In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  As my unit clattered down the steep gangway, hung as we were with rifles and equipment, there at the bottom was a newsreel camera crew, whirring away while we raised a cheer and a few expected thumbs. It was twenty-five years before I saw that piece of film. The well-known newspaper correspondent, turned novelist, Noel Barber, wrote a book about the Malaya Emergency called The War of the Running Dogs and this was adapted for a television documentary. Having written The Virgin Soldiers, a private's eye view of that segment of history, I was interviewed as part of the programme. When I saw the entire film for the first time there was a sequence of newsreel, culled from some archive, showing national servicemen leaving a troopship in Singapore. It was us. My half-forgotten comrades were clearly recognisable and there was a moment when my head poked out from behind somebody's pack. My first appearance before the camera!

  On the journey from the port to the barracks at Nee Soon, about ten miles from the city, our truck knocked over a village dog. The driver laughed and drove on. One of us newcomers protested loudly: 'No wonder they hate us out here, knocking their pets over like that!' We had much to learn. Indeed there were designated 'dog-days' when an open vehicle from each garrison drove around, with eager marskmen in the back shooting every dog in sight which did not have the benefit of a collar. Sometimes they presented such a good target that the collar was never noticed until the dog was dead. Then it was taken off and quietly thrown away.

  X

  Nee Soon was a broad, tropics garrison, four three-storeyed concrete barrack blocks around one square and the same pattern repeated a quarter of a mile lower down the hill. They had been planned, intended for Indian troops, in the early days of the war and had been completed conveniently in time for the Japanese occupation of Singapore. The Japanese fenced them around with wire and allied prisoners were herded into the confines, hundreds of lost souls living in appalling conditions, made to stand for hours on the open square in the fierce sun. Many died and indeed they had little to live for. The military police guard dogs of my day were struck with fear when they passed some of the buildings and refused to enter, snapping at their handlers and with their hackles raised. Bodies were discovered buried in the sports field.

  These deeds were only five years old when I first arrived there in January 1950. I was never aware of any ghosts although the place was bad enough without them. We had taken thirty-five days on the journey from England. Calculating that another thirty-five days might be required to get home again and taking into account disembarkation leave and the process of demobilisation we would probably only serve ten months in Singapore. Just enough to have a good time, perhaps; something of a holiday. Or so we thought.

  As soon as we arrived, handed our rifles into the armoury and left our kit within our allotted bed-space, we were taken to the mess hall. A lugubrious corporal with both a limp and warts accompanied us.

  'What's the food like?' I enquired as we queued.

  'Terrible,' he said solemnly. 'Fucking terrible.'

  'I suppose you can always fill up with fruit,' I suggested optimistically. 'Plenty of that about.'

  'Never see it,' he answered. 'Not unless you want to climb fucking trees for fucking coconuts.'

  'Go into Singapore much?' I persisted. 'Do you get to mix with the Chinese at all?'

  His eyes started watering. 'Never go down there,' he said. 'The Chinese 'ave all got the pox. I'm saving up to go 'Ome. That's the only place I want to go, mucker. 'Ome wiv a capital H.'

  Most of the soldiers did. In fact homesickness was endemic, not only among the national servicemen, who had been plucked from familiar streets, jobs and families, but the regulars who were presumably in the service as a career.

  'Get your knees brown,' was the ritual jibe directed at anyone newly arrived. 'I'm peachy!' was the boast of the soldier about to board the troopship for home. It was like Barnardo's all over again.

  The man whose bed I took over, whom I met for only a few minutes before he joyfully boarded the truck which had brought us and headed towards the docks and the troopship, was a reporter I had known in my first days on the papers at Voluntary Place. I took over his bed and he went home, took over one of my failed girlfriends, and married her.

