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Dead in the Dog
By Bernard Knight Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2012 Bernard Knight
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84751-424-0
CHAPTER 1
He was hot, tired and slightly bewildered. His fibre suitcase, lashed with a strap that had once been his father's belt, was in the back of the Land Rover. Alongside it was the new holdall that he had bought in Singapore to carry the overflow of his belongings. They said that the cabin-trunk he had packed so carefully in Gateshead wouldn't arrive for another six weeks.
Tom had come by air-trooping, four days' flight from Stansted Airport, cooped up in a Handley-Page Hermes that seemed only slightly faster than the Wright Flyer. His heavy baggage was allegedly on its way by sea, but as he slumped in the passenger seat of the olive-green vehicle, he had his doubts whether he'd ever see the trunk again.
Tom Howden was a pessimist by nature, as he had learned that it was the best way to avoid disappointment. Still, as he was going to be stuck out here for years, he supposed he had to make the best of it. He wondered for the hundredth time, what temporary insanity had led him to sign on for three years, when he could have got away with two as a National Serviceman? Was an extra pip on the shoulder, better pay and the promise of a three hundred quid gratuity at the end, worth another twelve months in this saturated sweat-box?
With a resigned grunt, he shook off the mood of near-desperation and forced himself to look at the scenery – though already he had decided that one Malayan road looked much the same as the next. All bloody trees, thatched huts, scruffy shophouses and fields that looked like rectangular swamps.
The driver was a skinny lance corporal in a faded jungle-green uniform that looked as if it had been tailored for a Sumo wrestler. He took a covert look at the officer alongside and with the smug euphoria of someone who was only three weeks away from his 'RHE' – Return Home Establishment – date, he diagnosed a new recruit to Her Majesty's Far East Land Forces. He saw a sturdy, almost squat young man with a round, plain face sporting a few old acne scars. It was a face that seemed to glare out at the world as if defying it to do its worst, with a downturned mouth and a brow too furrowed for someone in his mid-twenties. The corporal, a philosophical Cockney with an abiding curiosity about his fellow men, reckoned that this officer was a 'prole' like himself, different from the usual toffee-nosed, chinless wonders from the Garrison. But then, he wasn't a proper officer, was he? He was an MO, according to the brass RAMC tabs on his shoulders.
'Train a bit late, sir? They're usually pretty good out here.'
The doctor jerked himself out of his weary reverie.
'On time leaving Kuala Lumpur. Then one of those tortoise things broke down and delayed us.'
The driver nodded sagely. Those 'tortoise things' were armoured railcars that ran ahead of the trains, escorting them through the Black Areas on the long run up from Singapore.
'They've been very quiet lately, the CTs,' chirped the soldier.
'The what?' grunted the new arrival.
Gord, a right one here! thought the driver. Needs to get his knees brown pretty quick.
'CTs, sir,' he said aloud. 'The communist terrorists. That's why we're all out here, innit?'
He stole another look at his passenger, taking in the new green bush jacket and shorts, tailored in one day in Singapore. Though they were all issued with ill-fitting rags at their Depot near Aldershot, he knew that officers were supposed to look smart and had to cough up for tailor-mades at their own expense.
'How much further is it?' grunted Howden, lifting his new cap to rub off the sweat that had gathered under the leather hatband. The Londoner managed to decipher the marked Geordie accent.
'Another six miles, sir. It's a twelve-mile run from Sungei Siput railway station to the gates of Brigade – and BMH is slap next door.'
Howden was beginning to accept that the Army ran on acronyms and 'BMH' now held no mystery for him, though he thought it could just as well stand for 'Bloody Miserably Hot' as for 'British Military Hospital'.
The road began to climb gently from the flat plain that stretched for many miles back to the sea and the new doctor began to take more interest as the hills and high mountains of Perak State rose in front of them. The road this far had been fairly straight, running on causeways built a few feet above padi fields and banana plantations, but now it started to curve in repetitive bends as it passed between low hills. Regimented rows of rubber trees lined the road, all decorated with parallel diagonal scars running down to little pots to catch the latex. As he passed, Howden could see the rows were ruler-straight, millions of the slim trunks marching away from the road to cover thousands of acres, providing the world with the rubber for everything from bus tyres to condoms. Small houses roofed with attap, a palm-leaf thatch, or with red-painted corrugated iron, were scattered alongside the road, with grinning urchins, some stark naked, playing in the muddy water in the ditches outside. To someone brought up in the terraces and council estates of Tyneside, it was still as strange as the planet Mars, even though Tom had spent three days on Singapore Island and travelled almost the whole length of the Malayan Peninsula to get here.
'First time in the East, sir?' persisted the corporal.
'First time out of bloody England,' growled Howden. He preferred to forget the trip to Lille with the Newcastle Medicals' rugby team in 'forty-nine, when they were beaten thirty-six to five.
There was silence for another mile and the doctor felt he should say something to avoid being thought snooty.
'You from the hospital as well?'
'Nossir, I'm Service Corps, from the Transport Pool in the garrison. Don't do no soldiering, thank Christ! Not like them poor sods in the battalions.'
