Ashes In the Wind

by Christopher Bland

  ‘Not all cavalry regiments are the same,’ said Matthew. ‘We’re heavy cavalry, comfortably in the middle. The light cavalry are much grander than us. In the 10th Hussars they won’t have you without a private income of at least a thousand a year.’

  ‘That still goes on? In 1958?’

  ‘You have a lot to learn.’

  James did have a lot to learn, and not only about the social gradations of the British Army. By the time he left Mons he knew how a car engine worked, how to read a map, how to operate the notoriously unreliable No. 19 set – the Bravo Delta Romeo Mike of the alphabet remained with him for ever. And how to deal with a riot. In the grainy army film (‘Amritsar,’ said Matthew), they were advised to give one warning on the loud hailer, ‘Disperse or we fire,’ and then shoot the ringleader. The approach worked on the film.

  The months at Mons were crowned by a final exercise, five days and nights on Salisbury Plain, after which 203 Troop, G Squadron, marched up the steps of the parade ground and duly passed out.

  The Royal Irish Dragoons were in Malaya; James and Matthew flew out in an uncomfortable Viscount chartered by the RAF that stopped at every colonial and ex-colonial outpost on its roundabout route: Brindisi, Baghdad, Bahrain, Karachi, Delhi, Rangoon, Saigon, Singapore. The journey took four days, including an overnight stop in Mrs Minwallah’s Grand Hotel in Karachi. In Singapore they transferred to a train to Kuala Lumpur; Matthew was made to sign for a pistol and twenty rounds of ammunition by a harassed quartermaster lieutenant.

  ‘You’re in command of the train,’ said the lieutenant.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Only means something if you’re ambushed. Hasn’t happened for a long time.’

  ‘We are on active service,’ said Matthew to James later. ‘We’re keeping the CTs, the Communist Terrorists, at bay. Luckily we just swan about in armoured cars. It’s the infantry and the Special Forces that go into the jungle and do the hard stuff. But we’ll all get a general service medal after six months.’

  ‘If spared,’ said James, remembering his Ulster nanny’s caution about any reference to an uncertain future.

  In Kuala Lumpur, where the regiment was based, no one had been told that the days of Empire were over. Race meetings, polo, gymkhanas, golf, cocktail parties, dances were a more sophisticated version of life in County Kildare. Without the rain. James was put in charge of Three Troop, A Squadron – two Daimler armoured cars, two Saracen armoured personnel carriers and twenty-eight men.

  ‘You’ve got Sergeant McLester,’ James was told by his squadron leader. ‘He won a Military Medal in the Normandy campaign. He’d be an RSM if it wasn’t for the drink; busted to private six years ago, climbed back up. You’ll not need to boss him about too much, just keep him sober.’

  James took this advice, and the regimental duties in KL were not exacting. Vehicle maintenance, regular inspections, the occasional parade, left a lot of time for sport, and the regiment was sport-mad. James rode out every morning at six o’clock on a regimental polo pony, returned in time for breakfast and first parade at eight, watched while Sergeant McLester organized the day’s work. The Officers’ Mess lived up to Matthew’s Promised Land of gin and tonic, although a couple of crusty bachelor captains, one of whom was the adjutant, kept the excesses of twenty subalterns aged nineteen to twenty-four under some sort of control. Once every couple of months one of the regimental bands would beat The Retreat, an evening occasion to entertain local dignitaries with military music and marching.

  ‘Odd title,’ said Matthew to James. ‘Considering we’re meant to be doing the opposite. Still, it’s a chance for the ex-pats to blub when they hear “Land of Hope and Glory”.’

  After a month in Kuala Lumpur, James and Three Troop were sent up-country on detachment to relieve a troop from C Squadron. Camp Gurney, named after a murdered high commissioner, was two thousand feet above sea level at the far end of the Cameron Highlands, two hundred miles and a day’s journey from Kuala Lumpur. As they drove north, the landscape changed until all around them the green waves of the tea plantations flowed over the hills and the valleys. The air became cleaner, scented.

  ‘It’s the tea,’ said Sergeant McLester when they stopped for a brew-up at halfway. ‘No shortage of the stuff up here.’

