A Different Sky (28 page)

‘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.