In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  They had four little daughters, all under six, and lived in a confined and noxious slum, a crumbling house in one of four terraces around a square at the centre of which were communal lavatories.

  We went to visit him in hospital the next day. The poor girl trembled with nervousness and shame as we were led through corridor after corridor. Great locks were undone and bars rattled away until eventually we went into a ward where my brother Hally was sitting up cheerfully in bed. He showed no sign of surprise that I had turned up. He was not even sure who I was. I was in my army uniform and he imagined I had come to recruit him to fight somewhere.

  'I can sing,' he suddenly announced and launched into a baritone ballad. 'I play rugby for Newport, you know,' he boasted. Wasted and white, he sat in the bed. 'And,' he whispered, 'I've lived with the Trappist monks.' He nodded to the man in the next bed and winked. 'He's barmy, he is,' he confided. 'Off his rocker.'

  Stunned I led his tearful wife out of the ward. I was only eighteen but I had more confidence and logic than she could summon, poor lady. I sought out a doctor whom I finally traced to the hospital dance. A band was playing and a lot of people were waltzing around the floor. 'Everyone seems to be having a good time,' I ventured after I had told him who I was. A woman suddenly began whooping and jumping up and down. 'That's matron,' he nodded.

  'Your brother,' he told me. 'Has general paralysis of the insane, GPI we call it. We are treating him as best as we can but there is no hope that he will ever recover. It's caused by untreated syphilis, you know. He's like that for life.'

  It was early in the Christmas season. On the following day I took the four little girls, the youngest under two, to Lewis's store in the city to see Santa Claus.

  The weather was icy and I wore a civilian overcoat – my brother's probably – over my army khaki and I worried in case I encountered any military police.

  On the following day their mother accompanied me to the station and this stranger, who was my brother's wife, kissed me on the cheek and lent me half-a-crown because I had hardly any money. As soon as I got my first pay packet on my return to camp I wrote to her and enclosed a postal order in repayment of the loan. After that, when I reached Singapore, I sent her several letters but I never received a reply. The Thomas family had withdrawn into its isolation again. I was not to know for many years of the terrible thing that was to happen.

  December of that year saw some spectacularly raging weather around the British shores. Dented ships limped into Liverpool and you could almost hear them sigh with relief as they berthed. We, however, were sailing out.

  Marching from Lime Street Station to the dockside was hard enough, for the wind battered against us as we pressed forward in our widespread greatcoats and our bulky kit. We marched bent forward and as we did so the gale was shredded by a sleet storm. In the stoic tradition of the British Tommy we tried to sing in fractured voices. Not many people were about the streets in that awful weather but some who paused to see us march by were treated to one or other of the traditional digital salutes of the British soldier, the thumb or the two fingers up.

  'Thank God we've got a navy,' taunted a building site labourer, sheltering and idle. I bent forward with the rest, imagining I was being heroic, perhaps even leading the retreat from Moscow. My military ambitions were confined to fantasy, however; not that I minded the wind and sleet. After all I was off to Singapore.

  The troopship's white hull almost merged with the clay-coloured sky. We tramped up the gangway in the sleety wind. No band played. No one was there to see us off, nor did we expect there to be. Before the ship cast off it was announced that there were postal officials aboard who would accept what were somewhat ominously classed as 'last messages to the next of kin'. I had no idea who my next of kin might be but, perhaps to show myself as much as anyone else that I belonged to someone in the world, I queued with the others and sent a telegram to the plump girl I had met the previous evening at a dance in Slough. She made Mars Bars for a living, at a chocolate factory just along the road from the transit camp where we had been posted to await the troopship. Romantically I had walked her home, the soldier on his last night before going to a distant war, and we had shared a fumbling cuddle at her gate. She had given me a chaste kiss and a free Mars Bar, which I munched on my way back to camp. Now I sent her the dramatic message: 'Sailing troopship Orbita, Liverpool, today. Goodbye. Love Les.'

