Life Without Armour (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

The Kedah Peak trip – for it was no more than that – has been used in various of my books, spun-dried to produce outlandish shadows of fictional characters. The present account, shunning exact repetition as far as possible, tries a peeling back of the skin so as to reach the truth of the experience, though it is unlikely to get much closer. Only by what came afterwards can light be realistically flashed back to when half a dozen of us vanished for six days from the world. During that short enough period Chinese communist bandits began killing whoever they could of the British, service personnel or otherwise, in an effort to terrorize them out of the country so that they could set up a Marxist government.

It is fairly certain that the officer commanding RAF Butterworth wished the exercise of climbing Kedah Peak had never been conceived, especially since we had set off without radio communication and could not be recalled. Perhaps I exaggerate, yet six of his men were apparently lost in the jungle, which in those early days of the Malayan Emergency was assumed to be swarming with competent and ruthless guerrillas waiting in well-prepared ambush positions for just such noddy-boy action men as us.

We were seen by the CO, perhaps, as a group of lunatic, disobedient and sedentary signals types unable to give much fight if attacked, or to survive in such terrain even if we weren't, and he wasn't to know he couldn't have been more wrong – though his anxiety was understandable. I don't recall whether news of our disappearance was given to South-East Asia Command at Singapore, but he must have passed some uncomfortable days wondering whether or not our names would have to be added to those already filling the casualty lists.

A search party was sent by lorry to our jumping-off place, for I had left details and a sketch map of the route with the education officer. Once there, as we gathered later, they walked a short way up the Sungei Bujang beyond the dam, blew a few blasts on whistles whose noise would have been smothered by the first high waterfall if not before and, realizing in any case the futility of their task, withdrew. By this time we were several miles away, well above the 3,000-foot contour line and close to the Peak.

As if to prove that the RAF always looks after its own (and it did), the search party next day drove almost to the Peak on the track leading in from the north-east, but by now we were well on our way down. On the sixth day we noticed the silver fuselage of an Avro-19 flying over a clearing where we had paused in the sun to dry our clothes, and imagined it to be passing on a postal run to Rangoon, whereas it had been sent to look for us.

It was eleven o'clock before we set off on the first morning, rocks underwater so coated with algae that a couple of us capsized before establishing a suitable balance for walking. Even in my factory days I hadn't carried so much, at least not on my back and for such long hours, and the others must have felt it even more.

Corporal Coleman took charge of our party because he had done some bushwhacking in East Africa. A few years older, and experienced enough to know that the first day ought to be easy, he said nothing at our stopping for lunch, or when we later stripped off by a pool to swim, as if out on an extended picnic.

At three o'clock the stream narrowed into a ravine, and our only way forward was to cut a way up into the jungle. Soon afterwards the world changed to a maelstrom of rain which hammered at first as on a roof, and then gathered to fall in plate-sized splashes from the ceiling of trees, drenching us in seconds. Vegetation was so dense that visibility was never more than a few yards.

We floundered up the steep bank through reddish mud, grasping at creepers, and cutting at those which blocked our way. It was a good initiation into the worst kind of travel, and we took it with little humour, merely bashing our way forward and advancing when we could. After a few hours, the day coming to a close, we found a way back to the stream and laid out camp on a large flat bed of rock. Dry wood was got from somewhere, and mess tins of mouth-watering Maconochie's meat-and-vegetable stew were soon simmering between hot stones.

‘Camp' was a misnomer, for we carried no tents, and spread groundsheets over the rock before pulling a blanket over us, mosquito nets suspended from overhanging bushes. The sentry system never gave more than four hours' sleep: knowing nothing about bandits, we took precautions as if by instinct, and certainly no marauders could have surprised us during the night. The two on guard were well separated, though able to communicate by signs, sitting quiet and watchful with loaded rifles, safety catches off so that even the faint click before firing would not betray us. The CO need not have worried, born as we seemed to be with the know-how of infantry.

