Close to the Wind

by David B Hill

  The informality of the brief address did not diminish its gravity. It was the Aussie way, the what and the wherefore in few words. The men, all experienced seamen now, disappeared to their stations and prepared to cast off. Len heard ML311’s engines start up with a deep-throated burble of exhaust and water. A cloud of blue smoke wafted over him. His own boat’s engines fired, creating their own cloud of smoke, and everything vibrated, before settling into rhythm. He stood by his ropes, waiting for the order to cast off. He looked up to the bridge, where the Commanding Officer Sub-Lieutenant Maynard and the Coxswain Jock Brough stood at the helm. Then the shouted instructions came.

  ‘Stand by for’ard.’

  ‘Standing by for’ard.’

  ‘Stand by aft.’

  ‘Standing by aft.’

  ‘Cast off aft.’

  At the same time, in response to an order shouted down the pipe, the engines engaged, the helm spun and the stern of the boat began to swing away from the pier.

  ‘Cast off for’ard.’

  Another instruction put the engines in neutral, and the helm whirled again, before another call, and the boat slowly reversed. The Fairmile pulled away from the pier completely and followed ML311, gliding swiftly away to the other side of the roads. There they tied up among several vessels close under the lee of Pulau Bukom and erected their camouflage nets, to better avoid the attention of enemy aircraft. Keppel Harbour was not a sanctuary but a target.

  While plans were still being settled on shore for the operational deployment of the Fairmiles and the HDMLs, on board their newly assembled crews scuttled about ensuring the equipment was serviceable and everything was secure before watches were set. Then they took stock of their boat. The Fairmile itself had bunk berths, but Len found it impossible to sleep in the tiny space, in a constant sweat and with the odour of fresh varnish still present in the air. Most of the sailors preferred to find space on deck.

  The boat had become liveable mostly through the efforts of the Chinese cook they called Charlie Chan, after the fictional detective. It was customary in the Far East that each crew member make a small contribution to enable the employment of a local skilled in domestic arts such as bargaining for food, cooking and laundry. When the new crew assembled on ML310, they inherited Charlie for this purpose. Charlie was a dark horse, able to speak enough English to bargain, but not enough to explain where he was from. There was talk of him being Kuomintang, having escaped from China on one of the many gunboats that had been evacuated ahead of the Japanese advances. Vessels from Hong Kong and the China Station now lay in Singapore’s harbours. In fact Johnny Bull had spent most of 1941 serving on one, HMS Scorpion. Whatever Charlie’s origin, he was OK. Charlie ensured that the odour of wok-fried garlic chicken and vegetables permeated the ML, eventually displacing that of the varnish, and he provided vital translation services ashore.

  ★ ★ ★

  At a number of levels life went on in Singapore as if nothing untoward was happening. Local government officials and military staff officers practised their stiff upper lip, while censorship of the press and public statements concealed the truth. In spite of the circumstances, the men put it to the Executive Officer that he could afford to give them all a leave pass. Their Commanding Officer Sub-Lieutenant Maynard was unwilling, but when Executive Officer Henderson spoke up on their behalf, he conceded, forced to acknowledge that they had just spent weeks at sea. The first group of eight immediately took off before he changed his mind. They had twenty-four hours.

  When Len and Tim’s group received pay and leave passes, they headed past the MPs and warehousing to exit the port gates. There were over sixty large warehouses – locally called ‘go-downs’ – along the Telok Ayer waterfront, filled with rubber, copra and other products, much of it highly flammable. Many of the go-downs were burning, so the air was full of smoke, the odour of burning rubber and the sound of bicycle bells ringing and men shouting. They walked straight through the gates into a stationary mass of humanity laden with baggage which appeared to stretch the length of the Telok Ayer dock towards Keppel Harbour, where the evacuating vessels lay. Many of them were Chinese or Indian businessmen or Eurasians, who had travelled by bicycle or rickshaw, while a number in lorries, buses and private vehicles sat swamped by the crowd. Mostly these were British. Len guessed they were planters and their wives and families, and other displaced people, marshalled by MPs with batons as they inched towards the newly arrived ships. Military vehicles, staff cars sounding their horns urgently and convoys of lorries carrying newly landed material forced their way in the opposite direction through the throng. The civilian population had nowhere to go, and were forced to tolerate the destruction and the breakdown in services, dodging fire engines and bomb craters, fallen buildings and blocked streets. They suffered the deaths of loved ones, killed en masse from the undefended skies, yet still held on to the tenuous belief that the city itself would never fall.

