Spring – an English spring – visited Sumatra for one hour after dawn every day. Even my fellow sergeants, when they got up that early, had been known to scratch their hairy arses and exclaim with pleasure at the morning. Cool breezes wafted through our billets, birds called, and a decent mist lay over the land. The insect population still slumbered.
In that hour, the sun steered close to the horizon, losing itself among shaggy palms. The air was loaded with rosy hues and steaming bars of shadow. Ox-carts moving towards the fields proceeded with a ruminative rhythm. The natives in their sarongs, the women going to the well with bronze pots on their heads, walked slowly, as if in a dream among the trees. Later they would appear more bent, as the load of sunlight became too great.
Nipping back from Margey’s at this good hour, I cut down one of the Out of Bounds roads that bordered a kampong. The thatched bamboo huts, set beside a stream amid tall palms, looked too idyllic to be anything but fodder for some fucking travel poster. Hens clucked among the huts; there were tethered white goats, cats sitting staring at the water, and an old man, bent double, brushing a path with meticulous care, as if each grain of dust were familiar to him. It was hard to believe that anyone wanted to shoot me at this hour.
Too soon, the scene would be different. The sun would be roused from its pleasant lethargy and zoom to the zenith of the sky, showering fire as it went. The fog would vanish; the day would buzz like a saw; every squaddy alive would break out in a muck sweat; monkeys would start to pass out in the trees.
Climbing down into a ditch, I dodged between strands of barbed wire and climbed through a hole in the tall mesh perimeter. The hole had been made by ill-intentioned BORS taking short cuts to town. My way to the sergeants’ quarters lay through the Other Ranks’ lines.
Some BORS were slouching between houses, across their neglected gardens. They looked like apes with towels about their shoulders as they made their way to the wash-ups. As I rounded one of their billets, I came face to face with Johnny Mercer, the day’s Duty Sergeant. An unhappy corporal trailed behind Johnny, explaining something to him at great length.
‘Merdeka,’ I said by way of salute. He responded, but looked no happier than the corporal.
‘Stubby, we can’t get these shagging Other Ranks out of their billets. What do you think we ought to do?’
I looked at my watches. They seemed agreed that it was approximately seven-thirty.
‘Bit early, isn’t it? What’s the drill?’
He gave an abridged version of his laugh. ‘Agricultural Duties. They’re supposed to be up and out digging the field for planting potatoes from seven till eight. They refuse to get out of their charpoys.’
While I was mulling this news over and having a good yawn, the corporal – addressing Mercer but plainly repeating for my benefit a remark he had made before – said, ‘You can see why they object. They claim that digging fields is not part of their duties. They also maintain that even if a crop of potatoes resulted, the Dutch would get it and they would gain nothing.’
The corporal was 26 Div Signals. I had seen him before. His name was Kyle. He was typical post-war material, a thin specimen with pale skin and no service behind him, young, inexperienced, and cocky as you please.
They both looked hopefully at me as I rubbed my stubbly chin. A faint grin showed on Johnny’s face.
I plucked a few leaves off the nearest bush, asking casually, ‘Are your sympathies with the men, Corporal?’
‘Yes, very much. They are not farm hands. I don’t see why we should work for the Squareheads, do you?’
I scattered the leaves. ‘Never mind what you don’t see, Corporal. Your job is to carry out Standing Orders. As you bloody well know, the Indonesians are refusing to supply us with fresh rations, so the GOC has ordered that, where possible, units shall grow their own food. Reasonable, isn’t it? Get your men out of their bloody charpoys and on that stretch of miadan at the double! Give ’em five minutes, after which any man without a shovel at the ready is up on a fizzer.’
Corporal Kyle looked at Johnny. Johnny looked at me. Johnny started to grin more openly.
‘Don’t give that old bull, Stubby! Fat lot you care about Standing Orders. I know where you’ve been all night.’
‘This “O” Section shower is very shit-or-bust,’ the corporal said, apologetically. Yet I caught an undercurrent of boastfulness which set me off.
‘Shit-or-bust, is it? You’ve not earnt the right to be shit-or-bust, Corporal. You jump off the last boat with six months’ service in Clacton to your name and think you can swing that one, you’re sadly mistaken. Christ, three or four years’ soldiering in the Fourteenth Army and then you’re entitled to be shit-or-bust. Ever heard of the Fourteenth Army, Corporal?’
‘It’s disbanded.’
‘It’s before your time, when soldiering was pukka soldiering, let me tell you. So don’t start answering me back. I don’t know what bloody Britain’s coming to! Now – get in those stinking fucking billets, stop playing with yourself, and order those admis at the top of your voice to get fell in on the road with their shovels, in five minutes flat or else.’
‘Yes, you’d better do that,’ Johnny said, turning to Kyle. ‘Stir the buggers up. Otherwise it’s a case of mutiny, and we’ll have to report it to the CO.’
That was the first time the dread word ‘mutiny’ was mentioned.
Kyle’s expression went blank.
‘You two are coming the Old Soldier on me.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ I asked.
Ignoring me, he addressed Mercer.
‘They’ll only tell me to clear off. They say the IORS should do the job. Will you come with me, Sarge?’
Johnny grinned at me and then said to the corporal, ‘Thik-hai. I’ll threaten to shoot the bleeders if they don’t move.’
‘They won’t take any notice, I warn you,’ said the corporal. He tailed off with Johnny Mercer. I headed for my billet. My time was up.
Breakfast restored some of my depleted energies. I was shaving in my room when Johnny Mercer entered. He took a look at the Chinese servant who was obsequiously cleaning round, and told him to get out.
‘Merdeka! You’re a krab sight, Horry. Getting it up too much, that’s the trouble. Take my advice and pack it in a bit or you’ll be dead before you reach Blighty.’ These were standard pleasantries and I ignored them.
‘Did you get “O” Section out digging spuds?’
‘No. They said they weren’t a bunch of wogs, and that digging was a job for the Indian Other Ranks.’
‘Who’s that feeble tit of a corporal?’
‘Steve Kyle? He’s not a bad bloke. It’s the situation. The NEI isn’t Burma.’
I dried my face and prepared to brush my teeth. ‘Do you know how much this bloody toothpaste cost me? You realise that the “Q” stores is out of toothpaste? And the NAAFI. It’s all going to the Dutch.’
‘I’ve got a bit of Dutch crumpet who works in the RAPWI shop. She’ll get you a tube cheap. There’s plenty up the RAPWI.’
‘Six bloody Dutch guilders I had to pay for this toothpaste. That’s eleven bob, eleven and a kick. Daylight robbery. So what did you do?’
‘They agreed to parade at 8.30 hours for Arms Inspection, and you should have heard them ticking about that. But I couldn’t get them out for digging. They wouldn’t bloody well go.’
