Smith in Malaya: a short history of little value
For Muireann
Obscure /əbˈskjʊə/
adjective
1. Not clearly expressed or easily understood. "Obscure references to Proust or Jackie Collins "
2. Not discovered or known about; uncertain. "His origins and parentage are obscure"
verb
Keep from being seen; conceal. "Grey clouds obscure the sun" (Oxblood Languages, 2021)
Preface
During the ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948-1960), in which Britain was militarily engaged in the defence of key economic and strategic interests against the communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) (see Hale, 2013), British soldiers shot dead twenty-four unarmed Chinese Malay rubber tappers at the Sungei Remok rubber plantation near the village of Batang Kali in Selangor. Suspected of providing material support to the outlawed MNLA, the plantation workers were detained by the British army on December 11th 1948, and then shot to death the next day - because, according to the army, they were trying to escape (Ward & Miraflor 2009). (1)
One day in August 2012 - 64 years after the killings took place - Smith and Willing visited the site of the old rubber plantation at Sungei Remok with two members of the Batang Kali Action Committee: Letter A and Letter B.
This is Willing’s account of some of the events that took place that day – including a series of incidents involving a photograph album, allegedly compiled by Cohen – Smith’s father - who served as a British soldier in Malaya between 1950 and 1952. (2)
On Wednesday 13th August, 2012, at 10.47am, Smith and I met Letters A and B at Batang Kali Railway Station. (3)
At 10.42am, Smith photographed a plant.
Letter A said he owned a ‘practical city car’. He said it came from Russelsheim in Germany. There was a bunch of bananas on the dash, and as we pulled out of Batang Kali, at 10.58am, past Marrybrown and the fish tanks, A said B grew them on a patch of land on the outskirts of Ulu Yam Bahru, in a place called the ‘Abode of Sincerity’.
Four minutes later, at 11.02am, Smith said that Letter B’s bananas reminded him of a joke statue of Elvis Presley sat on the toilet, eating a burger, that he saw once years ago in a diner on Long Island.
‘B doesn’t speak any speak English,’ said Letter A.
‘That’s alright,’ I said. ‘Because we don’t speak Chinese.’
On the way to Sungei Remok, Smith said something strange about a place called Genting Highlands, a renowned leisure facility, 31kms east of Batang Kali, which, as we found out that morning, is almost entirely composed of concrete, electronic and plastic attractions, like: ‘Hotel Theme Park’, ‘Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas’, ‘Big Ben in Cairo’, and ‘Statue of Liberty in New York’.
‘If the way that one experiences time,’ said Smith, ‘doesn’t always bear a relation to the absence or presence of daylight - which it probably never always does, then I think it could be the case that our experience of time at Casino de Genting was almost entirely determined this morning by games involving wheels and wood - and... 'LISTEN!'
'WHAT?' I said.
‘Last night I asked a Chinese waitress if anything much happens at Sungei Remok these days? "If it does," she said, "then it probably involves the extraction of date palm oil, which," she said, "will one day fuel every single motorised vehicle on earth! And when that happens,” she said, “Malaysia will be just like Qatar was today.”’
*
A few minutes later, at 11.09am, I showed Smith one of the many old photographs I keep on my failing iPhone 4.
‘Port Said, I said - ‘appears at the beginning of the photograph album that Lance Corporal Boris (aka 'Borisal') Cohen began compiling on the 12th of February 1950, not long after he'd received a letter from His Majesty’s Ministry of Defence, in which he was curtly informed that he was required to defend King and country against savage communists, intent on the forced redistribution of wealth and influence in the Federated States of Malaya - one of Britain’s hitherto most profitable tropical colonies.
As we pulled into Sungei Remok, at 11.12am, Smith said that I must have made a mistake.
‘That picture never was in Cohen’s album!’
‘The ship in it, the one that Cohen’s standing on, clearly isn’t a proper soldier-carrier at all. His louche grin and rakish comportment,’ continued Smith, ‘would never have been tolerated in a million years on a regular soldier-carrier - like, for example... His Majesty's Empire Trooper.'
'In fact, it’s absolutely inconceivable…’ he blustered... 'that my father would not have internalised, and then made manifest - through all of the usual gestures... the army's most affecting and important slogan: DIGNITATIS. SEMPER.
'Dignity.
'ALWAYS!'
Ignoring, as best I could, the threatening undertone of Smith's remarks, I replied that:
‘Although I sort of agree that the relationship between the terms ‘war ship’ and ‘louche-ness’ does on the face of it involve the realisation of a mildly provocative counterpoint; I must say,’ I said, ‘that the basic point you’re making here about the informality of Cohen’s pose which, according to you, somehow proves that the ship in Port Said was just some kind of random pleasure crate, and not a ‘regular soldier-carrier’ at all, is really quite absurd.
