ROSE SAT AS ALWAYS on the chintz sofa in the alcove off the dining room, a large mixing bowl resting on her lap. Christmas was no more than a week away and the cake was not yet ready. She prided herself on her preparedness with regard to the festive season; the cake was always baked and regularly doused with alcohol for weeks before the great day. Beyond the roofed patio of the dining room rain emptied down, splashing from the guttering on to the shrubbery. The cook, Ah Fong, hovered disapprovingly near the sofa, a pained expression on his thin face. As Rose drove the wooden spoon through the sticky mix of Christmas cake, his mouth tightened. He was affronted, as he was each year, that he was not left to his own devices with the Christmas cooking. The recent bombing had upset everyone’s routine and Rose was so late with the cake it would have no time to mature but must be eaten immediately, although the puddings had been made in September. Yet, whatever the dastardly things happening about her, Rose was determined not to be done out of Christmas. Everyone felt the same. Newspapers were full of the need to ignore the Japanese and concentrate on positive things.
Japan’s posturing belligerence was brushed aside in Singapore, although their army had occupied Indo-China, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. The Japanese were establishing bases in the Pacific like a man securing stepping stones over a river, but no one saw cause for immediate worry. The distant rumble of fighting on the peninsula disturbed life in the way a ripple disturbs a still pond. The European community continued to follow their usual hedonistic routine, daring the bombs to fall. The Malaya Tribune had announced in bold headlines after the first air raid, SINGAPORE TAKES IT – WITH A GRIN, thumbing their nose at the enemy. The management of Raffles Hotel had perfected a blackout technique and the dance band played on. Strawberries, fresh roses and rock oysters were flown in as usual from far and near. Although a victim of the first air raid, Robinsons department store moved its coffee shop to the basement and was as ever filled to capacity with smart European women. Tennis continued to be played at the Tanglin Club, and cricket on the Padang. Unlimited hard liquor was freely available. The only news received by everyone with a painful jolt on 10 December was that the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales, so recently on view at the naval base, had – unbelievably – been sunk.
On hearing the announcement Rose had sat transfixed, the blood running cold in her veins. She remembered the vulnerability of Ordnance Seaman Jefferies’s knees, and his toothy smile. She remembered the High-Angle Plotting Table and wondered why it had not served its purpose on that great, unsinkable ship. Where was the picture of the King, nailed so firmly to the wall? Had the clamps on the cooking pots held them in place as the ship turned upside down? Now, as she stirred the Christmas cake mix, she imagined the great vessel lying at the bottom of the ocean like a wrecked cathedral, and her throat constricted with emotion.
A ring of the doorbell brought Rose back to herself. Outside, rain sluiced off the eves and foliage; the deluge had not let up all day. The monsoon seemed heavier than usual. Pillows and mattresses oozed a fusty smell, and in Belvedere the servants were forever putting things out to air the moment they saw the sun. Rose handed the Christmas cake to Ah Fong as she listened to Hamzah shuffling forward in response to the bell. A woman’s voice was heard and soon Hamzah reappeared with a middle-aged matron, a hat of purple gauze limp from the rain, slightly askew on her head. With a start Rose recognised her cousin Mavis from Penang. Mavis gave a cry at the sight of Rose and stumbled towards her. It must be ten years since we last met, Rose thought. Mavis had always been proud of her willowy frame but now she swelled generously, an ample bosom resting on her waist. With a sob Mavis threw herself upon Rose, tears spilling down her face.
‘Penang has fallen to the Japanese. They’re thick on the ground in George Town and doing terrible things. I could not think of anyone but you. There is fighting everywhere and Singapore is the only place left to come to,’ Cousin Mavis wailed. ‘British troops have not held a single town on the peninsula. When they knew the Japanese were coming every European man, woman and child cleared out of Penang overnight and left us to our fate.’ Mavis’s blue flowered dress was stained and crumpled; a feral odour escaped her as if she had not had a bath for days. Rose, in shock, steered her to the chintz sofa where, still sobbing, Mavis continued with her story.
