In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  ‘Heard anything of Ian Fleming?’ I asked.

  Alan pursed his lips. ‘Funny you should ask that,’ he said. ‘Ian hung on as personal assistant, and I think it’s because he keeps an eye on things for Stewart Menzies. Rumour has it that Ian is the man who makes sure information gets to those C wants it to get to.’ He cocked a speculative eye at Denis. ‘And of course you’re his opposite number out here, aren’t you, Denis?’

  Denis shrugged. ‘Von handles his secret stuff himself,’ he lied easily. ‘Won’t let anyone else touch it.’ Von was the DNI’s nickname amongst Royal Navy colleagues, earned because of his fascination with German technology while training in England.

  ‘What about Rob Draper?’ I asked. ‘Did he get out of Singapore?’

  ‘In the can, I’m afraid. A lot of fine chaps are in the can. Including John Dalley. We thought the Japs would bump him off because of Dalforce. But they didn’t. In fact, they’re treating him better than most. They almost seem to admire him. Rum people, the Japanese.’ He suddenly turned to me. ‘The Japs also collared that friend of yours, Malcolm Bryant. He tried to make a break for it by boat but they picked him up on an island when his engine gave out. He’s apparently doing great work in Changi Gaol, keeping up morale, running messages in and out of the prison through visiting Malay workers, and so on.’

  ‘I had a friend, a Chinese girl, who was married to one of the Dalforce sergeants,’ I said. ‘Her name was Koh. Catherine Koh. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything of her?’

  Alan gave me a strange look. ‘Of course I know Catherine Koh. Code name April. She’s in the jungle with Chin Peng. If it’s the same girl, she is one of the MCP’s most ruthless killers.’

  Of course she was the same girl. The code name could leave absolutely no doubt. But Catherine a ruthless killer? My mind swam.

  ‘She must have changed tremendously,’ I said. ‘She was so quiet and gentle. The loveliest creature you could imagine. Do you know what happened?’ But of course Alan didn’t know anything. I had to wait until the end of the war to learn how Catherine became Xiao Lao Hu, the ‘Little Tiger’ who killed Japanese soldiers with a smile on her pretty, frozen face.

  In Melbourne, the tension of war was gradually lifting from our shoulders, and by Christmas time people were openly speculating about when victory might be ours. It was a strange, heady thought, that the old world we had known and thought forever lost might be returning to us. Prospects that had seemed impossible dreams suddenly became possibilities. At Number 14 Alto Avenue, Denis and I began to discuss returning to Malaya.

  ‘I wonder how Whitelawns will be?’ I mused. The thought of driving down the dusty red ribbon of Tana Merah Besar Road, and seeing the grey shingles appearing through the coconut trees quite took my breath away.

  Denis came over and perched on the arm of my chair. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got bad news about Whitelawns,’ he said. ‘The Japs blew it to pieces the day we left Singapore. There’s nothing there but rubble.’

  The news hit me almost with the force of a physical blow. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked miserably. ‘How could you know Whitelawns was blown to pieces?’

  Denis shook his head gently. ‘I saw it with my own eyes, darling. I drove out there on the morning we sailed. I wanted to collect a few things, but the Japs had flattened the place before I arrived.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘There seemed to be no point. There is a point now, because we might be going back and I don’t want you to make plans based on a false assumption. I really am sorry, darling.’

  I got up and busied myself in the kitchen, trying to keep memories at bay. When Denis came in to check that I was all right I gave him my brightest smile. ‘Cry if you want to,’ he said. ‘I know how much you loved Whitelawns. Tears can quite often cleanse a wound.’

  ‘No good crying over spilt milk,’ I returned briskly, polishing a dinner plate to within an inch of its life.

  ‘We could rebuild,’ Denis said, but I shook my head vigorously.

  ‘It wasn’t the bricks and mortar,’ I said. ‘I loved Whitelawns for a whole lot of reasons. We were so very happy there. Remember finding the place on that lovely moonlit night? It started then, you know. The very best time of our lives.’ I felt myself losing my aplomb, and hurried on. ‘The house was just the backdrop, so I suppose it’s almost better that it’s gone. There’s nothing sadder than a backdrop to an empty stage.’

