The Day Gone By

by Richard Adams

  I already knew that I didn’t qualify for demobilization. The criteria were simple and fair. Only two things counted; your age and the length of time you had been in the service. These, coinciding on a sliding scale, produced your ‘demob.’ number. The lower it was, the quicker you were due for release. Mine turned out to be 32. To be demobbed forthwith, I would have to have rated a number of 26 or lower: I’d only done five years.

  So in due course I found myself again on Kastrop airfield, technically in command of ‘a hundred men’ - some due for demobilization, some in the same boat as myself. We were just a scratch lot: most were strangers to me. When we reached England an amusing incident occurred. The R.A.F. immigration control officer, armed in the usual way with a load of papers, came up to me where I stood at the head of my ‘hundred men’ and said ‘These chaps of yours aren’t carrying any goods liable to import duty, are they?’ ‘Well,’ I replied, slow in the uptake as usual, ‘I really don’t know: you see, I was only put in charge of them -’ ‘But they’re not carrying any imported tobacco, spirits, dutiable porcelain goods, jewels or similar precious articles’ - he thrust the papers, on a clipboard, under my nose - ‘ are they, are they? You sign here, by the way. There!’ It said ‘Captain Adams and a hundred men.’

  I signed, and the hundred men, staggering slightly under the contraband loads, hoisted their bulging kit-bags, right-turned and marched into the adjacent hangar for a cup of tea.

  I had a fortnight’s leave before reporting to - yes - to Bulford. I spent it at home, fishing on the Kennet, for it was the mayfly season. I fished wherever I would, for the riparian owners were mostly themselves away at the war, and the keepers, if not also away, were either in the local or readily amenable to a five-pound note. I kept thinking ‘What does it matter, anyway? I doubt whether all that many of us will be coming back.’ The state of mind of most people during the months between the defeat of Germany and the capitulation of Japan must, for those who did not experience it, be hard to imagine. The whole country was sick, sick to death of the war. Apart from our casualties and our orphaned children, our cities were all dismally dilapidated. There were shortages of everything - meat, eggs, milk, coal, clothes, sweets, petrol, even bread. Apart from these deprivations, everywhere marriages lay in ruins; and friends, sweethearts, sons, daughters, business partners - all those archetypal companions who make life worth living - were separated far, far apart. For most people, life had grown increasingly wearisome and had few or no pleasures. And this state of affairs was believed likely to continue, possibly even to get worse; no one knew for how long. In the Far East, thousands of our soldiers were dying of starvation and ill-treatment at the hands of a cruel enemy who did not recognize the Red Cross and who allowed his prisoners no medicines and no letters to or from home. Many of us were convinced that these evil men would probably take a long time to defeat, for each one of them was readier to die than to surrender. For example, when forced by the Australians to retreat to the northern beaches of New Guinea, they had constructed defence trench walls from the rotting bodies of their own dead before being literally driven into the water. Their air force had no lack of volunteer kamikaze pilots, and these, we reckoned, could not but cost us very dear.

  One fine evening in mid-June I caught, downstream of the little plank bridge which crosses the Kennet at Halfway, the best trout I had ever yet taken from that happy river. I had no business there, of course: that made it all the more delightful. It was early dusk: I was using a Coachman and was standing on the gravel in the water and my gumboots. I had let my fly drift down to right angles of me, under the overhanging boughs of, I think, a weeping willow, though it may have been a horse chestnut, and was about to recover it when the trout rose. He ran upstream like blazes. When he leapt I did not for a few moments realize that it was my fish, for he seemed so far away. When I did realize it, I became excited by the size. He leapt two or three times, falling back each time into a bed of reeds. I fully expected to lose him, but at length he came out. Then he ran downstream, gaining any amount of slack line which I couldn’t take in fast enough and finally swimming between the legs of my boots before turning upstream yet again. I pulled one boot off, put my foot back in the water and freed my leader. The trout was still there and a minute or two later I had him on the bank. I remember thinking that while this would probably be the last trout I’d ever be likely to catch, nevertheless that evening couldn’t, now, be taken away. Like all the best things - the begonias, for example, or Jennifer - the adventure was illicit; but it couldn’t very well catch up with me. I was bound for the Far East. This was the best parenthesis I have ever known.

