In the Mouth of the Tiger (66 page)

I recall that as we stood in the driveway, with the Java sparrows darting overhead and the shadows lengthening around us, there was a quiet sense of triumph. No formal paper had been signed, no trumpets had sounded, but a signal victory had been achieved nevertheless: Britons and Chinese Communists, so recently deadly enemies, had joined forces against a common enemy.

Bob Chrystal, Loi Tak and Chin Peng stayed on for dinner. It was a cheerful, informal meal and the first thing I noticed was that Loi Tak dropped the surly, truculent mask he had worn during the afternoon and displayed a charm and courtesy that – almost – took me by surprise.

‘You will forgive me for my rudeness during the afternoon, Norma,' he said at one point. ‘But I am a professional revolutionary and I need at times to act like one.' And then he had lifted his glass of bubbling South African champagne and winked at me across its rim before downing the lot.

Chin Peng impressed me in quite another way. He was incredibly well read, and could speak with careless familiarity about anything and everything under the sun. He had been a brilliant student, matriculating at fifteen and being offered a scholarship to the London School of Economics – a fantastic achievement for the son of a Chinese bicycle dealer in one of the furthestflung colonies of the Empire. He had known Bob Chrystal for years, ever since his appointment as a teacher at the Chinese school on Kamuning Rubber Estate which Bob had managed. ‘Mr Chrystal has been a mentor for me, Mrs Elesmere-Elliott,' he said. ‘I was a naïve young schoolteacher stuck out in the country, full of silly notions and quite angry with the world. Mr Chrystal put up with me. He did more than that. He gave me his time and friendship. He used to invite me to his bungalow where we would talk, sometimes until dawn. About history, about philosophy – even about Communism.' Chin Peng laughed suddenly. ‘I could be very rude. I once told him that if the revolution ever came to Malaya, he and his kind would have to be shot. But I was a compassionate young man. I promised that if it were at all in my power I would make sure he was shot quickly and cleanly so that he did not suffer. I must have been quite intolerable!'

‘Tell me,' I asked him. ‘What exactly is Communism? In my family it has always been a dirty word, but so many people seem to be attracted to the ideal.'

Chin Peng thought for a moment. ‘Think of what happens in a family,' he said. ‘The mother and father provide for the children. They provide everything while the children are babies, less as they grow up and begin to fend for themselves. Then, when the children are big and strong and their parents are old and weak, the children look after their parents. That is the essence of Communism. From everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need.'

‘That is the theory,' Denis put in. ‘And a very fine theory it is. In fact, it is precisely what Jesus Christ asked of us in the Sermon on the Mount. But in reality, the parents in Chin Peng's analogy are all too often greedy officials who abuse their position and use the system to feather their own nests. Not unlike the Church in the Middle Ages, I suppose.'

There was a small silence, and then Chin Peng leaned forward, his eyes on mine. ‘There are many families where the parents exploit their children. Where there is cruelty and abuse. Does that mean that the ideal we seek in every family should be abandoned? What Denis says is quite true in respect of many branches of the Communist Party. It may be true of the Malayan Communist Party' – he flashed a glance at Loi Tak – ‘but that does not mean that the
ideals
of Communism are not worth fighting for.'

There was a raid that night, the sirens sounding just after Amah served coffee. We all sat in the shelter, the pressure lamp hissing in the corner, the two boys fast asleep on their nurses' laps. Afterwards, dead tired, I went to bed and left the menfolk to it. I know they talked for most of the night, the subdued hum of their conversation audible from the verandah. I woke about four to hear Bob's car setting off, and hoped that poor old Bob would not have another puncture. I knew he had arranged to run Loi Tak and Chin Peng home and the thought of the three of them – the urbane, affable Scottish businessman and two of the most powerful Communist leaders in South-East Asia – fixing a tyre together in the dark almost made me chuckle.

‘What was that all about?' I asked the next morning as we sipped tea propped up in bed. ‘I heard the four of you chatting until dawn.'

‘Oh, this and that,' Denis smiled. ‘We had a lot to talk about. You know of course that those two fellows are British agents?'