‘There was a stampede to leave when we discovered what was happening. But only Europeans were allowed on the launches, and we locals were turned away. A kind English couple got me on to a train full of wounded soldiers along with the European women and children.’
It was difficult to fully comprehend Mavis’s garbled talk. Even as a child, Rose remembered, Mavis had been a drama queen. Obviously, she had suffered a terrible trauma and Rose indicated to Ah Fong, who was still standing with the bowl of Christmas cake cupped under one arm and following events with interest, to return to the kitchen and bring some fresh tea. Hamzah reappeared from the direction of the front door, carrying a battered leather suitcase and a dented hatbox. Mavis drew a shuddering breath and continued with her story.
‘The Japanese are coming down the peninsula on bicycles and in tanks; nothing can stop them,’ Mavis said. Taking a cup of tea from Ah Fong, she put in four lumps of sugar, picking the cubes up with her fingers and ignoring the silver tongs, much to Rose’s disapproval. Lifting off her hat, she placed it carefully on the sofa beside her, revealing short hair plastered damply to her head. She had been sitting tensely on the edge of the sofa, but now she settled her bulk more comfortably. The buttons of her dress strained over mountainous breasts as she turned to assess Belvedere’s cavernous interior.
‘You have a big place here, very comfortable, much bigger than I remember when I visited last.’ Mavis looked about, her eyes taking in every detail.
Over the years, Rose observed, Mavis had swelled but changed little; there were the same round cheeks and vacant gaze, and the shadow on her upper lip was now a bristly grey. Mavis had married Raymond Dias, a senior clerk in a British paper mill, and had moved from Malacca to Penang before Rose met Charlie Burns. There had been two children, a girl who married well and went to live in England, and a boy who was killed in a traffic accident. Raymond had died of a lingering disease when the children were in their teens. Since then, Mavis had supplemented his frugal pension by working as a stenographer in a bank.
‘You need a bath and a rest,’ Rose comforted her, knowing room must be found in Belvedere. This would not be difficult; the house had emptied at a steady rate with young men returning to fight for England after war began in Europe.
Rose came down the stairs from settling Cousin Mavis to see Arthur Boffort and his wife Valerie struggling into Belvedere with brown paper packages and Cold Storage bags. They were almost the only lodgers left.
‘Here we are, Mrs B – a bit of Christmas cheer,’ Boffort puffed, placing before her a bottle of wine wrapped up in coloured paper.
‘They have extra rations available at Cold Storage. Many people are taking the precaution of stocking up. What about you, Mrs B, have you stocked up?’ Valerie’s voice was full of suppressed anxiety. She was a slight woman with flyaway hair and round grey eyes; her collarbones protruded to such a degree they appeared to be deformed.
‘The Japanese will never get to Singapore.’ Rose spoke with unintended sharpness. The arrival of Cousin Mavis with her harrowing story had upset her more than she liked to admit.
‘We have corned beef, tinned salmon and rice. We thought we would seal it all up in a bread tin and bury it in the garden. Would you mind if we dug ourselves a hole, Mrs B?’ Boffort’s anxiety was evident in the way he spat out his words. Rose felt a speck of saliva land on her cheek.
‘In Penang they say the Japanese are commandeering all supplies,’ Valerie burst out, fear now getting the better of her.
The days went by and, as Christmas approached, the raids accelerated and casualties soon became more than hospitals could cope with. Penang had been abandoned with almost no fight just as Mavis said, and Singapore was awash with refugees and military casualties transported back to the colony. Finally, Christmas came and went, slipping away almost before it could be grasped. The tree Rose annually ordered failed to arrive from the Cameron Highlands because of the worsening state of war on the peninsula. Rose festooned branches from a mango tree instead, covering the unripe fruit with gold paint and adding some extra baubles; nothing could alleviate the tension.
Mei Lan had stayed more than a year in Hong Kong with her father. It had been a time of both boredom and excitement. She had loved the view from her father’s house, of the bay of Hong Kong with its armada of square-sailed junks. She had enjoyed the brief winter, the fresh bite in the air, and the deep fur coat of silver fox her father had bought her to keep off the evening chill.