He went and stood on the balcony, gazing morosely at the distant jungle. Johnny Mercer was solidly built, with a big red neck and thin brown hair. He had been in Burma and knew what was what, but this morning he was not his old self. He clutched at his big red neck.
‘I’ve got a hangover,’ he said moodily. ‘I hate this fucking dump. What are we doing here, anyway? The NEI isn’t our pigeon. We should have left this spot of trouble to the Dutch. I suppose you realise that we handed Sumatra over to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic Wars – now here we go again … Privately, my sympathies are with the BORS. Why should they go out digging the fields at seven in the morning, like a lot of coolies? Still, their refusal is serious, isn’t it?’
Spitting and wiping my mouth, I said, ‘Very serious. Mutiny. We’re on Active Service still – they could be shot for mutiny. You’d better go and talk to Jhamboo Singh – he’s the officer i/c. Perhaps there’s some way round it.’
‘Jhamboo. Yes, I suppose I had … What a bloody position.’ He sauntered back into the room, still clutching his neck. ‘What’s going to happen to your furniture when you’ve gone? I like that cabinet.’
In my room, tastefully arranged, I had an ornate mahogany cabinet, a fine mahogany table, a little brass side-table, and a heavy sideboard on which my collection of Balinese carvings stood. All the gear was looted, except for the carvings, which I bought with cigarettes in the bazaar. The cabinet had come with me overland from Padang.
My room gave me a lot of pleasure, although I was so rarely in it. On my walls I had bright posters of Hanuman, the Monkey God, and little pink Parvati on her lotus leaf. Over the head of my bed hung a large pin-up of Ida Lupino, slender, browbeaten, ever courageous.
‘What’ll you offer for the job lot?’
He laughed. ‘Nothing. I’ll wait till you’re gone and then I’ll commandeer it.’
When Johnny left, I scrutinised my face narrowly in the glass, prodding at its pimples and folds. A blank sort of face, I thought, yet not undistinguished. What was it going to look like, perched over a suit, collar, and tie? And what was I going to do in Civvy Street? Follow father’s footsteps into the bank, no doubt. Now I was a hero, tough, pretty independent; there, I’d be just one more pale-faced clerk. Now I had a smashing bird; and then …
The first heat of the day was getting through. I went to lie down on my bed, putting my hands behind my head and staring up at the cracks on the ceiling.
The Chinese cleaner came bowing himself into the room. I shouted to him to get out until I called.
Like a bird to a pool, the image of Margey’s face came back to me, that mysterious oriental face with those slanted eyes, that perfect mouth, the lips in repose like something carved. Only two hours ago I had awakened to find her beside me, and my arm full of cramps because she was lying on my wrist. I lay absorbing the sight of her, the curl of her hair round her ear and neck, the inexplicable curve of her shoulder.
Margey’s room with all its grotty detail was revealed to me in monochrome. Beyond the curtains were a thousand broken rooftops, all with tiles missing. Medan, falling apart at the seams …
My happiness had lasted only a moment. Came the pain, the knowledge that it was Friday, that in three days I would be swept away in one of those directives issuing from the Company Office. I sat up, and she awoke.
Then I’d left her, clung to her and left her, feeling so sick on my way back to the lines that I’d almost have welcomed a few extremists rising before me in the dawn-light and shooting me down into some stinking ditch.
I fell asleep for an hour. But circumstances were already at work to ensure that this was my last peaceful day in Sumatra …
The roofs of Medan were broken and the town was tumbling. Its occupying force was also in ruinous condition.
I had arrived in Medan only six weeks ago, having previously been in Padang or on detachment at Fort de Kock. During those six weeks, I had removed myself as far as possible from the army. It had ceased to have functional point; the closing down of the Fourteenth Army had been the final blow.
Despite my feeling of severance, emphasised by the detachment from my own unit, I could no more visualise myself as a civilian than I could visualise Margey away from Sumatra. The army had bred in me a contempt for the cushy civilian life; perhaps I clung to Margey as part of a more heroic existence.
However that might be, I woke from my sleep with an urgent resolve to marry the girl. Why fucking not? I’d show my mates how independent I was. At least I would see what the score was – and today, before the weekend set in. I would speak to Captain Boyer over the wireless link and discuss the situation with him. With that done, I would face Margey and settle her complaints one way or the other – for her complaints carried weight with me – and then we could go and swim.
I washed the sweat off my face and neck and dressed myself. The billet I lived in was beautiful. The rooms downstairs were high and cool, the staircase had an elegant curl, and there was a carved front door. Before the war, the place had belonged to a prosperous planter who headed for Australia when the Japs arrived and got himself killed in a bar-room brawl in Darwin. Under Jap rule, the building formed part of the Neutrals Camp, where Swiss and Swedes and their assorted women had been confined for the duration. Now it was a sergeants’ billet. I tried out a quick daydream about Margey’s and my living here when the British troops left, complete with bearers to wait on us; but the bearers would not stay still, and became petty officials in the new Indonesian order instead.
Nobody was about outside. The sun had already achieved tyrannical power and anyone who could scrounge a way off official duties would be stretched out on his charpoy.
The line of Dutch houses, with their neglected gardens and riotous shrubs, was sheltered by deciduous trees, doubtless imported from nurserymen in Amsterdam. As soon as I stepped out of their shadow, my body oozed sweat into my newly laundered jungle greens. A butterfly flew past me at waist-level, its wings as big as saucers.
I strolled over to ‘M’ Section, to get a vehicle to take me into town. Things were a bit jungly in ‘M’ Section. It had taken over a large thatched barn and fortified the space all round with rattan screens and barbed wire. There was a guard permanently on the gate, though he sometimes dozed under his square of thatch.
A few vehicles stood frying in the sun. In the shade of the barn, other vehicles were being repaired. Most of the vehicles and all of the repair equipment was Jap. It was an indication of feeling in the House of Commons, as well as of the situation in India and the NEI, that 26 Div had never managed to come up to strength, and relied heavily on commandeered equipment. The fact that such equipment as was permitted came via Singapore added to our problems. There was a shortage of everything – the ‘Q’ stores could not even provide new socks. If 26 Div did not pull out soon, it was going to be reduced to growing its own food in earnest.
Colour-Sergeant Ron Dyer stood at the entrance to the barn, smoking. He was a regular, and had been through the Arakan. At his waist he wore a Jap aviator’s sword, which made him look like a pirate. Apart from this weapon, and his revolver, he wore a filthy pair of dungarees, boots, and nothing else. His great chest and glistening belly were streaked with dirt. Directly he saw me, he set up an outcry and moved sluggishly about in mock-panic.
‘Right, lads, watch your vehicles! Watch those tyres or they’ll be all gone like shit off a hot stove. Keep your eye on anything this bloke can lift. Watch your rings! What do you want here, Stubbs? Got a gin-palace to flog me cheap?’
‘You’ve got fuck-all here anyone would want to swipe, Dyer.’