I looked at Denis incredulously. ‘Loi Tak and Chin Peng?

‘The same.'

‘What do you mean they're British agents?' I asked. ‘Haven't we been fighting the Communists in Malaya for years?'

Denis smiled a little grimly. ‘The first thing you have to know in this game is that nothing is exactly as it seems. Yes, we have been fighting the MCP for years. But to do that effectively we have had to get our people inside the Party. We've been rather lucky that way – it's not often you can get your men to the very top of the tree. Chin Peng and Loi Tak have been our people for years. I think you should know that, because one or another of them might want to contact me in an emergency, and it will be easier if you know the truth.'

I sat there sipping my tea, trying not to seem shocked. ‘How on earth did we manage to recruit them?' I asked.

‘We put Loi Tak into the Party back in the nineteen-twenties. Set him up with all the right credentials, and dropped him into the Singapore branch at a time it was looking for credibility in the Communist world. He promptly got to the top as he was supposed to. His job now is to tell us what is going on, and to a lesser extent try and get decisions we think appropriate. Like getting the MCP to join us in fighting the Japanese. It's often a lot harder than it might sound, though, because while he's Secretary-General he's still got to drag his colleagues in the Politburo along with him.'

‘What about Chin Peng?' I asked. I was not too shocked to hear that Loi Tak was a traitor to his people, but for some reason I didn't want to learn the same thing about Chin Peng. He had seemed to me such an honest man. And an idealist to boot.

‘Chin Peng is a very different kettle of fish,' Denis said. ‘Bob Chrystal recruited him back in 1936, when he was at the Chinese school on Bob's estate. He was a very bright young chap, full of ability but getting nowhere in the MCP because the Party is full of uneducated thugs. So we offered to put him under Loi Tak's wing and have him groomed as a future Secretary-General. He jumped at the chance and he's been Loi Tak's deputy virtually ever since. Of course, we took a risk with him because he could have blown Loi Tak out of the water, but he's not let us down.'

‘So he's a loyal British agent, is he?' I asked.

‘That's a very good question. To be perfectly frank I'm not sure if we're running him, or he's running us. Probably a little bit of both.'

I lay back on my pillows. One of the issues the Communists had fought
for at yesterday's meeting had been their status in Malaya after the war. Loi Tak had articulated their demand for civil rights but he was no more than a mouthpiece. It had been Chin Peng who had really pushed the issue, and it had been Chin Peng who had secured the promise from Colin McKenzie.

I thought of Rajeev Srinivasan's comment:
The Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. Each of these races is even now positioning itself, through its more far-sighted leaders, to take its place in the new Malaya.

Perhaps Chin Peng was on nobody's side but the Chinese. Perhaps he was simply positioning his people to take their place in the new Malaya.

I had another question. ‘Who knows that Loi Tak and Chin Peng are working with British Intelligence?'

‘Everybody who was at the meeting here yesterday. Onraet and one or two of his people. And Stewart Menzies. I told him when we were in England – it's not something one would ever put in writing. Nobody else knows. Except you.'

‘Not even John Morton?' I asked. ‘I thought he was the head of British Intelligence in Malaya.'

Denis shook his head. ‘The last people we'd want to have in on something like this are the career Intelligence people.'

So it was a project for the Linlithgow Hunt, I thought.

January 1942 went down in the history of Singapore as ‘the month of the bombs'. The Japanese had by now secured sufficient airfields in Malaya to be able to launch continuous raids against the island. The attacks, almost always in daylight, followed a pattern. The bombers came in neat, tight formations, composed of flights of 27, 54 or 81 planes. The lead plane would find an appropriate target and then all the bombs would fall together so that the earth rocked under the blast and flames and smoke rolled up into the hot blue sky. Fighters came too, busy, snarling little Zeros, but they were hardly needed as escorts as most of our own planes had been destroyed. Instead, they looked for ‘targets of opportunity': trucks and cars on the roads, boats in the harbour, individual buildings, even groups of people caught out in the open.

