The Empire Trilogy (185 page)

He reached out for some papers on his desk and as he picked them up a photograph fell out of them: they were private papers of no great importance which he had brought with him from Flagstaff House with the intention of having them destroyed. The photograph, by a coincidence, was of Gordon Bennett and himself standing, by the look of it, outside Flagstaff House. They were both ‘at ease', identically dressed except that Bennett was wearing a short-sleeved shirt while he himself had rolled his sleeves up to the elbow. But what struck Percival now was the difference of expression on their faces: while he himself was smiling pleasantly at the camera, Bennett, a short, plump fellow whose belt encircled a by no means negligible corporation, standing a few inches further back, was looking disaffected, was even glancing at him sideways out of the corner of his eye in a manner which could almost have been contemptuous. But perhaps he was simply imagining it… photographs are notorious for giving the wrong impression, for catching people with misleading expressions on their faces. Still, he had to admit that he no longer had the confidence in Bennett that he had once had. While many of the Australian troops had fought heroically and effectively, Bennett as their leader had proved a liability. Altogether Percival was glad that Bennett would be covering the north-western area which was least likely to be attacked.

Presently Percival's thoughts were interrupted by the GSO1 on duty in the War Room, and not with good news. An urgent message had come through from Kallang aerodrome by way of the RAF staff: one of the convoy of four ships transporting the remaining units of the British 18th Division, the
Empress of Asia
, had fallen behind the other three and had not managed, under cover of darkness, to reach the (relatively) safe umbrella of Singapore's air defences. She had been attacked by dive-bombers off the Sembilan Islands and was in danger of sinking. Efforts were being made by the Navy to rescue survivors.

For some moments, while he considered this news, Percival was speechless. He had been so confident that the unseen hand would play no further part in his affairs … and now this! He had been counting on the 18th Division arriving intact. At length, however, he collected himself and said mechanically to the GSO1: ‘We must count ourselves lucky that that's the only ship we've lost.' Then, becoming brisk, he turned to other business. There was still a great deal to be done. He wanted to know in particular what progress was being made with the demolition of plant at the Naval Base; almost unbelievably, it seemed to him, Naval personnel had decamped to Ceylon on Admiralty orders, without even bothering to inform him that this demolition would have to be undertaken by his own hard-pressed troops.

A little later there was further news of the
Empress of Asia
: although both the liner herself and the equipment she was carrying had been destroyed, the loss of life had been small. This undoubtedly was a good omen: Percival immediately summoned his driver and had himself conveyed to the docks to greet the survivors. True, they would not be much help without their equipment, which had included anti-tank guns (if only there had been more of those at the Slim River!) but it was still a step in the right direction. And every able-bodied man might prove useful in the end, provided there was sufficient time to establish satisfactory defences.

Then, however, an even more disturbing piece of news reached him; at last, on 7 February, Bennett had seen his way to sending the night-patrols he had asked for over to the mainland. On their return they had brought the dismaying report that Japanese troops were concentrating opposite the north-
western
sector. Could it be, Percival wondered, that his prediction was wrong?

In the first days of February it seemed to Matthew that the dock buildings were permanently ablaze. There the Mayfair unit would be sent whenever there were no fires to deal with in their own district, and so frequently did this occur that presently it became almost a ritual: they would report to Adamson and set into a hydrant, or if there were no hydrant, drop their suction hose into the filthy water of the dock itself and start up the pumps. No matter when they arrived, or where, it seemed that it was always Adamson who was in charge of the fire they had been sent to. It was a mystery when he found time to sleep. He would emerge from the drifting smoke, never in a hurry, strolling almost, as if perfectly remote from the fire raging close at hand.

