‘Why Batu Gajah? Why not Ipoh?’
‘I could drive him to Batu Gajah without having to pass through roadblocks. I did not want a soldier at a checkpoint discovering he did not have an identity card.’
‘And how did he enter the police station at Batu Gajah?’
‘I suppose you could say I carried him in. He was very thin by then.’
‘You say he was virtually unconscious. Was he aware of what you were doing?’
‘Oh yes, we agreed to do it.’
‘So with your help, my client surrendered to the police at Batu Gajah?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Now, Dr Thumboo, we have heard evidence in this court that my client was captured by Inspector Rex Marshall. What do you say to that?’
‘If by captured you mean they took him from me and laid him on a bed, then I suppose …’
‘By they, do you mean Inspector Rex Marshall and other officers?’
‘I have never met Inspector Marshall. He was certainly not present when I was at the station. The policemen I referred to were Malay constables, not English officers.’
‘How long were you at the station?’
‘Three hours. I spent three hours pleading with the constables to send him to hospital.’
‘And did they?’
‘Eventually. The next day, I believe.’
‘Did you present the constables at Batu Gajah with a safe conduct pass for my client? By that I mean a government-issued safe conduct pass such as this.’ Pa held up a small piece of white paper for everyone to see, just like the one I had picked up in Sungai Siput. ‘The kind of safe conduct pass that promises medical attention to the bearer who wishes to surrender.’
He showed the leaflet to Dr Thumboo. ‘Yes.’
‘I have no more questions, my lord.’
Mr Davies took his time. Asking questions of a heroine like Dr Thumboo, when his job was to make her appear to be telling lies, was bound to be no easy task.
‘Dr Thumboo,’ he began, ‘I understand how and why you were operating a secret clinic for resistance fighters during the war, but tell me how you came to be offering the same service more recently to terrorists.’
My father clearly knew this was coming because he was on his feet to object even before Mr Davies had finished asking the question. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘Dr Thumboo is not the accused here. She should not have to answer such a question.’
‘My lord,’ said Mr Davies, ‘neither were the Crown’s witnesses accused here; however, they were subjected to accusatory questioning. I am merely responding in kind.’
‘Good heavens, Mr Davies,’ the judge said. ‘This is no game of cricket we are playing here. You are not required to match the other side’s innings. Dr Thumboo is a heroine of the Empire and I have heard nothing to substantiate anything to the contrary. I suggest you restrict your questions to the point.’
Mr Davies shrugged and held his shrug for an awfully long time. ‘As your lordship pleases,’ he said. He then shuffled through some papers on the table before finding the note he was after.
‘Dr Thumboo,’ he said solemnly. ‘You have told us that Mr Liew was, and I quote, virtually unconscious when you took him to the Batu Gajah police station. Is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet you say he agreed to this course of action. How was that possible when he was in such a state?’
I could see that Dr Thumboo was flustered by his question. She looked at my father and gripped the woodwork, hesitating over an answer.
‘Come, come,’ prompted a now assertive Mr Davies. The judge cleared his throat gruffly at him, but he could not take the hint. ‘Well, Doctor?’
‘Mr Davies,’ said the judge sternly. ‘I fail to see the need for you to hector the witness.’
‘If your lordship pleases, I am …’
‘That is precisely the point, Mr Davies,’ the judge said. ‘I am not pleased. Dr Thumboo has answered this question already. Do you have any questions that might be to the point, or can we let this good lady return to her duties?’
Mr Davies’ eyes searched into every corner of the room for a moment, but it was obvious that he would find no help in any of them. ‘No, your lordship,’ he finally said, and sat down.
41
DAY THREE
After the thrills of the first day the second was closer to what I imagined would be a typical day for my father in court, with fewer confrontations or mannered verbal skirmishes to set the pulse racing up in the gallery – and blood boiling, I should think, behind the bench. Going home that afternoon in the bus with Ah Mun Cheir made it seem all the more normal – the bus still honked at the bikes, the cars still honked at the bus, women and dogs barked at one another, Ah Mun Cheir had nothing to say.
