Nee Soon does not appear in the film of The Virgin Soldiers. The barracks scenes were filmed at Tanglin, another almost identical garrison in Singapore. The army authorities, after initially being helpful, refused to let real soldiers appear as extras and the troops seen drilling in the picture are off-duty British sailors and airmen and Chinese troops of the Singapore army, all dressed up to look like we were. Since the latter bear no resemblance to British national servicemen, they were only filmed at a distance. Close-ups were confined to their boots.
To prepare myself for my assault on Fleet Street, I had obtained a complete, although antiquated, correspondence course on journalism. It included advice on the care and feeding of carrier pigeons taken by the reporter to wing his copy back to the office, but its general principles seemed, at the time, sound enough and I digested it avidly. I had already written to every British national newspaper giving them the good news that I was on my way home and ready to be employed. They responded with a great indifference. Only one, the Daily Herald, actually replied and that was to say they did not want me. I was realistic enough to accept that Fleet Street might have to wait for a while so I then wrote to numerous provincial newspapers only to evoke from them a similar lack of enthusiasm. I heard that there might be a job on the Essex Chronicle at Chelmsford and the Croydon Times in south London so I wrote warning them to expect me as soon as I disembarked from the troopship. I could hardly wait to be a reporter again.
There were some soldiering duties first, however, one of these being an impressive parade to mark the King's birthday to be held on the Padang in the middle of Singapore city, an especially formidable one this year, apparently to show the flag and the guns to the natives who had so recently been insurrecting. The Padang was a famous setting, a great green alongside the harbour, with the Supreme Court on one side, the cricket club pavilion on another and St Andrew's Cathedral on the fourth – commerce, the law, cricket and the church, foundations upon which the British had built this and many other overseas possessions. On a Saturday or a Sunday I would sometimes watch the matches on the Padang where the leading teams came to play against the Singapore Cricket Club. It was all slow and pukka; hot afternoons punctuated by polite applause.
Travelling through, years later, I was there for only a few hours and I took a taxi from the airport to the Padang. The Indian driver was intrigued. 'Never, sir, have I been asked to go to Padang,' he said over his shoulder. 'Straight from airport, sir, unheard of. Unheard of. Which part of Padang, sir?'
'Fourth bong tree on the left,' I replied. He set me down. It was a Saturday and once more I sat below the deep tree-shade I had used years before and watched the batsman at the wicket. Years of shadows had filtered by but the cricket was unchanged. It could have quite easily been the same match, second innings.
Our King's birthday parade was to occupy all this sacred green, apart from the roped-off square of the cricket playing area. Even mass homage to His Majesty was excluded from that. Hundreds of us lined up in the sunshine while the General Officer Commanding walked along the heavy ranks. He was upright and only gently perspiring (they perspired; we sweated). Out of the corner of my eye I could see him approaching, progressing along the unending lines of jungle green topped by resolute expressions. The order came for our company to present arms and we all managed to do it at the same time. My rifle was vertical, directly in front of my nose, the sun was bouncing on my forehead. I was soaking inside my shirt. A large wasp settled on the rifle, then moved across to my nose before striding confidently up my nostril. I went cross-eyed trying to see this drama. The Field Marshal was nearly abreast of me. The wasp began to potter about inside my nose, buzzing busily in the cavity. If ever a soldier on parade had a good excuse for fainting, or at least sneezing, then it must have been me. But the Field Marshal was before us. The soldiers on each flank were tense. Our colonel shone with pride and the Regimental Sergeant-Major eyed us like steel. I dare not faint. The wasp continued investigating my nostril. The General Officer Commanding taking easy paces nodded amiably as he went along the ranks, solid with resolve and earnestness. As he reached me the wasp departed from my nose, crawling quite slowly out of the aperture and then zooming away. The great man stared at me. 'Good God,' he said before passing on.
There were still a few disappointments left in the days remaining at Nee Soon. In preparation for a renewed and, I sincerely hoped, improved love-life on my return to England I had been corresponding with a young lady I had known when I was attending the college in Walthamstow. Our letters had been transformed from the friendly to the endearing to the passionate as my time in Singapore neared its end. I refused to admit to myself that this ardour may have had something to do with the nylon stockings I sent to her (they were plentiful in Nee Soon village shops but unobtainable in Britain) and the promise of a bumper supply on my homecoming. Extra endearments appeared in each letter and there were more kisses at the conclusion as time went on. For some reason, I think to fool the Customs, I used to send the stockings singly, wrapped inside an airmail letter. To get a pair she had to reply to the letter promptly, so that the second nylon would be winged on its way (I was not such a fool as to send the second one without getting a further reassurance of love and endless devotion). Then the whole dream was dissolved by a coincidence that came my way as they have done, great and minor, over the years. Playing in my final cricket match, against a neighbouring RAF team, before boarding my homeward boat, I was sitting at the tea interval next to an airman who came from Ilford, Essex, which was where my exclusive beloved lived. He produced a photograph of his girlfriend who turned out to be one and the same girl. Even the photographs were identical! I showed him mine and we sat drinking air force tea, watching the batsmen, and trying to calculate how many pairs of nylons we had sent her between us. My only consolation was that I was going home before him.