  After all the anticipation of tropical adventure, Singapore, or at least the piece in my immediate view, proved a dire disappointment. It was the hapless boredom of our daily military routine that primarily made it so. If I had been given a task which, even occasionally, glimmered with interest I could have enjoyed it and might even have been of some positive use. In fairness to the army in general, it could have been scarcely aware of this.

  Nee Soon, as so many barracks are in whatever part of the world and whichever army is occupying them, was a sort of ghetto. We mostly lived, worked, slept and entertained ourselves within its confines and those of the adjoining village. The city was a bus journey away and we had little money to spend when we reached it. You could go there to the services club and tango with especially selected partners, who were all good girls; you could sprawl out like a nabob in Oriental wicker chairs lined up in the NAAFI lounge, or trudge around and take photographs. That was the way I, and the others, saw it. Very soon all we wanted to do was go home.

  Naturally today this attitude embarrasses me. But at eighteen (especially eighteen as it was then) you do not know and appreciate the things that come later in life. In eighteen months in the Far East, for example, I never once sampled Chinese food. Years later I returned to the city with my wife Diana to take part in a television commercial. On arrival we were told that the film would concentrate on the delights of eating in Singapore, which puzzled me since the original contract was for some quite different aspect. The advertising agent explained that the man they had brought out to promote their food on television turned out to be a vegetarian. It was only then, years later, that 1 discovered the noodle paradise of Albert Street.

  In 1950, however, my culinary demands were confined to egg and chips and yellow Tiger Beer in Nee Soon village. There was also real steak, when you could afford it, something I had never seen before. In Britain the mean hand of rationing was still on the land but in Singapore meat (mostly from Australia) was plentiful.

  Our barrack rooms were lofty and cool. There were forty beds to a room, a radio loudspeaker in one corner, a balcony overlooking the parade ground at the front and the latrines at the back. We were issued with mosquito nets, but malaria had been eliminated in Singapore Island and we hardly ever used them unless we wanted privacy; a curious but effective way of shutting yourself off from the army and the world. The net would be hooked over the head of the bed and tucked in at the bottom and the sides. Sometimes, on a Tuesday when I did not even have the price of a beer or a camp cinema seat, I would put it up like a green sail and sit in bed reading, the life of the barrack room kept outside its confines. If anyone wanted to speak to you they had to tap on the outside like knocking at a door. It was the only privacy we had and was respected by all.

  Each morning, in our billowing green shorts and baggy bush jackets, we would troop from the barracks to the offices which were reached by a wooden bridge over a ravine. The bridge was still there when I was last in Singapore, now tramped by the smaller but more businesslike soldiers of the Singapore army. After the British left there were Australian and New Zealand troops at Nee Soon, and before us the Japanese. That old wooden bridge must have been stoutly built for it has known the tread of many different boots.

  As we went across the bridge we would beat a tinny tattoo with our eating irons, a knife, fork and spoon clipped together, on our enamel drinking mugs.

  Two hundred green youths clanked and clattered on their way to the steamy boredom of their desks. Sometimes we sang a song:

  We're a shower of bastards,

  Bastards we are . . .

  We'd rather fuck than fight,

  We're the Pay Corps Cavalry!

  We were not required to fight and we did not do much of the other either.

&n
bsp; The offices were pale wooden buildings with dumb fans whirring above. Because of the incompetence I had shown in training with figures I was posted to the transfers section which dealt with incoming and outgoing soldiers' accounts, as they arrived or as they departed. As another set of documents was dispatched to the United Kingdom, I saw, in imagination, those grinning soldiers following after. I don't know why I was so homesick for I had no home to which I could go.

