55
There was something odd about that fire, Matthew found. It hypnotized him. And not only him but everyone else round about. There was another air-raid before the end of the morning, but this time nobody paid it the least attention. The fact that somewhere above the smoke and heat some aeroplanes were dropping bombs seemed, beside that monstrous fire, altogether trivial.
The hours wore on without any appreciable change, except that the heat from the fire seemed to grow more intense. Early in the afternoon another AFS unit arrived and, without a word to anyone, they dropped their hoses into the river and set to work. This new team displayed even greater human variety than the Major’s: if you looked at them closely you could see that it included Indians, Malays, Chinese, Europeans and even an African who spoke only French. But these men had been to another fire and their hands and faces were already so blackened and blistered that it had become difficult to tell them apart. They knew what they were about, though, and positioned their branches so that they could control and repulse the restless claws of fire that continually threatened to encircle the Major’s men.
Matthew now found that he was present at the fire merely in excerpts with long blank intervals in between: one moment he would be holding the branch with someone else and trying to shield himself from the intense heat, the next he would be slumped on the river bank trying to explain to Ehrendorf how simple it would be for human beings to use co-operation instead of self-interest as the basis of all their behaviour. ‘So many people already do!’ he exclaimed, but Ehrendorf, who was not as accustomed to fire-fighting as Matthew, looked too distressed to reply. If you looked at teachers and nurses and all sorts of ordinary people, to whom, incidentally, society granted a rather reluctant and condescending respect, there were already many people whose greatest ambition was the welfare of others! Why should this not be extended to every walk of life? Ah, just you wait a moment, he protested, for Ehrendorf was opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish, I know that you want to say that such people, too, are motivated by self-interest but that they get their satisfaction in a different way. That is merely a psychological quibble! There’s all the difference in the world between someone who gets his satisfaction from helping others instead of helping himself! Can you imagine how tremendous life would be? Look at all these men at the fire: they’d do anything for each other, though some of them don’t even speak the same bloody language! But perhaps Matthew, instead of saying all this, had merely thought it, because when Ehrendorf at last managed to reply, his words did not seem to make any sense.
Ehrendorf, in case he should not survive, was urgently trying to pass on to Matthew his great discovery; Ehrendorf’s Second Law! That everything in human affairs is slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment. It was very important that this should be more widely known …
‘Say it again.’
Ehrendorf did so.
‘What? But it’s not true!’
‘Yes it is, if you think about it.’
‘Well, let me see … Certainly things seem to be getting worse for us in Singapore, but not for the Japanese.’
‘Yes, they are getting worse for the Japanese. It only seems that they’re not. Because things keep happening which don’t do anybody any good!’
‘Yes, but still there are lots of things …’ Before Matthew could finish what he was saying, however, he found himself back at the fire and feeling dreadfully exhausted. He inspected the person beside him, planning to give him a piece of his mind if it turned out to Ehrendorf. It was ridiculous that a man of his intelligence and culture should not be able to see how important it was that a vast, universal change of heart should take place. It was the only answer.
‘You might just as well expect stockbrokers to be ready to die for the Stock Exchange,’ chuckled the fire, trying to grasp his ankle with a fiery talon.
The man standing beside him, however, turned out to be not Ehrendorf but Dupigny. Dupigny’s normally pallid face had been scorched an angry red by the heat and his hair, cut to about the height of a toothbrush where it flourished most stiffly on the back and sides of his head, appeared to be smouldering. He was about to ask for an explanation of Dupigny’s presence when, pausing to blink his sore eyes, he suffered another irritating time slip and was once more holding the branch, but this time with a Chinese on whose face white blisters had risen where the skin covered bone. His face had become unrecognizable but it might have been Kee. Matthew had an urge to finger his own blisters which were becoming extremely painful, but he was afraid that if he removed one hand from the branch he would be too weak to hold it … it would wrestle him to the ground and flail-out his brains.
From the fire there now came a series of dull reports, as of internal organs swelling and exploding. ‘Paint chop!’ howled the Chinese beside him, pointing to the depths of the fire where the skeleton of a fiercely burning hut could still be seen. It dissolved as Matthew watched, shielding his eyes. ‘What about the tenements?’ he asked, unexpectedly finding himself back in reality again. The tenements were still there, certainly, and so was the wooden fence, but the round Chinese heads had departed from the windows. Evidently someone had at last thought of evacuating them, which was just as well because the fire was still lapping in that direction.
