Spit and Polish

by Carl Muller

  The trouble was Bandarawela, the nearby town where bars, booze and girls were found in liberal quantity. Recruits would take a bus or hire a car and these excursions would always end in running street battles between Army and Navy while the Air Force milled around and punched anyone handy; or between Navy and Air Force with the Army cheering throatily; or between the Army and the Air Force, with the Navy leaping in at twenty-second intervals just to keep the tempo.

  Every now and then, the forces would combine to take on gangs of civilian toughs, and the local constabulary and the military police would rush in. The shambles would leave a pale-faced Bandarawela to pick up the pieces. It was not surprising to learn, later, that when the Navy recruits were drafted to Colombo, a Thanksgiving Mass was said in the Bandarawela Church and harassed parishioners considered their daughters with much misgivings, certain beyond doubt that they were no longer in that desired state of hymen intacta.

  Before this blessed day, however, Lieutenant Dharamdass had much to say to the Army OC. ‘You and your bloody trenches. Nearly killed my buggers!’

  ‘So if they were drunk or something, why go to walk all over the hills? Should have come on the road. That way even if a truck ran over them, would have brought the bodies to the camp.’

  It had been, as Army doctor Kramer said, a close shave. Carloboy and Ordinary Seaman Caldera had been carried in, covered with leeches, bleeding from innumerable leech bites and in that pleasant state when life is ready to tiptoe away and there is a kind of hush while a tally clerk up there reaches for his slate.

  The boys had been on a Bandarawela binge. First, Carloboy had scouted the Welimada Road, telling Caldera, ‘My uncle is living somewhere here. Shall we go and see him?’

  Caldera said no. He detested families. Families meant questions and how is so-and-so and heard about so-and-so and this is my son’s girlfriend.

  ‘But can have some fun, men. This uncle is a Pentecostalist. Will pray for us, sure.’

  Caldera shuddered. ‘You’re mad? I know those buggers. Will tell to bow the head and go on the whole bloody evening. Come, go to a bar.’

  So they turned into a bar which proclaimed ARRACK in large red letters and WINES AND SPIRITS in smaller white letters, and were soon wolfing devilled potatoes and boiled eggs and squinting at the arrack which diminished rapidly.

  By eight Caldera solemnly proposed that the rest house would be a nice place to visit. ‘Nice girl in the reception also. Can put beer there.’

  So they swayed out, tottered up the rest house steps and sank into armchairs and called for beer. Caldera said he was going to the toilet, lost his way, stumbled into a side garden and urinated on a clump of fireballs. He told the flowers that he was in no condition to go anywhere, least of all back to camp.

  It was late. They were, at the moment, in that happy state of being absent without leave. Their red liberty cards would be surrendered to the duty officer. Von Bloss, Caldera hadn’t returned for supper. Therefore, they had ‘jumped ship’!

  When Carloboy and Caldera found that they had no more money, were very drunk and far from home, they had only one course of action. Walk, if they could, back to Rangalla. They agreed after some consultation with the gatepost, that this was the only thing to do.

  ‘We’ll go shot—short cut,’ Carloboy mumbled.

  ‘Wha’ shor’cut?’

  ‘I’ll sho—you come.’

  They weaved through rear gardens, roused sleeping dogs, plodded on. As a game plan it was good. Rather than the winding mountain road which, if followed, added miles to the journey, they followed the Fox Hill track. The idea was to cross its shoulders, then drop down to where, beyond the checkpoint and sentry box of the Army camp, lay Rangalla.

  The wind snapped at the sides of the hill and it made their heads swim. They had stumbled most erratically, this way and that, and their uniforms were studded with burrs, and they wanted, desperately, to sleep. And then, they fell into a trench and the soil was quite warm. They decided that if they closed their eyes, Diyatalawa would stop turning. They did. They slept.

  It was fortunate in the extreme that Army recruits had been sent to dig another trench. That was at five-thirty in the morning. The staff sergeant who took physical training and hated standing on the parade ground at dawn, packed his charges off to Fox Hill. ‘Go and dig,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a good dig. Good for the back and shoulders.’ He told Corporal Silva to tag along, keep an eye. He blew on his hands. It was bloody cold and all he wanted was to go to the kitchen and drink a mug of steaming tea.

