The Steel Tsar (2 page)

Still the hallucination did not waver; it even appeared to grow larger as I approached it. I completely forgot my pain as I allowed myself to be deceived by this splendid mirage.

I steered under brooding grey cliffs which fell sheer into the sea. I came to the lower slopes of the island and saw palms, their trunks bowed as if in prayer, swaying over sharp rocks washed by white surf. There was even a brown crab scuttling across a rock; there was weed and lichen of several varieties; seabirds diving in the shallows and darting upwards with shining fish in their long beaks. Perhaps the island was real, after all...?

But then I had rounded a coral outcrop and at once discovered the final confirmation of my complete madness. For here was a high concrete wall: a harbour wall encrusted above the water line with barnacles and coral and tiny plants. It had been built to follow the natural curve of a small bay. And over the top of the wall I saw the roofs and upper storeys of houses which might have belonged to a town on any part of the English coast. And as a superb last touch there was a flagpole at which flew a torn and weather-stained Union Jack! My fantasy was complete. I had created an English fishing port in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

I smiled again. The movement caused the blistered skin of my lips to crack still more. I ignored the discomfort. Now all I had to do was enter the harbour, step off onto what I believed to be dry land—and drown. It was a fine way to die. I gave another hoarse, mad chuckle, full of self-admiration, and I abandoned myself to the world of my mind.

* * *

G
uiding my boat round the wall I found the harbour mouth. It was partly blocked by the wreck of a steamer. Rust-red funnels and masts rose above the surface. The water was unclouded and as I passed I could see the rest of the sunken ship leaning on the pink coral with multicoloured fish swimming in and out of its hatches and portholes. The name was still visible on her side:
Jeddah,
Manila.

Now I saw the little town quite clearly.

The buildings were in that rather spare Victorian or Edwardian neo-classical style and had a distinctly run-down look about them. They seemed deserted and some were obviously boarded up. Could I not perhaps create a few inhabitants before I died? Even a lascar or two would be better than nothing, for I now realized that I had built a typical Outpost of Empire. These were colonial buildings, not English ones, and there were square, largely undecorated native buildings mixed in with them.

On the quay stood various sheds and offices. The largest of these bore the faded slogan
Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company.
A nice touch of mine. Behind the town stood something resembling a small and pitted version of the Eiffel Tower. A battered airship mooring mast! Even better!

Out from the middle of the quay stretched a stone mole. It had been built for engine-driven cargo ships, but there were only a few rather seedy-looking native fishing dhows moored there now. They looked hardly seaworthy. I headed towards the mole, croaking out the words of the song I had not sung for the past two days.

“Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves! Britons never, never shall be—marr-I-ed to a mer-MI-ad at the bottom of the deep, blue sea!”

* * *

A
s if invoked by my chant Malays and Chinese materialized on the quayside. Some of them began to run along the jetty, their brown and yellow bodies gleaming in the sunshine, their thin arms gesticulating. They wore loincloths or sarongs of various colours and their faces were shaded by wide coolie hats of woven palm-leaves. I even heard their voices babbling in excitement as they approached.

I laughed as the boat bumped against the weed-grown jetty. I tried to stand up to address these wonderful creatures of my imagination. I felt godlike, I suppose. And to talk to them was the least, after all, that I could do.

I opened my mouth. I spread my arms.

“My friends—”

And my starved body collapsed under me. I fell backwards into the dugout, striking my shoulder on the empty petrol can which had contained my water.

There came a few words shouted in pidgin English and a brown figure in patched white shorts jumped into the canoe which rocked violently, jolting the last tatters of sense from my skull.

White teeth grinned. “You okay now, sar”

“I can’t be,” I said.

“Jolly good, sar.”

Red darkness came.

I had set off to sail over a thousand miles to Australia in an open boat. I had barely managed to make two hundred, and most of that in the wrong direction.

The date was 3rd May, 1941. I had been at sea for about a hundred and fifty hours. It was three months since the Destruction of Singapore by the Third Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Aerial Navy.

