Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  The news reopened the discussion on their next course of action. Lee was intent on joining the main Communist camp, which was now called the 5th Division of the Malayan People’s Liberation Army.

  ‘How many are they?’ Bill asked the fat man.

  ‘One hundred, maybe two hundred. Not all in one place, but camps in the hills.’

  James saw that Bill was wavering.

  ‘We’re the only men trained and left behind with a working knowledge of native languages,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m the only Englishman I know of who can pass in the Asiatic population. Bill, we can’t quit. It’d be madness. We’re more good here than sweating over maps in Ceylon, eh?’

  The Australian took off his spectacles and polished them on the tail of his fraying shirt. ‘You’re right,’ he agreed at last. ‘If some of the other blokes can make out, so can we. Orders are clear that we should remain if there’s work we can do in safety. Lee,’ he turned to the sleepy Chinese, ‘we’re with you.’ Lee nodded, his eyelids drooping, then slumped gently sideways. ‘Now let’s figure out a route.’

  The map, dimpled with the all-pervading damp, stained and falling apart along its creases, was once more spread before them. Bill took their protector’s advice.

  ‘Up the Ipoh road are many friends like me,’ he told them with plump self-satisfaction. ‘Best you take that road to here,’ his manicured finger, smooth and almost creaseless like a yellow sausage, stabbed down on to the faint, red line on the map, ‘then the river. Very easy.’

  And so it was; with their health restored, they marched easily along the road, until they met a convoy of panic-stricken refugees and saw the distant smoke of a Japanese reprisal party which was massacring and burning its way southwards down the highway.

  They quit the road and tramped east, skirting the padi fields and the vast pools of slurry around the tin dredges. Much of this part of Perak was already an industrial wasteland, made grey and featureless by the concentration of open mine-workings. Bill then led them higher into the hills, choosing a route round the edges of rubber plantations where he could, because the going was easier although the risk of betrayal was greater. They saw the familiar sight of gangs of Tamil tappers about their work, oblivious of peace or war, uncaring whether the destination of the white juice yielded by the trees was Osaka or Detroit.

  ‘This is it, I hope,’ Bill told them at last, ‘we’ll have to strike off into the jungle and in about a week we should be in the right area.’ After a morning spent hacking their way through the dense jungle regrowth, when four hours of back-breaking labour gained them a mere twenty yards, they broke through to the dim, hot calm of the virgin rain-forest and made their way more easily.

  In a few days they came to a river bordered by chrome-yellow sandspits, and bathed in the crystal clear water with relief. James washed the mud from his sarong and draped it over the great flanged roots of a tree to dry. It was mid-day, and the forest was paralysed by the heat. A profound stillness and silence, the calm of millions of years of undisturbed vegetable life, held them like an enchanter’s spell.

  ‘It’s so still you think you can hear the trees growing.’ Bill sat on the bank, cleaning his glasses with the clear river water.

  ‘You’re whispering,’ James whispered back. They grinned at each other.

  ‘You’re a good mate, Jim.’

  ‘The best you’ll get.’

  ‘Even if you ain’t got a conscience.’

  ‘Can’t all be perfect, can we?’

  ‘It doesn’t even worry you, does it?’ Bill had been pondering his friend’s peculiar moral deficiency ever since he had argued that they should continue sabotage work in spite of the Japanese reprisals.

  ‘Never thought about it much, to tell you the truth.’ James was smiling up at the tree’s grey trunk, and the small, almost colourless orchid blooming in a fissure of the bark.

  ‘Would you really have carried on and blown the road?’ The question was asked in the spirit of bland intellectual curiosity, but it made James uncomfortable.

  ‘I thought that sabotage was what we were supposed to be doing.’ He grinned at his friend, uncertainty dulling his charm. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do.’

  The Australian put away his spectacles and looked at his friend with genuine concern. Jim wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t wicked. He was an honourable man, in many ways one of the best. But when he was enjoying something he was like a child, not wanting anything to spoil his pleasure, unable to tell right from wrong, utterly selfish. Being a soldier, especially in the role of a daring guerrilla fighter, powerfully titillated James’s masculine vanity and blinded him to all other considerations. There was no point in arguing with him, Bill realized. He was enamoured of a flawed ideal of manhood, a picture that was all show and violence, with no dimension of responsibility or care. For James, other people were mere objects to be disposed according to his fancy.

