UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Headhunters in Hospital By P. J. DIXON (Jesus College, Cambridge).
THE Military Hospital stood in an open, level plain, on land which had been worked for tin years before. Such as the humidity of the Malayan climate that even on the grey; gritty soil left by the dredges the long, coarse grass and scrub were constantly springing up. The new white blocks of the Hospital made a patch of neatness and order in a confusion of tin-workings and groves of tattered coconut palms, with squalid villages rusting among them. But above and beyond the " developed " land, closing our horizon from north to south like a wall, rose the vast range of jungle-covered hills, green, oppressively near. Nervous breakdowns among the staff seemed frequent; they were sent on the long rail journey down to Singapore, to be treated by the Army psychiatrists. Then it was the habit of the C.S.M. to announce heavily in the Ser- geants' Mess: " Another nutter gone down to Singapore today. Hard luck for those who can't take it ! "
I met my first headhunter on the verandah. I saw lounging against one of the supports, a stocky figure dressed in the regu- lation patients' blue-and-white, but with flattish oriental features which caught my eye at once. A Chinese ? The mouth and brows were too heavy, yet the eyes were narrow, without the dark brilliance of the typical Malay. Then he turned to re- enter the ward, and I saw that the side of his face was bandaged, and that his fine shock of straight black hair hung right down to the small of his back. I asked the British ward- orderly about his new patient. " Haven't you seen our headhunter before ? He's a Sakai, brought in the other day with a bullet-hole through his ear. I think he's crazy—spends all his time out there on the verandah, staring up at the hills." I accepted this information with some reserve. The Sakai are the aboriginal tribes of the Malayan hills, a wild primitive people, hunting with blow-pipes and deadly poison-darts. But I had never heard that they were headhunters. Besides, they had not been enlisted into the Army, so far as I knew, despite their great skill as trackers: they were supposed to be timid by nature, and to have become " unreliable ' through exposure to the propaganda of the Communists in the jungle. That evening I saw him again on the verandah of the ward, gazing at the dark mass of the hills. I spoke to him in English. Without altering his abstracted expression, he turned towards me, and drawing from his hip pocket a folded military identity card, silently presented it to me. (I realised later that, speaking no English, he used the card as a sort of passport to the modern world.) I was somewhat taken aback, on examining the card, to see his squat, rather sullen features immortalised in a small passport-type photograph. His identity was immediately explained: far from being a Sakai, he had been enlisted in Sarawak, and was described as a Land Dyak, or Iban. I began to think more seriously of him as a headhunter : his appearance was certainly savage enough. We were able to carry on some kind of a conversation in pidgin-Malay. I tried to get him to tell me the story of the bullet-hole through his ear. I received a confused impression of his leading a British patrol along the tracks of some bandits through a rubber estate—of surprising three of them, a girl and two men, in a but on the edge of the jungle—of his springing through the open doorway at them—of shots at close quarters, one passing through the lobe of his ear—then the pursuit of the bandits, who fled into the jungle, one being killed almost at once. What he stressed most strongly, how- ever, was his anger at having been prevented by the British officer from securing the head of the dead bandit as a trophy: without it, the whole significance of the pursuit and kill was lost. It was not till some weeks later, when articles about our new " allies " from Borneo began to appear in the Singapore press, that I knew that the same restraint was not always being exercised. . One evening he showed me the contents of a cloth bundle. which he had secreted at the back of the drawer in his bedside cupboard. I realised that these were the only personal posses- sions he had with him, his only material links with his home. They were a curious collection, mostly small pieces of what looked like stone, and little wallets of cloth. What caught my eye at once was a cylindrical piece of ivory, several inches long, and carved with a beautiful flowing pattern. It was hollow at one end. Itam told me that his treasure had been the tusk of a wild boar. He used it for storing the poison juice of a certain jungle tree; like the Sakai, the Ibans are adepts with the blow-pipe. Only when he detailed the uses of the rest of his collection did I realise the full extent of his belief in occult powers: stones for ensuring or preventing rain, powders which would render him inaudible or invisible to the enemy— this was indeed fighting the terrorists with their own weapons, for it is common knowledge among the Malays that certain of the most notorious Communists have rendered themselves invulnerable to all but silver bullets.
Itam made a swift recovery from his slight wound. My last sight of him was as he strode away between the two Yorkshire tommies who came to take him back to his unit. All three were wearing " jungle-green " uniform and rubber-and-canvas jungle-boots, the two lads from Sheffield or Leeds striding with upright, confident bearing, the shorter figure between moving with the easy, loping grace of the hunter. Strange comrades- in-arms !
Not long afterwards, another Iban arrived in the Hospital. sick with some kind of tropical fever. It was found convenient to put him alone in one of the small rooms to the side of the main wards, which were usually reserved for N.C.O.s. He was still very sick when I first saw him : a very different type from Itam, his features fine and intelligent, the mouth sharp and drawn tight with suffering, the large eyes black and troubled. I had been mistaken in supposing that a headhunting people is necessarily composed of brutal and savage individuals. This man was sensitive to his surroundings, and suffering from their strangeness. As his physical condition improved, his unhappi- ness increased. I visited him every two or three days, as he complained of having no one to talk to. He told me of himself and of his home, complained of his sickness, of the hospital food; yet this was only the activity of his surface mind: in his eyes there was all the time an intense bewildered misery. He was alone, cut-off, isolated completely from everything con- nected with the life he knew. (I began to understand Itam's fascinated staring at our jungle hills.) When he first began to sit up, he started some drawings in blue crayon on paper; curious spidery patterns such as might decorate a wooden tool or eathenware pot. He soon gave it up. Somehow he found out that our convalescent patients were sometimes sent up to the hill-station in the Cameron Highlands; some trackers of his own race were stationed there, so for several days his mind was set on going there. But he recovered too slowly from his illness. Hope faded, and as - the weeks passed he sank deeper into apathy and despair. He would lie for hours with his face to the wall, his eyes open but blank, not wishing to notice or speak to anyone.
I was told one evening that " the Dyak " had gone mad. In the small side-ward I found the orderly sitting impassively beside the bed, in which his patient lay tossing and muttering incomprehensibly. We watched in silence for some moments.
" What is he saying ? " I asked.
" He speaks his own language."
Then convulsively the sick man turned towards us, and spoke clearly and unmistakably in Malay, repeating the same phrase over and over: " I am not guilty ! " Then he began again his incomprehensible muttering.
" What does he mean? Guilty of what ? "
The Malay shrugged his shoulders: " Who knows ? "
When I returned to the Mess, the Sergeant-Major was saying: " That Dyak tracker's for Singapore tomorrow: nutter—been going that way for weeks. God alone knows what the trick-cyclists '11 make of him."
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