  James’s first impression of Camp Gurney was of something out of Beau Geste. Set in a clearing at the end of a rough laterite road were half a dozen wooden-walled, atap-roofed bashas on stilts inside a perimeter fence of barbed wire. The Union Jack flew over a small parade ground of beaten earth that doubled as a helicopter landing pad; an open hangar, the only building with a corrugated roof, housed the Daimlers, the Saracens and the REME. There were Bren-gun posts at each of the four corners of the camp. Outside the wire was a shallow moat filled with evil-looking pointed bamboo stakes at two-foot intervals. A strip fifty yards wide had been cleared of scrub and trees to separate the camp from the jungle and the road. The river was half a mile away, and in a clearing between the camp and the river were half a dozen longhouses, the home of seventy or so Malays. It was all a far cry from the comforts of Kuala Lumpur and the Selangor Club.

  On James’s arrival he was briefed by the District Officer.

  ‘Your job is to show the flag, escort the food convoys, patrol the roads, cheer up the tea planters and the tin miners, and convince the Malays that we’re on top. Which we are, by the way. The Emergency will be over by the end of the year, I reckon. Have they given you any jungle warfare training? Speak any Malay?’

  ‘No and no,’ said James. ‘National Servicemen aren’t around long enough to be worth training. I was given a copy of The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya and told to read that.’

  ‘Let’s hope that’s all you need. You’ll stick to the road; it’s the job of the infantry to look for CTs in the jungle.’

  James reported each evening by wireless to his squadron leader and was otherwise left to his own devices. His troop patrolled regularly along the rough, dusty roads that criss-crossed the five hundred square miles of his territory, calling on the five big tea plantations and three tin mines that they were there to protect, and liaising with the Hampshire Regiment’s platoon when wireless communications were good enough.

  He found the independence of his command both exciting and frightening. He was responsible for almost thirty men, two armoured cars and two armoured personnel carriers – half a million pounds of hardware. And although Sergeant McLester, a tough Ulsterman from County Antrim, took most of the routine decisions and organized the men and the maintenance of the vehicles, he made it clear to the troop that James was in charge.

  ‘Served with your father in Normandy,’ he had said to James in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Good soldier. Killed a lot of Germans with his Sten gun, so he did.’ Some of this glory had attached itself to James.

  Each morning at six they moved out on patrol, the air still cool and sharp, the jungle beginning to come to life. After the initial wireless check, Three Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta all on net, at least for the moment, James looked at the lead armoured car from the turret of his Daimler, then back at the two Saracens, and felt the romance as well as the loneliness of his little command.

  From the top of an armoured car the jungle looked magnificent. White-, red- and green-barked trees a hundred feet or more high supported a dense green canopy that filtered out most of the light. Their trunks were covered with vines and creepers; mosses and ferns created an aerial garden hung with bougainvillea, hibiscus and frangipani. There were innumerable butterflies, moths and dragonflies, and birds – wonderful birds, James thought, keeping a note of each new sighting in his notebook. Back from the road, and rarely seen, were elephants, tigers, wild pigs and monkeys. The villages were primitive, without electricity or running water unless they were attached to one of the large plantations. The Malays were beautiful, friendly, shy.

  ‘Don’t be taken in by the cheerful waves as you drive by,’ said the District Officer. ‘Th
ey are much more frightened of the CTs than they are of us, and for good reason.’

  ‘Who are the CTs?’

  ‘They aren’t Communists in any sense of the word, although it suits us to call them that, and they are almost all Chinese, not Malay. But they’re terrorists all right; they live off what they can extort – money, food, shelter – from the villages and the plantation workers. They are well armed, but there aren’t a lot of them. We’ve killed some, some have publicly defected, others have just gone home. They’ve given up any hope of winning. By the end of this year there will be a truce, an amnesty and it’ll all be over. And they’ll get their independence soon enough. Right now your job is to show them we’re here. The armoured cars are quite impressive if you can keep them on the road; the Daimler Mark 2 wasn’t designed for the tropics.’

  James shared a room with the Hampshires’ lieutenant, who was absent on patrol when James arrived. Three days later he returned from fifteen days in the jungle, grey and exhausted. His legs were scarred with angry fire-ant bites and when he needed help to remove a dozen leeches from his legs the jungle lost some of its magic for James.

