‘By the way, Blackett,’ old Solomon Langfield was unable to resist saying with ill-concealed malice as they prepared to go their separate ways, ‘it’s bad luck about your jubilee. I suppose you’ll have to call it off under the present circumstances.’
‘Not at all,’ replied Walter coldly. ‘We’ve been asked to go ahead with it for the sake of civilian morale. I hope you don’t mean to call yours off?’
‘We aren’t due to have ours for another couple of years,’ Solomon Langfield, out-manoeuvred and cursing inwardly, was forced to admit.
‘Oh? I didn’t realize that we had been established longer than you and Bowser,’ said Walter condescendingly.
‘By that time, at any rate,’ replied Solomon, trying to recover the ground he had lost, ‘we should be at peace again and able to do things properly.’
‘By that time,’ retorted Walter, delivering the coup de grâce, ‘another war will probably have broken out or heaven knows what will have happened.’
When Walter mentioned evacuation to Australia in the company of the Langfield women to his own family, however, his proposal was received with indignation and dismay. To travel with Langfields was bad enough, but to be expected to live cheek by jowl with them in Australia was more than flesh and blood could endure. Joan flatly refused to consider leaving with anybody, let alone a Langfield. There was a war on and plenty for an able-bodied young woman to do in Singapore! As for Kate, she was alarmed at the prospect of having as a constant companion Melanie, whom she considered capable of any outrage or excess. For there were times, particularly when there was some authority to be flouted, when Melanie’s behaviour verged on the insane, so it seemed to Kate. Now, while she listened to her parents arguing, she remembered an occasion at school when the girls in her dormitory had planned a midnight feast. It had been agreed that each of them would contribute something to eat or drink, a couple of biscuits saved from tea-time, say, or a bottle of lemonade crystals. She remembered how they had all crouched, shivering and breathless with excitement, on the waxed floor between two beds, each producing what she had managed to collect … until last of all, Melanie, with an air of triumph had slapped something down on the floor with a dull thud. An enormous dead chicken! She had somehow broken into the caretaker’s chicken coop, strangled a chicken, plucked it and here it was! Well, it seemed to Kate that someone who instead of a bar of chocolate or a couple of Marie biscuits brought a raw chicken to a midnight feast could hardly be called sane. What would she get up to in Australia with only her mother to restrain her?
Monty, on the other hand, brightened up when he heard that there was a prospect of either Nigel Langfield or himself accompanying the women-folk to safety. He believed he could count on Nigel to show the necessary courage and foolishness to insist on sticking it out at his post. Things had not been going well recently for Monty but now they might be looking better. In the meantime he was having to fight a determined rear-guard action with medical certificates from Dr Brownley to prevent himself being enlisted in the Local Defence Corps. The air-raids, too, increasingly alarmed him. Well, if there was a chance of escorting women to safety only an idiot would linger in Singapore to be bombed. He would crack off to Australia and take charge of the firm’s office there … as an ‘essential occupation’ that should keep him out of the beastly Army, with luck.
But after a day or two Monty’s spirits sank again. No European men were being allowed to leave without special permission and it soon became clear that such permission would not be granted to either himself or Nigel under the present circumstances despite more string-pulling by both Walter and Solomon. Evidently some spiteful little official in some office was seizing his opportunity to pay off a grudge against the merchant community. And he had to suffer!
In due course it was decided that Kate and Melanie and their mothers should leave for Australia on the Narkunda, sailing in mid-January. Walter agreed provisionally that Joan should stay a little longer but insisted that she would have to follow her mother if the situation got any worse. The truth was that Walter had need of Joan in Singapore, not only to supervise the running of the household in the absence of his wife, but also to lend a hand in the increasingly frantic work involved in administering Blackett and Webb’s affairs from temporary offices in Tanglin, for by now the air-raids on the docks, spasmodic hitherto, had made continued occupation of the premises on Collyer’s Quay too dangerous. Moreover, Walter still had not quite given up hope that Matthew might suffer a change of heart and decide he must marry Joan, after all. This match was such a good idea! That was what upset Walter, to see a good idea go to waste. There persisted in his mind the feeling that in some way Joan’s marriage could still be the foundation of Blackett and Webb’s recovery. But how? It was an instinct, nothing more.
An impetus was needed, that much was certain! Whether or not Singapore might survive as a military strong-point in the Far East it was clear that as a business centre it was finished for some time to come. As a result all Walter’s efforts were now directed towards the running-down of the company’s Singapore operations, the transferring of business to branches overseas in Britain, America and Australia and the suspension of that which could not be transferred.
