The Empire Trilogy (180 page)

Why had she been refused? Were her papers not in order or was there some other reason? Vera shook her head; she had been unable to get any explanation from the harassed and impatient officials at the office. Her papers certainly did not look very convincing. Under the Aliens Ordinance, 1932, she had been given merely a landing-permit which she had been obliged to exchange for a certificate of admission valid for two years and renewable. Matthew nudged his glasses up on his nose and examined the document despondently: it identified Vera merely as a landed immigrant resident in the Straits Settlements. If she needed a passport would she be able to get one at this eleventh hour? And what country would give her a passport? Time was running out so quickly. He was somewhat heartened, however, by the knowledge that it was official government policy that Vera, in common with other women, should leave if she wanted to.

Next, Vera had gone to another office to enquire whether she would be permitted to go to India. She had again been obliged to wait for many hours and once more it had proved to be in vain. On this occasion, although there had been no racial difficulty as there had been with Australia, she had been asked for evidence that she would have enough money to support herself in India. She had had none and by the time Matthew had taken out a letter of credit for her with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and sent her back again another two precious days had passed and she was once more obliged to join a long line of anxious people besieging the office … it had closed before she had been able to get anywhere near the counter. To make matters worse, Matthew could see that with weariness and disappointment Vera had grown fatalistic: she no longer believed that she would be allowed to leave Singapore before the Japanese arrived. Matthew, who in the meantime had been waiting fruitlessly on her behalf in another equally anxious queue at the Chinese Protectorate to apply for an exit permit, had secretly begun to wonder whether she might not be right. However, he did his best to reassure her, saying that certainly she would be able to escape and that the Japanese would be most unlikely to take Singapore.

Matthew was so tired these days that his few off-duty hours were spent in a waking trance. If he so much as sat down for a moment he was liable to fall asleep immediately; it seemed that his mind would only work in slow motion. If only he had had time to sleep he felt he might have been able to think of some solution, some way of getting through this baffling maze of administrative regulations. Add to that the difficulty, under constant air-raids, of accomplishing the most simple formalities. In search of a document you went to some office, only to find that it had been evacuated, nobody knew where. Then further exhausting searches through other offices, which themselves might have removed themselves to a safer area outside the city, would be necessary before you could locate the office you wanted.

While in the queue at the Chinese Protectorate Matthew had been told by some of the other people waiting that Vera would need passport photographs in order to obtain her exit permit. She had none and these days it had become impossible to obtain them. Change Alley, which had once swarmed with photographers who were only too willing to snap you in any official pose you wished, or even in a grotto of cardboard tigers and palms, was deserted, for the photographers had all been Japanese and were now interned. So what was to be done? Matthew considered buying a camera and taking the photographs himself, but this was hardly a solution: he would still have to find someone to develop and print them. To make matters worse Matthew had heard from the Major, who had heard from someone at ARP headquarters, that the troopships, the
West Point
and the
Wakefield
, which were bringing the 18th Division, would soon be able to take a great number of women and children to safety, provided that they could avoid the Japanese bombers. To know that only bureaucratic formalities prevented Vera from having this chance of escape filled Matthew with bitterness and despair. After five days of roaming the hot and increasingly ruined city with her in the last week of January, obliged to take shelter at intervals in the nearest storm-drain, he felt utterly exhausted and demoralized.

‘Don't worry, we'll find a way,' he told her as he was leaving her one evening after another unsuccessful search for a photographer. ‘Didn't you once have a camera?' He remembered that she had wanted to show him some pictures of his father. Yes, but it had only been a box-camera and anyway it had been stolen. Vera was lying on her bed in an odd, crumpled position, the very picture of hopelessness. She gave him a wan smile however, and told him in turn not to worry. After he had gone, she would get up and go and see someone she knew who might be able to help. Some hours later, returning from the docks with the Mayfair AFS unit, he passed near where she lived and asked the Major to stop for a moment so that he could ask whether she had been successful. With refugees from across the Causeway the number of people living in Vera's tenement had greatly increased and he had difficulty making his way past those sleeping on the stairs and in the corridor. When he had at last reached Vera's cubicle he found that she was still lying on the bed in the same odd position, just as he had left her. It seemed that she no longer even had the will to move.

