Another younger officer came up to take the captain’s place. He showed himself to be pretty competent. He kept his troops down and told them to direct fire to the hill, he’d worked out we were there. Full marks to him. He decided to stay low, and we could hear shouted and relayed orders. The afternoon thunderstorm rained on them and us both, clearing away the memory of their dead captain. Out on the beach, we could see the Japanese flogging some Malays into carrying the captain’s body to the barge. They beat the poor natives all the way across the stones, with half an eye on the hill all the time, worried about us, worried about our silent weapons.
I took a roll-call and two of our fellows, I discovered, hadn’t made it back through the jungle to us. They were a young army sergeant, Kelly, and an English fellow I hadn’t got to know so well because he had a quiet nature and seemed to choose chiefly to talk to his fellow Pom, Rufus. His name was Lieutenant Carlaw, and he had been assistant to Lower in teaching us how to ride the SBs. I hoped Kelly and Carlaw would join us on the hill once night fell. Then we could all slip away to one of the other islands, maybe Proma NE3, and we could hide there and creep back over here at night and wait for the rendezvous with the sub. I could see Proma from our position. Across the water it looked good to me – even thicker cover than NE1. But it seemed to lack a beach, at least on this side. Well, we’d just have to presume one existed on the blind-side.
When it was dark, Filmer and I sent the others off over the hill to fetch their folboats and drag them down to the beach on the east side of NE1. We were conscious that if the Japanese had landed there, we would have needed to fight for them. Leaving, the fellows moved as Rufus had taught them, flitting like ghosts. We saw a patrol boat circling the island, but Jockey timed it and it appeared off the eastern beach only every few hours. I went down to send all but one folboat away. In the acute dark, we had been able to find only seven of the vessels, not enough for all. We had been trained how to handle this. Three of the boats would need to tow a passenger, and we used the stratagem in each case of a pair of trousers stuffed with coconut husks, the passenger floating in the Y and holding on as he was dragged through the water. Jockey and I were leaving last so we weren’t burdened in this way. We went back to Hammock Hill after the first six boats got off and waited till the last hour and minute, 3.45 a.m., for Kelly and Carlaw to turn up. It was such a little, intimate island. We had to presume they’d been killed or captured. Otherwise, we reckoned, they’d easily be able to find their way back to our hill.
At the last we smashed the Bolton radio we weren’t able to use because the code had been sunk in the junk or was with the Boss. But we all had walkie-talkies in our boats for contacting the Orca when it turned up. We had packed the folboat so tight with supplies, there wasn’t really room for my legs, so I paddled kneeling.
Pushing off the beach with Jockey, I felt a real dingo. Lieutenant Carlaw was apparently an Oxford graduate in Middle Eastern Studies. Kelly was only twenty years old, and an athlete, and a handsome kid, a bright one too. We made a very nice little beach on the west side of NE3 – Proma – twenty minutes before dawn.
15
By morning, we were on NE3 and had all our folboats under cover and were making a dump for all our gear. We made a camp on the crest amongst cactus palms and pandanus and undergrowth netted by creepers. But from it we could see anyone coming from any direction. We drew breath and we hoped, and were more tired than we’d ever been from such a short paddle. Some slept – it was the fight and the sleepless night that had worn them out.
But I watched everything that was happening on NE1. Soon the daylight woke everyone and I was joined in that exercise of watching. I think we felt like people whose house, Serapem, had been taken over and we didn’t approve of what the new owners were doing.
Then we saw one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. We saw Lieutenant Carlaw running down out of the thick cover on the hill on NE1, sprinting south into scattered palm trees with just a pistol in his hand. There was no sign of Private Kelly. The first thing I thought was, I hardly know him well enough. I heard Jockey groaning, Jesus, Jesus! Poor bastard!
The enemy were all over our hill over there, that’s where Carlaw was running from, down into the clearing, amongst the papayas and coconut trees, but wide open, a clear target amongst the volcanic rocks. He was making for the sea. He could run, that boy, a beautiful runner, and he could probably swim strongly too, and intended to reach another island. We saw him weaving. You could hear them firing at him, and by the rocks on the edge of the sea he turned. We saw him twice take clear aim and fire, and the Japanese were coming close to him not only down the ridge from the hill but from the place where their barges were too. And now he was out of shots, so he threw his pistol away, and he just stood there and blessed himself – I hadn’t even known he was a Tyke, in fact, because he was English I believed he wasn’t – and a number of shots lifted him and threw him down the last decline to the sea. And everyone on our new place NE3 was groaning, Poor bastard, poor bastard! And then there was a second of mercy, when one of the Malay fishermen came up and took Carlaw in his arms and looked down in his eyes, but the Japs ended that with blows of their rifle butts.
Despite all they’d seen, two of my men vomited.
We watched them make the Malays dig a grave for Carlaw. We watched them all the time for three days, but on the morning the sub was due, the barges pulled away, leaving a section of soldiers and a few Malay Heiho, but taking the Malay fishermen with them. The Englishman Filmer was very troubled and came to me. He had written the fishermen a reference, saying they should take it to the British in Singapore after the war. He was sweating that the Japanese hadn’t found it. All at once it seemed very difficult to do good in this world.
Slowly, as we settled in, we became aware of things we’d left behind in the confusion of the dark. I’d left my camera. It had pictures in it. Filmer had left his sketchbook journal. Damned awful not to be able to vent oneself on paper, he told me. I was getting to forgive him for what happened on the junk and to think, Maybe it could have happened to anyone.
We watched for the Boss and Rufus, and Lower too. If they landed at Serapem and saw we’d been jumped there, they would quite naturally come here. We were getting used to the idea they might have been caught.
Two of us always rowed over to NE1 every night from then, landed on the east side, climbed up to the lookout tree on Hammock Hill. We listened and called for the sub every night on our walkie-talkies, but it did not respond. If it had broken the surface, our eagerness would have picked it out in the darkness. At first we hallucinated: There it is! Half a dozen times an hour. Then we got more critical with ourselves. It didn’t appear the first night. We told ourselves it was coming – even if late, or even if we’d missed it, for it was to return every night for a month if necessary. But it didn’t come at all. God knows what happened to it.