The gin-palace scandal was something I would never live down, not if I served another hundred years in the army.
If equipment was in short supply in Medan, matters were much worse in Padang. Padang lay south of the equator, on the other side of the island. Any goods intended for Padang had to make a sea-voyage from Medan of some twelve hundred miles. Air transport was scarce. There was a hazardous trail over the island – the trail five hundred miles long by which I had travelled to Medan – but that had always been threatened by extremists and was now entirely in their hands.
Padang was an outpost – an outpost which began to look increasingly forlorn as the political situation deteriorated.
One thing the garrison in Padang needed: a signal station. Their radio equipment consisted of battered old 22 sets. These relayed messages up to a hill station above the town, a place called Bukitinghi, from which signals were relayed over the mountains to Medan. Bukitinghi came under threat, with a signals captain shot up on the hazardous road back to Padang. A proper mobile signals station – known throughout the army as a gin-palace – was ordered. The message went to Bukitinghi, to Medan, to Singapore, to Calcutta, to Delhi, and so back to 26 Div supply base, many hundreds of miles away in Amritsar.
Six months later, a supply ship landed a gin-palace at Belawan, the port of Medan.
That gin-palace was the reason for my being on detachment in Medan. I had been despatched from Padang to collect the gin-palace by road. The Mendips had supplied a truck, a driver, two BORS, a Bren gun, and a load of supplies, and we had driven that marathon road across the interior of Sumatra, over a massive mountain range amid still-active volcanoes, past Lake Toba, down to Medan. What a ride! The adventure of my life! There’s no more marvellous country anywhere in the world. We were not shot at once.
But that was six weeks ago. Since then, the Indonesians had gained confidence, knowing we were pulling out, and closed the overland route. There was no way of getting the gin-palace to Padang, except by sea.
Meanwhile, the road between Medan and Belawan port became increasingly dangerous. I was given an escort to drive to the port and pick up the gin-palace. When we arrived, we found not one but ten gin-palaces. There they were, in a line, sitting out in the flaming sun beside a deserted go-down. The signal to Amritsar had become garbled on its way back to base.
I drove our one gin-palace back to Medan as ordered. It was like driving an oven on wheels.
At Div HQ I tried explaining the whole thing to an RASC major who took a dim view of the matter. Eventually, he agreed to send a signal to Amritsar to get the situation clarified. Messages went back and forth, days seeped by. I was ordered by the same dim major to form a convoy and collect the other nine gin-palaces; they were to be guarded carefully in Medan until they could be shipped back to Calcutta.
Our convoy was fired at and one Indian driver was killed. We arrived at the harbour. The nine gin-palaces had gone.
That was the story, and many a bitter laugh it raised.
In the popular version of the story I had done an arms-deal. I was in charge of the vehicles and so was responsible for selling all nine on the black market to the local branch of Soekarno’s TRI; I had made a fortune. My version of the story was that the RASC major had made the killing. What had really happened was that the Indonesians had driven them off. The vehicles had been left standing on the dockside by the Indian RASC with ignition keys in the ignition locks.
This was why Colour-Sergeant Dyer, not a man normally given to humour, cried aloud, ‘Watch your vehicles,’ whenever I went near ‘M’ Section. The one gin-palace we had rescued stood, practically unused, in his park. It would never reach Padang. Some humorist had stencilled the word MERDEKA in neat yellow letters on its sides.
I gave Dyer a fag and we had a little chat.
‘It’s all right for some, Stubbs. I shall have to hang on here till the Div pulls out at the end of the year. They can’t do without me – I’ve only got Wogs under me. We’re supposed to be patching up any vehicles we can lay our hands on to sell to the bloody Dutch when they take over.’
‘It’ll be a bloodbath then, I’m told.’
‘You wouldn’t fucking chuckle it will …’
We sucked on our cigarettes. Monkeys ran in the high branches above the barn.
‘It’s a terrible thought. Sumatra’s such a beautiful fucking island.’
‘Beautiful buggery. It’s easy for you to say, mate – you’re off home thora pechi. They can all kill each other down to the last little black baby for all I care, once I get out of here.’
‘You’re being unkind. Ron. It’s not like you.’
‘You can stuff your hypocrisy, too. These people mean nothing to us, and we’ve no bloody business being here. You know who let us in the shit same as I do – the bloody Americans. In particular, Harry Truman and General Fucking MacArthur. The NEI is part of the Pacific, and the Americans should have administered it theirselves, instead of off-loading it on to Mountbatten.’
‘I suppose it’ll sort itself out in the end.’
‘They’ve got to sort out their own bloody troubles. Me, all I want is to get out of this fucking uniform.’
As it happened I ran across Ron Dyer a year or two later, in Civvy Street. He had joined the police. He had lost a stone or two and looked good in his uniform.
An Indian driver came over, grinning, and climbed into one of the Jeeps parked under the trees.
‘There’s your gharri, Stubby-lad. See that little bugger doesn’t bash it up or flog it to the Sumatrans.’
I climbed in, gave Ron a wave, and we bowled down the Serdenweg and into the centre of town. As we were going at a brave smack, the whole gusto of life hit me. For the moment personal problems were forgotten. We were at the heart of things; the thought that we could be shot at at any moment just enhanced the tide of the blood. And Margey was not far away – Margey, mine, mine, semi-mine. I began to sing.
I see your face in every flower,
Your eyes in stars above:
It’s just the thought of you –
The very thought of you, my love.
When it was travelling at speed, my voice was quite as good as Bing Crosby’s.
The driver took me a long way round. He must have enjoyed my singing. He breezed by the Deli railway station, where the drivers and horses of two ancient gharris dozed in the sun, and braked flamboyantly in front of the signal office as instructed.
This had been the smart end of town before history overtook it. Like everything else, the building before us had been wrenched out of its intended purpose. Three years earlier, it had been a flower shop, where prosperous wives and daughters of planters came in their white dresses to buy the exotic flora with which Sumatra abounded. It was a low wooden building with large windows; now the windows were boarded and walls of sandbags were piled before it. A Rajput naik stood guard at the entrance.
Inside, each tucked into its own sandbagged nook, six wireless sets were operating, their operators working in R/T or W/T to ALFSEA in Singapore, to Batavia, or to detachments in places like Palembang and Padang. Links to smaller outposts such as Sabang and Benkoelen were worked for an hour or two every morning. A couple of the operators nodded to me; as a spare bod with some understanding of signals procedure, I had been known to take over from them for an hour or two if needed.
The superintendent came out of the rear room, clutching a piyala full of tea. It was Steve Kyle, the thin sharp-nosed corporal who had failed to get the lads out of bed for Agricultural Duties.
‘I want to put through a call to Captain Boyer in Padang HQ,’ I said. ‘Can I borrow the R/T for five minutes?’
‘There’s a lot of traffic this morning, Sergeant. Is it important?’
