Aldiss, Brian W-A Rude Awakening

by A Rude Awakening(Lit)

'I want to speak to Boyer. If you're busy, then it's quicker for us to have a chat over the R/T than to send half a dozen messages each way. Doesn't that make sense to you, Corporal ?'

  He faced up to me.

  'It may make sense to you, but you know very well that unauthorised persons are not allowed to go on the air, nor are they even allowed in the signal office. Okay?' He looked me straight in the eye. Pale and peacetime though he was, he was a determined bugger.

  Lowering my voice, I said, 'You've suddenly turned into a stickler for discipline, haven't you, Corporal? You put on a pretty feeble show this morning. Let me remind you that you have a mutiny on your hands, the consequences of which could be very serious for you as well as the blokes you think you're defending.'

  He coloured. 'Don't give me the Old Sweat bit, for Christ's sake, Sergeant. You old soldiers have had it, that's why they're shipping you home. You're going to get a shock when you get to Britain: we've got a Labour government now, you may have heard. It's Attlee you're under now, not Churchill, and things have changed. My chaps refused to dig this morning for the same reason that the British have failed to turn Sumatra back into a colony. Sense prevailed. The bloody war's over. The ordinary man's going to have his say here, at home, and anywhere else you care to name. So don't use old-fashioned words like mutiny to me.'

  Some of the IORs and BORs at the sets were turning round to listen, grinning. When it came to being shit-or-bust, I could teach these rookies things they never knew; but being shit-or- bust was personal, a very different thing from the new couldn't- care-less attitude coming from Blighty with sods like Kyle. What the hell were they doing back there, Attlee and the rest of them? The Fourteenth Army had fought for India and Burma, and many a good man had gone down, including my mates, the good old lads of the Mendips and 2 Div. Now what was going on? They were giving India away, and no one knew what was happening in Burma.

  I said, 'I gave you an order this morning, Kyle, to get your section out on spade parade. You failed to carry it out. You are involved with the rest of them and that's got nothing to do with politics. It's a matter of army discipline. Unless you want trouble, pack in the bullshit and give me five minutes' air space.'

  He began to sweat. 'Don't you threaten me, Sergeant Stubbs! You have no business in here. I'd be within my rights to fetch the Duty Officer and have you turned out. You had no business to give me orders this morning, either. That was between Johnny Mercer and me. He's my sergeant. Perhaps you've forgotten that you were just coming in from breaking curfew. That's a serious offence too, and don't you forget it.'

  He had a point.

  'Thik-hai, if that's the way you want it,' I said. 'I'll sort you out later, Corporal.'

  There was nothing for it but to leave. As I reached the door, Kyle came up behind me and said, 'You can see how I'm placed. I don't want trouble. The British Army has been caught in an impossible political situation and all of us'

  I turned on him angrily. 'Don't try and get round me. I'm as pissed off with the army as anyone, and I've seen more cockups than you've had NAAFI suppers. But the whole point of the fucking army is to sort out impossible situations. That's what it's there for. Which can only be done with a bit of discipline. Otherwise, we all get shot up. Malum that?'

  He shook his head. 'That's where you're wrong. We've only saved ourselves from being shot up here by failing to carry out impossible orders. Reinstating the Dutch can't be done. In Java, they're having a hell of a time because they refuse to recognise realities.'

  'Balls. That's all balls, and you know it. We haven't enough troops here or in Java, otherwise we could get this lot sorted out in no time. Now, get back to your desk and sort yourself out.'

  He pressed his hand to his lips, then turned away. I clattered down the steps of the signal office, lighting a fag as I went. The bastard had really got under my skin, but I told myself that I had better drop the matter and pursue my intention of speaking to Captain Boyer.

  Ordering my Indian driver to wait, I walked over to the nearest caf and ordered a coffee. The shop owner smiled, recognising me. I thought as I had every day since I arrived in Medan how pleasant this sleepy town must be in times of peace. Tiger Balm's bloodbath theory must be wrong. Once the British and Dutch had left, quiet would descend.

