THE BRITISH arrived in early September. If they had swept in immediately after the news of Japan’s surrender the impact of their return might not have been so forceful and memorable. To Philippa it was like waiting for Vicky to get back when she was late. Not that they doubted the British would come. It was a sort of impatience that made a homecoming more wonderful.
Many things seemed to happen at once although they came in succession. The Sime Road civilian POW gates being thrown open, the strange vehicles they called jeeps running down the streets. Pictures of aeroplanes without propellers. Amphibious vehicles they called DUCKS along the roads. Dehydrated vegetables. Dehydrated egg powder. The greatest thing to Catty was Radio SEAC. A flood of old tunes and new kinds of music. The Inkspots. The voice of Vera Lynn, the Forces sweetheart. Charlie Kunz. Girls in brief swimsuits in every issue of that Forces paper whose name Philippa could never remember. Blighty? SEAC? Reveille?
The good and the bad kept tumbling out of the air to crash down on top of them. They had to catch up with three and a half years of lost time and switch to scenes absent from the prewar stage, unfamiliar and unexpected.
Perhaps the hardest was that the Japanese ‘Banana’ currency had absolutely no value. It didn’t hit the Rosarios too badly. They had been living from hand to mouth. Most of Philippa’s meagre teacher’s pay went to Ma to run the household.
Ugly rumours of personal and communal vengeance erupted here and there. Someone whispered to Adam that the Chinese had beaten up a household of Malays near the Pereras’ place at Niven Road.
Almost as soon as the British arrived they put up an exhibition of the German camps for Jews near the Capitol cinema. Belsen. Philippa went. It hit her deep in her very core and dropped her into a pit of depression. Stories of tortures of the Japanese Kempeitai, the Military Police, churned her stomach but that camps like Belsen were planned to eradicate a whole race (she thought of the Jews as a race then, not a religious group), in a strange way made the Japanese tortures less horrific. Philippa didn’t know if it was because she saw the Japanese as only half civilised that she could forgive them, while the Germans to her were a fully civilised nation. White. White people massacring white people.
The exhibition sickened her. The other sickening thing, though less so, were the posters and billboards informing the Tommies (all British soldiers were Tommies to them) they had sweethearts at home, that Singapore was riddled with V.D. Philippa saw red. She was thirty-one, wise to the ways of men, but these posters depreciated her image of the returning British troops. They were not directed at the locals and the British were blind to the effect they had on them. Japanese military brothels fitted in with her angry and ugly concept of the Nips as barbarians. That British Tommies were not lily-white liberators damaged their virgin-clean image.
When the goods they had been deprived of for three and a half years started coming in there was another set of adjustments to make.
Ma Rosario went to town one day and served the family with everything they had missed in one meal. Ham, sausages, green peas, bacon, and God knows what else, as Philippa related it later. They gorged like pigs. Catty’s stomach could not take it. She threw up within the hour and was sick for three days.
In the early days of the British return, the great source of goodies was NAFFI. The wise befriended a Tommy, preferably an officer, who would bring unsolicited gifts of such wondrous things as cheese, whisky, chocolates, cigarettes … Many a husband and boyfriend fumed and sulked, but protested not too strongly.
The army men brought their hostesses gifts in gratitude for the favours of a family to be with, of the fabulous curries they cooked, of English speaking company with many touch-points that made the nights at the homes of Eurasians and Peranakans so mutually enjoyable. There was also news and information to exchange.
Things were returning gradually to normal. The pressures of her Victorian society began to bear on Philippa. Weddings, births, christenings, Christmas, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, funerals.
The British set up the B.M.A., the British Military Administration. It was the ultimate authority. Like the Spanish Junta. The temporary government. B.M.A. became the magic initials of bureaucratic omnipotence. And later the epitome of chaos and disorganisation in Philippa’s mind. It was all a haze to Philippa but out of the problems of resurrecting a rundown country, one thing affected her and Vicky, in a curious and exciting way.
Crime.
The mainly Malay police force was in a shambles, their public image at an all time low. Many Chinese believed, incorrectly, that the Malays were pro-Jap because some Malays were caught signalling enemy bombers. One story was that they put lights in the iron downpipes of roof drainage systems that Air Raid Precaution wardens could not see but which were clearly visible to the Jap pilots.
The British clung to the notion of the unarmed Bobby discouraging the underworld from using a gun on him in an ungentlemanly way – or maybe they didn’t trust the police – while the gangs had easy access to guns from the debris of the battle of Singapore or from the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army.
Limited quantities of goods were shipped in, and immediately soared in value in the thriving black-market as rationing had not been lifted.
There was no small-scale crime, as there was before the war — shirts stolen off washing lines, wallets hooked off tables through vertical window bars using bamboo poles and wire — because no one had anything worth stealing. But there were crimes no stable country would tolerate; thieving on a scale difficult under normal circumstances. Trucks with armed bandits would pull up outside a warehouse, hold up the watchmen, and empty it of whole lorry-loads of goods. The Japs would have beheaded those they caught stealing and displayed their rotting heads on steel spikes where there was a lot of human traffic, to instil fear into the unknown gangs, but the British were too hamstrung with a good Christian civilised sense of justice to meet evil with equally evil measures.
Philippa and Vicky read about the brazen lootings in the newspapers with anger and frustration and when Keh returned from Malaya they sat around many an evening talking about them.
Since Keh appeared on the scene, Philippa was asked over to Vicky’s flat about once a fortnight only. They would sit and drink and talk and Keh would go out and ‘buy-back’, as he described it, dinner from street stalls. Philippa would leave soon after dinner. She did not linger there as she used to during the Occupation. Or stop over for the night with the warmth of Vicky.
