There was at that time a song very popular in the sergeants’ mess, and constantly played on our gramophone, called ‘The Very Thought of You’, in which the lines ‘I see your face in every flower, Your eyes in stars above’, captured much of what I felt about Mandy – and at the same time failed to capture so much. At least her eyes were mentioned, for I was under the spell of those beautiful Chinese eyes as much as her other parts; they seemed to hold all mystery and meaning. I gloried in her foreignness, and felt I could not possibly have loved her so much had she come from any other land.
She taught me much about love. For her mother had trained her to use her body to best advantage in passion. The muscles of her pelvic floor could move in a way foreign to most women in the West. It is they who afterwards – afterwards – disappoint.
Often we laughed in the middle of our love-making. The hours of two-thirty to four-forty-five are sultry ones in Medan, and our bodies, oiled with sweat, often made outrageous noises as they pressed together. Perhaps this is why love affairs are rarely kept secret in the East: the bodies involved involuntarily give themselves away.
One morning after attending to the cleaning of the Rex following the previous night’s show, I strolled down to the bazaar to buy cigars. By no means the least enjoyable feature of life in Medan was the fact that large juicy cigars were to be had very cheaply; had they been boxed, labelled, and exported to the Netherlands, as happened before the war, they would have cost rather more than the equivalent of a penny apiece. I was about to go into the tobacconist when I came face to face with Ginny, out for a morning shop.
‘So, there you are! Now perhaps you can keep me company and protect me with that gun of yours.’
‘Am I to protect you from the Indonesians or the British?’
‘From all men. You’re such a wicked lot.’
We went into a street where there was a small market, and Ginny fussed over some cabbage.
‘I have to go to hospital tomorrow,’ she said, glancing quickly up at me. She was very different from her sister, and her movements were more birdlike.
‘Ginny – what’s the matter with you?’
‘Oh, my womb is shifting about or something. The specialist is going to take a look at it.’ She spoke lightly but inspected me solemnly. ‘I don’t want you to hurt Mandy. Be careful and kind, eh?’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ I felt a blush beginning.
She took my arm with one hand, swinging a net with the cabbage she had bought in the other, stepping out and saying lightly, ‘You need not pretend with me, Joe. Mandy always asks the advice of her sisters. Miss Chew of course also knows what goes on in her bungalow. You are shocked?’
‘Staggered. Ginny, I’m sorry – I mean, I really am sorry when you’ve all been so good—’
She laughed. ‘You British are so prudish. I always heard it, non? But happily you were not so prudish for long, Mandy says to me. Now don’t be shocked that I know. I will keep your terrible secret, I promise.’
I could not look at her. ‘I feel so bad.’
‘Don’t feel so bad. Come in this shop and you can buy me a duryan ice-cream if you like.’
We went into the shop she indicated and sat down at a table. It was dark, and a small Chinese girl served us.
She held my hand. ‘The times are so dreadful. Don’t feel bad. Be happy while you are able, non?’
‘Oh, Jesus, Ginny, you don’t understand, I do feel bad, but at the same time I am happy – wildly happy. I love you but I love your sister even more. I know it’s wrong …’
She shook her head. ‘Yes, it’s wicked. But enjoy it. I just have to warn you – Mandy loves you very seriously. She’s full of wild fantasies about you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just fantasies.’
The ice-cream arrived. I looked at her and smiled. ‘Once I get used to it I know I’ll be delighted that you know. I haven’t told anyone. Not even Charlie.’
‘But he’s your friend … And I thought what a good actor he was!’
‘You’re speaking out now because you’re going into hospital. Is it serious?’
‘No, no, of course not … Listen, Joe, the British will leave Sumatra soon, you realize.’
‘Some day, sure.’
‘They cannot just sit here, non? It’s impossible. When all the Japs are gone, then you also will go. In a matter of weeks. What about Mandy then?’
‘That’s all in the future …’
She sighed and took a dainty sip of the ice-cream. She was thin, even by the standards of the day. Her arms looked so fragile.
‘Ginny, I have great respect for your husband and should not say this, but I do think you are an absolute darling.’
I received one of her sunny, mischievous smiles. ‘“An absolute darling …” Well, that’s nice. And for my part, you know, I quite envy my little sister. There – that’s what you wish me to say, non?’
‘It’s what I like to hear, non?, but it’s too late to try and seduce me.’ She laughed with me.
