The Operations Room at Sime Road consisted of a wooden hut about the width of a tennis court but longer, more than half as long again. Tables ran from one end to the other and supported a bewildering mass of maps, charts and documents. Here and there telephones were shrilling in little herds, all together like frogs in a pond. Add to this the overcrowding, for this room housed the RAF as well as the Army Staff, the jostling to get a look at wall maps and aircraft availability charts, the shouting into telephones and hammering of typewriters and all the other commotion one would expect in the central nervous system of that clanking, mechanical warrior which the modern army has become, as the campaign in which he is engaged begins to near its climax, and yes, one could very well see that General Percival, who after all had the main responsibility to bear, might find it something of a nightmare to conduct his campaign from such a mad-house.
But in due course it emerged that Percival was not complaining of the noise from inside the hut but from outside, where, in order to remedy the serious overcrowding at Sime Road, a party of Engineers were working to provide some further accommodation. The BGS scratched his balding head but showed no more surprise at Percival’s outburst than he did at anything else. But all the same, to Sinclair it did seem peculiar. The fact was, you see, that with the noise inside the hut, a considerable racket, you could barely hear anything at all from outside. Sinclair cocked an ear and listened … but all he could hear was the faint whisper of a saw on wood as the men worked on the construction of the new hut.
59
The number of people, mainly men, who had taken up lodging at or near the Mayfair Building had continued to grow day by day. Now there were people there whom the Major barely knew by sight, others whom he did not know at all. Certain of these newcomers merely came to hang about during the daytime, for thanks to the fire-fighting the Mayfair was a centre of activity and news, or, if not news, rumours. The latest rumour asserted that a gigantic American force of several divisions had passed through the Straits of Malacca during the night and landed near Alor Star in the north. When asked to confirm this rumour, however, Ehrendorf merely shook his head sadly.
Of all the new lodgers, none pleased the Major so much as the girls from the Poh Leung Kuk who were quartered in the Board Room. They were so helpful, so good-natured and polite! The Major was delighted with them: they appealed strongly to his paternal instincts. He was somewhat surprised, however, when one day Captain Brown, whom he had put in charge of them, asked him what was supposed to be done about their prospective bridegrooms? What bridegrooms? The ones, Captain Brown said, that kept calling to inspect the girls with a view to matrimony. He had paraded them himself, looked them over, and given them short shrift: not good enough. But the girls had been upset: they wanted a go at the bridegrooms themselves! They did not want Captain Brown who was used to having everything ship-shape and had spent a lifetime on the water-fronts up and down the China coast selecting crews with the jaundiced eye of experience, they did not want him to make their decisions for them!
This was a difficult problem. The Major was surprised, as a matter of fact, that at such a time, with the city being progressively smashed to bits from the air, there should be any prospective bridegrooms at all, but perhaps it was the very uncertainty of the situation which was causing single men to make up their minds. Well, there was no doubt in his mind, provided the men had some sort of credentials to prove that they did not want the girls to stock brothels and could produce the forty dollars for the trousseau, the girls themselves, not Captain Brown, must choose.
Captain Brown was indignant. He was not accustomed to having his decisions questioned: it was only out of politeness that he had mentioned the matter to the Major at all. Since he had obtained his Master’s ticket all those years ago he had made it plain, as quite a few Owners had discovered to their cost, that he was not the sort of man who would countenance being interfered with in the correct exercise of his duties. The Major, taken aback, had tried to suggest to Captain Brown that this was note quite the same thing, that these girls, after all … But Captain Brown was adamant. Either they were under his command or they were not! And he had departed in a huff, leaving the Major to cope with the problem as best he could.
