Thursday 13 November 1952, Singapore Docks: Jason reached Jetty number 10 and saw a Movements Warrant Officer, Class 1, with a nominal roll standing in front of the leave party and went up to him. ‘I am the OC Troops, Sergeant Major. You are going to check everybody as they embark, families and single men alike?’
‘Correct, sir. My name is Mr Hutchinson,’ he added frostily as only Commanding Officers were deemed eligible to call such a senior person by his rank when he spoke to him. Every one lower than a lieutenant colonel was expected to address such a person as ‘Mr So-and-So’. He was a bluff, burly man, obviously competent at a certain level yet Jason had the feeling he would be easily waterlogged beyond the shallows of the commonplace.
Jason made that august warrant officer look uncomfortable as he saluted him and said, ‘Mr Hutchinson, I am merely Captain Rance. Please give me details of how you are managing this task.’
Mr Hutchinson had the grace to grin ruefully. “I will call them forward, first families with the name of the head, Gurkha officers to go to their 2nd Class cabins and finally single men by units, checking them as they walk up the gangway.’
Jason nodded and in a loud voice so that all waiting to embark could hear him, repeated that in Nepali. ‘ … and once you’re all safely on board I’ll come and see you.’ He knew that his own battalion’s Gurkha Major was among the leave details and called out so all could hear, ‘GM Saheb, when I am ready I’ll call you over the Tannoy system to come to the Purser’s Office and we’ll go round together.’
‘Hunchha Hajur.’
‘Before you go, sir, do you know that I have two members of the Corps of Military Police, Red Caps, escorting a prisoner among the men you are responsible for?’ Mr Hutchinson asked.
‘No, that I don’t. Where and who is he?’
‘Mr Hutchinson looked at his list. ‘He is a rifleman, demoted from acting sergeant, from 1/12 GR and his name is Padamsing Rai.’ The man I spoke to on the phone before going to Kelantan! He is in the detention cell in one of the buildings on this jetty. He will be in the brig on board. The two Red Caps will be responsible for exercising him each day and escorting him to and from his meals. They are also responsible for taking him the whole way to Calcutta and once there will sign him over to the civil police who will, so I’ve heard, escort him as far as the Gurkha Recruiting Depot in Darjeeling, I think it is. Once there he will be paid what he is due, given his release documents which won’t make ‘ealthy reading, I can assure you, sir, and officially dismissed,’
‘I suppose I ought to go and see him and warn him to behave himself once he’s on board.’
‘I’ll take you along once all your troops are inside.’
It took a long time to get everyone embarked, what with frightened and fractious children having to be carried on board when they could have walked. There was one little girl who was so ill she had to be taken to the sick bay rather than to her parents’ cabin. Jason was assured that there was a competent ship’s doctor on board.
‘Captain Rance, sir. I’ll take you along and show you the prisoner.’ He glanced at Jason’s shoulder titles. ‘From your lot, sir. Bad news.’
Jason agreed that it was and most unusual in a Gurkha battalion. They went over to the cell, a pokey little room which was almost unbearably hot. The door was opened and the prisoner was ordered to stand to attention by one of the Red Caps who had been standing outside.
‘Rifleman Padamsing Rai. I am Captain Rance, the OC Troops. I am responsible for you till you get to Calcutta. I don’t know why you are here or what has happened to make you no longer a soldier but, until you are discharged, you are still under military discipline.’
‘Rance saheb. You and I spoke on the phone some time back when you told me you were to be OC Troops and were on your way to Kelantan.’
‘Yes, you must be the one. I can now remember seeing you in the battalion.’
A tear came into the Gurkha’s eyes. ‘Sir, there has been a dreadful mistake. I am not guilty of any misconduct. I can’t understand why I am being dismissed.’ He had been surprised, shamed and shocked when he was found in the same bed as the British sergeant by two members of the Special Investigation Branch, as had the British Sergeant also been. Such behaviour was anathema to the British Army and there were government laws strictly forbidding it. To say it never occurred between consenting hill men could be wrong but it was so rare as to be taken as never happening. Rance guessed that the man’s removal from the army was the result of his report and was secretly relieved to see him on his way out but surprised at the speed of such happening. As for the Gurkha himself, he had not put his untoward behaviour down to his discharge and had thought that his communist activities must have been found out and were responsible for it. Just in case something serious happens to me I will never let on what I joined up for he vowed to himself. If Ah Ho finds out he could reach me back at home.
