Greene asked Catherine to pay no attention to his ‘lonely wail’ since by the time she got his letter he would be patrolling with the Gurkhas or drinking hard with his eccentric planter and would be feeling better. Three days later he put his need for her and his response to his nature succinctly: ‘I love privacy when you are with me and hate my own company when you are not.’28 And again he prayed: ‘Dear God, give me Catherine or give me death.’
*
On 10 December Greene was driven by car to Malacca, a loaded revolver between the driver and him in case of sudden ambush. The next day he went to St John’s fort: ‘lovely view. Mount Ophir, the islands, the kampong among the coconut palms’, and later visited a huge hillside Chinese burial ground: ‘the semi-circular graves that from a long way off look like huge hoofmarks in the turf, the ruins of the old church in which St. Francis Xavier was buried is in the ground of the residency’. He entered the tomb and prayed to St Francis Xavier that it might be God’s will that he marry Catherine.29
He went to a Chinese temple in Heeren Street and noticed how domestic the temples were: ‘In one a bicycle and two girls and a man having his evening meal.’ He compared one of the temples with a Catholic church: ‘joss sticks instead of candles; shrines instead of saints – for any occasion. The shrines for particular purposes like our saints – for safety at sea, for students entering an exam, for children born ailing … The altars with inscribed tablets that take the place of our Masses for the dead.’30 Greene was then driven to Port Dickson and had lunch at a Chinese hotel: ‘The smarmy landlord: the terrible fat gold toothed waitress with her coyness & advances. Hotel rooms used as brothel at night, only separated from diners by curtains.’31 They continued their journey and the evidence of war became more apparent: ‘Drove via Seremban to Kajang. Lots of activity. Incident reported an hour before & an operation setting out.’
Greene liked Malacca; he found its people open and friendly. It was a wonderful change from Kuala Lumpur. But before he returned to spend Christmas there with Hugh, he came across his bête noire in Kuala Lumpur – A. H. Wheeler. As a boy Wheeler (called Watson in A Sort of Life because Wheeler was still alive) had befriended Greene in school, shared his secrets with him, but then betrayed him to Carter, the young boy who successfully brought Greene to breakdown and his first attempt at suicide. Wheeler, the source of the many Judas figures in Greene’s novels, remained in his mind: ‘I found the desire for revenge alive like a creature under a stone. The only change was that I looked under the stone less and less often … But still every few years a scent, a stretch of wall, a book on a shelf, a name in a newspaper, would remind me to lift the stone and watch the creature move its head towards the light.’32
When Greene accidentally met Wheeler in the cold storage shop, it was apparent that he was quite oblivious to Greene’s hatred for him. Wheeler remembered that Greene used to help him with his Latin preparation, though Greene had forgotten this:
A man came up to me in the Cold Storage shop when I was buying drinks – a tall foxy faced rather heavy man who introduced himself as Wheeler. Wheeler was at school with me and belonged to the bad period. We were in the junior school together and then in the same house … The real misery of that time began when he was suborned on to the side of my great enemy, Carter (who he told me the other day was dead) [Wheeler was misinformed; Carter did not die for another twenty-one years] I put Carter in The Lawless Roads – ‘spreading terror from a distance’.33
Greene admitted that a ‘lot began with Wheeler and Carter – suspicion, mental pain, loneliness, this damned desire to be successful that comes from a sense of inferiority’. And now after thirty-two years Wheeler was in a shop in Kuala Lumpur: ‘rather flush, an ardent polo player and instead of saying what hell you made my life 30 years ago, one arranged to meet for drinks’.34
Greene drove back to Singapore with Noel Ross, missing bandits on the road by only an hour.35 He spent a few days with Ross visiting the east coast on the China Sea: ‘everything is much prettier from trees to women’. He stayed the night in a Malay-style house ‘on a beach with the monsoon surf of the China Sea beating away and the trees like very delicate firs with silver drops of spray hanging from every twig’.36 He found it peaceful but he hadn’t come to Malaya for peace.
