Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  After a technical examination and speed test for Morse I was reclassified Aircraftsman First Class, bringing my rate of pay up to three pounds a week. All success in the RAF was measured by merit, which is why it seemed for a time my natural home. The week before the test I memorized simple circuit diagrams as if they were maps – as indeed they were – from AP 1726, the wireless operator’s vade mecum. I hardly knew what they meant but, with my practical experience, I passed at the high rate of seventy-two per cent.

  As soon after pay parade as time off came, no buttons to shine though shoes had been well polished by our ‘bearer’, we rickshawed to Mitchell Pier and took the ferryboat Bagan to Penang. Alan Crossley, Frank Pardy or Ronald Schlachter guaranteed a ready group for a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston Café, then to see a film such as Cairo or Watch on the Rhine, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights.

  A Chinese tailor ran me up a suit of white drill so that I could dress like any other European civilian on walking out of camp. At the Whiteaway Laidlaw department store in George Town I was measured for a sports jacket and trousers for use in England – where clothes were rationed and in utility style – attended by a white assistant as if in a shop back home, and not caring what was in his mind as he called me ‘sir’.

  From the camp, or better viewed from the rowing boat out in the Straits, a mountain could be seen twenty-odd miles to the north, called Kedah Peak, or Gunong Jerai, set apart from the main range and rising to 4,000 feet as if, on the western side, coming straight out of the sea. The colouring, according to the state of sun and cloud, might give the illusion that the area of surrounding jungle was much larger than it was. Darker clouds on the summit could also make it seem higher and more remote, and thus even more tempting to explore.

  I considered going on a bicycle to reconnoitre, prior to tackling the Peak on foot, having created in my mind an irresistible exercise ground of wonders and hardship. Its distinctive summit was the last unusual topography seen before going to bed, and the first tantalizing sign on walking between palm trees to the wash house with towel and toilet bag in the morning. The George Town library gave little information, except for a book saying that a king once lived on its slopes who had fangs and drank human blood, which superstitious belief was interesting only for as long as the smile lasted.

  On wireless watch, keen to keep a meticulous log, I recorded the ding-dong interchange of signals on to spare paper, then entered them neatly into the book when a free moment came. Sharing the watch periods with Frank Pardy, Pete Spruce and ‘Tash’ Horton, we shepherded aircraft on their journeys across South-East Asia. Every direction-finding station, along the route and off, would exchange all information and position reports about any plane airborne in case something should go wrong.

  An old log book, which I still have but shouldn’t, records how a non-stop Lancastrian, on its lonely route from Karachi to Singapore during the night of 12–13 January 1948, was tracked by its airfield of departure, monitored by Negombo in Ceylon, picked up by me at Butterworth, and drawn to base by Singapore. Fussy and proprietorial, we listened even when atmospherics bushed the eardrums hour after hour up to midnight and through to dawn, ever on the alert for that half-murdered squeak of urgent Morse from an aircraft homing through the night.

  Parts of the kampong area around Mitchell Pier were declared out of bounds to all airmen because of prostitutes setting up in business. Having the reputation of being knowledgeable about maps, I was asked to make a coloured enlargement from the one-inch sheet on which to show the forbidden zone, handiwork to be lodged within a glass-framed noticeboard at the gate.

  Shortly afterwards, the CO having no plan of the airfield and its outstations, I was given a hand-held compass and asked to do a survey. For a few days, with a bag of instruments, and lunch in my haversack – looking now and again for a red light from the tower warning me to get out of the way because a plane would be landing – I wandered the runway and its environs taking bearings. Such work was an enjoyable combination of the physical and the technical, joining my knowledge of air navigation to what I had learned years ago about surveying in Practical Knowledge for All.

  The length, alignment and width of the runway provided a ready-made base line on which to triangulate from either end the various radio facilities, the fuel store, the fire engine shed, and control tower. Magnetic variation was zero, so all angles read true, simplifying matters still further. Halfway through, much data already transferred from notebook to drawing board, the clerk of works came across a plan made after the construction of the base and I was, as it were, laid off.