Smith was furious.
‘Look! Cohen’s album’s packed with snaps of soldiers malingering, on beaches, lawns, diving boards, tennis courts, and so on. See here,’ I said, easing myself slowly out of Letter A’s car, whilst rapidly scrolling through the rest of the sepia-toned images on my failing iPhone4.
‘On beaches fringed with palms, posing in tight trunks on big boulders with handsome looking European women in shirts and flowing dresses. The almost picture-perfect reproduction of a novel kind of photographic code: Le Grande Vacance de Guerre (or something like that.) The composition of which made a welcome change, no doubt,' I said, 'from hawking women's underwear up and down the Kingsland Road all day long, which, as I gather, is mostly what Cohen did before he went up jungle with a piece of army-issue cheese, some jam, a bit of steak, smidgeon of liver; tea, sugar, milk, chewing gum, toilet paper, and an Owen submachine gun.'
‘“The bearer Babu”... 4 or 5 nice Chinese pagodas... A couple of conical straw hats...The world famous ornamental gardens at Putrajaya... And look here… See!’ I said.
‘Lordie! More ravishing young men, dancing…’ he said.
‘Like lovers do!’ I interrupted. ‘Their happiness sustained by all manner of good things: cameras, rifles, bottles of beer - neon signs advertising legends like Randolph Scott - The Man Behind the Gun; Jerry and Deano in Jumping Jacks… And just look at those wooden trestle table-tops on page 24,’ I said, ‘stacked with Christmassy bits and pieces: crackers, cake...’
'A grave!'
'A what?'
‘There. Scroll down a bit... See! 'The almost picture-perfect reproduction ...’
‘Well, yes quite!' I said.
‘Anyhow, notice too how Cohen’s photographs are interrupted now and then by the most sumptuous professional studio portraits, executed, presumably, by the most accomplished professional photographers. Cohen and his pals, elegantly arranged,’ I said, like worsted hyacinths in front of a black and white “Venitian bridge”, all covered in roses. Three stout young men in soft focus: pressed trousers; neat black berets; big fat, flat, shiny shoes.’
‘Maybe the photographer used vaseline?' said Smith.
‘Not unusual in those days,’ he smirked.
On the way to the place where it happened, past a line of washing, a chicken and a plastic basket with some pegs in it, Letter A interrupted Smith and I at 11.31am, and told us that Letter B’s Chinese origins might be the reason why his story about the massacre and its aftermath, could never be what he called 'a properly credible eyewitness account.’
A said that 2 or 3 days after the shootings took place, in mid-December 1948, B and his father removed up to 24 bodies, including parts of bodies, from 4 places near the ‘shallow stream that still runs through the estate today.’
B was 7 years old.
‘Attributing the term ‘eyewitness account’ to any anecdote,’ he said, ‘can have far-reaching effects. In propitious circumstances,’ he continued, ‘some anecdotes may be reconstituted in such a way that their credibility in law, and, perhaps as a consequence, the departments of the wider culture, will eventually be improved…
‘But not necessarily.’
Behind A’s back, Smith said, softly: ‘That no eyewitness accounts were ever solicited by the British government, or its affiliates, from persons of Chinese origin, does at least mean that Letter B was spared innumerable humiliations.
'Does it not?’
‘Humiliations, you mean,’ I said, ‘that the exhibition of his primitive gestures would almost certainly have induced in the small wooden room at the garrison building in Kuala Kubu Bahru, where in January 1949 an apocryphal military inquiry, overseen by esteemed Chief of Police H.G. Beverley, was honestly designed to get to the bottom of things?’
'Exactly!' said Smith.
A few minutes later, as we continued following Letters A and B along a very muddy narrow track, I recorded the following audio note on my failing iPhone4 :
‘In ‘The Storyteller’, Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1999, 84) wistfully describes the experience of soldiers at the front during World War 1: “A generation, that had gone to school on a horse-drawn street car now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force, destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny fragile body.”
‘“I do not think that Raymond Grocock knew he was in the army to kill other men,” wrote Alexander Baron (Baron 2011, 75), in The Human Kind,’ interrupted Smith, at 11.58am.
‘“I doubt if it occurred to him that other men were out to kill him, even when they were trying to do it. Once…he’d been happy in the Boy Scouts, and the same thing – being able to dress up and pretend he was having adventures, was happening again.”’
