‘That’s TT down there, you can see the garrison and BMH next to it.’
Howden saw that they had stopped at the crest of a hill and were looking down on a bowl-shaped area a couple of miles across. It was open on the left where a broad valley went back towards the railway and the far distant sea. On the right, above the rubber estates, green jungle-covered hills climbed towards remote blue mountains, their tops wreathed in clouds. Below, the road snaked down for another mile to a small town, little more than a main street with a few parallel lanes of buildings. A little further on, there was a large rectangular complex of huts and other buildings, with many vehicles parked in rows, the sun glistening on their windscreens. Next to it was a smaller compound with more regular lines of low buildings, which the doctor took to be the hospital.
‘Dead flat down there, sir. It used to be a tin mine, before the Army bulldozed it to build the garrison.’
It was almost like an aerial view or a map and Tom was intrigued by the geography of what was to be his home for the foreseeable future. He saw that the road that passed through Tanah Timah forked at the further end of the main street. The left branch crossed a small bridge over a brown river that ran behind the little town, then climbed a rise on the other side of the valley before vanishing into the ubiquitous rubber. Just beyond the bridge was a large bungalow-style building, perched on a grassy mound. It had a wide green-painted tin roof and there was a tennis-court and a small swimming pool behind it.
‘What’s that place – the school?’
‘Nah, that’s ‘The Dog’, sir. It’s the posh club, white planters and officers only. They don’t let no wogs in there – nor ORs like me.’
Howden’s meagre stock of Army lore told him that ORs were ‘Other Ranks’, but ‘The Dog’ was beyond him. He asked his driver, but the corporal shrugged.
‘Search me, sir! I think the proper name’s the Sussex Club.’ He pointed again, this time slightly to the left.
‘Alongside them big hills in the distance, there’s another valley, see? It’s all Black country, goes up to Chenderoh Dam and a lake. The road goes all the way to Grik and the Siamese border, they say, but it’s bloody dangerous up there. Chin Peng himself hangs out in that area.’
Tom twisted further to his left, looking at more mountains on the other side of the flat plain below. ‘What’s over there, then?’
‘That’s Maxwell Hill, above Taiping. Decent town, is that. Another hospital there, BMH Kamunting, bigger than this one here. I drives a truck up there now and then, for stores and stuff.’
He decided that sightseeing was over and coasted down the long hill towards TT, his passenger looking sideways at the changing vegetation as the rubber gave way to oil palm and then bananas, before the rice padi appeared again on the flat land at the bottom. Black water buffalo trudged through the mud pulling crude ploughs, thin farmers urging them on from behind. Women in colourful sarongs and head cloths stood up to their knees in water, planting rice seedlings. As the Land Rover passed, they giggled and quickly turned their faces away in case a camera should appear.
As they came downhill, a long convoy of green military vehicles passed them in the opposite direction, three-tonners and Land Rovers grinding up the slope, shepherded by armoured cars in front and behind. As they passed, Tom saw scores of soldiers sitting in the trucks, some wearing bush hats with one side of the brim turned up.
‘What’s all that about?’
The driver shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Going off on a sweep of the “ulu” to chase out some of the little yellow sods. Some of those in the TCVs were Aussies.’
The Tynesider knew what Aussies were, but it was another day or so before he added ‘Troop Carrying Vehicle’ to his list of acronyms. ‘God knows what “ulu” might be,’ he muttered to himself.
As they approached some buildings, the corporal pointed ahead.
‘Here’s the town, sir. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!’
Tanah Timah was about four hundred yards long, a straight wide road lined on each side by ‘shophouses’, two-storied terraces of sun-bleached cement. The upper floors overhung a continuous arcade supported by pillars, known as the ‘five-foot way’ behind which were a multitude of colourful shops, selling everything from refrigerators to Nescafé, from paraffin stoves to rolls of silk brocade. Some were workshops and the glare of welding and the hammering of bicycle repairs spilled out into the arcades and across the ramps that crossed the deep monsoon drains that fronted the buildings.
