. He felt the flutter of her little sobbing heart against his chest and he wanted to be there forever. He lifted his hand up and patted her on the back. “There there.” he soothed. What could he do to cheer this little lady up? What did Harold do when he was feeling down? Oh, yes, he knew just the thing, he rummaged in his pocket and withdrew a small square of something wrapped in tin foil. “Would you like some Kendal Mint Cake?”

*

The Jivaro Indians in South America had a penchant for removing their enemies’ heads, but they were preserved with their skin, eyes and mouths sewn shut, shrunken by age old methods, long flowing hair still in place and dangled from a stick for all eternity. Tourists would tout the tribes as recently as the 1930s buying these poor people’s heads for twenty five dollars a piece. Twenty five dollars, the price for a shrivelled up head that had once usefully sat on someone's shoulders.

The Celt's of Europe also practised headhunting as the head was believed to contain a person's soul. Ancient Roman's and Greek's recorded the Celts' habits of nailing heads of personal enemies to walls or dangling them from the necks of horses. The practice continued approximately to the end of the Middle Ages in Ireland and the Scottish marches.  The religious reasons for collecting heads was likely lost after the Celts' conversion to Christianity. Heads were also taken among the Germanic Tribes, but the purpose is unknown.

The tribes in Borneo, undisturbed from the civilised world by the canopy of the rainforest, continued their headhunting for many years. Just as Hank and Billy had described to Andeline and Stephanie.  Like The Celts, they too believed in capturing the spirits, but they thought that the spirits would bring them great luck.  Semengat.  If a Bidayuh man wanted to marry a Bidayuh girl, first he would leave the village kampong and venture to another tribe to take the head of another man.  Then he would take the head to the girl he loved and present it to her.  If she loved him back, she would take the head and dance with it in acceptance.  If she did not love him back, then the head would be ignored in scorn and that would be that.  Bad luck for the young lover and rather more bad luck for his victim who would have died in vain.

*

C/O Tuah Kampong

Sungi Duuh

25^th mile

Kuching Sarawak

Dear Mother and Father,

How are you both? I trust you are well. This is the first opportunity I have had to write home. I have been so busy. I am sure that you will have been out blackberry picking back in Blighty and Mother will be churning out the jam and scones.

The journey to this country was rather treacherous. Ten weeks on a boat felt like a lifetime. But I feel like Darwin himself or Captain James Cook. As I have been thrown head first into working in the wonderful wilderness of this savage country. They are not really darkies out here, except for the ones who have spent too long out on the padi (rice) fields. Their skin is light brown and they are all fascinating creatures. A very gentle, honest and hard working bunch.

I am lucky enough to be living and working on what they call a long house with a tribe of Bidayuh‘s. They used to be headhunters! I’ve been told that they haven’t performed this ritual for around 20 years though. Even though it was forbidden before then. They had a nasty turn with the Japs you see and their skulls taken by the Bidayuh warriors are still hanging in the head house which is a large ceremony room with an open fire in the centre of the longhouse.

These longhouses are very long indeed - they are made entirely out of bamboo and are about two-three hundred feet long and about fifty feet wide. They are raised on posts and everyone lives on the first floor. They are very beautiful indeed and I shall be sending some photographs over soon if I get a chance to go back into the City of Kuching (Cat City) to have them printed.

It is customary and polite to walk around barefoot in the longhouses and before any building is entered. They find my socks rather amusing. But I can’t stand the way my sandals chafe. So I am often the last inside as I have to remove both my shoes and my socks. Then they like to point and laugh at my white feet. I am slowly picking up little bits of the language. They call me Branda, which means “white man.” I am not sure whether it is mockingly or not. Because they are always chuckling away. Everything is just so funny to them. I find it rather endearing.

My first assignment was to deliver a baby. Can you believe it? The poor woman gave birth to her child on the floor of the jungle, which had only just been hacked back by my comrades Kasan and Topa. She had a little girl. Now this will amuse you. She called her “Harold.” Baby Harold!

The food is basic but plentiful and every time I visit anyone they absolutely insist that I eat with them. They pull out bowls of cooked rice, dust off the ants, throw in some veggies and request that I eat. Of course, most of the time I’d really rather not - but I wouldn’t like to offend anyone. I keep dreaming about Mother's roast dinners!

I must sign off now. But I will write again soon.

Your loving son,

Harold

*

Borneo Hunter

Oh, savage man who rules the jungle with mortal machete,
Lord of the boar and monitor lizard‘s adversary,
Walking erect with anthropomorphic scorn,
Ignoring your primate cousin‘s cries;
Born from the same mother,
Mother nature she be.

Rest your blade, rest your mind, rest.

