by John Harris
There was a great deal of noise from the guns, however, and the news that the Japanese had landed on the north shore of Singapore Island seemed to bring the place to its senses, so that, as he returned, he noticed that the dancing had finally stopped. Vast palls of smoke from demolished oil tanks and stores were mingling with the funeral plumes from blazing warehouses and the air was full of the fumes of alcohol. When Hong Kong had fallen, alcohol had fuelled Japanese lusts and it had been decided not to take chances, and thousands of bottles of spirit were being thrown at cellar walls in a desperate bid to get rid of them.
Occupied with telephone and radio, Willie was struggling to raise ships. There were hundreds of people now wanting to leave and eventually he picked up news that one of his vessels was due to arrive. Inevitably, it was the Lady Roberts, these days, in the extremity of the disaster, called a sloop and with the letters HMS before her name.
The raids started again. At the office of the Dunlop Rubber Company, he just had time to dive into a ditch as the bombs came down. There was a tremendous roar that hurt his ears and he saw a lamp post go down and a body flying through the air. A lorry was hurled through a plate glass window and cars were set on fire. A man with the bleeding stump of an arm was pointing at a petrol tanker parked near a set of apartments and yelling for someone to move it. As he flopped to the ground, unconscious, a Malay climbed into the high cab and, crashing in the gear, drove the vehicle away in a series of jerks.
Scrambling to his feet, Willie slapped the man’s shoulder. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You’ve probably saved all those buildings.’
The Malay gave him a cold look. ‘We shall be here when you’ve gone,’ he said. ‘We shall need them.’
When the din stopped, there seemed to be bodies everywhere in the grotesque attitudes of death. The place reeked of burning flesh, cordite and smoke, yet, even now, the indifference to disaster was unbelievable and an air raid warden was stamping up and down in a fury because the picks and shovels he needed for rescue work were locked up and the storekeeper had gone to the cinema.
The indifference even seemed to affect the children. As the chaos was cleared and they started playing again, one of them fell over a body, sat up staring at his red hands, sniffed them, wiped them on his shirt went on with the game. A group of elderly women were knitting in the doorway of a shelter and an old Chinese threw cupfuls of water on to the flames of a burning house in an attempt to help. As they laid the bodies on the pavement they were serving tiffin at a hotel just round the corner.
As the city began to shrink, the days seemed more beautiful than ever with no humidity and the sea like burnished steel. At night the sky was laced with stars and lit by a huge moon, but across it were the writhing black plumes from fires, and in the air was always the stink of burning rubber, tar and rope, and the smell of decaying bodies trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings. Gas, water, electricity, drainage, were all gone and, to prevent looting, the big stores were giving away their stock. Singapore, the impregnable fortress, had become a curse and the British administration, which had been regarded with such pride for so long, was now exposed as a sham. The languid habits which the British had so complacently regarded as permanent had been swept away overnight and all the reserves of pride had been used up. It looked very much as if the Empire were dying. Its life and soul abroad had always been based on prestige and the final indication that the end was in sight was a Sikh soldier exchanging his uniform in the street for a suit of civilian clothes.
A message giving the estimated time of arrival of the Lady Roberts was telephoned through to Willie’s suite at his hotel, from where he was now conducting all his affairs. He had closed down the shipping office and told his employees to think only of themselves. He was in the docks when the ship arrived. The sight of her blunt ugly nose and the gun on her 1917 mounting lifted his heart. Damn the old bugger, he thought. She seemed to have been linked to his life forever. Ill-shaped, ill-behaved in a bad sea, here she was again, always on hand when she was wanted.
By now, with her cockroaches and bushy-tailed rats, she was practically all that was left in Singapore. Because his car had been destroyed, Willie managed to bribe a cab driver he knew to get his vehicle out and they headed for Polly’s house. Packing everybody in, they set out for the docks. Even now the curious indifference of Singapore to disaster was clear. In Raffles Place, Indian street traders were still doing business, and people in drill suits or sarongs were calmly shopping. Kelly and Walsh’s were still selling books and soldiers were still buying souvenirs to take home.