Just as in Singapore, Boon Eng was constantly absent from home, and much of the time Mei Lan had been left to her own devices. She had taken a secretarial course, and then worked in her father’s office trying to fill the empty hours. There had been efforts by her father, with the help of a great aunt and a matchmaker, to introduce her to a variety of wealthy young men. She had sabotaged these arrangements at every turn and soon gained a reputation as an unsuitable girl. She hated the constant talk of marriage, and felt nothing in common with the groups of idle young people she was pushed to join, who whiled away the days in tennis, dancing or mah-jong and social chatter over elaborate banquets of food. All she wanted was to return to Singapore and Ah Siew, who had stayed behind.
Her father had not accompanied her back to Singapore but had remained in Hong Kong, and she suspected that it was a new woman who kept him there. When Hong Kong finally fell to the Japanese it was impossible to get news of him. In Bougainvillaea House they could only wait and hope. As soon as things calmed down, as he was sure they would, Lim Hock An said optimistically, they would hear from him.
On her return to Singapore Mei Lan feared Second Grandmother would incarcerate her in the house and, like the great aunt in Hong Kong, call for the matchmaker again. In the familiar confines of her room, she both dreaded and desired the sight of Belvedere beyond the window, intimate as an old friend, forcing her thoughts back to Howard. His rejection lay within her, a constant and painful humiliation from which there was no respite. From Hong Kong she had written to him each day, and he had not replied to a single letter. Then, on her return she had opened the drawer of the dressing table and the first object she had seen was Howard’s compass, its red finger pointed as ever towards Belvedere. Quickly, she had thrust it away. In the evenings, she sometimes heard the notes of his saxophone, and wondered if he knew she was back. She could focus on nothing, the knowledge that he was near underlying everything.
The only thing that heartened Mei Lan was that JJ was now living and working in Singapore. In 1939, when war threatened to begin in England, he had abandoned his studies at Oxford, returning home on one of the last boats to leave the country safely; he had barely managed to finish his undergraduate degree. When he arrived back in Singapore, after a leisurely journey home via India where he stayed for several months, Lim Hock An had sent him to work in his Ipoh office, to manage a pineapple estate and its cannery. This provincial assignment was not to JJ’s liking; he had begged to be sent to the fast moving world of Shanghai or Hong Kong, but Lim Hock An stood firm. He relented only in agreeing to JJ being employed in the Singapore office. But in the years away JJ had grown distant from Mei Lan. He no longer treated her as a confidant but assumed the stance of a man of the world. Like his father he now wore a white silk scarf with his dinner jacket, and had bought an open sports car he could ill afford in which to roar around town. He used his father’s clubs and, after work at his grandfather’s office, his life transferred to the tennis courts and the dance floor. Like his father, he was always to be seen with a woman on his arm.
In the house Mei Lan listened each day to Second Grandmother’s throaty voice ordering her slave girls about, calling for barley water or chrysanthemum tea, bringing up wind and moaning with the pain of her twisted feet. From behind the closed door of JJ’s room, if he was home, came the trumpeted rhythm of jazz from a brass-eared phonograph. Lim Hock An, now that his health had improved, often left Bougainvillaea House for the East Coast home of Little Sparrow. Before his stroke he had taken up visiting her again after a long hiatus, much to Second Grandmother’s fury. A child had been born from this renewed relationship, another girl. She had been named Wen Yen, but Little Sparrow had visited the cinema to see a Greta Garbo film before her daughter’s birth and, determined not to be outdone by Lustrous Pearl’s naming of Bertie after an actor, had added the name Greta to Wen Yen’s identity.
After the shock of the first bombing, when the people of Singapore prepared to defend the city, many joined one or another of the auxiliary services. Mei Lan wanted to do the same. At dinner one evening she announced to the family that she would join the Medical Auxiliary Service. The heroics of such a commitment appealed to her, and in extravagant moments she saw herself comforting the dying. It was also a perfect means of evading the constrictions of Bougainvillaea House.