By Harold Harpington-Smythe August 1966

5. Fork 'n' Knife

Against all odds, Harold soon got in to the flow of his work with the overseas mission. He spent just a few months sleeping on the floor in the longhouse and running his surgery from the make-shift clinic in the jungle, teaching the locals how to make simple life saving salt, sugar and water solutions to prevent dehydration and an untimely death from diarrhoea. He was making friends and photographing nature, making notes and writing poetry based on his surroundings and spreading the word of God. While Andeline went back to the college and continued with her studies, dropping back to the village every couple of weeks. When she and Harold saw each other - they smiled and nodded politely and occasionally chatted, each one harbouring a vested interest, each one having had a little seed planted when they hugged over Kendal Mint Cake and each one not allowing themselves to get caught up in love’s fantasy as they both thought the other to be completely out of their league.

After a further two years at college from that fated day, Andeline qualified as a teacher. Endal was dragged out of the village and put into an oversized sweaty suit crafted from the finest polyester that machine can make which belonged to Paul’s brother, to see his daughter graduate in the city. He was so proud to see his wonderful daughter’s achievement, but felt so out of place in Kuching with it’s sharp edged buildings and Western influenced skyline. They went to a restaurant afterwards to celebrate with other parents and families. Endal did not like sitting at the table on a chair, he was confused by the cutlery and had his hands rapped like a naughty child by Nayla as he attempted to shovel his rice into his mouth with his fingers as he had always done.

“Samah! No!” Nayla chastised Endal. The restaurant was smart for 1960s Sarawak, but nothing compared to the ostentatiousness of today’s restaurant standards. It had neatly tiled walls and tables and chairs, with table cloths and napkins. Endal gave his daughter a filthy look, a look as filthy as the sole of his foot after he had waded through pig shit to rescue one if his grandchildren who had climbed over the fence into the pig’s quarters. He did not like the way his children lost their respect for him when he was out of the village. He was Tuah Kampong. Village leader! Endal the great hunter. He was important and respected. Don’t you know who I am? Here, he was nothing. No one gave him a reverend Namaste bow. He was just met with seas and seas of blank unrecognising faces mainly from other parents who thought that their children were the most precious, most intelligent, most wonderful creature that ever walked the Earth. And frankly, he didn’t like it. He could see straight through them. What a joke. He noticed it always seemed to be the rich Chinese family’s with their porky overfed children too. Well, his children may all be thin, but he had plenty of them and they were all fed enough to stay alive. So take that Mr Chan and Mrs Chan, Mr and Mrs Fatty Face. To say that Endal was out of his depth was an understatement. To say that Endal was like a fish out of water was reasonably accurate. But to say that Endal was like a cat at the bottom of the ocean was probably more so, he was drowning in civilisation, with bricks in his pockets and tarmac above his head. All these constraints and "dos" and "don’ts." 

All this tarmac, all these bricks ,all this concrete, Endal would have been thinking had he actually known what everything was called. The Bidayuh are a simple race, not simple in their thinking, but simple in their ways. One word covers each functionality. Only one word for water and the same word that applies to anything of water and water actions. Water, drink, sea, river, wet, rain, piss… all the same word. The same applies to sit, chair, seat, seated, sit down… all the same word. They talk to each other quite well and get their point across without any longwinded rambling. Literal literary at it‘s finest.

Endal sighed. He had endured the speeches, that meant nothing to him. He could not make out what they were talking about. It was all in English of course, but he did not know that, it could have been Taushiro, a language of native Peru, a language so rare that it is pretty much extinct for all Endal knew or even cared. Now he was enduring this unpleasant form of eating, where he could not use his hands and was expected to use these metal objects to place the food in his mouth, industrial implements with a mocking steel shine. Endal shuffled on his chair like a bored school boy.

Nayla gave him a warning look. The look a mother gives their child when they are on their last chance. The look that promises no pudding, no going out to play and an early night with nothing but a spank if they‘re lucky. “Samah is so embarrassing,” she said to Paul. She made every effort to sit straight in her chair as though her back were made from one of Endal’s poker straight blow pipes. She had had two more babies since Baby Harold had arrived and all six of her children were back in the Kampong with some of her younger sisters and cousins. She was wearing a red and black batik dress sewn into a tight fit so it showed off her remarkably slim figure for someone who had cranked out six babies at such speed. She was determined she was going to have a good day.

Paul just grinned and helped himself to another glass of wine from the centre of the table. It tasted like the sour bile of an orangutan to him, but he liked the effect it had.

