In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  ‘Tabek, Tuan,’ the leader of the group said politely, and then all three Communists opened fire, killing Arthur instantly.

  An hour later a dozen members of the same regiment emerged from the jungle armed with rifles and Sten guns and surrounded the offices of the Sungai Siput Rubber Estate just a few miles from the royal capital of Perak. They herded the office staff into the canteen, selected the two Europeans present – the manager, John Allison, and his assistant, Ian Christian – tied them up and shot them both through the head. They then set fire to the Estate’s smokehouse and its rubber stocks. Before disappearing back into the jungle the group’s leader lined up all the Asian staff. ‘The MCP has declared war on the British,’ he shouted. ‘All Europeans in Malaya are now enemies of the MCP and will be killed. Those of you who help the British or consort with them we will label “running dogs”. We will kill all running dogs of the British, mark my words.’

  By lunchtime, the threat against running dogs was being translated into fact. On the Senai Rubber Estate in Johore, a brave Chinese supervisor shouted out a warning as a half-dozen MCP soldiers moved in to surround the manager’s house. He was immediately machine-gunned to death. A Chinese contractor to the Taiping Local Government Council who was known to be a friend of the European town clerk was dragged from his home, handcuffed to a tree, and blown to pieces with a hand-grenade.

  By early afternoon, Radio Malaya was broadcasting warnings to all Europeans to stay indoors. Police reserves had been called up and at three o’clock the Governor of Malaya, Sir Edward Gent, declared a state of emergency.

  The vicious, lethal little war known as the Malayan Emergency had begun.

  At first, the sheer speed of events seemed to have caught the authorities flatfooted, but by early evening counter-measures were being taken. Prominent Communists who had not fled into the jungle were arrested in droves. The two Communist newspapers in Malaya, the Min Sheng Pau and the Vanguard, were raided and their staff taken into custody. Arrest warrants were issued for Chin Peng and for Lau Yew, whom Chin Peng had named his war leader. A price of ten thousand dollars was put on Chin Peng’s head – an unheard of amount in those days.

  ‘So it has started at last,’ I said flatly. ‘I’m almost relieved. At least now we know where we stand. We don’t have to pretend that the Communists are friends any more. They’re enemies and out-and-out murderers, and we can start fighting fire with fire.’ Denis and I had been listening to the radio all afternoon, which had suspended its normal programs to concentrate on the momentous events of the day.

  ‘Some Communists are our enemies,’ Denis said carefully. ‘Don’t tar them all with the same brush.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said sharply. ‘They’re all exactly the same. Look at Chin Peng. We thought he was a good man but he’s the one who’s leading the killers on their rampage.’

  ‘And Ah Khow?’ Denis asked. ‘Does this mean he’s going to murder us in our beds?’

  I thought about that. I liked Ah Khow. I trusted him. All day long he had gone out of his way to make it clear to me that he was as shocked at the killings as we were. ‘I will not let any Communists harm you, Mem,’ he had said at one point, looking me straight in the eye, ‘or Tuan, or the children. I would die before letting them do that.’

  ‘I’m prepared to make an exception of Ah Khow,’ I said. ‘But that’s because he’s a decent human being. Most Communists are sick people who want to destroy everything that other people have, just to bring them down to their own unhappy level.’

  Sir Edward Gent issued a statement late that night which was broadcast throughout Malaya in all the main languages. ‘This we promise you,’ the statement said. ‘These terrible killings will be stopped, and their perpetrators brought to justice. Terror will not prevail in Malaya.’

  But of course the killings did continue, and the terror bit more deeply. Over the next few days the nature of the atrocities changed. At first, only Europeans of stature were attacked – the managers of rubber estates and tin mines, senior government officials, police officers. But soon ordinary Europeans, including women and children, were being killed. Cars were ambushed at random, stopped by a log drawn across the road and then riddled with bullets fired indiscriminately from the jungle. Isolated houses were surrounded, their inhabitants interrogated, and all Europeans and running dogs executed on the spot.

  Life in Malaya became a waking nightmare.

