Hearts & Minds

by Mark Whitcombe-Power

Genres: Historical Fiction; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Malaya, 1948. In the heart of the jungle a band of Chinese communists are grouping together, mounting a series of raids and murders on isolated villages and rubber plantations.

In Kuala Lumpur Edward Fairfax, a para seconded to Intelligence, is preparing to outwit the elusive enemy. The hostile territory is rife with dangers and seductions from Edward's arch-enemy Ho Peng, to enigmatic Liya, the beautiful girl whom he recruits as a source of information.

As the threat of insurgency mounts and a State of Emergency is declared, Edward is plunged into a brutal jungle war which will test his courage, cunning and endurance - as well as the hearts and minds of the people - to their limits. The risks have never been greater...

Release date: July 1, 1994

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 464

Sample

A big four-engined Liberator, painted black and showing no lights, flew low over the dark hills on course to a point which only the navigator could identify. Huddled behind the pilot and co-pilot in his flying jacket, poring over his charts, his target after six hours’ flying time was nothing more than a spot in the most inaccessible tropical jungle where the three ancient Malay states of Pahang, Selangor and Negri Sembilan all meet.

The moon hung low over the ragged horizon on their right and cast long, weary, red shadows across the endless canopy of tree tops which spread under the bomber in all directions, like a sea of dark storm clouds lying over the undulating ground beneath.

The pilot rubbed his eyes and stared ahead, mesmerised by the continuous jungle rolling below them, and for a moment he wondered what went on beneath the canopy: a hellish, black nightmare of trees and tangled lianas, of snakes sliding through the rotting leaves on the soft dank floor of the jungle, dry scaly scorpions scuttling by, wild pigs rootling in the dark for food or salt licks, exotic birds sleeping high on branches out of reach of predators, and the endless cacophony of insects. He shuddered as he checked all round the sky for enemy aircraft. The last thing he wanted was to crash in the jungle.

‘Fifteen minutes out, Sir,’ said the navigator through the intercom, his face glowing in the tiny red night light poised over his map.

‘Raised anything on the S-phone?’ asked the pilot. He hoped they could pick up the signal at 3,000 feet. He dared not fly too high just in case there was a Japanese night patrol out.

The navigator did not reply at once, willing the needle on the instrument to indicate that the receiving party was in place.

Minutes passed.

The needle twitched. ‘Yes, Sir!’

‘Nine minutes out, Sir,’ said the co-pilot. The relief was tangible. After 1,500 miles they had pin-pointed a tiny group of men in one of the remotest places on earth.

The pilot ordered, ‘Action stations!’

In the belly of the converted bomber, the airloadmaster and dispatch crew sweated to prepare the Type-H containers to be parachuted to the reception party on the ground. Eight heavy, six-foot-long cylinders lay on rollers, like bombs, and the men fussed round, making last-minute checks that the casing was correctly fastened, the straps tight, and the static lines hooked up.

‘These are bloody heavy tonight,’ shouted one dispatcher over the roar of noise as he and another man rolled the big container towards the bomb-bay doors and fixed it in place with chocks.

The airloadmaster ignored him. It was none of his business what the resistance did on the ground. They were all brave men, but lunatics as far as he was concerned, and he was looking forward to a good breakfast when they got back to Ceylon. He opened the doors and the warm blast of slipstream air whipped round them, making conversation impossible. They worked on with handsigns and listened intently in their headphones. The pilot had picked up the men on the ground.

‘Hallo seven-four, hallo seven-four, this is Bravo-two-one-delta, are you receiving me?’

Faintly they heard the reply, ‘Roger, receiving you fives.’

The pilots strained their eyes ahead.

‘Ten left, Sir, and two minutes,’ intoned the navigator.

The pilot adjusted the plane and began to lose height for the run-in.

Suddenly the co-pilot jabbed with his gloved finger. ‘There! Dead ahead!’ He had spotted the dim triangle of lights which marked their target drop zone about two miles away.

The pilot nodded, immensely relieved. Only he of all the crew had been told how vitally important it was to make the drop that night, and if humanely possible to prevent the cargo of containers falling into Japanese hands. He was not a religious man but he thanked God for the weather – cloudy enough to hide in during their long flight but clear enough to see the torches of the reception party on the final approach. He dropped the big Liberator to 350 feet, skimming over the jungle trees, and spoke briefly into the intercom.