‘You must come with me to the Mayfair,' he said. ‘Bring a toothbrush and whatever else you need.

But Vera shook her head. ‘No Matthew, I am better to stay here. Soon I will feel better.'

‘But it's dangerous here. You're too near the river and the docks.'

Again she shook her head. Nothing he could say would make her change her mind.

‘I must go. They're waiting for me outside. You stay here and rest … I know how tired you must be. And don't worry about the photographs. I'll think of something …'

Having returned to the Mayfair still, despite his reassuring words to Vera, without any idea of what to do next, Matthew was greeted by the smiling face of Mr Wu, to whom he had already spoken of the difficulty of finding a photographer. Mr Wu had thought of a solution to the problem in the meantime. He had an interest in a Chinese newspaper which would undoubtedly employ a photographer. It would take nothing more than a telephone call: by evening Vera would have her photographs. It seemed almost too good to be true.

Tired though he was, Matthew set off again, this time on a bicycle he had borrowed, to tell Vera the good news. The streets were just beginning to get light; in Chinatown the first shadowy figures were emerging after the night's curfew. On his way along Southbridge Road, however, he was astonished to see that a great crowd of women and children had already formed outside one of the buildings and he thought: ‘Good heavens! What can they possibly want at this time in the morning?' But then he realized that they were waiting outside the passport office for it to open and his heart sank at the thought that the photographs were only the beginning.

Vera had been asleep: she gazed at him with dulled eyes as he told her about the photographs.

‘Don't you see!' he exclaimed irritably. ‘Now we'll be able to get the exit permit and everything else!' He was angry with her for not having reacted with more enthusiasm. It seemed that she had given up hope at the very moment that they had a chance of success. But his anger melted away almost immediately. ‘You mustn't give up hope,' he said more gently. ‘When did you last have something to eat?' He went out then to the food-stalls at the end of the street and presently returned with some soup and a dish of fried rice. He had to feed her with chopsticks, like a child: she was utterly exhausted. While he fed her he spoke to her encouragingly: when they had the photographs they would go to the Chinese Protectorate and get her an exit permit and whatever else was needed. After all, the Government wanted her to leave: they said so! Then they would get her a berth on a boat to Colombo or, failing that, to England. He would have money sent to a bank there for her. She could stay in a hotel and he would join her as soon as he could get away from Singapore. By tomorrow evening or perhaps the one after that, they should have all the necessary papers: then they could go together and register her name at the P & O office. They would certainly be in time to get her on one of the ships that were due to leave soon.

‘I don't want to leave without you.'

‘But you must. If the Japs take Singapore …'

‘You always said they wouldn't,' she said, smiling at last.

‘Well, perhaps not. Who knows?' Matthew no longer knew himself whether he believed that Singapore would hold out. ‘I must go now before the morning raids begin. Is there anywhere for you to shelter if the bombers come this way?'

Vera shook her head. ‘Don't worry. I feel better now.' She smiled again and squeezed his hand. ‘I'm sorry to have been “a weak link”.'

‘You're not a weak link,' said Matthew, delighted to see her more cheerful. ‘Don't forget to eat something today, even if it's only a pair of white mice on toast.'

In these last days of January it had become General Percival's habit to rise before dawn and spend an hour in his office before leaving by car for Johore just over the Causeway where the fighting was now taking place. As a rule, therefore, it was still dark outside the bathroom window while he was shaving. But he had had a restless night and had reached the bathroom a little later than usual: the sky was already brightening as he rubbed a finger over his bristly chin. In the course of the night two matters of enormous importance had loomed-up over his halfsleeping mind saying: ‘Remember us tomorrow!' But now, as he delved to drag them into the light, he could scarcely believe that he had taken them seriously. One of these anxieties had concerned transport: the prospect that every motor-car and lorry in his Army might have a simultaneous puncture causing the entire force to freeze up had afflicted him dreadfully. Was it nothing more than that? Evidently not.