  When a Dakota transport descended on to the airstrip early in 1948, a tractor took the crates from its belly to a dry site several hundred yards beyond the runway on the opposite side to the paddy field. The wherewithal for a new HF/DF station had arrived, and I was sent out to begin operating the moment it was put up, as if the wireless mechanic seconded for the job had only to wave a wand and the scattered pieces would join themselves together.

  Older than me by a year, he sat on the bare earth with a toolkit at his feet, looking at the crates through cigarette haze as if wondering what to do next. I felt sceptical as to his abilities, unable to conceive why a sergeant and several men hadn’t been sent up to do such work, but after a while he stood up and took off his cap – he was in full khaki drill uniform – ambled to the nearest crate, and split it open. In something like a couple of hours, with hardly any assistance from me, he erected and bolted together the wooden sides of the hut, then put on the roof. A few hours later, when the aerials were in place, we carried the Marconi-Adcock equipment inside. Next morning, after a special plane sent from Singapore had tested the bearings and found them as perfect as could be, the station was declared operational. The mechanic then hopped the next flight back to Changi.

  Neither assistance nor supervision was necessary at the D/F hut, and in any case there was only one chair to sit on, unless advantage was taken of an old cable drum outside. The morning and afternoon watches were interesting because more aircraft were about. During the nightwatch, the air muggy though slightly cooler, traffic was slack, and I lounged in the cane armchair with earphones around my neck, reading a borrowed copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, an absorbing but tragic story concerning the sort of people I had known, which left me with a feeling of hopelessness about their condition. A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison fell in the same genre, yet he was less sombre because the style was more polished, the plot more artful. I was amused by The Diary of a Nobody, though snatched any likely item the library could provide, whatever the quality, including books by H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse, Rafael Sabatini, P. C. Wren and Warwick Deeping.

  On the standby radio at midnight the haunting music of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite Number Two came shortwaving through static out of some place in the Pacific, as if it had followed me halfway round the world from a summer’s evening in Nottingham when I had heard it in the house alone and thought that my soul would burst. This adventitious repeat in the hut indicated a black hole in my personality that must sometime start to fill, though it was impossible to know how it would happen from the not sufficiently unhappy state I was locked into.

  By dawn, sleep had nearly won. Convinced the log book was kept in precise block capitals, an hour later showed the letters spider-crooked. The early morning aircraft sending its met report, or calling for a bearing, helped me to wakefulness, after which I made tea on the primus, and waited for the lorry to take me back to camp. Dawn sunlight on Penang made a spectacular flood of menacing green and mercurial vermilion on the landscape, and I wrote a score of lines which, hardly knowing what to make of them, came out as a kind of free verse poem from which all emotional content was missing.

  Some kind of change in my life must have been taking place within the agreeable trance of duty done and leisure enjoyed, a spirit clandestinely deciding what my fundamental obtus
eness would not be able to deny when the moment of reality came. There was no intimation that such was on its way, because a vague day-to-dayness was the whole of my existence, and I belonged to where I was to the extent that such feelings as weighed on me from time to time did not allow me to see into the future, or imagine anything I could not bear to contemplate.

  It was not part of my nature to live without a goal, however, so I began assembling a group of friends to explore the Kedah Peak area. Schlachter and I pedalled to Bukit Mertajam and, leaving our bikes by the railway line, shinned up 1,800 feet of its forested hill in an afternoon, so easy a climb not to be expected, however, on Kedah Peak. I persuaded Ron Gladstone, a wireless mechanic, to come on the trip, and we made an appointment to see Mr Robb, the Chief Surveyor in George Town, who during half an hour of his time told us he had ascended the Peak in 1939, but from the northeast, where a motorable track went almost to the summit.

  This sounded too easy for us, who intended going up from the south, which Mr Robb didn’t believe to be feasible, because the area was covered in primary jungle, and tigers were said to roam there. This only increased our enthusiasm and, realizing there was nothing further to say, he provided us with the necessary map sheets, and wished us luck.