The films discovered in the stores of the Rex proved to have Dutch subtitles. No one minded that. We had to show Dawn Patrol and The Bank Dick several times. We had good attendances; the cinema was marginally more comfortable than the worn Deli. And the Indonesians made no attempt to recover their lost ground. Perhaps they were prepared to wait for us to go.
Newer films from Singapore never arrived. Singapore was now regarded as the great Land of Plenty. To get leave there was bliss, according to all accounts. We continued to be short of almost all supplies. It was said that the only nutritional quality in our bread was the small beetles found in every loaf. The 26th Indian Division was more forgotten than the Forgotten Army had ever been.
Nor did replacements come through when men left for repatriation. It became apparent that, as Ginny forecast, we were going to withdraw from the island sooner or later, leaving the Dutch to manage as best they could. It was their quarrel, not ours, and someone higher up – probably Slim or Lord Louis Mountbatten – had recognized the fact.
Ginny lingered for several days in hospital. As the wife of a Swiss, she qualified for a bed in the British Field hospital. I went with Mandy to see her, pale and large-eyed against the pillow.
‘My God, we are all so fragile,’ Mandy said, as we left.
A week after her operation, Ginny was discharged. She had had cancer of the womb, and a hysterectomy had been performed. She lay on a couch, smiling and pleasant with everyone, but unable to nurse little Sammi, and scarcely able to move from her cushions.
I noticed that Sammi was beginning to form words. It was a puzzle to imagine what language he would speak, since he was addressed regularly in Cantonese, French, English, and – by several of the people living in the house with the Merciers – Malay. That linguistic uncertainty reflected the general uncertainty under which we lived. Every so often, our CO would have us on parade and give us a pep talk, or the sergeants would be sent for and told to tighten up the discipline of the men. But the rot had set in. Stalemate had been reached and there was no disguising it. Britain was getting out of India and Burma; she could hardly be expected to hold the N.E.I. for another power.
Mandy and I still clung to each other. Behind our barricades of furniture we kept the world at bay. But gradually a new note entered our conversation, embodied in that inscrutable question, What was going to happen to us all?
She pressed, I evaded.
‘Why don’t you say anything? I suppose you don’t care what will happen to us soon enough.’
‘Don’t say that, Mandy. I care, but what can I say? I’m in the bloody army. I have no control over my fate. I do what I’m told.’
‘So you say! You never have any orders, just a good life.’
‘I can’t explain the army to you. I am not as free as you think. One day I’ll get my marching orders and then I’ll have to go, same as anyone else.’
‘And what you think happens to me, please?’ Great eyes regarding me.
‘Everyone wants us to go. Things will be better for you once we’ve left. You’ll be free to return to Palembang with Wang. Life will get better again.’
She stifled a sob and sat up, turning her pale damp back.
‘Yes? You like to think me back in Wang’s bed again? My God, is that all you care?’
‘We’ve had a happy time – we’re still having it, but soon things must change. Then I have to go my way and you yours. You know old Wang is very kind, really.’
‘You Europeans are all alike. You lead an Eastern girl on then you just leave her when it will suit you. How many thousand times I hear that same story?’
We began meeting at Miss Chew’s every other day.
‘I’m so busy,’ I explained. ‘We’re going to have a proper beer bar in the foyer. The carpenters are in and I have to watch them.’
‘Beer, drink … My God! Listen, what is the use? Never mind beer and drink, what will happen to us?’
‘You know the answer. It hurts, but you know as well as I. I’ll miss you, but life will go on for you as before, except better. I’m the one who has to face the violent changes.’
She smacked me lightly on the thigh. ‘Life as before, you say? What do you know? You go back to peaceful Britain. The violence will be here, you understand? Real violence with blood and many, many people dead. Mainly Chinese. The Indonesians are mad murderous fanatics. They hate Chinese people, just like the bloody Nipponese. Oh, I can’t tell you! They wait now, they just wait … Once you are gone, then they start to kill off all foreigners except only Malay people. You think they give back Jean’s plantation in Palembang? No, they keep it for themselves. Us they push in the face, into the sea, to swim for China.’
I had no answer.
In the evenings, after dark had descended on the city, our little group, the Merciers, Charlie, and I, would sit outside the old grocery and chat, and I would pass Jean a Dutch cigar. The evenings were peaceful under the arcade, apart from the mosquitoes. A short distance away was the barrack where the Ambonese lived. The Ambonese were Indonesian mercenary troops faithful to the Dutch, good fighting men and good singers too. They had their women with them in barracks, and would sit at the open windows strumming guitars and singing songs which had travelled round the world, such as ‘Aurora’ and ‘La Cucaracha’. Sometimes they played a great Malay favourite, ‘Terang Boelan’. At such moments, I chafed that I could not take Mandy into my arms and carry her fast on to the nearest bed.
