Four

There was one consolation in the panic and defeat. Edward was safe. Commander Ruffard passed on the news. He was looking strained and exhausted now and was struggling to complete the evacuation of naval personnel.

‘The loss of life wasn’t too bad,’ he said. ‘Two thousand three hundred were picked up by destroyers out of two thousand nine hundred. They were brought here.’

‘Where’s Edward now?’

‘Gone to India already. Senior officers like him are going to be needed. The rest have gone to other ships or put on coastal ferries.’

‘It was kind of you to let me know,’ Willie said. ‘What about you?’

Ruffard shrugged. ‘I shall be going, too. I think we’re in a mess here and probably all of us will go in the end. There are wounded everywhere. Restaurants, halls, schoolrooms, the Cathedral, maternity hospitals, large houses. The Australians are blaming us for betraying them and our lot are saying the Australians lack discipline. Christ knows what the truth is, but it seems nobody expected to have to fight in the jungle or the mangrove swamps and nobody trained for it. The buggers set off north hung all over with the paraphernalia of a European war. I saw ’em go.’

Heading for his hotel in the purple evening light, Willie saw dancing was still going on, people in evening dress standing on the veranda with their drinks as if nothing had happened. After what he’d seen in the north he couldn’t believe his eyes.

The Straits Times had been left for him. It was still advertising houses to let and was making a great deal of the arrival from England of a consignment of pure silk stockings. Alongside the personal ads requesting the whereabouts of relatives lost in the north, it seemed a hideous mockery.

During the night there was another air raid, directed this time at Keppel Harbour, that left dockyard oil tanks blazing in a huge cloud of dense black smoke, and he rose the next day to hear that a big battle on the west coast had destroyed an Indian brigade. As he went downstairs he learned that, with the news of one defeat after another, the final signal that the Malays had lost faith in the Europeans had been given. A man who had been out to do some early shopping was complaining loudly to the manager. ‘The bastards refused to accept a chit,’ he was saying. ‘They’ve all started insisting on cash. All of them. The buggers have obviously got together.’

The bombers came again during the day and that evening Willie was surprised when the telephone in his rooms went and the voice he heard was his daughter’s.

‘Poll! What the hell are you doing here still?’

‘Pa! Never mind me. Are you all right? For God’s sake, I’ve been trying to find you for days. Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been looking at the mess in the north,’ Willie said grimly. ‘At close quarters. It’s worse than anybody here seems to realise. You should be away. Where’s Elliott?’

‘Pa, that’s what I’ve been trying to find out. I’m scared. I can’t get in touch with him. He cabled from Washington to say he was returning, but I’ve heard nothing since. I’ve tried his office and neither have they, so I tried Washington and then San Francisco, and they say he’s left. He should have arrived already but he’s disappeared. Pa, you don’t think–?’

‘That he’s bolted with another woman? Not likely. Not Elliott. He’s not the type. All the same, you ought to be thinking of leaving.’

‘Pa, how can I, when I don’t know where Elliott is? He might turn up and find me gone. It’d be like running away.’

In the hope of forcing her hand, Willie went to the office of the Colonial Secretary to try to persuade someone to make the evacuation compulsory. He was shunted down different corridors by people clearly concerned only to protect senior officials. The man who met him wore a white drill suit, collar and tie and, in his cool, shaded room, looked as if he’d just come out of a bandbox. A tray of tea stood on the desk alongside him. Hot, angry and tired, Willie hated him.

The man in the white suit listened to his demands politely but shook his head. ‘I’ve heard nothing official,’ he said.

‘Why the hell do you need something official?’ Willie snorted. ‘Does no one round here have the guts to make a decision off his own bat? They’ve just bombed the docks again. Or hasn’t that fact reached your bloody files yet?’

The man in the white suit looked down his nose at him. ‘People are free to go any time if they wish,’ he said.

‘It shouldn’t be up to them to decide,’ Willie snapped. ‘How the hell do women with kids assess the prospects or know what the dangers are? Not telling them to go is a bloody perverted kindness. It’s cruel to them, and the men who have to stay behind would find it a relief to know their families are safe. I’ll provide places in my ships–’

‘Mr Sarth!’ The man in the white suit raised his voice. ‘It probably won’t come to that.’

‘It’s come to it already, God damn it! I’ve just come from the north. The Japs are closing in for a siege. They’ll soon be in a position to deal with anything we try in order to get away.’