Dupigny, consulted, was of the opinion that the girls should be left to deal with the matter themselves. Although the Major would have liked and indeed intended to exercise some sort of supervision over the bridegrooms, he had so much on his mind these days that really he had no time to spare, and neither did anyone else. At best half an hour now and again could be set aside by Dupigny or Ehrendorf to inspect credentials, but in the existing conditions it was impossible even to do this properly. The girls were naturally delighted by their victory over Captain Brown and became more helpful than ever to the Major, showering him with little attentions, sewing on buttons for him and polishing his shoes. What splendid little things they were! It was all he could do to prevent the little darlings from bringing him cups of tea whenever he sat down for a moment. Indeed, when they were not interviewing bridegrooms in the Board Room, which they were doing a lot of the time, they brought cups of tea to everyone at all hours of the day. The only thing that made the Major a little uneasy was the fact that though there was a constant and increasing supply of bridegrooms waiting to be summoned to the Board Room (now and again the door would open releasing a gale of giggles) they never actually seemed to choose one. Still, that was hardly his business.
Now the Major and Dupigny were making their way to the verandah for some fresh air, picking their way among sleeping firemen; the Major noticed as he passed that many of them had simply thrown themselves down on the floor with a cushion or a jacket under their heads, faces and clothes still blackened by the fire they had just been to. Weariness now affected everyone, causing men to stumble about as if they were drunk, or forget to deal with the most urgent matters. ‘Really,’ he thought, ‘we can’t be expected to go on much longer like this!’
To replace the wooden steps to the compound which had been carried away in the raid a week earlier a ladder had been improvised. The Major descended it stiffly, his movements made clumsy by fatigue.
‘And who on earth is this?’ he asked Dupigny rather petulantly, for even more people had arrived since he had last made a tour of inspection and had installed themselves in a sort of gypsy encampment among the score of brick pillars on which the bungalow was built. Here in the shade woman and children sat mournfully among piles of suitcases and other belongings. Some of them dozed or nursed crying babies, others stared blankly at the Major and Dupigny as they passed, red-eyed and seemingly in a state of shock.
‘Refugees.’
‘Of course, but why is nothing being done by the Government to take care them? We can’t possibly be expected to feed them all. And what about sanitary arrangements? We’ll have an epidemic in no time if they stay here. I thought schools had been taken over to house them. Perhaps you could enquire, François, and see if there’s somewhere for them to go … The poor things are obviously too exhausted to find out for themselves.’
Dupigny smiled at his friend and made a gesture of helplessness; his experience of administration in Hanoi told him that even in the best conditions it would take several days or even weeks before Singapore was again able to cope adequately with its administrative problems, of which the refugees were only one. What about the water supply? The burial of the dead? The demolition of damaged buildings? The repair of damage done to vital roads, to gas, electricity and telephone installations? And then there was the storing and distribution of food, the struggle to prevent an epidemic of typhus or cholera, and a hundred and one other difficulties … None of these matters, Dupigny knew without any doubt, would be dealt with adequately, for the simple reason that there were not enough experienced men to do the job … some of them, he explained to the Major, would not be dealt with at all unless people took matters into their own hands … ‘Like this fellow here,’ he added.
They had pas
sed through another little community, this time living in army tents scrounged from somewhere, and had come with a certain relief to an open space which led presently to the little wilderness of rare shrubs beyond which lay the Blacketts’ compound. Beneath the shade of a rambutan a Chinese was digging a grave, or rather he had already dug the grave and was now shovelling earth back into it. On closer inspection the Chinese turned out to be Cheong who, for the past few days, had been working with astonishing energy and fortitude to provide meals at intervals for the ever-increasing number of volunteer firemen and their dependents. And now, not content with feeding people, here he was burying someone single-handed.
‘Ah, Cheong,’ said the Major peering into the grave where, however, nothing could be seen but the well-polished toes of a pair of stout English shoes. ‘Good show,’ he added, wanting to make it clear how much he appreciated Cheong’s efforts.
‘Whose grave is that?’
Cheong, without pausing in his digging, muttered a name which the Major had to cup his ear to catch.
‘Not old Tom Prescott!’ cried the Major in dismay. ‘Why, François, I knew him well. He used to do a trick at parties with an egg.’ And the Major gazed into the grave in concern.
