In the Mouth of the Tiger (97 page)

The children ran screaming up the stairs to bag their rooms while Denis and I helped Ah Khow unload the car. The lonely feeling of the previous afternoon was completely gone. This was a delightful house, I realised, and I felt immediately comfortable with Ah Khow. When I met his wife a moment later, the comfortable feeling was reinforced. She was a smiling, roly-poly woman, with an open honest face and large, competent hands.

‘What a delightful couple,' I said to Denis later. ‘I'm surprised they were available at such short notice.'

‘Ah Khow was the chef at the Blue Cow Inn until a week or so ago,' Denis said. ‘He got the sack from its new owner because of stories he was a Communist rabble-rouser.'

I clicked my tongue. ‘How terribly unfair. Surely, just being a Communist isn't a crime any more, is it?'

It would be an understatement to say that Ah Khow was a good cook. He was a magnificent cook, a peerless practitioner of his craft. And he really turned it on for us that first evening. We started with a chilled consommé, moved on to a crepe entrée, then duck à l'orange. We finished with a trifle so light it literally melted in our mouths.

‘Did Mem enjoy dinner?' Ah Khow asked politely when we had finished, and I left my chair to stand in front of him and grip both his hands in mine.

‘Mem has never, ever eaten such a magnificent dinner,' I said with complete sincerity, and I saw a faint blush touch Ah Khow's aesthetic features.

We were all tired but after the children had gone up to bed Denis and I took a walk on the lawns in front of Starlight. It was a balmy night for Cameron Highlands, and the air was fragrant with the smell of roses. Above us the stars seemed to glow through the faint mist like lights painted on a dark ceiling. I slipped my hand into Denis's and turned my face up to his. ‘I think we are going to be very, very happy here,' I said, and Denis reached down and kissed me on the lips.

‘I hope we're going to be happy,' he said. ‘And safe.'

As we wandered up the staircase to our room we could hear Ah Khow locking the external doors downstairs. It was a comforting, cared-for sound.

Within a day or two we had all fallen in love with Starlight, and wondered how we could ever have favoured Moonlight. The bedrooms were large and spacious, and all of them opened onto upstairs balconies with breathtaking views over the jungle. There was a huge open fire in the lounge, and a gallery-style dining room with a feature wall of glass through which the misty shape of Mount Brinchang could be seen, looking rather like the pastel image of a mountain in a Roman fresco.

It was during our second week in Starlight that I woke one night to hear a heavy vehicle grinding up our private road. I leaned across to waken Denis but he was already awake, lying stiff and alert beside me. ‘It's the party from the office,' he said immediately. ‘Anthony Pang told me on the phone that they would be coming up tonight.'

‘Should someone go up to Moonlight and let them in?' I asked.

‘Ah Khow has it all under control. He's up there now, waiting for them. Now relax and go back to sleep.'

But I slipped out of bed and ran out onto the balcony, just in time to see a heavy, canvas-covered truck passing the house, followed by a car. Denis quickly joined me, my dressing gown in his hands. ‘Come inside, darling,' he said almost sharply. ‘It's turned quite chilly. I don't want you to catch a cold.'

I came back into the room with him, strangely disturbed by the incident. I looked at our fluorescent bedside clock and saw that it was three in the morning, an extraordinary time for holiday-makers to arrive at their destination.

But what had really worried me was the glimpse I had got under the canopy of the truck. As it had turned the corner just above Starlight, someone had lit a match, illuminating the inside of the canopy for half a second. I may
have been wrong, it may have been just a trick of my eyes, but I could have sworn that the truck had been packed with men. I'd even seen, or thought I'd seen, the long, ugly shapes of weapons.

I didn't say anything at the time. I don't quite know why – perhaps because of the sheer absurdity of what I thought I'd seen. But I did mention it next morning while we were having breakfast, and Denis chuckled.

‘Soldiers? Guns? What nonsense, darling!' he said, pouring me a second cup of coffee. ‘They would have stacked their gear in the back of the truck, that's all. A sensible thing to do too, if you ask me: bring the whole lot up together. The truck's gone back to Tapah, by the way. It went past about seven but you were fast asleep.'