‘Girls of good family do not work in hospitals,’ Lim Hock An replied, looking up from a slice of watermelon and spitting out black pips.
‘Everyone who can is doing something, including women from good Chinese families,’ Mei Lan protested, standing firm. Second Grandmother, who had a better idea of the essentials of nursing, lowered her spoon above a bowl of coconut sago.
‘House of Lim girl cannot touch strange person’s bloody bandages. Cannot wash strange person’s filthy body. Cannot.’ Second Grandmother shuddered at the thought.
Mei Lan could not control her anger; the old people, preoccupied with their food, condensed her life to the narrowness of a coffin. The sound of Lim Hock An spitting out another volley of seeds filled the sudden silence and she knew they were waiting, united in their expectation of her disobedience.
‘I’m going to join.’ She was amazed at her own determination. The old people exchanged a quick glance, but even as she spoke she knew they could do nothing against the force of her will. Her life was her own to use as she wished; the thought came to her as a revelation. The following day Mei Lan enrolled in the Medical Auxiliary Service, and was immediately sent to the General Hospital.
‘What man wanting strong-willed wife? Aiyaah. What in-law putting up with disobedient girl?’ Second Grandmother screamed when she heard, slapping her brow in exasperation. Mei Lan listened, unperturbed, knowing something bigger than herself led her on. Across the room, sunk in a rattan chair and hidden behind a newspaper, Lim Hock An sighed as he listened to his wife’s angry wailing, counting the moments until he could leave for an evening with Little Sparrow. Although he could not put the thought into words, he understood his granddaughter had done no more than, as a young man, he had done himself; she had inherited his stubborn will.
With casualties overwhelming every medical facility, Cynthia seemed never to leave the hospital, much to the anxiety of Wilfred and Rose. People are dying, what can I do? she said. Wilfred had joined the St John Ambulance brigade as a volunteer ambulance driver, after taking some training in stretcher carrying and first aid. He often drove casualties to the General Hospital and was able to catch a few minutes with Cynthia. As his wife hurried down a hospital corridor looking for places to install the military casualties Wilfred had just brought in, he kept pace determinedly beside her. The hospital was overflowing with wounded soldiers, every corridor was crowded with makeshift beds. Whenever she managed to have an occasional hour or even a night alone with Wilfred, Cynthia found herself too tired to respond to the passion he seemed able to effortlessly summon. As they came out of the hospital into the fiery blast of the sun, a wave of desolation swept over her and tears filled her eyes. She could only live hour to hour.
Wilfred’s ambulance stood on the driveway and, with Cynthia beside him, he walked over to direct the auxiliaries as they unloaded further wounded men. Cynthia bent to assess the new casualties, stopping a passing orderly.
‘Call a volunteer nurse and more orderlies here quickly. We need to get these men inside,’ she told him. The man disappeared into the building, returning almost immediately with a white-coated doctor who issued directions for the wounded men to be taken to the operating theatre. Cynthia instructed the orderlies to pick up the stretchers and then turned to the volunteer nurse, demure in her hospital uniform and square of white linen folded over her head, and felt there was something familiar about her.
‘Mei Lan,’ Cynthia exclaimed in surprise, remembering the girl, noting her elegance even in her volunteer’s uniform. She wondered if Howard knew she had returned from Hong Kong, but decided it would be best not to mention her brother.
Mei Lan seemed embarrassed, refusing to look Cynthia in the eye, her gaze on the stretcher patients. At the hospital entrance, the doctor accompanying the patients stopped and turned back to Cynthia, waving an admittance slip he had forgotten to give her. Mei Lan immediately hurried over to collect it from him, as if grateful to get away. Cynthia shrugged her stiff shoulders wearily; she had had almost no sleep that night. There had been another heavy raid on Chinatown, and the flow of injured was never ending. As the days went by she found herself accepting violent death with a casualness that distressed her. Wilfred drew her aside, putting an arm about her.
