Once they were out of the city the march became easier. The roads were less damaged, and from the villages and coconut plantations people came out with food and water which they thrust into the men’s hands despite the angry orders of the Japanese. Every house along the route flew a red-and-white Japanese flag.
Gerald took a tin of lukewarm water from a Chinese boy and paused to drink.
‘Don’t stop,’ Douglas Lovell snapped at once. ‘Stop now and you’ll never get started again. Keep moving, man.’ Obediently Gerald shuffled onwards. Neither man had slept for more than a few hours in the past ten days. Exhaustion blurred their vision and dulled their senses, so they walked as if in a mist, with the insistent wail of the bagpipes pushing them forward.
At last they heard an order to halt, and waited in lines in the blazing sun until a subaltern with a clipboard worked his way round to them, asked for name, rank, number and regiment, and assigned them billets in the barracks.
‘It’s not Raffles, but it’s all we can do for now. We’ve got more than fifty thousand men here and only space for a fifth of that number. You’ll get enough room to he down in, and that’ll be it,’ he told them. ‘Report to your CO as soon as you can.’
‘CO be damned,’ Gerald muttered. ‘He can look for me if he wants me.’ They had no idea of the identity of their present Commanding Officer; the unit’s original commander had been killed during the shelling of one of the many positions they had attempted to hold in their chaotic retreat.
Inside the barracks, a single-storey, concrete building with a tin roof, Gerald lay down on the dirty stone floor and fell into a heavy sleep, oblivious of the milling men around him piling up their equipment and claiming their own territory.
Douglas Lovell woke him the next day. ‘They’re issuing rations. On your feet, Rawlins.’ Gerald sat up, rubbing his puffy eyes and scratching his unshaven face. They joined a long, sweating queue of men with mess tins and ate their portions of watery rice, boiled without salt, with distaste. It was sufficient nourishment to make Gerald feel refreshed, and the thoughts which he had been able to ignore came to the front of his mind.
‘I’m going to take a stroll, see what I can see,’ he told Douglas Lovell. ‘I’ve got to find out about Betty. If every man in Singapore is in this damned place there must be someone who saw her. And if Anderson made it, he’ll be with the wounded, don’t you think?’
With stolid persistence, Gerald began to ask every man in the barracks if he had encountered a brown-haired, blue-eyed, pregnant Englishwoman named Betty in the panic-stricken disorder of Singapore. Douglas Lovell went with him.
They joined a teeming mass of servicemen who were coming to terms with defeat. For most of them this meant thinking the unthinkable. For weeks they had been fired with confidence by propaganda and morale-boosting speeches in which the possibility of a Japanese victory had never been mentioned. Now it was a reality and the fall of Singapore also implied a loss of faith in their leaders. Immense crowds of captives walked around continuously in search of reassurance against the fearful uncertainty which they shared.
Each man felt as anonymous as a single ant in an anthill, despite their diversity. There were freckled Scots, scrawny Cockneys, fat planters, pallid civil servants, young police cadets and elderly clergymen. Rank, regiment and social standing were suddenly irrelevant. They were all prisoners.
Several of the barracks buildings were in use as hospitals, packed with wounded and dying men. The first medical centre which Gerald visited was full of Australian troops, but in the second their spirits lifted instantly when they recognized Anderson’s small, rounded figure crouched beside a patient at the end of the stuffy room. There was scarcely room to walk between the wounded men who lay on the stretchers and makeshift rope beds, flapping weakly at the flies.
The two men waited until Anderson could be absent for a few minutes. He joined them outside the building and shook hands vigorously, saying, ‘My goodness, my goodness,’ over and over again.
‘Did you get any news of Jean?’ Gerald asked at once.
‘I saw her for a few hours when we reached Singapore; she got news that our unit had arrived and hunted us down.’ Anderson still held Gerald’s hand and arm, debating with himself whether to pass on the news that Betty had lost their baby. ‘She’d been with Betty and I’m hopeful they both got away to sea,’ he added, deciding against passing on the bad news. The doctor had been sent directly to afield hospital from the rubber estate, and during the British troops’flight and the shelling of the city he had seen so many good men die that the loss of an ailing infant to a healthy young couple seemed less of a tragedy than a blessing in the present situation.