  The Army was in the nick of time. The recruits didn’t bargain on having to carry two leech-encrusted sailors—at the double—to the medical reception station. Physical training was becoming quite diverting.

  At the station, blood transfusions were in order and fat, blood-gorged leeches removed from practically every part of the boys’ bodies. Smelling of antiseptic, a yellow salve on hundreds of bites, pale as death and too sober for words, they lay, half-dead while grape-sugar solution was pumped into their veins and orderlies insisted that there must be a lot of inebriated leeches on Fox Hill.

  In two days they were discharged and prescribed iron pills and lots of fluids and Vitamin A, and Lieutenant Dharamdass lowered the boom on them. Liberty, he said, was one thing. These buggers were like—who’s that fellow who said, ‘give me liberty or give me death?’ —Yes, that’s it. ‘Gave liberty and what happened?’ he glowered, ‘Nearly died! No more bloody liberty!’ and he then went to talk about trenches, which he told the Army OC were an impediment to the progress of drunken sailors.

  ‘At least my buggers can navigate. Drunk or not drunk, they were coming straight home. Trouble is your damn trenches.’

  ‘Yes, but if my buggers didn’t go to dig a trench, your buggers might be still there.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘Fine bunch you got this time.’

  ‘You’re telling me!’

  8

  History—‘Chalo Delhi’ and the End of the INA

  Japan was finalizing preparations for the attack of India. Muller & Bhattacharjee1 told of the INA march with the Japanese, through Burma, across the Indo-Burmese frontier, penetrating 150 miles into Indian territory. It was an incredible feat. Everywhere the cry resounded: ‘Chalo Delhi’—On, on to Delhi!—and when Kohima was captured, everybody expected Manipur to soon be in Japanese-INA. hands. All they had to do was to take the capital, Imphal.

  The Ceylonese fighters were infused with the Japanese promise of Daitoa Kyoeiken—the planned Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was a concept which came under the larger rubric of a ‘New Order’. It would consist, Japan said, of some parts of China, Manchuria and Japan and all British and Western colonies in south-east Asia. It would be a self-sufficient economic bloc, based on ‘co-existence and co-prosperity’ and free of Western imperialism.

  No one heeded the reality. The concept was a camouflage to provide Japan with raw materials to support its war effort. It fell to pieces with the close of the war.

  But it was very real to Gladwin Kotelawala and the men of the Lanka Unit. The Japanese were masters. They held Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands in the south-western Pacific. From the capital, Honiara, the Japanese received ample supplies of fish, timber, copra and palm oil.

  They invaded and held Guam, the largest of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific. That was indeed a triumph. Guam had been ceded to America by Spain in 1899. That the Japanese could boldly seize US territory in 1941 did much to bolster their image, make the Ceylonese of Malaya acknowledge that the Japanese were on a winning streak; that resistance would be futile and disastrous.

  There was also the charismatic Tun Hussein Onn, the Johor-born veteran who hated the British. Hussein joined the INA and was a leading figure in the sweep into India. His father, too, organized the United Malaya National Organization (UNMO) to galvanize Malayan nationalism and fight the British proposal for a Malayan Union that, he sa
id, was a threat to the political interests of indigenous Malays.

  Hussein was to eventually become the third Prime Minister of Malaysia. Truly did the British never know how much they were resented and despised.

  The INA failed. Imphal stood firm, and the British poured everything into its defence. The Japanese, too, had their problems. America was swarming into the Pacific and suddenly, all occupied Japanese territories were threatened. The war swung around, destroying all INA hopes of liberating India. The cry for the surge towards Delhi died. Indeed, for the INA everything seemed to die. Even as they retreated, and were killed, captured, few of the British Indian government displayed any real interest in these ‘adventurers’. Even in Burma, the Japanese and the Indians were being pushed back. America was regaining the Pacific islands and sea battles caused immense Japanese losses. The Japanese had no longer any use for the INA or its Ceylon units. They were redundant, an embarrassment actually, as the Japanese retreated.