He heard Captain Rance say ‘I don’t know either. Sorry, nothing about changing the decision in your being dismissed is in my hands’ before he moved away.
The Movements Warrant Office said to the Military Police Corporals, ‘Take him aboard and put him in the lock-up. I believe the purser knows about this. In any case, check before and, don’t forget, get a signature for him when you hand him over to the Calcutta Police. The prisoner was led away and at long last Jason saw it was his turn to walk up the gangway with his suitcase.
His first impression on boarding the Chinese vessel was the strong small of cooking, something he had not noticed on other ships he had sailed in. He went to the Purser’s Office and reported in. ‘I am Captain Rance, OC Troops for the voyage, both ways,’ he said in English.
The purser looked at him, trying to hide his dislike of all Europeans who, to him, smelt of bad meat. ‘You are in cabin 2. I’ll ring for the cabin boy who will take you up.’
‘Thank you but I’d prefer it if he merely took my case. I must go and see if my men have settled in properly and have anything to report. If you need to talk about the prisoner you can contact me at any time.’
‘I understand.’ Law Chu Hoi, not used to thinking that red-haired devils had any interest in anyone but themselves, hid his surprise. ‘If that is what you wish. If you need help in finding your way around the boat I’ll give you someone to help you.’ It’s my job to be civil … He also gave the OC Troops details of meal timings, reporting sick and made mention of boat drill.
Jason asked the purser if he could use the Tannoy loud speaker and, reluctantly and somewhat rudely, pushed the microphone through the bars at him. He asked the Gurkha Major to come to the Purser’s Office and told the deck passengers that the two of them would visit them shortly. Cabin passengers were not included but he would visit them with any ship’s inspection on the morrow.
Up in cabin 1, Ah Fat, who was lying on his bunk, drowsing, not having had such an idle time for as long as he could remember, shot up, smiling, when he heard that oh so familiar voice. I thought he’d never come! Ah Fat understood quite a lot of Nepali, having worked with Gurkhas, so knew it would be a while before Jason reached his cabin. I’ll surprise him he chuckled softly, but how?
Meanwhile someone had taken Jason’s luggage to his cabin and Ah Fat heard the door open. He slipped his door open quietly but no Jason, only his baggage. He’ll be along later.
After the GM saheb had come to the Purser’s Office the two of them, along with a ship’s guide, took them to the mess decks. Everyone seemed as content as they could be when herded together in a hot, sweaty and cloistered atmosphere. On each mess deck Jason told them details of meal timings and what to do if a man became ill. At the end the GM invited Jason into his cabin where his wife and three children were, all still a bit afraid of their new surroundings. In his wonderful way Jason used his ventriloquist skills to get the children shouting with laughter and their mother smiling broadly so they forget their fears. ‘I’ll be on my way now, GM saheb’ said the OC Troops, making namasté to the mother and waving to the children, went up a deck from the 2nd Class cabins to the 1st.
As he was opening the door a pair of hands covered his eyes from behind and ‘Guess who?’ was whispered in his ear.
He spun round. ‘P’ing Yee. It can’t be true,’ but of course it was. ‘What a wonderful and unexpected surprise’ and they embraced warmly. Separated they looked at each other and both started talking at once. That made them made them laugh out loud. ‘Flat Ears, let me have a shower and a change as I need both and then we’ll have a great chat. It must be extra special for you to be on board here. I’m dying to hear all about it.’
Ah Fat said, ‘I hope you don’t mean that literally’ but as he only said it to himself Jason was left without the implied message.
Both incidents are described in Chapter 10, My Side of History, Chin Peng. ↵
The whole area became the Hala Bala Wild Life Sanctuary in 1996. ↵
Some years later a spittingly angry Empikau threatened to decapitate your author to make twenty with this same sword. ↵
4
Thursday 13 November 1952, Nepalese Consulate, Rangoon: The Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation’s original six aircraft had all crashed within six months of the corporation being formed. While a new fleet with better trained pilots was being assembled, it charted planes from the Darbanga Airways, whose pilots, therefore, were Indians.
