In the Mouth of the Tiger (98 page)

But of course the killings did continue, and the terror bit more deeply. Over the next few days the nature of the atrocities changed. At first, only Europeans of stature were attacked – the managers of rubber estates and tin mines, senior government officials, police officers. But soon ordinary Europeans, including women and children, were being killed. Cars were ambushed at random, stopped by a log drawn across the road and then riddled with bullets fired indiscriminately from the jungle. Isolated houses were surrounded, their inhabitants interrogated, and all Europeans and running dogs executed on the spot.

Life in Malaya became a waking nightmare.

But somehow, inexplicably, not at Starlight. Life went on as usual in our elegant eyrie above the jungle. Looking back, I am astounded at just how calmly we accepted what was happening around us. I remember looking at a photograph in the
Malay Mail
of a motor car on its side, riddled with bullets, and thinking
That happened just outside of Tapah. Not thirty miles from here
, and yet the knowledge had no impact at all. The truth was, of course, that we felt immune from the violence and the tragedy that was convulsing Malaya. We felt protected by our Talisman.

Our Talisman was of course Ah Khow. He was a Communist, but a Communist who was completely on our side. There is a saying of the Sakai people: ‘the safest place in the jungle is in the mouth of the tiger'. Ah Khow represented our tiger, and we were the kittens carried safely in its jaws.

Ah Khow's membership of the MCP did have its drawbacks. On the first weekend of the Emergency, the local inspector of police at Ringlet, a young Scot called Sandy McCabe, had driven up to Starlight with an armed constable and asked for ‘a quiet chat'.

‘I'm afraid we'll need to pull in your man Ah Khow,' McCabe had said. ‘He's a thorough-going Communist for sure, and we suspect he's linked to one of the worst of the Communist regiments, the Tiger Regiment.' We were standing in Denis's study, the Malay constable with us nervously fingering the safety-catch of his tommy-gun.

‘Well, you're not going to have him,' Denis said firmly. ‘Ah Khow's a damned fine cook, and a good friend to boot. If you lay a hand on him I'll have my lawyer slap a writ of
habeus corpus
on you before you can say Jack Robinson.'

McCabe looked slightly shocked. ‘I'm pulling him in for your own safety, sir,' he said. ‘You don't want a Communist killer loose in your home, do you?'

‘He's not a killer,' I retorted. ‘And you have no right to say such things about him without any evidence. Ah Khow is a gentleman, and we trust him completely.'

McCabe looked straight through me and then turned back to Denis. ‘You'll be sending Mrs Elesmere-Elliott and the children back to Singapore, of course? Far too dangerous for them to stay here. Cameron Highlands is marked red on my map, which means we think it's thick with Communists.'

‘Surely it is up to me to say whether I go or stay?' I asked angrily. ‘Now, Inspector, we've told you you're not taking Ah Khow, so why don't you and your soldier just shove off?'

McCabe still refused to look at me. ‘Sir?' he asked Denis. ‘Surely you don't want to be murdered in your own home?'

Denis cleared his throat. ‘You heard my wife,' he said mildly. ‘If I were you, Inspector McCabe, I'd do precisely what she said. Shove off.'

That evening, Ah Khow approached me after dinner. Denis had taken the children up to bed and I was sitting by the window staring out rather pensively at the gathering dusk. ‘I know the police wanted to arrest me this afternoon, Mem,' he said. ‘You and Tuan stood up for me. Thank you. And please believe me – no harm will come to you or your family.'

I did believe him. Implicitly. Even when the murders began in Cameron Highlands itself. Jock and Ethel McCubbin, an elderly couple living on a tea plantation a couple of miles from Ringlet, answered a knock on their door late one evening. According to the servants, six men in scruffy MCP uniforms burst into the house. They tied the McCubbins to their dining room chairs and used them for bayonet practice.

Denis and I had just finished an early morning round of golf when we heard the news. We came into the clubhouse to see a group of members clustered around the bar, white-faced and silent. Nora Warin left them and came over to us. ‘You must leave Starlight,' she said almost harshly. ‘They've murdered the McCubbins down at Ringlet – and the McCubbins were right
on the main road. You would be mad to stay out in the jungle as you are.'