  ‘Well, maybe you’ll get another chance with the Commies.’ Bill lodged his spectacles safely in his shirt pocket once more and glanced downstream’, to where Lee was sitting in the shade; rolling a cigarette.

  ‘What do you reckon we’ll find up at this camp?’ James asked, grateful for the change of subject. He never understood Bill when he got into one of his sermonizing moods.

  ‘I reckon we’ll find a couple of dozen peasants who don’t know their left foot from their right and a handful of political commissars filling them up with Marx.’

  ‘Can we trust them, Bill?’

  ‘We have to trust them or well die. But as your commanding officer my orders are to figure out a way to survive without them as fast as we can.’

  Another few hours’march led them to a track that had been freshly trodden, and a few hundred yards down it they were challenged by two young Chinese with guns, who brought them into the guerrilla camp at nightfall.

  In a large bamboo house, where twenty or so men and women were eating their evening meal, they were presented to the leader, Chang Hung, and his wife. He treated them like tiresome underlings barely deserving of his dismissal, and they were taken to another, smaller hut where they found two British men eating with a small group of Malays and one Indian.

  ‘Well, this evens up the odds a bit – good to see you, I’m Robertson, this is Evans.’ The four men shook hands and Robertson introduced the rest of the party. ‘This, as you may gather, is the no-chopsticks mess. They’ve segregated us so our disgusting eating habits don’t offend their revolutionary sensitivities. Tea?’

  ‘Where are these running dogs now, without their money and the trappings of imperialist power? Here in the jungle, where all men are equal, see how pathetic the white men appear! Did they not scatter like fowls when the Japanese came? The time of the white men is over!’ The speaker waved his fist, his whole arm trembling with tension, and the audience cheered. This was Chin Peng, a slender Chinese with a bad complexion and spectacles, the political commissar for Perak. James regarded him as the most dangerous of all the Communist leaders. He had a scholarly demeanour which automatically won him respect.

  Only James understood the speech, and he translated it for the other Europeans, looking at them as he did so. After six months with the Communists they were a shabby spectacle. Bill was a walking skeleton, with a pot belly and a swelling below his prominent ribs – the enlarged spleen of a malaria sufferer. Evans was not with them in the bamboo meeting-hut; he was dying rapidly of blackwater fever, the consequence of trying to treat malaria with insufficient quinine. James and Robertson, both thin and half-naked, were better off, although Robertson’s legs were a mass of suppurating sores. James now wore the moneybelt, which hung loose around his wasted hips. He did not take it off to sleep.

  There was prolonged cheering at the end of Chin Peng’s speech, followed by a commotion at the back of the hut. A white, man wearing only khaki shorts, a gleaming jungle knife thrust through his black cummerbund, entered the hall, accompanied by six bare-chested Temiar braves. Chang Hung
greeted him with respect.

  ‘It’s Noone!’ Bill’s lifeless eyes strained to see the newcomer. ‘My God, I hope he’s brought us some drugs.’

  Noone was one of their few links with the outside world. He was a British anthropologist who had been living with the aborigines to study them; full of romantic admiration for their mystical, peaceloving ways, at the onset of the war he had opted to live among them, with a Temiar wife. The aborigines loved him as a brother, and in consequence he could move freely through the deep jungle, guided and fed and defended by them.

  As soon as the meeting was over, the British gathered around Noone in the no-chopsticks mess. ‘I’ve got your quinine.’ He took a substantial package wrapped in banana leaves from one of his men and dumped it on the floor. ‘I’ve got tobacco, though it’s only the native stuff. There’s disinfectant, too, and the boys shot you a bird or two.’

  They looked hungrily at the two glossy-feathered carcasses. The rations at the camp had dwindled to bad rice and tapioca chips, with tiny amounts of sweet potato for special occasions. It sustained life, but afforded little enjoyment.