  These euphoric thoughts of a young man I set down here. History is rarely on the side of peace and quiet. Soekarno, the fiery revolutionary, made a doubtfully successful leader of free Indonesia. He was deposed in 1965, when the Suharto regime took power and began by massacring about a million Indonesian citizens, many of them Chinese; since they were fabelled communists, the nations of the West were not too dejected as news of the killings got about, although, as Bertrand Russell said, 'In four months, five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years.' I imagine that plenty of the victims were ordinary people like Margey, Tiger Balm, Auntie, Katie Chae, and optimistic old Fat.

  If the British would give me no help in getting through to Boyer in Padang, then my Dutch acquaintance, Ernst Sontrop, might come in useful. I paid for the coffee, bought two good cigars, and strolled across the road to the Dutch HQ, which stood conveniently next to the signal office.

  It was a building of grey stone, four storeys high and so one of the tallest buildings in the city. It was constructed in a cumbersome alien style with rounded corners and heavily overhanging porticos and pediments which gave its faade several permanent frowns. Once it had functioned as a court of justice, I believe. Justice was now suspended. The occupying personnel were military. Two swart Ambonese soldiers challenged me at the entrance, stepping smartly out from behind sandbags. They looked at my army paybook and consulted with an officer. I was admitted.

  In the dim-lit hall, a stuffed tiger prowled inside its glass case, fixing glass eyes upon whoever entered. On one marble wall were mounted skulls of the two-horned Sumatran rhino, while the wall opposite supported a bright mosaic map of the Indies, fringed with exotic tribal figures, together with insects, flowers, and bright-plumaged birds. Beside the lift and the stairs, plants grew in brass tubs.

  A grim old receptionist behind a desk tried to persuade me to hand over my revolver. He spoke no English. We glowered at each other before he disappeared, to return with a hulking man who asked me sharply what my business was. When I asked for Sontrop, he shrugged and led me upstairs without a word.

  Upstairs were comfortable sofas and a table bearing Dutch magazines. All this foreign colour made me wonder whether any Stubbs had ever been so far from home before. I visualised generation after generation of Stubby ancestors, with big noses, grey whiskers, and bizarre appetites, receding into the mists of time; Victorian Stubbses, Tudor Stubbses, Anglo-Saxon Stubbses, Stone-Age Stubbses, all standing on their home hearth and muttering, in the manner of my father, 'Why bother about the rest of the world when you've not seen all England yet?'

  What an affront to those imagined ancestors if I returned to England with a Chinese bride! There could be no more conclusive proof of the far-flung side of my nature.

  As I was rather loftily accepting the envious congratulations of my brother Nelson, Ernst Sontrop entered the waiting room.

  Sontrop seemed to my eyes tremendously ancient. He was thirty-five years old. A neat straight spade beard fringed his jawline, sparse hair swept back from his forehead. The beard was brown, streaked with white; the hair on his head was blond. His eyes were grey-blue, his expression set. There were deep wrinkles round his eyes and lips, as if he had once clung to a sheer cliff-face by those features.

  His clothes were ostentatiously neat: his bright civilian shirt, army trousers, socks and sandals, might have come straight from a shop that morning.

  'Good morning, Horatio, how do you do?' He paused, then came forward and formally shook hands with me. I offered him a cigarette which he tucked into his breast pocket before showing me down the corridor to his office.

  'Firstly, I must apologise for keeping you waiting. The Dutch ship, the Van
Heutsz, arrives tomorrow to take away many Dutch persons, so we are busy arranging documents.'

  I assured him that I had enjoyed the wait.

  'Not so many Britishers come into our headquarters, Horatio. It is a shame that our peoples do not go along better together, when we are both European races, and have common interests. Now, please to take a seat and tell me what I can do for you.'

