The Empire Trilogy (144 page)

Later in the morning Walter strolled the few yards from his office on Collyer Quay to have a look at the damage to Robinson's in Raffles Place. Around the corner barriers had been set up to keep back sightseers, but Walter showed his official pass and was allowed through. Broken glass and silk underwear from Gian Singh's window in Battery Road still lay on the pavement; part of Guthrie's had been reduced to a pile of rubble across the road. Walter surveyed with equanimity this devastation of one of his principal rival's buildings. Nevertheless he offered his sympathy to a Guthrie's man he saw standing nearby, and feebly tried to prevent himself thinking: ‘It's an ill wind …' His blue eyes glittered cheerfully in the sunlight as he watched the cautious efforts being made to search for unexploded bombs and to clear the rubble. Later, however, when he had returned to his office once more, a more sober mood took hold of him and he thought: ‘This is a fine thing to happen in our jubilee year!' Moreover, this unexpected attack by the Japanese could prove troublesome to Blackett and Webb's commercial interests.

Forewarned of centralized buying by the Americans, Walter in a short space of time had committed himself to a great deal of forward business in order to escape the limitations of the new arrangements. He had been obliged to acquire rubber in substantial quantities from other producers as well as from the estates managed by Blackett and Webb in order to fill these contracts. Not that, under the Restriction Scheme, it had been enough to get his hands on the rubber: it had also been necessary to buy
the right to sell it.
Under Restriction each rubber producer, whether estate or smallholding, had been allotted a share of Malaya's total exports. Each producer's share, naturally, was less than his capacity to produce: that was the point of the Scheme. Even with light tapping, heavy replanting and recent high rates of release to the world market, there was still no shortage of rubber (inside Malaya, that is). Rubber was plentiful, the right to sell it was scarce.

Fortunately, however, export rights could be bought from Asiatic smallholders who, for one reason or another, were not using them to sell their own rubber. Smallholders were issued with coupons which were equivalent to their share of Malaya's export rights: these coupons had to accompany any rubber they intended to sell. However, many of the smallholders were illiterate, or simply baffled by the bureaucratic intricacies of the system. Others were swindled out of their coupons by unscrupulous clerks at the Land Offices which issued them or, believing them to be of no value, gave them away to Chinese or Chettyar pimps who lay in wait outside. Some even believed that these perplexing pieces of paper represented a new government tax and therefore willingly surrendered them to entrepreneurs who magnanimously undertook to pay on their behalf in return for some favour. A number of smallholders gave up tapping their trees and simply sold their coupons instead of rubber. Walter, in any event, had found it possible to enlarge the export quota of Blackett and Webb's estates to cover the considerable stocks of extra rubber he had accumulated. Blackett and Webb's godowns in Singapore on this first day of the war in the Far East were crammed with rubber destined for America and fit to burst.

Walter, at first, had been delighted by his success in arranging contracts which would evade the Americans' new centralized buying. He had secured this business at prices which none of his competitors would be able to match. This was surely a coup to rival those of Mr Webb's early days in Rangoon! It made him feel young again; it reminded him that business was an adventure. How angry old Solomon Langfield must have been when he heard of these deals which Walter had closed in the nick of time. It would have been obvious to old Langfield that Walter had been tipped the wink in advance. How bitterly he must have remonstrated with Langfield and Bowser's board of dimwits for not having got wind of it! Walter thought with satisfaction of their fat, complacent Secretary, W. J. Bowser-Barrington, trembling before the old man's anger. Every
stengah
they drank for a month must have tasted of bile. Ha! He had vowed to give Langfields and the rest something to remember Blackett and Webb's jubilee by … and he had done so.

All the same, even at the height of his satisfaction with this state of affairs he had not been able entirely to conceal from himself certain misgivings about the sheer quantity of rubber he had awaiting shipment to various American ports. These misgivings had increased steadily week by week as shipping became more difficult to find. This morning, with the American Pacific fleet knocked out of action, or at best disabled, the prospects were that merchant shipping would become even more scarce. Hence, the chances of realizing Blackett and Webb's considerable investment in the rubber-crammed godowns on the wharfs in the near future had also diminished. Walter was not seriously worried yet. But he was beginning to wonder whether he might not have been a little too clever. Besides, there was another aspect of the matter on which he now began to brood and to which had not given sufficient attention earlier.

