Part Six

64

If you follow the Singapore River, from its mouth where it bulges and curves beneath the Fullerton Building, back along its many twists and turns, between sampans and barges so tightly packed that in places there is scarcely a channel wide enough for the flow of water-traffic, back almost as far as The Great World, then you will see an unusually handsome godown on the right bank, taller than any of the other godowns that line the river at that point, taller than any building of any kind for some distance and made taller by the familiar sign on its roof: Blackett and Webb Limited, painted white for the jubilee … Or rather, you would have seen it in those days, for now it no longer exists. The place where it once stood is now dominated by several many-storey apartment buildings where the resettled inhabitants of former Chinese slums now live, and even The Great World itself is mostly shuttered and empty, trembling on the very brink of no longer existing: its fortune-tellers, quacks and ronggeng dancers, its Chinese actors and mounte-banks, its brewers of monkey-soup and sellers of fruit, its pimps and soldiers and whores, have all been dumped in the dustbin of history and the lid clapped firmly on top of them. Their place has been taken by prosperous-looking workers from the electronic factories out for an evening stroll with their children, by a party of polite Japanese tourists with cameras who have strayed here by mistake, and by the author of this book writing busily in a small red notebook and scratching his knuckles where some lonely, last-remaining mosquito (for even they have mostly departed or been done away with), ignoring his dignified appearance, has not hesitated to bite him as he scribbles.

This particular godown was the one to which Walter had taken Joan to propose that she should marry Matthew (how far off that seemed now!): it was the oldest, the biggest, Walter’s favourite, the replica of that first warehouse in Rangoon which, in happier times, he had been so pleased to point out to visitors when he was showing them the paintings that hung in his drawing-room. To that first godown in Rangoon who knows what happened? No doubt it was knocked down, or fell down, or a fine offer was made for it, or perhaps it was even turned into a cinema. Walter did not know. But he was glad that this one still existed. For Walter had learned something important from his life in commerce: that business is not simply a matter of making profits.

A successful and respectable business, on the contrary, is deeply embedded in the life of its time and place. A respectable business supports the prevalent beliefs of the society of which it is a part. If society at large considers it immoral for a woman to smoke a cigarette in the street or for a man to wear a hat at his dining-table, then you will certainly not find Blackett and Webb countenancing such behaviour in their staff. Not only at Blackett and Webb but at every other business of standing in Singapore the clerical staff, despite the temperature, were expected to wear white suits and black ties. Even the better Asiatic houses followed this custom. Respectability is important in business because it generates more and better custom: it means you will pay your debts and deliver the goods, resisting the temptation to make a bolt for the hills. Better business in turn generates more respectability. But in order to be respectable you do have to know what society approves of. Provided you know that, then there is no problem: your business can play its full part in the community. It is only at a time like the present when it is hard to be sure what society at large believes, or if it believes anything at all, that a businessman grows baffled and uneasy and perhaps with a shrug of his shoulders gives it up and limits himself to a dogged pursuit of his profits.

Walter certainly had not reached that stage; witness the effort and expense he had consecrated to his jubilee celebrations. But already, it seemed to him, Blackett and Webb was beginning to stand out as an oasis of old-fashioned virtues in a desert of less scrupulous businesses. It was ‘the spirit of the times’ again, that is what it was! Wherever you looked you saw it at work. Now, Walter had heard, in England women were no longer wearing hats and were going into pubs. Some women, even in Singapore, had taken to wearing trousers, not something he would have permitted to his own women-folk. Well, continue along that road and one fine day you would find that a gentleman’s word was no longer his bond, but more likely an attempt to talk you into something. Why was this godown important to Walter? Because for him it symbolized the old-fashioned virtues and beliefs which were melting away all around him, progressively, in concert with the decaying spirit of earlier times to which he had been accustomed.

And yet … a man must move with the times. Think of those rice-millers in London for whom the Suez Canal had proved a banana skin on the road to prosperity! This godown was also important to Walter for the great qualities of raw rubber that it contained. A business cannot embody the highest aims of society without trading profitably from its warehouses. What they contain must not be wasted or abandoned. It was out of the question to allow these warehouses not to make the profit which lay piled up within their shadowy walls.

Now on Monday, 8 February, came the news that the Japanese had succeeded in landing on the Island in the course of the night. Walter found himself faced with a disturbing prospect: the contents of this building on the river and of several other godowns nearby would most likely be destroyed in accordance with a contingency plan for the denial of useful materials to the Japanese. He had long expected something of the sort if the Japanese pursued their advance. Reports had reached him in recent weeks that officials from the Public Works Department had been snooping about making enquiries as to the contents of his various godowns. Their first visits had been discreet: the authorities had been anxious not to sap morale by making too obvious preparations for a capitulation … Lately they had become more officious.

Today there came word that the Governor had authorized destruction of British-owned engineering plant, oil and rubber stocks, liquor supplies and various others goods and materials that the Japanese might consider valuable. Well, he had expected that it would come to this … But above all it was the selective nature of the Governor’s denial plans that stung Walter: Blackett and Webb (Engineering) Limited would be razed while neighbouring Chinese enterprises would be left untouched! It was an outrage. He promptly telephoned the Governor … but could not get through. He tried to arrange an appointment with the Governor’s staff: he had never had any trouble doing so before, yet now when it was necessary he found himself being headed off by pipsqueaks of secretaries. He would be left for minutes at a time holding a telephone receiver, obliged to listen to baffling electrical interference: strange hiccups, faintly tinkling xylophones, the ringing of distant telephones on other lines, and ghostly voices speaking gibberish which, however, sometimes held a queer sort of significance.

‘Old men must die. They’d not be human otherwise,’ someone remarked cheerfully in the middle of a blizzard of clickings and buzzings. ‘We’re all on a conveyor belt, each one of us. We all must fall off at the other end. Does that answer your question?’ Walter strained his ears but only to hear what sounded like a whole office full of telephones ringing. He put the telephone down, shattered. He was not used to making his own telephone calls at the best of times: that was his secretary’s job. He picked up the receiver again: this time he heard what he was convinced was a stream of Japanese followed by high-pitched laughter. But they had only been on the Island since the previous night: they would hardly be using the telephones already. He tried to summon one of his assistants who understood Japanese but by the time he arrived the voice had been replaced by silence and, eventually, by the ominous ticking of a clock.

‘Would you mind getting off this line, please?’ demanded a woman’s voice rudely.

‘I certainly would!’ snapped Walter. ‘Blackett here … of Blackett and Webb. I want to speak to the Governor and I’ve been kept waiting forty minutes already.’ A click. No answer.

Walter was abruptly seized by a dismaying thought: he had surely recognized the woman’s voice. Had it not been Lady Thomas herself? He was almost sure of it. But no, wait a moment. Lady Thomas was ill. He had heard someone saying so at the Club and he himself had even sent one of his staff to Government House with a basket of orchids and a note signed by … by his wife, a forgery to which he was well accustomed and to which she had never raised any objection. He had forgotten for the moment that his wife was now in Australia. Moreover, Lady Thomas would certainly know she was there and would be perplexed to receive a note from her in Singapore … But the man he had sent had returned still with the basket of orchids and the note (why had he not grabbed it back, oh fool!) saying that he had not been allowed past the gate, that the place was a shambles. How a shambles? Bomb-craters everywhere. Walter had flown into a rage, suspecting that the fellow had not bothered to go to Government House at all, that he considered such a messenger’s job beneath his dignity. Bomb-craters indeed! Walter had ordered him back to Government House and told him not to show himself again until he had delivered the orchids. Neither the messenger, nor the orchids, nor the note had been heard of since. Lady Thomas must consider him completely mad … a note sent by his absent wife … he himself rude to her on the telephone …

‘Things do not look particularly rosy,’ agreed the telephone. And then: ‘Thy sex to love!’ Or was it: ‘Three sets to love!’? Walter strained his ears but could not be sure.

Never mind. Never mind all that. It was of no great importance what she thought. Besides, it was clear to him that he was being deliberately baulked by the Government House staff, with or without the Governor’s permission. All right, all right, he thought, making a feeble effort to look at both sides of the question, it was true that the Governor must have a lot on his mind with the Japanese on the Island … but not to be able to get hold of him for such an important matter, that was an outrage! ‘And whose taxes go to paying the salaries of these stuffed shirts I should like to know!’

But never mind. Even if he succeeded in buttonholing the Governor, he doubted whether he would be very helpful. Sir Shenton would be too conventional to entertain seriously the proposal which Walter had in mind. For, to Walter, the matter was plain: the Japanese were going to get more rubber than they had a use for, whatever happened. They already had under their control the entire production of Indo-China and Malaya. The Japanese would very likely agree that it was senseless to destroy the rubber in Walter’s godowns. Well then, why should it not be kept pending the end of the war or, even better, sold under a strict guarantee to some non-belligerent nation such as Mexico or Portugal? Here Walter would have trading contracts and experience which the Japanese could put to good use: an understanding beneficial to all could certainly be reached with one of the zaibatsu. Walter had, he considered, an advantage over the Governor. He had had dealings for years with the Japanese. They were not ogres to him, as they undoubtedly were to Sir Shenton. Hard competitors they certainly were, but for that Walter could only admire them. Yes, an advantage could be won for Blackett and Webb in concert with, say, Mitsubishi, which would do no harm to anybody, least of all to the British War Effort. But Walter knew he must be realistic. There was little prospect of the Governor accepting such a plan.

Again he picked up the telephone. ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded. For a while there was only that distant cascade of cymbals. ‘You see,’ said the telephone suddenly, ‘capitalism used to mean a competitive export of goods, but that’s all a thing of the past, I’m afraid. We now export cash instead … sending it out here where it can make a bigger profit, thanks to low wages and the land available for estates. The result is that we’ve become a parasite on the land and labour of Malaya and our other colonies. Did you know, Walter, that bond-holdings brought in five times more revenue than actual foreign trade for Britain?’

‘What?’ demanded Walter. ‘Are you talking to me?’ But the voice had faded once more into the ghostly plucking of a harp. And anyway, it must have been someone else called Walter.

On the other hand, Walter realized suddenly, there was probably no need to worry about the rubber, at least for the moment. For there was so much of it, several thousand tons. Unless they had some mad idea of burning down the buildings as well, which was surely not the case, the PWD busybodies would need several weeks merely to shift the rubber from the godowns to a suitable site for burning. The same was probably true of other commodities which Blackett and Webb held in their godowns. It was evident that what was most at risk was the investment in engineering and motor-assembly plants. It was that which would need protection. It was that which the PWD men would go for first.

But oddly enough, as it turned out, they did not. They went for Walter’s liquor godown at the docks. A telephone message chased him round the city, warning him. He could no longer bear to sit in the improvised offices in Tanglin surrounded by a staff which had by now shrunk, thanks to the demands of the passive defence services, to an efficient young Cantonese, a couple of elderly Englishmen who but for the war would long since have been put out to grass, and two or three Eurasian typists. So, despite the danger, Walter had himself driven about the city inspecting the various Blackett and Webb premises and offering a word of encouragement to whatever staff remained (for here, too, the number of his employees was shrinking daily, almost hourly). Mohammed, his syce, did not seem to mind: he, too, seemed anxious to pursue his normal life.

Although he seldom stayed for more than a few minutes at each place he visited, it now took so long to cross the ruined city that the better part of Walter’s day was spent in the car, an ancient Alvis which Mohammed had found somewhere. Monty had evidently succeeded in getting both himself and the Bentley away on the Félix Roussel. Apart from faint surprise that the boy should have had sufficient initiative, Walter had no strong feelings about his son’s desertion. On the whole he was better out of the way. Once or twice, though, staring out with sightless eyes at the boiling streets, the thought of Harvey Firestone’s five efficient sons made him clench his fists and caused the bristles to stir on his spine. How promising life had once appeared, how disastrously it had turned out!

Even the city now was hardly recognizable any longer as the place where he had spent such a great part of his life. The roads were clogged with military vehicles, there were gun emplacements every few yards, each crossroads seemed to have its own traffic jam which sweating military policemen were trying to free. And everywhere he looked he saw bomb-craters and rubble, shattered trees, uprooted lamp-posts, tangled tramway cables, and smoke from the buildings burning on every side. With the smoke there came, barely noticeable at first, a disagreeable smell. Old Singapore hands like Walter were used to unpleasant smells: they came from everywhere … from the drains and from the river above all, but also from less likely places, from Tanglin rose-gardens for instance, where the ‘boys’ sometimes failed to bury properly the household excrement, or someone’s spaniel dug it up again. In Singapore you could never be quite safe: even while you stood smiling fixedly under the great candelabra in the ballroom at Government House, once a gift from the Emperor Franz Josef to the third Duke of Buckingham, you might suddenly get a distinct whiff of something disagreeable. But this was different. This was altogether more sickening. It seemed to cling to your hair and clothes. When you took out your handkerchief to blow your nose it was there, too. Presently, it became stronger and not even the swirling smoke could disguise the fact that it came from the bodies stretched in rows on the pavements which no one had yet had time to bury.

Tired of the endless delays and traffic jams on the way to Tanglin, Walter had a camp bed and a desk installed in the disused store-keeper’s office in the godown on the river where he had brought Joan one day not very long ago. Thank heaven that she and Nigel had got away, at any rate! This little office, which was really just a box of wood and glass without a roof other than that of the godown itself way above, had strong associations for Walter, reminding him of the old days. It was peaceful here, too, and very quiet. The dim light, the smell of the raw rubber which rose in tiers, bale upon bale, to the dim heights of the roof, he found infinitely soothing. There was a window, too, in the office from which he could contemplate the river, not so very different even now from the river he had gazed at as a young man from this spot. He needed this tranquillity to restore and refresh himself after his wanderings in the city.

And still the city’s collapse had not yet reached a limit which one could consider, however dreadful it might be, a stable state. On the contrary, familiar streets continued at an accelerating pace to be eaten away by fire and to crumble beneath the bombs and shells. A huge mushroom of black smoke had risen to the north: he paused to look at it from a window of the Singapore Club where he went for lunch. It issued, he was told, from the oil storage tanks at the Naval Base, to which fire had been set to prevent the Japanese capturing the fuel they so badly needed. From the Fullerton Building you looked over Anderson Bridge and the river, then an open space with an obelisk and the solid pile, now distinctly battered, of the Victoria Memorial Hall and Theatre and, away to the right, what might have been the two friendly onion domes of the Arab Community Arch. The smoke had risen on a fat, black stalk which, from where Walter was looking at it, grew just beside the clock tower though in fact its source was on the northern coast: its mushroom cap was growing steadily and spreading to the south-east. Soon it would cover most of the city and, indeed, of the Island itself, snowing as it came a light precipitation of oily black smuts which clung to everything, blackening skin and clothing alike.

When they set out to make another journey after lunch, this time to the docks, Mohammed had to switch on the windscreen wipers on account of the black film of soot that crept over the windscreen. But nowadays one needed to be able to see, not only forward, but upwards as well, because of the Zeros that continually tore in over the shattered palms or floated like hawks up and down the main roads, waiting for something to stir beneath them. Mohammed, therefore, opened the sliding roof of the Alvis so that while he drove he could keep an eye out. He also glanced into his rear-view mirror once or twice, half expecting Walter to protest. But Walter sat mute. It was not very long before one or two black spots of soot began to appear on Walter’s white linen suit. He tried to brush them off, but that only made them worse. Soon his suit, his shirt and his face were covered in oily black smudges.

65

The Japanese fighters were now flying so low in search of people or vehicles to machine-gun that troops, and sometimes even civilians who had picked up a weapon somewhere, would very often fire back from whatever cover they could find. Several times Walter and Mohammed were obliged to leave the Alvis in the road and dive for cover. On one occasion, before they had had time to take shelter, a two-engined Mitsubishi bomber blocked the sky and a burst of machine-gun bullets from its rear turret stitched along the brick wall above their heads, showering them with fragments. Meanwhile, from a sand-bagged gun emplacement beside them a steel-helmeted corporal blazed away with a bren-gun. It jammed. Cursing, he struck off the magazine with a blow of the back of his hand and clipped on a new one. Nearby stood a shattered army lorry in which sat a headless soldier still grasping the wheel.

