He banged against the cab and sheets of water took to the air as it made for the road. Malayan police at the gate stood under palm-leaf shelters, capes outspread under their glum heads. The lorry roared up the coast road, and all he could see were grey waves, grey clouds, and roaring mist a thousand yards out. He was glad to be leaving the camp and the apprehension that had descended with the first rain. Everything became subdued under it, all inmates on edge waiting for it to end not long enough after it had begun. Out of the crowd he felt better, freer, happy enough to whistle the latest song hit from Radio Seac. Fires, tended by women for the evening rice, burned by the native huts-on-stilts.
From the back he only saw what the lorry left behind, not what its blunt-nosed radiator was heading for—suddenly turning to pass the ramshackle control tower and race up the wet shine of the airstrip that seemed as if it were being laid like a carpet as he looked at it. He was going to the outlying DF hut set in the middle of a vast square paddy field and connected to the runway by a thin path of mud now hazed under needling rain. When the lorry stopped he leapt out, drew the cape about him, and made for the distant hut.
At the same time, the operator he was to relieve began walking towards him. The water was continually pierced with weighted rain, was churned to a murky and cancerous colour, and the earthen lifeline between runway and hut had in places been well eaten into by the force of it. Brian trod slowly to avoid slipping into the three-foot depth on either side, whistling a monotonous tune as if it would help him keep balance. Tall, fair-headed Baker came level, his myopic eyes looking superciliously through the rain, thin lips firmly closed, giving the impression that they were about to break out into a smile, though the opposite was true, for Brian knew he was browned off and dead to the wide after his afternoon grind. “Anything going on?”
“Not much.” Baker spoke tersely, his hat brim uptilted by a gust of wind. “You might as well close down at seven. A Dak coming up from Singapore should be landing in half an hour.”
“He’ll ’ave a job to land in this stuff.”
“Got to land somewhere, the poor mutt.”
“As long as he don’t flatten his snout on that runway,” Brian said. “I wun’t like to try it.” They were already fed up with each other: Brian eager to get into his isolation, Baker to escape from it, so there was no sympathy between them. They passed. On the far shore invisible hands of wind were trying to duck the heads of palm-trees into the water, bending their supple trunks that sprang back time and again in defiant protest. White flashes of lightning skidded across the water, to meet thunder out on the runway.
The hut stood on a square of ground, surrounded by four aerial poles whose wires joined above the middle of the patched and often-mended roof and went down through it into the direction-finding receiver. The smell of water and dampness was so strong that it threatened to block the nostrils, made it difficult to breathe, as if the earth were soil to its core and soaked through and through. Baker had plugged in the speaker, and atmospherics scuffled with the noise of rain by the hut door.
He went in, shedding cape, hat, and haversack, cursing Baker for an idle bastard because he had let rain drip on the accumulators. I suppose he was reading his motorbike catalogues again; the no-good worker should have been a mechanic, not a wireless operator. He struggled with the long heavy boxes on to a form, which he pulled to a dry corner, then signed on in logbook and diary, and called up Singapore to ask the strength of his signals.
The first flexible key-tapping of his nightwatch went out clear and neat, the long and short of each letter piercing his ears with birdlike music, balm to his brain, intoxicating yet sobering, like the first drink of a dipso. He wore his earphones half on and half off, so that while hearing the solid low-pitched thumps of the superheterodyne dots-and-dashes he got the clicking of the key at the same time, as a reassuring echo fed back from desk to ears. He was on his own, and in control of a radio set, had only to press a key for other lonely operators hundreds of miles away to push a hand forward and tap out a reply. Tonight their replies were all but inaudible, just as his own calls to them, he realized, were pounced on over the jungled mountain tops by saw-toothed atmospherics and torn into unrecognition. His beloved fourteen-hour stretch of isolation had begun, and despite rain battering against all sides of the small and flimsy hut, he felt good being at work, and paused from filling in the log to open a tin of cigarettes and have a smoke.