*
In his article on Malaya in Life (reprinted in Ways of Escape), Greene wrote first of the false view of planters pressed home by the popular press, a view which he held before visiting Malaya: ‘a group of men, the harsh overseers of great capitalist enterprises, intransigent, unconstructive exploiters of native labour, drinking stengah after stengah in the local club … in the Somerset Maugham manner making love to each other’s wives’.37 But the planters were made of sterner stuff. In these violent times they ran a sweepstake on who would be killed next, where and when.
The reality of the planters’ life came home to Greene when he stayed with Billy Litkie (in the article and in Ways of Escape he is called ‘X’) and his wife, Betty.
He lived with his wife in a small house of two floors surrounded by barbed wire, the ground lit at night by search-lights as far as the first trees. He was a man of late middle age, a former prisoner of the Japanese, who should have been looking forward to the final, easier, more prosperous years … But the life that remained for him was very different … this slow approach of inevitable violence.38
Earlier, on a day six people were killed, Litkie was ambushed a mile from his house, but shot his way out: ‘Night and day the telephone rang at half-hour intervals from the nearest village to make sure the line had not been cut.’39
His assistant, Mansell, had been murdered on the estate a short while before Greene arrived and Litkie could not find a replacement. Communists had come on to the estate to question Litkie’s tappers about his movements and his assistant had made the mistake of visiting the ‘blocks of the estate in regular order at a regular time’. The communists so terrified the workers on the rubber plantations that no one was safe from betrayal. When Litkie moved outside the wire, even a hundred yards away:
he carried a Sten gun over his arm, an automatic pistol on his hip and two hand grenades at his belt … He would not contemplate retirement – he is in the front line for life and there was no expectation of peace but death.40
Litkie drank brandy and ginger ale with his breakfast instead of coffee: ‘“Dutch courage,” he said to me, pushing the starter of the little inadequately armoured car, setting off for a round of the estate or moving slowly out at the blind corner past which the road to the village ran and where one day, from the jungle opposite, a Sten gun would almost certainly open fire.’41
Litkie took Greene into the village, where they drank warm beer in the company of a Chinese shopkeeper who bought Litkie’s cheap rubber, acted as his banker, and ‘probably reported his movements to the guerrillas’. The planter would have a pink gin at the rest-house ‘before he drove back along the lonely two-mile stretch, slowed down at the turn before that jungle wall, ten seconds of stretched nerves … One morning he and I were half an hour late in returning, and his wife waited with the anger of love for the sound of the engine, until he was safely back in the prison of wire. That night the radio announced the murder of three more planters.’42
Writing about the Litkies to his mother, Greene described how they ‘fought each other from morning till night, but that, I suppose, was nerves’. He described the atmosphere at the estate as ‘distinctly electric’.43 In his journal Greene noted: ‘Mrs. L’s nerves very strained, but unlike most women here no physical signs of it. In the evening rather bitched L.: “You’ve never been in love … you’ve never been a husband.” Secrets of married life … L. went to bed & Mrs. L & I continued with brandy till nearly 1. Discussion on boredom.’44
His last journal entry about Litkie records a final journey into Jerantut to get cheques, ‘paid out 10,000 dollars just like that. Warm beer. Chinese candles. Sten gun & revolver laid on milk chests … [Story of] Disembow
elling by bandits of trussed victims – in one case 3 children.’45
Terrorist squads did not limit their activity to rural villages and rubber estates. Trains and railway towns were attacked, railway and police stations burnt down. Always the killing was on a small scale: 300 terrorists burned down the station and the homes of the station master and inspector (two British railway engineers found asleep in a siding were killed). Trains were derailed, wrecked and set on fire. British troops moved by railway were often ambushed. On one occasion, the terrorist position, situated above the roof of the train, allowed the attackers to shoot through the roof with devastating results.