  I don't know whether she ever received it because I never saw her again. My sense of petty drama often obstructed more practical things; on the voyage I wrote to my Auntie Kate in Wales heading the notepaper: 'Somewhere in the Indian Ocean' and she simply replied to that address. I had appended my Singapore address but she ignored that. The letter took ten months to find me, having been presumably floating around in tropical waters until then. This grasping onto people, casual acquaintances and scarcely known relatives, seems banal now that I have my own family. But in those days, I suppose, I needed to feel I had known someone, anyone, long enough to send them a telegram even if I had only met them the previous night. When the ship reached Port Said I paid ten shillings to a bumboatman for an aromatic toilet case, splitting at the seams and loaded with bottles of sordid liquid. You could smell it from the deck. This I kept for my Mars Bar love as well. At least initially. When she stopped writing (she met a boy in the coconut department) I reserved it for the lucky girl, whoever she was, who might take her place. For the whole eighteen months I was in Singapore I kept it. When all the contents of my barrack room locker were stolen, just before I was due to return home, the thief left it behind. By then it had so fallen to pieces that it was hardly worthwhile stealing anyway and in the end I dropped it in a rubbish bin just before sailing. A waste of ten shillings if there ever was.

  Despite the December tempests, and the forecasts of more and worse to follow, the SS Orbita cast off on time and proceeded up the murky Mersey. We were sitting in the messroom, at the midday eating shift, when the BBC News, being broadcast over our heads from loudspeakers, and retelling the terrible storm, announced: 'The troopship Orbita, with a thousand men for the Far East, was unable to sail from Liverpool this morning because of me bad weather.' Everyone cheered this travesty. At that moment we felt the bow begin to dip.

  I had never been to sea, apart from crossing to the Isle of Man on the ferry, also from Liverpool, but my father's and my grandfather's blood must have been there in my veins because I found I enjoyed it; I watched the Liver Birds disappear into the ragged sky and then turned and sniffed the raw ocean. Outward bound, I whispered to myself, I was outward bound. That day, and for three days after, it was raw indeed. Black waves, with sharp white edges, lumbered from the horizon and battered the large ship, throwing her this way and that and sometimes in both directions at once. The sky shrieked, the rain deluged, landward lighthouses flashed distantly. Sheltering in a companionway hatch I watched the drama spill across the sea. My face was wet with salt, my hair felt as if it would be torn off by the gale. Hanging onto a stanchion or a rope I let myself sway and dip with the deck. Sometimes I hummed 'Fingal's Gave'.

  For most of the time I was up there alone, apart from the crew who were largely unenthusiastic about my poetic feelings. A friendly chap from the galley who came up for a breath of air now and again, confessed that the only thing he really liked about the sea was when the Liver Birds again appeared over the horizon and he knew he would soon be paid off and home. He had been everywhere but seen nothing but a few bars. Like my father he could scarcely pronounce some of the romantic names. He was content to spend his time below in the dry.

  Every now and then I would go to the lower decks myself and walk among what appeared to be the dead and the dying. There was a unit of the Coldstream Guards aboard and they had never looked so small. Soldiers lay groaning everywhere. When I reported at mealtimes and ate heartily, I was one of only a dozen who managed to get to the table and these valiant few would invariably be diminished by the end of the sausage and mash or fatty pork fill
et.

  My own close comrades scarcely rose from the horizontal by day or night although such inducements as bingo, dance-band rehearsals, and a quiz were dangled tantalisingly. One fellow, a professional corporal, who complained more bitterly than any conscript about the army sending him abroad, kept muttering dark poetry to me: 'Can you still see England? Is the land in sight?' Perhaps he had thoughts of making a swim for it.

  We sighted no other vessels except the famous German training barque Pamir with her crew of boys, plunging and rolling through the great grey storm. She sank only shortly after; all the youthful sailors being lost.