Dupigny shrugged, as if to say: ‘What else can one expect, the way things are?’
They moved on a little way. The Major, upset, mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. ‘Poor old Tommy,’ he said. ‘What a card he was! He used to have us in fits. Mind you, he was getting on in years. He’d had a good innings.’
The Major, too, Dupigny could not help thinking, was beginning to look his years; the lack of sleep and the ceaseless activity of the past few days had given his features a haggard appearance, accentuating the lines under his eyes; even his moustache had a chewed and patchy look, perhaps singed by drifting sparks at one of the fires he had attended.
‘People are like bubbles, Brendan,’ declared Dupigny in a sombre and sententious manner. ‘They drift about for a little while and then they burst.’
‘Oh, François, please!’
‘Not clear bubbles which sparkle, but bubbles of muddy, blood-stained water. Prick them and they burst. Moreover, it is scientific,’ he added, narrowing his eyes in a Cartesian manner. ‘We are made of ninety-nine per cent water, we are like cucumbers. So what do you expect?’ If you prick a cucumber it does not burst, the Major thought of saying, but decided not to encourage his friend in this lugubrious vein.
Having returned to the bungalow they found Ehrendorf who had disappeared for an hour to drive some of the women refugees from up-country to Cluny to join the queue of people trying to register for passages at the P & O Agency House. He reported a scene of despair and chaos. Now, with what might be the last passenger ships for some time preparing to leave, men, women and children were braving the heat and the air-raids in an attempt to get away.
‘Perhaps you should be on one of them yourself, Jim, unless you expect your army to arrive and rescue us and are merely waiting to welcome them ashore.’
‘While François is still in the Colony I know it must be safe,’ replied Ehrendorf with a smile.
‘You surely do not expect me to leave on … quelle horreur … a troopship. If you have ever been on such a vessel you will know that there is at least one instance in which it is better to arrive than to travel. Besides, I am curious to see how it ends, this Singapore story.’
Matthew, too, arrived presently. He had spent the morning at the Chinese Protectorate trying to get an exit permit for Vera. They now had everything that was needed including photographs and had both been hopeful that at last they would be able to tackle the next obstacle of getting Vera registered with the P & O. But the exit permit had been refused without explanation. Matthew was still shocked by this set-back: he had been so certain that they would succeed. Curiously enough, this time Vera had seemed to be less affected than he was by the disappointment, had comforted him as best she could and had come back with him to the Mayfair.
‘I know someone at the Protectorate,’ said the Major suddenly. ‘I think I shall go and have a word with him.’
It was not until later in the afternoon that the Major found time to telephone Smith at the Chinese Protectorate, asking to see him. Smith was discouraging. ‘We’re very busy here, Major. We have a whole lot of Chinese on our plate. What’s it about?’
‘I’m coming to see you now, Smith,’ the Major told him sharply, ‘and you’d better be there or else you’ll find a dozen young women camping in your office tomorrow.’
‘You’ll never get through. Traffic jams.’ There was silence for a moment, then Smith’s voice asked suspiciously: ‘What’s it about?’
The Major rang off.
Word had now spread that two, or even more, of the troopships that had brought the 18th Division would be sailing that evening after dark. This was a further blow for Matthew, made no better by the knowledge that even if they had managed to get the exit permit they still would not have been able to complete the other formalities in time to get Vera on board. From early in the afternoon those prospective passengers fortunate enough to have been granted passages on the ships that were due to sail had begun to converge on the docks, with the result that delays and traffic jams soon began to develop. Eventually those who were trying to approach Keppel Harbour along Tanjong Pagar Road found that they could no longer move forward at all: so many cars had been abandoned in the road by passengers who had driven themselves to the docks that the stream of traffic had become hopelessly blocked by them. The situation both there and in the other approach roads was made even worse by the bomb-craters, the rubble from destroyed buildings which had not yet been cleared away, and by the efforts of the newly arrived 18th Division to unload their equipment and force a passage through for it in the opposite direction. Everywhere desperate people were sweltering in cars which crept forward at best only a few feet at a time through clouds of smoke or dust, thin in places, dense in others, between rows of heat-distorted buildings, accompanied by a nightmare braying of car-horns, the hammering of anti-aircraft guns and the crump of bombs falling ahead of them. Nearer the docks a number of buildings were on fire: there were godowns with roofs neatly carpeted with rectangles of flame and shop-houses with flames sprouting like orange weeds from every window. Some passengers began to realize that they would never reach the docks in time, but the greater the panic the worse the situation became. It was obvious, even to the Major, arriving after a considerable delay at the Chinese Protectorate on the corner of Havelock Road, that the embarkation had turned into a shambles.