  Then off to Bulford. So I’ve soldiered at Aldershot and at Bulford, though never at Catterick. John Smith and I reported together to H.Q. 5th Independent Parachute Brigade; he still Brigade Signals officer, I still a Brasco.

  5th Para. Brigade, paradoxically, turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than 1st. This, to me, was unexpected, for the brigade were part of 6th Airborne Division and veterans of Normandy and the Rhine crossing (where they had had a lot of casualties). Yet no one treated us as anything but friends. The brigadier was Nigel Poett (now General Sir Nigel). Poett was, of course, a regular, and had commanded the newly formed 5th Brigade in the Normandy landings. He was a very courageous commander, who liked to show a lot of dash and personal example. For instance, he had been firm that on the night of 5-6 June 1944 he himself was going to be the first member of his brigade to land on Norman soil. During the brigade’s subsequent action east of the Orne, he had shown most gallant leadership; and had done so again in the so-called ‘Operation Varsity’ - the Rhine crossing operation - which began on 24 March 1945. (The casualties there were awful.) He was now taking 5th Brigade to India as the spearhead of the larger airborne force which was to follow. We were going to attack the Japanese as part of an amphibious invasion of the Malay peninsula.

  Poett and I were, of course, not at all compatible types. (Later, after I’d been demobilized from the brigade, I learned from my friend Denis Rendell that one day Poett had recollected me, in the mess, as ‘that quite awful ass’.) Yet you couldn’t dislike him. He was polite to you. He wasn’t frigid, like Lathbury. Nor was his entourage made up of people from the Tatler. He may not have liked me personally, but he was always friendly, pleasant and what Roy Emberson used to call ‘genuine’. When I was in hospital in Poona, having had a minor operation, he came to see me. I didn’t forget that. I found his mess much jollier and fuller of likeable people than 1st Brigade’s: but then, of course, they weren’t brooding on the after-effects of Arnhem.

  Names mean little or nothing except to the memoirist himself: but all the same I’d like to put down a few. Jim Webber, M.C., commanding the H.Q. Defence Platoon; an exceptionally kindly, gentle man; Denis Rendell, his second-in-command, one of Colonel Frost’s original officers in Tunisia. Denis, a true Mercutio, came of a military family. He had been awarded the M.C. after having escaped in Italy and proceeded to organize and maintain an Allied escape route through the Italian lines. He told me that he had stayed to do this on account of an Italian girl whom he didn’t want to part from. His M.C. cut little ice at home, for his father was a V.C. and his brother a D.S.O. John Reidy, Denis’s subaltern, was perhaps the most amusing person I have ever known; he made you howl and roll about. (‘Twarn’t what he said, ‘twas the way that he said it.) Tommy Farr, the G.3 Ops., (who had been wounded in Normandy), became a good friend; an even closer friend was Tommy Hanley, the Brigade H.Q. medical officer, with whom I was to share a billet in Singapore. I also, of course, made various friends among the officers (my ‘customers’) in the battalions, and of these I recall with particular warmth a certain John Awdry. Thirty years later I put him into The Plague Dogs as the parachute officer who refuses to shoot Snitter and Rowf on the orders of the time-serving Secretary of State. We met again recently and he was much the same.

  The Brigade flew out to Karachi via Corsica and Alam Haifa: and it was at
Alam Haifa that an incident occurred which still hurts in memory after more than forty years. The ‘plane had landed at mid-day and I was one of a group of officers invited to lunch in the R.A.F. officers’ mess. Of course, like all ‘ports of passage’ messes, it was accustomed to entertaining heterogeneous bunches of people - anything from royalty to civilian journalists.

