***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright 2015 Frederick Forsyth WHISPERED WORDS My father was born in 1906, the eldest son of a frequently absent Chief Petty Officer, Royal Navy, in Chatham, Kent, and emerged at twenty from the Dockyard School to an economy that was creating one job for every ten young men in the labor pool. The other nine were destined for the dole queue. He had studied to be a naval architect, but as the Great Depression loomed, no one wanted ships to be built. The Hitlerian threat had not materialized and there were more merchant ships than anyone needed to carry the diminishing industrial product. After five years scraping a living from little more than odd jobs, he followed the popular advice of the age: Go East, Young Man. He applied for and secured a post as a rubber planter in Malaya. Today it would seem strange to appoint a young man with not a word of Malay nor knowledge of the Orient to go to the other end of the world to manage many thousands of acres of plantation and a large labour force of Malays and Chinese. But those were the days of empire, when such challenges were perfectly normal.
So he packed his things, said goodbye to his parents and took ship for Singapore. He learned Malay and the intricacies of estate management and rubber production, and ran his estate for five years. Each day, he wrote a love letter to the girl with whom he had been "walking out," as they called dating back then, and she wrote to him. The next liner from Britain to Singapore brought the week''s supply of letters and they came to the estate in Johore on the weekly riverboat. Life was lonely and isolated, illuminated by the weekly motorcycle ride south through the jungle, out onto the main road, across the causeway and into Changi for a convivial evening at the planters'' club. His estate consisted of a huge tract of rubber trees set in parallel rows and surrounded by jungle which was home to tigers, black panthers, and the much-feared hamadryad or king cobra. There was no car, because the track to the main road ten miles through the jungle was a narrow, winding line of red laterite gravel, so he rode a motorcycle. And there was the village in which the labour force of Chinese tappers lived with their wives and families.
And like any village there were a few craftsmen - a butcher, a baker, a blacksmith and so forth. He stuck it for four years until it became plain there was little enough future in it. Rubber had slumped on the market. European rearmament had not yet started, but the new synthetics were taking more and more market share. The planters were asked to take a twenty percent salary cut as a condition of continued employment. For the bachelors, the choice was either send for their fiances to come and join them, or to go home to England. By 1935, he was havering between the two when something happened. One night his houseboy roused him with a request.
"Tuan, the village carpenter is outside. He begs to see you." The routine was usually rise at five, tour the estate for two hours, then the morning reception when he would sit on the verandah and hear any petitions, complaints or adjudications in quarrels. Because of the early rise, he turned in at nine p.m. and this request was after ten o''clock. He was about to say "In the morning" when it occurred to him that if it could not wait, it might be serious. "Bring him in," he said.
The houseboy demurred. "He will not come, tuan . He is not worthy." My father rose, opened the screen door and went out to the verandah. Outside, the tropical night was warm velvet and the mosquitos voracious. Standing in a pool of light below the verandah was the village carpenter, a Japanese, the only one in the village. My father knew he had a wife and child and they never mixed with anyone. The man bowed deeply.
"It is my son, tuan . The boy is very ill. I fear for him." Dad called for lanterns and they went to the village. The child was about ten and wracked with pain from his stomach. His mother, an agonized face, crouched in the corner. My father was no doctor, not even a paramedic, but a compulsory course of first aid and a clutch of medical textbooks gave him enough knowledge to recognize acute appendicitis. It was pitch black and closing on midnight.
Changi hospital was eighty miles away, but he knew that if appendicitis turned to peritonitis, it would kill. He ordered his motorcycle brought out, fully fuelled. The father used his wife''s broad sash, the obi, to fasten the child on the pillion, tied to my father''s back, and he set off. He told me later it was a hellish journey, for all the predators hunt at night. It was nearly an hour down the rutted track to the main road, then due south for the Causeway. Dawn was close to breaking some hours later when he rolled into the forecourt of Changi General Hospital, yelling for someone to come and help him. Nursing staff appeared and wheeled the child away. By luck, a British doctor was coming off night shift, but took one look and rushed the boy to surgery.
The doctor joined my father for tiffin in the canteen and told him he had been just in time. The appendix was just about to burst, with probably lethal results. But the boy would live and was even then asleep. He gave the obi back. After re-fuelling, my father rode back to his estate to reassure the impassive but hollow-eyed parents and catch up with the delayed day''s work. A fortnight later, the riverboat brought the mail package, the usual stores, and a small Japanese boy with a shy smile and a scar. Four days later, the carpenter appeared again, this time in daylight. He was waiting near the bungalow when Dad returned from the latex store for tea.
He kept his eyes on the ground as he spoke. '' Tuan , my son will live. In my culture when a man owes what I owe you, he must offer the most valuable thing that he has. But I am a poor man and have nothing to offer save one thing. Advice.'' Then he raised his eyes and stared my father in the face. ''Leave Malaya, tuan . If you value your life, leave Malaya.
'' To the end of his days in 1991, my father never knew if those words caused his decision or merely reinforced it. But the next year, 1936, instead of sending for his fiance, he resigned and came home. In 1941, Imperial Japanese forces invaded Malaya. In 1945, of all his contemporaries, not one came home from the camps. There was nothing spontaneous about the Japanese invasion of Malaya. It was meticulously planned and the imperial forces swept down the peninsular as an unstoppable tide. British and Australian troops were rushed up the spine of the colony to man defensive points along the main roads south. But the Japanese did not come that way.
Out of the rubber estates came scores of sleeper agents, infiltrated years before. On hundreds of bicycles, the Japanese rode south along tiny, unknown jungle tracks, guided by the agents. Others came by sea, leapfrogging down the coast, guided inshore by winking lanterns held by fellow countrymen who knew the coast and all the inlets. The British and Australians were outflanked over and over again as the Japanese appeared behind them, and in strength, always guided by the agents. It was all over in days and the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore was taken from the landward side, her massive guns facing out to sea. When I was a child but old enough to understand, my father told me this story and swore it was absolutely true and it happened nearly seven years before the invasion of December 1941. But he was never quite certain that his village carpenter was one of those agents, only that had he been taken, he, too, would have died. So perhaps a few whispered words from a grateful carpenter caused me to appear on this earth at all.
Since 1945, the Japanes.