There we would sit, enjoying the cooler air which followed sunset, until the satay man was heard, progressing slowly down the next street, clicking his wooden clickers to announce his wares. When he appeared with his wooden trolley, freighted with steaming soup and the charcoal fire over which these sticks of satay sent out an appetizing smell, we bought our supper from him. It saved cooking. Eating satay in those circumstances seemed to me one of the heights of bliss, the pleasures of Mandy apart.
Terrible anxieties overcame me. I had no idea what to do. I asked Jean for his opinion of the situation.
‘Some days I think maybe I’ll get back to the plantation, non? Then it doesn’t look so good. The overland route to Palembang is closed. The British won’t let me go by sea, though I could pay – the ships are too crowded. A fine idea, non? Doesn’t anyone build ships now the war is supposed to be over? The Swiss office remains closed.’
‘If – when we leave, you’ll be part of the Republic of Soekarno’s Indonesia. Doesn’t that scare you a bit?’
‘Merdeka!’ he said, ironically. ‘Sure, it scares me, but what can I do? I’m not Dutch, who they hate. I hope they’ll let me and Wang and the ladies go back to work. They’ll want rubber production, and it needs real skilled work to bring a plantation to productivity, non? So we hope always for the best.’
‘Why don’t you just give up and go to Singapore where you’ll all be safe?’
‘Singapore? You crazy? You heard how crowded it is? Who could live in such a place? I like open air, me. Besides, all my capital investment is in Palembang. I leave here, I lose it, okay?’
‘But you’d be safe in Singapore. What about the others?’
‘We’ve got nothing, Joe. All we’ve got is here. You might as well suggest going back to la Suisse – in Switzerland.’
‘What’s wrong with Switzerland?’
He dropped his voice. ‘You’re not a child, non? You know what prejudice exists in Europe. Do you think I’d want to take Ginny back there? We’d both be – what’s the word in English? – ostracized. What would she do in la Suisse? I belong in the East with her. It’s my commitment, non?’
If anything, Jean increased my anxieties, by showing me clearly the nature of the trap that was closing round them, round Ginny and Mandy. I still found it difficult to believe in the violence of the Indonesians. Yet only a few years later, Bertrand Russell, one of the few people in the West who seemed at all disturbed by the situation in Indonesia, said that the Soekarno government had killed as many as ten million Chinese. The government had declared them to be Communists, and so not a finger had been lifted in the West. At that time, the Chinese under Chairman Mao were nobody’s friends.
The subject was not going to go away. A few days later, Mandy resumed it.
‘You like Medan, I think, Joe? Don’t I often hear you say how it’s nice, warmer than England and so on, non?’
She smiled, with a hint of that sharp tooth. ‘My God, you look so careful … These days, you know you look pretty careful. Listen, I just had this thought. Maybe you don’t go with the rest of the army when they leave Medan. You stay here, draw your pay and get some work in this nice place.’
‘On Jean’s plantation, I suppose? I wouldn’t know a rubber tree if it came up and bit me.’
‘Oh, you are so comical. Maybe here in a bank, in the big Dutch bank in the Kesawan. You are Englishman – the Indonesians would not harm you.’
‘I couldn’t work in a bank. I wouldn’t be any good. I’ve had no training.’ Her suggestion threw me into a panic. I liked Medan: but the thought of being stuck in it on my own in the chaos that would undoubtedly follow as the Indonesians and Dutch fought it out was extremely alarming.
I fell back on my old line of defence.
‘You don’t understand the army.’
‘Oh, this damn army! Do they own you lock, stock and barrel, yes? Listen, can’t you speak to your officer? The Polish person. Ask him. Ask him if I can come to Singapore with you. I can pay to come on your troopship. Or go in disguise, who knows?’
‘Forget it, my darling. These are all fantasies.’
But a few days later came the words I had already anticipated, lying awake late into the night.
‘Sadly, Joe, you don’t love me any more.’
Sulkily, ‘You know I do.’
She threw herself naked on top of me and seized my shoulders. ‘Then why not marry me and get me out of this place? Then I will love you for ever, I swear!’