Gerald looked at his cracked, mud-caked boots in silence for a few moments, sensing what he had not been told. ‘As long as Betty’s all right…’ he muttered.
The following day, Gerald found another group of Volunteers, mostly planters like himself, all of whom were anxious about their families and friends. They sat talking for hours in the meagre shade of a squat palm tree, desperate for some hint of the welfare of their wives and children. There was nothing else to do, and nothing else to think about except their own unimaginable fate.
‘It’s damn useless standing here jawing,’ Douglas Lovell said at last. ‘The thing to do is post a list of all the relatives. There’ll be Red Cross workers of some kind once this place is organized. And there are two thousand women in the civilian camp hereabouts, so I’ve heard. If we can get in contact with them and get their names, that’ll be a start.’
‘How do you propose doing that?’ Gerald sneered, suddenly made vicious by his sense of powerlessness. ‘Ask the Japs if we can invite the ladies over for tea?’
‘Damn your insolence! Don’t you know the way to speak to a superior officer?’ the older man snarled, and Gerald flinched and looked apologetic, responding instinctively to the military tone of the reproach. Douglas Lovell Once more assumed the responsibility of command. He outranked all the survivors of the Volunteer Force, and knew by instinct that if these demoralized men, in their overcrowded, deprived conditions, were not immediately held together with discipline, they would degenerate to the level of animals.
‘I want all the writing materials we’ve got,’ he ordered them, ‘and all the food. You –’ he pointed at a skinny young man whose shoulders were straightening visibly at the sound of commands, ‘will be our quartermaster in charge of rations. And tomorrow morning, instead of sitting around gossiping like a bunch of washerwomen, there’ll be half an hour of physical jerks. We must keep ourselves fit at all costs; there’ll be an Allied landing and we must be ready to do our bit. And you, Rawlins, you’ll beg, borrow or steal a razor and shave off that fuzz. If you wanted to grow a beard, you should have joined the navy.’
Soon the other commanders also brought their men into line and the vanquished army began to adapt to the prison camp. At first there were few Japanese to guard them, and while the enemy officers harangued them with barely comprehensible speeches about the shame of defeat and the greater shame of not committing suicide rather than be captured, the Japanese soldiers proved to be peasant types who were seldom wantonly cruel.
Within a few weeks, the Japanese ordered their captives to form work-gangs for forced labour in the Singapore docks. Smuggling began in earnest; every man who marched out of the compound returned with food, cigarettes or information pressed upon them by loyal citizens of the city.
With ingenuity which surprised Douglas Lovell, Gerald got himself included in one of the earliest labour-gangs and bribed a Chinese youth to ask at the hospital where Anderson told him Betty had been taken for news of their wives.
‘They’re OK,’ he told Anderson on his return one night. ‘They got on a navy ship with the hospital nurses – the HMS Marco Polo. They were trying to get to Colombo. Betty and Jean are OK.’ His ruddy face, for weeks drawn with anxiety, was now creased in a permanent smile and Anderson slapped him on the shoulder, thinking that t
here would be little benefit to Gerald in speculative talk about minefields and enemy warships. What the man could not imagine could not hurt him.
‘That’s splendid news,’ the doctor said in a quiet voice. ‘Absolutely splendid. They’re safe – thank heaven for that.’
Betty had only been in the water for twenty minutes, and already it no longer felt warm but icy cold. Her arms and legs were numb, her body was so chilled that it felt insubstantial but in the core of her abdomen an excruciating agony raged like an inner inferno. The waves lapped below her chin, sometimes splashing into her scarlet face. Her lips, deeply cracked after days of fever, were sore and swollen from the salt water. Mercifully, she was scarcely aware of the scene of desolation around her.
The indigo sea was full of floating debris from the stricken Marco Polo; like most of the ships at the tail end of the escape fleet from Singapore she was a rough-and-ready coastal freighter hastily commandeered by the navy to evacuate civilians from the besieged city.
