Aldiss, Brian W-A Rude Awakening

by A Rude Awakening(Lit)

  'They won't take any notice, I warn you,' said the corporal. He tailed off with Johnny Mercer. I headed for my billet. My time was up.

  Breakfast restored some of my depleted energies. I was shaving in my room when Johnny Mercer entered. He took a look at the Chinese servant who was obsequiously cleaning round, and told him to get out.

  'Merdeka! You're a krab sight, Horry. Getting it up too much, that's the trouble. Take my advice and pack it in a bit or you'll be dead before you reach Blighty.' These were standard pleasantries and I ignored them.

  'Did you get "O" Section out digging spuds?'

  'No. They said they weren't a bunch of wogs, and that digging was a job for the Indian Other Ranks.'

  'Who's that feeble tit of a corporal?'

  'Steve Kyle? He's not a bad bloke. It's the situation. The NEI isn't Burma.'

  I dried my face and prepared to brush my teeth. 'Do you know how much this bloody toothpaste cost me? You realise that the "Q" stores is out of toothpaste? And the NAAFI. It's all going to the Dutch.'

  'I've got a bit of Dutch crumpet who works in the RAPWI shop. She'll get you a tube cheap. There's plenty up the RAPWI.'

  'Six bloody Dutch guilders I had to pay for this toothpaste. That's eleven bob, eleven and a kick. Daylight robbery. So what did you do?'

  'They agreed to parade at 8.30 hours for Arms Inspection, and you should have heard them ticking about that. But I couldn't get them out for digging. They wouldn't bloody well go.'

  He went and stood on the balcony, gazing morosely at the distant jungle. Johnny Mercer was solidly built, with a big red neck and thin brown hair. He had been in Burma and knew what was what, but this morning he was not his old self. He clutched at his big red neck.

  'I've got a hangover,' he said moodily. 'I hate this fucking dump. What are we doing here, anyway? The NEI isn't our pigeon. We should have left this spot of trouble to the Dutch. I suppose you realise that we handed Sumatra over to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic Wars now here we go again... Privately, my sympathies are with the BORs. Why should they go out digging the fields at seven in the morning, like a lot of coolies? Still, their refusal is serious, isn't it?'

  Spitting and wiping my mouth, I said, 'Very serious. Mutiny. We're on Active Service still they could be shot for mutiny. You'd better go and talk to Jhamboo Singh he's the Officer i/c. Perhaps there's some way round it.'

  'Jhamboo. Yes, I suppose I had... What a bloody position.' He sauntered back into the room, still clutching his neck. 'What's going to happen to your furniture when you've gone? I like that cabinet.'

  In my room, tastefully arranged, I had an ornate mahogany cabinet, a fine mahogany table, a little brass side-table, and a heavy sideboard on which my collection of Balinese carvings stood. All the gear was looted, except for the carvings, which I bought with cigarettes in the bazaar. The cabinet had come with me overland from Padang.

  My room gave me a lot of pleasure, although I was so rarely in it. On my walls I had bright posters of Hanuman, the Monkey God, and little pink Parvati on her lotus leaf. Over the head of my bed hung a large pin-up of Ida Lupino, slender, browbeaten, ever courageous.

  'What'll you offer for the job lot?'

  He laughed. 'Nothing. I'll wait till you're gone and then I'll commandeer it.'

  When Johnny left, I scrutinised my face narrowly in the glass, prodding at its pimples and folds. A blank sort of face, I thought, yet not undistinguished. What was it going to look like, perched over a suit, collar, and tie? And what was I going to do in Civvy Street? Follow father's footsteps into the bank, no doubt. Now I was a hero, tough, pretty independent; there, I'd be just one more pale-faced clerk. Now I had a smashing bird; and then...

  The first heat of the day was getting through. I went to lie down on my bed, putting my hands behind my head and staring up at the cracks on the ceiling.

