In the Mouth of the Tiger (67 page)

‘The worst aspect of the whole business,' Denis said, ‘was the defeatism we ran into in the Base wardroom. It was the first time George or I had spoken to brass hats since the shooting started, and we simply couldn't believe the way they spoke. As far as they are concerned, the whole shooting match is already over. All they are interested in is getting their families out of Singapore.'

‘How did poor old George take it?' I asked.

‘Like a brick.' Denis was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You know, from the moment the bombers appeared on the scene until we met our first brass hat, George didn't experience a single facial tic. But as soon as he knew his people were safe, he was grimacing as badly as ever. Tells one something, I'm sure.'

Denis wasn't long ‘on the beach', as they say in the Navy. That night we had a call from Captain Mulock, giving him command of a Harbour Defence Vessel. She didn't have a name, just a number – HDML 24. ‘She's a tight little craft,' Mulock said. ‘Crew of nine, couple of Oerlikons to bang away at the Japs with, and she has a couple of depth charges on the stern. Decent top speed, though – over eighteen knots.'

‘I'd prefer to stay with George, sir,' Denis said. ‘I think we make a good team.'

‘Sorry,' Mulock said gruffly. ‘I'm afraid George has bought it. His car turned turtle when he was driving home from the Base. Simplest accident imaginable, but the poor blighter struck his head on a fence post beside the road. He was killed instantly.'

George Fortesque's death affected Denis and me far more than the sinking. The casual, almost comical nature of the accident seemed to mock every concept of human dignity. A man survives the rage of war and the sinking of his ship only to be wiped from the face of the earth as he potters home in his car. I hugged Denis tight and wept for George, and for all of us poor mortals trapped in a cruel and capricious world.

Catherine's baby came two or three weeks late, in the first week of January, and one wet, windy afternoon Margaret and I decided on the spur of the moment to drive over and visit her. The heavy cloud would keep the bombers away, we told ourselves, and so we cut flowers and wrapped presents, and set off dressed in bright cotton sundresses for Catherine's home in Chamberlain Road just north of the city.

Catherine was radiant. She met us at the front door of her modern concrete bungalow, her baby in her arms. ‘We have called her April,' she said a little uncertainly. ‘Do you think it's a silly name? It seems so pretty to me. It makes me think of blossom, and spring flowers, and fresh new life. Even though we don't have seasons here in Singapore.'

‘I think it's a lovely name,' I said honestly. She was a beautiful baby, with all Catherine's delicacy, and I took her and held her gently against my cheek. She opened her eyes and seemed to stare at me, with that all-knowing stare
that some babies have. ‘I'm going to have a baby, too,' I whispered to her. ‘It's going to be born in April, so you two already have something in common. I hope you will grow up as friends, and see a better Singapore than this tired and awful one we live in now.'

We drank tea in Catherine's impeccable lounge room, and for a while talked about babies, and schools, and everything on earth except the war. But in the end the war was pressing too close upon us to be ignored.

‘Do you think Singapore will fall?' Catherine asked, and both Margaret and I shook our heads. ‘They are bringing in reinforcements every day,' Margaret said. ‘British, Indian and Australian troops, with shiploads of equipment. Poor old Johnny Jap will soon be running back up the peninsula as fast as his fat little legs will carry him.'

‘If they land on Singapore, Robert will be in the front line,' Catherine said. ‘He's training every day now, and can talk of nothing but Dalforce and how well it will fight.' Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. ‘But he's not really a soldier, even if he thinks he is. He's an architect. He thinks that when he goes into battle it's going to be just like playing soldiers. I'm sure he won't take care.' She was becoming upset so I reached across and squeezed her hand.

‘I sometimes think I should
do
something,' she said. ‘You know, bribe a couple of tough guys to kidnap Robert and bundle him into a junk. We could sail away to somewhere, and stay there until the war is over. Robert would hate me but he would still be
alive
.'

