Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  The next morning, Sunday, compass bearings plotted us at less than a mile in from the dam and about nine hundred feet higher, little enough to show for a day. We ate breakfast of hardtack biscuits and tinned bacon, packs from then on becoming somewhat lighter after each camp.

  We struggled the next three days closer to the Peak, following the stream when we could, but mostly chopping and pulling our way up and down through primeval forest. I had never done anything so energetic, yet didn’t question why I was there, living from minute to minute in the cocoon of effort, isolated from any feeling or emotion the world might have to offer; no novelty, but different scenery. In the midst of purpose realized, this is what I had wanted to do, nothing more and nothing less, imagination and reality perfectly blending which, for the time being, was all there could be to life. Venture adventure: the marvellous end of it all, yet by no means an end.

  How the others explained such a climb-and-slither to themselves I did not know, since what was in my own mind was hardly of a questioning nature. Thought and action were hide-bound together, and in any case one was almost too exhausted to think, always striving to grasp the right creeper with which to haul oneself up the bank, and to prevent rolling with top-heavy kit when going down gradient. The only talk came in warnings, jocular complaints and half-cock remarks, until camp was set in the evening, when a certain amount of badinage made the meal pleasant. Soon afterwards, all but those on guard lay in the undergrowth to sleep.

  There was a feeling that, having got myself locked into this rain-soaked forest, I had come as far in my life as possible, that this was the zenith of my physical existence, and nothing in that sense could be the same again. The success of the experiment must have consisted partly in not having to speculate on what that success was to entail. Thoughtlessness and acceptance contributed to my enjoyment of being there, for I loved all that was hazardous and arduous, gloried in those occasional glimpses of the ash-grey Peak, lifting from a muffler of forest, that had to be struggled for because it was there. Pack and rifle on my back, and hacking a trail where no one had bothered to go before, it was as if I had to reach the Peak not only for the struggle to be over but for a different life to begin, though during my self-imposed and not altogether unpleasant travail this life was real indeed.

  For days we hardly saw the sky through the netting together of enormous treetops. Knowing at the same time how minor our little exercise was compared to those of the heroic Fourteenth Army in Burma during the war, it was nevertheless a taste of endurance in that the first week must always be the worst, and we knew by the end of ours that we could have gone on much longer, although a parachute drop of food and new boots would have been appreciated.

  Curiously enough there was, for the first couple of nights, something never before noted in my life: difficulty in getting to sleep. My daylight soul would not depart with its accustomed speed on my head going down, and though the delay may not have lasted as long as it seemed in my impatience, the wonder and irritation was noticed. The cause was obviously the strangeness of my bed and situation, the noise of rushing water, the unwillingness to relinquish alertness, and the damp discomfort.

  By the end of the fourth day, a couple of hundred feet below the Peak, our way was blocked by an escarpment that we could not climb. A little beyond lay the Dak bungalow of our dreams, but we didn’t have the wherewithal to scale the wall and reach it. Not too disappointed, as if lack of success was also part of the adventure, we clung to the muddy undergrowth of the ledge much, we joked, like those explorers in The Lost World of Conan Doyle, and at nearly 4,000 feet dozed as best we could.

  The view in the cold dawn was more inspiring for being hard earned: we saw the kind of terrain we had come through to be where we were: miles of dark green interlocking cauliflower tree-tops hiding our plodding serpentine approach and, before rain clouds came in again, a vista of clear land beyond, with its seeming paradise of paddy fields and rubber plantations, kampongs and rivers, and islands off the coast in the sombre glow of the rising sun. Instead of a short slog over the top to the bungalow, from where we could have telephoned for a lorry and been back at Butterworth in a few hours, we had a day’s trek and slither down through thornbush till reaching the usual jungle.

  Unable to follow our track made on the ascent, a cliff face stopped us dead and seemed impossible to cross. We had been cut off from water for twenty-four hours, and needed to reach the stream, whose course would also make navigation easier. It wasn’t known how feebly or otherwise a scattering of bushes gripped the rock, but we decided to chance it and, nerving ourselves, got over by a narrow ledge. Sometimes in my dreams I see that awesome drop.

  At the night’s camp, which point had taken three days to reach on the way up, the stream was flowing strongly. Tearing down rotted boughs for a bonfire, a few yards into the trees, I was falling asleep on my feet, something which happened to the others at different times. But for me it was new, my senses so disorientated that I seemed to be elsewhere, yet at the same moment where I was, indicating not only that I no longer knew for a certainty where I was, but that wherever it was I couldn’t feel sure I wanted to be there, a peculiar sensation impossible to forget.

  For a few moments my mind was divided, one part in the forest with noise from the rushing stream, and the other in a dimly illuminated room of no place possible to locate, but with a fainter sound of water nearby. My senses switched at will (but not my will) from one state to the other, perhaps as much a symptom of exhaustion as an indication of that splitting of the mind which would later not only enable me to understand more clearly what was going on around me, but to make use of that gap between thought and action necessary for spiritual development.