  Time was I had done something for Sontrop. When I was still with my unit in Padang, I was given the job of establishing a RAPWI area. RAPWI was the Rehabilitation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees organisation, also known unofficially as Rape All Pretty Women in Indonesia. Among the RAPWI personnel in Padang were several Dutch girls, whom I had to fetch from the hill station of Bukitinghi, where they had been interned by the Japs. I became involved with one of the biggest blondes, Addy Sontrop a fine strapping girl, taller than I and milder than a pat of butter.

  One day, I was drinking in a bar with a couple of my mates when I noticed Addy serving at the food counter. A taffy from the South Wales Borderers was pawing her and making himself generally objectionable. When he slapped a hand on Addy's left tit, I went over and punched him in the guts. Some of his mates showed up, and we had a dodgy few minutes of it.

  Addy was later shifted to Medan. I met her again when I arrived there, and she introduced me to brother Ernst. Ernst was unexpectedly friendly the Dutch had a reputation for being stand-offish and he continued being civil after Addy boarded the Van Heutsz and sailed for the Netherlands.

  So I gave him an outline of my story, telling him just enough to explain why I wished to speak to Boyer over the radio link. Something in his face, an expression of disapproval, brought the blood to my throat before I had finished my story.

  'Don't you go for the idea of my marrying a Chinese girl, Ernst?'

  He dropped his glance to his neatly manicured nails.

  'Of course it is not for me to give any opinion about your private affairs, Horatio.'

  'Go on.'

  'No, it is simply that we found throughout many years of ruling in these islands that mixed marriages never turn out very happily. For you it may be different. Let's proceed to the wireless room.'

  Sontrop took me to the top floor of the building, where two Dutchmen were working a Jap transmitter of formidable size. While they were calling Padang, Sontrop summoned a uniformed native, who served us with glasses of fresh iced lime juice. I couldn't see anything like that happening in Corporal Kyle's lousy signal office.

  After a certain amount of impenetrable Dutch had gone over the air, Sontrop came and said, 'Our friends in Padang at the Netherlands Headquarters are unable to telephone to the British Division. Extremists severed the cable during the hours of night, and it is not yet do you say, reinstated? Reinstalled. They will send a messenger on a motor-bike. Captain Boyer shall radio you back here in two hours' time. Provided that he may be found.'

  I checked with my watches. It was somewhere about midday.

  As I thanked him, he said, 'It is time for my lunch. You caught me almost as I left. Come to my house and eat with me. Let me first get my carbine.'

  My Jeep was waiting outside, so I invited him to climb in. Some British troops were strolling by; one of them laughed and said something to his mates. If there was one thing regarded as more eccentric than associating with the Chinese, it was associating with the Dutch.

  Our Indian driver, ever glad of distraction, made a showy turn round the park, passed the de Witte Club, and bowled up past the old deserted children's playground towards the RAPWI area. Buildings on either side of the road were shuttered and ruinous until we came to the little model village where the Dutch were now mainly housed. The guards at the gate were Japs, with the insignia removed from their uniforms.

  Sontrop gave the driver directions.

  We turned down a neat little side road. The trees were deciduous again, formally spaced, just as on the banks of the Zuyder Zee.

  Ernst lived in something that looked like a shrunken version of an Odeon Cinema, with a strange multi-angle tower rising above the roof-line. Curved steps flounced up to an elaborate front door. Inside, the floors were marble and there was a Rembrandt reproduction on the wall. The Night Watch.

  We met a couple of Dutch women in the hall, padding round half-naked with their hair in curlers. I was immediately interested though they were ugly-looking cows since Sontrop had not struck me as a ladies' man; it was always hard to tell with foreigners. The women took no notice of us. They smoked and walked about white their hair set, presumably getting ready for some evening event. There were dances in the RAPWI area every night. Passing them politely, Sontrop showed me into his quarters. We entered a big room. A grotesque stone fireplace was the chief feature. His bed was here, and a table, some novels on a shelf, some ammo boxes under the window, little else. A door led off to back quarters.

  'I bring you a beer,' he said.