Once Walter saw one of the fighter-planes hit by a fusillade from the streets and go out of control, crashing with a roar some way away into a steep wooded bank beside the Bukit Timah Road. Yet although he nodded to the jubilant Mohammed and smiled grimly at the cheering Tommies beside the road and muttered: ‘Well done … Good show!’ he was not really interested. He was too preoccupied with other matters to care greatly whether a Japanese plane crashed or did not crash. And when one of the two elderly Englishmen on his staff came running after him as he was leaving for the liquor godown where the PWD men were about to start demolition work and asked him whether he would like to take a gun with him ‘just in case’, he replied sharply: ‘Don’t be absurd, man! We aren’t going to take the law into our own hands.’

‘But I meant …’ stammered the assistant, astonished.

In the matter of the destruction of liquor, Walter did even better than not taking the law into his own hands: he lent it his active support, ordering one of the remaining secretaries to telephone the Tribune and the Straits Times with instructions for them to send a photographer. His intention was to have himself photographed smashing the first bottle of whisky. In the event no photographer appeared. Nevertheless, he still insisted on smashing the first bottle.

‘We aren’t here to launch a bloody ship, sir, you know,’ said the Volunteer Engineers sergeant who had been seconded to the PWD. ‘We’ve got to get through all that lot and several more bonded warehouses as well. Not to mention the shops, clubs and hotels all over the place.’ Walter nodded: he knew better than anyone how much liquor there must be on the Island. After all, Singapore was the distribution centre for the entire Far East. Blackett and Webb alone must have several tens of thousands of crates containing gin, whisky and wine; he could only guess that altogether there would be well over a million bottles of whisky belonging to various merchants and institutions in store or awaiting despatch from the Island, perhaps even more when one considered that the flow of spirits from Singapore into a number of Far Eastern ports had been dammed up for the past few weeks by the outbreak of war and the freezing of Japanese assets.

The demolition squad set to work on the cases with crowbars. Walter, thinking grimly of his jubilee year, obstinately grabbed a bottle out of the first case to be opened and smashed it violently at his feet.

‘Not here, sir, the fumes will do us in,’ said the sergeant, assuming he wanted to help.

Walter fell back then and watched silently as the bottles were carried outside and smashed against the wall. Presently, in a sort of daze from the heat and the noise of the ack-ack guns, that distant slamming of doors that followed you everywhere in the city, he too picked up some bottles and smashed them against the wall. And he went on doing so, despite the heat. Soon he was obliged to take off his jacket: the sweat fell in salty drops from his chin and his shirt clung to his back. The other men had stripped to the waist but this Walter could not do, because of the bristles on his spine.

The smashing of these bottles filled him with a strange exultation. He felt he could go on doing it for ever. Whereas the other men, conserving their strength, merely made the effort required to break the bottles, Walter dashed them violently against the wall. Once, as he turned too quickly, he thought he saw two other men exchanging a sly grin at his expense, but he did not care. He went on and on. He ground his teeth and smashed and muttered and smashed until his head was ringing. A mound of glittering broken glass rose steadily against the wall and in no time he found himself sloshing back and forth through deep pools of whisky which had gathered on the concrete surface. Even here outside the alcohol fumes soon became oppressive. Once, as he was sloshing through a pool of Johnny Walker, he lost his balance and sat down, cutting his hand on one of the bottles he had been holding and which had broken. He got up immediately, revived by the sharp stinging of alcohol on the wound, and went on with the job, but more carefully now. He was getting tired.

A telephone had been ringing for some time in the storekeeper’s office. A whispered conversation took place between Mohammed and the store-keeper who had been eyeing Walter uncertainly. Mohammed finally approached Walter to tell him that his office had rung, afraid that Walter might forget that he had an appointment with the directors of Langfield and Bowser. Mohammed would have liked to ask Walter if he was feeling all right, but did not quite dare. He stared blankly at Mohammed for a few moments. Then he said: ‘Oh yes, so I have. What time is it?’

When he had washed his face under a tap, and bound a handkerchief round his cut hand, he picked up his jacket and went outside to the car where Mohammed was waiting, holding the door open. As he made to get in he caught sight of his own reflection in the window. His shirt and trousers were black with smuts from the burning oil on the other side of the Island. He hesitated a moment, wondering whether he should first have driven himself to the Club to shower and change. But he was already late. Besides, there was a war on.

Langfield and Bowser’s headquarters were in the Bowser Building on the corner of Cecil and Cross Streets. Had Solomon Langfield’s house in Nassim Road not been devastated in the January air-raids they would most likely have moved their offices there, away from the centre of town, as Walter had done with his offices. As it was, on account of the sudden flowing back to Singapore of so many troops who had to be found billets, they had been unable to find convenient premises out of the danger zone. ‘All the safe places appear to have been hogged by the bloody Army,’ the Secretary had explained to those anxious members of the board who had remained on the Island. They might have managed to find somewhere even so, thanks to old Solomon’s cunning and contacts, had the Chairman not been abruptly called to his reward. That had thrown everything into confusion. The result was that here they still were, holding uneasy board meetings in the Bowser Building ‘in the thick of the action’ as the Secretary put it. He belched dejectedly; for some reason everything he ate these days seemed to cause flatulence.

Meetings were now held as infrequently as possible, but unfortunately they could not be discontinued altogether: there was so much of importance that had to be discussed. They had been astonished and dismayed to hear of Nigel Langfield’s proposed marriage to Joan Blackett and had spent many perilous hours attempting to predict its implications for themselves and their firm. If Walter Blackett got his hands on Nigel’s stock or, what amounted to the same thing, got his hands on Nigel, then the future looked black indeed for Langfield and Bowser Limited. Walter would surely waste no time in diverting Langfield’s most profitable business into Blackett and Webb’s coffers, no doubt doing so with a wealth of plausible-sounding arguments about ‘rationalization’. But Langfield’s worried directors, sitting around their board-room table in steel helmets and quivering with alarm at the menacing sounds that filtered in from outside, had no appetite for a dose of rationalism administered by Walter … at least, not if it meant what they thought it would mean.

They racked their brains, wondering what Solomon would have done in such a situation, though really they knew the answer all too well. Soloman would not have got himself into it in the first place. But one thing, above all, puzzled them. Why had Solomon given his blessing to the marriage? He must have known of the danger of Nigel’s being annexed, shares and all, by the Blackett family. Yet he had given his consent. This was altogether baffling. For they had known Solomon well enough to realize that he would not have done so without having some clever plan worked out in advance in the manner of a chess master who sacrifices a piece willingly in the knowledge that, in the long run, it will be to his advantage. Again and again this had happened in the past, though never on such a momentous scale. Solomon had proposed some apparently rash manoeuvre which had then unexpectedly matured before their delighted eyes so that they could hardly prevent themselves clapping their hands with glee. But in this case what was it that Solomon had foreseen? What could it be?

They took off their steel helmets and scratched their heads and then put them back on again, all in vain. If only Solomon had still been there to answer this one question! Well, as it happened, Solomon was still there, various freight carriers and passenger ships alike having refused, even at full fare, to transport him home to his grateful shareholders at such a time. He even looked very little different from the way he had looked in life: his eyes had always had a hooded, half-closed appearance. But though he might still appear to be listening to questions, he no longer gave any answers. Had Solomon pulled a fast one after all? Or had Blackett pulled a fast one? Or, just conceivably, had both of them? It was too much for the worried board to make head or tail of. The best they could do in the circumstances was to hope that the young couple would be torpedoed on the way home. That, at least, would solve this particular problem.

After Nigel’s departure from Singapore Walter had telephoned, saying that he wanted to discuss a combined approach to the demolition problem. The directors had eyed each other uneasily (what was he up to?) but they could hardly say no. And so now he was on his way, though already an hour late for some reason. As the minutes ticked by, one or two of the more sanguine members of the board began to have tempting visions of Walter lying riddled with tracer bullets in a ditch. But then, just as their optimism was beginning to increase, he was announced. And when they saw him they could hardly believe their eyes.

Instead of the brutal self-controlled ogre that they knew Walter to be, it was someone more resembling a down-and-out who now reeled through the door and stood gazing at them, wild-eyed. They all knew Walter, of course, at least by sight and reputation, if not personally, and there was not a Langfield man in Singapore (unless it were old Solomon himself) but had not found the mere presence of Walter daunting. Even if you passed him quietly drinking a beer at the Long Bar in the Club you could feel the electricity that charged the air around him. But the Walter who had now appeared was, well, pathetic. How could they ever have felt daunted by this dishevelled individual with a bloodstained handkerchief bound round one fist as if he had come straight from a waterfront brawl, this fellow whose suit could have done with a visit to the laundry? … no, not even the laundry could have done anything with it; it was fit only for the rubbish dump. The board of Langfield and Bowser Limited gazed long and hard at Walter and they liked what they saw. The Secretary, W. J. Bowser-Barrington, smirking politely, rose and offered him a chair.

Walter was wasting no time. Even before he had taken his seat he had begun to talk rapidly and somewhat incoherently about the destruction of engineering plant … selective, mind you, they were not going to do a bloody thing to the Chinese. What did this mean? It meant that when the war was over the Chinese would have a head start in engineering throughout the Far East. Well, they knew the situation as well as he did, he did not have to spell it out for them! What they had to decide, without more ado, was how they were going to respond. One firm alone standing out against the demolition order was not going to cut any ice at all. Together there might be a better chance, not good but better, of making the Governor see reason. The question was, how were they going to get the Governor to rescind the order in time! ‘In time!’ Walter repeated, stifling a groan, while the Langfield men gazed at him, hypnotized. They had not so much been listening to Walter’s words as marvelling at his appearance and manner.

‘In time!’ he groaned again, striking the table with his damaged fist and causing the blood to well up between his bandaged fingers.

While Walter had been speaking, W. J. Bowser-Barrington had surreptitiously scribbled a little note and passed it along to his colleagues; Blackett has been on quite a binge!!! They nodded gravely to each other as this note was passed along. The truth of it was undeniable. Moreover, as Walter talked an overpowering smell of whisky permeated the airless atmosphere of the board-room. Yes, the fellow had without doubt been on a considerable bender. He looked as if he were going to pieces.

At length, Walter’s speech became halting and eventually dried up altogether. None of the Langfield men had anything to say and for a considerable time they sat in silence in the gloomy little room, listening to the distant rattle and boom of the guns. W. J. Bowser-Barrington wore a pink carnation in his button-hole and he had turned his head so that his nose rested among its petals; the sweet fragrance was a relief after the smell of sweat and alcohol from Walter. Since a reply was clearly expected, however, he stated his opinion, in terms as vague as possible and subject to all subsequent changes of mind and circumstances that there was little that could be done to resist, either severally or in concert, these admittedly undesirable developments, but that no time should be lost in bringing pressure to bear in the appropriate quarters in London for adequate compensation for everything that was destroyed.

‘And that is something,’ he added cautiously, ‘which would certainly benefit from a combined operation, perhaps with other Singapore firms who find themselves in the same predicament. And what’s more …’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Walter, cutting him short before he had a chance to finish. But instead of arguing or protesting, as they had expected (such a noisy scene, my dears, you have no idea! they had already imagined themselves saying to certain old cronies at the Club), Walter simply continued to sit there, breathing heavily, his eyes straying vaguely round the room.

‘By the way, where’s Solomon?’ he asked suddenly. And then, seeing that the Langfield men were taken aback by this question, he added: ‘I mean, did you ship him home or is he in a godown somewhere?’

‘Well, no, he’s here actually,’ said Bowser-Barrington, pointing at a long wooden box beneath the table, on which, as it happened, Walter had a moment earlier been resting his feet. ‘We’ll probably take him with us when we leave. It’s pretty clear that things will collapse here in a matter of days. We have a motor-launch waiting at the Telok Ayer Basin to take us to Sumatra when the balloon goes up. You’d better think of coming with us, old boy,’ he added, his eyes narrowing insultingly, while the rest of the board gazed at him in consternation.

‘Thanks, I’ll bear it in mind,’ replied Walter shortly. He despised Bowser-Barrington who was not even a real Bowser but had married one of the Bowser women and then changed his name to give himself face. He sighed. Then he got to his feet heavily, paused to look round the table, and with a shrug of indifference blundered out of the room without any further comment.

When the door had closed behind him an excited babble broke out among the Langfield men. What had the Secretary been thinking of! To invite Blackett to come with them, what an idea! Bowser-Barrington sat calmly and with a complacent expression on his face until the excitement had died down a little. Then he held up his hand for silence and began to explain. He now had the answer to that crucial question which had eluded them hitherto; namely, what could have been in old Solomon’s mind when he had agreed to the marriage between Nigel and Miss Blackett? For Solomon, with his customary perspicacity, had seen that the real situation was, in fact, the exact reverse of what they had imagined it to be. It was not Nigel and Langfield and Bowser Limited that were in danger of being swallowed up by Walter Blackett, it was Blackett and Webb which had become temptingly vulnerable to Langfield’s, thanks to the fact that Walter was going to pieces. The old Chairman must have seen the tell-tale signs of Walter’s imminent downfall and, with a clarity of mind which took your breath away, had drawn the appropriate conclusions.

It was true! What else could it be? It was suddenly so obvious now that it had been pointed out to them that they wondered why they had not seen it before. What a noise of jubilation rose from around the board-room table! So loudly did they cheer their Secretary and Chairman-elect that even Walter heard it and paused grimly on the way to his car, reflecting that the first thing he must do once he had taken control of Langfield and Bowser was to purge the board of its dimwits. But just for a moment, accepting the congratulations of his colleagues, Bowser-Barrington had a frightening feeling, almost as if he had heard what might have been a faint grunt of exasperation and a tapping against wood from beneath the table. But no, he was, of course, imagining it. It was merely one of his directors drumming with his shoe on the lid of the box in his excitement.

66

Singapore Island (which, if you recall, resembled the head and ears of an elephant on the map in General Percival’s office) was now under siege. Late on Sunday night the first Japanese landing-craft had crossed the Strait to attack the north-western shore. This had come as an unpleasant surprise to General Percival because it meant that the Japanese were attacking the top of the elephant’s right ear. In other words, they were attacking the wrong one! He had confidently expected them to attack the other ear, using Pulau Ubin to shield their approach. Even when the reconnaissance patrol sent across the Straits by General Gordon Bennett had reported large troop concentrations opposite that right-hand ear General Percival still had not ceased to hope that they might nevertheless attack the other one … where they would find the fresh, newly arrived British 18th Division waiting for them. After all, it might just be that this attack in the north-west was merely a diversionary move, intended to make him commit his reserve to that front while the main attack would still come in from the north-east to deal him a stunning blow on the left ear while he was looking in the other direction.

Percival, trying to snatch some sleep in his Sime Road office while waiting for news of the fighting, simply could not bring himself to believe that what Gordon Bennett’s weakened 22nd Australian Brigade was now having to repel was the main attack. Communications had been severed by the heavy bombardment from the mainland before the attack: as a result there was a long delay before reports at last began to reach Sime Road. At first it seemed as if things might not be going too badly. There was word of tough resistance by the Australians and of Japanese landing craft being destroyed in large quantities. But that coastline was too long and too thinly defended. Gradually Percival’s hopes began to melt away. By the early hours of the morning it had become evident that this was indeed the main Japanese attack and that, by daylight, the right-hand ear would be virtually lost to the Japanese.

At 8.30 a.m. Percival at last committed his only Command Reserve, the 12th Indian Brigade consisting of Argylls and Hyderabads who had survived the Slim River, to come under Gordon Bennett’s orders for the defence of the crucial north-south line where the elephant’s ear was attached to its head. This was the Jurong line, the shortest and the last line from which it was conceivable that the Japanese might be prevented from seizing the all-important central part of the Island and the high ground at Bukit Timah. Because from Bukit Timah, if they reached there, they would not only be occupying that part of the Island where the main food, fuel and ammunition stocks were held but also be looking down on Singapore Town itself. Then it would be all over: the city would lie in the palm of the Japanese hand.

Nevertheless, although this north-south line was in fact the last truly defensible position before Singapore Town itself, Percival was naturally obliged to draw up a contingency plan; after all, even if defeat is a foregone conclusion you still have to do something (otherwise you would look a fool). Accordingly, after a visit to Gordon Bennett’s HQ near Bukit Timah village to discuss how best to defend the head from the lost ear (that is, the Jurong line from an attack from the west), General Percival and his staff set to work with their maps drawing up the positively final perimeter beyond which there could be no further retreat unless to fight through the city streets.

