Ashes In the Wind (36 page)

‘Who are the CTs?’

‘They aren’t Communists in any sense of the word, although it suits us to call them that, and they are almost all Chinese, not Malay. But they’re terrorists all right; they live off what they can extort – money, food, shelter – from the villages and the plantation workers. They are well armed, but there aren’t a lot of them. We’ve killed some, some have publicly defected, others have just gone home. They’ve given up any hope of winning. By the end of this year there will be a truce, an amnesty and it’ll all be over. And they’ll get their independence soon enough. Right now your job is to show them we’re here. The armoured cars are quite impressive if you can keep them on the road; the Daimler Mark 2 wasn’t designed for the tropics.’

James shared a room with the Hampshires’ lieutenant, who was absent on patrol when James arrived. Three days later he returned from fifteen days in the jungle, grey and exhausted. His legs were scarred with angry fire-ant bites and when he needed help to remove a dozen leeches from his legs the jungle lost some of its magic for James.

James and Three Troop soon settled into a routine; stand-to at dawn and dusk, guard duties shared with the Hampshires, vehicle maintenance, machine-gun practice, patrols and escort duty. For the first month it was a welcome change from Kuala Lumpur, although the troopers grumbled about the humidity, the cold nights, the uncomfortable beds and the food.

‘Don’t you worry about that, sir,’ said Sergeant McLester. ‘They’d grumble wherever they were, Kuala Lumpur, Catterick or Paradise, not that many of them are likely to get there.’

A week before Three Troop was due to go back to Kuala Lumpur they were on a routine patrol through one of the biggest tea plantations, the twelve-thousand-acre Ladang, when James heard Corporal Dean in the leading armoured car shout over his wireless, ‘Three Alpha, Three Alpha, this is Three Charlie, roadblock’, then the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire, then, ‘Christ, Jack’s been hit’.

Jack Mackie was Three Charlie’s driver. As James in the second Daimler came round the corner he saw Three Charlie had slewed off the road and into the ditch.

‘Close down, close down, fire when you see a target,’ James said, although closed down in an armoured car it was hard to see anything but straight ahead, hard to see the source of the bullets zinging off their armour.

James was unsure what to do next, knew he had to do something. He looked down at his hands, grabbed hold of the hatch handle to stop them shaking, felt his mouth dry, tried to speak, took several swallows from his water bottle, then a deep breath, and said, ‘I’ll go forward and get a tow-rope onto Three Charlie. Saracens, give me covering fire, and don’t worry about wasting ammunition once I’m out of the wagon.’

They drove within six feet of Three Charlie, occasional bullets still hitting the armoured cars; the CTs seemed to be in deep brush thirty yards off the road to the left.

‘Start firing now, they’re on the left of the road,’ said James, opening the hatch of his Daimler.

He climbed out of the top, went round to the back and detached the tow-rope, ran forward in an undignified crouch and attached the rope to the rear of Three Alpha and the front of his own armoured car. This seemed to take an age. The machine guns were plastering the jungle edge to the left of the road, tearing up the small trees and bushes. If James was fired at, he didn’t notice. He went round to the front of Three Charlie where McKelvey was slumped below the level of the armour, bleeding from the head and unconscious. He pulled him out with difficulty, carried him round to the back of Three Alpha and heaved his body up and onto the engine cover.

‘Right, now very gently haul Three Charlie out of the ditch,’ he told his driver.

The ditch was dry and not too deep, and after two heart-stopping, wheel-spinning moments Three Charlie was back on the road.

James climbed onto the top of Three Charlie, hammered on the hatch until Corporal Dean opened up, and said, ‘Corporal Dean, you drive, you take McKelvey’s place.’

There was no reply. Corporal Dean was unable to speak or move, staring down at the empty driving seat spattered with congealing blood.

The covering fire continued, with only the occasional shot in reply; one of the gunners said over the wireless, ‘I think I hit one of the bastards.’

Sergeant McLester came up from the rear Saracen and said, ‘I’ll drive her, sir. Dean can hold McKelvey on the back of the wagon and bandage him up. I’ve left the first-aid kit beside him,’ ran forward and climbed into the driver’s seat.

A minute later a reluctant Corporal Dean emerged from Three Charlie to join McKelvey on the back of James’s armoured car.

