by Nigel Barley
‘The index cards, the lists of what was in the library, surely you brought those? The books were arranged by subject and carefully subcategorised alphabetically …’
‘Just books,’ said the major truculently and turned away. It was impossible of course but, at some level, he always feared that Pilchard knew. Spratt had seen his moment of triumph in quartermastering. Then he had met his Waterloo. For two glorious years he had been Officer Commanding (Butter) in Aldershot, towering over pyramids of bright yellow tins and then his world had fallen apart. The British Army was a global operation whose tendrils stretched to embrace the icy wastes of Arctic and Antarctic as readily as they gripped the globe’s equatorial paunch. And all army posts required butter on their toast. Tinned butter that soothed British palates in such climatic extremes required careful formulation, developed over years of slow experimentation. A special Arctic blend ensured spreadability at -40°C while a tropical version still held solid at 40°C above. And then, in a still inexplicable moment of distraction, he had confused the consignments. In Arctic Baffinland, for three months, they had received butter that could only be worked with power tools while, in Kuala Lumpur, it sloshed from the tin as a greasy liquid that only the Indians enjoyed. The humiliation, the joy of his enemies, especially the Officer Commanding (Jam and Condiments Various), still woke him red-faced and heart pounding in the middle of the night. There had been an enquiry, harsh words in his file and they had laughed and posted him out east to learn what climate and quartermastering could do to each other, expiation through perspiration. To him, it was still a greater shame than the fall of Singapore for, at least, when he handed over three years of military supplies—lock, stock and oil barrels, all intact—to the Japanese, they had been in apple-pie order. He was sure they respected him for that.
‘The orders just said books.’
* * *
As a child, James Pilchard had been greatly impressed by imperial pomp and circumstance, as known chiefly from the church parades of the Boy Scouts. His collecting had begun with the postage stamps of empire, a rare blaze of colour in a Birmingham childhood composed otherwise of muted greys. Most, of course, bore the stuffy, decollated profiles of King George and Queen Mary, like china dogs on the mantlepiece, but there was enough background variation—plants, animals and exotic vistas—from around the empire to stimulate the interest of a bookish boy with no brothers and sisters. The stamps had fired in him the urge to travel and he liked to think that this had refuted the old adage that ‘philately will get you nowhere’. Collecting had continued to relieve the dullness of a medical degree, a vocation which, in his family, seemed the epitome of learning and respectability. But he had been cruelly disabused by his time in Singapore, first by the obsessive mediocrity of colonial life with its tin trumpets and tin gods and then by his service in the Volunteer Force, lasting two appalling weeks during which the stammer that had afflicted him most of his life completely disappeared. Much of it had been spent lying flat on the ground as, above him, bombs tumbled, like shiny black rat droppings, from the backsides of invulnerable aircraft. He had seen selfless heroism of course but sadly misapplied, as men laid down their lives to protect the strategic installations that their comrades, the following day, would be ordered to lay down their own lives to destroy. In the middle came a very awkward and unacknowledged period of ‘realignment of the front’ where both sides suddenly realised that something must be wrong because they were now both trying to blow up the same targets. That 130,000 Allied troops had surrendered to 30,000 Japanese that they could have simply kicked to death, argued that something was badly amiss at staff college and Spratt was a good example of his kind—pompous and resolutely stupid, an ocean-going buffoon—fit to be impaled on a pin and set in a glass exhibition case of military idiocy as the specimen type. The old description of the army as ‘lions led by donkeys’ popped up in his brain from somewhere. He was sure the British commander had contemplated the total cock-up with something like ‘I blame myself for all this, chaps. But you, of course, will be the ones paying for it.’ The very best specimens, the highest-ranking officers with the fancy plumage, had been shipped off by the Japs months ago. No one knew where. Perhaps they had been shot. The men all rather hoped they had.
