1. Pearl of the Orient
The first I ever heard of the Philippines was from my grandad. I was six, he was sixty. I was surprised how warmly he spoke of the place. He wasn’t known for his warmth.
‘Took shore leave in Manila with the navy. Back in ’41. We were well looked after. Bloody modern as you like. Elevators that went whoosh. Also rather pretty. Palm trees, mangoes, that sort of thing.’
Grandad always spoke in these telegram-like sentences, as if giving orders. While he talked, he’d scratch at his cropped white hair, bold and bright as the target spots of the searchlights he used on HMS Formidable to bamboozle kamikazes.
He showed me black and white pictures of Manila and told me how it had been beautified by the American architect Daniel Burnham. According to Burnham’s plans, the US colonial authorities widened the tangled streets into acacia-shaded boulevards, dredged the inner city estuaries and grew gardens between handsome villas with capiz (oyster shell) windows. Grandad claimed Manila was cleaner and greener than British cities of the time.
For an officer of the Royal Navy, Manila’s pleasures were varied and affordable. Grandad frequented the Manila Hotel, another Burnham brainchild. Surrounded by its own custom-built park, this 500-room Art Deco spectacle had champagne suites, string quartets and celebrity guests. One evening, Grandad spotted the imposing bulk and moustache of Mr Ernest Hemingway holding hands with an attractive blonde woman, but was too shy to approach them. Grandad’s memory was probably correct – later I found out that, in February 1941, Hemingway flew into Manila with his then wife Martha Gellhorn, the notable war correspondent, en route to Beijing to report on the Sino-Japanese War.
Grandad showed me the silk suits he’d bought from Chinese-Filipino tailors in Intramuros, the walled city built in the late sixteenth century by the Spanish colonizers of the Philippines. He told of lazy afternoons at a café famed for its bibingka (rice cakes) that took hours to prepare, and of long nights on the azoteas of colonial bars filling his belly with ice-cold tuba (coconut wine) and his pipe with fine local tobacco.
The Army and Navy Club in Luneta Park was the place to go for poker, pink gins and beautiful women. Grandad said he resisted the latter temptation.