Jean Anderson and Betty had been evacuated from the hospital with the handful of European nurses who had remained there. After the birth of her child, Betty had been seriously ill with an internal infection, but when the announcement was made at the head of the crowded corridor that patients capable of walking would be evacuated, Jean hauled her bodily off the bed and forced her to stand.
They had been bundled first aboard a heavily loaded launch which had ploughed from ship to ship in the crowded harbour until the commander of the Marco Polo agreed to take its human cargo. They set sail with two other ships, all crammed with women and children, but the desperate flotilla had separated outside the harbour, hoping to ensure by scattering that at least some of the craft would evade the Japanese warships and reach safety. The unlucky Marco Polo had very soon encountered a small patrol of Japanese warships, and the first shell had holed her, tearing the rusty fabric of the ship as if it were paper.
Now her surviving passengers, Jean and Betty among them, were buoyed up in the water by their cumbersome green, canvas life jackets and bobbed on the waves like so much flotsam among the splintered planks of the old freighter. The Japanese cruiser which had fired on their ship was invisible over the horizon, but three aeroplanes, like evil insects, droned louder and louder above them in the sky as they bore down on the helpless survivors.
The ship was listing and her bows were already below the surface. As Jean watched, the rusty stern slowly rose up in the water and the ship poised vertically for an instant before slipping swiftly down below the waves in terrifying obedience to the law of gravity.
‘There she goes. That’s the end of the Marco Polo,’ gasped Jean at Betty’s side, struggling to point across the surface as the swell bore them up and they saw the last few feet of the vessel’s upended stern as it vanished into the swirling water. An instant later nothing remained where the ship had been except a pall of black smoke in the air and a spreading oil slick on the surface of the water. The stink of fuel and of burning debris filled their lungs at every breath, and Betty began to cough.
‘Stop it, Betty, you must stop it,’ the older woman pleaded, keeping a firm hold of the tapes securing Betty’s canvas and cork life-jacket.
‘I can’t stop it.’ Betty miserably wiped a stream of mucus from her nose into the oily water and coughed again and again.
‘You must stop it, you silly girl. You’ve got to save your strength, and if you keep gasping and spluttering like that you’ll get sea water in your lungs,’ Jean snapped at her friend without sympathy. In the past few weeks Betty had eroded almost all the gallant woman’s patience with her selfish refusal to fend for herself. Too late, Jean had realized that Betty’s strategy for survival was simply to demand that stronger people take care of her.
With a roar the aircraft swooped down from the sky and spewed bullets over the water fifty yards away from them. Choppy waves spread out from the impact, washing into Betty’s face, and half filling her mouth with a vile emulsion of fuel and brine as if to prove Jean right. The lake of oil which marked the Marco Polo’s grave ignited; above the slap of water and the snarl of the aircraft they heard faint screams from the survivors who were burning in the water.
‘Thank God they got us off first,’ Jean murmured to herself, hoping Betty was too far gone in her fever to register the horror around her. Her head was lolling heavily forward now and Jean saw that she was becoming unconscious.
‘Here you are, ma’am, catch hold of this.’ A seaman, swimming strongly, approached pushing a stout wooden door from the ship. ‘Can we get her on it, d’you think, if we push her up together?’ With desperate determination they manoeuvred Betty’s awkward body on to the half-submerged surface, skinning their hands and exhausting their strength in the process. The seaman’s face and neck were burned raw on one side.
The enemy aircraft did not return, and a weird peace settled over the water as the floating survivors fell silent and were separated from each other by the strong currents. The overcast sky darkened, and squalls of rain harrowed the ocean surface. Jean copied the seaman and opened her mouth to catch the sweet water.
‘Can you tell which way we’re drifting?’ she asked him. He shook his head. ‘Makes no odds. Whether we’re carried back to Singapore or the islands, or swept over to Sumatra, the Japs’ll be waiting.’
‘How long can we survive in the water?’ Jean’s tone was as calm and conversational as if she were asking the time. She no longer felt cold, only tired, but her arms and hands ached from the effort of clinging to the side of the floating door.