It made no impact whatsoever. The man in the white suit drained his teacup complacently. ‘We can’t apply pressure if it’s not policy,’ he said.

 

The behaviour of such men seemed incredible as the news grew worse. The Japanese had been swift to exploit their success at Pearl Harbor and had overwhelmed the American garrison of Guam, and invaded Wake and the Philippines. In Malaya, the British remained firmly on the retreat, and, while in the Philippines the Americans were buckling down to a hard defence, in Malaya things were only deteriorating. The best soldiers of all ranks had been retained at home to defend the United Kingdom and in Malaya there seemed only a soft residue. Morale was poor and, faced with disaster, the European residents were lost. They had felt that wherever the war went it would not arrive in Singapore and the first two untouched years had confirmed the belief. Like the official at the Colonial Secretary’s office, nobody was prepared to assume any other responsibility beyond producing tin and rubber and coping with the climate.

The Sarth Line shipping office reported liners still sailing half-empty, but then, that night, they picked up on the radio Winston Churchill’s warning to the House of Commons of the possibility of bad news from the East. It seemed to have more power even than falling bombs and the telephone went early the next morning.

‘They’ve made four troopships available, Mr Sarth,’ the clerk at the shipping office informed Willie. ‘They’ve finally set up the apparatus for evacuation.’

‘Who’s handling it?’

‘P&O are making the bookings.’

‘Bookings? What are they organising? Cruises? Why don’t they just pack the damn things and send them away?’

Setting off to see what could be done, Willie found the P&O officials operating from Agency House, a large bungalow outside the city centre. They had set up two tables, one for those who wished to go to Colombo, one for those who wished to go to Britain, but the two lines of waiting people had blended into one monstrous slow-moving queue of which the end was quite out of sight. Those cool women the Malays were so used to seeing were becoming hysterical and some were half-fainting in the pitiless heat as they clutched their children and begged for a place on a ship. Along the road, scores of cars, some marked by bomb splinters, had been left anyhow, some with their wheels in the ditch. The police were fighting to unravel the queue, but, even as Willie arrived, the first Japanese planes of the day appeared and there was a rush for the monsoon drains. When the planes vanished, the exhausted women clambered out and, as they fought to find their places, the police had to start all over again.

When Willie reached the table a fierce argument was going on with a half-hysterical woman who had lost her passport.

‘For God’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘Give her the bloody booking!’

The clerk looked shocked. ‘We can’t let people go without papers or their nationality and marital status being known.’

‘What bloody difference does it make? If she’s not here who’s going to worry?’

In the middle of it all, it was discovered that the woman, who had gone to enormous lengths to obtain money from the bank to pay her fare, could have had it paid for by the government.

Determined by this time to see her aboard, Willie drove her to the docks with her children only to find another vast queue had formed to pass through the gate to the quayside, where a lone Malay clerk with a pencil and ledger was slowly inscribing in excellent copper plate every passenger’s name.

‘What in God’s name for?’ Willie demanded.

The Malay looked up. ‘So we shall know who’s aboard, sir.’

Snatching up the ledger, Willie tossed it aside and, while the clerk was retrieving it, waved the queue through. The clerk fetched a white official, who was almost dancing with rage.

‘As a shipowner, Mr Sarth,’ he yelled, ‘you know this is something you can’t do!’

‘I’ve done it,’ Willie said bluntly.

The whole business had become ridiculous, anyway, because, as the number of useless mouths was reduced, a complete reversal of the evacuation was taking place with thousands of up-country Asians from Johore starting to flood on to Singapore Island to double the normal population. Dormitories had been prepared in Raffles College and in schools, but many of the women who were arriving had neither clothes nor the means of providing food for their babies, some of them even without any knowledge of where their husbands were.