Denis looked shaken for a moment, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and passing it over his face. But he recovered quickly. ‘I knew Jock well,' he said. ‘He is – he was – an old Malaya hand and a very fine man indeed. I'm dreadfully sorry to hear that he and Ethel are dead.'

‘Come back to the Smoke House,' Nora demanded. ‘Today. Then you can join one of the convoys. They are arranging armed convoys to take people down to the train at Tapah. I think the first one is due to leave this afternoon.'

Denis shook his head. ‘It's terrible about poor Jock and Ethel,' he said quietly, ‘but it doesn't change anything. In fact it makes it all the more important to carry on.' He looked so vulnerable and so brave that I came up and instinctively linked my arm with his.

‘Thank you for your concern,' I said to Nora. ‘But of course Denis is right. We must carry on.'

A lot of people left Cameron Highlands after the McCubbin murders, but those who remained were infected with a feeling probably akin to that which infected Londoners during the Blitz. A sense of comradeship and of shared danger, which inspires confidence and a determination to not give in. When we ran into other Europeans – shopping in the bazaar at Tanah Rata, or playing golf, or riding at the Cameron Highlands Riding Club – we would greet each other like long-lost friends. ‘Still keeping the flag flying?' we'd cry out cheerfully, as if it was all a game.

But while most people went home knowing that there was a real chance they'd face terror before the dawn, we went back to the sanctuary of Starlight sublimely confident of our safety. Ah Khow would greet us at the door with a grave smile, Amah would bring in the makan kechil with our pre-dinner drinks, and soon we would be eating a scrumptious dinner while the children told us tall tales and true about their day at school.

The Communists were not having it all their way. Within weeks of the declaration of the Emergency every rubber plantation and every tin mine in Malaya had been provided with its own detachment of Gurkhas. Every town police station had been reinforced with tough, experienced sergeants flown in from the demobilised Palestine Police Force. Every European school, including Tanglin School in Cameron Highlands, had been surrounded by thickets of barbed wire and was guarded by troops.

We even began to hear of occasional successes against the Communists.
‘Bandits' (as we called them in those days) attacked the police stations at Kuala Krau in central Pahang and at Senenak in Johore, but were beaten off in both actions with more casualties than they had inflicted. And early in July a Communist patrol was itself ambushed by security forces just outside Seremban and completely wiped out. The successful ambush was reason enough for celebration, but the papers recovered from the pouch of a dead courier were an even greater cause for joy. They showed that there were serious divisions within Communist ranks, and that the seemingly invincible forces in the jungle were already going through great self-doubts.

The papers, which became known as the Selangor Papers, were translated, analysed, and released to the Malayan press both to show Europeans the weakness of the Communist position, and to expose to the Communists the frailties of their leaders. The papers included minutes of a meeting of the MCP's Politburo which indicated that a bitter falling-out had occurred between the second highest Communist leader, Lau Yew, and the Party's Secretary-General, Chin Peng. Lau had argued that the move into the jungle had been a fatal mistake. ‘The jungle is not on our side,' he was quoted as saying. ‘It is sapping our strength, limiting our mobility, and clouding our vision. We should have remained invisible in the cities and towns of Malaya. There we had food, shelter, and anonymity. Secretary-General Chin has led us into a wilderness and the question has to be asked: why?'

On 12 July, the Communists undertook their biggest operation to date. It was clearly an attempt to wrest back the initiative, and it was far from a success. Elements from four MCP regiments attacked Malaya's largest coal mine at Batu Arang. The mine had symbolic importance, having been the scene of the Communist-led strike back in 1936 that had thrown Malaya into panic. On that occasion six thousand strikers had taken over the mine, but today sixty jungle-weary guerrillas had been able to hold the town for less than an hour before melting back into the jungle. It was dramatic confirmation of General Lau's assessment that the move into the jungle had been a miscalculation. ‘Make no mistake,' the
Malay Mail
predicted. ‘This failure sounds the death-knell of arch-fiend Chin Peng, the man determined to wage war on women and children.'