Pointing at the remains of the Kongsi, where 23 of the 24 executed rubber tappers were detained on the evening of December 11 1948, before their extermination next morning by self-selected members of the 14 man section of 7 platoon, G Company, 2nd Battalion Scots Guards, Letter A told Smith and I about a newspaper story that appeared in the People on Sunday on February 1st, 1970, 16,000 days before Smith had ever heard of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur... Batu Caves...
Or Li Leen.
‘Some of the perpetrators - William Cootes, Alan Tuppen, Victor Remedios, Robert Brownrigg, and George Kydd – confessed to the People newspaper that the plantation workers were definitely not shot because, as the former Attorney General in Malaya, Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, reputedly alleged, "The suspects would have made good their escape (had they not been)." Actually, according to Kydd, the "suspects’ were (all)[…]shot down[…]in cold blood. They weren’t running away (at all)", he said, "(and) there was (absolutely) no reason to shoot them."' (Ward and Miraflor 2009, 89).
‘Sssssss…’ said Smith, at 11.44am.
Tapping the ground with a stick.
If you’re afraid of snakes, this is what you have to do.
’The thing is,’ I said to Smith, as we approached the shallow stream, at 11.53am, ‘whether or not ‘Port Said’ (or your father’s album generally) does have anything much to do with a voyage (or an ‘Emergency’) that may (or may not) have actually taken place, involving a fella who may or may not have been on it - or in it…’
‘WHAT!’ said Smith.
‘You have to admit,' I continued, 'that Cohen’s album does say something quite remarkable about Cohen’s role as ‘storyteller’, the staging of which is achieved - his role, I mean,’ I said, ‘through his intelligent prosecution of what Captain Hank Quinlan, in Touch of Evil calls: “Visual patterns!”
‘Remember Quinlan?’ I said, at 11.54am.
‘Notice, for example’ I continued, pointing at my iPhone4, ‘how the album’s passage – its linearity (or lack thereof) - depends on the nomination, by Cohen, of a ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end.’ Notice too,’ I continued, ‘how Port Said strategically appears at the beginning of the album; how its middle is almost entirely composed of photographs and captions; and how the connections between them are largely determined,’ I said, at 11.58am, ‘by what Ingrid Eissenhauser in Humidity and Revolution calls the (Eissenhauser 2008, 12) “proximity effect”, and not by any obviously related thematic, chronological, and / or aesthetic properties - blackness, whiteness, teeth, shorts, trucks, cars, suits, and so on - some of which do actually appear from time to time in a considerable number of Cohen’s photographs: at the beginning of the album – most of which comes before the middle - and at the end, which, quite naturally, comes after that.
‘Consider also,’ I continued, ignoring Letter A's protestations, ‘how very often in a travelogue, which, as I said, is what Cohen’s album purports to be - the act of going back invariably culminates in what’s called ‘the end’. But how any indication here of going back, which could be represented as a kind of reverse journey, involving obvious and / or more oblique forms of what you might call doubling...' - Smith was beginning to wilt! - '... including the repetition, or merely the suggestion, of some of the visual elements that make up the album’s beginning, middle, and also the beginning of its end - bananas, rifles, bottles of beer, and so on - are missing.
‘In point of fact,’ I said, ignoring Letter A again at 12.03pm, ‘see how, at the beginning of the album's conclusion, there is the complete absence of a convincing introduction - to its end, I mean! - which a photograph like Port of London, say, might plausibly represent - if such a photograph ever existed in the first place - which I think is highly unlikely.'
'Instead, notice how Cohen is all of a sudden just back where he started - in 'the end', which is composed mainly of photographs that Cohen presumably received,’ I said, sometime after he arrived in Malaya, maybe around the time of the start of the album's middle - of Mummy, Daddy, Grand-daddy, and your cousin Jessica - who looks to me a lot like Carmen Miranda...
‘Don’t you think?’
Strolling back to Letter A’s car at 1.05pm, in-between the arthritic trees that are going to be replaced soon, according to Letter A, by a tapestry of high-tech condominiums, Smith, who, at 1.09pm, was wearing a pair of damp chinos, a purple and grey stripy t-shirt, a pair of rubber-soled black Vans, and a brown Carhartt baseball cap, theatricalised for me part of a conversation he said he had with Cohen, and a psychiatrist from Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence, between 10.35am and 10.39am on Wednesday 24th March 2010, in a house near Brighton.
‘SMITH (said Smith): On the back of a photo you took in 1952, you wrote that you got yourself something to eat there… A steak, you said. The best steak, you said it was.