  The seven men made their way out of the docks towards the city. They decided to take rickshaws, Tim, Len and Jock choosing to share one, given they were all the same size. Economical, Lofty would have called it. In fact, the three of them were almost exactly the same age, too, born in 1920 within a month of one another.

  Len was fascinated by all the peculiar headgear – turbans in various colours, coolie hats, Muslim pillboxes, military caps, berets, sailors’ hats and even the odd slouched hat. Then there were the smells. Frangipani flowered resolutely in the face of the ruin, releasing an aroma so concentrated that when Len was able to draw in the rich perfumes, he was transported. Charcoal smoke from roadside cooking fires proved similarly pleasant, more so when laced with the smell of chicken, beef or pork, frying in garlic, peanut oil and the fragrant spices of the East. Occasionally other less agreeable odours presented themselves: rotting vegetation, roadside waste or the stinking durian fruit. Every now and then the stench of death assailed them again, signalling their passage through another bomb site.

  Rickshaws clogged the roads heading towards Keppel Harbour, overloaded with people or cargo, driven by incongruously thin Chinese men labouring hard to push down, one pedal at a time. The sailors were going the other way, along Fullerton Road, where their driver indicated Change Alley and the towering Fullerton Building. They crossed the Singapore River and headed up High Street, skirting the grassy Padang, which had served as the cricket ground and now hosted anti-aircraft batteries, and travelling past imposing administrative buildings, before they saw a sign that said ‘Hill Street’.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Tim and Len simultaneously. ‘This seems as good a place as any.’

  It was beginning to get dark.

  ‘How do we get back from here?’ Len asked their driver. He pointed out the bridge back across the river, while a group of people started to cross the road to engage the sailors, beggars asking for money and street vendors selling food and even souvenir items, as if there wasn’t a war on. Fans, coolie hats, joss sticks, and curious little packages of rolled leaves, tied with string.

  ‘What do you do with those?’ Len asked, about this last item.

  ‘Bidi, sir. Cigarette. You smoke. One dollar,’ said the seller, thrusting a packet into Len’s hand.

  ‘One dollar. One dollar.’

  Everything was a dollar.

  Tim fished out a dollar from his pocket to buy a Chinese fan made of sandalwood from a vendor draped in fabrics and immediately became the centre of attention.

  Len called to him over the melee. ‘That’ll be useful.’

  Tim raised his eyebrows. ‘Ava, mate.’

  Girls were the last thing on Len’s mind, but Ava was clearly never far from Tim’s, and he could hardly be blamed. Len called her face to mind now. With her hair typically arranged in a French roll, Ava’s beauty was classical. Her voice was low and smoky and her laugh rich like velvet, and she exuded a gentle grace that Len found almost bewitching. Not for the first time he found himself taking check of his thoughts. He considered Tim’s unlikely
gesture, 6000 miles and a world away from home, and felt a lump in his throat. He thought he should probably buy a fan for his mother, but the vendors turned away from his group to concentrate on another group of sailors arriving behind them.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Harry. ‘There’s got to be a bar around here somewhere.’ Harry was a career Navy man, who knew these things instinctively.

  Suddenly an Indian gentleman thrust himself right into the middle of the small cluster of thirsty sailors.

  ‘A bar, sir? I can take you to a very fine bar, sir, and it’s not far from here. No, sir, not far at all, in fact.’

  ‘Jammy bastard can read minds,’ said Harry to the others. But they needed no further encouragement.

  To the Indian, Harry said ‘Lead on, sir!’ And the small group fell in behind the Sikh. Fortunately it wasn’t far.

