The Plantation (28 page)

‘Heavens, Roland,’ she said. ‘We just can’t sit here and wait for the Japs to get to Utopia
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We have to do something.’

So I decided then and there that my wife, my son Philip, a mere three years old, and my sister-in-law must also try to get out of Malaya and return to their family home in Australia.

‘Margaret, you’re right. You have to try and get a ship back to Australia. I’m sure that the authorities will be organising some sort of evacuation from Singapore, which I suppose is safe enough. I’m going to have to join my unit straight away, so you’ll have to take Bette, Philip and Father and get to Singapore. But you’ll be fine. Hamid will drive you as far as KL and you can get the train from there.’

My wife stared at me. ‘You can’t be serious. You can’t just abandon us to take our chances.’

‘What choice do I have?’ I tried to explain. ‘I have to stay and fight the Japs.’

‘Margaret, we’ll be fine,’ Bette, her sister, assured her. ‘We’ll have Eugene with us and he knows the country better than anyone, and Gilbert’s in Singapore, trying to ship out rubber for his company. He’ll organise things for us when we get there.’

But my father had other ideas.

‘I’m not leaving the plantation,’ he said. ‘I have built this place from the ground up. It’s been my life’s work. Besides I will not leave my people. They have been faithful and I must remain loyal to them. These people trust me, so what would they think if the tuan besar fled and left them to the Japs. No, it’s simply not on.’

The decision that neither my father Eugene, or myself would be travelling south threw Margaret into a frenzy of organisation and packing. I tried to persuade her to travel as lightly as possible since time was of the essence and petrol could be difficult to get, but she wanted to take everything. Her sister Bette, a more practical young woman, persuaded Margaret to pack a trunk of her valuables and sentimental possessions, and I quietly buried it in the garden, where I hoped it would remain safe from whatever was to occur.

Before they could leave with Hamid we had two other late-night visitors, also fleeing south from Penang. They told us more about the bombing and the evacuation.

‘It has all been such a shambles,’ said Ethel Bourke, an old friend. ‘We were told that we had to leave secretly. No thought was given to our Asian staff, who were just left to face the Japs. I feel so ashamed that we did that. Surely there must have been some way to help them. Anyway, we came over to the mainland on an old Straits Steamship ferry and then we were supposed to be packed into a train heading south. It was impossibly crowded and I was worried all the time about the train being strafed, but it so happened that my friend Mildred here knew where there was a company car, so we left the train and drove down under our own steam.’

Their story made me reassess my original plan and, taking Hamid to one side, I told him that he would be driving the women and my son all the way to Singapore. My father briefly laid his hand on Hamid’s shoulder, telling him that since he had been a faithful driver for many years, he could be entrusted with the lives of the mems and the tuan kechil.

Philip did not want to leave, and he clung to me when I carried him to the car. I told him he was to be brave, to listen and do what his mother and aunt told him. I said that he had to be a big boy until we were all home again at Utopia
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when the war was over. My wife flung her arms around my neck.

‘You will be careful, Roland. I don’t know how I would manage if anything happened to you.’

I had decided that Hamid should drive by night, pulling into rubber trees should there be any danger. Hamid said he had friends who would help them and once the women had safely arrived in Singapore he would make his way back to Utopia. I believed him and felt comforted that he would be here for my father.

I was relieved the next morning that the women were on their way to safety. I said goodbye to my father when I was collected by another volunteer, Bill Dickson, and we drove to meet up with the rest of the unit. Bill, who was some years younger than me, was a fine young man and a cadet in the Malayan Civil Service. I liked him enormously.

The drive was certainly eventful. We took it in turns behind the wheel. Driving hard, fast and incautiously was perhaps not wise. Although it was a road we traversed often, we were generally in the hands of our syce, and our drivers knew every inch of these roads, whereas Bill and I were often caught unawares. Suddenly we saw the dirt on the road ahead of us exploding. Coming very low towards us over the top of the road zoomed a Jap plane. Instantly, Bill slid off the road into the edge of a plantation and we rolled out of the car, trying to make for shelter in the undergrowth. As we crawled in between the rubber trees, we heard our car being strafed. Seconds later, the plane had gone. We waited, hoping there were no more planes, and were astounded that the vehicle had not burst into flames.

‘That was a close call,’ remarked Bill, in a tone of voice that suggested he was used to these sorts of encounters. ‘How are we going to get the car out of here?’ The task of pushing the car back onto the road was indeed going to be difficult, for although it seemed relatively undamaged, one wheel refused to move as the mudguard was flattened against it.

While we were trying to straighten out the mudguard, a frightened whisper came from further in the plantation. Shyly, an Indian girl, holding an infant, came towards us. In a mixture of Malay, Tamil and English she told us everyone in their village had left because a Jap plane had machine-gunned it and they were too frightened to come back. She had been hiding in a rice paddy, but she was now alone, so we offered to drop her and her child off at the next village once we got the car going. As we banged at the jammed mudguard the woman went back into the plantation and returned with a tapper’s knife and small axe. With these we were able to free the mudguard.

She shook and wept in the back seat, the child at her breast until we left her at a nearby kampong.

We were near to our destination when I remarked, ‘If we can drive through the back roads and the plantation roads, what’s to stop the Japanese doing the same? Why would they just stick to the main road? They’ll come around, behind our troops.’

I already knew Bill’s reply. ‘I suppose that’s their plan.’

We joined our unit, fired with enthusiasm to prevent the Japanese advance. But, to our frustration, annoyance and disappointment, our observations and suggestions were ignored by the officers of the regular troops. The Perak Volunteers were treated as ill-informed amateurs.