Later that day she must have decided that I needed some exercise after sitting still for so long, as she took me to the playground in the park down the road. I could see there were the usual ball games and chasing games in progress, with girls on swings and boys hunting for fighting spiders. I had not realised that my father’s notoriety now extended even to me, but I was soon made aware of it.
When I arrived one of the English boys shouted, ‘Here comes the queen of the bandits!’, which had everyone wanting to join in the game, and it might have been fun if they didn’t all want to chase just me. So Ah Mun Cheir took me home and the only exercise I got then was peeling vegetables and feeding scraps to my geese.
Sahm Ji Ging were right at home after so long living behind our garage, and now only created a din when two things happened – firstly when I fed them, and secondly when a stranger was around. The arrival of a visitor could start them honking enough to frighten a ghost, and that is precisely what happened.
Long after midnight, when we were all fast asleep, even our father who had again arrived home late, the geese made such a noise that it woke up the whole house. Malayan nights were not the quietest at any time, with so many insects and frogs and animals in the wild, and it took a good deal of noise to wake everyone up, and that is what we got.
With heavy eyelids I made my way downstairs to find Ah Mun Cheir was already at the back door taking a grim hold of the latch. She told me to stay back as someone was out there.
‘Ghost!’ she said. ‘Big white ghost!’
My father looked through the window and then went to the front door to check that lock as well. He peered out into the gloom through a front window and I crept up beside him to see what I could see for myself. What I saw was Ah Mun Cheir’s ghost cycling quickly down our driveway – just a vision of something white disappearing into the dark.
‘It’s a ghost!’ I said to Pa.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘It’s a man.’
What it was, of course, was the power of suggestion. That was what Mei used to say to me whenever I smelled something cooking, something delicious like fried lard crusts, and then said I was hungry. ‘You’re not hungry,’ she’d say, ‘that’s just the power of suggestion.’ In just such a way, when Ah Mun Cheir said it was a ghost, that was what I saw. But when my father said it was a man, I could see that he was right. It was a man on a bicycle. What sort of ghost rides a bicycle, after all? It was a small man who only gave a ghostly appearance because of the white shirt, the tail of which flapped behind him like the wake from a boat.
We were in just such a flap. Pa calmly gathered us together and sat us down in the kitchen. He said we were to sit there quietly, saying nothing, until the geese stopped honking. They were good watchdogs, he said, and had probably stopped a thief from getting into the back of the house and stealing things. He said when the geese quietened down we would know it was safe.
When they finally did, he lit a lantern and opened the back door, holding it up to see into the dark outside. As he stepped out he kicked something, and it clattered against the doorframe and onto the ground. He lowered the lantern and I caught a glimpse of a shiny little pen. Pa picked it up, quickly slipped it into hi
s pocket, locked the door again and said we should all go to bed, that there was nothing to be concerned about any more.
Next morning he had already left when we woke up. I said to Mei that the thief must have dropped that pen because I had never seen it before. Maybe he was using it to try and prise open our door lock.
‘That wasn’t a pen,’ Mei said. ‘That was a bullet. And that wasn’t a thief, either. That was a bandit.’
I did not know what to make of all that, but when I saw the paper I knew I had been right about the second day of the trial – it was not even a big enough sensation to be put on the front page. The sensation that day was the funeral of the High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur. There was a large picture of soldiers marching beside a gun carriage on which there was a coffin draped in a British flag. Crowds of people were standing around with blank looks, no wailing or crying to be seen. It looked to me like nobody was mourning for Sir Henry Gurney. But then I considered that perhaps the Mahayanese nuns had already shown these people their scroll of the Ten Courts of Chinese Hell, and that had given them quite enough to think about.
