The Casuarina Tree by Somerset Maugham – Take the Long Way Home

The Casaurina Tree is a collection of Somerset Maugham short stories, published in 1926. They are all set in the 1920s, amongst the British community of what was then the Federated Malay States.

These stories are from a different time, when, particularly in British terms, the world was bigger. I wasn’t very well when I read them, not getting around much. This made it all the more pleasurable to find myself taking long sea voyages, to places where London newspapers are always six weeks out of date. And yet, ironically, the personalities inhabiting these stories have a characteristically small outlook, which strives to never leave England.

I think my favourite story was The Outstation. This little gem was about Mr Warburton, a peripheral member of an old English family, who in his youth frittered away an inheritance, keeping up appearances in card games, and making loans to hard up noblemen, knowing it was bad form to expect the money back. Accepting his losses like a good sport, and not having ever had a proper job, he decides to disappear into colonial administration. By the 1920s Warburton is sitting in his remote outstation in Malaya, fondly recalling a lost aristocratic England, and having to deal with Mr Cooper, who arrives to assist in the station’s duties. Cooper is a man who lacks refinement, but does his job well, a representative of brash, modern meritocracy.

And then we get the really interesting part. Cooper is harsh with his Malay staff. Warburton advises more respect. Things do not go well when Cooper ignores him. In this section of the story we see that Warburton has come to love Malaya and its people because Malay society is old, with long established family lines and traditions. It is actually similar to old, aristocratic, pre-First World War Britain in that respect. Warburton has gone to Malaya, and in doing so, he unexpectedly comes home. The story was a moving combination of leaving and homecoming, loss and recovery.

All the stories revolve around this sort of contradiction, with perhaps The Outstation, for me anyway, as the definitive expression of the theme. The stories are about a specific community, wider changes in British society and identity in the 1920s, and finally, meditations on the contradictory human desire to seek both change and familiarity.