That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
W.B. Yeats, Long-Legged Fly
They are under siege and Singapore knows it. Una knows it. Puck, throwing peanuts at a recumbent Akela, knows it. This is the worst of all to Una, because overnight the great, mottled, affectionate guard dog of Trinity house falls silent.
As the shells fall with wild and weird unpredictability, Akela hies himself to Carl and Li's room, and there lies with his massive paws on his head and his head under the bed. Una thinks he would lie completely under the bed if he was not too big to fit. Iris hides with him, and Una and Li encourage her, especially when the shells start. Iris is also too big to fit, but anywhere is safer than the exposed sitting room with its sun-dazzled windows overlooking the veranda.
They think that if she is under the bed with Akela then he will protect her from whatever snare of the enemy should find them out.
And if not Akela, then Puck. Una finds him in the aftermath of a shelling onslaught pressed to Iris's back, tail around her neck, peanuts in one hand, the little girl's hair in the other. He makes soothing simian noises. They sound weird, warped and unholy, but Una sees how still Iris is, how quieted, and cannot bring herself to castigate Puck for doing what all her best efforts could not.
Life goes on. Una teaches at the ACS and Carl teaches at the university. Sometimes the drone of dictation drills is fractured by the whistle of a shell through the air. On those days Una claps her hands loud, clear and humminbird-fast and they all leap from their chairs. The children press flat against the floor, behind their desks, behind Una's desk. Knees to floor, palms to floor, head to palms, as per Drill, which is no longer about physical exercise but about how to survive a siege. Una doesn't mind how they dive so long as they are not sitting stiff and alert in case the hit is for them.
She thinks this is unlikely, because Barker Road is too far out of the way of the painfully strategic Japanese. They whizz up and down the city roads unfazed by the shelling on – of all the absurdities man invented – the bicycle. They cycle zip-zip around corners and up hills with deadly silence and grace that rivals their zero-planes.
This has the bizarre corollary that overnight bicycles become a rare and valuable commodity. Everyone who owns one must either hide it, destroy it or sell it. The people foolish enough to leave them untethered wake up to find they now have no bicycle. Una is grateful, as she halts today's bible verse with those short, sharp claps, that Papatee is a buffalo. Nobody wants to requisition a buffalo. Papatee, whatever his virtues does not go feather light, zip-zip around corners. He ambles leisurely, and without purpose in the way of buffalo everywhere. Here he munches the grass. There he sniffs an orchid. Mostly he lives in the garage and munches the food Una brings him each morning, his massive head moving languorously from side to side as he chews. He noses Una gently but incuriously in Buffalo-thanks. Or he noses the catmint in Buffalo-grief and perplexity. Much better than a bicycle.
Of course, most people do sell the bicycles because the money is useful. Man cannot, after all, live on bread alone, and the bread has to come from somewhere. What with stopping for the shells at their random intervals , bread baking is a thing of the past. Susan Baker would be horrified.
But, Susan Baker did not live to see the thronging, overcrowded shops. They aren't safe these days, with the shells falling, whst-whst, because there is nowhere to move when the shells come. One can only stand pressed against the hundreds of others and hope the shell is far away or that the damage is minimal. These days Una and Li play a guessing game to see when the shops will be least crowded. But what they find is that there is no best time. There is only the jam-packed shops with their people in their hundreds, abacus beads clack-clacking to themselves, their babble muted by the swirling, whirling chatter of customers.
Una stands in the midst of these teeming masses and touches her fingers to her Trinitarian fish, where they nest snug around a sapphire, a double-heart to the one beating away underneath them. Her fingers brush them and she prays psalm snatches, the Lord's Prayer (trespasses, not debts), and Yeats. I went into a hazel wood, because a fire was in my head…
So, no, the store-bought bread doesn't horrify Una. Neither is she horrified the day Li comes back with tinned bread instead of a fresh loaf, even though the smell is wrong and the tubular shape of the bread uncanny. It is still bread, still edible. Una saves her horror in case something more calamitous happens, for instance, the sudden commodification of buffalo.
It might happen. The British and the Australians they conscript to their cause do not have bicycles. They travel on horseback or by foot, sometimes in wagons. Whenever Una sees them she thinks they look sleepless in the way she, Carl and Li were all equally sleepless in the years of Iris's infancy. They are red with sunburn, too. It is as if no one told them how to prepare for Singapore. Except that would be absurd. Surely no one sends men off to fight these days without telling them what the place they are going to is like? What the terrain is? To bring bicycles?
