Part Five
53
AIR-RAIDS: TWO POINTS FOR THE PUBLIC
1 You must not crowd to the place where a bomb has dropped. The enemy may come back and machine-gun you. Moreover, crowds interfere with the Passive Defence Services.
2 In air-raids people are sometimes suffocated by dust and plaster. You can lessen this danger by covering your mouth and nose with a wet handkerchief.
In the past few days the Major, assisted by Matthew, Dupigny, Nigel Langfield and such of the other volunteer firemen who were at hand, had made an effort to convert the Mayfair into a more efficient fire station. Matthew’s former office had become a dormitory where those on night-duty might rest between calls: half a dozen charpoys had been put against the walls and an extra fan installed. The room next to it, meanwhile, had been converted into a watch-room where the. Major presided over the telephone and maps of Singapore. There was no way of protecting such a building adequately against bombs: constructed of wood on brick piles even the blast from a near miss would be likely to demolish it. Nevertheless, the two rooms most in use had been protected with an outer layer of sandbags while work on an air-raid shelter of sorts had begun in the compound where the ground rose conveniently in a slope up to the road at the rear. Into this slope a trench was dug, just long enough to accommodate the estimated maximum number of people likely to be found at the Mayfair at any one moment; it was then roofed over with timber and corrugated-iron sheets which the Major, without consulting Walter, commandeered from the construction of the floats in the nutmeg grove.
As the days went by, however, the shelter had to be dug further and further into the slope, on account of the Mayfair’s steadily increasing population of volunteer firemen, of refugees from up-country who could find no other lodging, and of transients of one kind and another. Among the new arrivals in the early days of the New Year there were a number who did not stay more than a night, military people en route from one posting to another and very often with a bottle of whisky or gin in their trappings, anxious to celebrate a few hours of freedom before plunging back into the struggle. At such times the Mayfair took on a gay, even uproarious atmosphere: the piano was trundled up from the recreation hut, someone was found to hammer away at it and songs were bellowed out into the compound from the verandah where, though it was dark, at least the revellers could get a breath of air. Other people came and went according to a mysterious time-table of their own, sleeping on camp-beds in odd corners or even on the floor, perhaps not speaking to anyone but merely dropping in to use the lavatory, for the Mayfair, though dilapidated in certain respects, had one that flushed, a great luxury in Singapore.
With refugees pouring back in increasing numbers on to Singapore Island you saw new faces wherever you went, and even some people who had already been living in the city had adapted themselves to a new, nomadic sort of life. Thus, one day when the Major returned from the compound where he had been training some new recruits in a ‘dry drill’, he was not particularly surprised to find on the verandah an elderly gentleman who had not been there before. This old fellow, comfortably installed and drinking a cup of tea he had ordered from Cheong, gave no explanation of his presence but he did introduce himself in the course of the conversation. His name was Captain John Brown and he was eighty years of age, he informed the Major in the confident tone of a man accustomed to command. He had spent the greater part of his life in Eastern waters, fool that he was for he hated every inch, every last shoal and channel of ’em … As a result his health was ruined and as for savings, ha! If the Major saw his bank balance he would be astonished, yes, flabbergasted that this was all a man had been able to put by for his old age after sixty-five years at sea. ‘My health has been ruined by the climate out here, Archer, and that’s a fact.’
The Major, inspecting Captain Brown, could not help thinking that he looked remarkably hale, considering his age. He was a wiry little man with unusually large ears. His thin neck and prominent Adam’s apple were encircled by a collar several times too big for them and altogether his physical presence was too slight to explain the air of authority which clung to him. It emerged that the Captain had been living in a hostel for mariners near the docks; the air-raids on the docks had obliged him to leave and push further inland, a mile or two, as far as Tanglin. But he evidently had another billet as well as the Mayfair for after a day or two of holding forth to the young firemen about the hard knocks which life in the East had dealt him and adjudicating any other matters which came up in his presence he disappeared again, picking up his bag and slinging it over his shoulder as if he were a twenty-year-old. For three or four days there was no sign of him, but then the Major passed Cheong hastening towards the verandah with a sandwich and a cup of tea, peremptorily ordered by Captain Brown, and there he was, comfortably installed in his favourite chair once again.
‘How are you, sir?’ asked the Major, pleased to see him back.
‘Very ill,’ retorted the Captain grimly, and for some time held forth fluently on the state of his health, which did not prevent him bolting his sandwich in the meantime. For the better part of a week Captain Brown was in residence and whether he was on the verandah or in the outer office, which now served as the watch-room for the AFS unit, everything grew ship-shape around him; he could not abide slackness or muddle and he had strong opinions on how matters should be conducted. Indeed, if the Major had not at last spoken out bluntly he would have assumed command of the fire-service.
The Human Condition, with an instinct which drew him magnetically to pay homage to the most powerful source of authority within range, invariably installed himself beneath the Captain’s chair whenever he was in residence. ‘I really must have that poor animal destroyed,’ mused the Major. But the Major had a great deal to do without having to deal with dogs as well. Although Captain Brown soon proved to be a considerable help in the administration of the AFS unit, the Major now had the added problem of refugees from the more dangerous parts of Singapore.
One day, for example, when he was going about his business as usual he received an urgent instruction to call on Mr Smith of the Chinese Protectorate. The Major remembered Smith as the rather supercilious young man who had summoned him once before, to warn him of the dangers of Communism and wondered whether he was to be given a further homily on the subject. But this time Smith, with his hair still flickering disconcertingly about his ears and showing no sign of having moved an inch in the weeks that had passed since the Major had last seen him, wanted to know how many vacant rooms there were at the Mayfair Building. The Major had no difficulty in answering that question.
‘None.’ And he explained about his refugees.
‘How many rooms then which are not vacant?’
The Major told him.
‘Excellent. Since these other lodgers you mention are not official evacuees you will be able to turn them out in favour of the girls we are going to send you from the Poh Leung Kuk.’
‘From where?’
‘From the Chinese Girls’ Home.’
‘But that’s impossible. We can’t turn people out when they have nowhere to go!’
‘They’ll find somewhere, Major, don’t worry. Besides, it’s an order. It has nothing to do with me. It’s official, so there you are. Perhaps you’d like to know a little more about them?’ And Smith began to explain that the Poh Leung Kuk was run by a committee of Chinese under the supervision of the Protectorate. There had been such an importing of young girls into the Colony to act as prostitutes, particularly before the brothels had been closed down in 1930, that it had been necessary to find a suitable institution to house them. Girls arriving from China were taken to an inspection depot and only released to genuine relatives or employers. Any employers with dubious credentials were obliged to post a bond for a sum of money that the girl in question would not be disposed of to someone else or made to work as a prostitute. Other girls found themselves in the home as a result of police raids on illicit establishments. Unfortunately, since the Poh Leung Kuk was situated in a vulnerable part of Singapore in buildings near Outram Road (next to the prison on one side and near the Teck Lee Ice Works on the other), it had been found necessary to disperse the inmates where possible. The Major had been specially selected as a man of probity to give temporary shelter to half a dozen of these girls.
‘Oh, and one more thing, Major. You’ll probably find that some, if not all, of your girls are on the “marriage list”. I suppose you don’t know the procedure in that eventuality …’
‘No, I don’t, and frankly …’
‘No need to take that tone here, Major. You don’t seem to realize that there’s a war on and that we must improvise as best we can. Now, about the “marriage list” …’
In due course the Major, accompanied for moral support by Dupigny, had driven over to the Poh Leung Kuk in one of the Blackett and Webb vans to take delivery of the half-dozen girls who had been assigned to the Mayfair. He found himself waiting in a sort of yard aware that from the windows round about him a multitude of eyes were appraising him. After a while, the official to whom he had explained his business returned, saying rather nervously: ‘They’ll be out in a moment, I think.’ He stood in silence for a moment, then said brightly: ‘None of yours have any venereal problems, as far as we know.’ The Major cleared his throat gloomily, but said nothing. ‘Ah, here they come now.’
‘But there were supposed only to be half a dozen. Here there are twice as many!’
‘That was only an estimate …’
‘What d’you think, François? They look well-behaved. Can we manage so many? I suppose they could help Cheong with the cooking and household chores …’ The Major surveyed the row of neatly dressed Chinese girls who had lined up beside the van as if for inspection, each with her little bundle of belongings. They kept their eyes meekly on the ground while the two men discussed what to do. Dupigny, who could see the Major already weakening and who, moreover, was experienced in the ways of civil servants, gave it as his opinion that they should return to the Mayfair and only accept those girls whom the Protectorate succeeded in billeting on them by force.
‘But François, we can’t possibly leave so many of them here! How would we feel if a bomb dropped on this building tonight? We could never forgive ourselves!’
And so, with the back of the van crammed with young women, the Major and Dupigny drove back to the Mayfair. ‘I’m sure they won’t be any trouble, François … what d’you think?’ There was silence from Dupigny and a raised eyebrow. ‘Once we’ve got it sorted out which of them is on the marriage list and which isn’t … I mean, that’s the only real problem.’ Smith had explained that thanks to a shortage of women in the Colony, there was a great demand for brides from the Poh Leung Kuk among the less affluent Chinese who could not afford to find a wife in the usual manner, that is through a go-between, which could involve great expense. A man who wanted a wife, once he had given details of his circumstances, might look over the girls on the list and make his selection. The girl then would accept or reject him on the spot. He would then pay forty dollars for his bride’s trousseau and undergo a medical inspection. And that was that.
‘I shouldn’t think there’ll be many men wanting to get married in the present situation,’ said the Major confidently. ‘I don’t think we need worry about it, François. What d’you think?’ Dupigny smiled but still made no comment. From the back of the van there came one or two smothered giggles.
All the same, there was no question of the Major asking any of the refugees to leave so that he might accommodate the newcomers. He allotted the former Board Room to the girls as a dormitory, asked Cheong to make use of them for kitchen and cleaning duties and, having nominated Captain Brown to deal with any difficulties that might arise, he returned to his other preoccupations, hoping for the best.
And still, as the days went by, more refugees continued to arrive so that soon new arrivals were obliged to camp in the compound. Now the centre of the city was thronged with refugees from up-country, milling about aimlessly all day in the hot streets in the hope of coming across someone they knew who might be able to help them. Many of them were women with small children who had been separated from their menfolk in the upheaval and had no idea of how they could make contact with them again. The Major, gazing at these shattered-looking people, was appalled and angry at the inadequacy of the arrangements which had been made to cope with them. But at this late date, with the administration of the city already in chaos, what was there to be done?
There was, however, one newcomer to the Mayfair whom everyone was pleased to see. Returning early one morning from an exhausting night at the docks, Matthew saw a familiar figure sitting on the verandah chatting with Dupigny. It was Ehrendorf.
‘You’ve got thin, Matthew,’ he said with a smile, getting to his feet. ‘I hardly recognize you.’
‘So have you!’ Matthew was taken aback to see the change that had taken place in his friend’s appearance in the few weeks since he had last seen him. Ehrendorf’s handsome face was deeply lined and shrunk, as if he were suddenly ten years older. His cheekbones stood out sharply and grim little brackets which Matthew had never noticed before now enclosed the corners of his mouth; as he was speaking his eyes kept wandering from Matthew’s face, as if he were trying to estimate, by the sound of the ack-ack batteries, the course of the raid which at that moment was taking place to the south.
Ehrendorf’s voice was firm, however, as he explained that he had been ill with dysentery in Kuala Lumpur. Later he had been to Kuantan on the east coast, then back to Kuala Lumpur to find that it was being evacuated. He had no specific idea of how the campaign was progressing but it was clear that it was going badly. The roads throughout Johore were jammed with reinforcements and supplies going in one direction and refugees going, or attempting to go, in the other. It had taken him many hours to get through the traffic by car to Singapore and there was a danger of the whole line of communication seizing up. It was already a sitting target during daylight hours for Japanese bombers. He had heard one piece of good news, though. Last Tuesday it had rained providentially and a convoy of reinforcements had managed to sneak in, thanks to the bad weather, without being taken to bits by the bombers which now prowled the sea approaches to Singapore. Provided there was some way of getting the new men and equipment into the line quickly enough … Ehrendorf shrugged.
‘I shall probably be going back to the States in a few days if I can get transport.’
‘In the meantime, you can stay here and lend a hand at the pumps.’ Noticing Ehrendorf hesitate he added: ‘You haven’t seen Joan, I suppose? Mrs Blackett and Kate have left for Australia. Joan’s still here, I believe, but I haven’t seen her recently. Come on, grab your kit and I’ll show you the few inches that are your ration of floorboards. We’ll soon make a fireman of you.’
54
LEARN TO DANCE AND DROWN YOUR WORRIES IN CABARETS!
Success guaranteed to anyone after two and a half hours
private coaching at the
Modern Dancing School
5A Ann Siang Hill
(the road is diagonally opposite to the Hindu Temple
of South Bridge Road).
Straits Times, 16 Jan 1942
PROGRAMME FOR SUNDAY, 18 JAN, 1942,
at the Sea View Hotel popular concert
11 a.m. to 1 p.m. by Reller’s band
1 Overture The Beautiful Helena Offenbach 2 Waltz Wine, Women & Song Strauss 3 Fantasia Faust Gounod 4 Selection Showboat Kern 5 Rhapsody Slavonic Rhapsody Friedman 6 Selection No, No, Nanette Youman 7 Medley Somers Scottish Medley Rijf 8 Selection Tommy’s Tunes Pecher Tiffin special Curry served from 12.30–2.30 p.m.
MR SOLOMON R. LANGFIELD,
PEACEFULLY IN HIS SIXTY-THIRD YEAR.
NO FLOWERS PLEASE.
The death was announced today of Mr Solomon Langfield, co-founder of Langfield and Bowser Ltd and a familiar figure in Singapore business circles for many years. Mr Walter Blackett, paying tribute, said that although not the first in the field Mr Langfield’s family firm had made a contribution.
So troubled were the times that for the general public the passing of old Solomon Langfield, who surprisingly had turned out not to be quite as old as everyone had thought, took place with scarcely a murmur. There were none of the official manifestations of grief which had marked old Mr Webb’s departure, for example, none of the letters of regret from the Governor nor the flying of flags at half-mast over buildings frequented by rubber dealers, bankers and merchants. At best a few of his old colleagues from Club or committee found their way to the Blacketts’ residence to pay their last respects and offer condolences to young Nigel Langfield on his bereavement. If there were not even as many of these as one might have hoped, considering the long and devoted service which Solomon Langfield had bestowed unstintingly on the Colony in a number of different fields of endeavour, it was partly because in these troubled times everyone had difficulties of his own. It was partly, too, because some of those who were among the first to make the sad pilgrimage to take leave of their friend, reported back that Walter was inclined to be moody and odd in his behaviour, feigning not to know why they had come and then, when they had explained, giving the impression that their journey had been a waste of time and that they were disturbing his peace unnecessarily for such a trivial matter. However, with a shrug of his shoulders he would direct them to the room where the body had been laid out (refrigerated fortunately) awaiting mortuary attentions.
No doubt Walter’s moody behaviour would have seemed more explicable to the friends of the deceased if they had known the extent of his disappointment over Solomon Langfield’s rejection of the match he had proposed between their respective children. Walter was bitter about this. It had been such a good idea. When you are in a pickle as complicated as that which Walter considered himself to be in, with a partner in your company you cannot depend upon, with a daughter to marry off, and vast stocks of rubber to ship, it could only be expected that the rejection of a single elegant solution to these disparate problems would come as a blow. Add to that old Solomon Langfield’s insulting behaviour and you have enough to make blood bubble in the veins.
A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter’s marriage. Otherwise she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night and get herself fertilized under a bush by God knows whom! Yes, even a sensible daughter will, there’s no trusting them, particularly these days … Or to put it another way, there are no sensible daughters. Not even with a girl like Joan, who had her head screwed on more tightly than most, could you be sure that you would not wake up one morning to find her entangled with some worthless adventurer. Now, although Walter was confident that sooner or later the present difficulties with the Japanese would be overcome and life in Singapore would return to normal, it was increasingly obvious to him that for some time to come the Singapore community would be scattered to the winds. Finding herself in a different environment, in Australia, say, or India, was there not a danger that Joan would lose the sensible perspective she had acquired in Singapore? Yes, there was, and that was why Walter felt he must see Joan married before she left Singapore. The last thing Walter wanted was to find her captivated by some mustachioed flight-lieutenant who happened to catch her fancy because he was serving his country so heroically.
The morning after Langfield had rejected his proposal so impudently Walter had discussed the matter with Joan. ‘The old brute was against the idea,’ he had explained grimly, ‘and even if Nigel was so besotted about you that he was willing to go ahead without the old man’s permission, it still wouldn’t do any good because if I know Solomon he’d just cut off the funds. Then we’d be stuck with Nigel but with none of the Langfield business which would be the worst possible solution.’ Yes, it had begun to seem to Walter that he had left this question of marrying off his daughter until too late. Fate, however, had then taken a hand.
When, in due course, Abdul came to inform Walter, first that Tuan Langfield had not risen for breakfast, then that Tuan Langfield would not be rising again on this earth, Walter had merely said to himself: ‘What a blessed nuisance! Trust that old codger to make a nuisance of himself!’ But presently it did occur to him that provided Solomon had not discussed the matter with his son, his death might not be such a nuisance after all. Joan was inclined to share his opinion.
Walter was astonished to see the effect that the news of his father’s death had on Nigel. The young man seemed positively afflicted to hear of it; he was visibly on the verge of breaking down. Walter inspected him with curiosity, marvelling at the resources of human nature that could inspire, even for such as Solomon Langfield, an affection so deep. But there was the evidence: Nigel sat before him with his head in his hands, overcome. Such grief could only be respected.
Walter gave Joan a nod and a wink and she advanced to place a comforting hand on the young man’s shoulder. Walter himself retired then to brood in his dressing-room. He believed he had thought of a way to bring solace to Nigel in his hour of loss. Thus, later in the morning when Nigel had regained control of himself, Walter summoned him and said: ‘My boy, I know how you must be feeling. I won’t beat about the bush. Your father and I had our ups and downs but we always respected each other. When you get down to it, you know, we were very much alike in many ways. Well, I hesitate to tell you what I’m going to tell you because I know that he did not want you to be influenced in any way. I think that poor Solomon may have had some intimation that the end was not far away because the other evening, while we were chatting together about old times and the fun we’d had as youngsters in this Colony, he happened to say how concerned he was for the future … Yes, to put it in a nutshell he told me that he would not be at all averse to seeing you settle down and start a family. “Well, Walter,” he said to me, “this may come as a surprise to you, considering the ups and downs we’ve had in business matters, but there’s only one young woman I’d like to see him married to and that’s that young woman of yours, Joan.” There it is, Nigel, and I was pretty surprised about it, I must say, but once I’d got to thinking about it, why … Lord, are those the wretched air-raid sirens again?’
‘But Mr Blackett!’ cried Nigel who in the matter of a few seconds had flushed, turned pale and was now flushing again.
‘Dammit! It’s only five to ten. This is becoming too much of a good thing …’
‘I thought my father …’
‘Well, there we are. We’ll talk about it later … but of course, only if you want to. Maybe I’ve been speaking out of turn, maybe I should have kept mum about it: it wasn’t an easy decision for me to bring it up. And mind you, I know he didn’t want you to be influenced in any way and he even told me that if anything he would pretend to take a dim view of such an arrangement just so that … Ah, there go the guns! Damn these air-raids! How can we possibly get anything done? By the sound of the guns they seem to be coming our way … We’d better go to the shelter this time, I think. You go and get Joan and I’ll tell the staff to get under cover …’
There was no time for further discussion. Already the bombs were beginning to fall and the thudding of the anti-aircraft guns matched the thudding of young Nigel’s heart as he dashed upstairs to get Joan and bring her to the shelter which Walter had had dug beside the Orchid Garden. This time, it seemed, the Japanese bombers were not going to be content with an attack on Keppel Harbour or the Naval Base: they were setting to work on the city itself and on Tanglin in particular.
Nearby at the Mayfair those of the Major’s firemen who were awake after their night’s work listened wearily to the sirens. Only when the guns at Bukit Timah opened up did they make a move to take shelter. Here, as almost everywhere else on the island, it was hard to see any distance, except upwards. And so as they struggled out of the building, still red-eyed and bewildered from lack of sleep, they looked upwards … to see a densely packed wave of Japanese bombers flying at a great height and directly over Tanglin. In a moment the leading bomber would fire a burst of machine-gun fire: at this signal all the planes would drop their bombs at the same moment and there would be havoc on the ground. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards from where they stood the light ack-ack battery over the brow of the hill was blazing away quite uselessly, it seemed, for the bombers were flying well out of range.