Of necessity this perimeter closely hugged the fringes of the city itself, beginning in the east at the Tanjong Rhu Swimming Club to include Kallang Aerodrome, heading north from there to embrace the vital pumping station at Woodleigh, across country to include the reservoirs and the Bukit Timah depots and then down to the coast again at the village of Pasir Panjang. It was, of course, essential that knowledge of this emergency, last-resort perimeter should not filter down the chain of command, thereby encouraging a retreat beyond the last position from which a serious defence could be offered, the Jurong line. Percival gave details of the final perimeter to Generals Heath and Simmons when they visited him at Sime Road on that Monday evening. It was sent to Gordon Bennett in the early hours of Tuesday morning with instructions that it was to be kept secret. Bennett, however, promptly passed on as an operations order to his brigadiers those aspects of it which might concern them. Once again, and now for the last time in the campaign, if Percival had listened carefully he would have heard the discreet sawing of wood.

On this Tuesday, while Walter was smashing whisky bottles four or five miles away, General Percival at Sime Road was doggedly trying to get a clear picture of where the leaks had sprung in his line of defence. This was not easy. The heavy shelling of the north shore had to a great extent destroyed telephone wires; wireless reports, when they came in at all, were confusing. In the course of the morning a flying-boat dropped out of the cloud-covered sky and landed in the harbour, bringing General Wavell, the Supreme Commander, from Java. Percival, therefore, now found himself having to deal with the tricky job of reorganizing his defences with the gloomy glass eye of his Supreme Commander fixed on him. Together they drove to Gordon Bennett’s new HQ on Ulu Pandan Road, just off Holland Road to the south of Bukit Timah village. Wavell’s lined and rugged face grew increasingly sombre as Percival passed on what he knew of the night’s events. The deep furrows which ran from his nose to the corner of his mouth grew deeper, his brow puckered, and his good right eye seemed to recede further into his skull. His lips were slightly parted as if he were on the point of making some bitter remark about the competence of Malaya Command and of Percival himself. He remained silent, however.

Nor did he brighten up at the sight of Gordon Bennett whose optimistic and aggressive spirit had cheered him earlier in the campaign on the mainland. Indeed, his gloom deepened as Bennett began to explain that he had little information about developments in his area. Bennett himself was much subdued. How had the Japanese broken through the Australian troops with such comparative ease? This had come as a great shock to him. He could still hardly believe it. Consequently there was little sign of his normal ebullience as the three generals began to survey the situation.

But hardly had they begun their discussion when anti-aircraft guns started up all around them like waking guard-dogs. Within a few moments the whistling of bombs could be heard. ‘Take cover!’ yelled someone outside and each of the generals dived under the nearest table. Instantly the room erupted in a blizzard of flying glass and plaster. The foundations of the house quaked as more bombs fell all around. As he crouched under the table Percival noticed something bright and gleaming roll towards him. For a moment he thought: ‘My God! It’s Wavell’s glass eye!’ but on closer inspection it turned out to be only a fugitive from a box of child’s marbles left in a corner!

When the three men stood up and dusted themselves off it was discovered that none of them had been hurt. Moreover, although one corner of the building had been demolished by a bomb (which fortunately had failed to explode) and both Percival’s and Wavell’s cars had been wrecked, there had been no casualities at the HQ itself. This seemed a miracle. The generals shook the plaster and broken glass off the map they had been studying and resumed their conference. ‘Really,’ declared Wavell presently, ‘these constant withdrawals won’t do, you know. You must attack, you must attack.

Percival and Bennett nodded thoughtfully, but what was in their minds as they stood there, all three of them, in this suddenly shattered room, as if in a tiny vessel tossed here and there in a mounting sea of confusion?

More cars were found. Wavell, determined to find out what was happening in the Causeway area, had decided to go forward to see General Heath at 11th Division. Just as they were leaving the Australian headquarters Percival was dismayed to see a group of Indian troops in filthy uniforms shambling along the road, rifles held any old way and not even properly formed up into column of route. He could not help glancing at Wavell: that merciless glass eye betrayed no emotion but Percival guessed what must be in his mind. How dreadful! Undisciplined men shambling about under their GOC’s nose, that is the sort of thing that can have a bad effect on a fellow’s chances if the rumour of it gets back to the Powers That Be. Of course, compared with everything else that had gone wrong this was a minor matter. The trouble was that this column of Indians was not alone by any means. Behind them, like a wound filling up with pus, Singapore Town was harbouring an increasing number of stragglers and deserters; in particular, it was reported that deserters from the untrained Australian reinforcements at the General Base Depot were running wild.

Exhausted though he was, Percival maintained a stoical determination to do his best with whatever opportunities the military situation offered. He was determined to show no sign of defeatism in front of Wavell. It was, however, only when they reached General Heath’s headquarters that the really heavy blows began to fall. From Heath they learned that the 27th Australian Brigade under Brigadier Maxwell had withdrawn during the night. Maxwell? Was he not that same militia officer, a doctor by profession, whom Bennett had promoted as his protégé to the command of the 27th Brigade despite his lack of experience and seniority? This withdrawal had left a crucial gap between the Causeway and the Kranji River: this meant in turn that the most important road on the Island (that which began at the Causeway and headed south for Singapore Town by way of Bukit Timah village) lay open for the Japanese to push southwards behind the Jurong line which Percival had been hoping to hold. This was simply disastrous. Why had Maxwell withdrawn from his crucial position? He asserted that Gordon Bennett had authorized the move. The result, in any case, was that Percival now found his entire defensive edifice crumbling. He promptly ordered Maxwell to counter-attack to recover Mandai village and reoccupy his former position. He also ordered three battalions of the 18th Division to come under Bennett’s command on the Bukit Timah Road, concentrating them at the racecourse to act as badly needed reserve. But these, as Percival well knew, were desperate measures.

It was half past two in the afternoon before Wavell and Percival returned to Gordon Bennett’s headquarters. Here Bennett denied having authorized Maxwell’s withdrawal during the night. In any event, there was worse to come. Brigadier Taylor’s 22nd Australian Brigade, already shattered in the fighting which had taken place during the night, had been obliged to fall back to the Jurong line. Now, while Percival and Wavell had been visiting other units, news had reached Bennett that in the meantime Taylor had received the secret contingency plans for the last-resort perimeter round the city itself, including details of the sector south of the Bukit Timah Road which had been allotted to his brigade. Taylor had interpreted these plans as an order to fall back to this position. Accordingly, the last defensible position before Singapore Town, failing a successful counter-attack, had been abandoned without having been seriously put to the test by the Japanese. Given the confusion which now reigned behind the British lines, however, the units out of touch with their headquarters, the traffic jams, the communications difficulties and the hazards of organizing resistance with heterogeneous forces in territory that was unfamiliar to them, there seemed little prospect that a counter-attack would succeed.

By the time they had returned to Command Headquarters it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Now Percival was met by a worried Brigadier Torrance: a report had come in that the Japanese were approaching Bukit Timah village. Apart from its alarming general implications this news also indicated that the large reserve petrol depot to the east of the village was in danger of being captured. Percival ordered its immediate destruction and by six o’clock it had been set on fire. Wavell, meanwhile, had himself driven to Government House to see Sir Shenton Thomas. He was tired himself after the long day of visits and conferences. What must it be like for Percival and the others who had had no respite for days or weeks? Passing through the gates of Government House his eyes happened on a great basket of orchids decked with bright ribbons lying on the grass a few yards inside the railings. They had evidently been hurled over by some well-wisher too shy to present them. Most likely a sign, he mused, that the British were still popular among the native population in spite of their military reverses. He sighed as the car came to a stop and the door was opened for him. He must make a point of persuading Lady Thomas, who was sick, to return with him to Java in the Catalina.

At nine that evening, before leaving Singapore, Wavell went to Flagstaff House to say goodbye to Percival. The day, which had begun with at least some cards still held by the defenders, had ended with the defence a shambles. Nevertheless, before leaving, he had Ian Graham, one of his ADCs, type out a final exhortation for Percival to pass on to his troops; this was inspired by a signal he had received earlier in the day from Churchill comparing the British resistance unfavourably to that of the Russians and the Americans elsewhere and instructing the British troops to fight to the bitter end. Then, having ordered the last remaining squadron of Hurricanes to be evacuated from the Island, he shook hands with Percival and set off through the dark streets to the waterfront in the second of two cars, accompanied by Count Mackay, a member of his Java staff, and by Air Vice-Marshal Pulford. On the way they heard occasional shots. Looters, sensing the imminent collapse of the city, were already beginning the sack of shops and stores in the less frequented areas.

The Catalina was moored in the middle of the harbour. The car stopped beside the sea wall in the darkness and Pulford got out to look for a motor-boat to take Wavell and his party out to it. He was gone such a long time that Wavell, in frustration, suddenly opened the door on his left-hand side, the side of that blank, glass eye which throughout the long day had been picking up reflections of the British collapse. He sprang out… but the car had parked so close to the sea wall that there was no ground left on this side of the car. He fell several feet in the darkness on to some rocks. He lay quietly where he had fallen for a little while, breathless with the shock and pain, thinking: ‘Singapore is done for,’ until presently he managed to shout and his ADCs, groping anxiously, located him and carried him to the motor-boat. He was laid in the bottom of the boat and presently they forged out on to the black waters, lit here and there by the fires burning on the shore all around. When they at last reached the flying-boat it was found impossible to lift Wavell into it without unshipping the machine-gun which had been mounted at the door. The Dutch crew of the flying-boat, unfamiliar with the mounting, set to work on it as best they could. At last they succeeded in removing it and Wavell was hoisted up from the swaying boat. But even when Wavell was safely aboard and had been given whisky and aspirins to dull the pain he was suffering and the sacks of government documents which Sir Shenton Thomas had entrusted to him to take to safety had been stowed beside him, the flying-boat still could not take off. The pilot reported that such was the number of small craft trying to escape from Singapore under cover of darkness he was unable to find a long enough stretch of clear water. It was not until it at last began to grow light that they eventually managed to take off for Batavia, leaving the chaos and destruction of Singapore as nothing but a tiny smudge on the horizon, insignificant compared with the vast, shining sea beneath them.

67

Matthew had returned from fire-fighting to find a note from Vera saying that she had gone to Bukit Timah village to look for a friend who might be willing to hide her from the Japanese. Matthew clasped his brow in horror when he read this. Had she gone mad? Did she not realize that she was going to what must be the most dangerous part of the Island? Neither Matthew himself, nor anyone else he met, had any clear idea of where the front line might be, but it seemed likely from the noise of the guns that the Japanese were already advancing towards Bukit Timah. He hoped that there would be road-blocks to prevent her going forward, as seemed likely. But after some minutes spent pacing about, uncertain what to do, he decided to go and look for her himself. Even though he knew that his chances of finding her in the darkness and confusion were slim, at least this would give him something to do. And so, in due course, he set out on Turner’s motor-cycle.

Matthew had only ridden a motor-cycle once or twice before and felt by no means confident that he could control this one, particularly on a pitch dark night with a masked headlight and the prospect of bomb-craters in the roads. But after five minutes practice in the compound under Turner’s tutelage, wandering a couple of times round the tennis court and through the flowerbeds in the darkness, he gripped the knob of the hand gear-lever on the petrol tank and prepared to release the clutch. The machine pounced into the road like a tiger.

In a flash he was careering up Stevens Road through the warm tropical darkness in the direction of the Bukit Timah Road. As he charged onwards his searching foot kept finding an outcrop of metal which ought to be the brake … yet when he trod on it he only seemed to go faster, and the more alarmed he became, the faster he went, not realizing that in his excitement he was involuntarily twisting the throttle with his right hand. Dark objects loomed and vanished on either side with horrifying speed. On he sped, foot still searching for the brake-pedal. At the junction with Dalvey Road he at last realized that his frenzied grip of the throttle was what was causing the machine to bolt with him. He relaxed it and managed to slow down a little, and not a moment too soon, for here there was a roadblock. A masked flashlight waved to him to stop. He drew near, his foot searching more desperately than ever for the brake as he wobbled towards it.

‘I can’t stop!’ he shouted at the dim figures standing in the road ahead. In his excitement he again forgot not to twist the hand-grip; again he found himself hurled forward. The figures scattered to right and left.

‘Silly bugger!’ one of them shouted furiously after him as he shot by. But already he was at the corner of the Bukit Timah Road. Then, just as he was certain that he must hurtle to his doom in the stream of traffic ahead, his foot alighted on another outcrop of metal which this time proved to be the brake. By a miracle he avoided ramming a lorry that loomed across the end of Stevens Road.

It was hard to see what was going on. The road appeared to be full of shambling, cursing figures, some going one way, some going another. A military policeman was shouting hoarsely at drivers from the middle of the road beside the storm-canal. Beyond the canal an occasional flicker of light betrayed another vast military column on Dunearn Road struggling in the opposite direction. Someone flashed a torch in his face and shouted at him hoarsely: ‘You’re going the wrong bloody way, mate. That’s the way to the war!’ There were no further roadblocks and nobody tried to stop him, but all along the road men and vehicles continued to thrash in the obscurity like the limbs of some stricken, fettered giant.

Matthew soon became skilful at directing his motor-cycle into narrow gaps between the labouring vehicles but his progress was slow, nevertheless. Near the racecourse a huge fire was flaring a hundred feet into the sky: this was the reserve petrol dump which General Percival had ordered to be set on fire an hour before dark. Against its glare Matthew could see the long-shadowed silhouettes of men and guns, for the most part struggling in the direction of Singapore Town but constantly being arrested by traffic breaking into the stream or forcing a way through it. He, too, soon found it difficult to make any progress, wedged in now between two lorry-loads of silent, apprehensive Indians. Meanwhile, desperate-looking figures continued to pour in the opposite direction, their faces transfigured by the glare. One of these men staggered against him, breathing whisky fumes into his face. ‘What’s going on?’ Matthew asked anxiously. ‘Are we retreating?’

‘You’re damn right we are, sport!’ And the man heaved himself away, laughing hysterically.

Even by the light of the burning petrol dump it was impossible to see clearly enough to recognize someone. ‘How will I ever find Vera in all this?’ Matthew wondered hopelessly. From time to time, among the soldiers fleeing from the direction of Bukit Timah village, there were little pockets of civilians with bundles on their backs or dragging hand-carts; at the side of the road he could see the shadows of men jogging with poles across their backs from which hung boxes, suitcases or other burdens, but they all slipped by, heads averted: only by their clothes could you make a guess as to whether they were Indian, Malay or Chinese. Yes, it was hopeless. He considered turning back, but by now he had passed the racecourse on the right and Bukit Timah itself could not be more than half a mile up the road, so he decided to press on a little further. He rode on in a daze, travelling more freely the further he went. He passed a road junction to the left. This road was quiet and tempting but he ignored it and presently, as the ground rose on either side, he knew that Bukit Timah and the junction with the Jurong Road must lie just ahead in the obscurity.

Suspended between two rows of houses above the wide road a bundle of electric cables spluttered a cascade of white sparks over a scene of such confusion that Matthew’s heart sank. Lorries and turreted Quad cars were wedged together at all angles with a tide of men flowing by on each side of them; military police, bawling at drivers and at each other and at the same time trying to marshal a squad to drag away an abandoned or broken-down vehicle, seemed unable to make any impression on the jammed traffic. In the very middle of this chaos, four brigadiers in an open staff-car were trying to read a map by torchlight and occasionally peering about them into the seething darkness as if wondering where they were.

Matthew turned the motor-cycle and allowed himself to be swept back the way he had come for some distance in the middle of a cantering mob of Indian troops, some of whom had discarded their rifles and boots and were running barefoot, jabbering to each other hysterically as they ran. Matthew, infected by their alarm, kept looking over his shoulder as if expecting to find the Japanese at his heels. Abruptly he found himself at the quiet road he had seen before; he accelerated out of the chattering Indians and turned into it. For some distance after he had left them he could still hear them calling and chattering as they passed on down the road towards Singapore Town.

The road he had turned into was Reformatory Road which led down to Pasir Panjang on the coast. He could not be sure that it would not lead him into the Japanese lines … for where were the Japanese lines? However, provided the road did not turn towards the thud and flash of the guns on his right, he was prepared to follow it, though cautiously. A few tepid spots of rain began to fall.

Some way ahead in the darkness he saw the flash of a torch. He stopped the motor-cycle immediately and held his breath, his heart pounding. The torchlight reappeared a moment later, shining on the front of a car. It did not seem to be coming any closer so he left the motor-cycle and adavanced stealthily on foot. As he approached he saw the shadow of a jeep with a man in uniform peering under the bonnet; after a moment he slammed down the bonnet, said something to another man in the back and then began to jog away down the road in direction of Pasir Panjang, evidently to summon assistance.