In the back, the airloadmaster acknowledged the orders crackling in his headphones and gestured at the dispatch crew. Hands on chocks, they tensed ready to shove, fascinated by the trees rushing past outside, so near they could see the chaos of branches, the occasional tree thrusting above the smooth undulating grey-green surface like a breaker from the sea.

‘Red on!’ said the pilot, throwing the switch.

In the rush of the slipstream, the airloadmaster flung his hand out to point at the glowing bulb. The dispatchers tensed and gripped the big containers.

Abruptly the jungle stopped as they raced over an open clearing of swamp and padi fields towards the three lights on the ground, where the moonlight glinted on the water between the mud banks and soft tufts of rice.

Seconds to go. The pilot concentrated, hand poised over the switch. Watch the lights below. Over the first. Over the second, lined up with the third, at right angles shining from the darkness on the left.

‘Green on!’ His fingers flicked the switch.

Behind him, in the back of the aircraft, the green bulb flared and the dispatchers heaved the first long cylinder into the night, swiftly following with the three behind.

Leaning out into the warm slipstream, the airloadmaster counted the four white chutes floating rapidly away in the darkness. ‘All away, all opened,’ he reported over the intercom.

‘Any sign of enemy aircraft?’ asked the pilot tersely. He turned towards his navigator whose attention was fixed over the dull glow of the small round radar screen.

‘Nothing, Sir.’

Not yet.

‘Going round again,’ said the pilot. Eight containers meant two run-ins, as the length of the drop zone was 850 yards, long enough for only four containers each time. He wanted to get on with it, get away.

The Liberator strained round in a tight circle, hugging the contours inside a wide bowl of jungle-covered mountain ridges. Long, tense minutes later the pilot held her straight on the second run-in.

Again, the pilot held the Liberator on course for the three tiny lights on the silver-glinting padi fields ahead. Again, he throttled back the four Pratt and Witney engines to 115 knots, to reduce the distance the containers would be thrown forward before the parachutes opened.

‘Red on!’

Watching the lights on the ground, the pilot fancied he could see the pale faces looking up at him as the Liberator roared over the reception party.

Over the first light. Dead on line. Over the second.

‘Green on!’

A moment later it seemed, his airloadmaster’s voice crackled in his headphones, ‘Containers all gone, Sir, right as rain.’

The ground-to-air radio crackled for the last time, ‘Thanks Bravo-two-four-delta, all stores landed safely. Good luck on the way back!’

‘Let’s go home,’ said the pilot smiling with relief. There was a long dangerous flight ahead, looping north around Japanese ack-ack batteries in Kuala Lumpur, out to sea over the deserted mangrove swamps on the coast of northern Selangor, over the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean to Ceylon. If they were going to be shot down, the pilot told himself, he would rather it was into the water. He hated the jungle.

In the jungle clearing there was frenetic activity. As soon as the last container splashed down into the rice fields, a crowd of Chinese in sweat-stained uniforms ran out from the shadows of the jungle to clear away every sign of the drop.

They flitted over the padi fields like thin shadows of the night, their bodies under their uniforms gaunt from years of hiding from the Japanese, and their faces pale from seeing no sunlight under the jungle canopy. They splashed through the rice padi, slinging their rifles across their shoulders, and sweated in the warm night air as they hurried to dismantle the heavy metal containers. Two steel rods down each side were loosened and the containers fell apart into five round drums. They worked in silence, confident in the orders they had received from the white officer before the drop. He was standing under the trees at the side of the wide clearing, a stocky powerful man quite different to the slight shape of the Chinese commander beside him.

‘Bloody drums are heavy,’ the big man said bluntly. Two Chinese were struggling in the muddy rice water to roll a drum round so they could slide wood poles they had cut from the jungle through webbing straps fitted to the side of the drum.

‘They can manage,’ said the Chinese commander. Like all the other Chinese soldiers, he wore a pale khaki uniform shirt and trousers and his leggings were fixed with puttees, Japanese style, down to his soft plimsole shoes. Ho Peng was impressed. The drop had worked out exactly as this vulgar British officer had promised; and the sight and sound of the great four-engined bomber roaring low overhead had been utterly thrilling, particularly when he thought of what was in the containers.