  After two days of this wayward voyage I saw from the framed chart that we were about to leave the last outriders of England. Going out to the port side of the ship, with the oily smoke from the funnels flying around me, I looked over broken ocean to the Isles of Scilly. They lay low like whales against the horizon, the light from the Bishop Rock winked a last goodbye. The deep sky had broken for a while and above the islands fell pale fingers of wintry sunlight. I thought I could see a white smudge, perhaps a house on the shore. At that moment I felt very sad in my heart for it came to me that I was truly leaving, that the last land would disappear out of sight and that my life would again change. Islands, even then, were very attractive to me and I would have been glad to be going there instead of some unknown far country. As it was, I went below and told the morose regular soldier that indeed England was slipping away. He made the prophecy that he would never return alive, but he did. On the voyage he found a medical book and studied it carefully. Within a few weeks of arriving in Singapore he was given a discharge on the grounds of chronic ill-health and went happily home.

  While the storms persisted the Jonahs, those of them who could actually raise themselves on their elbows and speak, forecast that worse was to come, for before us was the dreaded Bay of Biscay. We slept on crowded troop decks, in bunks layered one above the other, although these were an improvement on some troopships where the other ranks also had their meals in the same cramped space, an uncongenial experience in a turbulent sea.

  When we entered the notorious bay, however, it sat quietly waiting for us, sunshine soft as a smile upon its face. The ship eased her rolling and the soldiers began to appear, blinking in the light, pacing the deck and pointing out the European mainland to each other. Other ranks had to keep to one area of the ship and were not allowed to pass into the officers' accommodation. It was possible, however, for a conscript to crane his neck out and peep into the forward saloon where lieutenants only our age lounged about in what seemed acres of room sipping drinks and talking to women. These were service wives going out to join their husbands in the Far East. And the officers had them to themselves.

  In the army, however, there are always ways. There was a call for volunteers for a concert party, an all-ranks' concert party. Those who wished to take part should report to the purser's office, in the forward saloon. Swiftly I was over the barrier with my repertoire of songs and stories learned at Rotary dinners, added to which I had a good stock of army jokes stolen from the Regimental Sergeant-Major's blackboard at Devizes.

  About twenty other ranks were assembled and we were given chairs and tea. Not beer, because it was apparently thought that it might set us on a rampage. This, however, was more like it. I took a good look at the women and they looked back, doubtless through curiosity, at the army's lower members. Lounging back in the padded chair, sipping my tea, I wondered why I could not have been an officer.

  The concert was to be held on the open deck once the ship had rounded Gibraltar and was sailing through the Mediterranean. During rehearsals I began to converse with an attractive lady soprano. Each time the producer dismissed us and I had to return over the divide to the mob on the troop deck, she would accompany me to the barrier and say goodnight. Her husband was in the air force police in Singapore and was captain of the combined services' water polo team. If there was going to be an affair then it would have to be reasonably soon.

  She sang beautifully and I stood, speared by romance, in the wings while she stood on the hatch-cover stage causing soldiers' eyes to dampen with 'We'll Meet Again'. Unusually for me, I almost missed my entrance.

  My jokes went down well, I thought, although the act did go on rather a long time and some stories that had been suitable for smoking nights at Woodford did not meet with the full approval of a colonel's wife. This became clear when her husband eventually stood up, strode out purposefully and dragged me bodily from the stage. There was a roar of booing from the non-commissioned ranks at this, and the crew standing around the rails joined in. 'See,' said the Colonel, trying to excuse his action. 'They're booing you.'

  The crew were trouble. Not to me or my fellow conscripts, because they treated us like the boys we were. But as the voyage went on they became more rebellious and on Christmas Eve, in humid Aden, open mutiny was close. The sailors' leader was a giant New Zealander, a man like a side of beef who looked even more like one when the ship reached the sunshine because, stripped to a mass of waist, he went red, then purple, then the tone of a leather armchair. He also had a curl in his eye and he rolled around, amiably threatening, and swinging a length of knotted rope.