  The war in Europe ended in May 1945, and a few months later, after atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it ended for us in the Pacific also. Suddenly, unimaginably, the whole world was at peace. I remember hearing the announcement that Japan had surrendered with no emotion whatsoever. Newsreels would show jubilation and dancing in the streets on that day, but I think that for many people the cost had been too great, the struggle too long, for its ending to engender anything but profound relief.

  Certainly I felt no joy. Release from tension, perhaps. A sudden blessed calm. But not joy. Certainly not joy.

  In Melbourne the weather was fine and hot, and the DNI brought Vera and their children over for a picnic on our back lawn. While the youngsters romped in the sunshine, the grown-ups sat in deck chairs and talked about the world that had been given back to us.

  ‘Are you going back to Malaya?’ Vera asked.

  ‘We are,’ I said. ‘I know it will be different. I know there will be problems. But if there is anywhere on earth that’s home to us, I suspect it is Malaya.’

  The DNI leaned forward in his chair. ‘I’ll make a prediction, Norma,’ he said. ‘I know you will go back to Malaya, and I’m sure you will succeed in your endeavours. But the Malaya that used to be your home no longer exists. The war has released powers that can never again be contained. Nationalism for a start. The Malays will want a nation. The Chinese will want a role in its future. Even the Tamils will need to be catered for. I don’t want to sound unkind, but there is simply no longer any room for the British in Malaya. Mark my words, you will find that out fairly quickly, and go back to England, or come back here if you are wise, and leave Malaya to follow its destiny.’

  It did sound unkind, and at the time I didn’t agree with Von at all. But I look back now and realise what a wise man he was. He was a man out of his time, brilliant but largely unappreciated. He had invented the Coastwatchers, an organisation that probably saved Australia from invasion, and he was recognised as the best spymaster and tactician on the Allied side by far. And yet he ended the war as a commander, the same rank he had held at its beginning. Part of the reason was no doubt professional jealousy on the part of his colleagues. Part of it was no doubt fear on the part of his political masters of the immense power that he wielded. But in the end it didn’t matter that he hadn’t been promoted, because his hand-picked people, the NIDites, forswore their own promotions in order to work for him. After the war these people became the new Australian elite: business leaders, ambassadors, senators, judges, knights of the realm, even a couple of governor-generals. An adequate riposte, I would have thought.

  But all that was for the future. Within weeks of VJ Day, we tearfully farewelled Shirley, for it was time for her to return to her real family. A few weeks later, Denis and I and our children boarded the Trans-Continental for Western Australia, where we set sail for Singapore on the Charon. Like Shirley, we thought we were going home.

  PART 3

  Mouth of the Tiger

  ‘The safest place in the jungle is in

  the mouth of the tiger.’

  SAYING OF THE TEMIAR PEOPLE OF CENTRAL MALAYA

  Chapter Thirty

  I don’t know what we expected when we returned to Singapore in December 1945, but what we found was a city apparently unchanged by four years of warfare. On the surface at least it was the same city it had always been. We tied up at Collier Quay on a still, hot morning to be swamped by jostling coolies, officious Tamil luggage-handlers, and smart Chinese clerks with sheafs of papers in their hands. On
the wharf below urchins played and Malay drivers squatted in the shade of their taxis, immaculate in their white uniforms and with neat black songkoks on their heads. From the city beyond the wharves came the tinkle of rickshaw bells, the blare of car horns, and the tok tok tok of food vendors tapping out their calls on bamboo sticks. And overriding everything was the smell of the East – the pungent smell of sweat, and spice, and open drains, and joss sticks, and frangipani wilting in the sun.

  We moved into the Adelphi Hotel in the middle of Singapore, and it was suddenly as if Australia, and the war, and everything that had happened over the past four years had never been. We unpacked in our spacious suite with the fans circling above us, then sat on the upstairs terrace with iced gin and tonics in our hands while the children explored the tropical garden beneath us.

