Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right dear?’ Anxious now, Jean pulled at her hand. There was no room for the two of them to stand in the crammed carriage.

  ‘I felt something,’ Betty said, too embarrassed to say any more.

  ‘What sort of something – a pain?’ Jean gently pulled her back to her seat.

  ‘No, not a pain. My back aches a bit. It was something else.’

  One of the nurses, a broadfaced, competent girl, leaned across towards her. ‘What kind of something else? Was it like a trickle?’

  Betty looked uncomfortably at the two women, not wanting to answer them in case they should confirm her worst fears.

  ‘I’m all right, really,’ she told them. ‘My back aches, that’s all. The baby’s not due for weeks yet.’

  The nurse stood up and stepped towards her. ‘Come on – you don’t want to take any chances do you? What did it feel like – was it like liquid?’

  ‘Her seat was wet,’ Jean put in, her voice low. Betty shot her a glance of total hatred.

  ‘Have you been having any pains at all, any pains before?’ persisted the nurse.

  ‘No, no. Nothing. I’m fine, honestly. There’s no need to worry about … uhup!’ She caught her breath as a strong cramp emphatically seized her guts. The nurse quickly put out a hand and felt her belly, then glanced down at the watch pinned to the bib of her crumpled apron. She waited in silence until the onset of the next contraction.

  ‘Seven minutes! Holy smoke – why didn’t you say anything before?’

  At the end of the causeway Betty, now weeping and scarlet in the face with the heat of her contractions, was helped off the train and into a loaded car. With Jean and the nurse gamely hanging on to the running board, they drove through cratered streets to a hospital which was already crowded with casualties of every race, who had been injured in the air-raids.

  ‘There’s nowhere to put her,’ a Chinese sister said with calm authority, as they half-dragged Betty into the building. ‘The best we can do is a trolley at the end of the corridor. The theatre was hit this morning, but our equipment is OK, mostly. Lucky for you this was a maternity hospital before.’

  Betty screamed as another wave of pain engulfed her.

  ‘Try to keep her quiet,’ were the sister’s final instructions. ‘And when the next raid comes take cover where you can.’

  Night fell quickly, and Betty began to vomit continuously, bringing up yellow bile and mucus once her stomach was empty. Tears flowed down her cracked cheeks and she began to call out incoherently, no longer able to control herself enough to speak. Her eyes rolled and the lids flickered irregularly.

  ‘She’s burning hot all over.’ Jean quickly tucked a kidney bowl under Betty’s chin and supported her as she spat feebly into it. ‘Do you think she can hold still long enough for us to take her temperature?’

  ‘She’s so far gone, she might bite the thermometer.’ The nurse shook her head.

  ‘We can try in the armpit, maybe.’

  The thermometer confirmed their fears.

  ‘She’s running an almighty fever – this baby had better not take much longer.’

  The nurse propped the delirious woman’s knees apart and examined her internally. ‘It’s a normal presentation, that’s one good thing. But she’s so weak and she’s getting really dehydrated.’

  They fetched water, stripped Betty’s inflamed body and sponged it to cool her. They made her drink, but she brought back the liquid at once.

  The lights failed, then glimmered feebly, then failed again. An air-raid warning was called, and in a short time, the ground shook and the roar of bombs drowned their voices; at the end of the corridor a window blew out, showering them with broken glass, and all the time Betty groaned and cried out.

  ‘I wish to God I could remember my midwifery training,’ the Australian said, ducking perfunctorily behind the trolley as another explosion shook the building. ‘There’s got to be some way to help her.’

  They tried to raise the tortured body to let gravity help its weakening muscles, but Betty screamed like an animal and bit Jean’s arms in a frenzy of pain. Then at last there was an alteration in the tenor of her cries, and the nurse pulled apart her knees once more in time for the small body, sticky and blackened with viscous secretion, to slide head first into her hands. She worked deftly to clean out its gaping mouth and bubbles of dark mucus appeared.

  ‘There’s breath in the lungs,’ she said, ‘so far so good.’