Tom Howden thought it was an opportunity to find out more about the place that was to be his home for most of the next three years – unless the mysterious ways of the Royal Army Medical Corps found somewhere even more obscure to send him. His knowledge of the military machine was rudimentary, as six weeks' basic training in Britain had only taught him how to march badly, miss every target with a revolver and learn a little about intestinal parasites and numerous types of tropical lurgy.
'What's this Brigade you talk about, then?'
The driver sighed under his breath. They shouldn't let virgins like this out alone, he thought.
'You're part of it now, sir!' He squinted at the pristine green oblong sewn on to his passenger's sleeve, portraying a yellow lion alongside a palm tree.
'That dog-and-lampost flash'll have to come off pretty quick, sir. Your CO will spit tacks if he sees it. That's Singapore Base District, but we're Twenty-First Commonwealth Independent Infantry Brigade. Different flash altogether – you need one like mine.'
Tom looked at the dhobi-faded patch on the corporal's uniform – a blue shield and crossed red swords below the figures '21'.
'Is the hospital part of that, then?' he asked dubiously.
'Well, you've got your own CO, a half-colonel. Queer bugger, he is too ... oh, sorry sir!' The driver had the grace to look sheepish at his gaffe. 'But the big chief is the Brigadier, runs the whole outfit.'
The explanation was cut short as the Land Rover rounded a bend and came into a village, where they were forced to crawl along behind an ox-cart heaped with dried palm fronds for roofing. The driver swerved to avoid mangy pi-dogs, men on high bicycles, wandering chickens and assorted children scattered across the road. Ramshackle stalls selling fruit and Coca-Cola stood on the beaten earth in front of a few two-storied shophouses, from which taped Chinese pop songs blared out at ear-splitting volume. Malay girls in sarong-kerbayahs, colourful tunics over long skirts, swayed gracefully through the hubbub, resisting the raucous invitations of the shopkeepers to buy tin alarm clocks, dried fish or plastic toys. A dilapidated bus was coming the other way and they were forced to stop for a moment behind a grimy truck, from which several emaciated men were unloading heavy sacks of rice. Across the tailboard large Chinese characters were painted and underneath, Tom read a presumed translation in Roman lettering proclaiming the owner to be 'Wun Fat Tit', which left him wondering if it could possibly be true or was just some oriental leg-pull.
As the bus passed, blaring its horn raucously and belching black diesel smoke, the Land Rover pulled out, but almost immediately, the driver had to brake to avoid a Chinese woman wearing a samfu, a kind of floral pyjamas, leading a skinny cow on a length of rope.
'This is Kampong Kerdah, sir, the last village before our place. Tanah Timah is a proper town, not like this 'ere dump,' said the soldier, with an almost proprietorial air.
As Howden was thinking that most places in Malaya seemed to have alliterative names, the driver twisted the wheel again and squeezed past the ox cart and accelerated out of the village on to more curves between more rubber estates.
'Where's this road go to?' he asked.
'It forks at Tanah Timah – or 'TT' as everyone calls it. Straight on it goes up a few miles to Kampong Jalong, then fizzles out against the mountains. Big buggers they are, some go up to six thousand feet. The other track just goes through the rubber up past Gunong Besar, with a village at the end called Kampong Kerbau. Damn-all beyond that for 'undreds of miles across the jungle and mountains, until you hit the China Sea. All Black Area that, real bandit country, very nasty!'
He said this with morbid glee, as if he had daily experience of hunting terrorists, though in fact he had never heard a single shot fired in anger during his two years up at this 'sharp end' of the campaign.
'Is this a Black Area?' Howden looked uneasily at the deserted plantations, where the rubber trees stood in endless ranks, reminding him of the war graves he had seen on his rugby trip to Flanders.
'Nossir, but this White Area stops just beyond TT. If it was Black here, we wouldn't be allowed out without an escort – and have to carry a weapon.'
He bent his head towards the officer as if to impart some great secret.
'Best not to carry a pistol, sir. You only get a ticking off for not having one, but if you lose the bloody thing, it's a court martial.'
Tom had no intention of carrying anything more lethal than a syringe, especially as Aldershot had proved that he could barely hit a house at ten paces. The vehicle suddenly slowed to a stop and he looked around in alarm.
'Just thought you'd like to see the view, sir,' reassured the corporal. He leaned on his steering wheel and pointed through the windscreen.
'That's TT down there, you can see the garrison and BMH next to it.'
Howden saw that they had stopped at the crest of a hill and were looking down on a bowl-shaped area a couple of miles across. It was open on the left where a broad valley went back towards the railway and the far distant sea. On the right, above the rubber estates, green jungle-covered hills climbed towards remote blue mountains, their tops wreathed in clouds. Below, the road snaked down for another mile to a small town, little more than a main street with a few parallel lanes of buildings. A little further on, there was a large rectangular complex of huts and other buildings, with many vehicles parked in rows, the sun glistening on their windscreens. Next to it was a smaller compound with more regular lines of low buildings, which the doctor took to be the hospital.
