Life Without Armour (16 page)

Squeaks of Morse around midnight were rendered indecipherable by atmospherics screeching into my earphones. I turned the control wheel to bring the signals clearer, nursing it for a while till recognizing my own call sign tapped out by a radio officer in a Lancastrian passenger plane on the 2,000-mile leg from Darwin. Monsoon cumulus up to 30,000 feet hid the stars, so the only navigational aid over the whole stretch, apart from fallible dead reckoning, was the Marconi equipment on my desk connected to four tall aerials outside. Such responsibility was not lost on me and, like a friendly and concerned spider at the centre of its web, the succulent prize was drawn to a safe landing by more and more accurate bearings the closer it got.

With Bill Brown, another operator, we hammered two Mosquito droptanks together with spars of wood to make a crude type of catamaran. Homespun paddles took us halfway across the estuary on an afternoon's exploring trip, and water gushing in led me to wonder if the plywood hadn't been made at Toone's factory three years before. We aimed towards shore in the remaining tank, until that also split along the bottom, marooning us on a shelf of bush-covered mud on the edge of the mangrove swamps.

The tide was on its way in but, having spotted the name ‘Alligator Shoal' on a map in the signals' office, I didn't relish swimming the necessary distance to firmer ground, though what there was to wait for neither of us knew. I kept the thought to myself as to whether we would make it to safety, finding interest in white clouds above the water, or in the green hills of Johore. Due on watch in a couple of hours, and though by now imbued with the anarchic spirit of ‘couldn't care less', it was plain that life would turn serious indeed should duty be missed.

A Chinese fisherman, upright in a sampan and pushing the oars before him, glided from behind the bushes, having already seen the half-submerged tangle of our homemade craft, and veered towards us. Barely fitting into his boat, water level with the sides but sliding harmlessly by, he put us ashore near the wireless hut. We lacked the verbal means of saying thank you, and our gestures turned his wrinkled face into a sketch of laughter.

After a month at Seletar, four of us signallers were ordered to the staging post of Butterworth, a few hundred miles up the Straits of Malacca. I was glad to do more travelling, especially in an Avro-19, which lifted from the runway at Changi and followed a route marked on my map from Langar. The sea to port was stippled with ships and junks, waterways meandering through coastal swamps. Eastwards the jungle backbone of the peninsula was topped by cumulo-nimbus, and I speculated on the chances of finding out what the terrain would be like to hike in. Tarzan films, as well as too much Rider Haggard and Edgar Wallace, fuelled a congenital urge to go into a tropical rain forest and perhaps discover something about myself, or at least break such romantic notions of adventure by a dose of reality.

The thought was momentary, and premature, the others in the plane pointing through the windscreen at Penang, not so densely forested nor half so high as the mountains, but a jewel-like island lost sight of as the pilot banked over the water towards Butterworth airstrip, set the plane neatly down, and taxied to the ramshackle control tower.

Life was more basic, billets of long thatched huts, called
bashas
, among coconut palms on the beach facing the ships in George Town harbour. My horror of snakes diminished on closer contact, and in any case few were dangerous, though a rustling in the latrine bucket taught one soon enough to button up quickly.

The HF/DF hut where I worked was a patch-roofed eight feet by eight structure a couple of miles up the coast and off the far end of the airstrip, set on a square of beaten mud in the middle of a paddy field. A python which occasionally splashed its proprietorial way across the water was ignored, but when a small snake curled around the leg of a farmer ploughing with his buffalo outside my hut he pulled so violently that the reptile snapped in two, and though it had already bitten and drawn blood he must have known it was not venomous as he went on stoically with his labour.

I jumped from the back of the lorry on the runway with my haversack of rations and descended to the raised path to begin the nightwatch, having barely room to pass the afternoon operator on his way out, so that we had to edge around each other to avoid slipping into a foot or so of water on either side. First thing to do at the hut was sign on in the log book and check what if anything was happening on the frequency, signifying that the responsibility for the next fourteen hours was all mine, as it had been when put on my own machine at the factory, or installed in the runway caravan on air-traffic control.