‘I’ll come back tonight. We’ll have a few hours together,’ he said. She had been given a room of her own at the hospital and no longer had to live in the nurses’ dormitory. It was as small as a cupboard but it gave her privacy, and Matron turned a blind eye to Wilfred’s visits.
The first time she had seen Cynthia in Admissions a few days previously, Mei Lan had stopped in shock, flooded by emotion and images of Howard she had tried to suppress for months. She did not have the courage to approach Cynthia so backed away, finding ways to avoid her whenever she saw her in the distance. Yet Cynthia’s presence in the hospital gave an edge to the day; she carried with her the aura of Howard, allowing Mei Lan to sense him again.
The hospital allowed Mei Lan to escape the confines of Bougainvillaea House. However, she was loath to admit a volunteer’s work was nothing like she had expected. She was immediately taught how to cut badly burned clothing from open wounds, change dressings, give a bed bath, take temperatures and pulse rates. Nothing prepared her for the need to have contact with the odorous excretions of the human body or the sight of the full bedpans, even if an orderly took them away. From the beginning she was ordered to go round the wards and dark crowded corridors of the hospital with a torch, a pair of forceps and a kidney bowl picking maggots, hatched by swarms of odious flies, out of the oozing wounds of soldiers. When she had finished she sat down and cried. There was nothing heroic about this distasteful work; at the first bedpan she had turned away to retch. She found no dying person in need of her comfort; all they wanted was relief from pain. On the second day she would have given up, but for the thought of Second Grandmother’s derision.
She had no option later but to return to Cynthia with the signed admission form. Cynthia smiled, trying to put Mei Lan at ease, even as she watched Wilfred’s ambulance disappear down the hospital drive. ‘Why don’t you come along with me to the nurses’ quarters? I’ve got to bring over spare blankets from the storeroom,’ she said.
Mei Lin walked beside Cynthia through the grounds of the hospital listening to the singing of birds and the constant whirr of cicadas, glad to be free for a short time from work. She wanted to ask a thousand questions about Howard, but swallowed them down. What use would it be even to ask, when she knew he had lost interest in her? There could be no other reason for his silence, when she had written him letter after letter.
‘Looks like giant worms have been at work in the gardens,’ Mei Lan commented as they walked towards the nurses’ quarters behind the hospital building. Trenches furrowed the lawns around the hospital, the mountains of soft loose earth piled up beside them acting as breeding ground for swarms of malarial mosquitoes. They had been dug for protection during air raids, but few people bothered to run to these damp shelters, preferring to take their chances in the hospital under tables or beds. The alert was now almost permanent, with deadly formations of aircraft flying over too frequently to monitor. Soon the blankets were gathered and Cynthia and Mei Lan began the short walk back to the hospital. A small plane hovered above them in the sky, and they stopped apprehensively to observe it.
‘It’s just a single reconnaissance plane, not a bomber,’ Mei Lan decided, squinting up at it.
The blankets were piled high in their arms and it was difficult to see where they were going on the narrow path with its border of bougainvillaea, the purple flowers faded because of the continuous rain. Ahead of them a group of medical students came out of a side door of the hospital, and one of the young men waved to Mei Lan. Earlier, he had been on duty in the emergency room and she had helped him with a tourniquet on an old woman. Mei Lan was about to comment on this when the sound of shelling began without warning. The medical students scattered, some running for the hospital, others pushing through the hedge to jump into the trenches.
A sudden explosion moved the ground beneath Mei Lan, the blast ricocheting through her head. One moment the earth spurted high about her and the next she was lying deep in a trench unable to move for the weight of bodies upon her. Loose earth covered her face and hands; there was a dense scent of wet soil and the stench of brackish water collected below her in the pit. Mosquitoes swarmed about. Machine-gun fire, sounding like a bag of marbles dropped on a stone floor, followed the explosions. Bodies pressing down heavily upon her, muffled the noise. Panic overwhelmed Mei Lan: she thought she might suffocate and struggled to dislodge the heavy mass. Then there was movement, she heard voices, the load upon her lessened and people were climbing out of the trench.
