In the Mouth of the Tiger (61 page)

‘I don't think it's quite that simple,' I said rather lamely. ‘And we're not attacking them, they're attacking us. They don't want to buy our tin and rubber anymore, they just want to take it from us.'

I heard Catherine sigh. ‘I'm just about to have my baby, Norma. It is due any day, in fact. I hate the thought that my little child is going to be born into a world full of fear and violence.' It was a sentiment so close to my own thoughts of earlier in the day that I could only nod in silent agreement.

‘I have a Japanese hairdresser,' I said thoughtfully. ‘Her name is Akiko. She is sweet and gentle and could harm nobody. I just don't understand how she could be so nice while her fellow Japanese can be so cruel and aggressive.'

I heard Catherine sigh again. ‘I am so afraid, Norma,' she said. ‘Robert is over at Holland Road right now. The Government has decided to give
Dalforce the guns they have been asking for. It means Robert will be fighting the Japanese. I am so frightened he will be killed. If he is killed, what does anything at all matter?'

I couldn't answer, and we both sat there, the line buzzing emptily between us but understanding each other perfectly.

Late that night an Army dispatch rider arrived on a motor cycle, a closefaced young man who insisted on handing his buckled leather pouch to Denis personally. It was the first of many such visits. Always late at night, always the same taciturn young man, the pouch always passed over in the shadows of our back porch, with the engine of the cycle left running. I once asked the young man what was in the pouch but he just looked at me without deigning to answer. Denis was not much more forthcoming and I didn't press him. But it made me aware that Denis was involved in more than just his naval work. There were other things going on and he was part of them.

The next day Denis again left for
Penghulu
before dawn, speeding away up Tanah Merah Besar Road in the little Fiat. Tony had come out to wave goodbye, and stood with me as the stars paled and a cool breeze blew in from the sea. ‘You've been cutting onions again, Mummy,' he said mischievously. I simply couldn't help it: every time Denis left for his ship some Pavlovian reaction squeezed tears from my eyes.

‘Cutting onions indeed,' I said chasing him back to the house. ‘Let's see if a smack on the bottom makes
your
eyes water!'

That day, the second day of war, was a strange one for me, and perhaps for many others throughout Malaya. The anaesthetic effects of shock, which had kept reality at bay the day before, had worn off so that one saw things for the first time as they really were. We faced a powerful and savage enemy, and that enemy had already proved that the pre-war vaunts of the Malayan bureaucrats were false and hollow. It was true that America had joined the war on our side, but America was a long way away and was herself reeling from the shock of Pearl Harbor. The American cavalry might one day come our way, but even the blindest optimist would realise that they would come far too late.

But there was one shining factor on our side: Admiral Tom Phillips and his battle fleet. I would think of those ships steaming north through the rain showers, their grey sides glistening and their huge battle ensigns flying at their mastheads, and feel a throb of pure joy. For hundreds of years, I'd tell myself, the Royal Navy had been victorious, and it was unthinkable that rusty little
Japanese ships manned by little Japanese sailors in crumpled uniforms could prevail against them.

Denis was home early with news that he had a couple of days off while
Penghulu
had new fire-fighting equipment fitted, so we decided to make the next day a Make and Mend day. Make and Mend is a naval tradition – a day dedicated to doing things for oneself. Completing the little chores that have been stacking up for ages. Enjoying little treats one has deprived oneself of in the line of duty. In a word, taking time out to focus on one's own needs and interests. On a Make and Mend day one is not allowed to feel selfish: being selfish is what it's all about.

So in the morning we indulged ourselves in a long, rambling ride without thought of time or duties. We went as far as Changi Prison and tied our horses up on the padang while we poked around the native shops, then enjoyed a hard gallop back along the beach. After breakfast Denis marked out where the air-raid shelter was to be, and we took the children out in the canoes, splashing each other with our paddles and then trying to tip each other's craft over in the warm, shallow water. We called in on the Deans for a picnic lunch by their tennis court (it was too hot to play), and then we all drove down to the Swimming Club for a swim and drinks in the cool shade of the upstairs terrace.