Greene also spent time at Gemas with a railway superintendent called Carrapiet. It was a stretch of line which had endured forty derailments in less than a year – on average about once a week. But Greene was unlucky; there were no derailments for him; instead the area had the worst rains in twenty-five years. He recalled the telephone ringing at intervals throughout the night, as at the Litkies; the activity was unceasing:
At 1 a.m. on Saturday the power plant was flooded and electricity failed. At 2.15 a.m. the Communists emerged from the jungle and derailed the breakdown train. At 4 a.m. the junction was completely cut off by road and the East Coast line was cut by floods. By breakfast time the water supply had failed – an odd added discomfort in the pouring rain. Even the station a quarter of a mile away must now be reached by wading. To the north a new landslide had taken place.46
In the evening Carrapiet and Greene waded through to the station and ‘sat in the little refreshment room by the light of candles while the messages came in. Even the signal boxes were lit only dimly by oil lamps; figures disappeared in the dark of the long platform, and the whole obscure station and its wet acres had a strangely Victorian air as though electricity had not yet come into use. At 6 p.m. there was a washout to the south, and another landslide to the north. At 8.45 p.m. an East Coast train was derailed – by floods this time, not Communists. All the labour of the little town had to be called in to load freight cars with ballast by the light of lamps, but was there enough labour, enough ballast, enough freight cars?’47
Greene described Carrapiet without mentioning him by name: ‘And at intervals the big patient man padded away and padded back to his glass, laughing at the wet, the cold, the enemy, waiting unruffled for the next telegram of disaster. One talks in terms of soldiers; and civilians, but there was never a better soldier than [he].’48 Greene was sure of the courage of men like Carrapiet and Litkie and he made the point: ‘perhaps you do not find courage where there is no danger [as in Kuala Lumpur], and love, too, may be a product of active war’.49
But Greene wasn’t satisfied and couldn’t leave Malaya until he had gone on a trek with the Gurkhas: ‘Gurkhas gave their British officers absolute loyalty, and their officers returned them a quality of love you would not find in any other unit. Officers of the British Regiments complained that their colleagues in the Gurkhas never stopped talking about their men.’50 Gurkhas are famed throughout Asia for their fighting qualities, they are mercenaries with a reputation sometimes sufficient to make the terrorist vacate his ambush in fear of their name.
On 12 December Greene was ready to make his journey with the Gurkhas. He noted in his diary that he visited a Police Operations Room and looked at the incidents’ chart: ‘Casualties of civilians heaviest, police next heaviest. Already well over 400 civilians …’ His testing in the jungle was about to begin: ‘Collected jungle kit from police stores.’ The trip to the Gurkhas didn’t get under way till 2.30 and then they stopped at 4 at the mess of the Scots Guards for tea and waited for a fresh convoy to take on the fourteen Gurkhas and one officer, Major McGregor Cheers, known as Hooray: ‘Rode with Cheers in jeep with two Gurkha guards. Fresh convoy three lorries and scout car. Reach the Gap at twilight … into Pahang in darkness. Winding road … Shadows of lorry illuminated by scout car cast on forest wall.’ That night he went to his tent at the army camp and slept well; it would be his last restful sleep for three days.
Before leaving Malaya Greene would know about the jungle: ‘A far denser jungle than that of Burma, it restricts movement to less than a mile an hour. Visibility is sometimes 20 feet. Almost every day water pours down upon it, making the steep slippery slopes of the innumerable hills a cruel effort to climb. One is never dry and at night one is never in quiet – the ugly din of birds with their barnyard cries comes between the newcomer and sleep. When you pause for a halt on the march you see the leeches make for your boots – thin matchsticks looping with blind purpose across the wet leaves, later to swell into fat grey slugs if they find an opening in your clothing. And always there is the jungle stench – the heavy odor of decaying vegetation. It clings to your clothes. When you come out, your friends will avoid you if they can until you have bathed and changed.’51
The jungle nights were long: ‘By six it is dark except for the shine of phosphorescent leaves: by midnight the rain will be falling down on yesterday’s soaked leaves, and long after the storm is over the rain will continue to drip from the reservoirs of foliage. There will be nearly twelve hours of virtual darkness …’52
On 15 December Greene recorded: ‘Left on patrol, pack & revolver. They struck out through the kitchen quarters, through the thin belt of rubber and into the jungle.’ The next three days were to be the most arduous of his life:
A Gurkha patrol worked by compass, and not by paths. It moved as the crow flies … but far less comfortably … only nine miles separated us from our objective, the main road on the other side of the block of jungle, but it took two and half days of walking and two nights to get there. We had started late and we began to camp after five hours’ march. When our position was plotted we had penetrated rather more than three miles. There had been an interminable succession of 500-foot hills, the slippery laterite slopes set at an angle of almost 45°. Even the Gurkha sometimes slips and falls as he holds himself up by the branches of trees, the rubber soles of his jungle boots taking no grip in the mud and slime of leaves.53
And the reason for the Gurkha’s method of patrol? ‘If … you patrolled by paths you avoided the worst hills, which sometimes rose in this area to two thousand feet, and you never have to carve your way through the undergrowth, but you were staking all on finding tracks on the one path you followed. The Gurkha technique meant that in the course of a day you cut across many paths in your search for signs of the enemy; a newly broken bamboo with the juice still wet might be the only indication.’54
Greene’s exclamation, ‘even the Gurkha sometimes slips and falls’, suggests that Greene did. In a letter to his mother written on 23 December from Kuala Lumpur, he spoke of his experience: ‘I got back yesterday from a rather rough week in Pahang. I found a 3 day jungle patrol with the Gurkhas in full kit a bit of a strain! It was an interesting but at the time horrible experience. No bandits but complete exhaustion. They are quick movers … up & down 500 foot hills with slippery clay slopes at this angle hauling oneself up by trees.’ In spite of its cryptic style Greene’s journal gives an intimate taste of that gruelling journey:
Delicious taste of tea & rum at first halt. Before the end feeling completely whacked. Staggering in tracks. Terribly slippery – wet clay slopes with rubber soles. Scratched to pieces. Hill of over 500 feet at end. The camp. Double bed of logs & leaves for Cheers & self. V. depressed & worried in case I hold them up. Would welcome bandit bullet. Whole score 2 abandoned [terrorist] camps. Torrential rain at night & both rather sleepless with cramp.55
A halt had been made by 4.30 and the Gurkhas with their kukris cut down boughs to make ‘shelters for men in pairs with one ground sheet stretched over-head to keep out night rains … Darkness has begun to fall when the kukri becomes a can-opener … Gurkha ration – rice, raisins, curry powder, tea, sugar and a little spirit lamp. The small flames glow like nursery night-lights in the dark.’56
On the second day an air drop was due at 10 a.m.:
Wireless not workin
g. Clearing made with kukris. Great trees falling. Smoke bombs white & green colouring. Plane 30 mins late. Parachutes crashing down 20 feet outside area not larger than tennis court … Missing brandy. After lunch on. The area of the air strikes … Camp near stream & lovely baths, but afterwards feel sick. Leech has been at my right buttock. Bad night, too small log bed, rain getting in. Dreamed I was at Ritz with C[atherine] but the back against mine was only that of Major McGregor Cheers of the 2/7 Gurkha Rifles.57
In his Life article Greene recalled McGregor Cheers’s concern with ornithology: ‘My companion stands upright listening, but not for Communists. He whispers, “There is one bird I always listen for – at dark and at dawn. There it is. Like a bell. Do you hear it?” I could hear nothing but the clamour of the jungle barnyard. At 6 in the morning he is standing by our bed in the new mud of the night’s downpour. “There. Do you hear it?” he whispers. “Like a bell.”’58
Greene’s thoughts about his experiences reflected public school standards:
It was three days and two nights … in the jungle and it rained continually … The first night I was thoroughly tired and seriously contemplated putting a shot in my head because I thought if they had to send – there were only twelve of us – two men back with me, and they were hunting two hundred communists – I mean it was hardly a sporting effort and I’d be an awful nuisance to them.59
The following day, 17 December (a Sunday), he recorded again the strain and the struggle of the patrol: ‘On again feeling sick. At first halt broke security silence with my retches [according to McGregor Cheers SILENCE had to be observed and conversation was reduced to a minimum (whisper) or by hand signal]. Another leech removed from my neck. Terribly steep hill finished me. Retching & retching. Have hardly eaten these three days.’ Greene wrote in his journal, ‘Relieved of pack & that way kept up in spite of 1500 ft. hill,’ but then crossed this embarrassing acknowledgment of failure out of the text. The entry was followed by the glorious words: ‘At last out of jungle.’
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 45