“THE IDES of February is here, my dear,” Tan said to Philippa as she walked into the staff room.
“Aye, Caesar, but not gone … and it’s the ides of March that …”
“I know that, lah! But for us the ides of February is the fateful day.” He saw the blank look on Philippa’s face. “The day Singapore fell to the Japanese hordes, my dear.”
“Oh. But the February ides is not the fifteenth …”
He ignored her words. “I shall never forget that day. I had just turned fifty …”
“Not now, Mr Tan. I just came in to dump my piles of exercise books and dash off.” He raised his eyebrows, questioning. “There’s a meeting at St Joseph’s Institution which I have to go to. Another of those futile meetings.”
She deliberately did not use the initials S.J.I. as everyone did. She objected to the way the name of every organisation was cut down to its initial letters. Not just acronyms; B.M.A., S.T.C., the Singapore Traction Company, R.A.F., M.G.S., Methodist Girls’ School, and W.A.C.s, M.P.s, N.C.O.s, B.O.R.s.
“Coordination, planning, estimating or moderating?” he asked sarcastically, not expecting an answer.
“English syllabus or curriculum, whatever the latest word is …”
“Have fun. Be a true civil servant. Don’t decide anything.”
Today, four years ago, she said silently to herself as she sat on the bus. But not hordes. It was a small army that trounced the hordes of Australian, British and Indian soldiers. But that’s behind us now. D.G., Deo gratias, thank God!
Hey, D.G. is Duncan Gudgeon!
As she got off the trolley-bus she saw clumps of Malay policemen in their pale blue-grey flannel-like shirts and khaki shorts standing around Bras Basah Road and Waterloo Street, with a few European officers. A shiver went through her body. It was like the last days of Singapore again. Only the sky was blue and there was no smoke shutting out the sun, just everyday town sounds, the rumbling of traffic, an occasional “Dah!” from a bullock-cart driver, cries of hawkers instead of the drone of Nip planes and dull thudding of distant explosions.
“What’s up with all the mata-mata, the police, around?” she asked Paddy Aeria, one of the S.J.I. teachers. He was standing on the first floor verandah looking down on the street below.
“Haven’t you heard?”
“No. What?”
“The commies have said they are going to celebrate the anniversary. The anniversary of the fall of British imperialism in the East.”
“Good heavens!”
“Yah, Phil. It’s an ominous sign. They must be mad.”
She looked out at the policemen on the streets and in groups on the S.J.I. football field which was separated from the school by Bras Basah Road.
“Why here?”
“I hear the celebration rally is to be here. On our field.”
“Brother Director gave permission?” she asked incredulously.
“For Pete’s sake, they’re communists, Phil. They just take. They don’t ask.”
She wasn’t quite clear what he meant. What communism really meant.
“Look!” Paddy pointed. “Some of them have rifles.”
It frightened her. The war again. The police with rifles.
The school bell sounded. Paddy said, “They’ve only just been out for recess. Brother Director’s calling them in again. He’s on the verandah. There. No, over there,” he pointed. “Good thinking.”
Then they saw a small group of Chinese with banners and placards mounted on stout sticks walking raggedly in some semblance of formation into the field, singing in Mandarin.
A European police officer went up to the leader. From his gesticulations they knew he was telling the group to break it up. The leader tossed his head in the air and waved his people onward.
As the officer turned round and walked away, a voice through a megaphone said something in Hokkien. Philippa thought it was Hokkien. The tone was imperative, firm.
She turned to speak to Paddy but saw him tense. Following his line of vision to another end of the field, she saw a row of policemen standing with rifles pointed skyward. A crack of shots rang out. It sent a wave of cold fear through Philippa although it was a thin sound, like crackers at Chinese New Year, not the rat-a-tat-tat sporadic roaring during the last days of the battle of Singapore. She smelt the bitter, memorable smell of war. Antonio called it cordite.
Another group of policemen rushed at the small crowd swinging their truncheons. One policeman hit a man hard on his shoulder. Then two Chinese attacked a policeman with the thick sticks of their placards. Scuffling, the thuds of wood on flesh, shouts of encouragement, of hate, curses, cries of pain, crisp commands in Malay. Like a loose scrum. But with fifty or more players on each side all armed with truncheons or sticks.
And no clear focus like the oval rugby ball.
She gripped Paddy’s shoulder and he put his arm around her, squeezing her firmly, he too wanting to touch, to hold, to be held, in his tension. Like her hand and Daud’s intertwined, interlocked, hurting where knucklebone pressed against bone in the heat of a film thriller, in the dark intimacy and anonymity of the crowd around them in the cinema.
As suddenly as the scuffling began it ended with the Chinese running and the Malay policemen pursuing them swinging their truncheons. A European officer dropped a big flabby Chinese with a rugby tackle. To her surprise and horror, a woman demonstrator was tripped by a policeman as she ran. She fell, sprawling, on her face, her cheek hitting the ground, and the policeman hit her as she lay there. Philippa had not noticed women in the crowd earlier.