I recall that I had just divided a plate of hot chips into four portions for the four children and was telling them not to pinch from each other when Margaret laid her hand on my arm. There was a radio on somewhere and everybody around us was listening.

The words of the news bulletin sent a chill through me but at first made no sense whatever. Something about Singapore hospitals being asked to make preparations to receive hundreds of expected casualties. But then the import of the bulletin became clear and I felt physically sick.

The
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
had both been sunk, and Admiral Sir Tom Phillips' fleet was no more.

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
here is a concept known to naval strategists as ‘the Fleet in Being'. The Fleet in Being protects a sea-girt country from invasion even if it never fires a shot in anger, because no invader could risk putting troops to sea while there is a chance they might be intercepted by warships. It is a concept that has served England well since the Spanish Armada, which is why even aggressive admirals like Jellico refused battle unless certain of success. When Jellico was criticised for refusing to chance his arm against the German Fleet at Jutland, it was said in his defence that he was ‘the only man in England who could have lost the war in an afternoon'.

Well, Tom Phillips had chanced his arm off the north coast of Malaya, and in losing his fleet he had lost the war in an afternoon. Without a Fleet in Being to deter the Japanese, Singapore was a sitting duck. Not many of us may have thought of it in terms of the principles of naval strategy, but the facts of the situation were as plain as a pikestaff.

I remember that we all carried on that evening as normally as we could. We took the children for a night swim in the paddling pool, and then chatted inconsequentially with a couple of families sitting close to us on the patio. But underneath it all there ran a sharp, bright thread of worry, and it was a blessed relief to get home, put the children to bed, and to be alone.

Denis and I sat side by side on the verandah, talking quietly without even bothering to turn on the lights. It seemed suddenly clear that we were going to lose Whitelawns, and all that went with it. Riding on the beach at dawn. Tennis on the Deans' lush grass court. Splashing in the warm waters off our beach, the two boys as brown as berries and the sun transforming their blond hair into golden haloes.

We might also lose our lives. The possibility stared us in the face,
uncompromising, unarguable. I wasn't frightened, not at that moment. Probably I was too tired and too shocked to feel anything. We went to bed and made gentle love, the moonlight tracing patterns on our bedroom wall as it filtered through the coconut fronds. It was comforting being together, holding each other tight, being one against the world.

I slept soundly but woke up as the grey light of dawn percolated into the room, making it look dull and cheerless. The pattern of coconut fronds had gone and I felt suddenly lonely, and infinitely sad. To have been so happy, and then to have everything snatched away. I found myself blaming poor Admiral Phillips, who had gone down with his ship. It seemed to me inconceivable that he could lose those two great capital ships so easily. Weren't they supposed to be the most powerful naval units in the world? Weren't they supposed to guarantee Singapore against invasion? They had been swept into oblivion, as a truculent child might sweep prize chess pieces from the board.

We heard what had happened only after the war. Tom Phillips had taken his battle group north, looking for trouble, anxious to nip the Japanese invasion of northern Malaya in the bud. He had been warned early on that there was no air cover available, and been ordered back to Singapore. But Phillips always asked himself what Nelson would have done in any situation, and when he looked out of his bridge windows at the heavy cloud and drifting rain he turned a Nelsonian blind eye on the recall signal. When he heard a report that the Japanese were about to land at Kuantan he decided to attack under cover of the weather and shell the invasion fleet out of existence. With his huge guns he could do it from twenty miles away, firing with impunity out of the misty rain with his guns under radar control. The sleek grey fleet worked up to attack speed, their Union Jacks flying, water creaming from their bows, their guns at maximum elevation. The Japanese battleship
Kongo
glimpsed them through the murk – a vision straight from hell – and made a bolt for it. They got within hours of Kuantan and it looked, for one wild moment, as if the gamble would pay off. But then the sky suddenly cleared and they were left exposed. Within an hour they were under air attack, and within another hour it was all over. They say the
Prince of Wales
made a sound like a giant in mortal agony as its huge bulk slid under the South China Sea.