  I made some attempt to hint at my abilities at shorthand and typing, but the orderly room was staffed with pouting Chinese girls in silken cheung sams, split up to their hips. There was no chance for me. Chinese civilians also worked in the office with us. On the transfers section we had two, Mr Wee and Mr Lee. Mr Wee was a dear doddery old chap who managed to get everything wrong but still somehow clung onto his job. Accounts of troops far up in the Malay jungle would mysteriously turn up at Warley Barracks in Essex and the finger would eventually point to Mr Wee. He stayed because he often bought the tea. Mr Lee was younger and neater. He was also an exceedingly kind little man. On my nineteenth birthday, knowing my writing ambitions, he gave me a present of a Roget's Thesaurus. He was the only one in the world who remembered it was my birthday and I was overcome with gratitude. I took the book back to the barrack room, hoisted the mosquito net, and began to look through its unending pages of words. It lies on the desk before me as I write this, thirty-four years later.

  The operation of the transfers section was scarcely arduous and I began to think I could undertake some work of my own if only I could get away from the gaze, often as bored as mine, of the officer in charge, a bald amiable Welshman, Lieutenant Williams, or the huge sweating Cockney sergeant, a gentle elephant called Darby. We plodded on while the fans whirled eternally. Tea and cakes came and went. Lunchtime saw us clanking over the bridge again, then enduring three hot hours in the afternoon office before trudging back to the barrack room to flop on our beds, or wanking chariots as they were called, until it was time for the evening meal. Where, I used to wonder, had the mystic East gone?

  In one corner, distant from the general section, so cosseted that he even had a little plant in a pot on the window sill, was a young sergeant dealing with something ominously called Death Gases. One day he mentioned that it was getting him down, dealing with the final finances of dead soldiers, and he was applying for a transfer. Reasoning that handling Death Cases could not be more demoralising than traipsing around undertakers and bereaved homes as a reporter, I applied for the job and they gladly thrust it at me. At first the Adjutant was a little dubious; after all, the work had previously been accomplished by a sergeant. Did I think I could manage it? I said I thought I could and I did. It took me about an hour and a half each day. I was pleased with this for, in my out-of-the-way niche, I could get my official work done and then concentrate on industry of my own. No one ever suggested that since I was doing a sergeant's work I might at least be promoted to lance-corporal but, although I would have welcomed the extra pay, I did not mind very much about this. The army, bless its heart, had provided me with time to write.

  More cheerfully now, I would march each morning over the bridge with the reluctant clerks and, after watering the plant on the window sill, I would go through the post and do some work on outstanding matters. Then, leaving a voluminous file open on the desk in front of me, I would insert some scrap paper and, while apparently wrestling with funds and figures, give myself to composing some article or short story. I am afraid that some of my earliest published work was fashioned on the last accounting of some moribund soldier.

  My one-man department also dealt with local releases, soldiers who had completed their service and had married Chinese or Eurasian girls or for some other motive had decided to stay in the Far East and make a civil career. It even crossed my mind to take advantage of this facility myself. An England cricket team was going to Australia about the time when my service would be coming to its end and I wrote to the MCC authorities at Lords suggesting that they might like me to accompany them on tour as a baggage man, secretary and general factotum. I guaranteed to find my own passage to Sydney (how, I knew not) but the offer was politely refused in a letter which pointed out that they already had a baggage man. I was, however, fairly pleased with the letter headed 'Marylebone Cricket Club' and I pinned it on the inside of my locker in the barrack room.

  My daily job, by its very definition, had its sad and sometimes grisly aspects. Up-country, in the Ulu as we called it, across the causeway spanning the Straits of Johore, which kept Singapore immune from their activities, Communist guerillas were waging a deadly and often successful campaign.