Keppel Road was a tangle of potholes, craters, twisted telephone wires and smashed trees, and a large crowd was outside the closed gates of the docks. The police and the army had given up trying to control the traffic; cars were left anyhow, in the way of lorries trying to head into town, and the place was an indescribable scrum of women and children with luggage, a sweaty mass of humanity without a single porter to help.
In addition to the Lady Roberts, there were three other ships still in the harbour, but the launches that carried out would-be passengers were being turned away because the ships were already crammed with people. The separations were heart-rending, wives from husbands, children from fathers, girls from the men to whom they’d just become engaged. The roads were littered with wounded soldiers who had run out of energy and now sprawled among the women sitting on their luggage, their eyes wet as they waited their turn.
One of the soldiers, driven beyond normality by strain and exhaustion, suddenly started shouting that they were all done for and, as his friends dragged him away, the faces round them stiffened in blank shock. Further along the quay, brand new cars were being pushed into the sea, and employees of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank – Honkers and Shankers to everybody who used it – were dumping long coffin-like crates into the harbour. Occasional shells fell among the wharves so that everybody ducked, cowered and ran for shelter. Except for a line of Australian nurses, straight and calm in their white uniforms, who didn’t even bother to look up.
Women already on board the Lady Roberts, the only ship still alongside, were screaming; their husbands, not allowed up the gangplank, were frantically waving papers. Most didn’t have passes or berths, and there were Chinese who had worked for the British complaining they had been refused permits to leave, although it had been repeatedly announced that all were to be treated alike.
As they left the taxi on the edge of the crowd, the sky filled with an iron roaring and they had to cower in a ditch as half a dozen Japanese bombers came over, flying low, dropping bombs and strafing the docks with their machine guns. A woman clutching her child and a suitcase was about to head for shelter when her husband shouted to her not to move. ‘We’ll lose our places,’ he said. As the machines disappeared over the buildings, Willie saw that one of them had been hit. It was only the second he’d seen damaged during the whole of the fighting. It came low across the water and as it passed overhead he saw it was on fire. Flames were pouring out from underneath the engine and it was trailing a thin plume of smoke. It was low enough to see the pilot struggling with the controls or trying to open the cockpit hatch so he could parachute to safety. As it passed them, it swung to the right and the sky blossomed with a huge ball of flame from which other smaller balls of flame were ejected haphazardly like misdirected rockets. They could still see the pilot in the middle of it, still fighting; then, just as the machine dropped behind the houses, they saw him fall clear. His body struck one of the buildings, bounced off and vanished from sight as the machine also disappeared and they saw the smoke from a vast funeral pyre lift up to darken the sky.
‘Oh, God, Pa!’ Polly was holding her children to her, trying to hide their eyes in her breast, but they were struggling to free themselves so they could see.
Even the death of the Japanese pilot wasn’t enough to stir the crowded people from their wretchedness and terror and, while once they might have raised a cheer, this time they hardly bothered to l
ook up.
Then Willie saw that the woman holding the child and the suitcase had dropped the suitcase and was standing clutching the child and staring at the body of her husband lying at her feet. ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, then one of the officials grabbed her arm and told her to get a move on. For a second, Willie saw the agony in her eyes as she stared at her dead husband then, realising she could do nothing and that it was her duty to save the child, she swallowed and pushed forward with the others.
‘Oh, Pa,’ Polly sobbed.
The Lady Roberts was already crammed with people as they boarded her – in the cabins, in the saloon, on the decks. In case it proved impossible to shed her moorings, the order was given to cast off so that the ship could stand out from the quay. There was a wail as she prepared to move and, as she called goodbye to her soldier husband on the dockside, a woman threatened to jump overboard with her child. At the last moment, Willie pressed the husband into service as a ship’s clerk and he was allowed to accompany her.