I
t had been a Utopia of sorts which the Japanese destroyed.

Designed as a model for other great settlements which would in the future spring up throughout the East, Singapore’s white graceful skyscrapers, her systems of shining monorails, her complex of smoothly run airparks, had been lovingly laid out as an example to our Empire’s duskier citizens of the benefits which British rule would eventually bring them.

And Singapore was burning. I am probably the last European to have witnessed her destruction.

After serving on the Portuguese aerial freighter
Palmerin
for a couple of months, I took several berths for single voyages, usually filling in for sick men, or men on leave, until I found myself in Rangoon without any chance of a job. I ran out of money in Rangoon and was willing to begin any kind of employment, even considered enlisting as a private in the army, when I was told by one of my bar acquaintances of a mate’s position which had become vacant the night before.

“Chap was killed in a fight in Shari’s house,” he said, nodding down the street. “The skipper started the fight. He’s not offering good money, but it could get you somewhere better than Rangoon, eh?”

“Indeed.”

“He’s just over there? Want to meet him?”

I agreed. And that was how I came, eventually, to Singapore, though not in the ship on which I had signed.

A greasy Greek merchantman, the
Andreas Papadakis,
from some disgusting Cypriot port, trading in any marginally lucrative cargo which more fastidious captains would reject, had originally been bound for Bangkok when her engines had given out during an electrical storm which also affected our wireless telephone. We had drifted for two days, trying to make repairs aloft and losing two of our crew in the process, by the time the old windbag began to sag badly in the middle and drift towards the ground.

The
Papadakis
was not much suited to rough weather of any kind and could not be relied upon in even a minor crisis. The gondola cables and our steering cables both were badly in need of repair and we should have waited our moment and come down over water if we hoped for any chance of landing without serious damage, but by now the captain was drunk on retsina and refused to listen to my advice, while the rest of the crew, a mixed bunch of cut-throats from most parts of the Adriatic, were in a panic. I did my best to persuade the captain to let go our remaining gas, but he told me he knew best. The result was that we had begun to drop rapidly as we neared the coast of the Malay Peninsula, the
Andreas Papadakis
groaning and complaining the whole time and threatening to come apart at the seams.

She shivered and trembled in every section as the captain stared blearily through the forward ports and began, it seemed to me, to argue in Greek with the powers of Fate, on whom he blamed the entire disaster. It was as if he thought he could talk or soothe his way out of the inevitable fact. I kept my hands on the wheel, praying to sight a lake or at least a river, but we were heading over dense jungle. I remember a mass of waving green branches, an appalling screech of metal and wood as they met, a blow to my ribs which knocked me backwards into the arms of the captain, who must have died muttering some wretched Cypriot remonstration.

He saved my life, as it happened, by cushioning my own fall and breaking his back. I came to once or twice while I was being pulled from the wreckage, but only really regained my senses when I woke up in St. Mary’s Hospital, Changi, Singapore. I had a few broken bones, which were mending, some minor internal injuries, which had been tended to, and I would soon be recovered, thanks to the Airshipmen’s Distress Fund which had paid for my medical treatment and the period during which I would recuperate.

I had been lucky. There were only two other survivors. Five more had died in one of the native hospitals to which they had been taken.

While I rested, somewhat relieved not to be worrying about work and glad to be in Singapore, where there was every chance of finding decent employment, I began to read about the tensions growing between several of the Great Powers. Japan was disputing territory with Russia. The Russians, even though they were now a republic, had quite as much imperial determination as the Japs. However, we knew nothing of the War until the night of 22nd February, 1941: the night of the attack by Japan’s Third Fleet: the night when a British dream of Utopia was destroyed perhaps for ever.