‘Of course. It’s about my demob next week.’
He went over to his desk and set the mug down, looking at it rather than me.
‘Your message will have to go through Admin. I can’t accept private traffic.’
‘I want to speak to Boyer. If you’re busy, then it’s quicker for us to have a chat over the R/T than to send half a dozen messages each way. Doesn’t that make sense to you, Corporal?’
He faced up to me.
‘It may make sense to you, but you know very well that unauthorised persons are not allowed to go on the air, nor are they even allowed in the signal office. Okay?’ He looked me straight in the eye. Pale and peacetime though he was, he was a determined bugger.
Lowering my voice, I said, ‘You’ve suddenly turned into a stickler for discipline, haven’t you, Corporal? You put on a pretty feeble show this morning. Let me remind you that you have a mutiny on your hands, the consequences of which could be very serious – for you as well as the blokes you think you’re defending.’
He coloured. ‘Don’t give me the Old Sweat bit, for Christ’s sake, Sergeant. You old soldiers have had it, that’s why they’re shipping you home. You’re going to get a shock when you get to Britain: we’ve got a Labour government now, you may have heard. It’s Attlee you’re under now, not Churchill, and things have changed. My chaps refused to dig this morning for the same reason that the British have failed to turn Sumatra back into a colony. Sense prevailed. The bloody war’s over. The ordinary man’s going to have his say – here, at home, and anywhere else you care to name. So don’t use old-fashioned words like mutiny to me.’
Some of the IORS and BORS at the sets were turning round to listen, grinning. When it came to being shit-or-bust, I could teach these rookies things they never knew; but being shit-or-bust was personal, a very different thing from the new couldn’t-care-less attitude coming from Blighty with sods like Kyle. What the hell were they doing back there, Attlee and the rest of them? The Fourteenth Army had fought for India and Burma, and many a good man had gone down, including my mates, the good old lads of the Mendips and 2 Div. Now what was going on? They were giving India away, and no one knew what was happening in Burma.
I said, ‘I gave you an order this morning, Kyle, to get your section out on spade parade. You failed to carry it out. You are involved with the rest of them and that’s got nothing to do with politics. It’s a matter of army discipline. Unless you want trouble, pack in the bullshit and give me five minutes’ air space.’
He began to sweat. ‘Don’t you threaten me, Sergeant Stubbs! You have no business in here. I’d be within my rights to fetch the Duty Officer and have you turned out. You had no business to give me orders this morning, either. That was between Johnny Mercer and me. He’s my sergeant. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that you were just coming in from breaking curfew. That’s a serious offence, too, and don’t you forget it.’
He had a point.
‘Thik-hai, if that’s the way you want it,’ I said. ‘I’ll sort you out later, Corporal.’
There was nothing for it but to leave. As I reached the door, Kyle came up behind me and said, ‘You can see how I’m placed. I don’t want trouble. The British Army has been caught in an impossible political situation and all of us –’
I turned on him angrily. ‘Don’t try and get round me. I’m as pissed off with the army as anyone, and I’ve seen more cock-ups than you’ve had NAAFI suppers. But the whole point of the fucking army is to sort out impossible situations. That’s what it’s there for. Which can only be done with a bit of discipline. Otherwise, we all get shot up. Malum that?’
He shook his head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. We’ve only saved ourselves from being shot up here by failing to carry out impossible orders. Reinstating the Dutch can’t be done. In Java, they’re having a hell of a time because they refuse to recognise realities.’
‘Balls. That’s all balls, and you know it. We haven’t enough troops here or in Java, otherwise we could get this lot sorted out in no time. Now, get back to your desk and sort yourself out.’
He pressed his hand to his lips, then turned away. I clattered down the steps of the signal office, lighting a fag as I went. The bastard had really got under my skin, but I told myself that I had better drop the matter and pursue my intention of speaking to Captain Boyer.
Ordering my Indian driver to wait, I walked over to the nearest café and ordered a coffee. The shop owner smiled, recognising me. I thought as I had every day since I arrived in Medan how pleasant this sleepy town must be in times of peace. Tiger Balm’s bloodbath theory must be wrong. Once the British and Dutch had left, quiet would descend.
These euphoric thoughts of a young man I set down here. History is rarely on the side of peace and quiet. Soekarno, the fiery revolutionary, made a doubtfully successful leader of free Indonesia. He was deposed in 1965, when the Suharto regime took power and began by massacring about a million Indonesian citizens, many of them Chinese; since they were labelled Communists, the nations of the West were not too dejected as news of the killings got about, although, as Bertrand Russell said, ‘In four months, five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years.’ I imagine that plenty of the victims were ordinary people like Margey, Tiger Balm, Auntie, Katie Chae, and optimistic old Fat.
If the British would give me no help in getting through to Boyer in Padang, then my Dutch acquaintance, Ernst Sontrop, might come in useful. I paid for the coffee, bought two good cigars, and strolled across the road to the Dutch HQ, which stood conveniently next to the signal office.
It was a building of grey stone, four storeys high and so one of the tallest buildings in the city. It was constructed in a cumbersome alien style with rounded corners and heavily overhanging porticos and pediments which gave its façade several permanent frowns. Once it had functioned as a court of justice, I believe. Justice was now suspended. The occupying personnel were military. Two swart Ambonese soldiers challenged me at the entrance, stepping smartly out from behind sandbags. They looked at my army paybook and consulted with an officer. I was admitted.
In the dim-lit hall, a stuffed tiger prowled inside its glass case, fixing glass eyes upon whoever entered. On one marble wall were mounted skulls of the two-horned Sumatran rhino, while the wall opposite supported a bright mosaic map of the Indies, fringed with exotic tribal figures, together with insects, flowers, and bright-plumaged birds. Beside the lift and the stairs, plants grew in brass tubs.
A grim old receptionist behind a desk tried to persuade me to hand over my revolver. He spoke no English. We glowered at each other before he disappeared, to return with a hulking man who asked me sharply what my business was. When I asked for Sontrop, he shrugged and led me upstairs without a word.
Upstairs were comfortable sofas and a table bearing Dutch magazines. All this foreign colour made me wonder whether any Stubbs had ever been so far from home before. I visualised generation after generation of Stubby ancestors, with big noses, grey whiskers, and bizarre appetites, receding into the mists of time; Victorian Stubbses, Tudor Stubbses, Anglo-Saxon Stubbses, Stone-Age Stubbses, all standing on their home hearth and muttering, in the manner of my father, ‘Why bother about the rest of the world when you’ve not seen all England yet?’
What an affront to those imagined ancestors if I returned to England with a Chinese bride! There could be no more conclusive proof of the far-flung side of my nature.
As I was rather loftily accepting the envious congratulations of my brother Nelson, Ernst Sontrop entered the waiting room.