Chair, table, bed and a small cupboard furnished my residence, with the big outside for a toilet. The childhood fantasy of my cousin Jack and me had been that all one needed for a happy life was just such a hut as I now had charge of, and I would have been content to live there for more time if need be than the duration of the usual stint. A Sten submachine-gun and Short Lee Enfield rifle, with plenty of ammunition, completed the outfittings, and in the hour of light still left I cleaned both guns, firing a few rounds into the water from the Sten to be sure it worked, and hammering a steel rod down the barrel to get the bullet out when it jammed.

The music of the spheres came into my earphones, and I communicated in Morse with Rangoon and Singapore, chatted to Saigon using my bits of French, and even for half an hour after dawn made contact with such far-away places as Karachi, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Every transmitter, even if of the same make, had a different tone and, no need of call signs, one soon learned to know them at the moment of their tune-forking into the ears.

This furthest outstation of the camp was connected by field telephone to the control tower a mile away, and though letters home were marked
ON ACTIVE SERVICE
I never felt anything but safe after shutting the doors and lighting the place from the power of a large accumulator. Mysterious splashings from outside were ignored as I sat at the table reading, and when appetite struck there was a tin of sardines or cheese, and half a loaf in the metal ammunition box used for keeping provisions dry and free from insects. A primus to make tea was slightly less demonic than the specimen at Seletar, but I had got the hang of using it, and could brew up in double-quick time – of necessity on the stove because there was no gathering of wood in a paddy field.

I was allowed to close my station for the night, unless a late plane from Singapore was on its way with mail and supplies, in which case I would listen until it landed. Stretching out on the string bed, proper sleep was hardly possible, for at the slightest sound my right hand would touch the loaded rifle with its short meat-skewer-type bayonet firmly in place.

Opening the wide doors to daylight at the operating time of seven o'clock a wash of blood-red sun from over the palm forest slowly painted the stalks of rice swaying in the water. A flushing out of my insides with a dose of strong tea was followed by a snack if I was hungry. Taking stock of the larder, two tins of sardines were surplus to requirements, and on my giving them to the Chinese farmer already ploughing near the hut he took off his wide round hat and smiled acceptance, and presented a coconut of appreciation to the man who came on after me, unable perhaps to tell us one from the other.

An aircraft on a regular early morning meteorological reconnaissance tapped out its reports, which figures were telephoned to the control tower for analysis. The frequency (or wavelength) was also used by any plane in distress and, when the navigator of a Beaufighter sent an SOS, the Singapore operator and myself fixed his crash-landing site accurately enough for him and the pilot to be picked up from an uninhabited island by Air Sea Rescue two hours later.

Monsoon time brought frequent rain, and on the long watch, light off during sleep to save power, came the noise of an atmospheric battleground such as I had never heard before. I recalled how my Grandmother Burton, at the first distant rattle of thunder, would shelter under the stairs with an oil lamp till the storm was finished. How, I wondered, would she cope with this?

Ripples without let-up lighted the hut through the cracks. Chilled sweat was in my bones by morning, and a foot of water, in which floated a small drowned snake, washed around my bed. The primus was also submerged, meaning that breakfast must be put off for a while.

It was plain that the directional properties of the aerials were useless, so the signals officer telephoned permission for me to get out. Laden with rifle, Sten gun, ammunition, haversack, and log books stuffed between vest and shirt to keep them as dry as possible, I set off for the runway. The path had been washed down, which meant wading through the flood, cape flapping uselessly in horizontal rain, to a lorry waiting on the tarmac. That patched and eerie place was closed and dismantled, and I worked for a while in the comfortable signals section on the camp, no longer able to give bearings, but keeping the frequency open for distress calls and emergency air traffic.