The leeward side of the hut lay open to the grey rain-filled daylight of water and low cloud. The aerial wires generated a ghostly morse of their own, soon dominated by a message from the approaching aircraft asking for a weather report. He spun the phone handle to get the met office—once, twice, three times—but the wire was dead. Must have been chewed through by water. “None available,” he told the plane, but the operator came back fast, saying they had to have one.
He stood in the doorway to observe the weather: cloud base two thousand feet, visibility a mile, wind westerly at forty knots, raining; went back and tapped it out. Not very accurate, but the operator in the plane seemed happy. He then wanted a bearing to bring him in, but the aerials must have shorted because they wouldn’t give a reliable reading. Third class, Brian sent back, so don’t rely on it. “I won’t,” said the ironic operator.
Christ, what rain. It came with frightening elemental force, as if it had an animal mentality and imagined it would win its battle against the land after one final effort. The paddy field was a lake as far as the trees, and ripples appeared, as if the DF hut were a boat on the open sea but approaching the coast. Water dripped through the roof, some splashing on to the Sten gun and ammunition. Maybe it don’t work any more: he took it outside, stood with legs apart and fired off a magazine, aiming level across the paddy field. The sharp fireworks-sound of bullets was muffled by the storm and taken harmlessly into its belly.
Soaked, he went back in the hut, stripped to the waist, and sat at the set. What a life! He’d a date with Mimi tonight, hadn’t expected to do a watch, but the corporal who was to have taken a turn had reported sick, and looked like being in dock for a couple of weeks. He called up the French operator at Saigon, using a mixture of Q signals and pidgin French: “Any planes flying around your way tonight?” Maybe he was reading a book and didn’t want to be disturbed, but he sent fast and nervous through the interference: “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” he tapped, and waited a few minutes.
Saigon came back: “My name is Henri. What’s yours?”
“Jean Valjean.”
Brian felt his mystification, repeated the name.
“How old are you?” Henri tapped out, making several mistakes. “Thirty-five,” Brian said, enjoying his game. “And you?”
“Twenty-seven.” Brian asked if he liked Saigon, and back came the wireless operator’s laugh: dah-dah-di-di-di-di-dah-dah. “Where were you born?”
Brian told him: “Nottingham.”
“Give me the address of a hot girl then.”
It was forbidden to send plain language, but Brian had never known any conscript operator that didn’t. What can you do, O what can you do, But ride to your death on a kangaroo? was a rhyme he had made up, and it came into his head now. He sent out a fictitious name and address to Saigon, and they gave the wireless operator’s handshake by simultaneously pressing down on their keys.
He watched the Dakota landing: it hovered low over the palm-trees, came bouncing on to the tarmac, and hurled itself like a cannonball in the direction of the control tower. He sent out his closing-down message—good night, good night, good night—and switched off the set, leaving the ether free for the confused legions of atmospherics. Darkness closed over the water, and he fastened the doors to stop insects getting at the lights and feeding on his cold sweat. The primus flared when he tried to light it for tea, so he kicked it away and drank water with his bread and cheese.
The thought of eleven hours still to go was appalling. Lightning winked at him under the slit o
f door, as if mocking him because he could have been in bed with Mimi. I’m not lucky enough for this world, though it’s better to laugh than curse your luck. The wind brawled with the hut like a hooligan. God knows how I got here, I don’t. I don’t mind being cut off, but this is like clink: not even a bleddy telephone to call the control tower.
“Look,” the old man said that night when I told him I’d be eighteen in the morning, “if I catch you joining up I’ll punch your bleddy ’ead in. Mark my word.” I’d come back late after a session with Pauline on the sofa, and felt marvellous. “You don’t join up,” I told him. “In case you don’t know, they’ve been calling people up for six years.”
“Don’t be so bleddy cheeky,” he said, scowling as black as thunder, as if he’d bosh the teapot over my head, though instead he poured me a cup. “I don’t care whether or not they call you up: they didn’t get me, did they?”
“Well,” I said, “thanks for the tea, but that was because you di’n’t pass your medical, though, worn’t it?”
“’Appen so. But I swung the lead a bit as well. After all them years on the dole I swore I’d never fayt for ’em, the bleddy bastards. Not after all me and yer mam and yo’ lot ’ad ter put up wi’.” He cut me a slice of meat, all fussy in a rare bout of letting himself go in talk.