The Major had half expected not to find Smith in his office but there he was at his desk, peering intently into one of its drawers which, however, contained nothing but a few whiskers of perforated paper left over from a sheet of postage stamps, a much-bitten pencil, and one or two wire paper-clips. Ignoring the Major’s entrance he put the pencil between his teeth and after some deliberation selected one of the paper-clips. Sitting back he asked blandly: ‘Well, what can I do for you, Major?’
The Major explained that he wanted an exit permit for Vera.
‘Does she have a valid certificate of admission? Why doesn’t she apply herself?’
‘She has … and has been refused without explanation.’
‘I’m afraid in that case …’ said Smith, beginning to clean his ear with the paper-clip and inspecting it at intervals.
‘She’ll be in grave danger should the Japanese gain control of Singapore.’
‘Can’t do much about that, I’m afraid. But as a favour we’ll have a little look at her file, shall we? If she’s properly registered we should have her photograph and thumb-print, I should think … Just a moment.’
Smith got to his feet and made his way to a door leading to an inner office. He left the door ajar and the Major could hear whispering but could not make out what was being said. He looked around. Nothing in the office had changed since his first visit except that strips of brown paper had been pas
ted over the window as a precaution against flying glass-splinters. It was some time before Smith reappeared; when he did so he was wearing spectacles and carrying a file. The atmosphere in the office was stifling despite the fan thrashing away above his desk. He sat down and for a while studied the file suspiciously, occasionally making a clicking sound with his tongue. From time to time he lifted the paper-clip and twisted it in his ear like a key in a lock. At length he looked up and said sharply: ‘What’s your interest in this case, Major?’
‘She’s a friend of mine …’
‘I believe we’ve discussed this woman before, haven’t we? I told you she wasn’t reliable, perhaps even a whore. Surely now you don’t mean to tell me that she’s a friend of yours!’
‘Even if your evil-minded suggestions were true,’ replied the Major coldly, ‘it would be no reason to refuse her an exit permit when her life is in danger if she remains in Singapore.’
Smith had once more dropped his eyes to the file and was champing his lips in a disagreeable manner. How little had changed, the Major reflected, since the first time he had sat in this office! Smith was still blinking and sweating profusely: wisps of hair still flickered on each side of his bald crown like electric sparks, dancing weirdly in the draught of the fan. The Major had been too busy fire-fighting to give much thought to earlier days when his Civil Defence Committee had lobbied the various departments of the Government for distribution of gasmasks and for air-raid shelters in the populous quarters of the city. But now his sense of frustration with petty officials returned in full force, combined with bitterness at the results of their ineptitude which he had witnessed in the last few days driving about in the defenceless, shelterless city.
‘This woman once had connections with the General Labour Union,’ pursued Smith, unaware of the Major’s anger. ‘I suppose you know that that was a Communist organization?’
The Major said nothing. Outside the air-raid sirens yet again began their rise and fall, rise and fall. Smith cocked an ear anxiously to them, then went on: ‘We have information that she was also implicated in some criminal affair in Shanghai before the war in which a Japanese officer was killed. That was also Communist-inspired without doubt. So you see …’
The Empire Trilogy Page 142