Philippa began to get interested in Chinese astrological signs about that time. Mrs Teoh at her school talked about them periodically after lunch and Philippa made notes, not telling Mrs Teoh in case that caused her spontaneous flow to dry up.
Keh had said he was a tiger. And so was Philippa.
Philippa believed that all Mrs Teoh told her about the tiger applied to her. She had not compared the Chinese and the western signs then. And so she studied Keh, looking for the tiger.
She saw all the tiger traits in him: courage, charisma, boundless energy, quick wit, originality in thinking, restlessness, adaptability, honesty, to himself and to others. Like her, he was impulsive, spent money without thinking, was blunt, delayed decisions.
Alert as the tiger he was, Keh saw Philippa watching him like a tiger. He was suspicious of her.
Then one day Mrs Teoh told her that tiger and tiger could not mate. Philippa disagreed, believing that people who reacted in the same way, thrilled to the same stimuli, well matched in the sharpness of each other’s minds, driving themselves with similar honesty must surely click. But later she saw that the energy, the impulsiveness, the sensitivity of two tigers facing each other could overwhelm the clear mental commonalities.
It was Vicky, the rabbit, who kept them apart and held both of them restless and together with her in her rabbit world.
“Three lorries of rice stolen yesterday,” Vicky said one evening in a gap of idle chatter.
“Yes, I heard,” Keh said, frowning.
Vicky read his look. “You heard? From the talk?”
“Yah.” He pursed his lips for a second or two then spoke slowly. “And I think I know where they’ve hidden it.”
They waited.
“This business is really bugging me. We should do something about it.”
“We?” Vicky asked.
“Yes. You and me. And Phil too.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I can reactivate my old gangland contacts. But they would only organise it better. And take their cut. My communist friends I know think like us, that this free-for-all crime wave is crazy. Some of them believe a few bloody B.M.A. blokes are involved. They will move if I stir them up …”
He looked at Philippa first, then at Vicky. He saw they were listening intently.
“But the Party has conflict now on what stances to take against the British. It is not a good time. I have an idea. But I need your help.”
Keh turned to Philippa. “I know you two can help. The first problem is to outline a plan. To think it out.”
Philippa and Vicky looked at each other. Something stirred in Philippa.
“Our objective is to stop the gangs. Perhaps not gangs. Just thieves. Stop them from bleeding our country.” He lit a cigarette and waited to let that sink in. “I have the contacts. I can get the information. I can get guns. But I need a team of people who are not political. Nor thieves. You think about that.”
They sat in silence, looking at the ashtray. Philippa was in two minds. As much as she believed something had to be done, that a Robin Hood was needed who could operate unfettered by British laws, she had misgivings about Keh’s friends. She knew Vicky would support Keh, if only for sentimental reasons. The challenge of it all stirred her. Keh broke the silence after about two minutes.
“I have a sort of plan. It means using the communists and the secret societies. But not running with either of them.”
He saw the doubt on Philippa’s face. He did not look at Vicky.
“I can get the guns we need. And radios. And the information. That’ll be from the secret societies’ networks. I have already sounded out two people in whom I have the greatest trust. They are not Chinese. If we get caught the last thing we want is to be branded as Reds. You probably know one of them. Gus Perera.”
Keh studied Philippa as she reacted to the name.
“Gus Perera! He’s just a kid!”
“What you don’t know is that he worked with the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army in Malaya. He’s not a kid any longer. He can handle a gun and can plan. We’ll bring his girlfriend in too. She’s got guts.”
“Who is she?”
“Tessie …”
“Tessie!”
“Yes. You haven’t caught up with the Bahau news, obviously …”
“And who’s the other person you say you trust?”
“Can’t tell you now.”
Keh saw he had stilled some of Philippa’s fears. He looked at Vicky. She was frowning, as confused and surprised as Philippa.
After a few minutes of empty silence Keh said, “What say you we sleep on it and meet here tomorrow night …”
“Can’t. Have to go to the Reutens’.”
“Bugger the Reutens!” Keh cut in. “Tomorrow evening. Seven. I’ll buy-back the food. And I’ll bring Gus and Tessie. That’ll be five of us. You with us, aren’t you, Phil?”
“Yes. For sure,” Philippa said, somewhat subdued by Keh’s curt reaction, but not quite sure.
She said she had to go and left. All the way home in the rickshaw the challenge Keh had thrown out kept running through Philippa’s mind. We should use Keh’s underworld contacts and pass information to the police was her first obvious thought. But her faith in the efficacy of the police was low. Lying in bed, turning all the possibilities over but finding no clear resolution of the problem, she finally gave up well past midnight. Hugging her bolster, she thought in exasperation, what we need is the Saint — a Singapore Saint — Leslie Charteris’s fictitious Simon Templar.
It rained at about three in the morning. She woke up with the sound of rainwater rushing through the drainpipes and heard Ma stirring. “O.K., Ma, I’ll do it,” she called out and went round the house, letting down the bamboo blinds, shutting the windows, putting the galvanised bucket under the roof leak in Vera’s room.
Back in bed, Antonio’s frequent complaint that half the problems in the world were due to people using the wrong tools came to her mind.
She began to think of Keh. There was no indecision in him this time. Perhaps he had agonised about his plan for days. Yet it was not his style to ask … But he really didn’t ask her. He played his card of Eurasians being involved and assumed he’d won her over. And that nonsense about not wanting a Chinese group. It was his devious way of getting her sucked into his schemes. The fox.
No, tiger … with its originality in thinking.
But why me?
And who is the unknown man he trusts? Or woman?
Hell! Gotta go round to the Reutens, tell them I can’t make it.
The drumming rush of water in the pipes eased Philippa’s mental tension and she dropped off into a deep sleep.