‘What did you tell him?’ James asked his troop sergeant later.

‘I told him
the CTs won’t shoot you if you climb out, but I fucking well will if you don’t.’

‘Right, high reverse down the road until we can turn round and see where we are.’

Where they were was in one of the last ambushes of the Malayan Emergency. They drove back to Camp Gurney as fast as carrying Trooper McKelvey and Corporal Dean on the engine hatch would allow. James had already radioed for a helicopter to take the wounded trooper to hospital in Kuala Lumpur, and by the time they were back at the camp the helicopter was sitting on the parade ground ready to take off. McKelvey was still unconscious with a deep furrow along the side of his head from a bullet that had removed the top of his left ear. His bandage was replaced and he was loaded gently into the helicopter.

James and Three Troop were told to return south a day later; at the debriefing the colonel and his squadron leader were cautiously complimentary.

‘You did well to get a tow-rope onto Three Charlie,’ said the colonel. ‘And Trooper McKelvey will be OK. The Hampshires went out the next evening and found one dead CT at the edge of the jungle, so honours were better than even. I’ll put you in for a Mention in Despatches.’

James was relieved. Running into an ambush and nearly losing one of his men and an armoured car didn’t seem a major military achievement. It was clear the dead CT had tipped the balance.

James’s remaining months, all spent in Kuala Lumpur, were uneventful, and he was not sent up-country again. Three Troop, with James in goal, won the regimental seven-a-side football competition, a triumph regarded as more important than a Mention in Despatches, and far more important than James’s triumph in the South-East Asia Command Golf Championship.

‘Well done, James,’ said his commanding officer, who felt that most games were best played from the back of a horse. ‘Wished you’d given the brigadier a bit of slack in the semi-final. Five and four was a bit brutal.’

James’s journey back at the end of two years’ National Service was as tedious and roundabout as the trip out, but without Matthew as company. Matthew had signed on for another year shortly after his arrival in Malaya.

‘They’ll make me assistant adjutant in October and give me a second pip and Regular pay. It’s a change from farming in Northumberland, which is what I’ll be doing for the next forty years. And the Emergency is about to come to an end, thanks to Three Troop’s heroic exploits in the Cameron Highlands.’

‘Bugger off,’ said James. ‘It’s the cheap gin and tonics, you might as well admit it. Not to mention your soldier servant polishing your boots, laying out your uniform, doing your laundry. I’ll miss your company on the trip home.’

‘We’ll keep in touch. The regiment will be back in England this time next year – we’ll meet at the regimental dinner.’

‘It all sounds weird, terrible,’ says Anna. ‘What did it do to you?’

‘Toughened me up, taught me to swear, taught me to smoke, although I never took to cigarettes. It made me tidy; once you’ve ironed your pyjamas into twelve-inch squares you’re never the same again. I’d led a sheltered life, I suppose, in Ireland and at Winchester. I’ve never been as cold, tired and hungry as during that time at Catterick. Or as scared, except perhaps on a dodgy horse, but not scared of other people acting in a random and often vicious way, people who had real power over you. I was still a boy when I joined the army. I felt grown up two years later.’

‘What about the man you killed?’

‘I didn’t kill him, one of the gunners did; they all wanted the credit, by the way. He was a terrorist, they were trying to kill us, and nearly succeeded with Trooper McKelvey.’

‘It was his country.’

‘He was Chinese, like the vast majority of CTs. Lim Men Sek, he was called; he’d killed five Malays in Sungai Siput.’

‘I see.’ Anna doesn’t sound convinced.

James didn’t add that during those two years he had uncritically absorbed the petty snobberies of a world that was already an anachronism, and he had then shaken them off within days of arriving at Oxford, replacing them with a new set of rules. He felt this made him seem both chameleon-like and priggish, and he continued to need Anna’s approval.

They go on a long walk together up the River Allen, retracing in reverse James’s journey in the rain when he thought Anna had gone. They are sitting on a bench by the river; the tide is in and the river full.

‘Allenmouth must have been a good place to grow up in,’ says James.

‘I suppose – but it’s very small, everyone knows everybody and everything. When I look back it seems strange to have been brought up by my dad. Mum had gone off with his best friend before I was three, so I never knew the two of them together. Dad didn’t want to have anything to do with her, so I’d go off by train on my own to Newcastle once a month.’