  Jungle game, James said, was heard but not seen. He himself, the best hunter among them, had bagged nothing but a monkey in six months.

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ Bill slapped Noone on the shoulder and shook hands with the Temiars to show his appreciation. ‘We’ve been eating snails for weeks, and there isn’t a bamboo shoot for miles.’

  ‘There’s no news on batteries for your wireless, though. Chapman sent you his newsletter.’ He gave Bill a sheet of ruled paper on which the officer in command of the men remaining in Malaya hand-wrote a jungle newspaper to keep the farflung band informed. ‘The worst news isn’t in there, though.’ He gave them cigarettes rolled the Temiar way, in pungent nipa leaves.

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Japs are using our men from Changi as slave labour up north. Word is they’re dying like flies. I’ve seen them myself in cattle-trucks heading over the Siamese border – living skeletons already. A lot with dysentery, too. You three look fat in comparison.’

  They were so low in body and spirit that they barely reacted to the news. There was, after all, nothing they could do to help their comrades-in-arms. Only two things were plentiful in the camp – time and talk. The Chinese were increasingly hostile to all the other races, and in the hours that remained after drilling the surly troops and scavenging for food, James, Bill and Ibrahim ran a desultory education scheme among themselves. James taught Cantonese, Bill taught chess, and Ibrahim instructed them in the Koran – their only printed book.

  Next morning the guerrillas put three Malays accused of spying on trial in the large hut. ‘You’d better be on parade for this,’ Bill told Noone. ‘They stage these trials on the bread-and-circuses idea to give their people something to think about. We tried to boycott the last one on principle, but they attacked us for lack of solidarity. Pretty nasty, the whole affair.’

  The three accused, two old men and a girl, were charged before a tribunal of the guerrilla leaders, and condemned by a succession of prosecutors. At least one of the men was well advanced in his second childhood; the girl was speechless with terror.

  ‘They’re just peasants,’ Bill murmured.

  Ibrahim nodded. ‘Nothing more than rattan-cutters. Harmless.’

  The prosecutors worked themselves into a frenzy of anti-Malay rhetoric. A token defence was woodenly put forward by a young Chinese, then the tribunal made a show of consultation and delivered the verdict of guilty. The three Malays were taken out into the clearing, tied to trees, and bayoneted to death, amid much cheering.

  ‘My job is to mould that rabble into a killing machine,’ Bill said with contempt. ‘They’re so hostile they’ve even invented a “Chinese” way of firing a goddam rifle. It’s like a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – except I wouldn’t fancy my chances very long after I left the table.’

  ‘We can’t just sit here, starving to death in the middle of a hundred crazy Communists. We’ve got to get out and do something.’ James felt as if frustration instead of hunger were eating his guts.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, man, what can we do? We’ve no equipment, hardly any arms, no wireless, not even enough to keep ourselves alive.’ Illness made Bill’s normal reasonable tone sound weak and peevish.

  ‘We’ve enough quinine now for months. Remember your orders, Bill? Find a way to survive without the Communists.’

  ‘So what? We can’t survive without them. If they think we’re betraying them, they’ll put us on trial like the other poor bastards. We’re trapped. We’ll just have to sit it out.’

  James flung his hair out of his eyes in angry dismissal of this argument.

  ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy? I sat it out, dear, in the jungle, and took lessons in Marxist dialectics. For God’s sake, man, what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Are you trying to call me yellow?’ Feeble rage gleamed behind Bill’s glasses. Ibrahim raised his half-moon eyebrows in amusement.

  ‘Peace, my friends, let the birds do the squawking. What James is trying to tell you, in his heavy-handed European way, is that we have devised a strategy. Do you want to hear it?’ Bill nodded grudgingly. ‘It is this. In my own state, Pahang, we have two very interesting things. One is the Japanese military HQ; two is a very loyal Malay population, and very few Chinese. We know the Sultan has helped Europeans escape to the jungle, and the police are reluctant to pursue the Japanese orders concerning security.’