Now the aeroplanes above, like monstrous insects, began to deposit batches of little black eggs into the sky and a fearful whistling grew in the air around the men fleeing through the flowerbeds. Soon the shelter was crammed and people flung themselves down in any hole or ditch they could find while the Major, wearing a steel helmet, bundled the girls from the Poh Leung Kuk and other latecomers into the recreation hut whose walls had been padded with rubber bales, mattresses and cushions, more as a gesture than anything else. As he did so the first bomb landed in the long-disused swimming pool sending up a great column of water which hung in the air for a moment like a block of green marble before crashing down again. Another bomb landed simultaneously in the road blowing a snowstorm of red tiles off the Mayfair’s roof and out over the compound, and another in the grove of old rubber which lay between the Mayfair and the Blacketts’ house. The last explosion, though some distance from both makeshift shelters, was strong enough to blow in one wall of the recreation hut, hurling those who had been huddled against it back into a jumble of cushions, mattresses and struggling bodies: the roof, too, began to sag and utter piercing cracks. In the deep hush which followed, the telephone could be heard ringing, very faintly, in the empty bungalow. People began to extricate themselves from the jumble on the floor of the recreation hut. Nobody seemed to be badly hurt.
Abruptly there was a roar overhead and everyone ducked. ‘It’s one of the RAF buses!’ someone shouted as a Hurricane vanished over the tree tops. A ragged cheer went up. The telephone was still ringing: it seemed a miracle that the wires had not been brought down in the bombing. The Major ran towards the bungalow to answer it. He had to swing himself up by the verandah rail because the wooden steps had been carried away by the blast from the bomb which had fallen in the road and now sagged in a drunken concertina some yards from the building. As he had expected they were being called to a fire: houses and a timber yard between River Valley Road and the river had been set alight.
Shortly afterwards a strange cavalcade was to be seen setting out from the Mayfair. In the lead came the Major’s Lagonda towing a trailer-pump, followed by Mr Wu’s Buick crammed with passengers. Next came two Blackett and Webb vans commandeered from the nutmeg grove by the Major and it was these which lent the Mayfair unit its air of rather desperate carnival, for there had been no time to unbolt the bizarre wooden super-structure which had been fitted on top of them; besides, it might give added protection from shrapnel. The first van, towing a second, newly acquired trailer-pump, still carried the gigantic facsimilies of red and blue Straits dollar bills, complete with slant-eyed portrait of the King. From the other van eight long arms painted dark brown, light brown, yellow and white, each pair supplied with a papier mâché head, emerged symbolically from the jaws of Poverty; since these arms, which were enormously long and stretched forward over the cabin of the van, were supposed to be reaching for Prosperity, it had been collectively decided that the van displaying the dollar bills should go first. Otherwise, as Dupigny remarked, it might almost look as if dollar bills were chasing the representatives of the four races and that they, arms outstretched, were fleeing in terror.
As they emerged on to Orchard Road they saw for the first time the extent of the havoc caused by the air-raid. A stick of high-explosive bombs had fallen along the upper reaches beginning near the junction with Tanglin Road and neatly distributing themselves, two on one side, three on the other, reducing a number of buildings to rubble, bringing down overhead cables and smashing shop windows so that the pavements of the covered ways glittered with a frosting of glass. The way into Paterson Road was blocked by a number of blazing vehicles which had been hurled across the road by the blast; a lorry lay upside down, its wheels in the air; everywhere people scrabbled desperately in the rubble searching for survivors. A greyish-white cloud of dust muted the blaze of the burning vehicles and turned the people struggling in the road into figures from a winter scene.
The Major continued down Orchard Road hoping to approach River Valley Road from the other direction; he looked back once or twice to make sure that the others were following. Behind the two vans a motor-cycle brought up the rear of the column, carrying Turner, formerly the manager of the Johore estate, but now obliged by military preparations across the Causeway to return to Singapore, and a Chinese friend of Mr Wu’s whose name was Kee, a strong and taciturn individual, extremely courageous.
They had to proceed carefully here, sounding their horns on account of the people, many of them apparently still dazed, some wandering about aimlessly, others laying out the dead and wounded at the side of the road. Once they had to stop while an abandoned vehicle was dragged out of their path; then they came upon an oil-tanker that had collided with a tree but by a miracle had not caught fire. Not far away the Cold Storage had had a near miss and badly shaken shoppers were being helped from the building. Near the vegetable and fruit market next door a block of flats was on fire. A Sikh traffic policeman, still incongruously wearing the basketwork wings that gave him the appearance of a dragon-fly, waved his arms vigorously, trying to direct the Major towards the burning flats. But the Major would not be directed: he had his own fire to go to. As they passed by he saw the policeman sink to his knees and then fold up with his forehead on the sticky tar surface of the road, evidently overcome by shock or concussion: one of his basket wings had been neatly broken in the middle and bent back behind the shoulderblade. A moment later and he had been left behind in the swirling dust and smoke, motionless as a dying insect in the road.
By the time they reached the timber yard two Chinese AFS units were already at work under a detachment from the Central Fire Station but it was clear that there was no chance of saving either the yard itself or the adjoining saw-mills, both of which were well alight. To make matters worse a stiff breeze was blowing from the north-east in the direction of a group of slum tenements standing a little way back from the river: an attempt was being made to arrest the wall of flame advancing towards them.
When the suction hose had been dropped in the river and the delivery hose had been laid out the pumps were started up: the Major and Ehrendorf went ahead with one branch, Mr Wu and Turner with the other. Kee, who was a mechanic, had taken charge of both pumps, assisted by Captain Brown, while Matthew, Cheong, Dupigny and the others ran back and forth as the branches advanced, laying out extra lengths, signalling to the pumps, uncoupling and coupling again, dizzy and breathless with heat. His head spinning, Matthew watched the jets from half a dozen branches curving towards the fire but nevertheless it grew and grew. Flames were now rising over half an acre of piled-up timber and roaring a hundred feet into the air and the water seemed to evaporate before it had time to touch any part of it. Once, when he was accidently splashed by water from another branch on his way to relieve the Major, who was lurching drunkenly and seemed about to fall, Matthew gave an involuntary cry of pain: the water was scalding.
Now the fire, like some inadequately chained-up oriental demon, was roaring and raging on his left, occasionally making sudden darts forward as if to seize him by the leg and drag him back to its lair. Behind him was the river; on his right was a wooden fence and, beyond that, the tenements whose windows he could see were packed with round Chinese heads, like oranges in a box, watching the fire as if it were no concern of theirs. ‘Why doesn’t someone tell them to hop it?’ he shouted at Ehrendorf beside him, but Ehrendorf was too bemused by the heat to reply.
Beside this ocean of flame hours passed in a dream. Every so often the men holding the branch were relieved and led back to splash themselves with the stinking water from the river. Again and again Matthew was scalded with water from another branch, but now he could hardly feel it. One moment he would be drenched from head to foot, the next his clothes would be dry and stiff on his body again.
Suddenly Matthew realized that this fire had a personality of its own. It was not just a fire, in fact, it was a living creature. He tried to explain this to Ehrendorf who was again beside him, holding on like himself to the same struggling branch: he gabbled away laughing at his insight but could not get Ehrendorf to comprehend. But it was so obvious! Not only did this fire have its own delightful fragrance (like sandalwood), it also had a restless and cunning disposition, constantly sending out rivulets of flame like outstretched claws to surround and seize the men fighting it and squeeze them to its fiery heart. But Ehrendorf, on whose forehead a large white blister had appeared, could only shake his head and mumble … meanwhile, the blister grew and presently burst and fluid ran down his face but dried instantly, like a trail of tears on his cheeks. These claws of flame which stretched out from the fire, Matthew noticed, very often overran the lengths of bulging hose that lay between the river and the fire and, presently, on one of his stumbling journeys back and forth, he saw that the canvas skin of the hose had already been eaten so thin by the fire that he could see the water coursing through, as if these were semi-transparent veins pulsing in the direction of the fire to supply it with nourishment. But what they were really trying to do was not to nourish it but to poison it. The fire chuckled and crackled cheerfully at this, and said: ‘You won’t poison me so quickly. You’d better watch out for yourself !’
55
There was something odd about that fire, Matthew found. It hypnotized him. And not only him but everyone else round about. There was another air-raid before the end of the morning, but this time nobody paid it the least attention. The fact that somewhere above the smoke and heat some aeroplanes were dropping bombs seemed, beside that monstrous fire, altogether trivial.
The hours wore on without any appreciable change, except that the heat from the fire seemed to grow more intense. Early in the afternoon another AFS unit arrived and, without a word to anyone, they dropped their hoses into the river and set to work. This new team displayed even greater human variety than the Major’s: if you looked at them closely you could see that it included Indians, Malays, Chinese, Europeans and even an African who spoke only French. But these men had been to another fire and their hands and faces were already so blackened and blistered that it had become difficult to tell them apart. They knew what they were about, though, and positioned their branches so that they could control and repulse the restless claws of fire that continually threatened to encircle the Major’s men.
Matthew now found that he was present at the fire merely in excerpts with long blank intervals in between: one moment he would be holding the branch with someone else and trying to shield himself from the intense heat, the next he would be slumped on the river bank trying to explain to Ehrendorf how simple it would be for human beings to use co-operation instead of self-interest as the basis of all their behaviour. ‘So many people already do!’ he exclaimed, but Ehrendorf, who was not as accustomed to fire-fighting as Matthew, looked too distressed to reply. If you looked at teachers and nurses and all sorts of ordinary people, to whom, incidentally, society granted a rather reluctant and condescending respect, there were already many people whose greatest ambition was the welfare of others! Why should this not be extended to every walk of life? Ah, just you wait a moment, he protested, for Ehrendorf was opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish, I know that you want to say that such people, too, are motivated by self-interest but that they get their satisfaction in a different way. That is merely a psychological quibble! There’s all the difference in the world between someone who gets his satisfaction from helping others instead of helping himself! Can you imagine how tremendous life would be? Look at all these men at the fire: they’d do anything for each other, though some of them don’t even speak the same bloody language! But perhaps Matthew, instead of saying all this, had merely thought it, because when Ehrendorf at last managed to reply, his words did not seem to make any sense.
Ehrendorf, in case he should not survive, was urgently trying to pass on to Matthew his great discovery; Ehrendorf’s Second Law! That everything in human affairs is slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment. It was very important that this should be more widely known …
‘Say it again.’
Ehrendorf did so.
‘What? But it’s not true!’
‘Yes it is, if you think about it.’
‘Well, let me see … Certainly things seem to be getting worse for us in Singapore, but not for the Japanese.’
‘Yes, they are getting worse for the Japanese. It only seems that they’re not. Because things keep happening which don’t do anybody any good!’
‘Yes, but still there are lots of things …’ Before Matthew could finish what he was saying, however, he found himself back at the fire and feeling dreadfully exhausted. He inspected the person beside him, planning to give him a piece of his mind if it turned out to Ehrendorf. It was ridiculous that a man of his intelligence and culture should not be able to see how important it was that a vast, universal change of heart should take place. It was the only answer.
‘You might just as well expect stockbrokers to be ready to die for the Stock Exchange,’ chuckled the fire, trying to grasp his ankle with a fiery talon.
The man standing beside him, however, turned out to be not Ehrendorf but Dupigny. Dupigny’s normally pallid face had been scorched an angry red by the heat and his hair, cut to about the height of a toothbrush where it flourished most stiffly on the back and sides of his head, appeared to be smouldering. He was about to ask for an explanation of Dupigny’s presence when, pausing to blink his sore eyes, he suffered another irritating time slip and was once more holding the branch, but this time with a Chinese on whose face white blisters had risen where the skin covered bone. His face had become unrecognizable but it might have been Kee. Matthew had an urge to finger his own blisters which were becoming extremely painful, but he was afraid that if he removed one hand from the branch he would be too weak to hold it … it would wrestle him to the ground and flail-out his brains.
From the fire there now came a series of dull reports, as of internal organs swelling and exploding. ‘Paint chop!’ howled the Chinese beside him, pointing to the depths of the fire where the skeleton of a fiercely burning hut could still be seen. It dissolved as Matthew watched, shielding his eyes. ‘What about the tenements?’ he asked, unexpectedly finding himself back in reality again. The tenements were still there, certainly, and so was the wooden fence, but the round Chinese heads had departed from the windows. Evidently someone had at last thought of evacuating them, which was just as well because the fire was still lapping in that direction.
Towards the end of the afternoon half a dozen huge cranes which had been towering over the fire in a semi-circle on its south-western fringe began to waver; then, one by one, they slowly buckled, toppling into the fire and sending up great fountains of sparks and burning debris which started fresh fires all around as they fell to earth again; these new fires threatened once more to cut off the men wielding the branches. The Major had become very concerned about the safety of his men and decided on a roll-call: even this was not easy to effect in the dense smoke and ever more intense heat. Finally it was completed. There was one man missing. Nobody had seen Mr Wu since he had been relieved at one of the branches some time earlier: an hour, half an hour? it was impossible to say. But just as they were deciding with dismay that Mr Wu must have been cut off by a subsidiary fire stemming from one of the fallen cranes and consumed, he suddenly reappeared again, as cheerful as ever, together with a lorry loaded with Fraser and Neave’s mineral waters which he had somehow commandeered, hired or hijacked … and not a moment too soon for everyone at the fire was suffering badly from dehydration. The Chinese driver of the lorry, which had evidently been on a delivery round, then volunteered to join the firemen and was promptly enrolled. Next time, the Major reflected, it would be as well to bring food and drink; it had not occurred to him that they might have to spend such a long time away from the Mayfair.
At dusk the fire grew steadily more magnificent. As the sky darkened they became aware that the air was full of drifting sparks which fell around them in a steady golden drizzle which now and again grew more heavy, so that they wondered uneasily whether their clothes might catch fire. Nevertheless, the beauty of this golden rainstorm was such that Matthew was filled with great exhilaration, no longer feeling the sting of sparks on his unprotected face and forearms but gazing about in wonder like a child.
For some time now the fire had ceased to make progress towards the tenements and it was easier in the darkness to spot new advances it tried to make before they had time to become established. But although the fire itself stopped advancing, and even fell back a little, its core in which thousands of tons of logs were being consumed, grew hotter and hotter so that even at a considerable distance it could no longer be faced and the men with the branch could only work for a few minutes at a time. In the gloom it could be seen that the drainpipes on the tenement buildings had begun to glow red-hot, standing out like blood vessels on the dark masses of the buildings. And now the wooden fence spontaneously burst into flame though the fire was nowhere near it: it blazed furiously for a minute or two, then melted away and a rich wine darkness returned.
Some time after midnight Adamson arrived, bringing two more units from another fire at the docks. He made a quick inspection, detailed the new men to hose down the tenement roofs and walls and then, after a word of encouragement to the exhausted men, returned to his own fire at the docks. Not long afterwards it was found that there were two men missing from one of the other AFS units: a frantic search for them began. One was found unconscious not far from the pumps, overcome by the heat and smoke: he was splashed with water from the river and given some lemonade from Mr Wu’s lorry. Towards dawn the other man was found dead on the no man’s land between the fire and the tenements where he had evidently collapsed. His scanty clothing had been burned off his back and his helmet was glowing a dull red. For some hours it was impossible to retrieve his body and when at last this was done and someone made to grasp his arm to lift him on to a stretcher, the arm came away from the shoulder like the wing of an overcooked chicken.
The fire reached its zenith at about five o’clock in the morning and thereafter it became possible to drive it back gradually, a few feet hour after hour: the plan was to contain it and let it burn itself out. Abruptly Matthew realized that it was daylight again: standing so close to the fire he had not noticed the sky growing paler. In the darkness it had been difficult to tell the Mayfair men from the others, but in the daylight it was not much easier, so dirty and unkempt were the figures staggering drunkenly about on the uneven ground. Moreover, by now there was so much hose running between the river and the fire that when it became necessary to put in another length it was a laborious job to discover which hose belonged to the Mayfair and which to other units; the job was made even more difficult by the exhausted state that everyone was in, for by now they had been almost twenty hours at the fire and those who fell down found it hard to get up again. At one point, while engaged in a weary search to trace the correct coupling in the hoses which lay like a bundle of arteries half-buried in sodden wood shavings, Matthew stumbled against a man from one of the other companies lying on the ground. ‘Thanks, mate, I’m OK,’ he said when Matthew tried to help him up. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ He peered up at Matthew, recognizing him. ‘You still all right then?’ It was Evans, the fireman who had told him about Adamson some days earlier.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be OK in a minute,’ Evans repeated. So Matthew went on searching for the hose he wanted. But half an hour later Evans was still lying there.
Presently Matthew, too, stumbled and fell into a pile of wood shavings: they had a pleasantly fresh scent: he lay with his cheek against them and his head spinning. He felt wonderfully contented, however, and despite his weariness, exhilarated by the sense of comradeship with the other men. After a while he made feeble efforts to get to his feet again, but the best he could do was to sit up. He sat there in the wood shavings between the fire and the river, waiting for the strength to move: the fire was quiet now, and in daylight appeared shabby and dull but it still radiated the same stupendous heat. ‘This is the life I should have been living years ago,’ he thought, again experiencing an extraordinary sensation of freedom and fulfilment, ‘instead of which I’ve wasted my time with theories and empty disputes! When the war is over I shall make myself useful to someone.’
Presently Ehrendorf and Dupigny came looking for him and between them got him to his feet. The Mayfair unit was being relieved, they told him. He would do better to sleep in one of the roster beds at the Mayfair. As they left, Evans was still lying exhausted on the ground. Hardly had they passed through the shattered streets to the Mayfair when the sirens began to wail once more. Another raid, heavier even than the one on Tanglin, was just beginning on the crowded shop-houses and tenements of the Beach Road area.
56
An indication of communal co-operation was provided yesterday when Indian passive defence volunteers attended to the casualties in their area … these casualties were mostly Chinese. One of the members of the Indian Youth League, Mr N. M. Marshall, was most helpful in providing a van for the removal of the casualties.
In a certain well-known hotel yesterday a bomb damaged the boys’ quarters but this did not prevent patrons from having their midday meal. They went to the kitchen and helped themselves.
WORKERS, every hour counts in the battle for Singapore. Don’t let the sirens stop your work. The enemy bombers may be miles away. They may never come near you. Carry on till the roof-spotters give the signal to take cover. The fighting men are counting on you. Back them up in the workshops, shipyards and offices. Every hour’s work makes Singapore stronger.
ADVERTISEMENT
Prevent a Blitzkrieg … by White Ants!
The Borneo Company Ltd.
‘DIFFICULT TO TAKE SINGAPORE,’ SAYS JAP.
‘It would be risky to expect that the capture of Singapore will be an easy task to be fulfilled in a short time,’ said the spokesman of the Jap War Ministry in a broadcast speech quoted by Rome radio.
Reuter.
ADVERTISEMENT
Shopping at Robinson’s during alert periods. We had roof spotters on duty throughout alert periods to give final ‘take cover’ alarm when danger is near. Until this warning is given we endeavour to continue normal business. Members of our staff carry on and give shoppers cheerful service. We have shelter facilities and seating accommodation in the basement for all persons who are in the building should the spotters’ give the danger alarm. These arrangements have been made for the protection and convenience of our customers, so you need have no fear regarding shopping arrangements if you are at Robinson’s during an alert period.
Straits Times 21, 22, 23 January 1942
In the course of this last week of January the city underwent a final metamorphosis: the peaceful and prosperous city of Singapore which Walter remembered from his early days had already been eroded by time and change, the way all cities are. But now there came a dreadful acceleration: in the course of a few days and nights many familiar parts of the city were demolished. Bombs fell in Tanglin, interrupting his important conversation with Nigel. They were sprinkled through the grounds of Government House and fell in a dense shower on Beach Road. They peppered the docks and the airfields and Bukit Timah. They fell all around the padang and the Municipal Offices, shattering windows in High Street and Armenian Street beneath Fort Canning Hill, and blowing out one face of the clock in the tower of the Victoria Memorial Theatre where, in years gone by, Walter had so often gone with other parents to watch the children of the European community in Mr Buckley’s Christmas pantomime. ‘What was all this, anyway,’ mused Walter grimly, ‘but the physical evidence of all the more fundamental changes that had taken place in Singapore in the last two decades?’