At some time in the past few days Adamson had acquired a dog, a black and white sheepdog which had mysteriously adopted him at one of the fires he had attended and which added to his air of detachment. Very often when the Mayfair party arrived the dog would appear first out of the smoke, would examine them, sniffing and wagging its tail, and then disappear into the smoke again, returning presently with Adamson. Then Adamson would briefly explain the nature of the fire to the Major and the plan for fighting, or at least containing it … for the bombs which caused the fires continued to fall with ritual precision, day after day, very often at ten or eleven o'clock in the morning and again in the afternoon, but always more rapidly than the fires, death and destruction which they brought about could be dealt with. The truth was that although the staff at the Central Fire Station in Hill Street continued to map the new outbreaks as best they could, there were likely to be as many ‘unofficial' fires burning briskly in the docks or elsewhere in the city as those which had been reported and mapped. But somehow Adamson and his dog found out about these fires, sifted them and matched them against the pumps and fire-engines available, deciding which were the least dangerous and could be left to burn, and which had to be stopped then and there.

Once or twice, when the Major happened on an unattended fire on his way to the docks, he anxiously sought out Adamson to report it, only to find out that Adamson already knew about it. ‘Let it burn, Major,' he would say with a curious, ironic smile and then go on to explain in his casual manner where the Mayfair pumps might come in useful. At times Adamson was to be seen in a jeep he had found somewhere, manoeuvring in and out of the piles of rubble and masonry that lay in the streets, while the black and white dog sat up on the seat beside him looking around with keen interest as if ready to alert his companion to any new fire that broke out. But more often, because of the dense traffic of military vehicles unloading equipment and trying to move food stores from the threatened godowns to some safer location in the city, Adamson and his dog moved about on foot. Matthew, in particular, watched them with keen interest.

Despite his weariness, the hectic life he was leading, the constant danger, and his worries lest Vera should be trapped in Singapore, Matthew had not ceased to feel that novel sense of fulfilment which he had first experienced at the timber-yard fire. The satisfaction of doing something practical, the results of which were visible and practical, in the company of friends seemed to him so powerful that he was amazed that he should never have considered it before. While he had been cudgelling his brains with the question: ‘What is the best way in which to live one's life?' with no other result than that a substantial part of that life had gone by in the process, the answer had been all around him, being demonstrated by the most ordinary of people.

Watching Adamson and his dog, calm but determined, going about their business, Matthew thought: ‘Surely there are people like this all over the world, in every country, in every society in every class or caste or community! People who simply go about doing the things that have to be done, not just for themselves but for everybody.' Such people, whether they were Socialists, or Capitalists, or Communists, or paid no attention to politics at all, because they were entirely committed to whatever job it was they were doing were bound to be the very backbone of their society; without them people like himself who spent their days in speculation and dispute could scarcely expect to survive. Matthew was anxious to know Adamson's thoughts, to know whether he had consciously decided to behave in the way he did. But he found it difficult to corner Adamson and even more difficult to get him to say what he thought about anything. He would merely answer with a smile or a shrug when Matthew tried to sound him out on some political question. Once he admitted reluctantly in reply to Matthew's question that, after the war, if he got back to Britain, he would vote for a Labour Government ‘to change all this' and he gestured vaguely with a stick at the smouldering warehouses around them. After a moment's silent reflection he added: ‘I read somewhere that the boatman who rowed King William back across the river after the Battle of the Boyne is supposed to have asked the King which side won … To which the King replied: “What's it to you? You'll still be a boatman.”' Matthew had to be satisfied with this.

In the course of the past few days Adamson had hurt his foot and now limped rather, but he still managed to convey the impression that he was merely out for a stroll among the burning buildings; his casual air was increased by the fact that he had taken to carrying a walking stick he had picked up somewhere. Once Matthew came upon him unexpectedly. Not far from one of the dock gates there was a sad little parcel of tattered clothing and personal odds and ends, abandoned by someone unable to carry them in the stampede to reach one of the last ships to leave. Other similarly abandoned suitcases had in the meantime vanished or been rifled of their contents. Now Adamson, leaning on his stick, was contemplating a battered old hairbrush with bristles splayed by use, a sponge-bag, a couple of books including a child's picture-book, what might have been a cotton dress or apron and several other indeterminate pieces of cloth or clothing. He continued to gaze at these things for a moment with raised eyebrows and a grim expression on his face; then he limped on, swiping with his stick at a tennis ball he saw in the gutter with a shoe and one or two other things. The dog, which had come back to see what was the matter, went racing off again to seek out more fires. Matthew would remember for a long time to come that bitter, ironic expression he had glimpsed on Adamson's face as he limped away down the empty street after the dog which had already disappeared into the rolling smoke.

