Part 64 (1/2)

'All right, take the job! Be a showgirl!'

'But Franz!'

A plane roared low overhead and the heads of the audience, many of them wearing helmets, wilted in silhouette against the flickering screen. 'I suppose it would be as well to put one's tin hat on,' mused the Major, returning his attention to the screen. But he put the matter out of his mind. He was too susceptible to the cold, rather sad beauty of Hedy Lamarr. He had never been able to resist that sort of woman: she reminded him of someone he had known, oh, years ago ... That melancholy smile. 'What's she like now?' he wondered. 'Getting on, of course. Water under the bridge,' he thought sadly. Yes, Hedy Lamarr was very much the Major's cup of tea.

Now it was the dressing-room before the first night.

'Nervous?'

'Oh, Jenny, I ... I can't even put on my lipstick.'

'Relax, honey. They won't be lookin' at your mouth.' A breathless, manic Judy Garland burst in. The girls chattered excitedly. They were quelled by a man who said: 'Listen, kids-I've got something important to say to you ... in a few minutes you're going on in your first number. D'you know what that means? It means you're a Ziegfeld Girl. It means you're going to have all the opportunities of a lifetime crowded into a couple of hours. And all the temptations ...'

'Oh dear,' said Matthew, drowsing with his chin on his chest. 'Soon I shall go and look for Vera.'

'The ”Dream” number. Places for the ”Dream” number.'

'All right, girls. And good luck.'

The music swelled and, as it did so, a bomb falling not far away caused the building to shake and one or two small pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. In the warm darkness the audience stirred uneasily and one or two silhouettes, crouching under the beam from the projector, made their way to the exit.

But this was the 'Dream' number. A plump, sleek tenor wearing a voluminous pair of Oxford bags began to sing: You stepped out of a dream, You are too wonderful to be what you seem.

Could there be eyes like yours?

Could there be lips like yours?

Could there be smiles like yours?

Honestly and truly, You stepped out of a cloud I want to take you away, away from the crowd ...

Matthew fell asleep, woke, fell asleep, woke again. His limbs had grown stiff from sitting so long in the same position. He longed to stretch out and sleep ... in clean sheets, in safety. The palms of his hands, raw and weeping from the gla.s.s splinters that clung to the hose, had begun to throb unbearably; on the screen one glittering scene followed another: he could no longer make sense of them. The screen filled with balloons from the midst of which Judy Garland emerged dressed in white. Then there were girls dancing on moving white beds, girls in white fur, girls with sheepdogs. Meanwhile, the plot was begining to thicken beyond Matthew's powers of comprehension with Lana Turner forsaking a truck-driver for an older man with an English accent, identified as a 'stage-door johnny', who offered her a meal in a French restaurant, jewels, minks. This man bore a very slight resemblance to the Major. Judy Garland danced frantically and sang: They call her Minnie from Trinidad, And all the natives would be so sad, Ay! Ay! Ay! ...

If Minnie ever left Trinidad!

She was wearing a turban, three rings of big white beads and a striped dress, through the open front of which there was an occasional glimpse of her childishly muscled legs. Matthew found something distressing about her manic innocence. He fell asleep and woke again.

Now there was the shadow of the fat tenor thrown on to the sail of a yacht. As he spun the wheel he sang: Come, come where the moon s.h.i.+nes with magic enchantment, High up in the blue sky above you.

Come where a scented breeze caresses you with a lovely melody. While my heart is whispering 'I love you.'

Then Hedy Lamarr, reflected in a mirror misted over with steam, was getting into her bath, but Matthew could no longer make sense of it all and the others were asleep: even the Major missed this important development. Again and again the girls drifted up and down brilliant staircases wearing elaborate constructions of stars on twigs, of stuffed parrots, of spangles, trailing miles of white chiffon ... and outside, beneath the music of the soundtrack, the thudding of the guns continued without a pause. The girls now appeared to be clad only in flas.h.i.+ng white beads. On and on they went filing up and down staircases. Their clothes grew ever more elaborate. One girl had an entire dead swan strapped to her chest with its neck round hers. Lana Turner, descending yet another staircase, but not so steadily now, for in the meantime she had taken to drink, at last pitched over senseless while supporting a whole flight of stuffed white doves.

'Gos.h.!.+ How can a girl do that to her career?' asked one of the other girls.

'I must go and find Vera,' whispered Matthew to the Major. But the Major was still asleep. Matthew did not wake him but made his way stiffly out to the foyer. He stood there for a few moments gazing out in bewilderment as the last glittering staircase faded from his mind and was replaced by half a dozen motor-cars blazing fiercely in a car park a hundred yards away.

Although Matthew had no clear idea where he should look for Vera, it seemed to him quite likely that he would find her sooner or later. After all, the s.p.a.ce in which they could avoid each other was shrinking rapidly; they were like two fish caught in a huge net: as the net was drawn in they were inevitably brought closer together. The difficulty was that a million or more other people had been caught in the same net and now here they all were together, like herrings in a flas.h.i.+ng bundle dumped on the quayside ... it was difficult to see one herring for all the others. Finding himself across the road from Raffles Hotel he went inside and telephoned the Mayfair. But Vera still had not returned and there had been no word of her.