  Naturally, I had become very fond of my red beret. It was the one which I had been dished out with on my first night with 250 Company at Lincoln; the one Paddy Kavanagh had told me that we ‘didn’t quite’ tuck under our shoulder epaulettes. By now it and I had seen a lot together, and I had done it proud. There was a place in London where you could buy hand-embroidered regimental cap badges and have them stitched on. They cost a bit, of course, but they were worth it. John Gifford had encouraged his officers to wear them. Nearly all of us did, including myself. I had hung that beret up in innumerable messes, pubs., estaminets and hospitable homes in France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark. It had never occurred to me that it might be stolen. Before going in to lunch at Alam Haifa, I left it on a table in the ante-room in the usual way. When I came out it had been stolen. It was irreplaceable, of course: no embroidered cap badges in India. For my remaining six months in the Army I wore a plain brass cap badge, and felt the loss every day. I feel it still.

  At Bahrein it was so hot that you couldn’t sleep and had no need to dry yourself when you stepped out of the shower. European camp personnel rose at first light, worked until about eight or nine a.m. and then went under cover. Work resumed at about five p.m. and continued until early dark. Only the natives could bear middle-of-the-day conditions. I have to say that from what I saw they seemed to work well enough.

  Having reached Karachi from England in three days, we then took a week to travel by train to Bombay via Delhi. It was during this journey that Tommy Hanley taught me to play ‘Five Letter Words’, while I taught him to play piquet. These pastimes whiled away many wearisome, clanking hours.

  It was during this trip that an incident took place which I wish with all my heart that I could lose from mind. In those days the railway carriages in India were huge and solid and stood very high off the ground. (For all I know they still do.) In my recollection, the distance from the sill of a carriage door down to the ground was a good seven feet. On this account, during halts, when doors were opened, iron ladders used to be placed against the doorway openings into the train’s corridors. They were not steep, and most people - most Europeans, anyway - used to descend facing forwards. This was mainly because one usually found oneself descending into a jabbering crowd of beggars, hawkers, porters and the like. If you had your back to them, your pocket could be picked before you knew what had happened. Coming down face forwards, you had to shove your way to the ground, firmly refusing to dispense alms and cigarettes or to buy fruit, eggs, chapatis and the like.

  One evening during our week-long journey, we had stopped at some station or other between Karachi and Delhi, and I had decided to stretch my legs on the platform for five or ten minutes. As I was descending the ladder, a boy aged about twelve or fourteen, with an open cotton bag slung round his neck, pushed his way through the throng on the ground, made his way a rung or two upwards and flung his two arms up into my face. He had no hands. What he thrust into my face were the stumps of his wrists.

  I recoiled in sickened shock and went back into the corridor. Some little way along it I met our Indian liaison officer, Captain Gokral. I asked him what possible explanation there could be of this horrible experience. ‘The boy’s too young to have been a soldier and too young, I’d have thought, to have been involved in any sort of industrial accident or -’

  ‘Oh, Captain Adams,’ he interjected, ‘when you’ve been in this country a little longer you’ll come to realize the kind of things that happen here. The boy will have been deliberately mutilated to excite pity. Somewhere in the town there will be a man like Mr Fagin making use of ten or more such boys. If they don’t bring back enough money each evening, they don’t eat.’

  Does God know about this? I thought. During the last forty and more years it has never taken much to recall it to my mind. Captain Gokral was right: on that day I learnt a heavy matter about the world.

  Arrived at Bombay, we went into camp at Kalyan, as very many have done before us. So it was here that we experienced our first monsoon. The monsoon was actually coming towards its end when we moved into Kalyan camp, but what we had of it was quite enough. And there was little or nothing to do, except to wonder what form our attack on the Malay peninsula was likely to take. I whiled away some of the time by going into hospital at Poona with an abscess of the nipple. When I came round from the anaesthetic, the Indian surgeon who had done the job was sitting beside my bed. ‘Well,’ he said genially, “didn’t know much about that, did you?’ I never learned his name, but I’ve always remembered what a nice chap he was, and how solicitous and kind. That was the time when Brigadier Poett took the trouble to come and see me.

  Back in camp, one evening in early August, I was having a casual drink with Tommy Farr when I happened to say something about the Mikado and our forthcoming activities.

  “Doesn’t look as though we’ll be making his acquaintance now, after all, does it?’ said Tommy. ‘However d’you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, haven’t you heard about this new bomb they’ve dropped?’