There were now hundreds of passengers aboard a ship with the normal accommodation of a dozen. With twilight, the jade sky turned pink from the fires that were consuming rubber, timber and fuel, the flames roaring across Keppel Road. Singapore lay under a pall of heavy black smoke that hung over the business section, the European homes and the shattered native quarter alike. It hid the dying sun and made the air stink of charred wood. Aircraft were burning on Kallang airfield and tanks were on fire on the oil islands a few miles away.
It was clearly going to be impossible to leave in daylight because the Japanese were sinking everything that appeared, and they had heard that a Dutch ship, the Konige, had been set on fire, while the Japanese tentacles were already reaching out towards Java. Death seemed to hover over the dark dying city, occasional shells screaming over to burst among the blackened buildings, and beyond Fort Canning and Mount Faber you could still hear the rattle of musketry and machine-gun fire. The streets, once so clean and tidy, were littered with rubble and blackened scraps of burnt paper. Here and there, leaning against a wall or lying in a gutter, was a hastily covered body.
There was no longer any point in asking people for tickets or permits to leave. All that could be done was cram aboard everybody who appeared in launches, among them a few weary soldiers, their eyes dull with fatigue, who had fought their way back down the Malayan peninsula and over the Johore Causeway to the illusive safety of the island; stretchers containing wounded, escorted by a few European or Eurasian nurses, their faces tired and strained; children with amahs; women with babies; Chinese, Malays, Indians, the light from the flames catching the angles and curves of their faces. The foremost thing in the minds of every one of them as they stumbled to the deck was the wish to reach safety. A lot of the women were weeping, but the children were staring about them wide-eyed, unable to understand what was happening, and over the roar of flames and the rattle of musketry there was a constant wailing sound, as if the whole population of the city were giving way to despair.
The ship was treated to a final air raid as it steamed past a burning Blue Funnel liner, and the crazy pattern of colour in which the city died was reflected in the water. One of the Australian nursing sisters began singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and the rest took it up. Gradually a few other people joined in defiantly, until half the ship was singing. The buoy intended to mark the minefield outside the harbour had disappeared and, with his skin crawling, Willie watched Yeh as he conned the ship to sea. The sky was red with flames stabbed through occasionally by bursts of shellfire. Even the sea seemed to be ablaze. It was Friday the Thirteenth.
Five
There were far too many people aboard the Lady Roberts and, because there had been no time in the confusion to attend to stores, far from enough food, but the Australian nursing sisters organised a rationing and feeding system so that no one went hungry. Huddled on deck, sitting with their heads together, at first the passengers tended to keep to themselves, but the indefatigable Australian women refused to let anyone sink into misery. Sing-songs started in the saloon, Willie played the piano as badly as usual. Card games were started, names were collected to make lists.
Almost at once, however, they began to hear of other ships which had left just ahead of them and run smack into Japanese vessels rendezvousing in the Bangka Strait for the assault on Palembang. The Man of Harlech had disappeared in a vast pyre of flames. The Vyner Brooke had been sunk. The Mata Hari had been boarded and captured. The Giang Bee had been bombed and set on fire. Bangka Strait had become known as Dive Bomb Alley.
The Lady Roberts was lucky. Slipping through the Karimata Strait, they headed into the Java Sea away from the land and, beginning to feel safer all the time, the games on deck began to spread and there was even a little tomfoolery as one of the passengers celebrated her twenty-first birthday.
They were beginning to think they had got beyond the range of the Japanese planes when they picked up a boatful of survivors from one of the flotilla of forty ships which had left ahead of them. Only a small number survived by dodging among the islands and Willie began to think that, by leaving late, they were going to be better off and that the Japanese had given up the search. But then, just to the north of Samarang, they were spotted. The aeroplanes came in with steady ferocity as the ship began to twist and turn in an attempt to escape. At least a dozen bombs exploded close by with no damage, to set up wails of terror from the deck passengers as gigantic geysers of water lifted alongside the ship then dropped back to drench them. They thought they had escaped, then the last plane to appear above them dropped its stick almost casually, the final bomb striking the forward hatch. The blast made matchwood of half the lifeboats, killed the first mate and turned the deck into a shambles.
