Jason joined the army, was sent to India for officer training in the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, where he outshone all the other cadets in his knowledge of jungle lore. He learnt to make a cuckoo call as well as the real bird which misled many a hearer on patrol exercises when a cuckoo answered his calls. On being commissioned he was posted to the 1st Gurkha Rifles. The three Indians and the Gurkha joined the Indian National Army, composed of Indian Army prisoners of war in Singapore. Intercepted by ‘Magic’, the highly guarded codeword given to the breaking of Japanese codes which the Indian National Army command in Singapore was allowed to use, the four men were captured; Rabilal Rai by Jason Rance and his men when he tried to get to India in a Japanese submarine; the two nephews, captured after parachuting into Burma and later hanged, and Tor Gul Khan, who was killed in Burma. Amazingly Jason Rance had been witness at the capture of the two Indians and the death of the one.
During the early stages of Japan’s invasion of Malaya Jason’s parents had escaped to India and his father had been commissioned in the Indian Intelligence Corps and worked in General Headquarters in New Delhi. He had met his son when Jason went to GHQ for briefing for two special jobs; teaching units of the Chinese Army to use British Light Machine Guns; being loaned to the Nepalese Contingent’s battalion in Burma to teach them the use of snipers’ rifles. A third meeting was at the trial of the two captured parachutists.
At that time victory over the Japanese had yet to occur and the future of India was in doubt. The future of Gurkhas was, too, and no one expected either to be allowed to serve in the post-independent Indian Army or that there would be Gurkhas in the British Army. Having no civil job to go back to he had volunteered for a regular commission and been awarded one so when he heard that Gurkha regiments had been divided between the two armies he had volunteered for continued service with them and to his intense delight he had been commissioned into the 12th Gurkha Rifles, made up of men from the east of Nepal. After Indian independence, the British Army’s Gurkhas were sent either to Hong Kong or Malaya. Jason’s new battalion had been detailed to go the latter and that was why it was, in its way, a home-coming for him.
To date his soldering had been with Gurkhas from the west of Nepal, now he had to serve with easterners. He was to learn that both were as good as each other with one main difference: in the west, one could foster a friendship but in the east one had to wait until the other man took the initiative.
He heard orders for disembarkation over the Tannoy. He looked at his watch and saw it was half past three. He had yet to be given a job in charge of troops but his batman, Rifleman Kulbahadur Limbu, was reputed to be the battalion’s expert tracker. Jason wondered if that meant his future was to be the commander of the Recce Platoon.
‘Saheb, time for us to leave the boat. I’ll be happy to get off it and onto the firm ground again,’ he heard a voice behind him and looking round there was Kulbahadur with Jason’s and his own kit. ‘I’ve been told we’ll have our meal on the dockside before getting on the train’, rel to Gurkhas, ‘and moving all through the night. Do you know where we’re going? It’s all the same to me, new, green and fresh, so unlike it was in India.’
India, since the end of the war, had been a terrible place to serve in. Anti-British and anti-Gurkha tensions were constant: Hindu versus Moslem antipathy had resulted in a raging lust for religious superiority that caused myriad deaths, horrendous injuries, abject penury, widespread starvation and a collapse of all civil authority. Civil law and order were nowhere. The birth of the new country of Pakistan was something that generations of Britons who had loved and worked for India could never, in nightmares, have imagined or foretold. The final evacuation for Britons to leave in late December 1947 was Scheme QUIIM for Quit India Immediately, a name making those with a knowledge of one particular nickname of the most private part of a woman’s body giggle.
So yes, the comparison between India and this new, green and fresh country, with no nose-to-tail, a-hundred-miles-long convoys of bullock carts of homeless refugees, no stench of death, no rotting corpses by the roadside and no hordes of hungry beggars. ‘I agree with you, Kulé. It will a great change, too, no killings, proper peacetime, no war, training not operations, no casualties like there have been for so long.’
Jason was a born linguist and his Nepali, honed over the wartime years, was of a higher standard than many other British officers’. ‘Saheb, your Nepali accent is as I have heard how the western Gurkhas speak, different from our eastern accent. Were you born in India and not in Belayat?’ his batman asked.
‘No, Kulé, I was born in this country.’
‘So I suppose you speak Malay?’
‘Yes’ and fluently, but he did not let on that his Chinese was of a higher standard and, if his face were covered, he would be taken for a Chinese and not an Englishman, an Angrej, a Belayati. He somehow felt that he ought not to ‘show off’ his Chinese language ability, quite why he never really worked out, but at the back of his mind was the thought that it might be of the greatest use if he kept quiet about it.