Una tries and fails to remember Carl and Jerry's letters to her. These are useless. All she remembers is cheery snippets about the pranks they pulled, the games they played and the animals Carl nursed. He was going to make a study of mud beetles, or something. Are there such things as mud beetles?
Whst, goes a shell with a sound like a screaming kettle. It hisses like hot water bubbling to alertness and the children jump. Una jumps. Whst-whst.
To distract the children pressed against the polished but otherwise unassuming floor of her classroom, Una says, 'Shall we play a game?'
More than half a dozen children sit up to squeal their assent of this plan. Hands shoot into the air, full of ideas. Fighting spiders are passé these days and the hoop toys are outside. But spinning tops are still in season, so they sit hunched and limbs akimbo on the floor and spin their tops competitively to see which will go the longest.
The tops knock and jostle against each other, rat-tat-rat, sometimes knocking each other off kilter or out of orbit. The varnished floor gives them extra impetus and the tops spin wild and extravagant across it. Una begins a paper of the bets the children take to see which top spins longest. Good Presbyterians do not bet, of course. But then, Una thinks, that was before Good Presbyterians found themselves in charge of anxious children in a Methodist mission school listening to the whst-whst noise of shells falling on Singapore.
'My money's on Sally's,' says little George in Una's ear.
Una should tell him to save his sixpence. She doesn't. Shells are falling, bicycles are all the rage and the water runs brown and undrinkable from their taps. These days they must boil everything and decide for themselves if that whst-whst is a kettle or an incoming shell. She pats little George on the shoulder and says, 'Mine too.'
As the tops spin the children relax. They begin to talk. Nick Xei says, 'Our dog doesn't bark any more.'
This makes Una listen, because it makes her think of Akela. Her shoulders straighten reflexively to attention, her spine uncurls from it's protective S-curve around the child in her arms. Liu, dark-haired and delicate like Iris. Asthmatic, Una remembers, like the wife of the man who served her and Percival Curtis tea not so long ago.
Sally says, 'Ours don't either.'
'Doesn't,' says someone else, saving Una the lecture. In spite of herself, Una smiles.
George says, 'We have no dog but the old lady next door has two and all they do now is lie under her sofa. All day. They don't even eat any more, isn't that odd?'
When the shells stop Una calls a break and takes this odd phenomena of the dogs not barking to their staff room. Someone, undaunted by the shells, boiled tea recently. The pot on the counter is still hot and half full. The tea in it is dark, black and slowly oversteeping. It smells of tarry, long-brewed Assam. Una pours a restorative cup and asks about the dogs.
'Oh,' says Mrs Bowen, 'I meant to ask you about your Akela. He doesn't bark, either? I always felt so safe, you know, whenever I heard your Akela barking fit to raise the dead.'
Una, privately used to feel that she could throttle Akela for barking at everything from bicycles to children playing to butterflies that had the temerity to blink. She does not think this now. She would give her eye teeth to hear that deep, bass bark come rumbling out of Trinity House as from the womb of the world. Especially to hear it directed at the zip-zip of the bicycles.
'Not a sound,' is all she says. 'Not since the Japanese declared the state of siege.'
'Ours is just the same,' says Andrew Clement, sixth-form teacher. Una sips her tea and feels the oversteeped astringency of it kick her hard in her ribs. It seers her mouth and scrapes her teeth. But it's grounding, too, like stepping onto solid ground again after too long on the rocking docks of the Keppel Harbour.
'It's happening everywhere,' says Percival Curtis with his usual, quiet authority. Sometimes this authority can turn lecture and nettle people, but not today. Today the declaration simply falls into the room and ripples through their discussion like a stone skimming a pond. Una sips her too-strong Assam tea and listens while he talks.
'All up and down the city. None of the dogs are barking. They all stopped when the siege started. A man at the university has been going around conducting a study.'
And well he might, Una supposes, since now Raffles is less a university and more an emergency hospital. She still goes down in the mornings early, or late in the afternoon to bandage and bind and do what she can. She is much better, these days at not cutting herself on shards of glass. She even no longer tastes the copper tang of blood on her tongue as she works. But she still cannot imagine why Faith would want to do the work. Except, Una supposes that someone must do it or it would never get done.