Endal wished his beautiful wife Namari was here. She would have understood. She was the one who listened to the Great White Rajah’s and the missionaries’ words. She took to the English language like a child to sugar. Lapping it up greedily, eager to learn more. She was soon babbling away with white faced Brandas, and their churlish pale wives. And Endal couldn’t have cared a hoot at the time, he was off out hunting, organising the trees of rubber, planting pepper, drying out cocoa beans, seeing to the coffee harvest and tending to the animals. He knew everything there was to know about the land they lived on, what more of an education could he need. He looked over to Andeline, his beautiful daughter, the replication of Namari. Andeline was wielding a pair of chopsticks and adeptly picking up slippery squid from the centre of their round table. What a show off. Andeline had become more and more like Namari each day.

“I am not an old man. I am not a little child. Do not give me that look daughter!” Endal reminded Nayla. In an act of defiance, he took the strangulating appendage of the tie from around his neck and tied it round his head so he looked like a small simian faced Rambo.

“Samah, what are you doing?” Andeline looked up and began to laugh at her father’s odd behaviour.

Roll reversal is a curious thing, for every generation of family there are new ways and peculiarities. Steadfast traditions and brand new relaxations. The miniskirt to the British who once found a glimmer of ankle to be naughty, the knife and fork to the Bidayuh who have no problem with breast exposure. The breastfeeding toddler. Oh me! Oh my! When the world average is a whole four years of breastfeeding. What is the problem? With the none sexualisation of ankles came the sexualisation of breasts. Always some new perversion coming out play, to make mothers worry and humanity guilty. With the reformation of the headhunters came new necessities, queuing, queue jumping, taking turns and the use of the napkin. All completely unnecessary but all bringing with them new dilemmas and a new point of judgement for the uneducated.

“Samah!” Nayla, looked at Endal crossly. “You are showing Andeline up.”

“Stop talking to me like I am one of your babies or I will take all of these stupid Branda clothes off and sit here in my loin, like the hunter warrior that I am!” Endal did not like being made a fool of and he certainly wasn’t afraid to strip naked. He was Tuah Kampong. His father and his grandfather and his great grandfather and his father before him were all great warriors, who ruled their land, justly and fairly striking fear into neighbouring enemies, unless they were peaceful, in which case his tribe would be peaceful too, they had countless heads hanging in their head house and had lost only the tiniest percentile of their own tribe’s heads in comparison. He had no time for polyester suits and knives and forks and these airs and graces that were listed as manners. Good manners is sharing your food, good manners is offering your companion the tasty parts first, the fish eyeballs, the sweet meat still attached to the bones, your last grain of rice. Not this posturing and pretending.

Tok laughed at his father, “Oh, Samah! Great warrior!”

“Yes, Samah - Tuah Kampong!” Joined in Paul. He raised his glass and took a long swig.

Endal smiled. He looked across to the next table where Stephanie was seated with her parents, he could see Stephanie’s mother looking in surprise.

She nudged Stephanie’s father who, fat like Buddha was too busy ramming food down his throat as if he had a deep trench to fill in a race and the chopsticks were a mere extension of his fingers. Shovel, food, shovel, food, shovel… He looked up as Stephanie’s mother whispered in his ear and indicated to Endal. Stephanie’s father stopped with the shovelling and stared at Endal open mouthed, tongue coated in noodles with his cheeks as round as the Earth itself.

Endal nodded in acquiescence and pulled the tie harder across his forehead, his bulging veins blue and heaving beneath the striped navy polyester of the tie. “Heh heh!” He laughed. “Heh, heh, heh…” He was beginning to have fun. Nayla ignored her foolish father, but their relative companions got the joke. The other diners paid no attention to the family, everyone else was too concerned about themselves and their own posturing. They wouldn’t have noticed the love and warmth that emanated from their blissful beings if it had floated out of their backsides and spat them in the eye.

It was of course by now 1967. The summer of love. The course of history hit a new milestone and teenagers and young people everywhere were turning on, tuning in and copping off. The likes of Stephanie and Andeline were safe in their country far away from the mad world that Britain had become. But Harold’s old medical peers were dabbling in all sorts of extreme and wondrous narcotics, then fixing themselves with a nightly saline intravenous drip straight into the vein. The perfect cure for a come-down-come-hangover on a forty eight hour shift in a busy London hospital. Tom and Monique were working like billio, minds messed up with acid and hash. But no one seemed to notice, erratic medical behaviour was always put down to tiredness or the eccentricity of a brilliant mind.

Newly qualified, Andeline began her first job as a teacher in the village of Bunuk, which just happened to be where Harold was now stationed. They shyly peered at each other over their hymn books at church every Sunday until the Very Reverend Stubs finally introduced them properly. Their first date was a success as Harold’s bumbling ways were lost in translation and became pure comedy for Andeline. She thought he was divinely handsome with his pale skin and dark glasses. It made perfect sense then that Andeline, beautiful, intelligent belle of the village that she was would fall for Harold who in reality was a blundering klutz with pink parched skin, thick bottle top glasses and a fondness for socks and sandals worn together.