Sontrop seemed to my eyes tremendously ancient. He was thirty-five years old. A neat straight spade beard fringed his jawline, sparse hair swept back from his forehead. The beard was brown, streaked with white; the hair on his head was blond. His eyes were grey-blue, his expression set. There were deep wrinkles round his eyes and lips, as if he had once clung to a sheer cliff-face by those features.
His clothes were ostentatiously neat: his bright civilian shirt, army trousers, socks and sandals, might have come straight from a shop that morning.
‘Good morning, Horatio, how do you do?’ He paused, then came forward and formally shook hands with me. I offered him a cigarette which he tucked into his breast pocket before showing me down the corridor to his office.
‘Firstly, I must apologise for keeping you waiting. The Dutch ship, the Van Heutsz, arrives tomorrow to take away many Dutch persons, so we are busy arranging documents.’
I assured him that I had enjoyed the wait.
‘Not so many Britishers come into our headquarters, Horatio. It is a shame that our peoples do not go along better together, when we are both European races, and have common interests. Now, please to take a seat and tell me what I can do for you.’
Time was I had done something for Sontrop. When I was still with my unit in Padang, I was given the job of establishing a RAPWI area. RAPWI was the Rehabilitation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees organisation, also known unofficially as Rape All Pretty Women in Indonesia. Among the RAPWI personnel in Padang were several Dutch girls, whom I had to fetch from the hill station of Bukitinghi, where they had been interned by the Japs. I became involved with one of the biggest blondes, Addy Sontrop – a fine strapping girl, taller than I and milder than a pat of butter.
One day, I was drinking in a bar with a couple of my mates when I noticed Addy serving at the food counter. A taffy from the South Wales Borderers was pawing her and making himself generally objectionable. When he slapped a hand on Addy’s left tit, I went over and punched him in the guts. Some of his mates showed up, and we had a dodgy few minutes of it.
Addy was later shifted to Medan. I met her again when I arrived there, and she introduced me to brother Ernst. Ernst was unexpectedly friendly – the Dutch had a reputation for being stand-offish – and he continued being civil after Addy boarded the Van Heutsz and sailed for the Netherlands.
So I gave him an outline of my story, telling him just enough to explain why I wished to speak to Boyer over the radio link. Something in his face, an expression of disapproval, brought the blood to my throat before I had finished my story.
‘Don’t you go for the idea of my marrying a Chinese girl, Ernst?’
He dropped his glance to his neatly manicured nails.
‘Of course it is not for me to give any opinion about your private affairs, Horatio.’
‘Go on.’
‘No, it is simply that we found throughout many years of ruling in these islands that mixed marriages never turn out very happily. For you it may be different. Let’s proceed to the wireless room.’
Sontrop took me to the top floor of the building, where two Dutchmen were working a Jap transmitter of formidable size. While they were calling Padang, Sontrop summoned a uniformed native, who served us with glasses of fresh iced lime juice. I couldn’t see anything like that happening in Corporal Kyle’s lousy signal office.
After a certain amount of impenetrable Dutch had gone over the air, Sontrop came and said, ‘Our friends in Padang at the Netherlands Headquarters are unable to telephone to the British Division. Extremists severed the cable during the hours of night, and it is not yet – do you say, reinstated? Reinstalled. They will send a messenger on a motor-bike. Captain Boyer shall radio you back here in two hours’ time. Provided that he may be found.’
I checked with my watches. It was somewhere about midday.
As I thanked him, he said, ‘It is time for my lunch. You caught me almost as I left. Come to my house and eat with me. Let me first get my carbine.’
My Jeep was waiting outside, so I invited him to climb in. Some British troops were strolling by; one of them laughed and said something to his mates. If there was one thing regarded as more eccentric than associating with the Chinese, it was associating with the Dutch.
Our Indian driver, ever glad of distraction, made a showy turn round the park, passed the de Witte Club, and bowled up past the old deserted children’s playground towards the RAPWI area. Buildings on either side of the road were shuttered and ruinous until we came to the little model village where the Dutch were now mainly housed. The guards at the gate were Japs, with the insignia removed from their uniforms.
Sontrop gave the driver directions.
We turned down a neat little side road. The trees were deciduous again, formally spaced, just as on the banks of the Zuyder Zee.
Ernst lived in something that looked like a shrunken version of an Odeon Cinema, with a strange multi-angle tower rising above the roof-line. Curved steps flounced up to an elaborate front door. Inside, the floors were marble and there was a Rembrandt reproduction on the wall. The Night Watch.
We met a couple of Dutch women in the hall, padding round half-naked with their hair in curlers. I was immediately interested – though they were ugly-looking cows – since Sontrop had not struck me as a ladies’ man; it was always hard to tell with foreigners. The women took no notice of us. They smoked and walked about while their hair set, presumably getting ready for some evening event. There were dances in the RAPWI area every night. Passing them politely, Sontrop showed me into his quarters. We entered a big room. A grotesque stone fireplace was the chief feature. His bed was here, and a table, some novels on a shelf, some ammo boxes under the window, little else. A door led off to back quarters.
‘I bring you a beer,’ he said.
‘What about the driver?’
‘He can have water.’ He brought me a Milwaukee beer and then disappeared. I walked round the room looking at photographs hanging framed on the walls. They were all views of some foreign town where it appeared permanently about to rain. By the bed stood snaps of Addy and an older female, presumably Mum.
Nowhere in Sontrop’s bare room did I see signs of female occupancy. Of course, owing to the emergency, houses in protected areas were always overcrowded. One heard funny things about the Dutch, but that did not mean that all the women in the bungalow had to be Sontrop’s mistresses. I stared out of the back window into a patch of unkempt back-garden, where unkempt bushes flowered. Laundered sanitary towels were hanging on a wire to dry, five of them in a row like rabbit pelts.
Sontrop came back bearing a plate with some big thick cheese sandwiches. I saw he had no beer for himself. Perhaps he had given me his last bottle. Hospitable people, the Dutch.
As we munched, he said, ‘You have heard that all the British forces are pulling out from Medan within four months.’
‘Is the date confirmed?’
‘Yes, as I understand. It makes our small Dutch force in a very difficult situation. But British politicians have recognised Soekarno’s Republic, which we cannot do.’
‘You’d be well advised to pull out, too. The Indonesians are determined to be independent. Support from Europe is a long way off.’
He shrugged. ‘The natives cannot manage administration. They are unprepared for autonomy, like children. They cannot run hospitals and telephone exchanges and banks and the mercantile aspects. They cannot build roads or keep down malaria. They can hardly cook a meal without Chinese help.
‘We must stay here. We made this place! There was nothing before we came here last century, nothing, you understand, just a few stinking huts beside the River Deli. Addy’s and my parents arrived here as a young married couple at the start of this century. By hard work my father became to own his own plantation, growing rubber and tobacco. He carved it out of the jungle with his own blade and killed off the snakes and other wild life. He and my mother died here, defending their land when the Japanese invaded. I was born here. How, do we just disappear weakly because we are afraid of a few extremists like Soekarno?’