* * *

W
e were trying to escape what was left of the colony. An ambulance ship was moored to an improvised mast and the vessel all but filled the blackened, ruined grounds of St. Mary’s: a huge airship silhouetted against a sky which was ruby red with the flames of a thousand fires. The scene was surreal. I think of it today as the flight from Sodom and Gomorrah, but in Noah’s Ark! Tiny figures of patients and staff rushed, panic-stricken, into the vessel’s swollen belly while everywhere overhead moved monstrous, implacable Japanese flying ironclads. They had come suddenly, mindless beasts of the upper regions, to seed Singapore with their incendiary spawn.

Our resistance had been impotent. Far away a few searchlight beams wandered about the sky, sometimes showing a dense cloud of smoke from which could be glimpsed a section of one of the vast aerial men-o’-war. Then the three remaining anti-aircraft guns would boom and send up shells which either missed or exploded harmlessly against the side of the attacking craft. There were several of our monoplanes still buzzing through the blackness at speeds of over four hundred miles an hour, firing uselessly into hulls stronger than steel. They were picked off by tracer bullets shrieking from armoured gun-gondolas. I saw a hovergyro whirl like a frightened humming bird out of the flames, then it, too, was struck by magnesium bullets and went spinning into the flaming chaos below.

Our ship was not the latest type. Few hospital ships ever were. The cigar-shaped hull protecting the gasbags was of strong boron-fibreglass, but the two-tiered gondola below was more vulnerable. This gondola contained crew and passenger accommodation, engines, fuel and ballast tanks, and into it we were packing as many human beings as we could. I, of course, almost fully recovered, was helping the doctors and medical staff.

Without much hope of the ship’s being able to get away, I helped carry stretchers up one of the two folding staircases lowered from the bowels of the ship. This in itself was a hard enough task, for the vessel was insecurely anchored and it swayed and strained at the dozen or so steel cables holding it to the ground.

The last terrified patient was packed in and the last nurses, carrying bundles of blankets and medical supplies, hurried aboard while airmen unpegged the gangways so they could be folded back into the ship. The stairs began to bounce like a cakewalk at a fair as, with the riggers, I managed to climb into the ship, losing my footing several times, shaken so much I felt my body would fall to pieces.

Suddenly several incendiary bombs struck the hospital at once. The darkness exploded with shouting flame. More bombs burst in the grounds, but incredibly none hit the airship direct. For a moment I was blinded by brilliant silver light and a wave of intense heat struck my face and hands.

From somewhere above I heard the captain shout “Let slip!” even before the gangway was fully raised. I clutched and found a handrail, dropped the box I had been carrying and desperately tried to grope my way up the few final rungs before I should be crushed by the automatically closing steps. My vision returned quickly and I saw the cables lashing as if in fury at having to release their grip on the ship. And then I stood on the embarkation platform itself and my immediate danger was past.

N
ot much later I sighted the large conglomeration of tightly crowded together buildings which was the port of Surabaya. A busy city of mixed European and Malayan architecture, it was one of the few big ports to survive the decline of conventional shipping in favour of the air-going cargo vessels. Its harbour was still crammed with steamers and the whole place looked unnaturally peaceful in the early morning light. I felt an irrational surge of jealousy, a desire that Surabaya too might one day experience what Singapore had experienced. What right had this dirty, ugly port to survive when a mighty monument to a humane and idealistic Empire had perished in flames?

I pushed these dreadful ideas from my head. In a few more moments we should be crashing into the sea. Without power of any kind, the ship was going to have great difficulty in landing short of the harbour itself.

The whole vessel suddenly shuddered and I called for the staff to stand by as some patients began to moan questions or whimper in fear. The ship turned and began to drift in a clumsy, barely controlled manoeuvre and I lost sight of the town altogether. I saw only a steam launch surging over the waves and turning to follow us, leaving a white scar in the sea. There came a peculiar creaking and groaning from overhead as if some unusual strain had been placed on the gasbags and the hull containing them.

We began to drop.

A wailing went up from the patients then and we did our best to reassure them that everything was in order and that soon they would be in safe hospital beds in Surabaya.