We were sitting on the balcony in the pale morning sunshine, the breakfast things laid out on a rattan table. ‘But if they didn't have anything to hide, why did they come up at that unearthly hour?' I persisted.

Denis gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘If they had left KL late in the evening, it would have taken them
at least
until three in the morning to get here.' He chuckled dismissively. ‘I'm quite sure that there's nothing untoward going on up at Moonlight. But if you are worried we'll wander up there after breakfast and have a look around. We could say hullo to our new neighbours at the same time.'

We walked up about eleven, coming around the bend in the road to find Moonlight looking absolutely normal. There was no truck, no soldiers, no pile of weapons. Just a few sleepy Chinese from Denis's old office, chatting quietly on the front terrace.

The first to catch sight of us was Mr Soong, the man who had tried to prevent me entering Denis's office. He got quickly to his feet, bobbing his head politely. ‘Tabek, Tuan!' he called. ‘Tabek, Mem!'

I didn't know any of the others but they were equally polite. They were fit, tough-looking younger men, obviously from the cargo-handling side of the business. Using a truck – probably a company truck – to bring up their luggage suddenly seemed precisely the thing they would do. I felt a little silly about my fears of the morning and went out of my way to play the gracious neighbour.

‘If there is anything you need, please don't hesitate to come over and ask for it,' I said. ‘We're pretty well established. Ah Khow has everything anyone could possibly want.' They all nodded and smiled politely, but I got the impression that only Mr Soong understood English.

Walking back to Starlight I had only one more query for Denis. ‘How can they afford it?' I asked. ‘I mean, afford a holiday up here? They're nice enough young men, but they seem quite out of place in a bungalow like Moonlight.' I wasn't being snobbish, just realistic. In the 1940s it was unheard of for a group of young Chinese office workers, or perhaps godown labourers, to live like English gentlemen in a hill-station resort.

‘They are reasonably wealthy men, Norma,' Denis said severely. ‘Don't forget that I passed the company over as a pretty profitable concern. We Europeans are going to have to get used to the idea of living with Asians on even terms.'

But it still didn't sound right to me. Why would fit young men stick themselves away in a house like Moonlight? Surely, the bright lights of Singapore would have been more to their taste. I shook my head uncertainly, and was about to say something further when Denis suddenly dropped to one knee, pointing into the thick foliage at the side of the road.

‘A pitcher plant,' he said. ‘Have a look at this. It lures insects with the promise of a drink, and then traps anything foolish enough to crawl inside. The plant digests what it captures just as we digest food in our stomachs.' He picked up a tiny beetle from the leaf mould and dropped it into the green pitcher. Almost immediately a ‘lid' folded down, sealing the opening. Of course I had heard about the pitcher plant but I'd never seen one, and its deliberate, almost predatory action rather shocked me.

I dreamed about the pitcher plant that night. It had turned into a creeper that swarmed all over Starlight, strangling the house and trapping us inside. Towards the end of the dream Malcolm Bryant appeared, the old KL version of Malcolm in his police uniform. ‘You're well and truly trapped now, Nona,' he was saying. ‘And it's entirely your own fault. I did warn you.'

I woke up sweating despite the cool night air and lay with my heart thumping and my eyes wide open. Through the window I could see the jungle-clad ridges marching away to the horizon like waves at sea. There was a quarter moon, drifting through high, filmy banks of mist. It was indescribably beautiful. So beautiful that my terror slowly ebbed away, replaced by a feeling of awe, and then of exultation. I could feel the warmth of Denis's body close to me, radiating a sense of comfort and security. In the distance somewhere, perhaps down at the Golf Club, I could just hear the faintest sound of music, transported on a vagrant breeze.

‘I am a lucky, lucky girl,' I said to myself. ‘I'm safe in the ulu with the man
I love, and with my children around me. Nothing can touch us here, nothing can spoil this loveliness.'

