WAN A. HULAIMI:
The travels of Uncle Salim

2009/11/08

WAN A. HULAIMI

OUR Uncle Salim was a man of many parts and much travel.

As a young man he travelled down to Singapore and was in a queue for what he thought was landlubber's work until he found himself on a foreign ship and was immediately shanghaied to a distant port.

I first heard of Uncle Salim at a fortuitous time when we were looking at pictures in our primary schoolbooks, of Old Lob in his English farm with the grumpy billy goat and Willy the Pig and Dobbins the Horse working close to Percy the Bad Chick.

In another corner in yet another of our schoolbooks sat Little Miss Muffet on a tuffet, profile bedimmed in the soft wintry light, and eating something called curds and whey.

We had an uncle -- gasps of disbelief -- who was now probably sitting on his tuffet in the land of Old Lob.

This was England that was as remote to us as Oxo cubes, where fish and chips were vinegared and wrapped in the News of the World and ships were sailing into Tilbury docks, and the voices of foreign sailors were abuzz on Liverpool's shores where many of their children and grandchildren now still live.

We heard that Uncle Salim painted houses to earn his keep.

When I came to England in the 1980s I sought and found Uncle Salim (well, he actually came to us). I asked him about the day he was "press-ganged" into a ship that weighed anchor at a Singapore port, where it sailed to, and if he had any regrets. No, he said.

Soon after he found himself in Liverpool he sailed again with the Blue Funnel to many parts of the Earth, and on Blighty soil not only had he painted houses but he had also done many odd jobs before he finally decided to move down south to London.

London was changing even as we spoke, with the docklands buried deep under the rubble of its past and the concrete piles of rising towers of the Thatcher years.

When Uncle Salim met the Brits for the first time, they were still beef tea-drinking people living on rationed chocolates, and it was still possible to bar Irishmen from British hostelries, and to turn away coloured citizens of the empire from the Bed and Breakfasts of the land.

When he spoke of his journey down from Liverpool to London I thought of De Quincey, the English Opium Eater, rushing downstairs with thought disrupted, to see there in his kitchen an itinerant Malay standing before his terrified maid.

A stray sailor, thought De Quincey, while racking his brains for a language that could have been close to Malay. So he quoted lines from the Iliad to the man for whom it must have all been well, Greek.

It struck me as odd that there was a touch of De Quincey too in the way that Uncle Salim had made himself known to us.

It was while sitting in reverie in a flat that once belonged to this newspaper (for reasons that I shall not go into) that I heard loud conversation coming from the front door.

Rushing out, I saw my wife standing before two strangers, one proffering a box of fish, and another a box of crabs still living and pincer-waving at us in reproach.

That was how I met, for the first time, my Uncle Salim and his ex-sailor friend Pak Ismail.

They'd heard of us, they said, from members of the club of Malaysian ex-seafarers in East London close to where they lived and close to the Billingsgate fish market where they'd been to at daybreak.

That was the East where Uncle Salim had painted houses in days of penury; now he and his friend Ismail were workers in the Ford motor assembly plant, but these were days when England still had its motor works.

I noted that Uncle Salim's Malay was still very Terengganu and his English was a mix of Malayan make-do and the Mockney of London's East.

Close to 30 years ago this must have been. Not long after that Uncle Salim decided to go back to Malaysia with his life's earnings, to Terengganu, his fourth move in life after Liverpool, London and Singapore.

After a long bachelor's life he found a wife in the East Coast, and soon after that he died and was buried in Terengganu's earth.

I was thinking of Uncle Salim the other day while trudging through parts of East London in search of ideas for a book.

I noted how London had changed further in the intervening years since I met Uncle Salim, and how the East -- his East -- is no longer bleak but is filled now with glass towers, and where sailors and stevedores used to work in the docks, there are now bankers and brokers in their balconied flats looking down at the river boats.

Even Liverpool now is a European City where ghostly ships float not in the water but in the high seas of its past.

Veteran London-based writer and journalist Wan A. Hulaimi is also known as "Awang Goneng", author of Growing Up in Trengganu. He can be reached at elsewhere@columnist.com

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