What is my real claim to fame? I was a choirboy at St. Mary’s Oatlands where Julie Andrews was married. Her husband was someone called Walton which confused everyone as Walton was also the name of the town next door but the whole village turned out. I was disappointed that none of us got any cake.
Nigel Barley
Favourite animal? I have lived in Africa and Asia but nothing can compare to cats, cool, rational creatures that permit only a limited and negotiated intimacy. Our best cat simply turned up one day and scratched at the door, walked all round the house, decided we’d do and moved in. He stayed till he was nineteen.
Favourite museum? British Museum. I used to work there and looked after the collection made by Stamford Raffles when the British invaded and ruled Java between 1811 and 1816. I once wrote a history of the museum as seen through the eyes of that cat.
Favourite country? Definitely Indonesia. The best food, nicest people and finest scenery anywhere. Several of my books deal with the Western engagement with the country, the latest being ‘Snow Over Surabaya’ about Muriel Stuart Walker, a Scottish schoolgirl who ended up a heroine of the Indonesian Revolution, unknown here, but still studied in schools there.
Favourite book? Anthony Burgess’s ‘Earthly Powers’. Burgess spent many years in SE Asia and it left its mark on everything he did. He wrote beautiful sentences.
Favourite programme? The sitcom ‘Frasier’ – superbly cast, scripted and acted. Luckily, it is always being rerun somewhere. I wouldn’t want to start my day without it. I love the way it shows the self-blindness of so-called experts.
Oddest experience? Probably working with witchdoctors. As an anthropologist in Africa, I spent a lot of time with a man who lived up a mountain and controlled the rain. When I was ill In Singapore, my in-laws insisted I go to a fashionable female healer in Malaysia. She said I had been bewitched and described, as the guilty party, one of my female colleagues with tremendous accuracy. Would I like her to be killed? Maybe later.
Guilty pleasure? Cream cakes. When I had to give Muriel Stuart Walker a vice, I gave her gluttony, especially a passion for cream cakes. Writers often use their productions as a channel of secret confession/ therapy. It’s what makes lit. crit. interesting. I once wrote the line – somewhere-, ‘It’s only cake and birdsong that justify the universe’. It’s still my profoundest philosophical statement.
Worst moment? Nearly drowning as a student when I fell in the river and struggled to the surface only to see everyone laughing and unaware that I was dying. I still regularly have the nightmare to go with it.
Recent disappointment? Coffee luwak – the amazingly expensive one, beloved of gourmets, where the beans are fed through the digestive system of civet cats. It just tasted like rather poor coffee. When I remarked on it to an Indonesian friend he explained, ‘Nowadays they cheat. It’s the plantation workers who swallow the beans’.
