The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  54

  LEARN TO DANCE AND DROWN YOUR WORRIES IN CABARETS!

  Success guaranteed to anyone after two and a half hours

  private coaching at the

  Modern Dancing School

  5A Ann Siang Hill

  (the road is diagonally opposite to the Hindu Temple

  of South Bridge Road).

  Straits Times, 16 Jan 1942

  PROGRAMME FOR SUNDAY, 18 JAN, 1942,

  at the Sea View Hotel popular concert

  11 a.m. to 1 p.m. by Reller’s band

  1 Overture The Beautiful Helena Offenbach

  2 Waltz Wine, Women & Song Strauss

  3 Fantasia Faust Gounod

  4 Selection Showboat Kern

  5 Rhapsody Slavonic Rhapsody Friedman

  6 Selection No, No, Nanette Youman

  7 Medley Somers Scottish Medley Rijf

  8 Selection Tommy’s Tunes Pecher

  Tiffin special Curry served from 12.30–2.30 p.m.

  MR SOLOMON R. LANGFIELD,

  PEACEFULLY IN HIS SIXTY-THIRD YEAR.

  NO FLOWERS PLEASE.

  The death was announced today of Mr Solomon Langfield, co-founder of Langfield and Bowser Ltd and a familiar figure in Singapore business circles for many years. Mr Walter Blackett, paying tribute, said that although not the first in the field Mr Langfield’s family firm had made a contribution.

  So troubled were the times that for the general public the passing of old Solomon Langfield, who surprisingly had turned out not to be quite as old as everyone had thought, took place with scarcely a murmur. There were none of the official manifestations of grief which had marked old Mr Webb’s departure, for example, none of the letters of regret from the Governor nor the flying of flags at half-mast over buildings frequented by rubber dealers, bankers and merchants. At best a few of his old colleagues from Club or committee found their way to the Blacketts’ residence to pay their last respects and offer condolences to young Nigel Langfield on his bereavement. If there were not even as many of these as one might have hoped, considering the long and devoted service which Solomon Langfield had bestowed unstintingly on the Colony in a number of different fields of endeavour, it was partly because in these troubled times everyone had difficulties of his own. It was partly, too, because some of those who were among the first to make the sad pilgrimage to take leave of their friend, reported back that Walter was inclined to be moody and odd in his behaviour, feigning not to know why they had come and then, when they had explained, giving the impression that their journey had been a waste of time and that they were disturbing his peace unnecessarily for such a trivial matter. However, with a shrug of his shoulders he would direct them to the room where the body had been laid out (refrigerated fortunately) awaiting mortuary attentions.

  No doubt Walter’s moody behaviour would have seemed more explicable to the friends of the deceased if they had known the extent of his disappointment over Solomon Langfield’s rejection of the match he had proposed between their respective children. Walter was bitter about this. It had been such a good idea. When you are in a pickle as complicated as that which Walter considered himself to be in, with a partner in your company you cannot depend upon, with a daughter to marry off, and vast stocks of rubber to ship, it could only be expected that the rejection of a single elegant solution to these disparate problems would come as a blow. Add to that old Solomon Langfield’s insulting behaviour and you have enough to make blood bubble in the veins.

  A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter’s marriage. Otherwise she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night and get herself fertilized under a bush by God knows whom! Yes, even a sensible daughter will, there’s no trusting them, particularly these days … Or to put it another way, there are no sensible daughters. Not even with a girl like Joan, who had her head screwed on more tightly than most, could you be sure that you would not wake up one morning to find her entangled with some worthless adventurer. Now, although Walter was confident that sooner or later the present difficulties with the Japanese would be overcome and life in Singapore would return to normal, it was increasingly obvious to him that for some time to come the Singapore community would be scattered to the winds. Finding herself in a different environment, in Australia, say, or India, was there not a danger that Joan would lose the sensible perspective she had acquired in Singapore? Yes, there was, and that was why Walter felt he must see Joan married before she left Singapore. The last thing Walter wanted was to find her captivated by some mustachioed flight-lieutenant who happened to catch her fancy because he was serving his country so heroically.