The ship shuddered and lurched and Willie, scrambling to his feet from the floor of the saloon and bursting through the door, saw everybody flat on deck, bodies everywhere, so that the ship looked like a giant sardine tin. There was a hiss of escaping steam, and stokers came hurtling out from below, staggering through the smoke. The noise was incredible.
As someone shut off the steam and the screams of the ship died, the air became blessedly free from the screeching din, but now all the other sounds were audible – the people screaming with pain or fear, the siren going.
As they tried to comfort the wounded, the aeroplane came back, its machine guns stuttering, and more people were hit. A plume of smoke was coming between the decks and as the order was given to swing out the remaining lifeboats, Willie could only assume that the ship was lost, and the fact that it was the Lady Roberts, his first and his oldest ship, wrenched at his heart. As he went below to collect Poll and her children, there was surprisingly little panic. It was almost as if the women had seen so much horror in the last few weeks they were immune to shock.
The ship had stopped and the boats were lowered. Finding soldiers and seamen stuffing their pockets with cigarettes from the saloon bar, Willie waved the big revolver at them and told them to load food instead. Bulkheads were riddled, the deck was a carpet of splintered wood, glass and fragments of metal, festooned with fallen rigging and stained with blood. At a cry of ‘Fire in the bunker’, a chain of buckets was organised, but it spread to a pile of planks and was only accessible from a hole above. By the time it was damped down the wind had dropped and the heat was terrific.
As he returned to the deck, Willie saw that Yeh had cancelled the order to fill the boats and, instead, the crew were assembling hoses. In no time, as the pumps started, the deck was awash, the water sweeping paper, deck chairs and fragments of clothing towards the scuppers. A man had jumped overboard in panic and was now alongside the stopped ship yelling that he couldn’t swim. One of the soldiers jumped in after him to support him, but was immediately grabbed round the neck in a frantic embrace.
The fire was extinguished by evening and, gasping in the heat, blackened by smoke, the firefighters stared at each other, surprised to find that the old Lady Roberts, though now with a bad list,
showed no signs of sinking. The chief engineer was sent back below and eventually they heard the slow chunk-chunk as the engine was set in motion again. Slowly, the old ship began to make way through the water, this time with Willie on the bridge with Yeh in place of the dead mate.
The saloon was cleared of people and the Australian nurses began to attend to the wounded, who were carried to the makeshift sick bay. When daylight came the next morning. Willie was surprised to find they were still afloat and moving. The dead were sewn into canvas by the ship’s carpenter and weighted with lumps of coal from the bunkers before being dropped overboard to the haunting words of an exhausted-looking military padre with one arm in a sling.
It seemed unbelievable that the ship could survive, but she crept along the north coast of Java, for some reason unnoticed by the Japanese fleet heading for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. Islands came up and disappeared astern as the Lady Roberts, her list not getting any better but also not getting any worse, trudged her way east and south. As they passed Flores, they ran into a screaming gale which Willie felt sure, would be the end of them, but they passed Timor, where they had to bury two more passengers with the ship still heaving on the dying sea. The one-armed padre read the burial service and the two bodies hardly made a splash.
After that, the Lady Roberts almost sailed herself to Sydney. At Darwin, where they stopped to pick up coal and supplies, Willie learned that out of an allied naval force of five cruisers and nine destroyers that had been hastily scraped together from the British, American and Dutch navies, all at the limit of their endurance, only four destroyers had survived a battle with the Japanese, and their sacrifice had managed to delay the invasion of Java by no more than twenty-four hours.