He was back in Bukit Timah. They were hot and filthy, tired after a night sleeping fitfully under trees, being eaten alive by mosquitoes. It was not clear which of them was supposed to be in charge. In the Volunteers, pulling rank was considered bad form so decisions sort of just happened by default. At dawn they had broken open tins of bully beef and eaten flakes of stale meat enrobed in fat and salt, so that now they were thirsty. There was a noise down there by the road and suddenly Japanese were running along the tarmac, crouching low, trundling two heavy machine guns between the ruins of a light-engineering works. He had never actually seen Japanese before and he tried to fix them in his mind. They could have opened fire with their old WWI rifles, killed a couple of them maybe, before the machine guns found them with the inevitable outcome they had been watching for days. As good as dead. As bad as dead. They kept quiet. The soldier out front seemed to hear a noise, turned, shading his eyes with one hand, then smiled slowly. There was a little Chinese boy, quite naked, standing half-hidden in the ruins watching him. The soldier laughed, bent down and made clicking tongue noises as you might to a nervous cat and beckoned with his fingers. The little boy looked at him, eyes wide with fear and then his face broke into a broad smile and he stepped out unsteadily into the sunlight. The soldier raised his rifle and shot him dead with a single round through the forehead.
Pilchard blinked and wandered out over the square. He could feel a tremor running through his arms and hands. From afar, he spotted Sergeant Fukui, a thoroughly nasty ex-greengrocer from Osaka, who loved to make trouble. He was doing his rounds, hitting people, kicking things over just for the fun of it, a couple of beefy Korean conscripts, acting as a sort of mute bodyguard, dogging his steps. He had passed Pilchard in the prison proper earlier, pausing to receive the obligatory bow, when he had dropped by to torment an unfortunate prisoner named Churchill, and might just remember him. Pilchard ducked behind a shed until he had passed, looked at the sun to judge the time. He had to be back in jail for the midday meal and he had a couple of calls to make along the way. Strictly speaking, he was probably still in the military as a Volunteer, should have saluted Spratt, stamped his feet, all that other nonsense like in the OTC. Too bad. A while ago, the Japanese had ordered all officers to remove insignia of rank and it had created a pleasing anonymity, almost invisibility, like a big city in a blackout as if everything henceforth was off the record. Pilchard had retained khaki without badges, like a defrocked scoutmaster. But you could still tell who was who. Authority brought a walk, a look, a tone of the voice even when opposing the authority of others. He, himself—he knew—had it whether he liked it or not.
The area was less a single camp than an assembly of old British barracks, mostly wooden-built, split and rotten, eked out with tents and informal shelters of bamboo and thatch that clustered round the walls of the old prison. When they had marched in—all the men had cried as the women and children followed singing ‘There’ll always be an England’—it had been virtually an empty shell but barter, theft and ingenuity had worked wonders and now there were at least basic comforts such as beds, water and zitheringly erratic electricity. Pilchard’s collector’s heart was gladdened by the rich variety of humanity gathered together: black, brown, yellow, white, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, British, Australian, New Zealand, Dutch, Malay, Javanese, Moluccan, Indian. In Changi, of course, Indians came in two varieties that crosscut all other regional and caste labels—the loyal and the Indian National Army who had thrown their lot in with the Japanese in return for freedom and a vague promise of Indian independence. The former might be smiled at, the latter’s stare must be avoided at all costs since they had adopted an almost hysterical brutality as the mark of their bond with Japan. And they speciali
sed not just in beatings but rapes, the sort not done in the hot lubricity of lust but the cold, congealed determination to humiliate and completed by urinating all over the victim.
They had caught Manson alone in his cell in Changi proper and he had been slow to get to his feet. That had been excuse enough. One stood outside in the doorway, smacking a thick bamboo pole in the palm of his hand as the other two taught Manson to respect them. The screams electrified the very air. All other sound died as the prisoners listened but looked the other way. Then the shame, Manson’s and their own, as they were unable to meet anyone else’s eyes in case they saw themselves for what they were. The Indians had emerged, laughing and swaggering and all three had sauntered off, running their clubs along the stair rails like innocent, little boys playing on railings on the way to school. As the thrumming died away, the sound of Manson’s sobs became louder, the very heartbeat of the prison.