She got up, picked a cornflower from the bank behind them and tucked it into James’s buttonhole, then continued, ‘Andy, that was my stepfather, got a job as the pro in a smart golf club just outside Newcastle. He’d made a bit on the European tour, he never won a tournament, but he picked up some decent place money now and again. They lived in a flash villa in Denton Burn, very tidy, no kids, full of my mother’s collection of china pigs. I hated going there, went less and less often. Andy tried to teach me to play golf, I thought that was my father’s job and told him so, and he gave up on me after that. He probably wasn’t a bad bloke, but I couldn’t see him straight. I don’t suppose Dad was that easy to live with, although he and I get on OK.’

‘What about school?’

‘I got the bus every day to the comprehensive five miles away in town. Half a dozen of us went there from Allenmouth. We called ourselves the Seaside Gang, hung out together. I couldn’t wait to get away, wound up in college in Newcastle for three years. I loved Newcastle, still do – I’m a real Geordie, a city girl at heart.’

‘Living with your mother?’

‘You’re joking. I saw less of them when I was at college than when I was at school. I was in a student hostel for a while, moved out into a flat with my first proper boyfriend.’

‘Lucky man.’

‘We were both lucky with each other. He was a medical student, but he knew about as much about sex as I did, absolutely nothing. We found out together, and all that was great. After he got sent to Leeds by the NHS we met only at weekends, then I went to work for the Falcons, and he met a nurse in his hospital. We still send each other cards on our birthdays. I met Zach when I was with the Falcons – I’ve told you about all that.’

‘Did you ever think about marrying him?’

‘Mum leaving Dad put me off. I did think about it. Zach asked me often enough, swore he’d give up drink, said he was ready to settle down. But rugby’s a violent game and he was never able to leave all his aggression on the field. Half the time he didn’t know what he was doing; it often wasn’t much, a hard push, a slap that he meant to be mild. Sometimes he’d make love to me after a row and it was almost like rape. I found that quite exciting the first time, and later when I tried to stop it I wasn’t strong enough, and I suppose he thought it was all part of sex with me. I should have left him then before it got worse. When he beat me up after the dance...’

Anna stops talking, takes several deep breaths, starts again. ‘I was two months’ pregnant, and I hadn’t told him. I wasn’t ready to tell him, I knew he’d say we’d have to get married.’

Anna buries her face in her hands. ‘I thought I’d lose the baby after the battering I’d had. But I didn’t. Then I had an abortion, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I wish I’d kept the baby, it was mine as much as Zach’s. But I didn’t, and it’s gone.’

Anna begins to cry, great shuddering sobs, doubled over, her face in her hands. James tries to put his arm around her; she shrugs him off and moves away. After a few minutes she stops crying, stands up and says fiercely to him, ‘No one else knows about that, not Zach, not Dad, no one. I shouldn’t have told you – I’m sorry I did. Let’s go home.’

They walk back to Allenmouth, not talking. Anna, still angry, stops outside her father’s house, ducks a kiss on the cheek from James and leaves him to walk back to his flat alone. James curses his curiosity; they have both been blighted by the story. It shouldn’t affect our relationship, he says to himself, but he is aware that logic has nothing to do with it.

That evening he goes to the Ex-Servicemen’s Club, knowing that he will see none of his Allenmouth acquaintances there. He is the only customer. He discourages conversation from the ex-REME bartender, whose ‘On your own tonight?’ is met by a blank stare and a request for a double Scotch. After three of these James walks unsteadily back to his flat; there will be no visit from Anna later that night.

He has no word from her for the next three days, and he doesn’t try to contact her, using the time to begin sorting through his great-grandmother’s letters and diaries. The north-east coast of England seems a long way from County Kerry in the middle of the nineteenth century, and while he is immersed in them he is able to stop thinking about Anna, at least for a while.

The papers had come from his great-aunt Agnes, in half a dozen boxes containing a miscellaneous collection of letters, rent rolls, commissions, faded photographs and daguerreotypes, newspaper cuttings, diaries and commonplace books, with a covering letter.

‘I found these in the stable block, the only part of Derriquin to escape the fire, and thought you would be the best person to look after them now John is away to England,’ Josephine Burke had written to Agnes in 1928.