  'What about the driver?'

  'He can have water.' He brought me a Milwaukee beer and then disappeared. I walked round the room looking at photographs hanging framed on the walk. They were all views of some foreign town where it appeared permanently about to rain. By the bed stood snaps of Addy and an older female, presumably Mum.

  Nowhere in Sontrop's bare room did I see signs of female occupancy. Of course, owing to the emergency, houses in protected areas were always overcrowded. One heard funny things about the Dutch, but that did not mean that all the women in the bungalow had to be Sontrop's mistresses. I stared out of the back window into a patch of unkempt back-garden, where unkempt bushes flowered. Laundered sanitary towels were hanging on a wire to dry, five of them in a row like rabbit pelts.

  Sontrop came back bearing a plate with some big thick cheese sandwiches. I saw he had no beer for himself. Perhaps he had given me his last bottle. Hospitable people, the Dutch.

  As we munched, he said, 'You have heard that all the British forces are pulling out from Medan within four months.'

  'Is the date confirmed?'

  'Yes, as I understand. It makes our small Dutch force in a very difficult situation. But British politicians have recognised Soekarno's Republic, which we cannot do.'

  'You'd be well advised to pull out too. The Indonesians are determined to be independent. Support from Europe is a long way off.'

  He shrugged. 'The natives cannot manage administration. They are unprepared for autonomy, like children. They cannot run hospitals and telephone exchanges and banks and the mercantile aspects. They cannot build roads or keep down malaria. They can hardly cook a meal without Chinese help.

  'We must stay here. We made this place! There was nothing before we came here last century, nothing, you understand, just a few stinking huts beside the River Deli. Addy's and my parents arrived here as a young married couple at the start of this century. By hard work my father became to own his own plantation, growing rubber and tobacco. He carved it out of the jungle with his own blade and killed off the snakes and other wild life. He and my mother died here, defending their land when the Japanese invaded. I was born here. How, do we just disappear weakly because we are afraid of a few extremists like Soekarno?'

  'I can see how you feel.' We ate the sandwiches in silence.

  Sontrop laughed. 'You know what? We get more volunteers now from the Netherlands. And I hear tell that after the German Wehrmacht disbanded, many of its officers join the French Foreign Legion to help them fight in Indo-China. They also enlist in the Dutch Army, to help fight here and in Java. So we have both our old enemies, the Nazis and the Japs, to give assistances now.'

  Weevils had been baked into the spongy bread just like the bread in the sergeants' mess. I said, 'I can't see the British ever using German military aid. There would be a devil of a row if we did so.'

  He wagged a finger at me. 'You British got scared by Ghandi. You should have locked him up and throwed away the key. Suddenly, the war ends and you aren't tough any more. You, Horatio, you are good at punching a man at the st
omach when it is necessary, but I have a sense you do not want more fighting.'

  'I've had a belly-full. I was in Burma. One of the worst theatres of war in the world.'

  'No, forgive me, but Dutch New Guinea is easily First Worst. What did you did in Burma?'

  So I gave him a quick run-down on the battle of Kohima, and how the fighting had raged over the DC's tennis court. I told him how Charlie Meadows and I had climbed a cliff and thrown grenades into a Jap bunker.

  'Were you scared then, Horatio?'

  'At the time, I didn't feel a thing. Afterwards, I got the shakes. They had to feed Charlie and me on rum. When we came out of Burma and were resting up outside Calcutta, I had a few bad nightmares. Where were you during the war? Here?'

  He told me his experiences. It was quiet in the bungalow. Now and again, the half-clad women called to each other in Dutch. Outside, cries of children came faintly.

  Ernst Sontrop's family lived on their plantation some miles outside Medan. When the Japs arrived in 1942, a mortar shell landed on their bungalow. Ernst was knocked unconscious. His parents and an elder brother were killed and Addy ran away in panic. A faithful servant carried Sontrop to a native hut and hid him when the Japanese troops marched in. Then followed a few weeks of hell.