And then, too, Papatee doesn't think much of it, either. Whenever Una visits him afterward he huffs and snuffles at her, his breath warm and moist against Una's skin as the buffalo double-checks Una is still the person he thinks Una is.
'Like the poem,' says Percival Curtis. 'You know the one. Stop all the clocks, etc.'
In the ensuing silence Una realises that apparently no one else bar her and Mr Curtis do know the poem.
'Prevent the dog from barking,' she quotes without thinking, without even feeling for the words, 'with a juicy bone.'
'Might have guessed you'd know,' says Percival Curtis without rancour. 'Our unschooled contemporaries, on the other hand…'
There is gentle, amicable, companionable laughter. Now that the city is crawling with bicycling Japanese, zip-zip, they are much better at laughing together, Una finds, herself and her colleagues. They tolerate the mundanities of work and their pursuant irritants because they are so much more bearable than the zip-zip of the bicycles or the swooping of the zero-planes or even the brown, contaminated tap water.
'Quiet the dogs,' says Una now. 'That's really what it's like.'
'And here I thought,' says Mr Curtis, 'You only read the really old stuff.'
'I only teach the old stuff,' says Una, playful. 'I read all sorts.' For half a minute she feels Walter's dark, poetic ghost at her shoulder, an old, friendly sort of ghost. But then she sips her Assam tea, bitter with tannin, strong like a mule as it kicks at her ribs and the feeling is gone.
She says, 'After the last war I was hungry for words. I read everything, I think. Or near enough.'
Her colleague nods, and Una sees in the half-lowered gaze that he knows this feeling too. She wonders, for the first time, if this is how he came to the ACS. Strange that years on they still do not know what they do not know about one another. But there are, Una suspects, ghosts that orbit him, too. Shadows that chase and dance their way across memory at inopportune moments. Una has suspected this ever since, long ago now, with November looming, he had done the unthinkable and asked for one of her white poppies.
No one does this. Mrs Bowen clucks on sight of them. Other colleagues avert their eyes, uncomfortable in the face of stark white conviction. But in 1926, the memory conjured by imperfect tea and by the silence gravid with sleep and petulance as any November rain, Mr Curtis appeared in the doorway of Una's classroom, and she looked up and saw that here was understanding. Here was someone bleeding understanding like blood, the bone-dense dread of that internal pulse, Not again, please not again. Not ever, etched in the lines of his face.
Una's ghost says, inanely 'Not everyone appreciates them.'
Una reaches for and comes up with his response to this, with Hardy. Had he and I but met/By some old ancient inn/ We should have sat us down... Una sewed the poppy. It was the white of swans, of the space that surrounds poetry on its page, of please not again. Not ever. She did it that November, and the one after that, and every November since.
All that understanding, and somehow it has never come up that she reads her contemporaries. That either of them does. She shakes her head, smiles around the tea. Overhead a clock chimes, shattering memory and discussion as it bongs portentously. There's a watch at Una's wrist, with a stamp of poppies down the strap, colourless except a white enamel poppy beneath the face, testifying to Carl's understanding of her when he had it made, and it ticks subtle agreement. Una rises, rinses her teacup and murmuring her excuses, sets off to resume her lesson where they left off.
It is Matthew: 23 today, the house built on sand and the one on solid ground. There came great rain, and much water, but the house stood firm.And what, Una wonders, happens when the house built on dry land is shelled continuously? What then?
Also quoted briefly here is W.H. Auden's 'Funeral Blues' and Thomas Hardy's 'The Man I Killed.'
Parnokianlipstic- Thank you :) Regrettably for all of us I have done my turn as Una here. So, while the cat I belong to is underwhelmed by the demise of her doppelgänger, it comes from a particular place of understanding. Stillness and numbness says it perfectly. They really do bring the most unique colour and shape to life, as does any animal. And Papatee, I though people might forgive the psychic buffalo, since he does have a canon equivalent.
We are having a very unseasonably warm November but hard to complain at our continuing ravine rambles. Agree, unsurprisingly about Camomile Lawn and Rusalka. Back when you still bought CDs, the little man who sold me mine said Gabriela Beňačková was the definitive Rusalka. He'd done his thesis on the opera so I trusted him. Excellent taste on your part :)