Matthew moved forward cautiously, listening to the diminishing sound of the driver’s boots on the metalled surface of the road: he did not want to be shot by mistake. When he was within a few yards of the stationary jeep the torch was switched on again and its glow revealed a portly little man with a moustache wearing a general’s uniform; he, too, was consulting a map. Surely there was something familiar about that round, discontented face with its bulging eyes! This plump little fellow sitting abandoned in the darkness with raindrops beginning to patter on his red-banded hat and on the map he was holding was surely General Gordon Bennett, the Australian Commander! Matthew had seen a photograph of him in a newspaper inspecting troops. And now here he was, stranded in a broken-down jeep at what might be a crucial moment in the battle for Singapore. Perhaps he, Matthew, thanks to his motorcycle, might be able to bring help to the General at a vital moment. He hesitated, wondering whether to spring forward and offer his services.

Gordon Bennett, sitting in the jeep, had not heard Matthew’s approach. He had been too preoccupied with other, desperate matters. These last few hours had been among the worst he had ever experienced in his life. He had been shaken that morning when he had heard the news that the Japanese had broken through his Australian troops on the north-west coast, a failure that had earlier seemed to him inconceivable. Then there had been the bombing of his headquarters while Wavell and Percival had been visiting him. As if that had not been enough he had later been made to look a fool in front of Wavell by not knowing what Maxwell had been up to in his sector at the Causeway. No, things had not been going well in the past few hours. Perhaps the only crumb of comfort was that earlier in the campaign the Sultan of Johore had taken quite a liking to him and behaved most generously. He had even been given to understand by the Sultan that in the event of a total British collapse some help with an escape to Australia might not be altogether out of the question.

Yes, Gordon Bennett had recognized in the Sultan a really high-class person, and the Sultan, for his part, he felt sure, had not altogether failed to notice his own qualities of good breeding. Not long before, so he had heard, a guest of the Sultan, a titled English lady, had expressed a caprice to swim in the shark-infested Strait of Johore. For many a host this would have been too much, but not for the Sultan. What had he done? He had instructed several hundred of his palace guards to enter the water and link bands to form a shark-proof enclosure in which the lady could safely bathe. That, Bennett knew, was class. He could tell a classy act a mile off. He sighed and reluctantly returned his thoughts to the map. It was just at this moment, as if the breakdown itself were not bad enough, that some wild-eyed civilian sprang out of the darkness at him like a werewolf. As Matthew emerged from the surrounding darkness Bennett shrank back with a gasp of alarm, showing the whites of his eyes.

‘Who the devil are you and what d’you want?’ he demanded furiously.

‘I have a motor-cycle,’ said Matthew, taken aback by this hostile reception. ‘I just wondered whether you might like a lift… But I expect you don’t,’ he added as the General’s cheeks grew purple. With an embarrassed cough he sank back again into the darkness. Presently a motor-cycle engine roared not far away and grew fainter. The General was left alone to the rain and the night.

When Matthew reached the Mayfair he learned that Vera, unable to get through to Bukit Timah, had returned to the Mayfair but had almost immediately set off again, nobody knew where.

68

Walter had long since ceased to believe that the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese could be averted. If it had not been possible to stop, or even delay, the Japanese up-country with the help of prepared defences and relatively fresh troops, it was improbable that they would be stopped now at the gates of the city. Curiously, he gave little thought either to escaping or to rejoining his family. After all, they were safe. His wife and Kate were in Australia. Monty was heaven knew where … India perhaps. Joan and Nigel should soon be in Bombay. Joan’s capture of Nigel, certainly, was a cause for satisfaction and boded well for the future of Blackett and Webb. In that respect everything had turned out even better than if she had got Matthew Webb in her grip: once the two companies had merged, any attempt by Matthew to use his stake in the company to influence its policy could be comfortably out-voted.

Yet what a lot had been lost for Blackett and Webb in the past few weeks! It would be a long time (he himself might even be an old man, a grumpy old figurehead to whom the young executives took it in turns to make polite remarks at garden-parties!) before Blackett and Webb was again the commercial force in the Far East that it had been over the past thirty or forty years. All Malaya’s rubber, tin and palm-oil were already in Japanese hands; in Java and Sumatra they probably soon would be. All the agencies … the shipping, the insurance, the import-export and entrepôt, the engineering and banking, were either in suspended animation or had been withdrawn to Australia or Britain, their management and staff scattered to the winds. Something on that scale is not built up again overnight! In so far as these enterprises had a physical presence (godowns, goods and produce in stock, engineering plant, vehicles and so forth) it was being demolished with equal enthusiasm by Japanese bombers and British demolition teams. Perhaps it was this single-minded approach to the demolition of everything that had gone to make up the presence of Blackett and Webb in Singapore, amounting almost to collusion, it seemed to Walter, that he found so disorienting.

His family had left Singapore. He no longer had any responsibilities, except to the people who worked for him … but even his duty to them had grown nebulous under the bombs. In any case, he could no longer exert any real influence to help them. He passed these few days, therefore, roaming the city aimlessly and alone, almost as he had done in his youth when he had lived in a mess run by one of the big merchant houses, with a lot of other young lads. So Walter drifted about the city like a shadow or brooded alone in the store-keeper’s office in the godown on the river which he had made his temporary home. Once or twice, rather than walk or use a car, he hailed a sampan from where they clustered several deep with the tongkangs at the Blackett quay and had himself conveyed downriver to the Club. But the Club itself was unrecognizable, crammed with refugees, sick and wounded, and he left again immediately without speaking to anyone. On the Wednesday afternoon he made a sudden appearance at a bonded liquor warehouse where the same demolition team which had destroyed Blackett and Webb’s stocks had now begun work. Without a word he took off his jacket and set to work with them. They were grateful: they needed all the help they could get. Walter smashed bottles doggedly until it grew dark and then retired once more to brood alone in the godown on the river.

As he wandered along the narrow corridors between the bales of rubber he tried to explain to himself what had happened. If he succeeded in understanding what had gone wrong then perhaps he would once more be able to gain control of events instead of drifting helplessly, now this way, now that. It was surely not the Japanese alone who were to blame for the way things had gone. One of the first signs, undoubtedly, that Blackett and Webb’s hitherto secure grip on its own destiny was beginning to loosen had come with the labour unrest on the estates five years ago … not just his, but other firms’, too, of course. Could the Japanese be blamed for that? Well, perhaps they could. They had certainly been behind a number of strikes in Shanghai against British firms. The strike in 1939 at the China Printing and Finishing Company in Pootung which had gone on for six months and for which British marines had had to be landed to keep order had certainly been engineered by the Japanese. One had only to look at all the anti-British propaganda that had accompanied it, the wall-posters, the demonstrations, the pamphlets, the slogan-shouting … even the sympathy strike organized at the British-owned Yee Tsoong Tobacco Factory. And then there had been a rash of strikes against other British concerns: the China Soup Company, the Asiatic Petroleum Company, Ewo Brewery and Ewo Cotton Mills, Ewo Cold Storage (Jardine Matheson had been a favourite target) and Paton and Baldwin’s wool mill. But there was a difficulty here that Walter had to acknowledge. Although it was most likely that some, if not all, of these strikes were Japanese-inspired, it was extremely difficult to argue that they would not have broken out spontaneously, even without Japanese encouragement.

In a sense it did not matter whether these strikes had been encouraged for political reasons by the Japanese, or by the Communists, or had sprung up independently among disgruntled workers who happened to identify all employers with the British. Because given that huge reservoir of cheap labour with attendant ‘exposed corpses’ pour encourager les autres a mixture of the two extremes of submission and resistance was about what you would expect, in Walter’s view. Thus the disadvantage of labour unrest was bonded indissolubly to the advantage of cheap labour.

In Malaya, however, which had lost its pool of cheap labour when immigration was curtailed as a result of the Depression, there were no ‘exposed corpses’ on the streets in the morning and the extremes to which the labour force had been driven were less stark. In Malaya it was clearly unrealistic to blame the Japanese for the growth of labour unrest. Purely political agitation by Nationalists and, above all, Communists against the British had caused a number of strikes which, because they were not based on genuine labour grievances, would not otherwise have occurred. Walter sensed that it was here that Blackett and Webb in common with other British firms had begun to lose its grip on the country and on its own destiny. A worker with a genuine grievance you can do something about. You can give him more pay, or sack him, or improve his living conditions. But what can you do with a worker who wants you to leave the country or, just as bad, wants to run the business himself?

‘I suppose they expect me to dye my face brown and wear a sarong!’ grumbled Walter aloud, pausing to lean wearily against a bale of the ‘ribbed smoked sheet’ that had made his fortune. He groaned. He had no difficulty in recognizing what it was that he had been up against. It was ‘the spirit of the times’ which had stolen up on him again.

Presently, feeling hungry, Walter went out into the streets again. He did not eat, however, but instead went to the Cricket Club for a shower. His clothes were filthy but so were everyone else’s he met: nobody seemed to find anything remarkable about his appearance. He was shocked, however, to see what he looked like in a mirror and while he was taking a shower sent someone to fetch Mohammed from Tanglin with some clean clothes. He felt better then and ate a sandwich.

Mohammed, waiting for him outside in the car, wanted to drive him back to Tanglin but Walter told him to go to the godown on the river. He was very tired. To reach the storekeeper’s office he had to climb the swaying ladder some forty feet up into the shadowy vault of the building to the ledge which formed a rudimentary loft some way out from the wall. Two-thirds the way up the ladder he dropped the electric torch he was holding. He saw its light revolve once in the air as it fell. Then it went out and he could see nothing at all. Fortunately, Mohammed, concerned for his safety, had been watching his unsteady ascent from the entrance to the godown. He shouted up to him not to move and hurried away to fetch another torch from the car.

While he waited on the gently creaking, bending ladder, too unsure of his balance to go either up or down in the almost total darkness, he nevertheless thought how easy it would be to let go, to allow himself to pitch out from the ladder and plunge into the silent, peaceful depths beneath. Mohammed was taking a long time. So much rubber! It was all around him. He could not see it but he knew it was there. He thought of oil palms again but no, that was merely a detail … A man must move with the times, otherwise he is done for. Clinging to the ladder in the darkness he began to muse on this business of moving with the times. In Shanghai he had managed to do so with skill, why had he not succeeded in Malaya? In Shanghai it should have been more difficult. Surely no commercial city could have undergone so many drastic changes in such a short time as had Shanghai in the past five years: the Japanese war on the mainland, their blockade of the coastal ports, the ending in consequence of the Open Door policy and the decline of the Chinese Customs, not to mention all the deliberate Japanese attempts to strangle British trade with restrictions and monopolies. Yet he had not only moved with the times and managed to survive in that beleaguered, monstrously over-populated city, he had positively thrived.

Ah, but he could be objective about Shanghai. It was difficult with Malaya. Malaya he regarded as his own country. He had lived here most of his life, had raised a family here. He had a preconceived idea of what the place should be like. He did not want it to change. He liked it the way it used to be. ‘I’m beginning to sound like old Webb,’ he thought. Well, he had accommodated himself as best he could to the new labour disturbances. Perhaps he had not done so badly, after all.

Mohammed returned and Walter pursued his way upwards among the tiers of rubber bales by the light of the torch-beam from below. When he had reached the top Mohammed followed him up, carrying a basket with some provisions he had brought. Walter thanked him, took out his wallet and gave him a few dollars, adding that he would not be needed for some time, that he should lay the car up wherever he found convenient, preferably immobilized and concealed, and that he would be well advised to return to his own kampong until the situation became normal.

‘A man must move with the times, Mohammed,’ he said with a faint smile. Then he conducted him back to the ladder and held the light for him while he descended.

‘Goodbye, Tuan.’

‘Goodbye, Mohammed.’ And the syce departed, feeling more concerned than ever. It seemed to him that only a madman would want to stay in this place by the river where rats fidgeted in the darkness and mosquitoes settled on you in clouds. And then, of course, there were the bombs.

From the little window of the store-keeper’s office Walter had an unobstructed view, thanks to the river, for a considerable distance to the east and south-east in the direction of Raffles Place. Over the low roofs on the far bank some of the taller buildings around Raffles Place stood out in silhouette against other buildings on fire behind them. The looming shape of the Fullerton Building was visible, too, thanks to some vessel burning furiously in the inner roads behind it. Searchlights swept the sky, criss-crossing with each other; occasionally he could see the flashes of guns. Of the docks nothing was visible but it was clear from the pink-tinged clouds above them that they were still burning in several places. Nearer at hand yet another great conflagration had started in the godowns which lined the river between Clark Quay and Robertson Quay and on the opposite bank, too, between Magazine Road and part of Havelock Road where it ran beside the river. Walter, sometimes muttering something to himself, more often in silence, stood leaning against the side of the window for most of the night watching the progress of these fires.

69

It was to this fire beside the river that the Mayfair unit had been directed by the Central Fire Station. They sped towards it through a corridor of fire; on every street they passed through there seemed to be buildings ablaze. The major hunched wearily over the wheel, listening anxiously to the Lagonda’s motor and sniffing the odour of petrol that was leaking somewhere. The Lagonda had broken down once or twice but somehow had been restored to the road; it now bore a jagged tear along one side from a piece of shrapnel and the paint on the bonnet was blistered in several places by the heat of previous fires. It had done good service, certainly. All the same, perhaps it was not wise to go to a fire in a car that was leaking petrol.

In spite of the curfew the streets were full of people, many of them refugees from the threatened area. The Lagonda raced past figures struggling with bundles and belongings, crashed and slithered over rubble strewn in the street, passed a crowd of looters dragging goods out of a shop window like entrails out of a dead animal. Matthew, beside the Major, turned to see a shadowy battery of guns pointing skywards which flashed and gulped one by one as they went by. Evidently another air-raid was in progress.

It was a relief to arrive at the fire by the river and set to work. This, at least, was familiar: the search for a water supply, the laying out of the hose, the starting of the pump. While they were busy looking for a convenient place to drop the suction hose into the river a dog came dashing up, inspected them and hurried away again. ‘Adamson must be here somewhere!’ And they all smiled, for this was comforting and familiar. And sure enough, presently Adamson appeared; he was still limping and walking with a stick; his manner was as casual as ever but for once even he looked tired. He said: ‘I’d knock down that fence if I were you and do it from there. If you get in any closer you’ll have one of these walls come down on top of you.’ Presently he limped away again, vanishing into a trembling haze of heat and light with the dog at his heels.

Kee, Turner and Cheong were left to get the pumps ready, the others set off for the fire unreeling hose as they went. Evidently it had been burning unchecked for some considerable time for at its centre it was no longer possible to distinguish the individual riverside godowns: these had now become the fuel of a gigantic furnace. As they approached, they converged with other men, heads lowered into a glittering blizzard of sparks, dragging their hoses towards the fire’s heart. Matthew was among the helmeted figures struggling through this brilliant storm, his pulse pounding with excitement and trepidation as it always did when he went to a fire. Had he touched wood? Yes. Or was that yesterday? He had lost his hold on the passage of time; events telescoped into each other. Soon the water was crackling through the hose and they were directing their branch against the outer walls of a vast arena of heat and light. For beyond the burning buildings which they were trying to contain, the fire possessed an inner core of other buildings which seemed to stretch over several acres and which by now could hardly be looked at with the naked eye.

Time passed. It could have been a few minutes but, looking at his watch, Matthew saw that two hours had elapsed since their arrival. Occasionally, hurrying back for another length of hose, he glimpsed the glowing inner core as he crossed a street leading into it. Then he would be buffeted suddenly by a wave of heat until he reached the shelter of the next wall. Once, as he hurried across one of these rivers of light, arm raised to shield his face, he saw two lamp-posts, whose elongated shadows almost reached him along the cobbles, buckle and wilt as they began to melt. An instant later he had plunged gratefully into the next dark shadow, unable to believe what he had just seen.