Walter did not often abandon himself to abstract thought and when he did so it was a sign that he was in a state of depression. He found himself now, however, brooding on what makes up a moment of history; if you took a knife and chopped cleanly through a moment of history what would it look like in cross-section? Would it be like chopping through a leg of lamb where you see the ends of the muscles, nerves, sinews and bone of one piece matching a similar arrangement in the other? Walter thought that it would, on the whole. A moment of history would be composed of countless millions of events of varying degrees of importance, some of them independent, other associated with each other. And since all these events would have both causes and consequences they would certainly match each other where they were divided, just like the leg of lamb. But did all these events collectively have a meaning?
Most people, Walter believed, would have said ‘No, they are merely random.’ Perhaps sometimes, in retrospect, we may stick a label on a whole stretch of events and call it, say, ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ the way we might call a long hank of muscle a fillet steak, but we are simply imposing a meaning on what was, unlike the fillet steak whose cells are organized to some purpose, essentially random. Well, if that was what most people thought, Walter did not agree with them.
Certainly, it was not easy to see a common principle in the great mass of events occurring at any moment far and near. But Walter believed that that was because you were too near to them. It was like being a single gymnast in a vast stadium with several thousand other gymnasts: your movements and theirs might seem quite baffling from where you stand whereas viewed from an aeroplane, collectively you are forming letters which spell out ‘God Save The King’ in a pattern of delightful colours.
Well, what was this organizing principle? Walter was vague about that. He believed that each individual event in a historical moment was subtly modified by an intangible mechanism which he could only think of as ‘the spirit of the time’. If a Japanese bomber had opened its bomb doors over Singapore in the year 1920 no bomb would have struck the city. Its bombs would have been lodged in the transparent roof that covered Singapore like a bubble, or bounced off it into the sea. This transparent roof was ‘the spirit of those times’. The spirit of these times, unfortunately, allowed the bombs of an Asiatic nation to fall on a British city. Walter had seen the roof growing weaker even during the early thirties: such ruinous Japanese competition in the cotton trade would not have been permitted by the spirit of yet earlier times. Now the bubble no longer covered Singapore at all, or if it did, it let everything through.
Walter’s own house had so far escaped damage though it had lost a few windows. in the air-raid of 20 January. But the atmosphere of the place had changed considerably since his wife and Kate had left. It was not too bad during the daytime: there was always a good deal of bustle now that he had moved his office staff up here from Collyer Quay. Once the office had closed down for the day, however, an eerie solitude descended on the house. He would sit fidgeting restlessly on the verandah or stroll on the lawn, waiting for the sirens or watching the searchlight batteries fingering the sky. Now he was back sitting on the verandah in darkness.
He was surprised that the absence of his wife and Kate should make such a difference. There were still people about. Nigel and Joan were usually somewhere mooning about the house (thank heaven, at least, that that looked like coming off successfully!). There were still the ‘boys’ and Abdul, though some of the kitchen staff had made themselves scarce. He occasionally saw Monty sloping in from the direction of the compound. No, what upset Walter was not the absence of people but the absence of normality. Life had taken on an aspect of nightmarish unreality. If someone had told him a year ago that on a certain date in January Solomon Langfield would be found under his roof he would have dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Yet not only was Langfield under his roof (his mortal remains, anyway) but at this very moment he was in the process of being embalmed by Dr Brownley on the dining-room table … or would have been if Dr Brownley had known better how to proceed. As it was, for the last few minutes he had been on the telephone asking a colleague for instructions. The line was not a good one and he had to shout. So Walter’s melancholy reflections had been punctuated by the medical instructions which Dr Brownley howled for confirmation into the instrument. Evidently he was concerned lest too much time should have elapsed since the old fox had gone to his reward. No wonder then if Walter felt that his grip on reality had loosened.
Embalming old Langfield at a time like this, what an idea! To embalm him at any time would have seemed to Walter an unprofitable undertaking, but with bombs raining on the city and corpses laid out everywhere on the pavements the idea of preserving the old goat was perfectly ludicrous. Yet his board of directors had demanded it ‘for the sake of Langfield and Bowser Limited and its British and overseas shareholders’ on whose behalf, they had explained, they were making ‘this very natural gesture’.
‘Very natural indeed!’ grumbled Walter to himself. ‘What could be more unnatural? I should have had him stuck under the ground immediately. Mind you, with the sort of man they have on Langfield’s board these days they would most likely have been out there in the graveyard at the dead of night helping the company secretary to dig him up again!’
Walter sighed, allowing his mind to wander on to the subject of graveyards … Poor old Webb must be rotted away by now, he mused. His cane chair squeaked as he shifted about in it restlessly, trying to convince himself that the best thing would be to go inside and deal with some of the paper-work which awaited him. Abruptly he became aware that two wraith-like figures were moving in the shadows beyond the swimming pool. He stirred uneasily, trying to identify them. Nigel and Joan perhaps? But they had gone inside some time ago. The white wraiths shimmered nearer, growing brighter as they left the shadows of the trees and drifted into the open. Voices now reached Walter, raised in argument, and he relaxed for these were not the ghosts of old Webb and old Langfield returning to remonstrate with him from beyond the grave, but Matthew and Ehrendorf haggling over colonial policy well on this side of it.
‘If by “progress” you mean the increasing welfare of the native then I’m afraid you’re going to have a job proving the beneficial effects of these public works you make such a song and dance about …’ Matthew was saying: he had not forgotten his moment of illumination while sitting exhausted beside the fire at the timber-yard: he still intended to give up theorizing and devote his life to practical work of some kind. But there were one or two arguments he felt he had to finish first; besides, the mere presence of Ehrendorf, even mute, was enough to start his brain secreting theories and his tongue expressing them. As for Ehrendorf, he was peering ahead at the dark house with trepidation, half hoping, half dreading that they would bump into Joan. A moment ago he had bravely offered to accompany Matthew across the compound to see Walter about something, but he had not expected to feel quite so vulnerable.
‘I suppose you’re talking about railways … In our African colonies something like three-quarters of all loans raised by the colonial governments are for railways. True, they’re useful for administration … but what they’re mainly useful for is opening up great tracts of land to be developed as plantations by Europeans. In other words, it’s done not for the natives’ benefit but for ours! To which you will reply, Jim, that what benefits us, benefits them … To which I reply … “Not necessarily so!” To which you reply …’
‘Wait a moment,’ came Dr Brownley’s voice faintly to Walter on the darkened verandah, interrupting Matthew who had been gripped by such a frenzy of abstractions that he had been obliged to commandeer both sides of the argument. ‘Let me make quite sure that I’ve got the embalming fluid down properly … I repeat … Liquor formaldehyde, 13.5cc. Sodium borate, 5 grammes … and water to make up to 100cc. Is that correct? Yes, I see … And with what? A bicycle pump?’
‘A bicycle pump!’ thought Walter giddily.
Meanwhile, as a descant to Dr Brownley’s rather anxious elucidations (the good doctor, though for years he had been medical officer to Langfield and Bowser Limited, had never been faced with such a problem before … And just think of it! The Chairman himself! A heavy responsibility indeed!) there came Ehrendorf’s reasonable tones, gently chiding Matthew for being selective in his view of railways in the colonies, for conveniently forgetting their positive aspects …
‘What we are doing is subsidizing the white man’s business operations at the expense of native welfare … Now, I agree with you, this would not matter if the profits stayed where they were produced, but they don’t … they’re whipped off back to Britain, or France, or Belgium or Holland or wherever …’
‘A three-gallon bottle with two glass tubes passing through the rubber stopper, yes, I’ve got that … One tube reaches the bottom of the bottle to take up the liquid and pass it out to a rubber tube and then to the injection canula. I see. The other glass tube through the stopper you attach to the bicycle pump … Oh, I see, a foot pump … I thought you might mean …’
‘Let’s not forget that railways act as an instrument of civilization,’ said Ehrendorf vaguely, his eyes probing the darkness for some sign of hope, ‘bringing isolated people into contact with the modern world.’
‘Slavery used to be defended in those very words! Besides, in Africa natives died by the hundreds of thousands just in building the damn things. Look at the Belgian Congo under Leopold! You see, what I’m trying to explain is how everything in a colony, even beneficial-sounding things like railways and experimental rice-growing stations, are set up in one way or another to the commercial advantage of the Europeans or Americans with money invested in the country …’
‘D’you mind if we just go over the sites of injection once more,’ cried Dr Brownley in a voice of despair. ‘No, operator, this is an important matter, a matter of life and death. I’m a doctor, will you kindly get off the line, please. Now, fluid equal to fifteen per cent of body weight into the arterial system? 450 cc to a pound, yes, I’ve got that. Two per cent body weight to be injected into each femoral artery towards the toes. One per cent into each brachial artery towards the fingers, yes. One common carotid artery towards head with two per cent. Inject same carotid towards heart with seven per cent. Total amount of fluid should come to fifteen per cent body weight. What happens, though, if the blood in the artery has clotted, as I’m afraid it might have by now, and you can’t force the fluid in? Wait a moment, I’m trying to note it down, yes … the extremity should be wrapped in cotton wool soaked in the fluid and then bandaged … and you keep on soaking the cotton at intervals. Good. Another thing I want to know is whether one has to inject fluid into the thoracic and abdominal cavities?’
‘How frightful!’ thought Walter, and despite the heat his skin became gooseflesh and even the bristles on his spine rose in horror. Meanwhile, the two young men had reached the foot of the white marble steps which curved up to the portico and thence to the verandah. Still talking nonsense they began to ascend.
‘How about the rights of the individual, imported along with a Western legal system? Isn’t that worth having, Matthew?’
‘Freedom of the individual at the expense of food, clothing and a harmonious life, of being swindled by a system devised to the advantage of those with capital? If you had asked the inmates of the coolie barracks in Rangoon, dying by their hundreds from malnutrition and disease, I’m sure they would have told you that wonderful though being free was, just at the moment so wretched was their condition that it wasn’t much help. It’s no good calling somebody free unless he’s economically free, too, at least to some extent … Is it? … however much lack of individual freedom may horrify an English intellectual sitting at his desk with a hot dinner under his belt.’
‘Yet even if one admits, and I’m not saying I do,’ replied Ehrendorf, ‘that the natives in British and other colonies have been placed at a disadvantage, or even swindled and abused, can you actually say that they would have been better off left strictly alone? You could say that the coming of Western capital is simply a bitter pill that they have to swallow if they are ever to achieve a higher state of civilization … In others words, that capitalism is like a disease against which no traditional culture anywhere has any resistance and that, in the circumstances, in Malaya and other colonies it could have been worse and will certainly get better.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Matthew dubiously, ‘at some future period men will be able to look back and say, why, it was merely a bitter pill they had to swallow before achieving their present state of felicity, but for the moment, although it’s clear what they’ve lost with their traditional way of life, it’s not so easy to see what they’ve gained. Improved medicine in some places, but mainly to combat new illnesses we’ve brought with us. Education … largely to become unemployable or exploited clerks in the service of our businesses or government departments … And so on.’
‘I say, Walter, are you there?’ called Dr Brownley who had left the telephone and was peering uneasily out on to the darkened verandah. ‘Oh, there you are, I didn’t see you at first. What a business!’ he added, mopping his brow. ‘It seems we must wash the entire body with the fluid, including the face, ears and hair … and we can get rid of any post-mortem staining of the face by massage.’
Walter did not reply. He was looking at the silhouettes of Matthew and Ehrendorf who had paused by the wire door to the verandah and were looking out towards the restlessly moving searchlights over the docks. Dr Brownley, distraught, began to think of a matter which had occupied his mind almost exclusively for the past few days: walking with an innocent mind and a serene, untroubled expression on his face along the street his eye had happened to stray to Whiteaway’s window and there, alas, had found itself locked in the basilisk stare emitted by a certain article of an almost infinite desirability, agreed, but costing $985.50. How could a man afford such a price? Yes, but how could a man do without such an article? These were the horns of the Doctor’s dilemma. But first he would have to deal with this dreadful business of embalming old Langfield.
‘There’s only one way, it seems to me,’ said Matthew with a sigh, ‘in which our colonies could begin to get the benefits of their contact with us …’
‘And what’s that, I should like to know?’ came Walter’s forbidding voice from within, startling the two young men.
‘Oh, hello, Walter. Well, by kicking us out and running the mines and plantations for their own profit instead of ours. In other words, a revolution!’ He smiled wearily. ‘The only trouble with a revolution is that it seldom improves things and very often makes them worse.’
‘Obviously they too are subject to my Second Law,’ smiled Ehrendorf.
‘But it wasn’t that that I wanted to see you about, Walter. I wanted to ask for your help in another matter entirely.’
‘And what might that be?’ Walter did not sound encouraging. Matthew explained that he was trying to help Miss Chiang to leave Singapore because she would run a particular risk if the city fell to the Japanese. It seemed impossible, however, to get her the necessary passport and permit to leave. Perhaps Walter could do something …?
‘I don’t see how I can help,’ said Walter testily. ‘With all the red tape I can’t get anything done myself these days.’ Although there was some truth in this, Walter would not have felt inclined to help in any case. He considered it a sign of ‘the spirit of the times’ that Matthew should be seeking a favour for a Eurasian woman with little concern for propriety as if she were his wife.
‘I thought it might be easier to get her an exit permit if she were travelling with someone who had a British passport. Presumably Joan will be leaving soon? Perhaps she could go with Joan if you have no objection?’
‘That’s up to Joan,’ replied Walter shortly. ‘You’d better ask her and Nigel.’ From his tone it was plain that he did not want to discuss the matter further.
When the two young men had retreated, in silence this time, the way they had come, the Doctor cleared his throat. ‘I say, Walter, d’you think you could give me a hand in the dining-room for a few minutes. I can’t get hold of anyone to help me on account of these damned air-raids. This job shouldn’t be too difficult, fortunately, but I’ve never had to do it before … And by the way, please don’t let me forget to plug the anus, mouth and nostrils with cotton soaked in the embalming fluid. Oh yes, and what I wanted to ask you was this: do you think that the Langfield and Bowser shareholders will want to keep the body a long time? I mean, they aren’t thinking of keeping it in a glass case in the board-room or anything like that, are they? Because the thing is this: If they do want to keep it we shall have to rub it with plenty of Vaseline and bandage it to prevent it from drying out … I say, Walter, is anything the matter?’
57
‘I’ll make sure that she has money, of course, and take care of the ticket. We think it may be easier to get her an exit permit if she is employed, at least nominally, by someone with a British passport. She won’t be any trouble, Joan, I guarantee.’
‘Nigel,’ Joan called to her fiancé, invisible in the room behind her, ‘Matthew wants to know if we can take someone with us? I don’t think we can, can we?’
‘I don’t think you realize how urgent it is …’
‘A Eurasian girl, you say? An amah? A servant? Really, it’s impossible.’
‘Not a servant … a friend.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Joan, this isn’t just anyone. It’s someone you know. She’ll be in deadly danger if the Japanese ever take Singapore and she’s still here. Vera has told me that you were there when the Japs arrested her in Shanghai … You know better than anyone what will happen to her if they find her here!’
‘Nigel, there’s nothing we can do, is there?’
A voice called something from the interior of the room which Matthew was unable to make out.
‘Sorry, Miss Chiang should have thought about all this earlier in the day. There’s nothing we can do, I’m afraid.’
‘To hell with you then, you bitch!’ cried Matthew in a voice that took even him by surprise.
Since the air-raids which had on successive days devastated Tanglin, Beach Road and the central part of the city, many Europeans had at last come to realize the extreme danger that they ran. Even if it were improbable that the Japanese would be permitted to land on Singapore Island itself, the fact remained that their air force, whose control of the sky was no longer seriously disputed by the few and rapidly diminishing fighters of the RAF, could inflict all the damage that was necessary. Such was the confidence of the Japanese bombers that they now droned constantly over the city in daylight, flying at a great height, twenty thousand feet or more, in enormous packs that for some reason were always in multiples of twenty-seven, causing Europeans below to think that there must be something sinister and unusual about Japanese arithmetic. At such a height they were well beyond the range of the light anti-aircraft guns which made up the greater part of Singapore’s air defences. And so the truth had begun to dawn on the inhabitants of the city: if attacked from the air they were defenceless.
Many European women who had bravely declared that they would ‘stay put’ now had second thoughts or at least yielded to the demands of their men-folk that they should leave forth-with. The result was that every day crowds assembled at the shipping offices in search of passages to Europe, Australia or India. But, although earlier in the month many ships had sailed from Singapore with room to spare (Mrs Blackett and Mrs Langfield had marvelled at the deserted decks and echoing state-rooms of the Narkunda) now, quite suddenly it seemed, you were lucky to find a berth on any sort of vessel going anywhere. Partly this was the result of the chaos in the docks, where unloading had almost seized up under the bombing; partly it was the result of the diminished ability of the RAF to defend incoming convoys in the sea approaches to the Island, now rendered hazardous to a distance of twenty miles or more by prowling Japanese bombers.
Matthew’s efforts to help Vera had so far been frustrated as much by the perplexing regulations which governed departure from the Colony as by the rapidly swelling numbers of those who wanted to leave. Moreover, so much of his time was taken up by his duties as a fireman that he had little time or energy to spare to help and encourage her. One of the major difficulties was to find somewhere for her to go. After a series of tiring and time-consuming enquiries he had at length succeeded in discovering that it was government policy that women and children, irrespective of race, should be allowed to leave if they wanted to. To begin with he had thought it would be best to send Vera to Australia … but Australia had agreed to accept only a limited number of Asiatics and Vera had returned empty-handed from their temporary immigration office, depressed and exhausted after many hours of waiting.
Why had she been refused? Were her papers not in order or was there some other reason? Vera shook her head; she had been unable to get any explanation from the harassed and impatient officials at the office. Her papers certainly did not look very convincing. Under the Aliens Ordinance, 1932, she had been given merely a landing-permit which she had been obliged to exchange for a certificate of admission valid for two years and renewable. Matthew nudged his glasses up on his nose and examined the document despondently: it identified Vera merely as a landed immigrant resident in the Straits Settlements. If she needed a passport would she be able to get one at this eleventh hour? And what country would give her a passport? Time was running out so quickly. He was somewhat heartened, however, by the knowledge that it was official government policy that Vera, in common with other women, should leave if she wanted to.
Next, Vera had gone to another office to enquire whether she would be permitted to go to India. She had again been obliged to wait for many hours and once more it had proved to be in vain. On this occasion, although there had been no racial difficulty as there had been with Australia, she had been asked for evidence that she would have enough money to support herself in India. She had had none and by the time Matthew had taken out a letter of credit for her with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and sent her back again another two precious days had passed and she was once more obliged to join a long line of anxious people besieging the office … it had closed before she had been able to get anywhere near the counter. To make matters worse, Matthew could see that with weariness and disappointment Vera had grown fatalistic: she no longer believed that she would be allowed to leave Singapore before the Japanese arrived. Matthew, who in the meantime had been waiting fruitlessly on her behalf in another equally anxious queue at the Chinese Protectorate to apply for an exit permit, had secretly begun to wonder whether she might not be right. However, he did his best to reassure her, saying that certainly she would be able to escape and that the Japanese would be most unlikely to take Singapore.
Matthew was so tired these days that his few off-duty hours were spent in a waking trance. If he so much as sat down for a moment he was liable to fall asleep immediately; it seemed that his mind would only work in slow motion. If only he had had time to sleep he felt he might have been able to think of some solution, some way of getting through this baffling maze of administrative regulations. Add to that the difficulty, under constant air-raids, of accomplishing the most simple formalities. In search of a document you went to some office, only to find that it had been evacuated, nobody knew where. Then further exhausting searches through other offices, which themselves might have removed themselves to a safer area outside the city, would be necessary before you could locate the office you wanted.
While in the queue at the Chinese Protectorate Matthew had been told by some of the other people waiting that Vera would need passport photographs in order to obtain her exit permit. She had none and these days it had become impossible to obtain them. Change Alley, which had once swarmed with photographers who were only too willing to snap you in any official pose you wished, or even in a grotto of cardboard tigers and palms, was deserted, for the photographers had all been Japanese and were now interned. So what was to be done? Matthew considered buying a camera and taking the photographs himself, but this was hardly a solution: he would still have to find someone to develop and print them. To make matters worse Matthew had heard from the Major, who had heard from someone at ARP headquarters, that the troopships, the West Point and the Wakefield, which were bringing the 18th Division, would soon be able to take a great number of women and children to safety, provided that they could avoid the Japanese bombers. To know that only bureaucratic formalities prevented Vera from having this chance of escape filled Matthew with bitterness and despair. After five days of roaming the hot and increasingly ruined city with her in the last week of January, obliged to take shelter at intervals in the nearest storm-drain, he felt utterly exhausted and demoralized.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll find a way,’ he told her as he was leaving her one evening after another unsuccessful search for a photographer. ‘Didn’t you once have a camera?’ He remembered that she had wanted to show him some pictures of his father. Yes, but it had only been a box-camera and anyway it had been stolen. Vera was lying on her bed in an odd, crumpled position, the very picture of hopelessness. She gave him a wan smile however, and told him in turn not to worry. After he had gone, she would get up and go and see someone she knew who might be able to help. Some hours later, returning from the docks with the Mayfair AFS unit, he passed near where she lived and asked the Major to stop for a moment so that he could ask whether she had been successful. With refugees from across the Causeway the number of people living in Vera’s tenement had greatly increased and he had difficulty making his way past those sleeping on the stairs and in the corridor. When he had at last reached Vera’s cubicle he found that she was still lying on the bed in the same odd position, just as he had left her. It seemed that she no longer even had the will to move.
