China Seas

by John Harris

  Ruffard provided him with the information that the Sunga Kavalan was at Port Weld and in trouble because the coal she was expecting to pick up there had not turned up. The captain was an Englishman and Willie had often suspected him of being self-important, lethargic and too busy feathering his own nest to put the concerns of the Sarth Line first. It seemed to be time to go up-country and stir him up a little.

  By a stroke of luck he was able to scrounge a lift in an RAF transport plane with a wing commander called Woodburn whom he knew. Since the Sunga Kavalan was likely to be needed, nobody argued about his presence on board.

  But while they were in the air, they heard that Penang had been evacuated and the machine landed at a small air strip near Taiping, where Willie was able to acquire a Morris car from a man who was due to leave for the south by train. Port Weld had just been attacked by a wave of Japanese bombers and was on fire, two ships burning and aground, but, to his surprise, the Sunga Kavalan had found her coal and had already left, so that he had to review his opinion of her captain.

  Wing Commander Woodburn turned up. The transport aircraft had returned south and he was hoping to make his way back by car. ‘The retreat’s already started,’ he said. ‘The boys at Kota Bharu were done for by rumours that the Japanese were behind them. Fifth Columnists, I suppose. You’d better push off. It’s going to be unhealthy up here before long.’

  The retirement from Kota Bharu had already become a helter skelter panic and was reducing the army of the defenders to a near rabble. As they had discovered Penang had gone, its Asian population bitter because some panicking official had ordered a secret evacuation of European women and children, leaving the local people to face the Japanese alone. Three steam ferries operated by the Navy were now trying to get them away.

  The RAF field at Port Butterworth had been flattened, George Town had gone up in flames, and the exodus of Europeans had started. Carrying everything they possessed in pillow cases because there had been time to collect nothing else, people were joining the moving horde heading south, deafened all the way by the roar of passing vehicles and terrified of the possibility of stray Japanese.

  Woodburn was still around, trying to round up RAF personnel and put them in trucks or on trains. He was furiously angry.

  ‘The bloody Japs always catch us on the ground,’ he said. ‘Time and time again they arrive just as we’re getting ready to take off. It’s as if some bastard’s signalling to them.’

  It was more than possible, Willie knew, because the Malays resented the Chinese who had settled in their country and blamed the British for allowing it to happen, and nobody had ever troubled to weed out the Japanese barmen, barbers and masseurs who existed in every town and city in the peninsula.

  The roads were crowded with refugees. With all that was happening, Singapore in the south seemed a symbol of stability in an environment that was racing towards chaos. Simply getting there had become an objective that gave some semblance of sense to the anarchy around them. A tropical downpour reduced everybody to a common misery and the lights of vehicles, thrusting through the streaming rain that shone like golden stair rods, showed a throng of bewildered humanity concerned only with keeping going. At Taiping the tide of casualties had already become a flood and, as Willie rattled through Ipoh’s deserted streets, there were distinct signs of a burgeoning collapse.

  In Kuala Lumpur he was able to telephone to Singapore and learn that the Sunga Kavalan had turned up, and there seemed to be no further need to hang around. But the disaster, gathering momentum, was beginning to catch him up so that he left Kuala Lumpur only just ahead of the Japanese arrival, by this time with two wounded RAF men in the back of the car. Woodburn appeared as he left and demanded a lift because everything else was already on the road. He was bitter.

  ‘Some bastard was signalling the sods,’ he snarled. ‘And we found him.’

  They had hoped to catch a train at Seremban, but the Japanese bombers had smashed it and Willie found himself spending Christmas hiding from the bombs in an irrigation ditch.

  ‘Sweet Suffering J,’ he said bitterly to Woodburn. ‘I started my adult life in a siege. Surely to God I’m not going to end it in one.’

  It was in Seremban that they heard on the railway telegraph system that Borneo had gone and Hong Kong had surrendered. The Japanese had got at the booze and there had been fearful atrocities, but it seemed the place had put up a stout defence, which to Willie didn’t seem likely in Malaya.