All eight containers had landed in the open. No time would be wasted searching in the jungle. The eighty men in the carrying party were busy in the padi fields bringing in the containers, two men to every drum, and more men waited silently out of sight on the edge of the clearing manning Bren guns in case of attack. Over years of clandestine activity, Ho Peng had learned never to take chances, but he thought it unlikely that the Japanese would interrupt them. There was no way they could reach such a remote place except by days of hard sweating slog through the trees, and they would not undertake such an expedition unless they had specific information. Betrayal was always a problem, but in this case only he and the British officer had known about the drop.

Trying to keep the excitement out of his voice, he mustered his best English and asked the big man beside him, ‘Captain, how do we know which drums hold weapons and which have the bags?’

The British captain laughed unpleasantly and said, ‘You’re a suspicious bastard. You don’t believe it, even now. You won’t be satisfied till you’ve seen it with your own eyes.’

‘Maybe the British Headquarters have not sent what we demanded?’ snapped Ho Peng. He resented the other’s patronising tone which had so often precipitated arguments during the months they had spent together in the jungle. ‘It would not be the first time.’

‘’Course they’ve sent it,’ said the captain crossly.

‘I hope so. It is vital for our cause.’ If the British had sent what he wanted, these differences no longer mattered and the action he had dreamed of for years was possible.

‘Whose bloody cause?’ asked the captain. ‘That’s the question, ain’t it?’

‘The fight against the Japanese,’ Ho Peng hissed.

‘Or for you and your mates?’

‘No!’ said Ho Peng furiously.

Behind him, in deep shadow under the fringe of the jungle, one other Chinese was watching the two men arguing and thinking how similar they were.

The captain grunted at Ho Peng and said, ‘Well, you got everything you asked for. Eight canisters dropped, five drums each. Ten are marked “Bravo-seven”, full of weapons.’

‘What’s the marking on the others?’ insisted Ho Peng.

‘They’re the ones you want, aren’t they?’ the captain sneered. ‘They’re marked “Alpha-four-nine”.’

At once Ho Peng turned and shouted at the line of porters as in pairs they stepped slowly and carefully over the uneven banks of the padi fields towards the jungle, the drums swung heavily from poles over their shoulders. Two men detached themselves and dropped their drum at the feet of the two officers.

Ho Peng dismissed them.

‘Wouldn’t do to let the others see, eh?’ taunted the captain from the darkness behind him.

Ho Peng ignored the remark. The British officer was jealous. He bent down and peered in the gloom at the letters stencilled on the side of the drum. In halting English, he read, ‘Alpha-four-nine’. With mounting excitement he demanded, ‘How does this drum open?’

The captain stepped forward, knelt down on the wet earth, twisted a set of latches and pulled a knotted string on top of the drum. The lid came away. He put it down on the ground. He reached into the drum, shovelled away some cardboard packing and roughly pulled up the neck of a canvas sack inside. He needed both hands to lift it. He produced a slender pencil torch from his pocket and shone it at a small round object tied to the canvas.

‘A lead seal,’ he said. ‘From the Royal Mint in Australia.’

He twisted the seal on the canvas sack to read the words stamped on it, the Chinese ducked down beside him and a knife flashed in his hand. The captain instinctively flung himself sideways and rolled away on the ground.

Ho Peng laughed as he stabbed his knife into the canvas sack in the drum. The sack burst and a shower of small gold coins scattered over the top of the drum. Some fell on to the ground where they lay gleaming in the moonlight.

‘Impatient sod,’ cursed the captain, clambering to his knees. But he stared fascinated at the coins.

Ho Peng ignored him, mesmerised. On his knees before the drum, he pushed his hands into the sack of gold, feeling the smooth oiliness of new minted metal. The coins ran over his hands like drops of heavy water.

‘Christ! Don’t lose the frigging things!’ said the captain. His aggressive tone had vanished. He reached out and picked up one coin, shone his torch on it, and read, ‘King George V, 1929’. Awed by the sheer scale, he calculated out loud, ‘Four bags of gold sovereigns in each drum and there are thirty drums. Jesus!’ He dropped the coin back into the sack. ‘That makes 120,000 gold sovereigns.’

The Chinese hiding in the darkness behind them silently wondered which of the two men kneeling before the drum of gold sovereigns, the communist or the British officer, would prove the stronger in the end, and vowed to see that the gold was used for its true purpose.

Ho Peng sat back on his haunches, his black slanting eyes glittering. In Chinese, he said emphatically, ‘I have waited years for this. At last we have the financial backing to win the war.’