‘I can see how you feel.’ We ate the sandwiches in silence.
Sontrop laughed. ‘You know what? We get more volunteers now from the Netherlands. And I hear tell that after the German Wehrmacht disbanded, many of its officers join the French Foreign Legion to help them fight in Indo-China. They also enlist in the Dutch Army, to help fight here and in Java. So we have both our old enemies, the Nazis and the Japs, to give assistances now.’
Weevils had been baked into the spongy bread – just like the bread in the sergeants’ mess. I said, ‘I can’t see the British ever using German military aid. There would be a devil of a row if we did so.’
He wagged a finger at me. ‘You British got scared by Ghandi. You should have locked him up and throwed away the key. Suddenly, the war ends and you aren’t tough any more. You, Horatio, you are good at punching a man at the stomach when it is necessary, but I have a sense you do not want more fighting.’
‘I’ve had a belly-full. I was in Burma. One of the worst theatres of war in the world.’
‘No, forgive me, but Dutch New Guinea is easily First Worst. What did you do in Burma?’
So I gave him a quick run-down on the battle of Kohima, and how the fighting had raged over the DC’S tennis court. I told him how Charlie Meadows and I had climbed a cliff and thrown grenades into a Jap bunker.
‘Were you scared then, Horatio?’
‘At the time, I didn’t feel a thing. Afterwards, I got the shakes. They had to feed Charlie and me on rum. When we came out of Burma and were resting up outside Calcutta, I had a few bad nightmares. Where were you during the war? Here?’
He told me his experiences. It was quiet in the bungalow. Now and again, the half-clad women called to each other in Dutch. Outside, cries of children came faintly.
Ernst Sontrop’s family lived on their plantation some miles outside Medan. When the Japs arrived in 1942, a mortar shell landed on their bungalow. Ernst was knocked unconscious. His parents and an elder brother were killed and Addy ran away in panic. A faithful servant carried Sontrop to a native hut and hid him when the Japanese troops marched in. Then followed a few weeks of hell.
The world was alive with heroes after the war. Unexpected countries were suddenly thrown open like treasure-chests, their secrets bursting into the light of incredible truth. The most ordinary people had dramatic stories to tell.
Europe had undergone its terrible upheavals, but the upheaval that took place in the Far East was grander, more terrible, more far-reaching. That upheaval still remains largely misunderstood or neglected. From the splendour and havoc of the East, few stories travelled back to the West. Those that have done so are largely misleading. To give but one example: the film of The Bridge over the River Kwai, which dealt with the Death Railway built largely by British and Australian prisoners of war in order to link Burma with Malaya, was a tremendous success – because it glorified the white man. It showed him building a bridge which the Japanese could not have managed on their own. The truth was that the Japanese were masters of the jungle; they were ferociously brave and ingenious enemies and, as their post-war success has shown, they were fully a match for the European races at building anything from a watch to an oil tanker. Bridges were nothing to them. And they endured conditions that no white races had been trained to endure. As it was with the Japanese, so it was with the other teeming peoples of South-East Asia – then, and now. Perhaps the West dare not know.
There was another reason for not being eager to go home. As the women were beautiful, so the men were amazingly resilient. The Chinese in particular were to exhibit their capacity for endurance and for an unexcelled ability to flourish in impossible conditions. Four million of them fled from the Communist regime in their homeland and were cast upon the rock of Hong Kong. There, they made a world-success of what, under four million variegated Europeans, would have turned into a concentration camp on a grand scale.
Ernst Sontrop, the faithful servant, and a couple of friends, managed to launch a small boat from a desolate stretch of coast and sail up the Malacca Straits towards the Anderman Islands. They were picked up, half-dead after twenty-one days afloat, by a British naval vessel. They were taken to Colombo, where the servant died.
After some weeks in India, the three Dutchmen were given passage on a ship bound for England. The ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. Later, he was to discover that he was almost the sole survivor of the ship. Sontrop drifted on a lifebelt to the coast of France. He met up with members of the French Resistance and after some months made his way into occupied Holland, to fight with the underground against the Nazis.
‘You had a brave time in Burma, Horatio, but fighting in an occupied country, then you need a different sort of courage. Each time you have to go to sleep, you wonder if you will waken with a German carbine muzzle stuck in your stomach.’
‘Strange experience to get home and find it’s an enemy country.’
‘Holland is not my home. Sumatra is my home. That is why I come back here as soon as I can to fight for what is mine.’
We had another cigarette, smoking in silence.
‘We will go back to the HQ and find if your Captain Boyer has made contact.’
‘Will Addy return to Medan some day?’
‘Of course. Once we put down this bloody Merdeka movement.’ He took up his carbine from his bed and slung it over his shoulder as we made for the fancy door.
The Jeep driver had disappeared. We walked around and discovered him down by a little Chinese stall, sucking a mango-flavoured ice cream.
A message awaited me in the Dutch HQ. They could not contact Captain Boyer. He had left Padang. Nothing was said about where he had gone.
‘Thanks a lot,’ I said to Sontrop as I left his office. ‘I shall have to go to Div HQ and find out where he has gone. If he’s in Palembang or Singapore, I’m in trouble.’
‘It’s a disappointment not to help you more. I will see you again before you leave Medan, I hope.’
‘Sure.’
‘Perhaps a little celebration.’
‘That would be great.’
As we shook hands in the hall by the tiger, I said emotionally, ‘This is a great place, Medan, the heat, the bloody insects. I’ve got to go back to England, and the thought – it kills me just to think of it.’
He said, ‘The world owes a debt to your country. When you have returned back there, it will not be painful for you, I think. You will quickly forget the East – it is not inside you here.’ He touched his chest. ‘As it is with me.’
‘I somehow don’t fancy going back to that little dark bombed-out island.’
‘I was in England, Horatio. We had a vacation when my parents were on leave in the Netherlands, before the war. We spent some days in Hull, a very pleasant and historic city.’
I went to the door. ‘Oh, yes, Hull! Hull’s great. Well, thanks again for the lunch.’
‘You are welcome.’ He bowed.
Outside was the sunshine, the dusty road. My Jeep was there waiting, its driver a few yards away, chatting to some Rajput Rifles from the nearby British HQ. He strolled over affably when I emerged.
‘You want go back home, Johnny?’
‘Johnny …’ from a bloody naik! He was fresh out from India, as Kyle was fresh out from England. Someone else who did not know the rules. When I arrived in India, three years earlier – in Jan 1943 to be precise – no Indian would have dared to call any British soldier ‘Johnny’. Since then, American troops, with their easy money and habits, had flowed into Calcutta and Bengal in their hundreds, and from them the custom of calling everyone ‘Johnny’ had spread. Maybe the Yanks thought it sounded democratic; for anyone who served in the Fourteenth Army, it had a ring of contempt.
