Autobiographers From The United Kingdom

"It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East."

"I was only the returned Oriental eccentric, drunk at that…"

"Ted, I noted, was very busy - at the pumps, at the glasses behind, the bottles below, the merrily ringing till, like a percussion-player in some modern work who dashes with confidence from xylophone to glockenspiel to triangle to wind-machine to big drum to tambourine."

"I had a sudden longing, like a pain, for the hot smelly East, and remembered that Everett had said something about an Indian restaurant. I asked the barman, a hot-haired Irishman, and he asked one of the business-men (who, I saw now, was a Pakistani) and then was able to tell me that the Calicut Restaurant was on Egg Street, by the Poultry Market. I went there and ate insipid dahl, tough chicken, greasy pappadams, and rice that had congealed to a pudding. The décor was depressing – brown oily wallpaper, a calendar with a Bengali pin-up (buff, deliriously plump, about thirty-eight) – and it was evident that the few Indian students were eating the special curry prepared for the staff. The manager was from Pondicherry : he caled me ‘monsieur’ and was not impressed by my complaints. At least one of the waiters was from Jamaica. I went out angry and, at a pub where the landlady sniffed in curlers, drank brandy till closing-time."

"…a man who sold meat but knew nothing of the poetry of the slaughterhouse…. Ted Arden was no ice-cream butcher."

"She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated."

"…of course, keep-fit people are no good in bed…"

"…when I went out I tried to push the door instead of pulling it. 'Pull it, mate,' said someone, and I had to obey. I nearly tripped over a footscraper and, the door closed, had the impression of loud laughter. The vile blunt-razor-blade wind blew hard from my sister’s house. I felt ashamed and furious. In the East there was politeness, doors opened the right way, there were no footscrapers."

"I know little about the women of my own race..."

"He seemed to lose interest in the subject of his daughter, glooming at a yellow card of ancient railway regulations on the wall. But when the harbingers of the coming train were audible – porters trundling, a scrambled gabble from the station announcer, frantic blowing on hot tea – he became eager again and was out swiftly on to the platform. I followed him. The train slid in. I saw the driver look down disdainful from his cosy hell, sharing – like soldier and auxiliary – a mystique with the tea-room woman. Passengers, disillusioned with arrival, got out greyly amid grey steam; passengers, hungry for the illusion of getting somewhere, jostled their way on."

"'They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.'"

"‘We might as well have a cup of tea,’ he said, and we noisily marched over the hollow boards of the glass-covered bridge, down the stairs to Platform Four. We entered the filthy Gothic tea-room and Everett ordered. The serving-woman served us with tired distain; she treated her customers like a dull and endless film that could only, with order and money, make a very rare stereoscopic contact with her real though duller world. Everett took me to a table and began to talk sadly but eagerly."

"…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles."

"Mr Liversedge...saw the whole ridiculous Oriental susah in true proportion. Here men would murder for five dollars, here men would seek divorce because their wives sighed at the handsomeness of the film star P.Ramlee....nodding at the lucid exposition of Mr Lim from Penang, though contemning inwardly the Pommie accent..."

"‘Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves....We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilized temperate climate.’"

"an Australian….They have suffered under the yoke of the English…"

"‘it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts’"

"...the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory."

"“...I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist.”"

"...the dark brought out the prostitutes, Malay divorcees mostly, quietly moving from light to light, gaudy and graceful, like other of night’s creatures."

"...the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world...."

"There was a certain creative excitement, expressed in glandular constrictions which he knew well."

"…the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose"

"She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief."

"“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”"

"‘I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.’"

"Lim Cheng Po, Anglican, Royalist, cricketer, respectable husband and father, allowed his animal reflexes out for an avenue walk on the lead."

"“…And the rising sun shall rise yet higher, destroying with its flaming fire the evil will of the wicked West, but smiling warmly on the rest”"

"...even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference."

"Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life."

"…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…"

"Him they would not harm, Englishmen being, though infidel, yet the race of past District Officers, judges, doctors, men perhaps, in their time, more helpful than otherwise, powerful but mild."

"...the eyes, black, were all East - houris, harems, beds scented with Biblical spices; nose and lips were pan-Mediterranean. Her body...was that of the Shulamite and Italian film stars. The décolletage, with its promise of round, brown, infinitely smooth, vertiginous sensual treasure, was a torment to the blood....Many had promised marriage, but all had gone home, the promise unfulfilled....quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure."

"Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile."

"Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold."

"I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women."

"…English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has."

"My dear Hardman, It was pleasant... I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and for the East to dominate the West."

"…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…"

"He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense."

"Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all."

"In China he had spoken good Mandarin, and in ten years this had become his first tongue. Here he found himself with a parish of Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and a few English people whose language he could hardly talk. His French, severed from its sources of nourishment, grown coarse through lack of use, halted and wavered, searching for the right word which Mandarin was always ready to supply."

"He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them."

"‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’"

"…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…"

"...he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips."

"...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law..."

"'East? They wouldn’t know the bloody East if they saw it. Not if you was to hand it to them on a plate would they know it was the East. That’s where the East is, there.' He waved his hand wildly into the black night. 'Out there, west. You wasn’t there, so you wouldn’t know. Now I was. Palestine Police from the end of the war till we packed up. That was the East. You was in India, and that’s not the East any more than this is. So you know nothing about it either. So you needn’t be talking.'"

"She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden."

"Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy."