‘I can’t stop!’ he shouted at the dim figures standing in the road ahead. In his excitement he again forgot not to twist the hand-grip; again he found himself hurled forward. The figures scattered to right and left.
‘Silly bugger!’ one of them shouted furiously after him as he shot by. But already he was at the corner of the Bukit Timah Road. Then, just as he was certain that he must hurtle to his doom in the stream of traffic ahead, his foot alighted on another outcrop of metal which this time proved to be the brake. By a miracle he avoided ramming a lorry that loomed across the end of Stevens Road.
It was hard to see what was going on. The road appeared to be full of shambling, cursing figures, some going one way, some going another. A military policeman was shouting hoarsely at drivers from the middle of the road beside the storm-canal. Beyond the canal an occasional flicker of light betrayed another vast military column on Dunearn Road struggling in the opposite direction. Someone flashed a torch in his face and shouted at him hoarsely: ‘You’re going the wrong bloody way, mate. That’s the way to the war!’ There were no further roadblocks and nobody tried to stop him, but all along the road men and vehicles continued to thrash in the obscurity like the limbs of some stricken, fettered giant.
Matthew soon became skilful at directing his motor-cycle into narrow gaps between the labouring vehicles but his progress was slow, nevertheless. Near the racecourse a huge fire was flaring a hundred feet into the sky: this was the reserve petrol dump which General Percival had ordered to be set on fire an hour before dark. Against its glare Matthew could see the long-shadowed silhouettes of men and guns, for the most part struggling in the direction of Singapore Town but constantly being arrested by traffic breaking into the stream or forcing a way through it. He, too, soon found it difficult to make any progress, wedged in now between two lorry-loads of silent, apprehensive Indians. Meanwhile, desperate-looking figures continued to pour in the opposite direction, their faces transfigured by the glare. One of these men staggered against him, breathing whisky fumes into his face. ‘What’s going on?’ Matthew asked anxiously. ‘Are we retreating?’
‘You’re damn right we are, sport!’ And the man heaved himself away, laughing hysterically.
Even by the light of the burning petrol dump it was impossible to see clearly enough to recognize someone. ‘How will I ever find Vera in all this?’ Matthew wondered hopelessly. From time to time, among the soldiers fleeing from the direction of Bukit Timah village, there were little pockets of civilians with bundles on their backs or dragging hand-carts; at the side of the road he could see the shadows of men jogging with poles across their backs from which hung boxes, suitcases or other burdens, but they all slipped by, heads averted: only by their clothes could you make a guess as to whether they were Indian, Malay or Chinese. Yes, it was hopeless. He considered turning back, but by now he had passed the racecourse on the right and Bukit Timah itself could not be more than half a mile up the road, so he decided to press on a little further. He rode on in a daze, travelling more freely the further he went. He passed a road junction to the left. This road was quiet and tempting but he ignored it and presently, as the ground rose on either side, he knew that Bukit Timah and the junction with the Jurong Road must lie just ahead in the obscurity.
Suspended between two rows of houses above the wide road a bundle of electric cables spluttered a cascade of white sparks over a scene of such confusion that Matthew’s heart sank. Lorries and turreted Quad cars were wedged together at all angles with a tide of men flowing by on each side of them; military police, bawling at drivers and at each other and at the same time trying to marshal a squad to drag away an abandoned or broken-down vehicle, seemed unable to make any impression on the jammed traffic. In the very middle of this chaos, four brigadiers in an open staff-car were trying to read a map by torchlight and occasionally peering about them into the seething darkness as if wondering where they were.
Matthew turned the motor-cycle and allowed himself to be swept back the way he had come for some distance in the middle of a cantering mob of Indian troops, some of whom had discarded their rifles and boots and were running barefoot, jabbering to each other hysterically as they ran. Matthew, infected by their alarm, kept looking over his shoulder as if expecting to find the Japanese at his heels. Abruptly he found himself at the quiet road he had seen before; he accelerated out of the chattering Indians and turned into it. For some distance after he had left them he could still hear them calling and chattering as they passed on down the road towards Singapore Town.