How strange it was to stumble from one of these avenues flowing with light into the black darkness of a side street! Here in the shadows an exhausted fireman sat on the kerb and used his steel helmet to scoop up the water running to waste and pour it over his head; when you looked more carefully you saw that he was not alone: other firemen sprawled here and there, driven back into this dark haven to recuperate. Surprisingly a mood of good humour, almost of elation, prevailed among these exhausted men: they called cheerfully to Matthew in whatever language they happened to speak … in English, Tamil, Dutch, Cantonese … they laughed and teased each other, put their arms around each other’s shoulders and when, presently, the roof of a nearby godown fell in with a roar and another wave of sparks eddied over them illuminating the darkness of their refuge, a great cheer went up and someone began to sing ‘Roll out the barrel’. Laughing uncontrollably, he did not know why, Matthew set off with the new length of hose he had been sent for, following the fire’s perimeter. He was astonished at how quickly the fire changed its character from one sector to another. In one place it would be a cheerful blaze, gay with sparks, in another a sullen inflammation beneath blankets of acrid smoke; here, where the fire was spitting great streams of burning liquid towards a row of dark tenements, the firemen were fighting it with a desperate tenacity; nearby, where a bonded warehouse was in flames, they staggered about playfully, falling over each other like a litter of puppies, drunk with the alcohol fumes which billowed around them.

The night wore on. Matthew and Mr Wu were together at the branch, directing its jets at some gentle blue flames that prettily trimmed the roofs of a row of shop-houses, when they heard a sinister hissing above them. Behind them the men who had been singing fell silent. The hissing grew rapidly in volume and changed into a low whistle. Matthew and Mr Wu at the same moment dropped the branch and sprinted for the darkness. The next instant Matthew found himself lying face down in a pool of water issuing from a burst main; the road was quaking beneath him and he was being pummelled by flying fragments of brick and clods of earth. After a few moments a hand tugged his arm: he opened his eyes to see the ever-smiling face of Mr Wu. Together they began to search for the branch they had been holding and which they presently found, thrashing about by itself in the darkness. As Matthew tried to grasp it, it flailed up and dealt him a blow in the chest that robbed him of his breath; but Mr Wu had managed to throw himself on top of it and hold it down while they got a firm grip on it once more. A van now arrived, miraculously, from the Central Fire Station with hot, sweet tea in a metal fire-bucket.

While Matthew was sitting at some distance from the fire drinking tea with his back against a wall, Adamson and his dog approached. Two godowns containing rubber, engine-oil, copra, palm-oil and latex stored as a liquid were on fire only a few feet back from the river. Although there was no hope of saving the godowns themselves Adamson was afraid that burning liquid might flow from them into the river and set the crowded sampans and tongkangs on its surface alight. He wanted Matthew to relieve one of his men who was directing a jet from the roof of a tall building nearby. ‘Can you manage the branch by yourself? I’ll send someone to help as soon as I can.’ Matthew nodded. The dog eyed him dubiously and then looked up at Adamson, as if afraid that Matthew might not be up to it.

It seemed to take an age of climbing ladders up through the dark warehouse before he finally emerged on the roof. He immediately saw the silhouette of the man he had come to relieve: he had lashed the branch to an iron railing, but loosely enough so that he could still turn the jet a few degrees, and was slumped against the parapet which ran round the roof; he found it hard to get up when he saw Matthew. ‘I’ve been up here all night,’ he said. ‘I thought they’d forgotten me.’

‘Tea is being served down below: if you hurry you might get some.’

‘Enjoy the view,’ called the departing fireman, leaving Matthew alone on the roof. He turned his attention to the fire. From this position he could look down over the godowns and he wondered whether Adamson realized how far gone they already were; it seemed unlikely that a single jet could make any difference. However, he played the jet over the roofs on the river side, trying to let it stream down the outside walls to cool them and keep them standing as long as possible.

Soon he began to savour the strange sensation of being marooned above the city in the hot darkness; he was pervaded by a feeling of isolation and melancholy. The occasional drone of a bomber in the black sky above him, the slamming of distant doors from the ack-ack guns, the dull thud, thud, thud of bombs falling, the rapid popping and sighing of the Bofors guns, even the deep bark of the artillery … all this seemed perfectly remote from his vantage point over the rooftops. Up here he was only conscious of the moaning and creaking of the branch against the railing and the faint steady hiss of the jet as it curved down towards the fire. He could see a considerable distance, too: he could see the rapid flashes advancing along Raffles Quay and the Telok Ayer Basin as a stick of bombs fell, and the hulk of what might have been a barge burning near Anderson Bridge at the mouth of the river and another vessel blazing brilliantly in the inner roads, and yet other fires scattered here and there in the densely crowded residential quarters to the south and east of New Bridge Road. ‘If a bomb fell here,’ he thought suddenly, ‘nobody would ever find me,’ and he peered anxiously down towards the street to see if anyone was being sent up to join him, but with the smoke he could see nothing.

After a while he grew, calm again, soothed by the regular creaking of the branch. He was so remote from what was happening down there, after all. It seemed impossible that anything happening on the ground could touch him. Below was the fire, and beyond the fire and all around lay the city of Singapore where two hostile armies were struggling to subdue each other in the darkness. Up here it made no difference. All that concerned him was the fire raging below him: he must concentrate on playing the jet where it would do most good. But soon he found himself wondering whether his efforts might not be superfluous. With a change in the tide, burning oil from a stricken vessel at the mouth of the river was already beginning to flow up towards the tightly packed sampans and barges in the heart of the city. As the sky grew pale on the eastern horizon Matthew watched in dismay the leisurely advance of this fiery serpent.

70

‘The Blackett and Webb godown is threatened. Walter’s inside and refuses to leave. Someone on his staff got in touch with Hill Street and they passed it on to us. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind having a shot at persuading him?’

Matthew and the Major were sitting on the kerb beside the Blackett and Webb van which had once carried eight outstretched arms in various colours reaching for prosperity. These arms had not proved very durable and most of them had broken off going over bumps or pot-holes, some at the shoulder, some at the elbow. Only two still remained intact as far as the grasping fingers: Matthew suspected that they were the white ones but could not be sure. The steady precipitation of oily smuts from the sky had rendered white, yellow, light brown and dark brown and even the van itself a uniform black colour. Everything else in sight appeared also to be black, or grey like the sky and the smoke.

‘I’d go myself,’ said the Major, ‘but I must get all this lot back to the Mayfair for some rest and food.’ He stared vaguely at the palms of his hands which were raw and bleeding from handling hose in which the broken glass which littered the streets had become embedded. Matthew’s palms were similarly flayed. They were waiting their turn while one of the regular firemen went about with a pitcher of iodine, dripping it on to the other men’s wounds to a chorus of jokes, curses and cries of anguish. Adamson sat with them, holding out his own raw palms for this painful ritual. The dog slept with its head on his shoe. When, presently, Adamson got up to go for breakfast at Hill Street, the dog had to be shaken awake.

Matthew set off past a dismal row of buildings which had burned during the night: now they loomed, dripping, gutted shells in the grey light. Turning a corner he came upon half a dozen hoses lying side by side, still swollen into thick veins by the water coursing through them. A little further on the branches, perhaps abandoned during a raid, were rearing and flailing like a many-headed monster in the deserted street. He walked on, wondering where Vera was. He hoped that by now she had returned to the Mayfair. It might still be possible, somehow or other, to get her away from Singapore before the Japanese took over.

Matthew had visited the Blackett and Webb godown on the river once before, in the company of Walter himself, as it happened, in the first days after his arrival in Singapore. He had glimpsed it again when with Vera he had visited The Great World (now bleak and deserted except for an ARP post) for it lay close by. But he had found nothing particularly interesting about it, except that it had his own name painted on it in large white letters. Now, strangely undamaged amid the bomb-shattered buildings on either side, it looked somehow more impressive than he had remembered it.

Inside it seemed very dark at first, and quiet. What little light there was came from above, falling from a great height into the dim amphitheatre in which he stood. And there was a pleasant smell in the air, perhaps from the bales of rubber that mounted around him, if not from the old building itself.

‘Walter?’ he called uncertainly, his voice sounding very small in this great space. It seemed for a moment that there would be no answer but then there came the sound of footsteps from the half-floor above and a familiar voice asked impatiently: ‘What is it?’

‘It’s me, Matthew Webb. I want to talk to you.’

‘Who? Oh, it’s you. Well, all right … I suppose you want to destroy all this rubber, do you?’ Walter uttered a grim laugh. ‘I don’t know what your father would have thought of all this madness that’s got hold of everyone.’

‘It’s not about that. D’you mind if I come up there?’ Without waiting for an invitation Matthew began to climb a ladder which he dimly perceived nearby. He found Walter waiting at the top, looking restless and irritable. He paused to recover his breath, peering at him uncertainly. ‘Could we go somewhere where there’s a bit more light?’

‘All right. Come this way.’ Walter led the way down corridors of rubber. At a turning an old rat stood in their path and stared at them insolently for a moment before limping away down a side alley. Around the next corner grey daylight issued from a little cubicle of wood and glass. A row of huge fruit bats, neatly folded, hung from a rafter overhead and slept. Walter ushered him inside and offered him a chair. Before taking it Matthew went to the window, anxious to see what progress the fire had made towards them. But although it faced east, the direction from which the fire was being driven, his view was so obscured by smoke that he could see nothing. He knew that it must be very close.

‘You can’t stay here, Walter, you know. Have you made no arrangements to leave Singapore?’

‘I suppose like everybody else you want to get me out so you can burn the place down,’ said Walter grimly.

‘Don’t be absurd. It’s going to burn down without our help, I’m afraid. In any case, we’re trying to stop fires, not start them.’ He paused, noticing for the first time Walter’s dishevelled appearance. The clean clothes he had put on the evening before were already covered in dust and even his hair was thick with it; both his eyelids were red and swollen, perhaps from insect bites. His eyes kept wandering restlessly from one place to another, without meeting Matthew’s gaze for more than a moment.

‘I’m glad your father didn’t live to see this,’ he said presently with an air of resignation. After a silence he added with a sigh: ‘There was some fool here yesterday, an army chap … D’you know what he said to me?’

‘Well, no …’

‘I’ll tell you. He had the gall to tell me that we were leaving the troops to do the fighting while we only thought of feathering our nests! Can you beat it? He tried to claim that civilians have been trying to stop his demolition squad from doing its work … He actually said …’

‘But Walter, it’s true. That has been happening in some places … Look, we must go now. We’ll talk about it another time.’ Matthew got up and again looked anxiously out of the window: this time a bright banner of sparks was floating by. ‘Have you no way of getting out of Singapore? It’s obvious we aren’t going to hold out much longer.’

‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said Walter, chuckling grimly. ‘Certain business acquaintances are anxious to share their boat with me. What time is it now? They talk of leaving this evening from Telok Ayer Basin. You’d better come too, I should think. They wouldn’t refuse to take a Webb, even if it meant throwing someone else overboard!’ And Walter gave a sudden shout of laughter which rang in the rafters high above them. The row of bats slept on undisturbed, however.

‘After all,’ he went on presently, following some train of thought of his own. ‘War is only a passing phase in business life … No, it was Lever of Lever Brothers who said that, not me! Yes, it seems that in the Great War he wanted, naturally enough, to go on selling his … what did he call it? Sunlight Soap to the Germans … He made quite a fuss when they wouldn’t let him. He argued that the more soap they let him make the more glycerine there would be for munitions … which is true enough when you come to think about it. If you want my opinion there’s nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality. Now they’d do far better to leave certain things in Singapore as they are … Though destroy the oil the Japs need by all means, I don’t hold with people standing in the way of demolition squads if they’re acting sensibly … But no, you can’t argue with these people. You can’t say, look here, let’s discuss it sensibly! They swell up with patriotic indignation. They refuse to believe that in due course, probably in a matter of months, we’ll have come to some understanding with Japan and everything will continue as before. Except that in this case it won’t continue as before … why? Because a lot of self-righteous bloody fools will have destroyed our investments, lock, stock and barrel … and we shall have to start again from scratch!’

‘Walter,’ exclaimed Matthew, standing up excitedly, ‘it’s not self-righteous fools who are destroying your investment, it’s the bloody Japanese bombers! My God! Look at this …’

A momentary shift in the wind had peeled the smoke back from the river like a plaster from a wound. Near at hand a row of blazing godowns pointed towards their window like a fiery arrow whose barb had lodged in a shed burning directly beneath them. It was not this, however, but the river itself which had caused Matthew’s dismay for it seemed to be nothing but flame from one bank to another. The blazing oil which had surged up on the tide from the mouth of the river had enveloped the small wooden craft which clustered thickly over almost its entire length and breadth except for the narrow channel in the middle. Fanned by the breeze from the sea the fire had eaten its way up the twisting longbow-shaped course of the river, past another fire at Ord Road, under the Pulo Saigon Bridge and almost as far as Robertson Quay.

Matthew turned away, shocked, hoping that Adamson had managed to evacuate the thousands of Chinese families who lived on the river. Walter had joined him at the window, staring at the shining snake twisting all the way back to Anderson Bridge. He muttered: ‘Terrible! Terrible!’ and then turned away. ‘But look here,’ he went on, after a moment, ‘you forget the heavy responsibility that a businessman has to carry …’

‘Oh, Walter, please, not now. We must go.’ Matthew sniffed, certain he could see smoke eddying up between the bales of rubber. One of the sleeping bats stirred uneasily. But Walter had slumped heavily in his chair again.

‘You may think a responsibility to one’s shareholders is nothing of importance but I can assure you … Think of the poor widow, the clergyman, the spinster who has trusted her savings to your hands and whose very life may depend on the way you conduct your business. I can assure you, Matthew, that it makes you think twice when you have the well-being of other, perhaps vulnerable, people to protect. In the early days your father and I often used to work long into the night after everyone had gone … Yes, I sometimes used to fall asleep at this very desk here from sheer exhaustion … And what made me do it? I was quite simply afraid that Blackett and Webb, on whom so many poor people depended for their living, might have to pass their dividends! Yes, scoff if you want to, I don’t care!’

‘I don’t want to scoff, Walter. Of course I don’t! I just want us to leave here before it’s too late. We may be trapped.’

Walter again ignored him. ‘Well, I suppose the world was a different place in those days. The spirit of the times was quite different from the way it is now. Singapore was different, anyway, I can tell you that much! We had none of the comforts when I was a boy that people seem to expect these days. You would hardly believe it but we didn’t even have water you could drink out of a tap … In those days when my dear mother was alive she always used to filter it through a muslin dripston … you don’t see them any more but in those days … And did we have these fine roads and storm-drains and whatnot? Of course not. We had to put up with the monsoons as best we could. Sometimes the only way you could get about was in a rowing boat! Not like today when down comes the rain and it’s all over in a few minutes.’

‘Walter, I can hear a crackling sound from down below … Listen!’

Walter nodded sadly. ‘It was fun for us children, of course. Oh yes, we used to think it was great fun to have a change from the rickshaw. Mind you, we had fun in the rickshaws, too. Each of us kids had his own rickshaw and a coolie to himself. Yes. We used to make ’em race with us and see who’d win and we’d have a grand time. Yes … Grand! Grand!’

Matthew wafted the smoke away so that he could see Walter better. Then he took off his glasses, polished them with a dirty handkerchief and put them back over his smarting eyes. Walter’s massive head was bowed on his shoulders and he might almost have been asleep. He raised his head presently, however, and said: ‘Mind you, they were strict with us, too. Not like your father, Matthew, and his new-fangled ideas. Boys and girls all twined up together in the bath like a mess of snakes! That’s what they call education these days! And then they wonder why the kids go wrong. Well, I don’t know. When we children had our tea in the afternoon we had a Chinese “boy” to supervise us. And we had to be properly dressed into the bargain. Ah, how the girls hated to wear their stockings in the heat! But they had to, not like today when they run about practically naked. Any talking or nonsense and the “boy” would give us a sharp rap over the knuckles, I can tell you!’

‘Walter!’ cried Matthew, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. The bats had left their rafter now and were swooping about the godown squeaking unpleasantly. Matthew’s skin crawled: he did not care for bats.

‘Yes, my mother used to hold court with a circle of young men around her … young lads who would come out East and get themselves into debt, silly beggars, by signing chits. My mother used to take charge of them just as if they were her own children. She’d see that they ate proper meals and didn’t spend all their money drinking. She used to say to them: “What would your mother in England say if she could see you now? Think how her feelings would be hurt!” Ah, they adored her. Many of ’em were secretly homesick, you know, but didn’t like to admit it because they thought it wasn’t manly. They’d have done anything for her.’

Matthew again wafted his arm feebly to clear the smoke between them which grew thicker by the minute. ‘Yes, it must have been pleasant here in those days,’ he agreed with a sigh.

There was silence except for a crackling of wood from downstairs. Presently, Walter cleared his throat, then stood up abruptly. He pawed the smoky air in surprise.

‘What’s all this smoke?’ he demanded irritably.

