(The italicised text in the following article is taken directly rom A VIRGIN IN THE PHILIPPINES.)
What is so noticeable in the Philippines is the positive strength of the family. It’s uplifting and I only hope that this will continue. Let me here just introduce you a few of my family’s members.
In February 2011 I wrote the following:
Our house is built on the site of the chicken farm that Fay's father owned. Beyond, further away from the road is Diko's bungalow and Diche, Fay's elder sister, lives in a neighbouring house which she shares with her son, Eddie and his wife Ellen and their married son Eugene and his family. It's all so complicated, these family arrangements. But it only emphasises the strength of the family. No nursing homes here. The Filipinos would not want them.
Eddie who is in his mid-fifties is a slim, rather handsome chap, though he has a slightly sad look about him sometimes. He is always like that, Fay says. He is not miserable: it's just the way his face falls. I cannot help but think of him as Morose Eddie.
So Eddie is Fay’s nephew and so he calls me ‘Uncle’ as do Rody and Lito, both of them 60 year olds married to Eddie’s sisters. They are therefore Fay’s nephews by marriage. (I know it’s complicated but I need to straighten things out.]
Last night, we had a quiet drink, four or five of us, all males, at Morose Eddie's place. We just sat in the yard and nattered and sang. We touched on the subject of the sacred bond of marriage and the restraining bonds of matrimony and mused - at least Rody and Lito and I mused - on the setting up of an Escape Committee, a forum where we might discuss plans of how we three might get away just for a night or two. Sounds good but it'll never happen. Usual married men and their imaginations kind of stuff.
I later appointed myself Life President of the Escape Committee. And we eventually get away. At least Rody and I persuaded our wives that it would give them a rest, a well earned break, if we were to go off. I inserted the next passage into the narrative this January
[In January 2012 Rody and I got away to Subic Bay for a couple of nights: Lito didn't make it. Nevertheless, we had two very good days, seeing much of the countryside. We visited Corregidor and the National Museum on Mount Samat where the Death March of thousands of Filipino and American POWs is commemorated.
The only irritation came when at the XYZ Hotel at Subic we were found not to be acceptable as guests.
'It is company policy, po,' we are told.' Two gentlemen may not share a bedroom.'
Rody is 65 and I'm nearly twenty years older. It's ridiculous.
'This gentleman's wife is my wife's niece,' I say. 'He is my nephew.'
'And this gentleman's wife is my wife's auntie,' Rody says. 'He is my uncle.'
But I think what clinched it was the common Filipino difficulty with the personal pronoun. No matter how fluent they are Filipinos occasionally get their personal pronouns in a twist. So it may be that Rody's twice referring to me as 'she' told against us.
And maybe my wearing the pink polo shirt didn't help.]
When I reflect upon it this was no more than a minor inconvenience and I can understand, though I cannot support, the hotel’s point of view in this instance. Sitting in the bar of this hotel some months earlier I had been moved to record my thoughts because it did suggest a certain inconsistency in their policy.
I notice a number of English-speaking men here, men of middle age, the type who wear loose vests, ill fitting shorts and who have beer bellies and white flabby arms. Several have Oriental ladies, some are possibly married for they have children with them. Others seem to be accompanied by less permanent companions, not that I am being judgemental. I'm just creating a picture of some of the clientele because what's the point of going to a hotel if not to try to weigh up your fellow guests?
To give you a savour of what I mean – and they are not great in number, these types – here's a couple of examples. Last night, when we had our first meal here, there was a rather loud Australian, a sixty-year old I’d say, wearing khaki culottes to complement his over-long white vest and his bushy armpits. He had an unlikely-to-be-legal-possibly-under-age female companion in tow. His voice rasped across the restaurant as though he was herding cattle. She actually was a pretty little thing and it seemed sad that she should end up in such an old boor's company.
And as I write this in late afternoon, there’s a beachcomber manqué with a tangled beard, sitting over at the bar with a sultry child-woman with a rose tattooed on her leg. There are also two-shaven headed sixty-year-olds who get up from their seats in the bar and walk over to the lobby where two young women are waiting for them. The women are carrying cases and look from the paint and powder as if they're a newly arrived express shipment straight from Manila. Of course, I may be entirely fanciful in my summing-up and very unfair on all of these fellows who may in truth be men of the cloth meeting their god-daughters home from boarding school.
Okay, I am unreasonable in my assumptions.