‘You can return to lines and report back jhaldi to Colour-Sergeant Dyer in “M” Section, Naik, thik-hai?’
‘Thik-hai, Sergeant.’ That was better.
‘And no side-trips on the way, malum?’
‘Acha, sir.’ He jumped into his vehicle and drove off, grinning.
A fucking great thing zoomed in from the nearest swamp and landed on my cheek. I struck it with unnecessary violence and almost laid myself out. I missed the fucking great thing.
Peering groggily at my watches, I decided that an average reading made it about one-forty-five.
The signal office shift would have changed. Corporal Kyle was no longer on duty. I strolled into the office and spent the best part of an hour trying again to contact Captain Boyer, only to receive the same answer as the Dutch. Boring old Boyer was on the wing. Maybe he had pissed off to Singapore on leave. Or India. You never knew with officers. By now, he could be bedding one of the memsahibs of Ootie, who slept only with lieutenants or above. I had had enough: I was going to see Margey.
I had some money on me – Dutch guilders and worthless Jap guilders which served as currency in the bazaars. In one of the Chinese shops along the Kesawan, I found a can of Argentine corned beef, heavily overstamped ‘NAAFI’, going for thirty guilders, or almost three pounds sterling. Some illicit quartermaster was making a fortune. I paid up, sighing. Margey loved corned beef; her tastes were very sophisticated.
As I emerged into the street, the sky was rapidly clouding over. Wind scurried down the pavement. In four minutes, the streets would be awash. Before I reached Margey’s alley, the first drops of rain smashed against the ground.
Brother-in-law Fat was not seated at the central table. That in itself was remarkable. The erudite Tiger Balm was also absent, to my relief. The morning had been fruitless enough without him. Someone was at the table, sitting there in the gloom over a packet of fags; it was one of the most-frequented tables in the NEI. The someone was one of the interchangeable little old wrinkled men who guarded the place and kept it well fumigated with cigarette smoke.
‘Tabeh, Bapai,’ I said. He returned the greeting by offering his fag packet.
Auntie was not to be seen. One of her full-moon smiles would have gone down well. The screens were still round her sofa, as they had been when I left the house before dawn. Groans issued from behind them.
The old boy gestured at them and said something like ‘Sakit, sakit’, which I did not understand.
A Chinese came from behind the screens. His little black bag and serious air marked him out as a doctor. He was sand-coloured and wore sand-coloured shirt and shorts. He started chatting loudly with the old boy at the table.
If Auntie was ill, it was no business of mine. Margey was my target. Once, not so many weeks ago, I had run, run up those two grotty flights of stairs with her in my arms. Couldn’t wait to get her up there. Strong as a fucking ox, mad as a mosquito.
‘Margey!’ I called.
No reply. I looked at the watches on my wrist. The Amsterdam masterpiece had stopped again. According to the other, it was ten past two.
No room like hers anywhere. Anonymous yet personal, rapturous yet melancholy. The Bird’s Custard had been stored away. I stared out of the window at cracked roofs running with rain, at broken gutters belching water, at the stones below under flood. Let it piss down, I thought, let it always be extreme.
On the sagging pediment of a nearby roof, a row of shite-hawks sat. They were drab brown with white heads, scraggy creatures watching for something to salvage from the flood. A rat, an unwary lizard, a fish, a sick dog, a human corpse – all were welcome to the shite-hawks. It was their war, their peace. Whatever happened in Medan, they’d do well out of it.
Under the low ceiling it was as hot as ever. I took my boots off, removed my belt, set it with the revolver upmost by the head of the bed. I stretched out and closed my eyes.
Sleep came down, zonk, like the swoop of a shite-hawk.
A slight noise and I was awake again, right hand on gun butt.
Someone was coming up the stairs. More than one person, talking in low voices. I sat up and aimed the revolver at the door.
Logic declared that no extremists would break in to this area of Medan in daylight hours, nor, having broken in, would they tread quietly up the stairs, exchanging pleasantries. However, logic had little power against a mental picture of being killed on Margey’s bed.
A woman’s voice. Not Margey’s. Daisy’s. It must be Daisy’s! She called, softly, ‘Su Chi!’
Daisy’s cubicle was dark; since it had no window, such light as it received filtered over the partition. A match scraped in a box, lamplight glowed on the ceiling, throwing a pale wing of shadow above my head. I heard the chink of money. Then came a chuckle and the sound of someone preparing to fuck Daisy.
‘The bloody Chinese …’ I thought. ‘Mid-afternoon …’ They were at it all the time. What else was there to do when you were stuck in a country paralysed by revolution, preceded by three years of servitude under the scum of the earth? As banks closed, everywhere thighs were bound to open, the lips of those neat little Eastern twots to unfurl like buds, and fornication to commence. The savoury sounds from next door illustrated my thesis; I clutched my prick and wondered at the laws of the globe.
Although I had never thought about it before, old Daisy was not a bad screw. Her baby had ruled her out of consideration. True, she was a bit short, and rather podgy in the face, but one could imagine that good things lurked under the striped pyjamas she wore. Most of the good things were getting a hammering now. She was murmuring, making a little crooning noise, erotic enough to bestow erections on any male within earshot, be he soldier, animal, alligator, or chicken.
Whoever the guy was, he was getting into his stride. A decided slurp came from her socket each time his piston drove home, echoed immediately by the slap of two Chinese bellies coming together. I couldn’t help fantasising about Margey, taking up that same comfortable pace with her, as we lay side by side. Something of the sort would be good even with Daisy. I could imagine her, only a few feet away. They were getting more excited now: those chubby buttocks would be going like a fiddler’s elbow …
His heels were jammed against the partition, making a regular drumming sound. The sod was grunting and she was going ah-ah-ah to encourage him. She was encouraging me, too. Suddenly – oh, shit! Oh, Jesus wept! I was coming all over my bloody jungle greens.
What a bloody fool, what an ape! I had not even realised I had the damned thing in my hand. It had fitted in there of its own accord. Now it lay looking smugly up at me, relaxing, heaving slightly, like an old bull elephant seal on the rocks. Leaving its trail all over my flies and jacket.
Dead silence next door. From my pocket I fished a sweat rag – something I’d been issued with in Burma – and mopped myself up. But the effects remained obvious.
I lay back in disgust, conscious of a tropical headache gathering like thunderclouds behind my forehead. A revolting ginger object with perspex wings and countless legs or mandibles belted in through the window. It homed in on the come-stains, vibrating a great curled tongue with glee. It could have passed for either a new evolutionary brand of hornet or the innards of a Javanese watch. I struck it away with fear and loathing and it commenced to gyrate upside-down on the floor with loud whirring sounds. It was the innards of a Javanese watch.