Walter, you might argue, must have always known he was taking a risk, given the ominous way in which the Far Eastern political climate had been developing for some time past. He must have known that there was a possibility that he might be left holding a great deal of rubber which he was unable to deliver to the buyers. But a businessman must sometimes take a risk, particularly if he hopes to make profits on a grand scale. So what is all the fuss about? Walter will get rid of his rubber sooner or later, particularly now that America is in the war. If instead of making his grand profit the risk causes his plans to go astray, it will not be the end of the world for Blackett and Webb, merely a nuisance and a dead weight that must be carried for a while. Well, the aspect of the matter on which Walter had begun to brood (not that it was easy to brood on anything in the hectic atmosphere of that Monday morning, and with the sudden vulnerability of Blackett and Webb's Shanghai and Hong Kong interests demanding instant attention) was this: although certainly a considerable risk was embodied in those rubber-crammed godowns, there was no chance of making a grand profit, nor had there ever been. Blackett and Webb, being British-registered, were subject to the one hundred per cent excess profits tax introduced in the summer of 1940. The most that could be made on Walter's risky initiative was ‘a standard profit'. He had known this all along but had ignored it, dazzled by the prospect of an old-fashioned coup to celebrate his jubilee year. This was the first time in years that he had committed an error of judgement of this magnitude. It was clear that the prospective reward should have been on the same scale as the risk.

‘Well, it may still turn out all right,' Walter told himself with an effort and, shrugging off this depressing line of thought, turned to the more urgent matters awaiting his attention.

‘We have good reason to be proud of the RAF. In aircraft and efficiency it is second to none in the world!'

These words, echoing beneath the high ceiling of an upstairs room in the Singapore Cricket Club were sucked into the blur of the fan revolving above and scattered on the breeze to every corner. Half a dozen members of the Citizens' Committee for Civil Defence, of which the Major was founder, chairman, secretary, treasurer and most active participant, stirred and murmured: ‘Hear! hear!' These members, and others not present, had been summoned to attend an emergency meeting of the Committee. Of the other members, three were absent without explanation (either they had not been successfully contacted, or were ill, or were dead … death being a not uncommon reason for non-attendance, given the great age of most of the Committee members), three more were temporarily away in Malacca and Kuala Lumpur, another had not come on principle because he was having a feud with the Major: he was indignant at having been urged on a previous occasion to abbreviate his harangues to the Committee. There remained two other members whom the Major officially considered to be present although, in fact, they had been lost in the bar downstairs where they were performing the useful function of toasting the American entry into the war.

The Major, slumped in his chair at the head of the long table, did not join in the approval of the RAF; indeed, his eyebrows gathered into a gloomy frown. Although as loyal to the Forces as the next man, he had come to dread these patriotic remarks. He had found that even on a good day they badly clogged the proceedings of the Committee. On a bad day the wheels would not move at all. Besides, the Major reflected that he was surely not the only person in Singapore to wonder why the RAF had not managed to shoot down or drive off the Japanese bombers last night.

‘The attempts to set fire to London from the air persistently carried out in the raids from 1915 to 1917 resulted in failure,' declared the speaker, an octogenarian planter called Mr Bridges, in a quavering voice.
‘Why?'
He lifted his bespectacled eyes from the paper he held and glared round the table at his colleagues: this, however, was a mistake because he then had to find his place again, which took some time. The Major stirred restlessly and looked at his watch.

‘Why? Because of the low efficiency of the incendiary bombs then used, the poor marksmanship of the enemy and the brilliantly effective fire-fighting services.' Again Mr Bridges was unable to resist looking up from the paper in his trembling hand and glaring at his audience over his spectacles. This glare did not mean that Mr Bridges was aroused: it was purely rhetorical, part of the old chap's habitual oratory learned in youth from some forceful speaker and displayed year after year before the boards of the various tin mines and rubber companies on which he had served. ‘Let me say, gentlemen, that for courage and ability I doubt if there is a finer body of men than the London Fire Brigade.'

