During a few hours’ shore leave in Colombo the Victorian engravings from books at my grandparents’ were now in colour, and less impressive to my mind of nineteen than they had been to a child in the age of wonders. One of a group, I felt like a somnambulist, my first experience of a foreign land little more than a meal at the YMCA and a meander along York Street and down Queen Street, nothing to impress beyond the sight of a few strange costumes.
Perhaps memories are few because my sensations were so absorbing, yet there remained the corrugated Arabian Sea beyond the harbour, and the sudden appearance of a palm tree bending over a stagnant pool. In the heat of the day, with no town plan to show how far we were going, it was nevertheless enjoyable to be walking with that aimlessness of young and indigent soldiers in an overseas town, though I was happy enough to get home to the ship.
The one diversion came when a couple of turbaned men stopped us near a park and wanted to read the future in our hands, a proposition I may have rejected too brusquely — believing whatever was in store to be totally irrelevant, and not wanting a stranger to tell me what it was, even if he knew exactly, which in any case I didn’t see how he could — for the parting words of one that I had ‘snake eyes’ intrigued rather than offended me.
The boat rocked around the coast of Ceylon, lights far off on a dark tree-crowded shore, and headed across the Bay of Bengal towards Malaya 1,300 miles away. Those contingents disembarked at Colombo had left the ship less crowded, and with the patience of the sea I hoped to be carried even beyond Hong Kong, almost wishing the boat would go on for ever, oceanic vastness inducing a resignation not previously known.
I slept deeply at night, one of a long row on deck, waking at dawn to let barefooted Lascar seamen in their saris sluice all woodwork clean with jets of salt water. The gramophone record of a brisk march by Souza, which hurried us to boat stations, became more and more cracked, and I wondered when the captain would authorize a new copy from the top of the stack by his elbow. Either that, or find another tune after skimming the old one duck-and-drake across the briny.
It was as pleasant a peacetime cruise as anybody could wish for, especially when we sighted an island off the tip of Sumatra entirely covered in jungle. Huge spherical grey jellyfish took the place of dolphins in the Straits of Malacca, the sea swollen, the sky dull, the air steamy. A day before Singapore we learned that the destination for wireless operators was close, and at two in the afternoon my larger scale map sheet of South-East Asia, taken from the briefing hut at Langar, and brought as an inspired guess as to what region at least the final landing would be in, revealed with precision that we were off Port Swettenham. By nine at night Malacca was passed, the Singapore Approaches closing around the ship at half past four next morning. An increased speed for the last twenty-four hours led us to speculate that the captain might have some sentimental reason for going all out.
In spite of our pleasant cruise we were more than ready to quit the fuel and stew smell of the ship, the rumble of perpetual motion underfoot, the constant swish of water keeping the air tacky with salt and ozone, and the swaying sailor walk developed on promenading the ever-shrinking decks. With kitbags ready, and rifles distributed as if on landing we might inadvertently stray into a battlefield, which I wouldn’t have minded in the least, we watched the ship tie up at half past seven in the Empire Dock, an area of petrol tanks and warehouses, though palm trees and bungalows on hills provided a more residential backdrop to the scene.
Chapter Twenty
Events moved slowly enough, and only later could I say they raced and leapfrogged — almost up to the present, when they go slow again. Stepping down the gangplank with full kit to a waiting lorry was like a scene in a newsreel. Such pictures from the past, though trivial, become salient due to an uncanny persistence in being remembered, but in the process they exclude anything of importance that may have been in the mind, as spars on a calm surface after a boatwreck provide few clues regarding the currents which might have existed beneath the water.
Whatever my irrecoverable thoughts, to which I would have said ‘good riddance’ at the time, even supposing there were any, we crossed the island into Johore via the Causeway over which the Japanese Army went on to occupy in 1942 what military strategists had said could never be taken. A few days in a hutted camp several miles into Malaya gave time to retrieve the use of our legs, by leaping half-filled trenches among neglected rubber trees. Otherwise we played the usual card games for unfamiliar cents and dollars.
Accustomed to Duke of York manoeuvres, a group of us were posted back to Seletar on Singapore Island. Our accommodation was in barrack blocks set between lawns and gardens, four-course meals in the mess seeming like two dinners in one (as I might earlier have thought) and we shared an Indian servant for a few dollars a week to fix beds, clean shoes, bring coffee in the morning and see to the laundry (dhobi now). Two shillings a day overseas allowance since leaving Southampton enabled me to buy my first wristwatch, as well as a new fountain pen — for which only red ink was available.
The high-frequency direction-finding (HF/DF) station was a small square hut at the end of the runway with a view across to Johore. Such work hadn’t been included in the school course, but I was soon taking bearings with the Marconi-Adcock apparatus and tapping out three-figure numbers in Morse to Sunderland flying boats of 209 Squadron, as well as to KLM, BOAC and QANTAS airliners on the Europe run.
Nightwatch, from six in the evening till eight the next morning, was a long time to be on the alert, but the operator soon to go home underlined in a copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories the remark that ‘You have to be over twenty to stay awake all night.’ Free issues of tobacco and cigarettes helped, as well as a liberal allowance of tea sweetened with condensed milk and a katti of sugar from the village store. Water was boiled on a primus stove, but the danger of an arm being licked to the shoulder by pristine and painful flame was so constant that I preferred trawling the scrubby area around the hut for scraps of wood to make a fire.
Just before dusk (what there was of it), I spotted a half rotten box, and aimed a kick in case a snake lurked there, cautious because one had run over my foot the other night as I came out of the camp cinema. While arranging the pieces under my arm to take back to the hut, a paralysing ache gripped my leg. Cursing and limping, I made tea before bothering to investigate the pain now gone into my foot as well. Unable to find punctures in the skin, I imagined it to be the bite of a hornet, though never knew for sure, and after several days all trace had gone.
Squeaks of Morse around midnight were rendered indecipherable by atmospherics screeching into my earphones. I turned the control wheel to bring the signals clearer, nursing it for a while till recognizing my own call sign tapped out by a radio officer in a Lancastrian passenger plane on the 2,000-mile leg from Darwin. Monsoon cumulus up to 30,000 feet hid the stars, so the only navigational aid over the whole stretch, apart from fallible dead reckoning, was the Marconi equipment on my desk connected to four tall aerials outside. Such responsibility was not lost on me and, like a friendly and concerned spider at the centre of its web, the succulent prize was drawn to a safe landing by more and more accurate bearings the closer it got.
With Bill Brown, another operator, we hammered two Mosquito droptanks together with spars of wood to make a crude type of catamaran. Homespun paddles took us halfway across the estuary on an afternoon’s exploring trip, and water gushing in led me to wonder if the plywood hadn’t been made at Toone’s factory three years before. We aimed towards shore in the remaining tank, until that also split along the bottom, marooning us on a shelf of bush-covered mud on the edge of the mangrove swamps.