  Almost daily there were jungle ambushes and casualties. I would read about them in the Straits Times or hear the news on the barrack room radio; then, after a few days, the paybooks and the personal financial documents, letters written in round uneducated hands, would arrive on my desk. It was my task to finalise these money matters and I did it conscientiously and sadly. One morning a patrol of the Royal West Kents, all national servicemen under a regular sergeant, were caught in a trap on a rubber plantation only a few miles from where we sat at our figures. They were slaughtered and some had their teeth cut out as trophies by the jungle bandits. (The Communists were not alone in barbarity. The British-enlisted Dyak trackers from North Borneo not infrequently appeared from the trees grinning and transporting severed heads.) The Royal West Kents had been camping around our barrack square when they first arrived and we had got to know some of them. One young fellow; taking fright while on night guard duty, began spraying everywhere with Sten gun bullets, until he was calmed and told that this was a safe place; danger was some miles away. They soon found it because they had scarcely been posted up-country when they fell into the deathly ambush. Eventually the documents reached me. They included a paybook so soaked with its owner's blood that it had to be prised open. I almost threw up as I did it. It was against King's Regulations to carry the paybook on active duty but this poor young fellow must have forgotten. Then I saw his army number. He had joined up after me; he was three months younger.

  This episode was dramatised in the film The Virgin Soldiers and shortly afterwards I was signing books in a store in the Midlands when a man approached and asked if the incident had been based on the Royal West Kent ambush. I said it had. I even remembered the sergeant's name. It was Rowley. 'Yes,' he muttered. 'It's a long time ago now, isn't it. Years. But I still remember like it was yesterday.' With tears beginning to run down his cheeks he turned and walked away.

  Standing there that distant morning the steamy sunlight coming through the window with that bloody paybook in my hands, I looked around at the safe domesticity of the office, the fans, the scratching pens, the murmurs, the mugs of tea and the munched cakes, and thought that it was not such a bad place to be after all. Few of the regular soldiers at Nee Soon would have been fit for active service anyway. Many suffered minor disabilities; limps, dim eyesight, obesity, and deafness. Some were left-overs from the war, serving out their time in this torpid territory, the army their hearth and home, their life. Again, in its way, it was like Barnardo's.

  The conscripts were, in the main, in better condition, although some were far from soldierlike. One had the opposite to a hunched back, a hunched front, his chest rearing like the bill of a pelican under his chin. Another, with faint eyes, spent hours in the chemically laden swimming pool, hoping to infect them badly enough to be sent home. When he was almost blind he was discharged on account of deafness. Judging by photographs of those days I was scarcely a warlike specimen either, thin and little with sunken eyes, like an undersized skeleton.

  Each Saturday morning we left the pens and ledgers and played soldiers. We were required to fire our rifles on the range, attend lectures, or take part in military exercises such as riot control. Sometimes the Chinese from the village used to stand on the road watching us and spoil it all by laughing, and it takes quite a lot to make a Chinese laugh.

  During one of these
manoeuvres half the platoon were sent off over an area of fairly open ground and the other half had to cover their eyes while they hid. The soldiers on the road turned their backs to the hiders and after counting up to fifty they turned around and tried to spot them. I was in the spotting party and we soon picked them out. Then it was our turn to hide. Instead of going off into the distance I merely dropped into a shallow scrub-hidden ditch almost at the feet of the watchers. I crouched there, within a few feet, and they peered beyond me and pointed out the others. They failed to detect me and in the end they gave up because it was NAAFI break. They called me to come out and I emerged from under their noses. Some of my comrades were quite miffed, alleging unfair play. The officer in charge, however, was really impressed by this demonstration of initiative in camouflage. 'Good chap, Thomas,' he enthused. 'We ought to think about transferring you to an infantry mob up-country'

  I never did it again.

  My military aspirations were nil, although my freelance journalism, undertaken under the cover of dead men's files, was showing promise. I had composed an article about Chinese lanterns and another on the traditional Dragon Festival and these I sent to Charles Mitchell in London where, among his other writing activities, he ran a features agency. The Dragon article was published in the Liverpool Post and the one about lanterns in the LeicesterEvening Mercury. Proudly I pinned the cut-out pieces inside the door of my locker and people came to read them. I was paid a guinea for each.

  Someone must have mentioned my extramural activities to authority because I was summoned before the Adjutant. Yes, I admitted, I had been contributing to newspapers in Britain. Fortunately he did not ask in whose time the articles were composed.