Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 93

“It was beautiful countryside with miles of thick jungle beneath a jagged mountain chain, streaks of silvery lakes, and flat cultivated land

They were drawing away in their large car from an inn after having had lunch and were heading for the coast. Paris’s breeziness irritated Forbes so the latter decided that he and his group would overtake them. He was so determined to keep up that he managed to pass Paris’s car parked outside a rest house.

Paris and his staff drove north to Rengat on the Indragiri river. Here, Major Jock Campbell had made his headquarters and with help from the local Dutch Controlleour (district commissioner), he provided food, accommodation and transport for servicemen passing through.

Campbell was part of a team set up by Colonel Alan Warren, the aforementioned royal marine, who was attached to the Far East Special Operations Executive. They assisted escape groups to reach Sumatra and cross the mountains to Padang by organising aid en route. The team provided rest places and food along the 250-mile route and appointed doctors and nurses to tend the wounded.

Warren’s headquarters, on the west coast of Sumatra, was where he organised escape attempts, made financial handouts for local fishing boats, set up routes by foot and, when it was too late to obtain help from the Royal Navy, commandeered other ships to convey the escapees to safety.

Welcome change

When Paris’s party reached Rengat, they bumped into a handful of Argylls, who had made their way to Sumatra after being cut off from the battalion in Malaya. They were Sergeant Willie Macdonald, badly wounded at Dipang, Lance Corporal Jock Gray, and Corporal Walter Gibson.

At this time, overcrowded Rengat was being substituted as a meeting point for Ayer Mollek, farther west. Here, a Dutch rubber plantation was requisitioned as temporary accommodation. It was a welcome change for the evacuees, to be free from mosquitos, and they took baths in the latex tanks and slept between latex sheets.

That night it rained heavily and the river flooded, which made it impossible to navigate the following morning. Colonel Dillon, the man in charge at Ayer Mollek, had food for one more week and little transport as the Dutch were using it in their withdrawal 200 miles north-west to Fort de Kock.

A few fugitives became belligerent; exhausted, hungry and afraid they demanded supplies at gun point.

Paris and his staff were disadvantaged by their inability to speak either Dutch or the local language. However, at Ayer Mollek they met Lieutenant van de Gaast from the Malay Regiment, who volunteered to be their interpreter until they reached Padang.

As a junior officer, Van de Gaast found it hard to communicate instructions from senior Dutch officers that Paris’s authority was now limited to the control of his own troops and not to any others.

Many feared that they were now trapped as news came that the Japanese were trying to cut off the mountain roads.

Transport, mainly lorries, came trickling in but in the end, half the camp travelled upriver in an old steamboat and two barges, while the remainder went by bus to Taloek. Abandoning their car, Paris and his Argylls moved off in two lorries provided by the Dutch.

Beautiful

On leaving Taloek they climbed 4,000 feet into the Sumatran mountains, a range extending from north to south of the country’s western region. Arriving on the banks of a bridgeless river, they crossed it on a raft attached to a wire operated by a hand wheel.

It was beautiful countryside with miles of thick jungle beneath a jagged mountain chain, streaks of silvery lakes, and flat cultivated land.

They finally arrived at the coal mining town of Sawahloento where the Dutch community had organised blankets, food and even converted a shed into a shower room. As officers, Angus, Blackwood, and Paris booked into one of the town’s two, small, overcrowded hotels.

Here, at the end of the 19th Century, the Dutch had constructed a railway line that extended all the way to Padang. Usually the cargo was coal but at this critical period it was people. At the station, when the ancient looking train drew into the platform, the passengers climbed up several steps to enter the carriages.

After a puff and a jerk the train began its four hour journey to Padang over mountains, past deep lakes, and terraces of paddy fields, where workers wearing straw hats, laboured.

The train took its time, halting at innumerable stations where passengers bought duck eggs and fried bananas from platform vendors.

They followed the east bank of Lake Sinkarak and began the steep climb up to Padang-Panjang, at which point the train descended to the plains lying between the mountains and the sea.

When my daughter and I visited Sumatra in 2010, we flew from Malaysia to Medan on the country’s east coast instead of catching a ferry from Singapore. Flying over one of the world’s largest islands, a land mass the size of California, we looked down on mountainous, forested country and a patchwork of cultivated land.

But our stay was scarcely 10 months after a major earthquake had hit Padang in September 2009. As we rode in a taxi from the airport into the city we saw large, modern buildings with shattered walls and collapsed roofs.

Most probably, Padang looked more like a war zone than it did in early 1942 when Angus arrived.

Untouched

However, there were plenty of undamaged structures that boasted the local two-pronged Minangkabau roofs resembling buffalo horns; the buildings’ curved base resembled a ship’s hull.

This strange but graceful architectural style is not restricted to domestic houses and is used for school buildings, hotels, and even police stations.

“Nothing but broken houses!’ said our driver who could not understand why we were visiting his city. The language barrier prevented us from giving him our reason. But it did not stop him from halting his taxi, shaking our hands and introducing himself.

‘You go to Mentawi’ he advised. ‘Very beauty!’ Lying like a sparkling necklace off the coast, these islands attract surfers from all over the world. We drove past a church, its west side looking as if it had been hit by several cannonballs.

But down in the old town, untouched by the previous year’s earth tremors, were several old Dutch colonial houses, their teak verandas uncared for but still intact.

Gazing down on to the river bank, we saw, among the brightly painted fishing boats, a team of six men paddling a canoe that sliced swiftly upstream. More tomorrow © 2017 Mary C Gladstone, all rights reserved, courtesy of the author and Firefallmedia; available in hardcover and paperback online and from all booksellers.

By Mary Gladstone