'COHEN (said Smith): Whatever you wanted. They gave you a ticket, then afterwards you went upstairs.
'SMITH: With the ticket?
'COHEN: Of course with the ticket.
'SMITH: Where you exchanged it for what?
'COHEN: SEX!
'SMITH: Remember the Sandes Soldiers’ Home?
'PSYCHIATRIST (shouting): SIR!
'COHEN: Off the New Bridge Road?
'SMITH: Nowhere near there. Off Portsdown Road. I gather that when it opened in 1950, it was meant to keep British soldiers out of the cat houses.
'COHEN: The what houses?
'PSYCHIATRIST (still shouting): SIR!
'SMITH: WHAT? (to COHEN) Look! I’m reading between the lines here… I saw it in The Straits Times… Remember The Straits Times? The Sandes was set up to, erm, how did it go? “Accommodate soldiers’ every need” - something like that. I’m not quoting verbatim… Anyway, it said something about jigsaw puzzles. How a jolly good puzzle takes a soldier’s mind off things… In1982 they changed the name. Now it’s called The Temasek Club.
'PSYCHIATRIST: Sir! I must tell you that Mr Cohen has failed to achieve…
'SMITH: What?
'PSYCHIATRIST: Failed to achieve the necessary suffering percentile, required to secure a regular money allowance …
'SMITH: For what?
'COHEN: Dreams.
'SMITH: What dreams?
'COHEN: Dreams about fighting - killing - MORE FIGHTING!
'PSYCHIATRIST: Erm... I'm talking about a regular money allowance - from Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence.
'SMITH: Oh, I see.
'PSYCHIATRIST: However! In spite of this, Mr Cohen still does, in my opinion - still does seem to be under the influence of … something or other… And although it's obviously not too bad, it is bad enough – I think - to merit the receipt of a modest but meaningful one-off payment...
'COHEN: Mmm. (Pause.)'
At 2.17pm, 20 minutes after we said goodbye to Letters A and B, Smith and I ordered 2 bowls of delicious coconut rice, with sticky beef in black bean sauce, at Kedai Makanan Dan Minuman, which, according to Smith, ‘is actually the only authentic Chinese restaurant in Ulu Yam Bahru’.
At 2.19pm, immediately after I reminded him of our visit, three days earlier, to The Temasek Club in Singapore… Smith looked at me and said:
‘Forget about Cohen’s album! Let me tell you all you need to know instead.’
‘All I need to know about what instead?’ I said.
‘Letter B’s CONDITION.’
According to Smith, Letter B’s behaviour earlier on that day ‘typified’ what he called, ‘a series of on-going delusions.’
‘Illusions?!’ I said.
‘No, performances’, said Smith, witheringly, ‘that have been staged by B at various places since the day that he and his father dragged the rotting bodies away from underneath Tom Menzies’ trees.’
‘You see, virtually all B’s performances since the middle of 1949,’ said Smith, ‘have actually been determined by Letter B’s need to exorcize his yua gui: ‘DEMONS! which,’ he said, ‘take the form of images that usually include sounds and smells’.
'What?'
‘Let me explain,' said Smith.
'B’s quasi-abreactive procedures involve, first and most obviously,’ he said, ‘the return of Letter B’s IMPRINTS,' - by which I believe Smith sort of meant B’s memories of the aftermath of the massacre - ‘the agony and pain of which,’ he continued, ‘is unfortunately rarely apparent these days, either in the folds of his skin or the pit of his fizzyodorous stomach.’
‘You mean 'fortunately'?’ I said.
‘Oh, of course!’ said Smith.
Despite being unaware of the precise nature and content of B’s imprints, Smith said they ‘would almost certainly have included, and continue to include, the following: holes in heads; swollen arsebuckets; sticky-out teeth; the stench of ex-human waste – vile in conditions of extreme humidity; burned wood, where two Kongsis were... And a couple of foundation stones’.
At 2.25pm, Smith suddenly stood up and sashayed boldly over to a place in the middle of the road opposite Kedai Makunan Dan Minuman, where a young woman called Li Leen and a man in a limpid yellow sports shirt appeared to be exchanging important information.
‘She's lovely!’ I heard him say to Smith at 2.33pm. ‘You can tell because her hair’s short - the way I like it! - and her feet are long, like canoes.’
At 2.46pm, Smith returned to Kedai Makunan Dan Minuman, arm in arm with Li Leen. Whereupon he immediately began to outline for us what he referred to, cryptically, as: ‘The events that immediately precede Letter B’s SALVATION.’