Well, what was the other worry? During the night he had decided that he must issue orders to the effect that all dripping taps, both civilian and military, must be turned off at the main forthwith or provided with new washers. This was ridiculous too, but at least he knew what had caused it. The day before he had had a brief word with Brigadier Simson, the Director-General Civil Defence, who had made some gloomy observations about Singapore's water supply: it appeared that out here in the tropics where there was no danger of pipes freezing up, the municipal engineers did not bury them deep underground as they did in England: hence they were vulnerable to bombs. Already there had been considerable damage.

In a moment of intuition he realized, too, the source of his worry about punctures … it was the fear that both the 53rd (British) Brigade and the Segamat force might be cut off by the Japanese before they had time to retreat through the bottleneck at Yong Peng. But that was a danger which was now in the past, thank heavens. Strange that it should continue even so to torment him in his dreams. But … he brushed all that aside. He had more important things to think about.

As he began to shave, though, he did not think about them. He began to think about other things, about the Governor, and about oil dumps, and about his mother in Hertfordshire. What a terrible year 1941 had been! And yet it had seemed to start off so well with his appointment as GOC Singapore. In April, even before he had left England, his mother had died suddenly. She had been getting on in years, mind you, but it had been a heavy blow, nevertheless. All the same, once or twice recently when he had been in low spirits, it had occurred to him that perhaps, after all, her death had been a blessing in disguise, sparing her from unnecessary suffering on his account.

He stood poised, razor in hand, gazing at his lathered face in the mirror. A commander must be a man of strength of purpose and authority, like General Dobbie who had once no doubt shaved in this very mirror. But his own face with its thick white beard of lather looked encouragingly commanding and purposeful. With care, for he had been a staff officer long enough to know that one must be scrupulous in attention to detail, he began to attack the fringes of the lather, driving it inwards from its perimeter at ears and throat with tiny strokes of the blade in the direction of chin, lips and moustache. Here he would presently have it surrounded, if his experience was anything to go by, and would finish it off with a few decisive strokes.

Meanwhile, his mind had begun to feed once more on that run of bad luck which had assailed him so abruptly. His mother had not been dead a year and yet his whole career and perhaps even his life itself were in jeopardy. He had served on the Western Front in the Great War and had kept his eyes open. Yes, he knew what was what! For the truth was, if you were not on the Western Front you were
nowhere
… at least as far as the Powers That Be were concerned. The same thing went for this war, too. Right from the start he had been in no doubt about that. You only had to look at the obsolete equipment and untrained men, the odds and ends and riff-raff from India and Australia, all speaking different tongues. You only had to look at the way his best officers had been milked off to lend tone to the Middle Eastern and European theatres to know that Malaya Command was not very much in anybody's thoughts in Whitehall. The big reputations would be made in Europe: it had happened before and it would happen again. Europe was the fashionable place for a soldier to display his skills. Out here a man could perform miracles of military strategy and much good would it do him! Nobody would pay the slightest attention. But make a blunder and, ah! then it would be different.

‘Out here you can destroy your career in two shakes, but can you make one? Not an earthly.'

The door-handle rattled faintly as someone tried it discreetly from the outside, but it was locked. Could that be Pulford up and about already? Percival paused again, this time about to launch a flanking attack along his jaw from the direction of his right ear. If it was Pulford, he himself must be running even later than he had realized. He usually beat Pulford to the breakfast table. Poor Pulford! His career, too, depended on obsolete equipment … fancy having to send up the poor old Vildebeeste against modern Jap fighter planes! He had taken a liking to Pulford partly through loneliness, for neither man had brought out his family; he had not for a moment regretted inviting him to come and live here. One needed a staunch friend in a place as full of intrigue and back-biting as Singapore.