Once more his audience stirred and muttered: ‘Hear! hear!' with the exception of the Major who ground his teeth and scratched his bare knee which had just been bitten by some insect.

‘Out of 354 incendiary bombs on London only eight caused fatal casualties. The maximum number that fell during one raid was 258 and these were distributed over a wide area averaging seven bombs per square mile …'

‘Seven bombs per square mile! Where on earth has the old blighter got all this from?' wondered the Major knocking out his pipe into an ashtray which had been filled with water to prevent the ash being blown about by the fan overhead. He stifled a yawn. Lunch, combined with Mr Bridges' statistics, had made him drowsy. It was hot here, too, despite the generous dimensions of the room. How he loved the tropical Victorian architecture of the Cricket Club with its vast rooms, high ceilings and ornamented balconies! Behind his chair a segment of the green
padang
could be seen through the window which was angled to face, not the Eurasian Club at the far end of the ground, but the Esplanade and the sea. In the small area of the field that was visible from where he sat a little group of Tamil groundsmen were peacefully at work moving the practice nets a few feet seawards to a fresh patch of turf. No doubt cricket would continue despite the bombing; important matches could not be expected to wait until the Japanese had been dealt with. While the Major was trying to recall whether the annual Civil Service and Law versus the Rest (Gentlemen
v
. Players some cynic had called it) had yet taken place, there came unbidden to his mind the recollection of a girl being shot at a cricket match in College Park, oh, years ago. He had read about it in the
Irish Times
: a young woman of twenty or so who had been watching the Gentlemen of Ireland playing the Army. Some Sinn Feiner had fired a revolver through the park railings and taken to his heels; the bullet, aimed at one of the Army officers, had struck her on the temple. She had been engaged to be married, too, if he recalled correctly; an innocent young girl killed by a scampering fanatic in a cloth cap. This recollection, echoing back over two decades, still had the power to numb the Major with indignation and despair. The uselessness of it!

‘The total number of casualties in England from aerial attack during the Great War was 1,414 killed and 3,416 wounded … Material damage costing three million pounds was produced by 643 aircraft dropping 8,776 bombs which weighed a total of 270 tons!'

This paroxysm of statistics was delivered with such vigour that it caused someone inopportunely to murmur: ‘Hear! hear!' but the Major, profiting from the fact that Mr Bridges had once again glared round the table and lost his place, seized his chance.

‘We're all grateful, I'm sure, to Mr Bridges who has spared no effort of research into the last war. The point he is trying to make, I believe, is that a great gulf exists between the bombing methods of then and now … What we must decide is how best to combat by our civil defence procedure the
modern
methods of which we had a sample in the early hours of this morning. And in any case …'

But here he was obliged to stop for Mr Bridges had now succeeded in hunting down his lost place and capturing it on the page with a long ivory fingernail: this permitted him to display indignation at the Major's interruption. He still had a great deal to say! He still had to delve into the question of the Zeppelin raids on London in 1915 and 1916! The question he wanted to consider was whether the amount of damage caused varied according to the amount of cloud cover. ‘For example, on 31 May 1915, a fine moonlit night, Zeppelin LZ 38 dropped eighty-seven incendiary bombs and twenty-five explosive bombs, killing seven people, injuring thirty-two, and starting forty-one fires which caused £18,396 worth of damage
whereas
…'

This information was greeted by a groan. It came, however, not from one of the Committee members, whose minds had wandered in a herd to other pastures, but from behind the Major's chair, to the leg of which a black and white spotted dog was tethered. This animal, a Dalmatian, did not belong to the Major but had been borrowed for a demonstration which was to take place later in the afternoon. The poor dog undoubtedly was bored, hot and restless. The Major, who was suffering similarly, without turning reached a sympathetic hand behind his chair to caress the animal's damp muzzle. An unseen tongue licked his open palm.