I found the story about the trial on the inside pages, and again it had everything that anyone said the entire day. The only photograph was of Na Na with her arm in the sling and a policeman with a firm grip on the other one. There was also a cartoon of her standing in front of the judge and looking up at him behind his big bench and under his big coat of arms. She was saying to the judge, ‘You win, we die. We win, you die.’ Now I knew who the little Chinese man in the public gallery was.
By the third day I could recognise most of the regulars in the gallery, and I noticed that the little Chinese man was only one of a number of Asian and European men who seemed to spend most of the day scribbling in notebooks. Just one thing really happened that day, and that was Toh Kei sitting on the witness stand.
He appeared to be most relaxed, unconcerned about the attention, and certainly not a man on trial for his life. I expected that he had lived with such a threat for so many years now that nothing could intimidate him any more. I also thought that the courtroom with its open space and bench seats must be quite comfortable after the rigours of a jungle camp under constant threat, and a bleak prison cell, where eyes probably never left him for a moment. At least he looked to be healthy now, the effects of the blackwater fever we had heard so much about now merely presenting as a pallid complexion.
The day began with my father asking a stream of questions about his life in the jungle, and all morning we listened to him tell us about what Mr Davies had dismissed as a wild man’s camp. But actually, the more he said, the more I began to think it was not so wildly different from my own daily routine, perhaps not even as rigorous as I had imagined.
Toh Kei spoke clearly and confidently, and in good English with a strong Cantonese accent. He said they got up in the morning at a quarter to six when a whistle blew, and after ablutions had half an hour of exercises. Following that they had breakfast, and then for the entire morning they listened to lectures and sat in discussion groups, and as far as I was concerned that was surely just another way of saying ‘school’. At twelve o’clock they had lunch, one o’clock weapons training, four o’clock camp duties, five o’clock dinner, and then they sang songs for the rest of the night. These included ‘The East Is Red’, ‘The Long March of Comrade Mao’ and ‘We Wish Long Life for Comrade Mao’, which were songs I had never heard myself. I could only assume they must have done this to amuse themselves before going to bed because they were not allowed to listen to the radio, like the rest of us in Malaya.
My father said that Mr Davies had talked of red flags in a wild forest, but what really made up a camp? Toh Kei said they had kitchens, clinics, classrooms, sleeping quarters, and they always made their camp by a river and erected three stations on it, upstream to downstream – a water station, a bathing station and a latrine station. I wanted to ask someone what a latrine station was but it was court so I had to remain ignorant. I knew what ignorant meant, and I knew I was ignorant about most things because the world was a big and confusing place, which was why I needed to ask so many questions and also why I found it helpful to read my father’s newspaper. I found answers to questions in there that I had not even yet thought to ask. For instance, in the paper once I saw this – The Answer to Painful Haemorrhoids. I had to look that up, and even when I did I was none the wiser, but funnily enough I now knew the answer, and it was Preparation H.
Toh Kei knew all about newspapers himself. One of his duties had been to actually write one and print it there in the jungle. He said it was called Humanity News, which I had never seen in our house, or even in any of the Chinese coffee shops where men had taken to reading them aloud. He told Pa that there were hundreds of camps in Malaya, and in each of them all were required to follow what were known as the Ten Rules, and these could be found in every edition of his newspaper. They included regulations that demanded quiet speech, honesty, cleanliness, respect for others, going to the toilet every day, and so on. They reminded me of the Ten Commandments drilled into us daily by the nuns, although I noted that none of the Commandments said anything about going to the toilet. On the other hand, the Ten Rules didn’t say anything about adultery. I did not understand that one at all, and no nun would tell me anything more than that it was something else I was not to do. There were also expressions such as covet and graven image, which were difficult for me at first, but the nuns eventually succeeded in explaining them to me. It seemed, however, that Toh Kei’s Ten Rules were a lot easier to follow and most sensible. All in all, I did not have one question about them myself, and agreed they were good rules to go by, even for those of us who did not live in a camp in the jungle, but from the jaded expression on Judge Pretheroe’s face, I was pretty certain he did not feel the same way.