They had finished next door. The old chap was panting and wheezing. He could be the sand-coloured doctor I had seen down below, attending old Auntie. Standard fee: One Visit, One Bunk-Up. He was getting paid. Daisy said something in a low irritable voice, then the baby squeaked. It was on the bed with them.
I lay where I was until they went downstairs again, propping myself on one elbow and resting my head on my hand.
Life is a knocking-shop, nor am I out of it … It followed from this degrading experience that Margey was also just a little whore. Whatever was happening on the political front, whoring – like the business of the shite-hawks on the roof outside – never ceased to prosper. How else could she pay her way through life? From everyone, a price was exacted.
For a while I thought of Margey with hatred. She had been so bloody secretive about the other side of her life ever since we met. But the hatred went fast, like a storm blowing out to sea. You couldn’t hate Margey. She had only been tactful protecting me from the rottenness that surrounded her. She had to keep old Fat in cigarettes in exchange for this billet. Perhaps that was the arrangement.
When I had arrived in Medan to take delivery of my gin-palace, before the horrible event of the ‘arms deal’, Johnny Mercer was going out with Margey. He introduced me to her apologetically, and the three of us had a drink in a little Malayan shack on the edge of town.
Margey said so little that evening that I scarcely realised she could talk English. She looked small and not particularly interesting; her European-style dress did not suit her.
As we walked down the road afterwards, Margey trailing behind us, Johnny said, ‘Do you want to take her on, Horry? She’s very nice, though she doesn’t say a lot. Her talents lie in other directions.’
I didn’t know, and said as much.
‘Look, she really is smashing, though she was acting a bit thick back there. Trouble is, she always wants to eat Chinese grub and it doesn’t suit my stomach.’ He was silent for a moment, then he added, quietly, ‘It’s no skin off my nose. I’m going to jack her in; I’ve got a bit of blonde crumpet up the RAPWI whose husband’s been shipped home with his chest shot up.’
I looked back at the girl behind us. She sauntered along so innocently, her eyes directed to the ground. She was plump; the European little-girl dress was unsuitable and did nothing for her figure. As she caught my eye, she smiled as at some secret but rather shameful joke. I always remember that moment.
‘Does she dance?’ I asked.
The very next night I took her to the sergeants’ mess Saturday hop. Johnny faded gracefully out in the direction of the RAPWI, and thereafter was always tactful in his references to Margey. Although Margey was tactful about Johnny, I soon found out that she had not been fond of him – he had not behaved ‘politely’.
Margey had been open and affectionate towards me from that first dance. Such was her nature. Such was the nature of the political situation that she had to pay her way with her one natural resource, just like Daisy and Margey’s enemy down the street, Katie Chae.
I devoted a lot of psychic energy to denying the fact to myself.
You always paid more than you could afford. When I got back to the Blight – only a few days to go – I would lose my freedom, while pretending not to lose it, and would vanish into Barclay’s Bank like my father, lost for ever to the world of wider possibilities. Surely it was better to stay in Medan.
But there were few possibilities here either. That was why Daisy and Margey were screwed regularly by whoever had a few guilders. Or a can of bully beef.
I sat up and wiped furiously at the patches on my trousers, almost ruining my matrimonial hopes in the process.
If I took Margey back to England, that would be okay. For her and me. And yet … Even here, even in Medan, even in the bloody Indian Army, even ten thousand miles from home, I still met with that stupid British prejudice from my fellow sergeants, a racialism that it would take a million years to wipe out. They would screw the local girls of any shade or persuasion. But to love them, to treat them as human beings, that was not to be thought of.
These comments set down now are inevitably coloured by all that has happened since those distant days when the warmth between Margey and me was a real breathing thing. They are coloured by memories of the welcome Britain gave to the West Indians, the Indians, and the Pakistanis, who fought beside us against Jap and German alike in World War II. They came to work here in what they called their Mother Country. Only to find the milk had gone sour.
Grunting about my headache, I climbed back into socks, boots, puttees. I stood up and put the ginger machine-thing out of its agony with the heel of a left Army Boot Size Eleven. Then I clomped downstairs. I was going back to the billet. A strategically held bush hat concealed the mess on my trousers.
I left the corned beef, all thirty guilders’ worth, on the window sill, in payment for my sterile pleasure. If it had been pleasure. And I closed the window. Maybe shite-hawks liked corned beef.
At the top of the alley-way, Margey appeared. She carried her little purse, her parasol, and a small parcel wrapped in newspaper.
‘Oh, hello, Horry, darling. How nice I see you. You wait for me?’
‘I’d given up waiting. I was going back to the billet.’
‘Come in, sit down, and I make you nice coffee, darling. Today coffee again.’ She linked her chubby arm in mine. ‘I been shopping a long way, to get some medicine for poor Auntie. She no well today and doctor come, poor Auntie. When I go down Chuah Street, I see in a shop real lovely little hat from Paris or some prace like that. Just is right to wear in London and look smart but costs much price. Tomorrow I take you and show, and you can see me wear it, okay?’
‘I’ll buy it for you, Margey.’
‘No, is costing too much price. Just you see me wear it.’ She grinned up at me saucily. ‘Then you think you dear Margey very sexy, want make love to her in shop.’
I laughed. ‘I’ll buy it for you as my parting present.’
Her smile vanished immediately. ‘It impossible us to part, Horry, now we found each other.’ She clung to my arm.
We went back in. She started scolding the old man at the table, who stood up and started explaining something to her with a maximum of gesture. Margey became very angry and animated. I sat down at the table to watch her and keep my flies hidden. Fat appeared from the rear of the building, said something irritably, and immediately became a second object of Margey’s fine scorn. She stood there, beautifully moulded, with her eyes wide, letting them have it about something or other. Daisy also appeared, lolling against the wall and enjoying every word of it as she cradled her baby. Her manner was indolent.
When the men trooped dejectedly into the kitchen, Margey unwrapped her parcel on the table. I started back in alarm. A disgusting oily creature was revealed which looked like a fish with legs. It was black; it leaked an oily substance on to the table. Daisy came up to admire it.
Margey burst into laughter at my expression, her anger vanishing.
‘Don’t be frightened, darling. Is only medicine make Auntie better.’
‘What is that revolting thing?’
She explained that it was a common Sumatran animal which lived on the plantations. She held it up by its tail. It looked like a baby dinosaur, ripped palpitating at foetus-stage from some stygian archaic womb. It had frogs’ eyes. Along its body was a folded membrane which Margey pulled out, revealing wings rather like bats’ wings. The head was blunt, with curious flaps instead of ears. I had never seen anything like it before. It was a flying lizard, believed by the Chinese community to have medicinal powers. Margey trotted it out to the kitchen to cut it up. The old man went behind the screen to fan Auntie. Daisy made little crooning noises to her baby. Fat brought me a bottle of Red Fox. Life was going on more or less as usual, scraping by.