  But somehow, inexplicably, not at Starlight. Life went on as usual in our elegant eyrie above the jungle. Looking back, I am astounded at just how calmly we accepted what was happening around us. I remember looking at a photograph in the Malay Mail of a motor car on its side, riddled with bullets, and thinking That happened just outside of Tapah. Not thirty miles from here, and yet the knowledge had no impact at all. The truth was, of course, that we felt immune from the violence and the tragedy that was convulsing Malaya. We felt protected by our Talisman.

  Our Talisman was of course Ah Khow. He was a Communist, but a Communist who was completely on our side. There is a saying of the Sakai people: ‘the safest place in the jungle is in the mouth of the tiger’. Ah Khow represented our tiger, and we were the kittens carried safely in its jaws.

  Ah Khow’s membership of the MCP did have its drawbacks. On the first weekend of the Emergency, the local inspector of police at Ringlet, a young Scot called Sandy McCabe, had driven up to Starlight with an armed constable and asked for ‘a quiet chat’.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll need to pull in your man Ah Khow,’ McCabe had said. ‘He’s a thorough-going Communist for sure, and we suspect he’s linked to one of the worst of the Communist regiments, the Tiger Regiment.’ We were standing in Denis’s study, the Malay constable with us nervously fingering the safety-catch of his tommy-gun.

  ‘Well, you’re not going to have him,’ Denis said firmly. ‘Ah Khow’s a damned fine cook, and a good friend to boot. If you lay a hand on him I’ll have my lawyer slap a writ of habeus corpus on you before you can say Jack Robinson.’

  McCabe looked slightly shocked. ‘I’m pulling him in for your own safety, sir,’ he said. ‘You don’t want a Communist killer loose in your home, do you?’

  ‘He’s not a killer,’ I retorted. ‘And you have no right to say such things about him without any evidence. Ah Khow is a gentleman, and we trust him completely.’

  McCabe looked straight through me and then turned back to Denis. ‘You’ll be sending Mrs Elesmere-Elliott and the children back to Singapore, of course? Far too dangerous for them to stay here. Cameron Highlands is marked red on my map, which means we think it’s thick with Communists.’

  ‘Surely it is up to me to say whether I go or stay?’ I asked angrily. ‘Now, Inspector, we’ve told you you’re not taking Ah Khow, so why don’t you and your soldier just shove off?’

  McCabe still refused to look at me. ‘Sir?’ he asked Denis. ‘Surely you don’t want to be murdered in your own home?’

  Denis cleared his throat. ‘You heard my wife,’ he said mildly. ‘If I were you, Inspector McCabe, I’d do precisely what she said. Shove off.’

  That evening, Ah Khow approached me after dinner. Denis had taken the children up to bed and I was sitting by the window staring out rather pensively at the gathering dusk. ‘I know the police wanted to arrest me this afternoon, Mem,’ he said. ‘You and Tuan stood up for me. Thank you. And please believe me – no harm will come to you or your family.’

  I did believe him. Implicitly. Even when the murders began in Cameron Highlands itself. Jock and Ethel McCubbin, an elderly couple living on a tea plantation a couple of miles from Ringlet, answered a knock on their door late one evening. According to the servants, six men in scruffy MCP uniforms burst into the house. They tied the McCubbins to their dining room chairs and used them for bayonet practice.

  Denis and I had just finished an early morning round of golf when we heard the news. We came into the clubhouse to see a group of members clustered around the bar, white-faced and
silent. Nora Warin left them and came over to us. ‘You must leave Starlight,’ she said almost harshly. ‘They’ve murdered the McCubbins down at Ringlet – and the McCubbins were right on the main road. You would be mad to stay out in the jungle as you are.’

  Denis looked shaken for a moment, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and passing it over his face. But he recovered quickly. ‘I knew Jock well,’ he said. ‘He is – he was – an old Malaya hand and a very fine man indeed. I’m dreadfully sorry to hear that he and Ethel are dead.’

  ‘Come back to the Smoke House,’ Nora demanded. ‘Today. Then you can join one of the convoys. They are arranging armed convoys to take people down to the train at Tapah. I think the first one is due to leave this afternoon.’

  Denis shook his head. ‘It’s terrible about poor Jock and Ethel,’ he said quietly, ‘but it doesn’t change anything. In fact it makes it all the more important to carry on.’ He looked so vulnerable and so brave that I came up and instinctively linked my arm with his.