But already the Mayfair unit had gained so much experience that its members depended less and less on Adamson's advice and directions. The Major himself had become a hardened fireman and no longer would have dreamed of taking the risks he had taken in the beginning. Not that fire-fighting had become any less dangerous. Quite apart from the heavy carpet-bombing raids by gigantic formations of bombers (still in multiples of twenty-seven) which continued and intensified in the first week of February, now lone fighter-aircraft would appear suddenly out of nowhere, zooming up and down the main thoroughfares of the city and machine-gunning anything that moved, even rickshaws or Cold Storage ‘stop-me-and-buy-one' tricycles … one day they passed an overturned tricycle with a Chinese youth beside it, his brains spilling into a pool of milk or ice-cream in the road. Anywhere, coming and going to fires, you might suddenly have come upon a row of bodies stretched out on the pavement following the appearance of one of these aircraft.

The city of Singapore which, in unison with the rise of Blackett and Webb, had grown from a small settlement into the greatest trading port of the Far East had been the home of something over half a million people in peacetime. Now in the space of a few weeks the population had suddenly doubled to over a million as refugees poured across the Causeway from up-country. By the time a hole had at last been blown in the Causeway and the flow of refugees had dried up, the Island, and Singapore Town in particular, was swarming with people who had nowhere to go. From now on, almost everywhere you went you would see people with suitcases or bundles sitting by the roadside in whatever shade they could find, under trees or on the pavements of covered ways, clustering around water-taps or begging food from passers-by. To Matthew and the Major and even to Dupigny who had spent so many years in the swarming cities of the East, this sudden increase in Singapore's population was quite unnerving. Among these aimless crowds of refugees they themselves felt a loss of identity and purpose. They felt themselves losing their accustomed rank as Europeans, their special status, in that great, amorphous, anonymous herd of humanity trapped there in a burning city and unable any longer to exert any control over its own destiny.

Even after the demolition of the Causeway more refugees still continued to appear in Singapore Town, evacuated from the northern part of the Island by the Military who were preparing their defences. From the beginning of February a curfew from nine p.m. to five a.m. had been in force, but you cannot confine people to their houses if they have no houses to go to; it was not very long before the city's population, abnormally swollen by refugees and demoralized troops, had begun to show signs of getting out of control. The first sporadic cases of looting occurred in bombed-out districts. Rumours of the excesses of undisciplined troops, for the most part Australian, circulated among the alarmed Europeans: someone had had his car hijacked at gun-point-by drunken soldiers carousing with prostitutes from Lavender Road, and someone else had heard of a rape of English nurses on waste land near the biscuit factory. This sudden collapse, which you could almost feel in the air, of
normal standards of behaviour
was the most frightening thing of all, more frightening even than the Japanese bombers. As a result, anyone who had still hesitated over leaving, and who had permission to do so, now made up his mind.

Thanks to the Major's influence at the Chinese Protectorate, Matthew had at last succeeded, after more anxious hours of waiting, in having Vera's name registered at the P & O's temporary office in Cluny Road. But Vera, though she had seemed in mortal fear of the Japanese while they were still hundreds of miles away in the north, now that they had come to within a few miles, and could even be seen with the naked eye (so one of the transient officers at the Mayfair asserted) strutting on the sea front at Johore Bahru, had grown calm and apparently resigned. When every day, Matthew telephoned the P & O to find out if there were any ships sailing and, again every day, he received a negative answer she did not seem to be particularly disappointed. She merely shrugged her shoulders and smiled. In any case, he had less opportunity to see her now. While most of his waking hours were spent at fires, Vera had taken to working equally long hours as a volunteer nurse at one of the makeshift hospitals which had sprung up on the fringes of Chinatown to cope with the steadily increasing civilian casualties. Matthew continued doggedly to telephone the P & O, however. He was determined that she should not be in Singapore when the Japanese arrived. But would there be any more ships leaving? So the first week of February came to an end.