  As energetic as ever next morning, and expecting to spend further nights in the forest, we fixed each other’s packs into the most comfortable positions (for our backs were now scarred from the weight) and adjusted bush hats at the jauntiest old-hand slant, which stayed that way only while in the clearing.

  Trees had fallen at all angles. Some, of a wider diameter than the length of a man, blocked our way along the stream now and again, while others in deep forest had been down and undisturbed so long that the boot, on crunching through the covering of crisp bark, sank into purple softness inside.

  Looking at my map of the area, and comparing it with the log sheet, each camp site must have been fixed on counting the tributaries entering the main stream, by plotting compass bearings (which often meant guessing the identity of a jutting hilltop momentarily revealed by dissolving mist or lifting cloud), noting the disruption of contours close to a ravine or pool, and reading an aneroid barometer before using the conversion formula to make a fair estimate of the height. Positions in six-figure map references showed our tracks with more confidence than was felt at the time, and if correct at all it was as much by guesswork as skill in navigation. No amount of care could have produced better evidence of a will to stamp a pattern on what was felt to be uncharted, a desire to suggest order where little or none existed, and to posit knowledge of the half known as much in myself as on a few square miles of jungle.

  No places were dry for long, but we disregarded the frequent soaking of everything on our backs: while stripping off by the stream to get rid of leeches we saw the Avro-19 searching for those who were thought to be lost.

  We went up into the jungle for the last time to bypass a ravine, then waded down the river which on the first day had been paddled along. Almost to our surprise, by four o’clock in the afternoon, the forest opened out and we were through. Hinshallwood walked across the dam to the hut, and telephoned the camp for a lorry to meet us. Our ragged patrol, boots almost off our feet, marched four more miles to the main road rather than wait to be picked up by the edge of the forest.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Wearing our smartest khaki drill, we lined up in the CO’s office with the confidence of the absolutely guilty. In phrases of those days that salved the mind: butter wouldn’t melt in our
mouths, and we didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  I could not have felt more at ease. The CO had seen the diary and maps kept on the trip, and had already torn strips off Coleman and Hinshallwood, so on his asking why we had been so foolhardy as to vanish into the jungle for a week without taking a two-way wireless there was nothing we could do but stay silent. He went on for a while at how rash we had been, but a lightening of his features was detected when he concluded: ‘Next time, you’ll be carrying a full radio pack, because from now on you’re our Jungle Rescue Group. You’re the only ones on the station with the experience to go after any plane that crashes in that sort of country.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ Sergeant Flowerdew said, marching us out, and I wondered in what way he meant, but didn’t bother to ask. At the medical check on our return my weight had dropped a few pounds to 137, but we were passed as fit, and life was back to normal, except that the insurrectionary situation in the Peninsula deteriorated daily.

  Miles from the camp, and isolated in a hut beyond the runway, D/F operators were vulnerable to terrorist bullets skimming through the night. Such a condition didn’t worry us, though we were aware of standing little chance against armed and silent men who might surprise us while busy at the radio. I erected an outpost system of tin cans on connected wires so that there might be a second or two in which to run into the dark with my rifle should any prowler come close.

  Fancying one of the tins moved near midnight (it may have been the wind, or perhaps I was jumpy after all; certainly I was alert) I took the rifle, left the hut unlit, and stalked noiselessly through the elephant grass convinced someone lurked between me and the trees a few hundred yards away. Peering into the darkness, my shadow merged with that of the half moon, and when he moved I took aim, and let go a single round. The sharp echo went to heaven and down again, as if filling the whole province with noise while I fell back step by step towards the hut, and waited in concealment fifty yards to one side in case anyone else came close or appeared from the direction of the trees.

  The noise of the shot brought a section of the Malay Regiment to my hut, but I denied having fired, and my word was taken. I doubt anyone was hit, though had no compunction at shooting to kill, since a person in the area at such a time could only have been coming to threaten me. A search for signs of a casualty in the morning revealed nothing. No one had said anything about the use or otherwise of firearms, in spite of the State of Emergency being well into its second month, but since we had them it seemed obvious that my rifle should be employed in accordance with the age-old maxim that the best way to defend oneself was to go out and meet the attacker halfway – at least.

  All guns were later withdrawn from outstations and sent back to the armoury, on the assumption that if the hut was raided by the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army – no less – they would acquire first-class weapons and ammunition with little or no difficulty. To console us for being defenceless, patrols of native Malayan soldiers were increased in the area, but I saw few of them, and one night a whole platoon was found sleeping in the nearby fuel store, for which criminal misdemeanour they were dismissed from the service.

  An operator who resented being without a weapon gave a bottle of whisky to a sergeant in the armoury in return for a Smith and Wesson revolver, and a carton of ammunition. He brought it in his pack on every watch, to lay loaded and cocked by the Morse key. I kept a bottle of rum to hand rather than continue with the uncertain advantage of a more lethal comforter – or adopt a course which was against regulations.