  ‘Oh heaven – look.’ Jean wiped part of the infant’s back clean with the corner of the sheet; along half the length of the scrawny body was a visible deformity, an area of puckered flesh along the line of the backbone. ‘What is it?’

  The nurse shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen that, but they told us about some kind of spinal malformation. The neural tube hasn’t formed properly.’ Very tenderly she laid the baby down and folded its tiny legs towards its body. She held it upright and rested its feet on the trolley. It hung limp between her hands, snuffling feebly like a kitten. ‘It’s way too early, but it ought to be able to move a little – I think it could be paralysed.’

  In the wreck of the operating theatre, she hunted for oxygen, but the cylinder was empty. As the noise of the bombing receded, the cries of the injured grew louder, and a new influx of patients crowded into the teeming building. They cleared the baby’s throat of mucus and tried to breathe life into the weak lungs, but in a few more moments the infant’s slender hold on life slipped and it died.

  Betty lay inert on the trolley, flushed with fever, her lips stretched wide over her even teeth. After she had passed the afterbirth, she began to haemorrhage and the nurse, at the limit of her own endurance, summoned the last of her control to give her an injection.

  ‘Don’t you die on me now, you little cow,’ she snarled under her breath as she swabbed the puncture. ‘You die on me now and you’ll be sorry, you see.’

  James saw the Japanese army for the first time as he lay beside the trunk of a fallen tree on the bank of a wide, brown river. Out of sight of the bridge a hundred yards upstream, he stretched full length in the mud, blinking to keep his eyes focused.

  In his line of vision hung a slender black snake, immobile and precisely straight like a plumb line, hanging from a branch over the broad channel. James was distracted by the reptile for an instant, then the distant glint of the sun on weapons pulled his attention back to his objective. A disorderly column of soldiers in khaki was advancing rapidly across the wide span of planks.

  He gave the signal, then crawled back into the covering jungle and ran along the barely visible track, hearing as he went the roar of the explosion as the bridge was blown. Behind him came the fast, light footsteps of Ibrahim, the man he had charged with detonating the long cordtex fuse. Without speaking, the two men ran on through the forest, ducking and twisting around low branches, their feet slipping on the litter of damp leathery leaves and slimy sticks. Finally the light undergrowth of the virgin jungle gave way to a wall of plants whose leaves were bordered with savage thorns. The razor-sharp fronds and tangled roots disguised pools of mud which sucked at their feet as they followed a hidden pathway.

  Their camp was skilfully concealed in this impassable thicket of secondary jungle. At the base of a rocky outcrop Bill, waiting with the Chinese wireless operator, greeted them with repressed anxiety.

  ‘What luck this time?’ he asked brusquely.

  ‘Sounded good, but I couldn’t see much,’ responded James. He bent down to pull a leech off his leg and the glistening ribbon of black rubbery tissue curled angrily around his hand, searching for blood with its primitive sensory organs.

  ‘The bridge is all gone,’ Ibrahim confirmed. ‘I think everything went up. Many Japanese die.’ He pulled a bottle of iodine from the metal box of medical supplies and handed it to James.

  ‘Did they come after you?’

  ‘I heard shots behind us, but they faded away. You can’t hear anything in this jungle, Bill
, you know that. Sounds just get smothered.’ James applied the disinfectant to the bleeding spot from which he had detached the leech.

  His friend, now his commanding officer, Major Bill Treadwell of the Special Operations Division, pressed on; ‘And what about the grenades?’

  ‘Very good,’ Ibrahim told them. ‘I saw them go like we think, explosions all up the road. The Japanese were in confusion, running around everywhere like chickens.’ They laughed together; being trained in the British army ideal of smartness and discipline, the makeshift uniforms and ragged drill of the Japanese amused them.

  In a couple of hours two more Chinese members of their party arrived from stations on the far side of the bridge. Their reports were encouraging. The long column of invading troops had halted and bivouacked untidily by the roadside while despatch riders on bicycles rode aimlessly up and down. Five or six of the enemy had been killed at the bridge and the necklace of grenades strung out along the roads had killed a dozen more and wounded others.