‘Clang! Clang!’ There were half a dozen young men, crouching listlessly on the ground under the front of the shelter. Javanese. Asians felt the lack of furniture less than the Westerners. They should have been smoking but cigarettes were an impossible luxury in the camp so their hands rested limp and empty like their eyes. Since his time as resident medic on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, Pilchard had had a special fondness for the Javanese that lived there. In Changi, they were sited beside the Dutch, recalling the way that the Hunnish army had always advanced across the land as a living map of its provinces. Theirs was naturally the worst accommodation, an old workshop where generations of tinkering mechanics had left a miasma of engine grease and rust. As always, he drifted towards it.
It was the privilege of East Indies colonial troops to be issued with high, leather boots that set them off from, and above, local inhabitants. Normally an object of pride, polished and cosseted, they had become a burden among the boot-admiring Japanese whose own feet, it was swiftly discovered, also fitted into them very nicely. The first few months had seen a terrifying series of confiscations, with beatings for thanks, and searches of their quarters that made impossible the normal illegal activities necessary for life. So now the prisoners were forced to roam barefoot, on feet now grown tender from footwear, while the treasured boots lay hidden away and slowly succumbed to rats and mildew. More military idiocy.
At the centre, an older, very dark figure, wearing only a flowery sarong, was the sole moving element. He was hitting a piece of metal with a solid wooden hammer, timing the blows so that they fell rhythmically and humming as he worked, like some Wagnerian dwarf. Pilchard knew Sergeant Dewa was a gong-player as well as an engineer. He circled the men from the rear, greeted, shook hands. None of them bothered to stand, simply reaching up apathetically to limply touch his hand. Finally he moved to the centre.
‘Mas Dewa. What are you making?’
‘Dokter. Toko’s arm needs some work.’ He indicated one of the men and bashed anew. ‘One of the work parties found a crashed Kawasaki bomber. It didn’t need its wing but Toko needs an arm. He lost it in an air raid.’
Toko smiled and held up his limb, now ending just below the elbow. ‘Maybe it’s the same machine that took my arm. Now it’s giving it back.’ He laughed. The artificial arm was a hollow aluminium tube, articulated but lockable at the wrist. On the end was a hand, carved out of wood, very lifelike, but with an extraordinarily exaggerated, erect thumb. Pilchard raised a quizzical eyebrow. Toko shrugged. ‘For the wife,’ he explained and everyone laughed again. ‘Better than Nature.’
‘When she sees it,’ volunteered his friend, ‘she’ll think it’s a pity they didn’t shoot your dick off too.’ Pilchard bent and examined the stump. As a qualified general practitioner, he knew nothing of amputations but it looked neat, a good flap of flesh to cushion the end.
‘Nice work. Who did it?’
‘Some white man.’ To him they would all be the same. ‘I never saw him. In those days we had gas.’ Now it was a swig of rice toddy, or if you got really lucky, a scanty perfume sprinkling of precious chloroform, hardly enough to make you dizzy. Dewa laid down the hammer.
‘I’ve got your stuff.’ He spoke quietly and pulled an old Player’s tin off the shelf over the workbench, took off the lid, fished inside. The two men looked around and shook hands. A small package wrapped in banana leaves, swiftly pocketed, moved one way. A smaller one moved the other. They stepped apart quickly. Finished. All over.
* * *
Dr Catchpole sighed and ran a tired hand over his sweaty face, taking care not to jostle his wig. He had always hated museum visits by imperial worthies. At least, in the old days, they could only give you a bad report or cut off your funding. They were unlikely to cut off your head. Now they might well do just that. The two Japanese, Professor Tanakadate and tiny Dr Hanada, put their shoulders behind his and shuffled him forward towards the General, like a children’s toy. His colleague, Dr Post, lurked treacherously in the background, looking anxious. They bowed. Catchpole bowed a second too late, bowed shallowly, fearful of wig loss, spoiled the effect and got flustered. Around his neck hung a large bakelite hearing aid receiver that amplified speech to the headphone draped over one ear. To improve reception, he pointed it at people, like a box camera, but with overtones of an entomologist staring at bugs through a magnifying glass.
Prof Tanakadate stepped forward smoothly.
‘General. I should like to present my assistant, Dr Hanada, and our partner, Dr Catchpole, the eminent ichthyologist.’