  He finally reached a badly bombed Singapore railway station to find fires burning and bodies everywhere. The last stages of the journey had been made on a train driven by two British soldiers because the Eurasian driver had bolted into the jungle. It seemed to Willie that he had shown a great deal of common sense.

  Four

  There was one consolation in the panic and defeat. Edward was safe. Commander Ruffard passed on the news. He was looking strained and exhausted now and was struggling to complete the evacuation of naval personnel.

  ‘The loss of life wasn’t too bad,’ he said. ‘Two thousand three hundred were picked up by destroyers out of two thousand nine hundred. They were brought here.’

  ‘Where’s Edward now?’

  ‘Gone to India already. Senior officers like him are going to be needed. The rest have gone to other ships or put on coastal ferries.’

  ‘It was kind of you to let me know,’ Willie said. ‘What about you?’

  Ruffard shrugged. ‘I shall be going, too. I think we’re in a mess here and probably all of us will go in the end. There are wounded everywhere. Restaurants, halls, schoolrooms, the Cathedral, maternity hospitals, large houses. The Australians are blaming us for betraying them and our lot are saying the Australians lack discipline. Christ knows what the truth is, but it seems nobody expected to have to fight in the jungle or the mangrove swamps and nobody trained for it. The buggers set off north hung all over with the paraphernalia of a European war. I saw ’em go.’

  Heading for his hotel in the purple evening light, Willie saw dancing was still going on, people in evening dress standing on the veranda with their drinks as if nothing had happened. After what he’d seen in the north he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  The Straits Times had been left for him. It was still advertising houses to let and was making a great deal of the arrival from England of a consignment of pure silk stockings. Alongside the personal ads requesting the whereabouts of relatives lost in the north, it seemed a hideous mockery.

  During the night there was another air raid, directed this time at Keppel Harbour, that left dockyard oil tanks blazing in a huge cloud of dense black smoke, and he rose the next day to hear that a big battle on the west coast had destroyed an Indian brigade. As he went downstairs he learned that, with the news of one defeat after another, the final signal that the Malays had lost faith in the Europeans had been given. A man who had been out to do some early shopping was complaining loudly to the manager. ‘The bastards refused to accept a chit,’ he was saying. ‘They’ve all started insisting on cash. All of them. The buggers have obviously got together.’

  The bombers came again during the day and that evening Willie was surprised when the telephone in his rooms went and the voice he heard was his daughter’s.

  ‘Poll! What the hell are you doing here still?’

  ‘Pa! Never mind me. Are you all right? For God’s sake, I’ve been trying to find you for days. Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been looking at the mess in the north,’ Willie said grimly. ‘At close quarters. It’s worse than anybody here seems to realise. You should be away. Where’s Elliott?’

  ‘Pa, that’s what I’ve been trying to find out. I’m scared. I can’t get in touch with him. He cabled from Washington to say he was returning, but I’ve heard nothing since. I’ve tried his office and neither have they, so I tried Washington and then San Francisco, and they say he’s left. He should have arrived already but he’s disappeared. Pa, you don’t think–?’


  ‘That he’s bolted with another woman? Not likely. Not Elliott. He’s not the type. All the same, you ought to be thinking of leaving.’

  ‘Pa, how can I, when I don’t know where Elliott is? He might turn up and find me gone. It’d be like running away.’

  In the hope of forcing her hand, Willie went to the office of the Colonial Secretary to try to persuade someone to make the evacuation compulsory. He was shunted down different corridors by people clearly concerned only to protect senior officials. The man who met him wore a white drill suit, collar and tie and, in his cool, shaded room, looked as if he’d just come out of a bandbox. A tray of tea stood on the desk alongside him. Hot, angry and tired, Willie hated him.

  The man in the white suit listened to his demands politely but shook his head. ‘I’ve heard nothing official,’ he said.