“But don’t you see, dad, they’ll call me up, because I’m fit. I wain’t be able to get out of it.”
“Dave and Colin got out on it all through the war. They beat the bleddy redcaps.” He looked vacantly towards the curtained window. “They was boggers, our Dave and Colin was.”
“They got ’em, though, di’n’t they?” I said, remembering the time with regret.
“Ah,” Seaton said, laughing, “but the war was over by then.” He took a fat swig at his tea. “So stay out on it.”
But he hadn’t wanted to keep out on it, because that would mean staying in Nottingham when he wasn’t sure he wanted to any more. Not that he was afraid to desert either, but he felt he would be more of a deserter in letting himself be called up than roaming like an outlaw around the night streets, and in fact might miss something if he didn’t let himself go for once where the wind took him. The old man went on and on:
“Our Eddie deserted in 1917, got on a bike and rode to his sister’s at Coventry. The crafty bogger didn’t go by the road for fear the coppers ’ud stop ’im; he went along the canal bank and didn’t meet a soul. It was twice as far, but it paid him in the end. She hid him for six weeks, but the loony sod missed Nottingham and came back one day, so mother and dad had to look after him. A pal saw the coppers coming to the house and towd us, so he skipped off and stayed out in Wollaton Roughs. The poor bogger nearly froze to death. I used to ride out on my bike every day with snap my mother had packed up for ’im. But one day I worn’t clever enough: the bleddy coppers follered me, right to where Eddie was hiding—and got ’im. Three months later he was in France, and a week after that he was a prisoner with the Jerries till the end of the war. We had to laugh: our Eddie was fawce bogger.” Another round of hot tea was poured in the lighted kitchen.
After a drink of water Brian groped a way to the charpoy bed and spread sheets across it. Baker had let the accumulators run too low before phoning the transmitter compound for renewals, and there wasn’t enough light left to see a shadow by. He lay on the bed, listened to rain hitting the hut like thousands of grains of rice, the water harvest of South-East Asia. What would Colin and Dave have done in my place? Packed up and gone. But they wouldn’t have got this far, and I’ve seen things they’ll never see: “Did I tell you about that time I saw a python, our Dave, when I was in Malaya? In a paddy field it wor. Must a bin twenty feet long, as thick as my thin raps and splashing about like boggery. Di’n’t waste my time watching it, though.” “Better yo’ than me,” Dave would say. “I’d rather see Tarzan at the pictures.”
Large rats were scurrying on endless journeys up and down the hut, having a pow-wow on the roof about the rotten weather, and how it had flooded them out of their nests. He couldn’t relish such company, spun the telephone handle in the hope that somehow the cable had miraculously mended itself out in the swamps. But it was dead, useless as a picked lock, and after another drink of water he lay down in a cold sweat of sleep.
Livid wounds lit up the hut and penetrated his eyelids, forcing them wide open, so that, staring at wind and thunder that sounded as if some lunatic had been set loose with matches among touch paper, the noise seemed louder than when his head was down. The sheets were quickly wet, and he wondered if water had been dropping down without his knowing it, was comforted to realize it was only his sweat. The thought of moving the bed out of rain-drips seemed to demand a too impossible effort through his fatigue.
Lightning flashed continually, as if the sky had turned itself into an enormous signalling lamp and he was lying right by it: at one time he woke and tried to read its signals but they didn’t make sense, unintelligible morse quickly erased by a follow-up of thunder.