‘Before invoking the imprints of the massacre’, he said, at 2.47pm, ‘Letter B enjoys a brief period of relative ‘inactivity’. This marks,’ said Smith, ‘the moment of transition - between the sensation of calm that typifies the way B is generally feeling these days, and a feeling of intense trepidation which invariably apostrophises B’s anticipation of another difficult event.
‘Although at this point,’ said Smith, pensively,’ B certainly appears to be willing himself into some kind of 'fray', all I think we can really say for sure is that he is experiencing feelings now not dissimilar, I think, to those enjoyed by other kinds of performers, immediately before they stage other kinds of performances - in music halls, sound studios, and also on Facebook.’
At 2.49pm Smith formally introduced me to Li Leen and then at 2.50pm he vigorously began to describe what he called, ‘the structure of B’s psychical defence.’
‘The absolutely most critical period of Letter B’s salvation,’ he said, ominously, looking for, but not, so far as I could tell, receiving any visible signs of approval from Li Leen, ‘takes place immediately after invoking his imprints. That's when ‘re-modeling’ occurs,' he said.
‘Re-modeling involves the adjustment of B’s memory. Understand,’ he said, at 2.52pm, ‘that the preservation of Cohen's organism depends on it.’
'Cohen's organism?!' I said.
'Of course!' he replied.
Smith passed me a note and told me to read it aloud.
The note contained the following handwritten articles:
'1. Experience has taught Letter B that neglecting to take the necessary prophylactic measures (see banana), immediately before and during any encounter with an imprint, means that yua guài could in principle travel safely through his psychical rubble, overwhelming and corrupting, as they do, his synapses and ageing tatty axons - which contain other images of, for example: the Ridley Road market in Dalston, the Sultan Salaiman Stadium in Klang, the Summit Estate bandstand in Hoxton, Highbury football ground, Sandes Soldiers’ Home, gangs of frogs on Petaling Street, and Nora’s boy in Mile End.
'2. In short, Letter B actually believes that by invoking an imprint he is in effect disabling its capacity to unilaterally invoke him, albeit temporarily.
'3. Furthermore, B thinks that in order to diminish the power of imprints containing holes in heads and/or the smell of shit, he must subjugate them to a crude, but remarkably effective, imaginary spatial relation.'
'Ridiculous!' murmoured Li Leen.
'5. Letter B looks down, therefore - imperiously surveying his memories - beg your pardon, his imprints! - from a vantage point located in a place he calls: ‘my mind’s eye’.
'6. As you can see, Letter B's salvation is largely predicated on his belief that the amelioration of an imprint, containing arsebuckets, holes in heads and so on and so forth, is exponentially related to the changes in size and scale that occur as a consequence of the production of this deceptively simple (and deceptive) spatial relation.'
At 4.59pm, Li Leen interrupted and said: 'Before drawing any conclusions about the efficacy or otherwise of Letter B's behaviour today, I advise you to be mindful of the correlation between B's uses of memory now, and the way in which he experienced himself then, as a child, at precisely the moment when his subjugation to the inexorable will of yua guai began.'
'Oh, absolutely!' said Smith.
‘I don’t like the bed - the bed head’s wrong,’ he said.
Li Leen was wearing a dim grey cotton dress and russet open-toed sandals. Smith was wearing a pair of grey underpants. And there was a pool of water on the floor next to the bathroom in Room #6 at Ulu Yam Bahru’s first ever purpose built hotel. It was the remains of Li Leen’s shower.
Bits of her skin were in it.
Tying his wrists to the bed was easy because there was a four-inch gap between the wooden slats and the foam filled yellow mattress that Smith was on.
‘I just this minute worked out,’ said Smith – afterwards - ‘that between the time Cohen returned to Britain from Malaya, in 1953, and the psychiatrist’s visit to his home in Brighton in 2010, Cohen had 8,253 dreams about ‘fighting, killing and more fighting’. Now, I believe,’ said Smith, ‘that if the money the Ministry of Defence gave Cohen was intended to compensate for the discomfort induced by each war dream, then every war dream Cohen ever had, before his psychiatric evaluation, must have been worth almost exactly two and a half pence.
'Which means that if Cohen stays alive long enough to have, say, 150 more war dreams per year for the next 10 years, and no more money is forthcoming from Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence, then in 10 years time,’ said Smith, ‘the value of every war dream Cohen ever had will be almost exactly two pence.'
‘Personally,’ said Li Leen, ‘I think it’s unlikely that the Batang Kali Action Committee will receive any money at all from the British government, with which to build a memorial at Sungei Remok. Nevertheless,’ she said, at 4.47pm, ‘I should like to think that the surviving members of 7 Platoon, G Company, 2nd Batallion, Scots Guards would at least in principle support the erection of a terrible thing like that’.