  The Chinese cleaner came bowing himself into the room. I shouted to him to get out until I called.

  Like a bird to a pool, the image of Margey's face came back to me, that mysterious oriental face with those slanted eyes, that perfect mouth, the lips in repose like something carved. Only two hours ago I had wakened to find her beside me, and my arm full of cramps because she was lying on my wrist. I lay absorbing the sight of her, the curl of her hair round her ear and neck, the inexplicable curve of her shoulder.

  Margey's room with all its grotty detail was revealed to me in monochrome. Beyond the curtains were a thousand broken rooftops, all with tiles missing. Medan, falling apart at the seams...

  My happiness had lasted only a moment. Came the pain, the knowledge that it was Friday, that in three days I would be swept away in one of those directives issuing from the Company Office. I sat up, and she awoke.

  Then I'd left her, clung to her and left her, feeling so sick on my way back to the lines that I'd almost have welcomed a few extremists rising before me in the dawn-light and shooting me down into some stinking ditch.

  I fell asleep for an hour. But circumstances were already at work to ensure that this was my last peaceful day in Sumatra...

  The roofs of Medan were broken and the town was tumbling. Its occupying force was also in ruinous condition.

  I had arrived in Medan only six weeks ago, having previously been in Padang or on detachment at Fort de Kock. During those six weeks, I had removed myself as far as possible from the army. It had ceased to have functional point; the closing down of the Fourteenth Army had been the final blow.

  Despite my feeling of severance, emphasised by the detachment from my own unit, I could no more visualise myself as a civilian than I could visualise Margey away from Sumatra. The army had bred in me a contempt for the cushy civilian life; perhaps I clung to Margey as part of a more heroic existence.

  However that might be, I woke from my sleep with an urgent resolve to marry the girl. Why fucking not? I'd show my mates how independent I was. At least I would see what the score was and today, before the weekend set in. I would speak to Captain Boyer over the wireless link and discuss the situation with him. With that done, I would face Margey and settle her complaints one way or the other for her complaints carried weight with me and then we could go and swim.

  I washed the sweat off my face and neck and dressed myself. The billet I lived in was beautiful. The rooms downstairs were high and cool, the staircase had an elegant curl, and there was a carved front door. Before the war, the place had belonged to a prosperous planter who headed for Australia when the Japs arrived and got himself killed in a bar-room brawl in Darwin. Under Jap rule, the building formed part of the Neutrals Camp, where Swiss and Swedes and their assorted women had been confined for the duration. Now it was a sergeants' billet. I tried out a quick daydream about Margey's and my living here when the British troops left, complete with bearers to wait on us; but the bearers would not stay still, and became petty officials in the new Indonesian order instead.

  Nobody was about outside. The sun had already achieved tyrannical power and anyone who could scrounge a way off official duties would be stretched out on his charpoy.

  The line of Dutch houses, with their neglected gardens and riotous shrubs, was sheltered by deciduous trees, doubtless imported from nurserymen in Amsterdam. As soon as I stepped out of their shadow, my body oozed sweat into my newly laundered jungle greens. A butterfly flew past me at waist-level, its wings as big as saucers.

  I strolled over to 'M' Section, to get a vehicle to take me into town. Things were a bit jungly in 'M' Section. It had taken over a large thatched barn and fortified the space all round with rattan screens and barbed wire. There was a guard permanently on the gate, though he sometimes dozed under his square of thatch.

  A few vehicles stood frying in the sun. In the shade of the barn, other vehicles were being repaired. Most of the vehicles and all of the repair equipment was Jap. It was an indication of feeling in the House of Commons, as well as of the situation in India and the NEI, that 26 Div had never managed to come up to strength, an
d relied heavily on commandeered equipment. The fact that such equipment as was permitted came via Singapore added to our problems. There was a shortage of everything the 'Q' stores could not even provide new socks. If 26 Div did not pull out soon, it was going to be reduced to growing its own food in earnest.