The pilot on today’s flight from Calcutta had been told not to engage in any conversations with his Nepali passenger who, he saw, was ‘booted and suited’, with a handkerchief in his coat’s top pocket. The King of Nepal had been so worried about the battalion of returning mutinying troops that he had written a royal decree and sent it hot-foot by air to his consulate in Rangoon by hand of a senior member of the royal family, a Prince. The Nepali Consul in Calcutta was bidden to help arrange for the Cessna to fly out of India and back again. The Prince was on no account to give the King’s message to anyone else but to the Consul himself.
With minimum fuss the pilot helped him into his seat next to his own, fixed his seatbelt, smiled but got no reaction. He shut the door before walking round the plane doing the required checks before getting into his own seat. As he started the engine he wondered if his passenger was afraid of flying as was the pilot’s father – ‘Father, why don’t you fly with me?’ ‘Because in the air where you are but on the ground here you are’ – contacted the tower and was told which runway to use. After his final engine check he got permission for take-off and away they flew. The weather was fine and the flight smooth, the Cessna 170 being a ‘placid’ machine.
The pilot told his passenger when there was only half an hour’s flying time from Rangoon. ‘Contact the controller in the tower, tell him to ring the Nepalese consulate and tell the Consul personally to come and collect an important document’ was the response. This the pilot duly did.
Twenty minutes later the pilot and his passenger saw the shining top of the Shwedagon Pagoda, a golden dot in the distance. Shortly before reaching it they flew over some flat ground to the west of the Irrawaddy, not for one moment knowing that on 1 May 1945 153 Gurkha Parachute Battalion had been dropped there to capture the city from the Japanese but before they could advance they were bombed by some American ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers and suffered some nasty casualties. By the time the Gurkhas managed to get into the city the Japanese had left without causing any damage. At the same time a rescue party had liberated British prisoners-of-war from Insein jail. Happily ignorant, the pilot called the tower, giving his call sign and asked for instructions for landing.
The Consul, Dhruba Kumar Oli, was a tall man, once handsome but now run to seed, looking older than he was, paunchy and out of sorts so apt to wheeze. When the controller had rung the consulate a clerk answered the phone and took the message. Dhruba was stunned when told about it. ‘Hajur, the message stressed that you personally had to go and collect it, at once,’ his clerk quickly added as he saw his master was unwilling to do as requested.
‘Such a peremptory summons has never happened to me before.’ It was below his dignity to act as an office runner. ‘Who sent the message?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ the clerk mumbled, ‘the phone was put down the other end too quickly.’ Not quite true but good enough! His personal motto was ‘anything for a quiet life and my monthly pay’.
The Consul wavered. Obey or send someone else? On balance he decided, just this once, to swallow his pride and go himself.
‘Tell my driver to get my car ready now, at once!’ he called out, trying not to sound as though he was being taken advantage of and that he was still his own man. At least he had a clear conscience so there was really nothing to worry about, was there?
***
The Consul went to the Enquiries Desk and was shown into the private room of the airport manager. He did not recognise the Nepali already there nor knew that the handkerchief in the top pocket – he himself was ‘open neck’ – was one warning sign of an important man. Unfortunately he said, sharply without any of the usual courtesies, ‘Well, here I am. What’s all this all about? Why the hurry? Why me?’ He therefore, hapless man, did not greet royalty as royalty expected to be greeted, neither using the special vocabulary that talking to royalty required nor showing due deference.
The Prince, not known for his tact and feeling that it was below his dignity to talk to a mere Consul, for once bit his tongue – why waste words with riff-raff? – merely frowned disdainfully and took the letter out of a bag he had round his neck. ‘I am His Majesty’s nephew. His Majesty has ordered you to obey this implicitly. Take it,’ he said, scowling, as he handed it over at arm’s length, with his left hand, showing his disdain at not being spoken to properly.
Embarrassment flooded through the Consul who now realised that the giver of the letter was a Prince of the Realm, of royal blood, who had been demeaned by a complete lack of required protocol. Disaster! He bowed low, making namaste, wheezing in his nervousness as he said, ‘Sarkar. Jo Hukum.’ This was the phrase, translated as ‘whatever personal order’ that was always used to royalty on being told to do anything. The Prince threw a piece of paper on the floor. ‘Pick it up and sign it. It is a receipt for the letter.’ Degradation is a good punishment for such a proud nonentity!
Quaking at this once-in-a-lifetime encounter with the royal family, the Consul bent, picked it up, signed it and tried to hand it back.
