The Devil's Garden Read online

  THE DEVIL’S

  GARDEN

  NIGEL BARLEY

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Part I

  The Fruits of Victory

  Part II

  The Garden in the Wilderness

  Part III

  The Wilderness in the Garden

  ROGUE RAIDER

  ISLAND OF DEMONS

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF STAMFORD RAFFLES

  ABOUT MONSOON BOOKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Introduction

  Between February 1942 and September 1945, Singapore suffered one of the cruellest occupations of the Second World War as the conquered Japanese territory of Syonanto. Local civilians were subject to arbitrary killing, dispossession, torture and deprivation of the essentials for life and lived in fear of informers and a ruthless secret police force. Some 130,000 Allied POWs were incarcerated in shocking conditions that brought many to their deaths and cost many more irreplaceable years stolen from what should have been the prime of their lives. Allied civilians were imprisoned in the Changi jail and ravaged by disease, malnutrition and neglect. The city itself was extensively looted and destroyed. Yet, in the midst of all this, the Botanic Gardens—linked to the famous Raffles Museum—remained, for some time, a haven of tranquillity and greenery where Westerners, Singaporeans and Japanese continued peaceful co-operation in the service of science and culture and hinted at the possibility of an alternative world. This was not without its tensions and would lead to bitter recriminations after the war but such a phenomenon contradicts some of the received orthodoxies and extreme stereotypes that are still fixed in the popular memory of the occupation. Motivations, loyalties and identities were far more complex and uncertain than those assumed by subsequent history.

  The characters depicted here are partly inventions, though events are largely based on those recorded, publicly and privately, by witnesses and actors of the time. Professor Tanakadate, for example, is a genuine character—recalled fondly in a memoir somewhat hesitantly published by a member of staff after the war, at a time of still-strong anti-Japanese feeling—although he was subsequently replaced as a result of being seen, by the occupation authorities, as excessively pro-Western. He has been fused for reasons of literary economy with another real figure, the elegant and scholarly Marquis Yoshichika Tokugawa, who remained a powerful protector of the institution throughout the war years and was an important political and academic figure in post-war Japan after the Allied victory. The character of Alexander Hare, friend of Stamford Raffles, and referred to coyly in his wife’s memoir as ‘the eccentric Mr Hare’ is painted very much from life and a member of staff of the museum and gardens, Carl Gibson-Hill, was indeed more than a little obsessed with research on both him and the natural history of Cocos-Keeling.

  The situation of intercultural understanding is always fraught with difficulty and war is always rich in absurdity as well as suffering and heroism. It will come as no surprise that this story deals in all three and the only apparent contradiction between them, without apology. As has often been noted, one should not make predictions, especially about the future, and none could have guessed, even remotely, what that future held for Singapore after the war—which lends poignancy to the accounts and predictions written with such great confidence at that time. Being a place that was always referred back to another imagined homeland, different for each racial group, it was at a conceptual crossroads, having position but no single location on any political map. The creation of a distinctively Singaporean identity lay yet well in the future but there can be no doubt that the experiences of the war, even the rather unusual ones drawn on here, were an important part of the process by which that came about.

  Part I

  The Fruits of Victory

  Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki ‘Tiger’ Yamashita poked distastefully in the dust of the Raffles Museum with the toe of his boot. The pose was like a 17th-century French aristocrat ‘making a leg’. A staff field photographer—recognising his cue—darted forward, bowed, snapped, bowed, darted back. The General looked up at the hole in the dome, the satisfactory product of one of his own, non-photographic Canons—through the aperture you could see the edge of the Rising Sun flapping above—and then back down at the shattered display. ‘The Singapore Stone’ he read, scanning the information panel with one finger and moving lips. His English was not good but the Chinese calligraphy was just readable. One of many such ancient stones scattered over the whole archipelago. Possibly 12th century, possibly inscribed in Kawi script, possibly related to the legend of the strongman Badang who flung it there in a competition with a champion of the Rajah of Kling. But possibly none of these. A failed attempt at decipherment by Stamford Raffles. Blown up by the piqued and practical British in 1843 to build a lowly bungalow. Inscription on the surviving main fragment rubbed away by the illiterate backsides of sepoys who used it as a seat. Salvaged by the awed and romantic British as a poignant monument to the tooth of time. Sent to Calcutta. Sent back to Singapore. He bent over the lump of crumbly red sandstone and harumphed skeptically. It hardly seemed worth all the bother. Still no one even knew what the inscription meant. Anyway, it was no longer Singapore but now Syonanto, ‘Light of the South’. History lay not in the past but in the future. The British empire lay in ruins and its monuments were soon to be consigned to museums or erased as if by careless Japanese backsides.