Orders for entraining were given. Their destination was Seremban, a town south of Kuala Lumpur, in the state of Negri Sembilan. It had never had a regular army unit there before so there was no suitable accommodation ready for them. Going there pleased Jason as it meant he could go to Bhutan Estate where Rabilal Rai had lived, find out his parents and tell them that their son was dead, how they had become great friends, how Jason had managed to get him enlisted in the 1st Gurkha Rifles but how, sadly, he had been killed, by whom he never knew, as the Japanese were being driven south towards Rangoon.
The contrast between those last six months in India with the 1st Gurkha Rifles and the first three months in Malaya with 1/12 Gurkha Rifles took much getting used to. On the surface life was placid, humdrum, unexciting and boring. Initially the mass of paperwork required for the soldiers to change armies was time-consuming, mind-deadening but essential. Such matters as giving men their new army numbers, new pay books, a new currency, new accounting systems, new kit inventories and will forms in case a man died in service without a legal will had a high priority as did much else that was new. There were also a whole lot of new faces to recognise, new names and numbers to be learnt, a new accent and different words to get used to. There were many shortages: clerks, drivers, cooks, weapons specialists, signallers, pioneers and buglers, to say nothing of maps, compasses, wireless sets and even storage space, though there were several football grounds in the town. The weather was so different from what it had been in India, one could almost set one’s watch by the daily afternoon showers at twenty past four so the footballers finished playing wet from rain and sweat.
Although life was, generally, boring, there were two surprises. The first, unpopular in the extreme, was, very early on, to be told that the battalion had become a gunner regiment, no longer were soldiers ‘riflemen’ and ‘corporals’ but ‘gunners’ and ‘bombardiers’, with ‘companies’ becoming ‘batteries’. And indeed, the proposed ‘new-look’ Gurkha Division had the unit as 101 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, (12 Gurkha Rifles) but they still called themselves 1/12 Gurkha Rifles. The soldiers were bemused but it only made a difference when 25-pounder artillery pieces arrived and with half a dozen new British officers, Gunners all, knowing nothing about Gurkhas or their language. Apart from a new weapon to be learnt, that meant a second lot of new sahebs to get used to: certain over-educated hot heads felt that they had made the wrong decision in becoming British Army Gurkhas. It also posed a dilemma for those British officers who had come across from the 1st Gurkha Rifles and who had no wish to be a ‘nine-mile sniper’ as the derogatory phrase had it: bug out to a British infantry regiment of the line, try to convert to be a Gunner or leave the army altogether? The majority decision was to stay for one three-year tour if only to help the Gurkhas by being a buffer between them and this new influx.
Apart for any administrative consideration, the main task of the battalion for the next four months was to learn what was known as ‘gun drill’ with the new ‘pieces’. Peacetime routine also included drill, physical training, small arms weapon training and games, phantoms of memory in the past three and a half years. The regiment was badly under-strength as many men had opted to stay in the Indian Army, fed on anti-British propaganda by Congress Party sympathisers that there would be no rice in the rations which would only contain beef and bread. Likewise, it would be the first time ever that families were to live in a land beyond the Black Water, anathema to any Hindu.
But above all, people were thankful there was no war and peacetime conditions were now the norm … but they were all wrong. What nobody knew was that, within six months, death and destruction, chaos and confusion would reign as the Communists launched a deadly offensive that would last a dozen years.
Mid-January 1948
Jason’s parents had left India at the end of the war and settled in London. Jason’s father became critically ill and Jason was allowed two weeks’ compassionate leave, just in time to see him before he died. He was allowed to travel by air, an almost unknown privilege: it took two and a half days to get to England with night stops in Karachi and Rome. He almost had to wait for a ship to bring him back but was lucky to be given a flight instead. He decided to buy a Gurkha broach for his mother to wear. He went to Terrier’s, a jeweller’s shop in Regent’s Street, and told the man there what he wanted, mentioning that he was returning to Malaya. ‘I wonder you can do something for me?’ he asked and Jason felt he was almost duty bound to say, ‘I’ll certainly try to.’
It transpired that before being taken a prisoner by the Japanese in 1942, a Tamil estate comprador, Subramanian Mudaliar, had helped him recover when wounded by hiding him till he was better, otherwise, as he said later, he would probably have died in captivity. ‘I’d love to thank him and now is the chance of asking you to take a watch out for him as a present. Could you please manage that? Mind you, I don’t know if he is dead or alive, but I’ll risk it.’