  James and Three Troop soon settled into a routine; stand-to at dawn and dusk, guard duties shared with the Hampshires, vehicle maintenance, machine-gun practice, patrols and escort duty. For the first month it was a welcome change from Kuala Lumpur, although the troopers grumbled about the humidity, the cold nights, the uncomfortable beds and the food.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, sir,’ said Sergeant McLester. ‘They’d grumble wherever they were, Kuala Lumpur, Catterick or Paradise, not that many of them are likely to get there.’

  A week before Three Troop was due to go back to Kuala Lumpur they were on a routine patrol through one of the biggest tea plantations, the twelve-thousand-acre Ladang, when James heard Corporal Dean in the leading armoured car shout over his wireless, ‘Three Alpha, Three Alpha, this is Three Charlie, roadblock’, then the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire, then, ‘Christ, Jack’s been hit’.

  Jack Mackie was Three Charlie’s driver. As James in the second Daimler came round the corner he saw Three Charlie had slewed off the road and into the ditch.

  ‘Close down, close down, fire when you see a target,’ James said, although closed down in an armoured car it was hard to see anything but straight ahead, hard to see the source of the bullets zinging off their armour.

  James was unsure what to do next, knew he had to do something. He looked down at his hands, grabbed hold of the hatch handle to stop them shaking, felt his mouth dry, tried to speak, took several swallows from his water bottle, then a deep breath, and said, ‘I’ll go forward and get a tow-rope onto Three Charlie. Saracens, give me covering fire, and don’t worry about wasting ammunition once I’m out of the wagon.’

  They drove within six feet of Three Charlie, occasional bullets still hitting the armoured cars; the CTs seemed to be in deep brush thirty yards off the road to the left.

  ‘Start firing now, they’re on the left of the road,’ said James, opening the hatch of his Daimler.

  He climbed out of the top, went round to the back and detached the tow-rope, ran forward in an undignified crouch and attached the rope to the rear of Three Alpha and the front of his own armoured car. This seemed to take an age. The machine guns were plastering the jungle edge to the left of the road, tearing up the small trees and bushes. If James was fired at, he didn’t notice. He went round to the front of Three Charlie where McKelvey was slumped below the level of the armour, bleeding from the head and unconscious. He pulled him out with difficulty, carried him round to the back of Three Alpha and heaved his body up and onto the engine cover.

  ‘Right, now very gently haul Three Charlie out of the ditch,’ he told his driver.

  The ditch was dry and not too deep, and after two heart-stopping, wheel-spinning moments Three Charlie was back on the road.

  James climbed onto the top of Three Charlie, hammered on the hatch until Corporal Dean opened up, and said, ‘Corporal Dean, you drive, you take McKelvey’s place.’

  There was no reply. Corporal Dean was unable to speak or move, staring down at the empty driving seat spattered with congealing blood.

  The covering fire continued, with only the occasional shot in reply; one of the gunners said over the wireless, ‘I think I hit one of the bastards.’

  Sergeant McLester came up from the rear Saracen and said, ‘I’ll drive her, sir. Dean can hold McKelvey on the back of the wagon and bandage him up. I’ve left the first-aid kit beside him,’ ran forward and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  A minute later a reluctant Corporal Dean emerged from Three Charlie to join McKelvey on the back of James’s armoured car.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ James asked his troop sergeant later.

  ‘I told him the CTs won’t shoot you if you climb out, but I fucking well will if you don’t.’

  ‘Right, high reverse down the road until we can turn round and see where we are.’

  Where they were was in one of the last ambushes of the Malayan Emergency. They drove back to Camp Gurney as fast as carrying Trooper McKelvey and Corporal Dean on the engine hatch would allow. James had already radioed for a helicopter to take the wounded trooper to hospital in Kuala Lumpur, and by the time they were back at the camp the helicopter was sitting on the parade ground ready to take off. McKelvey was still unconscious with a deep furrow along the side of his head from a bullet that had removed the top of his left ear. His bandage was replaced and he was loaded gently into the helicopter.

  James and Three Troop were told to return south a day later; at the debriefing the colonel and his squadron leader were cautiously complimentary.