As the last of the big ships sailed, the monsoon rains, which had made everything damp and mildewed, began to abate. Heading back into the city, Willie found a stream of motor transport, guns, bren carriers, ambulances and cars were arriving from the end of the Johore Causeway. As the procession thinned and eventually dwindled to nothing, the infantry began to appear, their boots crunch-crunching in the roadway. Despite the clear defeat, placid communiqués were still being issued to insist they had been withdrawn to protect the naval base, but when Willie went to the base to demand wire hawsers for the Sunga Kavalan, which had been obliged to abandon hers in Port Weld, he found it empty. Millions of pounds’ worth of equipment had been left behind – shirts, gas masks, lockers, steel plate, a great crane, a floating dry dock, ships’ boilers, coils of chain cable, wire, rope, cord, the shabby hulls of three small ships. It even looked as if the occupants had fled at the last minute because there were still meals on the tables. He helped himself to the wire he required and returned to the city as the last of the defeated, bewildered, leaderless and demoralised troops stumbled into Singapore itself. Even as they arrived, there was a shattering explosion when the Causeway went up in a cloud of black smoke and flying fragments of masonry. By this time the city was in hopeless confusion, the hospitals filled with wounded and the Japanese planes sailing unheeded over the roofs. Because of the nature of the place and the type of society it contained, it couldn’t change its habits even in extremity, and while some died or gazed at appalling wounds, others – even now – were still eating, drinking and dancing.

When he saw her, Polly was haggard with worry. ‘I can’t go, Pa,’ she insisted. ‘What’ll Elliott think? He said he’d come back here. I’ve got to hear from him.’

 

In the last three days when it had finally dawned on everybody that all the talk about ‘It might not happen’ was just rubbish and it was not only going to happen, it was already happening, the numbers of those wanting to leave suddenly multiplied. For two months evacuation had remained a trickle, but now it was an unmanageable torrent, quite impossible to deal with and a serious risk to those who left. The thought that occurred to Willie was that throughout the years he’d always thought well in advance and managed to get away ahead of invading troops. This time he hadn’t.

Already the Sarth Line office had had reports of ships being bombed or shelled and sunk, with the women and children passengers killed outright, drowned, captured, or starving to death on islands they had managed to reach by lifeboats. Those who were left alive were going to undergo a long and unpleasant internment.

Brave words on the radio couldn’t hide the fact that the Japanese had reached the Johore shore and that to the crash of bombs was now added the whine and crump of shells. Determined to get Polly and her children away, he hired one of the little yellow taxis and arrived at her house to find her, to his surprise, surrounded by suitcases.

‘I’ve heard from Elliott,’ she said. ‘Or at least not from him. From his mother. He was on his way to San Francisco by car when there was an accident. He’s got a broken leg and a fractured skull and been unconscious for days. He’s going to be okay, though, and I’ve got a message to take the first ship to America.’

‘It’s a bit late for that now,’ Willie said bluntly. ‘You’ll have to go wherever you can. However, I’ll see to it. Just be ready. I’ll come and fetch you.’

Greatly relieved, he headed in the dark for his office. For the moment Singapore was quiet. Having created a panic, the Japanese bombers now seemed curiously indifferent and were operating further north, and aimless and exhausted soldiers had begun to wander the streets, getting drunk whenever they saw the opportunity.

There was a great deal of noise from the guns, however, and the news that the Japanese had landed on the north shore of Singapore Island seemed to bring the place to its senses, so that, as he returned, he noticed that the dancing had finally stopped. Vast palls of smoke from demolished oil tanks and stores were mingling with the funeral plumes from blazing warehouses and the air was full of the fumes of alcohol. When Hong Kong had fallen, alcohol had fuelled Japanese lusts and it had been decided not to take chances, and thousands of bottles of spirit were being thrown at cellar walls in a desperate bid to get rid of them.

Occupied with telephone and radio, Willie was struggling to raise ships. There were hundreds of people now wanting to leave and eventually he picked up news that one of his vessels was due to arrive. Inevitably, it was the Lady Roberts, these days, in the extremity of the disaster, called a sloop and with the letters HMS before her name.

The raids started again. At the office of the Dunlop Rubber Company, he just had time to dive into a ditch as the bombs came down. There was a tremendous roar that hurt his ears and he saw a lamp post go down and a body flying through the air. A lorry was hurled through a plate glass window and cars were set on fire. A man with the bleeding stump of an arm was pointing at a petrol tanker parked near a set of apartments and yelling for someone to move it. As he flopped to the ground, unconscious, a Malay climbed into the high cab and, crashing in the gear, drove the vehicle away in a series of jerks.

Scrambling to his feet, Willie slapped the man’s shoulder. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You’ve probably saved all those buildings.’

The Malay gave him a cold look. ‘We shall be here when you’ve gone,’ he said. ‘We shall need them.’

