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By Root 2757 0

at his meeting in Segamat with General Heath and General Gordon Bennett, that although in most respects the narrowness of the Slim River position lent itself well to defence, the threat of amphibious landings further down the coast would make it untenable in the long run unless reinforcements could be brought up to cover the coastal area. The Slim River defile, however, provided the last chance of stopping the enemy short of Kuala Lumpur … or indeed, south of it for a considerable distance. For as you went south the knobbly spine of mountains sank back beneath the peninsula’s fair skin, which itself became pleasantly wrinkled with roads. There would be little chance in such favourable terrain of stopping the Japanese in Malacca. And so, if not in Malacca, it would have to be in Johore … if not on Singapore Island itself. In the meantime, the Japanese must be denied the airfield at Kuantan on the east coast, at least until the reinforcements of troops and planes expected in mid-January had arrived. Moreover, if the defence of Johore was to be properly organized, the Japanese must be halted for a time and the capture of Kuala Lumpur postponed. Everything pointed therefore to the critical defensive stand being made at the Slim River. The Japanese must be stopped there or the defence of Johore would be hopeless. That was why the Punjabis and the Argylls had to keep on digging themselves in even after dark on the following nights. Everything would depend on them.

45

As the late afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen over the Mayfair’s increasingly neglected and overgrown compound, two figures could be seen making their way along the well-trodden path towards the Blacketts’ house: one of these was easily recognizable as Matthew, normally dressed, looking somewhat pensive, but who was the other, this individual wearing what looked like a scarlet boiler-suit, a scarlet balaclava helmet from which horns protruded, and carrying a large toasting-fork? This, as it happened, was only the Major who with great reluctance had put on the suit which he had been sent by Blackett and Webb Limited for the dress rehearsal of their jubilee parade. He was now regretting the decision because he felt much too hot: you cannot expect to wear a balaclava helmet and horns in the tropics without discomfort. Besides, he was afraid that he might be the only person who had decided to dress up, and he now regretted having yielded to Walter’s insistence that he should personify Inflation. The Major swiped irritably with his toasting-fork at one of the giant thistles growing beside the tennis court and the air filled with drifting white down.

The Major, however, had a reason for wanting to keep in with Walter. Several of Blackett and Webb’s vans had been set aside for conversion into floats for the jubilee parade and the Major, to whom it had been perfectly clear for some time that the parade would never take place, was anxious that his AFS unit should be able to call on them in an emergency to supplement what scanty transport was available: this amounted to the Lagonda, Mr Wu’s Buick, a motor-cycle belonging to the estate manager and a couple of bicycles.

A site for the building of the floats had been chosen adjacent to the Blacketts’ compound in a yard surrounded by a cluster of dilapidated godowns which at some time in the last century had been used as storage sheds for a nutmeg plantation but for the past many years had been disused, at least, until recently when Walter’s excessive buying of rubber to circumvent the new American regulations had filled all Blackett and Webb’s other godowns to overflowing and obliged these tumbledown buildings, hastily restored, to accommodate some of the surplus. Walter had originally bought the former nutmeg plantation, which still boasted pleasant groves of lofty, evergreen nutmeg trees, in order to cushion his own property from its acquisition by disagreeable neighbours. But now it seemed to him that he could hardly have made a better investment. Where better could he have found to prepare in secret the floats