‘You must come with me to the Mayfair,’ he said. ‘Bring a toothbrush and whatever else you need.
But Vera shook her head. ‘No Matthew, I am better to stay here. Soon I will feel better.’
‘But it’s dangerous here. You’re too near the river and the docks.’
Again she shook her head. Nothing he could say would make her change her mind.
‘I must go. They’re waiting for me outside. You stay here and rest … I know how tired you must be. And don’t worry about the photographs. I’ll think of something …’
Having returned to the Mayfair still, despite his reassuring words to Vera, without any idea of what to do next, Matthew was greeted by the smiling face of Mr Wu, to whom he had already spoken of the difficulty of finding a photographer. Mr Wu had thought of a solution to the problem in the meantime. He had an interest in a Chinese newspaper which would undoubtedly employ a photographer. It would take nothing more than a telephone call: by evening Vera would have her photographs. It seemed almost too good to be true.
Tired though he was, Matthew set off again, this time on a bicycle he had borrowed, to tell Vera the good news. The streets were just beginning to get light; in Chinatown the first shadowy figures were emerging after the night’s curfew. On his way along Southbridge Road, however, he was astonished to see that a great crowd of women and children had already formed outside one of the buildings and he thought: ‘Good heavens! What can they possibly want at this time in the morning?’ But then he realized that they were waiting outside the passport office for it to open and his heart sank at the thought that the photographs were only the beginning.
Vera had been asleep: she gazed at him with dulled eyes as he told her about the photographs.
‘Don’t you see!’ he exclaimed irritably. ‘Now we’ll be able to get the exit permit and everything else!’ He was angry with her for not having reacted with more enthusiasm. It seemed that she had given up hope at the very moment that they had a chance of success. But his anger melted away almost immediately. ‘You mustn’t give up hope,’ he said more gently. ‘When did you last have something to eat?’ He went out then to the food-stalls at the end of the street and presently returned with some soup and a dish of fried rice. He had to feed her with chopsticks, like a child: she was utterly exhausted. While he fed her he spoke to her encouragingly: when they had the photographs they would go to the Chinese Protectorate and get her an exit permit and whatever else was needed. After all, the Government wanted her to leave: they said so! Then they would get her a berth on a boat to Colombo or, failing that, to England. He would have money sent to a bank there for her. She could stay in a hotel and he would join her as soon as he could get away from Singapore. By tomorrow evening or perhaps the one after that, they should have all the necessary papers: then they could go together and register her name at the P & O office. They would certainly be in time to get her on one of the ships that were due to leave soon.
‘I don’t want to leave without you.’
‘But you must. If the Japs take Singapore …’
‘You always said they wouldn’t,’ she said, smiling at last.
‘Well, perhaps not. Who knows?’ Matthew no longer knew himself whether he believed that Singapore would hold out. ‘I must go now before the morning raids begin. Is there anywhere for you to shelter if the bombers come this way?’
Vera shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. I feel better now.’ She smiled again and squeezed his hand. ‘I’m sorry to have been “a weak link”.’
‘You’re not a weak link,’ said Matthew, delighted to see her more cheerful. ‘Don’t forget to eat something today, even if it’s only a pair of white mice on toast.’
58
In these last days of January it had become General Percival’s habit to rise before dawn and spend an hour in his office before leaving by car for Johore just over the Causeway where the fighting was now taking place. As a rule, therefore, it was still dark outside the bathroom window while he was shaving. But he had had a restless night and had reached the bathroom a little later than usual: the sky was already brightening as he rubbed a finger over his bristly chin. In the course of the night two matters of enormous importance had loomed-up over his halfsleeping mind saying: ‘Remember us tomorrow!’ But now, as he delved to drag them into the light, he could scarcely believe that he had taken them seriously. One of these anxieties had concerned transport: the prospect that every motor-car and lorry in his Army might have a simultaneous puncture causing the entire force to freeze up had afflicted him dreadfully. Was it nothing more than that? Evidently not.
Well, what was the other worry? During the night he had decided that he must issue orders to the effect that all dripping taps, both civilian and military, must be turned off at the main forthwith or provided with new washers. This was ridiculous too, but at least he knew what had caused it. The day before he had had a brief word with Brigadier Simson, the Director-General Civil Defence, who had made some gloomy observations about Singapore’s water supply: it appeared that out here in the tropics where there was no danger of pipes freezing up, the municipal engineers did not bury them deep underground as they did in England: hence they were vulnerable to bombs. Already there had been considerable damage.
In a moment of intuition he realized, too, the source of his worry about punctures … it was the fear that both the 53rd (British) Brigade and the Segamat force might be cut off by the Japanese before they had time to retreat through the bottleneck at Yong Peng. But that was a danger which was now in the past, thank heavens. Strange that it should continue even so to torment him in his dreams. But … he brushed all that aside. He had more important things to think about.
As he began to shave, though, he did not think about them. He began to think about other things, about the Governor, and about oil dumps, and about his mother in Hertfordshire. What a terrible year 1941 had been! And yet it had seemed to start off so well with his appointment as GOC Singapore. In April, even before he had left England, his mother had died suddenly. She had been getting on in years, mind you, but it had been a heavy blow, nevertheless. All the same, once or twice recently when he had been in low spirits, it had occurred to him that perhaps, after all, her death had been a blessing in disguise, sparing her from unnecessary suffering on his account.
He stood poised, razor in hand, gazing at his lathered face in the mirror. A commander must be a man of strength of purpose and authority, like General Dobbie who had once no doubt shaved in this very mirror. But his own face with its thick white beard of lather looked encouragingly commanding and purposeful. With care, for he had been a staff officer long enough to know that one must be scrupulous in attention to detail, he began to attack the fringes of the lather, driving it inwards from its perimeter at ears and throat with tiny strokes of the blade in the direction of chin, lips and moustache. Here he would presently have it surrounded, if his experience was anything to go by, and would finish it off with a few decisive strokes.
Meanwhile, his mind had begun to feed once more on that run of bad luck which had assailed him so abruptly. His mother had not been dead a year and yet his whole career and perhaps even his life itself were in jeopardy. He had served on the Western Front in the Great War and had kept his eyes open. Yes, he knew what was what! For the truth was, if you were not on the Western Front you were nowhere … at least as far as the Powers That Be were concerned. The same thing went for this war, too. Right from the start he had been in no doubt about that. You only had to look at the obsolete equipment and untrained men, the odds and ends and riff-raff from India and Australia, all speaking different tongues. You only had to look at the way his best officers had been milked off to lend tone to the Middle Eastern and European theatres to know that Malaya Command was not very much in anybody’s thoughts in Whitehall. The big reputations would be made in Europe: it had happened before and it would happen again. Europe was the fashionable place for a soldier to display his skills. Out here a man could perform miracles of military strategy and much good would it do him! Nobody would pay the slightest attention. But make a blunder and, ah! then it would be different.
‘Out here you can destroy your career in two shakes, but can you make one? Not an earthly.’
The door-handle rattled faintly as someone tried it discreetly from the outside, but it was locked. Could that be Pulford up and about already? Percival paused again, this time about to launch a flanking attack along his jaw from the direction of his right ear. If it was Pulford, he himself must be running even later than he had realized. He usually beat Pulford to the breakfast table. Poor Pulford! His career, too, depended on obsolete equipment … fancy having to send up the poor old Vildebeeste against modern Jap fighter planes! He had taken a liking to Pulford partly through loneliness, for neither man had brought out his family; he had not for a moment regretted inviting him to come and live here. One needed a staunch friend in a place as full of intrigue and back-biting as Singapore.
‘They’re all watching out for their own interests, every man jack of ’em, beginning with the Governor!’
How could the GOC Malaya be expected to defend a country whose civilians devoted their every effort to baulking his initiatives? What had happened to the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, for instance? You might well ask! Volunteer force indeed! When he had tried to call up part of it for training the civilians had created such a song and dance that the Government had insisted on his abandoning the rest of the training programme. Why? Because a rash of strikes on the plantations had been blamed on the fact that the Europeans were absent … while the truth of the matter was that they were not paying their workers enough. Naturally, he had protested. A waste of time! The Governor had waved some instructions from the Colonial Office in his face: these declared that exemption from training should not be what he (the GOC) considered practicable ‘but what he, the Governor, thought was necessary to keep up tin and rubber production’.
And now, when retreat to the Island had become inevitable (as you were! ‘withdrawal’ to the Island), would you believe it? He was up to his tricks again. This time Sir Shenton was declining to intervene with the Chinese Protectorate who were refusing exit permits to Chinese who wanted to leave the Colony. He had done his best to spell it out to the Governor: in a very short time they would find themselves under siege on an island already teeming with refugees. Non-combatants must not only be allowed but encouraged to leave, if necessary made to leave. But oh no, the Governor would not listen … for him this exit permit business was just another chapter in a story which had begun long before the Japanese had invaded. Sir Shenton Thomas was too august a figure to consider explaining himself to the GOC. But Percival had heard the story anyway from other sources. It seemed that the Chinese community had conceived a violent dislike of two senior officials of the Chinese secretariat: this pair were obsessed by the need to root out Communist infiltrators and even with the Japanese sweeping through Johore the fervour of their anti-Communist mission remained undimmed. It would have been sensible to get rid of these men months ago, to get the Chinese population firmly on the British side, but this the Governor would not do. The dignity of the British Government was at stake. You could not, in his opinion, start giving way to demands from the local population. Well, so much the worse for everyone. Other people had remonstrated with the Governor: Simson, the DGCD, for example, and a number of influential Chinese businessmen. Many Chinese would be on the Japanese death-list if Singapore fell. But it had been to no avail.
Percival had been scraping steadily at his commanding, white-bearded face. Gradually, as the razor advanced and the white beard fell away, the features in the mirror had grown more uncertain: a rather delicate jaw had appeared, followed by a not very strong chin and a mouth not sufficiently assertive for the moustache on its upper lip. Nevertheless, it was the face of a man anxious to do his best. Percival washed it carefully and mopped it, gasping slightly. As he did so the door-handle turned again. ‘Just a minute,’ he called. Silence and a vague air of expectation was all that came from the other side of the door. But why, Percival wondered, should Pulford want to use this bathroom when he had one of his own? Perhaps it was simply that he had left his shaving-tackle here. No doubt this rather unimpressive toothbrush was his; Percival inspected with disapproval its splayed and wilting bristles; it looked as if his batman had been cleaning his cap-badge with it.
His eyes moved back to the mirror to study with sympathy his clean-shaven but drawn features. Weariness was becoming a disease of epidemic proportions in Singapore these days and the past week had, perhaps, been the most exhausting in his life, spent in long car journeys back and forth to the front for conferences with his commanders. He had decided, however, that if disaster were not to ensue he must supervise the defence of Johore himself.
Alas, even this, he reflected, scrubbing his prominent teeth with tooth-powder from the round tin by the mirror, had not been enough, for Gordon Bennett had blundered. In Percival’s view it was not surprising that he had blundered, given his mentality and erratic behaviour. It was unfortunate that nothing could be done about Bennett without risk of offending the Australian Government. Bennett, moreover, had made a good impression on Wavell who had lately insisted on putting him in charge of the vulnerable west coast in the place of the battered III Corps. Good impression notwithstanding it was Bennett who had left the unfortunate, untrained 45th Indian Brigade to secure his communications on the coast from the Muar River southwards against amphibious attacks that were all too predictable. The Japanese had naturally made short work of encircling the 45th Brigade and all subsequent efforts to rescue them had failed. Indeed, one had to be thankful that in the end it had been possible to withdraw the rest of the force by the trunk road and railway without having a substantial part of it cut off by the Japanese strike from the coast. Percival heaved a sigh. By now it was clear in any case that a retreat to Singapore Island would be inevitable.
There had been moments since the opening of the war in Malaya when Percival had been visited by an exceedingly curious notion. Though he had done his best, as a pragmatic military man, to shrug it off, it had nevertheless returned more and more frequently in the past few days. Now it entered his mind again as he wearily threw his towel over his shoulder and unlocked the bathroom door. ‘Good morning,’ he said to Pulford who was hovering dejectedly in the corridor in a pair of pyjamas of Air Force blue. Pulford, too, had a thin face but more deeply lined than his own and with ears that stood out sharply from the side of his head; his moustache, moreover, was distinctly less generous … a mere smudge around the channel beneath his nose, creeping a little way out along his upper lip. Still, his features gave the impression of a decent and dependable sort of man. ‘You need a new toothbrush, old chap,’ Percival told him as he continued along the corridor. ‘Do I?’ asked Pulford, somewhat taken aback.
This exchange, unfortunately, had not been quite enough to distract Percival’s attention from his new train of thought, which could be summarized in one simple question. Had this entire campaign, in which tanks, ships and aeroplanes had taken part and in which thousands of men had already died, been staged or devised by Fate or by some unseen hand simply in order to make a mockery of his own private hopes and ambitions? Percival was not accustomed to think in such terms. He was a practical man. He did not believe in ‘unseen hands’. That sort of thing was balderdash in his view. He still thought so … yet the way in which, time and again, a flaw had appeared in his defences, first on one flank, then on the other … the way in which there always proved to be just one missing element (the aircraft carrier, for instance, which would have prevented the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse but which had gone aground on the way to Singapore: how often in a man’s lifetime does an aircraft carrier go aground that it should do so on the only occasion that he needed it?), a missing element which in due course would bring down a crucial part of the defensive edifice he had been trying to construct, this had begun to have its effect on Percival as it would on any reasonable man.
It was easy, Percival knew, when a fellow got tired for him to get things out of proportion. He was tired. He knew that, admitted it straight out. Still, he was aware of the risk and was determined to be objective. He was only interested in what the evidence had to say. Well, the fact was that all these apparently random acts of fate, all these strokes of bad luck, had now begun (for the man putting his thin legs into shorts wide enough to have accommodated not only the GOC but a member of his staff into the bargain) to appear suspiciously weighted against him. For if you looked at what had happened carefully enough and remained objective, you could see that some hidden hand had been tampering with what one might reasonably expect to have been the normal course of events. It was as if, to speak plainly, on life’s ladder some unseen hand had all but sawn through a number of the more important rungs.
The defence of Malaya had been organized before the war on the assumption that the RAF would deal with enemy forces before they had a chance to get ashore. But, in the event, the RAF, suffering from a suspicious lack of planes, had been quite unable to do this. Well, never mind. They were busy elsewhere. Such things do happen. But if, having put your foot on the RAF rung and heard it snap under your weight you thought, well, you still had your other foot on the strike across the Siamese border, here, too, you would have found yourself treading all too firmly on thin air, for the man in charge of that operation had been poor old Brookers, an actor quite improbably cast in the rôle of Commander-in-Chief, Far East.
A commander, as Percival very well knew, cannot always have things his own way. But when everything is designed to frustrate him he may well begin to wonder. To be expected to fight against trained men with untrained men, to fight without naval or air support worth mentioning through a sweltering country of apathetic natives and exasperating Europeans whose only aim is to obstruct him, frankly that is too much: he begins to see that he is the victim of some pretty curious circumstances.
Consider for a moment the defence of Johore that he had been trying to organize. When he had been GSO1 to General Dobbie in 1937 fixed defences had been planned for Johore to protect Singapore Island from overland attack. But where were they now that overland attack had developed? They were non-existent. Very well. Consider now Gordon Bennett, the man in command of the Australian Imperial Force in Malaya on whom he had to rely for the defence of Johore (with ‘Piggy’ Heath, of course, and his Indians). It was common knowledge that Bennett had been repeatedly passed over for the command of Australian forces sent to the Middle East; he was considered too difficult and erratic. There was no prospect, you might have thought, of such a man (a man of whom both the Australian War Minister and the Chief of the General Staff disapproved) being given command of the Australians in Malaya. So you might have thought. But already the sound of discreet sawing could be heard and presently these two influential men who disapproved of Bennett (the War Minister and the Chief of the General Staff) trod simultaneously on another weakened rung and the plane in which they were both travelling crashed in Canberra. They were replaced by men partial to Gordon Bennett. Aha! Bennett had wasted no time in promoting in turn Lieutenant-Colonel Maxwell, an- ‘amateur’ militia soldier and peacetime doctor, over the heads of more senior battalion commanders to take command of the 27th Australian Brigade on its way to Malaya. Maxwell, by the way, liked to keep his HQ near to Bennett’s in case he should need a spot of assistance. Maxwell, a rank outsider!
Or consider how Johore had been lost: that is to say, as a result of their inability to secure either flank against amphibious landings. The fortunes of war? But this would not have come about if that aircraft carrier had not gone aground in Jamaica and if the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had not in consequence been lost. But no, let us not be difficult. Let the carrier go aground! Sink the ships! It was a cruel and unexpected blow but never mind, he would bow his head. A commander sometimes had to put up with cruel and unexpected blows. Yes, but what he should not have to put up with is that faint rasp of metal teeth on wood! For if he followed the naval situation a little further back and strained his ears Percival could hear it again, quite clearly, that discreet rasping sound. He was now thinking of the French Far Eastern Fleet and how eager it had been to join the British in Singapore. It would have made all the difference, too, no doubt about it. But beneath the loyalty of Admiral Decoux, that friend and admirer of the British, that most patriotic of men (you might have thought) a sinister little cone of sawdust was beginning to pile up. The only man who could prevent the French fleet joining the British had, by an unfortunate coincidence (rasp! rasp! rasp!), a secret ambition to become Governor-General of Indo-China.
Percival stifled a groan and stood up to draw in the double-pronged buckle of his Sam Browne belt, passing the shoulder-strap beneath the flap on the right shoulder of his shirt; as he did so his groping fingers touched the solid little crown on his shoulder-flap and the sensation brought with it a sharp reminder of his rank and duties. If it was his job to fight not only the Japanese but an unseen hand as well, then so be it. It was his duty to get on with the job and leave the speculation to future historians who, he did not doubt, would not fail to find something fairly fishy about the way events had coincided against him. He glanced at the rectangular face of his wrist-watch. How late it was! No wonder Pulford had been trying to get into the bathroom. On his way down the corridor he glimpsed Pulford through the half-open door of his room in the act of adjusting a sock-suspender around a grey calf.
Breakfast. A cool and succulent slice of papaya, tea and toast. When he had finished he went directly to his office to study the latest situation reports and evaluate the night’s events. Then, with the balding, long-nosed, rather grim figure of the Brigadier General Staff, he went through the agenda for the daily meeting of the War Council: he must remember to have a final shot at getting the Governor to do something about exit permits for the Chinese if it were not already too late. Should he not be back from Johore Bahru in time the BGS would have to attend the War Council meeting in his place. Today, 28 January, was going to be another crucial day on the other side of the Causeway.
By 08.40 he was speeding across the island on his way to confer with General Heath at III Corps Headquarters, now located just on the other side of the Causeway in Johore Bahru. As he sat in the back of the car, his face beautifully shaven but expressionless, he swiftly reviewed the plans that had been made by Heath and his staff for the withdrawal of his entire force across the Causeway to Singapore Island. He had hoped until yesterday not to have put this plan into operation, particularly now that the 18th (British) Division was about to arrive. But alas, there was nothing else for it. Were his men to remain in Johore their flanks would still be threatened by amphibious attack, as Singapore Island itself would be, of course. Moreover, communications would depend on the narrow Causeway, all too vulnerable to air attack.
To withdraw is a delicate business at the best of times, but to withdraw such a disparate collection of forces from across a wide front back into the narrow neck of a funnel in the face of such a rapidly advancing enemy would require a degree of accuracy and discipline verging on the miraculous. Should one contingent withdraw too quickly it would automatically expose the flanks of its neighbours. General Heath’s 11th Division was to cover the crossroads at Skudai where the roads from east and west converged, (pinching in the funnel to its narrow neck) until the forces from the west coast had passed through. Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon the 8th Brigade of General Barstow’s 9th Indian Division had begun to withdraw down the railway in the direction of Layang Layang, passing through the 22nd Brigade under Brigadier Painter who had been ordered to hold his ground in concert with the phased withdrawal elsewhere.
