The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  As soon as darkness fell that night I sent the guard off to find Shorty, to tell him that Toh Kei was now gravely ill. It was the truth, even if the reason for the mission was not. All I wanted was to have the guard out of the way. Tang was barely conscious by now. I told him that I was going to take him to the hospital. I had a safe conduct pass that assured him of immediate medical attention. He could offer no words, but nodded with what I took to be acceptance of this course of action. I have always claimed that he was lucid when acknowledging what I was about to do, even making the claim under oath during the trial. I was unnerved at the time, being subject to cross-examination, and was fortunate to be rescued by a sympathetic judge. However, if the truth be known, I will never really know if Tang understood what I was doing or whether he actually consented to it. I was never given an opportunity to discuss it with him.

  In any event, I managed to get him down the stairs and into the back seat of my little Austin. The pass required the bearer to present himself at a police station for it to be honoured. Better to do that, I thought, than go directly to the hospital. Better to follow the instructions and put my faith in the authorities.

  PART 2

  TRIAL

  39

  DAY ONE

  The weekend before the trial was the most dramatic couple of days Malaya had seen since the end of the Japanese Time. Not because of the trial, but because of something that happened on another lonely road, and after it happened my father said that everything in Malaya would be different. By then I was getting used to my father telling me such things.

  Before that he said we would be going up to Penang again after the trial, which would not last long as Judge Pretheroe did not believe in wasting time and was a stickler for rules. Play the game right, was Judge Pretheroe’s motto, my father said, and I duly consulted the dictionary to learn that meant the words that appeared under a coat of arms. Mr Yew had a coat of arms and I wondered what his motto was, although I felt quite certain it would be nothing to do with games. I imagined Mr Yew’s motto would be ‘King of the Lake District’ or perhaps ‘This Happy Breed’.

  We would stay in Penang for a week this time, Pa said. The baby was due soon and if we were lucky we might be there when it happened, and then we could all travel back to Ipoh together. Mei said it would be a good idea if Ma stayed in Penang a little longer because if it was a boy the evil spirits who would be looking for him in Gopeng Road would be confused. Pa said that was mumbo-jumbo, and I looked that up too, but failed to find it anywhere. Whatever it meant, I could tell my father did not believe in it.

  All of that happened on the Saturday, the day of the drama on the lonely road, although nobody actually heard about that incident until the next day when the newspapers came out, which then triggered Pa’s prediction that everything would now be different.

  What happened on the lonely road to make such a difference was another ambush on a car by bandits hidden in the jungle. This time it was not a rubber planter or a tin miner or a little girl who suffered at the hands of the terrorists. It was Sir Henry Gurney, and that really did make all the difference. Sir Henry Gurney was the British High Commissioner in Malaya.

  I knew little about the man or the office he held, except that Uncle Hung Jeuk had once said he was also known as Colonel Blimp. I had seen his picture in the Straits Times every so often and he appeared to me to have the look of another one of the Happy Breed. He certainly did not look like someone who deserved to be shot dead on the side of a lonely road any more than the little girl deserved it. I did not understand what a High Commissioner was, but from all the fuss the episode created it was obvious he was someone of importance. After that weekend I became aware that he was quite the most important person in the whole of Malaya.

  In my young mind, having ‘Sir’ before his name equated him with Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad and Sir William Slim, all of whom I fancied to be Knights of the Round Table, and therefore good and noble men, which made it all the more mystifying why he should be shot dead on the lonely road. I wondered if they had shot him through the eye, or perhaps even scalped and cooked him, which I could never forget Uncle Hung Jeuk saying the bandits were sometimes inclined to do.

  Although that weekend was indeed the most dramatic couple of days since the end of the Japanese Time, it did not prevent the undoubtedly shaken authorities from getting the trial underway as scheduled on the following Monday. That day was the ninth of the ninth month in the Chinese calendar, and as we were getting ready to go to court Mei said it was a good sign. It’s the Double Ninth, she said, which is the Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods. I asked why that was such a good sign, and she said the Nine Emperor Gods brought good luck. Theirs was a day for climbing the hill to see a view of the good fortune that lay ahead. This trial was a hill our father was required to climb, but good luck would be the view from there.

  She seemed to be convinced, although Ah Mun Cheir, who had overheard her, said the Double Ninth, or Kow Wong Yeh as she called it, was the beginning of winter, the start of hard times, and then she shook her head despondently. I took both points of view to my father who said that Mei was absolutely right and there was no such thing as winter in Malaya. That settled the matter for me, and I looked forward to a view of good fortune over the ensuing days.

  We were to watch the proceedings from the public gallery, Pa told us all, and we were to utter not a sound, no matter what we heard or what happened during the trial. It was very important that we remained silent, which led me to consider whether perhaps the court might actually be some kind of holy place, such as a church. I had been to the courthouse many times, but never while court itself was in session with a judge sitting up in his high chair and bewigged lawyers arrayed before him, and some poor unfortunate sitting there in the dock when all and sundry discussed him while he was as silent as us in the public gallery.

