Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [209]
But there was still something that the young man from Blackett and Webb wanted to show him before he went and the Major, protesting weakly, allowed himself to be diverted towards one or two floats which had been designed to portray the social benefits which had attended these fifty years of successful commerce. Here was a papier mâché teacher beside a gigantic blackboard on which was written in the usual languages ‘All in it together’ and these small grey lumps which had still to be painted severally in dark brown, light brown, yellow and …
‘Yes, of course, “children of all races”,’ said the Major who was getting the hang of it by now.
‘And this figure on a horse which is meant to be a sort of Chinese Saint George is using his lance to kill … no, not a dragon, the Chinese are rather fond of dragons … but a hookworm, very much magnified, of course. But now, and this is what I really wanted you to see, we come to the most ambitious float of all from a technical point of view … though it doesn’t look much, I agree, until you see it working. Yes, it represents a symbolical rubber tree … It had to be symbolical because real rubber trees look so uninteresting … producing wealth for all races. If you look closely, Major, you’ll see that a hole representing the cut made by the tapper’s knife has been made in the bark. Now when I pull this switch here liquid gold pours out into this basin …’
‘Liquid gold?’
‘Well, actually, its just coloured water … now what’s the matter. Oh, I see, the pump’s not plugged in. Here we go!’ He pulled the switch and the tree began to spurt noisily into the basin.
‘It looks as if it’s … well …’ said the Major.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it does rather. But it was the best we could do. At first we tried a little conveyor belt inside the trunk which kept spilling coins through the opening in the bark and that looked fine, but the blighters kept pinching the coins. Still, it wasn’t a bad idea.’ He sighed and looked momentarily discouraged. ‘Anyway, don’t you agree that once we get this jubilee parade on the road it should make it clear to everyone what they will have to lose by exchanging us for the Japanese?’
46
There was an area of unusually dense jungle in that part of the Slim River region where General Percival had decided that a stand must be made if southern Malaya were to be given the time to prepare its defences: it lay a little to the north of the village and rubber plantation at Trolak where, incidently, one branch of the river flowed under a bridge. To cross this stretch of dense jungle both the trunk road and the railway were obliged to squeeze together and run side by side through a narrow defile which resembled the unusually long neck of a bottle. If the Japanese tanks were to continue their southward advance they would have no alternative but to come through this narrow defile. But just beyond its long neck the bottle opened out into the wider chamber (more like a decanter than a bottle) of the Klapa Bali rubber estate and of Trolak village. If the Japanese tanks once managed to pass through that long neck and get loose among the rubber trees, well … then there would be no stopping them. The only chance then, perhaps, might be to delay them by demolishing the bridge at Trolak and the Slim River Bridge some five miles down the road. And so, demolition charges had been set against these bridges, just in case.
The Brigadier in command of the 12th Brigade, which had been given the task of defending the defile, had established his Brigade HQ some distance into the Klapa Bali estate on the western side of the road. In the rubber on the other side of the road was the 2nd Battalion of his own regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, known since Balaclava as ‘The Thin Red Line’; the presence of the Argylls was naturally a source of comfort to the Brigadier for unlike many of the other