  ‘I have the strangest feeling,’ I said. ‘I feel as if I’ve just woken up after a dream, and that the syce will soon be coming to take us home to Whitelawns.’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly call what we’ve been through a dream,’ Denis said dryly. ‘But I do know what you mean. Everything is so much as it was that one is tempted to think that nothing’s changed. I suspect that might be a mistake, because an awful lot has changed.’

  We explored Singapore over the next few days, buying an old Wolseley from the reopened pre-war firm of Wearn’s and driving ourselves all over the island. The more we saw, the harder we found it to believe that Singapore had been through the fire and blood of Japanese occupation. Even the detritus of war – the crashed Zeros lying in the lallang, the roofless buildings and the odd burned-out tank or truck – seemed part and parcel of any Eastern city, where order and civilisation have always lain cheek by jowl with chaos and decay.

  Certainly the landmarks of pre-war Singapore were untouched. The Tanglin Club still slumbered behind its grove of coconut palms, the Swimming Club still basked beside the sea, and the Chicken Grill at the Sea View Hotel still hummed with customers. Even Aw Boon Haw’s Tiger Balm Gardens seemed unchanged, the jade dragons and golden tigers as bogus and awe-inspiring as they had ever been.

  One evening I suddenly realised just how much I had missed Malaya, and reached for Denis’s hand. We were returning to the hotel from a drive along the East Coast Road, and a glorious sunset bathed the Singapore Straits. ‘We are home at last, aren’t we?’ I said. ‘I hope we never have to go away again.’

  Denis squeezed my hand. ‘We are here to do a job,’ he said. ‘But I dare say we’ll stay on after it’s completed. I can think of worse places to put down roots than Singapore.’

  ‘What sort of job are we here to do?’ I asked.

  Denis didn’t answer me directly. ‘We were too soft last time, Norma,’ he said. ‘Much too soft. And because we were too soft a lot of fine people are dead and buried. We’re not going to let that happen ever again. This time we are going to play them at their own dirty game – and beat them at it hands down.’ His voice was so harsh that I looked up into his face with surprise, and saw that his jaw was clenched and his mouth a thin, hard line.

  ‘I take it you’re talking about your work for British Intelligence,’ I said. ‘But who are the people we’re going to beat at their own game? I thought the war was over.’

  Denis shrugged. ‘The shooting war is over but that’s no excuse for taking our eyes off the ball. We did that after the Great War, and look what happened. Hitler happened. Mussolini happened. Tojo happened.’ He took a deep breath. ‘As for who the enemy might be, I don’t think anyone knows as yet. They might be the Communists, or neo-fascists like the Soka-gakkai in Japan. Or even madcap nationalists. But whoever they are, we’re going to nip their mendacious little plans in the bud before decent people die.’

  It was extremely unlike Denis to talk like this, and I stared at him. Usually he was the most tolerant and affable of men, but today he sounded like an embittered fanatic. It wasn’t so much the words he used as the way he used them, almost spitting them out.

  I was about to say something but his eyes were so cold and so vividly blue that I looked away, letting the moment pass.

  We’d been in Singapore for about a week when we had a meeting with a man called Cheng Swee. Cheng Swee had been one of Denis’s business colleagues before the war, which meant he had been one of Denis’s agents. We met in a private corner of the dining room at Raffles, with a table set for three and a waiter hovering to take our order.

  I opened the conversation with a platitude: ‘You must have been through some awful times, Mr Cheng.’

  ‘It was a terrible time,’ he said. He was a small man, impeccably dressed in a Savile Row suit, and he shivered delicately. ‘Every day I would contact my friends and colleagues just to find out who had been taken by the Kempeitai. How I survived I really do not know. I suppose that the Japanese needed some of us to keep the economy alive. But they watched us like hawks, and pounced without rhyme or reason. I think they enjoyed seeing our fear.’

  It was still unusual for a Chinese to be the guest of Europeans, even in the rough and tumble days immediately after the war, and the boy who brought us drinks banged down Cheng Swee’s stengah with visible disapproval.