  Colour-Sergeant Ron Dyer stood at the entrance to the barn, smoking. He was a regular, and had been through the Arakan. At his waist he wore a Jap aviator's sword, which made him look like a pirate. Apart from this weapon, and his revolver, he wore a filthy pair of dungarees, boots, and nothing else. His great chest and glistening belly were streaked with dirt. Directly he saw me, he set up an outcry and moved sluggishly about in mock-panic.

  'Right, lads, watch your vehicles! Watch these tyres or they'll be all gone like shit off a hot stove. Keep your eye on anything this bloke can lift. Watch your rings! What do you want here, Stubbs? Got a gin-palace to flog me cheap?'

  'You've got fuck-all here anyone would want to swipe, Dyer.'

  The gin-palace scandal was something I would never live down, not if I served another hundred years in the army.

  If equipment was in short supply in Medan, matters were much worse in Padang. Padang lay south of the equator, on the other side of the island. Any goods intended for Padang had to make a sea-voyage from Medan of some twelve hundred miles. Air transport was scarce. There was a hazardous trail over the island the trail five hundred miles long by which I had travelled to Medan but that had always been threatened by extremists and was now entirely in their hands.

  Padang was an outpost an outpost which began to look increasingly forlorn as the political situation deteriorated.

  One thing the garrison in Padang needed: a signal station. Their radio equipment consisted of battered old 22 sets. These relayed messages up to a hill station above the town, a place called Bukitinghi, from which signals were relayed over the mountains to Medan. Bukitinghi came under threat, with a signals captain shot up on the hazardous road back to Padang. A proper mobile signals station known throughout the army as a gin-palace was ordered. The message went to Bukitinghi, to Medan, to Singapore, to Calcutta, to Delhi, and so back to 26 Div supply base, many hundreds of miles away in Amritsar.

  Six months later, a supply ship landed a gin-palace at Belawan, the port of Medan.

  That gin-palace was the reason for my being on detachment in Medan. I had been despatched from Padang to collect the gin-palace by road. The Mendips had supplied a truck, a driver, two BORs, a Bren gun, and a load of supplies, and we had driven that marathon road across the interior of Sumatra, over a massive mountain range amid still-active volcanoes, past Lake Toba, down to Medan. What a ride! The adventure of my life!

  There's no more marvellous country anywhere in the world. We were not shot at once.

  But that was six weeks ago. Since then, the Indonesians had gained confidence, knowing we were pulling out, and closed the overland route. There was no way of getting the gin-palace to Padang, except by sea.

  Meanwhile, the road between Medan and Belawan port became increasingly dangerous. I was given an escort to drive to the port and pick up the gin-palace. When we arrived, we found not one but ten gin-palaces. There they were, in a line, sitting out in the flaming sun beside a deserted go-down. The signal to Amritsar had become garbled on its way back to base.

  I drove our one gin-palace back to Medan as ordered. It was like driving an oven on wheels.

  At Div HQ I tried explaining the whole thing to an RASC major who took a dim view of the matter. Eventually, he agreed to send a signal to Amritsar to get the situation clarified. Messages went back and forth, days seeped by. I was ordered by the same dim major to form a convoy and collect the other nine gin-palaces; they were to be guarded carefully in Medan until they could be shipped back to Calcutta.

  Our convoy was fired at and one Indian driver was killed. We arrived at the harbour. The nine gin-palaces had gone.

  That was the story, and many a bitter laugh it raised.

  In the popular version of the story I had done an arms-deal. I was in charge of the vehicles and so was responsible for selling all nine on the black market to the local branch of Soekarno's TRI; I had made a fortune. My version of the story was that the RASC major had made the killing. What had really happened was that the Indonesians had driven them off. The vehicles had been left standing on the dockside by the Indian RASC with ignition keys in the ignition locks.

