In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  We lunched together, little Andrei behaving beautifully in his high chair while the adults chatted twenty to the dozen. We told each other our respective stories, breathlessly and in outline at first, and then filling in the details as lunch proceeded. The Aubreys had spent six months in Cape Town, and then at Eugene’s insistence they had sailed to England. ‘I wanted to strike a blow,’ Eugene said earnestly. ‘I had my commission, and I offered myself to SOE in Baker Street. I know a little bit about explosives – you know I first came to Malaya as a tin miner, don’t you? – and I can speak one or two of the Balkan languages. So they attached me to SOE in the Eastern Med.’

  He had had what was called a ‘good war’. Not too much suffering, but the spice of danger in a setting that allowed his skills full scope. He was parachuted into Yugoslavia six months before the war ended, joining a British unit attached to General Tito’s partisans. He blew up three bridges, a Germanmanned police station, and – just for good measure – a classy bordello full of senior German officers. ‘He also nearly blew himself up too,’ Tanya laughed, looping her arm over Eugene’s shoulder. ‘He was trying to blow up an enemy bunker but after he lit the fuse he got stuck trying to get out of the place. But the bomb didn’t go off.’

  ‘A brilliant piece of work,’ Eugene said with satisfaction. ‘Easy enough to make something blow up when you want it to blow up. Getting something not to blow up when you don’t want it to blow up is sheer genius.’

  We spent the rest of the afternoon together, and as soon Tanya and I were alone I confronted her. ‘So?’ I asked.

  ‘So?’ Tanya grinned back.

  ‘So how did you stop being Ingrid Bergman?’

  Tanya’s blue eyes danced. ‘I had to give him something, didn’t I? After cheating him out of his adventure in the jungle. So I got myself all sloshed one night in Cape Town and lay back thinking of England. Or rather, thinking about our place in Penang, because that’s the happiest place I’d ever been. And that’s when it happened. Or rather, when it didn’t happen.’

  ‘Don’t talk in riddles,’ I said. ‘What do you mean, when it didn’t happen?’

  Tanya blushed. ‘Eugene couldn’t manage it. He tried awfully hard. After a while I felt so sorry for him that I did my best to help him. It didn’t do any good and he got all red in the face and cursed in Armenian or some such language. And then we were just rolling about the bed and laughing, and laughing, and laughing. Sex was never an issue after that. That awful, crippling fear I’d had for so long simply disappeared.’

  I thought of something and chuckled out loud. ‘Are you sure Eugene wasn’t foxing? Remember what he said at lunch: “Easy enough to make something blow up when you want it to blow up. Getting something not to blow up when you don’t want it to blow up is sheer genius”.’

  We were still laughing when the men caught up with us. ‘No, we’re not going to tell you what is so funny,’ I said firmly. ‘Can’t sisters have their little secrets?’

  Which of course turned my thoughts towards my mother. ‘I know Mother got away from Singapore safely,’ I said to Tanya. ‘But I haven’t heard from her since. Have you any idea how she is?’

  ‘She is well. We were in touch with her in England during the war. She managed to keep her hands on some of her money, and bought a house. A small cottage in Wales, with a lovely garden and a view of the sea. She has a friend, too. A local man. He is not wealthy but neither is he totally without means. I suspect that one day they will be married.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Mother in a Welsh cottage seemed incongruous, but it suggested that at last she was beginning to adjust to the reality of life. I tried to picture the man who had established a place in her life, but failed. Mother’s choice of men had always been exotic. A ‘local man’ from a Welsh village seemed extraordinarily unlikely.

  Tanya must have read my mind. ‘He’s an ex-sea captain. A very strong character who won’t let your mother get away with any nonsense. He loves her, I’m sure. So you can rest assured that she will be all right.’

  So Mother was off my hands, I told myself. I could forget her with an easy mind. But even as I said the words to myself I realised that they were not true. Mother would never really be ‘off my hands’, even when she was dead.