We civilians became quite cunning. For example, we would set off for our shopping trips immediately after one raid had finished, knowing we had an hour or two before the next was due. We knew the safer places to shop, and the places to stay away from. The centre of the city – Raffles Place and the Robinsons building – were safe because the substantial granite of the
structures stood up well against bomb blasts and there were good public shelters. A favourite meeting place was the basement of Robinsons, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-shop-cum-air-raid-shelter. Docklands, and the area around Collier Quay, were dangerous places as they were the focus for raids against any newly arrived supply ships. But the most dangerous of all was the Chinese quarter, where the cheaply built multi-storey shops and residences collapsed under the bombs like houses of cards, spilling bricks and rubble into the streets and burying people in their hundreds. No official count has ever been made of all the casualties suffered during the raids on Singapore, but during January there must have been hundreds – sometimes thousands – every day. The ARP people, mainly grim-faced, dedicated young Chinese, would drag as many bodies from the rubble as they could after each raid and lay them along the streets for relatives to recognise and to take away for burial. Many hundreds of bodies were of course never claimed, probably because entire families had been wiped out, and these bodies would eventually be collected by sanitary workers to be dumped in lime-pits like so much rotting garbage.

Margaret and I tried to maintain our routine, if for no other reason than to sustain our own morale. Hamid would take us into the city about ten (‘after the morning raid', we used to say) and drop us off near Raffles Place. We'd do any essential shopping, have our hair done, pick up the dress or hat we had ordered, or just window-shop until midday, and then meet at the ‘Robinsons' Underground' for coffee. Coffee generally coincided with the lunchtime raid, so we would sit quietly as the ground reverberated to the sound of bombs, and then emerge into the smoky sunlight in time for Hamid to take us home.

I think about those forays into town these days and my hair stands on end. Why on earth did we do it? How on earth did we do it? I think the answer lies in an instinct we humans have which helps us through extraordinary times by making us stick like glue to the most ordinary of our routines.

In the middle of January the little
Penghulu
got caught up in the destruction going on all around us and was sent to the bottom. I learned about the sinking in the most casual way. I was doing a little therapeutic gardening in our vegetable plot – tying up the ladyfinger bushes, I think – when Denis's little Marvelette turned into the driveway. It was only mid-afternoon, so I walked over, curious to hear why he had come home so early. Denis got out dressed, quite extraordinarily, in a blue boiler suit and carrying a large, bulky paper bag.

‘What on earth happened?' I asked, inclined to laugh at his curious appearance.

‘We ran into a spot of bother,' he said lightly. ‘Nobody hurt, but I'm afraid poor old
Penghulu
has gone to the bottom.'

They had been sweeping off Pangarang Point when bombers returning from a raid on the city changed direction towards them. ‘Oh, oh,' George had said quietly. ‘Looks like those fellows have some bombs to get rid of.'

George ordered full speed and turned towards the planes, which was the approved drill in such circumstances. Warrant Officer Farthing, the gunner, began firing the popgun on the foredeck and Denis had a crack with a tommy-gun kept on the bridge for just such an eventuality. Nothing stopped the bombers, of course, but in that first pass all the bombs fell well clear.

‘Piece of cake,' George said, and then saw the straggler – a single Betty flying straight towards them, bombs already tumbling from its belly. Again they seemed to escape, with only one bomb falling anywhere near, and that one detonating deep under water several yards in front of them. There was no shrapnel but the force of the underwater explosion hit the ship's hull with a dull metallic thud.

‘Quite right, George,' Denis said. ‘Piece of cake.' But the underwater explosion had opened all the forward seams in the tired old trawler hull and HMMS
Penghulu
tilted gently downwards. The forward momentum of the vessel forced more and more water in through the gaping holes and the angle of descent increased inexorably. They did everything possible – reversed engines, started the pumps, closed the watertight doors, deployed the collision mats – but it was all quite hopeless. Within ten minutes George quietly ordered them to prepare to abandon ship. Denis collected the ship's codebooks and papers and threw them into the sea in the regulation weighted bag. George assembled and counted his crew on the tiny stern deck. And then, rather like a schoolmaster at a swimming carnival, George ordered them all to jump together and swim for the bobbing Carley float. An RAF crash boat picked them up and they were drying out at the Naval Base within an hour.