  ‘Did we get any vehicles?’ Bill asked. ‘Or were this lot on bicycles too?’

  ‘All bicycle,’ was the answer, ‘bicycle or walk. No car, no tank.’

  ‘Can you beat the Nips? They’re trying to take over the country with plimsolls and cycle clips.’ Bill laughed in grudging appreciation, but his expression was grim.

  The previous day they had seen an Indian division retreat down ‘their’road, ranks of Punjabi soldiers in turbans pouring southwards to Singapore. They had made cautious contact, identifying themselves only as members of the Volunteer Force.

  ‘I’m glad to hear Singapore’s sending somebody north,’ the British officer spoke with doubt and irritation. ‘Our orders have been just withdraw, withdraw, withdraw, nothing else for days. My chaps are pretty brassed off, I can tell you.’

  ‘Not as brassed off as they’d be if they’d had a few days in the jungle,’ James remarked to Bill afterwards. The Indian regiments had been welcomed when they had arrived as evidence that at last the War Office had accepted the fact that Malaya was vulnerable. Even before the fighting began, however, it became obvious that these soldiers, the finest in the world on their own native mountains, had received no training in the very different techniques of jungle warfare.

  Darkness fell, and the noise of the daytime insects was replaced by the strident night sounds of the jungle. They brewed tea, and Bill ordered a tin of pineapple to be opened in celebration.

  ‘Third time lucky, eh?’ he said, stirring sugar into his tin mug. ‘Three bridges in ten days – I think that’s pretty good going. Buck up, James.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘Now what is it, mate?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bill, I’ve cut myself on the tin opener. Here you’d better take over. That bloody wax.’ Their canned stores were coated in wax as a protection against rust. The jungle air, heavy with moisture all the time, was enough to destroy clean metal in a matter of weeks: even stainless steel razor-blades, left unwaxed, would become spotted with rust overnight. Flesh itself decayed almost as fast. Every scratch or insect bite had to be carefully treated with disinfectant, and James winced as he dripped iodine on the cut in his palm.

  ‘Haven’t smelt that since they patched us up after games at Eton,’ he said, taking his share of the pineapple and sucking the juice from it. In fact, the life of a jungle guerrilla to date seemed very much like his time at school. There was schoolboy pleasure in the secrecy procedures of an undercover operation, the code names, the ciphers, the passwords and the manuals stamped ‘Top Secret’.

  Every young Briton of the ruling class was trained from childhood to defend the Empire, and the rudimentary military training on the plantation tennis courts was just a continuation of the cadet exercises which James had done on the school playing fields. In Singapore, at the 101 Special Training School on an isolated peninsula, he had sat through lessons in demolition, sabotage, weapons, unarmed combat and jungle survival in the same fog of unfocused boredom in which he had passed his days at Eton avoiding Latin syntax.

  Most like school, however, was the rigid military hierarchy and the absurd, degrading wrangling in which Special Operations Division had been caught up. They had been forced to scheme like desperate spinsters in order to persuade their superiors to order undercover units into the jungle. But while the Japanese army swept down the Malayan mainland like a whirlwind, the military commanders had bickered over niceties of administration, making the final decision only at the eleventh hour. A mixed force of Europeans and a last-minute conscription from the Communist Party of Malaya had been hastily trained and sent into the field, but the sense that this effort was too little and too late haunted them all.

  Their stores would last them for three months, but Bill insisted that they conserve as much as possible and start to live off the jungle, so the supplies had been wrapped in gunny bags and hoisted high in the forest canopy for safety. The canned pineapple was a luxury. They ate fern-tips and bamboo-shoots, and cheated with rice bought from Chinese smallholders who supported the Communists.

  The wireless was their only link with what was going on in Singapore; it was an awkward mass of equipment which weighed 48lb and was best carried on a bicycle because it was almost too heavy for one man. Worst of all, it ran on batteries, and when the batteries failed they would need to be recharged or replaced. Bill ordered minimal use of the equipment – a contact every three days.