‘I've changed my mind!’ he said. 'I think I underestimated something.'
On the road to Kwang Dong cemetery. 5.15pm. Or thereabouts.
'Ahem.'
'What?'
‘I've changed my mind!’ he said. 'I think maybe I underestimated something.'
‘I just realised,’ said Smith - sweating, confused - ‘that the assistance Letter B provided his father with that day, actually occasioned the most profound and elevated feelings of love and indispensability in him! Feelings which,’ he continued, ‘actually superseded all of the other things that Letter B endured at Sungei Remok that day - including the things that you alluded to earlier, when you read my ridiculous note out over lunch, at Kedai Makunan Dan Minuman - shortly before you tied me up at Ulu Yam's first ever purpose-built hotel...
'Remember?’ he said.
At 5.50pm, Smith, Li Leen and I arrived at Ulu Yam Bahru police station, where, according to Li Leen, the executed rubber tappers were eventually deposited, and in front of which, one day, light bounced off several of the bodies on display there and into the back of Timothy Hatton’s camera.
‘An amateur photographer, policeman and future Director of Military Intelligence in Malaya, Hatton’s photographs,’ said Li Leen, as we approached the cemetery gates, ‘and his subsequent report into the ‘Batang Kali incident’ – the contents of which presumably echoed what he allegedly told his superior officer at the time - 'It’s sheer murder…and it’s a complete disgrace’ (Hale 2013, 294) – disappeared, not long after he passed them ‘up the line’. Which,’ as Li Leen correctly pointed out, ‘is not to say that Hatton's report into the massacre has never been seen since, or that its whereabouts aren't known about to anyone.'
Quite frankly, at this point the only thing that I knew I could be sure about for sure, was that Letter B’s father - the idea of whom was now, courtesy of Smith, well and truly installed in my imagination - would, in addition to my dehydration, cause me to behave in a most uncharacteristic way. Which I did, immediately after the unexpected arrival at Kwang Dong of Letters A and B, who pulled up outside the cemetery gates in Letter A’s German car, at 6.17pm.
Standing on a grassy elevation, near the unmarked grave which contained, according to Letter A, ‘the degraded remains of four mutilated rubber tappers,’ I suddenly announced that:
‘Privileging the gruesomeness of Letter B’s ‘imprints’ simply risks elevating the meaning of the massacre’s aftermath to the aesthetics of its fantastical remains. Like the sound of pulling flesh and the combined odour of blood, piss and latex... Well, the thing is I think I agree with you now, Smith,’ I said to Smith, who was sweating furiously below me, loading film into the only functioning camera back he had left. ‘This tedious pre-occupation with surfaces only serves to obliterate B’s father’s role in all this…'
‘In all this what?’ he said.
‘DRAMA!’ I said.
‘Of course your father rewarded B’s obedience that day with, as you put it so convincingly, at 5.24pm,“the fruit of his revering and much coveted gaze". Your father! Who was instrumental in the production of your…’
‘My father..?’
‘You're upset!’ I said.
Watching him slope off in the direction of said unmarked grave, more CONFUSED now than ever, I thought, at 6.25pm - I turned on Letter B and said:
‘I think it’s incredible, I really do. Despite acquiring the wherewithal in later life required to relieve the pressure caused inside, you still insist on stubbornly misrecognising the substance of your catastrophe - a horriblly confusing combination of worthlessness and indispensability, the bewildering conflation of which supplanted your old ‘I am',' I said, for want of a better way of putting it, 'for holes in heads, ex-human waste - albeit vile in conditions of extreme humidity.
‘“You! Help clear the bodies,”’ I said he said.
‘Or: ‘“HELP! Please! Clear the bodies.”
‘In short, your father’s words transformed your old ‘I am’ into another ‘I am’ altogether. Which is in actual fact another kind of place, populated ever since then by demons altogether different to the ones my note referred to earlier on this afternoon.
'Demons, whose existence,' I said to Smith, who was by now gradually returning from the grave – ‘Letter B has clearly never registered, at least not consciously.'
Growling.
Li Leen was.
At 7.13pm, as we prepared to make our way back to Batang Kali, Letter A reminded Smith and I that he owned a ‘practical city car’. He said it came from Russelsheim in Germany. There was a bunch of bananas on the dash, and as we pulled away from Kwang Dong cemetery at 7.16pm, past a motorbike and the police station, A said B grew them on a patch of land, on the outskirts of Ulu Yam Bahru, in a place called the ‘Abode of Sincerity’.