The road he had turned into was Reformatory Road which led down to Pasir Panjang on the coast. He could not be sure that it would not lead him into the Japanese lines … for where were the Japanese lines? However, provided the road did not turn towards the thud and flash of the guns on his right, he was prepared to follow it, though cautiously. A few tepid spots of rain began to fall.
Some way ahead in the darkness he saw the flash of a torch. He stopped the motor-cycle immediately and held his breath, his heart pounding. The torchlight reappeared a moment later, shining on the front of a car. It did not seem to be coming any closer so he left the motor-cycle and adavanced stealthily on foot. As he approached he saw the shadow of a jeep with a man in uniform peering under the bonnet; after a moment he slammed down the bonnet, said something to another man in the back and then began to jog away down the road in direction of Pasir Panjang, evidently to summon assistance.
Matthew moved forward cautiously, listening to the diminishing sound of the driver’s boots on the metalled surface of the road: he did not want to be shot by mistake. When he was within a few yards of the stationary jeep the torch was switched on again and its glow revealed a portly little man with a moustache wearing a general’s uniform; he, too, was consulting a map. Surely there was something familiar about that round, discontented face with its bulging eyes! This plump little fellow sitting abandoned in the darkness with raindrops beginning to patter on his red-banded hat and on the map he was holding was surely General Gordon Bennett, the Australian Commander! Matthew had seen a photograph of him in a newspaper inspecting troops. And now here he was, stranded in a broken-down jeep at what might be a crucial moment in the battle for Singapore. Perhaps he, Matthew, thanks to his motorcycle, might be able to bring help to the General at a vital moment. He hesitated, wondering whether to spring forward and offer his services.
Gordon Bennett, sitting in the jeep, had not heard Matthew’s approach. He had been too preoccupied with other, desperate matters. These last few hours had been among the worst he had ever experienced in his life. He had been shaken that morning when he had heard the news that the Japanese had broken through his Australian troops on the north-west coast, a failure that had earlier seemed to him inconceivable. Then there had been the bombing of his headquarters while Wavell and Percival had been visiting him. As if that had not been enough he had later been made to look a fool in front of Wavell by not knowing what Maxwell had been up to in his sector at the Causeway. No, things had not been going well in the past few hours. Perhaps the only crumb of comfort was that earlier in the campaign the Sultan of Johore had taken quite a liking to him and behaved most generously. He had even been given to understand by the Sultan that in the event of a total British collapse some help with an escape to Australia might not be altogether out of the question.
Yes, Gordon Bennett had recognized in the Sultan a really high-class person, and the Sultan, for his part, he felt sure, had not altogether failed to notice his own qualities of good breeding. Not long before, so he had heard, a guest of the Sultan, a titled English lady, had expressed a caprice to swim in the shark-infested Strait of Johore. For many a host this would have been too much, but not for the Sultan. What had he done? He had instructed several hundred of his palace guards to enter the water and link bands to form a shark-proof enclosure in which the lady could safely bathe. That, Bennett knew, was class. He could tell a classy act a mile off. He sighed and reluctantly returned h
is thoughts to the map. It was just at this moment, as if the breakdown itself were not bad enough, that some wild-eyed civilian sprang out of the darkness at him like a werewolf. As Matthew emerged from the surrounding darkness Bennett shrank back with a gasp of alarm, showing the whites of his eyes.
‘Who the devil are you and what d’you want?’ he demanded furiously.
‘I have a motor-cycle,’ said Matthew, taken aback by this hostile reception. ‘I just wondered whether you might like a lift… But I expect you don’t,’ he added as the General’s cheeks grew purple. With an embarrassed cough he sank back again into the darkness. Presently a motor-cycle engine roared not far away and grew fainter. The General was left alone to the rain and the night.
When Matthew reached the Mayfair he learned that Vera, unable to get through to Bukit Timah, had returned to the Mayfair but had almost immediately set off again, nobody knew where.