Toh Kei said that everyone in the camp was paid thirty dollars a month, and it did not matter whether they were low in the hierarchy or high, man or woman, they all received thirty dollars. He said the money came from the masses, and when my father asked him what he meant by that, he said they had support all over Malaya.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The comrades and the masses are like fish and water.’
Pa asked him how they dealt with illness in the camps and Toh Kei said they had clinics with ‘barefoot doctors’, who were comrades who had received some training in Western and Chinese medicine, and particularly the use of mountain herbs. He was asked what the barefoot doctors could treat, and he said dysentery, beri-beri, tick-typhus, pneumonia, and then he held up his arm to show the same small and pale scars that I had seen on Na Na’s arms, and said that the most common problem was jungle sores. He said many also had rheumatism because they were always wearing wet clothes. What about blackwater fever, Pa asked, and Toh Kei said that was worst of all, and treating really bad cases was too hard for them in the jungle. Pa asked what that meant. Blackwater fever usually meant death, Toh Kei said.
Pa said that hard living in the jungle like that must leave little time for anything else and he must know little about the outside world. Toh Kei said he had seen enough of the world to know that it needed to change. He had been to Prague and Calcutta for conferences, and to London for the victory parade at the end of the Japanese Time. What he saw he put into a book he wrote called Weaknesses of the Imperialists. Mr Davies asked the judge if he was going to allow his court to be a forum for propaganda, which had the judge annoyed with him for a change, and even I knew why.
As propaganda meant lies, Mr Davies was simply saying that Toh Kei was lying, even though he had sworn an oath on the Bible, and the judge knew, just as I knew, that Toh Kei was telling the truth. But what I also knew was that the judge was not particularly interested in anything that Toh Kei had to tell him so far, because not once did he pick up his pen to make a note on his sheet of paper.
Pa asked him about the time he went to Calcutta, and Toh Kei said it was in 1948 for the Southeast Asia Youth Conference.
> ‘What was the aim of the conference?’ Pa asked.
‘I can’t remember the aim,’ Toh Kei said, ‘but I remember the result. We planned for revolts in Malaya, Burma and Indonesia.’
‘By revolts, do you mean civil war?’
‘We thought of it as revolution, but civil war is another way of saying it.’
The judge coughed and grunted and wagged his finger at my father. ‘I trust we are not proceeding down that perilous path again, Mr Tan. I have said my piece and do not wish to repeat myself.’
‘Of course, my lord. Mr Liew, this … revolution … what was it for?’
‘For freedom, of course. Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan – all of them have their freedom now. Why not my country? Didn’t Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt agree ten years ago in their Atlantic Charter to give the colonies back to the people? Why did they come back after the war? Is Britain in so much debt to the United States that it must have our rubber and tin to pay them off?’
‘When you say your country, you mean Malaya?’
‘Yes, Malaya.’
‘Were you born in Malaya, Mr Liew?’
‘Yes. In Taiping.’
‘You regard Malaya as your country, not China?’
‘Malaya is my country. My fight has been for Malaya. More Chinese are being killed in this struggle than anyone. Our blood is enriching this soil, our soil. This is our land.’
‘Surely you don’t believe that Malaya could ever be a Chinese state?’
‘Why not? There are more Chinese here than anyone. The British government already recognises a Chinese communist state in China. They will recognise the same in Malaya. England itself threw over the Romans, the French threw over the Germans, we threw over the Japanese, now it is a matter of throwing over the British.’
‘Your plan, the plan of the Communist Party of Malaya, was armed insurrection?’
‘Not at first. After the Japanese, when the imperialists returned, we gave up our guns. Our policy was peaceful defiance, like Mr Gandhi. We attempted to organise the workers and to lead strikes and protests.’
The Heart Radical Page 33