71

That afternoon Matthew, the Major, Mr Wu and Adamson went to the cinema. The Mayfair unit’s last pump had broken down near the Gas Works and the water pressure throughout the city had fallen so low, thanks to burst mains, that it was no longer possible to use hydrants. On their way back from the Gas Works they passed two cinemas beside the Volunteers’ Drill Hall on the sea side of Beach Road. Surprisingly, one of the cinemas, the Alhambra, a small and rather shabby-looking place at first sight, was still open and was showing a film called Ziegfeld Girl. This seemed such a cause for wonder that they stopped and consulted each other. Why not? Just for a minute or two. They had such a craving for normality, even if only a glimpse of it… even if only for a few minutes. So they went inside, and once inside in the darkness they kept falling asleep and waking up, paralysed by weariness and comfort. With one thing and another they found it difficult to leave, now that they were inside.

When the light dimmed a newsreel, cheerful in tone, showed housewives with their hair tied up in handkerchiefs collecting pots and pans on the Home Front; next, iron railings were being harvested from parks and gardens. Matthew found this ridiculous and touching and was surprised to find himself in tears. The newsreel was followed by Ziegfeld Girl. He fell asleep for a few minutes and when he awoke it took him some time to fathom that the film concerned the destinies of a number of chorus girls. One of the girls, played by Hedy Lamarr, was beautiful, grave and sad. Her husband, a violinist of temperament, took a dim view of her being a chorus girl.

‘Well, what is it you want me to do? Give up the job? I know it’s a rather foolish way to earn money, but Franz, we need it!’

‘Do you really imagine that I would stand by while you showed yourself to other men?’

Matthew sighed, his head dropped on to his chest and it seemed to him that he slept for a while. But when he awoke the same conversation still seemed to be going on.

‘So we never really had the thing I thought we had,’ Hedy Lamarr was saying. ‘Faith in each other. If you have that you don’t mind about the other things. You don’t even know you haven’t got them.’

‘All right, take the job! Be a showgirl!’

‘But Franz!’

A plane roared low overhead and the heads of the audience, many of them wearing helmets, wilted in silhouette against the flickering screen. ‘I suppose it would be as well to put one’s tin hat on,’ mused the Major, returning his attention to the screen. But he put the matter out of his mind. He was too susceptible to the cold, rather sad beauty of Hedy Lamarr. He had never been able to resist that sort of woman: she reminded him of someone he had known, oh, years ago … That melancholy smile. ‘What’s she like now?’ he wondered. ‘Getting on, of course. Water under the bridge,’ he thought sadly. Yes, Hedy Lamarr was very much the Major’s cup of tea.

Now it was the dressing-room before the first night.

‘Nervous?’

‘Oh, Jenny, I … I can’t even put on my lipstick.’

‘Relax, honey. They won’t be lookin’ at your mouth.’ A breathless, manic Judy Garland burst in. The girls chattered excitedly. They were quelled by a man who said: ‘Listen, kids—I’ve got something important to say to you … in a few minutes you’re going on in your first number. D’you know what that means? It means you’re a Ziegfeld Girl. It means you’re going to have all the opportunities of a lifetime crowded into a couple of hours. And all the temptations …’

‘Oh dear,’ said Matthew, drowsing with his chin on his chest. ‘Soon I shall go and look for Vera.’

‘The “Dream” number. Places for the “Dream” number.’

‘All right, girls. And good luck.’

The music swelled and, as it did so, a bomb falling not far away caused the building to shake and one or two small pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. In the warm darkness the audience stirred uneasily and one or two silhouettes, crouching under the beam from the projector, made their way to the exit.

But this was the ‘Dream’ number. A plump, sleek tenor wearing a voluminous pair of Oxford bags began to sing:

You stepped out of a dream,
You are too wonderful to be what you seem.
Could there be eyes like yours?
Could there be lips like yours?
Could there be smiles like yours?
Honestly and truly,
You stepped out of a cloud
I want to take you away, away from the crowd …

Matthew fell asleep, woke, fell asleep, woke again. His limbs had grown stiff from sitting so long in the same position. He longed to stretch out and sleep … in clean sheets, in safety. The palms of his hands, raw and weeping from the glass splinters that clung to the hose, had begun to throb unbearably; on the screen one glittering scene followed another: he could no longer make sense of them. The screen filled with balloons from the midst of which Judy Garland emerged dressed in white. Then there were girls dancing on moving white beds, girls in white fur, girls with sheepdogs. Meanwhile, the plot was begining to thicken beyond Matthew’s powers of comprehension with Lana Turner forsaking a truck-driver for an older man with an English accent, identified as a ‘stage-door johnny’, who offered her a meal in a French restaurant, jewels, minks. This man bore a very slight resemblance to the Major. Judy Garland danced frantically and sang:

They call her Minnie from Trinidad,
And all the natives would be so sad,
Ay! Ay! Ay! …
If Minnie ever left Trinidad!

She was wearing a turban, three rings of big white beads and a striped dress, through the open front of which there was an occasional glimpse of her childishly muscled legs. Matthew found something distressing about her manic innocence. He fell asleep and woke again.

Now there was the shadow of the fat tenor thrown on to the sail of a yacht. As he spun the wheel he sang:

Come, come where the moon shines with magic enchantment, High up in the blue sky above you.
Come where a scented breeze caresses you with a lovely melody. While my heart is whispering ‘I love you.’

Then Hedy Lamarr, reflected in a mirror misted over with steam, was getting into her bath, but Matthew could no longer make sense of it all and the others were asleep: even the Major missed this important development. Again and again the girls drifted up and down brilliant staircases wearing elaborate constructions of stars on twigs, of stuffed parrots, of spangles, trailing miles of white chiffon … and outside, beneath the music of the soundtrack, the thudding of the guns continued without a pause. The girls now appeared to be clad only in flashing white beads. On and on they went filing up and down staircases. Their clothes grew ever more elaborate. One girl had an entire dead swan strapped to her chest with its neck round hers. Lana Turner, descending yet another staircase, but not so steadily now, for in the meantime she had taken to drink, at last pitched over senseless while supporting a whole flight of stuffed white doves.

‘Gosh! How can a girl do that to her career?’ asked one of the other girls.

‘I must go and find Vera,’ whispered Matthew to the Major. But the Major was still asleep. Matthew did not wake him but made his way stiffly out to the foyer. He stood there for a few moments gazing out in bewilderment as the last glittering staircase faded from his mind and was replaced by half a dozen motor-cars blazing fiercely in a car park a hundred yards away.

Although Matthew had no clear idea where he should look for Vera, it seemed to him quite likely that he would find her sooner or later. After all, the space in which they could avoid each other was shrinking rapidly; they were like two fish caught in a huge net: as the net was drawn in they were inevitably brought closer together. The difficulty was that a million or more other people had been caught in the same net and now here they all were together, like herrings in a flashing bundle dumped on the quayside … it was difficult to see one herring for all the others. Finding himself across the road from Raffles Hotel he went inside and telephoned the Mayfair. But Vera still had not returned and there had been no word of her.

In the past few hours a movement of refugees had developed from west to east across the city as the Japanese pressed in towards the outskirts of Tanglin and from Pasir Panjang towards the brickworks, Alexandra Barracks and the biscuit factory. As the fighting drew nearer, the Asiatic quarters emptied and people fled towards the Changi and Serangoon Roads with what few belongings they could carry, rushing together in a dying wave that would presently wash back again with diminished force the way it had come.

Matthew allowed himself to be carried along by the tide of refugees flowing from the direction of the padang and the cathedral. His watch had stopped and he had no idea what time it might be … It had grown dark while he had been in the cinema and it was no longer possible to make out clearly the features of the people he saw in the street … strained, blank, Oriental faces, men and women with swaying poles bouncing with the rhythm of their steps. Matthew felt sorry for them. What business was it of theirs, this war conceived hundreds of miles away and incubated in Geneva!

He plodded along mechanically, so tired that time passed in a dream. The palms of his hands continued to throb, but at a distance, as if they scarcely belonged to him any more. Presently he reached a place where the macadam road-surface, melted by the heat of the day, had been set on fire by an incendiary bomb and was burning bright orange. He hurried past it, aware that it must create a dangerous pool of light to attract the planes which still lurked in the black sky above. There was evidence of looting, too: he found himself trudging through sand-dunes which lay across his path and turned out to be sugar from a nearby store. He saw men and boys crawling in and out of shattered shop windows and a shadowy figure with a rickshaw full of bottles offered to sell him a bottle of brandy for a dollar. Half a mile further on he stumbled into a twenty-five-pounder field-gun halted in a prodigious traffic jam at a fork in the road: there were other guns, too, a little further on, and a great deal of cursing could be heard. A young officer sat on the wheel of one of the twenty-five-pounders.

‘You don’t happen to know where we are, do you?’ he asked Matthew. ‘We spent the afternoon over there firing on a map reference given us by the Sherwood Foresters, but the Japs landed a mortar on our OP truck and our maps went up with it.’

‘I think this must be the Serangoon Road,’ said Matthew. ‘If you take the left-hand fork you go to Woodleigh. I don’t know where the other one goes.’

‘We’re trying to get to Kallang.’

‘Kallang should be over there somewhere,’ said Matthew vaguely, pointing into the blackness with his throbbing hand. ‘Those gun-flashes must be the ack-ack from the aeodrome, I should think. But you’ll have to go back into town to get there. I don’t think there’s any road across. Are the Japs somewhere about?’

‘No idea, old chap. To tell the truth I doubt if I’d know one if I saw one. I’ve only been here a week. You’ll probably find them up the road somewhere. Well, thanks a lot.’

Matthew walked on into the darkness. Now there came a trickle of refugees from the opposite direction. He could just make them out as they flitted by with their bundles, some dragging carts, others steering monstrously overloaded bicycles. A party of men with rifles passed by: his pulse raced at the thought that this might be a Japanese patrol. The houses dropped away now; for a while there was a lull in the traffic and he could hear the guns grumbling for miles around. He wondered now whether it would be unwise to stretch out and sleep by the roadside, but plodded on, nevertheless. He was very thirsty, too, and his mind dully contemplated the thought of cold water as he walked. At length, however, he could walk no further: his legs would no longer carry him. An abandoned cart lay nearby at the side of the road. He crawled into it and fell asleep immediately with his arms over his face to protect it from mosquitoes. The battle for Singapore eddied and flowed around him while he slept.

72

When Matthew awoke day was breaking: the country round about was already suffused in a dismal grey light that reminded him of winter in England … with the difference that here it was sweltering hot still. While he had been asleep a lorry had parked a few yards away in the sparse shade of a grove of old, healed-up rubber trees. A British officer and an Australian corporal sat beside it, swigging alternately from a khaki water bottle. Matthew’s thirst had revived with horrible and astonishing power now that he was awake and he could hardly avert his eyes from the water bottle. The corporal noticed and said: ‘You look as if you could do with a drink. Come and have some water for breakfast.’

Matthew took the water bottle and drank. He was so thirsty that he had to force himself to hand it back before he finished it. The officer’s name was Major Williams. He said: ‘You look a mess, old boy. What have you done to your hands?’ Matthew told him. He nodded sympathetically and said: ‘Come back with us and we’ll get you a dressing.’

They climbed into the lorry’s cabin and set off. Major Williams commanded a mixed battery of 3·7-inch heavy AA guns and 40-mm Bofors on the airfield at Kallang. He explained that the Japanese planes were at last flying low enough to be in range of the Bofors. Until the past week only the 3·7s had been able to get near them. He added: ‘We lost half a dozen men, though, in a single raid yesterday. It’s not as if there are even any bloody planes left on the aerodrome. I don’t know why they bother.’ They drove on some way in silence, Matthew beginning to feel thirsty again.

‘None of this makes any sense to a chap like me,’ Williams said after a while, gesturing at the rubble-strewn streets. ‘I used to work in an insurance company before the war.’

They had barely reached the aerodrome when a siren began to wail. The corporal, who was behind the wheel, accelerated down one of the supply roads, slamming to a stop some fifty yards short of the nearest gun emplacement: all three sprinted for cover. ‘We have ammo in the back,’ the corporal said when he had recovered his breath. ‘It wouldn’t do to be caught in the open sitting on that lot.’

Now, all around the aerodrome the guns began to thunder. A squadron of Japanese bombers was approaching. This was not a high altitude carpet-bombing raid; the planes were coming in low and had split up before reaching the target to confuse the ack-ack guns. A scene of frenzied activity confronted Matthew in the sandbagged emplacement where he now found himself. He had no idea what was happening and hung back, anxious not to get in the way of the frantically working gun crew. He gazed in wonder at the great 3·7-inch gun looming above him; its two enormous, tyred wheels rearing off the ground gave it the appearance of a prancing prehistoric monster, Meanwhile the range was read off on the predictor, shells were brought up, their fuses were set and they were stacked into the loading trays. At a little distance on either side an appalling shrieking and popping had begun as the Bofors guns poured their small, impact-fused shells into the sky at the rate of two a second. To this shrieking and popping was added the prodigious roar of the heavy guns and the crump of bombs that made the ground ripple beneath his feet.

Matthew had never seen a gun fired at such close quarters and was overcome by enthusiasm. ‘There’s one, get it down!’ he shouted, pointing and even climbing on to the sandbagged parapet in his excitement. ‘Here it comes!’ But the gunners paid no attention to him. They worked on grimly, for the most part not even looking up at the sky. They seemed to be working in a daze, automatically. Their hands were blistered and in some cases as raw as Matthew’s own. The sweat poured off them. Sometimes they staggered under the weight of the shells as they handed them up. ‘Magnificent! What splendid men!’ thought Matthew, shouting and waving them on like a boat-race crew.

But now another bomber was clumsily droning towards them over the field, very low at no more than a few hundred feet, perhaps, coming from the direction of the river. Matthew leaped up again on to the parapet of sandbags and pointed, speechless with excitement, for evidently the gunners had not seen it. They continued to fire, not at this plane which lingered tantalizingly almost on their muzzle, but at some other aircraft which drifted miles above them and was scarcely to be seen through the canopy of smoke and cloud. Matthew, who did not know that the huge 3·7-inch would have been useless against a hedge-hopping plane, it was too slow (what you needed was a fast-swinging, rapid-firing gun like the Bofors, a glorified machine-gun), jumped up and down, almost having a fit. ‘Look at this one!’ he cried in a frenzy and again he pointed at the bomber which was still crawling steadily and now rather menacingly towards them, barely skimming the row of wooden huts on the far side of the field.

‘Fire!’ howled Matthew, gesticulating. ‘It’ll get away. Oh, my God! Quick!’ But the men continued to serve the gun not placidly, no, but steadily, grimly, and the gun continued to fire at the other plane, remote, maybe twenty thousand feet above them and no longer even visible but obscured once more by the canopy of smoke.

‘Can they be deaf?’ groaned Matthew, looking, it seemed, into the very eyes of the oncoming bomber-pilot, and concluded that perhaps they were deaf as anyone would be, standing beside those guns all day. ‘This may be dangerous,’ he thought, jumping down from the parapet. But his excitement was too much for him and he promptly sprang up again, to see the Bofors on each side of him firing over open sights at the plane which was now a mere hundred yards away. For a second the two streams of shells formed two sides of a triangle whose apex was the bomber itself. The glass cockpit suddenly vanished, as if vaporized. Matthew ducked involuntarily. A dark shadow covered him, like a lid on a pot. An appalling rush of air and a quaking of the ground, in complete silence, it seemed.

Matthew again jumped up, in time to see through the smoke the bomber departing peacefully over the flat, marshy ground in the direction of Geylang, but very low … and suddenly it seemed to trip on some obstruction, and then tumble head over heels with a tremendous explosion. Now it became several independent balls of fire that raced each other onwards over the flat ground burning brilliantly as they went and leaving the main hulk of the aircraft behind. Even the great noise this had caused had only reached Matthew faintly. The crew of the 3·7 had stopped firing, they were grinning, their mouths were working and they were waving their fists, Matthew swallowed and the sound suddenly came back. He, too, joined in the cheering. Around them all the guns had fallen silent for the moment. Williams appeared presently, having detailed one of his men to find Matthew a dressing. ‘I’m glad we got another one before we give up,’ he remarked.

‘How d’you mean “before we give up”?’ Matthew asked vaguely; he now felt shaken and disgusted with himself for having exulted over the death of the Japanese bomber-crew; even though they had presumably wanted to kill him and his companions it did not seem right to have allowed himself to get so excited.