  ‘Thank you for your concern,’ I said to Nora. ‘But of course Denis is right. We must carry on.’

  A lot of people left Cameron Highlands after the McCubbin murders, but those who remained were infected with a feeling probably akin to that which infected Londoners during the Blitz. A sense of comradeship and of shared danger, which inspires confidence and a determination to not give in. When we ran into other Europeans – shopping in the bazaar at Tanah Rata, or playing golf, or riding at the Cameron Highlands Riding Club – we would greet each other like long-lost friends. ‘Still keeping the flag flying?’ we’d cry out cheerfully, as if it was all a game.

  But while most people went home knowing that there was a real chance they’d face terror before the dawn, we went back to the sanctuary of Starlight sublimely confident of our safety. Ah Khow would greet us at the door with a grave smile, Amah would bring in the makan kechil with our pre-dinner drinks, and soon we would be eating a scrumptious dinner while the children told us tall tales and true about their day at school.

  The Communists were not having it all their way. Within weeks of the declaration of the Emergency every rubber plantation and every tin mine in Malaya had been provided with its own detachment of Gurkhas. Every town police station had been reinforced with tough, experienced sergeants flown in from the demobilised Palestine Police Force. Every European school, including Tanglin School in Cameron Highlands, had been surrounded by thickets of barbed wire and was guarded by troops.

  We even began to hear of occasional successes against the Communists. ‘Bandits’ (as we called them in those days) attacked the police stations at Kuala Krau in central Pahang and at Senenak in Johore, but were beaten off in both actions with more casualties than they had inflicted. And early in July a Communist patrol was itself ambushed by security forces just outside Seremban and completely wiped out. The successful ambush was reason enough for celebration, but the papers recovered from the pouch of a dead courier were an even greater cause for joy. They showed that there were serious divisions within Communist ranks, and that the seemingly invincible forces in the jungle were already going through great self-doubts.

  The papers, which became known as the Selangor Papers, were translated, analysed, and released to the Malayan press both to show Europeans the weakness of the Communist position, and to expose to the Communists the frailties of their leaders. The papers included minutes of a meeting of the MCP’s Politburo which indicated that a bitter falling-out had occurred between the second highest Communist leader, Lau Yew, and the Party’s Secretary-General, Chin Peng. Lau had argued that the move into the jungle had been a fatal mistake. ‘The jungle is not on our side,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘It is sapping our strength, limiting our mobility, and clouding our vision. We should have remained invisible in the cities and towns of Malaya. There we had food, shelter, and anonymity. Secretary-General Chin has led us into a wilderness and the question has to be asked: why?’

  On 12 July, the Communists undertook their biggest operation to date. It was clearly an attempt to wrest back the initiative, and it was far from a success. Elements from four MCP regiments attacked Malaya’s largest coal mine at Batu Arang. The mine had symbolic importance, having been the scene of the Communist-led strike back in 1936 that had thrown Malaya into panic. On that occasion six thousand strikers had taken over the mine, but today sixty jungle-weary guerrillas had been able to hold the town for less than an hour before melting back into the jungle. It was dramatic confirmation of General Lau’s assessment that the move into the jungle had been a miscalculation. ‘Make no mistake,’ the Malay Mail predicted. ‘This failure sounds the death-knell of arch-fiend Chin Peng, the man determined to wage war on women and children.’

  In fact, it sounded the death-knell of Lau Yew. Only four days after the attack on Batu Arang, a police superintendent called Bill Stafford, acting on a mysterious tip-off, raided an isolated cottage near the town of Kajang with a squad of fourteen Chinese and Malay detectives. As they moved in on the cottage in the pre-dawn darkness, three men charged out, firing as they came. One of them was Lau Yew himself, and he ended up a crumpled heap in the dust, a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

  And so died the most able soldier on the MCP’s side, and the man who had marched with Chin Peng in the Victory Parade in London, cheered by a hundred thousand people and saluted by the King and Queen of England.

  Towards the end of July our beloved Wolseley arrived at Starlight, driven up from Singapore by a brave man who earned every cent of the hundred dollars Denis paid him. It arrived in a rainstorm, but we all ran out to meet it, a forest of umbrellas over our heads, as it pulled up in the driveway. Even Ah Khow came out, his thin face struggling against a smile.