A kind of depression seized me. I went and lay on my bed on the roof of the Rex and wallowed in gloom. It was not Mandy who depressed me, but rather the tissue of circumstance in which she and the Merciers were caught. To whom did Sumatra belong? To those who lived here? But some of the Dutch in the RAPWI camp, awaiting a ship to take them to Europe, had farmed here for four generations. Much of the prosperity of Sumatra was owed to Dutch enterprise.
And Chinese enterprise had also contributed to the prosperity. I thought again of the first days in Padang, when British, Indian, Dutch, Japanese and Indonesian forces had sat armed together in the Chinese café. The memory clung like a parable. There seemed to be a kind of pleasant neutrality in the Chinese temperament, a moderation in general, which made the Chinese ill targets for retribution. Of course, this was long before Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution; but even that bout of madness was over comparatively quickly, to be followed by a prevailing Chinese wish for law and decency.
Everyone seemed convinced that a bloodbath would follow the withdrawal of British troops. Yet the same was said of India, and the Indians could scarcely wait to see us gone.
In my naivety, I had imagined that, following the end of the terrible war, everyone would rejoice in peace, and insist that there was no more fighting. Couldn’t laws be passed to that effect? Weren’t fifty-five million dead enough?
As for dear Mandy, I would have been happy – proud – to marry her. How exciting it would be to set up house somewhere with her and two Chinese children, provided she could get a divorce. I was vague about Chinese divorce. Where would we live? What would my father do if I returned home with a Chinese wife and two kids? The house would fall down …
I longed to be assimilated by her Chinese-ness, to learn Cantonese, to be in a real Chinese city. Perhaps we could go to Amoy, once the fighting there died down … But how would I go about all that?
The world’s unsatisfactoriness was bad enough; there was also my own unsatisfactoriness to cope with.
I was twenty years of age. Gloom at that age was a passing thing, just one colour in the dramatic spectrum of emotions. The phone rang.
It was Army Ciné, to announce that a delivery of films was arriving at the port of Belawan, from Singapore. I recognized the drawling voice of the chain-smoking officer, Captain Morrison. He ordered me to go down in the Jeep to collect it. A convoy would be leaving the city for Belawan the following morning at 1030 hours, and I was to join it.
‘Sir.’
That evening, Charlie and I went round to the Merciers as usual. I told them my news.
‘New films, hurrah!’ said Jean. ‘You must give us all free seats, Joe. I want most to see Hollywood Canteen with the Andrews sisters.’
‘Bataan,’ said Charlie. ‘I missed it in Calcutta.’
‘Oh, Gilda, please,’ said Mandy. ‘It stars Rita Hayworth and I’m just mad about her.’
‘Devotion for me,’ I said. ‘It stars Ida Lupino and I’m mad about her. How about you, Ginny?’
Ginny, still lying on her sofa, said, ‘I think that best would be Brief Encounter – a tragic love story …’
I gave her a glance. She returned an innocent smile.
When I said that I was going down to Belawan with a convoy the following morning, there were exclamations of alarm. Several vehicles had been shot up on the coast road.
‘The good old SWOBS will see that nothing happens,’ Charlie said. ‘The extremists have only got pluck enough to pick off single vehicles. It’ll be okay.’
‘I have the morning off,’ Wang said. ‘Can Mandy and I come along with you, Joe, for the ride?’
‘It isn’t exactly safe …’
‘Oh, do let us come,’ said Mandy, adding her mite. ‘It would be so lovely to have a sight of the sea.’
So it was agreed, with concealed reluctance on my part. I much liked the easy-going Wang, but there seemed a good chance that if he discovered how I was carrying on with his wife he might stick a knife into me. I had heard tales about the Chinese.
It rained the following morning, the downpour sounding thunderous on my flimsy bedroom roof. Shivering, pulling on a shirt, I looked out and saw everywhere leaking roofs and streaming gutters. Poor Medan – for over three years it had had no maintenance, no repair. Under the assaults of a tropical climate, it was falling slowly apart.
In an hour, the rain was over and the sun shone forth with its usual vigour. In ten minutes, everything was bone dry.
The convoy for Belawan assembled from the RAPWI camp. Some more lucky Dutch, mainly women, were off to catch the boat home. I was late arriving with Mandy and Wang. Ginny had taken a turn for the worse, and I drove her back to the field hospital.
She looked so pale. ‘You need a milder climate,’ I said.
‘Hong Kong would be nice now,’ she said, ‘with maybe the first typhoon of the season blowing in from the Pacific … Even Lake Toba would do. The air’s fresh by the lake.’
