Dead in the Dog

When he finally put the paper aside, Tom just sat quietly, listening to the endless chirrup of the crickets outside the open doors and the gentle whirr of the fans overhead. The strangeness of being dumped halfway across the world within a few weeks of leaving a cold, wet England was beginning to fade, though he still had fits of unreality about the whole business. He had rarely before been more than fifty miles from his native Tyneside. During the worst blitzes of the war, his parents had evacuated him to an aunt’s farm in rural Northumberland, but apart from rugby trips and some childhood holidays to Scarborough or Whitby, he had been very much a home bird. Even as a medical student in Newcastle, he had stayed in Gateshead, living in the semi-detached with his parents and younger brother. His father was a draughtsman in the huge Swan Hunter shipyard across the Tyne in Wallsend and Mum was a dedicated housewife.

Tom’s life had been happy and uneventful until now, the only major excitement being his getting a scholarship grant from the grammar school to go to university, as the family certainly could not have afforded it themselves. His parents were slightly overawed by having a doctor in the house, after generations of unambitious industrial workers in their family. When on his embarkation leave, he dressed up for them in his uniform with his three new pips on each shoulder, they stared at him as if he was a stranger from another planet, unable to recognize their ‘wee Tommy’ in this alien being.

Some of this went through his head as he sat alone in the cloying heat of a Malayan night. He had already written home a dozen times and this little attack of nostalgia decided him to start another epistle later that evening. He had a pack of flimsy airmail envelopes in his room, all with strips of greaseproof paper under the flaps to stop them sealing themselves up spontaneously in the humidity. It was little things like that which brought home to him how far away from home he was – along with the egg-cup full of anti-malaria tablets on the breakfast table each morning and the free issue of a tin of anti-foot-rot powder. There was also a free issue of fifty cigarettes each week, but as he had given up smoking at the age of twelve, he gave them to Ismail, the young Malay mess boy who made his bed, cleaned his room and polished his shoes.

Lim Ah Sok padded in again from his kitchen-cum-bar, to ask if he wanted another drink.

‘No thanks, Number One, on duty tonight. Must keep a clear head in case Chin Peng comes!’

He immediately wondered whether he should have make such a feeble joke to another Chinese, but the razor-thin steward merely grinned and made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

‘Those devils not come anywhere near here – too many guns in garrison!’

Tom wasn’t so confident, as he had heard the tale of BMH Kinrara, where the terrorists had come up to the perimeter wire and shot up the Sisters’ Mess, fortunately without injuring anyone. Before he left, Number One bent towards Tom as if to impart some confidence.

‘That trouble at Gunong Besar, that not CTs, sir. No, not at all!’

He grinned again and tapped a lean forefinger against his nose in a cryptic gesture, before padding out to share a bottle of Bulldog stout with his wife. Tom was left suspecting that the servants, especially the Chinese, knew more about the local situation than all the Army’s intelligence system. They seemed to have their own Mafia-like organization amongst the hundreds of civilians who worked for the military, full of information from all the houseboys, mess servants and gossip in the central market, shops and eating stalls of Tanah Timah. Tom’s only previous experience of Chinese was confined to one laundry in Gateshead and films about Fu Manchu. He had assumed that they all looked the same to Europeans, but it was patently obvious that there was more diversity in their features than amongst whites. As for being inscrutable and impassive, a walk down TT’s main street had soon proved that they could be as garrulous and noisy as a bunch of drunken Italians. In spite of his sometimes dictatorial manner, Number One was really a patient and kindly fellow and had more than once quietly asked Tom if there was anything he needed to help him settle down so far from home.

The clock over the Queen’s picture showed half past ten and the pathologist shook himself out of his sleepy reverie to grope in the pocket of his bush jacket. He pulled out the folded sheet of paper supplied by Alf Morris. Its poorly duplicated typing faintly set out the duties of the Orderly Medical Officer and he studied it once again to remind himself and make sure that he wouldn’t fall foul of the CO at tomorrow’s Morning Prayers.