'Dead flat down there, sir. It used to be a tin mine, before the Army bulldozed it to build the garrison.'
It was almost like an aerial view or a map and Tom was intrigued by the geography of what was to be his home for the foreseeable future. He saw that the road that passed through Tanah Timah forked at the further end of the main street. The left branch crossed a small bridge over a brown river that ran behind the little town, then climbed a rise on the other side of the valley before vanishing into the ubiquitous rubber. Just beyond the bridge was a large bungalow-style building, perched on a grassy mound. It had a wide green-painted tin roof and there was a tennis-court and a small swimming pool behind it.
'What's that place – the school?'
'Nah, that's 'The Dog', sir. It's the posh club, white planters and officers only. They don't let no wogs in there – nor ORs like me.'
Howden's meagre stock of Army lore told him that ORs were 'Other Ranks', but 'The Dog' was beyond him. He asked his driver, but the corporal shrugged.
'Search me, sir! I think the proper name's the Sussex Club.' He pointed again, this time slightly to the left.
'Alongside them big hills in the distance, there's another valley, see? It's all Black country, goes up to Chenderoh Dam and a lake. The road goes all the way to Grik and the Siamese border, they say, but it's bloody dangerous up there. Chin Peng himself hangs out in that area.'
Tom twisted further to his left, looking at more mountains on the other side of the flat plain below. 'What's over there, then?'
'That's Maxwell Hill, above Taiping. Decent town, is that. Another hospital there, BMH Kamunting, bigger than this one here. I drives a truck up there now and then, for stores and stuff.'
He decided that sightseeing was over and coasted down the long hill towards TT, his passenger looking sideways at the changing vegetation as the rubber gave way to oil palm and then bananas, before the rice padi appeared again on the flat land at the bottom. Black water buffalo trudged through the mud pulling crude ploughs, thin farmers urging them on from behind. Women in colourful sarongs and head cloths stood up to their knees in water, planting rice seedlings. As the Land Rover passed, they giggled and quickly turned their faces away in case a camera should appear.
As they came downhill, a long convoy of green military vehicles passed them in the opposite direction, three-tonners and Land Rovers grinding up the slope, shepherded by armoured cars in front and behind. As they passed, Tom saw scores of soldiers sitting in the trucks, some wearing bush hats with one side of the brim turned up.
'What's all that about?'
The driver shrugged nonchalantly. 'Going off on a sweep of the "ulu" to chase out some of the little yellow sods. Some of those in the TCVs were Aussies.'
The Tynesider knew what Aussies were, but it was another day or so before he added 'Troop Carrying Vehicle' to his list of acronyms. 'God knows what "ulu" might be,' he muttered to himself.
As they approached some buildings, the corporal pointed ahead.
'Here's the town, sir. Don't blink or you'll miss it!'
Tanah Timah was about four hundred yards long, a straight wide road lined on each side by 'shophouses', two-storied terraces of sun -bleached cement. The upper floors overhung a continuous arcade supported by pillars, known as the 'five-foot way' behind which were a multitude of colourful shops, selling everything from refrigerators to Nescafé, from paraffin stoves to rolls of silk brocade. Some were workshops and the glare of welding and the hammering of bicycle repairs spilled out into the arcades and across the ramps that crossed the deep monsoon drains that fronted the buildings.
There were people everywhere – old ladies squatting behind piles of fruit for sale, men chopping firewood, girls selling fried rice from huge woks, cobblers sitting cross-legged at their lasts and shoppers and loungers wandering across the road, oblivious of the traffic. Bicycle trishaws carried gaily dressed Malay women holding up paper umbrellas against the sun and barefoot labourers pushed bikes piled high with green fodder or crates of live ducks. Ungainly local trucks belched fumes, competing in noise and pollution with the battered bus that came up from Sungei Siput three times a day. An occasional green Army vehicle passed through, but the town seemed to be ignoring the fact that they were on the edge of a vicious terrorist war that had been going on for years.
As his driver had warned, they passed through the town in less than two minutes and as the shops ended, the new arrival saw the side turning off to the left, leading towards the bridge and the mysterious 'Dog'. Facing the road junction was a solid-looking building, freshly painted in white, with radio aerials on the roof. It was set in a compound behind a high perimeter wall topped by a barbed-wire fence. A barrier at the entrance was guarded by a Malay in a smart khaki uniform, with a black peaked cap and a pistol holstered on his belt.
'That's the Police Circle HQ – dunno why they call it a Circle, but they always do,' volunteered his oracle.
Another half mile along the dead flat road brought them alongside what seemed to be a huge Mississippi riverboat made from rusted corrugated iron. It was sitting forlornly in a few feet of dirty water, which appeared to be the remnants of a dried-up lake.
'What the hell's that?' asked Howden.
'The old tin dredge, that is. Abandoned after the Japs came. Like I said, the garrison and hospital are built on the old tin tailings. And here we are, sir.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dead in the Dog by Bernard Knight. Copyright © 2012 Bernard Knight. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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