I must say that Smith looked quite fabulous in a pair of cool grey cotton drainpipes by Fred Perry, a fresh black and white Motorhead t-shirt by G-Star, and brown, open-toed sandals by Birkenstock. I was wearing yellow chinos and a nice purple sleeveless vest from Diesel. Li Leen smelled absolutely great. And of course we all adored B’s Hawaian shirt.
Smith turned round and smacked me in the face.
‘Bloody hell!' he said. 'Of course Port Said proves my father went to Malaya! And another thing,’ he screamed, ‘all those other photos totally prove he did those other things you said he didn’t do as well.’
‘What other things I said he didn’t do as well?’ I said - flumoxed at 7.35pm. ‘Look! Believe me when I tell you that I honestly do believe in the authenticity of this piece of paper, steeped in image silver, known as Port Said. Which, quite frankly, is no more or less meaningful to me now than all the other images I have here,’ I said, pointing accusingly at my failing iPhone4, ‘like this one of a piece of ribbon, bow-tied and improbably still crimson, that for 61 years stopped Cohen from falling apart completely.
‘Listen! Although Port Said, and all of the other photographs in Cohen's album, might in some small way be responsible for detonating what little faith I have in the veracity of Cohen’s experiences, in Malaya and / or elsewhere,’ I said, at 7.36pm – ‘you have to accept – (or not) - that what actually took place in that country then is really less of a fact in fact,’ - shielding my eyes from further blows - ‘than all of these really rather marvellous pictures of pure soldierliness that I shared with you today - the ones here, in the cute little brown folder I keep on my failing iphone4’.
His fingers.
Tapping.
Then:
‘A knight of faith, I am… I AM!’ I cried, hysterically I suppose, at 7.51pm. 'Although, I have to say that unlike Abraham, whose pursuit of faith involved the transformation of a son into a sacrifice (and back) (Genesis 22:5, 22:8) - my faith isn’t inspired by God’s will at all.
'Fuck him!
'Ink embedded on the brittle surfaces of degraded bits of paper does it, smelling of vanilla pods and grass. Old photographs do it too: of young men in uniform and / or swimming trunks, boozing and wading their way through...
T. Rex on the radio. Smith tells A to crank up the volume.
Cue Willing's reverie: ‘At times like these I catch myself looking at myself looking at photographs like these sometimes, suspended below the surface of my failing iPhone 4…’
Get it on.
Willing's reverie (contd.): ‘And I think about the canal, near where I used to live, where I liked to watch the fat carp glide, an inch or two below the surface of my face, one day.’
‘Oh, do shut up!’ said Smith.
'Well, honestly!' I said.
‘In short,’ I continued, as we drove at last past Marrybrown and the fish tanks, ‘it’s not the actuality of Cohen’s deeds that interests me at all – quite obviously - but the ruinations of his speech (for want of a better way of putting it): Cohen’s visual and literary compositions – evincing, as they do, the authentic 'noise' of a sort of marvellous Great British working class-ness.
'Don't you think?'
At Batang Kali railway station - as we waited for the last train back to Kuala Lumpur, Li Leen said it was strange the way we never once mentioned them by name.
- Wong Yan
- Wong Teck Foong
- Loh Wei Nam
- Ho Heong
- Ho Choy
- Wong Hin
- Wong Sep
- Chan Kee
- Chong Voon
- Chong Sep
- Ng Yeng Kui
- Lim Sang
- Lim Tian Shui
- Loke Sang
- Lim Har
- Choo Wong
- Chong Sin
- Chan Ying
- Chan Chee
- Tien Min
- Chen Kai
- Mok Sau
- Chen Ching
- Ho Leong
She said it was strange the way we had a lot to say about Letter B, but nothing much to say about him either.
'Not really,' she said.
‘Oh yes we did!’
‘No, not really,’ she said.
I said he doesn’t speak any English. ‘Well, that’s alright, because you don’t speak Chinese. Do you?’ shes said.
And then she said that she didn’t understand why we bothered to come here in the first place.
‘More than that, why I listened to all the things you said about Cohen. For what reason, exactly, did I do that?’ she said. ‘Why I listened to these words? When I could have listened to other words instead’, she said, ‘about other things I think you should have said instead.'
‘What other things we should have said instead?’ I said.
‘You should have stayed in Singapore - or KL, or gone to Ipoh, or Taiping, or Penang. You needn’t have bothered,’ she said, ‘wasting time on this ridiculous... tribute.’
'Tribute! What tribute? Tribute to what?'
'The COVER-UP... You dummy!'