  British Gothic was how Pa once described the Ipoh courthouse, and I had heard him say similar things about churches on occasions. The British had put up such imposing buildings all over Malaya, he said, to remind everyone just who was in charge. That resulted in the Sultans feeling compelled to build even larger palaces, called istanas, to put the British back in their place. Before the British came the Sultans of the various states were happy to live in houses that were not so different – or much bigger – than any other house in their kampong. There was only one istana in the state of Perak, and that was in the royal town of Kuala Kangsar, which was a town of little consequence to anyone but the Malays. In Ipoh, which was of more consequence than anywhere else in Perak, the British had been free to throw up a complete collection of imposing buildings. Pa said the Romans were in the habit of doing that sort of thing wherever they went and the British had learned a great deal from the Romans.

  I was quite aware how big the British Empire was because we had a map of the world in our classroom and it was covered in pink, all of which was British, including Malaya, although it was not much when compared to the vast pink expanses of Canada and Australia, or even India. Britain itself was tiny when compared to them, just about the size of Malaya, and it was certainly difficult to fathom how a small country like that could rule over so many larger ones. Pa once told me that Britain made more money out of Malaya than all the other pink lands combined, and I wondered how that could be fair, so I asked him. ‘Precisely,’ was all he said.

  The court’s public gallery was upstairs, more like the dress circle in the Odeon than any church, but otherwise it did indeed have a solemn aura about it, in that everyone was careful to be quiet and there was nothing to be heard but the shuffling of feet and a little coughing that echoed around the reverential lofty ceiling. Where there might have been a cross if it were indeed a church, there hung instead a coat of arms with a crowned lion and a rearing unicorn and a motto that made absolutely no sense at all in any language I could recognise. It certainly was not ‘Play the game right’, and so was definitely not Judge Pretheroe’s coat of arms, but there he wa
s sitting right beneath it. Judge Pretheroe was higher than anyone else in the court – except of course for us up in the public gallery, not that we counted – and sat behind a massive wooden bench. Between that and the coat of arms and the wig he wore, and while this may not have been a church, Judge Pretheroe certainly gave the appearance that he was God.

  Our place in the gallery gave us a view over everything, even the judge, and I could see that on the bench in front of him there was just a single large sheet of blank paper. All the other bewigged gentlemen were surrounded by books and papers tied with pink or white ribbon, but not Judge Pretheroe, whose slightly discoloured wig gave the definite impression that he had been at this business longer than anyone else in the room.

  I rarely saw my father in his wig in those days, and not surprisingly to the uninitiated such as us it lent him a faintly comical air, which was precisely the opposite effect to that intended. As a rule he kept it safely stored at his office, although there was one particular occasion when he happened to bring it home with him. Mei came across it in his study and took the opportunity to try it on. She was admiring herself in the mirror when our mother saw her and got extremely angry. It was a controlled anger, though, not the sort that exploded into a whacking with the rotan, and in some ways that made it even more daunting. She sat Mei down and proceeded to tell her just what our father had once been required to endure in order to earn the right to wear that wig – how he had to live in a foreign land so many thousands of miles away, where he was made to feel less than welcome for five years; how he did not see his family once during that time and froze in the terrible weather; how he had to study during the day and clear tables in filthy restaurants at night; how he suffered being called chinkyman and yellow peril and worse; how in spite of all that he passed all the trials, tests and ordeals they could throw at him and was eventually called to the Bar in the Inner Temple.

  Anyone who had not been through all that, she said, had not earned the right to wear the wig and if they did it was disrespectful to those who had. She said why don’t you just slap your father in the face, because that is what you are doing when you put on his wig. Mei was in tears by the end of it.

  And here was Pa now, wearing his funny but precious little wig that Mei said smelled like baby powder, sitting at what I thought must be the Bar of the Inner Temple, which we who had not been put to such tests, and in our ignorance, merely called a court.

  Sitting next to Pa was Uncle Hung Jeuk who had his own wig. Pa told us that Uncle Hung Jeuk would be his junior, which was hard to understand given that I knew Uncle Hung Jeuk was quite a lot older than my father, and possibly even Judge Pretheroe. On the other side was Mr Davies. Beside the judge but sitting at benches that were on a lower level were two other men, and as they were the only ones facing the same way as the judge, I understood them to be the assessors. They were not both Chinese as Pa had said they would be – one was Malay. Chinese cakes don’t have icing, he had said to Mr Davies, and I had to think if that was the same with Malay cakes, although the Malays had so many kinds of cakes it was difficult to know.

  Up in the gallery Mei and Li and I sat with Uncle Raja, who as far as I knew had never been called to a Bar apart from the FMS, even though he was the senior partner in my father’s law firm and a member of the turf club committee, and next to him was Dr Thumboo. The scene below us was quite a spectacle, what with all the servants of the court and the wigs and gowns, but I noticed that Dr Thumboo’s eyes were not darting around to take it all in, as were those of the rest of us in the gallery. They were calm and focused, and I was interested to see what so occupied her attention.