He noticed a dull grey light in the hut, felt it before opening his eyes, as if it were a tangible thing, a ghost that rain had pushed like a letter under the door while his face was turned. He had mixed feelings about waking up, and such noise greeted him this morning that he would rather have stayed asleep. The storm had rampaged all night, still went like a full-grown battle that, though covering the whole country, seemed to centre on the paddy field and the DF hut in particular. Something else infected him with worry as he lay on his back. He shivered from the clinging touch of the cold sheet and the intense smell of mould, grew colder from a fit of coughing, so pulled his shirt on and sat up. A foot of water came nearly to bed level, covering his wellington boots and a tattered Penguin book. The flood: I’ll thumb a lift from Noah as he goes by. Roll on the boat. What can you do, O what can you do? Can it, and belt up. What a bastard, though. I’d better move. I can’t hear myself think with this thunder: I want earplugs—and an eyeshade for the lightning. Water curved from his wellingtons, which he emptied and put on. Then he paddled to the receiver and pulled down switches. He pressed the key to bring himself on frequency, which elicited a good morning from Mingaladon in Burma. “What’s good about it?” he tapped back. That stopped his gallop. It was seven o’clock.
He looked out from the leeward door of the hut. All but the far-off trees were covered, and the path across the paddy field—now a lake—leading to the higher ground of the runway was nowhere to be seen. Rain still pitched itself into agitated water, as if it would go on falling until the hut collapsed and floated away. He saw it clearly, and his first thought was to desert the hut, to wade through the paddy field and reach the runway, for in this mess the aerials were useless for bearings.
He paddled to the desk, and by some miracle got through to the control tower by field telephone, began spinning a sorry though vivid tale to the officer on duty. His description was cut short: “Close the hut then, and get back here. A lorry’ll take you to camp.” But what about a boat to get me to the runway? he thought as he slammed the receiver down so hard it almost cracked. The loony bastard.
Whistling a tune, he stuffed logbooks and ammunition into his pack, disconnected the accumulators, and lifted them to the highest point. A bloated leech, as big as a small snake, wriggled between his boots and made its way into the hut through a gap. “You wain’t find owt in there: I just got out in time,” he called after it. The hut sides were a crawling mass of spiders and other insects that had taken refuge from the rising flood, and rats squeaked in fear from the roof, running down to look at the water now and again, then hurrying back to tell the others it hadn’t gone down, might in fact come up to get them yet.
His boots found the path, two feet under the surface. A lit cigarette was soaked and blown across his face, and he spent most of the journey spitting tobacco-bits back at the wind. With the Sten gun looped over his shoulder, he waded slowly, for in some places the path had been washed away, and he floundered almost up to his armpits try
ing to find it again. He was sweating under the rain, afraid of meeting snakes, remembering the many he had seen and particularly the python splashing not long ago near the hut. Maybe they all swam off to the trees, was a happy though not convincing thought. He swore aloud and talked to himself. It’s an adventure right enough, and I’m as far away as I ever wanted to be, about three times farther than Abyssinia, which is sayin’ summat, but Christ, I’ll be glad to reach that runway where I can’t get bitten, and get back to camp where I can swill some tea. He pulled the cape around him to keep out the driving rain. If only the old man could see me now: “What did I tell you?” he’d say. “You daft sod, up to your neck in that rheumatic water. If you like water that much you’d a done better going for a swim in the Trent. I towd yer not to join up. They never did owt for us, so why should yo’ do owt for them? Eh?”
A mile trek along the runway was made against a spearhead of wind, and he felt his face being blown out of shape, cape flying back like Bela Lugosi, the vampire-bat man’s, hat twisted like an old gold-digger’s. Soap bubbles came from the toes of his wellingtons. He was even too fed up to worry about a plane pouring down the runway behind and flattening him. All I want now is a warm billet and a long novel, and a shovelful of grub every four hours to keep me fed. It’s an easy life, though, except when a wet sky falls on top of you.
The control tower wasn’t much better off than the DF hut. Water poured through the roof, and maps covering the walls were discoloured beyond recognition: Burma was running hell for leather into the Bay of Bengal, and French Indo-China was making a sly move against Singapore. Sumatra was going red, which gave him a laugh, though he thought it was a shame and a waste about the good maps. A large shed opposite the tower, which catapulted a firetender whenever a plane was expected to land, had been blown flat to the ground. That’ll cost ’em a bob or two to put right, he smiled. The flying-control officer gave him a few dirty looks because he was dressed in a civvy shirt instead of a uniform, but Brian smoked obliviously in the doorway, feeling the dampness getting into his marrow.
Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels) Page 24