And there still remained as a reminder of his own weakness those vast quantities of rubber in his godowns on the Singapore River. He had barely been able to shift a fraction of it. Nor was it any comfort to tell himself that he was the victim of circumstances beyond his control. Difficulties are made to be overcome! A businessman must shape his own environment to suit his needs: once he finds himself having to submit to it he is doomed. Once, years ago, while leafing through a copy of Wide World, he had come across a blurred photograph which, for reasons which he had not understood, had made a great impression on him. Well, if he had not understood it then, he certainly understood it now! It was a photograph, very poorly printed, of some dying animal, perhaps a panther or a leopard, it was hard to tell. Too weak to defend itself, this animal was being eaten alive by a flock of hideous birds. Walter had never been able to forget that picture. He had thought of it not long ago while standing at old Mr Webb’s bedside. And now he thought of it again, reflecting that there comes a time, inevitably, when the strong become, first weak, then helpless.
Walter knew very well, mind you, that other rubber merchants shared at least some of his own difficulties. Even old Solomon Langfield had admitted in an unguarded moment that he had large stocks waiting on the quays for a carrier. This was no comfort, however: Walter had always held in contempt businessmen who excused their own failures by matching them with those of other people. There was a way of shipping that rubber, he knew, just as there was a way of doing everything. But the present state of the docks baffled and exhausted him: the quays were jammed with shipping still loaded with war material said to be urgently needed by the military. Yet nobody was doing anything about it: the labour force had largely decamped, doubtless because they were unwilling to risk their lives under constant air-raids; what unloading was taking place was being done by the troops themselves: Walter had tried to suggest to a military acquaintance that these same men should reload with rubber ‘urgently needed for the War Effort elsewhere’, but the man had looked at him as if he were out of his mind.
Walter, even in his weakened state, had been stubborn enough to keep on trying. He had paid another visit to the Governor, suggesting that he might intercede with the War Council to provide a labour company under military discipline (which might encourage them to turn up for work) in order to start reloading the great backlog of rubber before it was too late. But Sir Shenton Thomas had barely listened to him. Although he was normally sympathetic to the Colony’s mercantile community, he had shown visible signs of impatience with Walter’s difficulties. That stuffed shirt! He had hardly even taken the trouble to make an excuse, muttering something about it being all he could do to prevent the military from commandeering what labour was already available to the rubber industry … Relations w
ith Malaya Command and Singapore Fortress, already bad at the outbreak of war, had got worse … Walter would kindly realize that the community had other needs, above all civil defence, besides his own … Well! Walter had come close to asking him whose taxes he thought paid his bloody salary! Affronted, he had taken his leave. The bales of rubber, in their thousands of tons, had continued to sleep undisturbed in their godowns.
And yet this was the moment, Walter knew in his heart, to adopt some resolute plan, perhaps to conscript a labour force of one’s own by closing down other aspects of the business, certain of which would soon close down anyway of their own accord, by transferring estate labour (such of it as had not yet been overrun by the advancing Japanese) to the docks, by offering double wages if necessary, anything provided that rubber was shifted. It was no good for Walter, isolated and overworked as he was, to tell himself that he must not let that rubber get out of proportion … What was it compared to the rubber which had passed through his hands in his time? Nothing! … It seemed to him like a tumour, disfiguring his career in Singapore. And like a tumour it continued to grow because, although diminished in quantity by the Japanese advance and by the increasingly chaotic state of the roads in Johore, new consignments of rubber continued to arrive from across the Causeway.
The fact was that all the options Walter considered were hedged around with administrative difficulties through which he could see no way. In desperation he even considered, though only for a moment, the possibility of forming a co-operative labour force with other firms in a similar, if less acute, predicament … perhaps even with Langfield and Bowser. But that solution, which was probably the only one capable of realization in practice, was denied to Walter by the competitive habits of a lifetime. He could hardly enter into such an agreement without revealing the sheer size of his stocks to his rivals, who would know immediately by the amount of rubber he had waiting that he had made a grotesque miscalculation. To go cap in hand to old Solomon Langfield in Blackett and Webb’s jubilee year to propose such a scheme was more than he could bring himself to do. But at this point fate, in the shape of a Japanese bomb, took a hand.
51
Even taking into account the new-found amity between the two families, you would hardly have expected to see what you now did see at the Blacketts’ house, the extraordinary spectacle of lions lying down with lambs and scarcely even licking their lips. Walter found himself sitting at his own dining-table surrounded, it seemed, by nothing but Langfields. Even more unexpected was the fact that a similar scene had taken place yesterday and would take place again tomorrow … though with the women-folk subtracted, for this was the eve of their departure for Australia. What then was the explanation? For this was not, needless to say, the company that Walter would have chosen for his evening meal, including as it did, old Solomon Langfield with a slightly condescending expression on his cunning old face and young Nigel, who looked almost human by comparison, sitting next to Joan.