‘These manoeuvres can be a sticky business,’ mused Percival, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sudden glare reflected from the surface of the water as the car emerged from the foliage of the island and sped out over the Causeway. Yes, such a delicate operation, mismanaged, could result in the most fearful mess. He sighed. The car hurtled on over the water.
If you had been watching it from the island you would have seen that camouflaged staff-car gradually diminish in size until it became merely a moving dot in the distance; the next moment it had disappeared altogether as it plunged into the streets of Johore Bahru. One hour, two hours passed. The sun changed its position so that the glare from the Strait of Johore became even more dazzling. At last a tiny moving dot appeared again on the mainland side of the Causeway cutting in and out of the slow line of traffic and rapidly growing larger until it revealed itself as the same car carrying Percival back from his conference with Heath. Heath had been worried about the ability of the 11th Division (the poor devils who had been in the thick of it since Jitra) to hold out much longer against the Japanese Imperial Guards. As a result the crossing of the Causeway had been moved forward twenty-four hours. At least, Percival reflected, again shielding his eyes, he would not get into hot water with the Chief of Staff, for Wavell had given him permission to withdraw to the Island at his own discretion. That old warrior had seen in the end that there would be nothing else for it. Unlike Churchill who a week earlier had sent instructions that they were to fight in the ruins of Singapore if necessary, Wavell had some conception of what they were up against.
How drab and dismal Singapore Island looked at a distance! And yet it would be here on this grey-green slab of land surrounded by glaring water that the most important events of his life would undoubtedly take place, providing he got his troops back to it safely. This thought reminded him that there had been one slightly disturbing piece of news at III Corps. Nothing too serious for the moment, just that contact had been lost temporarily with 22nd Brigade: that was the one which had been ordered to hold firm in front of Layang Layang. General Barstow was going forward now to find out what was the matter.
Later in the day, while Percival was in the Operations Room in Sime Road, he was observed by Sinclair who now found himself back there, much chastened and perplexed by his participation in the action at the Slim River: this in the end had amounted to a brief and disagreeable traffic accident and a good deal of even more disagreeable crawling through miles of jungle to get back to a British-held position. To make matters worse he had broken his wrist in his collision with the tank, although he had not realized it at first in the heat of the moment: this had soon become extremely painful, and all the more so as two hands are needed for making one’s way through the jungle. He would probably not have got through at all without the help of a little party of resourceful and determined Argylls who, like himself, had been over-run by the enemy attack, and were also making their way back. It had been gruelling enough, certainly, but there was no use trying to conceal the fact: he had hoped for more from his first active engagement. If only he had been at the bridge he could have joined in some real fighting. But he had gathered from his brother officers that even there it had not lasted very long. Sinclair could not help wondering whether warfare had not been a little spoiled by all the modern equipment that armies had taken to using. What fun was there in fighting with tanks? A cavalry charge would have been more his cup of tea. In any case, now he was back where he had started, and with his wrist in plaster into the bargain. Thank heaven that at least they had allowed him to do something useful!
Sinclair, busy though he was, was deeply interested in the comportment of the GOC at this critical point in the campaign and every now and then he would snatch a glance in his direction. Percival’s face wore a rather blank expression, rather like that which senior staff officers affected when on duty. Sinclair thought of it as a professional man’s face … where the profession is of the kind which expects you to keep a careful watch on your dignity. Sinclair found it fascinating, though, to think that this was the man who was conducting the defence of Malaya; behind that expressionless face, even while Sinclair’s eyes rested on its outer crust, the molten lava of history was boiling up!
Now some rather disturbing news was coming in: the 22nd Brigade had been cut off. Aghast though he was, Sinclair could not help keeping a surreptitious eye on the GOC to see how he was taking this news. Percival merely frowned slightly and looked annoyed, waiting for more details. It seemed that the 8th Brigade had retired further than planned, allowing the Japanese to move through the rubber around Painter’s eastern flank and seize Layang Layang. More serious still, General Barstow had gone up the railway with two staff officers to investigate, had been ambushed and was now missing, having hurled himself down one side of the railway embankment while the two staff officers, who had escaped, had thrown themselves down the other. Barstow, an experienced and able soldier, would be sorely missed if, as seemed likely, he had been killed or captured. Now the question was whether it would be possible to rescue the 22nd Brigade without prejudicing the evacuation of the entire force. All too soon it became clear that Painter and his men would have to be left to fight their own way out through the jungle as best they could. And what hope was there that, having done so, they would then be able to get across the Strait?
Presently, Percival came to stand quite near Sinclair, talking something over with the BGS but in a voice too low for him to hear. Sinclair considered that he had taken the bad news about the 22nd Brigade with admirable composure; but, of course, one had to remember that Percival was a professional and one would no more expect him to throw himself on the floor in a tantrum at the loss of a brigade than one would expect a grand master to utter a howl of anguish whenever one of his pawns was taken. That blank face of Percival’s, Sinclair realized, was the face of a man who has excluded all unnecessary emotion from the job in hand because he knows that it will only hinder him. Sinclair watched and approved. But then, quite unexpectedly, despite his blank expression, Percival began to shout. He suddenly shouted that men could not work properly in such conditions.
The Operations Room at Sime Road consisted of a wooden hut about the width of a tennis court but longer, more than half as long again. Tables ran from one end to the other and supported a bewildering mass of maps, charts and documents. Here and there telephones were shrilling in little herds, all together like frogs in a pond. Add to this the overcrowding, for this room housed the RAF as well as the Army Staff, the jostling to get a look at wall maps and aircraft availability charts, the shouting into telephones and hammering of typewriters and all the other commotion one would expect in the central nervous system of that clanking, mechanical warrior which the modern army has become, as the campaign in which he is engaged begins to near its climax, and yes, one could very well see that General Percival, who after all had the main responsibility to bear, might find it something of a nightmare to conduct his campaign from such a mad-house.
But in due course it emerged that Percival was not complaining of the noise from inside the hut but from outside, where, in order to remedy the serious overcrowding at Sime Road, a party of Engineers were working to provide some further accommodation. The BGS scratched his balding head but showed no more surprise at Percival’s outburst than he did at anything else. But all the same, to Sinclair it did seem peculiar. The fact was, you see, that with the noise inside the hut, a considerable racket, you could barely hear anything at all from outside. Sinclair cocked an ear and listened … but all he could hear was the faint whisper of a saw on wood as the men worked on the construction of the new hut.
59
The number of people, mainly men, who had taken up lodging at or near the Mayfair Building had continued to grow day by day. Now there were people there whom the Major barely knew by sight, others whom he did not know at all. Certain of these newcomers merely came to hang about during the daytime, for thanks to the fire-fighting the Mayfair was a centre of activity and news, or, if not news, rumours. The latest rumour asserted that a gigantic American force of several divisions had passed through the Straits of Malacca during the night and landed near Alor Star in the north. When asked to confirm this rumour, however, Ehrendorf merely shook his head sadly.
Of all the new lodgers, none pleased the Major so much as the girls from the Poh Leung Kuk who were quartered in the Board Room. They were so helpful, so good-natured and polite! The Major was delighted with them: they appealed strongly to his paternal instincts. He was somewhat surprised, however, when one day Captain Brown, whom he had put in charge of them, asked him what was supposed to be done about their prospective bridegrooms? What bridegrooms? The ones, Captain Brown said, that kept calling to inspect the girls with a view to matrimony. He had paraded them himself, looked them over, and given them short shrift: not good enough. But the girls had been upset: they wanted a go at the bridegrooms themselves! They did not want Captain Brown who was used to having everything ship-shape and had spent a lifetime on the water-fronts up and down the China coast selecting crews with the jaundiced eye of experience, they did not want him to make their decisions for them!
This was a difficult problem. The Major was surprised, as a matter of fact, that at such a time, with the city being progressively smashed to bits from the air, there should be any prospective bridegrooms at all, but perhaps it was the very uncertainty of the situation which was causing single men to make up their minds. Well, there was no doubt in his mind, provided the men had some sort of credentials to prove that they did not want the girls to stock brothels and could produce the forty dollars for the trousseau, the girls themselves, not Captain Brown, must choose.
Captain Brown was indignant. He was not accustomed to having his decisions questioned: it was only out of politeness that he had mentioned the matter to the Major at all. Since he had obtained his Master’s ticket all those years ago he had made it plain, as quite a few Owners had discovered to their cost, that he was not the sort of man who would countenance being interfered with in the correct exercise of his duties. The Major, taken aback, had tried to suggest to Captain Brown that this was note quite the same thing, that these girls, after all … But Captain Brown was adamant. Either they were under his command or they were not! And he had departed in a huff, leaving the Major to cope with the problem as best he could.
Dupigny, consulted, was of the opinion that the girls should be left to deal with the matter themselves. Although the Major would have liked and indeed intended to exercise some sort of supervision over the bridegrooms, he had so much on his mind these days that really he had no time to spare, and neither did anyone else. At best half an hour now and again could be set aside by Dupigny or Ehrendorf to inspect credentials, but in the existing conditions it was impossible even to do this properly. The girls were naturally delighted by their victory over Captain Brown and became more helpful than ever to the Major, showering him with little attentions, sewing on buttons for him and polishing his shoes. What splendid little things they were! It was all he could do to prevent the little darlings from bringing him cups of tea whenever he sat down for a moment. Indeed, when they were not interviewing bridegrooms in the Board Room, which they were doing a lot of the time, they brought cups of tea to everyone at all hours of the day. The only thing that made the Major a little uneasy was the fact that though there was a constant and increasing supply of bridegrooms waiting to be summoned to the Board Room (now and again the door would open releasing a gale of giggles) they never actually seemed to choose one. Still, that was hardly his business.
Now the Major and Dupigny were making their way to the verandah for some fresh air, picking their way among sleeping firemen; the Major noticed as he passed that many of them had simply thrown themselves down on the floor with a cushion or a jacket under their heads, faces and clothes still blackened by the fire they had just been to. Weariness now affected everyone, causing men to stumble about as if they were drunk, or forget to deal with the most urgent matters. ‘Really,’ he thought, ‘we can’t be expected to go on much longer like this!’
To replace the wooden steps to the compound which had been carried away in the raid a week earlier a ladder had been improvised. The Major descended it stiffly, his movements made clumsy by fatigue.
‘And who on earth is this?’ he asked Dupigny rather petulantly, for even more people had arrived since he had last made a tour of inspection and had installed themselves in a sort of gypsy encampment among the score of brick pillars on which the bungalow was built. Here in the shade woman and children sat mournfully among piles of suitcases and other belongings. Some of them dozed or nursed crying babies, others stared blankly at the Major and Dupigny as they passed, red-eyed and seemingly in a state of shock.
‘Refugees.’
‘Of course, but why is nothing being done by the Government to take care them? We can’t possibly be expected to feed them all. And what about sanitary arrangements? We’ll have an epidemic in no time if they stay here. I thought schools had been taken over to house them. Perhaps you could enquire, François, and see if there’s somewhere for them to go … The poor things are obviously too exhausted to find out for themselves.’
Dupigny smiled at his friend and made a gesture of helplessness; his experience of administration in Hanoi told him that even in the best conditions it would take several days or even weeks before Singapore was again able to cope adequately with its administrative problems, of which the refugees were only one. What about the water supply? The burial of the dead? The demolition of damaged buildings? The repair of damage done to vital roads, to gas, electricity and telephone installations? And then there was the storing and distribution of food, the struggle to prevent an epidemic of typhus or cholera, and a hundred and one other difficulties … None of these matters, Dupigny knew without any doubt, would be dealt with adequately, for the simple reason that there were not enough experienced men to do the job … some of them, he explained to the Major, would not be dealt with at all unless people took matters into their own hands … ‘Like this fellow here,’ he added.
They had passed through another little community, this time living in army tents scrounged from somewhere, and had come with a certain relief to an open space which led presently to the little wilderness of rare shrubs beyond which lay the Blacketts’ compound. Beneath the shade of a rambutan a Chinese was digging a grave, or rather he had already dug the grave and was now shovelling earth back into it. On closer inspection the Chinese turned out to be Cheong who, for the past few days, had been working with astonishing energy and fortitude to provide meals at intervals for the ever-increasing number of volunteer firemen and their dependents. And now, not content with feeding people, here he was burying someone single-handed.
‘Ah, Cheong,’ said the Major peering into the grave where, however, nothing could be seen but the well-polished toes of a pair of stout English shoes. ‘Good show,’ he added, wanting to make it clear how much he appreciated Cheong’s efforts.
‘Whose grave is that?’
Cheong, without pausing in his digging, muttered a name which the Major had to cup his ear to catch.
‘Not old Tom Prescott!’ cried the Major in dismay. ‘Why, François, I knew him well. He used to do a trick at parties with an egg.’ And the Major gazed into the grave in concern.
Dupigny shrugged, as if to say: ‘What else can one expect, the way things are?’
They moved on a little way. The Major, upset, mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. ‘Poor old Tommy,’ he said. ‘What a card he was! He used to have us in fits. Mind you, he was getting on in years. He’d had a good innings.’
The Major, too, Dupigny could not help thinking, was beginning to look his years; the lack of sleep and the ceaseless activity of the past few days had given his features a haggard appearance, accentuating the lines under his eyes; even his moustache had a chewed and patchy look, perhaps singed by drifting sparks at one of the fires he had attended.
‘People are like bubbles, Brendan,’ declared Dupigny in a sombre and sententious manner. ‘They drift about for a little while and then they burst.’
‘Oh, François, please!’
‘Not clear bubbles which sparkle, but bubbles of muddy, blood-stained water. Prick them and they burst. Moreover, it is scientific,’ he added, narrowing his eyes in a Cartesian manner. ‘We are made of ninety-nine per cent water, we are like cucumbers. So what do you expect?’ If you prick a cucumber it does not burst, the Major thought of saying, but decided not to encourage his friend in this lugubrious vein.
Having returned to the bungalow they found Ehrendorf who had disappeared for an hour to drive some of the women refugees from up-country to Cluny to join the queue of people trying to register for passages at the P & O Agency House. He reported a scene of despair and chaos. Now, with what might be the last passenger ships for some time preparing to leave, men, women and children were braving the heat and the air-raids in an attempt to get away.
‘Perhaps you should be on one of them yourself, Jim, unless you expect your army to arrive and rescue us and are merely waiting to welcome them ashore.’
‘While François is still in the Colony I know it must be safe,’ replied Ehrendorf with a smile.
‘You surely do not expect me to leave on … quelle horreur … a troopship. If you have ever been on such a vessel you will know that there is at least one instance in which it is better to arrive than to travel. Besides, I am curious to see how it ends, this Singapore story.’
Matthew, too, arrived presently. He had spent the morning at the Chinese Protectorate trying to get an exit permit for Vera. They now had everything that was needed including photographs and had both been hopeful that at last they would be able to tackle the next obstacle of getting Vera registered with the P & O. But the exit permit had been refused without explanation. Matthew was still shocked by this set-back: he had been so certain that they would succeed. Curiously enough, this time Vera had seemed to be less affected than he was by the disappointment, had comforted him as best she could and had come back with him to the Mayfair.
‘I know someone at the Protectorate,’ said the Major suddenly. ‘I think I shall go and have a word with him.’
It was not until later in the afternoon that the Major found time to telephone Smith at the Chinese Protectorate, asking to see him. Smith was discouraging. ‘We’re very busy here, Major. We have a whole lot of Chinese on our plate. What’s it about?’
‘I’m coming to see you now, Smith,’ the Major told him sharply, ‘and you’d better be there or else you’ll find a dozen young women camping in your office tomorrow.’
‘You’ll never get through. Traffic jams.’ There was silence for a moment, then Smith’s voice asked suspiciously: ‘What’s it about?’
The Major rang off.
Word had now spread that two, or even more, of the troopships that had brought the 18th Division would be sailing that evening after dark. This was a further blow for Matthew, made no better by the knowledge that even if they had managed to get the exit permit they still would not have been able to complete the other formalities in time to get Vera on board. From early in the afternoon those prospective passengers fortunate enough to have been granted passages on the ships that were due to sail had begun to converge on the docks, with the result that delays and traffic jams soon began to develop. Eventually those who were trying to approach Keppel Harbour along Tanjong Pagar Road found that they could no longer move forward at all: so many cars had been abandoned in the road by passengers who had driven themselves to the docks that the stream of traffic had become hopelessly blocked by them. The situation both there and in the other approach roads was made even worse by the bomb-craters, the rubble from destroyed buildings which had not yet been cleared away, and by the efforts of the newly arrived 18th Division to unload their equipment and force a passage through for it in the opposite direction. Everywhere desperate people were sweltering in cars which crept forward at best only a few feet at a time through clouds of smoke or dust, thin in places, dense in others, between rows of heat-distorted buildings, accompanied by a nightmare braying of car-horns, the hammering of anti-aircraft guns and the crump of bombs falling ahead of them. Nearer the docks a number of buildings were on fire: there were godowns with roofs neatly carpeted with rectangles of flame and shop-houses with flames sprouting like orange weeds from every window. Some passengers began to realize that they would never reach the docks in time, but the greater the panic the worse the situation became. It was obvious, even to the Major, arriving after a considerable delay at the Chinese Protectorate on the corner of Havelock Road, that the embarkation had turned into a shambles.
The Major had half expected not to find Smith in his office but there he was at his desk, peering intently into one of its drawers which, however, contained nothing but a few whiskers of perforated paper left over from a sheet of postage stamps, a much-bitten pencil, and one or two wire paper-clips. Ignoring the Major’s entrance he put the pencil between his teeth and after some deliberation selected one of the paper-clips. Sitting back he asked blandly: ‘Well, what can I do for you, Major?’
The Major explained that he wanted an exit permit for Vera.
‘Does she have a valid certificate of admission? Why doesn’t she apply herself?’
‘She has … and has been refused without explanation.’
‘I’m afraid in that case …’ said Smith, beginning to clean his ear with the paper-clip and inspecting it at intervals.
‘She’ll be in grave danger should the Japanese gain control of Singapore.’
‘Can’t do much about that, I’m afraid. But as a favour we’ll have a little look at her file, shall we? If she’s properly registered we should have her photograph and thumb-print, I should think … Just a moment.’
Smith got to his feet and made his way to a door leading to an inner office. He left the door ajar and the Major could hear whispering but could not make out what was being said. He looked around. Nothing in the office had changed since his first visit except that strips of brown paper had been pasted over the window as a precaution against flying glass-splinters. It was some time before Smith reappeared; when he did so he was wearing spectacles and carrying a file. The atmosphere in the office was stifling despite the fan thrashing away above his desk. He sat down and for a while studied the file suspiciously, occasionally making a clicking sound with his tongue. From time to time he lifted the paper-clip and twisted it in his ear like a key in a lock. At length he looked up and said sharply: ‘What’s your interest in this case, Major?’
‘She’s a friend of mine …’
‘I believe we’ve discussed this woman before, haven’t we? I told you she wasn’t reliable, perhaps even a whore. Surely now you don’t mean to tell me that she’s a friend of yours!’
‘Even if your evil-minded suggestions were true,’ replied the Major coldly, ‘it would be no reason to refuse her an exit permit when her life is in danger if she remains in Singapore.’
Smith had once more dropped his eyes to the file and was champing his lips in a disagreeable manner. How little had changed, the Major reflected, since the first time he had sat in this office! Smith was still blinking and sweating profusely: wisps of hair still flickered on each side of his bald crown like electric sparks, dancing weirdly in the draught of the fan. The Major had been too busy fire-fighting to give much thought to earlier days when his Civil Defence Committee had lobbied the various departments of the Government for distribution of gasmasks and for air-raid shelters in the populous quarters of the city. But now his sense of frustration with petty officials returned in full force, combined with bitterness at the results of their ineptitude which he had witnessed in the last few days driving about in the defenceless, shelterless city.
‘This woman once had connections with the General Labour Union,’ pursued Smith, unaware of the Major’s anger. ‘I suppose you know that that was a Communist organization?’
The Major said nothing. Outside the air-raid sirens yet again began their rise and fall, rise and fall. Smith cocked an ear anxiously to them, then went on: ‘We have information that she was also implicated in some criminal affair in Shanghai before the war in which a Japanese officer was killed. That was also Communist-inspired without doubt. So you see …’
‘I see nothing except that she’ll be on a Japanese black-list if she remains in Singapore!’ shouted the Major, losing his temper.
‘Don’t raise your voice with me, Major,’ said Smith nastily. ‘You’ll find that it doesn’t get you anywhere.’