The thought was curiously seductive. Escape with those we love while we still could. Tanya had done just that with Eugene, and they were now safe and sound in South Africa. But I shook my head. ‘If we all stick together we will pull through,' I said firmly. ‘I don't trust Duff Cooper but I do trust Shenton Thomas.'

But Catherine was not to be consoled. ‘Death is so final,' she said softly. ‘When I was a little girl I boarded at a school next door to a big Chinese cemetery. I used to hear people crying there after a funeral had been held, and then they would go away, and leave the one they loved behind. I'd look out of my dormitory window night after night and see the gravestones, and I'd think: people cry for a while, and then they go away. But the dead stay dead. Day after day, night after night, they stay dead. Dead for ever and ever.'

Margaret and I drove home in silence. All around us people were being killed. There was a risk, a very real risk, that we too might soon be dead. Our husbands might be dead already, Denis in his HDML, Alec with his ack-ack
gun down at Seletar Airfield. Even the children we had brought into the world might be dead, our homes in ruins around them. But some instinct, some primal compulsion towards what we call our duty, made us blind to the rank absurdity of the situation. We felt it right and proper to ignore reality, to maintain a stiff upper lip, to talk resolutely about ‘sticking it out'.

Perhaps it was all part of some vast, celestial confidence trick, some giant joke by a bored and indifferent god to make poor mortals look stupider than they really were. If that were so then the real heroes were those who called a halt to the charade, who refused to play by rules that had no meaning.

I had a brilliant idea that night. I woke about two o'clock with the idea fully developed in my mind. We had replaced the
Norma
with a new, Uffa Fox-designed sixty-foot ketch. The
Norma II
lay bobbing at her mooring not half a mile from where I lay. We would provision her in the morning – her water tanks and diesel tanks were always full – and then sail away that evening for the Riau Straits. We'd take Chu Lun and Amah, and the Deans, and Catherine and her family, and simply fade away from all the bombs and all the fear and all the death. Denis and I knew the area like the backs of our hands. The pretty little islands, the secure anchorages, the freshwater creeks, and all the short-cut channels through the reefs. We would be in Batavia within a week, and then have Australia or Ceylon within easy cruising range.

I woke Denis and told him my plan. We turned on the lights, and looked at maps, and calculated distances, and I wrote a list of what we'd have to do first thing. ‘If we ran all night under the diesel we would be well clear of the bombers by daylight,' Denis said.

My spirits rose by the minute, and I realised just how heavy had been the burden of the bombing and the knowledge that, inevitably, Japanese soldiers would come to Singapore Island. ‘We really will do it, won't we?' I asked Denis. ‘It's not just a pipedream?' Denis smiled and teased the curls from my forehead.

When I fell asleep I had the most wonderful dream. I was flying. I only had to kick my feet and I rose effortlessly into the air. To turn, I merely leaned the way I wanted to go and I would swoop like a bird, the air cool and slippery against my skin. Denis and the children were flying too, and we were so high one could hardly see the island of Singapore beneath us at all. It was just a long dark stain on the sea, and then that too was lost in the all-pervading blue.

We never spoke about our plan again. We just woke up the next morning to the real world, and carried on. Denis took off in the Marvelette for the
Naval Base and I went shopping in Changi, where they had built a new air-raid shelter close to the Cold Storage. In the afternoon I did some gardening, helped by the boys who loved harvesting the long, pale green ladyfingers and the small tropical tomatoes. We made up baskets of vegetables, one for the Deans, one for Amah, and the boys ran off on their delivery errands. I caught myself staring out at the
Norma II
, her long, graceful shape like a white swan at rest on the water. In some other realm of existence, I suppose, we might have gone through with our escape plan and sailed off in her for the lovely, peaceful world just over the horizon. But somehow I don't really think so.

Inexorably, the tough, self-sufficient soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army pushed their way down the Malayan Peninsula. One by one the big towns fell to their
Banzai!
charges: Alor Star, Kuantan, Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, Mersing. As each town fell our familiar world shrank further and the shadows crowded in upon us. Finally, at the end of January, Japanese troops were pouring into Johore Bahru, just across the narrow strip of water that separates Malaya from the island of Singapore.

