"It was literally a responsibility for life and death. The garden was full of snakes, of which Malaya has a large variety, and a king cobra with a growing family was much around King's Pavilion during my tenure. Scorpions would get into the boys' shoes or beds and sting them bitterly. Hygiene was a problem, for the water supply was erratic and sometimes totally failed. Because of some fault in the meter, the Water Department recorded an excessive use of water in a dry time when, in fact, there was no water at all. My complaints and counter-complaints were rebuffed. I groaned in my stomach. I had the reputation of being bloody-minded : it was the army all over again. Moreover, a linguistic burden was being imposed upon me which I could not, in my first few months, easily sustain. I had to harangue these young boys in good idiomatic Malay and, though I was learning the language fast, I was not able to learn it fast enough."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess%2C_biographies
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Anthony Burgess, biographies
73 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Anthony Burgess, biographies →
Related Quotes
"I was not really anything [at university in the late 1930s] but a renegade Catholic liberal humanist with tendencies …"
"Poor as I was [at one stage of university], however, I still insisted on the Friday night booze-up, with Gaunt and Ma…"
"The few Thailand women I met in northern Malaya called the sexual act kedunkading, with a resonant stress on the last…"
"Dylan Thomas was the one big name [in the literary circles Burgess frequented in wartime London], but George Orwell, …"
"The view of Liverpudlians that they are a race apart is well-founded. There is the unanalysable genetic mixture of a …"
"They [Burgess’s students in foreign languages] just could not understand why one word had to be masculine and another…"
"We landed at London docks [finally returning from service with Army education in Gibraltar], and the first thing we s…"
"There was a writer already working on a novel which should present the ultimate austerity, whose properties he took f…"
"In 1943 there had been the Battle of Bamber Bridge, well remembered, though it never got into the official chronicles…"
"Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now."