  The morning after Langfield had rejected his proposal so impudently Walter had discussed the matter with Joan. ‘The old brute was against the idea,’ he had explained grimly, ‘and even if Nigel was so besotted about you that he was willing to go ahead without the old man’s permission, it still wouldn’t do any good because if I know Solomon he’d just cut off the funds. Then we’d be stuck with Nigel but with none of the Langfield business which would be the worst possible solution.’ Yes, it had begun to seem to Walter that he had left this question of marrying off his daughter until too late. Fate, however, had then taken a hand.

  When, in due course, Abdul came to inform Walter, first that Tuan Langfield had not risen for breakfast, then that Tuan Langfield would not be rising again on this earth, Walter had merely said to himself: ‘What a blessed nuisance! Trust that old codger to make a nuisance of himself!’ But presently it did occur to him that provided Solomon had not discussed the matter with his son, his death might not be such a nuisance after all. Joan was inclined to share his opinion.

  Walter was astonished to see the effect that the news of his father’s death had on Nigel. The young man seemed positively afflicted to hear of it; he was visibly on the verge of breaking down. Walter inspected him with curiosity, marvelling at the resources of human nature that could inspire, even for such as Solomon Langfield, an affection so deep. But there was the evidence: Nigel sat before him with his head in his hands, overcome. Such grief could only be respected.

  Walter gave Joan a nod and a wink and she advanced to place a comforting hand on the young man’s shoulder. Walter himself retired then to brood in his dressing-room. He believed he had thought of a way to bring solace to Nigel in his hour of loss. Thus, later in the morning when Nigel had regained control of himself, Walter summoned him and said: ‘My boy, I know how you must be feeling. I won’t beat about the bush. Your father and I had our ups and downs but we always respected each other. When you get down to it, you know, we were very much alike in many ways. Well, I hesitate to tell you what I’m going to tell you because I know that he did not want you to be influenced in any way. I think that poor Solomon may have had some intimation that the end was not far away because the other evening, while we were chatting together about old times and the fun we’d had as youngsters in this Colony, he happened to say how concerned he was for the future … Yes, to put it in a nutshell he told me that he would not be at all averse to seeing you settle down and start a family. “Well, Walter,” he said to me, “this may come as a surprise to you, considering the ups and downs we’ve had in business matters, but there’s only one young woman I’d like to see him married to and that’s that young woman of yours, Joan.” There it is, Nigel, and I was pretty surprised about it, I must say, but once I’d got to thinking about it, why … Lord, are those the wretched air-raid sirens again?’

  ‘But Mr Blackett!’ cried Nigel who in the matter of a few seconds had flushed, turned pale and was now flushing again.

  ‘Dammit! It’s only five to ten. This is becoming too much of a good thing …’

  ‘I thought my father …’

  ‘Well, there we are. We’ll talk about it later … but of course, only if you want to. Maybe I’ve been speaking out of turn, maybe I should have kept mum about it: it wasn’t an easy decision for me to bring it up. And mind you, I know he didn’t want you to be influen
ced in any way and he even told me that if anything he would pretend to take a dim view of such an arrangement just so that … Ah, there go the guns! Damn these air-raids! How can we possibly get anything done? By the sound of the guns they seem to be coming our way … We’d better go to the shelter this time, I think. You go and get Joan and I’ll tell the staff to get under cover …’

  There was no time for further discussion. Already the bombs were beginning to fall and the thudding of the anti-aircraft guns matched the thudding of young Nigel’s heart as he dashed upstairs to get Joan and bring her to the shelter which Walter had had dug beside the Orchid Garden. This time, it seemed, the Japanese bombers were not going to be content with an attack on Keppel Harbour or the Naval Base: they were setting to work on the city itself and on Tanglin in particular.

  Nearby at the Mayfair those of the Major’s firemen who were awake after their night’s work listened wearily to the sirens. Only when the guns at Bukit Timah opened up did they make a move to take shelter. Here, as almost everywhere else on the island, it was hard to see any distance, except upwards. And so as they struggled out of the building, still red-eyed and bewildered from lack of sleep, they looked upwards … to see a densely packed wave of Japanese bombers flying at a great height and directly over Tanglin. In a moment the leading bomber would fire a burst of machine-gun fire: at this signal all the planes would drop their bombs at the same moment and there would be havoc on the ground. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards from where they stood the light ack-ack battery over the brow of the hill was blazing away quite uselessly, it seemed, for the bombers were flying well out of range.