The big man beside him looked up sharply and asked, ‘But who is your enemy?’

Ho Peng did not reply.

‘A heroic sacrifice is demanded of the proletariat!’ shouted the Chinese speaker from the podium. A pale, slight figure in his plain grey Mao Tse-tung tunic, he looked insignificant under the enormous red banner which proclaimed in huge yellow letters, ‘The Calcutta Communist Asian Youth Congress!’

He wiped the sweat from his forehead, and looked around the mass of faces staring up at him from the body of the hall: the smooth-skinned Chinese with their black hair, the darker Indians with their intellectual features, and a scattering of bearded and turbaned Sikhs. He picked out as well the sweating white faces of Europeans who had come from so far to represent their members in Calcutta, Trades Unionists and Party members from Russia and Australia, the sponsors of the Congress, from France, Italy and Britain.

He banged his fist on the wooden lectern and raised his voice so that it boomed statically from the loudspeakers at the sides of the stage.

‘Working men and women!’ he screamed, his magnified voice filling the hall. ‘On this earth there is only one banner which is worth fighting and dying for. It is the banner of the Communist International!’

Cheering greeted these final words and the speaker realised that his long journey from China had been worthwhile. He had not wanted to leave the Chinese People’s Army where it had been fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces in northern Shensi, but Mao Tse-tung had told him his duty to the Party lay in going to Calcutta.

The mass of delegates spontaneously began to sing the anthem of the Communist International, the Red Flag. Linking arms and swaying to and fro, the jumble of languages from different continents was lost in the stiffing tune.

‘Comrade, Ho Peng! There’s nothing to stop us!’ shouted a slim young Chinese leaning towards his older companion in the middle of the hall. His eyes shone with enthusiasm and even Ho Peng, carried away by the moment, sang as loudly as the rest.

But when they left the hall, Ho Peng did not allow his enthusiasm to overide his caution. He was a small wiry man of thirty-six with thin black hair and a pock-marked face, the indelible stigma of a smallpox epidemic which had scourged Shanghai where he had been born. Years of clandestine work in the Communist Movement had taught him never to relax. He nodded at a large black Humber police car parked at the side of the square, almost hidden behind crowds of Indians. ‘Uniformed police. But where are the Special Branch men in plain clothes?’

‘They won’t be after us,’ said Lao Tang, still buoyed up by the excitement of the speeches. ‘They’ll be looking for the red-hairs. The Russians, the Australians and British.’

Ho Peng gave him a sharp glance. ‘Maybe, but don’t ever allow yourself to be snared by the problems of others. It is still only days since Mahatma Gandhi was murdered, and the Indian police are still on the alert.’

Chastened, Lao Tang followed Ho Peng through the milling crowds as they plunged into the narrow alleys of Calcutta, where the dust danced in the hot sunlight between tattered jumbled houses. Dark-skinned Indians flopped past loose-limbed and barefoot, their shirt-tails hanging out, or sat on flattened haunches outside their shops and houses. The reek of hot curries and dry, sharp, spices, the stench of rubbish and the din of voices assailed Lao Tang’s senses but Ho Peng’s black eyes never stopped moving, left to right, sweeping the swarthy faces and liquid brown eyes for the element which was out of place, which would indicate danger.

After an hour Ho Peng decided that the Calcutta police were concentrating on the other more prominent communists at the Congress. They would take little notice of two insignificant Chinese from Malaya.

They walked into Chinatown. Here, instead of curries, the air was thick with the smell of frying; noodles, beans and bamboo shoots. Hands reached from the darkness inside open-fronted shophouses to pluck down scraggy pieces of chicken which hung at beams in windows or under the eaves. The soft indolent pace of the Indians was replaced by a brisk stir of activity. Chinese faces filled the streets. Barefoot men in baggy black trousers gathered at the knees pushed barrows, bicycles, and trishaws, or carried stuffed bundles on poles across their shoulders, and wrinkled old women genially watched groups of round-faced, black-haired children playing in the dust. Lao Tang relaxed. Here he felt at home.

The dingy wooden hotel where they were staying leaned on its neighbours as if exhausted by the weight of its own neon sign and the sweltering sweet heat of the Ganges delta. Inside the hallway, gloomy with dark wood, a thin Chinese in a string vest greeted them and they passed through to the ground floor café. Ho Peng sat down at a table at the rear with his back to the kitchens, where he could see the entrance and be nearest the exit through the back door. They ordered tea and fish with rice.