‘From the way you talk it sounds as if you’re on the side of the Japanese. Let me remind you that they and not the Chinese are the enemy!’
‘Look here, old man,’ said Smith in a condescending tone. ‘I happen to know a great deal more about this business than you do. Of course, the Japs are the enemy, of course they are! But that doesn’t mean the Chinese are on our side, particularly the Communists. You don’t know, as I do, how dangerous they are to the fabric of our society. Well, they’re like … I always say … hookworms in the body. They don’t respect the natural boundaries of the organs … They pass from one to another …’
‘So you said before. But I want an exit permit for that young woman and I don’t mean to leave without one.’
‘Out of the question, old man. Here in Singapore we have the Communists isolated and under control. We can’t allow them to spread all over the place. The way I describe it, which many people have been kind enough to find illuminating, is that they’re like millions of seeds in a pod. If we allow that pod to burst in India, say, or even in Australia, why, they’ll be scattered all over the Empire in no time … Oh Lord!’ he added hurrying to the window and throwing it open. ‘It looks as if they’re coming this way. We’d better go down to the shelter.’
The Major joined him at the window. The office was on the top floor of the building and looked eastwards over the city towards the sea. At this hour the stretch of water between Anderson Bridge and the horizon was a delicate duck-egg blue, extraordinarily beautiful. The Major, however, was looking up at the minute formation of silver-black planes flying towards the city at a great height. As the bombers passed over Kallang little white puffs began to appear in the sky beneath them, as if dotted here and there with an invisible paint-brush. After a moment the thud of guns came to them at the window. ‘Yes, they do seem to be coming this way,’ he agreed.
‘Well, we’ll have to continue this chat another time.’ Smith picked up the file, snapped it shut and clamped it under his arm very firmly, as if he expected the Major to snatch it from him. He eyed the Major warily, his head on one side.
The Major was surprised to hear himself say: ‘I’m not leaving this office without that exit permit and neither are you.’ He advanced on Smith threateningly, sensing that despite his advantage of years Smith was afraid of him; perhaps Smith sensed how deeply angry and resentful the Major was after the days he had spent working in the chaotic streets. The Major gripped the back of a chair and Smith fell back a pace. Outside an alarm-bell jangled.
‘That’s the roof-spotter,’ cried Smith in alarm. ‘Look, be sensible. I don’t even have the proper forms here. You must come back later, come back some other time.’
‘Just write it out on official paper, sign it and stamp it!’ The Major advanced a step. ‘I’ve had about enough of this,’ he added, taking off his jacket. ‘Put up your fists.’
‘What d’you mean?’ asked Smith, staring at him in amazement.
‘I mean I’m going to give you a punch on the nose,’ replied the Major.
‘This is absurd,’ muttered Smith. He had turned very pale. Tufts of hair continued to flutter above his ears. A hideous whistling sound had begun from outside; it grew higher and higher in pitch, ending in an explosion that shook the building. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Smith, ringing the bell on his desk sharply. But nothing happened. Evidently the people in the next office had departed to the shelter by another exit.
‘Now look here …’ said Smith, making for the door and delivering the Major a paralysing hack on the shins as he passed. But the Major caught him by the arm and yanked him back into the room. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘Put up your fists.’
‘At least let me take off my glasses,’ said Smith, giving the Major another mighty hack on the shins and punching him in the stomach for good measure.
‘I’m afraid you’ve gone too far,’ gasped the Major and, glasses or no glasses, drew back his first. But before he could strike, Smith was at his desk, writing busily.
‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away that she was your tart?’ he demanded in an aggrieved tone. ‘For chaps’ tarts we can make exceptions.’
Smith had finished writing. The Major picked up the paper, read it carefully and put it in his pocket. ‘One more thing. If I hear you’ve done anything to countermand this …’
But Smith had already fled for safety from the bombs and from the Major.
60
The first week of February was a week of frantic activity for General Percival. Such was the swiftness with which the Japanese had followed up their attacks throughout the campaign that he knew he could not count on more than a week’s grace before they launched their attack on Singapore Island itself. There was so much to be done, so little time in which to do it. He no longer even returned to Flagstaff House to sleep. Instead he would stretch out in his office at Command Headquarters in Sime Road and, within a few moments, would find himself plunging into a torrent of anxieties even more distressing than those he had to face while awake. And so, tired though he was, he preferred to remain conscious, taking cover in his work as if in a fortified position.
Moreover, he now sometimes had the impression that his luck was about to change, that the unseen hand had ceased to wield its influence over his affairs. For if you looked at matters objectively you would see immediately that the situation could have been a great deal worse. After all, was it not the case that the major part of his forces from the mainland had withdrawn unscathed across the Causeway and had been redeployed successfully to their defensive positions on the Island? They were there now, digging in as best they could under the shells which had started coming over the water from Johore. True, the 22nd Brigade had been lost, apart from a few stragglers who had managed to find their way across the Strait in small boats or who had been picked up at night by what was left of the Navy. On the other hand, the remainder of the (British) 18th Division was due to arrive on the 5th. It was Percival’s belief that it would arrive just in the nick of time.
Singapore Island in shape somewhat resembled the head of an elephant lumbering towards you, with both its flapping ears outstretched and with Singapore Town about where the mouth would be. On the extreme tip of the elephant’s left ear (on the east coast, that is) were the great fixed guns of the Johore and Changi batteries. On the other ear there was Tengah airfield and the coastline of creeks and mangrove swamps. As it happened, neither ear was now of very much use to Percival. Tengah was within easy range of observed artillery fire from the mainland and could no longer be used by the few remaining Hurricanes, detained on the Island for the purposes of morale and for the escorting of the last convoys: they now had to use the civil aerodrome at Kallang. As for those enormous, leopard-striped fifteen-inch guns at Changi which had contributed so much to Singapore’s reputation as a fortress, they had been sited to deal with an attack by ships from the sea, although some of them could indeed be traversed to fire into Johore; their ammunition (in short supply, incidentally) since it was armour-piercing, was also intended for use against ships and was expected to bury itself too deeply to be effective against targets on land.
No, although the ears must also, of course, be defended against an enemy landing, it was really the head itself that mattered, for it was in this central part of the Island that everything of importance was located. On the crown of the elephant’s head the Island was (or rather, had been) joined to the mainland by the Causeway which was a little over a thousand yards in length. When the last of the Argylls, who had been given the risky job of covering the withdrawal, had crossed safely back to the Island a considerable hole had been blown in the Causeway … or so it had seemed at first. Percival had been quite pleased with it, seeing the water flowing through at such a speed. But after a while even the hole had proved a disappointment, for what he had seen at first was the hole at high tide … at low tide it was a different story. It no longer looked as if it would provide such an effective obstacle. Still, it was a great deal better than no hole at all.
The important road which, in normal times, came over on the Causeway and landed on the crown of the elephant’s head continued straight down towards its mouth and trunk where Singapore Town was … that, is in a southerly direction, more or less. Two-thirds of the way across, it reached Bukit Timah Village, thereafter calling itself the Bukit Timah Road for the last lap into the city itself.
This principal road across the Island was straddled by not very impressive hills: Bukit (which means ‘hill’) Mandai, Bukit Panjang, Bukit Timah and Bukit Brown, the only hill terrain on the Island, by a nondescript area called Sleepy Valley, by a race course, a golf club and a cemetery (the latter on Bukit Brown), all grouped around Command Headquarters in Sime Road where Percival was now swatting at flies which were relentlessly trying to land on the backs of his sweating hands as he pored over the maps.
A little further to the east, right between the beast’s eyes, lay the reservoirs which would become vital if the siege were prolonged, and, further east again, the pumping station at Woodleigh. Apart from the water in the reservoirs, great stocks of food retrieved from the mainland had been dumped on the race course. Beside the race course two large petrol dumps had been established, not to mention other food, petrol and ammunition dumps which were located in the Bukit Timah area. Yes, altogether this was an area that Percival knew he must defend at all costs. But then, ‘at all costs’ was how he would have had to defend it, anyway, since Singapore Town was only just down the road.
In the plans which had been laid for the defence of the Island it had been decided that if the worst came to the worst and the Japanese got a solid footing ashore, the eastern and western areas (the elephant’s ears) might à la rigueur be abandoned and that the forces defending them might withdraw to second lines of defence. These second lines of defence, known as ‘switch lines’, followed very roughly the sides of the elephant’s head where the ears were stuck on to it: on the eastern side the ‘switch line’ was obliged to bulge out a bit from the side of the head in order to include Kallang aerodrome; also, the big guns at Changi would have to be abandoned. On the western side the ‘switch line’ was particularly easy to define, thanks to two rivers or creeks, the Jurong and the Kranji, which flowed north and south respectively just where the ear joined the skull. It was simply, then, a question of joining one creek to the other with a defensive line from north to south across the Island to isolate the western ear completely. Nothing could be simpler.
This ‘switch line’, known as the ‘Jurong line’, was accordingly reconnoitred but no effort was made to install fixed defences. This was for two reasons. One was that the troops were already frantically digging themselves in around the northern coast in order to prepare for the Japanese attack across the Strait of Johore and did not have time. The other was that Percival did not really think that the Japanese would come that way. He was pretty well convinced that they would attack somewhere along the top of the other (eastern) ear between Changi and Seletar.
Percival considered that the Japanese attack would fall on the north-east coast of the Island partly because Wavell, when they had discussed the prospect a couple of weeks earlier, had taken a different view: Wavell thought it would fall on the north-western. Nor was Wavell the only one: Brigadier Simson, the DGCD, clearly thought so, too, because he or his Deputy Chief Engineer had been dumping quantities of defensive material west of the Causeway on their own initiative. Ever since December it had been piling up: booby-traps, barbed wire, high-tensile anti-tank wire, even drums of petrol with which to set fire to the water surface and searchlights to illuminate it at every possible landing site. He had even dumped anti-tank cylinders, blocks and chains by the sides of the roads. No doubt Simson meant well. The fact remained that, in Percival’s view, he had the makings of a confounded nuisance. Ever since he had arrived he had been demanding that fixed defences should be built on the north shore of the Island. He simply had not wanted to realize what such defences would have done to the morale of the troops fighting up-country, or of the civilians either, come to that. Simson’s latest was to start stripping the headlights off cars to augment his searchlights! The Governor, however, had soon put a stop to that. He himself, aware that there would no longer be much time left to prepare for the Japanese assault, had seen to it that the defensive material was shifted from west to east of the Causeway where, he was pretty sure, it would be needed.
Tormented by flies, light-headed from lack of sleep, Percival sat in his office at Sime Road, brooding over his maps and listening to the distant, monotonous thudding of the guns. The Japanese had wasted no time in moving up their heavy artillery, they were good soldiers, there was no denying it. Now they were laying down a heavy bombardment of the northern coast … particularly, as it happened, west of the Causeway. Ah, but Percival was not about to be fooled into thinking that that was where the attack would come! To bombard one sector and attack another was the oldest trick in the game. There was something almost pleasant, he found, in this constant thudding of guns, which included his own artillery shelling Johore and the hammering of ack-ack guns … it reminded him curiously of his youth, of the endless artillery exchanges of the Great War. Terrible though that had been, it now seemed almost a pleasant memory. He thought for a moment of mentioning it to Brookers … he, too, would have enjoyed the reminiscence. But then he remembered that Brooke-Popham had already returned to England. Just as well, really. The old chap was no longer quite up to this sort of thing.
It occurred to Percival that what had gone wrong in the campaign until now was that he had never been able to act positively. Time and again he had been obliged to react. Thanks to Brooke-Popham’s hesitations the Japanese commander had taken the initiative from the beginning and had never let it go. True, he himself had been the victim of the most extraordinary (indeed, suspicious) series of misfortunes. But the fact was that that unseen hand had led him by the nose. When Wavell had expressed the opinion that a Japanese attack would fall west of the Causeway, when, independently, it seemed, the Chief Engineer had started dumping material west of the Causeway, how easy it would have been to have made the assumption that this was where the attack would fall! But something inside him had rebelled. He had sensed that once again that unseen hand was trying to lead him by the nose. He had told himself: ‘Be objective!’ And so he had cleared his mind of prejudices and looked at the map again, asking himself what he would have done if he had been the Japanese commander. The answer was: he would have launched his attack on the north-east coast using Pulau Ubin, the long island which lay in the Strait of Johore, to shield his preparations from the view of Singapore Island. Accordingly, Percival had allotted to the recently arrived British troops of the 18th Division whose morale had not been dented in the long retreat down the Peninsula the sector which he considered most critical… though the whole of the northern coast must be defended, of course.
There was, however, still the possibility that he was wrong in expecting the Japanese attack to fall east of the Causeway. The Intelligence wallahs in Fort Canning, for example, were predicting an attack to the west. But what did they know about it? They knew no more than he did: they had no reconnaissance planes to help them. All the same, to be on the safe side, he had ordered Gordon Bennett to send over night patrols to the mainland to get a better idea of what the Japanese were up to. Bennett had been dragging his feet over this. He would have to give him some plain speaking.
He reached out for some papers on his desk and as he picked them up a photograph fell out of them: they were private papers of no great importance which he had brought with him from Flagstaff House with the intention of having them destroyed. The photograph, by a coincidence, was of Gordon Bennett and himself standing, by the look of it, outside Flagstaff House. They were both ‘at ease’, identically dressed except that Bennett was wearing a short-sleeved shirt while he himself had rolled his sleeves up to the elbow. But what struck Percival now was the difference of expression on their faces: while he himself was smiling pleasantly at the camera, Bennett, a short, plump fellow whose belt encircled a by no means negligible corporation, standing a few inches further back, was looking disaffected, was even glancing at him sideways out of the corner of his eye in a manner which could almost have been contemptuous. But perhaps he was simply imagining it… photographs are notorious for giving the wrong impression, for catching people with misleading expressions on their faces. Still, he had to admit that he no longer had the confidence in Bennett that he had once had. While many of the Australian troops had fought heroically and effectively, Bennett as their leader had proved a liability. Altogether Percival was glad that Bennett would be covering the north-western area which was least likely to be attacked.
Presently Percival’s thoughts were interrupted by the GSO1 on duty in the War Room, and not with good news. An urgent message had come through from Kallang aerodrome by way of the RAF staff: one of the convoy of four ships transporting the remaining units of the British 18th Division, the Empress of Asia, had fallen behind the other three and had not managed, under cover of darkness, to reach the (relatively) safe umbrella of Singapore’s air defences. She had been attacked by dive-bombers off the Sembilan Islands and was in danger of sinking. Efforts were being made by the Navy to rescue survivors.
For some moments, while he considered this news, Percival was speechless. He had been so confident that the unseen hand would play no further part in his affairs … and now this! He had been counting on the 18th Division arriving intact. At length, however, he collected himself and said mechanically to the GSO1: ‘We must count ourselves lucky that that’s the only ship we’ve lost.’ Then, becoming brisk, he turned to other business. There was still a great deal to be done. He wanted to know in particular what progress was being made with the demolition of plant at the Naval Base; almost unbelievably, it seemed to him, Naval personnel had decamped to Ceylon on Admiralty orders, without even bothering to inform him that this demolition would have to be undertaken by his own hard-pressed troops.
A little later there was further news of the Empress of Asia: although both the liner herself and the equipment she was carrying had been destroyed, the loss of life had been small. This undoubtedly was a good omen: Percival immediately summoned his driver and had himself conveyed to the docks to greet the survivors. True, they would not be much help without their equipment, which had included anti-tank guns (if only there had been more of those at the Slim River!) but it was still a step in the right direction. And every able-bodied man might prove useful in the end, provided there was sufficient time to establish satisfactory defences.
Then, however, an even more disturbing piece of news reached him; at last, on 7 February, Bennett had seen his way to sending the night-patrols he had asked for over to the mainland. On their return they had brought the dismaying report that Japanese troops were concentrating opposite the north-western sector. Could it be, Percival wondered, that his prediction was wrong?
61
In the first days of February it seemed to Matthew that the dock buildings were permanently ablaze. There the Mayfair unit would be sent whenever there were no fires to deal with in their own district, and so frequently did this occur that presently it became almost a ritual: they would report to Adamson and set into a hydrant, or if there were no hydrant, drop their suction hose into the filthy water of the dock itself and start up the pumps. No matter when they arrived, or where, it seemed that it was always Adamson who was in charge of the fire they had been sent to. It was a mystery when he found time to sleep. He would emerge from the drifting smoke, never in a hurry, strolling almost, as if perfectly remote from the fire raging close at hand.
At some time in the past few days Adamson had acquired a dog, a black and white sheepdog which had mysteriously adopted him at one of the fires he had attended and which added to his air of detachment. Very often when the Mayfair party arrived the dog would appear first out of the smoke, would examine them, sniffing and wagging its tail, and then disappear into the smoke again, returning presently with Adamson. Then Adamson would briefly explain the nature of the fire to the Major and the plan for fighting, or at least containing it … for the bombs which caused the fires continued to fall with ritual precision, day after day, very often at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning and again in the afternoon, but always more rapidly than the fires, death and destruction which they brought about could be dealt with. The truth was that although the staff at the Central Fire Station in Hill Street continued to map the new outbreaks as best they could, there were likely to be as many ‘unofficial’ fires burning briskly in the docks or elsewhere in the city as those which had been reported and mapped. But somehow Adamson and his dog found out about these fires, sifted them and matched them against the pumps and fire-engines available, deciding which were the least dangerous and could be left to burn, and which had to be stopped then and there.
Once or twice, when the Major happened on an unattended fire on his way to the docks, he anxiously sought out Adamson to report it, only to find out that Adamson already knew about it. ‘Let it burn, Major,’ he would say with a curious, ironic smile and then go on to explain in his casual manner where the Mayfair pumps might come in useful. At times Adamson was to be seen in a jeep he had found somewhere, manoeuvring in and out of the piles of rubble and masonry that lay in the streets, while the black and white dog sat up on the seat beside him looking around with keen interest as if ready to alert his companion to any new fire that broke out. But more often, because of the dense traffic of military vehicles unloading equipment and trying to move food stores from the threatened godowns to some safer location in the city, Adamson and his dog moved about on foot. Matthew, in particular, watched them with keen interest.
Despite his weariness, the hectic life he was leading, the constant danger, and his worries lest Vera should be trapped in Singapore, Matthew had not ceased to feel that novel sense of fulfilment which he had first experienced at the timber-yard fire. The satisfaction of doing something practical, the results of which were visible and practical, in the company of friends seemed to him so powerful that he was amazed that he should never have considered it before. While he had been cudgelling his brains with the question: ‘What is the best way in which to live one’s life?’ with no other result than that a substantial part of that life had gone by in the process, the answer had been all around him, being demonstrated by the most ordinary of people.
Watching Adamson and his dog, calm but determined, going about their business, Matthew thought: ‘Surely there are people like this all over the world, in every country, in every society in every class or caste or community! People who simply go about doing the things that have to be done, not just for themselves but for everybody.’ Such people, whether they were Socialists, or Capitalists, or Communists, or paid no attention to politics at all, because they were entirely committed to whatever job it was they were doing were bound to be the very backbone of their society; without them people like himself who spent their days in speculation and dispute could scarcely expect to survive. Matthew was anxious to know Adamson’s thoughts, to know whether he had consciously decided to behave in the way he did. But he found it difficult to corner Adamson and even more difficult to get him to say what he thought about anything. He would merely answer with a smile or a shrug when Matthew tried to sound him out on some political question. Once he admitted reluctantly in reply to Matthew’s question that, after the war, if he got back to Britain, he would vote for a Labour Government ‘to change all this’ and he gestured vaguely with a stick at the smouldering warehouses around them. After a moment’s silent reflection he added: ‘I read somewhere that the boatman who rowed King William back across the river after the Battle of the Boyne is supposed to have asked the King which side won … To which the King replied: “What’s it to you? You’ll still be a boatman.”’ Matthew had to be satisfied with this.
In the course of the past few days Adamson had hurt his foot and now limped rather, but he still managed to convey the impression that he was merely out for a stroll among the burning buildings; his casual air was increased by the fact that he had taken to carrying a walking stick he had picked up somewhere. Once Matthew came upon him unexpectedly. Not far from one of the dock gates there was a sad little parcel of tattered clothing and personal odds and ends, abandoned by someone unable to carry them in the stampede to reach one of the last ships to leave. Other similarly abandoned suitcases had in the meantime vanished or been rifled of their contents. Now Adamson, leaning on his stick, was contemplating a battered old hairbrush with bristles splayed by use, a sponge-bag, a couple of books including a child’s picture-book, what might have been a cotton dress or apron and several other indeterminate pieces of cloth or clothing. He continued to gaze at these things for a moment with raised eyebrows and a grim expression on his face; then he limped on, swiping with his stick at a tennis ball he saw in the gutter with a shoe and one or two other things. The dog, which had come back to see what was the matter, went racing off again to seek out more fires. Matthew would remember for a long time to come that bitter, ironic expression he had glimpsed on Adamson’s face as he limped away down the empty street after the dog which had already disappeared into the rolling smoke.