Tiger scowled, he tucked his thumbs into his waistbelt and his voice dipped down into his military growl, a sound like gravel under jackboots. ‘Itchy? What is itchy?’ He stared shamelessly at the wig. It looked like a mass of shredded horseradish. That must be itchy. ‘And why are there gaijin in the museum? Who are you? What is all this?’
The Professor smiled unruffled and bowed again. ‘The General has perhaps forgotten his old schoolmate. Time has been kinder to him than to me. Tanakadate.’ He bowed again, grey, unmilitary hair flopping over his forehead.
‘Eh? Tanakadate? You?’ His eyes popped. ‘Forgive me. So many people. So busy. And nowadays everyone where you don’t expect them to be.’
‘We are honoured that the General has made time to visit us. Had we known in advance, we might have arranged something more worthy of him.’
‘Why these gaijin?’ Catchpole, pale expert on tropical fish, had retreated into a still alcove and was to be seen floundering awkwardly back there, in disreputable alpaca, between two refracting glass cases. ‘Why are they not in Changi? Are they German?’ He was doubtful about Germans, having fought them in Shantung in the last war but drunk with them while serving as military attaché, in Berlin, before this one.
‘It seems there was an agreement with the … er … outgoing governor that some staff might stay on to help our takeover. Dr Catchpole arranged the whole matter.’ He nodded at the chubby figure treading water and peering at them timorously through glass. ‘It is an arrangement that has been greatly to the advantage of Dai Nippon, rather than having them in prison.’
‘So they are collaborators. And Changi is not a prison. It is a processing centre for aliens.’ It was a mere administrative reflex, displacing another. He embarked on a swift ill-natured tour, stumping along the wooden corridors, hands clasped behind his back He peered into the library.
‘Books,’ he said.
‘There is some disorder while we are moving some of the less academic volumes to the prisoners in Changi.’
‘There are no prisoners in Changi. They are detainees only.’
‘Quite so.’
Tiger grunted and set off again, the floorboards resonating loudly and untigerishly under his boots. Through the ethnography gallery that traced the Malays’ endless birdlike ingenuity in teasing twigs and vegetable fibre into human culture.
‘Jungle stuff,’ he snorted. Through fish, monkeys and insects to arrive, finally at … ‘Birds,’ he nodded and half turned, then frowned and turned back. It was a display of brightly colour
ed finches or some such, stuffed and spaliered like a Kyoto cherry blossom into a sort of family tree against a backboard. He read aloud. ‘Birds of Cocos-Keeling. Collected by J. Pilchard 1940.’ Cocos-Keeling was a place of interest, the new front line, as yet still held by the British, a communications centre, the only place from which the Allies might now attack the Asian mainland by air. A hundred miles closer, on Christmas Island, sat a division of Japanese troops, sharpening their bayonets, just waiting for the order to advance before sweeping on to Australia and final victory. He tapped at the glass. ‘Where is …’ he leaned back to see the name ‘… Pilchard?’ He looked up. ‘Which one is Pilchard?’
‘Not here,’ said Tanakadate hastily. ‘Gone.’
‘In Changi!’ sniggered Catchpole from afar, a practised hatdoffer, the class sneak.
‘In Changi or not in Changi?’ echoed Tiger sweetly. Tanakadate squirmed and glared at Catchpole.
‘Oh yes. In Changi. I forgot.’ Tiger’s voice dropped back into military growl. Addressing his ADC, Captain Oishi.
‘Find him. Fetch him. Send him to the Kempeitei next door. Let them ask him some questions about Cocos-Keeling but not about birds. I wish to have everything on this Cocos-Keeling.’ He bowed, turned on his heel and stamped out swiftly, hands behind his back, bent forward, the museum staff flocking after like geese. As he passed Raffles he sniffed contemptuously, then dived into the back of the fat, leather-smelling Daimler that was now his. He adored it, shiny and solid as if carved from black marble. Its bench seats made him feel well upholstered. ‘Back to HQ!’ He settled into his seat. ‘Raffles College!’ he added happily, as if they did not know where it was and young Captain Oishi leapt to his place in front and slammed the door in one smooth drill movement. The driver, knowing what the General liked, floored the accelerator and they tipped back into the softened red oxhide and sped off with a gratifying spray of gravel and a cloud of wasteful, blue smoke.