The final disaster occurred only a week before we were due to depart from Nee Soon. The ship, we knew, was at that moment crossing the Indian Ocean, Singapore just over its horizon. Marking off the days to embarkation had now become a ritual, something to be kept and savoured for a given moment. I used to regularly refrain from touching my calendar until the actual day I was to delete was almost over. Some cheated by crossing off in the early morning, some were even a couple of days in advance, but for me the ceremony took place only a moment before lights-out in the barracks room.
On this particular night the magic moment arrived and I rose from my habitual posture on the bed and opened the locker door. The calendar was pinned inside the door and I had crossed out the day and was about to happily close the locker when I noticed that the cupboard was bare – my suits had gone! All those wonderful, hard-paid-for, sleek, fashionably hued suits, that Mr Fuk Yew had sewn together for me. There were five altogether, each one meant for an occasion in England – a suit for the Palais, a suit for going for a job in Fleet Street, a suit to actually wear on newspaper assignments, and so on. Five! All vanished. Only my singing outfit, my brown trousers and fawn jacket were left.
It was no prank. They had been stolen. I never discovered by whom. The laundry man who called to carry away the sheets in a huge basket was the prime suspect, but although several Charlie Chans of the local Chinese CID were called in by our Adjutant, no clue was ever forthcoming. I was demolished. All I had in which to face England, and its waiting women, was my Frank Sinatra ensemble. (This, incidentally, I wore for a singing competition at a holiday camp after my return home. I thought I was bound to win until standing at the side of the stage I saw the next competitor, a dwarf, dressed in a smart fawn and brown suit like mine, but in miniature. He sang 'Don't Laugh At Me 'Cos I'm A Fool' and won by miles.)
These disasters, however, could in the end do nothing to dilute the joy of leaving. On the final afternoon in the office the documents of another poor devil killed 'aiding the civil power', as the subterfuge went, were delivered to my desk and I was glad to pass the job to someone else.
The army
tried a final, crafty hand, however, because in the penultimate hour before quitting, I was offered a sergeant's stripes if I would sign on as a regular and continue to do the task which I had been doing as an ill-paid private for more than a year. I had no difficulty in refusing but there were others who, astonishingly, accepted such rewards and blandishments. On their very last day in Singapore they signed on for another three years in the army! They unpacked their kitbags, took down their calendars, and sewed on their stripes. Two fey lads, who had always been friends, signed on because one was due to go home and the other was not. Since neither would come to the end of his service at the same time as the other they vowed to keep signing on for more years and then for more after that. It was love they said. Another barrack room friend, an outgoing Welshman called Barney Harris, remained in the Pay Corps for another twenty-five years, eventually becoming the most important man in the corps, the Regimental Sergeant-Major. I met him just after his retirement and he appeared scarcely changed from the nineteen-year-old I last saw waving from the barrack room balcony as we left. He said he had enjoyed the life.
So it was all done. The moment that we had lived so often in dreams we now experienced in reality. We humped our kitbags aboard the trucks and we drove through the gates for the last time. Even Reg Wilcox was speechless, merely raising two fingers as we departed. It seems odd now that we should have set so much store on going home and should have taken so little advantage of our visit to foreign parts at the expense of the British Government. But there it was. When we reached the docks the big white troopship was sitting there awaiting us. We thought she was the most beautiful sight we had ever seen.
A month later, early on a muslin morning, I went up onto the deck of the troopship and saw the lovely land of England on the port bow. It was Start Point in Devon; rising above it the fingers of some lofty radio masts that I remembered were rooted next to the field where we had played football in my brief schooldays in Kingsbridge. That was the moment I knew I was really home, nothing could recall me now. The land began to appear along the hem of the sea. Cliffs, beaches and docile hills, the white faces of houses, the towers of churches, and everywhere the June green of my home country.
'Can't wait for a good knees-up down the pub,' commented Reg, surveying the same scene. 'Take the old woman and my old man out for a few pints. Blimey, will we have a time!'
Others voiced their differing ambitions. To see their families, obviously; to take their girlfriend or the dog or both for a walk, to sleep in their own bed in a single room, to see how the people at the office, or the bank, or the building yard, were getting on, to enquire about a job. One fellow said he was anxious to ride his bike. It was hard for me to share some of these ambitions, certainly the family plans. (Although I determined to visit my brother who was in Wales, living now with the choral Kate and Uncle Jack) but, ever romantic, I was glad to see my homeland for its own sake. We turned half left, to cheers from all the decks, into Southampton Water; the Isle of Wight, which I planned to visit as soon as possible, rising temptingly on the other side. Singapore, Colombo, Aden and Port Said I had seen. Now I was eager to extend my travels to Cowes and Ventnor.