  The Mayfair was a solid, four-storeyed Edwardian building of block and stucco, standing across the road from the main Singapore fire station on Hill Street. The floors above were apparently guest rooms, while at street level there was a small reception area, behind which was a large dining room and bar, where dark panelled walls and ceilings were dimly lit with red paper lanterns hanging above each table. The place was empty, and with a whoop of satisfaction the men, still accompanied by the Sikh, made straight for the bar. A Chinese man stood up from behind the counter, where he had been placing glasses. Jackie Hayward affected the accent of an officer.

  ‘Six of your finest ales, my man, and don’t spare the horses.’

  The barman stared blankly back at Jackie.

  ‘Try plain English, Jackie,’ said Tim.

  Jackie held up six fingers in front of the barman and said ‘Beer’.

  Without a glimmer of acknowledgement, the man reached back under the bar and began to place six glasses on the top. He then presented six bottles of beer.

  Tim reached out and picked the first one up.

  ‘Come on, mate!’ he exclaimed. ‘We can’t drink that. It’s bloody warm.’

  The communications became more animated, but with much gesturing and a bit of help from the friendly Sikh, ice appeared. The barman made to place the ice in the glasses, but was stopped instantly by a shout from Jock.

  ‘No, no. Don’t do that, mate. Stick the bottles in it. I don’t want to die of some unknown disease.’

  They all finally sat down at a large circular table and several ice buckets appeared, stamped with a suitably impressive champagne house label, filled with ice and bottled Tiger. Nobody could be bothered waiting for the first beer to cool properly, and the caps soon came off with a pop. As the day progressed, managing the beer and the ice became an exact science, requiring close attention. They discovered that the circular table centre rotated, and were thus able to send beer or cigarettes around the group with ease, sometimes at high speed and with spectacular results. Between the cool beer and the ceiling fan whirring away overhead, they began to feel quite relaxed.

  They had noticed several Asian women arrive, dressed in silken cheongsams split alluringly up the leg, and dallying in the vicinity of the bar. One of them brought menus to the table. These offered a meal list in Chinese, Malay and English, each choice with a number beside it. Len browsed the extensive choice until he came to number sixty-five – chilli prawns. He immediately chose it. He’d never had prawns before, but had heard all about them. All the others followed suit – six orders of chilli prawns and rice. When it arrived, it proved to be a huge amount of food. A handsome plate of fat, shelled prawns in a red chilli sauce sat in front of each man, but when they looked for cutlery, there were only chopsticks to hand. More hand signals followed; spoons and forks appeared, and the men began to shovel the untried delicacy into their mouths. It only took a moment for the first reaction.

  Ptui!

  Jackie spat a prawn out onto the table. Len looked at him in amazement.

  Ptui!

  Jack Kindred gasped and grabbed his throat. Tim delivered a second prawn into his mouth at once, before it became clear that he too was suddenly in the grip of something unexpected. But he neither spat nor swallowed. Instead, he kept chewing slowly, while his eyes filled with tears. Len too had his mouth full. The flesh was firm and meaty, and not as strongly flavoured as lobster, but no sooner had he made this assessment than the heat of the chilli began to bite. It engulfed the inside of his mouth with a burning intensity that was beyond anything he had experienced, and his eyes too began to water. When he swallowed, the fire descended down his gullet, while simultaneously burning fiercely on in his mouth. Somebody beat their fist on the tabletop while gasping for air. Harry managed a strangulated ‘Jesus!’

  Tim was unable to respond, reaching instead for his beer. They all did the same and took several long draughts, which turned out to make no difference whatever to the effect of the chilli. If anything, the heat actually intensified. Without thinking, Jackie Hayward thrust his hand into the bucket and stuck a piece of ice in his mouth, prompting a couple of others to do the same. Watching the uninitiated sailors undergo this baptism of fire from the shadowed recesses of the dining room, the women in the cheongsams tittered into their hands and stifled their laughter on one another’s shoulders. Len found that the more he ate the less intense the chilli – or at least the intensity stopped increasing – and so he ate on, albeit slowly. One by one, most of the others managed to follow suit, until they had demolished the entire meal, at which point the women began clapping and laughing wholeheartedly, before whisking the empty plates away.