Admiral Tom Phillips had dared mightily – and lost. If the cloud cover had persisted another hour on that fateful afternoon, perhaps the whole story of the Malayan campaign might have been different. But all I knew was that Tom Phillips had let us down, and that I hated him for his cocky grin and his
careless courage. He should have run away, kept his fleet in being, let us keep our hopes alive. I remember sitting up in bed in that grey dawn, staring out at the empty sea, remembering the ships I'd seen passing in their glory. The four destroyers
Electra
,
Vampire, Tenedos
and
Express
survived the encounter, and brought the survivors back to Singapore.

Ironically, it rained most of that day – heavy tropical rain that lashed the garden, sluiced off the roof in torrents, and flooded the air-raid shelter Chu Lun was digging on the edge of the croquet lawn. We spent most of the day indoors playing with the children and listening to the radio. Radio Malaya was full of stories of the sinkings, some sad and sensible, some quite silly. The most fatuous was an interview with a self-appointed ‘strategic analyst' who said that the destruction of the capital ships was ‘a blessing in disguise'. ‘It has given the Japanese a quite false impression that we are weak,' he said, with a chuckle intended to convey how preposterous such a concept was. ‘And just between you and me, we've now got the survivors of the sinkings – two thousand tough, well-trained British sailors – available for the defence of Singapore.' He seemed to be suggesting that the disaster had been a rather clever ploy by Admiral Phillips to trick the Japs and to release his ships' crews to fight on land. Denis was so disgusted he turned the set off with a snarl. ‘It's blind oafs like that who will lose this war for us,' he said bitterly.

We went for a walk in the rain, the boys dancing along beside us holding up brightly coloured little Chinese waxed-paper umbrellas, Denis and I enjoying the water on our faces and in our hair. We walked hard along the grey, wet beach, exorcising the pain we felt with exercise. By the time we came to Mata Ikan we felt better, and turned into the little kampong whistling one of our favourite songs in tune. Ahmet Pelowan, the village headman, ran out from his house to meet us. ‘Tuan, Mem,' he called. ‘Please come into the shelter of my house and drink some tea with me.'

We sat on Ahmet's verandah, the rain drumming on the atap roof, and sipped hot black tea from little copper cups. Behind us in the dark, spicesmelling interior of the house, I could hear Tony and Bobby beginning to make shy conversation with the penghulu's children. They could speak Malay almost as easily as they could speak English. It was sad that European children in the Far East lost their bilingual ability as soon as they went to school.

‘It is a bad thing, the bombing,' Ahmet said sadly. ‘Many people were killed, many people have lost their homes. What is the Government going to do about it, Tuan?'

Denis pursed his lips. ‘Ahmet, it would be easy for me to say that we will soon defeat the Japanese,' he said. ‘But I do not think that will happen. I think there will be a lot more bombing, and a lot of fighting, before peace comes back to Malaya.'

‘Is there any chance that the Japanese will win this war, Tuan?' Ahmet asked. ‘I need to know because if they do my people will have to live with them. The British have somewhere else to go, but not my people. This is where they will live their lives, where their children will live their lives. If the government is going to be a Japanese government, it would not be wise for my people to work too closely with the British at this time.' Ahmet was a wise, thoughtful man, and I admired him for being so frank.

‘If all of us took that position, the Japanese will surely be the new masters of Malaya,' Denis said, almost sharply. ‘And I can tell you, Ahmet, that they will not be good or caring masters. We British may have made some mistakes in ruling Malaya, but the evil the Japanese would do in this land would not be by mistake, it would be their deliberate policy. Look what they are doing already in the countries they have captured. They are killing the local people in hundreds of thousands and taking the riches of their lands without even the pretence of paying for them.'

Ahmet shook his head gravely. ‘I dread the thought of the Japanese coming as much as you do, Tuan. And I will myself do anything in my power to fight them. But I also have to think ahead. If the Japanese do win, and a Japanese soldier comes to Mata Ikun to find out who helped the British, I want to be able to tell him that nobody did. I want my people to be able to live without fear of being dragged away and shot as collaborators.'