Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [13]
‘But don’t you see, Papa dear,’ said Joan, reclining on her bed in her underwear and luxuriating in the draught of the fan directly above her, ‘how it could come as a shock to a nicely brought-up girl like me who has always been either at home or at school. It was absolutely shocking, I mean, and Mama was quite as taken aback as I was, at least she turned as white as milk and I thought she was going to faint. Her eyes got a funny look in them and even Carlos, in his absurd British clothes, looked a bit shaken. Actually, it was a good job Carlos was there because although I don’t think he’d seen much of the rougher side of life either, at least his presence was reassuring. He was a man, at any rate, even though I know you think he’s a bit ridiculous, and his clothes, a tweed suit I think it was, did tremendously inspire confidence. Anyway, without him and his tweeds and his monocle I’m quite sure that Mama would have fainted and think what problems that might have caused in the middle of I think it was called Hongkew and Mama already complaining that she was worn out because we had spent most of the afternoon trailing around the Japanese part looking for this wretched silk shop and being sent on one wild-goose chase after another and it would soon be getting dark and she wanted to get back to Bubbling Well Road where she felt safer and, anyway, I should have felt distinctly uncomfortable, particularly as all the rickshaw coolies vanished the moment they saw there was going to be trouble with Japanese soldiers arriving and, trust him! Carlos had told his chauffeur to pick us up not there, but two or three streets away. By the way, have I shown you the remains of my blisters?
‘Well, no, Daddy, I agree that nothing did happen … We weren’t actually molested but we easily could have been. It was more the feeling of being, well, vulnerable. One moment we were strolling along peacefully and the next the street was full of cars and lorries and little Jap soldiers pouring out … Well, all right then, I admit there was only one car and no lorry and only three or four soldiers poured out of it, the car, I mean, but still it was quite frightening when they started herding us in to the side of the pavement with their rifle butts and there was an officer who looked like a chimpanzee with a sword several times too long for him which he kept tripping over in the most ludicrous fashion. Until then it seemed at least fairly amusing, though Mama was getting apprehensive and Carlos was looking helpless and saying something like: ‘What a to-do!’ which frankly wasn’t very helpful of him because Mummy and I could think of that much ourselves. Well, we tried to walk on and they wouldn’t let us, and then Carlos suddenly stopped saying ‘Bless my soul’ and began to rattle away in Portuguese and got quite red in the face because he had seen that they’d blocked off the end of the street and he was afraid that he might be involved in heaven knows what, a diplomatic incident perhaps?
‘Of course, there was no reason to be alarmed, I’m not saying there was! All I’m saying is that it did occur to one that the Jap soldiers could turn nasty and their bayonets looked very sharp, even though there were only three or four of them, and in the meantime the street had suddenly filled with people pressing around the doorway that the soldiers had gone into and some of them looked pretty worked up about something, so unlike the Chinese who are usually well-behaved and mind their own business (or at least they do here in Singapore, don’t they?) and I’d never realized before how much smaller they are than us, because our three heads were sticking out of the crowd and it felt a bit like Gulliver’s Travels or something.
‘Anyway, then two Jap soldiers came out of the doorway again carrying someone. All I could see at first was the front man who had a very shiny leather boot gripped in the palm of each hand … I never did see the rest of him properly, I’m glad to say, just a hand trailing along the pavement and then a glimpse of a shape with its tunic and trousers undone