The fifty-hour working week left time for a derelict boat found on the beach to be lovingly tarred and carpentered, fitted with rowlocks, tiller and a mast. A dozen of us contributed many hours to its upkeep, as if under the skin of airmen lay the frustrated souls of matelots. We sculled, or tacked with a fullblown but patched spinnaker, to ships in George Town harbour, dodging multicoloured little sea snakes for a swim over the side, and at dusk hauling it up the shelving beach to safety from the waves.

Scads of my hair began to come out and, horrified at having a pink skull like every man of my father's family, I asked my mother to send a bottle of Silvikrin – as advertised in monthly editions of the
Daily Mirror
which she sometimes posted and which went on their rounds through the billet. Perhaps my hair was too thick anyway, and humidity made the excess fall, because after a while it stopped, so that baldness was never part of my fate.

For reading there was
Life
Magazine and the
New Yorker
, and slightly risqué stories in publications from Australia. The camp library provided Tolstoy's
Sevastopol
, as well as
The Kreutzer Sonata
which puzzled me with its theme of fatal jealousy, and also a history of the Franco-Prussian War. Ronald Schlachter, another wireless operator, lent me
I
,
Claudius
and
Claudius the God
by Robert Graves, which novels caused me to remark fatuously how exciting it must have been to live in Roman times.

‘Maybe not,' Schlachter replied, ‘because bods like us would have been slaves.'

On a little wind-up gramophone we heard Harry James' ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee,' and made fun of ‘Sparky's Magic Piano'. Time was passed in the NAAFI over pints of Tiger Beer, or we would walk up and down the beach and watch fishermen drawing in their catches of weird tropical fish, mindless pleasures after hours of concentration at the wireless.

A motor launch took us on picnic and swimming trips to Tiger Island, and leper huts between palm trees on Pulau Jerejak brought down a lugubrious silence in the few minutes passing. At the apex of our lives, a superstitious horror was felt at the closeness of human beings in the grip of incurable disease. Neither doctors nor maimed were visible, and we imagined those in the shuttered buildings slowly dying, and that being set apart from society in their contagion they must be suffering the greatest pain and humiliation of all.

Some old hands in their early twenties who had been abroad as long as four years waited impatiently for the number of their demobilization group to be made known. They invariably heard it even before the commanding officer of Butterworth, for as soon as it was decided at the Air Ministry which group was to be released that month a wireless operator at RAF Uxbridge would clandestinely tap out the number, with neither preamble nor signature, to an alert operator in Gibraltar, who relayed it to Egypt, from where it was bounced against the Heaviside Layer to Karachi, and spun on from there to Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore, a string of dots and dashes pinging and ponging halfway round the world in a few minutes. Whispering the number in the camp caused wireless operators to be regarded as beneficent magicians, and an occasional second helping came from the cooks at happy news passed on.

The trade of wireless operating blended with my temperament, and in the dead of night I would tune in on the spare radio to hear phrases of primitive music from the ionosphere, or a brewpot of jangled avant-garde sounds in no known language stirred around in the steely cackle of atmospherics. Such noises suggested other worlds where mysterious activities took place, and my pencil hovered in readiness for a spate of automatic writing, as if a text of vital importance to my life and spirit might suddenly come out of the Babel-screed.

Living from one wireless watch to the next, and with the time in between fully occupied, either the mind did not apparently exist, or what there was of it can never be recalled. Thought was expressed only in action, and if there were any thoughts they were so banal as to leave no mark in the memory. The most trivial actions drown the recollection of thought, though a semblance of inner turmoil indicated that the fusing of such wires could not go on for long without breaking, and that thought and action might one day separate from their apparently perfect marriage.

On the blackest of nights, when no aircraft were flying or land stations able to catch one's Morse, I called up God and asked him to explain how the universe had been made and how far it was to the end of it. The fact that I had always told myself I did not believe in Him was brushed aside by the effrontery of the question coming to mind and acted on. Nor did His understandable refusal to respond deter me from asking a second or even a third time. Having a Morse key and a transmitter, it seemed a natural question to put. After all, He might have answered.

Chapter Twenty-one