“Look! Chopet!” Paddy said, pointing.
She saw the Eurasian whom they knew as Chopet, short for the Malay tukang chopet, pickpocket, with a stick in his hand, like a wicket stump, running after a commie. He caught up with the youth, swung the stick at him (yes, it was a wicket stump) and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, breaking his fall, but pulling him, dragging him, towards a policeman.
Chopet was a character. One of the few Eurasians who ran his own business. As shrewd and tough as any Jew or Chinese businessman, but hovering on the brink of bankruptcy for years and years.
Paddy laughed. “The old bugger! Crazy!”
It released the tension in him.
His words triggered a surge of anger in Philippa.
She had not met Chopet, but it had always irritated her that he should be the butt of their jokes. They smeared him with the pickpocket nickname because he was sharper, wilder, more daring, in business than any of them, than any other Eurasian.
And there on the edge of the field, he was throwing himself into the fray because he believed. He was one of the old school. One of that generation totally committed to the British, who volunteered to fight the Japanese. Chopet would hate every drop of communist blood because to him communists were evil. But Chopet would not just stand at the bar and propound his ideas with clenched fists thumped down. He would throw himself into the fray. He would rush in, follow the fires in him, act, damning the consequences, because he believed.
Through her feelings of fright, fear, confusion and horror at the brutality of sticks and truncheons, enhanced by Paddy’s own excitement, Chopet out there fulfilling himself made a deep impression on Philippa.
She looked around her. The first floor verandah was packed with teachers and schoolboys. Brother Kelly came up to them, his pupils dilated, his face flushed.
“Did you see the viciousness, the vileness, the terrible unChristian bestiality … that’s how they treated us … like dirt, like animals. Just like the Black and Tans. Protestant English pigs! Leading the innocent Malay policemen on …”
Paddy and Philippa looked at him dumbfounded. A white man, an Irishman, taking the side of the commies.
At Vicky’s that night, Keh was fuming with anger.
“Idiots! That’s not the way. Can’t they see? You cannot fight the imperialists with placards and politics. They won their empires with the gun. They can only be unseated by the gun.”
Philippa looked at Vicky. Vicky looked down at the carpet, but Philippa knew his words had shaken her.
Different words shook her the next night.
“The Chinese will run Malaya if we don’t look out. You know, if the British had not respected the historical rights of our Rajas, our Sultans, and appreciated the fundamental fact that the Chinese were intruders, outsiders, we would be slaves today,” Daud said when they discussed the February fifteenth affair.
Philippa did not respond.
“My father’s brother, Samad bin Haji Suleiman, used to say we Malays must be grateful to the British for protecting us against the intruders. Earlier, Acheh warriors from the northern part of Sumatra, then the Chinese, and moving under the water, underground, not politically but subversively, economically, the Indian traders …”
Daud had never before expressed political views.
She wasn’t sure if he had got his periods of history mixed up. But he had talked without personal involvement. Unlike the way he got worked up about the ghastly new squarish, cubist shapes of postwar architecture. Unlike his passionate, illogical raging against Frenchmen and Italians, architects and engineers, Corbusier, Wright, Nervi. Unlike even the way he tried with his soul to convey to her the layers of emotional depths of Dave Brubeck’s sounds.
“You know, Daud, my darling, all this is strange to me. We are both not really interested in politics … it’s so boring … in many ways … But it’s bubbling up … all around us.”
“Yah …”
He looked pensive. Then suddenly a sunshine-smile broke through the grey nothingness in his face. “Must tell you Mrs Sunha’s latest pearls of wisdom.”
“Kitchen proverbs?”
“Well, she said one of the late Mr Sunha’s sayings was that one cannot keep two things sizzling at once. Two frying pans going. One cannot have two fires running high. One of the kwalis or frying pans will get burnt out. One can have a pot simmering quietly and a pan with the oil hissing and crackling at the same time, or even three pots boiling over low flames, but never, never two anglohs with the fire running wild at the same time.”
DUNCAN WAS all afire to pour out three days of his thoughts, reactions and emotions over the suppression of the anniversary celebrations to Philippa.
She listened. Watched his hands and shoulders, all of his body visible above the starched linen tablecloth, as he talked to her.
“They’re so bloomin’ stupid. The people are not ready yet. We’ve got to work at it. Showing your hand … too early … And I’m not sure if they did the right thing in January, last month. They pulled out 173,000 workers in Singapore’s very first general strike. A political strike, if you remember. To protest against Soon Kwong’s arrest. It might have been premature. The Party’s still disorganised.”
Duncan looked into her eyes. “It makes me wonder if we should not move in with our political experience, strongly and aggressively, take over rather than doing this ‘win-their-hearts’ bit …”
And the white man still leading, Philippa thought.