In the past few hours a movement of refugees had developed from west to east across the city as the j.a.panese pressed in towards the outskirts of Tanglin and from Pasir Panjang towards the brickworks, Alexandra Barracks and the biscuit factory. As the fighting drew nearer, the Asiatic quarters emptied and people fled towards the Changi and Serangoon Roads with what few belongings they could carry, rus.h.i.+ng together in a dying wave that would presently wash back again with diminished force the way it had come.

Matthew allowed himself to be carried along by the tide of refugees flowing from the direction of the padang padang and the cathedral. His watch had stopped and he had no idea what time it might be ... It had grown dark while he had been in the cinema and it was no longer possible to make out clearly the features of the people he saw in the street ... strained, blank, Oriental faces, men and women with swaying poles bouncing with the rhythm of their steps. Matthew felt sorry for them. What business was it of theirs, this war conceived hundreds of miles away and incubated in Geneva! and the cathedral. His watch had stopped and he had no idea what time it might be ... It had grown dark while he had been in the cinema and it was no longer possible to make out clearly the features of the people he saw in the street ... strained, blank, Oriental faces, men and women with swaying poles bouncing with the rhythm of their steps. Matthew felt sorry for them. What business was it of theirs, this war conceived hundreds of miles away and incubated in Geneva!

He plodded along mechanically, so tired that time pa.s.sed in a dream. The palms of his hands continued to throb, but at a distance, as if they scarcely belonged to him any more. Presently he reached a place where the macadam road-surface, melted by the heat of the day, had been set on fire by an incendiary bomb and was burning bright orange. He hurried past it, aware that it must create a dangerous pool of light to attract the planes which still lurked in the black sky above. There was evidence of looting, too: he found himself trudging through sand-dunes which lay across his path and turned out to be sugar from a nearby store. He saw men and boys crawling in and out of shattered shop windows and a shadowy figure with a rickshaw full of bottles offered to sell him a bottle of brandy for a dollar. Half a mile further on he stumbled into a twenty-five-pounder field-gun halted in a prodigious traffic jam at a fork in the road: there were other guns, too, a little further on, and a great deal of cursing could be heard. A young officer sat on the wheel of one of the twenty-five-pounders.

'You don't happen to know where we are, do you?' he asked Matthew. 'We spent the afternoon over there firing on a map reference given us by the Sherwood Foresters, but the j.a.ps landed a mortar on our OP truck and our maps went up with it.'

'I think this must be the Serangoon Road,' said Matthew. 'If you take the left-hand fork you go to Woodleigh. I don't know where the other one goes.'

'We're trying to get to Kallang.'

'Kallang should be over there somewhere,' said Matthew vaguely, pointing into the blackness with his throbbing hand. 'Those gun-flashes must be the ack-ack from the aeodrome, I should think. But you'll have to go back into town to get there. I don't think there's any road across. Are the j.a.ps somewhere about?'

'No idea, old chap. To tell the truth I doubt if I'd know one if I saw one. I've only been here a week. You'll probably find them up the road somewhere. Well, thanks a lot.'

Matthew walked on into the darkness. Now there came a trickle of refugees from the opposite direction. He could just make them out as they flitted by with their bundles, some dragging carts, others steering monstrously overloaded bicycles. A party of men with rifles pa.s.sed by: his pulse raced at the thought that this might be a j.a.panese patrol. The houses dropped away now; for a while there was a lull in the traffic and he could hear the guns grumbling for miles around. He wondered now whether it would be unwise to stretch out and sleep by the roadside, but plodded on, nevertheless. He was very thirsty, too, and his mind dully contemplated the thought of cold water as he walked. At length, however, he could walk no further: his legs would no longer carry him. An abandoned cart lay nearby at the side of the road. He crawled into it and fell asleep immediately with his arms over his face to protect it from mosquitoes. The battle for Singapore eddied and flowed around him while he slept.

72.

When Matthew awoke day was breaking: the country round about was already suffused in a dismal grey light that reminded him of winter in England ... with the difference that here it was sweltering hot still. While he had been asleep a lorry had parked a few yards away in the spa.r.s.e shade of a grove of old, healed-up rubber trees. A British officer and an Australian corporal sat beside it, swigging alternately from a khaki water bottle. Matthew's thirst had revived with horrible and astonis.h.i.+ng power now that he was awake and he could hardly avert his eyes from the water bottle. The corporal noticed and said: 'You look as if you could do with a drink. Come and have some water for breakfast.'

Matthew took the water bottle and drank. He was so thirsty that he had to force himself to hand it back before he finished it. The officer's name was Major Williams. He said: 'You look a mess, old boy. What have you done to your hands?' Matthew told him. He nodded sympathetically and said: 'Come back with us and we'll get you a dressing.'