Epilogue
Despite the fact that some of the perpetrators confessed to journalists (Gardener & Dorran, 1970), and the Metropolitan police, more than 50 years ago, that the rubber tappers at Sungei Remok never tried to escape and that no evidence of their collusion with the MNLA was ever discovered, Britain continues to adhere to its original, largely discredited, version of events
Encouragingly, Supreme Court justice Lord Kerr (Bowcott, 2015), in his concluding remarks at the appeal for an inquiry into the Batang Kali massacre in London in 2015, told the court that the ‘overwhelming preponderance of currently available evidence’ [shows that] ‘wholly innocent men were mercilessly murdered and the failure of the authorities of this state to conduct an effective inquiry into their deaths.’
But despite this – and despite the fact that the court acknowledged the politically motivated nature of the 'cover up', indicated in a note written by Detective Chief Superintendent Frank Williams in July 1970 (Bowcott, 2015), in which, he wrote that ‘It is patently clear that the decision to terminate inquiries [into the massacre] in the middle of the investigation was due to a political change of view when the new Conservative government came into office [in June 1970]’ - the case for an inquiry was dismissed. In part because as Supreme Court Judge Lord Neuberger remarked (Bowcott, 2015): '[This is] a case where the [government] has given coherent and relevant reasons for not holding an inquiry, including expressing a justifiable concern that the truth may not be ascertainable, and a justifiable belief that, even if the appellants’ expectations to the contrary were met, there would be little useful that could be learned from an inquiry so far as current actions and policies [are] concerned.'
As John Halford (Bowcott, 2015), the solicitor who represented the appellants at the Supreme Court, put it, in response to Judge Lord Neuberger’s remarks: 'On 12 December 1948, British soldiers left the bodies of 24 innocent, unarmed men riddled with bullets and the British government left their families without a credible explanation. Our courts have decided there is no legal right to that explanation. But they have been able to acknowledge the innocence of those killed, the failures to investigate and the ‘overwhelming’ evidence of mass murder. Just as importantly, Britain has been found responsible. All of this creates the clearest of moral imperatives on the British government to apologise, withdraw the false account given to parliament and to compassionately address what has been done, including by funding a memorial. If it does not, the blood of those killed at Batang Kali will indelibly stain the concept of British justice.'
Perhaps it comes as no surprise to learn that despite the judges’ fine words, no formal admission of responsibility, an apology, or any form of compensation has to date been offered by the British government to the relatives of the workers that were murdered by British soldiers at Tom Menzies’ rubber plantation on December 11 and 12, 1948. As a result, perhaps we should assume that most of the relatives would concur with John Halford’s summary of what has effectively taken place since 1948 (2012). That is, the sustained prosecution by the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of state of what he and also Li Leen (more or less, see above) called ‘a very British cover up’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their help and support with this project: Quek Ngee Meng, Chin Fo Sang, Loh Ah Choi, Marta Kotwas, Sebastian Groes, Nick Lavery, Clare Norton, T. Rex, Margarita Palacios, Gretchka.
In particular, I would like to thank Boris Henry Cohen, who died in Brighton on July 7th, 2018.
Notes
1. For a detailed account of the broader historical and political context of the massacre, see Christopher Hale’s Massacre in Malaya, 2013. For a forensic examination of the circumstances of the massacre itself, as well as its subsequent representation in the Malayan and British print media, see Miraflor & Ward’s excellent Slaughter and Deception at Batang Kali, 2009. See also batangkalimassacre.wordpress.com, the Batang Kali Action Committee’s own blog, which details the on-going struggle for the legitimation of the account proffered by the dead men’s relatives’ and supporters’ (including, remarkably, some of those responsible for the massacre itself).
2. Willing is interested in the way that Smith behaves in challenging environments and difficult situations.
3. In the English subtitles that accompany the Polish film Interrogation (1982), political prisoners are addressed by their captors using the word ‘Letter’. This is immediately followed by the first letter of a prisoner’s surname. For example, the film’s main protagonist ‘Tonia Dziwisz’ is referred to by her captors as ‘Letter D.’ Note that Letter A's and Letter B’s surnames do not begin with either the letter ‘A’ or ‘B’.
5. The ‘gap’ which separated Smith and Letter B was instituted by him when we arrived at Sungei Remok, and then sustained by us all in various ways for the rest of the day. At 2.35pm Smith said (softly): ‘Frankly, despite not having any evidence to support my point of view, I was convinced from the start that the gentlest interrogation of Letter B could have induced a crisis in him that I was afraid you would have found impossible to bear.’
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