  There was a man sitting by himself, albeit with two policemen in attendance behind, and his eyes were also calm and focused. His full attention was on Dr Thumboo. He was an ordinary sort of Chinese man in his thirties with short hair and a white shirt, nothing remarkable about him, until his mouth spread into a wide smile that reached into his eyes and his whole round face. I looked at Dr Thumboo and noticed that she was also smiling, and that was when I realised that I had finally laid eyes on Toh Kei.

  He was not at all like the imaginary friend I’d had to tea with Princess Anne. I had fancied him to be tall and broad-shouldered, strikingly handsome, with thick wavy hair. Essentially, a Chinese Dirk Bogarde. After all, that was how heroes were supposed to look. I had imagined him and Dr Thumboo as the tragic lovers in the Dream of the Red Chamber, whose love had sprouted in a dream like spring flowers only to fall, as spring flowers must, desolate to the ground. But as unremarkable as he actually appeared now, it mattered little to the fantasy that I had been creating for weeks. They were the Cowherd and the Spinning Maid, and between them now, across the expanse of the courtroom and arching with heavenly grace over all those august wigs, was surely a starry bridge.

  The clerk made a short pronouncement and when he sat down I saw Judge Pretheroe draw a line right down the middle of his big sheet of paper with a fountain pen and write something at the top of each side. Satisfied with that he said, ‘Order as prayed.’ He then sighed heavily, looked over his glasses in the direction of my father, and said, ‘Now, Mr Tan, I understand you wish to raise a point about these proceedings.’

  My father cleared his throat loudly and got to his feet. ‘I do, your lordship, and thank you for granting me leave to do so. I draw your lordship’s attention to the Criminal Procedure Code Ordinance 1873, with which I am sure your lordship is familiar. Trial by jury was enacted as law under that ordinance in the matter of capital cases. As this matter is indeed a capital case, in that my client faces the most extreme of punishments should he be found guilty, I put it to the court that the constitution of these proceedings fails to meet the requirements of the ordinance and should be adjourned until a proper jury of citizens can be selected and sworn in.’

  Throughout this speech the judge was frowning and slowly shaking his head, leaving everyone in no doubt how likely such an adjournment was.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Tan,’ he finally said. ‘I will allow you the benefit of the doubt as to whether you are being wilfully disingenuous on this point, and simply remind you that the Criminal Procedure Code of 1873 applied strictly to the Straits Settlements, being colonies of Her Majesty’s Government at the time, the Straits Settlements being Singapore, Penang and Malacca. Although the Straits Settlements no longer exist as such, the ordinance continues to apply to those territories, and only those territories. We, of course, are not now in one of those territories. We are in the Federated State of Perak, and this court is duly constituted according to the laws of this state. I am quite aware that you are in the vanguard for change in this matter, and that you are keen to see trial by jury enacted throughout Malaya, but this is not the place to appeal for such a change. When the Legislative Council of Perak sees fit to enact such a change, a gratuitous change I might add, and in the unlikely event the Secretary of State for the Colonies approves of it, you may indeed be successful in such an appeal, but until then you will not be. Now … if you are ready, Mr Davies. Order as prayed.’

  My father sat down as Mr Davies rose to his feet. ‘With your lordship’s permission …’ he said, and with that, a pair of solemn invocations that offered not the slightest whisper of what lay in store, the days of ‘sensation’ began.

  Mr Davies spoke for an hour about the manifest shortcomings of Toh Kei, and the longer he went on the lower my heart sank, as I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Could he really be such a terrible person, the cause of all the troubles currently visited on us in Malaya? But again no one else seemed to be disturbed, least of all Toh Kei who spent most of the time gazing calmly across the starry bridge to Dr Thumboo.

  Mr Davies said that the two Englishmen at the Essex Estate were innocent men who were minding their own business on the sixteenth of June 1948, which was now a date that would live in infamy … at which point my father jumped to his feet and said that comparing the deaths of two men with the deaths of thousands was objectionable
, although the judge disagreed. And then Pa said, ‘As your lordship pleases. And so the incident at Essex Estate at Sungai Siput on that date is tantamount to the well-known incident at Pearl Harbor and is likewise an act of war.’

  Judge Pretheroe said my father should resume his seat, and even I could see the judge was not happy with him. It was also clear to me that my capacity to follow this would be sorely tested, what with being required to sit quietly and not ask Uncle Raja what words like tantamount meant, but at that stage I really had no idea just how hard it was going to get. Tantamount ended up being about the least of all the unfathomable words that were thrown up for me over the next few days.

  So Mr Davies got back to his feet and resumed his opening speech. He said that the deaths of the men were not only high on the barometer of heinousness, they were the result of a cold-blooded criminal act calculated to cause terror among the general population and bring on the Emergency.

  My father interrupted again. ‘By Emergency, is my learned friend referring to the current state of war that exists in Malaya?’

  This upset the judge once more. ‘Mr Tan,’ he said solemnly. ‘We all know the state that exists in Malaya. It is called the Emergency, and we will leave it at that.’

  ‘As your lordship pleases,’ Pa said. ‘However, it will be our contention that a state of war does indeed exist in Malaya.’