“Communist colonialism,” Jack Nunis had said at the S.R.C. bar. “Have we really got a choice?” Dick had interrupted. Then Brian went on and on about ‘our culture’, meaning British education. Not including our far past, Philippa had thought then.
Whatever they said didn’t follow her to bed. Hugging her bolster, she remembered only Daud’s body, his fingers, her trembling to his touch, when she met him after the S.R.C. that night.
Duncan almost snapped at her the next time they met.
“Did you read the paper this morning?”
“Yah! Great, wasn’t it? Five trucks of canned abalone. That’s worth a fortune. The Chinese …”
“I know, I know. That was the first I heard about it.”
“Same with me.”
“I didn’t pass that information on …”
“Unless you bypassed me?”
“Can’t do that. I have no other contact.”
“Well then, I guess it’s from our other sources.”
“Who are they, do you know?”
“If I did, I can’t tell you. But I don’t.” He looked at her. “Our system is working. We both don’t know. That’s how it should be.”
“But surely we can get the news of our strikes early. It’s like reading about one’s family in the newspapers.”
“Why? Will it help you do your job better if you knew?”
“Yes. Job satisfaction. I’ll know that …”
“Stuff and nonsense! In fact you should have tipped us off too. That way we get confirmation from two sources.”
“I see we have a woman in one of the strike teams. So the paper says. And we had to open up with guns again.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what? We have women in the action teams?”
“Dunno,” she lied. Duncan was watching her like a hawk. He slipped into silence, still looking at her.
“All in all, Duncan, you’ve been a tremendous help. We can’t operate without your sources.”
“Yeah … initially. But you seem to have your other sources established now …”
“We’ve always had them. As an army officer, surely you know the ideal is to be able to check intelligence using other inputs?”
“You seem to know more than you tell me.”
“Very little more. But I do know that on a few occasions you were wrong and the others were wrong in some detail or other.”
“Like what, for example?” he asked at once.
He’s pumping me, she warned herself.
“The godown number in the Harbour Board was one …”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It would have been unwise to do so. You may have reacted by putting pressure on your sources to get it right next time. And in any such operation one plans for alternative moves if the intelligence is not quite right.”
His eyes drilled into hers. He lit a Churchman and called the waiter over to order another drink.
“Not just yet. Maybe later,” she replied to his offer.
Alcohol for seduction, she thought, smiling.
After an uncomfortable silence, he said slowly, “You’re quite a lass, Philippa. If your blokes are as good as they seem to be, they would have seen how you tick and pushed you up the organisation. You’re not just a contact pawn, eh?”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Duncan, you’ve made my day.” And immediately knew she had done it badly.
“Listen …” he said, his elbows on the table, moving his face closer towards hers and lowering his voice.
She cut in, “Fergus is over there drinking at the bar alone. But he’s thinking you’re delivering the sleep-me punchline, Duncan,” she giggled.
“Philippa,” Duncan ignored her words, “I want to be in the action team. Can you speak to the right man?”
“Listen, brother. You may be a commando, a decorated man, an shrewd finder of lost septic tanks, a brilliant strategist, but there’s no way we will blow the goldmine of information and contacts we have in you for future ops. by bringing you up to the front.”
“So you are at the top, aren’t you? Brigadier Rosario.”
“Lance-corporal.”
She put her hand on his as his fingers drummed slowly on the table. “And there’s another prime factor. A European sticks out like a sore thumb.” She stopped, thinking of Gus and Tessie. But Tessie was as brown as Daud, she realised.
“And there’s your language,” she added.
He changed the subject.
“That February fifteenth affair has got me thinking. As I said, waving flags and making rabble-rousing speeches is not going to get you colonial slaves anywhere.”
She noted the ‘you’.
“I see things are moving. Fast. The Malayan Democratic Union is up on its hind feet. But did you know the police have branded it communist?”
“Yep,” she lied.
“And it intrigued me how many Eurasians are involved. I mean quite out of proportion to the population.”
“Education. Language. Language again, Duncan.”
“We have shown our hand far too soon in the Malayan Democratic Union. That fellow de Cruz, for example, is far too honest. Revealing. But the party is obviously aware of that. Did you know the secretary of the Malayan Communist Party has disappeared off the face of this earth?”
Keh had told her and Vicky one night.
“Yes.”
“He obviously knows he’s too valuable to get arrested by the colonial government for petty things. Useless activities. Talking to the clowns at Whitehall.”
“Whitehall?” She only knew Whitechapel on the Monopoly board.
“The heart of our bureaucracy. He’s up to something. The Party’s planning something.”
She waited for him to continue.
“History, Philippa. Repeating itself. Only the gun will get the British out of your country.”
Philippa looked down at the tablecloth. Something she could not put her finger on disturbed her.