‘The rumour is we’ll surrender some time today.’ Williams shrugged. ‘It can’t be much longer, anyway. A few of us here are thinking of trying to make it to Sumatra by boat once the surrender is official. We’ve got hold of a motor-launch over by the Swimming Club on the other side of the field.’ He gazed at Matthew sympathetically. ‘There’s room for you if you care to join us.’

‘Could I bring a Chinese girl? She’s on the Japanese blacklist.’

Williams nodded. ‘It might be a squeeze. The plan is to leave as soon after nine o’clock as possible if we surrender today. If not, then tomorrow.’

‘I may not be able to find her in time but I’ll try. Don’t wait for me if I’m not here.’

Presently Matthew set off on foot back towards the centre of the city but shortly after he had left the aerodrome gates he was given a lift by a taciturn young Scot driving a van. There was barely time for the vehicle to start moving, however, before there was the roar of an aero-engine overhead and bullets began to furrow the tarmacadam. A moment later the plane, a Zero, had overshot them, was climbing and turning. The driver accelerated and the van began to sway violently from side to side. Matthew craned out of the window, trying to follow the path of the plane as it circled round behind them.

‘Damn! He’s coming back.’

The van screeched to a stop beside the Kallang bridge, slewing round in the road so that it was sideways on to the direction they had been going. Matthew and the driver plunged out, one on each side of the road. Matthew took cover in the doorway of a deserted shop-house and sank to the ground with his back against the wall, feeling sick and exhausted. The Zero came back. Another rattle of machine-gun fire and it zoomed over again. Then all was quiet for a while. Nothing moved on the road or on the bridge. There was no sign of the young Scot. Matthew continued to sit where he was, staring at the buildings across the road.

Beside the canal was the Firestone factory: a long, cream, concrete building with green windows which had a slight air of a cinema, perhaps because of the name ‘Firestone’ in red gothic lettering attached to its façade. Matthew remembered now that Monty had pointed this building out to him on the evening he had first arrived. There had been some strike or other there. Some distance further along, sandwiched between the Gas Company gas-holder and the Nanyang Lights Company, was a bizarre little temple. Its outer wall was painted in red and white stripes and supported a multitude of strange, sculpted figures painted silver: a plump silver guru held up three fingers and gazed complacently back across the street at Matthew; beside him silver cows relaxed; the head of an elephant supported each gatepost while, on the arch above, a Buddha-like figure sat on a lotus flower and was saluted by two baby elephants with their trunks; on each side of the elephants, most curious, winged angels played violins and blew trumpets. Beyond, on the roof itself, an elephant-headed god rode a cow and a cobra rode a peacock. In front of the temple, like an offering, a dead man lay in the gutter under a buzzing, seething black shroud.

‘I must get us both on to that boat tonight, come what may,’ he thought, longing to go home himself and forget the cruel sights he had seen. With an effort he forced himself to stand up and go in search of the young Scot and find out why he had not returned to the van.

73

The last position from which a defence of Singapore might have been successful had been lost but still the city had not surrendered.

On the previous day, Saturday, 14 February, General Percival had found himself at last having to wrestle with the problem he had been dreading for weeks: how long would it be possible to fight on. The water supply was on the verge of failing. On higher ground it had failed already. Drinking water especially was in short supply. Because of the damaged mains there were fires burning out of control on every hand. Twice he had visited Brigadier Simson at the Municipal Offices to inspect the figures for the city’s water supply for the previous day: he had found that two-thirds of the water being pumped was running to waste and that the situation was getting rapidly worse.

This was clearly a matter which must be discussed with the Governor who had, in the meantime, moved out of the bomb-damaged Government House and had taken up residence in the Singapore Club. This meeting with the Governor had left a distressing impression on Percival’s mind. Sir Shenton Thomas was alarmed by the prospect of a serious epidemic in the city. Why then did Percival still hesitate to surrender? Wavell, now back in Java, had made it plain that he was expected to fight on as long as possible, if necessary by fighting through the streets. Behind this reluctance of Wavell’s to countenance surrender there was undoubtedly the voice of Churchill himself. On the other hand, surrender was clearly the only way in which the civilian population might be spared some great disaster, either from an epidemic or from the fighting.

It is distressing to have to act under the impulsive orders of someone who, in a situation which concerns you deeply, does not know what he is talking about. Percival, as a deeply loyal soldier, was sufficiently nimble to dodge the notion that Churchill, trying to tell him what was best at a distance of several thousand miles, was nothing but a blockhead who had, moreover, already committed his full share of blunders with respect to the Malayan campaign. But no sooner had Percival dodged this disloyal thought than he found himself having to elude the grasp of another, even more cruel conviction: namely, that the Governor now sitting opposite him was not real. Nor was it only the Governor who suffered this disability: his wife did, too, and his staff, and indeed, everyone here in the Singapore Club and, come to that, outside it. For it had suddenly dawned on Percival that he was the victim of a cruel and elaborate charade: that the moment he left the Governor’s presence the fellow would cease to exist. Percival passed a hand over his brow and tried to collect himself. Could it really be that Churchill, Wavell, Gordon Bennett, even his own staff, had no real substance, that they were merely phantasms sent to test and torment him, incredibly lifelike but with no more reality than the flickering images one saw on a cinema screen? Wherever he looked, yes, these deceptive images would spring up, but the instant he looked away again they would vanish. What evidence was there that they continued to exist when he was not looking at them? Why, he doubted whether the Governor, relying on the dignity of his office to deter Percival from touching him, even bothered to cloak himself with a tactile as well as visual semblance. He could probably poke a finger through him! For a moment, staring at the Governor suspiciously over the little table between them, Percival had an urge to experiment, an urge to reach out and grasp him by the throat. With an effort of will, however, he mastered himself and muttered: ‘While we still have water we must fight on. It is our duty.’ But he continued to stare at the Governor until the latter grew uneasy.

‘Whatever ails the fellow?’ Sir Shenton wondered while Percival’s eyes, which for some reason had become unusually piercing, bored into him like the bits of two drills. ‘He’s been under a frightful strain, of course. But then, we all have.’

The Governor was somewhat relieved when Percival at last stood up to leave. Before he did so, he took the opportunity of returning once more to the subject of the epidemic he feared, but less with the hope of persuading Percival to surrender than of making sure that there was no doubt about his own position should the epidemic in fact occur. Percival nodded, licking his lips in an odd manner, and then asked unexpectedly: ‘What will you do now … I mean, immediately after I have left this room?’

‘What?’ The Governor was taken aback by this question which seemed to him peculiar, even impertinent. What business was it of Percival’s what he was going to do now? Or … wait. Wait a moment. Did Percival suspect that what he was about to do was to send a cable to the Colonial Office putting all responsibility for the decision not to surrender on to the Forces? He replied shortly that he must now visit his wife, who was sick. Percival nodded at this information, smiling in a rather offensive and knowing way, as if to say: ‘I’ll bet you are!’ and then took his leave.

Still, the Governor could not help wondering about Percival’s odd behaviour, even while drafting a cable to the Colonial Office to point out that there were now over a million people within a radius of three square miles. ‘Many dead lying in the streets and burial impossible. We are faced with total deprivation of water which must result in pestilence. I have felt that it is my duty to bring this to notice of General Officer Commanding.’ There! His flanks protected, the Governor felt a little better. Still, there was no denying it, they were all in a pickle.

That night Percival dreamed not about the war but about an epidemic. ‘What has your epidemic got to do with me?’ he demanded indignantly. The Governor replied: ‘If you don’t understand, it’s not much use trying to explain.’ Then the Governor faded and Percival slept in peace for a while, until presently a little group of military advisers assembled round his bedside led by Hamley, author of The Operations of War Explained and Illustrated. They were less confident than they had been on previous nights, but nevertheless, recommended a bold stroke: the million people who now crowded into Singapore Town should arm themselves as best they could with whatever lay to hand and all charge simultaneously at the same point of the Japanese lines. When they had finished with one point they might turn to another, and so on until the Japanese were defeated. ‘An attack by a million people,’ declared Hamley pompously, ‘is not to be shrugged off lightly.’

Now Sunday dawned, ominous, unbearably hot. Percival took communion and prayed fervently: he found it hard to masticate the wafer he was given: his mouth was too dry. However, his frame of mind was somewhat better. Only once, noticing the chaplain gaze at him with interest and compassion, did he find himself wondering whether this cleric had any other existence beyond the walk-on part of lending verisimilitude to his own Sunday devotions. He shrugged the thought off hastily. There would be time enough to worry about the existence of other people. The campaign was almost at an end.

He had called a conference of all his commanders for nine-thirty a.m. Brigadier Simson now reported that a complete failure of the water supply was likely within twenty-four hours. In the light of this news there were only two possible courses of action. One was to counter-attack and recover the reservoirs and the food depots at Bukit Timah. The other was to surrender.

It was agreed unanimously that there was no real alternative. The meeting was over within twenty minutes and Percival immediately set to work on the delicate and humiliating task of negotiating Singapore’s surrender. It was not until late in the afternoon that, after much difficulty, Percival found himself at the Ford factory, sitting opposite the Japanese Commander, General Yamashita. Although a cease-fire had already been ordered for four p.m. it was agreed that hostilities should officially cease at eight-thirty p.m. Yamashita conceded that his three fighting divisions should remain outside the city that night to prevent any disorder or excesses. At no point during this trying interview did General Yamashita seem anything but completely real to General Percival (only Torrance, his Chief of Staff, who sat on his right, occasionally dimmed like an electric light in a thunderstorm).

This Sunday, then, was the last day of the defence of Singapore, the last day of freedom for the British who remained on the Island … almost, you might say with hindsight, the last day of the British Empire in these parts. It took time for news of the impending surrender to percolate through the stricken city, particularly since the bombing, strafing and shelling continued unabated all morning and afternoon. Matthew still had not heard the news as he struggled in the mid-day heat near the Firestone factory to get the body of a young Scot into the back of the van … as a matter of fact, by now he had lost count of the days and could not have told you that today was Sunday. Nor had the Major heard the news as, after a rather odd tiffin of tinned sardines and tinned pears, he and Captain Brown held a cut-rate auction of the remaining girls from the Poh Leung Kuk in the presence of the handful of bridegrooms he had persuaded to assemble, thanks to the good offices of Mr Wu. The bridegrooms were apathetic and uneasy and bidding was not brisk. But the Major comforted himself with the thought that to get them husbands of any description in the circumstances was not bad going. How would those girls who had declined to accept one or other of the Major’s bridegrooms fare during the inevitable Japanese occupation of Singapore? He suspected that some of them, to judge by the lipstick and nail-varnish that was beginning to reappear, might fare all too well.

Matthew was now delivering the young Scot’s body to the General Hospital in Outram Road. It had taken an age to get the body into the van (a corpse is heavy and Matthew was weak) and it was two o’clock exactly as he reached the hospital. There, beside one of the paths leading up the slope to the main building, a mass grave had been dug. He looked up, afflicted by the sight of so many bodies laid out on the lawn for burial, and noticed the white clock tower above the portico of the main block with its four small, black clock faces. It came as a shock, somehow. The clock looked so peaceful nestling there beneath drooping classical garlands while on the ground below there was nothing to be seen but carnage and violent death. Two o’clock.

Two, three hours passed in a dream. The guns had fallen silent at last and bombs ceased to fall on the city. At the Mayfair there was no sign of Vera. Matthew longed to lie down there and sleep but time was slipping away and he must find her soon if they were to escape that night. A little later, without remembering how he had got there, he found himself sitting on his heels and gazing down at the wall of the storm-drain that ran along Orchard Road; part of it had fallen in, revealing a great wedge of neatly packed pink bricks, like the roe of a gutted fish, each with the word Jurong neatly printed on its back.

Later again he passed Dr Brownley scurrying along Battery Road in the direction of Whiteaways’: he called to him but the Doctor paid no attention. His eyes were shining, his pulse was racing, he suffered a painful, joyful constriction of his respiration. In his ears, instead of Matthew’s greeting, a celestial music sounded, while in his pocket rested $985·50 cents which in a moment he would be exchanging for the only true object of his desire, that article which had fixed him with its basilisk stare from Whiteaways’ window, whatever it was. Dr Brownley was flying as if to greet a lover (but let him pass on, for which of us is so poor in spirit that he has never experienced the delights of being united in bonds of ownership with a piece of merchandise?).

Then Matthew, having wished the Doctor well under his breath, was standing in the cathedral grounds inspecting a collection of furniture that had been carried outside. The pews, he noticed, were made of solid wood, such as one might find in any English church, but with woven rush seats and backs as a concession to the tropics. Inside, a hospital had been improvised. The shuttered sides of the building stood open, as did another row of shutters just beneath the timbered roof. Rows of wounded had been laid on the brown stone flags beneath a couple of dozen silently revolving fans which hung from elbowed brackets along the aisle. Nearer to the altar, a number of men and women knelt in prayer, some of them in uniform. From a distance this scene, like that in the grounds of the General Hospital, appeared relatively peaceful. It seemed to Matthew that the human beings in it looked quite insignificant compared with the great building which rose above them. The fans, revolving like propellers some distance below the dim heights of the roof, gave him the restful impression that he was under water … It was only when he looked with more particular attention at the wounded on the floor that he realized that here, too, people lay shattered and dying. Shocked, he fell back, intending to continue his search somewhere else. But then, at last, he saw Vera working among the patients not far away.

Vera saw him at almost the same moment. She hurried towards him but, at the last instant, hung back. He had thought at first that she was wearing a red and white dress. Now he saw that it was an overall and that she was soaked in blood from head to foot.

‘I know,’ she said immediately. ‘I’m going to change as soon as I can.’ She smiled at him then and burst into tears.

They went outside for a moment. ‘D’you notice something odd?’ he asked suddenly. ‘There are no birds. They’ve all gone. That’s why it seems so quiet.’

‘Tell me where you’ll be later,’ Vera said. ‘I can’t talk to you now. I must go.’

‘I’ll come back here just after seven. There may be a boat leaving tonight which we could both take.’

Vera borrowed his handkerchief, dried her eyes, smiled at him and hurried away. He retired a little way into the grounds but lingered for a while, watching her as she moved from one patient to another.

Later, after lying down for some time on the cathedral lawn, he joined the crowds milling slowly about in Raffles Place. A strange hush had fallen over everything: in it the occasional crash or crackle of a fire not far away in Battery Road or Market Street could be clearly heard. People drifted, for the most part aimlessly, in and out of the shops that were still open, or simply stood about talking in little groups. Many people had suitcases or bundles, evidently refugees from up-country or from districts lying outside the British-held perimeter. There were a number of forlorn-looking children: some of them had been bedded down on the street or in doorways by their parents. There were a great many soldiers: some of them, in defiance of the supposed destruction of liquor, were drunk and belligerent.

A dense crowd had gathered at the far end of Raffles Place in front of the Mercantile Bank. There, under a thick stone colonnade, someone was shouting. Matthew pressed forward into the crowd to see what was happening. A sculpted stone flame resembling an ice-cream cone twirled up over the grandiose entrance to the Mercantile Bank. Above that, two fluted, indigestible stone pillars supported four more twirled ice-cream cones set in dishes. It was beneath this important façade that a ragged British Tommy had chosen to address the crowd. Matthew strained to hear what he was saying.

‘A dirty capitalist war!’ he was shouting. ‘We’ve no reason to be here at all. Listen, mates, which of us gives a damn for the bleedin’ Chinese? Let ’em sort it out for themselves with the bloody Japs … What’s it to do with us? I’ll tell you what … It’s greedy profiteers in London, that’s what it is …’

A drunken shout of approval rose from the troops packed together in front of this vociferous figure. There were jeers, too, and bitter laughter. Matthew muttered: ‘No, that’s all wrong …’ and tried to force his way through the mob. But now, abruptly, a fight flared up just beside him and in the sudden thrashing of fists and boots Matthew was shoved backwards and somebody’s elbow caught him a blow in the face. He fell and for a moment, dazed, was afraid that the crowd would surge over him before he could get up. He could still hear the Tommy ranting as he scrambled to his feet and worked his way round to the right by the Meyer Building, muttering to himself as he went.