But already the Mayfair unit had gained so much experience that its members depended less and less on Adamson’s advice and directions. The Major himself had become a hardened fireman and no longer would have dreamed of taking the risks he had taken in the beginning. Not that fire-fighting had become any less dangerous. Quite apart from the heavy carpet-bombing raids by gigantic formations of bombers (still in multiples of twenty-seven) which continued and intensified in the first week of February, now lone fighter-aircraft would appear suddenly out of nowhere, zooming up and down the main thoroughfares of the city and machine-gunning anything that moved, even rickshaws or Cold Storage ‘stop-me-and-buy-one’ tricycles … one day they passed an overturned tricycle with a Chinese youth beside it, his brains spilling into a pool of milk or ice-cream in the road. Anywhere, coming and going to fires, you might suddenly have come upon a row of bodies stretched out on the pavement following the appearance of one of these aircraft.
The city of Singapore which, in unison with the rise of Blackett and Webb, had grown from a small settlement into the greatest trading port of the Far East had been the home of something over half a million people in peacetime. Now in the space of a few weeks the population had suddenly doubled to over a million as refugees poured across the Causeway from up-country. By the time a hole had at last been blown in the Causeway and the flow of refugees had dried up, the Island, and Singapore Town in particular, was swarming with people who had nowhere to go. From now on, almost everywhere you went you would see people with suitcases or bundles sitting by the roadside in whatever shade they could find, under trees or on the pavements of covered ways, clustering around water-taps or begging food from passers-by. To Matthew and the Major and even to Dupigny who had spent so many years in the swarming cities of the East, this sudden increase in Singapore’s population was quite unnerving. Among these aimless crowds of refugees they themselves felt a loss of identity and purpose. They felt themselves losing their accustomed rank as Europeans, their special status, in that great, amorphous, anonymous herd of humanity trapped there in a burning city and unable any longer to exert any control over its own destiny.
Even after the demolition of the Causeway more refugees still continued to appear in Singapore Town, evacuated from the northern part of the Island by the Military who were preparing their defences. From the beginning of February a curfew from nine p.m. to five a.m. had been in force, but you cannot confine people to their houses if they have no houses to go to; it was not very long before the city’s population, abnormally swollen by refugees and demoralized troops, had begun to show signs of getting out of control. The first sporadic cases of looting occurred in bombed-out districts. Rumours of the excesses of undisciplined troops, for the most part Australian, circulated among the alarmed Europeans: someone had had his car hijacked at gun-point-by drunken soldiers carousing with prostitutes from Lavender Road, and someone else had heard of a rape of English nurses on waste land near the biscuit factory. This sudden collapse, which you could almost feel in the air, of normal standards of behaviour was the most frightening thing of all, more frightening even than the Japanese bombers. As a result, anyone who had still hesitated over leaving, and who had permission to do so, now made up his mind.
Thanks to the Major’s influence at the Chinese Protectorate, Matthew had at last succeeded, after more anxious hours of waiting, in having Vera’s name registered at the P & O’s temporary office in Cluny Road. But Vera, though she had seemed in mortal fear of the Japanese while they were still hundreds of miles away in the north, now that they had come to within a few miles, and could even be seen with the naked eye (so one of the transient officers at the Mayfair asserted) strutting on the sea front at Johore Bahru, had grown calm and apparently resigned. When every day, Matthew telephoned the P & O to find out if there were any ships sailing and, again every day, he received a negative answer she did not seem to be particularly disappointed. She merely shrugged her shoulders and smiled. In any case, he had less opportunity to see her now. While most of his waking hours were spent at fires, Vera had taken to working equally long hours as a volunteer nurse at one of the makeshift hospitals which had sprung up on the fringes of Chinatown to cope with the steadily increasing civilian casualties. Matthew continued doggedly to telephone the P & O, however. He was determined that she should not be in Singapore when the Japanese arrived. But would there be any more ships leaving? So the first week of February came to an end.
They slept side by side. Matthew was dreaming deeply, anxiously about Geneva. Things would go terribly wrong unless he was careful: he knew that Vera’s life would be at stake unless he could persuade someone of something, whom and of what was not clear. He uttered a shout, waking himself up. But no, someone was there, hammering against the wall, telling him to wake up. He sat up immediately in the stifling darkness. He could see someone standing there in the faint glow from under the rolled-up bamboo window blinds, and he thought: ‘They have come to arrest her, after all.’
‘Sorry, I think you were having a nightmare,’ said a familiar voice. It was the Major. He wanted to say that someone in the Control Room in Hill Street had told him that a Free French ship, the Félix Roussel, was due to sail for Bombay in a few hours and anyone who wanted to sail on her was advised to reserve a passage without delay. The P & O office was already besieged. There was no time to waste.
The following morning a cheerful crowd sat amid the jumble of mattresses and chairs in the Mayfair. Everything had at last been arranged. Matthew, jubilant, sat reading again and again the printed instructions they had been given at the P & O office. Vera was to report to Collyer Quay at eight o’clock that evening, bringing only what luggage she could carry herself. Matthew had been given a pass which would allow him to drive home after seeing her off, which would necessarily be after the curfew. As for Vera, though she smiled from time to time, she said nothing. Matthew was puzzled by her calm. Was she upset by the prospect of finding herself alone in Bombay?
‘A little,’ Vera agreed. ‘But no, not really.’ She had been used to this sort of thing from childhood, being uprooted from one place after another.
‘You’ve got the address of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, haven’t you?’ Matthew asked anxiously, not for the first time. ‘It’s in Churchgate Street. I’ll write to you there and join you when I can.’ Vera smiled again and squeezed his hand. Matthew suspected that she still did not really believe she would get away from Singapore.
While they sat around talking they were startled by a whirring sound like a great bird passing over the house, followed by an explosion, perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
‘I didn’t hear the sirens, did you?’ They stared at each other in surprise. Only the Major knew immediately what had caused the explosion. He had heard that sort of noise before. He sighed but said nothing, bending his ear politely to listen to what his neighbour was saying. This man, a purple-faced planter from the Kuala Lumpur area, was one of the many refugees who had wandered in unannounced, having heard somewhere that there was shelter to be found at the Mayfair; he had brought several bottles of whisky with which he fortified himself at intervals, waving a roll of paper. On this roll of paper, he said, were the plans of a new type of anti-aircraft gun he had invented in the long evenings on his estate. It would fire twice as high as anything they had at present. He had written to General Percival about it but his letter had gone unanswered. ‘Save the whole of Singapore, old boy,’ he was now explaining huskily to the Major. ‘But the blighters won’t look at it… Save the British Empire, come to that!’ And he waved his blueprint despondently.
Again there came that whirring, whistling sound, followed by another explosion, more distant this time.
‘What on earth is it?’
‘I’m afraid they’ve started shelling us now,’ said the Major. ‘They must have moved up some heavier guns to reach this side of the Island.’ He felt a sudden compulsion to jump to his feet and start walking about, because if you kept on the move … well, more than once in the trenches in the First War a shell had exploded where he had been sitting or standing a moment before. Nevertheless, he obliged himself to sit still, staring somewhat glassily at Matthew and Vera opposite him. He did not want to start all that again at his age! It had taken him years after the war to get over this compulsion to be always on the move. How many years had he not spent with invisible shells exploding in dining-rooms and drawing-rooms he had just vacated!
‘At this range they’ll only be able to send over the small stuff,’ he added, lighting his pipe.
‘The Major means that if you are lucky you will only be hit by a small shell,’ observed Dupigny wryly from the doorway.
‘Ah, François! I suppose you know there’s a French ship sailing tonight for Bombay? Will you be aboard?’
Dupigny shook his head. ‘I shall stay a little longer, I think.
‘This may be your last chance.’
Dupigny, however, merely shrugged.
‘I saw Walter a little while ago. He said that Joan and Nigel would be leaving tonight. They’re to be married in Bombay and then go to Australia to join the others as soon as they can … Joan would have left the other day but could not get on the boat. It seems that …’ The Major paused. Matthew, with his finger to his lips, was signalling in the direction of Ehrendorf who lay sprawled on a mattress at the far end of the room with a folded newspaper over his head.
‘What are you going to do about this poor fellow?’ Matthew asked in order to change the subject.
Each shell that had exploded had produced a groan from beneath an elegant lacquered writing-desk which supported a field-telephone ‘for emergencies’ which no one could get to work and an ordinary telephone, as well as several other things. Presently the author of the groan crept out and went to slump down under the Major’s chair. With his refined sense of imminent danger The Human Condition had evidently sensed that these strange new explosions boded ill for his chances of survival.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take him to the vet this evening. We may as well bring him along at the same time as you go to the boat, poor creature.’ At these words The Human Condition rolled his eyeballs up to the Major’s face and uttered a piteous whine, licking the Major’s hand at the same time.
‘I think that dog must be rotting internally,’ remarked Dupigny objectively.
62
Ehrendorf made his way, carrying a towel and swimming trunks, towards the Blacketts’ compound, lingering for a moment among the exotic blooms which glowed like lamps amid the dark leaves. For a while he watched the butterflies which still swooped and fluttered in this little glade, impervious to the bombs that had fallen round about. Then, with a melancholy sigh which was partly counterfeit because he was now seeing himself as the ill-starred hero of his novel in its first version (innocent American abused by cynical Europeans), he moved on in the direction of the swimming pool.
Although he had paid a brief visit to Walter by darkness the other evening, it was several weeks since Ehrendorf had last seen the Blacketts’ house by daylight. It seemed to him to have a forlorn and deserted air. During the raid on Tanglin a bomb had fallen at one edge of the lawn, uprooting the ‘flame of the forest’ tree beneath which, several months ago, he had been standing with Joan when she had thrown wine in his face at the garden-party. No effort had been made to fill in the crater on whose raised lip the grass lawn continued peacefully to grow; in the façade of the house itself several of the windows which had once been glazed for the air-conditioning now gaped darkly where once they had sparkled with reflections from the pool.
He plodded past the tennis courts whose white lines, washed out by the monsoon rains and not repainted, were by now scarcely visible. Normally, too, there would have been several Tamils working in the flower-beds or cutting back the lalang but today he could not see a soul. He paused to stare uncomprehendingly at an untidy mass of broken spars and tattered paper which stood at the margin of the nutmeg grove and which he failed to recognize as the remains of damaged floats for the jubilee celebrations. Can Walter and Joan have left already? he wondered and, resigned though he already was to the fact that he was unlikely ever to see Joan again, he was nevertheless surprised by the intense and chilling sadness which suddenly enveloped him.
The summer-house, in which the Blacketts in happier times had invited their guests to change their clothes, remained undamaged; Ehrendorf changed rapidly and plunged into the pool which was full of dead leaves and other flotsam. He dived and swam under water for a few feet but the water was murky and disagreeable. How different everything was! Surfacing he bumped into a piece of floating wood on which the words ‘… in Prosperity’ were written. He took a deep breath and dived again; this time he dragged himself on and on through the silent grey corridors, counting the grey tiles on the bottom, inspecting weird grey objects which lay there: a broken flowerpot from which still trailed a slimy grey plant which wavered slightly at his passage, a brick, a rusting metal golf club, a slimy, swollen, disintegrating grey head, horribly merry, which had once belonged to one of the floats and which he also failed to recognize. He would have liked to drag himself on and on through that grey world but his lungs insisted that he should return to the surface. Shaking the water out of his eyes he saw that Joan was walking rapidly towards the pool. Her face was flushed and agitated.
‘Oh, hiya. I hope you don’t mind me using the pool. I didn’t see anyone around. I thought you’d all gone.’ He was aware of an extraordinary stiffness of the muscles of his face as he spoke.
Joan had stopped at the edge of the pool and was gazing down at him with an odd expression on her face, restlessly fingering the turban she was wearing. She ignored his greeting, turned away, looked at her watch, turned back to him. At last she said: ‘You must help me get to the boat. I’ve been trying to ring people but everyone else has gone. There’s only Abdul here and he’s too old … They say there’s already a terrible traffic jam beginning … All the “boys” have cleared off, even the kitchen “boy”, and Father has gone off somewhere … and Monty, I don’t know where he is … Nigel had to go and settle some business at the last moment and I’m to meet him at the boat but unless you help me … You see, they’ve all gone! Father was supposed to be back ages ago to take me down to the docks himself, but even the syce isn’t there and it’s getting late … Jim, I can’t manage the luggage by myself, d’you see? Oh, go away! You’re completely useless!’ she screamed at Abdul suddenly for the elderly servant had followed her out on to the lawn and was rubbing his hands anxiously. Shocked, he fell back a few paces but continued to watch Joan.
Ehrendorf had turned over on to his back and was no longer looking at Joan but straight up at the sky which was cloudless though covered with a white haze. Floating with arms and legs outstretched he thought: ‘From above I must look as if I’m floating like a star-fish … or perhaps like a piece of flotsam.’ In spite of the water bubbling in his ears he could still hear Joan’s voice, though quite faintly now. He could tell from its pitch that she was panic-stricken. And this was the girl who had refused to help Matthew get Vera away! He said to himself, floating placidly: ‘I wouldn’t help her even if my life depended upon it!’
When he turned over to swim to the side he could no longer hear her voice, but she was still there, kneeling in tears of rage at the side of the pool, hammering at it with a piece of broken wood. As he gripped the rounded lip of the pool and heaved himself out of the water he glanced at her, musing on the wonder of a beautiful woman with a disagreeable personality. Such a woman, he mused, was like a lovely schooner with a mad captain. The custodian of this lovely body was a hardhearted bitch. It was altogether astonishing.
‘Of course I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘Just wait a moment while I get changed.
Mr Wu’s Buick, which had been under repair for some days, was now on the road again and heading towards Wilkie Street where The Human Condition was to be left at the vet’s en route to Collyer’s Quay. The dog sat on the front seat and stared out uneasily at the darkening streets. But when they reached Wilkie Street they found a large crowd of harrowed-looking people grasping dogs, cats and birds of all shapes and sizes already waiting. It seemed that these doomed creatures had sensed the anguish of their owners, too, for they were setting up the most distressing din of shrieking, whining, miaouwing, barking and piping. The Major had no appetite for this and said: ‘We’ll call on the way back from the boat. There won’t be anyone there after the curfew. Besides, we’d better not waste any time.’ The Human Condition, who had been staring with dismay at this frantic queue of fellow-victims, uttered a heart-rending groan. For how long had he been reprieved?
When they reached Collyer’s Quay they were thankful that they had not delayed any longer for already the quay itself and the surrounding area was jammed with cars full of anxious people. Holding the paper that Vera had been given at Cluny Matthew plunged into the crowd of people trying to get tickets and embarkation instructions. He was gone for a long time; meanwhile the traffic jam around them had worsened considerably. When he at last returned he had Vera’s ticket but he was looking worried: he explained that they still had to drive to the P & O wharf some three miles away and the traffic by now was scarcely moving. To make matters worse, passengers were only allowed to board the ship in groups which had been staggered alphabetically in order to prevent everybody arriving at the dock at the same time. Because Vera’s surname began with C this regulation should have worked to her advantage, but by some error the official who had taken her name, perhaps assuming that she had given her surname first in the Chinese fashion, had reversed her names and allotted her to the last group. In any case passengers were not arriving at intervals as had been expected and some of those who had arrived too early were being made to wait, blocking the quayside. Nevertheless, although the boarding arrangements were no longer achieving what had been expected of them and were, indeed, only adding to the confusion, they were still being rigidly adhered to by the authorities in charge of the embarkation.
‘We should still make it all right. The boat doesn’t sail till one o’clock. We can always walk if the worst comes to the worst.’
It took several minutes before there was even an opening that allowed them to pull into the line of traffic crawling along Collyer’s Quay; then, for long stretches, they were obliged to stop altogether. Sometimes they discovered the reason for these delays, a car that had overheated or run out of petrol perhaps; then they would overtake a demented man peering at his engine in a cloud of steam, or a weeping woman sitting by herself with a pile of luggage, while those behind cursed and hooted at her to get her car out of the way.
‘This is dreadful.’ The Major’s face grew increasingly grim as the minutes ticked by. Presently a whole hour had fled. They still had not reached the shell of the Sailor’s Institute at the end of Anson Road.
‘Perhaps they’ll delay the time of sailing.’ But this, Matthew knew, was unlikely for if the Félix Roussel was to escape the Japanese bombers she would have to be well on her way from Singapore before dawn.
For some time now they had been following a large open Bentley which contained a party of elegantly dressed young ladies sitting on pigskin suitcases plastered with gaily coloured steamer and hotel labels. Since it was already quite dark and all street-lights had been extinguished in accordance with the blackout regulations there only remained the Buick’s papered-over headlights to cast a faint glow on the party travelling in front. But from time to time a match would flare as a cigarette was lit … (it appeared that the young ladies in the Bentley had no inhibitions about smoking in public) … then a cheerful little scene would be briefly illuminated, for to celebrate their departure from Singapore the ladies had brought two or three bottles of champagne and some glasses. And so, while another hour went by, the grim party from the Mayfair, with their doomed little dog sitting on the front seat, sat and watched the beautifully marcelled tresses in front of them and listened to the clink of glasses and the giggles, shrieks and popping of corks. Presently it occurred to the Major that there was something familiar about the Bentley.
‘Isn’t that one of Walter’s cars?’
‘I’ve been wondering the same thing. But what are those young women doing in it? There’s something familiar about them, too. But it surely can’t be Walter driving, nor his syce either, come to that.’ The driver, whoever it was, remained invisible slumped far down in the seat in a manner which by contrast with the exuberance of his companions, was almost furtive.
‘I have an idea it’s that singing team,’ said the Major, ‘the Da Sousa Sisters … the girls Walter wanted to have in his jubilee procession. He must have arranged for someone to take them to the boat in his car.’
After a while, in support of this theory as to their identity the young women sitting on their luggage in the back of the Bentley put their marcelled heads together and their arms round each other’s shoulders and began to sing:
Singapore, hulloa, hulloa!
In silk and satin and boa
We are the girlies from Goa!
The Major was too preoccupied, however, to be greatly concerned with the identity of some tipsy young women in Walter’s car. He was more worried by the glowing clock on the dashboard (had it stopped or was it a quarter-past eleven already?). It was true that they had now almost reached the corner of Trafalgar Street but the nearer they came to the docks the slower their progress. Now increasingly they found themselves halted in the same place for several minutes at a time. The heat, the exhaust fumes and the ever-present drifting smoke from burning buildings made it hard to breathe. Vera lay with her head slumped against the back of the seat, her eyes closed. The minute hand on the dashboard crept on.
In the car ahead of them as time went on the gaiety of the Da Sousa Sisters was replaced by a rather sullen silence: evidently they, too, were becoming anxious about reaching the boat in time. Soon a squabble erupted and they began to scream, either at each other or at their driver, it was hard to say. Then they began to shriek abuse at the car in front of them which for some reason was being abandoned by its passengers. Eventually the Bentley managed to pull round it and the column advanced a few more yards. On the sea side of the road a warehouse which had been damaged in an earlier raid had been left to burn, casting a red glow over the line of cars ahead and bringing an intolerable increase in the temperature for some distance round about. It now became clear that a number of the cars ahead had been abandoned and were blocking the road beyond redemption.
‘I think we’d better walk,’ Matthew said. Vera said that she felt well enough to do so but it was obvious that the smoke, the heat and the fumes were making her feel ill.
‘You go ahead,’ the Major said. ‘I’ll see if I can get rid of the car and then come back and help.’
Matthew opened the door, threw out Vera’s suitcase and helped her out into the road. As he was doing so The Human Condition suddenly sprang off the front seat into the darkness and vanished. ‘Hey! Come back!’ called the Major feebly, but this was no time to worry about a lost dog. Matthew picked up Vera’s suitcase and, supporting her as best he could, set off with her into the flickering night. As they were passing the Bentley another squabble suddenly broke out between the young ladies and their driver. It was clear that they considered him to be responsible for the traffic jam in which they found themselves.
‘You said you taking us to bloody boat!’ they screamed. ‘You damn well better take us to bloody-damn boat, OK!’