‘Those regular troops are damned silly,’ said Bill. ‘With our local knowledge of the topography and back roads and our contacts we could set up a great intelligence network. We know which are the best places to take on the Japs.’

‘I think that although the regular soldiers are pretty good fighters, their commanders don’t really know what they’re doing. I wonder about their competence,’ I replied.

‘I would never accuse our British troops of being lily- livered,’ said Bill. ‘But, it seems to me, that as soon as any troops get within range of the Japs, they are ordered to make a strategic retreat.’

I had to agree. ‘The trouble is that there is no full backup either. There’s no air cover and no big guns. And it seems to me that we’re losing a lot of ground without putting up much of a show.’

‘You know, there’s another problem. It’s as though the Japs and us are fighting different wars,’ said Bill. ‘Our men are weighed down with gear and heavy equipment, while those Japs paint themselves green, stick leaves on themselves and stalk us in rubber-soled shoes with small-calibre guns. It’s just not cricket.’

We both agreed that another of the great oversights by authorities was their refusal to make use of the loyal Chinese.

‘There must be a quarter of a million Chinese of all classes and cultures in Malaya who are united in their dislike of Japan especially after the Japs invaded China. I bet they would love to have a crack at that enemy,’ I added.

‘I’m afraid the pooh-bahs turn up their noses, just because they’re Chinese and therefore aren’t thought trustworthy enough to defend the British empire,’ said Bill.

‘I suspect that there is another reason. Some of the Chinese workers here are tainted with the whiff of communism. They say that they are working towards an independent Malaya. Won’t happen, of course, but it makes the authorities nervous. That’s another reason why they won’t work with them.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Bill. ‘But what the British authorities forget is that the Chinese hate the Japanese more than they hate us, especially after the terrible Rape of Nanking.’

Having aired our grievances we decided that, as we were volunteers, we had a choice in the matter of how we fought. And after several more days of endless retreats, we thought that the whole Malayan peninsula was going to fall, so we had to make a decision about what we were going to do.

‘I say it’s pointless waffling around with the tommies. Their damned officers still don’t know what they’re doing,’ said Bill.

‘I think that if we don’t decide to get away quickly, we’re going to be caught by the Japs and then what good would we be?’

Bill jumped at this idea. ‘Listen, I’ve still got that small sailboat down on the coast. What if we find it and try to get away and head for Colombo?’

So we decided to strike out for the coast, get Bill’s boat and sail to Ceylon. Luck was with us and we made the twenty or so miles to where Bill’s boat was on the coast with hardly any problems. We camouflaged it to look like a fishing craft and we travelled at night, until we made the open seas of the Indian Ocean. We made landfall at the Nicobar Islands and, as luck would have it, a small freighter was able to take us on to Colombo. We realised just how lucky we had been when the Nicobar Islands were taken by the Japanese only a couple of weeks later.

In Colombo, where we fell in with compatriots, we learned that Malaya had by now succumbed to the Japanese. Days later we heard that Singapore had also fallen, and that thousands of allied troops were now guests of the Emperor. We both felt very glad that we had been able to get away. Although I had heard nothing at this stage about my wife, or the rest of my family, I was sure that they would have had time to be evacuated and I prayed mightily that they were safe. I was also concerned about the welfare of my parents and hoped that they were both safe as well.

At first our time in Colombo was frustrating as we felt we weren’t doing enough to help towards the war effort. We were too far from all the action, although the Japanese were beginning to get closer to India. We both managed to find desk jobs with the army, organising supplies for the troops and other mundane, but necessary, tasks and we were eventually moved after many months to New Delhi, to take up positions at South East Asia HQ.

We knew there was a lot of intelligence gathering from behind enemy lines, and, when we heard about Force 136, both Bill and I latched onto the idea of joining it as a way of being more useful.

‘Force 136 is training and sending men into Japanese-occupied territory. What they need are local people like us who know the country, the jungle, the interior, and have local contacts,’ I told Bill.

‘Sounds like a good thing to do,’ said Bill. ‘No one else has valued our local knowledge.’

So we decided to make pests of ourselves until we were eventually asked to join the special intelligence unit and we were flattered by our reception.

‘You’re just the sort of chaps this unit needs,’ said the CO. ‘You know the people, speak the language and understand the natives.’

Bill and I felt greatly pleased that our local knowledge was to be put to use.

‘What do you need us to do?’ I asked.

‘As you two would know,’ explained the CO, ‘prior to the outbreak of war there were several communist cells in Malaya formed for the express purpose of getting rid of the British. Well, things have changed. Most of the commies are Chinese and many of them have decided that the Japanese are worse enemies than the British, so they have proposed a truce.’

‘I’m not surprised by that change of heart, sir,’ I responded. ‘How are you able to use it to your advantage?’

‘As a fifth column. They can get about the country behind enemy lines. They are saboteurs, but this is not their main function because we know that the Japs retaliate to that sort of thing with dreadful reprisals, so we primarily use the communists as intelligence gatherers in preparation for an Allied invasion.’

‘What do you want us to do? Act as go betweens?’ asked Bill.

‘More or less. We’ve got several chaps working with communist units, but we want you to try and make contact with one of our chaps in particular. He’s been working in the central mountains, staying with the Orang Asli, in one of their villages, but we haven’t heard from him for quite some time. The communist unit he was working with was extremely effective, and we would like to make contact with it again as well as finding out what happened to our man, Roger Burrows.’

‘How do we find this village and the communist unit, and what makes you think they will trust us?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think trust will be a problem. Here, I’ll show you on a map where Roger’s village is.’

When the CO pointed out the place, Bill shouted, ‘I know that place. I’ve even been there a couple of times, doing some research for the DO, counting heads, that sort of thing. I can even talk a bit of their lingo.’