The speed of the Japanese advance through Malaya caught the world by surprise. It was the first time that a modern European army had been clearly outfought by Asians, and all sorts of theories were put forward to explain the phenomenon. It was said that the British had been at a disadvantage against ‘jungle soldiers' who were at home in the wet, tangled forests. But the truth was that, while the Japanese were masters at infiltration, the main fighting had not been in the jungles at all, but on the roads and open paddy fields of ‘civilised' Malaya. It was also said that a cunning and treacherous Fifth Column had been to blame, with ‘natives' siding with the Japanese and betraying British positions to their gunners and airmen and sabotaging British communications.

I think that the simple reality was that the Japanese planned and executed their campaign better than the British, and took advantage of a whole parade of monumental British mistakes. For example, the British had no tanks in Malaya. They had no tanks because some hidebound oaf had said before the war that tanks could not operate in Malaya because it was mostly jungle and ‘tanks can't operate in the jungle'. The Japanese on the other hand had hundreds of medium and light tanks, which they used with stunning effect in the way tanks are always used – on the roads and in the open fields. Another mistake had been to underestimate the Japanese air force. I remember an RAF
officer telling me quite seriously in 1939 that short-sightedness was a national Japanese characteristic which made them incapable of matching keen-eyed Europeans in aerial combat.

But perhaps the single most important reason that the British collapsed so quickly in Malaya was the disastrous effect of the Japanese advance, forcing us into constant retreat. British armies are notorious for making early mistakes but then correcting them. Losing every battle except the last. This didn't happen in Malaya because the early defeats – the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
, the capture of Penang after just over a week of hostilities, the sweeping early victory in the Battle of Jitra and the disastrous battle at Slim River – spooked the British High Command. They suddenly perceived the Japanese not as funny little men with pebble glasses but as cunning, allpowerful magicians invested with the power to turn military convention on its head. Denis and poor George Fortesque had heard the brass hats talking in the wardroom at the Naval Base, and been shocked at the profundity of their defeatism, especially when troops under their command were at that time fighting desperate rearguard battles in Johore.

And these were the men now in charge of the defence of Singapore Island.

The proximity of the Japanese – we could actually hear the sharp crack of their field guns, quite different to the dull thud of bombs – spurred a sudden rush of departures. The sale of all ship tickets had been centralised through P&O because of the acute shortage of berths, and a ticketing office had been opened at Cluny, six miles outside the city. Every day now, from dawn to dusk, long lines of people snaked up a tree-lined road to Agency House. Even when the bombers and fighters came, the queue would remain, the people crouching terrified but determined under the trees. Babies cried at the noise of the planes, some women becoming hysterical, but as soon as the skies cleared the queue would reform and begin to inch its way slowly forward. One morning a Zero spotted the people under the trees and flew up and down the street spraying machine-gun fire into the foliage. Miraculously nobody was killed, the only casualty a teddy bear, its head blown off as it lay in the arms of a crying child. In Agency House itself, patient Chinese clerks scribbled tickets as fast as their pens would let them. There was no question of payment, the only qualification for a ticket being a valid passport and, if you were a man, written clearance to leave Singapore from your military unit or place of work.

The actual process of getting on board a departing ship was much less orderly. The assembly points were open areas at Clifford Pier and Keppel Harbour. People arrived at the designated place at the designated time only to find a scene from Hell: the area choked with abandoned cars, frightened, tearful families clutching their children and worldly possessions with equal determination, and shouting marshals attempting to create some sort of order out of utter chaos. Then a wire gate would be dragged aside and the stampede would begin, people rushing forward to the illusory safety of the docks. More than once they were caught there, hundreds of people jammed together as the planes came over, bombing and strafing at will. Hundreds died on the docks in those last dreadful days, horrible deaths stripped of every shred of human dignity as people stampeded for the inadequate above-ground shelters in blind panic, trampling over babies, the old, and the weak.