The next morning was 16 June 1948, and nightmare things began to happen up and down the Malayan peninsula. The first hint of trouble was in the morning papers, which contained reports about the sudden disappearance of the Communist regiments from all the towns and villages of Malaya. ‘Could it be,' the
Malay Mail
asked in its editorial, ‘that Chin Peng, the Secretary-General of the Malayan Communist Party, has gone stark staring mad and led his forces back into the jungle? Could it be that this man, who has been a guest of His Majesty the King in London, is going to throw away the good will earned by his soldiers in the war against the Japanese by waging a futile, suicidal war against the forces of law and order?'

The answer was not long in coming. At eight o'clock in the morning, three members of a Communist regiment rode up to the office of the Elphil Rubber Estate in Perak. They parked their bicycles beside the front door and ran up the steps with their pistols drawn. The manager, Arthur Walker, an old Malaya hand loved by his workers for his fairness and generosity, confronted them.

‘Tabek, Tuan,' the leader of the group said politely, and then all three Communists opened fire, killing Arthur instantly.

An hour later a dozen members of the same regiment emerged from the jungle armed with rifles and Sten guns and surrounded the offices of the Sungai Siput Rubber Estate just a few miles from the royal capital of Perak. They herded the office staff into the canteen, selected the two Europeans present – the manager, John Allison, and his assistant, Ian Christian – tied them up and shot them both through the head. They then set fire to the Estate's smokehouse and its rubber stocks. Before disappearing back into the jungle the group's leader lined up all the Asian staff. ‘The MCP has declared war on the British,' he shouted. ‘All Europeans in Malaya are now enemies of the MCP and will be killed. Those of you who help the British or consort with them we will label “running dogs”. We will kill all running dogs of the British, mark my words.'

By lunchtime, the threat against running dogs was being translated into fact. On the Senai Rubber Estate in Johore, a brave Chinese supervisor shouted out a warning as a half-dozen MCP soldiers moved in to surround the manager's house. He was immediately machine-gunned to death. A Chinese
contractor to the Taiping Local Government Council who was known to be a friend of the European town clerk was dragged from his home, handcuffed to a tree, and blown to pieces with a hand-grenade.

By early afternoon, Radio Malaya was broadcasting warnings to all Europeans to stay indoors. Police reserves had been called up and at three o'clock the Governor of Malaya, Sir Edward Gent, declared a state of emergency.

The vicious, lethal little war known as the Malayan Emergency had begun.

At first, the sheer speed of events seemed to have caught the authorities flatfooted, but by early evening counter-measures were being taken. Prominent Communists who had not fled into the jungle were arrested in droves. The two Communist newspapers in Malaya, the
Min Sheng Pau
and the
Vanguard
, were raided and their staff taken into custody. Arrest warrants were issued for Chin Peng and for Lau Yew, whom Chin Peng had named his war leader. A price of ten thousand dollars was put on Chin Peng's head – an unheard of amount in those days.

‘So it has started at last,' I said flatly. ‘I'm almost relieved. At least now we know where we stand. We don't have to pretend that the Communists are friends any more. They're enemies and out-and-out murderers, and we can start fighting fire with fire.' Denis and I had been listening to the radio all afternoon, which had suspended its normal programs to concentrate on the momentous events of the day.

‘
Some
Communists are our enemies,' Denis said carefully. ‘Don't tar them all with the same brush.'

‘Don't be silly,' I said sharply. ‘They're all exactly the same. Look at Chin Peng. We thought he was a good man but he's the one who's leading the killers on their rampage.'

‘And Ah Khow?' Denis asked. ‘Does this mean he's going to murder us in our beds?'

I thought about that. I liked Ah Khow. I trusted him. All day long he had gone out of his way to make it clear to me that he was as shocked at the killings as we were. ‘I will not let any Communists harm you, Mem,' he had said at one point, looking me straight in the eye, ‘or Tuan, or the children. I would die before letting them do that.'

‘I'm prepared to make an exception of Ah Khow,' I said. ‘But that's because he's a decent human being. Most Communists are sick people who
want to destroy everything that other people have, just to bring them down to their own unhappy level.'

Sir Edward Gent issued a statement late that night which was broadcast throughout Malaya in all the main languages. ‘This we promise you,' the statement said. ‘These terrible killings will be stopped, and their perpetrators brought to justice. Terror will not prevail in Malaya.'