‘Are you all right?’ She heard Cynthia’s voice above her, and realised they had both jumped into the trench. One of the medical students gave her a hand, and Mei Lan scrambled up into the sunlight, weak with relief. The sky was thick with a dark cloud of twittering birds; disturbed by the blast they were now settling noisily again in the trees. Mei Lan turned to peer back into the trench. Just a short distance from where she had been thrown she saw the young man who had waved at her minutes before, staring up at her, dead and open-eyed. The blankets she had carried were strewn about, covered by clods of damp earth.
For Singapore, the New Year’s Eve that saw in 1942 was a dismal affair; no one could any longer deny that the enemy were only 150 miles from the island. Troops were already retreating into the city from more northern posts on the Malayan mainland, filling Singapore’s streets and dance halls. Already, preparations for a siege were under way. Amongst other premises, the Capitol and Pavilion Cinemas had been turned into food dumps. Nine thousand cattle had been imported from Bali for slaughtering; 125,000 pigs had been counted in the colony. Two large dairy herds from Johore had crossed the Causeway on to the island, and now grazed by the roadsides and on golf courses. Confusion was everywhere. On government orders trenches were forever being dug and then re-dug in a contrary design, and then filled in for unfathomable reasons, leaving the Padang and other public spaces furrowed and rough. At the docks vital military equipment could not be unloaded; coolie labourers had already fled town and all the wharfs were bombed.
January brought a change of pace in the bombing. Sporadic raids on the docks and the airfields, with occasional sorties over the town, became ever more frequent, increasing in viciousness as the days went by. The raids were almost always in daylight and carried out by massive formations of up to eighty planes. No British planes were to be seen in the skies, and Japanese bombers flew like proud birds far above the reach of anti-aircraft guns. Through it all, the monsoon kept up its steady drumming. Finally, the Japanese reached Johore and occupied the Sultan’s palace: they were now fifty miles from Singapore. The European community danced on defiantly at Raffles Hotel, while swarms of restless, drunken soldiers queued for taxi girls at the barn-like dance halls of the Great Worlds. Only the Chinese community, understanding there was trouble ahead, withdrew the age-old chit system, demanding cash from every European for even the smallest purchase. Chinese were leaving the town in droves for more rural areas, and were seen every day pushing loaded carts of belongings out of the city. Tinned food and whisky were still available at Cold Storage, but fresh fruit and vegetables were hard to come by; Johore was Singapore’s market garden and the Japanese now controlled it. Hundreds of corpses were trapped irretrievably beneath bombed buildings, and their decomposing perfume pervaded the city; nothing could scrub the dreadful odour away. Bodies lay unattended in the street waiting for burial squads, black with flies, just like the meat hanging on hooks in the Beach Road market.
Weeks had slipped by in growing and nightmarish confusion. The naval base, where Rose had toured the Prince of Wales, was deliberately fired and evacuated by its European personnel, following a scorched earth policy. A black miasma hovered over the city as oil burned day and night at the base. Abandoned cars and bomb craters littered roads, damaged water mains flooded streets, making progress about the city difficult. Finally, at their Orchard Road premises the staff of Cold Storage, in spite of continued government bravado that Singapore was in no danger, stood on the first floor balcony of the shop disposing of their liquor stores, unwilling to leave such comfort to the Japanese. Bottles of spirits, wines and champagne were tossed at a great rate into the street below. Soon, thirty thousand British troops had crossed on to the island from mainland Malaya, blowing up the bridge of the Causeway behind them. The last ninety men on to the island were pipers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who marched over the Causeway playing ‘I’ll Take the High Road’ on their bagpipes. Dishevelled soldiers packed the island, wandering drunk in the streets, desperate with fatigue, with no unit, no billet and no one to give them orders. Only those battalions that still had commanders were returning gunfire at the front line. Across the narrow stretch of water separating the island from peninsular Malaya, the Japanese could now be seen walking about, to everyone’s indignation.