  It was delightful having the Aubreys back, and we saw a lot of them after that. Frances and Andrei were close enough in age to play together and so it was practical for Tanya and me to spend whole days together with our children. We alternated between the Swimming Club, Casuarinas and the Aubreys’ rented home in Holt Road.

  ‘It would be nice to stay in Singapore,’ Tanya said one day. ‘But Eugene has to earn a living. So we’ve decided to buy a rubber plantation in Malaya, and live the life of planters. It’s going to be fun, Nona, but I will miss you.’

  We were lounging on cane chairs on the upstairs verandah at Holt Road, iced ire limos in our hands, the children playing with blocks on the floor between us. ‘I thought Eugene was as rich as Croesus,’ I said. ‘Surely he’s got enough money to go into business in Singapore?’ I didn’t at all like the thought of Tanya leaving the island.

  Tanya sensed my disappointment and made a little gesture to show she understood. ‘He lost a lot of money just after the war started. Some ships were sunk, and he was underinsured. He had to sell a lot of real estate at rockbottom prices to cover his losses, and invested most of what he had left in English bonds. He thought it was the patriotic thing to do, but he isn’t getting any sort of return on them. So we are going to put everything we’ve got into buying a good plantation. It has to have a nice house, because we’re going to live there and manage the place ourselves.’

  ‘But Eugene doesn’t know anything about rubber!’ I protested. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’

  Tanya smiled. ‘I’m not sure at all. But that’s what’s going to make it so much fun. Can’t you see, Nona, it’ll mean that we will be working together, as equal partners. I’ll be sharing the challenge with Eugene. If we succeed, it will be a shared success. I’ll feel I have really earned my happiness.’ She suddenly looked very serious. ‘The gods don’t take away something that you’ve earned, do they?’

  I wasn’t too sure about that but I didn’t say anything. I knew precisely what she meant about sharing the challenge with her husband. The fact that I had shared some of Denis’s secret work, had shared some of the risks he had faced, had been incredibly important to me.

  The Aubreys’ plans to leave Singapore may have cast a shadow, but it was a shadow easy to forget in the bright sunshine of those days, days filled with extraordinary change and seemingly endless success. In our own world, things were changing too. Elesmere-Elliott & Co. prospered, with money pouring in like a torrent. It came from the Reparation Commission goods, and from Denis’s involvement in selling war surplus materiel. It also came in thick manila envelopes delivered to Casuarinas at odd hours by odder-looking people. Inscrutable Chinese, affluent-looking Indians, even an American who would turn up with his syce and wait for Denis to come home, sitting morose and uncommunicative in the front hall. ‘Clients,’ Denis would say cheerfully, counting the money on our dining table. ‘Unconventional but quite honest, I assure you.’ The amounts in those envelopes staggered me. On one occasion there was a hundred thousand Straits dollars, new notes neatly bundled as if fresh from a bank.

  Our lifestyle changed, as it was bound to. We imported a brand new Wolseley sedan, all black enamel, maple trim and real leather seating. We bought a roomful of toys: English pedal-cars, train sets, toy soldiers, model boats, and a dozen Dresden dolls. We bought a set of household silver, a tea-chest full of the stuff, ordered out from England and engraved with our scrolled initials. We bought two small ships, and had owner’s cabins fitted out on each, but never once went on board. We even bought a plane, an extraordinary machine that had a huge door at the front into which you could drive a modest-size truck.

  Just before Christmas 1946, we rented a house in Toora
k, the best suburb in Melbourne, and spent the school holidays there. It was a real family holiday, full of visits to Christmas pantomimes, picnics in the Dandenongs, and dinner parties for people the Battens thought we should meet. The only disappointment was Culver King. He had been brilliant as a two-year-old, but as he matured he proved to be no more than a sound middle-distance performer stuck solidly in Class 2. But he did look magnificent, and he carried our green-and-gold racing colours with style and panache. On the second occasion we saw him run he managed to hang on for a creditable third, and my heart throbbed with pride as we watched him trotting back past the neat rose bushes to the weighing-in yard. I turned to say something to Uncle Batten, to find him completely overcome by emotion, his race book held over his eyes in a futile attempt to hide the tears streaming down his face. ‘Gamest youngster I ever saw in my life,’ he said in explanation. ‘There’s none more willing in the country. And the longer the distance the better he gets. Next year he’ll have two miles in him, mark my words.’ Two miles, of course, was the traditional distance for the Melbourne Cup.