  ‘Why the hell do you need something official?’ Willie snorted. ‘Does no one round here have the guts to make a decision off his own bat? They’ve just bombed the docks again. Or hasn’t that fact reached your bloody files yet?’

  The man in the white suit looked down his nose at him. ‘People are free to go any time if they wish,’ he said.

  ‘It shouldn’t be up to them to decide,’ Willie snapped. ‘How the hell do women with kids assess the prospects or know what the dangers are? Not telling them to go is a bloody perverted kindness. It’s cruel to them, and the men who have to stay behind would find it a relief to know their families are safe. I’ll provide places in my ships–’

  ‘Mr Sarth!’ The man in the white suit raised his voice. ‘It probably won’t come to that.’

  ‘It’s come to it already, God damn it! I’ve just come from the north. The Japs are closing in for a siege. They’ll soon be in a position to deal with anything we try in order to get away.’

  It made no impact whatsoever. The man in the white suit drained his teacup complacently. ‘We can’t apply pressure if it’s not policy,’ he said.

  The behaviour of such men seemed incredible as the news grew worse. The Japanese had been swift to exploit their success at Pearl Harbor and had overwhelmed the American garrison of Guam, and invaded Wake and the Philippines. In Malaya, the British remained firmly on the retreat, and, while in the Philippines the Americans were buckling down to a hard defence, in Malaya things were only deteriorating. The best soldiers of all ranks had been retained at home to defend the United Kingdom and in Malaya there seemed only a soft residue. Morale was poor and, faced with disaster, the European residents were lost. They had felt that wherever the war went it would not arrive in Singapore and the first two untouched years had confirmed the belief. Like the official at the Colonial Secretary’s office, nobody was prepared to assume any other responsibility beyond producing tin and rubber and coping with the climate.

  The Sarth Line shipping office reported liners still sailing half-empty, but then, that night, they picked up on the radio Winston Churchill’s warning to the House of Commons of the possibility of bad news from the East. It seemed to have more power even than falling bombs and the telephone went early the next morning.

  ‘They’ve made four troopships available, Mr Sarth,’ the clerk at the shipping office informed Willie. ‘They’ve finally set up the apparatus for evacuation.’

  ‘Who’s handling it?’

  ‘P&O are making the bookings.’

  ‘Bookings? What are they organising? Cruises? Why don’t they just pack the damn things and send them away?’

  Setting off to see what could be done, Willie found the P&O officials operating from Agency House, a large bungalow outside the city centre. They had set up two tables, one for those who wished to go to Colombo, one for those who wished to go to Britain, but the two lines of waiting people had blended into one monstrous slow-moving queue of which the end was quite out of sight. Those cool women the Malays were so used to seeing were becoming hysterical and some were half-fainting in the pitiless heat as they clutched their children and begged for a place on a ship. Along the road, scores of cars, some marked by bomb splinters, had been left anyhow, some with their wheels in the ditch. The police were fighting to unravel the queue, but, even as Willie arrived, the first Japanese planes of the day appeared and there was a rush for the monsoon drains. When the planes vanished, the exhausted women clambered out and, as they fought to find their places, the police had to start all over again.

  When Willie reached the table a fierce argument was going on with a half-hysterical woman who had lost her passport.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘Give her the bloody booking!’

  The clerk looked shocked. ‘We can’t let people go without papers or their nationality and marital status being known.’

  ‘What bloody difference does it make? If she’s not here who’s going to worry?’

  In the middle of it all, it was discovered that the woman, who had gone to enormous lengths to obtain money from the bank to pay her fare, could have had it paid for by the government.

  Determined by this time to see her aboard, Willie drove her to the docks with her children only to find another vast queue had formed to pass through the gate to the quayside, where a lone Malay clerk with a pencil and ledger was slowly inscribing in excellent copper plate every passenger’s name.

  ‘What in God’s name for?’ Willie demanded.

  The Malay looked up. ‘So we shall know who’s aboard, sir.’