  Then, in August 1945, Bose was killed in an air crash. It was the end of the INA and the IIL. And the fighting Ceylonese? There they were, literally up the creek, and with no paddles. True, the campaign had been a sound one. The Ceylonese would play a supportive role of paving the way for the Japanese invasion of Ceylon. The combination of the land drive from Burma and a sea-borne invasion through Ceylon would have surely subdued India.

  But now . . . the Japanese were gone, and the British poured back and again, it was a time of reckoning. The British Military Administration began to round up all those who had served the IIL and the INA.

  Many of the Ceylonese were interrogated, then jailed. Gladwin Kotelawala also, but cannily, he let it be known that the Ceylonese in Malaya had to choose between two evils: death at the hands of the Japanese or the acceptance of billets in the INA. It was, he insisted, a means of self- preservation.

  The British were inclined to believe this. They were aware of the character of Japanese rule and accepted that the Ceylonese, as British subjects, had been indeed between a rock and a hard place.

  But the treason trials in India of INA officers was another matter. Staged in Delhi’s Red Fort in December 1945, it was an effective tool wielded by the British Indian government in the reconstruction of the post-war Indian Army. The British deplored the manner in which discipline and loyalty had been eroded, especially in the large-scale defections of soldiers to the INA. But the fierce spirit of nationalism could not be quelled. The trials sparked off country-wide disturbances, frenzied anti-British rioting and a naval mutiny.

  In post-war Ceylon, too, Gladwin Kotelawala was ignored. The bourgeois press clamped down on any reports of Ceylon’s involvement with Bose. It found no reason to glorify anti-British freedom fighters. Gladwin, too, held his peace. He did not wish to antagonize his old father any more. Rather, he pitched in with the island’s ruling political party, entered politics and, peculiarly enough, the ruling party, the United National Party, actually recommended him for British government honours. At that time, all such awards were always made on the recommendation of the country’s ruling party.

  The restless soul of Gladwin Kotelawala was stilled. He had become a military leader. He had been a major in Bose’s Army. He had organized the Lanka Unit and the Ceylon Department. He treasured the picture he had to himself with other officers of the INA. He had shared Bose’s distrust and hatred of the British and spent many years of his life, planning, scheming, preparing to drive them out of Ceylon and India. For all this did the British honour him! He was made a Member of the British Empire!

  What is the worth and value of the MBE one could well ask. How lightly and with what political deviousness are such honours bestowed!

  9

  Of Rifle Drill and Sundry Convulsions and Sex on the Never Never

  Time moved on, and rifle drill took up much of it in passage. This was viewed by the recruits as the vilest way to pass the precious hours of one’s young life. It was an eternal round of slope arms, order arms, shoulder arms and present arms, accompanied by the old, old song: ‘Hup, two, three, over, two three . . .’ which began to get on everyone’s nerves.

  Koelmeyer was skinny and knobby at the shoulders. Sloping arms was something he dreaded because he was expected to slam his rifle down on his left shoulder. It had to be a most satisfactory smack. It hurt him.

  The guards instructor was quite uncaring. ‘Now look here. I want to hear that rifle come down hard on your shoulders! Right? Squad! Ser-looope—arms! Hup, two three, ovah, two three . . . smack it down!’

  Koelmeyer went about it with the best will in the world. He set his teeth, plunked the rifle down hard, and his knobby shoulder couldn’t take it. It jarred the bone and he would whistle through his teeth. Sometimes, in an unguarded movement, he would gasp, ‘Ammo!’

  The GI would erupt. ‘You! What was that? Yes, you! Koelmeyer! Every time you slope arms you want your bloody mother?’

  Carloboy would tell him later, ‘Yes men, I know, your shoulder is paining. But don’t go to say anything. Where’s your bloody self-control?’

  ‘Self-control? You saw this?’ showing a very red and inflamed shoulder. ‘See, will you.’