When the din stopped, there seemed to be bodies everywhere in the grotesque attitudes of death. The place reeked of burning flesh, cordite and smoke, yet, even now, the indifference to disaster was unbelievable and an air raid warden was stamping up and down in a fury because the picks and shovels he needed for rescue work were locked up and the storekeeper had gone to the cinema.

The indifference even seemed to affect the children. As the chaos was cleared and they started playing again, one of them fell over a body, sat up staring at his red hands, sniffed them, wiped them on his shirt went on with the game. A group of elderly women were knitting in the doorway of a shelter and an old Chinese threw cupfuls of water on to the flames of a burning house in an attempt to help. As they laid the bodies on the pavement they were serving tiffin at a hotel just round the corner.

As the city began to shrink, the days seemed more beautiful than ever with no humidity and the sea like burnished steel. At night the sky was laced with stars and lit by a huge moon, but across it were the writhing black plumes from fires, and in the air was always the stink of burning rubber, tar and rope, and the smell of decaying bodies trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings. Gas, water, electricity, drainage, were all gone and, to prevent looting, the big stores were giving away their stock. Singapore, the impregnable fortress, had become a curse and the British administration, which had been regarded with such pride for so long, was now exposed as a sham. The languid habits which the British had so complacently regarded as permanent had been swept away overnight and all the reserves of pride had been used up. It looked very much as if the Empire were dying. Its life and soul abroad had always been based on prestige and the final indication that the end was in sight was a Sikh soldier exchanging his uniform in the street for a suit of civilian clothes.

 

A message giving the estimated time of arrival of the Lady Roberts was telephoned through to Willie’s suite at his hotel, from where he was now conducting all his affairs. He had closed down the shipping office and told his employees to think only of themselves. He was in the docks when the ship arrived. The sight of her blunt ugly nose and the gun on her 1917 mounting lifted his heart. Damn the old bugger, he thought. She seemed to have been linked to his life forever. Ill-shaped, ill-behaved in a bad sea, here she was again, always on hand when she was wanted.

By now, with her cockroaches and bushy-tailed rats, she was practically all that was left in Singapore. Because his car had been destroyed, Willie managed to bribe a cab driver he knew to get his vehicle out and they headed for Polly’s house. Packing everybody in, they set out for the docks. Even now the curious indifference of Singapore to disaster was clear. In Raffles Place, Indian street traders were still doing business, and people in drill suits or sarongs were calmly shopping. Kelly and Walsh’s were still selling books and soldiers were still buying souvenirs to take home.

Keppel Road was a tangle of potholes, craters, twisted telephone wires and smashed trees, and a large crowd was outside the closed gates of the docks. The police and the army had given up trying to control the traffic; cars were left anyhow, in the way of lorries trying to head into town, and the place was an indescribable scrum of women and children with luggage, a sweaty mass of humanity without a single porter to help.

In addition to the Lady Roberts, there were three other ships still in the harbour, but the launches that carried out would-be passengers were being turned away because the ships were already crammed with people. The separations were heart-rending, wives from husbands, children from fathers, girls from the men to whom they’d just become engaged. The roads were littered with wounded soldiers who had run out of energy and now sprawled among the women sitting on their luggage, their eyes wet as they waited their turn.

One of the soldiers, driven beyond normality by strain and exhaustion, suddenly started shouting that they were all done for and, as his friends dragged him away, the faces round them stiffened in blank shock. Further along the quay, brand new cars were being pushed into the sea, and employees of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank – Honkers and Shankers to everybody who used it – were dumping long coffin-like crates into the harbour. Occasional shells fell among the wharves so that everybody ducked, cowered and ran for shelter. Except for a line of Australian nurses, straight and calm in their white uniforms, who didn’t even bother to look up.

Women already on board the Lady Roberts, the only ship still alongside, were screaming; their husbands, not allowed up the gangplank, were frantically waving papers. Most didn’t have passes or berths, and there were Chinese who had worked for the British complaining they had been refused permits to leave, although it had been repeatedly announced that all were to be treated alike.