The next morning, Sunday, compass bearings plotted us at less than a mile in from the dam and about nine hundred feet higher, little enough to show for a day. We ate breakfast of hardtack biscuits and tinned bacon, packs from then on becoming somewhat lighter after each camp.

We struggled the next three days closer to the Peak, following the stream when we could, but mostly chopping and pulling our way up and down through primeval forest. I had never done anything so energetic, yet didn't question why I was there, living from minute to minute in the cocoon of effort, isolated from any feeling or emotion the world might have to offer; no novelty, but different scenery. In the midst of purpose realized, this is what I had wanted to do, nothing more and nothing less, imagination and reality perfectly blending which, for the time being, was all there could be to life. Venture adventure: the marvellous end of it all, yet by no means an end.

How the others explained such a climb-and-slither to themselves I did not know, since what was in my own mind was hardly of a questioning nature. Thought and action were hide-bound together, and in any case one was almost too exhausted to think, always striving to grasp the right creeper with which to haul oneself up the bank, and to prevent rolling with top-heavy kit when going down gradient. The only talk came in warnings, jocular complaints and half-cock remarks, until camp was set in the evening, when a certain amount of badinage made the meal pleasant. Soon afterwards, all but those on guard lay in the undergrowth to sleep.

There was a feeling that, having got myself locked into this rain-soaked forest, I had come as far in my life as possible, that this was the zenith of my physical existence, and nothing in that sense could be the same again. The success of the experiment must have consisted partly in not having to speculate on what that success was to entail. Thoughtlessness and acceptance contributed to my enjoyment of being there, for I loved all that was hazardous and arduous, gloried in those occasional glimpses of the ash-grey Peak, lifting from a muffler of forest, that had to be struggled for because it was there. Pack and rifle on my back, and hacking a trail where no one had bothered to go before, it was as if I had to reach the Peak not only for the struggle to be over but for a different life to begin, though during my self-imposed and not altogether unpleasant travail this life was real indeed.

For days we hardly saw the sky through the netting together of enormous treetops. Knowing at the same time how minor our little exercise was compared to those of the heroic Fourteenth Army in Burma during the war, it was nevertheless a taste of endurance in that the first week must always be the worst, and we knew by the end of ours that we could have gone on much longer, although a parachute drop of food and new boots would have been appreciated.

Curiously enough there was, for the first couple of nights, something never before noted in my life: difficulty in getting to sleep. My daylight soul would not depart with its accustomed speed on my head going down, and though the delay may not have lasted as long as it seemed in my impatience, the wonder and irritation was noticed. The cause was obviously the strangeness of my bed and situation, the noise of rushing water, the unwillingness to relinquish alertness, and the damp discomfort.

By the end of the fourth day, a couple of hundred feet below the Peak, our way was blocked by an escarpment that we could not climb. A little beyond lay the Dak bungalow of our dreams, but we didn't have the wherewithal to scale the wall and reach it. Not too disappointed, as if lack of success was also part of the adventure, we clung to the muddy undergrowth of the ledge much, we joked, like those explorers in
The Lost World
of Conan Doyle, and at nearly 4,000 feet dozed as best we could.

The view in the cold dawn was more inspiring for being hard earned: we saw the kind of terrain we had come through to be where we were: miles of dark green interlocking cauliflower tree-tops hiding our plodding serpentine approach and, before rain clouds came in again, a vista of clear land beyond, with its seeming paradise of paddy fields and rubber plantations, kampongs and rivers, and islands off the coast in the sombre glow of the rising sun. Instead of a short slog over the top to the bungalow, from where we could have telephoned for a lorry and been back at Butterworth in a few hours, we had a day's trek and slither down through thornbush till reaching the usual jungle.