  He stepped forward, commander of the 25th Army, lord of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, planted his boot squarely atop the stone, cocked his arm on his waist and ran his hand over his cropped skull and walnut-shell of a face as if smoothing them for the world. The reporter darted forward again, bowed over his instrument, crouched, flashed, bowed and scuttled away. The picture would look good back in Tokyo and with all the political enemies he had there—those toadies of Tojo’s—he could use all the public support he could get. He liked to feel on top of things and if you put your foot on a rock, people assumed you had climbed a mountain. It was like the way Chinese made offerings of the snout and tail of a pig and their stupid ancestors simply assumed they had got all the rest in between. As he stepped back, Tiger looked down at his boot and irritation flicked at the corner of his mouth. Dust had stuck to the immaculate toecap. He had complained to his servant about this before. The man had sighed, cringed respectfully, hands clasped to head in expectation of merited blows, and blamed the Australians. Until proper supplies of boot polish from Dai Nippon could be arranged, it seemed the man was forced to use an inferior Australian brand called Vegemite.

  Tiger put both hands behind his back and spun on his heel, scattering the officers and municipal officials around him. Across the vestibule stood the bronze statue of Stamford Raffles, his true enemy, now removed from his previous and unacceptable stance, gazing out to sea with visionary eyes from the front of the Victoria Theatre. That Victoria Theatre where the Lautrequish posters, now torn down, had advertised a performance of the scandalous insult to Japanese dignity that was Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’. Perhaps it had served him well. The absurd figures of the Mikado had encouraged false British arrogance, now richly repaid. He had ordered the actors shot in a final retrospective review.

  Raffles had been facing the wrong way as it turned out, for Tiger had come not from the sea but from the north and no one in the audience had shouted ‘Behind you!’. He walked across to fix Raffles in the eye, like a sergeant he was about to humiliate. Awkwardly, because the statue was mounted on a plinth, he had to look up. He had joined the army principally because it allowed short men like himself to shout and sneer at tall ones. And now that had become the whole of Japanese foreign policy. He noted the bad posture, the severe underdevelopme
nt of the calves and snorted skeptically. An army reject. In Penang, they had manhandled fat-bummed Francis Light off his podium and snapped his sword. Here, the treatment had been more gentle, perhaps misguidedly so. Tiger turned to the museum staff and rapped out instructions. A wooden box was rushed up and set beside Raffles so that the general could climb up, now a wobbly good three inches taller than the statue. The museum staff were nervous. They held their breath. The last encounter between the two sides had ended badly.

  The Japanese had seized the obvious photo opportunity of the removal of the statue, under the supervision of a young lieutenant, with staff officers and joyful populace looking on, all hoping for a treat. Accordingly, a band of Western prisoners and Tamil workmen had been whipped up. They had slung a rope round the disgraced imperialist’s neck to hoist Raffles off his base with block and tackle and swing him across to the waiting truck as the dignitaries stood around laughing like good ol’ boys at a Southern lynchin’. But Raffles had been parsimoniously cast hollow and, being severely wounded in the upper body by Japanese shrapnel during the assault on the city, the fissures had allowed rain to seep into the central cavity. As the men heaved and strained, he had initially swooped angelically enough overhead, then suddenly tipped and sprayed the Japanese staff officers with urine-hued water. It was the sort of pratfall that an Asian audience savours and a British commander—resigned since birth to being thought a silly-arse by foreigners—would have laughed it off, perhaps even played it up for the crowd, stamped and brushed himself down, cheerfully offered to lend the old man a penny, ‘Lucky he tipped forwards not backwards, eh? All things considered, what?’ There came a roar of unrestrained hysteria, followed by a terrible silence as it became clear the Japanese were not laughing, then screams as the soldiers unslung their rifles and began beating and stabbing at the crowd, trapped in the narrow space. Several had been killed. All the photographs had been confiscated and destroyed. Officially, it had never happened.