At Southampton there was, to me, a surprisingly large crowd on the quayside. I did not realise that people had so many relatives. As we tied up one of the soldiers shouted to a docker on a crane: 'Hey, mate, had any good strikes lately?' The taunt nearly caused one. The man glowered and then refused to swing the gangplank in, and it seemed as if setting foot on our native shore might be delayed as there was a summary union meeting to decide action. The man who had called the insult was under critical scrutiny on board. The stevedores decided that the disembarkation could go on provided the man who had shouted called out an apology in a similarly loud tone and that he would be the last to get off the ship. This was easily agreed, the caustic soldier's comrades leaning on him a trifle to obtain his acquiescence, and the joyful scenes continued.
'Oh, there he is!' called a mother from the dock-side seeing her boy at the rails. 'Oooo . . . isn't he thin! Haven't they been feeding you, Tommy?'
Few things are more embarrassing and ungainly than bawling a conversation up the side of a ship but most were undeterred. 'Big party tonight!' 'Got you some nice pork chops!' 'You're back in time to mow the lawn!' 'You're playing for the team on Saturday!' 'Auntie Mary died last week!' The soldiers remained relatively silent. A few remarks called back seemed the best they could manage. Some attempted, at that difficult distance, to introduce their comrades of the past two years but for the most part they merely stared at the flushed faces and the moving hands and handkerchiefs. Most, with nothing to say, retired below, calling down that they had received orders. They merely sat in the canteen, almost hiding. One young man had actually seen his welcome disintegrate into a terrible bawling row between himself and his father over some money that was owed. His mother had been so incensed at this crass intrusion on the occasion that she struck her husband with her handbag and in a moment there was a pitched fight on the dockside and the police had to be called. The boy sat morosely. 'Christ,' he muttered. 'They were scrapping when I went away and they're still scrapping when I get back. Wish I'd signed on, I do.'
From the ship those of us not delayed by tearful embraces were transported to a camp near Aldershot and that evening had the almost mystic experience of walking down a country lane for a beer at the local inn. There were rustics sitting outside on benches made from logs and we eventually fell into conversation with them. They were only vaguely interested in our tales from the distant side of the world, and not impressed in any way whatever by our shoulder flashes saying 'Singapore' or 'Malaya'. One of them told us a long story about a woman in the village who had been squashed to death by a horse and another reckoned that the fine weather was bound to break soon, probably at the change of the moon. The dusk deepened into a purple night and the honeysuckle smelled so fine in the hedgerows when we were having a pee on the way back to camp.
Most of us went on disembarkation leave although one unfortunate soul, having been cheeky to the local sergeant-major, was put on a spiteful seven days confined-to-barracks and when we left was pounding up and down the square in the sun carrying full kit and rifle, something he had avoided all through his service overseas.
I was given a rail warrant to Barry, where my brother lived with our aunt and uncle, but on the train running westwards to Wales an unkindly inspector came to the compartment and said that there was an error in my ticket and I would have to pay extra. This so incensed a man seated by the door that he vehemently attacked the inspector. 'Can't you see?' he demanded. 'This boy's been overseas for his country. Look at that, mister.' He pointed to my shoulder flash. 'Know where that is – Singapore? Don't suppose you do.'
'There during the war,' replied the ticket man with a sniff. 'Taken prisoner. You should have had a bit of my medicine.'
'Well I was in Italy,' retorted the man. 'And that was bloody war, I can tell you. Mud everywhere and at Anzio . . .'
Nonplussed I watched this unfamiliar British confrontation developing before my eyes. Other passengers joined in. A woman said she had done her bit like for her country like everybody else and a man told her it was very hard in the Tank Corps. Everyone was arguing at once and there was an Irishman who kept modestly muttering: 'Well, who built the airfields, I ask you? I'll tell you, we built the airfields. The airfields . . . the Irish built the airfields . . .'
I was taking no part, just watching, astonished while the two main protagonists were getting heated. 'I walked,' asserted the passenger who had defended me. 'Walked, mate, from one end of Italy to the other!' He glared at the inspector as if it were his fault. 'In the end my boots were in tatters on my . . .'
'Boots?' echoed the ticket inspector scornfully. 'You had boots?'
The arguments ended in a great deal of animosity with the Irishman, presumably as a neutral, trying to mediate. The ticket inspector went off in a huff, slamming the door, but forgetting my fault
y ticket which had begun it all.
I spent a week in Barry getting to know my brother again. He was no less unpredictable. He had gained, or had thrust upon him, a job in Cardiff, through the influence of our Uncle Chris, but his response had not been quite what the family hoped. He had to travel every day by train, the eight miles from Barry and, in order to conserve the money that should have been spent on fares, he used to leap from the slowing train into a convenient pile of sand just short of Cardiff Central Station and then scamper down the embankment. It was dark when he began this practice in the winter and he had become careless. He jumped one day only to find, suddenly and painfully, that the friendly sand had been replaced by stony rubble and sharp gravel. He was carried off to hospital to have his wounds stitched.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 30
