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By Root 5429 0

Noticing that the California Sandwich Shoppe on the right-hand side was still open he remembered that he had eaten nothing, apart from Mr Webb’s ears, for some hours. For a moment he considered telling the syce to stop, but no … he no longer felt hungry. The heat and weariness had robbed him of his appetite. At the bottom of Orchard Road the Bentley turned to the right into Hill Street, past the white Moorish façade of the Oriental Telephone and Telegraph Company trembling in the starlight like a vision from the Arabian Nights, and then glided on its way south-west under the looming blue-black shadow of the police barracks, over the river (Walter, holding his breath against the stench, briefly glimpsed the silhouette of Blackett and Webb’s godown at the bend of the river and closer at hand on the water itself the huddled lighters and sampans where prodigious numbers of Chinese were fated to live out their lives), and then on along New Bridge Road towards the General Hospital, Walter brooding now about the Chinese once more.

‘We in Singapore may have our share of overcrowding and child-labour and slums, but at least it’s not like Shanghai!’

For Walter, Shanghai was a constant reminder, a sort of memento mori, of the harsh world which lay outside the limits of British rule. The population of Shanghai’s foreign areas had already been excessive before the war had broken over the city in August 1937. But within a few weeks the influx of refugees to this sanctuary had brought it to more than five million. Moreover, these were people who, even in peacetime, had been living on a level of bare subsistence that all too often dipped into total destitution: then a man’s only means of supporting his family was to sift through rubbish bins or dredge the flotsam from the ships along the wharves. ‘You would think the Chinese here would be more grateful considering what their relatives in Shanghai have to put up with!’ There existed, Walter was aware, a macabre thermometer to the state of health and well-being of the Shanghai population (of other cities in China, too): namely, the ‘exposed corpse’. Even in relatively good times, such was the precarious level of life in China, vast numbers of ‘exposed corpses’ would be collected on the streets … six-thousand-odd in the streets of Shanghai in 1935. In 1937 more than twenty thousand bodies had been found on the streets or on waste ground in the city. By 1938 with the help of the war the number of corpses collected had risen to more than a hundred thousand in the International Settlement alone! ‘The cremation of six hundred corpses,’ the Health Department report for that year declared encouragingly, ‘takes only four hours, though a greater number must have from six to eight hours for complete combustion.’

Well, no wonder that labour in Shanghai was so cheap and productive when the worker was accompanied everywhere by his grim doppelgänger the ‘exposed corpse’! ‘Our workers in Singapore may sometimes find it hard to make ends meet but at least they don’t have that sort of thing to cope with. And why not? Because men like old Webb saw fit to devote their lives, not to a lot of political bilge about nationalism, welfare and equality, but to the building up of businesses which would actually produce some wealth! Perhaps one day we shall see what sort of fist our rabble-rousing friends the Communists make of feeding people but I only hope I don’t have to depend on them for my next meal!’

Righteous indignation welled up inside him at the prospect until he remembered that, for the moment at least, the Communists were dropping their anti-British campaign, so people said, in order to concentrate all their efforts against the Japanese.

‘Well, Mohammed,’ asked Walter leaning forward in the rush of air to speak into the syce’s ear, ‘are you happy living in Singapore?’

‘Very happy, Tuan.’ Walter could not see the man’s features in the darkness beneath the black outline of the cap he wore, but he glimpsed the flash of white teeth as he smiled.

Presently, soothed by the vastness of the night sky, his