  Tiger tottered momentarily atop his box and the onlookers gasped at the prospect of a—to them—lethal pratfall before he steadied himself. He toyed for a second with the idea of drawing his sword, holding it to Raffles’s neck in mockery of chortling execution but something told him that would simply not do. Instead he posed, embraced the previous, deluded imperialism in comradely fashion, arm about neck, smiled benevolently as the photographer snapped and flashed below. Looking down, on the top of the plinth, he was surprised to see an outline map of the Straits area. Raffles’s foot was stamping on British Malaya.

  ‘The British pride themselves on their sense of humour,’ he smiled at the cameramen. ‘So let me tell you a joke. There was a company of British troops at the Battle of Singapore.’ He looked around. They were all listening, pencils poised. ‘They saw a solitary Japanese infantryman shooting at them from behind a rock.’ He crouched and pointed, dropped his voice. ‘The British commander sent the whole company to skirt round behind him and waited. There came shots, explosions, screams, then silence. Finally, one of his soldiers crawled back, badly wounded. “Oh my God!” cried the commander. “What happened?” With his dying breath, the soldier replied, “It was an ambush. There were TWO of them!”.’ He laughed and stamped his feet on Raffles’s. A ripple of laughter ran round the room, a spattering of applause, the loudest from his dutiful ADC, Captain Yoshi Oishi. Tiger bent down to descend, placing his arm on the young man’s shoulder and brought his mouth close to his ear.

  ‘Have him melted down for scrap,’ he hissed through his smile. Captain Oishi made a brisk military note.

  Then Tiger frowned and pouted. There was a flash of gold over there in a glass case. He walked over and peered through the glass. Gold jewellery from Sumba or Sumbawa or somewhere—he was too vain to wear his glasses—the names now irrelevant anyway. They would all soon be changed to Japanese names, all swept away with the rest. Tiger was partial to gold. In a cave in the Philippines, he had several tons of it, looted from various local conquests, melted down and turned into trim little ingots, together with a gold Buddha figure that residual superstition prevented him from pulping. When transport became more assured, it should be sent back to Tokyo—well most of it. The gold Buddha he would certainly keep for himself—possibly more, depending on which way the political wind was blowing. The prisoners who had buried it had all been discreetly disposed of. Perhaps it might be safer here, in Syonanto, where he could keep his eye on it. In the interim, his ADC would call round tomorrow to pick up those trinkets that had found pleasure in his sight.

  But wait. There were white faces back there, surely British faces. What were they doing in his museum?

  * * *

  ‘It’s not just the books, Major,’ corrected James Pilchard. ‘The books are fully formed. They can stand on their own two feet. They will survive somehow. There’s the matter of a large metal trunk that’s missing. It’s my ethnographic and ornithological notes—fragile, unborn, full of unmade choices. If they get mishandled, they could be lost for ever.’ He wondered why he was making all this fuss but there were some things you just had to hold on to even while the world was collapsing around your ears—because the world was collapsing around your ears. He could see that Spratt was one of those people who had learned to enjoy the misfortunes of others. The war must have come as a great comfort to him.

