The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [642]
Reuter.
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Shopping at Robinson’s during alert periods. We had roof spotters on duty throughout alert periods to give final ‘take cover’ alarm when danger is near. Until this warning is given we endeavour to continue normal business. Members of our staff carry on and give shoppers cheerful service. We have shelter facilities and seating accommodation in the basement for all persons who are in the building should the spotters’ give the danger alarm. These arrangements have been made for the protection and convenience of our customers, so you need have no fear regarding shopping arrangements if you are at Robinson’s during an alert period.
Straits Times 21, 22, 23 January 1942
In the course of this last week of January the city underwent a final metamorphosis: the peaceful and prosperous city of Singapore which Walter remembered from his early days had already been eroded by time and change, the way all cities are. But now there came a dreadful acceleration: in the course of a few days and nights many familiar parts of the city were demolished. Bombs fell in Tanglin, interrupting his important conversation with Nigel. They were sprinkled through the grounds of Government House and fell in a dense shower on Beach Road. They peppered the docks and the airfields and Bukit Timah. They fell all around the padang and the Municipal Offices, shattering windows in High Street and Armenian Street beneath Fort Canning Hill, and blowing out one face of the clock in the tower of the Victoria Memorial Theatre where, in years gone by, Walter had so often gone with other parents to watch the children of the European community in Mr Buckley’s Christmas pantomime. ‘What was all this, anyway,’ mused Walter grimly, ‘but the physical evidence of all the more fundamental changes that had taken place in Singapore in the last two decades?’
Walter did not often abandon himself to abstract thought and when he did so it was a sign that he was in a state of depression. He found himself now, however, brooding on what makes up a moment of history; if you took a knife and chopped cleanly through a moment of history what would it look like in cross-section? Would it be like chopping through a leg of lamb where you see the ends of the muscles, nerves, sinews and bone of one piece matching a similar arrangement in the other? Walter thought that it would, on the whole. A moment of history would be composed of countless millions of events of varying degrees of importance, some of them independent, other associated with each other. And since all these events would have both causes and consequences they would certainly match each other where they were divided, just like the leg of lamb. But did all these events collectively have a meaning?
Most people, Walter believed, would have said ‘No, they are merely random.’ Perhaps sometimes, in retrospect, we may stick a label on a whole stretch of events and call it, say, ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ the way we might call a long hank of muscle a fillet steak, but we are simply imposing a meaning on what was, unlike the fillet steak whose cells are organized to some purpose, essentially random. Well, if that was what most people thought, Walter did not agree with them.
Certainly, it was not easy to see a common principle in the great mass of events occurring at any moment far and near. But Walter believed that that was because you were too near to them. It was like being a single gymnast in a vast stadium with several thousand other gymnasts: your movements and theirs might seem quite baffling from where you stand whereas viewed from an aeroplane, collectively you are forming letters which spell out ‘God Save The King’ in a pattern of delightful colours.
Well, what was this organizing principle? Walter was vague about that. He believed that each individual event in a historical moment was subtly modified by an intangible mechanism which he could only think of as ‘the spirit of the time’. If a Japanese bomber had opened its bomb doors