‘A day, two days … we’ll be in luck if it rains again.’
Darkness settled swiftly over the waves; the moon and stars were hidden behind thick clouds and more rain fell. Manipulating her wet possessions with great difficulty in the faint radiance that persisted, Jean pulled her powder-compact from the bag she had tied around her waist and caught a trickle of rainwater in the lid. It cost her a supreme effort of strength to tip the precious fluid between Betty’s lips.
Soon after falling back into the black water Jean felt the cold, hard snouts of fish butting against her legs. The seaman could feel them too: she heard him swear under his breath.
‘Beg pardon, ma’am. I don’t fancy being a fish’s breakfast just yet. Keep kicking your legs and the shoal will swim on.’ Jean did as he suggested and the underwater battering stopped.
Shortly after dawn the seaman pointed to a barely visible black line at the horizon.
‘That’s land, at any rate,’ he told Jean, suppressed hope in his voice. ‘We’re getting closer to it, and all. Let’s pray to God the current will carry us in.’
The line thickened quickly and the outlines of palms and other trees became visible, and soon the green of the forest stood out distinctly against the blue of the sea. For a tantalizing hour the current carried them along parallel to the coastline; eagerly they wasted their remaining strength trying to swim to the shore, but the water was too powerful. At last they were borne close to a sandspit and, dragging the unconscious Betty on her makeshift raft, Jean and the seaman waded into shallow water and stumbled on to dry land.
They sat thankfully on the silted strip of gravel, feeling the warmth of the mid-morning sun bring life back to their limbs and wordlessly watching white streaks of salt crystallize on their legs and arms. The seaman pulled off the burned remnant of his shirt, squeezed water from it and spread it over Betty’s face to protect her from the sun.
Bright as the sunlight was, it was kinder to their eyes on the brownish beach than it had been in the glittering water. Jean picked at the tight knots of her life-jacket with weak but persistent fingers, and at last was able to remove the heavy device which had saved her life. Feeling her strength return, and sensing a sweet, muddy smell in the air, she scrambled upright and looked around them.
‘Heavens, we’re at the mouth of a river!’ she exclaimed. ‘And I can see some houses and boats, quite a lot of boats. And people!’
‘Can they
see us?’ The seaman rose to his feet and strained his eyes in the direction in which Jean was looking. In the middle of the small estuary an elderly Malay fisherman was sculling a small boat out to sea; they watched his slow progress in silence until the seaman at last judged that he could see them, and began to shout. With maddening slowness the bowed figure straightened above its oar, and finally made a tentative gesture of recognition.
The villagers gave them rice, eggs and dried fish to eat but treated them with embarrassed diffidence; the ocean current had carried them to the coast of Sumatra, where the Japanese were already in occupation and had demanded that all Europeans should give themselves up. Jean was still pushing rice into Betty’s mouth when four Japanese soldiers on bicycles arrived, summoned by the village policeman.
A young man offered to transport Betty in a rough handcart which ran on a pair of bicycle wheels, and in the smothering heat of the afternoon the soldiers and their captives marched slowly along a road by the riverside. Jean became aware that she had a painful expanse of raw flesh, like a high collar, at the top of her neck, where the coarse canvas of the life-jacket had rubbed away her skin.
They spent the night with seventy other wretched Europeans in a derelict wooden cinema, and Jean noticed that Betty was no longer burning with fever. A night in the cold salt water had reduced her temperature. She was conscious and lucid in the morning, but remembered nothing of their escape from Singapore, or of the weeks she had spent in the hospital after the birth of her child; Jean told her very little, believing that forgetting was nature’s way of protecting a feeble mind from knowledge it could not bear.
In the morning the Japanese arrived in force, and marched them all onwards without pity. The strongest men among the captives took turns to carry Betty between them. They reached the small town of Muntok and were ordered to line up in front of the prison building, in peacetime a warehouse where spices had been stored.
The men were marched away, and the women ordered into the grim, harsh-smelling interior of the building.
Pearls Page 27