The Langfields on the whole looked subdued, which Walter found reasonably gratifying. Nor was this simply because their family was about to be sundered. The Langfields had suffered a misfortune. A bomb jettisoned at random by a Japanese plane had fallen in Nassim Road, partly destroying their house. None of them had been hurt, fortunately, except for a few scratches. Since the damage had only been to property Walter had felt himself permitted at first to treat the matter as a joke. At the Club, chuckling, he had entertained his friends with what he claimed was an eye-witness description of ‘the bomb on the bear-garden’. The rats and cockroaches that had poured out of the smoking ruins had been nobody’s business! And poor oldSolomon wandering about howling with grief. Why? Because he kept his money under his mattress, as everyone knew, and it had been blown up with the rest of the bear-garden! After a while, however, Walter fell silent, having realized that some of his audience were not relishing his joke at Langfield’s expense quite as much as he did himself. But Walter was fundamentally a kind-hearted man and he could see that, after all, having your house destroyed could have its unpleasant side. And so he had generously made amends by inviting the Langfields to stay at his house until they had managed to re-establish themselves in their own; besides, since the women-folk were going off together it made sense for the two families to be under the same roof for a while. Walter was considered at the Singapore Club to have emerged, after a shaky start, very creditably from the Langfields’ misfortune, given the legendary antipathy between the two families.
Solomon, as it happened, was not looking particularly well. He was getting on in years and had reached the age when a person finds it hard to adjust to a sudden shock like the destruction of his house. Mrs Langfield had confided in Mrs Blackett (the two ladies, having swallowed the distaste of years in a few minutes, had discovered that they had everything in common and had quite as much gossip backed up over the years as Walter had rubber in his warehouses) that it had taken some time for the poor old fellow to be coaxed out of the ruins. He had wanted to stay on there, it appeared! With ceilings which might collapse at any moment! And when he had been told of the invitation to the Blacketts’ he had grown more stubborn than ever. In the end Nigel had had to accept the invitation on his behalf and Dr Brownley had had to make a personal visit to the shattered house in Nassim Road to dislodge the old boy.
Dr Brownley, seated opposite old Solomon, might well have been thinking that the old man’s face had an unhealthy cast, yellowish with brightly flushed patches. But as a matter of fact he was concentrating more on his supper which was exceptionally appetizing. Walter, drumming absently on the table with a crust of ‘health bread’, for to the indignation of Tanglin the Cold Storage had stopped baking white bread on Government orders, surveyed the table and reflected that tomorrow, when the women had sailed for Australia, he would at last have time to get down to some serious work. He would miss them, no doubt, but that could not be helped. Besides, there was always Joan.
At the end of the table Matthew had become involved in a heated discussion with Nigel, odd snatches of which reached Walter’s distracted ears … something about colonial policy during the Depression. Matthew, Walter had to admit, had turned out a disappointment. He had grown somewhat thinner during his weeks in Singapore but no less excitable and opinionated. Why, the other day he had even asserted that the European estates had swindled inarticulate native smallholders out of their share of Malaya’s rubber exports under the Restriction Scheme. And how, Walter had enquired with an ironical smile, did we manage to do that? How did we manage to do that when assessment was under Government control? The estates had managed to do it through their creature, the Controller of Rubber! By packing the committee formed to ‘advise’ him … that was to say, to give him instructions for whatever they wanted to be done so that he could apply the official stamp to them!
‘Don’t be an idiot!’
‘I’m not saying you did anything illegal, just that you used your influence to bend the rules in your favour. Isn’t that the way it’s always done? Come to think of it, that’s what my father and his cronies did in the rice trade in Rangoon all those years ago. I suppose that’s what business out here consists of.’
Walter had spoken sharply at this point. He was not ready to listen to Matthew saying anything against old Mr Webb who had been the very soul of recitude and one of the pillars of the Singapore community His was an example of honesty and industry which Matthew would do well to follow instead of … of … Walter had been about to say ‘carrying on with half-caste women’ but thought better of it at the last moment. He had heard reports that Matthew had been seen with Miss Chiang but did not want to bring the matter up until he was more sure of his ground, for it was out of the question for a Webb to be seen associating openly with a ‘stengah’, particularly in Blackett and Webb’s jubilee year. ‘… Instead of wasting your time,’ he had finished rather weakly. Matthew had abandoned the subject, looking depressed.
Matthew was now saying, ‘Far from doing anything to help ou
r colonies foster their own native industries the Colonial Office sees to it that any which begin to develop are promptly scotched!’
‘Why should they do that?’ scoffed Nigel Langfield, under the approving eye of his elders. ‘I say, Mr Blackett, what d’you think, sir? Isn’t that just the nonsense that the Nationalists are always spouting?’
‘Why?’ demanded Matthew heatedly. ‘Because we want to sell our own goods. We don’t want competition from the natives: we want to keep them on the estates producing the raw materials we need.’
‘Absolute poppycock, old boy,’ chuckled Nigel. ‘Westminster has done a jolly great deal with grants to build up industry in the colonies.’
The Empire Trilogy Page 134