Unable to follow our track made on the ascent, a cliff face stopped us dead and seemed impossible to cross. We had been cut off from water for twenty-four hours, and needed to reach the stream, whose course would also make navigation easier. It wasn't known how feebly or otherwise a scattering of bushes gripped the rock, but we decided to chance it and, nerving ourselves, got over by a narrow ledge. Sometimes in my dreams I see that awesome drop.

At the night's camp, which point had taken three days to reach on the way up, the stream was flowing strongly. Tearing down rotted boughs for a bonfire, a few yards into the trees, I was falling asleep on my feet, something which happened to the others at different times. But for me it was new, my senses so disorientated that I seemed to be elsewhere, yet at the same moment where I was, indicating not only that I no longer knew for a certainty where I was, but that wherever it was I couldn't feel sure I wanted to be there, a peculiar sensation impossible to forget.

For a few moments my mind was divided, one part in the forest with noise from the rushing stream, and the other in a dimly illuminated room of no place possible to locate, but with a fainter sound of water nearby. My senses switched at will (but not my will) from one state to the other, perhaps as much a symptom of exhaustion as an indication of that splitting of the mind which would later not only enable me to understand more clearly what was going on around me, but to make use of that gap between thought and action necessary for spiritual development.

As energetic as ever next morning, and expecting to spend further nights in the forest, we fixed each other's packs into the most comfortable positions (for our backs were now scarred from the weight) and adjusted bush hats at the jauntiest old-hand slant, which stayed that way only while in the clearing.

Trees had fallen at all angles. Some, of a wider diameter than the length of a man, blocked our way along the stream now and again, while others in deep forest had been down and undisturbed so long that the boot, on crunching through the covering of crisp bark, sank into purple softness inside.

Looking at my map of the area, and comparing it with the log sheet, each camp site must have been fixed on counting the tributaries entering the main stream, by plotting compass bearings (which often meant guessing the identity of a jutting hilltop momentarily revealed by dissolving mist or lifting cloud), noting the disruption of contours close to a ravine or pool, and reading an aneroid barometer before using the conversion formula to make a fair estimate of the height. Positions in six-figure map references showed our tracks with more confidence than was felt at the time, and if correct at all it was as much by guesswork as skill in navigation. No amount of care could have produced better evidence of a will to stamp a pattern on what was felt to be uncharted, a desire to suggest order where little or none existed, and to posit knowledge of the half known as much in myself as on a few square miles of jungle.

No places were dry for long, but we disregarded the frequent soaking of everything on our backs: while stripping off by the stream to get rid of leeches we saw the Avro-19 searching for those who were thought to be lost.

We went up into the jungle for the last time to bypass a ravine, then waded down the river which on the first day had been paddled along. Almost to our surprise, by four o'clock in the afternoon, the forest opened out and we were through. Hinshallwood walked across the dam to the hut, and telephoned the camp for a lorry to meet us. Our ragged patrol, boots almost off our feet, marched four more miles to the main road rather than wait to be picked up by the edge of the forest.

Chapter Twenty-three

Wearing our smartest khaki drill, we lined up in the CO's office with the confidence of the absolutely guilty. In phrases of those days that salved the mind: butter wouldn't melt in our mouths, and we didn't have a leg to stand on.

I could not have felt more at ease. The CO had seen the diary and maps kept on the trip, and had already torn strips off Coleman and Hinshallwood, so on his asking why we had been so foolhardy as to vanish into the jungle for a week without taking a two-way wireless there was nothing we could do but stay silent. He went on for a while at how rash we had been, but a lightening of his features was detected when he concluded: ‘Next time, you'll be carrying a full radio pack, because from now on you're our Jungle Rescue Group. You're the only ones on the station with the experience to go after any plane that crashes in that sort of country.'

‘You were lucky,' Sergeant Flowerdew said, marching us out, and I wondered in what way he meant, but didn't bother to ask. At the medical check on our return my weight had dropped a few pounds to 137, but we were passed as fit, and life was back to normal, except that the insurrectionary situation in the Peninsula deteriorated daily.