There were people everywhere – old ladies squatting behind piles of fruit for sale, men chopping firewood, girls selling fried rice from huge woks, cobblers sitting cross-legged at their lasts and shoppers and loungers wandering across the road, oblivious of the traffic. Bicycle trishaws carried gaily dressed Malay women holding up paper umbrellas against the sun and barefoot labourers pushed bikes piled high with green fodder or crates of live ducks. Ungainly local trucks belched fumes, competing in noise and pollution with the battered bus that came up from Sungei Siput three times a day. An occasional green Army vehicle passed through, but the town seemed to be ignoring the fact that they were on the edge of a vicious terrorist war that had been going on for years.
As his driver had warned, they passed through the town in less than two minutes and as the shops ended, the new arrival saw the side turning off to the left, leading towards the bridge and the mysterious ‘Dog’. Facing the road junction was a solid-looking building, freshly painted in white, with radio aerials on the roof. It was set in a compound behind a high perimeter wall topped by a barbed-wire fence. A barrier at the entrance was guarded by a Malay in a smart khaki uniform, with a black peaked cap and a pistol holstered on his belt.
‘That’s the Police Circle HQ – dunno why they call it a Circle, but they always do,’ volunteered his oracle.
Another half mile along the dead flat road brought them alongside what seemed to be a huge Mississippi riverboat made from rusted corrugated iron. It was sitting forlornly in a few feet of dirty water, which appeared to be the remnants of a dried-up lake.
‘What the hell’s that?’ asked Howden.
‘The old tin dredge, that is. Abandoned after the Japs came. Like I said, the garrison and hospital are built on the old tin tailings. And here we are, sir.’
Not far beyond the dredge, on the left side of the dead straight road, Tom saw the corner of a formidable fence. A double line of ten-foot high chain-link formed two barriers, with coiled barbed wire in the space between. A large square of about fifty acres was filled with barrack huts, low brick buildings, workshops, vehicle shelters and at the back, some houses and a few bungalows. As they drove along the front, separated from the road only by a deep monsoon drain, they passed the main gate, made of steel bars. It was open, but a counter-weighted pole barred the entrance, outside a fortified guardroom where two red-capped Military Police stood scowling at the world.
‘Bastards, they are!’ muttered the corporal under his breath, obviously giving vent to some private hatred. Things were much more relaxed at the next gate, another three hundred yards down the road. The double fence continued around the smaller hospital compound and a similar gate stood open in the centre, also with a striped pole across the entrance. A lance corporal in a navy-blue beret and white-Blancoed belt stood outside a small guardroom, a rifle clutched in one hand, the stock resting on his boot. Tom half-expected a challenge, with a ‘Halt, who goes there?’ and a demand for their identity cards. Instead, the sentinel leaned on the counterweight, lifted the pole and as the Land Rover passed, raised a derisory two fingers at the driver.
‘Up yours, Fred!’ yelled the cockney and accelerated into the front vehicle park, turned right in front of the Admin huts and then sharp left on to the perimeter road that ran all around the hospital compound. The new doctor had a blurred view of a series of long huts that seemed to come off a central open corridor, like ribs from a spine. On the other side of the road, next to the outer fence, was a barrack block,
then a series of smaller buildings before an open space appeared where a camouflaged Whirlwind helicopter was waiting. Some distance beyond this, standing lonely and isolated in the furthest corner of the compound, were two parallel asbestos-roofed huts, joined at the near end by a short open corridor, forming a ‘U’. Wide eaves projected from each building, supported on wooden pillars to form austere verandahs. A series of louvred doors down the sides of the huts had been painted green, now bleached by the sun. Some sparse grass formed a central lawn between the two buildings and, around the entrance, some scraggy flowering plants tried to survive amongst the gravel of the tin tailings. A short path led from the road to the concrete strip beneath the cross-corridor and alongside it was a faded wooden sign bearing the legend ‘RAMC OFFICERS’ MESS’ in the Corps colours of blue, yellow and cherry red.
The Land Rover jerked to a stop.
‘Here we are, sir. Home sweet home!’ sang out the driver.
