Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [246]
Nearby at the Mayfair those of the Major’s firemen who were awake after their night’s work listened wearily to the sirens. Only when the guns at Bukit Timah opened up did they make a move to take shelter. Here, as almost everywhere else on the island, it was hard to see any distance, except upwards. And so as they struggled out of the building, still red-eyed and bewildered from lack of sleep, they looked upwards … to see a densely packed wave of Japanese bombers flying at a great height and directly over Tanglin. In a moment the leading bomber would fire a burst of machine-gun fire: at this signal all the planes would drop their bombs at the same moment and there would be havoc on the ground. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards from where they stood the light ack-ack battery over the brow of the hill was blazing away quite uselessly, it seemed, for the bombers were flying well out of range.
Now the aeroplanes above, like monstrous insects, began to deposit batches of little black eggs into the sky and a fearful whistling grew in the air around the men fleeing through the flowerbeds. Soon the shelter was crammed and people flung themselves down in any hole or ditch they could find while the Major, wearing a steel helmet, bundled the girls from the Poh Leung Kuk and other latecomers into the recreation hut whose walls had been padded with rubber bales, mattresses and cushions, more as a gesture than anything else. As he did so the first bomb landed in the long-disused swimming pool sending up a great column of water which hung in the air for a moment like a block of green marble before crashing down again. Another bomb landed simultaneously in the road blowing a snowstorm of red tiles off the Mayfair’s roof and out over the compound, and another in the grove of old rubber which lay between the Mayfair and the Blacketts’ house. The last explosion, though some distance from both makeshift shelters, was strong enough to blow in one wall of the recreation hut, hurling those who had been huddled against it back into a jumble of cushions, mattresses and struggling bodies: the roof, too, began to sag and utter piercing cracks. In the deep hush which followed, the telephone could be heard ringing, very faintly, in the empty bungalow. People began to extricate themselves from the jumble on the floor of the recreation hut. Nobody seemed to be badly hurt.
Abruptly there was a roar overhead and everyone ducked. ‘It’s one of the RAF buses!’ someone shouted as a Hurricane vanished over the tree tops. A ragged cheer went up. The telephone was still ringing: it seemed a miracle that the wires had not been brought down in the bombing. The Major ran towards the bungalow to answer it. He had to swing himself up by the verandah rail because the wooden steps had been carried away by the blast from the bomb which had fallen in the road and now sagged in a drunken concertina some yards from the building. As he had expected they were being called to a fire: houses and a timber yard between River Valley Road and the river had been set alight.
Shortly afterwards a strange cavalcade was to be seen setting out from the Mayfair. In the lead came the Major’s Lagonda towing a trailer-pump, followed by Mr Wu’s Buick crammed with passengers. Next came two Blackett and Webb vans commandeered from the nutmeg grove by the Major and it was these which lent the Mayfair unit its air of rather desperate carnival, for there had been no time to unbolt the bizarre wooden super-structure which had been fitted on top of them; besides, it might give added protection from shrapnel. The first van, towing a second, newly acquired trailer-pump, still carried the gigantic facsimilies of red and blue Straits dollar bills, complete with slant-eyed portrait of the King. From the other van eight long arms painted dark brown, light brown, yellow and white,