His heart bumped and trembled. My number’s up, though they didn’t shoot first, so maybe I can argue, give a few air-force secrets away. He looked for something he might use as a weapon. “Who’s that?” he called again.
He picked up the hammer and swung open the door. Light blinded him and he saw nothing. Then he made out an officer and a sergeant, and slid his hammer back to the table. “I didn’t hear you come up,” he said, observing the dark shadow of a jeep by the aerials. “I was working on the set.”
They looked around. The NCO, a sawn-off little bastard with a mug like Al Capone, carried a Sten: “Orderly officer,” he barked, as if expecting him to jump to attention and throw a well-ironed ceremonial uniform over his bare chest, oil-stained shorts, and unlaced slippers.
“Are you the only one here?” the orderly officer said. He was a flying-control officer, an enormous red-haired Jew of thirty-odd, more like Goliath than David, with the stature of the proverbial village blacksmith. Brian nodded. “What are all them tins doing around the hut?” the sergeant demanded. “I nearly broke my shins on ’em.”
“What tins?” Brian asked, reverting from an intelligent wireless operator to a Radford lout. The orderly officer glanced at his wireless set: “Any kites around?”
“Not tonight,” Brian said, adding “sir” when Al Capone gave him a dirty look. “Where’s your rifle?”
“I haven’t got one, sir. They called ’em in from out-stations in case the bandits should get in and take ’em.”
“I don’t suppose you feel very good about that,” the orderly officer said sympathetically.
“I don’t mind.”
“Why do you keep the doors closed and locked?” Al Capone said.
“To keep insects out.”
“Gets a bit stuffy, don’t it?” Brian kept quiet, while Capone looked the place over as if it were a pigsty he’d stumbled into instead of a brothel. “Are you all right out here then?” the orderly officer asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Telephone in order?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rations sufficient from the cookhouse?”
“Yes, sir. Fine.”
“What did they give you?” He told him: half a tin of milk, some sugar, tea, a loaf, and a tin of sardines.
“Enough?”
“Plenty, sir.”
He turned to go: “If you want anything, phone me at the control tower. I’ll be there for the night.”
Brian watched them drive off. It was the first time an orderly officer had thought to call that far from the bar at the officers’ mess. Maybe they are bothered whether I get shot after all. Tiredness rushed back, ached into his eyes like creosote. I don’t care if all the Communists of the world are creeping up on my hut to burn it to the ground, or if all the kites above Malaya are getting sore throats sending SOS’s: I’m dead-beat. He lowered the volume of the receiver, stretched out on the bed, and fell into a deep sleep till daylight.
He read every newspaper from front page to last, hoping to discover how the “war” was progressing. A so-called “state of emergency” brought in martial law, and he noted with some confusion the fact that he was part of it. Because others in the camp were also mixed up, a civilian education officer came from Singapore to give a lecture on the political situation. He was a thin, dried-out man of middle-age wearing an immaculate flower-blue shirt and beige trousers, a deliberate touch of informality that would endear him more to his khaki-drilled audience. The same talk, called “British Achievements in Malaya,” had been given at every camp along the line, so by the time he reached Kota Libis he was practised and adept in his delivery, the marked set of his jaw and his steel-blue eyes somehow dividing his personality between severity on the one hand, and final disbelief in his own words on the other. Even if what he said didn’t seem convincing to himself, he was a gifted enough speaker to make it appear so to the more simple of his listeners. The NAAFI canteen was filled with those who had come to hear him spout on the official view of the Malayan rebellion, and after the station adjutant had spoken a few words by way of introduction, the first twenty minutes of his address were an account of how the British had acquired Malaya, how they had rid it of disease and laid a superlative system of communication, pushed back the ravaging waves of the jungle and brought rubber into the country. He then came to the present day:
“War was declared, in a manner of speaking,” he said, “on June 15th. An emergency meeting of a hundred Perak rubber-estate managers took place at Ipoh, and it was decided then and there to ask Sir Edward Ghent (the High Commissioner, as you all know) to declare a state of emergency because of widespread outbreaks of lawlessness. For this lawlessness the planters blamed the weakness of civil government, as well as Communist political agitators, who were also behind the murders that were beginning to sweep the rest of the peninsula.
“It was about this time that the Cornish manager of a tin mine near Ipoh was shot dead while paying his employees, and robbed of two thousand four hundred dollars.” [“And ten thousand people starved that month,” someone near Brian said.] “The Straits Times also reported that three British rubber planters were murdered near Ipoh. They were captured by Chinese Communists armed with Sten guns, tied to chairs, and riddled with bullets. All European families were ordered to evacuate the area at once, though only a few would do so. A law was passed securing capital punishment for illegal possession of firearms” [It’s like a law being passed in 1939 making it criminal for the Jerries to have guns, Brian thought] “a law which, while necessary from a legal point of view, made little if any difference to the gathering wave of war coming out of the jungle. In such a country as this a few thousand men, resourceful and determined, can hold out for a long time, inflicting far more damage and casualties than they would sustain themselves, at first. Reinforcements come in constantly from South China, moving by secret jungle routes through Indo-China and Siam. British subjects in Malaya are now living under hard and dangerous conditions. Their bungalows — as most of you may well know — are turned into miniature fortresses, outposts on the edge of the jungle, guarded day and night, surrounded with barbed wire and sandbags. The planters carry on their work armed with rifles and sub-machine-guns, and these men and their families are showing the usual British obduracy under such difficult circumstances, an obduracy always unexpected by their enemies. The Communists had hoped for a concerted rush for the boats at Penang and Singapore, but they were disappointed.
“However, we mustn’t underestimate this Communist threat to Malaya. They possess a highly efficient, well-organized, and strictly disciplined army, moving in battle formation and receiving orders from well-equipped and well-camouflaged headquarters, staffed by experienced officers. Their idea is to strangle Malaya’s rubber production, to render the country a dead loss economically, and destroy the conditions of civilization built up patiently by the British during the last hundred and fifty years.
“Effective measures are being taken to meet this menace.…”
Awkward questions came at the end, such as: “Since this looks like a popular uprising, wouldn’t it be better for the British to clear out before too much blood is shed?” And: “Would it be so bad to the British economy if Malaya was lost?” The lecturer answered with calmness and intelligence, though some noise came from people at the back of the hall who wanted him to know they weren’t convinced. A Scottish cook from Glasgow next to Brian said that his MP was a Communist, so wouldn’t it be wrong to say that all Communists were evil? “So’s mine,” a Londoner said. “Piratin’s his name, and my old man voted for him.” The lecture was brought to a close by a few words on the difference between Communists who are elected into power (as in England) and those who try to take a country over by violence against the wishes of the majority (as in Malaya).