‘Matthew!’ called a despairing voice from the Bentley and Matthew stopped, peering at the car in astonishment, for there, slumped in the front seat, his face weirdly illuminated by the flickering light of the burning building nearby as if by infernal flames was Monty Blackett.
‘I say, you couldn’t give me a hand with some of this luggage, could you, old man? It’s so heavy I can’t manage it all. Go on, be a sport!’
‘Impossible! I have all I can manage already.’
‘Look here, Matthew, there’s a good fellow,’ pleaded Monty in a more confidential tone, ‘these young ladies here, who are simply charming, by the way, will let us hide in their cabin till the boat has sailed, in return for helping them, I mean to say … We’ll be in Bombay in two shakes and no one will be the wiser. And they’ll probably let us have some fun with them into the bargain. It’s our only chance. Don’t be a chump! Singapore’s done for! It’s common knowledge. And I promised these girls that I’d get them on board, you know, and they’ll be frightfully sticky if I don’t! We just go on board saying we’re helping them with their bags and stay there. Things are in such a mess that no one will know the difference!’
‘Sorry, Monty, I can’t help you. But you’re nearly there. I’m sure you’ll make it. Goodbye.’
While Monty had thus been pleading for help two of the Da Sousa Sisters, who had begun to pummel him and pull his hair in their indignation, had desisted and fixed their glittering, anthracite eyes on Matthew, allowing their victim to make this last appeal. In the meantime, other Da Sousa Sisters had come hopping forward over the suitcases to perch like leather-winged harpies on the back of the seat, on the door at his side, and even on the windscreen, clutching on with long red fingernails and staring down at him with their cruelly glittering eyes, one or two of them already beginning to dribble from scarlet-lipsticked mouths.
‘Be a sport!’ wailed Monty.
But Matthew was already on his way with Vera towards the distant P & O wharf. He looked back once, just in time to see Monty’s flickering, terror-stricken features disappear under a tide of biting, scratching, hair-pulling Da Sousa Sisters. In a moment there was nothing to be seen but an inner circle of feeding marcelled heads and an outer circle of tight-skirted bottoms. ‘Poor Monty!’ thought Matthew. ‘What a fate!’ But he hurried on with Vera, for by now it was getting close to midnight and the Félix Roussel was due to sail in a little over an hour.
As they advanced they saw that the road was jammed, not only with empty cars but with all sorts of other objects as well. Clearly no one had taken seriously the instruction to bring only hand luggage. Household goods of all sorts had been abandoned with the cars that had been conveying them: tables, chairs, chests and boxes were to be seen strapped on to car roofs: rolled-up carpets poked through windows. In places, abandoned possessions had been disgorged into the road, which was gradually coming to take on the appearance of a nightmare furniture store: some of them had been dragged by their reluctant owners a little distance in the direction of the wharf; in other cases their owners had not yet been able to make up their minds to forsake them: here and there a man with bulging eyes and swelling veins could still be seen wrestling with some possession too precious to leave behind, a mahogany dining-table perhaps, or a set of carved Chinese chairs, while at his side his wife groaned under a heavy brass Buddha or some other such fearful fardel.
Matthew and Vera now began to find that the litter of furniture and packing-cases, trunks and suitcases had become so dense in places that there was nothing for it but to climb over. They found themselves having to squeeze between wardrobes or clamber over pianos, their path lit only by the distant light of burning buildings, now seeing themselves faintly reflected in long mirrors, now listening to the sobs and groans of shadowy figures on their knees by the wayside. On one dark stretch they found themselves crunching through a tea-set of finest bone china; in another, stopping to rest because Vera was tired, they groped their way to a chesterfield sofa and sat down on it without realizing that a man and his wife, one at each end, were still trying to trundle it towards the wharf.
At long last they began to near the dock gates and could even make out the funnels of the Félix Roussel silhouetted against the pink glow of the night. Suddenly a rickshaw loomed out of the darkness along Keppel Road in the jostling crowd that flowed towards Gate 3 and the Empire Dock. Matthew, astonished, just had time to glimpse Joan sitting in it amidst a pile of luggage while Ehrendorf, stripped to the waist and streaming with sweat, galloped onwards as best he could between the shafts. Unable, like Matthew and Vera, to get through in the car Ehrendorf had wanted to abandon it, but Joan had refused to leave her luggage, which included a number of valuable wedding-presents, a set of pewter mugs, bed-linen, material to be made up into curtains according to a colour scheme she had already devised for her first home, a canteen of solid silver and other things. What was to be done? Ehrendorf had happened to spot an abandoned rickshaw beside the road and now here he was, head down and gasping for breath, scattering people right and left as he charged for the open gates.
‘Darling! I was afraid you wouldn’t get here in time,’ cried a voice almost in Ehrendorf’s ear. A pink-faced young man in a white linen suit and a trilby was addressing Joan. ‘I have someone keeping me a place near the front. I say, who’s this johnnie?’ he added, noticing at length that there was something unusual about Joan’s rickshaw-wallah. For a moment Ehrendorf stared into the slightly popping blue eyes of his successful rival. Then a lock of blonde hair dropped like a curtain from Nigel’s forehead and only one blue eye was visible. Nigel reached a hand to his brow and removed the offending lock, allowing the silky hair to sift through his fingers to the knuckle while he contemplated the half-naked Ehrendorf with distaste. Ehrendorf dropped the shafts of the rickshaw and reached for his shirt, murmuring: ‘I’ll leave the rest to you, if you don’t mind.’ He hesitated a moment, examining Nigel without hostility. ‘What on earth can she see in a chap like this?’ he asked himself in wonder … but then, women had appalling taste in men, he had always thought so. Without a further glance at Joan he slipped away, forcing his way back against the stream of people.
‘I say aren’t you going to stay and help with the luggage?’ came a faint, indignant voice following him through the darkness.
When at last Matthew and Vera had passed through the gates and saw the state of the quay, they looked at each other in dismay. Between where they stood and the narrow corridor through which the passengers were channelled there swayed a densely packed mass of people. Beyond, sat or stood half a dozen harassed officials examining tickets, remonstrating, copying names into a ledger, shouting, shrugging shoulders, looking impatient. Every now and then someone tore himself away from this dense mass and pursued his lonely way through the corridor then up the canvas-sided gang-plank to disappear at last into the looming vessel watched all the way by the boiling throng below. As Matthew and Vera thrust their way into the crowd they saw a woman make her way up to the ship’s side sobbing with nervous exhaustion and dragging by the hand a little girl with a pretty, open face and with a ribbon in her hair, herself carrying a doll in a long infant’s dress; behind walked a boy with a Meccano-set looking self-conscious and wearing a sun-helmet. After them there was nobody for a while, then Nigel and Joan, heavily laden with suitcases, made their way aboard and disappeared from view. Once, a powerful searchlight from the ship’s superstructure was switched on, swept over the packed crowds on the quay for a moment, then died.
As the hour drew nearer one a.m. and signs of activity began to appear at the ship’s side the crowd pressed forward more anxiously than ever. People shouted and waved tickets above their heads, hoping to attract the attention of the officials and let them know that ticket-holding passengers still remained on shore. The rate at which they were passing up the gang-plank hardly seemed to quicken, however, even though the officials must have realized that there was a danger of people being left on the quayside. Meanwhile, still later arrivals continued to flood in from behind, straining and pushing forward with all their might.
Abruptly, after an age of being jostled back and forth in the densest part of the crowd, as if by a miracle Vera and Matthew found themselves within reach of the nearest desk and, lunging forward, Matthew managed to slap down Vera’s ticket. The official picked it up, looked at it and handed it back with a shake of his head. ‘Alphabetical order, sir. Sorry. We aren’t ready for this lot yet.’
‘But the ship is leaving in five minutes!’
‘I can’t help that. Next please.’
Matthew had released his hold on Vera in order to deal with the man at the desk. Looking round, he saw that she had been caught in a cross-current of shoving passengers and thrown back. But this man behind the desk! Matthew reached out to take the official by the throat, but the people behind who had been shouting abuse at him for wasting time now seized his clothes and dragged him out of the way. As he struggled to reach Vera, something darted between his legs and away towards the gang-plank. It was an elderly King Charles spaniel. One of the officials tried to grab it as it passed but it swerved and eluded him; head down it battled its way up the gang-plank, darted past a surprised seaman and, plunging on to the crowded deck, vanished from sight just as the order was being given to raise the gang-plank (thereafter, some instinct directed The Human Condition unerringly towards the bridge where the captain, though worried by Japanese bombers and the anxious hours that lay ahead, at that moment happened to be contemplating with regret and longing his own little dog which, by a fortunate coincidence, had died, smothered in comfort, only a few days earlier).
Again a searchlight was switched on and swept hastily over the crowded quays, hesitating for a moment on a great net cradle containing a large motor-car that was being winched aboard. Matthew stared in disbelief: surely it was the Bentley which Monty had been driving! But how had it managed to get to the quayside? There was no sign of Monty. Perhaps he was lying on the floor. There were Da Sousa Sisters perched everywhere, however. A French sailor, looking handsome, clung on to a rope with one foot on the Bentley’s running-board and with the scarlet claws of one of the Da Sousa Sisters round his neck. Suddenly, like song-birds struck by a beam of sunlight, the Da Sousa Sisters put their marcelled heads together and trilled:
Matelot, hulloa, hulloa!
In silk and satin and boa
We are the girlies from Goa!
The searchlight was switched out. Blackness and a sudden silence descended. The next moment a roar of outrage erupted from the disappointed passengers on the quayside. The gangplank was beginning to go up.
Again the crowd pressed forward, pinning Matthew’s arms to his sides and squeezing the air out of his lungs. He at last managed to free an arm and reach out towards Vera…but as he did so, he saw the back of her reddish-black head vanish beneath the thrusting mob. In a rage he shoved his way through the crowd to where he had seen her go down, shouting at people to stand back from her. But nobody seemed to hear. As he groped for her on the ground his hand closed over a piece of wood and he picked it up, flailing about with it until he had driven everyone back from where she lay on the paved quay. He picked her up then and barged his way back towards the gates, still hitting about him with the piece of wood. Blood from her face began to trickle down his back. To the north the thud of guns continued. The Japanese assault on the island was only a few minutes away.
63
On his way home from the docks the Major, having given up the attempt to find Matthew and Vera in the crowd, had called in to see a friend at the Rescue Control Room in the Municipal Offices; together they had gone up to watch the bombardment from the flat roof of the building where a number of other people had already gathered. The flashes of the British guns, the noise, the restless glimmer of the Japanese batteries to the north, all combined to bring back memories of his younger days which he would have preferred to forget. After a few minutes he said goodbye to his friend and returned to the Mayfair. In the early hours of the morning Matthew and Vera returned, shocked and exhausted by their ordeal. Vera, though cut and bruised, was not badly hurt. The Major was sorry but he was not particularly surprised when he heard of the crowds left on the quayside.
Despite the lateness of the hour a sympathetic audience had assembled to hear what had happened at the docks. Everyone had found it hard to sleep, perhaps because there was a feeling in the air that a crisis was at hand. The terrific Japanese barrage from Johore suggested that it would not be long before they attempted to land on the Island. Earlier, in response to a rumour that all the alcohol in Singapore was soon to be destroyed lest Japanese troops, in the event of a successful landing, should go on the rampage among the civilian population, a party led by Dupigny and Mr Wu had slipped over to the Blacketts’ house and returned with several cases of wine from Walter’s cellar. Since there were not enough glasses to go round a separate bottle had been uncorked for everyone. Soon a party was getting under way.
Gradually, thanks to Walter’s fine claret, a mood of elation came to replace the sombre atmosphere which had prevailed. Festive sounds also issued from the board-room where the girls from the Poh Leung Kuk, under orders from the Major to accelerate the process of selecting bridegrooms, appeared to be having an all-night sitting. They had asked the Major if they could borrow his gramophone. He had responded dubiously to their request, wanting to know why they should need a gramophone for such a purpose? They had looked so disappointed and abashed, they had blinked their long eyelashes so submissively (and, after all, they had behaved themselves jolly well when you consider the uncomfortable conditions they had had to put up with) that the Major had found himself yielding in spite of himself. So, not without misgivings, he had handed over the gramophone, the only two records which remained unbroken and a box of needles with strict instructions that they were to change the needle every time before playing a record and not to wind the instrument too hard or they would break the spring. ‘And I want to see every single one of you with a husband by tomorrow at the latest,’ he had added sternly. ‘This choosing business has gone on long enough. If you don’t make up your minds I shall ask Captain Brown to do it for you.’
As a matter of fact, the Major had expected to find the bungalow quiet by the time he returned from the docks, but evidently the girls, in order to hammer out their final decisions, had found it necessary to retain their prospective bridegrooms even after the curfew. Now from behind the closed door of the board-room came the sound of laughter in the silence which followed Noel Coward singing ‘London Pride’. The Major tried to estimate whether there was enough time for them to have changed the needle before the other record began.
The moon that lingered over London Town,
Poor puzzled moon, He wore a frown …
The Major, too, wore a frown. He took a swig from the bottle of Château Ducru Beaucaillou he was holding, hoping that nothing untoward was happening in the board-room. He really should have insisted on the bridegrooms leaving before the curfew: he could hardly expect them to leave now. Perhaps he would turn them out at five o’clock.
How could he know we two were so in love,
The whole darn world was upside down?
And as we kissed and said goodnight
A nightingale sang in Berkley Square …
Soon, the Major did not doubt, it would again be the turn of Noel Coward.
Presently, Cheong, who was also finding it difficult to sleep, joined the circle and he, too was given a bottle of claret. Cheong’s status had undergone a remarkable change in the past few weeks. He was no longer to be considered a servant. On the contrary, he had now become a figure of considerable authority, organizing meals on a large scale and allotting space to transients who needed shelter both inside and underneath the bungalow. The Major depended on him heavily. On his own initiative he dealt with a variety of matters which, but for him, would most likely not have been dealt with at all. Had the Major not come across him burying someone quietly in the compound? To bury someone between breakfast and tiffin was nothing these days to Cheong. Sometimes the Major could not help wondering, such was the man’s initiative, whether Cheong might not secretly be a graduate of the University of the Toilers of the East. Not that it mattered, of course.
Under the influence of the wine the conversation grew animated. Matthew, still full of bitterness after his experience at the docks and quite unable to put it out of his mind for more than a moment, began to discourse volubly in an anguished tone on the kind of society which must follow this one. It was the injustice which he saw all around him that maddened him! Why should privilege and self-interest rule in everything instead of justice and reason? There was no need for it. A society based on justice would get the best out of its members by appealing to their better instead of their worse natures! Dupigny shook his head sadly but did not bother to explain that this view of human psychology was hopelessly ingenuous; he could see that Matthew was upset. But, in due course, when Matthew had turned, as he often did when in a state of nervous excitement, to Geneva in order to make extravagent claims for those such as Emperor Haile Selassie and himself who had foreseen years ago that the devious, unprincipled behaviour of the Big Powers would end in wholesale carnage, Dupigny, pausing only to gargle blissfully with a mouthful of Haut-Brion, could not resist challenging him. ‘I can’t believe, even with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to inspire him, that Haile Selassie could foresee in 1936 the troubles that we now are facing … unless at his court he had a fortune-teller with the crystal ball.’
‘Aha!’ cried Matthew. ‘And yet, François, in 1936 he said: “Do the peoples of the world not yet realize that by fighting on until the bitter end I am not only performing my sacred duty to my people but standing guard in the last citadel of collective security. I must hold on until my tardy allies appear. And if they never come then I say prophetically and without bitterness, the West must perish.’ ”
But Cheong, and perhaps Mr Wu too, had had difficulty in following the Emperor’s words and now he was looking enquiringly at the Major. Apologizing for the poor quality of his pidgin, which contained odds and ends picked up here and there on his pre-war Eastern travels, the Major interpreted as best he could. ‘Empelor talkee this fashion … My fightee long time but world people no wantchee savee. My makee number one pidgin my people, same time makee all-piecee nation pidgin. Empelor talkee: Whobody come? My must stop look-see fliend no come by and by. Spose fliend no come, Blitain, Flance, Melika, all catchee too-metchee bobbery! All catchee die, chop-chop! … Er, I’m afraid that’s about the best I can do,’ and the Major sank back, puffing his pipe.
‘It’s always the same, François. Your Foreign Office and mine, instead of making a principled stand on the Covenant of the League of Nations, always preferred some private horse-trading behind the scenes.’ Matthew tipped up his bottle and indignantly swallowed half a pint of Laffitte: almost immediately he suffered the odd delusion that he was a lighthouse and that his indignation was a small boat rowing steadily away from him. The thought of Lord Halifax, however, caused it to row back a little way.
With the Major desperately trying to keep up with him in pidgin he described what it had been like in Geneva when Haile Selassie had come with the Ethiopian delegation to protest about the Italian annexation and to demand that the Council of the League should not recognize it. On that occasion Halifax had risen to make what was surely the most grossly hypocritical speech in the history of international affairs: this, too, but involuntarily, Matthew knew by heart, simply because he had been unable to forget it.
‘Halifax said: “Here two ideals are in conflict: on the one hand the ideal of devotion, unflinching but unpractical, to some high purpose; on the other, the ideal of some practical victories for peace … I cannot doubt that the strongest claim is that of peace … Each of us knows by painful experience how consistently it is necessary to recognize that which may be ideally right and what is practically possible …” And so on. If the League was not prepared to use force then it should submit to the “reality” of the Italian conquest in the interests of peace. Is that not outrageous, François?’
‘Lord Halifax talkee this fashion,’ explained the Major, struggling to find some way of abbreviating Matthew’s harangue. ‘ “League of Nations idea blong plenty proper, plenty fine maybe, but League idea all-same plenty fine motor-car buggerup, motor-car no walkee. League of Nations no sendee soldier-man, no can do. Blitish Government idea yes can do.”’ (‘Oh dear, I’m afraid that was a bit complicated,’ apologized the Major.)
‘Ah so,’ nodded Cheong thoughtfully. ‘League Nation idea no walkee … Howfashion Lord Ha Lee Fax no wantchee League idea? Maskee,* this blong all-same fool pidgin!’ And with a shrug of disgust he, too, took a long pull at his bottle of Margaux (making a face, he preferred rice wine).
‘The Emperor replied to Halifax: “The suggestion of Great Britain is to favour general appeasement by the sacrifice of a people. This is contrary to the ideals of the Covenant and those ideals so constantly proclaimed by Great Britain and France,” and he ended, “It is sheer hypocrisy to attempt to strangle a people by procedure!” ’
‘Empelor plenty angry,’ summarized the Major. ‘Empelor talkee: “You buggerupim League of Nations!”’
Cheong nodded gravely. He had assumed that such would have been the Emperor’s reaction, for what other complexion could be put on Lord Ha Lee Fax’s preference for ‘realism’, the gospel of the corrupt, entrepreneurial diplomats of the West, over principle? What could be expected, in any case, Cheong wondered, of such strong-smelling diplomats? He had more than once, in his previous employment in Shanghai, had occasion to take the coat of a second or third secretary from one Legation or another and he knew what he was talking about. When the new China arose, as he did not doubt that it would, a new type of diplomat, odourless and strong-principled, would strut the world’s stage. Then at last things would be different.
‘Will we never be able to loosen the grip of the self-interested and corrupt on human affairs?’ demanded Matthew, springing to his feet, his eyes flashing.
‘By the way, that reminds me,’ remarked Ehrendorf, who had just been splashing himself from the Shanghai jar in the bathroom and now came in drying his hair to join the company, ‘it seems that the expression, “the Singapore Grip”, refers to the ability acquired by certain ladies of Singapore to control their autonomous vaginal muscles, apparently with delightful results. The girls from the Poh Leung Kuk agreed to tell me what it was for a dollar. They hinted that for ten dollars it might be possible to arrange a demonstration. Er … of course I didn’t accept,’ he added, seeing that the Major was looking upset.
‘No, Jim, that’s not what the Singapore Grip is,’ cried Matthew, his eyes flashing more than ever. ‘I know what it is! It’s the grip of our Western culture and economy on the Far East… It’s the stranglehold of capital on the traditional cultures of Malaya, China, Burma, Java, Indo-China and even India herself! It’s the doing of things our way … I mean, it’s the pursuit of self-interest rather than of the common interest! But one day we shall have a new League of Nations to conduct the world’s affairs with reason and justice and humanity! A League of Nations not made up of cynical power-brokers but of philosophers and philanthropists whose only desire will be to bind the nations and the races together!’
Ehrendorf sighed, thinking that in any case the Singapore Grip was about to be pried loose, if that was what it was. After some moments of hesitation and comparing of vintages, he selected the Laffitte. Altogether it had been a hard day.
*Never mind.