The fifty-hour working week left time for a derelict boat found on the beach to be lovingly tarred and carpentered, fitted with rowlocks, tiller and a mast. A dozen of us contributed many hours to its upkeep, as if under the skin of airmen lay the frustrated souls of matelots. We sculled, or tacked with a fullblown but patched spinnaker, to ships in George Town harbour, dodging multicoloured little sea snakes for a swim over the side, and at dusk hauling it up the shelving beach to safety from the waves.
Scads of my hair began to come out and, horrified at having a pink skull like every man of my father’s family, I asked my mother to send a bottle of Silvikrin — as advertised in monthly editions of the Daily Mirror which she sometimes posted and which went on their rounds through the billet. Perhaps my hair was too thick anyway, and humidity made the excess fall, because after a while it stopped, so that baldness was never part of my fate.
For reading there was Life Magazine and the New Yorker, and slightly risqué stories in publications from Australia. The camp library provided Tolstoy’s Sevastopol, as well as The Kreutzer Sonata which puzzled me with its theme of fatal jealousy, and also a history of the Franco-Prussian War. Ronald Schlachter, another wireless operator, lent me I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves, which novels caused me to remark fatuously how exciting it must have been to live in Roman times.
‘Maybe not,’ Schlachter replied, ‘because bods like us would have been slaves.’
On a little wind-up gramophone we heard Harry James’ ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee,’ and made fun of ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. Time was passed in the NAAFI over pints of Tiger Beer, or we would walk up and down the beach and watch fishermen drawing in their catches of weird tropical fish, mindless pleasures after hours of concentration at the wireless.
A motor launch took us on picnic and swimming trips to Tiger Island, and leper huts between palm trees on Pulau Jerejak brought down a lugubrious silence in the few minutes passing. At the apex of our lives, a superstitious horror was felt at the closeness of human beings in the grip of incurable disease. Neither doctors nor maimed were visible, and we imagined those in the shuttered buildings slowly dying, and that being set apart from society in their contagion they must be suffering the greatest pain and humiliation of all.
Some old hands in their early twenties who had been abroad as long as four years waited impatiently for the number of their demobilization group to be made known. They invariably heard it even before the commanding officer of Butterworth, for as soon as it was decided at the Air Ministry which group was to be released that month a wireless operator at RAF Uxbridge would clandestinely tap out the number, with neither preamble nor signature, to an alert operator in Gibraltar, who relayed it to Egypt, from where it was bounced against the Heaviside Layer to Karachi, and spun on from there to Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore, a string of dots and dashes pinging and ponging halfway round the world in a few minutes. Whispering the number in the camp caused wireless operators to be regarded as beneficent magicians, and an occasional second helping came from the cooks at happy news passed on.
The trade of wireless operating blended with my temperament, and in the dead of night I would tune in on the spare radio to hear phrases of primitive music from the ionosphere, or a brewpot of jangled avant-garde sounds in no known language stirred around in the steely cackle of atmospherics. Such noises suggested other worlds where mysterious activities took place, and my pencil hovered in readiness for a spate of automatic writing, as if a text of vital importance to my life and spirit might suddenly come out of the Babel-screed.
Living from one wireless watch to the next, and with the time in between fully occupied, either the mind did not apparently exist, or what there was of it can never be recalled. Thought was expressed only in action, and if there were any thoughts they were so banal as to leave no mark in the memory. The most trivial actions drown the recollection of thought, though a semblance of inner turmoil indicated that the fusing of such wires could not go on for long without breaking, and that thought and action might one day separate from their apparently perfect marriage.
On the blackest of nights, when no aircraft were flying or land stations able to catch one’s Morse, I called up God and asked him to explain how the universe had been made and how far it was to the end of it. The fact that I had always told myself I did not believe in Him was brushed aside by the effrontery of the question coming to mind and acted on. Nor did His understandable refusal to respond deter me from asking a second or even a third time. Having a Morse key and a transmitter, it seemed a natural question to put. After all, He might have answered.
Chapter Twenty-one
As long as work was done well we weren’t much troubled. Shorts and plimsolls barely resembled a uniform in walking around the camp, but slovenly we never were, the only call for proper dress when stepping forward to salute before receiving a wad of dollar notes, or on any business in the headquarters area.
After a technical examination and speed test for Morse I was reclassified Aircraftsman First Class, bringing my rate of pay up to three pounds a week. All success in the RAF was measured by merit, which is why it seemed for a time my natural home. The week before the test I memorized simple circuit diagrams as if they were maps — as indeed they were — from AP 1726, the wireless operator’s vade mecum. I hardly knew what they meant but, with my practical experience, I passed at the high rate of seventy-two per cent.
As soon after pay parade as time off came, no buttons to shine though shoes had been well polished by our ‘bearer’, we rickshawed to Mitchell Pier and took the ferryboat Bagan to Penang. Alan Crossley, Frank Pardy or Ronald Schlachter guaranteed a ready group for a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston Café, then to see a film such as Cairo or Watch on the Rhine, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights.
A Chinese tailor ran me up a suit of white drill so that I could dress like any other European civilian on walking out of camp. At the Whiteaway Laidlaw department store in George Town I was measured for a sports jacket and trousers for use in England — where clothes were rationed and in utility style — attended by a white assistant as if in a shop back home, and not caring what was in his mind as he called me ‘sir’.
From the camp, or better viewed from the rowing boat out in the Straits, a mountain could be seen twenty-odd miles to the north, called Kedah Peak, or Gunong Jerai, set apart from the main range and rising to 4,000 feet as if, on the western side, coming straight out of the sea. The colouring, according to the state of sun and cloud, might give the illusion that the area of surrounding jungle was much larger than it was. Darker clouds on the summit could also make it seem higher and more remote, and thus even more tempting to explore.
I considered going on a bicycle to reconnoitre, prior to tackling the Peak on foot, having created in my mind an irresistible exercise ground of wonders and hardship. Its distinctive summit was the last unusual topography seen before going to bed, and the first tantalizing sign on walking between palm trees to the wash house with towel and toilet bag in the morning. The George Town library gave little information, except for a book saying that a king once lived on its slopes who had fangs and drank human blood, which superstitious belief was interesting only for as long as the smile lasted.