  An education officer recently posted to the station ensured that travelling players passed our way. Dangerous Corner and Dover Road were put on in the NAAFI, and an occasional lecturer came to talk on current affairs. Classes in Malay were started, but few could be attended by me because they clashed with times on watch. In any case, who was there to practise with? The dance-girls at the City Lights laughed when I tried.

  Flight-Lieutenant Rice, the education officer, perhaps encouraged by his wife, found sufficient talent to form a concert party. Mr Margolis, the airstrip meteorologist (together with his wife) also liked the idea, as did others from the signals section who, having the kind of intelligence which wasn’t afraid to show enthusiasm, enrolled in ‘The Butterworth Variety Group’.

  For some reason it was decided that I should recite the Stanley Holloway monologues ‘Albert and the Lion’ and ‘How Sam Won the Battle of Waterloo’, as well as render a couple of Cockney songs such as ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’ and ‘I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I Am’. The Lancashire and London accents weren’t familiar, but a talent for mimicry enabled me to convince, in a comic sort of way. Nor had I ever memorized so many lines (or any at all, come to that) but jettisoning all timidity I took on the parts with sufficient gusto to amuse.

  My involvement in the concert party helped to gain Mr Rice’s backing for the expedition to Kedah Peak. He presented the scheme as an educational experience to the CO, whose permission I naively hadn’t thought to be necessary providing we went in our own time. But such official blessing gave access to all facilities, and in April four of us borrowed the Jungle Rescue jeep to have a look at the area.

  Beyond the kampong of Semiling, leaving the jeep at the estate manager’s house, we walked four miles between rubber trees and by the Sungei Bujang, to a dam where the track ended. The stream bed was wide and shallow, rocks scattered here and there, and we probed a few hundred yards north till the steep and seemingly impenetrable jungle reared to either side. Heavy knives would be needed to cut a way through, though we hoped to ascend most of the way by the stream, then zig-zag up the few hundred feet of escarpment (marked clearly on the map) to the summit. Ron Coleman, George French, Ron Gladstone, Ron Sanger and myself finally set the date. The CO insisted that an officer go with us, and Flight-Lieutenant Hinshall-wood, the camp dental surgeon, volunteered. We were also told to take a backpack wireless and keep in Morse contact with the camp. Since two of us were operators and one a mechanic this seemed no difficulty, and a twice daily schedule was worked out.

  Gladstone thought that for fitness’ sake he and I should spend an hour running up and down the beach every evening, but after a couple of half-mile jogs my chest seemed full of rusty nails. I considered myself as fit as ever in my life, and that whatever happened on Kedah Peak running was not likely to be called for. Nor did Gladstone continue the exercise.

  Appointed navigator, I collected the same compass used on my aborted airstrip survey, and enlarged a map of the Peak area to leave space for detail not on the Survey of Malaya sheets. Certain parts of the projected route were enlarged six times in outline for plotting bearings from subsidiary summits to give our position, and bound atlas-wise to avoid opening a larger map.

  Gladstone assembled the stores, including rifles and a shotgun, with fifty rounds for each. We devised a list of rations to last ten days, most of the food in tins and weighing nearly 200 pounds which, divided between us, clocked each pack on the scales at almost half our body weight. After a medical check declared us fit the MO insisted that we have a typhus inoculation, and take anti-malaria tablets for ten days before departure (and for ten days afterwards), this latter precaution seeming unnecessary, since we were going into an uninhabited area.

