“There is nowhere in this place where one can break into a canter, except on the golf course, and that might not be popular with the golfers.

Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 69

This huge carpet of green, largely untouched and very ancient, was inhabited by native people and mammals like the tiger, wild pig, and tapir. As the motorist negotiated the road’s corkscrew bends, he saw, growing beyond the verges, tall trees with wide leaves and a mass of vinelike creepers hanging from their branches. Angus’s destination was The Smoke House Inn situated high in the hills near the village of Tanah Rata.

Opening for Christmas 1937, the hotel was small and exclusive with, initially, only six guest rooms. It was the brainchild of William Warin, “managing director of the biggest firm of advertising agents in Malaya”, explained Angus in his letter. The Smoke House, constructed in a mock-Tudor style, was one of the first permanent buildings erected in the hill station.

Warin was clever – “he ran the place more or less as a hobby” – and knew how to make expatriates feel at home. An early advertisement claimed the inn was a place that Europeans in Malaya “have yearned for ever since they left the homely shores of Britain”. Combining “architectural beauty, modern fixtures and a crazy-paved garden,” it was “the first of its kind in the Far East”.

Decoration

At last Angus could feel cool. “They have fires in the evening and sometimes in the middle of the day as well and I have two blankets on my bed.”

The food was good and, as advertised, there was “roast beef of Old England as only Old England knows it”. The beds were comfortable and the bath water hot. It was Warin’s decor that Angus found overwhelming.

Homesick he may have been but he failed to fall for the overstated decoration. “The general style of the architecture is ‘olde worlde’ as is also the furniture,” he says.

“You know the sort of thing – open fireplaces with warming pans hung about the place and a spinning wheel by the side of the fireplace. It is all very well done but myself I think there is a little bit too much of the olde worlde stuff”.

The Smoke House was a ragbag of ‘let’s pretend’ and more like a stage set than a hostelry. Its decor owed much to cliche: pictures of the Charge of the Light Brigade, the death scene of Horatio Nelson, scenes of foxhounds in full cry, cricketers on the village green and ladies in crinolines; also chintzcovered armchairs and sofas, a grandfather clock, and horse brasses pinned to the wall.

Angus gave the garden the thumbs up – “it is exactly like an English garden, say in Surrey, with roses and all the usual sorts of flowers that grow at home, all complete with crazy pavements, sundials and a particularly bogus well, which on close examination proves not to be a well at all!”

This bogusness pervaded Angus’s experience here, making his last leave not entirely satisfactory. He played golf on the Highlands’ nine-hole course close to the hotel but, because he had not played for over 15 months, his game was ‘very painful indeed.’ Apart from his rusty playing, his golf balls kept disappearing.

Exercise

“One expects to lose them when one hits them into the rough, as I frequently do,” he writes, “but on this course you can quite easily lose a ball in the centre of the fairway, as in many places the ground is damp and peaty and the ball not infrequently sinks right in and you never see it again! Rather expensive!”

Fortunately, there were second-hand balls on offer at 10 cents each. ‘These are the ones that people like me hit into the rough and which the caddies collect in their spare time and sell to the caddy master.”

Up in the Cameron Highlands, he wished to take exercise and see the countryside. “When one does so, one is disappointed as there is no view at all on account of the jungle.

“Even with paths cut through the undergrowth, there is no view worth speaking of, so I could get no photographs except for snaps of the hotel, its garden and dogs.”

Nor did Angus have much luck at riding, although there were horses for hire and he’d packed his riding breeches. “I thought it might be rather fun to have a ride, as I have not ridden at all since I arrived in Malaya. But I find that there is literally nowhere in this place where one can break into a canter, except on the golf course, and that might not be very popular with the golfers.”

Perhaps his complaints of the “impenetrable jungle” and having to “cut through the undergrowth” are associated with the tough training he underwent in Johore and on Singapore Island.

By this time, he’d had enough experience of the Malayan hinterland to be wary of it, with its parasites, poisonous snakes and difficulties in navigation.

Had my uncle been a botanist or, like his mother and aunts, interested in gardening and plants, he would have been happier.

If he’d climbed a further 2,000 feet he would have found himself in the clouds, close to tall trees that allowed creepers with flame-red blooms or purple convolvulus-like flowers to encircle their trunks.

He would have seen wild bananas, the tough wide leaves used for clothing by the native Orang Asli who today sell honey at the roadside.

Here he’d have seen virgin forest, trees with huge canopies, palms, ferns, lichens and other genera that produce medicinal plants, while the bamboos, if cut correctly, provide water for a person’s survival.

Renowned

Seventy years on, The Smoke House still thrives. Indeed the building has been extended so that it has 16 rooms or suites, each with a quintessential English name such as Squire, Fairhaven, Ambleside, Gwenlaura, Hazelwell, Hermitage, Spencer and Croft.

The Smoke House was so renowned that for years it appeared on all Ordnance Survey maps of the region. It is now an attraction for Malaysian families who choose to take tea at the inn while they relax to the gentle strains of canned Mozart, or stay for dinner to feast on large steaks and bombe Alaska.

The inn retains its ‘olde worlde’ atmosphere and some of the original furniture, like the grandfather clock in reception.

Although, six months after Angus’s visit, the Japanese took over the hotel and used it as an officers’ mess, the invaders preserved the Warins’ effects. “The Japanese destroyed people, not property,” said William Warin’s son, Tony who, on the eve of the invasion, escaped with his mother to Australia to spend the war years there.

More tomorrow