Towards the end of the afternoon half a dozen huge cranes which had been towering over the fire in a semi-circle on its south-western fringe began to waver; then, one by one, they slowly buckled, toppling into the fire and sending up great fountains of sparks and burning debris which started fresh fires all around as they fell to earth again; these new fires threatened once more to cut off the men wielding the branches. The Major had become very concerned about the safety of his men and decided on a roll-call: even this was not easy to effect in the dense smoke and ever more intense heat. Finally it was completed. There was one man missing. Nobody had seen Mr Wu since he had been relieved at one of the branches some time earlier: an hour, half an hour? it was impossible to say. But just as they were deciding with dismay that Mr Wu must have been cut off by a subsidiary fire stemming from one of the fallen cranes and consumed, he suddenly reappeared again, as cheerful as ever, together with a lorry loaded with Fraser and Neave’s mineral waters which he had somehow commandeered, hired or hijacked … and not a moment too soon for everyone at the fire was suffering badly from dehydration. The Chinese driver of the lorry, which had evidently been on a delivery round, then volunteered to join the firemen and was promptly enrolled. Next time, the Major reflected, it would be as well to bring food and drink; it had not occurred to him that they might have to spend such a long time away from the Mayfair.
At dusk the fire grew steadily more magnificent. As the sky darkened they became aware that the air was full of drifting sparks which fell around them in a steady golden drizzle which now and again grew more heavy, so that they wondered uneasily whether their clothes might catch fire. Nevertheless, the beauty of this golden rainstorm was such that Matthew was filled with great exhilaration, no longer feeling the sting of sparks on his unprotected face and forearms but gazing about in wonder like a child.
For some time now the fire had ceased to make progress towards the tenements and it was easier in the darkness to spot new advances it tried to make before they had time to become established. But although the fire itself stopped advancing, and even fell back a little, its core in which thousands of tons of logs were being consumed, grew hotter and hotter so that even at a considerable distance it could no longer be faced and the men with the branch could only work for a few minutes at a time. In the gloom it could be seen that the drainpipes on the tenement buildings had begun to glow red-hot, standing out like blood vessels on the dark masses of the buildings. And now the wooden fence spontaneously burst into flame though the fire was nowhere near it: it blazed furiously for a minute or two, then melted away and a rich wine darkness returned.
Some time after midnight Adamson arrived, bringing two more units from anoth
er fire at the docks. He made a quick inspection, detailed the new men to hose down the tenement roofs and walls and then, after a word of encouragement to the exhausted men, returned to his own fire at the docks. Not long afterwards it was found that there were two men missing from one of the other AFS units: a frantic search for them began. One was found unconscious not far from the pumps, overcome by the heat and smoke: he was splashed with water from the river and given some lemonade from Mr Wu’s lorry. Towards dawn the other man was found dead on the no man’s land between the fire and the tenements where he had evidently collapsed. His scanty clothing had been burned off his back and his helmet was glowing a dull red. For some hours it was impossible to retrieve his body and when at last this was done and someone made to grasp his arm to lift him on to a stretcher, the arm came away from the shoulder like the wing of an overcooked chicken.
The fire reached its zenith at about five o’clock in the morning and thereafter it became possible to drive it back gradually, a few feet hour after hour: the plan was to contain it and let it burn itself out. Abruptly Matthew realized that it was daylight again: standing so close to the fire he had not noticed the sky growing paler. In the darkness it had been difficult to tell the Mayfair men from the others, but in the daylight it was not much easier, so dirty and unkempt were the figures staggering drunkenly about on the uneven ground. Moreover, by now there was so much hose running between the river and the fire that when it became necessary to put in another length it was a laborious job to discover which hose belonged to the Mayfair and which to other units; the job was made even more difficult by the exhausted state that everyone was in, for by now they had been almost twenty hours at the fire and those who fell down found it hard to get up again. At one point, while engaged in a weary search to trace the correct coupling in the hoses which lay like a bundle of arteries half-buried in sodden wood shavings, Matthew stumbled against a man from one of the other companies lying on the ground. ‘Thanks, mate, I’m OK,’ he said when Matthew tried to help him up. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ He peered up at Matthew, recognizing him. ‘You still all right then?’ It was Evans, the fireman who had told him about Adamson some days earlier.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be OK in a minute,’ Evans repeated. So Matthew went on searching for the hose he wanted. But half an hour later Evans was still lying there.
Presently Matthew, too, stumbled and fell into a pile of wood shavings: they had a pleasantly fresh scent: he lay with his cheek against them and his head spinning. He felt wonderfully contented, however, and despite his weariness, exhilarated by the sense of comradeship with the other men. After a while he made feeble efforts to get to his feet again, but the best he could do was to sit up. He sat there in the wood shavings between the fire and the river, waiting for the strength to move: the fire was quiet now, and in daylight appeared shabby and dull but it still radiated the same stupendous heat. ‘This is the life I should have been living years ago,’ he thought, again experiencing an extraordinary sensation of freedom and fulfilment, ‘instead of which I’ve wasted my time with theories and empty disputes! When the war is over I shall make myself useful to someone.’
Presently Ehrendorf and Dupigny came looking for him and between them got him to his feet. The Mayfair unit was being relieved, they told him. He would do better to sleep in one of the roster beds at the Mayfair. As they left, Evans was still lying exhausted on the ground. Hardly had they passed through the shattered streets to the Mayfair when the sirens began to wail once more. Another raid, heavier even than the one on Tanglin, was just beginning on the crowded shop-houses and tenements of the Beach Road area.
