No places were dry for long, but we disregarded the frequent soaking of everything on our backs: while stripping off by the stream to get rid of leeches we saw the Avro-19 searching for those who were thought to be lost.
We went up into the jungle for the last time to bypass a ravine, then waded down the river which on the first day had been paddled along. Almost to our surprise, by four o’clock in the afternoon, the forest opened out and we were through. Hinshallwood walked across the dam to the hut, and telephoned the camp for a lorry to meet us. Our ragged patrol, boots almost off our feet, marched four more miles to the main road rather than wait to be picked up by the edge of the forest.
Chapter Twenty-three
Wearing our smartest khaki drill, we lined up in the CO’s office with the confidence of the absolutely guilty. In phrases of those days that salved the mind: butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths, and we didn’t have a leg to stand on.
I could not have felt more at ease. The CO had seen the diary and maps kept on the trip, and had already torn strips off Coleman and Hinshallwood, so on his asking why we had been so foolhardy as to vanish into the jungle for a week without taking a two-way wireless there was nothing we could do but stay silent. He went on for a while at how rash we had been, but a lightening of his features was detected when he concluded: ‘Next time, you’ll be carrying a full radio pack, because from now on you’re our Jungle Rescue Group. You’re the only ones on the station with the experience to go after any plane that crashes in that sort of country.’
‘You were lucky,’ Sergeant Flowerdew said, marching us out, and I wondered in what way he meant, but didn’t bother to ask. At the medical check on our return my weight had dropped a few pounds to 137, but we were passed as fit, and life was back to normal, except that the insurrectionary situation in the Peninsula deteriorated daily.
Miles from the camp, and isolated in a hut beyond the runway, D/F operators were vulnerable to terrorist bullets skimming through the night. Such a condition didn’t worry us, though we were aware of standing little chance against armed and silent men who might surprise us while busy at the radio. I erected an outpost system of tin cans on connected wires so that there might be a second or two in which to run into the dark with my rifle should any prowler come close.
Fancying one of the tins moved near midnight (it may have been the wind, or perhaps I was jumpy after all; certainly I was alert) I took the rifle, left the hut unlit, and stalked noiselessly through the elephant grass convinced someone lurked between me and the trees a few hundred yards away. Peering into the darkness, my shadow merged with that of the half moon, and when he moved I took aim, and let go a single round. The sharp echo went to heaven and down again, as if filling the whole province with noise while I fell back step by step towards the hut, and waited in concealment fifty yards to one side in case anyone else came close or appeared from the direction of the trees.
The noise of the shot brought a section of the Malay Regiment to my hut, but I denied having fired, and my word was taken. I doubt anyone was hit, though had no compunction at shooting to kill, since a person in the area at such a time could only have been coming to threaten me. A search for signs of a casualty in the morning revealed nothing. No one had said anything about the use or otherwise of firearms, in spite of the State of Emergency being well into its second month, but since we had them it seemed obvious that my rifle should be employed in accordance with the age-old maxim that the best way to defend oneself was to go out and meet the attacker halfway — at least.
All guns were later withdrawn from outstations and sent back to the armoury, on the assumption that if the hut was raided by the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army — no less — they would acquire first-class weapons and ammunition with little or no difficulty. To console us for being defenceless, patrols of native Malayan soldiers were increased in the area, but I saw few of them, and one night a whole platoon was found sleeping in the nearby fuel store, for which criminal misdemeanour they were dismissed from the service.
An operator who resented being without a weapon gave a bottle of whisky to a sergeant in the armoury in return for a Smith and Wesson revolver, and a carton of ammunition. He brought it in his pack on every watch, to lay loaded and cocked by the Morse key. I kept a bottle of rum to hand rather than continue with the uncertain advantage of a more lethal comforter — or adopt a course which was against regulations.
The four-engined Lincoln bombers of 97 Squadron flew to Malaya from the UK and began pounding suspected bandit hideouts in the jungle. All twelve would take off from Singapore island and head north-west, their wireless operators competing to be first in getting a bearing. As each string of Morse came hammering on the air I noted his call sign and told him to wait, and when they were in the correct queueing order I would go down the list until all were dealt with. Every bearing was sharp and therefore accurate, though it was hard to think their bombs hit much in the kind of jungle I knew about. But it was exhilarating to work with so many experienced operators in the sky at once, rather than spend hour after hour listening to mind-numbing atmospherics.
A company of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were billeted in tents within the camp boundary, and HMS Belfast used George Town harbour as a base for up and down patrolling along the coast looking for boats smuggling arms to the terrorists. We didn’t reckon much to the Army signallers, who were trying, and not doing very well, to get a message by lamp over to HMS Belfast one night. Ronald Schlachter finally took over and rippled it across.
Schlachter and I made fun of the Emergency situation by initiating ‘Bandit Routine Orders’, which we persuaded one of the clerks to type on Orderly Room foolscap and pin to the noticeboard beside the legitimate Station Routine Orders. An average sample of our nonsense might be: ‘Bandits are to fall in at 0630 Hours to take up amble-and-bush positions at map reference 123987, stop. Catchee erks from ship with knees not yet brown, in crossbow fire between dock and NAAFI, stop. Signed by the Red Admiraclass="underline" Get-sum Inn.’ They caused amusement for a few days, until torn down by an irate warrant officer.
I had expected to be in the Far East for two or three years, but it was decided that we would be trooping back to Blighty in July, after barely eighteen months. It seemed uneconomical of the air force, which had taken such trouble over our training, to let us go just as we had reached the height of our competence.
ROTB, the acronym for ‘roll on the boat,’ made a convenient code group for rattling out in Morse whenever the ennui bit deep, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to leave or not, a will o’ the wisp who couldn’t care less — on one level — carried along by the general euphoria of the men in the hut, who unanimously desired the boat trip back to civilian life, more able perhaps to imagine the future than I was. Most of them believed they had jobs to return to, and were not much troubled if they hadn’t, since there was work for everyone in those days. Demobilization for me was a precipice over which to do a free-fall into reality, but I could see only as far ahead as the ship departing from Singapore in six weeks’ time.