• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2779 0

of a few weeks the population had suddenly doubled to over a million as refugees poured across the Causeway from up-country. By the time a hole had at last been blown in the Causeway and the flow of refugees had dried up, the Island, and Singapore Town in particular, was swarming with people who had nowhere to go. From now on, almost everywhere you went you would see people with suitcases or bundles sitting by the roadside in whatever shade they could find, under trees or on the pavements of covered ways, clustering around water-taps or begging food from passers-by. To Matthew and the Major and even to Dupigny who had spent so many years in the swarming cities of the East, this sudden increase in Singapore’s population was quite unnerving. Among these aimless crowds of refugees they themselves felt a loss of identity and purpose. They felt themselves losing their accustomed rank as Europeans, their special status, in that great, amorphous, anonymous herd of humanity trapped there in a burning city and unable any longer to exert any control over its own destiny.

Even after the demolition of the Causeway more refugees still continued to appear in Singapore Town, evacuated from the northern part of the Island by the Military who were preparing their defences. From the beginning of February a curfew from nine p.m. to five a.m. had been in force, but you cannot confine people to their houses if they have no houses to go to; it was not very long before the city’s population, abnormally swollen by refugees and demoralized troops, had begun to show signs of getting out of control. The first sporadic cases of looting occurred in bombed-out districts. Rumours of the excesses of undisciplined troops, for the most part Australian, circulated among the alarmed Europeans: someone had had his car hijacked at gun-point-by drunken soldiers carousing with prostitutes from Lavender Road, and someone else had heard of a rape of English nurses on waste land near the biscuit factory. This sudden collapse, which you could almost feel in the air, of normal standards of behaviour was the most frightening thing of all, more frightening even than the Japanese bombers. As a result, anyone who had still hesitated over leaving, and who had permission to do so, now made up his mind.

Thanks to the Major’s influence at the Chinese Protectorate, Matthew had at last succeeded, after more anxious hours of waiting, in having Vera’s name registered at the P & O’s temporary office in Cluny Road. But Vera, though she had seemed in mortal fear of the Japanese while they were still hundreds of miles away in the north, now that they had come to within a few miles, and could even be seen with the naked eye (so one of the transient officers at the Mayfair asserted) strutting on the sea front at Johore Bahru, had grown calm and apparently resigned. When every day, Matthew telephoned the P & O to find out if there were any ships sailing and, again every day, he received a negative answer she did not seem to be particularly disappointed. She merely shrugged her shoulders and smiled. In any case, he had less opportunity to see her now. While most of his waking hours were spent at fires, Vera had taken to working equally long hours as a volunteer nurse at one of the makeshift hospitals which had sprung up on the fringes of Chinatown to cope with the steadily increasing civilian casualties. Matthew continued doggedly to telephone the P & O, however. He was determined that she should not be in Singapore when the Japanese arrived. But would there be any more ships leaving? So the first week of February came to an end.

They slept side by side. Matthew was dreaming deeply, anxiously about Geneva. Things would go terribly wrong unless he was careful: he knew that Vera’s life would be at stake unless he could persuade someone of something, whom and of what was not clear. He uttered a shout, waking himself up. But no, someone was there, hammering against the wall, telling him to wake up. He sat up immediately in the stifling darkness. He could see someone standing there in the