56
An indication of communal co-operation was provided yesterday when Indian passive defence volunteers attended to the casualties in their area … these casualties were mostly Chinese. One of the members of the Indian Youth League, Mr N. M. Marshall, was most helpful in providing a van for the removal of the casualties.
In a certain well-known hotel yesterday a bomb damaged the boys’ quarters but this did not prevent patrons from having their midday meal. They went to the kitchen and helped themselves.
WORKERS, every hour counts in the battle for Singapore. Don’t let the sirens stop your work. The enemy bombers may be miles away. They may never come near you. Carry on till the roof-spotters give the signal to take cover. The fighting men are counting on you. Back them up in the workshops, shipyards and offices. Every hour’s work makes Singapore stronger.
ADVERTISEMENT
Prevent a Blitzkrieg … by White Ants!
The Borneo Company Ltd.
‘DIFFICULT TO TAKE SINGAPORE,’ SAYS JAP.
‘It would be risky to expect that the capture of Singapore will be an easy task to be fulfilled in a short time,’ said the spokesman of the Jap War Ministry in a broadcast speech quoted by Rome radio.
Reuter.
ADVERTISEMENT
Shopping at Robinson’s during alert periods. We had roof spotters on duty throughout alert periods to give final ‘take cover’ alarm when danger is near. Until this warning is given we endeavour to continue normal business. Members of our staff carry on and give shoppers cheerful service. We have shelter facilities and seating accommodation in the basement for all persons who are in the building should the spotters’ give the danger alarm. These arrangements have been made for the protection and convenience of our customers, so you need have no fear regarding shopping arrangements if you are at Robinson’s during an alert period.
Straits Times 21, 22, 23 January 1942
In the course of this last week of January the city underwent a final metamorphosis: the peaceful and prosperous city of Singapore which Walter remembered from his early days had already been eroded by time and change, the way all cities are. But now there came a dreadful acceleration: in the course of a few days and nights many familiar parts of the city were demolished. Bombs fell in Tanglin, interrupting his important conversation with Nigel. They were sprinkled through the grounds of Government House and fell in a dense shower on Beach Road. They peppered the docks and the airfields and Bukit Timah. They fell all around the padang and the Municipal Offices, shattering windows in High Street and Armenian Street beneath Fort Canning Hill, and blowing out one face of the clock in the tower of the Victoria Memorial Theatre where, in years gone by, Walter had so often gone with other parents to watch the children of the European community in Mr Buckley’s Christmas pantomime. ‘What was all this, anyway,’ mused Walter grimly, ‘but the physical evidence of all the more fundamental changes that had taken place in Singapore in the last two decades?’
Walter did not often abandon himself to abstract thought and when he did so it was a sign that he was in a state of depression. He found himself now, however, brooding on what makes up a moment of history; if you took a knife and chopped cleanly through a moment of history what would it look like in cross-section? Would it be like chopping through a leg of lamb where you see the ends of the muscles, nerves, sinews and bone of one piece matching a similar arrangement in the other? Walter thought that it would, on the whole. A moment of history would be composed of countless millions of events of varying degrees of importance, some of them independent, other associated with each other. And since all these events would have both causes and consequences they would certainly match each other where they were divided, just like the leg of lamb. But did all these events collectively have a meaning?
Most people, Walter believed, would have said ‘No, they are merely random.’ Perhaps sometimes, in retrospect, we may stick a label on a whole stretch of events and call it, say, ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ the way we might call a long hank of muscle a fillet steak, but we are simply imposing a meaning on what was, unlike the fillet steak whose cells are organized to some purpose, essentially random. Well, if that was what most people thought, Walter did not agree with them.
Certainly, it was not easy to see a common principle in the great mass of events occurring at any moment far
and near. But Walter believed that that was because you were too near to them. It was like being a single gymnast in a vast stadium with several thousand other gymnasts: your movements and theirs might seem quite baffling from where you stand whereas viewed from an aeroplane, collectively you are forming letters which spell out ‘God Save The King’ in a pattern of delightful colours.
Well, what was this organizing principle? Walter was vague about that. He believed that each individual event in a historical moment was subtly modified by an intangible mechanism which he could only think of as ‘the spirit of the time’. If a Japanese bomber had opened its bomb doors over Singapore in the year 1920 no bomb would have struck the city. Its bombs would have been lodged in the transparent roof that covered Singapore like a bubble, or bounced off it into the sea. This transparent roof was ‘the spirit of those times’. The spirit of these times, unfortunately, allowed the bombs of an Asiatic nation to fall on a British city. Walter had seen the roof growing weaker even during the early thirties: such ruinous Japanese competition in the cotton trade would not have been permitted by the spirit of yet earlier times. Now the bubble no longer covered Singapore at all, or if it did, it let everything through.
The Empire Trilogy Page 138