  I hadn’t. Tommy told me. He himself felt sure that it could only push Japan into surrender. Myself, I didn’t know what to think. During the next two or three days we were told very little, but sitting in our muddy, sodden camp, we wondered and speculated. On 9 August the Allies dropped the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki. The war was over. We weren’t going to have to fight the Japanese now. How could any reasonable person in our position not feel glad and thankful for the bomb?

  Quite soon afterwards the brigade boarded a ship called the Chitral and sailed for Malaya. It had been decided that, since the Allied attack had already been worked out and organized, the simplest way to carry out the reoccupation of Malaya would be for all units to do what they would have been going to do anyway, but without, of course, any contribution from the Japanese.

  5th Brigade duly landed on the shores of the Malay peninsula, and I recall how, while clambering down from the Chitral, I hurt my left thumb rather painfully on the metal gunwale of the landing craft. (The landing craft was bouncing up and down in a choppy sea and the gunwale came up and hit my open hand, hard.) We marched about ten miles inland and passed the night in torrential rain and a rubber plantation. No one slept: you couldn’t. I came to realize that prolonged exposure to this sort of rain would be bound to make anyone, however fit, unserviceable. Jungle warfare was something to feel grateful to have been spared. No wonder 14th Army veterans tended to be touchy on the subject.

  Next morning we found ourselves the centre of a crisis. We were white! It was imperative, for political reasons, that the first Allied troops to enter Singapore should be white and not Indian. Apparently this vital matter had hitherto been overlooked. We, at the moment, were the nearest white troops to Singapore; so we must re-embark and sail there forthwith.

  And so we did; and a foul march back to the ship it was, on foot, through the sweltering humidity and the rubber groves. The salt tablets with which we had been issued were palatable and refreshing, but even so a lot of people dropped out along the roadside. We simply weren’t used to these conditions, we husky European parachutists.

  I rather think it was on 3 September that we landed at Singapore. We weren’t the only white troops to arrive. There were other units — as many as could be rushed in at short notice — veterans of the Burmese war. Initially, these didn’t take too kindly to 5th Parachute Brigade, who had only been in the Far East for about five minutes. Such feelings, however, were soon swallowed up in the general reaction to what we found on entering the city - incidentally, the third capital in which I had happened to have been with the first relieving troops.

  We
were not, of course, expecting acclamation, as in Brussels or Copenhagen. This was not a European capital. However, from my own direct, first-hand experience I can assure the reader of one thing. The inhabitants of Singapore were beyond all argument glad to be rid of the Japanese. They had had three-and-a-half years of the Dai Nippon Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere, and as far as they were concerned you could keep it. There had been precious little prosperity, and no prospect of any.

  Most of us were already mentally inured to the poverty, squalor, disease and beggary common to Oriental cities. I had myself experienced not only Karachi and Bombay, but also Cairo and Alexandria, Jerusalem, Amman, Ma’an and, of course, in weekly doses for a year, Gaza, that celebrated couple of shit-bins and a camel. Yet all these places had been, in their own ways, going concerns, and were inhabited by people pursuing traditional styles of life which collectively they more or less accepted. You knew where you were and felt that at least there was a certain stability about local ways and daily life, even if those ways were not ours.

  By contrast, you felt at once that throughout Singapore there was something badly wrong; a dislocation which seemed to permeate everything. The place might be compared to a run-down engine which was being mishandled and likely at any moment to seize up for lack of oil or water or because of flat batteries. It was like a city in a fantasy film, a city run by some sort of intelligent apes with just about enough know-how to keep things going at the roughest level. To start with, inflation was over the moon, but although that was one of the basic factors it wasn’t, of course, among the visible, tactile first impressions which struck us at the outset. Everything was worn-out or broken: nothing worked properly and no Japanese seemed particularly aware of it. John Smith (who was, you will recall, Brigade Signals officer) told me that the whole telephone exchange was in the most awful state. I myself, as Brasco, couldn’t find a single refrigerator on the Island in working condition: the Japs just weren’t interested in refrigerators, let alone in air conditioning. (The Island, by the way, is about the same size and shape as the Isle of Wight.) Other specialists - Sappers, R.E.M.E. and so on - reported similar states of affairs on their respective fronts.