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By Root 2657 0

where it bulges and curves beneath the Fullerton Building, back along its many twists and turns, between sampans and barges so tightly packed that in places there is scarcely a channel wide enough for the flow of water-traffic, back almost as far as The Great World, then you will see an unusually handsome godown on the right bank, taller than any of the other godowns that line the river at that point, taller than any building of any kind for some distance and made taller by the familiar sign on its roof: Blackett and Webb Limited, painted white for the jubilee … Or rather, you would have seen it in those days, for now it no longer exists. The place where it once stood is now dominated by several many-storey apartment buildings where the resettled inhabitants of former Chinese slums now live, and even The Great World itself is mostly shuttered and empty, trembling on the very brink of no longer existing: its fortune-tellers, quacks and ronggeng dancers, its Chinese actors and mounte-banks, its brewers of monkey-soup and sellers of fruit, its pimps and soldiers and whores, have all been dumped in the dustbin of history and the lid clapped firmly on top of them. Their place has been taken by prosperous-looking workers from the electronic factories out for an evening stroll with their children, by a party of polite Japanese tourists with cameras who have strayed here by mistake, and by the author of this book writing busily in a small red notebook and scratching his knuckles where some lonely, last-remaining mosquito (for even they have mostly departed or been done away with), ignoring his dignified appearance, has not hesitated to bite him as he scribbles.

This particular godown was the one to which Walter had taken Joan to propose that she should marry Matthew (how far off that seemed now!): it was the oldest, the biggest, Walter’s favourite, the replica of that first warehouse in Rangoon which, in happier times, he had been so pleased to point out to visitors when he was showing them the paintings that hung in his drawing-room. To that first godown in Rangoon who knows what happened? No doubt it was knocked down, or fell down, or a fine offer was made for it, or perhaps it was even turned into a cinema. Walter did not know. But he was glad that this one still existed. For Walter had learned something important from his life in commerce: that business is not simply a matter of making profits.

A successful and respectable business, on the contrary, is deeply embedded in the life of its time and place. A respectable business supports the prevalent beliefs of the society of which it is a part. If society at large considers it immoral for a woman to smoke a cigarette in the street or for a man to wear a hat at his dining-table, then you will certainly not find Blackett and Webb countenancing such behaviour in their staff. Not only at Blackett and Webb but at every other business of standing in Singapore the clerical staff, despite the temperature, were expected to wear white suits and black ties. Even the better Asiatic houses followed this custom. Respectability is important in business because it generates more and better custom: it means you will pay your debts and deliver the goods, resisting the temptation to make a bolt for the hills. Better business in turn generates more respectability. But in order to be respectable you do have to know what society approves of. Provided you know that, then there is no problem: your business can play its full part in the community. It is only at a time like the present when it is hard to be sure what society at large believes, or if it believes anything at all, that a businessman grows baffled and uneasy and perhaps with a shrug of his shoulders gives it up and limits himself to a dogged pursuit of his profits.

Walter certainly had not reached that stage; witness the effort and expense he had consecrated to his jubilee celebrations. But already, it seemed to him, Blackett and Webb was beginning to stand out as an oasis of old-fashioned virtues in a desert of less scrupulous businesses.