  By midnight, the men’s indulgence had taken its course. They decided as a group to leave and explore the city; some had left already. They roused Jock, who had fallen asleep in his chair. At the cash booth, Len watched the cashier’s hands move swiftly across the abacus, totalling the bill. When he went to join the others, he passed one of the Chinese women standing to the side of the small entrance foyer, and smiled. She smiled back, and raised her eyes. Len followed her gaze, then went outside.

  ‘So you didn’t fancy her offer either?’ asked Tim.

  ‘What offer was that?’

  ‘The offer to go upstairs and explore the carnal delights of the mystic East.’

  ‘The what? Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Yes, I have, mate, but not so much that I can’t recognise someone on the game when I see them.’

  It took another moment or two before the facts dawned on Len. There had been a lot of women at the bar, and yet no customers had come into the dining room during the whole time they had been there.

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Yes, mate. It’s a knock shop.’

  Len looked around. There were a couple of faces missing from their group. He couldn’t quite be sure who it was. He shook his head.

  ‘Bugger me.’

  ‘Now let’s not take this too far,’ Tim replied, his wit lost on a bewildered Len.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and, draping an arm over Len’s shoulder, he steered his friend away from the bar.

  ★ ★ ★

  The following morning, Tim and Jackie were sitting with Len in a bar on Collier Quay. It was hardly a bar, really; just a simple bamboo shade roof without walls, covered in a tarpaulin to keep the sun and rain out. Tiger beer and Fraser & Neave soft drinks were kept in an icebox behind a makeshift counter on which sat a glass box filled with snack foods. There was no fan and the air was stifling, but the beer was cheap and cold, and it would do. On the river, below the embankment on which they were sitting, large lighters chugged past, empty ones heading down and out into the roads to load cargo, full ones heading up to unload.

  The three men were tired. None of them had ever heard of a taxi dance until, wandering around shortly after leaving the Mayfair, they had happened upon one hidden behind black-out curtains in a converted cinema. Band music had attracted their attention; inside, they found a five-piece orchestra playing modern dance music, entertaining a crowd of people dancing on a wooden floor. The whole thing was lit with
candles. It was a magical scene, so they went over, paid the cashier and were handed a sheet of coupons.

  The place was half full. It seemed that most of the people here were men in a uniform of some sort or other, and there were also Asian women – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Tamil – a line of whom sat along one side of the dance floor. While Tim wormed his way to the bar to get the beers, Len watched as men went up to the women and appeared to exchange their coupons for a dance. Brilliant! By the time Tim returned, Len had already sorted out their partners. When they were cleared out of the place by the MPs at closing, the sun was starting to rise.

  ★ ★ ★

  Now the three of them sat on the Quay in silence, drinking slowly. Money, and time, were running out. They were due back on board at 1600. Len felt another trickle of sweat run down his backbone.

  ‘I wonder how long this is going to last,’ he said.

  Air-raid sirens began to wail. Len drained his glass and stood up.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get back to the ship. I need a rest.’

  He slammed the remaining money he had in his pocket down on the table.

  The others scraped back their chairs and stood up. They raised an eyebrow to their host and walked off along the riverside, back towards the harbour, without speaking. Bombs began falling again near the Empire Docks, where some of the troopships had been tied up, but it was over by the time they walked through the gates and down to the pier, where a Naval launch took them across the harbour to their boat. Once on board 310, Len didn’t even bother to undress properly. He kicked off his footwear and stripped off his tunic, then slid into his bunk and fell into a deep sleep within seconds. In four hours it would be his watch.

  ★ ★ ★

  Len woke to the sound of air-raid sirens. His heart missed a beat. There had been plenty of air-raid drills during the long voyage, but it took him a moment to remember he was in Singapore and this was real. He sat up too quickly and banged his head on the bunk above. Jamming his feet into his boots, he grabbed his life jacket and tin hat and scrambled topside, just as the command for ‘All hands to action stations’ was issued.