  Major Spratt looked out through the hut window and across the burning parade ground, as he had looked out over so many parade grounds in the East, and sighed. He had reached the age where a man’s nose begins to collapse into formlessness and, with the little moustache underneath, it looked as if he had a mouse hanging down the middle of his face. He drew on his empty pipe and conjured up ghostly memories of the taste of real tobacco and the smell of his leatherette-upholstered Ford Prefect back in Aldershot. He did not like James Pilchard. He did not like his attitude. He even made ‘sir’ sound like a sneer. A stuck up, arrogantly dishevelled young man with a terrible lack of team spirit and no awareness of military priorities. He had a beard dammit. A reddish, curly beard, untrained, untrimmed. He had not so much grown a beard as just stopped shaving. Spratt recognised the control of hair as the clearest mark of the control of body and spirit. And Pilchard was public school and only in his mid-thirties. He looked at you with that superior leer they all had, imagining the rules did not apply to them. Spratt was a grammar school boy, an insider on sufferance only. Good enough for the colonial army but not—it had always been made clear—Sandhurst material. It would not be the worst loss of the war that Pilchard’s bird notes should go astray. He probed the pipe bowl with the blunt end of a pencil, then remembered that it was empty.

  ‘Ornithology? No need to get in such a flap. Not, strictly speaking, my pigeon, old boy.’ He smirked and savoured the joke. ‘From every perspective a civilian matter. Feel free to have a word with General Yamashita if you want.’ He stifled a grin. The Japanese did not allow contact between POWs and civilian internees. If they even knew Pilchard was here in the camp, outside Changi prison proper, they’d have kittens, turn nasty like as not, dish him out a good beating. He might even end up in Outram Road. People tended not to come back from Outram Road. Still, at least he wasn’t collaborating with the Japs like the rest of that shower from the museum and the water and electric wallahs.

  In the hot Singapore sun of the square, two sweating men—one scraggy and bare-chested, the other pot-bellied and bear-chested—were flinging armfuls of books from the back of a Public Works Department truck into an improvised handcart. They tossed them deliberately high—windmilling in the air—to land with the sound of softly cracking spines and tearing paper. Spratt resumed smoothly.

  ‘I can assure you, the museum’s library will be treated with the greatest possible respect. Normally, of course, it would have been proper form to contact you first, you being senior museum officer, but these are not normal times. Colonel Saito was keen for us to get our university going, the Kempeitei secret police wanted the books out to make room for the poss
ible overflow of their own files from next door. You should consider yourself lucky. The College got taken over entirely. And the Stamford Road YMCA is no longer big enough what with …’ his voice fell and he blushed, ran his hand nervously over his own fresh-barbered chin, ‘… their sorting out of the Chinese. It was important to strike while the iron was hot. I have thousands of men sitting around with their hands in their pockets. It’s a matter of keeping them busy, not letting them brood and get slack, a matter of the utmost military importance. You can’t expect to waltz in here and go on about a load of blasted notes about tweetie-birds.’ He paused and puffed himself up. Pilchard winced. He knew what was coming. It came with tooth-grinding inevitability. He watched Spratt turn it into a sequenced military exercise as he paused, stiffened and thrust out his jaw in Churchillian bulldog parody. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

  All over the globe, the question was being used to justify acts of cultural vandalism. The fine china of civilisation was everywhere being smashed in military target practice or debased for the slopping out of army latrines, its embroideries ripped up to provide bandages and canteen dishcloths, its museums converted into military offices where daily orders were tacked up on the Georgian furniture.

  ‘It’s the Australians, of course, who are the main problem—well enough in a scrap, I grant you, but not sound like your English Tommy. Basically, they’re a bunch of bolshie bastards.’ Pilchard looked at the men unloading the books. Tommies they might be but they were enjoying the sacrilege of it, smirking with deliberate malice as they lobbed the odd bigger volumes overarm like grenades. There could be no going back now. It would not be the same world after the war and there would be bolshie bastards to spare everywhere. He studied Spratt curiously, like a specimen, saw the confused class hostility in his eyes and was amused to know himself a class impostor. If Spratt had known that Pilchard was a scholarship boy, from a home poorer than his own, he would not have disliked him any the less, for it. The British would turn on each other all right after the war but little men like Spratt would not be the ones left to tell the world to get its hair cut. It would be mob rule. He tried a different tack.