‘Of course. Where does he live?’ and the address was Jemima Estate, not far from Seremban. Once back from leave Jason asked at the Police Station if they could help him find the man and the reason why. A week later Jason was asked to go to the Police Station where he found a frightened man who said yes, he had helped a British captain in 1942. When Jason told him what the captain had asked him to do, the man was overcome with surprise and delight. ‘Tuan, as a thank you I can’t do anything other than ask you to tell the captain how grateful I am and for you for having bothered to find me.’ Here he hesitated then burst out with, ‘if there is ever anything I can help you with, you must let me know.’
They parted and Jason put that out of his mind … but Subramanian Mudaliar remembered.
In late February the Gunner CO, Lieutenant Colonel James Heron, a nice enough man but palpably out of his depth commanding Gurkhas, suggested holding a party for various local dignitaries and senior officers. Among the guests was one Reggie Hutton. When Jason Rance was introduced to him, he leant forwards and softly said, ‘When there’s a quiet moment come and talk to me.’ It was only after Jason had drifted off that he realised that Hutton had not spoken English to him but Chinese.
When they did meet up Hutton, smiling, said, ‘Congratulations, you have passed one most important test!’
Jason looked at him nonplussed so Hutton felt he had to explain himself. ‘When I spoke to you in Chinese you didn’t bat an eyelid in surprise. A great attribute.’
‘How did you know I spoke Chinese, sir?’
‘During the war I was in a stay-behind party in which was your boyhood friend Ah Fat and he told me all about you …’
Rudely Jason interrupted. ‘Is he still alive? I do hope so.’
‘Yes, and you will learn what he’s up to all in good time. Now, there’s something I want to tell you about.’ He came nearer and lowered his voice. ‘I am in charge of Special Branch in Singapore and there is a Chinese, named Lee Soon, who worked with me in the same group during the war. He was one of the two Malayan Communist Party’s representative at a so-called Youth Meeting in Calcutta in January when he was told that a Communist uprising was due to start here in Malaya sometime this year. At the meeting and then a Communist get-together there was a Gurkha from Bhutan Estate. He is Kamal Rai, who was my close companion in my hide-away years during the war. I spoke to him recently when I went to stay with the estate manager, Mr Theopulos. I took him to one side and told him about you and if ever it was suggested that he work with you, not to refuse.’
Jason gasped. ‘Sir, I knew a Kamal Rai when I lived in Malaya pre-war. I wonder if he’s the same.’
‘Yes, he is the same as he knows you and your boyhood friend Ah Fat. Kamal has been my close agent ever since we met. That would be after you left Malaya, in 1936, wasn’t it?’ He took a sip from the glass in his hand.
‘No, sir, 1938.’
‘I arranged for him to go to Calcutta for the Youth meeting and to act dumb as I wanted to know what Lee Soong was up to and also what the two meetings, the Youth bit and a Communist Party Plenum, were about. On his return, apart from debriefing him, I was also keeping tabs on the Australian Communist leader, Sharkey, who had been at the Calcutta meeting and who stopped off in Singapore where he had a secret meeting with the MCP and urged them to become active.’
‘If I do meet Kamal am I to know about that or will I just meet him as a one-time friend?’
A wine waiter offered them some drinks but both declined, too busy to break off their conversation.
‘If you meet socially, keep it social,’ Reggie continued as though he had not been interrupted. ‘If any situation arises that involves his background, “yes”. My name will be your passport for any skulduggery and when you do meet him, give him my regards. And, for your ears only, there are three Chinese Green Dragon men near Bhutan Estate in the Sepang area who are waiting for matters to turn active and have been warned that this Lee Soon will be visiting them. You don’t know Lee Soong but Kamal does – and hates his guts.’
‘Just one point, sir. A Rabilal Rai from Bhutan Estate tried to enter India by submarine during the war. I and my men captured him, prevented him from drowning. We became friends, he my gunman. He was killed at the end of the war by an Indian soldier who had volunteered for the Azad Hind Fauj, the Free Indian Army, in Burma and I need to go and tell his parents who will not have heard what’s happened to him. When I am in Bhutan Estate looking for his folk, do I also look for Kamal?’
Reggie Hutton considered that then said, ‘no. Let it happen of its own accord.’
Jason thanked him and, after a hand clasp, they drifted apart.
By early March Jason felt it was time for him to go and see Rabilal’s parents and, if the occasion arose, ‘bump into’ Kamal. He asked the Adjutant for a weekend’s leave. Many officers went the few miles to Port Dickson to swim and lounge and Bhutan Estate, under Mr Theopulos, whose uncle had brought the original workforce from Darjeeling in 1904, was not as far. Granted.