In fact, it sounded the death-knell of Lau Yew. Only four days after the attack on Batu Arang, a police superintendent called Bill Stafford, acting on a mysterious tip-off, raided an isolated cottage near the town of Kajang with a squad of fourteen Chinese and Malay detectives. As they moved in on the
cottage in the pre-dawn darkness, three men charged out, firing as they came. One of them was Lau Yew himself, and he ended up a crumpled heap in the dust, a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

And so died the most able soldier on the MCP's side, and the man who had marched with Chin Peng in the Victory Parade in London, cheered by a hundred thousand people and saluted by the King and Queen of England.

Towards the end of July our beloved Wolseley arrived at Starlight, driven up from Singapore by a brave man who earned every cent of the hundred dollars Denis paid him. It arrived in a rainstorm, but we all ran out to meet it, a forest of umbrellas over our heads, as it pulled up in the driveway. Even Ah Khow came out, his thin face struggling against a smile.

‘It is like an old friend, Mem?' he asked.

I touched him on the arm. ‘A dear old friend, Ah Khow. We even took it to Australia with us. Tuan won't let anyone drive it except himself. We have not had a syce since we bought it.'

Ah Khow looked at me seriously for a moment. ‘It would be good if Mem and the children always drove in this car,' he said. ‘Not in any other car. This is a safe car, Mem. It will protect you.' He sounded so sincere, so concerned, that I smiled and nodded solemnly.

The next day was a Saturday, and we took the Wolseley on its first outing. Ah Khow packed a wicker basket with sandwiches, scones and small jam tarts, and we drove to Robinson's Falls. The falls had been a popular picnic spot before the Emergency, usually packed on a Saturday with families sprawled in the shade of the tall teak trees. But it is isolated, and on this occasion we had it entirely to ourselves. It was a hot, still afternoon, and after lunch Denis and I stretched out on a blanket with our books while the children splashed in shallows well above the falls, cooling off in the cool mountain water. I recall that I had just put my book down and was staring sleepily into the sky when I heard their chatter cease, the sudden silence seeming somehow sinister. Denis was looking over my shoulder, a curious expression on his face.

I rolled onto my side and looked towards the river. The children were frozen in a silent tableau, staring into the jungle, and suddenly my heart was beating twenty to the dozen.

It is happening, I thought. Communists will come out of the jungle, their weapons levelled and within minutes we will all be dead. But even as the thought formed I saw the tiger. It was a huge, lethal-looking beast, walking
towards the children with the tip of its tail flicking like an angry cat. A rumble, more a vibration of the air than a sound, issued from deep within its chest.

Denis had got to his feet. ‘Don't try and run away, children,' he called, his voice light, soothing, almost flippant. ‘Just move around naturally until I get there.' He sauntered towards the river, his hands deep in his trouser pockets, a careless smile on his face.

‘I'm scared,' Frances called back. ‘Can we go home?'

‘You mustn't let the tiger think you're frightened,' Denis said conversationally. ‘It won't charge unless you make a run for it.' He reached the riverbank and held out his arms. ‘Now,' he ordered, his voice suddenly crisp and authoritative. ‘Come back past me and go straight to the car. Quickly but quietly.' As the children passed him Denis strode purposefully out into the shallows, then stood with his arms on his hips facing the tiger. The tiger stopped too, and then dropped down on its haunches, staring at Denis with unblinking eyes.

Its deep rumble subsided. Its ears pricked up. The tail stopped flicking.

‘Oh, go to blazes!' Denis said suddenly, turning on his heel and striding back towards the car. For a second, a heartbeat, I thought the tiger would charge. But as if in parody of Denis's actions, it too got up, turned and loped back into the jungle.

‘A near-run thing,' Denis said as we sat in the car. He took a cigarette from his cigarette case and offered me one, his hands shaking with reaction. Then he turned to the children in the back seat. ‘Top marks to all of you. It's not every day you run into a tiger in the wild.'

I had put my arms around Frances, but now she pulled away. ‘I wasn't frightened,' she insisted a little breathlessly. ‘It was a nice tiger. It wasn't going to hurt us. It wanted to play.'

Tony took a long, deep breath. ‘If you like it so much why don't you go back and play with the pussy cat?' he said. ‘We'll watch you from the car.' The boy was learning irony.