He hopped around to the back and took out the officer’s two bags which he dumped on the concrete. Tom Howden climbed out more slowly and looked with dismay at his new domicile. It looked more like a chicken farm set down in a desert, than the residence of holders of the Queen’s Commission. As the corporal passed him on the path, he gave a salute worthy of the Grenadier Guards.
‘Best of luck, sir!’
As the doctor hesitantly touched his cap in return, he was conscious of the sweat-blackened areas of fabric under his arms and over the whole of his back. He heard the vehicle roar away behind him, but kept his eyes fixed on the deserted huts, a feeling of almost desperate loneliness engulfing him.
As Tom Howden was staring despondently at his new home, Diane Robertson sat alone in hers, the late afternoon sun striking through the open doors. The silence was broken only by her sniffs of petulant self-pity, until a small voice asked, ‘Mem want anything now?’
The face of her amah, Lee Mei Mei, appeared timorously around the door to the dining room, half scared, half intrigued by the domestic dramas that were becoming more frequent in the Robertson household. Mei was a slight, fragile Chinese girl of twenty, with an elfin face that always looked slightly startled. Her glossy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail held with a rubber band, the end hanging down the back of her blue floral pyjama suit.
‘Yes, May. Tell Siva to bring me a stinger, will you? A large one.’
Diane sat alone in the wide, lofty room, the big brass fan whirling slowly over her head, trying to waft the cloying air into a draught. She thought of Norfolk now, at the beginning of December, cold and perhaps wet, but not with the all-pervading dampness they had here, where there was an electric light bulb in every wardrobe to keep the mould off the shoes and where the camera had to be kept in a sealed biscuit tin with a bag of silica gel.
She wished to God she had stayed in England and not been seduced by both James’s body and his glowing descriptions of life on a Malayan rubber estate. Twenty-six years old, she was the third daughter of a minor squire from Norfolk, rejoicing in the name of Henry Blessington-Luke. After an expensive and largely wasted education at Cheltenham, she had done little but ride, party and hunt for both foxes and a husband. Three years earlier, at a Hunt Ball near Newmarket, she had met James Robertson, home on leave – and three months later, had married him in the cathedral in Singapore.
The bastard! She gingerly touched her face again and wondered how well she could cover up any marks by tomorrow night, when there was the weekly dance at The Dog.
A slim Tamil came in through the dining room, carrying a tray bearing a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a tumbler and a jug of iced water.
‘A big one, Siva,’ she murmured, still shielding one side of her face with a scarlet-nailed hand, though the amah had already given him a blow-by-blow account of the fracas. He poured a liberal shot of whisky into the glass and added an equal amount of water – the famous ‘stinger’ was a corruption of the Malay ‘stengah’, meaning ‘half’.
He lowered the tray for her to take the glass, but she gestured to a small table at the end of the settee. ‘Leave it, Siva. I may want another.’
He put the tray down and stepped back.
‘Mem want anything else? Sandwich, curry puff?’
She shook her head, managing to give him a wan smile. He was a good-looking fellow of about her own age – but of course, he was Indian. Not that that seemed to bother her bloody husband!
The cook-cum-butler padded silently to the door but stopped there to throw a look back at the woman sipping her drink. Though he considered her no more attractive than most of the sleek girls of his own race, the contrast between their dark beauty and her startling blondeness always intrigued him. Slim but full-breasted, her long pale neck was framed by the silky swathe of hair the colour of light honey that came down to her shoulders. He knew that some English women got their colour from a bottle, but this was surely natural. With a little sigh at such forbidden fruit, he padded off to his kitchen hut behind the house, to sit over a cup of tea with the amah and gossip about the latest domestic developments at Gunong Besar Estate.
On the settee, the blonde drank her first stinger quickly and poured herself a stronger one. She lifted her shapely legs up on to the cushions and leaned back against one of the padded arms, cradling the drink in her hands. Her temper had cooled, but it was replaced by a steely determination to do the swine down as effectively as she could.