68
Walter had long since ceased to believe that the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese could be averted. If it had not been possible to stop, or even delay, the Japanese up-country with the help of prepared defences and relatively fresh troops, it was improbable that they would be stopped now at the gates of the city. Curiously, he gave little thought either to escaping or to rejoining his family. After all, they were safe. His wife and Kate were in Australia. Monty was heaven knew where … India perhaps. Joan and Nigel should soon be in Bombay. Joan’s capture of Nigel, certainly, was a cause for satisfaction and boded well for the future of Blackett and Webb. In that respect everything had turned out even better than if she had got Matthew Webb in her grip: once the two companies had merged, any attempt by Matthew to use his stake in the company to influence its policy could be comfortably out-voted.
Yet what a lot had been lost for Blackett and Webb in the past few weeks! It would be a long time (he himself might even be an old man, a grumpy old figurehead to whom the young executives took it in turns to make polite remarks at garden-parties!) before Blackett and Webb was again the commercial force in the Far East that it had been over the past thirty or forty years. All Malaya’s rubber, tin and palm-oil were already in Japanese hands; in Java and Sumatra they probably soon would be. All the agencies … the shipping, the insurance, the import-export and entrepôt, the engineering and banking, were either in suspended animation or had been withdrawn to Australia or Britain, their management and staff scattered to the winds. Something on that scale is not built up again overnight! In so far as these enterprises had a physical presence (godowns, goods and produce in stock, engineering plant, vehicles and so forth) it was being demolished with equal enthusiasm by Japanese bombers and British demolition teams. Perhaps it was this single-minded approach to the demolition of everything that had gone to make up the presence of Blackett and Webb in Singapore, amounting almost to collusion, it seemed to Walter, that he found so disorienting.
His family had left Singapore. He no longer had any responsibilities, except to the people who worked for him … but even his duty to them had grown nebulous under the bombs. In any case, he could no longer exert any real influence to help them. He passed these few days, therefore, roaming the city aimlessly and alone, almost as he had done in his youth when he had lived in a mess run by one of the big merchant houses, with a lot of other young lads. So Walter drifted about the city like a shadow or brooded alone in the store-keeper’s office in the godown on the river which he had made his temporary home. Once or twice, rather than walk or use a car, he hailed a sampan from where they clustered several deep with the tongkangs at the Blackett quay and had himself conveyed downriver to the Club. But the Club itself was unrecognizable, crammed with refugees, sick and wounded, and he left again immediately without speaking to anyone. On the Wednesday afternoon he made a sudden appearance at a bonded liquor warehouse where the same demolition team which had destroyed Blackett and Webb’s stocks had now begun work. Without a word he took off his jacket and set to work with them. They were grateful: they needed all the help they could get. Walter smashed bottles doggedly until it grew dark and then retired once more to brood alone in the godown on the river.
As he wandered along the narrow corridors between the bales of rubber he tried to explain to himself what had happened. If he succeeded in understanding what had gone wrong then perhaps he would once more be able to gain control of events instead of drifting helplessly, now this way, now that. It was surely not the Japanese alone who were to blame for the way things had gone. One of the first signs, undoubtedly, that Blackett and Webb’s hitherto secure grip on its own destiny was beginning to loosen had come with the labour unrest on the estates five years ago … not just his, but other firms’, too, of course. Could the Japanese be blamed for that? Well, perhaps they could. They had certainly been behind a number of strikes in Shanghai against British firms. The strike in 1939 at the China Printing and Finishing Company in Pootung which had gone on for six months and for which British marines had had to be landed to keep order had certainly been engineered by the Japanese. One had only to look at all the anti-British propaganda that had accompanied it, the wall-posters, the demonstrations, the pamphlets, the slogan-shouting … even the sympathy strike organized at the British-owned Yee Tsoong Tobacco Factory. And then there had been a rash of strikes against other British concerns: the China Soup Company, the Asiatic Petroleum Company, Ewo Brewery and Ewo Cotton Mills, Ewo Cold Storage (Jardine Matheson had been a favourite target) and Paton and Baldwin’s wool mill. But there was a difficulty here that Walter had to acknowledge. Although it was most likely that some, if not all, of these strikes were Japanese-inspired, it was extremely difficult to argue that they would not have broken out spontaneously, even without Japanese encouragement.