  Snatching up the ledger, Willie tossed it aside and, while the clerk was retrieving it, waved the queue through. The clerk fetched a white official, who was almost dancing with rage.

  ‘As a shipowner, Mr Sarth,’ he yelled, ‘you know this is something you can’t do!’

  ‘I’ve done it,’ Willie said bluntly.

  The whole business had become ridiculous, anyway, because, as the number of useless mouths was reduced, a complete reversal of the evacuation was taking place with thousands of up-country Asians from Johore starting to flood on to Singapore Island to double the normal population. Dormitories had been prepared in Raffles College and in schools, but many of the women who were arriving had neither clothes nor the means of providing food for their babies, some of them even without any knowledge of where their husbands were.

  As the last of the big ships sailed, the monsoon rains, which had made everything damp and mildewed, began to abate. Heading back into the city, Willie found a stream of motor transport, guns, bren carriers, ambulances and cars were arriving from the end of the Johore Causeway. As the procession thinned and eventually dwindled to nothing, the infantry began to appear, their boots crunch-crunching in the roadway. Despite the clear defeat, placid communiqués were still being issued to insist they had been withdrawn to protect the naval base, but when Willie went to the base to demand wire hawsers for the Sunga Kavalan, which had been obliged to abandon hers in Port Weld, he found it empty. Millions of pounds’ worth of equipment had been left behind – shirts, gas masks, lockers, steel plate, a great crane, a floating dry dock, ships’ boilers, coils of chain cable, wire, rope, cord, the shabby hulls of three small ships. It even looked as if the occupants had fled at the last minute because there were still meals on the tables. He helped himself to the wire he required and returned to the city as the last of the defeated, bewildered, leaderless and demoralised troops stumbled into Singapore itself. Even as they arrived, there was a shattering explosion when the Causeway went up in a cloud of black smoke and flying fragments of masonry. By this time the city was in hopeless confusion, the hospitals filled with wounded and the Japanese planes sailing unheeded over the roofs. Because of the nature of the place and the type of society it contained, it couldn’t change its habits even in extremity, and while some died or gazed at appalling wounds, others – even now – were still eating, drinking and dancing.

  When he saw her, Polly was haggard with worry. ‘I can’t go, Pa,’ she insisted. ‘What’ll Elliott think? He said he’d come back here. I’ve got to hear from him.’

  In the last three days when
it had finally dawned on everybody that all the talk about ‘It might not happen’ was just rubbish and it was not only going to happen, it was already happening, the numbers of those wanting to leave suddenly multiplied. For two months evacuation had remained a trickle, but now it was an unmanageable torrent, quite impossible to deal with and a serious risk to those who left. The thought that occurred to Willie was that throughout the years he’d always thought well in advance and managed to get away ahead of invading troops. This time he hadn’t.

  Already the Sarth Line office had had reports of ships being bombed or shelled and sunk, with the women and children passengers killed outright, drowned, captured, or starving to death on islands they had managed to reach by lifeboats. Those who were left alive were going to undergo a long and unpleasant internment.

  Brave words on the radio couldn’t hide the fact that the Japanese had reached the Johore shore and that to the crash of bombs was now added the whine and crump of shells. Determined to get Polly and her children away, he hired one of the little yellow taxis and arrived at her house to find her, to his surprise, surrounded by suitcases.

  ‘I’ve heard from Elliott,’ she said. ‘Or at least not from him. From his mother. He was on his way to San Francisco by car when there was an accident. He’s got a broken leg and a fractured skull and been unconscious for days. He’s going to be okay, though, and I’ve got a message to take the first ship to America.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that now,’ Willie said bluntly. ‘You’ll have to go wherever you can. However, I’ll see to it. Just be ready. I’ll come and fetch you.’

  Greatly relieved, he headed in the dark for his office. For the moment Singapore was quiet. Having created a panic, the Japanese bombers now seemed curiously indifferent and were operating further north, and aimless and exhausted soldiers had begun to wander the streets, getting drunk whenever they saw the opportunity.