They climbed into the lorry's cabin and set off. Major Williams commanded a mixed battery of 37-inch heavy AA guns and 40-mm Bofors on the airfield at Kallang. He explained that the j.a.panese planes were at last flying low enough to be in range of the Bofors. Until the past week only the 37s had been able to get near them. He added: 'We lost half a dozen men, though, in a single raid yesterday. It's not as if there are even any b.l.o.o.d.y planes left on the aerodrome. I don't know why they bother.' They drove on some way in silence, Matthew beginning to feel thirsty again.

'None of this makes any sense to a chap like me,' Williams said after a while, gesturing at the rubble-strewn streets. 'I used to work in an insurance company before the war.'

They had barely reached the aerodrome when a siren began to wail. The corporal, who was behind the wheel, accelerated down one of the supply roads, slamming to a stop some fifty yards short of the nearest gun emplacement: all three sprinted for cover. 'We have ammo in the back,' the corporal said when he had recovered his breath. 'It wouldn't do to be caught in the open sitting on that lot.'

Now, all around the aerodrome the guns began to thunder. A squadron of j.a.panese bombers was approaching. This was not a high alt.i.tude carpet-bombing raid; the planes were coming in low and had split up before reaching the target to confuse the ack-ack guns. A scene of frenzied activity confronted Matthew in the sandbagged emplacement where he now found himself. He had no idea what was happening and hung back, anxious not to get in the way of the frantically working gun crew. He gazed in wonder at the great 37-inch gun looming above him; its two enormous, tyred wheels rearing off the ground gave it the appearance of a prancing prehistoric monster, Meanwhile the range was read off on the predictor, sh.e.l.ls were brought up, their fuses were set and they were stacked into the loading trays. At a little distance on either side an appalling shrieking and popping had begun as the Bofors guns poured their small, impact-fused sh.e.l.ls into the sky at the rate of two a second. To this shrieking and popping was added the prodigious roar of the heavy guns and the crump of bombs that made the ground ripple beneath his feet.

Matthew had never seen a gun fired at such close quarters and was overcome by enthusiasm. 'There's one, get it down!' he shouted, pointing and even climbing on to the sandbagged parapet in his excitement. 'Here it comes!' But the gunners paid no attention to him. They worked on grimly, for the most part not even looking up at the sky. They seemed to be working in a daze, automatically. Their hands were blistered and in some cases as raw as Matthew's own. The sweat poured off them. Sometimes they staggered under the weight of the sh.e.l.ls as they handed them up. 'Magnificent! What splendid men!' thought Matthew, shouting and waving them on like a boat-race crew.

But now another bomber was clumsily droning towards them over the field, very low at no more than a few hundred feet, perhaps, coming from the direction of the river. Matthew leaped up again on to the parapet of sandbags and pointed, speechless with excitement, for evidently the gunners had not seen it. They continued to fire, not at this plane which lingered tantalizingly almost on their muzzle, but at some other aircraft which drifted miles above them and was scarcely to be seen through the canopy of smoke and cloud. Matthew, who did not know that the huge 37-inch would have been useless against a hedge-hopping plane, it was too slow (what you needed was a fast-swinging, rapid-firing gun like the Bofors, a glorified machine-gun), jumped up and down, almost having a fit. 'Look at this one!' he cried in a frenzy and again he pointed at the bomber which was still crawling steadily and now rather menacingly towards them, barely skimming the row of wooden huts on the far side of the field.

'Fire!' howled Matthew, gesticulating. 'It'll get away. Oh, my G.o.d! Quick!' But the men continued to serve the gun not placidly, no, but steadily, grimly, and the gun continued to fire at the other plane, remote, maybe twenty thousand feet above them and no longer even visible but obscured once more by the canopy of smoke.

'Can they be deaf?' groaned Matthew, looking, it seemed, into the very eyes of the oncoming bomber-pilot, and concluded that perhaps they were deaf as anyone would be, standing beside those guns all day. 'This may be dangerous,' he thought, jumping down from the parapet. But his excitement was too much for him and he promptly sprang up again, to see the Bofors on each side of him firing over open sights at the plane which was now a mere hundred yards away. For a second the two streams of sh.e.l.ls formed two sides of a triangle whose apex was the bomber itself. The gla.s.s c.o.c.kpit suddenly vanished, as if vaporized. Matthew ducked involuntarily. A dark shadow covered him, like a lid on a pot. An appalling rush of air and a quaking of the ground, in complete silence, it seemed.

Matthew again jumped up, in time to see through the smoke the bomber departing peacefully over the flat, marshy ground in the direction of Geylang, but very low ... and suddenly it seemed to trip on some obstruction, and then tumble head over heels with a tremendous explosion. Now it became several independent b.a.l.l.s of fire that raced each other onwards over the flat ground burning brilliantly as they went and leaving the main hulk of the aircraft behind. Even the great noise this had caused had only reached Matthew faintly. The crew of the 37 had stopped firing, they were grinning, their mouths were working and they were waving their fists, Matthew swallowed and the sound suddenly came back. He, too, joined in the cheering. Around them all the guns had fallen silent for the moment. Williams appeared presently, having detailed one of his men to find Matthew a dressing. 'I'm glad we got another one before we give up,' he remarked.