‘Our movement truly spans the globe,’ said Lao Tang. He had never been outside Malaya before, and was amazed by the power of an ideology which could bring together people from so many places and then bind them with such fervour in the service of the ordinary people.

‘They were all most encouraging,’ remarked Ho Peng.

Lao Tang detected a note of sarcasm and fell silent, afraid he had said something wrong.

The tea came and Ho Peng held the delicate teacup with both hands, enjoying the feel of warmth through the thin china. He sipped the hot green drink and stared at Lao Tang disconcertingly. In a low voice he added, ‘We met the Russians and they were encouraging. We met the speaker from Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Army and he was encouraging too. These men represent the great Communist Movements. They are our models in the vanguard of the fight against Imperialism. But what substance did they offer?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘The time for words is over. The struggle will begin and for that we need substance, support. Weapons and money.’

Enthusiastically, Lao Tang replied, ‘But there are two million Chinese in Malaya. Nearly half the population! There can be no doubt of our success!’

‘They will follow us, I’m sure,’ agreed Ho Peng. ‘But we can’t succeed against the British Empire without arms and finance.’

‘The proletariat will rise up,’ Lao Tang insisted. ‘Just as they have in Indo-China against the French, and in Greece against the British. The Malays are a lazy people and dominated by Islam, but there are more than two million of them. When they see how we are defeating the British who have stolen their country, they will join us. The Indians in Malaya will join us too, the Sikhs and the Tamils. It will be impossible for a few thousand bourgeois British bureaucrats to resist us. Look what happened in Palestine.’

Ho Peng sipped his tea. This was indeed the vision. The British Empire was fatally weak, bankrupt after the Second World War when the British had been so ignominiously defeated in Malaya by the Japanese in February 1942. Yet somehow, in August 1945, they had muscled back in and carried on, pretending nothing had changed. This time, they must leave for good.

An old Chinese woman appeared from the kitchen. She was fat and her skin was spotted with brown maculations and incredibly wrinkled. She put their food down on the table. Ho Peng was hungry and started eating at once, shovelling the rice straight from the bowl into his mouth with the chopsticks, as though someone might grab it from him.

When he had finished, he put the empty bowl back on the table, leaned forward and spoke fiercely, ‘Of course we live on our ideals and success will be ours, Lao Tang, but until then we will grow lean, for there are going to be hard times ahead. That speaker from Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Army called them sacrifices. He was right. Men, women and children will be butchered for the benefit of the masses. It is the only way. Millions have died in the great fight in China. We know that because China is our homeland.’ His hands tightened in fists on the table. ‘But our losses will be nothing compared to the blows we shall strike at the British and their running dogs, the Malays, Indians, and even Chinese who support them. That is the message which I shall take back to Comrade General-Secretary Chin Peng in Malaya. We must delay our struggle no longer. The killing must begin!’

The following day, they left their lodging house in the Chinese quarter with a small suitcase each and walked to the docks. They found the big open quay where the SS Nanyang was tied up to battered rope fenders in harbour water covered with scum and rubbish. She was an ancient commercial steamer registered in Penang, Malaya, and was carrying cloth and a few passengers back to Port Swettenham in Malacca Province on the West coast of Malaya.

As he glanced up at the ship’s name in chipped white letters on the battered black hull, Ho Peng’s faced creased in a smile. ‘Nanyang’, translated literally from Chinese, meant the ‘South Seas’ and it was the clandestine name the Communist Party used when Ho Peng first came to Singapore in 1927. That was the year his family in Shanghai had been slaughtered by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. Ho Peng, still only a boy of sixteen, had fled to Malaya looking for work, like thousands of other mainland Chinese. He had found various jobs, as rubber tapper, tin-miner, in clothing factories and restaurants, everywhere preaching the benefits of communism and laying the foundations of his life’s work. In 1931 he survived a disastrous police coup, when the Malay police arrested a senior agent of the Chinese Comintern carrying details of the organisation of the Malayan Communist Party, and he had survived the Japanese occupation, hiding in the jungle. Now it was fitting that he was returning to fight the British in the Nanyang.

The white bulk of the troopship The Empire Orwell glided south along the Suez Canal, towering incongruously over the harsh desert on each side.