In a sense it did not matter whether these strikes had been encouraged for political reasons by the Japanese, or by the Communists, or had sprung up independently among disgruntled workers who happened to identify all employers with the British. Because given that huge reservoir of cheap labour with attendant ‘exposed corpses’ pour encourager les autres a mixture of the two extremes of submission and resistance was about what you would expect, in Walter’s view. Thus the disadvantage of labour unrest was bonded indissolubly to the advantage of cheap labour.
In Malaya, however, which had lost its pool of cheap labour when immigration was curtailed as a result of the Depression, there were no ‘exposed corpses’ on the streets in the morning and the extremes to which the labour force had been driven were less stark. In Malaya it was clearly unrealistic to blame the Japanese for the growth of labour unrest. Purely political agitation by Nationalists and, above all, Communists against the British had caused a number of strikes which, because they were not based on genuine labour grievances, would not otherwise have occurred. Walter sensed that it was here that Blackett and Webb in common with other British firms had begun to lose its grip on the country and on its own destiny. A worker with a genuine grievance you can do something about. You can give him more pay, or sack him, or improve his living conditions. But what can you do with a worker who wants you to leave the country or, just as bad, wants to run the business himself?
‘I suppose they expect me to dye my face brown and wear a sarong!’ grumbled Walter aloud, pausing to lean wearily against a bale of the ‘ribbed smoked sheet’ that had made his fortune. He groaned. He had no difficulty in recognizing what it was that he had been up against. It was ‘the spirit of the times’ which had stolen up on him again.
Presently, feeling hungry, Walter went out into the streets again. He did not eat, however, but instead went to the Cricket Club for a shower. His clothes were filthy but so were everyone else’s he met: nobody seemed to find anything remarkable about his appearance. He was shocked, however, to see what he looked like in a mirror and while he was taking a shower sent someone to fetch Mohammed from Tanglin with some clean clothes. He felt better then and ate a sandwich.
Mohammed, waiting for him outside in the car, wanted to drive him back t
o Tanglin but Walter told him to go to the godown on the river. He was very tired. To reach the storekeeper’s office he had to climb the swaying ladder some forty feet up into the shadowy vault of the building to the ledge which formed a rudimentary loft some way out from the wall. Two-thirds the way up the ladder he dropped the electric torch he was holding. He saw its light revolve once in the air as it fell. Then it went out and he could see nothing at all. Fortunately, Mohammed, concerned for his safety, had been watching his unsteady ascent from the entrance to the godown. He shouted up to him not to move and hurried away to fetch another torch from the car.
While he waited on the gently creaking, bending ladder, too unsure of his balance to go either up or down in the almost total darkness, he nevertheless thought how easy it would be to let go, to allow himself to pitch out from the ladder and plunge into the silent, peaceful depths beneath. Mohammed was taking a long time. So much rubber! It was all around him. He could not see it but he knew it was there. He thought of oil palms again but no, that was merely a detail … A man must move with the times, otherwise he is done for. Clinging to the ladder in the darkness he began to muse on this business of moving with the times. In Shanghai he had managed to do so with skill, why had he not succeeded in Malaya? In Shanghai it should have been more difficult. Surely no commercial city could have undergone so many drastic changes in such a short time as had Shanghai in the past five years: the Japanese war on the mainland, their blockade of the coastal ports, the ending in consequence of the Open Door policy and the decline of the Chinese Customs, not to mention all the deliberate Japanese attempts to strangle British trade with restrictions and monopolies. Yet he had not only moved with the times and managed to survive in that beleaguered, monstrously over-populated city, he had positively thrived.
The Empire Trilogy Page 150