  This was why Colour-Sergeant Dyer, not a man normally given to humour, cried aloud, 'Watch your vehicles,' whenever I went near 'M' Section. The one gin-palace we had rescued stood, practically unused, in his park. It would never reach Padang. Some humorist had stencilled the word MERDEKA in neat yellow letters on its sides.

  I gave Dyer a fag and we had a little chat.

  'It's all right for some, Stubbs. I shall have to hang on here till the Div pulls out at the end of the year. They can't do without me I've only got Wogs under me. We're supposed to be patching up any vehicles we can lay our hands on to sell to the bloody Dutch when they take over.'

  'It'll be a bloodbath then, PM told.'

  'You wouldn't fucking chuckle it will...'

  We sucked on our cigarettes. Monkeys ran in the high branches above the barn.

  'It's a terrible thought. Sumatra's such a beautiful fucking island.'

  'Beautiful buggery. It's easy for you to say, mate you're off home thora pechi. They can all kill each other down to the last little black baby for all I care, once I get out of here.'

  'You're being unkind, Ron. It's not like you.'

  'You can stuff your hypocrisy, too. These people mean nothing to us, and we've no bloody business being here. You know who let us in the shit same as I do the bloody Americans. In particular, Harry Truman and General Fucking MacArthur. The NEI is part of the Pacific, and the Americans should have administered it theirselves, instead of off-loading it on to Mountbatten.'

  'I suppose it'll sort itself out in the end.'

  'They've got to sort out their own bloody troubles. Me, all I want is to get out of this fucking uniform.'

  As it happened I ran across Ron Dyer a year or two later, in Civvy Street. He had joined the police. He had lost a stone or two and looked good in his uniform.

  An Indian driver came over, grinning, and climbed into one of the Jeeps parked under the trees.

  'There's your gharri, Stubby-lad. See that little bugger doesn't bash it up or flog it to the Sumatrans.'

  I climbed in, gave Ron a wave, and we bowled down the Serdenweg and into the centre of town. As we were going at a brave smack, the whole gusto of life hit me. For the moment personal problems were forgotten. We were at the heart of things; the thought that we could be shot at at any moment just enhanced the tide of the blood. And Margey was not far away Margey, mine, mine, semi-mine. I began to sing.

  I see your face in every flower,

  Your eyes in stars above:

  It's just the thought of you

  The very thought of you, my love.

  When it was travelling at speed, my voice was quite as good as Bing Crosby's.

  The driver took me a long way round. He must have enjoyed my singing. He breezed by the Deli railway station, where the drivers and horses of two ancient gharris dozed in the sun, and braked flamboyantly in front of the signal office as instructed.

  This had been the smart end of town before history overtook it. Like everything else, the building before us had been wrenched out of its intended purpose. Three years earlier, it had been a flower shop, where prosperous wives and daughters of planters came in their white dresses to buy the exotic flora with which Sumatra abounded. It was a low wooden building with large windows; now the windows were boarded and walls of sandbags were piled before it. A Rajput naik stood guard at the entrance.

  Inside, each tucked into its own sandbagged nook, six wireless sets were operating, their operators working in R/T or W/T to ALFSEA in Singapore, to Batavia, or to detachments in places like Palembang and Pada
ng. Links to smaller outposts such as Sabang and Benkoelen were worked for an hour or two every morning. A couple of the operators nodded to me; as a spare bod with some understanding of signals procedure, I had been known to take over from them for an hour or two if needed.

  The superintendent came out of the rear room, clutching a piyala full of tea. It was Steve Kyle, the thin sharp-nosed corporal who had failed to get the lads out of bed for Agricultural Duties.

  'I want to put through a call to Captain Boyer in Padang HQ,' I said. 'Can I borrow the R/T for five minutes?'

  'There's a lot of traffic this morning, Sergeant. Is it important?'

  'Of course. It's about my demob next week.'

  He went over to his desk and set the mug down, looking at it rather than me.

  'Your message will have to go through Admin. I can't accept private traffic.'