  Now the aeroplanes above, like monstrous insects, began to deposit batches of little black eggs into the sky and a fearful whistling grew in the air around the men fleeing through the flowerbeds. Soon the shelter was crammed and people flung themselves down in any hole or ditch they could find while the Major, wearing a steel helmet, bundled the girls from the Poh Leung Kuk and other latecomers into the recreation hut whose walls had been padded with rubber bales, mattresses and cushions, more as a gesture than anything else. As he did so the first bomb landed in the long-disused swimming pool sending up a great column of water which hung in the air for a moment like a block of green marble before crashing down again. Another bomb landed simultaneously in the road blowing a snowstorm of red tiles off the Mayfair’s roof and out over the compound, and another in the grove of old rubber which lay between the Mayfair and the Blacketts’ house. The last explosion, though some distance from both makeshift shelters, was strong enough to blow in one wall of the recreation hut, hurling those who had been huddled against it back into a jumble of cushions, mattresses and struggling bodies: the roof, too, began to sag and utter piercing cracks. In the deep hush which followed, the telephone could be heard ringing, very faintly, in the empty bungalow. People began to extricate themselves from the jumble on the floor of the recreation hut. Nobody seemed to be badly hurt.

  Abruptly there was a roar overhead and everyone ducked. ‘It’s one of the RAF buses!’ someone shouted as a Hurricane vanished over the tree tops. A ragged cheer went up. The telephone was still ringing: it seemed a miracle that the wires had not been brought down in the bombing. The Major ran towards the bungalow to answer it. He had to swing himself up by the verandah rail because the wooden steps had been carried away by the blast from the bomb which had fallen in the road and now sagged in a drunken concertina some yards from the building. As he had expected they were being called to a fire: houses and a timber yard between River Valley Road and the river had been set alight.

  Shortly afterwards a strange cavalcade was to be seen setting out from the Mayfair. In the lead came the Major’s Lagonda towing a trailer-pump, followed by Mr Wu’s Buick crammed with passengers. Next came two Blackett and Webb vans commandeered from the nutmeg grove by the Major and it was these which lent the Mayfair unit its air of rather desperate carnival, for there had been no time to unbolt the bizarre wooden super-structure which had been fitted on top of them; besides, it might give added protection from shrapnel. The first van, towing a second, newly acquired trailer-pump, still carried the gigantic facsimilies of red and blue Straits dollar bills, complete with slant-eyed portrait of the King. From the other van eight long arms painted dark brown, light brown, yellow and white, each pair supplied with a papier mâché head, emerged symbolically from the jaws of Poverty; since these arms, which were enormously long and stretched forward over the cabin of the van, were supposed to be reaching for Prosperity, it had been collectively decided that the van displaying the dollar bills should go first. Otherwise, as Dupigny remarked, it might almost look as if dollar bills were chasing the representatives of the four races and that they, arms outstretched, were fleeing in terror.

  As they emerged on to Orchard Road they saw for the first time the extent of the havoc caused by the air-raid. A stick of high-explosive bombs had fallen along the upper reaches beginning near the junction with Tanglin Road and neatly distributing themselves, two on one side, three on the other, reducing a number of buildings to rubble, bringing down overhead cables and smashing shop windows so that the pavements of the covered ways glittered with a frosting of glass. The way into Paterson Road was blocked by a number of blazing vehicles which had been hurled across the road by the blast; a lorry lay upside down, its wheels in the air; everywhere people scrabbled desperately in the rubble searching for survivors. A greyish-white cloud of dust muted the blaze of the burning vehicles and turned the people struggling in the road into figures from a winter scene.

  The Major continued down Orchard Road hoping to approach River Valley Road from the other direction; he looked back once or twice to make sure that the others were following. Behind the two vans a motor-cycle brought up the rear of the column, carrying Turner, formerly the manager of the Johore estate, but now obliged by military preparations across the Causeway to return to Singapore, and a Chinese friend of Mr Wu’s whose name was Kee, a strong and taciturn individual, extremely courageous.