I kissed her and left. I feared for her. She would be a wonderful sister-in-law.
The convoy started off only a few minutes late. The South Wales Borderers were there in strength, with Bren carriers leading and tailing the procession of three five-ton lorries, a private car, and several Jeeps, all loaded with civilians. Dispatch riders patrolled the convoy, seeing to it that the vehicles remained close together.
Once there had been fields and cultivation on either side of the Medan–Belawan road. Now it was wilderness, with the jungle drawing nearer. Several Merdeka flags flew on wayside huts; only the odd kid or dog ran out to greet us as we went by in our cloud of dust. Mandy and Wang were wildly excited by the ride. I had a conviction that we were going to be shot at, but the journey passed without incident, and we arrived safely at Belawan.
In some respects Belawan was the very opposite to Emmahaaven. The hills sloped jungle-clad down to the water’s edge in Emmahaaven, and there was a deep-water anchorage. The Belawan coastline was more ambiguous, being of shallow descent from land to water, and that margin concealed by low-lying mangrove swamps, through which water and mud trickled. No one could say where Sumatra really began or ended. So shallow was the sea for some miles out that a channel to the docks had to be regularly dredged through treacherous sandbanks. This of course had not been undertaken since the outbreak of war; ships of any draught had in consequence to moor two or three miles out to sea, with shallow-bottomed landing craft to transport passengers or cargoes between shore and ship.
There, two miles out on the listless flood, the celebrated Van Heutz lay at anchor. It had arrived from Singapore the previous day. Seeing it, the Dutch raised a gallant cheer.
The military ranged themselves protectively round the lorries as the latter were unloaded. A few buildings and go-downs stood forlornly on the dock, their windows broken or missing. Someone had raised a Union Jack over the RTO’s office for the occasion; it was an encouraging sight, limply though it lay against its mast in the still heat. Leaving Mandy and her husband by the Jeep, I made my way towards, the office through the mêlée of women shrieking as they tugged at their respective bundles of luggage.
My name was called. I looked round and there was Eedie, a blue scarf tied round her head, carrying an enormous wicker trunk.
‘I’m going, Joe, leaving this fucking place at last,’ she said. She put down the trunk and embraced me mightily. She was still an inch taller than I was. I looked into her broad honest face, beaded with sweat, with the tiniest blonde down on her upper lip; all differences between us were forgotten in this moment of reunion and parting. I thanked God that her mad Irishman was not there to see her off.
‘Oh, he buggered off last night,’ she said, when I asked about him. ‘He’s on duty today. Now it’s a new life, God be thanked. Three years and seven months in this stinking part of the world – and I only came for a month’s holiday with my uncle. Now – no uncle, youth gone, and just this trunk full of all that I possess in the world, just! Oh, but what’s that? Soon I’ll see snow again, wonderful snow, and pancakes and flowers and Tampax. And no yellow or brown people.’
She kissed me again vigorously.
‘You’ll be going home soon, Joe. Write to me. I give you my address. Maybe you can come and see me in Maastricht. Listen, I know you have a Chinese girl friend now, isn’t it? Take my advice, don’t get too entangled. Just have fun, old boy, okay?’
‘I am having fun,’ I said, a little unsteadily. She was writing down her address on a damp piece of paper.
‘The Orientals are Orientals – okay in their place, that’s all. Remember what your Kipling said, eh? “East is East and West is West, and never the two shall meet.” He was right, you know.’
‘Things are different these days, Eedie.’
She prepared to hump her trunk again. ‘Okay, I’m a racist. After all the Nips did, anyone would be. I still have nightmares of being raped. When I get back to Holland, I hope never to see another Oriental again.’
We gave each other a farewell kiss and a hug. Someone was shouting for everyone to get a move on. ‘Whatever you do, take care of your darling self, Eedie.’
‘Goodbye, fucking Sumatra!’ she shouted, joining the crowd.
I stood there rather misty-eyed.
British and Indian MPs and soldiers were directing the excited crowd. I could see that it would take a while, allowing for the usual army bullshit, before they were all embarked in the landing craft and the craft got away safely towards the distant ship. I went over to the RTO to collect the crate of films. Eedie’s parting words were still very much in my mind.
When I had signed for it, two sepoys helped me carry the crate back to the Jeep.
‘How I wish we were getting on that boat too,’ said Mandy. Wang said nothing. He sat where he was in the back of the vehicle, shading his eyes with his hand, gazing out over the leaden water.