  On the morning of 12th June, all ready to leave, a worried man came to the lorry from the wireless section and said they couldn’t get the pack radio to work. A condition being a condition, indeed an order, we should not have gone, but the power of optimism prevailed over insubordination, and the confidence induced by a six o’clock breakfast made it impossible to abort what had been in preparation for weeks. Hinshallwood, by now as keen as the rest of us, looked up into the palm leaves and said nothing, so Corporal Coleman banged against the cab, and told the driver in no uncertain terms to pull his finger out and get moving.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Kedah Peak trip – for it was no more than that – has been used in various of my books, spun-dried to produce outlandish shadows of fictional characters. The present account, shunning exact repetition as far as possible, tries a peeling back of the skin so as to reach the truth of the experience, though it is unlikely to get much closer. Only by what came afterwards can light be realistically flashed back to when half a dozen of us vanished for six days from the world. During that short enough period Chinese communist bandits began killing whoever they could of the British, service personnel or otherwise, in an effort to terrorize them out of the country so that they could set up a Marxist government.

  It is fairly certain that the officer commanding RAF Butterworth wished the exercise of climbing Kedah Peak had never been conceived, especially since we had set off without radio communication and could not be recalled. Perhaps I exaggerate, yet six of his men were apparently lost in the jungle, which in those early days of the Malayan Emergency was assumed to be swarming with competent and ruthless guerrillas waiting in well-prepared ambush positions for just such noddy-boy action men as us.

  We were seen by the CO, perhaps, as a group of lunatic, disobedient and sedentary signals types unable to give much fight if attacked, or to survive in such terrain even if we weren’t, and he wasn’t to know he couldn’t have been more wrong – though his anxiety was understandable. I don’t recall whether news of our disappearance was given to South-East Asia Command at Singapore, but he must have passed some uncomfortable days wondering whether or not our names would have to be added to those already filling the casualty lists.

  A search party was sent by lorry to our jumping-off place, for I had left details and a sketch map of the route with the education officer. Once there, as we gathered later, they walked a short way up the Sungei Bujang beyond the dam, blew a few blasts on whistles whose noise would have been smothered by the first high waterfall if not before and, realizing in any case the futility of their task, withdrew. By this time we were several miles away, well above the 3,000-foot contour line and close to the Peak.

  As if to prove that the RAF always looks after its own (and it did), the search party next day drove almost to the Peak on the track leading in from the north-east, but by now we were well on our way down. On the sixth day we noticed the silver fuselage of an Avro-19 flying over a clearing where we had paused in the sun to dry our cloth
es, and imagined it to be passing on a postal run to Rangoon, whereas it had been sent to look for us.

  It was eleven o’clock before we set off on the first morning, rocks underwater so coated with algae that a couple of us capsized before establishing a suitable balance for walking. Even in my factory days I hadn’t carried so much, at least not on my back and for such long hours, and the others must have felt it even more.

  Corporal Coleman took charge of our party because he had done some bushwhacking in East Africa. A few years older, and experienced enough to know that the first day ought to be easy, he said nothing at our stopping for lunch, or when we later stripped off by a pool to swim, as if out on an extended picnic.

  At three o’clock the stream narrowed into a ravine, and our only way forward was to cut a way up into the jungle. Soon afterwards the world changed to a maelstrom of rain which hammered at first as on a roof, and then gathered to fall in plate-sized splashes from the ceiling of trees, drenching us in seconds. Vegetation was so dense that visibility was never more than a few yards.

  We floundered up the steep bank through reddish mud, grasping at creepers, and cutting at those which blocked our way. It was a good initiation into the worst kind of travel, and we took it with little humour, merely bashing our way forward and advancing when we could. After a few hours, the day coming to a close, we found a way back to the stream and laid out camp on a large flat bed of rock. Dry wood was got from somewhere, and mess tins of mouth-watering Maconochie’s meat-and-vegetable stew were soon simmering between hot stones.

  ‘Camp’ was a misnomer, for we carried no tents, and spread groundsheets over the rock before pulling a blanket over us, mosquito nets suspended from overhanging bushes. The sentry system never gave more than four hours’ sleep: knowing nothing about bandits, we took precautions as if by instinct, and certainly no marauders could have surprised us during the night. The two on guard were well separated, though able to communicate by signs, sitting quiet and watchful with loaded rifles, safety catches off so that even the faint click before firing would not betray us. The CO need not have worried, born as we seemed to be with the know-how of infantry.