  They had to proceed carefully here, sounding their horns on account of the people, many of them apparently still dazed, some wandering about aimlessly, others laying out the dead and wounded at the side of the road. Once they had to stop while an abandoned vehicle was dragged out of their path; then they came upon an oil-tanker that had collided with a tree but by a miracle had not caught fire. Not far away the Cold Storage had had a near miss and badly shaken shoppers were being helped from the building. Near the vegetable and fruit market next door a block of flats was on fire. A Sikh traffic policeman, still incongruously wearing the basketwork wings that gave him the appearance of a dragon-fly, waved his arms vigorously, trying to direct the Major towards the burning flats. But the Major would not be directed: he had his own fire to go to. As they passed by he saw the policeman sink to his knees and then fold up with his forehead on the sticky tar surface of the road, evidently overcome by shock or concussion: one of his basket wings had been neatly broken in the middle and bent back behind the shoulderblade. A moment later and he had been left behind in the swirling dust and smoke, motionless as a dying insect in the road.

  By the time they reached the timber yard two Chinese AFS units were already at work under a detachment from the Central Fire Station but it was clear that there was no chance of saving either the yard itself or the adjoining saw-mills, both of which were well alight. To make matters worse a stiff breeze was blowing from the north-east in the direction of a group of slum tenements standing a little way back from the river: an attempt was being made to arrest the wall of flame advancing towards them.

  When the suction hose had been dropped in the river and the delivery hose had been laid out the pumps were started up: the Major and Ehrendorf went ahead with one branch, Mr Wu and Turner with the other. Kee, who was a mechanic, had taken charge of both pumps, assisted by Captain Brown, while Matthew, Cheong, Dupigny and the others ran back and forth as the branches advanced, laying out extra lengths, signallin
g to the pumps, uncoupling and coupling again, dizzy and breathless with heat. His head spinning, Matthew watched the jets from half a dozen branches curving towards the fire but nevertheless it grew and grew. Flames were now rising over half an acre of piled-up timber and roaring a hundred feet into the air and the water seemed to evaporate before it had time to touch any part of it. Once, when he was accidently splashed by water from another branch on his way to relieve the Major, who was lurching drunkenly and seemed about to fall, Matthew gave an involuntary cry of pain: the water was scalding.

  Now the fire, like some inadequately chained-up oriental demon, was roaring and raging on his left, occasionally making sudden darts forward as if to seize him by the leg and drag him back to its lair. Behind him was the river; on his right was a wooden fence and, beyond that, the tenements whose windows he could see were packed with round Chinese heads, like oranges in a box, watching the fire as if it were no concern of theirs. ‘Why doesn’t someone tell them to hop it?’ he shouted at Ehrendorf beside him, but Ehrendorf was too bemused by the heat to reply.

  Beside this ocean of flame hours passed in a dream. Every so often the men holding the branch were relieved and led back to splash themselves with the stinking water from the river. Again and again Matthew was scalded with water from another branch, but now he could hardly feel it. One moment he would be drenched from head to foot, the next his clothes would be dry and stiff on his body again.

  Suddenly Matthew realized that this fire had a personality of its own. It was not just a fire, in fact, it was a living creature. He tried to explain this to Ehrendorf who was again beside him, holding on like himself to the same struggling branch: he gabbled away laughing at his insight but could not get Ehrendorf to comprehend. But it was so obvious! Not only did this fire have its own delightful fragrance (like sandalwood), it also had a restless and cunning disposition, constantly sending out rivulets of flame like outstretched claws to surround and seize the men fighting it and squeeze them to its fiery heart. But Ehrendorf, on whose forehead a large white blister had appeared, could only shake his head and mumble … meanwhile, the blister grew and presently burst and fluid ran down his face but dried instantly, like a trail of tears on his cheeks. These claws of flame which stretched out from the fire, Matthew noticed, very often overran the lengths of bulging hose that lay between the river and the fire and, presently, on one of his stumbling journeys back and forth, he saw that the canvas skin of the hose had already been eaten so thin by the fire that he could see the water coursing through, as if these were semi-transparent veins pulsing in the direction of the fire to supply it with nourishment. But what they were really trying to do was not to nourish it but to poison it. The fire chuckled and crackled cheerfully at this, and said: ‘You won’t poison me so quickly. You’d better watch out for yourself !’