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A LIFE AT THE EMPIRE'S END

Author:    H.D.S. GREENWAY Date: December 6, 2002 Page: A31 Section: Op-Ed

PETER SIMMS, JOURNALIST, ADVENTURER, SPY, AND FRIEND, DIED LAST WEEK IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE. HE WAS ONE OF THOSE LARGER-THAN-LIFE ENGLISHMEN WHO IN A PREVIOUS GENERATION WOULD HAVE BEEN RUNNING AN EMPIRE INSTEAD OF RECORDING ITS DECLINE. I FIRST MET HIM OUT EAST SOME 35 YEARS AGO, WHEN THE INDOCHINA WARS WERE STILL RAGING AND THE AMERICANS WERE TRYING THEIR HAND AT KEEPING OLD EMPIRES AFLOAT THAT THE EUROPEANS HAD LONG SINCE ABANDONED.

He was a big man, well over 6 foot 4, and broad, with a laugh like a rolling artillery barrage that you could hear across any crowded bar in Southeast Asia. "Supaahh," he would say in his 1940s slang.

We were colleagues in Time magazine's Bangkok office, and Peter seemed to know everybody and everything between Burma and the China seas. Sometimes I thought of him as Fowler in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," the cynical old British journalist whose face had seen a thousand betrayals and compromises. At other times he reminded me of Conrad's Lord Jim, idealistic and vulnerable, perhaps trying to redeem, if not himself, then the white race for its sins east of Suez. I wasn't the only one to see him as a character out of fiction. He later became the model for John le Carre's "The Honorable Schoolboy," in which his wide gestures and mannerisms were so accurately portrayed, as was his role in British intelligence, with which le Carre took only a little literary license. It wasn't until many years later that I discovered that connection, which was an irony for me because a Time magazine colleague in my previous posting, Saigon, later turned out to have been a spy for the North Vietnamese.

Peter began his romance with Asia in the Bombay Sappers and Miners in World War II India. At Cambridge he studied Sanskrit, and at Cambridge he met his future wife, Sanda, a princess from the Shan States of Burma, a dreamy land of enchanted lakes on which Sanda's family had floated about in a ceremonial boat the shape of a golden bird. Her father, Sao Shwe Thaik, the hereditary Sawbwa of Yawnghwe, became the first president of independent Burma. Along the way Peter became a Buddhist, and he and Sanda were married in Bangkok. They spent half a year in the mid-1950s walking all over northern Laos in those last, lost years before war overcame that fabled land.

The Simmses went on to live in Rangoon, where Peter taught at the university. In 1962 his father-in-law was overthrown in a military coup, and the Simmses, like democracy, left Burma never to return.

In later life he gave up journalism to join the intelligence branch of the Hong Kong police when Hong Kong was still a British colony. Then he was hired by the Sultan of Oman, who surrounded himself with expatriate Brits to help him run his Scheherazade-like Arabian land. It was as if the British Empire had been boiled down to the last drop, and there in the bottom of the cup you would find Peter. In a typical Simmsian gesture, he and Sanda drove home to England from Oman when his tour was over, across the Empty Quarter of Arabia in his beloved Land Rover.

Peter retired to England and then France, and when his physical health began to fade he kept on writing - most notably a history, "The Kingdoms of Laos," with Sanda - and when he died he was working on a book on how to read Proust.

I saw him for the last time last month in his home above Napoule. He was reduced to shuffling with a walker, his health failing fast, but I will always think of him in our journalistic days in Asia, in our years of living dangerously, in that last twilight time before the old Indochina disappeared forever. As was said of Lord Jim, he was "one of us."

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.