‘Two can play at that game,’ she whispered to herself, then smiled into her whisky. The game had already started, though James didn’t know it. She didn’t care if he did, she thought with uncertain bravado. But there were problems – she was still his wife and though she had a small allowance of her own from Daddy, this damned plantation was their livelihood. If she blew the whistle on him with Douglas Mackay, what would happen to the place? James was too dependent on his manager to survive on his own and even if their marriage was becoming decidedly rocky, she didn’t want to divorce a bankrupt and have to go home penniless. And she certainly didn’t want to be divorced by him and go home both penniless and with her tail between her legs, so she had to watch her mouth and her step.
Diane mixed a third drink, resolutely deciding that it would be her last before dinner. There were magazines on the little table, but after riffling through the curled pages of a six-month-old Vogue, she threw it petulantly on to the polished floor and stared aimlessly around the room, which took up the full width of the bungalow. It was large and bare by British standards, the walls lined with darkly varnished planks that carried a few conical Malay straw hats and a set of framed hunting prints. There was no ceiling, the inside of the high peaked roof being wood-lined like the walls. The furniture was equally sombre, a locally made wicker suite with a large settee and four armchairs.
A ponderous teak sideboard, an old-fashioned piano left from the twenties, and a sandalwood chest on which sat a radiogram, completed the decor.
‘God, what a dump!’ she murmured, self-pity washing over her. After a moment, she rose restlessly to her feet and took her glass across to the verandah. The front wall of the lounge had three pairs of slatted doors designed to let in air, but keep out the sun. The centre ones were open and Diane walked out on to the wide verandah which extended the full width of the big bungalow, furnished with some rattan chairs and a couple of small tables beneath the overhang of the tin roof. It was railed in by a varnished fence, except at the centre, where wide wooden steps went down some eight feet to the ground, the whole building being raised high on brick piles. Her Austin Ten was sheltered underneath, alongside the mud-spattered Land Rover that James used around the estate, though he rarely bothered to park his old armoured Buick under there.
She leaned on the rail, with her glass gripped in both hands, as she had done hundreds of times before and looked out over the estate. Though Norfolk became increasingly desirable with every passing month, she had to admit that the view from here was spectacular. The bungalow was built on a small knoll above the dirt road that
led down on the left to Tanah Timah, three miles away. It was at the foot of an isolated hill about a thousand feet high, hence the name Gunong Besar – ‘big mountain’ – though it was a mere hillock compared to the peaks ten miles behind them, on the border between Perak and Pahang States. The bungalow faced west and looked over their acres of rubber down into the distant valley. On rare clear days, they could see as far as the towns of Sungei Siput and Kuala Kangsar and even imagine that they could see the Malacca Straits on the far horizon, over which there were often fantastic sunsets.
She dropped her eyes to the road at the bottom of the knoll fifty yards away, made of the red laterite soil that was dust when it was dry, but usually was a tenacious mud that stuck to wheels and bodywork. There was very little traffic on it, as only one small village, Kampong Kerbau, lay a few miles up to the right. Police patrols and a few military vehicles were the main users, apart from a couple of Chinese trucks and the twice-daily bus to the village.
The whisky was getting warm and Diane tossed down half of it and walked to the right-hand end of the verandah to lean on the side rail. Here her elegant features, with the cornflower blue eyes and enviable bone structure, seemed to darken as she stared past the flowers of a large Flame-of-the-Forest tree down towards another bungalow a few hundred yards away. Built nearer the foot of the knoll, it was smaller than theirs, but of the same general appearance, though all she could see through the trees was the red tin roof and the end of their verandah.
As she watched, trying to project hatred across the space, a battered pre-war Plymouth pick-up came from the latex-processing sheds on the other side of the road and crossed into the drive to the next-door bungalow. The trees obstructed most of her view, but she could just see the driver get out and run up the verandah steps. After spending most of his life in the East, Douglas Mackay seemed impervious to the heat, which made most Europeans slow-moving. She had no quarrel with Douglas, more a mild pity for his weakness in dealing with his domestic life – though she was in no position to criticize in that direction, she thought cynically.
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