  ‘Put that glass down again properly.’ Denis had snatched the man’s hand so hard that he literally yelped with pain and surprise. ‘And then apologise to Mr Cheng.’ His voice was low but so coldly furious that even I was shocked.

  And then, just as suddenly as it had started the incident was over. The glass was replaced reverentially, the apology given. Cheng Swee inclined his head graciously. ‘Thank you, Mr Elesmere-Elliott, but I do assure you that I took no offence. The boy is a sombong, not worthy of concern.’

  ‘Bad manners are always worthy of concern,’ Denis said. His anger was still there, making his eyes vivid blue, his mouth the thin hard line I’d seen a few days before. It was only when I reached out and touched him that I saw him make an attempt to relax. It worried me, this change in Denis. The capacity for sudden anger had always been there, but since the war – since Thursday Island in particular – it had been much closer to the surface. Like a flint that sparked at the slightest touch.

  I am sure that war changes men in ways we still don’t understand. Denis had seen and done dreadful things, and those things had changed him. I had a sudden vivid memory of the tiger outside our bamboo hut on the Telom River, and Denis smiling at it through his gunsights, never once intending to fire. I wondered if he would have held his hand today.

  We talked for hours that night, and I learned exactly how the new British Intelligence apparatus was to be reassembled in liberated Singapore. Cheng Swee was to be a central figure in the rebuilding. He was a towkey, perhaps the most powerful in Malaya after the loss of so many Chinese leaders during the war. Losses partly due to the savage purges of the Kempeitai, but also incurred in the internecine war which had raged between the Kuomintang and the Communists all through the Japanese occupation.

  ‘I want you to be my principal go-between,’ Denis said quite early in the conversation. ‘You are acceptable to both the Communists and the Kuomintang, and your connections to the British can be explained away as purely commercial. Your relationship with me will be commercial, too. I will be your principal supplier of goods, and so it will be quite understandable for me to provide you and your friends with the credit facilities you will need. In turn, you will find and convince key people to cooperate with us.’

  Cheng Swee inclined his head. ‘I understand my obligations perfectly, Mr Elesmere-Elliott.’ Then he gave a small, polite cough. ‘May I ask where you will be getting these goods you intend to sell to me and my colleagues?’

  ‘They will be what the Japanese left behind,’ Denis said shortly. ‘Confiscated tin and rubber. Bauxite. Palm oil and rice. Some manufactured goods. And of course war disposals – motor vehicles, boats and the like. There is an awful lot of it, lying in godowns all over Malaya and Indo-China. Over eighty million dollars worth in Malaya alone. It is now owned by the Allied War Reparatio
ns Commission, and the Commission will be disposing of it through me and one or two other selected people.’

  The simplicity of the plan was rather breathtaking. In one go, the government was establishing a marketing structure for the sale of a mountain of seized Japanese material, and at the same time it was providing huge funds to buy intelligence and influence throughout the Far East. All without the need to appropriate a single cent of public money. Or to trouble sensitive consciences in Whitehall.

  ‘There is one problem we need to face,’ Cheng Swee said thoughtfully. ‘The problem of the turncoats. I will have no real persuasion amongst my Chinese brethren unless I can promise them that the turncoats have been dealt with. They have a great deal of power, you see.’ The turncoats were the Chinese traders who had prospered under the Japanese. They had earned the hatred of the general population and many had already left with their fortunes for Siam and Indo-China. But there were still a lot of them in Singapore, tough, ruthless men running large businesses and often surrounded by private armies of thugs and bullies.

  ‘Then they will be expelled,’ Denis said simply. ‘Give me a list, a considered list, of those whom you think should go, and I’ll talk to the Military Administration. We can have them deported as undesirable aliens.’

  ‘Surely some of them would have been born here?’ I interposed. ‘They may be undesirable, but they wouldn’t be aliens.’

  Both Denis and Cheng Swee looked at me. ‘All Chinese are invitees in Malaya, Norma,’ Denis said quietly. ‘We decide who is and who is not an alien.’

  The waiter came with coffee, placing Cheng Swee’s before him with almost comical reverence. When he left, Cheng Swee made an elegant gesture with his hands.