As they left the taxi on the edge of the crowd, the sky filled with an iron roaring and they had to cower in a ditch as half a dozen Japanese bombers came over, flying low, dropping bombs and strafing the docks with their machine guns. A woman clutching her child and a suitcase was about to head for shelter when her husband shouted to her not to move. ‘We’ll lose our places,’ he said. As the machines disappeared over the buildings, Willie saw that one of them had been hit. It was only the second he’d seen damaged during the whole of the fighting. It came low across the water and as it passed overhead he saw it was on fire. Flames were pouring out from underneath the engine and it was trailing a thin plume of smoke. It was low enough to see the pilot struggling with the controls or trying to open the cockpit hatch so he could parachute to safety. As it passed them, it swung to the right and the sky blossomed with a huge ball of flame from which other smaller balls of flame were ejected haphazardly like misdirected rockets. They could still see the pilot in the middle of it, still fighting; then, just as the machine dropped behind the houses, they saw him fall clear. His body struck one of the buildings, bounced off and vanished from sight as the machine also disappeared and they saw the smoke from a vast funeral pyre lift up to darken the sky.

‘Oh, God, Pa!’ Polly was holding her children to her, trying to hide their eyes in her breast, but they were struggling to free themselves so they could see.

Even the death of the Japanese pilot wasn’t enough to stir the crowded people from their wretchedness and terror and, while once they might have raised a cheer, this time they hardly bothered to look up.

Then Willie saw that the woman holding the child and the suitcase had dropped the suitcase and was standing clutching the child and staring at the body of her husband lying at her feet. ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, then one of the officials grabbed her arm and told her to get a move on. For a second, Willie saw the agony in her eyes as she stared at her dead husband then, realising she could do nothing and that it was her duty to save the child, she swallowed and pushed forward with the others.

‘Oh, Pa,’ Polly sobbed.

The Lady Roberts was already crammed with people as they boarded her – in the cabins, in the saloon, on the decks. In case it proved impossible to shed her moorings, the order was given to cast off so that the ship could stand out from the quay. There was a wail as she prepared to move and, as she called goodbye to her soldier husband on the dockside, a woman threatened to jump overboard with her child. At the last moment, Willie pressed the husband into service as a ship’s clerk and he was allowed to accompany her.

There were now hundreds of passengers aboard a ship with the normal accommodation of a dozen. With twilight, the jade sky turned pink from the fires that were consuming rubber, timber and fuel, the flames roaring across Keppel Road. Singapore lay under a pall of heavy black smoke that hung over the business section, the European homes and the shattered native quarter alike. It hid the dying sun and made the air stink of charred wood. Aircraft were burning on Kallang airfield and tanks were on fire on the oil islands a few miles away.

It was clearly going to be impossible to leave in daylight because the Japanese were sinking everything that appeared, and they had heard that a Dutch ship, the Konige, had been set on fire, while the Japanese tentacles were already reaching out towards Java. Death seemed to hover over the dark dying city, occasional shells screaming over to burst among the blackened buildings, and beyond Fort Canning and Mount Faber you could still hear the rattle of musketry and machine-gun fire. The streets, once so clean and tidy, were littered with rubble and blackened scraps of burnt paper. Here and there, leaning against a wall or lying in a gutter, was a hastily covered body.

There was no longer any point in asking people for tickets or permits to leave. All that could be done was cram aboard everybody who appeared in launches, among them a few weary soldiers, their eyes dull with fatigue, who had fought their way back down the Malayan peninsula and over the Johore Causeway to the illusive safety of the island; stretchers containing wounded, escorted by a few European or Eurasian nurses, their faces tired and strained; children with amahs; women with babies; Chinese, Malays, Indians, the light from the flames catching the angles and curves of their faces. The foremost thing in the minds of every one of them as they stumbled to the deck was the wish to reach safety. A lot of the women were weeping, but the children were staring about them wide-eyed, unable to understand what was happening, and over the roar of flames and the rattle of musketry there was a constant wailing sound, as if the whole population of the city were giving way to despair.

The ship was treated to a final air raid as it steamed past a burning Blue Funnel liner, and the crazy pattern of colour in which the city died was reflected in the water. One of the Australian nursing sisters began singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and the rest took it up. Gradually a few other people joined in defiantly, until half the ship was singing. The buoy intended to mark the minefield outside the harbour had disappeared and, with his skin crawling, Willie watched Yeh as he conned the ship to sea. The sky was red with flames stabbed through occasionally by bursts of shellfire. Even the sea seemed to be ablaze. It was Friday the Thirteenth.