  The Japanese were offering a bounty for every captured white, and as Europeans James and Bill were instantly conspicuous and vulnerable to betrayal. They adopted Malay dress; Bill dyed his yellow hair black and stained his skin. His height and light eyes made his disguise useless except at a distance, but James had been able to transform himself more successfully.

  Alone among the undercover parties, they had been given a container of tablets which their instructing officer had discouragingly informed them were ‘some dope London wants us to try out – supposed to darken your skin. Never had a field trial so heaven knows how it works. Might come in handy for disguise, if it does any good.’ The canister was labelled Trisoralen.

  James experimented with the drug at once, and found that it darkened his olive skin to an agreeable café-au-lait, although he felt nauseated and giddy at times. After a month, however, these effects were wearing off.

  ‘Joking apart, Bill, I reckon the dope’s pretty good.’ He pulled up his shirtsleeve and showed-a smooth, brown arm. ‘I reckon I can tolerate it, and I’m having to take less and less of it to keep the colour up.’

  ‘Your own mother wouldn’t know you; how many are you taking?’

  ‘Four a day now. I was on twelve at the beginning.’

  ‘How much have we got left?’

  ‘Eleven tins, 100 tablets a tin, plus a handful I’ve got here.’ Fearful that the tablets might degenerate in the humid heat, James had meticulously wrapped each day’s dose in tinfoil and stored them in an airtight tin, which had once held Craven A tobacco.

  With his curling dark hair, ready smile and the curve of his slightly bowed legs outlined by his clinging sarong, James appeared a very passable Malay. His British stride had been modified to the swaying, graceful walk imposed by his native dress. It seemed to the others as if he even smelt like a Malay, because the village dogs seldom barked at him as they did at Bill.

  With Ibrahim and the Chinese, he could move freely in the towns unremarked among the crowds of refugees. Communist supporters gave them information, and there was much that they could see with their own eyes. Thousands of enemy troops poured southwards, with heavier guns and vehicles landed from the sea on the wide, white beaches.

  At the end of January came the news that the British had abandoned their last fingerhold on the mainland, retreated to the island of Singapore, and blown up the causeway. The city was under heavy mortar fire as well as air attack, and the European women and children were being evacuated with all speed.

  On February 15th they got the news that the defending forces had ca
pitulated. The impregnable fortress had fallen. It was the worst day of James’s carefree young life.

  ‘We just cleared out, buggered off. We did nothing, nothing worthwhile.’ He blew furiously at the sulky fire, making the damp wood burst into flame.

  ‘It’s London – London sold us down the river. That bastard Churchill had the East written off from the start.’ The firelight glinted feebly on Bill’s spectacles.

  ‘You know what Malay people call this time?’ Ibrahim asked them. ‘They speak of tarek orang puteh lari now.’

  ‘The time when the tuans ran.’ James nodded. ‘They’re right.’

  ‘Well, we ain’t running. We’re all that’s left, we’re on our own, and it’s up to us.’

  ‘I suppose before this I was proud to be British, although I couldn’t go along with all that land-of-hope-and-glory stuff of Gerald’s.’ James’s voice shook with shame and anger. ‘But not now, not after this.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if you’re feeling sick, think how Gerald must be taking it. Poor bastard. I wonder where he is.’

  A river of men, defeated troops marching doggedly in unison, flowed eastwards across Singapore island, periodically clearing the highway to let through the ambulances which carried their wounded. Once they had accepted the Allied surrender, the Japanese issued a general order that all men of the conquered army were to march out to the Changi district, where there was a civilian prison and a military barracks.

  The march continued for three days, over bomb-cratered roads obstructed with rubble, twisted tram cables and fallen telegraph posts. The men marched past ruined houses and burned-out vehicles, with the ghastly stench of decaying corpses in their nostrils. Every white man on the island joined the march, from the age of twelve upwards, soldiers and civilians marching separately.

  Gerald marched with a blank mind, all his energy concentrated on forcing his shaking legs to walk. Beside him Douglas Lovell strode in silence, his eyes staring ahead. From behind them came the sound of bagpipes and the regular tramp of the Gordon Highlanders.