  Ibrahim spoke with passion instead of with his normal Mala reserve. ‘Why do we not leave this place, where, as James says, we can do nothing and our lives may soon be in danger, and travel to Pahang? We should think about organizing a separate Malay resistance. Then we can perhaps recruit agents, start to gather information on the movement of troops and supplies, and pass it back to this camp, maybe to the British headquarters in India or Ceylon?’

  Bill thoughtfully fingered his spectacles, which were now wired together where the tiny metal hinges had rusted through. ‘But we’ll be informed on, for sure.’

  Ibrahim shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘The jungle will protect us. I am sure the Japanese know the location of this camp, but they know also the difficulties of pursuing guerrillas through this kind of country.’

  ‘And just the three of us?’

  James nodded. ‘We haven’t talked to the others. Evans can’t travel in his condition, and one of us must stay here in case they do start sending men in from Ceylon. And I didn’t think there was much point in talking to Lee.’ Their Chinese companion had become one of the most vociferous Communist officers.

  They left the next day with Noone and his Temiars, arousing no immediate suspicion in the Chinese who did not believe the white men could live long in the forest. The aborigines guided them through the deep jungle, using their own tracks which were invisible to the untrained eye. In a week they reached the boundary of the state of Pahang.

  ‘Arthur, my darling,’ wrote Jean Anderson, her pencil crawling slowly across the page of damp-roughened paper, ‘eighteen years ago today we were married. We never thought, we could never imagine, that we would spend this anniversary in such circumstances as this.’ She paused, exhausted by the effort, and looked around the room. The European women interned in Sumatra had been moved to an old prison house, a forbidding square building with heavy double doors and iron-barred cells like animal cages around a central courtyard. These enclosures, which were not locked, served as small dormitories and were furnished with bare platforms of bamboo on which the women slept.

  The corner of this grim building which was occupied by Jean and Betty had been decorated with flowers by the other women for Jean’s anniversary, and the vivid, succulent pinks of oleanders and the purple-blue of the jungle convolvulus glowed incongruously against the iron grille.

  ‘Today, I think of you all the time,’ she continued. It took all her strength to push the pencil across the page. Jean’s wiry endurance had been sapp
ed by more than a year of malnutrition and disease. Her legs, once skinny, were now bloated so that her ankles were almost obliterated. Her shoes had long ago disintegrated, and when she walked she wore rough wooden clogs, which were now arranged neatly, side-by-side, at the foot of her sleeping space. ‘And I renew my vows to you, Arthur. When this nightmare is over we shall begin our married life anew in such a burst of happiness …’ The pencil was now blunted and she paused again, looking for Betty. To sharpen the pencil, she needed to borrow a knife, and to borrow a knife she needed to walk to the kitchen, and to get up and walk she needed Betty’s help.

  There was a burst of giggling from across the dank courtyard. Four or five of the younger women, Betty among them, were amusing themselves by dressing a young Cockney girl as a bride, and now their creation was complete. The scrawny figure wore a veil of ragged mosquito net and carried an elaborate bouquet of wilting blooms and leathery leaves. Her dress was fashioned from an old sheet spotted with rust marks, and she skittishly pulled up the skirt to show a garter created from a perished rubber ring and a few shreds of grey lingerie lace.

  ‘Pity about the bandages, Irene,’ Betty laughed, pointing to the ragged dressings covering the tropical ulcers on the girl’s ankles. ‘Spoil the whole effect.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know – who’ll be looking at my feet on my wedding day?’

  ‘Betty,’ Jean called out apologetically, and the younger woman turned towards her.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked with a trace of irritation. Jean was struggling to get up, and clutching at the iron grille for support, but in her weakened condition she could not manage alone. Reluctantly, Betty left her entertainment and went to help her friend.

  ‘Can you help me to the kitchen, Betty? I need to get the pencil sharpened.’

  Betty hesitated. ‘Must you, Jean? It’s pointless writing to Arthur, they’ll never let us send the letters. You won’t want to read them at the end of the war, anyway.’

  The outlandish bride clattered across to them on her wooden clogs and picked up the two-inch length of pencil with which Jean had been writing. ‘I’ll go for you,’ she offered cheerfully. ‘You sit down and take it easy, love. Save your strength.’