Now he had shoved his way in under the colonnade and was almost within reach of the table on which the soldier was standing, still declaiming wildly against the profiteers and their native henchmen. At this moment a missile, perhaps a bottle, hurled from the crowd, struck the speaker and he fell suddenly to his knees, crouching on the table like a wild animal, blood pouring from his temple. Matthew saw the glinting studs of his boots as he knelt there with his head between his knees. Then someone helped him off the table and Matthew immediately jumped up in his place, holding up his hand and shouting:

‘No! Don’t you see? Things don’t have to be like this … Please listen to me! It’s just a question of how we approach each other. People seem to think that self-interest … No, what I mean to say really … Wait! We’re no different from each other, after all! We don’t have to have … yes, I believe it, and one day we won’t! We won’t have them …! We shall live …!’ He tried to say more but a great wave of jeering and yelling surged forward from the crowd and his voice broke. ‘Oh, don’t you see, you’re playing their game …’ he muttered, gazing down in distress at the baying crowd in front of him until, a moment later, a bottle came winging end over end towards him and struck him a numbing blow in the ribs. He staggered back with a gasp. A hand gripped his arm firmly and dragged him off the table. He found himself looking at the grinning face of Dupigny.

‘François,’ he muttered. ‘What are you doing …?’

‘D’you want to get yourself killed?’ asked Dupigny. ‘Now is not the moment for such nonsense.’

74

At the Adelphi Hotel beside the cathedral someone had had the foresight to fill several baths before the water supply had failed. Although these baths had already been used by several people and the water in them had taken on a dark grey colour, both Matthew and Dupigny took advantage of them and were feeling distinctly refreshed as they emerged from the hotel into the twilight and crossed the road to the cathedral grounds. Dupigny himself had decided not to try to escape. He was too old, he had explained with a shrug, and besides ‘avec la Boche en France’ … He would stay and keep his friend the Major company during the internment which no doubt awaited them. He had agreed to drive Matthew and Vera to the boat waiting at Tanjong Rhu, however.

A great crowd had gathered around the cathedral in the dusk, and seeing it Matthew began to feel anxious again, lest they should not be able to locate Vera. A service was in progress and these people standing in devout silence several deep around the building were those who had been unable to find room inside. As Matthew and Dupigny searched the fringes of this crowd the congregation began to sing:

Praise, my soul, the King of
To his feet thy tribute bring.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven
Who like me his praise should sing?
Praise him! Praise him!
Praise the everlasting King!

Suddenly a young woman detached herself from the crowd and took Matthew’s arm. It was Vera. He gazed at her, smiling with relief, remembering how he had first seen her come up to him in the twilight at The Great World just like this.

‘Come,’ said Dupigny.

It was very dark by the time they reached the aerodrome. They left the car near the entrance, having decided that in order not to attract attention it would be best to complete their journey on foot. It seemed to grow even darker, however, once they were on the airfield itself and they had to grope their way forward with the utmost caution to avoid bomb-craters and other obstacles. This wandering in the blackness seemed to take an age. Once, not far away, they saw a party of men with a powerful torch, also moving across the field. They crouched down and held their breath while the men went by, talking among themselves. It was impossible to tell what language they were speaking. The wavering light of the torch moved on for another hundred yards, then was switched off suddenly. A little later it was switched on again and some distance further away and played for a moment on the shattered barrel of a spiked anti-aircraft gun. Then the torch vanished once more. Matthew, Vera and Dupigny continued their laborious journey. At last they could hear the lapping of the water and a voice spoke to them quietly from the darkness. Matthew answered. It was Major Williams.

‘Glad you made it. There are some other people about so we’d better be quiet. They may be Japs or other escapers. You just got here in time, as a matter of fact, because we’re about ready to leave. The boat’s out here.’

Ahead of them a shaded light appeared for a second or two on a gang-plank. Matthew glimpsed the Australian corporal he had seen that morning with Williams; behind him it was just possible to make out the shadow of a boat against the water. ‘Come along, the sooner we shove off the better.’

Matthew and Vera said goodbye to Dupigny and they wished each other luck. They shook hands. Matthew and Vera crossed the gang-plank followed by Williams. Dupigny waited to help them cast off and was just stooping to do so when a powerful beam sprang out of the darkness and played over the launch, then fastened on Dupigny. The figures on the deck froze. The Australian corporal who was holding a lamp switched it on. It illuminated a ragged party of soldiers wearing Australian hats. One of them had a revolver, another a tommy-gun. There were about a dozen of them.

‘Sorry, sports, we’re taking the boat,’ the man with the torch on Dupigny said. ‘Hop it.’

Nobody moved or spoke. Dupigny, however, reached down for the mooring-rope to cast off. There was a shot and he began to hop about like a wounded bird, clutching his leg.

‘Why don’t you find your own bloody boat?’ shouted the Australian corporal in a sudden rage.

‘Hop it. You, too, cobber.’

‘There’s nothing for it, I’m afraid,’ said Williams. One by one they came back over the gang-plank.

‘Right now. Clear off and take him, too, before we do him in.’

They picked up Dupigny who had now fallen over and was struggling to get up again. He said he was not badly hurt but Matthew and Williams had to take his arms over their shoulders and support him; one leg of his cotton drill trousers was already soaked in blood. Speechless with anger and frustration they made their way wearily back across the aerodrome in the darkness.

From elsewhere on the Island other parties bent on escape were also groping about in the darkness. General Gordon Bennett found himself at the docks searching for a boat in which he might sail to Malacca in search of a bigger boat which in turn might carry him to Australia and freedom; he had thought it best not to mention his departure to the GOC and had left an inspiriting order for the Australian troops under his command to remain vigilantly at their posts … but in the meantime, where was that damn boat he needed?

As for Walter, he was making his way along a quay at Telok Ayer Basin where the Nigel, a handsome motor-yacht, was waiting for him and his companion, W. J. Bowser-Barrington. Poor Bowser-Barrington had fallen some way behind and was gasping under the tarpaulin-wrapped burden he carried on his shoulders. Bowser-Barrington was feeling anything but pleased, for his intention had been that Walter should carry this burden which consisted of his deceased Chairman who, though not a heavy man, was not a light one either. Walter, however, had flatly refused to have anything to do with carrying old Solomon’s remains and had even gone so far as to recommend that Bowser-Barrington should simply throw his Chairman away somewhere. This, naturally, was altogether out of the question.

‘Well,’ thought Bowser-Barrington uneasily as he struggled along the quay in Walter’s wake, ‘once we’re out at sea I’ll show him who’s boss.’ Or rather … wait. Perhaps that was something he should discuss with the rest of the Board. Might it not be better to wait until they had reached Australia?

‘Ahhhh!’ He stumbled in the darkness and, as he did so, it was almost as if his Chairman deliberately ground his sharp knee painfully into his ear. But, of course, that was out of the question. ‘Where are you, Walter?’ he cried feebly into the darkness. ‘I say, old boy, please don’t leave me!’

Once Dupigny, whose wound fortunately had proved none too serious, had been returned to the Mayfair, Matthew had to consider what to do next. With only a few hours left before the Japanese occupation of the city it had become urgent to find a place where Vera might be able to lie low and conceal her identity. She needed a Chinese family willing to take the risk of hiding her, but neither Vera nor Matthew knew one. The Major suggested that they should ask Mr Wu. But Mr Wu was nowhere to be found. Either he had managed to escape during the early part of the night or else he, too, in danger as a former officer in the Chinese Air Force, had decided to lie low. Matthew and Vera wasted two precious hours in a vain search for Mr Wu. Such was the confusion in the city that nobody knew where anybody might be. As they made their way once again through the city centre Matthew gazed with envy at the troops who had stretched out to sleep on the pavements. By now both he and Vera were too tired to think constructively: they just wandered aimlessly, hand in hand, full of bitterness and discouragement as a result of their abortive attempt to escape and longing to be at peace.

At last, in desperation, they went to visit the tenement where Vera had lived before. The building was half deserted and there was no longer anyone sleeping on the stairs or in the corridors. Evidently many of those who had lived there formerly had moved to kampongs outside the city to avoid the bombing and shelling. Vera’s little cubicle was still as she had left it. Nothing had been touched in her absence.

‘You can’t stay here. Someone in the building would inform on you sooner or later.’

‘Where else is there to go?’ Vera put a soothing hand on his shoulder. ‘They’re simple people here. They don’t know about what happened in Shanghai.’

‘They’ll think you’re suspicious. They’ll have seen you with me.’

‘They will just think I’m a prostitute. To them all Englishmen look alike,’ she smiled wanly. ‘Really, I shall be all right. I have been in a situation like this before.’ She shrugged. ‘Besides, we have no choice.’ After she had rested her head against his shoulder for a little while in silence she said: ‘You must go now, Matthew. It would be best if we weren’t seen together any more. When you have gone I shall cut my hair and take off these European clothes.’

‘Is there nothing else I can do for you? Let me give you some money, though it may no longer be any use once the Japanese have taken over. Perhaps it would be best to buy some things tomorrow, then exchange them later when they get rid of our currency.’

Vera nodded and took the money. She began to weep quietly, saying: ‘I’m sorry to be like this. I feel so tired, that’s all. Tomorrow when I have slept I shall be all right.’

‘We’ll see each other again, won’t we?’

‘Yes, one day, certainly,’ she agreed.

Early on Tuesday afternoon European civilians were at last marched off to Katong on the first stage of their long journey on foot to internment in Changi gaol. They had been assembled on the padang all morning under the tropical sun. Many of them were already suffering from the heat, weariness and thirst. The Major and Matthew walked one on each side of Dupigny who, despite his injury, insisted on walking by himself. Matthew carried a small bundle of Dupigny’s belongings as well as a water bottle and a suitcase of his own. They walked in silence at first. The Major, in addition to his suitcase, carried a folded stretcher they had improvised, lest it should become necessary to carry Dupigny.

The ruined, baking streets stretched interminably ahead. In some of the shops they passed Matthew noticed that crude Japanese flags had already appeared. Dupigny noticed them, too, and said with a cynical smile: ‘Well, Matthew, do you really believe that one day all races will decide to abandon self-interest and live together in harmony?’

‘Yes, François, one day.’

They struggled on in the heat, stopping now and then to rest for a few moments in whatever shade they could find. Once, while they were resting, an elderly Chinese came out of a shop-house and offered them cigarettes from a round tin of Gold Flake, nodding and smiling at them sympathetically. They thanked him warmly and walked on, feeling encouraged.

The Chinese and Indians who had vanished from the streets after the surrender were beginning cautiously to reappear. By a row of burned-out shop-houses a group of young Indians had gathered to watch the column of Europeans as they straggled by. When Dupigny, limping painfully, came abreast of them they laughed and jeered at him. Delighted, he turned to smile ironically at Matthew.

‘One day, François.’

They walked on. As time passed, Dupigny found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the others. His face was grey now and running with sweat. The Major insisted on having a look at his leg: his wound had opened again and his shoe was full of blood. He told the others to go on without him; he would get a lift from one of the Japanese vehicles which occasionally passed on the road. But the others considered this too risky. Ignoring his protests the Major unfolded the stretcher and made Dupigny lie down on it. Then he and Matthew picked up the stretcher and they went forward again, leaving their suitcases to volunteers in the column behind them; meanwhile, another volunteer searched through the column for a doctor, but presently he returned saying none could be found: it seemed that the doctors had been detained to look after the wounded in the city. They moved on once more: Dupigny seemed hardly to have the strength to brush the flies from his lips and eyes. They spread a handkerchief over his face to keep off the glare of the sun.

Time passed. At last Katong was no longer very far ahead. Dupigny lay with his eyes closed and seemed to be scarcely conscious. Again they passed a crowd of jeering Indians. Hearing them, Dupigny opened his eyes for a moment and his mouth twisted into a smile.

In the weeks, then months, then years that followed, first in Changi, later at the Sime Road civilian camp, Matthew found that his world had suddenly shrunk. Accustomed to speculate grandly about the state and fate of nations he now found that his thought were limited to the smallest of matters … a glass of water, a pencil, a handful of rice. Hope had deserted him completely. It came as a surprise to him to realize how much he had depended on it before.

In the first weeks after his internment, news began to filter into Changi of mass executions of Chinese suspected of having helped the British. ‘Will all men still be brothers one day, Matthew?’ asked Dupigny when he heard about these executions.

‘I think so, François.’ And Matthew shrugged sadly.

‘Ah,’ said Dupigny.

Many of the Chinese who were killed were towed out to sea in lighters and made to jump overboard, still bound together in twos and three. Others were machine-gunned wholesale on the beaches. According to the rumours which reached the camp, in every part of Singapore where Chinese lived they were forced by the Japanese to leave their houses at dawn and paraded in front of hooded informers. Matthew had a chilling vision of the scene … the hooded man, of whose face nothing could be seen but a glitter of eyes behind the mask, moving like Death along the row of waiting people, without explanation picking out now this person, now that. What chance would Vera have? No wonder hope had deserted him and that he preferred to restrict his thoughts to simple things. A glass of water, a pencil, a handful of rice.

But then one day in his second year of captivity, while he was out with a working party on the road, a young Chinese brushed up against him and pressed something into his hand. He looked at it surreptitiously: it was a cigarette packet wrapped in a handkerchief. When he opened it he put his head in his hands: it contained a lump of sugar and two cooked white mice. And he thought: ‘Well, who knows? At least there’s a chance. Perhaps she’ll survive after all, and so will I.’

75

But more years pass and yet more. Let us suppose that Kate Blackett, now a woman with grown-up children of her own, is sitting at her breakfast-table in a quiet street in Bayswater. Kate has a pleasant, kindly, humorous look (as characters tend to have when their author treats them well) and this is an agreeable room she is having breakfast in: on the wall there is a charming painting by Patricia Moynagh of a curled-up cat, and a delightful, serene painting by Mary Newcomb of several people standing on a ferry, and another of a dog peacefully asleep surrounded by red flowers. Through the window, from where she is sitting, there is a glimpse of garden in which a cat is trying to catch butterflies … Or rather, no. Let us suppose that it is winter. Rub out the cat, erase the butterflies and let us move back inside where it is warmer.

Opposite Kate at the table is a man reading The Times for 10 December 1976. Kate can see nothing of this man (her husband, let us hope) but some grey hair on top of his head and two hands holding up the newspaper. Does he wear glasses? It is impossible to say. His face is hidden by the newspaper. The fingers which are holding it are long and slender and he is wearing a green sweater … (we can see part of its sleeve) and that is all there will be of him until he decides to put down the newspaper. Well, not quite all, however, for presently he speaks to Kate with a slight drawl. An Australian perhaps? From his voice he could be English, though, or even an American who has lived a long time in England. Perhaps, then, Kate has married Ehrendorf, that incorrigible Anglophile, who has at last come to his senses and realized which was the most attractive of the Blackett girls.

‘Listen to this, Kate,’ he says. ‘Here’s something that might interest a rubber tycoon’s daughter: “Plantation work pays less than one dollar a day.” From Our Correspondent, Geneva, 9 December. “Millions of workers on rubber, sugar, tea, cotton or coffee plantations are earning less than $1 (62p) a day, according to the International Labour Office.” Let me see, what else does it say? Trade union rights … et cetera … malnutrition … disease .. Yes … “Many migrant workers on rubber or sugar plantations live in conditions of acute overcrowding. Sometimes there are up to 100 workers in one large room.” Daily wage rates … And so on. There.’

Kate looks around the room vaguely but says nothing. Singapore seems very far away to her now, and no longer quite real … a magical place where she spent her childhood. Why, Malaya is no longer even called Malaya. Things that once seemed immutable have turned out to be remarkably vulnerable to change.

Or have they? That man behind the newspaper, if it were Ehrendorf, let us say, and if he happened to remember his arguments of years ago with Matthew about colonialism and tropical agriculture, might he not, as his eye was caught by that headline ‘Plantation work pays less than one dollar a day’, have said to himself that nothing very much had changed, after all, despite that tremendous upheaval in the Far East? That if even after independence in these Third World countries, it is still like that, then something has gone wrong, that some other, perhaps native, élite has merely replaced the British? If it were Ehrendorf might he not have recalled that remark of Adamson’s (passed on to him by Matthew) about King William and the boatman who asked who had won the battle (‘What’s it to you? You’ll still be a boatman.’)?

But Ehrendorf, with his good manners, would surely have put down the newspapers by now or would at least have given part of it to Kate to read. Instead of which this individual has by now moved on to read about some other matter in some other part of the world, leaving Kate to gaze out of the window at the garden where it is suddenly summer again and a cat is trying to catch a butterfly. In any case …

In any case, there is really nothing more to be said. And so, if you have been reading in a deck-chair on the lawn, it is time to go inside and make the tea. And if you have been reading in bed, why, it is time to put out the light now and go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, as they say, as they say.