‘What’s this Brigade you talk about, then?’
The driver sighed under his breath. They shouldn’t let virgins like this out alone, he thought.
‘You’re part of it now, sir!’ He squinted at the pristine green oblong sewn on to his passenger’s sleeve, portraying a yellow lion alongside a palm tree.
‘That dog-and-lampost flash’ll have to come off pretty quick, sir. Your CO will spit tacks if he sees it. That’s Singapore Base District, but we’re Twenty-First Commonwealth Independent Infantry Brigade. Different flash altogether — you need one like mine.’
Tom looked at the dhobi-faded patch on the corporal’s uniform — a blue shield and crossed red swords below the figures ‘21’.
‘Is the hospital part of that, then?’ he asked dubiously.
‘Well, you’ve got your own CO, a half-colonel. Queer bugger, he is too. . oh, sorry sir!’ The driver had the grace to look sheepish at his gaffe. ‘But the big chief is the Brigadier, runs the whole outfit.’
The explanation was cut short as the Land Rover rounded a bend and came into a village, where they were forced to crawl along behind an ox-cart heaped with dried palm fronds for roofing. The driver swerved to avoid mangy pi-dogs, men on high bicycles, wandering chickens and assorted children scattered across the road. Ramshackle stalls selling fruit and Coca-Cola stood on the beaten earth in front of a few two-storied shophouses, from which taped Chinese pop songs blared out at ear-splitting volume. Malay girls in sarong-kerbayahs, colourful tunics over long skirts, swayed gracefully through the hubbub, resisting the raucous invitations of the shopkeepers to buy tin alarm clocks, dried fish or plastic toys. A dilapidated bus was coming the other way and they were forced to stop for a moment behind a grimy truck, from which several emaciated men were unloading heavy sacks of rice. Across the tailboard large Chinese characters were painted and underneath, Tom read a presumed translation in Roman lettering proclaiming the owner to be ‘Wun Fat Tit’, which left him wondering if it could possibly be true or was just some oriental leg-pull.
As the bus passed, blaring its horn raucously and belching black diesel smoke, the Land Rover pulled out, but almost immediately, the driver had to brake to avoid a Chinese woman wearing a samfu, a kind of floral pyjamas, leading a skinny cow on a length of rope.
‘This is Kampong Kerdah, sir, the last village before our place. Tanah Timah is a proper town, not like this ’ere dump,’ said the soldier, with an almost proprietorial air.
As Howden was thinking that most places in Malaya seemed to have alliterative names, the driver twisted the wheel again and squeezed past the ox cart and accelerated out of the village on to more curves between more rubber estates.
‘Where’s this road go to?’ he asked.
‘It forks at Tanah Timah — or ‘TT’ as everyone calls it. Straight on it goes up a few miles to Kampong Jalong, then fizzles out against the mountains. Big buggers they are, some go up to six thousand feet. The other track just goes through the rubber up past Gunong Besar, with a village at the end called Kampong Kerbau. Damn-all beyond that for ’undreds of miles across the jungle and mountains, until you hit the China Sea. All Black Area that, real bandit country, very nasty!’
He said this with morbid glee, as if he had daily experience of hunting terrorists, though in fact he had never heard a single shot fired in anger during his two years up at this ‘sharp end’ of the campaign.
‘Is this a Black Area?’ Howden looked uneasily at the deserted plantations, where the rubber trees stood in endless ranks, reminding him of the war graves he had seen on his rugby trip to Flanders.
‘Nossir, but this White Area stops just beyond TT. If it was Black here, we wouldn’t be allowed out without an escort — and have to carry a weapon.’
He bent his head towards the officer as if to impart some great secret.
‘Best not to carry a pistol, sir. You only get a ticking off for not having one, but if you lose the bloody thing, it’s a court martial.’
Tom had no intention of carrying anything more lethal than a syringe, especially as Aldershot had proved that he could barely hit a house at ten paces. The vehicle suddenly slowed to a stop and he looked around in alarm.
‘Just thought you’d like to see the view, sir,’ reassured the corporal. He leaned on his steering wheel and pointed through the windscreen.
‘That’s TT down there, you can see the garrison and BMH next to it.’
Howden saw that they had stopped at the crest of a hill and were looking down on a bowl-shaped area a couple of miles across. It was open on the left where a broad valley went back towards the railway and the far distant sea. On the right, above the rubber estates, green jungle-covered hills climbed towards remote blue mountains, their tops wreathed in clouds. Below, the road snaked down for another mile to a small town, little more than a main street with a few parallel lanes of buildings. A little further on, there was a large rectangular complex of huts and other buildings, with many vehicles parked in rows, the sun glistening on their windscreens. Next to it was a smaller compound with more regular lines of low buildings, which the doctor took to be the hospital.
‘Dead flat down there, sir. It used to be a tin mine, before the Army bulldozed it to build the garrison.’
It was almost like an aerial view or a map and Tom was intrigued by the geography of what was to be his home for the foreseeable future. He saw that the road that passed through Tanah Timah forked at the further end of the main street. The left branch crossed a small bridge over a brown river that ran behind the little town, then climbed a rise on the other side of the valley before vanishing into the ubiquitous rubber. Just beyond the bridge was a large bungalow-style building, perched on a grassy mound. It had a wide green-painted tin roof and there was a tennis-court and a small swimming pool behind it.
‘What’s that place — the school?’
‘Nah, that’s ‘The Dog’, sir. It’s the posh club, white planters and officers only. They don’t let no wogs in there — nor ORs like me.’
Howden’s meagre stock of Army lore told him that ORs were ‘Other Ranks’, but ‘The Dog’ was beyond him. He asked his driver, but the corporal shrugged.
‘Search me, sir! I think the proper name’s the Sussex Club.’ He pointed again, this time slightly to the left.
‘Alongside them big hills in the distance, there’s another valley, see? It’s all Black country, goes up to Chenderoh Dam and a lake. The road goes all the way to Grik and the Siamese border, they say, but it’s bloody dangerous up there. Chin Peng himself hangs out in that area.’
Tom twisted further to his left, looking at more mountains on the other side of the flat plain below. ‘What’s over there, then?’
‘That’s Maxwell Hill, above Taiping. Decent town, is that. Another hospital there, BMH Kamunting, bigger than this one here. I drives a truck up there now and then, for stores and stuff.’
He decided that sightseeing was over and coasted down the long hill towards TT, his passenger looking sideways at the changing vegetation as the rubber gave way to oil palm and then bananas, before the rice padi appeared again on the flat land at the bottom. Black water buffalo trudged through the mud pulling crude ploughs, thin farmers urging them on from behind. Women in colourful sarongs and head cloths stood up to their knees in water, planting rice seedlings. As the Land Rover passed, they giggled and quickly turned their faces away in case a camera should appear.
As they came downhill, a long convoy of green military vehicles passed them in the opposite direction, three-tonners and Land Rovers grinding up the slope, shepherded by armoured cars in front and behind. As they passed, Tom saw scores of soldiers sitting in the trucks, some wearing bush hats with one side of the brim turned up.