Flight-Lieutenant Rice, the education officer, perhaps encouraged by his wife, found sufficient talent to form a concert party. Mr Margolis, the airstrip meteorologist (together with his wife) also liked the idea, as did others from the signals section who, having the kind of intelligence which wasn’t afraid to show enthusiasm, enrolled in ‘The Butterworth Variety Group’.
For some reason it was decided that I should recite the Stanley Holloway monologues ‘Albert and the Lion’ and ‘How Sam Won the Battle of Waterloo’, as well as render a couple of Cockney songs such as ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’ and ‘I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I Am’. The Lancashire and London accents weren’t familiar, but a talent for mimicry enabled me to convince, in a comic sort of way. Nor had I ever memorized so many lines (or any at all, come to that) but jettisoning all timidity I took on the parts with sufficient gusto to amuse.
My involvement in the concert party helped to gain Mr Rice’s backing for the expedition to Kedah Peak. He presented the scheme as an educational experience to the CO, whose permission I naively hadn’t thought to be necessary providing we went in our own time. But such official blessing gave access to all facilities, and in April four of us borrowed the Jungle Rescue jeep to have a look at the area.
Beyond the kampong of Semiling, leaving the jeep at the estate manager’s house, we walked four miles between rubber trees and by the Sungei Bujang, to a dam where the track ended. The stream bed was wide and shallow, rocks scattered here and there, and we probed a few hundred yards north till the steep and seemingly impenetrable jungle reared to either side. Heavy knives would be needed to cut a way through, though we hoped to ascend most of the way by the stream, then zig-zag up the few hundred feet of escarpment (marked clearly on the map) to the summit. Ron Coleman, George French, Ron Gladstone, Ron Sanger and myself finally set the date. The CO insisted that an officer go with us, and Flight-Lieutenant Hinshall-wood, the camp dental surgeon, volunteered. We were also told to take a backpack wireless and keep in Morse contact with the camp. Since two of us were operators and one a mechanic this seemed no difficulty, and a twice daily schedule was worked out.
Gladstone thought that for fitness’ sake he and I should spend an hour running up and down the beach every evening, but after a couple of half-mile jogs my chest seemed full of rusty nails. I considered myself as fit as ever in my life, and that whatever happened on Kedah Peak running was not likely to be called for. Nor did Gladstone continue the exercise.
Appointed navigator, I collected the same compass used on my aborted airstrip survey, and enlarged a map of the Peak area to leave space for detail not on the Survey of Malaya sheets. Certain parts of the projected route were enlarged six times in outline for plotting bearings from subsidiary summits to give our position, and bound atlas-wise to avoid opening a larger map.
Gladstone assembled the stores, including rifles and a shotgun, with fifty rounds for each. We devised a list of rations to last ten days, most of the food in tins and weighing nearly 200 pounds which, divided between us, clocked each pack on the scales at almost half our body weight. After a medical check declared us fit the MO insisted that we have a typhus inoculation, and take anti-malaria tablets for ten days before departure (and for ten days afterwards), this latter precaution seeming unnecessary, since we were going into an uninhabited area.
On the morning of 12th June, all ready to leave, a worried man came to the lorry from the wireless section and said they couldn’t get the pack radio to work. A condition being a condition, indeed an order, we should not have gone, but the power of optimism prevailed over insubordination, and the confidence induced by a six o’clock breakfast made it impossible to abort what had been in preparation for weeks. Hinshallwood, by now as keen as the rest of us, looked up into the palm leaves and said nothing, so Corporal Coleman banged against the cab, and told the driver in no uncertain terms to pull his finger out and get moving.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Kedah Peak trip — for it was no more than that — has been used in various of my books, spun-dried to produce outlandish shadows of fictional characters. The present account, shunning exact repetition as far as possible, tries a peeling back of the skin so as to reach the truth of the experience, though it is unlikely to get much closer. Only by what came afterwards can light be realistically flashed back to when half a dozen of us vanished for six days from the world. During that short enough period Chinese communist bandits began killing whoever they could of the British, service personnel or otherwise, in an effort to terrorize them out of the country so that they could set up a Marxist government.
It is fairly certain that the officer commanding RAF Butterworth wished the exercise of climbing Kedah Peak had never been conceived, especially since we had set off without radio communication and could not be recalled. Perhaps I exaggerate, yet six of his men were apparently lost in the jungle, which in those early days of the Malayan Emergency was assumed to be swarming with competent and ruthless guerrillas waiting in well-prepared ambush positions for just such noddy-boy action men as us.
We were seen by the CO, perhaps, as a group of lunatic, disobedient and sedentary signals types unable to give much fight if attacked, or to survive in such terrain even if we weren’t, and he wasn’t to know he couldn’t have been more wrong — though his anxiety was understandable. I don’t recall whether news of our disappearance was given to South-East Asia Command at Singapore, but he must have passed some uncomfortable days wondering whether or not our names would have to be added to those already filling the casualty lists.
A search party was sent by lorry to our jumping-off place, for I had left details and a sketch map of the route with the education officer. Once there, as we gathered later, they walked a short way up the Sungei Bujang beyond the dam, blew a few blasts on whistles whose noise would have been smothered by the first high waterfall if not before and, realizing in any case the futility of their task, withdrew. By this time we were several miles away, well above the 3,000-foot contour line and close to the Peak.
As if to prove that the RAF always looks after its own (and it did), the search party next day drove almost to the Peak on the track leading in from the north-east, but by now we were well on our way down. On the sixth day we noticed the silver fuselage of an Avro-19 flying over a clearing where we had paused in the sun to dry our clothes, and imagined it to be passing on a postal run to Rangoon, whereas it had been sent to look for us.
It was eleven o’clock before we set off on the first morning, rocks underwater so coated with algae that a couple of us capsized before establishing a suitable balance for walking. Even in my factory days I hadn’t carried so much, at least not on my back and for such long hours, and the others must have felt it even more.
Corporal Coleman took charge of our party because he had done some bushwhacking in East Africa. A few years older, and experienced enough to know that the first day ought to be easy, he said nothing at our stopping for lunch, or when we later stripped off by a pool to swim, as if out on an extended picnic.
At three o’clock the stream narrowed into a ravine, and our only way forward was to cut a way up into the jungle. Soon afterwards the world changed to a maelstrom of rain which hammered at first as on a roof, and then gathered to fall in plate-sized splashes from the ceiling of trees, drenching us in seconds. Vegetation was so dense that visibility was never more than a few yards.