  ‘You did well to get a tow-rope onto Three Charlie,’ said the colonel. ‘And Trooper McKelvey will be OK. The Hampshires went out the next evening and found one dead CT at the edge of the jungle, so honours were better than even. I’ll put you in for a Mention in Despatches.’

  James was relieved. Running into an ambush and nearly losing one of his men and an armoured car didn’t seem a major military achievement. It was clear the dead CT had tipped the balance.

  James’s remaining months, all spent in Kuala Lumpur, were uneventful, and he was not sent up-country again. Three Troop, with James in goal, won the regimental seven-a-side football competition, a triumph regarded as more important than a Mention in Despatches, and far more important than James’s triumph in the South-East Asia Command Golf Championship.

  ‘Well done, James,’ said his commanding officer, who felt that most games were best played from the back of a horse. ‘Wished you’d given the brigadier a bit of slack in the semi-final. Five and four was a bit brutal.’

  James’s journey back at the end of two years’ National Service was as tedious and roundabout as the trip out, but without Matthew as company. Matthew had signed on for another year shortly after his arrival in Malaya.

  ‘They’ll make me assistant adjutant in October and give me a second pip and Regular pay. It’s a change from farming in Northumberland, which is what I’ll be doing for the next forty years. And the Emergency is about to come to an end, thanks to Three Troop’s heroic exploits in the Cameron Highlands.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ said James. ‘It’s the cheap gin and tonics, you might as well admit it. Not to mention your soldier servant polishing your boots, laying out your uniform, doing your laundry. I’ll miss your company on the trip home.’

  ‘We’ll keep in touch. The regiment will be back in England this time next year – we’ll meet at the regimental dinner.’

  ‘It all sounds weird, terrible,’ says Anna. ‘What did it do to you?’

  ‘Toughened me up, taught me to swear, taught me to smoke, although I never took to cigarettes. It made me tidy; once you’ve ironed your pyjamas into twelve-inch squares you’re never the same again. I’d led a sheltered life, I suppose, in Ireland and at Winchester. I’ve never been as cold, tired and hungry as during that time at Catterick. Or
as scared, except perhaps on a dodgy horse, but not scared of other people acting in a random and often vicious way, people who had real power over you. I was still a boy when I joined the army. I felt grown up two years later.’

  ‘What about the man you killed?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him, one of the gunners did; they all wanted the credit, by the way. He was a terrorist, they were trying to kill us, and nearly succeeded with Trooper McKelvey.’

  ‘It was his country.’

  ‘He was Chinese, like the vast majority of CTs. Lim Men Sek, he was called; he’d killed five Malays in Sungai Siput.’

  ‘I see.’ Anna doesn’t sound convinced.

  James didn’t add that during those two years he had uncritically absorbed the petty snobberies of a world that was already an anachronism, and he had then shaken them off within days of arriving at Oxford, replacing them with a new set of rules. He felt this made him seem both chameleon-like and priggish, and he continued to need Anna’s approval.

  They go on a long walk together up the River Allen, retracing in reverse James’s journey in the rain when he thought Anna had gone. They are sitting on a bench by the river; the tide is in and the river full.

  ‘Allenmouth must have been a good place to grow up in,’ says James.

  ‘I suppose – but it’s very small, everyone knows everybody and everything. When I look back it seems strange to have been brought up by my dad. Mum had gone off with his best friend before I was three, so I never knew the two of them together. Dad didn’t want to have anything to do with her, so I’d go off by train on my own to Newcastle once a month.’

  She got up, picked a cornflower from the bank behind them and tucked it into James’s buttonhole, then continued, ‘Andy, that was my stepfather, got a job as the pro in a smart golf club just outside Newcastle. He’d made a bit on the European tour, he never won a tournament, but he picked up some decent place money now and again. They lived in a flash villa in Denton Burn, very tidy, no kids, full of my mother’s collection of china pigs. I hated going there, went less and less often. Andy tried to teach me to play golf, I thought that was my father’s job and told him so, and he gave up on me after that. He probably wasn’t a bad bloke, but I couldn’t see him straight. I don’t suppose Dad was that easy to live with, although he and I get on OK.’