  The boys had had a good year at school. According to Miss McComas they had settled well. They were not exactly Rhodes Scholarship material, but Tony had topped his class in a couple of subjects and the housemaster’s note on Bobby’s report card said ‘tries hard – in fact this boy can be very trying indeed’. It meant he had spirit, and with spirit you can generally overcome most things in life.

  So we enrolled them for another year, even though Miss McComas told us – her voice hushed as if she were imparting a state secret – that the school was being taken over as a preparatory school for Geelong Grammar. ‘I will not be here to keep an eye on things,’ she said a little wistfully. ‘But Geelong has good people and they should be able to keep up the standard.’ Geelong Grammar happened to be the finest school in Australia at the time.

  I loved our rented home. It was in Hayington Place, a leafy part of Toorak full of the older, more gracious style of homes, and it was surrounded by a large, well-kept garden where Denis and I would roam in the cool of the evening, discovering new nooks and crannies almost every day. There was a clay tennis court where the children expended immense amounts of energy without doing any harm, and a lawn big enough for backyard cricket. We bought stumps and a bat, and Denis would lob the cherry-red cricket ball slowly enough for the children to hit as hard as they liked.

  It was heaven, and I even had a stray, disloyal thought. We were rich enough now never to have to leave Melbourne. Why didn’t we buy this lovely home and stay here, close to the boys’ school and close to the Battens? I had realised by now that what the DNI had said was true and that Malaya was never going to be the place it had been before the war. The winds of change were blowing through the rickety framework of Colonial society, demolishing some of the awful things that had to go, but also tearing down some of the certainties on which that society depended. There had been odd incidents of violence, irrational acts reported in the Straits Times with bemusement rather than fear. A planter in Johore was shot at while conducting morning roll-call with his tappers. The assailant, a Chinese clerk, gave no explanation for the attack except to say that the days of the white man were over in Malaya. In Perak, an unidentified group of men had attacked a village, tied up everyone they could capture, and quite capriciously murdered anyone connected in any way with British-owned enterprises. And closer to home, a European woman out walking her dog had been shot and wounded near the Katong Golf Club for no reason at all.

  Just after Christmas we had a visit from the Chrystals. Bob had spent the war in the Malayan jungle with Force 136, and had emerged a very sick man, his stomach ulcers in open rebellion against the jungle diet that had assaulted them for the past three years. But a year’s recuperation under Babs’ care in their Perth home had done wonders and when the two of them clambered out of their taxi it seemed as if time had rolled backwards and we were all young again. They had brought their tennis racquets and sandshoes, and Bob had a chilled bottle of Moet champagne under his arm.

  ‘Isn’t this just like Ampang Road?’ Babs said as we embraced. ‘You’ve even got a pillared portico. I almost expect to see old Teng bustling out to take our things.’

  We played tennis, and had a casual lunch of cold meats and salad in the breakfast room. And then we talked. We had an awful lot to talk about.

  ‘Was it awful for you, Bob?’ I asked. ‘I did hear that they had to carry you out of the jungle on a stretcher.’

  Bob laughed. ‘It wasn’t quite as bad as that. But they did put me into hospital for a few months.’ He pursed his lips, a small frown creasing his forehead. ‘But I’ve often wondered since what earthly use it all was. Sticking it out year after year in the stinking jungle, without so much as a glimpse of the Japanese. It seems in retrospect to have been a complete waste of time and effort.’

  I remembered Denis’s argument with Pat Noone up in the Telom Valley about the futility of hiding in the jungle. But of course I couldn’t say that to Bob. ‘I am sure that just by being there, you tied up Japanese soldiers who could have been better employed somewhere else,’ I said.