Lieutenant Edward Fairfax was standing on the deck, leaning against the wooden rail which felt hot through his pale khaki tropical uniform. He switched his gaze from the shimmering blue ribbon of the canal ahead to the east. Beyond the arid sands of the Sinai Desert lay Palestine, where he had served his first two years in the army, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Jews and Arabs.

‘Was Jerusalem ever as hot as this?’ asked Diana, reading his thoughts. She stood close to him, her arm linked in his. A pleasant breeze set up by the ship’s motion disturbed the unrelenting heat but she was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat to shade her fair skin from the sun and, beneath it, her long blonde hair fell down her back over the thinnest cotton frock she had brought out with her.

Edward gave her arm a little squeeze and shrugged. He wanted to forget. The desert to him was synonymous with the past and personal loss. His father had died under tons of rubble when the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up; and then he lost the American girl he thought he loved. He thought she had loved him too, but without a word she had disappeared from his life in the autumn of the previous year and he had given up trying to find her. His letters had gone unanswered and his friend in the Palestine police, Angus Maclean, had been unable to trace her.

When he returned to England, Edward found he had missed Diana Haike as much as she had missed him, and their long friendship as children grew into something promising much more. She was more vivacious and enthusiastic for his career in the army than he could remember. They saw a great deal of each other and, during his leave just before Christmas 1947, he had asked her to marry him. It seemed the most natural question in the world to both of them, and she had not hesitated.

In Palestine, Edward, had developed a strong interest in Intelligence. When he learned of a posting in Kuala Lumpur, the Parachute Regiment had been willing to release him and Diana’s father, Colonel Septimus Haike, had smoothed his application through the War Office. Edward and Diana were both delighted, their decision to leave a war-torn Britain unanimous. The country was struggling in another cold winter, rationing was worse than it had been during the war, and industrial strikes were increasing. Diana hated the atmosphere of depression, the drab utility clothes and the cold. The attraction of a new life far away in the warmth and the colonial comfort of Malaya was for them both the answer to a prayer and offered a completely fresh start.

The slatted mahogany door to the passenger lounge opened behind them and a padre in a dog-collar stepped over the deep sill on to the deck. He introduced himself, ‘Leonard Goodbury. I’m taking over as Chaplain in Kuala Lumpur.’

He was very dark and thin and would have worn a monk’s habit had the war not intervened and put him in uniform.

‘Malaya should be wonderful,’ he said.

‘We can’t wait,’ agreed Diana.

‘Suvarnabhumi!’ said Goodbury dramatically and then explained with an embarrassed half-smile, ‘The Land of Gold, according to Indian writers at the time of Christ.’

‘Better than Europe, or this,’ said Edward waving a hand over the ship’s rail at the desert.

‘“Prepare ye the way of the Lord”,’ said the padre. ‘“And make straight in the desert a highway”.’

Edward smiled.

‘Isaiah.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t suppose the old boy was thinking of a water highway but it fits the Suez Canal pretty well otherwise, don’t you think? And today being Sunday, I shall be the voice crying in this wilderness.’

Edward looked a bit blank but Diana smiled and said, ‘I promise we’ll listen to every word.’ Church Parade was an important part of army life and she was determined that Edward would rise to the top.

The padre departed on a brisk constitutional around the deck before the service, wondering if he would see more of Diana Fairfax in Malaya. Snatches of his sermon floated back to them on the warm breeze.

Edward wondered what the Arabs either side of the canal would think of a boat gliding between them filled with infidel Christians at worship. He remembered the posting officer in England telling him the Malays were also Muslims. He hoped he would find less bitterness in Malaya than in Palestine.

A month later, as The Empire Orwell cruised into the approaches to Singapore harbour, the officers and men crowded the rails in anticipation. The pale lines of uniforms on the upper decks were broken occasionally by coloured dresses where families stood together.

‘It’s very humid,’ remarked Diana as they watched mile after mile of jungle hanging in tangled green confusion over the red laterite cliffs.

The big white liner passed a two-storey brick building patchily covered with sun-faded camouflage paint. The concrete gun emplacements facing the sea were empty, like eye sockets in a skull.

‘Those are the guns which pointed the wrong way,’ Edward explained how the British defences had proved so embarrassingly useless when in 1941 the Japanese invaded Singapore from the landward Malayan, side.

A comfortable-looking full colonel, standing the other side of Diana, overheard and said, ‘My brother was in the Malay Police at th