  On Christmas Eve, after returning from Aden where we had been maudlin through Yuletide memories over warm beer in the NAAFI, we joined the passengers around the forward hatch and sang carols under the Arabian stars. Religiously waiting for the conclusion of 'Silent Night', the huge New Zealander then mounted the stage holding his knotted rope and tried to enlist our sympathy, even physical support, in the mutiny that was about to break out. 'The captain of this ship,' he bellowed, 'is a right bastard! He's refused to let us have a single bottle of drink on board to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus. Now I ask you, what fucking justice is there in that?'

  It took seven military policemen, and one or two of his own shipmates who thought he had gone too far, to get him from the stage. He was put in a place of safety (from the passengers' point of view, that is) but a few days later was about the decks again. In the heat of the Red Sea there came a confrontation which we young conscripts watched with some appetite. A human barrier of Coldstream Guards was placed across the deck with a violent and vocal sergeant, whereupon the grumbling crew, under their beefy leader, came one by one from a forward hatch and advanced with barefooted threat. The rank of young guardsmen looked straight ahead as the sailors advanced. At the time I personally thought that it would have been a better strategy to disable the mutineers as they emerged from the hatch, one by one, but no one asked my advice. The hairy-browed, axe-handle-swinging, rope-dangling crew neared the rank of unarmed, inexperienced but upright soldiers. At the final tense moment, with the two parties stationary and facing each other only six feet apart, the sergeant snapped an order, or rather a series of orders, managing to give the impression that he had only been trying to remember the words. 'Guard . . . stand at ease . . . Stand easy . . . Guard dismiss.' With sighs of relief all around (although with a certain feeling of disappointment on our part) the crew walked through. One of the guardsmen told me afterwards that they were saving their fighting for the Communist bandits in Malaya.

  All was calm, at least as far as we could ascertain, until Colombo. There a naval party and civilian police (who arrived with an elephant) came to the ship and, after some negotiation, several members of the crew were transferred ashore. Later, it transpired that one of them was charged with a murder committed shortly before at a cinema in Liverpool.

  Now the SS Orbita, in sunny seas, sailed on towards the Orient. A further call for volunteers was made, this time for Welshmen. I had not had sufficient service experience to know that you never volunteer for anything. Since the summons was for those of Welsh birth I imagined that we were required for singing but instead I found myself with a dozen others in a hold where the temperature was about a hundred degrees – skinning leeks, our national emblem.

  Predictably my love affair had not come to very much. We wa
ltzed on the deck during the all-ranks' dances and we stood at the rail and observed the ocean scuttling by. 'I want to go home,' she said moonily one night. 'This ship is going the wrong way for me.' She laid her head on my shoulder and wept: 'Please, please, take me home.'

  It was a tallish order for a class three private in the Pay Corps, earning a pound a week, and being himself carried off he knew not where by forces beyond his control. 'I'll try' I promised wildly. 'I'll think of something.'

  The bravado must have been less than convincing because she afterwards transferred her devotions to a bathroom steward who had walked in while she was having a shower. He was obviously a far more worldly man than I (he had been aboard when the Orbita took Australian war brides to Sydney, six hundred of them, and had sailed into harbour with a pair of knickers flying at the mainmast). However, getting the ship turned around for her was also beyond him and the last he or I saw of her was when she disembarked in Singapore and fell into the arms of her husband – one of the biggest and fittest-looking RAF police water polo players I have ever seen.

  For once I was not distressed. Looking out from the deck over the grey-clouded, steaming city, I knew that adventure lay there in plenty and that some portion of it might be concerned with women. With any luck my days as a virgin were numbered.

  As we waited to disembark it commenced to rain, warm and soupily, and it scarcely ceased during the next thirty-seven days. I remember the total precisely because when the weather did at last clear the Straits Times headline proclaimed: 'Old Sol Shines Again'. It had been the longest time without sunshine that even the most ancient of Chinese could remember.

  Looking down at the cluttered dockside I observed that the Europeans had iodine tans, almost yellow as if they were sick with fever. The rain rattled the palm trees and coolies cantered about with sacks over their heads. Viewed from above the warehouse roofs the city looked like a hot Newport, Mon.