  Carloboy hauled the sufferer to the sick bay, where a petty officer looked at the shoulder and clucked.

  ‘If it’s like this now, how will it be tomorrow after some more rifle drill?’ Carloboy asked.

  ‘Shit!’ said the PO, ‘You have knobs on your shoulders. How did they pass you in Colombo? Best thing I think is to break and re-set the bones. What do you say?’

  Koelmeyer blanched. ‘Here, you can’t just break my bones like that!’

  ‘Oh, we can’t? Why not? Knobs on the shoulders! Who told you you could join the Navy with knobs on the shoulders? Fine thing this is, sending deformed buggers here.’

  Koelmeyer was given ‘ex rifle drill’ and then a stout shoulder pad. He was Knobby and the mess always sang ‘Knobby-all’ in his honour.

  ‘They call him Knobby-all, Knobby-all,

  They call him Knobby-all, Knobby-all,

  They call him Knobby-all

  ‘Cause his shoulders have big balls,

  So they call him Knobby-all, Knobby-all.’

  Four years later, when Carloboy quit the Navy, Koelmeyer was till Knobby to all. He had graduated to a leather shoulder pad which was his prized possession.

  Pay days saw the little canteen burst into life. It was a parade, even for the pay packet, with the boys stepping smartly up to off caps and extend them to the paymaster petty officer who would place the creamy envelope on their caps. They would then each make a smart right turn, step away to cram the envelope in their pockets and don caps. Then they would scoot, for money meant a booze-up and since the canteen served only beer to recruits, beer it was, consumed in alarming quantities.

  The staff would come in too, and soon the roof would ring with lots of atrocious songs, all exceedingly vile, many rumbustious and raunchy parodies, the bluest of limericks and it was also a crying shame if someone did not get his nose stoved in just for the heck of it.

  Canteen brawls would encompass everybody present, but just as often, many sang on unconcerned, while much blood was being spilled and many bottles and glasses broken in frenzied pockets and furious corners.

  It is only when chairs are airborne and windows lose their last shreds of respect that frantic canteen staff summon the duty officer who is expected to break up the several parties in full swing.

  The only effective method of doing so was to stand at the door and scream . . . which was all the OOD ever did, for he had to keep an eye out for a host of projectiles that whizzed around and were surely aimed at his head. These included glasses, beer bottles, cans, ashtrays, seamen’s knives and folding chairs. Occasional tables required a joint effort.

  But order was grudgingly restored and the next morning he would be crow-hoarse, naturally, and glare at the recruits as though they had just been identified and confirmed as a new and virulent type of bacillus.
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br />   Paydays were also pay-off days ... for Little England, faithful to tradition, had many desirable women who had grown up to carry on their services to the Services. The good ship Rangalla was serviced by a bevy of personable young women who would come to the perimeter at night, where sentries would help them over the barbed wire and lead them stealthily into the mess huts.

  Some nights were good; others not so good, especially if only a few women could make it and had to accommodate thirty each. This, the women would admit, was no real chore, given an 11 p.m. start and 4 a.m. finish, but the boys found it all rather unappetizing. They queued, true, but with such impatience that not one could really give of his best. There simply had to be more women.

  One pretty tart who said her name was Isobel, promised to bring more. ‘Lot have in village, but some not young like us. Never mind if bring?’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Apoi, not sooo old. Twenty-five, thirty about. That never mind?’

  Carloboy, jerking over her on a bunk divested of sheets, was expansive. ‘So bring and come. Even your mother, let her come. How to wait like this till the other buggers finish? Can you hear?’

  Yes, they could hear. Everyone in line was so impatient. The crudest jibes were hurled at the performers on the bunk. It was hardly the atmosphere, Carloboy knew, for even the pleasure of a moment. The women knew this too. They suffered the recruits to come unto them and felt that any one taking more than the usual four to five minutes was getting more than money’s worth.

  ‘So finish quickly,’ Isobel said, ‘to go also have sentry changing before.’

  This, too, was necessary. Usually the four to eight watch was manned by staffers. The girls had to be over the fence before four.