  ‘It is like an old friend, Mem?’ he asked.

  I touched him on the arm. ‘A dear old friend, Ah Khow. We even took it to Australia with us. Tuan won’t let anyone drive it except himself. We have not had a syce since we bought it.’

  Ah Khow looked at me seriously for a moment. ‘It would be good if Mem and the children always drove in this car,’ he said. ‘Not in any other car. This is a safe car, Mem. It will protect you.’ He sounded so sincere, so concerned, that I smiled and nodded solemnly.

  The next day was a Saturday, and we took the Wolseley on its first outing. Ah Khow packed a wicker basket with sandwiches, scones and small jam tarts, and we drove to Robinson’s Falls. The falls had been a popular picnic spot before the Emergency, usually packed on a Saturday with families sprawled in the shade of the tall teak trees. But it is isolated, and on this occasion we had it entirely to ourselves. It was a hot, still afternoon, and after lunch Denis and I stretched out on a blanket with our books while the children splashed in shallows well above the falls, cooling off in the cool mountain water. I recall that I had just put my book down and was staring sleepily into the sky when I heard their chatter cease, the sudden silence seeming somehow sinister. Denis was looking over my shoulder, a curious expression on his face.

  I rolled onto my side and looked towards the river. The children were frozen in a silent tableau, staring into the jungle, and suddenly my heart was beating twenty to the dozen.

  It is happening, I thought. Communists will come out of the jungle, their weapons levelled and within minutes we will all be dead. But even as the thought formed I saw the tiger. It was a huge, lethal-looking beast, walking towards the children with the tip of its tail flicking like an angry cat. A rumble, more a vibration of the air than a sound, issued from deep within its chest.

  Denis had got to his feet. ‘Don’t try and run away, children,’ he called, his voice light, soothing, almost flippant. ‘Just move around naturally until I get there.’ He sauntered towards the river, his hands deep in his trouser pockets, a careless smile on his face.

  ‘I’m scared,’ Frances called back. ‘Can we go home?’

  ‘You mustn’t let the tiger think you’re frightened,’ Denis said conversationally. ‘It won’t char
ge unless you make a run for it.’ He reached the riverbank and held out his arms. ‘Now,’ he ordered, his voice suddenly crisp and authoritative. ‘Come back past me and go straight to the car. Quickly but quietly.’ As the children passed him Denis strode purposefully out into the shallows, then stood with his arms on his hips facing the tiger. The tiger stopped too, and then dropped down on its haunches, staring at Denis with unblinking eyes.

  Its deep rumble subsided. Its ears pricked up. The tail stopped flicking.

  ‘Oh, go to blazes!’ Denis said suddenly, turning on his heel and striding back towards the car. For a second, a heartbeat, I thought the tiger would charge. But as if in parody of Denis’s actions, it too got up, turned and loped back into the jungle.

  ‘A near-run thing,’ Denis said as we sat in the car. He took a cigarette from his cigarette case and offered me one, his hands shaking with reaction. Then he turned to the children in the back seat. ‘Top marks to all of you. It’s not every day you run into a tiger in the wild.’

  I had put my arms around Frances, but now she pulled away. ‘I wasn’t frightened,’ she insisted a little breathlessly. ‘It was a nice tiger. It wasn’t going to hurt us. It wanted to play.’

  Tony took a long, deep breath. ‘If you like it so much why don’t you go back and play with the pussy cat?’ he said. ‘We’ll watch you from the car.’ The boy was learning irony.

  That night we had a dinner party. We had Miss Griff and Bob Stone, Horace Parsons, an old friend of Denis’s whom we’d run into at the Golf Club, and a girl called ‘Pinka’ Robinson. Pinka ran the Cameron Highlands Riding School and seemed a perfect match for Horace. It was a lovely evening, gracious and friendly, and eminently civilised. Our glass and silver sparkled on the table, Ah Khow had exceeded himself with the food, and the imported French wines were as good as they were supposed to be.

  This, I thought to myself dreamily, is really living. This crazy amalgam of utter wildness, comfort and security.