On wireless watch, keen to keep a meticulous log, I recorded the ding-dong interchange of signals on to spare paper, then entered them neatly into the book when a free moment came. Sharing the watch periods with Frank Pardy, Pete Spruce and ‘Tash’ Horton, we shepherded aircraft on their journeys across South-East Asia. Every direction-finding station, along the route and off, would exchange all information and position reports about any plane airborne in case something should go wrong.
An old log book, which I still have but shouldn’t, records how a non-stop Lancastrian, on its lonely route from Karachi to Singapore during the night of 12–13 January 1948, was tracked by its airfield of departure, monitored by Negombo in Ceylon, picked up by me at Butterworth, and drawn to base by Singapore. Fussy and proprietorial, we listened even when atmospherics bushed the eardrums hour after hour up to midnight and through to dawn, ever on the alert for that half-murdered squeak of urgent Morse from an aircraft homing through the night.
Parts of the kampong area around Mitchell Pier were declared out of bounds to all airmen because of prostitutes setting up in business. Having the reputation of being knowledgeable about maps, I was asked to make a coloured enlargement from the one-inch sheet on which to show the forbidden zone, handiwork to be lodged within a glass-framed noticeboard at the gate.
Shortly afterwards, the CO having no plan of the airfield and its outstations, I was given a hand-held compass and asked to do a survey. For a few days, with a bag of instruments, and lunch in my haversack — looking now and again for a red light from the tower warning me to get out of the way because a plane would be landing — I wandered the runway and its environs taking bearings. Such work was an enjoyable combination of the physical and the technical, joining my knowledge of air navigation to what I had learned years ago about surveying in Practical Knowledge for All.
The length, alignment and width of the runway provided a ready-made base line on which to triangulate from either end the various radio facilities, the fuel store, the fire engine shed, and control tower. Magnetic variation was zero, so all angles read true, simplifying matters still further. Halfway through, much data already transferred from notebook to drawing board, the clerk of works came across a plan made after the construction of the base and I was, as it were, laid off.
When a Dakota transport descended on to the airstrip early in 1948, a tractor took the crates from its belly to a dry site several hundred yards beyond the runway on the opposite side to the paddy field. The wherewithal for a new HF/DF station had arrived, and I was sent out to begin operating the moment it was put up, as if the wireless mechanic seconded for the job had only to wave a wand and the scattered pieces would join themselves together.
Older than me by a year, he sat on the bare earth with a toolkit at his feet, looking at the crates through cigarette haze as if wondering what to do next. I felt sceptical as to his abilities, unable to conceive why a sergeant and several men hadn’t been sent up to do such work, but after a while he stood up and took off his cap — he was in full khaki drill uniform — ambled to the nearest crate, and split it open. In something like a couple of hours, with hardly any assistance from me, he erected and bolted together the wooden sides of the hut, then put on the roof. A few hours later, when the aerials were in place, we carried the Marconi-Adcock equipment inside. Next morning, after a special plane sent from Singapore had tested the bearings and found them as perfect as could be, the station was declared operational. The mechanic then hopped the next flight back to Changi.
Neither assistance nor supervision was necessary at the D/F hut, and in any case there was only one chair to sit on, unless advantage was taken of an old cable drum outside. The morning and afternoon watches were interesting because more aircraft were about. During the nightwatch, the air muggy though slightly cooler, traffic was slack, and I lounged in the cane armchair with earphones around my neck, reading a borrowed copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, an absorbing but tragic story concerning the sort of people I had known, which left me with a feeling of hopelessness about their condition. A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison fell in the same genre, yet he was less sombre because the style was more polished, the plot more artful. I was amused by The Diary of a Nobody, though snatched any likely item the library could provide, whatever the quality, including books by H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse, Rafael Sabatini, P. C. Wren and Warwick Deeping.
On the standby radio at midnight the haunting music of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite Number Two came shortwaving through static out of some place in the Pacific, as if it had followed me halfway round the world from a summer’s evening in Nottingham when I had heard it in the house alone and thought that my soul would burst. This adventitious repeat in the hut indicated a black hole in my personality that must sometime start to fill, though it was impossible to know how it would happen from the not sufficiently unhappy state I was locked into.
By dawn, sleep had nearly won. Convinced the log book was kept in precise block capitals, an hour later showed the letters spider-crooked. The early morning aircraft sending its met report, or calling for a bearing, helped me to wakefulness, after which I made tea on the primus, and waited for the lorry to take me back to camp. Dawn sunlight on Penang made a spectacular flood of menacing green and mercurial vermilion on the landscape, and I wrote a score of lines which, hardly knowing what to make of them, came out as a kind of free verse poem from which all emotional content was missing.
Some kind of change in my life must have been taking place within the agreeable trance of duty done and leisure enjoyed, a spirit clandestinely deciding what my fundamental obtuseness would not be able to deny when the moment of reality came. There was no intimation that such was on its way, because a vague day-to-dayness was the whole of my existence, and I belonged to where I was to the extent that such feelings as weighed on me from time to time did not allow me to see into the future, or imagine anything I could not bear to contemplate.
It was not part of my nature to live without a goal, however, so I began assembling a group of friends to explore the Kedah Peak area. Schlachter and I pedalled to Bukit Mertajam and, leaving our bikes by the railway line, shinned up 1,800 feet of its forested hill in an afternoon, so easy a climb not to be expected, however, on Kedah Peak. I persuaded Ron Gladstone, a wireless mechanic, to come on the trip, and we made an appointment to see Mr Robb, the Chief Surveyor in George Town, who during half an hour of his time told us he had ascended the Peak in 1939, but from the northeast, where a motorable track went almost to the summit.
This sounded too easy for us, who intended going up from the south, which Mr Robb didn’t believe to be feasible, because the area was covered in primary jungle, and tigers were said to roam there. This only increased our enthusiasm and, realizing there was nothing further to say, he provided us with the necessary map sheets, and wished us luck.
An education officer recently posted to the station ensured that travelling players passed our way. Dangerous Corner and Dover Road were put on in the NAAFI, and an occasional lecturer came to talk on current affairs. Classes in Malay were started, but few could be attended by me because they clashed with times on watch. In any case, who was there to practise with? The dance-girls at the City Lights laughed when I tried.