  The four-engined Lincoln bombers of 97 Squadron flew to Malaya from the UK and began pounding suspected bandit hideouts in the jungle. All twelve would take off from Singapore island and head north-west, their wireless operators competing to be first in getting a bearing. As each string of Morse came hammering on the air I noted his call sign and told him to wait, and when they were in the correct queueing order I would go down the list until all were dealt with. Every bearing was sharp and therefore accurate, though it was hard to think their bombs hit much in the kind of jungle I knew about. But it was exhilarating to work with so many experienced operators in the sky at once, rather than spend hour after hour listening to mind-numbing atmospherics.

  A company of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were billeted in tents within the camp boundary, and HMS Belfast used George Town harbour as a base for up and down patrolling along the coast looking for boats smuggling arms to the terrorists. We didn’t reckon much to the Army signallers, who were trying, and not doing very well, to get a message by lamp over to HMS Belfast one night. Ronald Schlachter finally took over and rippled it across.

  Schlachter and I made fun of the Emergency situation by initiating ‘Bandit Routine Orders’, which we persuaded one of the clerks to type on Orderly Room foolscap and pin to the noticeboard beside the legitimate Station Routine Orders. An average sample of our nonsense might be: ‘Bandits are to fall in at 0630 Hours to take up amble-and-bush positions at map reference 123987, stop. Catchee erks from ship with knees not yet brown, in crossbow fire between dock and NAAFI, stop. Signed by the Red Admiral: Get-sum Inn.’ They caused amusement for a few days, until torn down by an irate warrant officer.

  I had expected to be in the Far East for two or three years, but it was decided that we would be trooping back to Blighty in July, after barely eighteen months. It seemed uneconomical of the air force, which had taken such trouble over our training, to let us go just as we had reached the height of our competence.

  ROTB, the acronym for ‘roll on the boat,’ made a convenient code group for rattling out in Morse whenever the ennui bit deep, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to leave or not, a will o’ the wisp who couldn’t care less – on one level – carried along by the general euphoria of the men in the hut, who unanimously desired the boat trip back to civilian life, more able perhaps to imagine the future than I was. Most of them believed they had jobs to return to, and were not much troubled if they hadn’t, since there was work for everyone in those days. Demobilization for me was a precipice over which to do a free-fall into reality, but I could see only as far ahead as the ship departing from Singapore in six weeks’ time.

  A difficult decision still had to be made, however, because the signals chief, Flight-Lieutenant Power, called me into his office and asked if I would care to stay on a few more years. He did so perhaps because some weeks earlier the wireless operator of an aircraft had mentioned me in a report saying I should be thanked for the way I had worked under difficult circumstances. Or maybe the question was put to me because I was a volunteer and not a conscript.

  An answer was wanted there and then, as I stood stiffly, and baulked at the blunt enquiry. I was tempted to stay on, as happy in Malaya as I had ever been anywhere, wireless operating a compatible job I could have done to the end of my days. Had time been given to think I might well have said yes, but then felt slightly disloyal when a voice in me insisted on saying no which, as things turned out, was the correct decision to have made.

  Having committed myself, I played with the notion of using my service qualifications to get a Postmaster General’s Certificate of Wireless Telegraphy, so as to become a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. If I didn’t want to take that amount of trouble I could re-enlist into the Royal Canadian Air Force, and receive twice as much pay for the work I was doing now. All I wanted was to live without effort, and do the kind of work I liked, as well as have the big decisions made for me.

  The last weeks pulled along, the refrain of ‘roll on the boat’ moaned around the billet instead of said in a tone of hope and expectation, as if the moment would never come. The so-called Emergency had lost its excitement, and took on the ding-dong character of a crime wave that would – as indeed it did – last for years. Trains between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore were sometimes shot at from the bush, but the more murder and mayhem perpetrated by the bandits the less it seemed they could expect any kind of success.

  After signing off from my
last wireless watch a dozen of us were motored with full kit and a suitcase to Prai railway station. We travelled to Kuala Lumpur in a carriage with wooden seats, changing after dusk to one with bunks for our comfort, but which produced more sweat than sleep. In twenty-four hours we reached the same old Empire Dock at Singapore and, on 23rd July, our troopship Dunera, of 11,000 tons, was played off by the bagpipes of a Highland band.

  Standing on the lower deck while crossing the Bay of Bengal a drop of water that splashed the back of my hand tasted like acid, the ship tumbling comfortably on through the monsoon at an average rate of twelve knots, not much more than the speed of a bicycle. Every four days I turned my watch-hand one hour in the direction of tomorrow, a mechanical gesture suggesting that even on a troopship a future of some kind might be possible.

  At times I regretted leaving Malaya, sentimentally touched when ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ was played on the ship’s tannoy. Unlike my usual extravert self I preferred as much isolation as I could get. Up in the morning before most others I shaved in peace and put on a clean uniform, because after eight o’clock sea water only ran through the showers.

  Asian deckhands wielded hoses almost as thick as their bodies, steely anacondas of salt water sluicing towards the scuppers. The usual marching tune brayed at ten from the speakers, while the knotted rope of the days was rewinding us back to Europe. There was nothing to do except now and again do as you were told, so I played patience, went to the canteen for a pint of beer, had a game or two of darts in the swaying saloon, and read (among other books) The Confessions of an Innkeeper by an amusing though snobby type called Fothergill.