  Bob didn’t look convinced. ‘It cost a lot of us our lives,’ he said. ‘Fine chaps like Pat Noone. I really think it was an awful mistake. There were hundreds of us in the jungle – Communists, Kuomintang, and the British – but I doubt we bothered the Japanese one little bit.’

  Late in the afternoon we played cricket with the children, and then, when they had been sent up for a bath and bed, and the shadows were falling in our lovely garden, we opened the Moet. I took some cushions up to the little garden house, and we sprawled on them toasting absent friends.

  I don’t think we were being maudlin but it seemed to us, being all together once again, that it was an appropriate moment to contemplate the ledger of life and death. So many of the old KL crowd had died. Roger Hornung, killed by a falling beam while trying to help evacuate the burning District Offices in Kuantan after an air raid. Jane and Sandy Burns, the couple who had stopped to admire the Alvis in Bentong so long ago, who died when their ship went down fleeing Singapore. Margaret and Alec had died – I’m quite sure now – because the Japanese had mistaken their house for ours. Ivan Lyon had died on Soreh Island when Operation Rimau went wrong. And of course poor Pat Noone had died deep in the ulu, killed, we had learnt, not in a glorious fight with the Japs but stabbed in the back by his companion, Uda, who had fallen in love with Anjang.

  But many had lived, and after we’d toasted the dead we toasted the living.

  ‘Here’s to all of us who survived,’ Bob said finally. ‘And to the destiny – or the sheer blind chance – that brought us through. I sometimes feel quite guilty that I’m alive and kicking, and so many finer than I are mouldering in the grave. But I tell myself that it wrong to think like that. It’s better to think that the gift of life comes with an obligation. To make sure that our children never have to go through what we’ve been through.’

  Denis nodded vigorously. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Bob. We must never be weak again. We must never give in to the bullies and the standover men. We must play them at their own game, and beat them at it.’

  Later, it began to rain and we went indoors and talked about post-war Malaya. ‘Are you going back?’ I asked Bob.

  Bob was emphatic. ‘Not on your life, dear girl. There is going to be a bloodbath in Malaya, mark my words. The Communists will take over quite legally, and when they are in charge all hell will break loose. They will want to wipe out every aspect of the existing order and start afresh. It’ll be like Russia during the worst of Stalin’s purges.’

  ‘Could the Communists ever take over legally?’ I asked. ‘Win an election, I mean? I don’t think Communists have ever won an election, anywhere in the world.’

  ‘They’re about to win this one,’ Bob said firmly. ‘They’re quite the heroes amongst the native people. They’re given credit for turfing out the Japs. The fact that they hardly trou
bled the Japs in reality doesn’t matter a jot – it’s perception that counts.’

  Denis, Frances and I sailed back to Malaya at the end of February 1947, into the jaws of what was to become known as the Malayan Emergency. The Communists called it the War of the Running Dogs.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  About a week after we returned to Singapore, I woke in the early hours to hear the kampong dogs barking wildly. It meant that someone was coming through Mata Ikan, and as the road came on only to Casuarinas it meant we were about to have a visitor. Denis heard the racket too, and clambered out of bed with a small groan. There was no sound of an engine, so our visitor would have to be on foot or on a bicycle.

  For some reason my heart was racing and after Denis headed to the front door I pulled on my dressing gown and hurried after him. By the time I caught up with him he was waiting under the porch. Chu Lun had intercepted our visitor on the gravel turning circle at the end of the drive and was leading him towards us. The porch light revealed a dishevelled, pale-faced Loi Tak.

  ‘What sort of blithering idiot are you?’ Denis snapped. ‘By now the whole village must know you’ve come to see me.’

  ‘I had a scarf around my face,’ Loi Tak said shakily. ‘Nobody could have recognised me. But those dogs! I had no idea they would make so much noise.’ He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. ‘But they are only ignorant villagers in the kampong. No one would know who I am.’ He was doing his best to appear calm but we could both see he was rattled, and I sat him down while Denis poured him a small glass of whisky.

  ‘What’s the trouble, Loi Tak?’ Denis asked, falling into a chair beside him. I was about to leave them to it, but Denis signalled me to stay and I too pulled up a chair.